Dining Out
Variations on the Confidence Game
A passel of new films about everyone's favorite con men, from Tom Sawyer to Adolph Hitler, with a few con women thrown in for balance.
(Page 2 of 2)
For the horrow of truth and of all too recent memory, there's Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a British-Italian co-production based on Gerhard Boldt's eye-witness account, The Last Days of Chancellery, with its English screenplay adaptation by Ivan Moffat and its historical accuracy attested to by the English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper. It is directed by Ennio de Concini, whose screenplays range from Shoeshine to Divorce Italian Style and on and who collaborated with Wolfgang Reinhardt and Maria Pia Fusco on this screenplay, and covers those ten days, from April 20-30, 1945, of the Gotterdamerung in Hitler's bunker beneath the Reichschancellery as the Russians made their holocaustic sweep into Berlin.
But while there are cuts and intercuts of newsreels and newsreel-like depictions of the final march of the war, and while the bunker is populated by the high command and Hitler's inner circle, complete with the lush Eva Braun, the limping Goebbels and his family, the "elusive" Martin Bormann, the focal point is Hitler—and his portrayal by Alec Guinness is, perhaps, the ultimate study of megalomania. Not only is his physical portrait of that madman the Hitler we knew, albeit through the newsreels of his time, but also his portrait of the man's psychopathia confirms all that we have known and learned since. The genius of Guinness' impersonation is that he manages not only the moments of urbanity but also, grotesquely enough, of the charm that must have enthralled those who dedicated their lives to him—whether on the personal or national-leader level. And this is not an easy accomplishment, given a relatively out-of-context situation. I am not sure that those without any contemporary sense of Hitler's hold upon a nation and his world power will find credibility in all that transpires—but that, of course, is the essence of historic tragedy. And for those of us who know that time and tragedy, will sit enthralled through a reenactment of the ultimate horror of our time. And above all, the filmmakers do drive home the quintessential lesson that the world was given at a cost of thirty million lives and continental devastation—the price that is paid for "law and order" and, finally, for "order" alone. It is a lesson that tragically we have not yet learned.
An Autumn Afternoon, Yasujiro Ozu's 53rd and last film, completed in 1962 before his death the following year, is the fourth of that master's works to be released here in the past year. If you were unfortunate enough to have missed his Tokyo Story (1953), Late Spring (1949), or The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), you can now encounter the quiet sense of his artistic approach and philosophy and be not only enriched but also refreshed thereby.
Not quite the encompassing masterwork that Tokyo Story is, with its penetrating study of generations slowly separating, An Autumn Afternoon epitomizes all that made Ozu, as Donald Richie, Americans' infallible guide to Japanese cinema, has pointed out, the most "Japanese" of that country's filmmakers. He was its most honored as well, in the course of his 35 years in film; but Richie notes too that he was not therefore its most popular. Flash and sensation make for the big box-office the whole world over. We save our honoring of the George Cukors or John Fords or Raoul Walshes, let alone of some of our major and truly talented performers, for retrospectives—if the timing is right—and more often for posthumous Oscars.
Ozu's distinction is the total, absence of flash and sensation and the absolute minimum of camera "work" or even of plot. His study is mankind and he chooses to observe it below eye level, the camera "seated" in Japanese style as the thoughtful onlooker, recording what appears before it. So deep is his contemplation of what does pass that we achieve the utmost of drama and the honest flash and sensation that marks the lives of men and women the world over. There are no fades and dissolves, no swoops and swerves; the men and women come and go in the empty street or hallway or room where the watcher waits. And we watch and are drawn into their lives and assimilate them at a human pace.
There are, in An Autumn Afternoon, not only the actors we have encountered before, but the same "plot" elements of his previous works; for his concern is the family, its children taking on lives of their own, a parent left ultimately to solitude. His protagonist is again the father, again the superb Chishu Ryu, a business executive with friendly colleagues, a widower living contentedly with his daughter and his younger son, generous with his elder son, who is a married man beset by the high cost of refrigerators and golf clubs versus his low salary. The father dines regularly with two old friends, one an executive like himself with a wife given to match-making, the other a professor who has married a girl of his daughter's age. Through them and their small talk, through the departure of his own secretary for marriage and in the aftermath of a dinner the men and some others give for a favorite teacher they all shared, the father becomes increasingly aware of his daughter's maturing and his responsibility in seeing that she makes a marriage before too long.
Hardly the stuff of thrillers, but no Hitchcock McGuffin, no Sleuth-like turnabout can surpass the suspense that Ozu builds slowly and subtly to crisis and climax. And such is his art, as incident builds upon incident, that there is breath-bating tensions as we await a young man's answer, in the outcome of a friendly put-on, in a young woman's sudden loss of composure. One becomes so deeply involved with the father, with the daughter, even with the petty domestic bickering of the married son that, as always at the end of an Ozu film, one wants another chapter, the what-happened-next of the truly satisfying novel. The edges of their lives are rounded with incident: As in other films, for example, the father encounters a younger man who served with him in the Navy and off they go to celebrate their reunion. It's a boozy affair, culminating in a brassy bar with a warm and dimpled barmaid to play a rousing march on the jukebox and join their small-boy replay. (There's a delightful side comment here as the younger man, speculating on Japan's winning the war, notes, "We'd be in New York now, you and I, the real thing, not an imitation—and the blue-eyed ones would be wearing the wigs and chewing gum and plonking tunes on the samisen.") But the incident is open-minded, as all human contacts are, for the father returns to the bar to note that if one does not look too closely, the barmaid resembles his wife, and he returns again when he has done his duty as well as a loving father can, fresh from a wedding that is, perhaps, the funeral the barmaid assumes from his demeanor. But it is in his own home, as his younger son fecklessly heads for bed with an admonition to his father to take it easy on the booze—we can't have you dying on us—that the loneliness of living soaks into our hearts.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
