“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” - Robert Altman (1971)

Robert Altman’s eclectic fifty-year career had a number of ups and downs, but over its course he created enough cinematic masterpieces to establish himself as one of the greatest of all film auteurs.  Critic Adrian Danks has remarked in this regard that [1]:

“It is possible to argue that Altman is the most significant and emblematic director of post-classical American cinema.”

Coming up through the more restrictive confines of network television production, rather than independent film production, Altman was something of a late bloomer – it took him awhile to unfetter his always independent approach to film expression from the demands of his studio producers.  But finally in his mid-40s, with the success of his Palme d'Or-winning anti-war black comedy MASH (1970), Altman emerged with the independence to follow his own course.  He soon started producing masterworks, which include McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), and Nashville (1975).  The greatest of these, in my view, was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman’s melancholic tale about what happens when an ambitious man meets up with a similarly ambitious woman in a remote Pacific Northwest mining town at the turn of the 20th century. 

Film critic Roger Ebert had similar thoughts along these lines [2]:

“It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).”

And the film was recently ranked in a survey of critics conducted by the BBC as the 16th greatest American film ever made [3]. 

Much has been made, over the years, of some of Altman’s eccentric modes of cinematic expression, many of which were introduced in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.  These occur with respect to both the visual presentation and the spoken dialogue.

In connection with the visual plane of the film, the innovations were partly attributable to and conducted by outstanding cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who emerged as a major cinematographer with this film.  (Zsigmond would also do the cinematography for Altman’s subsequent The Long Good-bye (1973), as well as for a number of atmospheric films directed by Brian De Palma).  Here in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman and Zsigmond introduced novelties directly to the image-gathering process, itself, as explained by commentator Nathaniel Rich [4]:

“As with MASH, Altman placed fog filters over the cameras to smudge the colors. But on McCabe, he went even further, partially exposing the negatives to destroy the clarity of the film, creating the impression that one is viewing it through a pane of stained glass. ‘I wanted it to have that antique, historical look . . . I really set out to make it look like those old photographs do.’“

And as Altman also pointed out, by doing this to the negative, it also prevented the studio from later overruling him during the editing stage, since that would have required re-shooting everything [5].

This smoky, stained-glass imagery had more than just a clouding effect: combined with the film’s disparate multi-character compositions, it cast an artistic pall over the cinematic tapestry of the film that Adrian Danks likened to the atmospheric works of 16th century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel [1].

Altman’s innovations in connection with spoken dialogue, which were initiated here in this film, are even more well-known and have come to represent something of a stamp with respect to his filmmaking.  Using 8-track sound recording, he emphatically overlapped multiple conversations going on in a scene so that it was hard for the viewer to discern what was being said by the personages of presumed narrative focalization [5].  Indeed this made it sometimes difficult for the viewer to determine what actually was the intended narrative focalization for a scene, at least at its outset.  And this is what Altman wanted – he felt it was more true to life.

However, these supposed true-to-life soundtrack effects do not take into account the human capability known as the “cocktail party effect” [6], which is a capacity primarily associated with binaural hearing. Thanks to their accommodation of two slightly different sound signals coming separately to their two ears, people with binaural hearing (most everybody) can selectively single out individual conversations at a mixed gathering such as a cocktail party – this is the “cocktail party effect”.  But when watching a movie, this would only work with carefully crafted stereo sound, which is not usually available in the distributed movie, so the cocktail party effect capacity is not available to film viewers.  What we all could do at a cocktail party is something we cannot do in the movie theater.  Filmmakers are generally aware of this situation, and that is one of the reasons why they make efforts to ensure that important spoken dialogue in a crowded scene is carefully articulated and highlighted.  But Altman headed in a different direction.  He actually wanted his viewers to struggle to hear what was being said so that they would immerse themselves more fully in the psychological milieu of the film.

Indeed, it is the evocative psychological mood of the film that makes this an outstanding work, and there were a number of other contributing factors that figured into achieving this.  One of the most significant factors was the moody background music provided by Leonard Cohen singing his own compositions – “The Stranger Song”, “Sisters of Mercy”, and “Winter Lady”.  Cohen’s droning, doleful voice casts a wistful spell over the entire film and evokes a fatalistic feeling of unfulfilled longing.  Actually, Altman had finished the shooting of the film before he approached Cohen to provide his music [5].  But he had for sometime been a fan of Cohen and may well have had his music in mind while he was planning and shooting the film.  In any case, Cohen’s songs fit so perfectly that the film seems almost like a visual instantiation of Cohen’s nostalgic thoughts. 

Another contributing factor is Altman’s signature mise-en-scene, which offers his unique take on narrative composition and focalization.  In this connection, though John McCabe is the main target of focalization in the film, there are many other dramatic happenings on the periphery that are also focalized, thereby widening the viewer’s awareness of the social context (which to a certain extent mirrors our real-life, on-the-fly experiences).  And moreover, although there are many wide-screen pans and zoom shots, the presumed perspectives and focalizations for many of these shots is often unclear, sometimes suggesting an outer-eye, but still personal, narrative perspective that oversees the multifarious dramas going on in front of its wondered gaze.  We seem to be watching a mournful Bruegelian tapestry that has come to life before us.

Despite all the many and various narrative goings on in the film, there are three main foci of our attention and compassion as we watch the film.

• John McCabe (played by Warren Beatty in perhaps his best performance) is an ambitious young entrepreneur (he calls himself a “businessman”) who seeks to make his fortune by poker gambling and by opening up his own brothel in the new mining time that he comes to.  McCabe is uneducated, and he relies on his bravado and his ability to bluff his opponents in order to succeed.
   
• Mrs. Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is a tough Cockney lady from San Francisco with  more streets smarts than McCabe.  She, too, is seeking to make her fortune.  Although  she tells McCabe that you have to spend money to make money, she is more protective of her inner persona and less willing to take risks on the personal level than he is.
               
• The People of Presbyterian Church, a remote mining town in Washington state.  These people are mostly poor uneducated miners, including some Chinese coolies.   We see them as more or less friendly and innocent, but they are relatively isolated from each other and lacking in protective social institutions, which makes them vulnerable to the harsh circumstances of their environment.

The Story of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller passes through four approximate stages.  And throughout all of them, the sky is perpetually dark and overcast with rain or snow falling.

1.  A Stranger Arrives

“It's true that all the men you knew were dealers
Who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
Who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
Who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
You find he did not leave you very much not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild
He'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.”
            – Leonard Cohen, “The Stranger”

To the droning strains of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, a well-dressed stranger, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives slowly on horseback in the new and still under construction mining town of Presbyterian Church, Washington.  McCabe is a cardsharp by profession, and he quickly stops at the only local saloon in town to set up a gambling table where he can play poker with the local clientele. 

McCabe is a self-made man who is constantly muttering to himself to live  up his ambitions. He has a little money, and his larger plan is to have his own saloon built that will feature gambling and his own whorehouse.  He goes to the nearest established town, Bearpaw, to purchase three chippies that he can bring back to work as his whores.  Soon his business is up and running, and the miners now have more diversions that can help line McCabe’s pockets.

2.  A Madam Joins McCabe

“And why are you so quiet now
Standing there in the doorway?
You chose your journey long before
You came upon this highway

Traveling lady stay awhile
Until the night is over
I'm just a station on your way
I know I'm not your lover”
            – Leonard Cohen, “Winter Lady”

After some time, a primitive steam locomotive arrives in Presbyterian Church bringing some passengers, among whom is a tough-minded madam, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who wants to partner up with McCabe in the brothel business.  She quickly convinces McCabe, who is snowed by both her beauty and her aggressive shrewdness, that she knows how to manage a whorehouse better than he does.  So with McCabe paying the expenses, she imports five better looking hookers from San Francisco, and they start operating a higher-class whorehouse that soon starts making even better money.

3.  Managing Relationships

“Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been traveling so long
. . .
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon
Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.”
                – Leonard Cohen, “Sisters of Mercy”

Business is good for McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but there are other things on McCabe’s mind, too.  McCabe is clearly falling in love with the woman and wants to have a meaningful relationship with her.  He can be heard later muttering to himself that he knows he is unsophisticated, but he plaintively swears, “I got poetry in me”.  But the experienced and hard-nosed Mrs. Miller is unimpressed with McCabe’s swagger and sees him as just a tinhorn.  She is only willing to sleep with him if he pays her upscale hooker’s fee for the privilege. 
 
Mrs. Miller later explains her cynical attitude about love to Ida (Shelley Duvall), a young, recent widow who is forced by her new poverty to join Mrs. Miller’s brothel.  Ida expresses doubts about her ability to have sex with strange men, which contrasts with her having had sex with her husband, because it was her duty.  Mrs. Miller self-centeredly counters Ida’s argument with the following:

"It weren't your duty, either. You did it pay for your bed and board.  And you'll do this to pay for your bed and board, too. And you get to keep a little extra for yourself."

Further evidence of Mrs. Miller’s self-absorption is shown when she is sometimes seen alone in her room, secretly smoking on an opium pipe.

Meanwhile another complication arises.  Two men from the big Harrison Shaughnessy mining company, Sears and Holland, arrive in town and immediately make an offer to buy up all of McCabe’s holdings.  Trying to impress Mrs. Miller with his manliness and instinctively resorting to his usual bluffing tactics, McCabe turns down their first two offers. When Mrs. Miller hears about this, she is alarmed for McCabe’s safety, and she warns him that Harrison Shaughnessy are ruthless and will stop at nothing to get their way.  But McCabe, still mindful of his presumed need to show his manliness before Mrs. Miller, resignedly counters with

“I guess if a man’s fool enough to get in business with a woman, she ain’t going to think much of him.”

Before long Sears and Holland have departed without making a deal, and they are replaced by three hired armed men who menacingly have come to Presbyterian Church presumably to finish off McCabe.  McCabe quickly makes a trip to Bearpaw to see what can be done, but finds the hands-off  lawyer he talks to there to be officious and unhelpful.  McCabe is now resigned to the fact that he will have to face his apparent assailants alone.  He spends one more night with the woman he loves, during which he opens his heart, and they come closer to the amorous union that McCabe has been so desperately seeking.

4.  Playing Out the Game

“And then leaning on your window sill
He'll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet
An old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger.”
            – Leonard Cohen, “The Stranger”

The three newly arrived thugs – Butler, Breed, and Kid – are hanging out in town and apparently waiting for their opportunity to do away with McCabe.  Their leader, Butler (Hugh Millais), is memorably menacing.  Tall and courteously forbidding, Butler seems implacable, almost like an inexorable abstract force of nature.  In keeping with this tenor of lethality, there is an extended and extraordinarily chilling scene in which Kid faces off with and guns down an innocent, good-natured cowboy (Keith Carradine) on a suspension bridge, just for the sake of target practice. 

The final, intense 23 minutes of the film show a hostile universe closing in on McCabe, and they take place during a heavy snowstorm. This was an unplanned event for Altman’s production team, but it works here to the film’s advantage.  Most of the earlier outdoor scenes in the film are shot in rainy weather, but the severe weather in this sequence serves to accentuate and underscore the vulnerability of all our protagonists.

The hired killers now spread out in the town and are ready to finish off McCabe once and for all.  McCabe flees to the church, and he barely escapes the prowling Butler by slipping out a side door just before Butler bursts in and mistakenly guns down the church parson.  Butler’s murderous act also accidentaly starts a fire in the church, but Butler continues searching for his prey.

There are now two parallel, desperate narrative threads: (1) McCabe trying to escape his murderous assailants and (2) the townspeople, who have no available fire department, frantically trying to organize themselves to put out the church fire.  In the face of the daunting circumstances, both attempts are gripping but look hopeless.

As these final events play out, McCabe makes a number of valiant moves and almost succeeds.  In the end the church fire does get put out by the townspeople.  But we see McCabe left mortally wounded in the frozen snow.  And Mrs. Millers is finally shown lying down in a local Chinatown  opium den and lost in an opium-fueled dream.  We are left on a note of unfulfilled romantic longing.  It seems that the cards were stacked against them.  On this score Roger Ebert remarked [2],

"This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come -- not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem--an elegy for the dead.”

But McCabe & Mrs. Miller is more than just a sad romantic story; its themes cover a larger scope about life itself [7].  If we consider the film’s three main protagonists, we can see that each of them had a different and ultimately inadequate approach towards facing life’s vicissitudes.  

• The People of Presbyterian Church were generally friendly, but they lived in an American society based on individual striving and trade.  There was little in the way of supporting norms and institutions that would help them live together.  Even love was a commodity to be bought and sold in the brothel.
   
• Mrs. Miller’s approach was one of total self-absorption and solipsistic withdrawal. Although she seemed at the end tentatively responsive to McCabe’s awkward approaches, she ultimately lapsed back into her opium-fueled haze.
   
• John McCabe was the one who was actively seeking authentic personal engagement.  But he was trained to be a loner who bluffed his way to success.  And he lived in a world where there was little social support for the kind of engagement that he now instinctively sought.

So Altman’s film touches on some larger themes than just romantic love.  We could say that along general lines our Western world has offered two rough and contrasting schemes for organizing society – socialism and libertarian capitalism.  Socialism neglects the individual and elevates the primacy of the social class.  Libertarian capitalism, which is a dominant theme in America and is in focus in this film, emphasizes the individual and presumes society will automatically self-organize in a mutually beneficent way for all.  But we see in this film that American institutional structures in the mining town shown were hopelessly lacking for the support of what McCabe sought.  For example:

• The church was basically unattended, and its reverend minister was reclusive and selfishly withdrawn.
• Libertarian economics had not provided self-adjusting counterforces to curb the overweening ruthlessness of the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company.
• The legal system and law enforcement authorities were absent or inadequate to maintain order in that society.  And the lawyer McCabe consulted seemed to think that the “invisible hand” of libertarian economics was enough to maintain a lawful society.

So there is an implicit suggestion in this film that more supportive social structures that lie somewhere in between individual-ignoring socialism and individual-centered free-market capitalism are needed.

Similarly, on the philosophical plane we seem to have two general perspectives according to which we organize the world – (1) objective materialism that is grounded on the physical sciences and (2) phenomenology and existentialism that are focused on the subjective experiences of the individual.  Neither of these perspectives offers a pathway to the fulfillment in connection with authentic engagement with the beloved other person that McCabe was seeking. 

I would suggest that there is another general perspective that can bridge the gap between the neglect of the individual (objectivism) and the exclusive focus on the individual (subjectivism), and this is what is sometimes referred to in philosophical circles as “Personalism” [8].  Personalism incorporates basic notions from existentialism and phenomenology, but it extends its compass to focus on authentic engagement with the people around us.  According to this way of thinking, our very being comprises the interactive engagements (and the narratives we construct according to which we understand those engagements) with the people with whom we have authentic interactions.  This was the missing perspective that could have provided some support for McCabe, Mrs. Miller, and the people of Presbyterian Church.  As it was, they all suffered from isolation.  And the relentless yearning and instinctive desire to give his love that was churning inside McCabe couldn’t be quenched.

But these thoughts concerning the underlying problems tormenting McCabe are only implicit in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.  It is ultimately the sadness of this romantic isolation that Altman so movingly evokes in this wistful film that makes it a true work of art.  McCabe arrived as a stranger to love and left as a stranger.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Adrian Danks, “Just Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, Senses of Cinema, (September 2000).   
2. Roger Ebert, “MCCABE AND MRS MILLER”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (14 November 1999).   
3. “The 100 Greatest American Films”, BBC Culture, (20 July 2015).   
4. Nathaniel Rich, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Showdowns”, The Criterion Collection, (13 October 2016).  
5. Edward Copeland, “We need Bob — now more than ever”, Edward Copeland's Tangents, (23 June 2011).  
6. “Cocktail party effect”, Wikipedia, (31 May 2018).   
7. Roger Ebert, “MCCABE AND MRS MILLER”, RogerEbert.com, (30 July 1971).   
8. Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, "Personalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (Summer 2018 Edition).    

Robert Altman

Films of Robert Altman:

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller - Robert Altman (1971)
• The Long Goodbye - Robert Altman (1973)
• Thieves Like Us - Robert Altman (1974)
• Nashville - Robert Altman (1975)

“Lamb to the Slaughter”, AHP, Season Three: Episode 28 - Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

“Lamb to the Slaughter” was an episode on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television anthology series (Season 3, Episode 28) that was scripted by Roald Dahl and based on his famous 1953 short story of the same name [1].  Like many of Dahl’s tales, this one is a black-comedy with a macabre twist at the end, which fits right in with the general tenor of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series.

Also in line with a general Hitchcockian theme is Dahl’s focus here on guilt.  Western culture is obsessed with guilt, inasmuch as a good part of it is derived from the Abrahamic religions, for which guilt is a major concern.  So our cultures have developed many social institutions, such as the police and judicial systems, for the assessment and identification of guilt.  Hitchcock was particularly concerned in portraying the paranoia-inducing effects associated with situations in which these mechanically-based institutional assessments of guilt go awry, and the wrong identification of guilt is made, such as in his film The Wrong Man (1956).  This is what also happens in “Lamb to the Slaughter” but in an ironic way.

This episode benefits from the presence of two veteran character actors – Barbara Bel Geddes  and Harold J. Stone.  Barbara Bel Geddes’s long career on the stage and screen often had her an portraying ordinary homespun woman, as she does here, with whom viewers can identify, and she played a similar role that year in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).  She is the main focus of this episode. Harold J. Stone, a long-time TV character actor, plays a dedicated police detective, much like the similar role he played in The Wrong Man.

The story of “Lamb to the Slaughter” comprises two parts – the crime and the police investigation..

1.  The Crime

The opening scene shows dedicated and pregnant housewife Mary Maloney (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) lovingly kissing her policeman husband Patrick when he returns home from work.  But her husband brusquely turns away and coldly announces to her that he is immediately leaving her for another woman and that he wants a divorce.  Mary is stunned by this news, and in a daze she staggers back into the kitchen to continue her housewifely duties of preparing dinner for him.  After withdrawing a large frozen leg of lamb from their freezer, she calls out to him that she won’t let him leaver her. 

“Try and stop me,” he tells her with his back turned to her while fixing a stiff drink for himself in the living room.  Still stunned, Mary comes into the living room and in an impulsive act of blind rage, hits her husband over the back of the head with the frozen leg of lamb she is  still absent-mindedly holding.  The severe blow fractures Patrick’s skull and immediately kills him.

Still in a daze, Mary walks back into the kitchen and almost mindlessly places the frozen leg of lamb into the oven and turns it on.  Then she sits down at the kitchen table and begins pondering what has just happened.   At this just point we see a change come over Mary’s face.  She shifts from being the innocent, abused housewife to being a person trying to figure out what to do with the situation she now finds herself in.  She gets up and strews rubbish and overturns furniture around Patrick’s corpse in the living room.  Then she goes out for a brief shopping visit to the local grocery store.  When she returns home, she calls the police and informs them that her husband was murdered while she was out.

2.  The Police Investigation
The police, led by Lieutenant Jack Noonan (Harold J. Stone), arrive and begin a thorough investigation of the crime scene.  The police investigators, accompanied by a doctor, are meticulous in recording all the details, as they take fingerprints everywhere and look for every last clue.  This is where the dramatic tension tightens further, as the rigorously thorough police seem to be (to the viewer’s eyes) closing in on Mary.  They quickly conclude that the appearance of a struggle prior to the murder was artificially staged and that an unsuspecting Patrick must have been murdered suddenly by an acquaintance.  But the one thing they can’t find is the murder weapon, which they are sure must have been a blunt club-like instrument.

Under all this scrutiny, Mary’s position seems increasingly shaky.  But her innocent and wounded demeanor puts her beyond the suspicions of the careful and civilized police investigators.  They inform Mary that they will be spending the entire night at her home investigating the premises in further detail in the hopes of finding that missing murder weapon. 

Mary tells the men, who she cordially acknowledges are all her husband’s former colleagues, that they should eat the leg of lamb which has been cooked in the oven and is now ready to eat.  It will just have to be thrown out if they don’t eat it, she tells them. The police all welcome Mary’s act of hospitality and sit down at the kitchen table to dine on the cooked lamb, while Mary sits down in the living room.  As the men happily engorge themselves on the sought-after murder weapon, Mary, in the other room, smirks quietly.

Hitchcock’s presentation of “Lamb to the Slaughter” follows the Dahl’s original story quite closely. As with many Hitchcockian tales, the objective mechanics of guilt attribution have had trouble dealing with the complexities of this world we live in. A key to the effectiveness of this episode, though, is Barbara Bel Geddes’s delicate performance.  She subtly and naturally shifts the dramatic perspective from that of an innocent victim to one of an almost scheming perpetrator. In the end, Mary shows no remorse, only cynical relief.  All along the way, the viewer shares her perspective and is likely to sympathize with her.  The degree to which the viewer fully shares and is in tune with Mary’s closing smirk, however, may well depend on the viewer’s own feelings about justice.  Where do you fall in this balance?
★★★★

Notes:

1. Roald Dahl, “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Harper’s Magazine, (September 1953).     

“The Wrong Man” - Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) is considered to be a minor, oddball work in the great director’s career.  It is frequently set aside from the rest of his masterful oeuvre by reviewers and critics and dismissed as an offbeat, realist docudrama uncharacteristic of the “Master’s” line of highly charged movie entertainment.  It is more like a neorealist documentary, according to some commentators [1]. 

While it is true that the film is based on real events and with the original names of the participants in those events preserved, The Wrong Man very much conforms to the general emotional and philosophical themes which have often underlain his most powerful cinematic narratives [2].  Many of his most stirring films, such as for example The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1938), Saboteur (1942), and North By Northwest (1959), feature an ordinary civilized protagonist who suddenly finds himself the mistaken target of a dark nefarious gang of antagonists.  This person faces a mysterious existential threat, and he must find out who his enemies are and how to escape them.  But in The Wrong Man the existential threat has been extended and abstracted – it here comprises the supposedly civilized and justice-oriented machinations of modern organized society, itself.  Our innocent protagonist in this film thus faces an out-of-control justice machine from which there is seemingly no escape.  (The nature of the Hitchcockian existential threat would be even further extended to that of animated Mother Nature, herself, in his subsequent horror film, The Birds (1963).)

So we have something of a paradox – a true story and a dark, existential horror film at the same time.  It was Hitchcock’s genius to have been able to combine these two contrasting narrative elements into a single film that made The Wrong Man particularly interesting. 

The true story concerns what happened to a middle-class New York family man, Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero, who was wrongly accused of multiple armed robberies.  The case against Balestrero was based on mistaken eye-witness identifications of him by those who had earlier been held up at gunpoint.   The details of the case were reported in a Life Magazine article [3] which apparently caught the eye of Hitchcock at the time.  Hitchcock went on to make his film based on scriptwriter Maxwell Anderson’s account of those events, The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, and in a personal appearance at the film’s outset Hitchcock solemnly assures his audience that “this is a true story, every word of it.”  And indeed all the facts seem to be there, as one would expect in a docudrama.  Hitchcock even used many of the original New York locations for many of the film’s exterior shots.  And yet we know that every narrative account must involve some degree of interpretation from an observer’s perspective.

And also Hitchcock’s mise-en-scene underscores a larger theme that haunts the film: guilt.  Guilt is a major element of Western consciousness, and it stems from the obsession with guilt on the part of the Abrahamic religions, which has been insightfully criticized in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche [4,5,6].  (Guilt is distinguished from the ancient Indian notion of bad karma in that guilt assumes there to be a permanent stain on and contamination of the individual(s) held to be guilty.)  In fact guilt is pervasive in modern society and manifests itself on many levels – social, institutional, and personal.  And these can be intertwined in complex ways.  In The Wrong Man there are at least five such theaters of guilt that come into play:

• Manny Balestrero.  Manny has been accused publicly of being guilty, but privately knows he is innocent.  He starts out with a naive faith that objective observation of the facts will lead to a just outcome, but his trust in the public administration of guilt is progressively shaken as he sees it fail to arrive at the right assessment. 
   
• Rose Balestrero (Manny’s wife).   The Balestrero family are devout Roman Catholics, and Manny’s misfortunes lead Rose to assume an overwhelming sense of internal, personal guilt.  She comes to believe that she, herself, is profoundly and irredeemably guilty and hopelessly isolated in a hostile universe that is stacked against her.
   
• The Police and Legal System.   The public institutional operation of guilt determination is shown to be operated by people who are just parts of a mechanized system tasked with the determination of some hoped-for objectivity concerning who is to be labeled guilty.
   
• The Public Notion of Guilt.  We also see the attitudes of the public at large, in the roles of the eyewitnesses, who participate in the public assignment of guilt.  These are undertaken in association with various social norms that encourage the public’s aggressive assignment of guilt to observed wrongful individuals.
   
• Christian Notions of Guilt and Redemption.  Guilt is a major theme in Christianity, as it is with all the Abrahamic religions, but it is also tempered by the notion of unqualified forgiveness and salvation.  This is a subtle theme that comes more into play at the close of the film.

These theaters of guilt and their associated themes are tracked through the five acts of The Wrong Man.

1.  Before the Arrest

Manny Balestrero (played by Henry Fonda), a musical bassist in a resident band that plays dance music at the famous New York nightclub, the Stork Club, is married and a devoted father of two children and living in a modest home in Queens, NY.  His wife Rose (Vera Miles) is something of a worrier, but Manny’s faith in traditional values is the family’s mainstay.  In order to pay for Rose’s needed and expensive dental work, he decides to go to their insurance company and borrow money on Rose’s insurance account.  While visiting the insurance office, he is recognized (mistakenly, as it turns out) by some of the workers there as someone who had robbed the office a few weeks earlier.  Immediately upon Manny’s departure from the insurance office, the workers report him to the police.  Thus the film here enters the realm of the Public Notion of Guilt.

2.  Manny’s Arrest

Here we come to the machinations of the institutional guilt-determination system – the Police and Legal System.  When Manny arrives home, he is arrested on his doorstep and immediately ushered to two a liquor store and a delicatessen, whose operators identify Manny as the man who had earlier robbed them at gunpoint.  Manny obediently follows all the police’s instructions, trusting that they will soon find him to be innocent. But he is further incriminated when, asked orally to print out the original perpetrator’s money demand note, he makes the identical handwriting mistake that the original thief had made.  Then he is treated like a laboratory specimen, and he is fingerprinted, handcuffed, and jailed.  Throughout this sequence there is a disturbing atmosphere of confinement and isolation.  Manny is helplessly getting closed up by the system into a little box.

After his arraignment in court the next morning, Manny is finally released from jail on bail.

3.  Efforts to Establish Innocence
Manny now takes his own steps to try and save himself from the clutches of an errant system.  We are in Manny Balestrero’s realm.  He hires a lawyer (Anthony Quayle), who urges him to find people who can vouch for his presence with them on the days of his purported crimes a couple of months ago.  But the few people he can remember for this purpose turn out to have recently died or are unlocatable.  The  uncanny misfortune of these circumstances (the fateful disappearance of redeeming evidence) affects them both and seems to weigh so heavily on Rose, in particular, that she slides into hopelessness.

4.  Rose’s Problems

Now Manny’s world is further disintegrating as we enter Rose Balestrero’s realm.  Not only is Manny threatened by a malfunctioning public guilt-assignment system, but his own personal world is crumbling due to the onset of Rose’s mental deterioration.  She blames everything on herself, and she begins exhibiting symptoms of paranoid personality disorder, wherein further efforts in life seem futile.  Soon she has to be committed to a mental institution – another institution in connection with which Manny can do nothing and only helplessly hope that things will work out.  This is the most alarming part of Manny’s downward existential spiral and the most disturbing part of the film.

Then at Manny’s trial, his lawyer’s laborious efforts to cross-examine the incriminating eyewitnesses doesn’t fare well with the jury, and they are only saved temporarily by the happenstance of a mistrial being declared.

5. Salvation

During the waiting for a new trial, Manny’s devout Catholic mother urges him to pray to God not  for help, but for strength.  And then, as if by miracle, salvation does come.  The film narrative extendsd into the realm of Christian redemption and salvation.  The real robbery perpetrator is caught in the act of committing another robbery, and he subsequently confesses to having committed the crimes for which Manny was charged.  Manny is finally freed.  But contrary to the film’s closing textual statement, his wife Rose never did fully recover from her guilt-obsessed mental breakdown [7]


The whole story of Manny Balestrero’s existential crisis is colored by Hitchcock’s carefully crafted mise-en-scene.  Far from a supposedly objectivist presentation of truth with fly-on-the-wall “objective” observation, Hitchcock carefully fashioned The Wrong Man into a moody film-noir. In order to achieve these to achieve these atmospheric noirish effects. Hitchcock’s cinematographer, Robert Burks, skillfully employed high-contrast black-and-white photography and striking oblique camera angles.  And in this connection, every shot was carefully storyboarded well ahead of the actual shooting [8].  The film’s moody ambience was further enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s quirky, low-key Latin-inspired musical score. 

Mention should also be made of the acting performances of Henry Fonda and Vera Miles.  Although Hitchcock did not customarily place much emphasis on acting theatrics, these two performances, particularly that of Vera Miles, add to the film’s flavor of mysterious impending existential annihilation.

The result for Hitchcock was a dark-toned melancholic masterpiece.   Indeed Jean-Luc Godard, in his early days as a youthful film critic for Cahiers du Cinema before  he launched his career as a feature film director that helped pioneer the French New Wave, marveled at the cinematic craftsmanship that Hitchcock displayed in The Wrong Man, and he rated the film as the second-best movie of 1957 [9].  Godard was particularly impressed with Hitchcock’s repeated couplings of similar narrative elements that connect like echoes or narrative responses throughout the film.  In this regard Godard cites a number of examples of these narrative pairings that permeate The Wrong Man [10]:

“To cite at random: the two imprisonments; the two handwriting tests at the police station; two conversations with Rose in the kitchen; the two hearings; apart from the credit sequence, the Stork Club appears twice; Manny goes twice to the clinic, twice to the lawyer, twice with policeman into shops for identification; the spy-hole duplicating the driving mirror; the insurance company is in the same building as the lawyer’s office; the two miracles happening on Fonda’s face; Bernard Herrmann’s score is based on two notes, etc.”

All in all, we can see that, despite its realist veneer, The Wrong Man has been carefully crafted to be one of Hitchcock’s most disturbing horror films, and it is a film that deserves a more prominent place among his oeuvre.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Devon Powell, “Blue-ray: Review: The Wrong Man”, Hitchcockmaster, (16 January 2016).  
2. Andy Webb, “The Wrong Man (1956)”, The Movie Scene, (n.d.).    
3. Herbert Brean, “A Case of Identity”, Life Magazine, (29 June 1953), pp. 97-107.   
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (1886), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), (in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
6. R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (17 March 2017).   
7. Lou Lumenick, “A case of mistaken identity ruined this man’s life — and inspired Hitchcock”, The New York Post, (7 February 2016).   
8. Laurent Bouzereau, Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man, Blue Collar Productions, (2004).
9. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Ten Best Films of 1957", (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), p. 66. 
10. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Wrong Man”, (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), pp. 48-55.

“The New Babylon” - Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (1929)

Grigori Kozintsev (1905-1973) and Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990) were two outstanding Soviet Russian [1] filmmakers who from early on worked together as a creative team.  Even as teenagers, they were members of the avant garde, and together they helped found the radical theater group the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS, 1921-1926), which drew inspiration from the contemporary disruptive artistic movements of Dadaism and Futurism then surging through Europe.  They soon shifted their creative energies to the dynamic Soviet Russian silent film movement pioneered at that time by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, making a string of successful silent films, the last of which, The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon, 1929), is the most famous [2,3,4].

The film’s story concerns a highly significant, but now somewhat overlooked, sociopolitical event of the 19th century – the Paris Commune (1871), which is an important landmark in the history of socialism and communism and had a key influence on the thoughts of Karl Marx.  Perhaps because of last-minute censorial cuts imposed on Kozintsev and Trauberg just a few weeks before the release of The New Babylon by the socialist propaganda-minded Russian authorities, some of the details concerning the Paris Commune’s relatively brief existence (18 March 1871- 28 May 1871) are absent from the film, and it helps  to have some familiarity with this history [4,5].

The Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) had disastrous consequences for the French and led to the fall of the Second French Empire under Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third French Republic in 1870. The French were still menaced at that time by an advancing Prussian army, and Paris, which was then a hotbed of working-class activism, resisted submission to the new authorities. The Parisian working-class quarter, with the support of the sympathetic and semi-independent National Guard (distinct from the French Army), established its independence by setting up a worker-ruled authority, the Paris Commune, on 18 March 1871.  Although the Paris Commune lasted only a short time, it quickly came to be regarded as a signal historical event showing how bottom-up, cooperative worker solidarity could bring about progressive social change and release the working people from the exploitative and rent-seeking oppression of the upper-classes and the bourgeoisie. 

A key issue of debate during the Paris Commune period concerned the degree to which the Communards (the Paris Commune activists) should eschew revolutionary violence and seek cooperative solutions that would benefit all concerned [6,7].  This is an important theme of The New Babylon, too, although its prominence may have been diminished by those last-minute cuts. 

Indeed, there is some debate concerning the degree to which today’s restored 93-minute version of The New Babylon, as compared with the original two-hour “directors’ cut” version, should be considered a faithful rendition of the directors’ original intentions [8].  Trauberg apparently later expressed his approval of the released version [9].  I found running the 93-minute version at a playback speed of 0.9, which represented a running time of 103 minutes, to be the most satisfactory way of watching the film, and my review is based on that experience. 

Anyway, the film as it stands is hardly an exemplar of socialist realism.  And it is not a treatise on socialist values, either, like some Russian films of this period were.  Instead it plays like an expressionistic musical suite in eight movements, which over its course passionately dwells on its various themes.  In fact the film’s music, composed by 23-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, is not just a mood-enhancing background – it is a fundamental driver of the work and an integral element of the cinematic composition.  I found the music to be sometimes distractingly strident, but often fascinatingly stirring when I watched the film.  Shostakovich, of course, was one of the major Russian musical composers of the 20th century, and with this film he began a lifelong collaboration with Kozintsev, which continued through to Kozintsev’s later, concluding masterpieces, Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971).
 
The film’s eight movements have the feel of metaphorical back-and-forth polemical dialogue  between two contrasting social perspectives – the self-centered bourgeoisie (B) and the community-centered working class (W).  It is this highly dramatized and expressionistic B-W argument that constitutes the core of the film’s appeal.   Over the course of this metaphorical imagery, there are a few themes that are repeatedly put before the viewer:

• the obsessive and selfish conspicuous consumption on the part of the bourgeoisie;
• the joy that emerges from worker solidarity and community mindedness;
• the fragility of love in an oppressive and self-focussed environment;
• the importance of nonviolence in order to sustain a cooperative society for all.

The film begins during the Franco-Prussian War prior to the establishment of the Paris Commune.

1.  "Death to the Prussians!"

The first movement shows the mindless chauvinist patriotism of the nightclub-going Parisian bourgeoisie during the war.  Louise (played by Elena Kuzmina) is a working-class girl who works behind the counter at The New Babylon department store (a name, itself, suggestive of wasteful self-indulgence), where wealthy ladies shop for the latest styles.  Because she is attractive, she gets invited by her boss to a bourgeois ball coming up.

2.  Paris
At the ball there is more selfish bourgeois role-playing, and the department store manager makes a pass at Louise.  Then a progressive-minded journalist, Loutro (Sergei Gerasimov), announces to everyone that the French Army has just surrendered to the Prussians, and the ballroom suddenly empties in a panic.

3.  Paris under siege

Now the perspective shifts to the oppressed working-class sector of Paris, and it shows their destitution.  The focus then narrows to a local dwelling, where Loutro expresses his anti-war sentiments (i.e. that war is essentially an instrument of “disaster capitalism” and only benefits wealthy investors – cf. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine [10]) to Louise and an elderly worker.  They are then joined by Jean (Pyotr Sobolevsky), a  soldier from the regular French army who sullenly comes to beg for food.  At this point the narrative slows down, and Louise and Jean exchange long, meaningful glances, which contrasts with the artificial exchanges shown in the bourgeoisie segments (which involve more visually declamatory expressions of emotive states than meaningful interactive exchanges).

4.  March 18th

Now some specifics of the establishment of the Paris Commune are covered.  And here we see the stark contrast separating the B-W sensibilities.  The National Guard largely supports the rebellious Communards, and the regular French Army retreats to its headquarters in Versailles. Louise, who has joined the Communards, asks Jean to join the rebellious National Guard, but though he responds by kissing her passionately, his knee-jerk loyalty to duty compels him to stick with the regular army.

5.  The New Paris
Here there is more B-W contrast.  In the Commune the happy workers celebrate their newly obtained autonomy, singing out,

 “We work for ourselves and not for the owners!  . . . As decided by the Commune!”

Meanwhile the patriotic bourgeoisie loyally sing “Le Marseillaise”, although Shostakovich’s participatory soundtrack mixes in elements of the French Cancan to suggest the raucous superficiality of their feelings.

6.  The 49th day of the battle  

We move to the latter stages of the Commune, when the Communards are under siege and in despair.  The workers desperately all pitch in to set up barricades to protect their sector from the advancing French Army, who want to regain national control of Paris.  The workers shout out to their foes,

“We are not French.  We are Communards!” 

In the ensuing battle, though, the Communards are overwhelmed, and the Commune falls, while the contemptuous bourgeoisie look on with satisfaction from a hillside in Versailles.

7.  "Peace and Order" is restored in Paris
The last two segments are shown in darkness and a continuous downpour.  Many Communards have been killed, and the distraught working-class people stand miserably outside the Parisian cafés, watching the bourgeoisie celebrate their defeat of the lower-class rabble and their return to control.  Amid this ruckus, Jean, who is treated as a heroic soldier, desperately searches for the whereabouts of Louise.

8.  The trial

One-by-one, the captured Communards are brought before a military marshal and summarily sentenced to death.  When Louise is brought forward, she, too is sentenced to be executed.  Jean, who happened to be helplessly watching this operation, is in a state of shock – especially when he is then explicitly ordered to start digging Louise’s grave in the downpour.  When Louise sees him, she laughs scornfully and shouts out to him,

“We will meet again, Jean!”

Much of the tone of The New Babylon is ironic and sarcastic, and it is not surprising that the Russian authorities tried to censor it.  But the mise-en-scene used to create this over-the-top expressionistic mood is fascinating.  There are many rapid-fire swish-pan montages that are employed to create a chaotic feeling of turbulence.  These are coupled with long, dramatic sequences of back-and-forth closeups that emphasize the dialogic contest between self-centered capitalism and community-oriented socialism that underlies this high-voltage tale of a cataclysmic moment of world history.  Altogether, this is a fascinating and moving experiment in cinematic expression.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Kozintsev and Trauberg were from what is now Ukraine.
2. Vincent Canby, “'NEW BABYLON,' SILENT RUSSIAN CLASSIC”, The New York Times, (3 October 1983).   
3. Stephen L. Hanson, “Novyi Vavilon - Film (Movie) Plot and Review”, Film Reference, (n.d.).    
4. Jugu Abraham, “196. Russian director-duo Grigory Kozintsev’s and Leonid Trauberg’s silent film “Novyy Vavilon” (The New Babylon) (1929) (former USSR/France), with music by Dimitri Shostakovich: One of the most laudable silent films ever made that has surfaced recently”, Movies that make you think, (19 September 2016).  
5. “Paris Commune”, Wikipedia, (29 May 2018).     
6. Ibid.
7. “Communards”, Wikipedia, (10 April 2018).   
8. Michael St Aubyn, “The New Babylon - Novyy Vavilon”, DVD Beaver, (n.d.).   
9. Ibid.
10. Naomi Klein,  The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf Canada, (2007).