Cinema for Adults, Now and Then

For those of us who still miss the carefully plotted and fluent exposition of traditional American cinema, three of 2016’s end-of-year releases are at least promising. They are not in the same class as Sully (reviewed in the November issue) but they all have decent plotting, fine acting and plausible characterisations.

Inferno is the third movie to be adapted from Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series, which are beginning to form a genre in their own right. In the novels and films Langdon is a Harvard professor, a symbologist, who specialises in codes and symbols. In each movie he has had to solve a puzzle of some sort, usually while being hunted by sinister forces in spectacular locations. As Langdon, Tom Hanks has made the character believable in spite of the enjoyably outrageous plots; the puzzles too make sense—sort of. This time Brown and screenwriter David Koepp have added a few twists from good old-fashioned film noir. There are two enigmatic women, played by Felicity Jones and Sidse Babett Knudsen, and the film opens with Langdon in hospital suffering from amnesia—plenty of opportunities for the subjective camera work familiar to noir aficionados, and almost certainly relished by director Ron Howard, who frequently reworks the style and plot devices of Hollywood classics.

Devotees of the novel have attacked the picture for not using the original’s more sophisticated ending. Howard is unrepentant: “I employed the sort of climax film viewers expect.” I don’t want to spoil the film by going into details; although be warned: some websites discuss the different endings at length. However for me the climax was so over-edited that it became an assault on the viewers’ sensibilities, something the earlier fast-paced chase sequences had avoided. The incoherence of these last scenes was all the more disappointing because the film had achieved some nicely played interaction between the characters and had a well structured plot that included a few genuine surprises.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is the second film featuring British author Lee Child’s hero. According to Child, Jack Reacher was conceived “as an antidote to all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre”. Reacher is a former major in the military police who is a wanderer and investigates anything that comes his way. In the novels he six feet five inches tall and often violent. Casting the relatively short Tom Cruise in the role might seem surprising but now, over fifty, he projects craggy integrity rather well.

This second film, in what may or may not be a series, has Reacher investigating a major government conspiracy with Major Turner (Cobie Smulders), his successor in the military police, a tough no-nonsense career officer. Refreshingly the relationship remains professional even though they are on the run and share hotel rooms and she is very attractive. There is also Samantha (Danika Yarosh), a street-wise girl he has to protect, who may be his daughter. There is some nice camaraderie amongst the three of them as they avoid a particularly repellent assassin.

Veteran director Edward Zwick, who produced Shakespeare in Love and directed The Siege, keeps the story toughly unsentimental, and the climax is disturbingly believable. Not quite as chilling as The Siege, which came close to predicting 9/11, but satisfactory nevertheless.

Doctor Strange, the most commercially successful of these three films, belongs to what fans call the Marvel Universe, peopled by superheroes that first appeared in the Marvel comics. I first encountered these worlds in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (2011) which is a surprisingly good film. Branagh managed to attract an impressive cast including Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman and, in the title role, Chris Hemsworth. It worked rather like a Wagnerian opera and indeed the mythology was quite similar. Doctor Strange, however, first appeared in the Marvel comics in 1963 and although in the movies, according to a preview in the closing credits, he is to appear with Thor and the other Avengers, the character was a master of mystic arts who became a Sorcerer Supreme, using magic to defend the world against an array of other-worldly villains. This film describes how he gained these powers, and the special effects department has great fun showing him using them.

To someone who stopped reading comics at the age of ten the film’s universe appears to be a mixture of concepts from quantum physics and the occult. The plot, beginning with Strange working as a brilliant neurosurgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident, and following him on a journey during which he acquires magical powers, actually works rather well. The characters have more depth than one might expect. Benedict Cumberbatch never condescends to the material and plays Strange as an anguished wounded hero at the outset, and then a darkly powerful superhero once he gains his powers. The special effects are extraordinary and do indeed create a magical universe. Director-writer Scott Derrickson manages the spectacle well but also makes the outrageous story effective drama.

Nevertheless, even though I will probably make a point of seeing the sequels to Doctor Strange, comparing these offerings with some of the mainstream narrative cinema of fifty years ago these films seem lightweight—skilfully crafted and entertaining, but shallow. Is this just nostalgia for a safer, more predictable art form? I decided to rescreen DVDs of two major films of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Criterion recently released a beautifully restored special edition of Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The cinematographer Sam Leavitt’s black-and-white Panavision photography looks even better than it did at the Embassy in Sydney when I first saw the film in 1959. The film too seemed richer and more complex than anything I’d been seeing in the cinema lately. So this appeared to be a good starting point.

Anatomy of a Murder began life as one of those thick best-sellers that families like mine would rent from the local lending library. It was what we now call a legal procedural based on an actual case defended by the author, Robert Traver, in Michigan five years earlier. An officer in the US Army shot a man who allegedly raped the officer’s wife, and was subsequently charged with his murder. The book would be regarded as rather heavy going now, with all the speeches and submissions carefully recreated, but back then we were fascinated with the ambiguity of the characters and the intricate duel of wits between defence and prosecution.

Otto Preminger had trained as a lawyer in Austria and he tended to encourage his writers to present a range of viewpoints; and even though his background was in the theatre, Preminger liked whenever possible to work on location. So Anatomy of a Murder was filmed in the actual Michigan town where the events of the trial and murder took place. When defence lawyer Paul Biegler (James Stewart) examines the murder scene it is where the actual killing took place. As well Traver allowed the film crew to use his own house for the home and office of the fictional lawyer. (It is still maintained in the town as a museum.) The trial we see in the movie was staged in an actual Michigan courtroom. Preminger and Leavitt fell in love with the bleak late spring light of the area and exploited this in the many driving scenes.

Viewers in 1959 did not necessarily know all this when they saw the film, although some stories from the location were included in the publicity. But we did regard the film as “modern”. Its black-and-white Panavision was for us a new technology. In addition there was a jazz score by Duke Ellington, who appears in the film seated at a piano beside James Stewart’s character. The South African exhibitor wanted that scene removed, as it was unthinkable that a black, however distinguished, should be seated beside a white man. Preminger refused. This was politically advanced film-making.

Although in no way obtrusive, the black-and-white Panavision frame and deep-focus photography draw the viewer into the world of the film. Preminger only cuts when he has to, shooting vital confrontations in long takes that serve to screw up the tension. A figure in the foreground may dominate the frame but there is often something happening deep in the shot. The result is a kind of visual democracy. The viewer is free to observe the full complexity of the drama and is not, as happens so often now, virtually assaulted by over-emphatic editing and thunderous music. But this is, of course, only the style. The screenwriter, Wendell Mayes, avoided the slightest hint of a cinematic cliché and crafted a script with fully rounded characters that are more than a little ambiguous. We like James Stewart’s Paul Biegler but wonder at the way he constructs an insanity defence for Ben Gazzara’s brooding Lieutenant Manion. Lee Remick, who played Manion’s wife, was so unsure of their real relationship as portrayed in the script that she and Gazzara worked out a subtext for themselves. It made for fascinating characterisations by both performers.

In a period that produced many fine legal dramas Anatomy of a Murder is arguably the most believable. The difference between this film and so many modern courtroom dramas is that the audience has to concentrate on the dialogue and the performances. There are no flashbacks, just the descriptions of what may or may not have happened, and unlike the slick compressions in so many modern legal films and series, Mayes’s script and Preminger’s direction create the illusion of a real case on screen. Performances by Stewart, a young George C. Scott as the “Prosecutor from Lansing” and Joseph N. Welch, the legendary counsel from the McCarthy hearings, are all splendid and the ironic conclusion based on what actually happened is very effective as drama. It invites the viewer to rethink and question nearly everything that has gone before.

Another film Preminger made, three years later, seemed even more relevant as a comparison with modern cinema. This was Advise and Consent, based on a novel by Allen Drury. It took place in a fictional US Senate but insiders could recognise many of the characters Drury used as his models. Again I recall finding them all believable at the time, with the kind of ambiguity you experience with people in real life. This is a considerable achievement for a film filled with well-known stars.

Preminger makes good use of his Washington locations. A cafeteria at Treasury became the setting for a blackmailing phone call. The dramatic hearing is staged in a real Senate caucus room and you see the actors in the actual hotel used by congressmen and senators in the 1960s. They could not get the Senate chamber itself so Columbia used the set created for Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Wendell Mayes’s script distilled the essence of a richly detailed array of characters. In quick succession we are introduced to the Chief Whip of the Senate (Paul Ford), the Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) and a dying President (Franchot Tone) who wants to nominate a brilliant but deeply unpopular public servant as Secretary of State (Henry Fonda).

There are no comfortable central figures although the gifted actors are all given their big scenes. Standouts are Charles Laughton as a vindictive bigoted southern senator, who we actually come to like, and Don Murray as an idealist with a “shameful” secret (homosexuality) who becomes a target for blackmail by George Grizzard’s fanatical ideologue.

Advise and Consent was very much a film of its times. Allen Drury was a deeply conservative man and the dying President represented Republican resentment of Roosevelt’s fourth term while the nominee for Secretary of State was loosely based on Alger Hiss. The McCarthy witch hunts and their exploitation by unscrupulous politicians are deftly portrayed with Burgess Meredith making an effective Whittaker Chambers substitute. However, Preminger and Mayes altered the original’s staunch conservatism to moderate liberalism. The film was released after the Cuban Missile Crisis and liberals including President Kennedy were seeking to make peace. The President is represented in the film, but as a womanising senator played by Peter Lawford, who was at the time the President’s brother-in-law.

Even more than fifty years later Preminger’s unobtrusive style and even-handed treatment of political and moral issues make for compelling drama. Advise and Consent may be stylish cinema but again the viewer is required to listen intently. There are no easy stereotypes in either of these works. This is cinema for adults from which modern film-makers can learn a great deal.