The Criterion Collection #435 The Furies

By Dan Callahan

[The Furies streets on June 24th, 2008. Screencaps from DVDBeaver.]

Anthony Mann is best known today for the remarkable series of westerns he made with James Stewart in the fifties, but he reached his peak with Men in War (1957) and Man of the West (1958), late works which brought his central theme of the violence within man and the demoralizing aftermath of violence to nearly intolerable heights of insight and catharsis. In his famous Stewart films, Mann had a tendency to be a bit too tidy in his storytelling; coming out of one of his mid-period westerns can be a little like exiting a scrupulous, intelligent lecture on ethics and morality, festooned with some of the best landscape photography this side of John Ford. Criterion’s surprising, all-stops-out release of Mann’s early western The Furies (1950) offers a valuable view of this director nearing the height of his powers, before his gifts had calcified; in many ways, it’s his most exciting movie because it’s also his most unresolved, opening up a Pandora’s box of psychological issues that cannot be contained in any conventional conclusion.

At its core, The Furies is a passionate stand off between a father and a daughter, played by a rip-snorting Walter Huston (in his last role on screen) and a primal Barbara Stanwyck, who dazzlingly alternates between extreme aggression and extreme, childlike vulnerability. As T.C. Jeffords, a wily cattle baron who fancies himself a sort of prairie Napoleon, Huston is in titanic grand old man mold (if you want to see the real genesis of Daniel Day-Lewis’ John Huston-aping Daniel Plainview, look no further). His beady eyes twinkling, T.C. continually asks Vance to scratch his “sixth lumbar vertebrae,” and when you see the outrageously knowing way that Stanwyck scratches her Daddy’s itches, you’ll wonder how Mann snuck this Incest Out West epic past the censors.

The Furies has several tributary plots, the most affecting of which is Vance’s platonic love affair with her best friend Juan (Gilbert Roland), a Mexican on the verge of being burned off his own land by her father. Stanwyck develops far more heat and feeling with Roland than with her nominal leading man, Wendell Corey, but the real face-off mid-way through the film is between Vance and a self-described “adventuress” played by the formidable Judith Anderson. In the theater, Anderson was the greatest modern Medea and had cornered the market on vengeance, so it’s quite appropriate when this vengeance is visited upon her in the film’s most shocking scene; I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that Stanwyck is the first, best and ultimate Scissors Sister.

It would take a boatload of Freudian psychoanalysts to unpack all the psychosexual baggage on display in The Furies, all amplified by one of Franz Waxman’s stormiest scores; most of the film is so alarming, and Stanwyck’s Vance is so dedicatedly perverse, that it’s easy to shake off the last twenty minutes or so, which serve as a kind of valedictory for Huston the actor while smoothing out the rough edges of his crude tycoon character. Fascinating as Stanwyck and Huston are, though, in the end it’s Anderson who haunts the film. In her last scene, this former tigress rises to a level of regret that’s practically Shakespearian in its pathos and depth, matching Mann’s obsessive attempts to bring the form of classical tragedy to the western. Her suffering is echoed in the famous scene in Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) where James Stewart’s hand gets shot at point blank range, and the sickening scene in Man of the West where Julie London is forced to strip. Mann was always after the root of our worst impulses, and in The Furies, a very messy, provoking film, he came a little closer to those roots than he ever would again, even in the justly lauded movies of his maturity.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: There’s been a meticulous clean-up of the image, especially in the many outdoor scenes played in soft, nearly out of focus grey half-light, and the sound is good, though there’s a bit of hiss on the track towards the end. There’s a brief interview with Mann himself, a touching interview with his daughter Nina, who emphasizes how personal his movies were, an excellent commentary track by Jim Kitses, and Niven Busch’s original novel, a lurid blueprint for the film where Juan is more clearly Vance’s lover. Best of all, there’s a superb essay by Robin Wood on Mann’s westerns and The Furies in particular. All in all, this is one of the essential DVD releases of the year.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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The Criterion Collection #434: Classe Touse Risques

By Andrew Chan

Until recently, Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques was a long forgotten noir relic. A commercial flop in its own country, it was only released briefly in the U.S. in a dubbed version called The Big Risk before it fell completely out of sight. But thanks to a Rialto Pictures re-release in 2005, and the attraction of lead performances from stars most consider among the immortals, it has the air of a major new discovery. Following hopeless fugitive Lino Ventura as he sneaks his way from Milan to Paris with wife and children in tow, Sautet’s first major film adopts some of the mood and energy from American crime movies but—like a handful of French films before and after it—tries to endow the genre with a conscience. Responsibility to friends and family humanizes even the most heartless, and Classe Tous Risques takes as its subject the masculine codes of honor that are upheld and broken by those who dare to live outside the law.

The rediscovery of Classe Tous Risques is, in a way, doubly special, as it leads us to reexamine the work of someone who is not an acknowledged master. Sautet’s career is notable for its lack of ostentation. Having begun as a highly respected assistant director in the ’50s, known for fixing the weak spots in a script and taking the reins from inept filmmakers (Truffaut once called him the “mender of French cinema”), he made a name for himself as a skilled and competent craftsman but not as an auteur. Against the two great superstars of the French New Wave, both of whom made their debuts right around the time Classe Tous Risques was released, he had neither the stylistic flair nor the youthful preoccupations to hold his own. What anchored his films was not the nouvelle vague’s cinephilia or ideology, but rather the ordinary human concerns he found at the center of big genre constructions like the criminal underworld or the comic ménage a trois. For him, even the fantasies of genre were subject to the cruel disappointments of real life.

I can’t claim any special expertise on Sautet, having only seen the four titles (out of the 14 features he made) currently available on American DVD. But looking back at what I’ve seen of this unsung oeuvre, what strikes me are the affinities linking works as disparate as his first gangster film and the not-quite-romantic dramas for which he later became famous. Consider the lovely César and Rosalie, which was a hit for him in 1972, and the intriguingly understated, mostly unarticulated passion of Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, which in 1995 became his swan song. Both films introduce an amiable, well-liked man in the autumn of his years falling in love with a young woman. Both are leisurely paced and visually sunny, but also characterized by midlife male frustration. This fascination with aging—with the male’s stumbling transition from one self to another, milder, less free self—can be found in Classe Tous Risques, where Ventura must face up to the responsibilities of a grown man just as the sins of his youth are catching up with him.

In contrast to the sympathy Sautet extends to the men in César and Nelly, the women (Romy Schneider and Emmanuelle Béart) remain about as enigmatic as the trio of female characters in Classe Tous Risques. Defined by the vagueness of their whims, they are gauzily emotional, steely and unknowable, as if Sautet were paralyzed by the thought of having to enter a woman’s psychology. Accordingly, the representations of and attitudes toward love in these films are uniformly ambivalent, and remarkable for being neither condescending to that emotion nor confined by its intensity. When Ventura—almost at the end of his rope—takes time to fall in love with some random chambermaid, the plot twist serves as nothing more than an evanescent moment of grace, requiring minimal dramatization and no further explanation. Even at the end, love is possible, though it is clear it won’t absolve anyone’s sins or compensate for the greatest human weaknesses.

While Sautet’s films profess to be grounded in and conflicted over adult fears and dilemmas, there is still something inexplicably remote about them. In César and Rosalie, the lack of intimacy we feel toward the characters allows us to buy into the central love triangle’s frequent and absurd rearrangements. But in Classe Tous Risques’ case, this remove becomes an impediment, keeping the film just out of reach of the ranks of Touchez pas au grisbi, Rififi, and Bob le flambeur, even in the moments when it thrills and moves us. In the effort to avoid melodrama—a difficult act to pull off with those children in jeopardy—it sometimes feels stiff and stifled rather than suave. There is no scene here comparable to the grudging tenderness of Jean Gabin and his best friend sharing a hotel room, or the twinkle in Roger Duchesne’s eyes when he acts as a father figure to a duo of street kids—no scene that gives us a feel for the genuineness of the gangster’s heart of gold and the depth of his family crisis, while also revealing the thug’s capacity for brutishness.

Ventura is great for his role and instantly relatable, his iconic face exuding more life-size decency than movie-size courage or charisma. But here he is largely incapable of communicating the sorrowfulness of a Bogart or the humor of a Gabin—qualities that make a cliché-ridden genre come alive with inner drama. It is Belmondo, with his mixture of toughness, seduction, and angelic innocence, who emerges as the film’s most alluring element, even as Sautet’s elliptical style keeps the character mostly inscrutable. As the hapless hero’s saving grace, Belmondo (fresh off a star-making turn in Breathless) offers the perfect foil to Ventura. More or less at peace with the contradictory extremes of criminal life, he’s as suave as any of the great men of noir, and separate from all the film’s middle-aged hand-wringing.

Sautet’s vision was able to recognize human fragility without turning soft, and was willing to accept the ultimate dissatisfaction in relationships and social life. Where the rules of love fail the characters in Sautet’s later romances, the unforgiving nature of adult society and the irresoluteness of male friendship are what lead Ventura to his inescapable destiny. These darker, more personal undercurrents can easily go unnoticed when Classe Tous Risques is lumped with other pre-New Wave crime flicks, and when César and Nelly are marketed to appeal to the middle-brow tastes Truffaut famously ridiculed in his rants against “la qualité française,” along with the kind of movies that now get exiled to Blockbuster’s foreign section. If a director as subtle and sophisticated as Sautet still fails to inspire much excitement, it’s because he was always, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum, aesthetically conservative, even as he tried to breathe new life into tired old formulas. His Classe Tous Risques is not as cold-blooded or urgently told as the finest Hollywood noirs, or as boldly atmospheric as a Jean-Pierre Melville film, or even as entertaining as that wonderful Italian gangster comedy, Mafioso, just recently released on Criterion, which shares the same juxtaposition of the demands of domestic, private life with the relentless pull of the underworld.

But one trick that Sautet quietly pioneered in both Classe and his later romances is sure to leave a deep impression on anyone interested in taking a closer look at the parallels in his work. His great trademark is a harsh, clipped narrative brevity: deaths and separations and ends of relationships coming so unceremoniously, with so little fanfare, that they show us the swiftness with which life’s changes—and a film’s climax—can occur. In Sautet’s world, as in ours, people depart without warning, without proper goodbyes. And at the end of Classe Tous Risques, Ventura, too, has vanished like an afterthought of the camera, perhaps no luckier or more tragic than the rest of us.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The Criterion Collection’s one-disc package boasts a typically beautiful transfer, as well as an impressive collection of excerpts from interviews conducted by French critic N.T. Binh. These include conversations with Sautet, who shares his early experiences in the film industry, and novelist and screenwriter José Giovanni, who relates the true story that inspired him to write Classe Tous Risques. Also included is an old interview of Ventura looking back on his career. Along with the highly informative essays in the set’s booklet—most notable of which is a tribute by Bertrand Tavernier, reminiscing on his double-friendship with mentors Sautet and Giovanni—these supplementary materials emphasize the close bonds forged during the filmmaking process, an insight that complements the film’s focus on the complicated loyalties of male relationships.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

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The Criterion Collection #265: Short Cuts

By Jonathan Pacheco

For nearly a decade, I've felt a certain allegiance to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, and I'd never seen a single frame of it. It was always known as a "big sister" to the sprawling ensemble films that I became obsessed with in the late 90s; if I loved movies like Magnolia so much, then there's no doubt that Altman's opus must've been exceptional. I took this allegiance so far as to chide anyone who would praise any new "tapestry film" with interlocking stories because, if they knew anything, they'd know that Short Cuts did it first.

Now, finally, I've met the "big sister."

As Altman has put it, Short Cuts is not necessarily a group of stories, but rather a group of occurrences. It lifts the roofs off houses and peeks in on the conversations. And it's not what the characters are doing that's important, it's the fact that they are doing it (and why and how). The film is not concerned with plot, but with people; the rest will take care of itself. It's a risky approach, and even Altman himself isn't always successful with the method—The Company took a similar tack with a smaller cast and more plot, and it didn't work as well as it should have. But it works in Short Cuts.

One thing that separates Short Cuts from the likes of Magnolia, and which separates most Altman films from the pack, is its unbiased exterior. No melodramatic violin cues are used to manipulate your feelings one way or another. Occurrences and emotions are simply placed in front of you for you to see and experience for yourself. Everything feels very matter-of-fact, and this, coupled with the film's humor, makes Short Cuts seem "light." Yet the objective nature of Altman's directing allows for so many subtleties to brew under the surface, so while the film may play as very funny and relatively happy upon initial viewings, you soon realize that, in a multitude of ways, it's actually a very dark film, laced with tragedy.

That's apparent in certain story threads, such as that of the Finnigan family (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison), whose child (Zane Cassidy) is struck by a car and survives, only to later die in the hospital. Yet I find the story of the Kaisers to be the most heartbreaking. Jerry (played by the late Chris Penn, who seems an older version of Jonah Hill) is a pool cleaner whose wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) helps make ends meet as a phone sex operator working from home. Some of Short Cuts' funniest moments come from the shock of seeing her character say some terribly provocative things on the phone while changing her baby's diaper. Through all this, Jerry begins to experience jealousy, confusion, and so many other emotions that he doesn't know what to do with. At one point he asks Lois why she doesn't talk to him the way she does to the guys who call in. Her response shows that she is completely oblivious to her husband's emotions. To her, sex is either part of a job that pays good enough money, or something so mechanical that she's really only going through the motions. I doubt that she feels that she's being unfaithful in any way—it's just that meaningful passionate sex is of no interest to her at this point. Perhaps it's because she talks about it and fakes it all day long. Or sometimes there are just people who for one reason or another are not that "into it." Regardless, Jerry still wants something that halfway resembles what his wife gives to the strangers that call in. He feels he shouldn't be jealous, and that he probably shouldn't want the type of "dirty talk" that his wife provides; but why, then, does he feel this way? Why does it eat at him? He's too mixed up and frustrated to sort out the ways in which he feels about the situation, and eventually, this spurs him on to commit a shocking act of violence. As disturbing as the bloody outcome of his story is, simply seeing Jerry struggle internally, trying not to feel the way he feels, is the most tragic part.

The beauty of Short Cuts is that most of its characters' conflicts aren't said or revealed. The majority of Penn's acting comes through silent expression, and that is one of the goals of Short Cuts: to force the viewer to fill in some of the blanks. As it is with Carver's short stories, it's not what you know, but rather what you remain in the dark about. Possibly more so than in other films, Short Cuts can be understood and interpreted in as many ways as there are people in the world.

Visually, this film is vintage Altman. Zooms are an under-discussed element of cinema—a zoom in one filmmaker's hands is cheesy, out of place, and inexplicable, but in the hands of someone like Altman, even the snappiest of zooms is personal, elegant, and evocative. There's something very old-school about the way he uses them. Even a respected director like Wes Anderson seems to wink at the audience with every long zoom, yet with older filmmakers like Altman or Woody Allen, something as mundane as a quick zoom into a glass of milk seems so much more sincere.

I think this is partially why Altman's films tend to look older than they really are. Short Cuts may have been made in the early 90s, but its aesthetic quality and style at times feels straight out of the 70s. In an age with too many steadicam or other fancy shots, zooms seem kind of outdated, but Altman always held on to them, at times putting the slickest dolly shot to shame with his zoom lens. But even his more recent films like Cookie's Fortune have an older feel because of this, and it's really not until the new millennium that Altman's pictures feel more visually "modern." Yet up until and including his final film, the gorgeously photographed A Prairie Home Companion, the zooms remained, and they were just as good as they were in M*A*S*H.

Short Cuts is about randomness. Not "random" in the sense that Magnolia connects its characters and not "random" in the way that Crash's protagonists supposedly meet by coincidence. This is chance without prejudice or agenda. It's what helps to put across the film's unbiased feel. Even the earthquake at the end of Short Cuts is an example of this. Some feel that it is a way to tie the stories together, but I never get that sense. It's sort of the ultimate capper to the randomness: earthquakes simply happen.

Because of chance, some characters are lucky and some are unlucky. Altman asserts, more or less, that they're the same thing. One person can win the lottery and another person across the globe gets killed at the same time by a falling icicle; good or bad, it's all the same. It's all chance. Looking at the stories of Short Cuts, we see this same randomness, and it's something that the characters must learn to come to grips with. In the story of the Finnigans, we see a family that is very well off. A family that does everything the right way and the safe way, yet it's their child who is struck by the vehicle. It's their child that dies. They think, "Why? Why us?" But why not? What they have to come to realize is that there is no "why." There is no reason why their son died, just as there is no real reason why the two-timing cop (Tim Robbins) ends the film with a happy family. Their lives, according to Altman, and Carver (in a way), are just random.

Relatively speaking, the story of Honey and Bill Bush (Lili Taylor and Robert Downey, Jr.), the couple watching the apartment of traveling neighbors, is the weakest thread of Short Cuts. It's not a bad storyline, but it lacks some of the subtext that is found in other parts of the film. The more disappointing part is that the Carver short story that this segment is based on is actually quite good. I realize that Altman is in no way trying to deliver a pure and literal adaptation of Carver's works, but the original piece has more emotional involvement. In both pieces, the couple become obsessed with their neighbor's home and how it makes them feel to occupy it, yet in the short story there is a specific sense of desperation. There are signs of something deeper than just mere fascination on the couple's part. The film doesn't explore this; unfortunately, it doesn't feel like it explores much of anything with the storyline.

It's difficult to do justice to the film's various threads because there are so many facets to each of them. But reflecting on Short Cuts, I dwell more on certain moments and fragments: Earl (Tom Waits) and Doreen (Lily Tomlin), happy once again in their trailer, but for how long? Gene, the cop and sleazeball, standing as a hero to his family, his wife in his arms. The baker (Lyle Lovett) offering muffins to the Finnigans. The reveal of the dead body during the fishing trip. Jack Lemmon, as Howard Finnigan's estranged father, delivering a beautiful confessional monologue. Jerry's face as he listens to his wife perform her job. These moments and so many more serve as fragments and pieces of a brilliant whole. It's fitting that the Criterion Collection DVD of Short Cuts features a shared motif on its cover and its menus of a heart shattered into fragments. They're broken pieces, yes, but they still form a heart.

***
Images/Sound/Extras: Compiled into a tight little book are the nine Raymond Carver short stories and single poem that provided the tales for Short Cuts. With a brief but informative foreword by Robert Altman, it's easy to see the connection between the filmmaker and Carver. These stories are spare in language and in story elements, only giving you just enough to draw your own conclusions. It's easy to appreciate both artists' ability to reveal the most private moments of the everyman. I've heard people describe Carver's prose as "poetic," but when I read them, I didn't think so. On the contrary, the language is very straightforward and at times mundane, but then I realized that it's not the language that's poetic, it's the story itself.

As is to be expected, Altman's movie has its share of grain and the occasional film jitter, but a good job is done eliminating every other visual nuisance. The DVD also features a couple of disappointing deleted scenes (too short) and the usual trailers and TV spots, along with a nice archive of poster mock-ups that were part of a preliminary marketing campaign. There's also a lengthy look at Carver's life via a PBS documentary, as well as an audio interview with the late writer. He's more down-to-earth than I would have expected, but he never short-changes himself either; he knew when he did good work, and he is happy to discuss it. The one piece that's made specifically for the Criterion disc is a reflective half-hour conversation between Tim Robbins and Robert Altman. It features several good insights from both the actor and director, not only on making Short Cuts, but how they interpret the film when they watch it now.

Luck, Trust and Ketchup is a feature-length documentary on the making of the film (some video glitches at the bottom of the picture lead me to believe that the source material was transferred from tape). It's decent enough as a documentary, with some informative interviews from Carver's widow, some of the film's actors, and Altman himself, though most of the filmmaker's insights are found almost verbatim in the short stories' foreword. The real reason to see the feature is for the clips of Altman as he directs. It's one thing to read about the director's process or to hear him speak on it, but it's totally another thing to see the man in action. There are times when he's very specific about what he wants and there are times where he merely sits back, chuckling his head off at a scene, and turning to the documentarian's camera as if to say, "You getting this?"

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Jonathan Pacheco is a current web developer and future freelance writer. He blogs and reviews films at Bohemian Cinema.

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