David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
A week for men in the maelstrom, of war and nature:
APPETIZER (Reviews of They
Shall Not Grow Old
and Arctic)
They Shall Not Grow Old
Survivors of the awful Great War of 1914-18 were never
praised as “the greatest generation” (the last American vet of WWI died in
2010, the last Britisher in 2012). Despite strong books and excellent movies (Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, Gallipoli,
Jules et Jim, All Quiet on the Western Front), the conflict always felt distant
to me. I grew up in the more imposing shadow of WWII, “the good war” – a rather
questionable term, given the Holocaust, fire-bombed cities and two atom bombs.
Education continues, and I have now seen Peter
Jackson’s amazing They Shall Not Grow Old.
The title is a wistful grace note for the fallen. The British Empire lost
almost a million combatants, including many boys accepted well before the legal
enlistment age of 19. Jackson has raised a monument to rival Europe’s many WWI
memorials, and one more viscerally effective. For the BBC’s centenary of the
war’s end (Nov. 11, 1918), he made this documentary from around 600 hours of once-hidden,
frequently frightening footage at the Imperial War Museum. He edited to 99
superb minutes, and added color. Tinting only starts once the recruits, having
endured the rude rigors of training, join the frontline in France or Belgium. The
digital tinting (mostly pink, brown, green, gray with gashes and dribbles of red)
punches right through all the quaint newsreel memories. We feel entrenched, at
times almost bayoneted.
The steady drumbeat of veterans’s voices was taped decades
ago, their varied accents often affecting a very British sangfroid (“You take
the rough with the smooth”). Nobody imagined this kind of rough, for the home
front was soaked in propaganda and censorship. Soon most of the soldierly bravado
was smelted down by fear, but that also forged a bond of total comradeship (the
men felt that civilians never did, or could, understand). Only such soul steel
could deal with the daily hell: lousy food (mostly tinned stew), awful
latrines, boot-sucking mud, lice and rats, snipers, corpse odors, oncoming barrages
of artillery. Two weeks of such service brought 50 pence, often spent near the line
in a shabby bordello, but “rest” mostly brought more grueling work and exhausted
sleep.
The front was a dark satanic mill. In one astonishing
sequence, a platoon waits to go “over the top” and march into machine gun fire,
barbed wire, shell craters. The faces, many young in a hardened way, stare at
the camera with a glazed foreboding. They knew then (as we know now) that for
many this was their final day of life. A century later they flicker as mates
for life, beyond death.
Masters have filmed great battle episodes (Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, Welles’s Chimes at Midnight). Jackson’s glory here
is another kind, exceeding his epic battles in the Lord of the Rings saga. This is so much more real, so shockingly
candid. The Great War didn’t need a great generation, it just needed desperately
to end. One of the moving truths is that nearly all the Brits felt compassion
for the Germans they killed or caught (and vice-versa). Hell had bound them
together. Dazed veterans on both sides went home to poor pensions, unemployment,
general indifference and little talk of their ordeal. One survivor converted
the brutal nightmare into his own grotesque “victory,” a frontline messenger who
found a new, deadly message. Adolf Hitler.
Arctic
Frigidly rooted in Nanook
of the North and the novels of Jack London, Arctic is set in a world where global warming will bring no timely relief
for H. Overgard. With his crew mates buried near his smashed plane, now crusted
in snow, Overgard hunkers inside the fuselage. There he can sleep, eat the fish
he pulls up from ice holes, and attempt feeble radio contact. As death seems
more certain than rescue, he will strike out into the white mountains.
Arctic is the sure-footed feature debut of director Joe
Penna, best known for short films (and self-promotion on YouTube). He was born
in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and you wonder how much these wintry, Icelandic locations
tormented and enchanted him (Tómas Orn Tómasson’s landscape vistas are like
beautiful abstract paintings that want to kill you). Mads Mikkelson, far from
past roles like Igor Stravinsky and Bond villain Le Chiffre, has the severe
face of a Nordic crag, perfect for Overgard. No review should map out the incidents
that reveal his fate. Let’s say it involves another person, two bears, a cave
and the sort of total struggle that has no time for posing like a hero. Arctic puts the cold into our bones, but
has a heartbeat of warm humanity.
SALAD (A List)
Stanley
Donen’s Dozen Best
Donen, one of the supreme directors of musicals and
other entertainments, died at 94 last Saturday. He made the best Hitchcocky film
not directed by Hitch (Charade), and
what I would call the two finest American musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face). Donen also gave one of the best
Oscars acceptance speeches, singing and tapping for his honorary award in 1998.
(You can watch it on YouTube.)
His Twelve Best, by my reckoning: Singin’ in the Rain (1952),
Funny Face (1957), Charade (1963), The Pajama Game (1957), Two for the Road (1967), On the Town (1949), Damn Yankees (1958), Bedazzled (1967), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954),
Once More, with Feeling! (1960), Arabesque (1966) and It’s
Always Fair Weather (1955).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
For
all his ebullience – see his early scenes in Citizen Kane (and his Will
Varner in The Long, Hot Summer) –
Orson Welles had a streak of lucid melancholy, which provoked the studio-edit ambush
of the movie he loved best, his 1942 family tragedy The Magnificent Ambersons. He later said that “everything (in
America), including a six-minute talk show conversation or a 30-second
commercial, has a happy ending. There was just a built-in dread of the downbeat
movie, and I knew I’d have that to face, but I thought I had a movie so good –
I was absolutely certain of its value, more than Kane – that I had no doubt
that it would win through, in spite of that industry fear of the dark movie.” In
a lasting sense it has – see the new Criterion blu-ray. (Quote from Barbara
Leaming’s Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
two, often rainy weeks of 1956 filming in Paris for Funny Face in Paris, above all the sunny Champs-Elysees scene that
opens “Bonjour, Paris,” was probably the apex of Stanley Donen’s vivid career.
As he told biographer Steven Silverman, “It was Sunday, we were on the Champs.
I was directing Fred Astaire, and we had extras dressed as policemen to keep
away the crowds … We used crumpled-up cigarettes as Fred’s marks, and then I
hit the (music) playback and Fred started singing that song. I thought, ‘This
is it! In my entire life, this is all I ever wanted to do.” (From the Audrey
Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book
Starlight Rising, available via Amazon,
Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Kay
Thompson, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire after arriving in Paris in spring
1956, to shoot the French scenes of Funny
Face (Paramount Pictures 1957; director Stanley Donen, photography by Ray
June).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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