Getting off

Reversal of Fortune 1990 U.S. (112 minutes) directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Nicholas Kazan, based on the book by Alan Dershowitz.

A darkly glib titled European convicted of trying to murder his American socialite wife hires a brilliant, passionate and media-loving lawyer to clear his name.

This entertaining feature film based on the Claus von Bülow case makes legal research sexy and comes with a moral which underlines the touchstone of the American criminal justice system: everyone gets a defense. 

The victim, Martha ‘Sunny’ von Bülow (Glenn Close), is an extremely wealthy and spoiled American socialite who chronically abused drugs and alcohol.

The defendant, her husband Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons), is a charming German with a title, a great deal less money than his wife, and a stygian sense of humor. Irons received a Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for his role.

The defense attorney, Alan M. Dershowitz (a schlubbed down Ron Silver), is a brilliant legal practitioner who, self-deprecating in manner, knows damn well in his heart of Harvard Law School hearts that the criminal justice sun rises and sets on him. This may be an occupational hazard.

In other words—and to paraphrase Minnie (Felicity Huffman), one of the movie’s law students involved in the case—everyone’s a stinker.

The defendant probably ‘did it’; nobody liked the smug rich bastard to begin with. But the court blew it. Vindictive family members hired a private investigator and fed the state prejudicially selective evidence upon which its prosecution relied.

This is the thing that Dershowitz, through gritted teeth, tells his law students ‘really pisses me off,’ because regardless of who this defendant happened to be his prosecution unfairly prejudiced the trial outcome.

‘It’s the basis of the whole legal system. Everyone gets a defense. So the system is there for the one innocent person who is falsely accused,’ Dershowitz says.

The case is The State of Rhode Island v. Claus von Bülow. Made for the tabloids, it produced a pair of high profile trials in a decade of glitter and excess.

Sunny van Bülow inexplicably went into a coma in her Newport, Rhode Island, ‘cottage’ Clarendon Court just before Christmas 1980. This event turned out to be ‘suspiciously’ similar to an incident that happened almost exactly a year before from which she recovered. Insulin was the suspected substance—and alleged link.

In the first trial, a Rhode Island jury found von Bülow guilty on two counts of attempting to murder his wife by insulin injection. The state supreme court vacated von Bülow’s guilty verdict and thirty-year sentence, sending the case back to a new jury which subsequently acquitted him.

Sunny von Bülow remained in a coma for 28 years, from the time the second incident occurred until her death in December 2008. Close’s character, who gets the first and last word, often speaks reflectively from beyond in a voiceover.

Since the movie is based on a lawyer’s book, it loses a lot of the celebrity frisson that surrounded the case as one of the 1980s ‘trials of the decade.’

Dershowitz came into the case when von Bülow hired him to appeal the first verdict. The screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, structured on the issues Dershowitz argued before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, dramatizes the case from court records and trial transcripts as Dershowitz, his law students and lawyers working with him research, argue and shape their appeal.

But all work and no play would make Alan’s a dull story.

The leaven that makes this rich play rise and shine is the odd couple at its center: Irons’ coolly sharp and sardonic Old World patrician, and Silver’s energetic, inspired lawyer whose smarts compete bodily with his New York chutzpah.

The character Dershowitz is as nonplussed by von Bülow’s Newport-Upper East Side world of opulent privilege as is von Bülow by Dershowitz’s democratic, communal life in Cambridge among his students. The film has fun playing these contrasts. There also is a hint of the [anti-Semitic] high and mighty hiring ‘the Jew’ to ‘get Von Bülow off,’ while Dershowitz struggles not to see a ‘Hitla’ in the haughty German.

‘Is he the devil?’ Dershowitz wonders. ‘If so, can the devil get justice? And all this legal activity, is this in Satan’s service?’

But von Bülow, incidentally also trained as a lawyer, gets the best lines.

While first discussing the case with his client over ‘a proper lunch at Delmonico’s’ (where von Bülow points out that Dershowitz’s star power got them a better table than his elite social connections ever did) Dershowitz notes that von Bülow has one thing in his favor.

‘What’s that?’

‘Everyone hates you.’

‘Well, that’s a start,’ von Bülow replies, not missing a beat.

Later, when first meeting Dershowitz’s highly skeptical law students, von Bülow tries to break the ice with light humor:

‘What do you give a wife who has everything?’ he deadpans, pausing to regard the curious young faces: ‘An injection of insulin.’

Uh-huh…

Irons, Silver and Close inhabit their roles so convincingly that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these were actors playing living people less than a decade after the events occurred.

Maybe the best ingredient of Irons’ role is his character’s guardedness. In preparing and playing the role Irons said he got a sense about what really happened; but his von Bülow is an enigma. It is hard to know what he thinks or feels about anything.

Irons, who said he once met von Bülow through a mutual friend, noted in an interview that von Bülow had objected to details of his portrayal and groused that he is much better known to the world from Irons’ character than who he is himself.   

Who were these people, then, and what really did happen?

In Sunny’s words, ‘If you could just go back in time and take a peek, you’d know. And all this would be unnecessary. Then again, everyone enjoys a circus.’

Jannie soet wees

Searching for Sugar Man 2010 Sweden/U.K. (87 minutes) written, directed, edited and co-produced by Malik Bendjelloul; filmed by Camilla Skagerström.

The voice and lyrics of an American pop musician inspired disaffected 1970s Afrikaner youth and others who opposed authority and apartheid in South Africa.

Most Americans never heard of him.

Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American Detroiter, became best known in South Africa for his first album Cold Fact. His acoustic guitar tunes swing and his lyrics have an edge. Americans who grew up at the time or are familiar with its popular music easily will recognize Rodriguez’s period sound and his lyrics’ period slang and attitude.

The artist cut three albums in the early 1970s. Despite the expectations and high hopes of local supporters and record company cognoscenti who were sure they had discovered another Bob Dylan, the records were, in the words of former Motown records chairman Clarence Avant, ‘monumental flops.’

After this, Rodriguez got on with his life in Detroit. In his quiet self-deprecating manner, he said, ‘I pretty much went back to work.’ This work is the hard manual labor he has done most of his life to support his family.

Meanwhile, unknown to Rodriguez and just about everyone else in the U.S.—though someone somewhere had to have been making a lot of money—Rodriguez became ‘monumentally’ popular in South Africa.

‘To many South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,’ said Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman, who said he got his nickname when army comrades found it easier to refer to him as ‘Sugar Man,’ the lead song on Cold Fact, than Segerman. They later shortened this to ‘Sugar.’

The besieged police state that was the apartheid-gripped, internationally isolated 1970s Republic of South Africa could not have been more different from the U.S. at the time. Rodriguez’s catchy tunes with lyrics that referenced sex, drugs and young peoples’ angst had passed Americans by but were a new thing to young South Africans.

Rodriguez and his music captured their imagination.  

‘Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently,’ said South African music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom.

South African authorities controlled the country’s radio airwaves at the time and everything they did to limit Rodriguez’s exposure—including manually incising ‘offending’ tracks which made reference to sex and drugs on vinyl record albums produced locally or imported from abroad—just enhanced the singer’s popularity.

South Africans only had heard his records. In the political climate of the day, it would not have been unusual for an artist like Rodriguez to be denied entry or to refuse to come to the country. When it became apparent he no longer was producing songs, young South Africans began to believe rumors that Rodriguez had died or killed himself, like Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

And like those legends, he stayed young in people’s minds and also became popular to younger listeners.

In the 1990s Bartholomew-Strydom turned his journalistic skills to the task of figuring out what actually became of Rodriguez. He was joined in his effort by Segerman, a self-described lifelong Rodriguez fan.

Music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and lifelong Rodriguez fan Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman.

Segerman created a Web site, ‘The Great Rodriguez Hunt’; he put Rodriguez’s image on milk cartons. Bartholomew at first tried to ‘follow the money.’ The songs are filled with references to places. Bartholomew-Strydom traveled the globe trying to track him down. He finally hit pay dirt when he followed up a name in Rodriguez’s song ‘Inner City Blues’:

‘Met a girl from Dearborn,

            Early six this morn’,

A cold fact.’

This South African wondered whether ‘Dearborn’ is a place. It turned out to be a place in Wayne County, Michigan, not far from Detroit.

He located Mike Theodore in Detroit and reached him by telephone from South Africa. Theodore has known Rodriguez since the 1960s; he had co-produced Cold Fact. Bartholomew-Strydom asked Theodore for specifics about the purported theatrical death that Rodriguez’s South African fans had imagined. Did he set himself alight or shoot himself on stage?

Rodriguez dead? Theodore asked rhetorically. ‘The principal artist known as Sixto Rodriguez is alive and kicking, and living in Detroit,’ he said.

Bartholomew-Strydom had found his quarry, solved the mystery, and could finish his Rodriguez story, ‘Looking for Jesus.’

Malik Bendjelloul’s AcademyAward and BAFTA-winning documentary tells the incredible tale of how Bartholomew-Strydom and Segerman tracked down this obscure music legend whom they and many other fans believed to be long dead.

Even more extraordinary is the calmly centered, unassuming man Searching for Sugar Man reveals behind the legend and the life his tale took on in the U.S. and South Africa after Bartholomew-Strydom’s story ran.

As Rodriguez’s Detroit employer and friend Rick Emmerson said:

‘Even if his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained. And he had to keep finding a place, refining the process of how to apply himself. He knew there was something more.’

The Fifth Horseman is Fear

A Páty Jezdec je Strach (The Fifth Horseman Is Fear) 1964 Czechoslovakia Filmové Studio Barrandor (100 minutes) directed by Zbyněk Brynych.

The Fifth Horseman is that rare ‘Holocaust film’ which has not a single yellow star or jackbooted German.

The movie’s title adds a Fifth Rider, ‘Fear,’ to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the New Testament Book of Revelation, in which ‘War’ rides a white horse, ‘Famine’ a red horse, ‘Pestilence’ a black horse, and ‘Predation’ a pale horse.

The new rider, the face of which is fear-inspiringly anonymous policemen in plain black suits, gets about town in an open automobile with a telephone connected to an anonymous tip line. As such, the Fifth Rider delivers a near hallucinatory paranoia equal to that of the French existentialist dramas set in Nazi-occupied France.

The main plot is straightforward. Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček), a middle-aged Jewish doctor banned from practicing medicine and forced to compromise himself morally and spiritually to survive, risks his life simply to do his ethical duty as a doctor. Dr. Braun saves the life of a neighbor’s friend, a resistance fighter—Panek (Karel Nováček)—shot by police; he obtains morphine under the table to ease his patient’s pain and hides him.

The film opens—and closes—with a montage of Prague’s streets and passages. Drawn into this series of well composed day lit images, one becomes aware that there is someone in the background keeping an eye on him. Wherever you go in the city, someone watches you with suspicion.

Wherever you go in fascist-occupied Prague, someone is watching you, in Brynych's 1964 classic The Fifth Horseman Is Fear.   

The camera at first tentatively nears, and then returns several times to a printed notice pasted across Nazi-published lists of Czech names: 

RYCHL‎‎ÝM A PRĚSNÝM UDÁNÍM CHRÁNÍTE SVOU VLASTÍ BEZPEČNOST

VOLEJTE 448 11

‘Promptly and accurately reporting information ensures your safety. Call 448 11.’

In other words, ‘If you see something, say something.’

This film would say through an assortment of characters that one’s worst enemy most often is himself: bad conscience, willful moral or ethical blindness, or self-preserving myopia.

Authority induces an atmosphere of corrosive paranoia. It isolates people by informing a sense of self-preservation that alienates them from each another. Like the Old Testament God, its restless, ruthless, capricious gaze falls upon real people, often with devastating effect. Its black suited agents conduct intrusive searches of private apartments.

A police inspector (Jirí Vrstála) investigates the cleavage of Věra Šidlak (Jana Pracharová) during an apartment search in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964. 

Meanwhile, each person’s ego paces endlessly inside his head, gripped by the enormity of its own smallness, shortcomings, powerlessness and sense of personal guilt. And while everyone believes he is maintaining his self-preservation by assuming that someone is watching him and keeping an eye on others, few have the time, energy, or independence to see what actually is going on before their own eyes.

The plot and action center on Dr. Braun, but a boy who watches and knows the principal characters the way children do witnesses key plot points and his view links the broader narrative together. Honzik Veselý (Tomás Hádl) does not always understand what he sees, but the camera needs his vantage point to tell the whole story.

The boy Honzik (Tomás Hádl) does not always understand what he sees, but the camera needs his vantage point to tell the whole story in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

The drama takes place among the residents of an Art Nouveau apartment building. A character itself in the story, this structure with its grand spiraling staircase, dramatic lighting and long shadows, makes for ideal expressionist shots.

A character itself, the Art Nouveau apartment building makes for ideal expressionist shots in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

The residents appear to be ordinary middle class people. There is the well-to-do Dr. Karel Veselý (Jirí Adamíra), apparently a lawyer, his luxury-loving wife, Marta (Zdenka Procházková), their son Honzik, and Anička, the nanny (Iva Janzurová).

There is Vlastimil Fanta (Josef Vinklár), an anxious middle-aged tattletale; an elderly music teacher (Olga Scheinpflugová) with a pet dachshund, who worships the composer Franz Haydn; Mrs. Kratochvílová (Eva Svobodová), the middle-aged female concierge. There is Mr. Šidlak (Ilja Prachar), a butcher, his young wife Věra (Jana Pracharová) and their baby.

And there is Dr. Braun, a trimly fastidious and apparently cultivated, well dressed middle-aged man who lives alone in the garret. The doctor lives quietly above the racket of a football field, with a violin he tunes and fingers but does not play, and a very different, not so distant past.

Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček) compartmentalizes the frighteningly disparate parts of his life in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Dr. Braun was a physician until the Nazi race laws banned him from practicing medicine. He now lives somewhat incongruously among these Gentiles. Everyone in the building knows he is a Jew; everyone knows he was a doctor; everyone knows that the authorities have sanctioned him to live in the building; but no one associates with him.

The former doctor makes a living as ‘a kind of warehouseman,’ he says. He works at the Registry of Appropriated Jewish Property [Registrace židovských konfiskátů], where the story begins.

The ‘warehouse,’ the lovely and unwarehouselike interior spaces and ornate trimmings of which indicate a once prominent synagogue, is an Ali Baba’s cave of former Jewish household goods and property. Every item is primly ‘marked and ticketed.’ There are shelves stocked with food preserves and fine china, stacks of antique books and beautiful furniture, a floor of carelessly parked pianos. Countless musical instruments neatly line stairwells. There is a high wall of confiscated clocks.

Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček) inventories items among ‘a high wall of confiscated clocks’ at work in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Ghostly moving vans on empty streets collect everything to the last bird cage. They also evidently make deliveries. Privileged people phone Dr. Braun at the registry to requisition apartments and furnishings as needed, including towels. The efficiency and workaday normality of this operation, if not the whole city, underline madness beyond the banality of evil. 

Dr. Braun occasionally recognizes the former property and street addresses of old friends as he goes through the warehouse with his ledger. He fends off the stressful anxiety dream his existence has become by compartmentalizing the frighteningly disparate parts of his life, often with exteriorized interior monologues:

‘You’ll always find somebody who doesn’t think at all. And so he wants to think for the rest and decide everything for them. Life, death—no problem. Death’s not a novelty if not my own. No one is screaming. He’s transferred, marked and ticketed. It’s really an act of mercy. The reason is I cannot tell. I do not like you, Doctor Fell. You’ve got such a strange nose. But not to complicate matters. I’ve made a dividing line, and it’s bad luck you’re on the wrong side.’

A medical emergency seeks the doctor out and makes him decide which role is most important. It takes him into the streets to get morphine, to a night club where he seeks out a former medical colleague among people partying to drown their anxieties, to a ‘Jewish sanatorium.’

Police agents respond to the ring of a dime dropped in the apartment building.

Honzik, puzzled by the events he witnesses, asks, ‘Daddy, who is a real hero?’

‘A man who dies unnecessarily, as opposed to those who live unnecessarily,’ his father replies.

The ‘warehouse’: Each person’s ego paces endlessly inside his own head, gripped by the enormity of his own smallness in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Shot in Prague in the mid-1960s on the crest of the Czech New Wave, the movie does not claim to be ‘based on a true story.’ Nor do the filmmakers make an effort to create the illusion of the city under Nazi occupation twenty years earlier. Policemen wear plain black suits and non-specific reference is made to devotion for a ‘beloved leader’ in a repeated propaganda formula without further elaboration.

What director Zbyněk Brynych tried to do was to recapture the fraught psychological atmosphere of everyday life in Nazi-ruled Prague of twenty years before.

In the ‘Prague Spring’ of the 1960s, this served as an analogous commentary on contemporary Soviet rule. Within the context of that time, the ideological nuance that Josef Stalin was much more a ‘beloved leader’ than ever Adolf Hitler was purported to be would not have been lost on Czech viewers. 

Born to Kill

Born to Kill, 1947 U.S. RKO (83 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, written by Eve Green and Richard Macaulay; based on the novel Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn; features a kibitz track with Wise discussing the picture with film historian Eddie Muller.

A coolly attractive woman in Reno for a quickie divorce falls for a striking, intense man, but the character actors are what make this gothic noir marvel sparkle.

Divorcée Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) first meets Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) across a craps table. Wild aggressively pursues what he wants. Their paths cross again on a railway siding leaving town.

The former Mrs. Brent is game. True to his moniker, Wild embodies a passionate, unpredictable, aberrant sexuality that attracts the ironic, appraising Brent. She holds the world at bay with sharp tailoring, manicured syntax and a raised eyebrow.

Wild wastes no time shedding his scanty self-control when someone comes between him and a subject of his desire. A housemaid later observing him through the crack of a kitchen door sums up his grim focus: ‘His eyes get me: they run up and down you like a searchlight.’

They really do.                                         

Brent and Wild travel by train together to San Francisco where she has plans to marry steel magnate Fred Grover (Phillip Terry), all dahlings and highballs. Wild, set on making himself ‘a lot more than I am,’ marries Brent’s sweetly clueless sister Georgia (Audrey Long) in his pre-Brent meanwhile. Georgia is heiress to a San Francisco newspaper (Brent was adopted).

But the dark lees of Wild’s sociopathic past shadow him to San Francisco in the person of one Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak), a middle-aged, proverb-quoting and jovially venal private eye with a Central European accent. 

Walter Slezak as private investigator Albert Arnett in Born to Kill (1947). 

‘I am a man of integrity. But I am always ready to listen to an interesting offer,’ Arnett helpfully tells a potential client.

His client is Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), the Reno landlady of the murdered Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), one of Wild’s former girlfriends. Palmer’s girlish but fatal mistake was to make a psychopath jealous. Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett to investigate the young woman’s killing after Reno police seem to lose interest in the case.

Dramatic studio lighting illuminates Brent as it shrouds the energized Wild. His dark side draws her to him, but also makes the narrative wobble a bit because the psychosexual high jinx had to be muted in the era the film was made.

But any gothic excess is more than offset by an outstanding ensemble of character actors who bring the story off, from Slezak’s Ecclesiastes-quoting detective—‘I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets and he who falls beneath her spell has need of God’s mercy’—to Elisha Cook Jr., film noir’s perennial ‘scared little guy,’ as Mart Waterman, Wild’s best friend and facilitator.

Best of all is Esther Howard’s Mrs. Kraft, the middle-aged landlady to Reno divorcées and friend of the murdered woman. Mrs. Kraft braves middle age drinking beer with her girls and flirting with younger men. After she hires Arnett to find Palmer’s killer, she follows Arnett to San Francisco to make sure that her money is well spent. 

Esther Howard as Mrs. Frank in Born to Kill (1947).

Mrs. Kraft has more lines, fills in more blanks, and moves the plot along as well as a Shakespearean clown. Her scenes are fun to watch, whether boozily flirting and playing hearts with a bellhop, trying to escape a killer in the dunes (and proving handy with a hatpin), or having it out woman-to-woman with Brent.

Back projection, a technique common to films of this time, is notable in this film, with great shots of the neon-lit ‘Biggest Little City in the World’ seen at night from inside the train as Brent and Wild blow town. There also are lovely shots of long gone San Francisco cityscapes and street exteriors seen through the windows of Los Angeles studio set interiors.

The credits appear in the final frame against a fetishistic under-the-table still shot of a woman’s legs in sheer black hose and dark pumps. The woman, seated at an antique side table, wears a dark gown open from mid-thigh, her legs crossed right thigh over left, the lower part of the gown draped on the floor beneath the chair. 

Getting back

Revanche (Getting Back) 2008 Austria Criterion (121 minutes) written and directed by Götz Spielmann.

The fates of two young couples collide in this modern folk tale when a daydreaming Viennese sad sack with a prostitute girlfriend tries to solve their existential problems by robbing a small town bank.

The story about these couples becomes a series of fascinating character studies of the four individual people who comprise these relationships, as well as an aged widower farmer, one of the men’s grandfathers.

This is the first feature film of writer and director Götz Spielmann, an established Austrian playwright and stage director.

Spielmann said in an interview that his title Revanche has a double meaning in German. Like the expression ‘getting back’ in English, ‘revanche’ can convey the sense of ‘revenge’; it also contains the possibility of retrieving something lost or getting a second chance. Characters use the word ‘revenge’ several times during the movie, but in these instances they say the German word ‘rache’ (vengeance) rather than ‘revanche’.

Alex (Johannes Krisch, a veteran Austrian stage actor) is a porter at the Cinderella Club, a Viennese brothel. He and his girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), one of the club’s top ‘madels,’ are deeply in love.

In love and trouble: Alex (Johannes Krisch) and Tamara (Irina Potapenko) in Revanche (2008).

Alex has a minor criminal record and jail time which seem more a product of bad luck and poor judgment than criminal intent. He is not a ‘bad’ guy. He works hard on the farm of his maternal grandfather, ‘Old Hausner’ (Hannes Thanheiser). Alex’s good intentions and best efforts just never add up to putting him up on the straight-and-narrow.

Tamara, an undocumented Russian sex worker and illegal alien from Ukraine, appears to keep her life together by compartmentalizing its radically different parts and living them one at a time: her relationship with Alex, the daily sexual humiliation she experiences on the job, her religion, and regular telephone calls home to her family.

For Tamara, her job seems to come down to partying with men she does not have to like, mildly anaesthetized with drugs and alcohol. She ‘performs’ and has desultory oral sex, neither of which appear to her really to count; the money is better than she ever made before, and the work is not too demanding. But Alex knows that very shortly the club management will ‘break’ her: the party will end and she won’t be able to leave.

Tamara (Irina Potapenko) 'performing' for a client at the Cinderella Club.

Tamara tells Alex that she needs $30,000 to buy her freedom from Cinderella Club owner Konecny (Hanno Poschl). Alex needs €80,000 to buy a partnership in a bar on Ibiza in Spain’s Balearic Islands to spirit himself and Tamara away from Austria and the Viennese underworld.

During a chance stop at a Volksbank branch in a town near his grandfather’s farm, Alex imagines what little risk it would take to stick-up this folksy-friendly bank hard and fast before they knew what hit them. He would use an unloaded gun to make sure no one could get hurt. He would solve all his and Tamara’s money problems in one morning’s quick work.

‘Nothing can go wrong,’ Alex repeatedly reassures his disbelieving Tamara.

In this town, an intense young policeman sensitive to parental pressure to get on with his life dreams of making a dramatic arrest that will advance his career.

Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust), the fresh-faced, earnest cop, and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss), the owner and manager of a grocery store, are an attractive couple with good jobs and a nice new house, but they are frustrated by their inability to conceive a child. Their new nursery was finished before Susanne’s miscarriage, itself a ‘fluke’ because Robert is impotent.

A perfect life: Susanne (Ursula Strauss) and Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust) in Revanche (2008).

Against his better judgment, Alex lets Tamara go with him when he does the bank job. She stays in the car on the getaway route, sitting in the passenger seat, praying in a whisper in Russian with her eyes closed while he disappears up the alley.

At this moment, Officer Kargl, rounding the corner on a routine foot patrol, notices a vehicle illegally parked and taps on the passenger side window to tell the woman in the car that she cannot park there.

Robert walks to the front of the car after the passenger, a Slav speaking broken German, tells him that she does not have identification—and just as Alex nearly bounds back around the corner. 

The events which follow draw the characters together in unexpected ways designed to pinpoint each character’s soft spot.

Robert (Andreas Lust) and Alex (Johannes Krisch) in Revanche (2008)

One could object that it would not take long for the Austrian equivalent of the FBI working the case to solve the bank robbery and its outcome, but this story is not a police procedural. Spielmann said in an interview that the story he had in mind developed from a Jungian idea that one’s challenges in life arise psychically from what one has to learn as a human being.

Thus the story resolves more like a folk tale, in a ‘house at the end of the road,’ and it is in this way that each character ‘gets back.’

One of the most notable effects of this well made film is that the actors carry the drama without a clutter of music, as though on stage. Other than club music in the background in scenes at the Cinderella and actor Hannes Thanheiser’s improvisations on an accordion as the old farmer, Spielmann lets the actors’ Austrian dialect and broken German, the birds, the wind, nature and night speak for themselves.

Hannes Thanheiser as Old Hausner, playing for Ursula Strauss' Susanne in Revanche (2008)

Also, rather than show his audience plain or even telling objects they already have seen, such as photographs, Spielmann shows his actors’ faces responding to these things, letting his actors carry the drama.

The brothel scenes were shot in an actual club using its employees as extras. The women are almost always shot low looking up at their male customers and males who work at the club.

The sets in the country, especially on Old Hausner’s farm, are lit and the frames composed like classic Netherlandish genre paintings.

Included in CD set is Fremdland (Foreign Land), 1984, Spielmann’s first short film. A small boy has been sent to live and work for the summer on his family farm in the Austrian Alps alone with an intense, repressed farmhand. Dry—and spooky—as this may sound, this forty-three minute film draws one in by telling an intense and intimate, pitch perfect story in pictures.

The house at the end of the road in Revanche (2008).

Moon tow

門徒 [Moon tow—Cantonese; Mén Tú—pinyin] (Protégé) 2007 Hong Kong (108 minutes) written and directed by Derek Yee [Yee Tung-Shing]

This is a good local story about heroin trafficking in Hong Kong, in Cantonese but aimed at an international audience.

The movie is something like a Hong Kong version of the 1989 BBC mini-series Traffik (Traffic 2000 U.S.), seen through the eyes of an undercover Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officer. It looks at the narcotics trafficking ‘industry’ more than the politics, as well as people the industry affects: addicts, police, and various levels of heroin traffickers, from Hong Kong ‘kitchens’ where wholesalers convert pure import for distribution to local dealers, to a warlord opium producer in Asia’s Golden Triangle.

The story reportedly is based on the experiences of Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officers. The narrative incorporates an engaging variety of authentic details involving the production, transportation, and distribution of heroin. There is no stylized action film ‘action’ such as acrobatic martial arts and ‘endless clip’ automatic weapons fire.

The film opens with a young uniformed policeman’s meditation on drug users. We then watch the same man, ‘Nick’ [Lee Chi-Lik] (Daniel Wu), in business casual attire quarterback a complex drug exchange on the fly and under police surveillance while talking to Narcotics Bureau police on a separate ‘burner’ phone. The quick-paced sequence is well-composed, deftly edited, and realistic.

Nick is an undercover officer in the Narcotics Bureau, a loner whose dangerous work is his life. He apparently has worked undercover his entire police career of seven years. In this time, he has become the right hand man—the ‘moon tow,’ or ‘protégé,’ of the title—to Lin Quin (Andy Lau), who controls half of Hong Kong’s heroin trade and whom Hong Kong law enforcement authorities want to bring down.

Quin’s mantra is ‘Never take risks.’ He is a businessman like Tony Soprano, operating every day in an environment in which the downside of the lucrative financial gain his business realizes is a long prison term if caught and convicted. And like Soprano, Quin has personal and family issues: the gangster is a diabetic in dire need of a kidney transplant, with a demanding wife (Anita Yuen) and a difficult tomboy teenager, among other things.

Nick’s boss, Police Superintendent Miu Chi-Wah (Derek Yee, also the film’s director), and other higher-ups praise Nick’s work. Nick’s dilemma, as a straight cop without any apparent proclivities for acquiring money and power or using drugs, is that his life revolves around ‘industry’ people he has got close to but ultimately is setting up to bust, and addicts in the mean streets where he lives to maintain his cover. 

As the story progresses, Nick gets involved with Fan [Pang Yuk-Fun] (Zhang Jingchu), a neighbor with an adorable toddler, separated from her husband. Fan is a heroin addict. Nick discovers her condition when they first have sex, when his fingertips find lesions which the camera shows us on the back of her legs behind her knees where she has shot up.

Nick is truly a good guy. The story plays out around his young man’s passion and inexperience, large enough to take on the seemingly impossible in shouldering a risky role in Hong Kong’s ‘war on drugs,’ and in trying to help a vampire-like neighbor with a small child ‘kick’ her taste for blood.

Quin’s deteriorating health and his questions about Nick’s loyalty after Hong Kong customs police conduct a ham-handed bust of Quin’s kitchen accelerate his need to designate a successor.

Note to police (and warning to squeamish viewers): do not fire live ammunition at close range at steel doors, especially with colleagues standing nearby; and do not reach through holes on steel doors when you do not know who, and with what implement, is on the other side.

Nick accompanies Quin, his family and amorous single sister-in-law (He Mei-tian) on a trip ‘to pay tribute to Buddha’ in Thailand, where Nick will be either ‘made’ or made simply to disappear.

In the vicinity of Mae Sai, a small town in the heart of the Golden Triangle, near the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos, Quin and Nick ride elephants to meet the genial drug warlord General Chachai (Nirut Sirijanya). The three discuss the industry Big Picture with the aid of ‘market research’ provided by the good offices of the United Nations in its 2005 World Drug Report.

The general notes that surrounding governments have begun to crack down on the industry. He points out a crater near his compound where rival international drug producers dropped a 2000-pound bomb to ‘make a point’ that the Golden Triangle has seen its day. Fields of American-style corn attest to the fact that foreign do-gooders now overpay farmers in relative terms to grow alternative crops. The general also is aware that the market is trending away from needle-injected heroin, toward psychotropic drugs such as Ecstasy and K (ketamine).

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Fan’s estranged, ne’er-do-well junkie husband (Louis Koo playing a Toshiro Mifune-like rogue) tracks Fan down house-sitting for Nick and trying to kick her heroin habit.

Without unnecessarily spoiling plot turns, the significance of Nick eventually sending Fan’s husband to Singapore as a drug courier is that this country executes people caught bringing in even relatively small amounts of illegal narcotics (at that time, 15 grams had been the heroin limit, though the law appears since to have eased). 

The story comes full circle to the young uniformed policeman’s meditations on why people use drugs; though this full circle begins a new cycle.

Free Cinema

Free Cinema 1952-1963 U.K. British Film Institute (475 minutes/three DVDs) Facets Video, 2006.

Nothing could be less ‘typical’ than a Saturday night at Piccadilly Circus or a Sunday morning at the old Covent Garden flower market in the hands of imaginative young filmmakers seeking their subjects in the ordinary.

This three-DVD set reissued by the British Film Institute includes 14 short documentary films, two short ‘art’ pieces, and a recent documentary which looks back at a group of young British filmmakers in the 1950s who called their movement Free Cinema. 

Hand-held cameras catch revelers at an annual bash for miners in Durham, as well as ‘peepers’ with binoculars trying to spot young couples making out in the bushes. American and British servicemen, civilians and prostitutes look each other over in the heart of a Saturday night. A film editor lays bare a campy amusement park exhibitor’s pretense of torture and death by execution as family entertainment.

Nightlife on Piccadilly Circus in Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner's Nice Time (1957).

An old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments appears through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit. A northern mill town closes down for the weekend. A working shed of Lancashire railway engineers regrets the passing of coal-fired steam to diesel locomotives.

A pair of deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns is pestered by children as they make their way across the working industrial landscapes and German bomb-devastated postwar vacant lots of East End docklands. A Hungarian refugee newly arrived in London speaks little English and seeks a street address without the postal district code.

Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews in Lorenza Mazzetti's Together (1956).

A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar obsessively in bowls and umbrella-wielding middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy.

London schoolchildren play street games with traditional counting songs, and adolescent girls skip rope and chalk squares across Edinburgh. Their older peers jitterbug to live rockabilly music at a London youth club and to r&b and Dixieland jazz in a pub.

Edinburgh schoolgirls with happy feet in N. McIsaac's The Singing Street (1952)

A local group of five family-owned West Riding weekly newspapers (still in operation) is profiled in the context of the communities they serve, from reporters and advertising personnel on the street, to composing and proofing the galleys and making pages from hot lead, to the early morning delivery boys. 

We also see and hear the distinctive individual voices of many faces in the crowd that marched to Aldermaston in Easter 1958 to protest Britain’s nuclear weapons program. The uncredited unseen narrator is the young actor Richard Burton.

'Ordinary people' protesting Britain's nuclear arms program in March to Aldermaston (1959). 

They called themselves Free Cinema. The original ‘they’ were Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. It was a start, if not a ‘new wave’; they made their pictures and never looked back.

They called their movement ‘free,’ because their projects, mostly short documentaries, were free from the strictures of studio suits and sponsors. The British Film Institute’s Experimental Film Fund provided them minimal funding to shoot and complete their films as they saw fit. (Reisz worked for Ford’s film unit with the understanding that he could use its facilities for his own work.)

These short films document what had been predominately white urban working- and middle-class Britain in the first era of the Cold War. From today’s perspective, it can be seen as much a look back at a disappearing industrial Britain as a look forward at how these films influenced what followed. The streets feel more open and at the same time more empty with the incredibly few automobiles there used to be on them.

Empty streets on a Friday night in the north in Michael Grigsby's Tomorrow's Saturday (1962).

The young men (and women) who made these films are less notably ‘angry’ than their dramatic contemporaries such as John Osborne; they were more focused on training their limited technology—mostly hand-held, black & white 16mm movie cameras—on their living subjects than training an audience.

The films’ authenticity derives from the cameras’ go-with-the-flow subjectivity. The cinematographers realized that what they were doing was not strictly objective, though some editors had a heavier hand than others (e.g., campy torture and execution = family entertainment). The subjects speak eloquently for themselves, more often than not.

Images that speak for themselves: Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953).

The sound technology at this time was primitive and rather limited. A viewer gets to know these mostly anonymous ‘ordinary people’ by their faces. They are fascinating to watch as characters, from the neighborhood children and working people who know each other well to strangers on London streets, as they interact with each other within the contexts of their particular settings.

One of the most intriguing features throughout this collection is watching how expressive people’s hands can be, what they do with their hands, where they put them, and how they use them.

Small Is Beautiful—The Story of the Free Cinema Films Told by Their Makers, the 43-minute, 2006 documentary included at the end of the set, gives a good introduction to the movement and its personalities and places them in a broader context.

Walter Lassally, a Free Cinema cinematographer, said he developed his technique for shooting Every Day but Christmas (1957), a typical morning among vendors at the old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market, and the short art film Together (1956), from closely observing his subjects and getting used to the rhythms in which they moved in their spaces.    

Covent Garden flower market in Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas (1957)

‘I studied this rhythm so that when I was ready to shoot,’ Lassally said, ‘I was able to follow that rhythm and to anticipate. It’s like you’re a fly on the wall, but you’re an intelligent fly, and you’re very well trained, you’ve observed the process and you’re ready to film it in the most effective manner without drawing attention to yourself.

‘There again, like with Together, the result was a film which you can look at fifty years later and be perfectly happy with,’ he said.

Lost in the city in Robert Vas' Refuge England (1959).

_______________________________________________________________________

The films are:

DVD #1

O Dreamland 1953 (12 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by John Fletcher. Middle- and working-class crowds enjoy themselves at an enormous amusement park and pavilion in Margate, England, where campy sexuality and torture and death by execution are part of the entertainment. 16 mm

Momma Don’t Allow 1956 (22 minutes) directed by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher; set among young local regulars, including a dental assistant, a butcher, and a train cleaner (and some incidental slumming toffs) who come to dance at Art and Viv Sanders’ Wood Green Jazz Club in the Fishmonger’s Arms (north London), featuring the Chris Barber Jazz Band. 16mm

Together 1956 (49 minutes) directed by Lorenza Mazzetti with the collaboration of Denis Horne and the technical assistance of Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher and Walter Lassally, among others. Two deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns (British painter Michael Andrews and the Scottish sculptor and pop art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi) lyrically navigate the postwar ruins and oversized industrial landscapes of the old East End docklands, pestered by children. 35mm

Wakefield Express 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by Lindsay Anderson with John Fletcher, filmed by Walter Lassally, commentary by George Potts. A profile of a family-owned local newspaper group told in the context of the communities it serves in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Wakefield, Horbury, Pontefract, Selby and Skyrack, etc.), showing where the news and advertising comes from and how these weekly newspapers are produced and distributed. 16mm

Nice Time 1957 (17 minutes) directed by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, filmed by John Fletcher. Throngs of pleasure seekers in Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night, centered on the statue of Eros. Filmed on 20 consecutive Saturday nights using the natural light, with pieces of movie soundtracks, barkers, a busker, and stray conversations. Shot at night with HPS Ilford 400 ASA 16mm stock.

The Singing Street 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by N. McIsaac, J.T.R. Ritchie and R. Townsend. Edinburgh schoolgirls singing traditional songs while skipping rope and chalk squares and playing sidewalk games. 16mm

Every Day Except Christmas 1957 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-1 (39 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Daniele Paris, narration by Alun Owen (who later wrote the screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night). A typical morning among vendors operating stalls at the 300-year-old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market (closed 1974). Shot inside at night with then-new HPS Ilford 400 ASA 35mm stock.

DVD #2

Refuge England 1959 (27 minutes) directed and cowritten by Robert Vas, filmed by Walter Lassally and Louis Wolfers, with Tibor Molnár as a Hungarian refugee of the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, new to London, trying to find a London address without a postal district code. 16mm

Enginemen 1959 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby and his team, colleagues from his day job at Granada Television, among railroad engineers and rolling stock at a locomotive shed at Newton Heath, near Manchester, England. Unit Five Seven’s first film. 16mm

We Are the Lambeth Boys 1959 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-2 (49 minutes)   directed by Karel Reisz, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Johnny Dankworth and the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and the Mickey Williams Group. A lively profile of activities offered at Alford House, a youth club in Kennington in south London, among a core of its local 350 young men and women members. 35mm  

Food for a Blluuusssshhhhhh! 1959 (30 minutes) directed by Elizabeth Russell, filmed by Alan Forbes, edited by Jack Gold, with Elizabeth Russell, Nicholas Ferguson, Felicity Innes, Brian Innes. A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar in bowls and middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy. The story ends on the threshold of The World’s End pub. 16mm

DVD #3 Beyond Free Cinema

One Potato, Two Potato 1957 (21 minutes) directed by Leslie Daiken, filmed by Peter Kennedy, edited by Morag Maclennan. London schoolchildren larking and playing street games among postwar bombed out blocks to a soundtrack of traditional rhymes and counting songs.

March to Aldermaston 1959 (33 minutes) an anonymously-made collaborative effort about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament-organized, four-day march during Easter weekend 1958 from Trafalgar Square to the hydrogen-bomb producing factory at Aldermaston, about 50 miles west of London, with an uncredited narration by Richard Burton.

The Vanishing Street 1962 (19 minutes) directed, written and filmed by Robert Vas.  The ‘street’ is Hessel Street, high street of a soon-to-be-razed old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments, a synagogue, a Yiddish newspaper and kibitzers, viewed through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit.

Tomorrow’s Saturday 1962 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby, filmed by Chris Faulds in the summers of 1959 and 1960 among the working populaces of the industrial mill towns Blackburn and Preston, Lancashire, closing down the mills and mines for the weekend. The broad empty streets without automobiles feel unnaturally eerie.

Gala Day 1963 (25 minutes) directed by John Irvin with several teams of cameramen, shot among revelers and paraders at the Durham Miner’s Gala on July 21, 1962. Irvin got into hot water for including scenes in which men, some with binoculars, appear to be ‘peeping’ at couples making out in the shrubbery.

Small Is Beautiful 2006 (43 minutes) directed by Christophe Dupin. A concise, expository film about Free Cinema, including interviews with cameraman Walter Lassally and directors Michael Grigsby and Alain Tanner. 

Making whoopee in Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953)