Darkness at Noon

46 years and counting . . .

Unlike the circumstances surrounding "9/11" -- an event which made an already vicious, criminal, stupid, narcissistic nation even more vicious, criminal, stupid, and narcissistic -- November 22nd, 1963 really did change everything. It broke the country's heart; and it destroyed for good all faith in our Empire as a just and open one. As I wrote in a post about David Talbot's necessary book Brothers:

Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff ourselves up, the assumption that people are basically good, and the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. And that is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from "Brothers" will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.

Yet we dream. And we hope. (Two most human longings brilliantly and ruthlessly exploited by conman Barack Obama in '07 and '08.) John F. Kennedy often spoke about his own dreams and hopes for a better America, and never so eloquently as his tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College, October 26th, 1963.

"There's No Bringing Her Back"

At the end of Vertigo (1958), immediately before its jaw-dropping finale, James Stewart stands before Kim Novak, who has given him her soul. (Along with her hair color, wardrobe, and manner of speaking.) She stands stripped and naked, willfully transformed back into his dream image.

The madman doesn't even see her.

If anyone proves that movie actresses are born and not made, it is Kim Novak. Often mistaken for just another dumb blonde-with-big-breasts, a product of Harry Cohn's enormous casting couch, she is in fact the loving spirit of 1950s cinema, the tender germ in the living plasma of the Studio System as it was passing away.

Her training was nil. And it seems as if she did not know what she was getting into, moving to Hollywood from Chicago in 1952. But the camera knew, and was very glad to give us her first wonderment.

There it is, pure Novak: earnest, open, longing, without a trace of narcissism or ego. How many of our greatest movie stars happened by miracle? Mitchum, Lancaster, Wayne, Grant, Stanwyck, Astaire, Cagney, Cooper, Vivien Leigh. And Novak. The heart wants what it wants, she says to us. And so does the camera. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our movie transformation from the Studio to the market-obsessed vampires now in charge of our culture is that happy accidents and miracles are no longer possible.

Her natural ardor became more fully formed as Frank Sinatra's girlfriend in 1955's Man with the Golden Arm, where she recaptures her Chicago accent.

Vertigo, the first conversation.

She is at the heart of perhaps the most radical story moment in theatrical movie history. (Ultimate spoiler ahead.)

Stewart's madman has lost his love object (he thinks to death), yet he sees someone on the street who sort of looks like her. He follows the woman to a small hotel room where she lives. Up to this point in Vertigo, Hitchcock has kept us deep within the Stewart character. Then, it all changes.

Now, we are inside her. Until then, almost 100 minutes into the film, we have cared deeply and obsessively for the Stewart character, dreaming with him as a romantic. Inside Novak until her end and the movie's end, we experience Stewart for what in fact he is: a sick exploiter of this woman purely for his own ego needs. Look again at the ending. ("I heard voices.") She has made herself over for him, head to toe, and what does he care about? Nothing, except how she tricked him. And in her final descent into movie eternity, he returns -- in full crucifixion, martyr pose -- to his land of self-pity and loss. Not caring a damn for the dead woman below.

Hitchcock is often looked at as a cold and calculating manipulator of movie characters and movie audiences. Yet he is also the greatest director of female suffering not named Mizoguchi or Ophuls or Dreyer: Bergman in Notorious; Janet Leigh in Psycho; Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds; Tippi Hedren in Marnie and The Birds. And perhaps most spiritually with Vera Miles as the wife in The Wrong Man, a film not about Catholic guilt or confused identity or the horrors of jail, but a movie about the sufferings of an average 1950s housewife. (Just watch the first scene between husband and wife, when he arrives home near dawn and she is still up with a "toothache." Hitchcock shoots it to make it seem like they are on different moons. And ends it with Henry Fonda swooping down on Miles's neck like a vampire. Before his arrest.) Miles, of course, was Hitchcock's first choice for Vertigo. Lucky for us, she became pregnant and backed out of the role. Without Novak's woundedness, sorrow and operatic desire, Vertigo would have been much less.

The Fifties were over. But in 1960, producer/director Richard Quine cast Novak in Strangers When We Meet -- a suburban soap opera about infidelity. It stars Ernie Kovacs and the incredibly wooden Kirk Douglas, but the movie is all Novak, as a housewife who has an affair with Douglas. Joshua Logan, director of Picnic, once said that Kim Novak wore her beauty "like a crown of thorns" -- a crown on full display here.

Kinuyo-san at 100

Our best film critic Chris Fujiwara has written a love letter to the greatest movie actress of all time.

As Fujiwara points out, she made 15 movies with Kenji Mizoguchi, 19 with Hiroshi Shimizu, 20 with Gosho, 9 with Kinoshita, 10 with Ozu, 6 with Mikio Naruse. So it is safe to say that no actor or actress in movie history has ever (or will ever) work as regularly with as many great directors as did Kinuyo Tanaka.

She began at the age of 14 in 1924 and would go on to act in over 200 movies. (The exact number is unknown due to the extermination of so many Japanese films [and human beings] in the US carpet-bombings of Tokyo.) She was the first female movie director in Japan, an achievement which cost her the deep emotional and professional relationship she'd had with Mizoguchi, who had no patience for woman directors.

At the centenary of her birth, where does one begin to choose a handful of tributary scenes, among the dozens (or hundreds) of possibilities? One thing Tanaka fans know: she was a great closer. If the most difficult thing for a filmmaker (or novelist) is the creation of a miracle ending that sums up all that came before, who better to call on then she?

David Thomson on Army (1944):

    Kinuyo Tanaka is a mother, whose son is going off to war. At first, she refuses to accept what's happening. Then, away in the distance, she hears the new recruits parading and she starts running through the empty streets until she reaches the avenue where they're marching. Rushing frantically through the crowd, she dodges and pushes her way until she finds her son. The emotion builds in a long tracking shot, and (because film stock was so scarce by then) it had to be done in one take. That was all Tanaka needed.

Then came the Occupation and General Douglas MacArthur, who ordered all filmmakers to dig deep and find that liberal/humanist, democratic, socially-conscious center at the heart of Japanese society, mostly by showing the corruption and rot of everything which had come before, before the society was starved and carpet-bombed and nuked (in the midst of surrender pleas) by the democratic humanist Americans. Still, we're talking about Ozu and Mizoguchi, who managed to find greatness.

A Hen in the Wind (1948) is Yasujiro Ozu's Mizoguchi movie. (Can one imagine, even under Occupation, Mizoguchi making an Ozu film?) Tanaka plays a loving wife left at home by a drafted husband, one missing-in-action and presumed dead. Because of the American extermination of Japanese society, Tanaka must do all she can to take care of herself and her son -- including GI prostitution. When the husband unexpectedly returns, the wife is joyous and grateful, for herself and the boy -- but she must confess what she has done. Ozu ends the scene (and the story) with one of the most stunning shots in movie history.

Also from '48, a real Mizoguchi, with an ending perhaps the closest movies have come to religious opera: Women of the Night. Tanaka and her little sister have been separated by the US-created hell of postwar Japan, Tanaka forced into street prostitution, her sister merely wandering. Eventually, they come together, in a bombed-out area surrounded by the remains of what once a church. Tanaka recognizes the sister, and recognizes what imouto-chan has started to become.

Ugetsu (1953) -- perhaps the greatest of Japanese movies. Tanaka again plays a devoted and dutiful wife, to a genius potter who must seek other things, during country-wide war. Midway through the film, during the husband/artist's long absence, we see her wounded by a warrior, as she is carrying home her small boy. At last, the husband returns, oblivious to what may have occurred.

Gilbert Adair: "Sansho the Bailiff (1954) is one of those films for which cinema exists — just as it perhaps exists for the sake of its last scene.” A mother and son are forcibly separated for decades, the son becoming a powerful progressive governor (power eventually renounced by him), the mother sold into slavery and prostitution. She is now blind and decrepit, her feet broken to keep her from escaping.

The son finds her.