Small Things Like These

Cillian Murphy

I enjoyed the film adaptation of Claire Keegan's novel Small Things Like These more than I expected to, if enjoyment is not quite the right word for a work concerning the depravations of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. Set in 1982 or so, both film and book concern a simple and honest lorry driver named Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) who discovers dark secrets about the local church run facility while making his deliveries. The laundries employed and sheltered Ireland's unmarried mothers who were forced to give away their babies for adoption. The laundries were Dickensian work houses, David Copperfield figures prominently in Small Things Like These, that became satanic mills of abuse and exploitation. Screenwriter Enda Walsh has streamlined the novel, yet retained its very Gaelic flavor.

What worried me about the material is that there is no subtext, book and film are both righteous screeds against the Laundries. Fair enough, but not necessarily the stuff of multi-dimensional art. However, the film is superbly acted by all concerned and director Tim Mielants' technique is interesting and evocative. He conjures the period by giving the film a throwback look and audio design. The colors are muted, appropriate for this grim tale of the 1980s. The sound is multi-layered and scratchy like an old cassette mixtape. Furlong is constantly going back in time within his head to revisit his troubled childhood. Mielants includes many shots of characters looking through windows conveying how we are constantly rewitnessing the past, but are forever cut off from it. The past is a foreign country as L.P. Hartley put it. Mielants uses long and slow pans to give the viewer a queasy sense that some undiscovered horror is just around the corner or in a disused coal bin. Furlong is a virtual saint, devoted to his wife and five daughters. We have little doubt that he will do the right thing even if he has to oppose his beloved church. As in Oppenheimer, Murphy underplays beautifully in what was a pet project for him. Emily Watson delivers in the juicy role of the Mother Superior who personifies the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy.

El

Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova

Luis Buñuel's Él (Him), from 1953, is probably the most personal of his masterpieces from his Mexican period. Buñuel and Luis Alcorize's script was derived from Mercedes Pinto's 1926 novel Pensamientos. That novel was a roman à clef about Pinto's relationship with her jealous husband who descended into paranoia when he could not control her. The first part of the film focuses on Francisco (Arturo de Córdova), a middle aged business magnate and his wooing of the much younger Gloria (Delia Garcés). Francisco spies Gloria in church during a Maundy Thursday service and with one look at her ankles, the torch is lit. Buñuel indulges full bore in his foot fetishism in this one. Even though Gloria is seeing the dependable Raul (Luis Beristáin), an employee of Francisco's, she is swept away by Francisco's profession of love and he soon manipulates her into a hasty marriage.

The second part of the film is a flashback that is from Gloria's perspective, as she recounts the horror of her married life to Raul some time in the future. Francisco's jealousy erupts almost immediately after they pledge their troth, ruining their wedding night and honeymoon. He moves her into his palatial family estate, an art nouveau palace with surrealistic flourishes, brilliantly designed by frequent Buñuel collaborator Edward Fitzgerald. This house soon becomes the prison it resembles on the outside, a gilded cage for Gloria. Francisco's behavior descends into the pathological and goads Buñuel and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa into some of their most disturbing imagery: a pin through a keyhole with the intention of blinding a imagined peeper, Francisco collecting tools in order to sew up Gloria's vagina; a harbinger of That Obscure Object of Desire. It is no surprise that Él tanked with critics and audiences in the repressed 1950s. There is a bell tower scene that prefigures Vertigo, Hitchcock was an avowed admirer of Buñuel, in which Francisco threatens to throw Gloria to her doom and castigates the people below as "worms".

Gloria tries to find an ally who will help her in her plight, but no one will listen to her. Francisco's servants, his business associates, the local curate, all buy into Francisco's projected image as magnanimous yet traditional bourgeois grandee. Even Gloria's mother is fooled. When Gloria goes to her mother for counsel, she responds by, in essence, telling Gloria that boys will be boys. The final third of the film goes back to Francisco's perspective as he becomes more paranoid and delusional. He stalks Gloria after she wisely leaves him and endeavors to get out of Dodge. Francisco mistakes a couple for Gloria and Raul and follows  them into the church we encountered earlier in the film, bringing us full circle. Francisco imagines that the parishioners are mocking him. Buñuel cuts between reality and Francisco's delusions in purposefully crude cuts, the line being thin between reality and delusion. The coda, a sop to the conventions of melodrama, shows Gloria wed to Raul. They are parenting Francisco Jr. Francisco has retreated from society and is now a brother in a monastery. His mustache, an emblem of his machismo, is gone. The final shot is of Francisco walking a crooked path, as he did on the stairs of his mansion. His madness still lingers.

The fact that it is Buñuel in a cassock in this last shot is indicative of his identification with the divided nature of Francisco. To the world Buñuel was an icon of Surrealism and Leftist humanism, or, as Dali dismissed him, an atheist and a Communist. At home though, he was a traditional Spanish patriarch, stern and unyielding. He demanded unconditional fealty from his wife and children. Disobedience was not to be tolerated. Now, the fact that Él can be read as an auto-critique makes me think that Buñuel was not the domestic tyrant that some have made him out to be. Still, boys will be boys. He does deemphasize the theme of divorce and the difficulty of obtaining one in a Catholic country compared to the original novel. The subject is briefly mentioned, but then ignored. Buñuel was so in thrall to his own Romantic agonies to ever be fully sympathetic to feminism. 

Él may have the best lead performances in any Buñuel film. The line on him is that he let his professional performers be while micro-managing his amateur ones. If this is true, and I've read and seen nothing to contradict this, then he was very fortunate in the casting of Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova. Garcés was an Argentine actress who took a hiatus from her homeland with her husband during the Perón era. We can glean what Francisco sees in her, she is a dish, but Garcés gives Gloria a backbone even when Francisco tries to spatchcock her. Cordova was the greatest leading man of the Mexican cinema, appearing in over a hundred Mexican features and quite a few American ones (like For Whom The Bell Tolls). One of the delights of Él is watching Córdova and Buñuel gleefully deconstruct Córdova's image as a romantic leading man.

The Gallant Hours

James Cagney and Ward Costello

Robert Montgomery's The Gallant Hours is a peculiar mix of docudrama and hagiography. The picture illustrates Admiral Bull Halsey's leadership during World War 2's Guadalcanal campaign. The film is bookended by scenes of Halsey's retirement from service. The limited scope of this feature is a kindness to Halsey whose personal life and naval career were far more checkered than this flick lets on. Halsey in the film is a salt of the earth mensch, his door always open to the plaints of a troubled junior officer or swabie. James Cagney, in a role that is tailor made for him, holds together this rather static flick. There is an attempt to parallel Halsey's strategizing with that of his opponent, the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. This film does a reasonably good job of humanizing the enemy for an American film from 1960.  However, Yamamoto's death, which serves as the ambivalent climax of this film, occurred five months after the end of the Guadalcanal campaign. There are a few other inaccuracies because when you do a hagiography there has to be a little hogwash.

The documentary aspect of the script, by Frank D. Gilroy and Air Force veteran Beirne Lay Jr., uses extensive narration to outline, poorly, the strategy of the campaign. What works better is an effort to humanize the characters by offering details about individual's make-up and ultimate fate. The narration, alternated by Montgomery and Art Gilmore, is compelling when offering us such tidbits as Yamamoto's passion for poker and that one character ends up Governor of South Dakota and another a paraplegic. Would that Montgomery's visual approach had been half as interesting. Instead, the approach is torpid and seems chintzy. This was a film produced by Montgomery and Cagney, so there seems to have been more attention to cutting corners than usual. Most of the camera set-ups are primitive and there are no battle scenes in this war movie. It is an actor's movie of the war.

Now that may not have been such a bad idea with one of the greatest actors of the century in the lead. Cagney underplays, the mythos of the role preceding him, and captures an exemplary senior officer who displays more charm than the real Halsey did. Cagney's deft touch is best seen in the moment he hears of Yamamoto's death. While his comrades are celebrating, Halsey seems aggrieved. Earlier in the film, Halsey had narrowly escaped a similar fate as that of his opponent. We can see what Halsey is thinking in Cagney's eyes: there, but for the grace of God, go I. I also enjoyed the scenes of Cagney interacting with faces that would become increasing familiar in the future: Dennis Weaver, Richard Jaeckel, and William Schallert. I don't really like The Gallant Hours as a film, but admire Montgomery for providing moments of dignity for those who gave all. A large portion of the cast of this film served in the war. Some, like Montgomery and Ward Costello, were genuine heroes.