#stuart collier

Roberto Rossellini’s Outliers by Stuart Collier

Among cinephiles, Roberto Rossellini carries a reputation not unlike Jean Renoir’s. He is said to have been one of the supreme humanists of cinema, an artist who rarely sought technical perfection but often achieved indelible insights into the human spirit and its soulful struggle against the postwar zeitgeist. Many other contemporary Italian filmmakers drew from the same thematic palette—class, Catholicism, postwar anhedonia—but Rossellini’s films were unique for their lack of linearity and didacticism, instead seeking out dialectical ruptures and open-ended mysteries. And unlike many auteurs, he cycled through aesthetic phases at an alarming rate, never seeming to resist the pull of perpetual reinvention.

And yet, Rossellini himself is almost as indecipherable and contradictory as his films. Lacking the gentle and generous temperament that cemented Renoir’s persona as a warm-hearted humanitarian, Rossellini was something of a playboy with a penchant for fast cars, adulterous affairs and immature fits. His biography never seems to coherently thread pieces together: how could the man who struck so righteously at fascism in ROME, OPEN CITY (’45) have contributed propaganda films to Mussolini’s wartime government?

In addition to the canonical titles of Rossellini that are familiar to Criterion Collection enthusiasts, FilmStruck offers quite a few strange and delectable rarities that highlight Rossellini’s perhaps unmatched flexibility as a filmmaker.

L’AMORE (’48)

An anthology film consisting of only two vignettes, L’AMORE is especially puzzling in that these vignettes lack the connective thread that binds them together—with the exception of its star, Anna Magnani. The first vignette is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice, with Magnani as a woman agonizing over her crumbling relationship with a lover who remains off-screen: she talks to him over the phone, and whatever his thoughts or feelings or wrongs or rights, it is Magnani’s character who remains the focus. The effect is one of agonized and uncomfortable intimacy, and it diverges markedly from Rossellini’s usual earthiness and expansiveness of vision. These qualities come to bear on the second story, “The Miracle,” wherein Magnani plays a deluded religious fanatic who—impregnated by an idling wanderer (Federico Fellini, who co-wrote this and other Rossellini films)— believes that her pregnancy is a miracle from God. Catholic reactionaries were not happy about the story’s perceived sacrilege, but in hindsight, it is difficult to miss the compassion and the sense of climactic, enigmatic rapture that seems, time and again, to mark Rossellini’s treatment of religious themes.

THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE (’52)

I have always suspected that THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE (originally titled La macchina ammazzacattivi) is overlooked not only because it is a comedy, but also because of the crudeness of the title’s English translation. And yet the film itself is inspired. Rossellini aims for a morbid farce of fantastical dimension, in which the devil—in the guise of Saint Andrew—goads a devout Catholic named Celestino into literally exterminate the “bad people” of his community with a hexed camera. It is far-fetched to be sure, but also well within the parameters of a comically enlivened Catholicism and grounded within the social realities of the coastal village of the film’s setting. The life of the village becomes Rossellini’s satirical playground, wherein he depicts the stratification of local politics according to histrionic self-interest. The incessant bickering over the allocation of great sums of money (much of which is conferred by the estates of those whom Celestino has killed) is both a wellspring of hilarity and a serious moral failure all at once.

FEAR (’54)

The Trials of Wartime in Ingmar Bergman’s SHAME (’68) by Stuart Collier

The admiring gaze of the aesthete, when aimed at the filmography of Ingmar Bergman, naturally lunges upon THE SEVENTH SEAL (‘57) or PERSONA (‘66), two of his most abstract and abstruse works of primordially imagistic art. But many of Bergman’s greatest and most emotionally demanding works are visceral feats of unadorned realism – works of interpersonal bitterness and vulnerability. With the nether reaches of human misery as his subject, Bergman’s camera maintained a crisply measured distance, gracefully imposing an angular theatrical dramaturgy on the material. Out of this strain comes THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (’61), SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (‘73), AUTUMN SONATA (’78) and numerous other masterworks.

Bergman’s SHAME (’68) is an under-discussed masterpiece in his body of work. The reasons for its obscurity are hard to come by – my supposition is that war movie genre expectations inevitably minimize what the film is really up to. SHAME is certainly about war, but not in soldiers, politics or in the ins and outs of combat. Rather, it is about war as an unwelcome fact in the lives of two nonparticipants, a husband and wife played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman. As Jan and Eva Rosenberg, two former violinists, Ullman and von Sydow comprise one of Bergman’s great tempestuous married couples. Neutral and non-partisan to a dissonant fault (their coping mechanism seems to be merely to carry on as if the conflict is not happening), Jan and Eva are functionally aligned. Together they work on a small farm and are mutually committed to the persistence of their rustic, whittled-down life.

However, Jan and Eva’s teamwork in clearing the practical hurdles of farmhouse upkeep belies the fact that an unfathomable rift has grown between them, no doubt exacerbated by the bludgeoning warfare that haunts the periphery of their lives. Where Eva is strong-willed and adaptable to the travails of wartime, Jan slips helplessly into pained reminiscence and nervous collapse. There are a number of piquant moments served up by Bergman to articulate this pained relationship. The reluctance of Jan to shoot one of their chickens serves as an illuminating source of contention between the two, while an expertly timed formalist structure in the narrative accentuates Eva’s fraught disbelief in response to Jan’s admission that he is not a determinist, and that perhaps he will have outgrown his selfishness in the weeks or years to come.

Indeed, determinism is of the utmost importance to SHAME, which seems fixated on the question of whether any relationship can remain intact in response to civil war. Are Jan and Eva foredoomed to failure? While the experiential panic of bombs and artillery-fire is one dimension of warfare, the issue is reframed entirely by the introduction of one Colonel Jacobi, played to perfection by Gunnar Björnstrand. For Jacobi embodies military administrative authority, and it is his intrusion into the lives of Jan and Eva that expedites their ruin. The horror of chaos has given way to the horror of power.

Reveling in the TCM Archives by Stuart Collier

Pull up OUT OF THE PAST (’47) on FilmStruck and you will be treated not only to one of the most acclaimed film noirs in movie history, but also to a number of archival interviews with show-biz luminaries explaining what the Robert Mitchum classic means to them. There is an excerpt of Jane Greer describing her acting in the film – and how director Jacques Tourneur sought from her a performance drained of all effusive emotion. And there is a conversation with Rose McGowan, who discusses the embryonic stardom of Kirk Douglas at a time before the United Artists knockout CHAMPION (’49) made him a true heavy-hitter in Hollywood. And, my favorite, there is comedian Greg Proops describing the film’s paradigmatic noir conventions, before host Robert Osborne kicks the discussion up a notch with an assessment of RKO’s singular approach to lighting and production design.

Any foray into the TCM Select collection—which adds a new film each week—is likely to unearth all manner of archival material from throughout TCM’s 20+ year broadcasting history. Taken together, these discussions, interviews and specially produced intros qualify as a treasure trove of information and insight, from the original stars (such as Eli Wallach on his breathtaking performance in BABY DOLL (’56), or Ann Miller reminiscing about ON THE TOWN [’49]) to contemporary admirers (see John Lithgow’s stirring introduction to FATHER OF THE BRIDE [’50]).

In short, when FilmStruck announced its mission to integrate the TCM library into its streaming platform, this is exactly what was intended – not simply the movies, but the supplemental content that provides a much-needed context for truly appreciating the movies, how they were made and how they continue to resonate to this day. As I was going through these various treasures, I was especially struck by the features compiled for WOMAN OF THE YEAR (’42) and STAGECOACH (’39). For each film, there are a number of documentaries and scholarly supplements imported from the Criterion Collection editions. But, as if to counterbalance these lengthy educational extras, FilmStruck has also included several bite-sized roundtables between Robert Osborne and his guests – legendary feminist scholar Molly Haskell can be seen weighing in on the Hepburn/Tracy dynamic, while basketball icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar waxes lovingly about John Ford’s impeccable use of the Monument Valley landscape.

Naturally, Osborne proves to be the star of these offerings: a man who became for many the face of classic movie appreciation, mixing a boundless knowledge of film history with a fundamental amicability and even humility. Osborne never presented himself as an expert or as an authority (though he certainly was those things), but as the viewer’s friend and partner in film appreciation. And by gradually making available his hosted intros or his guest programmer interviews, FilmStruck is ensuring that his legacy lives on. Cinephilia is a much drearier place without his indelible voice.

Classifying the Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet by Stuart Collier

The films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet — it is said time and time again — are challenging, rigorous, alienating, invariably belonging to a mode of filmmaking that uses cinema as a means of accessing the Western cultural past. Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, among many others, have similarly sought to filter ancient texts through the medium of cinema, and, in the process, to creatively resolve those heated junctures where antiquity and modernity don’t quite mesh together. Yet Straub and Huillet’s commitment to this demanding, dialectical approach to filmic storytelling was uniquely all-consuming: with very few exceptions, each of their feature films tackles an exceptionally ambitious source, be it Franz Kafka or Sophocles, and pushes the art of adaptation to new experimental heights.

Now, this is not to say that these films are inaccessible, deified works of art more fitting for the museum or the lecture hall than the home media center. I would like to cast this duo’s films in a less demanding light. For all of the textual interpolations and formal rigor of these films, they are far from confusing — rather, the subject matter of each film is approached with a directness uncommon in most narrative cinema. In fact, I would even propose that they can be classified according to genre, and that these recognizable forms of storytelling can help us to understand what makes Straub and Huillet so unique.

The Musician Biopic

THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (’68) remains Straub and Huillet’s most celebrated work, precisely because it has no interest in adhering to the dictates of dramatic storytelling. This is a truly uncompromising biopic in that it recreates Johann Sebastian Bach’s actual music without adding on any bells or whistles. Bach himself is played by Dutch harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt, who facilitates over two dozen performances of the master’s pieces throughout the film, all of which are rendered with an uncanny verisimilitude in many of the original locations where Bach actually performed. As for narrative, conflict or characterization — these qualities are all cryptically embedded in the fictitious diary entries of his second wife, Anna Magdalena (played by Christiane Lang-Drewanz), which are read in intervals between performances. Where a traditional biopic might work to dramatically emphasize the contradictions between the music and the man, Straub and Huillet present the two side-by-side, in alternating blocks of screen time, beseeching the audience to thread the needle of this biographical history for themselves.

The Political Thriller

In 1664, French tragedian Pierre Corneille’s play Othon was staged at the court of King Louis XIV. This obscure drama, practically unknown today, concerns the labyrinthine bids for imperial power following the death of Emperor Nero. Straub and Huillet, for their first color film, decided to adapt this long forgotten relic of the West’s theatrical heritage, opting for the rather unusual title, EYES DO NOT WANT TO CLOSE AT ALL TIMES… (’70). Shot on location on the Palatine Hill of Rome, with all actors in period dress, the film is notable for one striking and deliberate inconsistency: Straub and Huillet make no effort to camouflage Rome as it exists today, replete with automotive traffic in the background and the din of urban industry riddling the soundtrack. As a panoply of characters engages in consultation and conspiracy regarding the fate of Rome — not all of it entirely comprehensible — the filmmakers continually emphasize that the Rome under discussion is a living historical paradox. This is not a political thriller in the vein of Alan J. Pakula — there is little action or suspense, for starters — but Straub and Huillet are no less interested in the nested intricacies of political power.

The Biblical Epic

The Power of the Pre-Code Press by Stuart Collier

Of all the institutions that govern our society, none forges a relationship with the public quite like the news media, which furnishes our understanding of the world’s varied goings-on even as it meretriciously peddles a more sordid influence. The goal of every press outlet is to optimize circulation, and so the specter of sensationalism comes to haunt even the most objectively reported stories. The slope from journalistic pedigree to tabloid tawdriness is a slippery one indeed, and it is every reporter’s choice not to lose his or her footing.

At least, this is the paradigm of the press that 1930’s Hollywood exploited for the purposes of screen drama, and FilmStruck has done the redoubtable duty of including three exceptional pre-Code productions in its recent slate highlighting cinema with a journalistic edge. Each of these brilliant studio concoctions involves opportunistic, savvy newsmen on the prowl, capturing the electric charge of the obstreperous pressroom and the ethical risks that are run in the covetous hunt for the newsworthy morsel. One man’s ruined reputation is the grist for another man’s Sunday column.

THE FRONT PAGE (’31) is the first screen adaptation of the hit Broadway comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur that would later serve as the inspiration for Howard Hawks’ HIS GIRL FRIDAY (’40). Where the Hawks version turns the relationship between managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and his star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) into a screwball romance, the original is a boys’ club through and through. For Lewis Milestone’s screen adaptation, it is Pat O’Brien who plays the Hildy to Adolphe Menjou’s Burns. The conflict is whether Hildy will choose love and marriage over the more primal thrill of clamping down on a juicy story involving a recently escaped convict who has narrowly avoided a hanging.

The play proved to be something of a blueprint for the screwball press sagas that dominate in the 1930s, cementing the manic mode of the newsroom milieu. Amidst the din of galloping typewriters crackles the most rarefied streetwise dialogue; the plotting, meanwhile, is at once fleet-footed and supremely intricate. In helming the 1931 screen production, Milestone brought an added innovation to bear on the proceedings – his customary mobile camera, which darts and swivels in lockstep with the frenzied reporters.

For all of the sterling qualities that THE FRONT PAGE has to recommend it, the more unsung FIVE STAR FINAL (’31) and BLESSED EVENT (’32) both tap into the more disturbing implications of what was then known as the gutter press, and are ultimately more scabrous meditations on journalistic ethics. It is no surprise that Warner Bros., then in its most fruitful period of sustained social critique, was responsible for both films.

FIVE STAR FINAL concerns a newspaper in a slump, whose city editor (Edward G. Robinson) begrudgingly agrees to embark upon a sensationalistic retrospective series on a 20-year-old murder scandal. It does not seem to cross Robinson’s mind that the ‘murderess’ of the story, played by Frances Starr, is now a respectable member of society who has worked hard to put the past behind her. The film goes to great pains to depict the psychic anguish that is unleashed on Starr’s character, eventually reaching a crescendo of violence and outrage whose exhortative tone is mollified by the all too human emotions of its characters. Among these are Robinson’s secretary (Aline MacMahon), who, with a serrated edge of cynicism, delivers the immortal line, “I think you can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.”

Rosaries and Razorblades: The Acrid Catholicism of BRIGHTON ROCK (’48) by Stuart Collier

The British and American cinema of the late 1940s, bristling as it did with noirish portent and psychological acuity, turned often to the remarkable literature of Graham Greene, that perennial master of the Catholic moral quandary framed by thriller conventions and a ruthless, frostbitten materialism. A few early crime and espionage thrillers lit the way — THIS GUN FOR HIRE (’42), MINISTRY OF FEAR (’44), CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (’45) — but the deluge was underway by the end of the decade, whence THE MAN WITHIN (’47), BRIGHTON ROCK (’48), THE FUGITIVE (’47), THE THIRD MAN (’49) and THE FALLEN IDOL (’48) all rolled off the proverbial assembly line over the span of a few short years.

Greene’s novels, particularly the thrillers (or what he called “entertainments”), were endlessly amenable to screenplay translation — his prose never paused to explicate the interiority of his characters, but rather briskly alighted on themes of the utmost moral seriousness by way of unremitting present-tense action. It is through their resolve under duress, the objects they suggestively brandish, and their surplus of earthly sufferings that his characters come into focus as haggard spiritual wanderers, even as they moonlight as spies, fugitives, Hitchcockian “wrong men” (one wonders at Greene’s hostility as a critic to the work of that other British grandmaster of the Catholic thriller).

The best directors of the era knew how to charge such commonplaces as abound in these stories with darkly thematic significance. Postwar anxiety had merged with prevailing trends in lighting and camerawork such that the camera eye now perceived both the world and its deranged, guilt-ridden shadow — a palpable dread had infected the popular cinema in the form of film noir. The best adaptations of Greene’s work hammer that ominous alloy, that unspeakable malaise, into a distinctly Catholic shape.

BRIGHTON ROCK — directed by John Boulting, produced by his brother Roy and scripted by the eminent playwright Terence Rattigan — comes closest to the mark. THE FUGITIVE from the previous year is a fatal misstep, with director John Ford piously prostrated before gleaming crucifixes and showy gestures of dewy-eyed reverence where the novel (titled The Power and the Glory) opted for something more haunting, a vitiated relic of the Catholic faith drifting forlornly through an earthbound purgatory. MINISTRY OF FEAR is a demented marvel of Langian excess, and the Carol Reed films twin masterworks of the filmic form. But BRIGHTON ROCK is so in lockstep with the source material (the film’s ending is the lone departure in concession to the censors, but it is in its own way a masterstroke of savage irony), so adept at incarnating visually Greene’s larger Catholic project, that the author’s vision of a broken, sin-suffused world fleetingly redeemed by imperfect emissaries of Godly grace finally attains cinematic expression.

The film opens with a scroll of text that notes the sharp contrast between Brighton’s seaside frivolity and the jagged latticework of criminal violence undergirding that frothy edifice. Snaking through the crowds of delighted revelers are members a local mob outfit led by seventeen-year-old Pinkie, played by Richard Attenborough in a dissonant key of pallid ferocity. One bright, cheerful day, Pinkie and his pals set their sights on a newspaperman in town for a local promotion who had formerly betrayed the gang in a story about the Brighton rackets. The murder, finally committed by Pinkie, is a crescendo of pure horror set adjacent to an upswell of carnivalesque excitement, with the line between the two eventually dissipating. Here is a fitting point to observe the visual mastery of the Boulting brothers, whose remarkably fluid camera creeps through a space until it lunges into foreboding close-up — of an incriminating object, of hands that fidget before they are summoned to slit a throat, of faces bent by chiaroscuro into luminous portraits of terror and rage.

It isn’t long after this opening bit of carnage that two women come to be recurring thorns in Pinkie’s side. One is a young waitress named Rose (played by Carol Marsh with a sweetly smiling susceptibility) whose pure-hearted naïveté is buttressed by her unwavering Catholicism and who, by an accident of chance, stands to fatally complicate Pinkie’s alibi. The other is a fixture of the surrounding amusements, an entertainer named Ida (Hermione Baddeley) who all but witnesses the killing and becomes a force of probing morality. But she is not Catholic. Officious, superstitious and betokened by an ear-splitting cackle, she cares more for earthly justice than the great mystery of redemption. Rose, stupidly but sublimely, falls for Pinkie, while Ida hopes to wrest her away from his evil influence. The vile, seemingly sociopathic Pinkie then becomes a hopeless candidate for saving grace. Whether Rose’s love is exerted in vain is the operative spiritual question.

The Dark Flight of the Soul: BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (’62) by Stuart Collier

The story of Robert Stroud is, on dispassionate biographical terms alone, an extraordinary one. A diagnosed psychopath with an IQ of 134, Stroud entered the U.S. prison system a ruthless killer and emerged, after years in solitary confinement and a transfer to the newly established federal penitentiary at Alcatraz, as one of the world’s leading experts in ornithology — and one of those rare cases of true rehabilitation in a brutal institution that so often fails to live up to that mission. As established in Edmond O’Brien’s opening narration to John Frankenheimer’s biopic of Stroud, BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (’62), the eponymous inmate had missed out on the changing cultural currents and technological innovations of the early 20th century, but all to the benefit of his single-minded devotion to birds. As Frankenheimer’s film suggests, he may have earned his humanity in the process.

The film was based on the book of the same name by Thomas E. Gaddis, played by O’Brien in the film. Gaddis was a staunch advocate of prison reform and saw in Stroud’s story a rhetorical vehicle for pushing his agenda. Papering over Stroud’s psychopathy and the likelihood that his penal rehabilitation did not align with any real inner redemption, Gaddis depicted Stroud as an ennobling figure, an exemplar of moral transformation. Here was a man whose acquired genius absolved him of his long-forgotten criminal ways, and American prisons could be churning out such remarkable men by the dozens if only their conditions were improved.

Adapted into a screenplay by Guy Trosper, the project found a happy home in the hands of Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster, whose production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had already excelled at making films with a strong social consciousness (TAKE A GIANT STEP [’59], THE YOUNG SAVAGES [’61]). Lancaster himself was cast in the title role and John Frankenheimer, who thrived in partnership with the actor (four of their collaborations are currently streaming on FilmStruck), eventually came on to direct.

Given Gaddis’ simplified treatment of Stroud and Lancaster’s early-sixties penchant for social sermonizing, the production certainly ran the risk of indulging in overwrought moralizing and didacticism. And at points, it does. But Frankenheimer was ultimately too good a filmmaker — and Lancaster too skilled an actor — not to make something greater. Trimmed down from a staggering 4 1/2 hour cut, the finished film is, for the bulk of its running time, an extraordinary accomplishment. The opening passages have a solemnity drained of all hope and feeling, with Frankenheimer at the height of his powers depicting the dirge-like procession of prison life at Leavenworth, where Stroud was first incarcerated. And Lancaster does not flinch from the innate brutality of his subject. In his hulking form, hard-set face and inexhaustible reserves of raw menace, the Stroud that Lancaster portrays in these scenes seems the unlikeliest candidate for salvation.

But salvation finally arrives in the form of an injured sparrow, and Stroud soon appoints himself as its devoted caretaker. Elmer Bernstein’s poignant score becomes a fixture on the soundtrack, and a rarefied tenderness enters the film’s aesthetic bloodstream. There are no easy appeals to pity, no cheap emotional shortcuts, and it is only by the subtlest increments that the indomitable, cold-blooded killer is dispossessed of his violent nature and attains something resembling a soul. Lancaster’s performance here is purely elemental, a matter of total immersion in the role. Unsurprisingly, the star later revealed that it was all he could do not to cry during the most emotionally demanding sequences. Frankenheimer, for his part, keeps the tone almost unrelentingly somber, refusing to go in for the heart-wrenching kill. Against this gray and grimy atmosphere, Stroud’s transformation is all the more miraculous.

Gradually, the film loses something of its mystery and begins to adhere to a more conventional shape. Stroud achieves some celebrity, marries a fan from the outside world, leads a minor revolution in prison policy (all inmates become entitled to birds of their own) and grapples with his strangely possessive mother (played by Thelma Ritter at her most formidably funereal). Soon enough, the focus has shifted to the elusive possibility of Stroud’s release from prison, and the soulful strains of the film’s first half have diminished in resonance. Even the eleventh-hour transfer to Alcatraz carries little in the way of dramatic heft. Threading everything together are Stroud’s intermittent showdowns with the cold-hearted warden played by Karl Malden, scenes which initially speak to a moral stalemate between two unmovable opposites. But as with so much else in the film, it is not long before Gaddis’s rhetoric begins to overwhelm the drama.