The Bible...in the Beginning (John Huston, 1966)

 

John Huston’s The Bible…in the Beginning is as misbegotten as any big-budget movie of its era, its superficial fidelity to the source and humorless solemnity embodying a perceived importance, if not transformative capacity, but barely coherent as conventional narrative while also lacking any sense of unifying mystery or basic theological curiosity. The film travels through God’s initial establishment of the light and creation of the world, through the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, making dull use of the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole, sometimes momentarily impressing with its spectacle and resources, but never penetrating or moving: the episodically plodding, literal approach succeeds at least in establishing God’s unknowable, if not wantonly capricious, nature, but offers almost no discernible means of navigation. As presented here, for instance, the mythic grandeur of the Noah story can hardly surmount endless questions: how one old man and his family possess the resources and know-how to harvest so much timber, build such a seaworthy vessel and so on; what kind of land it is in which kangaroos, hippos and polar bears live in close proximity; what the point of the flood was when the movie depicts mankind rapidly returning to its fractured and sparring ways (even so, the Noah episode at least possess a sense of fun absent from the rest of the movie, with Huston himself turning in the film’s most enjoyable performance). The film concludes with its longest segment, the story of Abraham (George C. Scott), presented here as a one-note trudge, much of it likely to be mystifying to non-scholars (one’s resistance reaching a pinnacle in the brutal final testing of Abraham’s faith). The film’s approach ultimately might seem forged in veiled contempt as much as in intelligent engagement or respectful devotion.

Le deuxieme souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

 

Jean-Pierre Melville’s directorial control over Le deuxieme souffle sometimes seems to border on the supernatural, to be drawing from a liminal state of watching and waiting and calculating, one in which normal, law-enforced ethics are replaced by what might very loosely be termed “honor among thieves,” a label with bottomless layers of underlying complexity and subtext. The names of the main adversaries, career criminal Gustav Manda (Lino Ventura), known as Gu, and police inspector Blot (Paul Meurisse), evoke an elemental struggle, the “Gu” perpetually threatening a hole in the societal fabric, the “Blot” the primary means of repair; their opposition forming a kind of kinship (Blot’s precise early reading of a crime scene, complete with laconic predictions of what form the noncooperation of the eyewitnesses will take, is priceless). Gu escapes from jail at the start of the film, but a fellow escapee is killed during the attempt (and we later learn the other didn’t do much better); he shortly thereafter kills two thugs who cross his path, and from there his activities always feel stalked by death, even his smallest interactions carrying a heightened existential charge. Gu’s twisted sense of ethics generates some almost deliriously contorted rationalizations: tricked into naming one of his collaborators and labeled in the papers as a stool pigeon, he has a police inspector sign an account of what happened, and then cold-bloodedly kills the man, with no apparent sense that such a venal action might outweigh the reclaimed reputational virtue. But judgments and weightings are no clearer on the other side of the law: Blot in the film’s final moments has an easy opportunity to suppress the inspector’s brutally-obtained confession, but instead ensures it will be made known. Ventura and Meurisse, despite sharing very little screen time, are among the all-time spellbinding adversaries, one of several respects in which one senses a path being laid for Michael Mann’s Heat.

92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane, 1975)

 

Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade is, often simultaneously, a film made out of almost nothing (even at a late stage, it spends extended time observing one minor character instruct another in the names of fish) and one driven by profound existential tension: somehow, the meeting of the two creates something rather uniquely gripping, its essentially irresolvable quality indicated by the existence of two versions with alternate endings (I’ve only seen the bleaker and I imagine more haunting of the two). Peter Fonda plays Skelton, aspiring to become a Key West fishing guide, blowing up a boat owned by Warren Oates’ Dance as revenge for an elaborate practical joke; Dance then vows to kill him unless he quits the business. Skelton doesn’t seem to doubt Dance’s resolve, but keeps going anyway: it sums up the film’s evasive charm that one can hardly guess to what degree he’s driven by fatalism versus self-confidence versus idiocy, et cetera. The film frequently cuts off scenes that feel like they could have gone on longer, or refers to incidents and conversations that one might typically expect to have been part of the movie: while that could be held up as a failure of craft (Fonda for one was unhappy with the editing), it also lends it a kind of goofy authenticity, a sense that we’re peering into sometimes near-random chunks of the sunbaked intertwined lives. The fine and happy-seeming cast includes a blissfully unhinged Burgess Meredith (who even more than most of the others seems to be making it up as he goes along, especially in his scenes with Sylvia Miles), a wonderfully light-spirited Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Ashley demonstrating her baton-twirling skills, and William Hickey, recounting how he failed dismally at operating a whorehouse; it says something that Harry Dean Stanton has trouble stealing any scenes.

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003)

 

The opening sequence of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf might promise a relatively conventional society-breakdown film: a family of four arrives at their weekend cottage to take refuge, finding it already occupied; within minutes the father is dead and the mother (Isabelle Huppert) and two children are out on their own, stripped of their supplies. A little while later, they see a passing train and make their way to a railway station in hope of finding transport out, and that’s almost as much as ever happens: all the subsequent scenes are set at or around the station, with limited news of the outside world, and declining hope of that train ever showing up. It’s a set-up that might evoke Beckett, its dark ridiculousness increasing in proportion to the existential stakes, and Haneke very subtly teases us with portents and possibilities that never go where they might (for example, the station is initially dominated by a potentially dangerous man called Koslowski who lays down the law and controls the allocation of supplies, but as others arrive he fades into the mix; another character seems like a symbol of non-conformity and defiance, but his efforts end up as failures, stealing a precious goat and ending up pointlessly killing it; even Huppert’s character barely emerges from the crowd in the latter stretch, a confrontation with her husband’s killer likewise coming to nothing). Haneke orchestrates a typically strong, richly ambiguous finale, fusing elements of supernatural possession and ritual self- destruction with a comforting (if likely delusionary) assertion of all that was good and might be again; the final extended shot might belong either to the past or the future, might be either the expression of a wish or of the extinguishment of one. Overall it’s one of Haneke’s narrower and more withholding visions, but no less meticulously rewarding for that.