He Who Must Die

Pierre Vaneck

I've been itching to see Jules Dassin's He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir) since I read Peter Wolf's memoir, Waiting on the Moon. In it, Wolf recounts his being taken to the film by his parents whereupon he eventually falls asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to him. That lady was named Marilyn Monroe who was there on a date night with her husband Arthur Miller, just two everyday New York intellectuals paying homage to one of Joseph McCarthy's victims as Wolf's parents were. The movie is a French language wide screen version of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Both works are set in a Greek village under Ottoman rule in the year of 1921. Refugees from a town sacked by the Turks arrive, are spurned by the town's ruling class, the Church and bourgeoisie, and flee to the hills. The village people are rehearsing their version of the Passion Play which they put on every seven years. However, events spin out of control and Christ's sacrifice recurs after a class war erupts. The battle rages on as the film ends. 

In his review in The New Leader, Manny Farber detected the "tang of propaganda" in the film's images and I concur.⛨ However, I don't think this was necessarily a problem since Kazantzakis was fellow traveler if not a doctrinaire Communist. I am not so sure about Jesus. The film reminded Farber of Steinbeck. Nevertheless, Dassin's allegorical groupings of the lumpen rural proletariat results in stasis rather than movement, posturing rather than acting. This is social realism at its most ham-fisted, turning an ambivalent and questioning book into a Marxist fresco. There are endless shots of the choreographed peasantry happily warbling or intoning their dignity. I, unlike Peter Wolf, did not fall asleep, though. Enough of Kazantzakis' dialogue remains and I especially enjoyed the readings by Jean Servais and Fernand Ledoux as the film's good and bad pharisees. However, the film's performances are all over the map. Melina Mercouri has a bad case of the cutes as the picture's Magdalene figure and Pierre Vaneck is hopeless as the film's creeping Jesus. The film's Pilate figure is the most broadly drawn, a Turkish Snidely Whiplash avec catamite. A pretentious curiosity, all in all. 

⛨ Manny Farber, The New Leader, Three Art-y Films, pg. 26.

Who by Fire

 

Noah Parker

Philippe Lesage's Who by Fire (Comme le feu) is a Canadian drama than conveys the claustrophobia of intimacy from first shot to last. It is a long film, over two and a half hours long, and a slow burn that unspools at its own pace. It is set at a remote lakeside lodge in Northern Quebec owned by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a maverick filmmaker. The film chronicles a troubled reunion he hosts with his former collaborator, Albert (Paul Ahmarani). Albert brings along his two late adolescent children and, crucially, a friend of one of them named Jeff (Noah Parker). Jeff is the main witness to the various entanglements that ensue, the only character given point of view shots by the director. 

Jeff's awkwardness and essential estrangement mark this film as a coming of age drama and, indeed, we do detect some growth in his compassion by film's end. The film has its outdoor sequences which contain more than a whiff of danger, hiking, hunting and canoeing through rapids, but the real battles occur indoors over many bottles of wine as the temporary housemates share meals around a table captured by the largely fixed gaze of Lesage's camera. Despite the many stunned onlookers, which includes Blake's staff and the odd film star (Irène Jacobs), Albert and Blake partake in verbal sparring, taking the opportunity to trade recriminations and old resentments. The backbiting gets so vicious that the film becomes a nightmarish dreamscape of bourgeois neurosis. The frantic party mood, highlighted by a conga line to "Rock Lobster", quickly devolves into bleary disenchantment. The constant petty humiliations and lengthy harangues that dot Who by Fire recall Dostoyevsky who Lesage's script alludes to. So too does the final scene which highlights compassion to a beast allegedly dumber than a man. 

The film does reach discordant heights, but it is far from perfect. The scenes of canoes maneuvering through white water are unconvincing. Some of the motivations for actions by the characters are sketchily motivated. Still, there is a sense of unease in Who by Fire that I found unsettling and memorable. The cast is outstanding, delivering the high falutin dialogue mellifluously.

The Whip and the Body

                

Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body, from 1963, is so much more accomplished than the average exploitation flick from this period that it threatens to be art. The film's narrative is a Poe pastiche (mostly Usher and The Premature Burial) which opens with prodigal son, Kurt (Christopher Lee) returning to the family castle on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Kurt is so despised by the castle's inhabitants that we wonder why he bothered to return, but the plot really kicks into gear when it is revealed that Kurt had a previous relationship with his brother's fiancee, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi). Their relationship is revealed and rekindled on the beach as Kurt brandishes and unleashes his whip. Nevenka says she despises Kurt, but after more than a few hearty lashes, she becomes aroused and yields to him; a sub to his dom. Even after Kurt is mysteriously murdered, Nevenka follows his ghostly bidding and accomplishes Kurt's revenge. Bava lets this S/M relationship unspool to its illogical conclusion with eros and thanatos irreparably linked. Doom awaits us all.

The Whip and the Body was made for peanuts as a co-Italian and French production designed to have its dialogue post-synced so it could be released in at least those two markets. So, the dialogue is an afterthought for this flick, which, fortunately, is largely silent for most of its 87 minutes. The best sequences of the film contain no dialogue per se: the funeral ceremony (above) or Nevenka pacing through the labyrinthine castle unable to sleep because she hears the snap of Kurt's whip. Bava and cinematographer Ubaldo Terzano give the film an appropriately dark palette: blue, green, black and purple with occasional spots of light. The film exudes a whiff (or is that a whip) of the exotic perfume of transgressive beauty. Lavi writhes amusingly and Lee is perfect for a stone cold ghost in a film that would probably be PG-13 today. Out of the ten or so Bava pictures I've seen, The Whip and the Body along with Black Sunday ranks at the top. I kind of wish that Bava got the chance to direct an A production like The Leopard, but that was not his fate.