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Marie Antoinette (2006)
Lush Budget, yes; History, no way
Few women have been so poorly served by historians or film makers as Marie Antoinette. Marie's life has become a clothes peg on which successive biographers & directors hang what they please. The 1942 Norma Shearer film misrepresents Marie as a high-minded queen, nobly dedicated to the subjects who showed their appreciation by killing her. (Based on a biography by Stefan Zweig, the film could not address Zweig's explicitly sexual theory for Louis XVI's failure to consummate his marriage for 7 years.) The 1956 French film "Marie Antoinette," with Michele Morgan, lacks analysis or explanation for what happens. "L'Autrichenne," with Ute Lemper, re-enacts the queen's trial; the dialog, from the trial records, is of scant interest. The best film to date is "Farewell, My Queen," a dramatization of events at Versailles in the days after the fall of the Bastille in July 1789. The ease with which Marie's attention wandered is made obvious, & the undereducated queen's failure to grasp what was happening around her offers the real explanation for the blundering that led her to the scaffold in 1793.
Sofia Coppola's films have been noted for a lack of character development & a preferential focus on atmosphere. "Marie Antoinette" bears out that observation in spades. Whatever chances to deal with the evolution of Marie's character after the Revolution's outbreak vanished with Coppola's decision to end the film with the royal family's departure from Versailles in October 1789. It is the one general truth shared by all historians that Marie achieved nobility of character only in the last months of her life, after Louis XVI's death in January 1793 and before her death 10 months later. Coppola evades precisely that period of Marie's life, and shows us only the whipped-cream years at Versailles. It isn't at all clear what we're supposed to take from this treatment.
Marie, played with a limp if sweet rag-doll complacency by a nearly expressionless Kirsten Dunst, is sent aged 14 to marry the doltish heir to the French throne. This would never have happened had not Marie's older sister, destined for the King of Naples, died of smallpox. Their mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had to advance her 2 youngest daughters, the elder of whom went to Naples. Marie, the youngest, was moved to the square of the Habsburg chessboard originally meant for the new Queen of Naples, and went to Versailles. It was never foreseen that she would marry the future King of France, so she had been left uneducated for her lot in life.
From a court that placed less value on formality than did Versailles, Marie disliked Versailles from the get-go. Formality is represented by the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis, in an effective if overdone performance), who presides over the daily ordeal whereby Marie has to dress, from the skin out, before courtiers. Dunst manages to convey the real Marie's irritation at this duty but, eager as ever to obey as her mother told her to do, goes with the program. She eats in public with her husband, and properly attends the delivery of her sister-in-law, though it causes her anguish since she herself has not yet had a child.
Coppola's hold on facts is slim. The sister-in-law who has that baby was the Comtesse d'Artois, but the film makes her the Comtesse de Provence, who was childless. We see 2 of Louis XVI's spinster aunts, Victoire and Sophie, but there were 3--the eldest, Adelaide, was the dominant one, & the real troublemaker who set Marie against Louis XV's mistress, du Barry. Marie had 4 live born children,of whom 2 died before the Revolution; we get 3 here, and only 1 dies.
The acting is largely bland if not lackluster, seemingly in keeping with Dunst's blankly smiling efforts to be charming. Marie is largely controlled, or directed, by more assertive types, particularly Madame de Polignac. Much of what we see Marie do in this film shows her trying to meet others' expectations, not her own wishes; were it not for her brother Emperor Joseph's visit to Versailles in 1777, during which he lectured Marie and Louis XVI on the lack of activity in the royal bed, she probably never would have had a child.
Coppola is evidently trying for humor by staging Joseph's lecture to Louis at Versailles' zoo, where a bull elephant gives a good imitation of the male human anatomy as Joseph explains how things are supposed to work. The image is too obvious and heavy-handed to work. The same is true of sequences showing ladies of Versailles learning to snort snuff (standing in for a substance snorted today), or passing around a tobacco pipe (standing in for something smoked today that is often passed around). This silliness reaches a climax with the notorious shot of Converse high-tops glimpsed during a sequence in which Marie and her friends sort through a selection of new clothing, asking "Can we get this in pink?"
Coppola was evidently trying to make Marie accessible, or relevant, by implying that she was like a modern teenager, obsessed with new clothes and hairstyles and experimenting with "snuff" and "pipe tobacco." Hogwash. There can be no valid comparison between an 18th-century princess and a teenager today. To begin with, today's teenage girls are, we hope, more concerned with ways to avoid pregnancy. In Marie's milieu, young girls were traded among kingdoms to serve as wombs, and throughout this film we see Marie constantly badgered to produce a male heir for her husband. At least Coppola didn't try to work smart phones or MP3s into this film.
The one redeeming point is that Copolla was allowed to film extensively in the palace of Versailles, at the Petit Trianon and its adjacent village, so we have some sense of how Marie lived there. But that was only a part of this tragic woman's life, which is ill served by Coppola's essentially meaningless presentation.
The Gathering, Part II (1979)
Next time, leave well enough alone
This insipid effort is a sequel to the superior 1977 TV film "The Gathering," with Maureen Stapleton and Ed Asner as an estranged couple grappling at Christmas with profound issues of mortality, alienation and reconciliation. "The Gathering II" limpingly tries to address similar issues at Christmas 2 years after the patriarch's (Asner's) death. "Gathering II" does not attain the level of its predecessor.
The wonderful cast of "Gathering I" is only partly re-united for "II." The most notable shift is in the casting of the Thorntons' younger son, Bud, Gregory Harrison in the earlier film, here replaced by Jameson Parker in a sadly overwrought performance. (In the 1st film, Bud was seen only briefly; now he has returned to the US from his Canadian draft-dodging exile and is an annoyingly sulky presence throughout most of the film.) Bud's wife, briefly but engagingly played by Stephanie Zimbalist in Gathering I, is not present here, which seems odd since her father, Efrem Zimbalist Jr, has joined the cast as Mrs Thornton's ardent swain, suspected by her children of having his eye on Thornton Industries and not Mother Thornton's hand.
The rest of the cast is well remembered from "Gathering I," and do what they can to help this lame dinosaur move along, but it's a lost cause. The script tries to touch on many late '70s buzz topics including unwed cohabitation, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, and autumn romance. But the writers never found the yellow brick road that would have let them handle these themes gracefully or with any balance. "Maude" dealt with them much more capably. There are gaping holes in what passes for a plot here, most wretchedly in the abrupt, unconvincing way in which the Thornton children accept her relationship with Wainwright; even in the case of the hild most aggressively opposed to the courtship (Julie, again played by the engaging Rebecca Balding), we really don't get any plausible reason why she suddenly drops her objections, which until the end of the film are the one thing that has kept this particular "plot" thread erratically unwinding.
The impressive Gail Strickland gives a fine account of herself as elder daughter Peggy, who has recently ended a long-term cohabitation with Aaron (a new actor too), but discovers just before Christmas that she is pregnant by him. Strickland is the standout in "Gathering II" as she negotiates her feelings about motherhood and her feelings for Aaron; her conversation with him, when he phones on Christmas Eve, comes close to the best one-way phone conversations on film; it may well surpass Luise Rainer's Oscar-winning turn in "The Great Ziegfeld," and most definitely outstrips Joan Crawford's in "The Women." While she decides to "stay pregnant" as the writers awkwardly put it, it's left undecided whether she will keep the baby or not. (I have a suspicion this might have been meant as the springboard for a 3rd Thornton Christmas film. If so, we're lucky that one got shelved.)
Other cast members are wasted here, particularly the lustrous Veronica Hamel, who played a pivotal role in "Gathering I" by persuading her husband Tom (Lawrence Pressman) to attend the Christmas reunion Adam Thornton Sr so desperately wants. This time around she is given little to do but welcome guests and go shopping, and it's a disappointment. I longed for dialog among Strickland, Hamel and Balding about the unplanned pregnancy, but it never happens.
Pressman's Tom Thornton is involved in 2 "plot" threads: Wainwright's intentions toward Mrs Thornton, and an initially puzzling conflict between Tom and Bud. He does his best in both cases, and contributes admirably in the case of his mystifying conflict with Bud. The Wainwright thread is badly handled as it is, and Tom's part in it, while apparently clear at first (he uses business connections to find out whether Wainwright is after Stapleton or the family business), succumbs in the end to the same vagueness that surrounds Julie's sudden acceptance of Wainwright as Stapleton's suitor. The conflict between Tom and Bud is opaque, largely as a result of Parker's unfocused performance (though his problems may well have arisen from a bad script or disinterested direction). Bud's revelation of the cause of his distance from Tom is minimally plausible as a case of sibling rivalry in their relationships with their late father, but the actual resolution of the quarrel is left to the disappointingly mechanical solution of a water fight between the brothers--which strikes me as a desperate effort by the writers to end the thread as quickly as they could.
Annoying miscalculations plague the film throughout. In Gathering I, Julie's children are appealing, round-faced blonde tykes; here, 2 years later, they are thin, black-haired and in the case of the boy, a quite unattractive brat who deliberately tells his sister there is no Santa Claus. The children's' only other function here is to raise topics in conversation that spark flashbacks by one family member or another to pivotal moments in the family's past. Bud's son, the infant baptized on Christmas Day in the 1st film, now appears to be about 4 years old, walking well and fully capable of articulate conversation, albeit the 2nd film supposedly takes place only 2 years after the 1st. I don't agree that Mother Thornton's new house is a distraction; after her husband's death she might well have chosen to move out of the family home, with its memories good and bad.
I purchased the Warner Archive 2-disk package to secure a decent version of the classic "Gathering I," and in that at least I wasn't disappointed. The quality of the DVD far surpasses the terrible VHS bootleg disk I made do with for so long, and I'm delighted to have it at long last. Warner might well have omitted "Gathering II" from the package.
Journey to Promethea (2010)
A Class-A Stinker for All Time
This alleged film is nothing less than a crime against humanity, an insult to the collective intelligence of the human race. At least I was able to watch it at no cost, as it's presently on the free movies feature from Comcast, at least in my city.
In an attempt to explain why this atrocity was ever put on film, I can only offer a few suggestions: 1) The supposed studio behind the film needed a tax deduction and made a film that was sure to lose them a bundle. That at least would explain the absurd claim of a $2 million budget. 2) Billy Zane needed some quick scratch to pay a traffic fine. 3) Billy Zane's career has tanked. 4) Billy Zane really ticked off somebody in Hollywood and this is the only work he can get nowadays. 4) Somebody had to grind out a film to graduate from a course at one of those basement tech schools.
This film features absurdly crisp, shiny new costumes on people who have supposedly been trekking through the woods nonstop for decades, never allowed to stop walking. If you look carefully at the end credits, you will see that most of the evil king's guards keep their helmets on b/c they play other roles, so we mustn't see their faces. Note too that about 90% of this nonsense was shot outdoors (otherwise known as free scenery). I thought the only convincing performance in the film was a blind fortuneteller, who mercifully won't suffer serious professional damage as she's on screen for all of 3 minutes.
You might also note that the cast of another recent Zane epic,"Darfur," overlaps considerably with that of "Promethea." I have not seen Darfur and as of right now, have no intention of doing so. Neither should you.
For the first time, Plan 9 from Outer Space has a serious rival for the distinction of Worst Film Ever Made.
The Nutcracker (1987)
Of Historical Interest, but little more than that
This creaky Soviet-era (1978) production of Tchaikovsky's classic is primarily of interest to those who wish to see what cultural life was like under the Soviet regime in its most heavy-handed years. (It was filmed a year before the USSR invaded Afghanistan, leading to decades of murderous political instability that are still influencing world politics in 2009.) The quality of the film is, frankly, poor; the stage seems to be in near total darkness for much of the 1st act, and the TV work is downright awful; every time the shot changes, the stage is out of focus for at least a couple of seconds before somebody thinks to refocus the new camera.
The production features 2 of the Bolshoi's most renowned stars of the late Soviet era: the husband-and-wife team of Ekaterina Maximova (as the heroine "Masha," better known in the west as "Klara") and Vladimir Vasiliev as the Nutcracker/Prince. As this production took place at the Bolshoi, however, don't expect the dazzling dancing seen in other productions available on DVD. The dancing is precise and technically almost flawless, but one can't avoid feeling the KGB were backstage with Kalashnikovs locked and loaded; the dancing is careful, therefore tedious, at times to the point of being leaden. Some of the best dancing is not from the principals---both in their mid-40s when this production was filmed and a bit long in the tooth for "The Nutcracker" in any case---but appears in the 2nd-act divertissements, most especially the "Arabian" variation which is costumed here as a "Central Asian" number, less redolent of Arabia than of Circassian or Caucasian numbers in "Prince Igor" or the Polovtsian Dances of Borodin.
Staging and costuming raise puzzling questions about this production. It is neither a traditional Nutcracker nor is it especially innovative, and yet there is something unsettled and unsettling about the whole thing--as with that "Central Asian" dance. This is particularly obvious in the peculiar staging and choreography of the 2nd-act pas de deux, here danced by "Masha" and the Nutcracker/Prince. (This production has no Sugar Plum Fairy.) There are some very odd moves here suggesting a ritual context, so obvious it must have been meant to have some significance. When Masha and the Prince first emerge to dance this number, they kneel facing away from the audience and toward a group of male dancers who hold up huge candelabra with electric candles. Later both of them are invested with honorific garments---the prince gets a long red cloak and Masha, a bridal veil so long that other dancers have to follow her around holding it off the floor. Then both are raised as if standing on the shoulders of other dancers, exalted above everyone else on stage. The production consequently seems to suggest some kind of mystic marriage of the Russian people ("Masha") and Marxist-Leninist communism---The Nutcracker, dressed in blazing red from top to toe. (In 1978 Russia that much red was no coincidence.)
That "The Nutcracker" could be adapted to such propagandizing ends in Russia is not surprising. Nor is it unusual that it could have been done in such a strained and tendentious manner. It is unfortunate that the results are so unimpressive in their clumsiness and obscurity. But that, too, can serve the present-day observer as an example of what the Soviet people had to put up with even as they watched one of their past culture's most light-hearted yet imperishable creations.
The Gathering (1977)
A lost and not-so-minor classic, sorely missed
Hard to know whether to say too much or too little about this sadly and undeservedly neglected gem. We are apt to develop special feelings for films about special occasions, especially Christmas, and this one's a prime example. With the usual blockbusters (A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, A Wonderful Life),The Gathering is among the very finest evocations of the magic Christmas can work.
In a nutshell, Adam Thornton (Ed Asner), estranged from his wife Kate (Maureen Stapleton) and their 4 children, finds just before Christmas that he is about to die from an incurable illness, and wants to clear up loose ends while he can. This sounds like a recipe for the most mawkish kind of tripe, but if there is anything truly miraculous about this film--and there is plenty that is wondrous--it's that the writers avoid such slush, and in a delicately understated but highly believable way at that. (And when I say "delicate," I do not mean "fragile.")
There are no ghosts here as such, but Thornton's wife and family serve as a nexus of past (wife and the family home), present (the children) and future (the grandkids), so it's not entirely without reason that Thornton at one point grumps "Add a bah,humbug and I'd sound just like Ebenezer Scrooge." This is a highly sublimated, and sublime, reshaping of the Scrooge theme even if it does lack the spectacular CGI that many Christmas films seem to feel they must inflict on us these days.
There are many pitfalls and the script adroitly avoids every one of them. On Christmas Eve, the abrasive elder Thornton son (Lawrence Pressman) divines the reason behind the reunion his parents are holding for their fragmented family. In less capable hands, the consequences of his realization that his father is dying could have made this film degenerate into pure crap, but the means the writers adopt to keep that from happening are as satisfying as they are visually dazzling. (Simply put, father and son are able to fashion a long-delayed celebration of their relationship thanks to an unusual gift to the elder Thornton from the doctor and longtime family friend who diagnosed his illness.) Next day, Thornton realizes that his son now knows the truth and his quiet acknowledgment is affectionate and fatherly, man to man without the least bit of sugar. And yet, that sequence can still bring tears. As astonishingly adept, and flawlessly acted, as it is profoundly moving.
The cast is superlative with nary a misstep. Asner and Stapleton move unerringly through the many nuances the script demands. The 2 elder children, Pressman and Gail Strickland, are the more antagonistic to their father, but (especially in Pressman's case) convincingly work their ways through and around their enmity. The younger girl (Rebecca Balding) skilfully balances her own matrimonial and money problems with devotion to her birth family. The reconciliation Adam most urgently desires is with his younger son Bud (Gregory Harrison), a draft dodger living in Canada. Bud's arrival (with a wife and baby whose existences are unknown to the family) is delayed by distance and again, could have dragged the film into pathos; but it's handled, and acted, with simple restraint and profound conviction.
Generally overlooked is John Barry's unobtrusive but finely evocative score, minimalist in concept and keyed to dramatic situations rather than personalities. Some of its repetitive motifs are only 3 notes long, but they will linger.
I withhold a full 10 points for 1 reason. Thornton is supposedly near death--he has maybe 90 days---but still can heft both grandchildren at once, and runs around a snow-filled back yard pulling the pair of them on a sled. Whether he's got cancer, an inoperable brain aneurysm or kidney failure, it doesn't quite add up. There are one or 2 minor goofs, oddly enough in the same scene. The elder daughter arrives outside the family home with a suitcase and brightly wrapped gifts. When Thornton embraces her she drops everything into the snow and, when they walk into the house a moment later, she's still empty-handed. In the same sequence, the family maid is seen in one shot carrying a tray of egg nog glasses, preceding Thornton and his daughter into the house; in the very next shot she appears again, still carrying the tray but now following them into the house.
I make do with a DVD bootlegged from the inferior VHS tape; as long as the film isn't released as a decent DVD, I figure it's every man for himself. I used to think The Gathering vanished from the airwaves because the mainspring of the plot is Adam's imminent death, which might be seen as unsuited to Christmas. But now I wonder if it isn't simply because the film is so wonderfully gentle and understated--lacking the overheated punch of, say, that ghastly musical Christmas Carol with Kelsey Grammar that was dumped on us a few years ago. You can have your punch and welcome to it, if that's what you like. I'll take The Gathering any time, thanks.
Holocaust (1978)
Impressive but Flawed
Time has dulled the impact of this 1978 NBC blockbuster: we have had much more graphic depictions of the Holocaust. What remains intact are the parallel moral experiences of two families, one Aryan German,one Polish-German Jewish, the moral strength of the latter played off against the moral collapse of the former.
The problem with this juxtaposition is that the historical moral ambiguities involved were so profound that they cannot be satisfyingly analyzed, let alone brought to a sound conclusion, within a cinematic space. Schindler's List contains this problem by focusing primarily on Schindler himself. Charting 2 competing moral universes, and giving each one equal time (so to speak), inescapably makes Holocaust too diffuse.
If there is one overriding criticism, it's that too many characters, while portrayed by actors who went on to greater things, are only moral puppets. Few of them take fire as convincing individuals and too often that happens only with minor characters. The one towering exception is Fritz Weaver's utterly credible Josef Weiss, the Polish-born Jewish doctor who practices in Berlin where his family is one of the film's main foci. As his wife Bertha, Rosemary Harris is statically, even snobbishly, serene even walking into a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Meryl Streep's Inga, the Weiss' Christian daughter-in-law, is nobly devoted to her husband Karl but petulantly defiant with her parents, who resent the danger to which her marriage has exposed them.
Such improbabilities plague the film throughout. The final episode deals abruptly and simplistically with too many threads, as if the writers launched so much material that they had no time in the final episode to bring any of it to a believable conclusion. The worst is the final encounter between Rudi Weiss (Joseph Bottoms) and Inga. The 2 almost casually bump into each other at Terezin; they have not seen each other for 7 years, the family has been decimated and Rudi had never seen his nephew Josef, his only living relative. Yet Rudi and Inga chat for only a few minutes and take leave of each other as if they will meet for lunch next week; but the dialogue implies they may never see each other again. This does not ring true, given the heroic efforts by most camp survivors to find living relatives.
The writers dispose of Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a once-idealistic lawyer corrupted by Nazi ideology, in a puzzlingly opaque manner. Dorf witnessed the death camps' operations and personally shot Jews; yet only in the office of a US Army interrogator, as Dorf looks in rather too detached a fashion at photographs of the camps and their victims, does he abruptly (and in that sense, inexplicably) realize what he has become. He pops a cyanide pill and leaves an ambitious, equally corrupt widow and deeply confused children to deal with his dark legacy as best they can.
Near-perfect sets, costumes and music can't quite compensate for the flawed achievement that is "Holocaust."
The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
Leave your history books at home; then maybe you'll enjoy it
In fiction and history alike, it's Anne Boleyn who gets Henry VIII & thus commands most of our attention. Philippa Gregory wanted to examine Mary's history, though her novel plays fast & loose with the facts of Anne Boleyn's ascendancy at Henry VIII's court. It's a decent enough yarn, but ends up serving Mary poorly. She comes off in both book and film as a passive woman whose family treat her horribly but, weak & pliable, she's always there to help no matter what they've done to her. As Mary's character is at the heart of Gregory's story, her passivity doesn't rouse much sympathy for herself or the film. Mary was, in fact, more adventurous than Anne--mistress of the French King Francis I in her youth at his court, & sent home for loose morals. Back in England around 1520, Mary attracted Henry VIII who, to camouflage their affair & likely to cover up her first pregnancy by him, set up her marriage to a gentleman of his chamber. Henry probably fathered both children Mary bore while married & she may have continued to service him while Anne was playing the virtuous virgin. After Henry married Anne, Mary met William Stafford, became pregnant & married him in 1533/34. She was exiled from court & never saw Anne again. There's plenty of spice there but Gregory's curious failure to address it--especially Mary's early experiences at the French court--leaves this side of Mary's character in darkness. The film, alas, does likewise. That said, the film is a sumptuous delight for eye & ear even if the writing is stilted and the acting uneven. Eric Bana's Henry is badly served by a poor script &/or lousy editing. (Comparison to "The Tudors" is unfair; a theatrical film does does not have as much time as a TV miniseries for detailed character development.) As written & acted, Johansson's Mary is too passive, almost naive, to impress. The film really belongs to two characters. Kristin Scott Thomas, as the troubled Lady Boleyn, comments from the margins of the social fabric on the forces at play in the Boleyns' story. Of the film's performances, Scott's is the most likely to be remembered at awards time. Natalie Portman's Anne resents Mary's unexpected success with Henry, childishly tries to steal the spotlight with a secret marriage to Henry Percy, then uses all her wiles to take the king from Mary. Portman handles this with ease & assurance, and compellingly portrays Anne's despair as she finds she has cost Henry too much: he realizes the prize was not worth the chase. Indeed the strength of Portman's portrayal only further subverts the supposedly central role of Mary Boleyn and wrests control of the narrative from Johansson's character. Gregory's novel was clear that Mary was to be considered the "other" Boleyn girl, but by allowing Anne to upstage Mary completely--or rather by having Mary allow Anne to do so--the film at least introduces a challenging ambiguity as to which sister really was, or should be regarded as, the "other." That ambiguity is, however, the only really challenging aspect of the whole production.
The Nutcracker (1977)
A coherent story at last
The problem with "The Nutcracker's" original staging is that the story falls apart in the second act. The first act consists of a reasonable sequence of events, but after Clara helps the Nutcracker defeat the Mouse King & he turns into a handsome prince, they depart for the Kingdom of Sweets & the story line evaporates. After the pair arrive in the kingdom, Clara sits out the entire second act watching a succession of sweet treats dance us into diabetes, while the prince deserts her for the Sugar Plum Fairy. Baryshnikov transforms this incoherent sequence of dream images into a tale that means something. But as witness Celia Franca's "it makes me want to vomit" rant, Misha's vision is often misunderstood. Clara is not having an affair with Drosselmeyer, nor does he desire her.
Key to Baryshnikov's interpretation is the Mouse King. It is clear from the King's costume--a purple frock coat & short violet cape--that he is Clara's dream transformation of the drunken adult male party guest who wrenches off the Nutcracker's head. That guest is the only one wearing a frock coat; all other adult male guests wear tails except for an elderly general in uniform, & as the guests depart, the man who broke the Nutcracker ostentatiously swirls a violet cape onto his shoulders. The visual link between that guest & the Mouse King is unmistakable. In fact all the mice are Clara's dream transformations of adult male party guests, including the old general who re-appears as a mouse wearing the same uniform.
Adult males are, then, threatening to Clara, which pretty much rules out any idea that she has a thing for Drosselmeyer. Her dream, Drosselmeyer's gift as Baryshnikov's prologue explains, gently allows her to discover womanly feelings with which her dawning womanhood endows her. At the party, Clara is a girl among children, playing with toys including the Nutcracker. Baryshnikov stresses differences between adult & child by contrasting the adults' & children's experiences of the party, unlike productions of the ballet that showcase the children. The children's undisciplined, boisterous carousing interrupts the adults' carefully measured dancing, neatly demonstrating the difference between the worlds of children & their elders. Baryshnikov emphasizes the adult world's menace to Clara by having an adult male break the Nutcracker, not Clara's young brother as is common in traditional productions of "The Nutcracker."
Clara's tenderness for the Nutcracker, Drosselmeyer's gift, forecasts her feelings for the prince after she helps him defeat the Mouse King (who broke the toy at the party). Initially, however, her feelings are confused: note her efforts to run from the prince just after he has morphed from the Nutcracker, & the childlike way the pair skip along in the first act pas de deux. In the second act, Clara's feelings develop further. Baryshnikov banishes the Sugar Plum Fairy to make Clara the prince's partner in the second act. Their ecstatic solos & the second-act pas de deux reveal her growing ease with her feelings. But Drosselmeyer reappears to waken Clara: her transformation into womanhood must take place in the real world, not in a dream fantasy. (Drosselmeyer's face is often superimposed on a clock face: he is linked with the passage of time, which must really bring about Clara's transformation into womanhood. In the second act pas de deux, she is clearly hesitant when Drosselmeyer tries to hold her; in obvious contrast, she joyously leaps into the air when the prince embraces her.)
Baryshnikov omitted the Arabian variation to keep the film within time limits for TV broadcast. This is tragic; one can only imagine what he and Kirkland might have done with it. Otherwise the score is intact; the familiar Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy survives with its celeste accompaniment, here danced by Clara. Note her exquisite foot-dragging, wonderfully hesitant yet ecstatic, which was foreshadowed in the first-act pas de deux & is restated in pendulum fashion during the second-act pas de deux whenever Drosselmeyer seeks to hold her (suggesting, again, his association with the passage of time).
The production values in the film are high with the exception of the scenery, which could have been more literally rendered; it's often murky to the point of mystery. But uniformly outstanding dancing & excellent costumes go a long way to offset this minor liability.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
Dazzling cinema, disappointing drama
Robert Massie's _Nicholas and Alexandra_, basis of this film, appeared to acclaim in 1968. Massie gave the first straightforward look at Nicholas II and Alexandra, last sovereigns of Old Russia. Most people knew only outlines of their tragedy--their son was hemophiliac, victim of a condition hereditary in Alexandra's family: the boy might bleed to death from any injury. His poor health left Alexandra vulnerable to a charlatan, Rasputin, who gained unchallenged influence over her. Massie put flesh and blood on these bones. But his own son was hemophiliac, and his outlook blinkered by personal knowledge of his wife's agony as a mother responsible for her son's sufferings. Inescapably, Massie's book is sympathetic to Alexandra and until the 1990s, most accounts of the Romanovs echoed him: the empress' excesses were excused as those of a distraught mother in the grip of guilt and grief.
After 1989, Russian archival material radically changed this picture. Letters and diaries by politicians and the Romanov family prove that Alexandra was strongly disliked and distrusted. Her uninformed political meddling arose from undue confidence in her own limited abilities and was a main factor in the events of 1917-18. Domestically she was a hypochondriac tyrant, emotionally distant from her daughters and smotheringly watchful over Alexei who, like his sisters, never developed social skills appropriate to his age.
Against these revised views on the Tsar and his wife, "Nicholas and Alexandra" seems almost quaint today. It is nonetheless visually glorious cinema; sumptuous interiors, beautiful uniforms and gowns, and staggering wealth displayed in jewels, delight the eye and visualize the isolated world these people inhabited. The contrast between imperial wealth and urban poverty is, however, too sharply drawn. We see how factory workers lived, but the film ignores Russia's growing middle class when increasing wealth and education favored a flourishing cultural life--the works of such men as Tchaikovsky and Gorky. Massie's book dealt with such developments; but the film ignores them, so viewers' image of late Tsarist Russia is skewed.
Dramatically, "Nicholas and Alexandra" is rarely anything but turgid. In only one scene did James Goldman, a gifted screenwriter, rise to the level he achieved in "The Lion in Winter"--the dialogue between Nicholas and Alexei after the boy races his sled downstairs into a closed door: Goldman sensitively develops their words into a dialogue between the disgraced Tsar and Russia itself. With one brief exception(see below) the film doesn't sustain that level.
We rarely get a satisfying sense of the relationship between Tsar and empress, who either express undying love for each other or quarrel over Rasputin and how Nicholas should run his government. One of the clearest glimpses of the relationship comes late in the film, as Nicholas argues not with his wife but with his mother over Alexandra's influence. The film more successfully maps Alexandra's relationship with Rasputin, as witness the first scene between them at the dowager empress' birthday party. Here we see how deftly the pseudo-monk played on Alexandra's fears.
Goldman alters chronology for dramatic effect even when the historical record is dramatic enough. The film has Alexei's near-fatal illness at Spala followed by celebrations for the Romanovs' 300th anniversary, and the shooting of Prime Minister Stolypin. In fact Stolypin died in 1911, Alexei's illness was in 1912 and the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. What Goldman hoped to achieve by shuffling these events is unclear. Possibly it was to juxtapose Alexei's recovery at Spala, and Rasputin's consequent vindication, with the outbreak of World War I, when Alexandra, acting for an absent Nicholas, appointed hopelessly unqualified ministers Rasputin recommended, men in whose hands the Tsar's government collapsed in 1917. But if this was Goldman's intent, he failed to make his meaning clear.
Many scenes are sanitized, especially the last. We know they'll be shot. The director's endless delay of that moment as the family sits in that basement room is unbearable, if not inexcusable. The shooting itself is so brisk that but for the guns, we would hardly know what was happening. That said, I hope no film ever recreates the family's last minutes as Greg King and Penny Wilson reconstruct them in excruciating detail, using archival accounts by members of the firing squad and the forensic evidence of the bones recovered in 1979 (King and Wilson, _The Fate of the Romanovs_ Hoboken, 2003, chapter 12.)
Reviewers here criticize the scene, invented by Goldman, in which Tatiana disrobes before a young guard. Astoundingly, however, King and Wilson found documentary proof that during a snap inspection of the Ipatiev house on June 27, 1918, Grand Duchess Marie was found in a compromising "situation" with a guard named Ivan Skorokhodov (King and Wilson, _Fate of the Romanovs_, pp. 243-47). Documents proving this were still hidden away in Goldman's day. His invention of Tatiana's self-exposure thus reveals that he did have a dramatic sense of, and made an effort to portray, the feelings he realized these tragic young women experienced as they endured confinement and faced death. The documents do not reveal details of Marie's "situation," but the event proved that security at the house was unreliable. With the White Army approaching Ekaterinburg, Marie's peccadillo led to the local Soviet's decision to execute the entire family three weeks later.
Marie Antoinette (1938)
Great entertainment, but not history
Norma Shearer's turn as Marie Antoinette, the tragic 18th-century queen of France, will always stand out as one of the lushest of MGM's 1930s lush budget productions, and for that reason alone is always worth a look--and a very enjoyable look it is. Forget that the costume designs are more than a bit over the top, even for the Versailles of Marie Antoinette's day. Forget Shearer's uneven acting, which as in all her films veers from the truly affecting to the annoyingly melodramatic (e.g., her stagey, even hokey body language in the night meeting with Tyrone Power in the garden just after she becomes queen, when he makes her understand they must not see each other again). Just enjoy the experience of what Hollywood figured it could pass off as history in the 1930s and expect a worldwide audience to accept as history.
The film fails as history for two major reasons. First, it is based on a groundbreaking biography of the queen by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian novelist who was a close friend of Freud and was deeply influenced by psychoanalytic thought. Zweig's book created and popularized the view of Marie Antoinette's sex life that remained current for decades--that Louis XVI was physically unable to consummate his marriage with her for more than 7 years, and had to have minor surgery before he could seal the deal. Zweig's predictable view was that sexual frustration explained Marie Antoinette's notorious frivolity and spendthrift ways. We know today that Zweig created his tale by suppressing valuable evidence that would have weakened his theory, and giving inappropriate prominence to other material that let him paint the picture he wanted to create. Recent historians--Zweig was a novelist, not an historian--looked at the evidence Zweig omitted and proved conclusively that Louis XVI was not incapable of fathering a child, and never had the surgery Zweig claimed was necessary. Louis was a lousy lover, true, and it did take some years before he got down to serious boudoir athletics, but Zweig's thesis has been thoroughly wrecked.
In the 1930s when Zweig's book was new and influential, MGM could base a film on it but couldn't openly address the sexual issues at the heart of Zweig's account. Screenwriters had to dance around Louis' bedroom limitations and had to find a way to imply that the queen and Count Axel Fersen (Tyrone Power) were not adulterous lovers as Zweig implied they were. Hence the film's version, that the noble Fersen gently but firmly told the enamoured queen that they could no longer see each other. In fact, Fersen was at Versailles on and off throughout Louis XVI's reign; it was rumored that he fathered the queen's second son, born in 1785 exactly 9 months after one of Fersen's visits. But Louis accepted the child as his, so he must have been visiting the queen's bedroom at the right time. There's no proof Fersen ever paid the queen that kind of visit, or that she wanted him to do so.
The second major flaw in the film's historicity is that Shearer would not play Marie Antoinette as a featherbrained, shop-til-you-drop type, which would be nearer the truth than the noble character Shearer gives us. It's unlikely that Marie's sex life was as active as some writers want us to believe--after visiting Versailles in 1777, her own brother wrote frankly that she had no interest in bedtime antics--but she could spend up a storm when she put her mind to it. Shearer preferred to act a queen seriously devoted to the welfare of France and the French people, a writer of Louis' speeches and a woman who relentlessly labored to improve her subjects' lot. Shearer's queen bears no resemblance to the real deal. Attractive, charming, stylish, generous to a fault, yes; a skilled and dedicated politician, no.
The film's hold on history is thus slender. In 1938 Hollywood could not acknowledge that the real dupe in the Affair of the Necklace was a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church; here the fool appears as the duke de Rohan, the cardinal's cousin. Mozart's "Don Giovanni" minuet is played at a ball during which Marie Antoinette insults Louis XV's mistress, Mme du Barry. In the film's chronology the ball immediately precedes Louis XV's illness and death in 1774; Mozart composed "Don Giovanni" only in 1787. The film compresses the ball and Louis XV's death into 24 hours, but Louis XV's last illness lasted 2 weeks. Marie Antoinette never openly insulted du Barry as shown here, nor was there ever an official decision to annul Marie's marriage. The royal family's return to Paris after their foiled escape attempt in June 1791 is here followed immediately by Mme de Lamballe's murder. Lamballe was not with the royal party during the attempt (as shown in the film), and she was killed in the September Massacres of 1792, more than a year after the escape attempt.
So enjoy this splendid piece of film purely as spectacle--a testament to Hollywood's world view in a bleak decade. Entertainment it truly is, and not at all bad. As history, it's bunk.
Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
Land of the Commandments, or The Ten Pharaohs?
There are evident similarities between this film about Ancient Egypt and De Mille's _Ten Commandments_, which came out soon after _Land of the Pharaohs_. In both films a downtrodden people are held captive by an arrogant Egyptian ruler; a noble leader of the captive people leads them out of Egypt; a scheming, sexy queen endangers the life of the heir to the Egyptian throne. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
_Land of the Pharaohs_ is is a less engaging film than _The Ten Commandments_, Jack Hawkins' Khufu less human than Yul Brynner's Ramses II. Khufu doesn't have to deal with the crises Ramses II faces--plagues, his only son dying and his army getting wiped out. But this means that we don't see any reason why Khufu's priests should be so loyal to him as to line up & have their tongues cut out so they can keep the location of his tomb a secret and be buried alive with him when he dies. As written, Khufu's character is dramatically stagnant; all he really does is represent Egyptian arrogance and contempt for the enslaved people, and it's impossible to discern anything in him that would inspire the kind of loyalty his subjects show him. The writers also decided to make him blind to the wiles of a trampy concubine (Collins); a long-reigning and experienced pharaoh should be able to see through her. As in most of her early dramatic outings, Collins is called upon to do little but whine and wiggle. We applaud her well-deserved fate even as we wince at her final "I don't wanna die," but her character is as 3-dimensional as a paper doll. Nefertiri in _Ten Commandments_ (Anne Baxter) is a first-class whiner and wiggler too, but her dramatic situation is more compelling: she loses the love of her life (Moses) and son, so her writhing and complaining are played out in human situations that _Land of the Pharaohs_ lacks.
Other characters are similarly 1- or 2-dimensional and fail to engage interest. As Vashtar, leader of the enslaved tribe, James Robertson Justice embodies fierce integrity, the opposite to Khufu's tyranny, but that's all he really has to do--criticize Egypian duplicity and cruelty. Dewey Martin, Vashtar's hotheaded son, is more resentful of the Egyptians but again, he's only there to provide a dramatic foil so Vashtar can rein him in and thus demonstrate his calm, rational nature by saving his people's lives under Egyptian misrule.
The script's dramatic immobility is manifest in a too-neat wrapping-up of loose ends as the film closes. Khufu is poisoned by his concubine and her lover, an occupational hazard for film pharaohs (remember who kills Seti in "The Mummy"?). Collins sends a snake to bite her stepson the crown prince (remember Cleopatra?) but boy's mother throws herself on the serpent and dies in his place. During Khufu's burial Collins is tricked into entering the pyramid before Vashtar engages his mechanism to protect Khufu's body against robbers, so she is trapped and will die there. Vashtar's people are free and leave Egypt. Not a moral ambiguity in sight.
These weaknesses are offset to some extent by solid production values. Backgrounds, sets and costumes are accurate and well executed. At the film's end we have a dazzling view of what the Great Pyramid's outside looked like when new, covered in sparkling white limestone and with a gold top; the mechanism Vashtar designs to protect it from robbers is impressive. The score is evocative and supports the action well.
_Land of the Pharaohs_ is a decent but not top-notch way to spend a spare evening. Just have plenty of popcorn on hand.
Titanic (1953)
The Best Dramatic Retelling
Of all Titanic films, the 1997 blockbuster included, 1953's "Titanic" holds the field for dramatic truth and intensity. This film tells a more believable human story than the 1997 FX spectacle, and the acting is superior to any other Titanic film. The most obvious similarity to Cameron's film is the estranged Sturges parents' battle over their daughter's shipboard romance with an American college student. Wealthy, snobbish Papa Sturges wants her to marry a European title; Mama, plebeian by birth, likes the American. The girl does a Rose Bukater, chooses the Yank and never gives a moment's thought to jumping overboard.
This film is essentially a morality play, and a good one it is. When the touchingly human and deeply wounded Mama Sturges reveals that Junior isn't really Papa Sturges' son and heir, but the result of a long-ago one-nighter, Papa abandons the adoring boy. On board is also a young Catholic priest, defrocked for alcoholism. In the final disaster all threads are resolved: the embattled Sturges recover the shreds of their lost love at the last moment; Papa redeems himself by accepting his wife's son as his own; Mama's sexual transgression is punished by the boy's death; the priest redeems himself by descending to certain death to help crewmen trapped below decks; the daughter will be happy with her Yank (though at film's end she is unaware he has survived).
There are NO loose ends apart from a few historical inaccuracies. Among those not noted elsewhere here: the captain somehow realizes within seconds of the collision that the ship is doomed and issues brisk orders to everyone unlike the real Captain Smith who, by all accounts, was almost incapable of action in the face of overwhelming disaster; Papa Sturges tells his family to go to lifeboat #6, though nobody on board had been told what lifeboat to use. Of overlooked minor details is that the actress portraying Mrs Astor is Frances Bergen, wife of Edgar and mother of Candice Bergen. Of the lead actors, Clifton Webb comes close to the performance of his career as Papa, and as Mama, a superb Barbara Stanwyck is his equal to the last syllable. Audrey Dalton is perfect as their lovely daughter; Robert Wagner does a credible if unexceptional turn as her romantic interest. As the priest, Richard Basehart's brief but convincing turn makes all more poignant the sad decline of his later career.
Titanic (1996)
Never leaves the dock
In 1996 I decided this TV miniseries was a ripoff to grab viewers' attention a year before James Cameron's blockbuster opened. I haven't changed my mind. The plot is mechanical as a watch; within minutes of meeting each new character, or of their shipboard meetings with each other, we know almost exactly what will happen to each one. The writers resort to the tired ploy of having characters introduce each other to viewers--e.g., Eva Marie Saint, a society matron, "explains" others to her granddaughter: Molly Brown, vulgar but too rich to ignore, the disreputable Mr Guggenheim, the "Jewish" Strausses. The acting stinks all round. Worst, from any standpoint, is the hysterical mother who refuses to leave her cabin for the lifeboats without her husband. The whole thread involving this couple and their nanny sets your teeth on edge, though it is based on a real couple who died because they stayed on board too long to find their son, who was safe in a lifeboat w/the nanny. The thread is so badly written, so implausibly dramatized, that were it not that the mother's idiocy dooms her annoyingly precocious daughter, it's almost possible to say she deserves to drown. As usual, Ms Zeta Jones is more impressed with her own beauty than with the need to act. Marilu Henner is worse miscast as Molly Brown in this film than Cloris Leachman in "S.O.S. Titanic" (1979); the real Molly was not as brazen as the vulgarian we see here. Henner seems trapped in some proto-feminist, sexually revolutionized time warp. George C. Scott was in poor health in 1996, and seems propped up for many of his scenes as Capt. Smith; was his melodramatic characterization an effort to compensate for physical immobility? Tim Curry badly overdoes the slime as a lustful, larcenous steward. The only remotely believable figures are a young British criminal, his Danish shipboard sweetheart, and the British working-class family with whom she travels. Avoid this one. It sank before it ever left the dock. The iceberg might as well have been lurking in Southampton harbor.
The House That Would Not Die (1970)
Good, but the book was better
The House That Would Not Die is a solid TV-film that could have been stronger had screenwriters stuck closer to Barbara Michael's excellent supernatural suspense novel, "Ammie, Come Home." Michael's story is set in Washington, D.C.; Ruth, a Department of Commerce official, has lived in a Georgetown row house for some years after inheriting it from a distant cousin. There is no ghostly presence until Ruth's niece Sara moves in with her to attend a nearby university. Sara first hears a voice in the night calling "Ammie, come home," but aunt & niece decide it's a neighbor calling a lost pet. When Ruth meets one of Sara's professors, the adventurous son of a famous Washington hostess (a character based on Marjorie Merriwether Post), the ghostly presences intensify & become violent. By using entries in the family Bible and searching old newspapers & archives, the 4 major characters (Ruth, the professor--who becomes her love interest--Sara & her boyfriend) piece together the tragic tale of the house's original builder & his daughter, Amanda. During the Revolution, Amanda's father was a royalist but Amanda fell in love with a young officer in the American army. When her father discovered they were about to elope, he killed them & buried the bodies in the basement of his house. He lived there as a recluse until he was killed when the house burned. Relatives (Ruth's ancestors) inherited the land & built a new house, never knowing what had happened. After young Sara moved in, the spirits of Amanda & her father began to re-enact their tragedy endlessly. It is the disembodied voice of Amanda's lover calling, "Ammie, come home."
Why the writers moved the film to Amish country in Pennsylvania is a mystery, unless they figured in 1970 Washington had enough problems & didn't need any more ghosts. Having Ruth occupy the house only as the film begins robs the novel's story line of a major point: that Ruth had lived there for some years with no sign of supernatural activity. The sudden appearance of a voice crying in the night is, in the novel, an unexpected, vaguely ominous occurrence,which Ruth & Sara assume is a neighbor. That there are neighbors in Georgetown highlights a second point in the novel that is weakened by the shift to Pennsylvania: a setting in highly civilized, urbane Georgetown makes supernatural events seem even more incongruous with everyday life than the film's rural setting in Pennsylvania, where the house's isolation, like Hill House in "The Haunting," seems to invite every ghost within shouting distance. (Why are these houses always 'way out in the country?)
Despite inferior adaptation from the novel, performances & production values in The House That Would Not Die are exceptional in every way. Stanwyck & Egan are physically perfect for the characters described in "Ammie, Come Home." As the at-times-possessed Sara, Wynn must portray not only that modern young woman but the long-dead Amanda too, and she does a very solid job. Her boyfriend is portrayed by Michael Anderson Jr., who does not resemble the tall, slim, dark character in Michael's novel, but plays the role well. All things considered, this is a worthwhile TV-film that will repay a viewing. But don't deny yourself the chance to read the book.