A Confucian Confusion

Shiang-Cyi Chen and Shu-Chun Ni

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is an engrossing polyphonic portrait of Taipei released in 1994.  If I had to categorize this winning film, I would call it a workplace based romantic comedy, since a number of the characters work at a public relations agency, but that would be pigeonholing a work that defies easy categorization. What strikes me about the film, which juggles the lives of over a dozen characters over the course of of two days, is the overall mood of romantic dissatisfaction that permeates throughout. All of the couples we witness are well past the honeymoon period of their relationship. This is more a movie about conscious uncoupling than one about romance sparking. When a relationship is consummated in the film, regret is inevitable and almost instantaneous. Yet, the film, though rueful, is never depressing, but is ultimately buoyant in its handling of its characters' travails.

A Confucian Confusion fragmented narrative mirrors the disconnected lives of its characters. The film is edited into shards of plot, Confucian parables, painted legends, and advertising slogans. The mise-en-scene entraps the characters at luxurious offices and TGIFridays giving the picture a lost in the supermarket feel of anomie. The surfaces are bright, reflecting the lives of the pretty young things enjoying the luxuries of Taiwan's economic miracle. The characters are miserable despite the appointed decor, the to die for couture, and the bling. They careen around after work doing cartwheels, puking into potted plants, and bickering in cabs. Dual poles within a narrow society are displayed. Postmodern amorality is contrasted with delusional traditionalism, ascetic artists with gleefully vulgar ones. The film is on a par with such masterpieces as A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi. It has been paired in an attractive package by the ever dependable Criterion Collection with Yang's 1996 effort Mahjong.

Mahjong is less successful, but most movies are. The international actors seem ill at ease. Once again we are faced with Confucian parables and perfidious western influence. TGIFridays is reprised and The Hard Rock Cafe is the featured location. Amoral criminality reigns supreme. The film's most successful procurer, Diana Dupuis' Ginger, struck me as a double for Ghislaine Maxwell in this farsighted and somber film whose main theme is sexual grooming. This Criterion two pack would grace any film lover's video library.

Springfield Rifle

Philip Carey, Gary Cooper, and Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams

André De Toth's Springfield Rifle is a very good and under sung Western released in 1952.  It was a part of wave of films that featured weapons in their title, a trend heralded by the success of Winchester '73 in 1950. Titles included Colt .45, Carbine Williams, Kentucky Rifle, and many more on American television. The film, which had multiple writers attached to it, seems a little like a stitched together Frankenstein's monster. It is set during the Civil War and has Gary Cooper attached to a fort in Colorado where he and his cohorts must thwart Confederate rustlers who are stealing Yankee horses. The titular rifles are one of the stuck on bits. They are mentioned briefly at the beginning and arrive at the nick of time as a deus ex machina to save Coop and the Yanks. Springfield rifles had been made at the armory in Massachusetts since the Mexican War era, but a new innovation occurred during the 1860s. The Civil War marked the shift from muzzle loading rifles to the easier to use breech loading models which gave the more industrial North an edge. 

Another negative aspect of this filmic kluge is the romance angle. Phyllis Thaxter travels all the way from West Chester, PA. to Coop's fort to beg him to turn his sword into a plowshare. The scenes are pointless, a repeat of Coop's equally tedious scenes with Grace Kelly in High Noon which had opened three months before Springfield Rifle. Hollywood always has been a place with many echo chambers. What is original about the film is that it is an espionage flick with Western trappings. There is a spy at Coop's fort who must be unmasked. Coop, we learn, must go under cover, even undergoing a trumped up court martial. Once he is cast out of the Yankee fort with the yellow stripe of cowardice on his back, he ingratiates himself with the rustlers and is able to unmask the traitor. Critics and audiences at the time bridled against the film as needlessly convoluted for a Western. However, this is what I like about the film. Cooper's character has only a limited number of people he can trust, the number of whom diminishes as the movie unspools. The air of the film is rife with paranoia. Most of the characters, Yank or Reb, seem nice enough, though we know there is a two faced traitor in their midst. Characters often hide their true motivations and De Toth treats them all equivocally. This is not a film of good guys and bad guys. Even the villain has his reasons.

I view Springfield Rifle as largely a Cold War allegory concocted in the shadow of the arrest and trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950 and their trial began in March of 1951. They were executed in 1953. Springfield Rifle trumpets its theme: that counterespionage is necessary to the preservation of our Republic. A message that must have seemed pertinent in the age of the Red Menace. This theme seems most obviously to be the work of screenwriter Charles Marquis Warren. As the late Philip French has pointed out 🌵, Warren was on the hawkish Hollywood right wing and wrote and directed another 1952 Western, Hellgate, that can be seen as a pro-McCarthy statement. Despite the rigidity of Springfield Rifle's theme, Warren and De Toth sketch ambivalent characters with multiple dimensions. Cooper's character can bond with the Rebs as well as he can with his compatriots. It helps that such capable and familiar, to my generation, actors such as Martin Milner, Alan Hale Jr., and Fess Parker are on hand. De Toth handles his cast with aplomb. Even Lon Chaney Jr., a clumsy performer if you ask me, is effective as a craven killer. De Toth handles his exteriors as well as his actors with Mt. Whitney and its surrounding standing in for the Rockies. The snow draped hills provide an apt setting for treachery, as they do in De Toth's Day of the Outlaw.

Phylllis Thaxter's profile and Paul Kelly

                                                                  Spoiler Alert

Cooper is an axiomatic personality: if you've seen him once, you pretty much know what you are going to get. The performance that most impressed me was Paul Kelly's as the traitor. He provides a smooth and unruffled facade, but also hints at the inner turmoil of a man who is not what he seems. I'd enjoyed Kelly in a number of films, like The President Vanishes, The Roaring Twenties, Flying Tigers, Crossfire, and Side Street, but wonder why he had a career that seems partially submerged. He began onstage, but was featured in film as early as 1919 when he wooed Mary Miles Minter in Anne of Green Gables. In 1927 he beat to a pulp actor Ray Raymond, a brawl precipitated by Kelly's affair with actress Dorothy Mackaye. Raymond never regained consciousness and Kelly was convicted of manslaughter. Kelly was sentenced to serve ten years, but was sprung after 25 months. He eventually married Mackaye and they were wed until her death in 1940 from injuries resulting from a automobile accident.

🌵 Philip French, Westerns, Pgs. 81-82.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond

              

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are a French filmmaking couple based in Brussels specializing in homages to the exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s. Their latest, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, is a delirious tribute to the spy films that were released in the 1960s in the wake of James Bond. Fabio Testi, still walking this earth, stars as John Diman, a retired agent who spends his retirement at a hotel on the Riviera drinking vermouth and ogling young girls. We are caught up in the reveries of Diman as he reminisces about his past. In these flashbacks, the young Diman is played by Yannick Renier and has been tasked to protect a shady businessman from assassination. His nemesis is a female assassin named Serpentik who bears more than a passing resemblance to Irma Vep. The always welcome Maria de Medeiros appears in the present day section as a vamp who toys with Testi. Is she Serpentik or the author of the spy novel franchise that morphed into a film series? Reflection in a Dead Diamond provides no pat answers, it exists to provoke and tease the mind's eye.

No film I've seen this past year has placed less emphasis on narrative or characterization. However, I was buoyed by the sheer energy and visual imagination of the film. This film may be just a genre pastiche, but its surreal flourishes are smartly integrated with the film's structure. This film most closely resembles not the Bond films, but their more mod camp followers such as Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik and Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise. The mod look of Reflection in a Dead Diamond is much more than campy eye candy, however. The op art designs of the carpet and walls of the hotel reflect the disorientation of the protagonist and act as portals for the film's travels through time and space. The directors employ all sorts of visual styles including animation. At one point, as a character is being beheaded, the scene is intercut with two of the goriest and greatest paintings of Caravaggio: Judith Beheading Holofernes and David with the Head of Goliath. Except for the obvious, I am not sure what this ultimately means, but, as with Reflection in a Dead Diamond in general, I admire its audacity.