This week Jeff Godsil joins us to discuss the film noir Cry Danger, as well as Ari Aster's new "state of the nation" tale Eddington. In addition we have reviews of two recent Criterion releases, Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 and Jean Eustace's The Mother and the Whore.
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Death permeates the mother and the whore in a myriad of mysterious ways. Some of the participants committed suicide after completion of the shoot, and the director himself, Jean Eustache, committed suicide in 1981, a few years after the film’s release, despondent after an accident affected his body integrity.
Most important of all the mother and the Whore is about the death of idealism and social change among the young Parisian intelligentsia. The film is set within the Paris of its time and focuses on a handful of people all of whom presumably participated in the events of May, 1968, when students joined workers in protest. At first, the main character Alexandre, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, which also signals that the movie as a post New Wave film, or possibly an announcement of the death of the once vital New Wave from the late ‘50s through, say, 1964.
A man of , as they say, no visible means of support, unless it is through his girlfriend, Marie, played by Bernadette Lafont, who owns a small dress shop, for when not with her, Alexandre is out and about not unlike men in a François Truffaut. Here, he is first trying to re-ignite a romance with a previous girlfriend, then picking up any other woman who seems willing. One who particularly attracts his attention is a young Polish woman, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), who works in a hospital, her appeal partially enforced due to her resemblance to the ex-girlfriend, who has rejected him yet again?
You wouldn’t know art to watch but M&W came in a detailed script, from which Eustache privileged no deviation. Rather, it comes across as improvised, like a John Cassavetes film. And to a certain frame of mind, the four hours of talk among the threesome is fascinating and real.
As the brochure notes, “[Eustache] came from a working-class background in southwestern France, Eustache trained as an electrician, and after moving to Paris worked for the railways. But he became a regular at the Cinémathèque française, and his wife got a job as secretary at Cahiers du cinéma, so he was able to enter that milieu. … [In] 1972, he received funding to make a feature, thanks to his producer friend Pierre Cottrell, who got it from Bob Rafelson, after his enormous success with Easy Rider.
Labeled Spine No. 1245, The Mother and the whore comes in a new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack, one 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features, with supplements including a new interview with actor Françoise Lebrun
and a 30-minute conversation between filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin and everyone’s favorite novelist, Rachel Kushner, who has a European spine to many of her books. They both reminisce about the impact of the film on their lives and sensibilities, and grapple with its lingering death hues.
Also included is an account of on the film’s restoration, and a segment from the French television series Pour le cinéma featuring Lebrun, Eustache, Lafont ,and Léaud. Finally there is the film’s trailer, new English subtitles, and in the accompanying booklet along with cast, crew, and transfer info, is an essay by critic Lucy Sante, and an introduction to the film by Eustache
Sante writes, “In Marie’s apartment, after sex, he tells Veronika about a café that opens at 5:25 in the morning, where you meet the most extraordinary characters. Instead of a cut to a scene in that café, though, Alexandre continues his description, including of the day that he walked into the café and everyone was weeping. It was May ’68, and the police had just thrown in a canister of tear gas.
‘That is the film’s only extended allusion to May ’68, but that period and its aftermath hang over the movie like a lowering cloud. You can assume that Alexandre and Marie were at least in the streets then, although maybe more as spectators than activists … Veronika, who is not French and not bourgeois, brings reality back to the table, reminding everyone that the personal is political. A key focus of May ’68 was the politics of daily life, although the French left was inclined to let that part slide after women started claiming it.”
In the middle of the essay, Ms Sante honors the film’s curious shift of central characters from Alexandre to Veronica, writing, “She has been through a great deal at the hands of men; she is a beautiful Polish nurse who lives in a small room in the hospital, who drinks too much, who has seen it all and is resignedly acquiescent, but who somehow underneath remains a romantic. Unlike the other characters, who are clearly middle-class and, especially the men, educated to the point of pedantry, Veronika is a working-class immigrant who doesn’t read, doesn’t tailor her speech, and loves slang [which got the fiim in trouble with the censors], perhaps immoderately. But both couples use the formal vous with one another, employing tu with everyone else (and Marie and Veronika with each other). That imbues their exchanges, which can range from playful to sordid, with the courtliness of the classics of infidelity, by Beaumarchais or Choderlos de Laclos.”
And that his a brief sample one of the best an most informative of all of Crteriion’s pamphlet inserts.
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I was surprised to see as the Criterion DVD of Winchester ’73 began to spin that the film is in black-and-white. I could've sworn it was color. And indeed, as I continued on to watch the film I begin to wonder if I had ever seen it in the first place. I thought I'd caught up with all the Anthony Mann westerns.
Mann was one of the most conspicuously talented genre specialists in Hollywood in the ‘40s and ‘50s and he was especially good with film noir subjects, especially when his cinematographer was John Alton. With Winchester ’73, Mann introduced a series of so-called adult westerns, many of them in collaboration with James Stewart, but also some were made with Gary Cooper or even Barbara Stanwyck.
Most of his Western films were in color, while mostly switching from thrillers to westerns, the reverse of Elmore Leonard’s trajectory at the same time.. The furies, also from the Criterion Collection is probably his breakthrough western, in that it is psychologically acute from most other westerns at the time, showing the influence, usually dire, of Freudianism on American popular culture and its manufacturers. But his first foray into psychological complexity begins with with Winchester ’73, and the black-and-white, it turns out, suits the hard edged, abrasive, unsettling, nature of the characters involved in the long running cross country fight to keep the much treasured Winchester rifle that has a talismanic perfection as a weapon of death, to victims and owners alike.
Stewart's character wins the gun in a contest, but then it is stolen by the vile and equally obsessive character played by Steven McNally. Soon the rifle ends in the hands of Dan Duryea’s character, one of Mann’s more obnoxious villain characters, who disrupts any social circle he invades. Also, along for the journeys is Shelley Winters as a woman run out of town. There's a touching, almost inside joke, when James Stewart gives her a pistol in anticipation of a soon-to-come Indian attack, and she inspects the chamber to look up and say, “ I know what the last bullet is for." The moment harks back to Ford’s Stagecoach.
Also in the cast is Rock Hudson as a “malevolent “ Native American, and Tony Curtis, as an impossibly beautiful cavalry troop. Though the two actors don't inhabit the same frame, they do cohabitate in a universe in which the studio marbled its many productions with gifted performers obviously on the rise.
The subject of Native Americans and their portrayal in Hollywood I introduced by film programmer Adam Piron in a thorough discussion on the disc in one of its many supplements. He tracks back the actual etherority of “Indians,” from mislabeling in colonial days, to early silents by indigenous people, inspired or in reaction to Western shows. Mann was more respectful to that populace than most of his contemporaries.
Also on the disc is a new 4K digital restoration, undertaken by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack, One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features, an audio commentary featuring actor James Stewart and film historian Paul Lindenschmidt, in which Stewart proves to be insightful about his character her than the professor, in one of those all-too-rare Maeshall McLuhan - XXX Fielding Mellish moments.
Also on hand is Forces of Nature: Anthony Mann at Universal, a biography in video form the charts man's unexpectedly interesting life, and pays particular attention to Winchester 73 and the following westerns and other films he made in collaboration with James Stuart. It is packed with information otherwise difficult to access.
Also on hand are the Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1951, the trailer, English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, and in the accompanying book with cast, crew and transfer notes, aad an essay by An essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith, in which she writes, “
“Though leavened with humor and regular jolts of excitement, the first Mann-Stewart outing introduces somber themes that would return in The Naked Spur (1953) and The Man from Laramie (1955). In each of these films, Stewart plays a man scarred by a primal experience of loss and betrayal, on an obsessive quest to right some irreversible wrong, imagining that vengeance will make him whole again. The actor brings to these stories a quality that would reach its neurotic pinnacle in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): a tormented zeal to restore or repair the past. The realization that this is impossible brings a burned-out bitterness to the long-sought settling of scores, leaving the victor both disappointed and soiled—a feeling that subtly shades the ending of Winchester ’73 and darkens in the later Mann-Stewart films.”
Once again, this disc is a reminder that when the Criterion Collection cooks with excellent supplements, they create a complete cinema education in a jewel box.
- KBOO