Jamaica Inn

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.

Chess Fever

Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) is a comedic classic of Soviet cinema that builds on early Russian silent cinema, not just upon the revolutionary impulses of October 1917. The film presents a domestic picture of wintry Moscow in the grip of “chess fever,” and includes both actual footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow that year as well as cameo appearances by famed chess stars of the day, such as the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (world champion 1921-1927). Chess Fever stars Anna Zemtsova (later billed as Anna Pudovkin) and Vladimir Fogel as they prepare, in much different fashion, for their wedding day. When Fogel’s obsession with chess—shared by the entire male population of the city, including the chemist who unwittingly mistakes lipstick and poison—tears apart their engagement, Fogel and Zemstiva must each evaluate what is truly important. Will a chance encounter with chess champion Capablanca (who prefers beautiful women to chess) save the day? The 27-minute Soviet silent features chess-loving kittens, checkered socks, and an attempted suicide.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese’s dark, postmodern comedy After Hours (1985) stars Griffin Dunne as computer programmer Paul Hackett, whose casual and nervous encounter with Rosanna Arquette leads him on a nightmare voyage through Soho’s dark and rainy streets. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Hackett’s only thoughts are of finding an illusive and elusive way home “home”-- which in his case is back at work in his corporate office. On his journey through New York’s underground, where he encounters (but does not participate in) the libidinous world of drugs and sex, he will be tempted and tormented by an increasingly strange collection of women, from the trauma-inflicted Arquette to a sexually threatening sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino, from the obsessive, beehived, and potentially-castrating Teri Garr (who has access to a Xerox machine) to Catherine O’Hara (and her Mister Softee truck), and finally to the mysterious and maternal Verna Bloom, who lives in the basement of the Oz-like Club Berlin. Also features fantastic location shooting, mis-communication, repetition, an angry mob, and a cameo by Cheech and Chong. As a fantastic portrait of downtown in the early 1980s, After Hours is best viewed in conjunction with Downtown 81 or Permanent Vacation.

Ramona (1928)

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.

The Gaucho (1927)

Starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mexican actress Lupe Velez, The Gaucho was released in 1927 as “The Gaucho Starring Douglas Fairbanks” to largely positive reviews that noted, nonetheless, “a rather gruesome undertone to an otherwise gay symphony.” The film’s Argentine setting allowed Fairbanks to operate in an essentially Zorro-like adventure plot that ostensibly skirted Mexican concerns, with the Andean highlands functioning in the same manner as the fictive Costa Roja. Released a month earlier than The Dove, Fairbanks’ film contained many explicit allusions to Mexican themes and images. As a return to the hero-bandit formula that Fairbanks had helped popularize with The Mark of Zorro (and the 1924 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro), The Gaucho pits Fairbanks against a greedy, corrupt, drunken, and ineffectual state government, ruled in this case by Ruiz, the usurper, played by German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz. Armed with an Argentine bolas that replaces Zorro’s sword, Fairbanks must the native peasants with the elite ruling class, which, in this case, is represented by the Catholic Church. The film adds the specter of infectious disease as a plot twist that differentiates The Gaucho from previous incarnations of this Ramona and Zorro theme of a corrupt state unable to protect its land, women, or gold. Infected with the “Black Doom,” a leprosy-like disease, that the state has been unable to successfully quarantine, The Gaucho finds his religious calling via a ghostly vision of the Virgin Mary (played by Mary Pickford) at the City of the Miracle. Following his miraculous cure from the Black Doom at the shrine of Mary (aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), the Gaucho leads the people against Ruiz and his corrupt and inebriated army. Like in the Zorro films, Fairbanks’ own celebrity operates as part of the narrative as well. It was not only reinforced by the apparition of Mary Pickford but by the Gaucho’s magnetic appeal to common men and women alike. Not only does Velez, as the Mountain Girl, fawn over the Gaucho’s pictures on her wall and decorate herself with make-up when he visits her small town, but when we are introduced to the Gaucho/Fairbanks he is signing autographs in a local cantina. Though the film is in many ways reflects the basic Zorro narrative, it cinematographically recalls the visual language employed by D.W. Griffith’s Ramona in 1910, as sweeping long-shots of the landscape and natural beauty of this simpler time and place are fore-fronted in The Gaucho. Compared to The Mark of Zorro, the film featured a toned-down version of the arched doorways, bleached-white walls, and ornate tile work representative of the same Spanish-style architecture and interior design that was popular in 1920s California, as modern local boosters were reshaping Southern California in this Spanish/Mexican hybrid vision by re-constructing historical sites such as Olvera Street (a Mexican marketplace billed as the oldest street in Los Angeles) and the El Camino Real. The styling was somewhat subdued in the film, in part reflecting the larger trend of 1920s set design. As Simon Dixon has argued, 1920s set design was involved in a visual discourse with celebrity homes, and film magazines like Photoplay featured lavish photo spreads on estates like Marion Davies’ San Simeon-by-the-Sea “Ocean House,” Rudolph Valentino’s “Falcon Lair” in Beverly Hills, and Fairbanks and Pickford’s own Spanish-styled house, called “Pickfair,” that Fairbanks and Pickford constructed in 1927, the same year that The Gaucho premiered, in an elite and exclusively white subdivision of Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, California. This is more than conjecture: “Pickfair” was discussed in the film’s original program book as well as in newspaper articles as the new home of the over 600 head of longhorn cattle that Fairbanks purchased for the pivotal stampede scene near the end of the film. Such discussions of Fairbanks’ extravagant spending on The Gaucho was not merely a nod to his own celebrity but were also an attempt to elevate the film’s critical appeal and cultural significance. Again mirroring the film’s official program book, newspapers lauded The Gaucho’s high production costs while, simultaneously, commenting on Fairbanks’ creativity and genius as a producer. Sections of the program called “When Fairbanks Gets An Idea” and “Things Only Fairbanks Can Do” were printed in the New York Times leading up to the film’s release, including a discussion of the construction of the massive set of the City of the Miracle, which included an 800-foot street and the development of a camera lens that “would picture such a street in a way that all parts of it, down to the pilgrims entering the shrine at the end.” The establishing shot of the village, consisting of a long backwards pan, was an impressive innovation that, according to the Times, was an example of how “Fairbanks’s fanciful notions of one sort or another in his new picture come into reality” and were “the sort of thing that has given him name for accomplishing in a seemingly easy manner some seemingly impossible technical problems.” The film’s program book that went to great lengths to explain that an Argentine gaucho was not very different from a Mexican caballero. The “gaucho of yesterday,” the program informs us, “was a romantic, audacious guerilla of the plains.” He was “tall, handsome, and lighter-skinned than the North American Indians, but with black eyes.” As “King of the Pampas,” he was an “excellent cattleman and a savage fighter . . . a fierce, uncompromising son of Spanish-Indian stock,” a “picturesque figure” in “flamboyant” clothing armed with the traditional weapon of choice, a bolas. The program then notes that Fairbanks has taken some poetic liberties with the historical presentation of the Gaucho, believing, as he does, that “’things as they are’ are never as appealing as ‘things as we would like them to be.” That the program comments on the light skin of the Argentine gaucho is rather surprising considering the dark make-up that Fairbanks wears in the film. But, as Paula Marantz Cohen has written, Fairbanks’ skin tone was one of the many closely controlled aspects of his on and off screen image that he and Pickford adeptly and closely controlled. Fairbanks, who was a quarter Jewish, had skin “far darker than that of the conventional leading men of the period,” and negotiated this darkness in his earlier roles by lightening his skin with a heavy layer of white make-up. But in his later films set in “exotic” Mexican, South American, or Arabian locale (such as The Gaucho), Cohen argues that Fairbanks pioneered the use of sun-tanning his skin even darker to not only to connect his character with the illicit and foreign persona he is portraying, but also to navigate his own darkness by “normalizing a look that would otherwise have marginalized him in mainstream culture.” Neither The Gaucho’s narrative and visual connections to Zorro and Ramona, nor the use of its pointedly non-Mexican setting as in The Dove, nor its focus (like Zorro) on Fairbanks’ own celebrity were the most significant aspects of the film to our understanding its complex and ambiguous response to the heightened Mexican pressure of derogatory depictions in Hollywood films. Perhaps most crucial to the way the film engages with Mexican protest was in the film’s cast, with the introduction of Lupe Velez in her first starring role. Of course, it should be noted, Velez was not the only Mexican in the film. Indeed, as the New York Times wrote, “most” of The Gaucho’s “cantankerous bandits . . . are Mexicans, to whom the bolas was as unfamiliar as croquet to an American Indian or baseball to an Eskimo.” Velez, who was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and educated in Texas, inaugurated an exaggerated version of the “Mexican Spitfire” character she was most known for. Although Dolores Del Rio had broken into Hollywood movies two years earlier, it was Velez’s portrayal of the star-struck/love-smitten Mountain Girl whose performance inaugurated the stereotype of the hot-blooded (and specifically) Mexicana whose uncontrollable passions are, in the end, subdued by a dominant man. Velez’s passion smolder as The Gaucho literally intertwines the pair with his bolas in a suggestive dance in the cantina where they first meet, but are aroused to their fiery fullest as a rival appears for the affections her “Gaucho mio.” Velez, who was quick to fight women rivals, other men in the Gaucho’s gang, or even the Gaucho himself (often biting or slapping him and getting bitten or slapped back in an extremely casual presentation of domestic violence in which love, anger, and passion are intertwined), was praised in film reviews. She was acclaimed for her performance as a peasant girl who, even when civilized in fine clothing, does not overcome the hot fervor of her station. She was perfect in the role of the Latina “termagant, quickly fired to anger. Whether she is in rags or laces she gives blow for blow to the men who get in her way or incur her anger . . . never heeding for an instant that she is arrayed in silks and laces.” Even the reviewer noted that although “Miss Velez gives a capital characterization . . . it does seem strange that she is so suddenly tamed in the end, when she becomes the bride of the Gaucho.” As Carlos Cortes has shown, the pairing of a Mexican female character and Anglo man had long been an acceptable pairing in Hollywood films, as long as the white man was successfully able to tame his Mexican or Indian bride. The casting of a Mexican actress to serve as Fairbanks’ onscreen bride was an important development in Hollywood’s response to ongoing protests. The development of a Mexicana star not only reflected a calculated decision in ethnic marketing that reflected the increased distribution into the Mexican and Latin American markets as well as the growing purchasing power of Mexican American audiences. It also served to inherently temper Mexican criticism, as a film featuring a Mexican movie star could be popular even if the character portrayed presents a negative or derogatory stereotype, the feature at the very heart of Mexican complaint about Hollywood films dating back a decade. As Laura Serna has written, when The Gaucho premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, theater magnate Sid Grauman attempted to exploit the Mexcana star’s popularity with the Mexican American population in Los Angeles and “organized a special event in honor of Velez, who had just signed a five-year contract with United Artists, called Fiesta de Mexico in the English language advertisement.” The event, though a blatant attempt to connect Mexico with the film’s Argentine setting, was a failure. Velez, however, proved to be extremely popular with both Mexican and Anglo audiences and critics alike. In fact, two years later, in a less than stellar review of a Lupe Velez film that paired her with Gary Cooper, the Times laments the loss of some of the passionate temper than Velez displayed in The Gaucho. “The exotic and curiously attractive Mexican actress,” they wrote, “…is now to be seen as a more placid but not wiser young woman” in a film called Wolf Song (1929). Velez had not been Douglas Fairbanks’ first choice for The Gaucho. After seeing Dolores Del Rio in Edwin Carewe’s Resurrection during a private screening for Mary Pickford and her mother, Fairbanks had inquired as to her availability. Carewe informed the swashbuckling star that the twenty-two year-old Del Rio was already signed to star in Carewe’s remake of Ramona, which would go into production at the end of the year. The role of the Mountain Girl then went to Velez, who had arrived in California the year before following many Mexican stage roles, and was, herself, originally considered for the lead in The Dove the year before.

The Dove (1927)

Another film that demonstrates the ambiguity of the American response to Mexican protest was The Dove, released by Norma Talmadge Productions and distributed by United Artists in December of 1927. Set in the fictional Latin American nation of “Costa Roja,” The Dove was produced by Joseph Schenck, directed by Roland West, and starred Norma Talmadge in one of her last screen roles. The film was billed as a romantic melodrama and was based on a 1925 play by Willard Mack, which was in turn based on a short story called “The Blue Ribbon” by Gerald Beaumont, published in Red Book Magazine in 1923. Like The Bad Man, the Norma Talmadge silent was remade by RKO Radio Pictures in sound in 1931 as The Girl of the Rio, starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, and again by RKO in 1939 as The Girl and the Gambler, starring the Hungarian-born actress Steffi Duna. While this transnational lineage of the character of Dolores ‘the Dove’ (later renamed Dolores ‘the Dove’ Romero in the 1939 version) is interesting, the Norma Talmadge version of the film was deeply engaged in Mexican protests over the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood movies. Indeed, it was for a time at the very center of the protests. Though films of the 1920s such as The Bad Man and The Dove continued to present derogatory stereotypes of Mexican villains, they each demonstrated the ploys that Hollywood used to soften their message. The growth of Mexico and Latin America as a viable market for films was a concern for both Hollywood and Washington. As Ulf Jonas Bjork has written, the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC)—the agency in charge of trade promotion in the U.S. Department of Commerce—had established strong ties with Hollywood dating back to 1921. Bureau employee Clarence Jackson North was the point man in Washington for establishing the strong relationship with the film industry. His comment that “through American motion pictures, the ideals, culture, custom, and traditions of the United States are gradually” resulting in a “subtle Americanization process” in other countries mirrored Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s 1927 claim that American films were central in “transmitting ‘intellectual ideas and national ideals’ from the United States to other nations.” North’s primary contact in Hollywood was Frederick Herron, who worked for William Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).Hays, who had famously held that foreign trade “followed the film, not the flag,” was equally eager to assist the BFDC and profit from the extensive material and intellectual support that Hoover offered Hollywood in the realm of foreign trade and distribution. The Dove’s release in 1927 came during the same year that relations between the BFDC and MPPDA were at their closest, when North’s office began sending the Hollywood trade press weekly press releases and updates from his Commerce Reports, which had begun publishing film items and reports two years earlier. The Dove’s use of the fictional “Costa Roja” as a setting has been seen by historians as one of the most novel ploys by Hollywood to give attention to the expanding Latin American market, while leaving their biased narratives and imagery about Mexicans and Latin Americans largely unaltered. It was also viewed as a transparent at the time. In a January 3, 1928 review, the New York Times wrote that “geography” was meaningless to this “yarn,” noting that the producers “decided to pluck Mexicana from Mr. Mack’s original effort, call it Costa Roja and then fling it over to the blue Mediterranean.” The Times then explicitly connects The Dove to the Mexican protest, commenting that the lead male character Don Jose Maria y Sandoval, played by Noah Beery (modeled on the theatrical role played by “The Bad Man” star Holbrook Blinn), was “a screen character to which the Mexican Government may have objected to, for he is greedy, sensuous, boastful, cold-blooded, irritable, and quite a wine-bibber.” The review continues, however, by suggesting that Don Jose may not offend Mexican officials because, after all, “he does dress well . . . hates to have his luncheon spoiled by a noisy victim of his shooting squad [and] adores beauty.” Mexican politicians were not fooled by these (ostensibly) positive traits presented in the film and The Dove was the first high-profile attempt at economic boycott. As Wilbur Morse wrote in 1931, after years of “having its diplomatic representations so disregarded, Mexico took its first step toward definite action about two years ago when it barred Norma Talmadge’s silent version of The Dove. Soon, every film in which the villain said ‘carramba’ or was known as ‘Pancho’ or ‘Lopez’ was refused showing in any Mexican theater.” It is quite appropriate that Morse’s examples of derogatory Mexican names were the exact full name of Holbrook Blinn’s character in the Bad Man, for Mordaunt Hall, writing a second article about the film in the New York Times, declared that “this film should have been called ‘The Bad Man’s Brother’ instead of The Dove.”The Dove featured cinematic similarities to the Bad Man as well, including the same exaggerated Mexican accents used in the inter-titles of the 1923 film Not only does Don Jose speak in broken Spanish/English, proclaiming himself as the “Bes’ dam caballero in Costa Roja,” and commenting “Dios, what a man I am!,” but so too does the Dolores “the Dove” speak in a manner that even contemporary reviewers related to an attempt at a more subtle form of derision. “As you watch the scenes flash by,” Hall wrote, “it seems rather strange to perceive through the subtitles that Dolores talks in broken English when conversing with Don Jose, a fellow countryman. This is obviously done to give her the chance to use the expression, ‘You betcha my life!’ quite a number of times.”

The Bad Man (1923)

The image of Mexicans portrayed in The Bad Man (1923) contrasted heavily with that in The Mark of Zorro. Directed by Edwin Carewe (who later directed the 1928 version of Ramona starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio), the film starred Holbrook Blinn as the “notorious Mexican bandit Pancho Lopez,” in a revival of his stage performance as the Bad Man in the play by Porter Emerson Browne. The film is not, however, a return to the directly derogatory representation of Mexicans as dangerous villains or bandits that marked prior Hollywood films. Instead, as the New York Times wrote, this “clever and restrained . . . production” lost none of the whimsical humor of the play and Blinn, as the comic anti-hero Pancho Lopez, is “never at a loss for a smirk, a smile, a look of surprise, threatening gestures, or interest in what is going on around him. Blinn’s hands and feet appear to suit the very expression of his darkened countenance.” The film is a comedy that features the loyal Lopez, the mal hombre of yesteryear, defending the patriarch Gilbert Jones, who has once saved his life. By killing Morgan Pell, the rival of his friend Jones (and setting Jones up with Pell’s wife), Lopez is an allegorical stand-in for the mysterious and appealing side of Mexico and represents the complex tension of attraction and repulsion that marked relations between the United States and Mexico. It is not an irony that his very repulsive nature—the ability to kill—is also the source of his nobleness, albeit a naturalistic and primitive form of nobility. The Bad Man repeatedly undermines even this primitive nobility awarded Lopez by making the sound of his thick accent a featured part of the “silent” movie. As Melinda Szaloky has examined in an essay about F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), visual acoustics as “a dimension of silent cinema that . . . does not originate from extrafilmic sound effects but, instead, issues from the images [of the films] themselves” is an underappreciated aspect of the silent film. When Lopez informs Morgan Pell that he is going to kill him, the inter-titles exaggerated the sound of his voice for the audience. Turning to his chief assistant, Lopez declares, “Pedro, I do not hunt rabbits—you keel heem.” According to the Times, the comedic effect was not lost on the audience, as the film was surely a “picture which sends one away joking about the lingo of the Bad Man.” When the film was remade in 1930 by First National Pictures, Walter Huston supplied in sound the exaggerated Mexican accent of the comedic anti-hero Pancho Lopez. The portrayal of Pancho Lopez in the film as a noble yet comic, murderous yet and unthreatening hero-villain came amidst increased pressures by the Mexican government to influence the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood films. Pressure came in the form of diplomatic protest and economic boycott, including the “ban on motion pictures which contain Mexican villains or incidents that may portray Mexican life unfavorably” that was delivered to Hollywood studios via Mexican General G.S. Seguin in 1922. The letter sent to the Hollywood studios by Seguin was not the first form of protest by the Mexican government, who had “long made efforts to control the image of Mexicans produced in the United States.” The Bad Man attempted to navigate official protests by the Mexican government by attempting to ennoble its comic villain-hero; it is Lopez’ actions, after all, that guarantees the happiness and love interest of the film’s American protagonist. But as Wilbur Morse, Jr. pointed out in a 1931 article in Motion Picture Classic, audiences inside and outside of the Mexican government were not fooled. Commenting on the remake of the Bad Man, Morse wrote that Walter Huston had given “an added sting to the lines which, as silent picture titles, had enraged the good citizens of our Sister Republic” in 1923. Mexican efforts at banning American films (and controlling the image of Mexicans) throughout the 1920s were undercut by a combination of external factors. These included the popularity of non-derogatory Hollywood films in Mexico, the sheer size and dominance of Hollywood productions, and by the conflicted needs of Mexican President Alvaro Obregon, who was president of Mexico from 1920-1924. Obregon was attempting to reconstruct the Mexican economy and political system and was forced to balance differing goals: the quest to avoid United States domination and the need for diplomatic recognition from the United States.

The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The Mark of Zorro (1920) bore many resemblances to Griffith’s Ramona. Starring Douglas Fairbanks as the mysterious “Castilian” hero, the film was directed by Fred Niblo, produced by the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, and distributed by United Artists, the company Fairbanks co-owned with D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. Based on a 1919 short story “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCully, the screenplay was originally credited to Eugene Miller and has since been credited to Elton Thomas, a pseudonym of Douglas Fairbanks. Like Ramona, the story of Zorro has had tremendous staying power. Following a decade in which the image of Mexicans in Hollywood films was largely based on the shifting American allegiances during the Mexican Revolution or on blatant racism, The Mark of Zorro represented a return to the mythological past of pre-1846 California. The reference to Capistrano, the most famed of the Spanish missions of Old California, was credited at the beginning of the film and firmly established the mission-era setting and plot. Whereas Ramona portrayed Mexican characters physically unable to protect their women from Anglo encroachment, The Mark of Zorro featured a corrupt Mexican government morally unable to protect its own citizens. Inter-titles near the beginning of the film instruct the viewer about the “greedy, licentious, and arrogant” military and government who declare that Zorro, as protector of the poor and native Mexican, poses the threat of rebellion. The governor personally vows to capture the mysterious bandit. The shift away from the explicitly derogatory “Greaser” films of the 1910s to a more complex representation of Mexican nationality was in part influenced by rising protest from the Mexican government following the election of Venustiano Carranza and drafting of the Mexican Constitution in 1917. As Helen Delpar points out, the shift also reflects the increased distribution of Hollywood films into Mexico following World War I, as the French film industry that had previously dominated the Mexican market was devastated during the war. In addition, the 1920s featured the rise of the Mexican American as a consumer of Hollywood films, especially in Los Angeles and San Diego, where, “as in [Anglo] American families, movie tickets were an essential feature of these Mexican families’ spending ways” (George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p.173). The increased purchasing power of Mexican Americans may have affected the types of Mexican characters portrayed by Hollywood. The Mark of Zorro was notable, however, in that the “noble-blooded” Zorro was a bandit hero in the model of Joaquin Murrieta, the “Mexican Robin Hood” of Gold Rush-era California. Murrieta is a complex figure in Mexican culture, and has represented a wide breadth of political ideologies and factions—seen as both a leader of the resistance to Anglo encroachment in 1840s California and as a representative of the tyranny during the Mexican Revolution. Just as Zorro is described in the film, Murrieta appears in Mexican letters “like a graveyard ghost and like a ghost he disappears.” Jose Vasconcelos, the former Secretary of Public Education and director of the National University of Mexico (who had procured public subsidies for the murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros), wrote a 1944 essay called “The Tragedy of California” that expressed a nostalgic reading of Murrieta as defender of the people while at the same time demonstrated his keen disillusionment with the Mexican Revolution. In the essay he compares Murrieta’s descent into banditry and terrorism with the actions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, who he claimed had manipulated the “Mexican lower classes” into revolt against wealthy hacienda owners, only to find United States banks buying up the “despoiled” Mexican lands. Like the folk tales about Joaquin Murrieta, The Mark of Zorro offered an intertwined interpretation of both the Mexican-American War and Mexican Revolution in which the bandit hero represented simultaneous and contradictory factions. Douglas Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro presented audiences in 1920-21 with a simultaneously comic but sexualized body through which these tangled and ambiguous history lessons were viewed. In the story on which the film is based, the lead character shares a double-identity as both Don Diego Vega, the elite and effete son of a noble Spanish family, whose languid mannerisms and lingering bachelorhood cause the consternation of his father and the rejection of his would-be marriage partner Lolita Pulido and as the masked and adventurous Zorro, whose righteous defense of the poor and masculine sexuality make him the object of respect and desire by his father and love interest alike. The film’s denouement, however, introduces a third persona to the lead character, as an unmasked Zorro (and non-effete Diego Vega) fights the rival Captain Ramon: the acrobatic swordfight at the film’s end is clearly won by Fairbanks himself, whose considerable celebrity made him easily recognizable to the audience and all the more attractive to the film’s (Pickford lookalike) heroine. Reviewers at the time took this “triangular” construct as rather matter of fact. In the March 1921 issue of Photoplay, Burns Mantle wrote that Fairbanks was graceful and thrilling as the “romantic hero, who is the alleged weakling son of a Mexican don, but who doubles at odd moments, and especially at night, as a bandit set on freeing the people of his state from the oppression of their political rulers . . . and in the end rescues the trusting heroine . . . as ever the knights of old.” By commenting on Zorro’s nighttime escapades as both revolutionary hero and sexual conqueror, Mantle expanded upon image of Zorro as weakling son/Murrieta figure while at the same time noting that Fairbanks, as a major Hollywood star, provided for American audiences the romantic idol that the dark-skinned Murrieta, Villa, and Zapata could not. But not all contemporary reviewers agreed with Mantle’s assessment. Other reviewers commented on this triangulation in rather negative terms. Upon the film’s release at the Capitol Theater, the New York Times wrote that Fairbanks was more of an “athletic comedian” than romantic hero, and that The Mark of Zorro sacrificed “plausibility . . . for headlong action.” Not only did the film contain too much “romantic nonsense,” but the casting of Fairbanks as the Mexican “stranger with a sure sword, swift horse, and a sense of humor” was directly questioned by the Times. They wrote that the film’s picturesque settings often contrasted “amusingly with the emphatically non-Spanish appearance of some of the players, including, of course, Fairbanks himself.”Although Fairbanks’ own appearance was distracting to some contemporary reviewers, it successfully confirmed the pure Spanish blood of Zorro, the Mexican romantic bandit hero. As an unmasked Zorro (now clearly representing Fairbanks himself) warned the corrupt politicians at the end of the film, “here your abuse of power ends. Every Californian of noble blood stand with me.” After declaring “Justice for All!,” Fairbanks acrobatically leaps to the balcony above him where Marguerite de la Motte, as the pale-skinned Lolita Pulido, awaits. De la Motte, a close friend of Fairbanks and Pickford, tells him “You talk, you fight, you look like Zorro!” to which he replies “And I love like Zorro.” To a crowd of cheering onlookers below, Fairbanks and de la Motte (as a stand-in for Pickford) feign a comic and bashful kiss in the same exaggerated manner with which Pickford and Fairbanks entertained the American public in “real” life. Celebrity and narrative functioned simultaneously at the end of the film, and Zorro and Fairbanks cannot be separated from one another. Mexican folk heroes were white Hollywood stars. When Fairbanks returned to the Latin hero in The Gaucho (1927), he did so as a darker-skinned, more sexualized, and more exotic figure. The image of Fairbanks presented in this later film comments on the development and death of Hollywood icon Rudolph Valentino, whose Arabian and Latin characters in the mid-1920s were in many ways re-workings of this Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro.

Ramona (1910)

D.W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) starred Mary Pickford as the half-white, half-Indian title character in a highly condensed adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Indian-reform novel Ramona. The sentimental novel, in 1910, was still well known in Southern California and (as cited in film reviews) remained well remembered throughout the rest of the nation. Griffith’s film was an important part of a long cultural process that transformed the sentimental novel into commercialized mythology in the form of tourist promotion and regional development strategy. By combining the book’s popularity with the romantic visual decorations of 1890s parades and festivals such as La Fiesta de Los Angeles and La Fiesta de Las Flores (which were also modeled on the novel), Griffith was able to present his film as a reclamation of the novel’s original reform intent while, simultaneously, introducing the work to a new audience composed largely of middle-class businessmen. Filmed on location in the “real” settings of the novel—such as the verdant mountains above the Camulos estate in Ventura County—and introduced with a title card crediting Helen Hunt Jackson, the film was subtitled “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.” Louis Reeves Harrison, reviewing the film for Moving Picture World in 1910, commented that Griffith and the Biograph Company had harmoniously blended narrative and location, signifying an advanced “step in the evolution of a new art and blazed the way forward for additional, greater achievement.” The review also described a filled-to-capacity theater of “earnest-looking” businessmen for the film’s premiere—an audience that contrasts heavily with Jackson’s largely female readership at the time of the novel’s publication. It was an audience, Harrison wrote, that viewed Griffith and the Biograph Company to be reflections of themselves: models of business-minded progressivism. The film’s producers were “strongly entrenched in public confidence” and “known to be earnest, striving to attain the best results, never pandering to the baser elements of society nor catering to perverted instincts.” Harrison enlarged upon this relationship between the business-minded audience and Griffith’s revision of the original text, writing “it seemed as though the playwright or director, or possibly both, had consciously emphasized a bigger and broader and finer theme . . . Natural Selection!” This association between Griffith’s Ramona and Social Darwinism was implicit in the visual language of the film itself, which was undoubtedly based on theatrical versions of the novel as well. Griffith, who had starred as the character Alessandro in a traveling production of Ramona that toured California from February 28—April 23, 1905, was intimately familiar with the original novel and adapted theater versions. The visual depiction of the Indian Alessandro and Mexican Felipe as meek, helpless, and feminine reconfigured the plot of the reform novel into a sexual melodrama centered the eroticized body of Mary Pickford. The contrast of Pickford’s languishing body and Felipe’s un-masculine response functioned as a dual message to the progressive businessmen of the audience, at once appealing to their libido and serving as valuable history lesson. In Griffith’s reworking of the text, Felipe has become and allegory for the Mexican state prior to the Mexican-American War. By representing the inability of the Mexico state to protect its women and defend its territory against invasion—from either the Anglo settlers depicted in the novel or the United States military during the Mexican-American War—Felipe’s feminine weakness suggested the intertwined notions that the physical protection of lily-white Mary Pickford (even when portraying the half-Indian Ramona) was better suited for the modern businessman in the audience than for the onscreen Mexican, and that American imperialism was justified.

The Saphead

Buster Keaton's first feature-length film, The Saphead (1920), famously includes his last onscreen smile. While the film is not the best choice to acquaint a first-time viewer to Keaton's comedy, it represents an essential and pivotal point in his career and will be watched with great interest by any fan of his later work. Building on his earlier work supporting Fatty Arbuckle (they made 15 two-reel films together before Keaton's service in France during WWI and three more after the war), The Saphead foreshadows several plot points familiar in his later films. Keaton stars as Bertie Van Alstyne, ne'er do well son of the richest man in New York (Willaim H. Crane) whose "shortcomings, ambitions, misfortunes and final triumph" are intertwined with the film's complex narrative in which Bertie's conniving brother-in-law, an illegitimate child, and falling stock prices of the family mine are intertwined with Bertie's love for Agnes, his adopted sister (Beulah Booker). The film features the development of Keaton's deadpan style, his restrained performance a conscious choice that reflected his innovative interpretation of Bertie as a "person who does not properly connect with his surroundings, his failure to understand being paralleled by his failure to respond emotionally." Keaton's performance subverts the class structure and conservative ending of the source material, a novel and play called "The Henrietta" (and "The New Henrietta") that was originally intended to star Douglas Fairbanks on screen. The film also is noted for Keaton's extended slap-stick acrobatics at the New York Stock Exchange. [Above quotes taken from Peter Kramer's excellent essay "The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead" (1995)].

Fat City

John Huston's Fat City (1972), a terse, funny, and unsentimental meditation on youth, marriage, and wine that played for a two-week run at the Film Forum this month, was at its roots a lover's elegy to all the lost dreams of the Stockton, California: the bars, the boxers, the migrant farm workers, the faded rooms, the peeling paint, the broken hopes. Stacey Keach starred as Billy Tully, an aging (30) and alcoholic man who once boxed against the 5th in line for the title. Based on the 1969 novel by Stockton-born Leonard Gardner, Huston took over production from Monte Hellman and directed one of his finest films, aided by the sunlit color cinematography of Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke) and by Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" (taken from his 1970 album Kristofferson). Susan Tyrell was superb in an Oscar-nominated performance as Oma that was equally lighthearted and heartbreaking. Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark were featured as visions of Tully and Oma's idealized youth, while Curtis Cokes (as Earl), Sixto Rodriguez (as Lucero), and Nicholas Colasanto (as Ruben) gave the film depth and life from smaller roles. Fat City moved seamlessly across the San Joaquin Valley's world of migrant labor from the predawn allotment of jobs to the onion fields and walnut farms picked by black, Mexican, and Chinese laborers. The workers in these fields, like the young boxers in Ruben's gym, provided some of the best moments in the film. For Keach, who played Mike Hammer on CBS in the the 1980s and was excellent in The Killer Inside Me (1976), Billy Tully was a career-defining role.

The Bedroom Window

The pairing of Steve Guttenberg and Isabelle Huppert as illicit lovers in The Bedroom Window (1987) should warn first-time viewers that a plot twist is soon forthcoming. Directed by Curtis Hanson (Bad Influence, L.A. Confidential), Huppert is the wealthy and otherworldly Sylvia Wentworth—aka the boss’s wife—who goes home with the hapless everyman Guttenberg following a work party. Huppert, witnessing the attempted rape of a girl through Guttenberg’s bedroom window, is hesitant to call the police as she, of course, would not be able to explain the her presence in his apartment without revealing her liaison dangereuse (with the Brooklyn-born star of Diner, Police Academy, and Bad Medicine no less). When Guttenberg calls the police to report the crime himself, he soon becomes the focus of both the police investigation and the attack victim played by Elizabeth McGovern (Once Upon A Time in America). Though its billing as a “romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense” was a bit of a stretch, The Bedroom Window should nonetheless please fans of Huppert as it marks one of her very few American films, along with Michael Cimino's brilliant Heaven's Gate (1980), a turn-of-the-century historical epic starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. The Bedroom Window features several 80s-style chase scenes and was filmed by Gilbert Taylor, the director of photography of The Omen (1976) and Star Wars (1977). Look for Wallace Shawn in a scene-stealing performance as defense attorney for the lead suspect in the attack.

The Stranger

Orson Welles' Nazi-fugitive thriller The Stranger (1946) starred Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young. Each play a sort of perfected version of their screen self: Welles as the duplicitous college professor Charles Rankin/fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler; Robinson as the tireless federal agent Mr. Wilson, doggedly on Kindler's trail; Young as the resilient but desperate damsel in distress. Like The Night Porter (1974), Liliana Cavani's sadomasochistic cult film starring Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling, Welles' film begins with an examination of fugitive psychology, a process involving confession, conversion, guilt, and murder. As the movie begins, Rankin performs the ultimate film noir daily double--a marriage followed by the secret burial of a man he has killed in the woods of his small Connecticut college town. Rankin/Kindler, part-author of the final solution, must evade not only Robinson but his strongest "ally" as well, Loretta Young's subconscious. The film is full of textual gags such as the USE GYM AT OWN RISK sign in the beginning, admonitions like "in Harper there's nothing to be afraid of," and casually-spoken lines like "we'll catch up with you." 1946 was an eventful year for Welles who also used his radio show that year to work in conjunction with the NAACP to publicize the case of Isaac Woodard Jr., a returning African American soldier beaten and maimed in his South Carolina hometown while still in his Army uniform. Stylistically, The Stranger bears an unmistakable nod to Hitchcock. Robinson's character of the Nazi-hunting federal agent also brings to mind the role of "Vampire Hunter" Van Meer played by the great Sam Fuller in Larry Cohen's A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Fuller, a notorious cigar smoker, guaranteed Cohen that he would carefully regulate the use of his on-screen and off-screen cigars so that continuity would not be disturbed during editing. The problem was that Sam Fuller did not really have an on-screen and off-screen cigar; watching the film today it is more than amusing (for Fuller fans) to watch his cigars magically change back and forth in length. The Stranger's melodramatic ending, high above the town in the giant clock tower, should not distract from this well-paced thriller.

Gran Casino

The first of Luis Bunuel's 20 Mexican films, Gran Casino (1947) is part melodrama, part musical. It is also, of course, total Bunuel. Set in the booming Gulf Coast oil fields of pre-Revolution Mexico, Gran Casino intertwines greed, fate, and desire in a tale hinging on the foreign ownership of Mexican natural resources. Though it was Bunuel's first film in 15 years, it was--in his own words--not half bad. The musical numbers performed by stars Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque are filled with suggestion and surprise (including the hilarious "Trio Calaveras" as Negrete's backing chorus who appear out of nowhere). Though missing the usual dream sequence, the layout of the casino in the film's title was utilized as a kind of map of the mind--characters pausing on the stairs between the conscious and subconscious worlds where scheming and dreaming evolve into murder and suspicion. Having fled Franco's Spain, Bunuel edited propaganda films at MOMA in New York and dubbed features into Spanish in Hollywood before his Socialist ties and distaste for life in the U.S. led him, unbeknown to himself at the time, towards a career and citizenship in Mexico. After a long layoff from the three films of his youth, Le Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age D'Or (1930), and Land Without Bread (1933), Bunuel was asked to direct Gran Casino for producer Oscar Dancigers, who he had known in Paris. Dancigers is thus one of the most important men in film history, resurrecting the career of one of the medium's most innovative and international directors; their collaboration in Mexico included, among other films, Los Olvidados (1950), El (1953), and Abismos de Pasion (aka Wuthering Heights)(1954). Though Bunuel, the master of surrealist cinema, would undoubtedly reject such a simplistic reading, as Negrete claims in Gran Casino to have "won something out of our defeat," it is difficult not to see Bunuel's comments veering toward the defeated Republicans of the Spanish Civil War, toward the oppression of workers everywhere, and toward his own directorial career.

Don't Touch the White Woman!

Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (2008), which opened in New York at the IFC Center last summer, starred Asia Argento and Fu'ad Ait Aattou as ill-fated lovers in a brilliantly filmed version of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1851 novel Une Vieille Maitresse (aka An Old Mistress). D'Aurevilly was a minor French writer and newspaper critic whose career spanned the Second Republic and Second Empire of Napoleon III. Like many of his other works, Une Vieille Maitress presents characters in a vice-like grip of passion who are drawn to excess, criminality, and self destruction with an almost-supernatural obsession. For Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell), the period-costumes and mannerisms of d'Aurevilly's novel seemed more liberating than restrictive, and The Last Mistress was her most balanced and human work. Likewise, playing the outcast Spanish mistress Vellini opened new possibilities for Argento, whose carnality--while central to her on and off-screen image--is usually handled awkwardly by lesser directors (including her father). In surrendering herself to Breillat, however, Argento displayed the emotional depths of her talents as an actor and took the film to heights it would not have reached without her. Co-starring with Argento and the fey Ait Aattou was Roxane Mesquida as the demure bride Hermangarde and Yolande Moreau as La comtesse d’Artelles, the spiritual matriarch of the film. Shot by Greek cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis (Romance, Anatomy of Hell) and edited by Pascale Chavance (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy), The Last Mistress was ultimately about the complex banality of doomed love-triangles (in any era) and will stand as one of the most complete films of the decade. Old lovers, literally, will haunt your dreams after watching this film.

The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.

The Limits of Control

Throughout his long career (almost 30 years) Jim Jarmusch has continually reasserted himself as this country's finest filmmaker. Each of his films have been a regeneration of his idiosyncratic and obsessive vision, and no one has painted a portrait of urban and national geography quite like Jarmusch. Like most great American art, this vision has been in the form of a quest. From James Fenimore Cooper's captivity narratives to John Ford's Western films, American art has traced the lines of the quest and hunt in both physical and moral terms. Occasionally, this quest has been subverted to show the hollowness and madness of America's violent obsessions. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is, of course, the great standard of subversion. Released in 1851, amidst violent territorial expansion and a headlong course to Civil War, its message was largely ignored before resonating with European intellectuals in the 1930s, as fascism descended upon Spain and Germany. Jarmusch's work is as relevant to his own time as Melville's was to his; amidst the Reagan Revolution and revival of the Wall Street ethos, Jarmusch released Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986). Amidst the culture wars, he offered the poetic Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999).

The Limits of Control (2009), which opened at the Angelica last spring, starred Isaach De Bankole, Paz de la Huerta, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Bill Murray. De Bankole is excellent as the mysterious and meticulous Lone Man in Spain who is met by a various ensemble of mysterious international characters who each greet him with the same line “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” De la Huerta, as the Nude girl, delivered one of the most subtle performances in the film; though everyone is an enigma, her character exudes more emotion than anyone else and yet keeps the most hidden as well (quite remarkable given her bared state throughout the film). The comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville and John Boorman are obvious, but the film is far more than an existential homage to Le Samouri or Ponit Blank: Jarmusch has again reinvented himself by flooding the screen in Sevillian color and light and a seemingly disjointed soundtrack by Japanese noise band Boris. But this reinvention also represents a return to the same obsessive quest that has marked all of his movies; The Limits of Control, strangely, is most similar to Jarmusch's student film Permanent Vacation (1980), also about a mysterious loner who encounters mysterious characters as he wanders around burnt-out New York City. Though filmed with different budgets, each utilized brilliant location shooting to etch a portrait of time and place and memory through the eyes of a wandering stranger.

House of the Sleeping Beauties

Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?

Young and Innocent

Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) starred Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam in the classic man-on-the-run formula that Hitchcock had perfected two years earlier with The 39 Steps. Thanks in part to a surprise ending featuring a jazz band in blackface, Young and Innocent deserves re-evaluation as one of his more significant prewar films. De Marney plays Robert Tisdale, an innocent man turned preordained suspect who, after his mistress is found strangled on the beach, must chase the real killer while he himself is chased by the police. Nova Pilbeam stars as Erica Burgoyne, the young and adventurous daughter of the lead police detective and romantic interest of the fugitive Tisdale. For Pilbeam, who was just 18 at the time, this was her first adult role; as a 15 year-old she had played the daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) with Peter Lorre. Based on a Josephine Tey mystery, Young and Innocent was written by Charles Bennett who had scripted several of Hitchcock's U.K. films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage (1936), and The Secret Agent (1936). Tisdale's freedom (to pursue the detective's daughter, no less) rests on finding a missing raincoat and the man with the twitching eyes. Along the way are a multitude of hats, phones, cars, a chase through an old mill, and a strange birthday party. As Paul Duncan has written, the climactic crane shot in a London hotel was one of Hitchcock's most difficult, panning from 145 feet high down into a 4 inch close-up. The opening scene of this film--a strangled woman washed upon the shore--later reappeared at the beginning of Frenzy (1972).