A Man Out of Land

A man makes a nuisance of himself in several communities in 1951's Outcast of the Islands. This Carol Reed movie is based on a Joseph Conrad novel and stars Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, and an intriguing young lady called simply Kerima.

This is the kind of movie I'd been in the mood for for a while. Along the lines of Treasure of Sierra Madre, Secret of the Incas, or The Ebb-Tide, it's about a disparate group of unscrupulous Westerners living in foreign lands. These stories are usually dismissed now for how they depict indigenous people but, having met many of the Westerners who've come to live in Japan, these old movies and books, I can attest, are certainly true to life as far as Western characters are concerned.

I've met a few rogues like Trevor Howard's character Willems, though Willems is certainly much smarter. We find him as an idler in Singapore, having weaselled himself into a high paying job. Yet he squanders his cushy position by wearing flashy clothes and playing billiards during work hours. We learn he used to be a bare-footed ship's hand when he was found by Captain Lingard (Ralph Richardson) and worked his way up from there. As Lingard's ship pulls into port, fortune has it that Willems' boss finally loses patience with him and fires him. So Willems abandons his wife and dives into the bay, once more going to work for Lingard.

Lingard takes him to a secret, lucrative trading post safely hidden behind treacherous shoals. There he's set up an English couple played by Robert Morley and Wendy Hiller in a kind of hacienda. Surrounding them are a community of mysterious natives, some of them played by white actors in brown face.

Among them is the chieftain's mute daughter, Aissa, and Willems falls recklessly in love with her. She's played by Kerima, whose biography on Wikipedia is fascinating. Born and raised in France to French parents, she was nonetheless believed for decades to have been the daughter of "a wealthy Arab from Algiers". She traded on her "exotic looks" for years to play characters from various foreign countries. I don't know about you, but she just looks white to me.

It fascinates me that she evidently didn't look white to so many people. The film would probably be stronger if the locals were properly cast and Aissa in particular is crucial to conveying an impression of the culture. She's captivating her for different reasons than those intended. I do wonder what's going on behind her constantly angry eyes.

Willems is a fascinating character. He is a scoundrel and he lies and cheats routinely. But he's also smart and even considerate sometimes. The film challenges the viewer to evaluate Lingard's moral judgements of him, to show him kindness or rebuke, and you wonder if he deserves either.

Twitter Sonnet #1659

A carrot clock began to count the fur.
Another month was yet unlike the last.
The mouser first to sleep was last to purr.
A reckless ogre sports a ragged cast.
The needed nurse was left beside the pond.
Distinctive tags could never save a soul.
Prosthetic faces forge an empty bond.
The big hotel was built to ape a bowl.
'Twas only once a proper song was played.
But every end was capped with stupid strings.
If only witless hands had wisely stayed.
The empty sea would be a glass that sings.
The dancing scoundrel takes an island home.
Where froth appears the waves are like to roam.

The Distance to Israel

The location shots in 1960's Exodus are amazing, which is appropriate given it's a story about the importance of location. Otto Preminger's epic film is amazing for its sense of scope particularly considering the sensitive contemporary issues it was dealing with.

The film begins in the aftermath of World War II, focusing on a refugee camp of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, prevented by the British from going to Palestine where they hope to settle as a nation under the name of Israel. The film is mostly told from the point of view of an American nurse, Kitty, played by Eva Marie Saint in not one of her best performances.

In On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan got a good performance from her and she was serviceable as icy for Hitchcock in North by Northwest. Performing opposite Ralph Richardson and Paul Newman in this movie, though, she comes off as a bored tour guide.

The movie subtly and blatantly presents arguments for recognising Israel, one of them being the persistent threat of anti-Semitism--not a difficult argument, one would think, after World War II. But Exodus makes an effort to show shades of anti-Semitism aside from the more blatant examples of Nazis and concentration camps, offering hints as to how this form of bigotry finds fertile soil. A British officer played by Peter Lawford brags about how he can always detect a Jew--amusingly he says this to Newman's character, a Jewish militant posing as a British officer--and everyone assumes Richardson's character, the general in charge of the British forces, is Jewish or has a Jewish relative simply because he's sympathetic to the refugees.

Even Kitty has some bias--when she meets a little girl in the refugee camp with blonde hair, she wants to help her, eventually wanting to take her home to America. She admits with some embarrassment she warmed to the girl because she didn't fit with her preconceptions of a Jew.

Paul Newman gives a much better performance than Marie Saint though his role is arguably simpler. He plays Ari Ben Canaan who leads hundreds of refugees, managing to get them on a cargo ship to Palestine. Filmed on an actual ship, the best sequence in the film involves the tension of a hunger strike effected by the refugees in their attempt to force the British to let them leave the bay in Cyprus.

Sal Mineo is good in a supporting role and Marius Goring has a brief appearance as a mysterious, sinister man I think is a Nazi. The last portion of the film becomes a little muddled, focusing on romance between Newman and Marie Saint's characters and on a conflict with British authority and Muslim locals. Many specific details seem like they were avoided in order to give the film an unambiguously pro-Israel stance--it's really not clear why Ari Ben Canaan decides to help Irgun terrorists escape prison after their bombing of the King David Hotel--a real life event in which 91 people were killed. Family relationships established in the film partly explains Ben Canaan's decision but the tone of the film isn't quite up to an issue this thorny. But for all that, it's a film with amazing visuals and Newman gives some emotional nuance to his character who otherwise might have come across as a very simple hero, obviously justified in wanting to secure a homeland. Exodus is available to stream on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1178

A thought for licorice was red and black.
A task reported lists of corded phones.
A million birds can fit inside the sack.
The canvas only keeps the turkey's bones.
A giant mantis musters gangly gusts.
The air advanced to part the clouds of bees.
A fatted yam with grace profoundly busts.
A cleaner breath's obtained above the trees.
For meaning, shoes concealed the marching time.
A little wonder goes so far away.
A kettle's heat reported walls to climb.
The crowd decides to sleep for lunch to-day.
Lapels were soaked in wine before the show.
From planted papers sycamores'll grow.

The Gods Over the City

Charles George Gordon was a British officer whose list of seemingly impossible exploits occurred all over the world. He earned the commendation of the Emperor of China for putting down a rebellion and the love of the people in the Sudan for disrupting the slave trade. It all makes the events of 1966's Khartoum seem preposterous but I was surprised to read later how much of it was true. That said, the film has a lot of faults, generally coming off as a poor man's Lawrence of Arabia with its overuse of process shots, clear evidence of poor research, and some improbable plot contrivances. But the cast is great, including Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as his opponent, the Mahdi, and Ralph Richardson is perfectly cast as a somewhat idealised version of the British Prime Minister William Gladstone.

In this version of history, Gladstone is secretly a strong supporter of Gordon's. Why he should keep it a secret when the public and Queen Victoria are passionately on Gordon's side is put down to the Parliament not liking the cost of Gordon's plan to defend the Sudanese town Khartoum; the Siege of Khartoum is the central subject of the story.

There are some terrific battle sequences in the film, though far from the best I've seen. There are too many shots of guys clutching their chests and falling over theatrically and too many times where the camera is misplaced, as when the front line of the Mahdi's troops rush directly at the camera moving backwards--the men run with obvious restraint to avoid colliding with the thing. But the biggest problem is that the film's stars, Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, clearly spent very little time on location. We almost never see the latter--and almost always on soundstages when we do--and the former is lamely inserted with process shots that are particularly obtrusive in a night battle.

The film has two scenes where Gordon and the Mahdi meet in the Mahdi's tent; both scenes are somewhat preposterous poetic license and the idea that Gordon can safely drop in on the Mahdi is ridiculous even as the film makes a point of having characters remark on how dangerous it is. But apparently Gordon and the Mahdi really did correspond and the idea of having Heston and Olivier share scenes must have been too good to pass up, especially since the relationship between the two men ends up being the best part of the film.

It turns out, each sees something in the other similar to himself; each believes himself a key figure in the service of God. To the point where the implications of Gordon's defeat are troubling even to the Mahdi. The film spends a lot of time building up Gordon the point where you start to wonder if it's all to flatter Charlton Heston but it pays off in the end, giving the viewer an idea of what it's like when people have so much spiritual investment in their belief in one man.

There's a lot of brown-face in the film, really more than there needs to be, though personally I don't mind when its obviously someone as singular as Laurence Olivier. But the dozens of white actors playing Sudanese men shows just how little the production was willing to work with the location. Meanwhile, Charlton Heston's English accent seems almost okay in some scenes and then is completely absent in others. But otherwise he's good in the role and the film has some great visuals shot in Ultra Panavision.

Twelve Nights and One Thousand Nine Hundred Sixty Nine Years

One of the adaptations of Twelfth Night available on Amazon Prime is a 1969 made for television version with Alec Guinness as Malvolio, Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby, and Tommy Steele as Feste. It's not bad but I still haven't seen an adaptation of the play I really like. The BBC Television Shakespeare version is pretty lousy with weak performances except from Robert Hardy as Sir Toby. And Trevor Peacock as Feste isn't bad. I've also seen Kenneth Branagh's version from the late 80s which is okay but I think I like the 1969 version more. They have some things in common: Both Branagh's and the 1969 version turn Feste, the fool, into a sort of melancholy rock star.

Though while Branagh went for goth rocker the 69 version, directed by John Sichel and John Dexter, comes across as the teen idol Steele was at the time. He's so perfectly 60s it's kind of cute.

Joan Plowright plays Viola and Sebastian, so she plays a woman pretending to be a man and a man. She does a good job keeping the two performances distinct though she'd have been better off without the blue shadow when playing the masquerading Viola and it definitely looks out of place on Sebastian.

I guess we're meant to think Joan Plowright just has naturally blue skin in that spot.

But of course the best performances are from Guinness and Richardson. As a sort of low key Falstaff, Richardson makes a lot with a pretty simple role and it's always nice seeing a great actor play drunk. But Guinness takes the cake as the Puritan whose severe devotion to virtuous living goes right out the window when he thinks Olivia is in love with him. Watching him smiling and strutting in those stupid yellow stockings he's tricked into wearing is pretty great.

The play's themes of crossing gender and class lines are well known. For a Puritan, the idea of a servant daring to think he could have a relationship with the woman in charge of the household does kind of make sense given that the Levellers were one of the groups associated under the blanket pejorative of "Puritan". Shakespeare may be poking fun at England's most zealous Protestants though Malvolio is represented primarily as an extraordinary hypocrite:

MARIA.

The devil a puritan that he is, or any thing constantly, but a time-pleaser; an affection'd ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths; the best persuaded of himself, so cramm'd, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.

For a comedy, it's strange that Malvolio ends the play with his issues unresolved. His last line before exiting is, "Ill be revenged on the whole pack of you." I wonder if Shakespeare was commenting on the increasingly serious division in English culture at the time. Interestingly, though Malvolio here as elsewhere is portrayed as kind of villainous, there's nothing actually in the text that indicates he's such a bad guy, certainly not deserving the treatment he receives from Sir Toby and his comrades. He wouldn't have been trying to woo Olivia if he didn't believe he'd received a letter from her indicating her affection. I feel bad for him, a feeling enhanced by the unresolved nature of his story. He's punished for basically not being as perfect as he thinks he is--in fact, either way you look at it, whether you're meant to sympathise with him or not, the story seems to be critical of puritanism.