How to Watch a Movie (5 page)

I don't want to see
The Usual Suspects
again now that I know who Keyser Söze is. Instead, I see that movie as a mass of mannered implausibilities, and witty character acting, that bets all its chips on the thing we don't know. The eventual revelation destroys the film's fragile mood. I think I know from the
established tropes of movies that by the end of
The Godfather
and
The Godfather Part II
Michael Corleone is going to be secure in his power. But I can't forget the tension in those two films between the dead end of power and the liveliness of all the characters, and I believe that it becomes not just a Mafia movie, but a stricken study in how attractive gangsters and their sleek elegance can be. I have thought over the years that there might be an even greater film in the two
Godfather
s if Kay (Diane Keaton), the least explored character, becomes so horrified by Michael that she goes to the law and becomes a witness against him. But we hardly notice that the cops barely figure in these films.
The Sopranos
was similarly short of lawmen. Crime has become so organized on our screens, so tranquil, it is not to be interfered with.

In the early history of gangster films, or crime movies, there was never room for doubt. In the thirties and forties, every code required that crime could not pay, except at the box office. From
Public Enemy
to
White Heat
, Cagney ran amok—to our delight. His liberty was permitted because we knew he would be destroyed finally—and because the system making the film knew we knew. So if you get into the habit of watching
White Heat
again and again, I think you're reveling in the fantasy of violence. That may be how you begin to forget the damage it causes.

Throughout the 1970s, I taught film and steadily offered
Citizen Kane
to American students, some of whom still regarded Welles as an overweight bon vivant who did cynical ads for cheap wines. A teacher tends to preach a film; in which case his mind is made up. When you are strong in erasing other people's doubts, you neglect your own. At Dartmouth, I taught a seminar on Welles, until in the early eighties I realized I was
not looking at the film any longer. I knew what to say about it, and that stopped me thinking. Perhaps that happened on a wider scale.
Kane
topped that
Sight & Sound
poll from 1962 to 2002, and the film was taken for granted. It became axiomatic, and that gave up the shock and excitement—the sensation—that I had felt in Tooting. Welles himself (he only died in 1985) said he could no longer look at his picture, and I followed suit with six or seven years of moratorium. I came back, and the film was alive again, but to this day I know that afternoon in Tooting was the crucial occasion.

In a university, a film teacher might exchange common room gossip with people teaching Dickens, Mozart, and Velázquez. They were charmed to hear you were doing
Citizen Kane
, but
The Flame and the Arrow
? I choose that 1950 movie almost at random because at the age of nine I loved the thrill of imagining myself as Burt Lancaster, with Virginia Mayo as my prize, in a never-never land called Lombardy in the twelfth century. I saw the film a couple of times in 1950 and I reveled in Burt's grin, his cheek, and his backflips. “Lombardy” looked magical in Technicolor. So it needed to be, for the film was shot on a ranch in California's Simi Valley. The picture was enriched by several supporting players: Nick Cravat (Burt's regular side-kick), Robert Douglas, and Norman Lloyd. It was a Warner Bros. picture and I trusted that studio and its blithe sense of history. The film was in color, photographed by Ernest Haller, with music by Max Steiner. Both men had done
Gone With the Wind
. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur, and Waldo Salt had written the script.

Later on, the film scholar would discover that Waldo Salt had been blacklisted. He had joined the Communist Party in 1938. He was vital to Joseph Losey's superb remaking of
M
. But
later on he would write
Midnight Cowboy
and
Coming Home
. So maybe the story of peasants revolting against cruel lords in old Lombardy was a political metaphor? Tourneur was a director with great visual aplomb: he had done
Out of the Past
just a few years earlier, and that is still a classic noir with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.

Still,
The Flame and the Arrow
was routine fare, and a big hit: it had domestic rentals of $3 million. It was ideal for a nine-year-old in 1950, and something some six-year-olds would enjoy now. But truly you could have too much of it, or take it too seriously. You wouldn't worry that most of the pleasure and the sensation of the film was there now, immediately, the first time you saw it—perhaps 90 percent? Here was a film like thousands of others meant to fill around ninety minutes with delight, and which was based on the principle that in three days' time there would be something else on your screen just as entertaining.

Could it be studied—
should
it be? Was there a Marxist sub-text and Ph.D. prospects in
The Flame and the Arrow
? Had this movie threatened American military cohesion in the year the Korean War began? (It was released two weeks after the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel.) Or was there another subtext that it took me fifty years to discover? Was the movie begging for the kind of affectionate parody of Hollywood movies provided by Carol Burnett or Monty Python? And once you were alert to parody, what was this about two chums, Dardo and Piccolo, hiding out in the forest and sniping at tyranny? Their acrobatics and their insouciant smiles were a kind of schoolboy ballet. How did forest dwellers stay so buffed and trim? How were their teeth perfect? (Their smiles were as important as any love of nature, archery, or Anne of
Hesse. Virginia Mayo's promotion: from her days in St. Louis and vaudeville, she was known as the pin-up who had come to life.) Was there a suggestion of gay brotherhood in Burt and Nick Cravat? The two actors had been boyhood friends; they joined the circus together; and then went to Hollywood. Both of them were married with children, but there is a legend now that Lancaster was gay, too. Why not?

There were more far-reaching films made in 1950, like
Sunset Blvd., All About Eve
, or Max Ophüls's
La Ronde
, which was regarded as a “naughty” film not fit for children. Was it “naughty” to expose anyone to an ironic, dispassionate survey of love as a human infection? Whereas
The Flame and the Arrow
in Britain had a U certificate (open to any age) and I actually went to see it on my own. In those times, I tried whatever was on—like the bulk of the filmgoing audience. Sometimes I knew no more than a title, a poster, and an actor's name. What I really went for were the ninety minutes of escape, the fun, the sensation, the silly nowness of it all.

That attitude meant a film could never match that first impact when it came up on the screen like this morning's sun, and innocence could ask, “Will Dardo win?” There are still good, pleasing films that deserve no more than a single viewing—I hope this doesn't shock you but I'd put
The Artist, Slumdog Millionaire, Million Dollar Baby, The King's Speech
, and
Gravity
in that category. Some of them won Best Picture at the Oscars, but once was enough. They are smart, confident entertainments, nicely played, but they have no significant ambition or sense of mystery. They are small stories, well told, and all deeply old-fashioned, even when the effects are very special. The most intriguing thing about
The King's Speech
is that it could have been made in 1937 at a time when a speech defect could seem, to the king, the gravest issue in the world.

Try those films again: a boredom may begin to arise with the reiteration of so much niceness. For decades I watched
Citizen Kane
and believed I was getting more out of it: the possibility that the whole film was a daydream in Kane's head as he died; the ironic place of applause; the rueful examination of the dangers in charm; the fallibility of memory. There were plenty of other movies as rich—Buñuel's
Un Chien Andalou
, Renoir's
La Règle du Jeu
, most of Bresson and Ophüls, Resnais's
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, several films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman's
Persona
and
Cries and Whispers
, Godard's
Pierrot le Fou
—or, more recently,
Blue Velvet
and
Mulholland Dr
. by David Lynch,
No Country for Old Men
by the Coen brothers,
Magnolia
by Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher's
Zodiac
, or Martin Scorsese's
Casino
.

When I first saw
Casino
, in 1995, I didn't like it. I regarded it as yet one more Scorsese gangster film, monopolized by its own violence and the inflammatory and implausible eloquence of hoodlums, with jukebox accompaniment and the dazzle of Las Vegas. Scorsese is vulnerable on all those counts, and on his reluctance in developing female characters. But ten years or so after
Casino
opened theatrically, the film played regularly on cable TV stations. I found myself watching it repeatedly (although I still reckoned I didn't like it). What was happening? Well, in part it was the sheer cinematic fluency of the picture and its relaxed attitude to plot. Ostensibly, it concerned the rivalry between two friends (Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci) and how that turmoil ruined the sweet money mine of Las Vegas for both of them. Hadn't that game been played in
Goodfellas
, and even in
Raging Bull
? But in
Casino
, there was a variation: De Niro was the rational, orderly man fit to make the system work, while Pesci was madness determined to fuck it up. (It's order and chaos, just like in
Locke
.) That was
more interesting than the male relationships in Scorsese's earlier films, because it began to offer (or I began to see) De Niro's character, “Ace” Rothstein, as a tragic fool.

What I never saw at first—and I'm not sure it was intended by the filmmakers—was the desperate comedy of De Niro being thwarted at every turn. This added to the disaster of his marriage to Ginger (Sharon Stone), the fullest female character in Scorsese's work. She is greedy, treacherous, self-destructive, a thief, and a slut, but she fascinates Scorsese as much as she does “Ace.” So
Casino
is a story about a failed marriage, full of pain, but unable to shake off the tinge of gallows humor.

Does this mean that if you watch any film long enough it gets better? Alas, no; there are plenty of films that discourage you (or me) from trying again. I'm not going back to Lars von Trier's
Melancholia
or Terrence Malick's
The Tree of Life
. If you admire those films, we must live with our disagreements. It's not as if there is any true state of being right or wrong. In suggesting “how to watch a movie,” I do not intend to present you with a tidy pantheon or a set of correct answers.

Earlier, I mentioned the rumor that old people say movies can shift over time. But they can't change, can they, not in a medium reliant on mechanical reproduction? Well, sad things do happen: almost any color system except Technicolor tends to deteriorate; it's not common these days to see films projected (or shown on television) in the Academy frame format that was intended. You wouldn't respect
Las Meninas
as much if thick strips top and bottom had been removed from it. Some studios neglect their own treasures, so the negatives of great films suffer and will never be what they were. By now, it is increasingly difficult to find prints of films you love—they come as digital projection packages. And the two things are not the same, even
if the digital formats are more economical and convenient. The one was made from light, the other comes from electronics. So far at least, digital has been a little less human, a trait exacerbated by its facility at showing things that never could have happened.

Then there is the matter of how movies date, sometimes over years, but sometimes over the weekend. When
The Exorcist
opened in 1973 it was a very frightening experience. I had no faith in the devil or being possessed, but the growling voice coming out of the child's head gave me the shivers. The film was a box-office hit. But when it was re-released in 2000, the tension was gone. People in the audience were laughing at it and at the idea that once upon a time they or their parents had been terrified. We take rapid vengeance on things that have frightened us.

So movies can shift. Of course, for its golden years, the film business never envisaged or cared about that alteration. They took the money in their now, the thing we regard as then. I had to wait a while to learn the emotional wisdom in some Lubitsch films—
Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be
. A similar passage of time was necessary to see that Howard Hawks's comedies were richer than the epic companionship of
Red River
or
Air Force
or
The Big Sky
. Hadn't I always realized that
Rio Bravo, To Have and Have Not
, and
The Big Sleep
, despite the apparent crises of guarding a prisoner, saving Resistance fighters, and finding a killer, were comedies made by a man who had little respect for murder, war, or law and order, and no interest in anything except flight, women, and dreaming?

We should be wary of ourselves and that first viewing, no matter how heady it was at the time. When they opened in
London, I saw
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Pierrot le Fou
five times in a week. Those films had a visceral, sensational rush, akin to the hot water in a shower or the taste of salted caramel ice cream. It's like your first encounter with serious kissing, and classical cinema adored the kiss. You want to do it again and again, and maybe those first kisses are the most momentous.

My love of film says, Again, please; and DVD lets me look at some highlight instead of the full, tedious ninety minutes: Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell dancing “Begin the Beguine” over and over so I don't have to bother with the rest of
Broadway Melody of 1940
—I can now no longer remember what happens in that story. (George Murphy is the other man in that film, and he is as unnoticed now as a man who might have been with the woman in white on Bernstein's ferry to Jersey. Murphy was also the U.S. senior senator from California from 1965 to 1971—I suppose someone had to be.)