Bridge on the River Kwai (Britain, 1957, David Lean)












Wherein Ben and I, whenever we feel afraid, we whistle a happy tune. And could there be a more misleading movie poster?


Ben Begins:

Another title from Jacob's to-see list derived from his must-see book. A nice change for me because this is the first such selection that was new for me. I am betting that you have had occasion to watch TBOTRK but even if you have not, the film is so famous, I cannot think that you are unfamiliar with the plot. Whatever. I'm not going to get into it anyway.

There are a number of things about Kwai (that's a better abbreviation than TBOTRK) that totally surprised me. In the first place the propaganda aspects are very slight. Perhaps by 1957 the deep indoctrination about the meaning of WWII was so firmly entrenched in the popular consciousness, there was a little space to tell a relatively nuanced tale in that setting. When certain things are just taken for granted, a bit of eccentricity is allowed. And I have to say that Kwai is quirky. Other than it's above average running time which sends a signal of self-importance, the film is actually quite modest in scale, not conducted in such epic proportions. So it is a bit odd that it was such a massive blockbuster.

Whatever the conditions surrounding it's creation and reception, Kwai is not a typical war movie insofar as it does not depict battle at all. It belongs to a sub-genre, the prisioner-of-war setting. But Kwai is not a typical POW movie either. These center on the the ongoing plans and reoccuring attempts to escape, which in turn allow for all sorts of suspense and action. Kwai is not about this at all. Granted, the plot requires an escape by an individual early on. But after this is put in place and as this character's plot line is subsequently pursued, the story is about being in the camp, not getting out of it. And by the way, with regard to the single escape by William Holden's character, the film has the implicit wit to admit that it is implausible and later on, when he is compelled to return to the camp, the film has even greater wit in admitting almost explicitly in the dialogue that this is a ludicrous turn of events.



This wit in the script is what raises Kwai out of the ranks of the ordinary. It is not the sort of postmoden irony we expect today, but is rather coming out of good old fashioned dramatic values, which is to say that it is in keeping with the characters, especially Holden's, who constantly cracks wise, but Alec Guinness' character has his own wry sense of humour. What is more, the performances by the leads, including the guy who plays the Japanese warden, are very good, with Guinness especially doing some brilliant stuff, not the least of which is with his body movement.

I am attending to characterization because, in my view, for all the obvious this-is-an-epic story about life and death and the equally t-i-a-e cinematography out in the glorious tropics, Kwai could be a play. It really is character-driven. What is interesting is the psychological make-up of the principals. They conform to nationalist stereotypes but in an interesting way insofar as these types themselves are given internally contradictory depth.

Holden is the pragmatic American who verges on cynical, reflecting a working-class survivalism that threatens to become little more than opportunistic individualism. It is only be impostering an officer that he scrapes by and it is only be being bureacratically trapped that he returns to his duty as a soldier. This may sound standard enough today but I reckon at the time the reluctance of muscular Mr. America to be a hero for Uncle Sam was novel indeed.

Racism attends the film only in that the Japanese in general are shown to be incapable of engineering the construction of a bridge or calculating how to best extract labour from their prisioners. But the Japanese warden himself is not some two-dimensional "Jap" who knows only barbaric cruelty to others in order to prop up what he considers honorable for himself. He suffers from some personal incompetence as a leader of men, in part the result of his having been educated in England. He is culturally confused and vacilates between (supposedly) Eastern and Western codes of conduct. He is, in short, more of a tragic figure than a villain.

But it is really Guiness' character that steals the show and this is because the man pushes the whole British nobility paradigm into the realm of twit psychosis. This he does without passionate fireworks but rather plucky determination to the nth degree. This is a guy who definitely can't see the forest for the trees, such a stickler to principle is he. At bedrock he is a career officer who understands everything about the army and its rules and nothing about war and its realities. Up to a point, his devotion to the formalities of military organization serve him well but when the point arrives, this turns inside out and he must confront the essential content of military activity.

In the end, there is some cool suspense and the bridge blows up real good, quite a real-life special effect. But like I said before, even without this narrative and cinematic payoff, the best quality of the story could have been presented in a play. Because in the end, all three of the principals die. (A fourth principal lives but he is the least worthwhile psychologically, really a vehicle for the plot.) That the three main players perish levels the playing field and allows a secondary character to utter the prouncement that concludes Kwai: "Madness, madness." What is interesting about this is not that it constitutes a moralistic declaration by the film that war is futile. As I've already suggested, it's taken for granted that WWII was necessary and won by the good guys. Instead, the madness, madness seems to be confined to the particular persons in the story, individuals so confused about what they are doing, it borders on craziness.

Two nice touches. When the Japanese camp commander is yelling at his engineer about the schedule for constructing the bridge, they refer to a calendar. It's an American one for the GIs, one of the classic proto-Playboy girlie pin-ups. More worthwhile, the paratroop commando squad to destroy the bridge has only four men. In their campagin they are assisted by an equal number of Burmese locals, all of whom are women except one. Sure they are all young and pretty and there's a bit of sexual chemistry between them and our fine handsome men. But they are shown to be integral to the operation and utterly unafraid. Refreshingly progressive portrayal.

And Then There's Dan:

So, yeah, this is a Big Budget war film (it cost 2.8m, which was an astronomical number at the time) that took nearly a year to film in jungles of Sri Lanka. And as Werner Herzog would do decades later in Fitzcarraldo, Lean committed to a physical recreation of the film's central action (and conceit). So, just as Herzog had his crew haul that boat over that hill, Lean had his men construct the titular bridge. So, if you knew nothing else about TBOTRK, you could be excused for believing that everything about the film screams megalomania and self-indulgence. Even the fact that it won the Oscar for Best Picture is hardly enough to allay fears that the film was sure to be bloated and self-congratulatory. After all, didn't Around the World in 80 Days win the Oscar the year before?


And yet, what a truly worthy Oscar winner this is. For all the money spent in the production of this epic, the film is really about the relationship between the Japanese (Col Saito) and British (Col. Nicholson) commanders. Each man faces not only the terrible tasks that war asks you to undertake, but also faces up to the entire weight of their history and culture, as well as to the expectation that in their positions they will maintain and uphold the ideals thereof, while in the end realizing the horrors and futility of the entire endeavor. And, most interestingly, the film does not ask you to take sides with the British in this struggle. Instead, Lean's film seems more inclined to have you feel Saito's pain, and in this we may have something truly radical. A World War II film wherein we are asked to empathize with the guys that history has judged and found wanting? Given the general similarity of viewpoint in Letters from Iwo Jima, you have to wonder if Clint Eastwood doesn't owe something of a debt to Lean's fine film.



It is not often that you have a war film about the Good War that refuses to glorify the efforts of the supposed Good Guys. In fact, the film moves beyond simple even-handedness and into a place that must have made some moviegoers at the time a bit uncomfortable. The film is positively empathetic towards the Bad Guys, specifically Saito (great performance by Hayakawa, before I forget), whose torment and uncertainty about his role in the war is intelligently and sensitively developed. Nicholson (Alec Guinness is the prototype of stiff-lipped upper class Britishness), on the other hand, becomes increasingly erratic and belligerent in his attachment to the "noble" rules of wartime engagement, to the point of making sociopathological decisions to allow his men to die as a matter of "principle." Later, Nicholson's refusal to concern himself with the consequences of his men's actions as they build this bridge for their Japanese captors speaks well to the general madness of war as well. There's no real commitment to a greater good, only piecemeal efforts to help get you through another day.

Even the film's desaturated colour palette reflects Lean's determination to deglamorize war. The muddy greens, grays and browns that fill the jungle and the men imprisoned within it scream not of a greater glory, but of inevitable demise. Lean's stately compositions do occasionally draw attention to themselves (the guy knew how to manipulate widescreen) but generally contribute to the sense of



And lastly, while William Holden (and I'm a big fan of his) gets plenty of screen time, he is hardly in the picture for me. He does get in some good digs at the war machine, and those lunatics who sit at its helm, "…crazy with a kind of courage. For what? To die like gentlemen? When the only important thing is how to live like a human being." Still, his value is mostly as a quipster and plot-progressor, with a little romance tossed in on the side. He's the concession to a demographic (You can almost hear the studio arguing, "If this is gonna sell stateside, we need an American in this picture! We need romance! And some action! Is Bill Holden available?")

TBOTRK was the first war film I ever saw that challenged my assumptions about who was Good and Bad, and that asked me to empathize with the supposed Devil. If for nothing else (and there's plenty else, thankfully) you have to give it up to David Lean. Barely a decade removed from the war, this is a pretty bold position to stake.

Then Ben:

Well, shucks, I was trying to say that the film really isn't all that spectacular and exciting and over-the-top. And I was also saying that this is a good thing. Except for the big money shot at the end and perhaps the big commando crawl leading up to it, the scale of the film is not so huge. Perhaps I am just naive about the demands and costs associated with filming on location, a tropical location, a tropical foreign country location. No matter. We agree that the film succeeds as much as a character-driven drama as it does as an epic, if not more so.

You draw attention to the film's desaturated colour palette and this is helpful for me. If I had been watching a VHS rather than a DVD, I would have sworn that the tape was washed out. As it was, I wondered if the DVD transfer was from a diluted print. Eventually I came round to the notion that it was supposed to evoke the scorched earth of the prision camp and the burn-out of everyone in it. This seemed to be confirmed later by the look of the allied base and then the commando travels through the lush vegetation complete with a waterfall bathing scene, all much richer in hue.



I find your treatment of William Holden's position in the proceedings also very useful. It adds considerably that Guiness recognizes Holden immediately prior to gasping, "My god, what have I done?" But this coming-full-circle is hardly essential. Guiness can still wake up (too late) and gasp the line as long as his falling dead body lands on the detonator (in time). You are so right that all of the business involving Holden is sort of fifth-wheel, an excuse for a bit of extra action and some gratuitous sex; I say old boy, we can't cut the Yanks out entirely.

As for your reading of the larger themes at work, I will go along with your assessment that the film is progressive about humanizing the enemy. I approached this thesis myself in terms of the characters being culturally and psychologically complex. Mind you, I am not as impressed as you are that this sort of moral sophistication was in place by the time Kwai was made. The primacy of the British perspective informing the film and the addition of Holden as a bone for American dogs to chew is all very well. By 1957, however, the British empire is a dead duck and it's US hegemony in spades. After a decade of US capital investment in Japanese industry, the shift was away from the medium profit margins of domestic reconstruction there to the grand profit margins of exporting "Made in Japan" to the American market. So the Japanese were listed among The Good Guys, especially in contradistinction to those evil chinks and gooks who were communists.

More contentious for me is your feeling that Kwai offers an even more general humanism in the form of a blanket condemnation of war. This I believe is misguided. Forgive me for quoting myself: "Perhaps by 1957 the deep indoctrination about the meaning of WWII was so firmly entrenched in the popular consciousness, there was a little space to tell a relatively nuanced tale in that setting. When certain things are just taken for granted, a bit of eccentricity is allowed." Actually, the film is not that eccentric with respect to the humanization of the Japanese, as I just addressed above. What is quirky is the drama hinging on military careerists who - to quote myself again - "understand everything about the army and its rules and nothing about war and its realities." There is absolutely nothing in Kwai that asks us to question war in general, never mind criticize WWII in particular. Indeed, the drama of the film is predicated on taking the accepted meaning of the war for granted. For it is precisely Nicholson and Saito who lose sight of this accepted meaning. The "madness madness" is ascribed to these characters specifically and not to the war as such.

In mainstream English-language cinema, truly radical opposition to war in 1957 remained confined to WWI. But the genius of the film I have in mind is that it goes beyond a particular war or even war in general to a deeper level of abstraction, giving a class analytical critique of militarism itself. Thank you Kubrick for Paths of Glory.

And Finally Dan:

Well, to be honest, it has been a very, very long time since I last saw this film, and memory can be a tricky thing, so I'll have to take another look at the dvd before committing myself to a life and death struggle with you (I refuse to sumo!) over the film's stance on war. And while you are right that it doesn't hold a candle to Kubrick's film when it comes to getting to the root of war's many hypocrisies, I still think that the "madness, madness" line is about more than just the struggle between these two men. The men, after all, represent their countries, their countries histories, cultures and attitudes towards war. At least, must like the two vying officers in The Grand Illusion, they represent their respective nation's upper class's understanding of war. And because they come up pikers in the end, you've got to think that there's some critique of the entire endeavour stuck in the mix.

But, like I say, without another viewing of the film, I wouldn't stake my honour on this interpretation. Even if I had any. Honour, that is. Interpretations (among other things) I am full of.

Screen Cap Quizzical'

All right, so here I am, back in your grill daring you to show me up by identifying two wildly disparate films chosen randomly from my DVD collection. If you can correctly identify BOTH films, you will win this week's Grand Prize, an autographed copy of Douglas Coupland's screenwriting debut, Everything's Gone Green. All right, so the autograph is mine and not Coupland's. What of it?

And, as always, don't cheat. You'll just feel dirty in the morning.

Oh, and by the way, click on the image if you want to more closely inspect the details.

The first clues have now been added. Go get 'em!

Next clues are up. As my response to Jeff's guess suggests, the first film is Italian. You oughta be able to narrow it down to a handful of possibles from the visuals. The second film is a brand new release, and its nation of origin is Thailand.

All righty, a (hopefully) final visual clue below for that elusive second film. As for the written clue, the film is brought to you by the same folks who produced Ong Bak, a similar, adrenaline-driven, stunt-filled extravaganza.

Cap no. 1 from Film no. 1:

















Clue No. 1 for film No. 1:
















Clue No. 2 for film no. 1:













Cap No. 1 from Film No. 2:















Clue No. 1 for Film No. 2:













Clue No. 2 for film no. 2:














Clue no. 3 for film no. 2:

The Bicycle Thief--or for you purists Bicycle Thieves (1948, Italy, Vittorio de Sica)











Wherein Ben and I take turns slavering praise upon this, The Most Important Film of a Generation. Or All Time. Let the hyperbole begin!

Ben Begins:

This may or may not be listed in Jacob's book. I couldn't care less. When I was at Pic-a-Flic grabbing Easy Rider and Bridge on the River Kwai, I wanted to ensure that something educational was included... something educational, goddamn right. Max, too, was instructed to watch. His reaction is as good a place as any to start.

When the "FIN" title came up on the screen, he yelled out: "That's it? I thought it was going to have a happy ending!" His tone was one of shock mixed with near outrage, as if he had been ripped off. Broken as I was by the film (my second time) I was intolerant of his ignorant response and I quickly dispatched him to bed. I asked Monica, how could the kid not get it? She suggested that he got it alright but he was in denial about it to the extent that he identified with the prepubescent son and could not confront the utter emasculation of the father, although she managed to say this without resorting to Freudian rhetoric as I have done here. The next day I interviewed Max himself and while I heard from him nothing to either substantiate or discredit Monica's deep speculation, I did touch on the surface texture of his denial.













Simply put, after a diet of Disney, a portion of realism is not so easy to digest. I asked Max how he could have entertained the possibility that the story would have a happy ending when it was so obvious that things just went from bad to worse, that the plot offered no false leads for optimism, that the desperation was unrelenting unto absolute despair. He replied that he got this plainly enough but still, and I'm paraphasing here, he thought the film was about a man trying to catch the man who stole his bicycle and given this, it seemed narratively inevitable that the protagonist would apprehend his nemisis; after all, the movie is called The Bicycle Thief. But Max, I probed pedagogically, WHO is the bicycle thief, the title referrs to whom, what happens at the conclusion of the film? We had arrived at the nodal point of his denial. He had refused to regard the father as the bicycle thief, he rationalized that he was not a robber because he was immediately caught, and even more, he was immediately released, he was not taken to the police and processed as a criminal. Of course, I dismantled this sociological nonsense, protected as it was by an outer layer of pure formalism having to do with the supposed conventions of story-telling. We discussed the dialectical ontology of becoming your opposite in the material situation of extreme downward mobility. In short, we got busy with the class analysis demanded of us by this realism. (As for the psychological dynamics attending the little boy having to literally save his destitute dad from being dragged to the cops, as for Monica's insight into Max's denial, well, I gave my 11-year old a break for a change; my 15-year old was up to speed enough about this for the both of them.)

Interestingly enough, Max's infantile confusion about the identity of the bicycle thief is legitimated by the matter of the original title's translation into English. In the UK, the translation is more authentic with the original by adhering to the plural, "Bicycle Thieves," whereas the North American version we know is not only in the sigular but with the definite article. About the latter, Wikipedia reports: According to critic Philip French of The Observer, this alternate title is misleading, "because the desperate hero eventually becomes himself a bicycle thief." Turns out Max has at least the intelligence of the average movie-goer whom French fears will be misled by the American title. I have already investigated the case of being so misled as so much denial on the part of the viewer. In the instance of Max, the lad has the excuse of being but a lad. Any adult unable to grasp that the desperate hero eventually becomes himself a bicycle thief is either flat-out retarded or in such a state of bourgeois ideology-induced denial, well, psychiatric treatment is required. For we are dealing with working class art as powerful as any other art you might care to compare it to. Confined to a cinematic contest, this film is as great as Chaplin's greatest work, and I'm sorry to burst the bubble of postmodern cinephiles today who are bored with Chaplin's sentimentality and underwhelmed by his specifically filmic skills - I am giving The Bicycle Thief the highest praise.

And plese notice that I continue to use the American title. I prefer it to the plurality of the British version and therefore even the Italian original. I do so because of the different semantic implications. The plural version might seem to suggest a genuinely social perspective insofar as it quantitatively moves beyond the individual. But in my dialectial estimation, the singular version with the definite article - the latter being absolutely essential to my interpretation - takes us more meaningfully into the larger social abstraction by way of the particular concrete person. Indeed, it is precisely this immediately qualitative methodological option which is so much better afforded to art than it is to social science, the latter instead attempting to "paint a picture" by way of quantitative data. Or as Bertrand Russell points out, statistics cannot make anyone care about anything.













TBT makes you care. Shoot me and put me out of my empathy - how it made me care! And once more, in all fairness to Max, I suppose the first time I saw it, there was some small degree of suspense, some tiny fraction of hope that the man would somehow recover his lost bicycle. But the second time, this speck of utopian aspiration was annihilated from the outset, so the film unfolded before me like true tragedy should, except without any classical mumbo-jumbo about the fatal flaw that is the undoing of the aristocrat, itself given metaphysical determination to some extent in pre-proletarian drama. No, the realism in TBT is hard core materialist and sociological. By no fault of his own, due to conditions into which he is historically deposited, the man fails and falls. This does not make TBT a Marxist tract, however, i.e.; a work of socialist realism so-called. In his treatment of TBT, Andre Bazin's navigation through the churning waters of the debate between the communists dogmatically committed to Stalin and those advancing an independent course is illuminating both historically and aesthetically. Suffice to say here that it is no accident that the film was able to find an audience outside of Italy and is today considered the defining example of the Italian neo-realist movement coming out of WWII.

About this neo-realism, Arthur Miller associated it with his own creative ambition, "where there was nothing left, no plots, no cagey angles, but only the possibility of saying openly and clearly and simply what I had in mind, to say uncloaked, naively." Similarly, George Sadoul said in his Dictionary of Films that the "story of a man searching for something on which his very life depended was a theme so new that the film required no artificial drama." To be sure, this is fundamentally correct. Yet, seeing the film a second time, I want to emphasize the artistry of its creation. All the non-professional theatrical aspects and cinema verite techniques employed in TBT have been justly celebrated, but the film is just as much brilliantly staged, shot and edited. And let's be clear on this, TBT ain't no raw documentary.

The way De Sica makes use of locations is profoundly artistic. Sometimes a street scene is depicted as vastly endless, intimidating because it is impossible to traverse. Sometimes a street scene is depicted as claustrophobically contained, intimidating because it is impossible to escape. Certain interiors are filmed in such a way as to convey a critique of the institution associated with the architecture, the wanna-be socialist cell meeting in the basement, the supposedly civic-minded pawn shop, police station and the like, and especially the false-leadership of the church. Bring in the outstandingly crisp pacing of the narrative and the triumph of the editing becomes apparent. Perhaps most of all, the incredible performances the director somehow brought out of his two leads, both of whom had no prior acting experience, one of whom a little kid no less. I'm sorry, you can caw away about naturalism all you want, but De Sica had to extract the sculpture from the stone. Amazing.

And one final point about the artifice involved, there is a moment of pure melodrama in TBT. The son rubs his father's face in the fact that he made a certain tactical mistake. The father loses his composure and smacks his son in the face. The kid cries and briefly tries to keep his distance, but the father ushers him back. Then he tells the boy to wait beside a bridge while he tries to rectify the tactical mistake. Under this bridge by the river, the man hears shouting about a boy drowning in the river. Of course he (and we) fear the worst. He rushes up to see that the crisis involves a group of teenagers out swimming and he finds his boy waiting where he was supposed to. All of this is shown realistically and leads realistically to subsequent events, but in the context of the film as a whole it is a melodramatic episode. It it completely effective, by the way, and this only goes to further my recognition of the artistry of the film.













TBT is just devastating. Shattering. What somebody could possibly want from a film that this film does not deliver, I can't imagine. And when at the very end, the boy catches up to the man, when the son takes the hand of his father and walks beside him and looks up at him... there is the poverty of everything but love.


And Dan Responds:

Firstly, thank you for writing that review. I enjoyed it very much on its own merits, but it also deals with a film that is at the core of what I love about movies. This film deserves every accolade it gets. Including yours. As a self-contained piece of cinema, it is, as you say, absolutely emotionally devastating and artistically breathtaking. But equally as a progenitor of perhaps the most significant and influential movement in cinematic history (that would be neo-realism, of course) Bicycle Thief (along with--arguably--Rossellini's Rome, Open City) pretty much defines the word 'seminal.' De Sica's film almost single-handedly fertilized the imaginations of generations of great filmmakers, from Visconti to Fellini, and from Polanski to Kieslowski. It's not just the content that distinguishes it--the study of a devastated post-war Europe in decay--but also the stylistic choices, from the turning away from self-consciously cinematic camera work and towards a more documentary style realism, to the use of "real people" rather than professionally trained thespians in key roles, and shooting in the "real world" on actual locations (and often in "real" time) rather than in the artificial world of the studio lot. And while I love and admire the greatness of a cinematically self-conscious film like Citizen Kane, itself a dazzling distillation of nearly every innovation in film's young history, when it comes to determining which film has had the greatest and most lasting influence on film and filmmakers, there really ain't no competition. De Sica's film wins hands down. Is this the Greatest Film of All Time? Probably not. There are more adventurously and better made films, and there are more intellectually or philosophically profound films, but when we get right down to it, there may be no film that has been more influential, so if not The Greatest, The Bicycle Thief could still well be The Most Important film of all time.

(At first, I felt like a shit comparing Kane to Thieves, cuz I love them both so much. Then I tripped on over to Criterion Collection's site, and I discovered that noted film historian Godfrey Chesire argues the following, "much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). Though separated by World War II, the two movies symbolize the cardinal impulses that came to captivate serious audiences, critics, and filmmakers after the war. The tendencies they signaled—ones soon fused into a singular aesthetic by the French new wave—are not so much divergent as complementary." Interesting thesis. Heh. Great minds, fools and all that. If you read the essay, you'll note that Chesire references Bazin's singling out of the film's dialectical approach as well.)













I found your interview with Max instructive. Imagine the difference in the film's impact on him had he not been tainted by Disney-fied expectations. And this, of course, is exactly how many of the film's first generations of viewers would have come to the film, which helps explain why the film's greatness was quickly recognized and not just by aesthetes, but by the 'great unwashed' as well. Call me cynical, but I fear that Max's initial reaction reflects pretty accurately the way modern audiences, weaned on razzle dazzle and happy endings, would respond if such a film were made today. It just wouldn't stand a chance. Cinematic realism is the tiniest of niche markets today. Intelligent and humanitarian cinematic realism (think Before Sunset/Sunrise) is the province of art houses, so far from the mainstream that you'd need a GPS to locate it. There's a certain sad and tired irony to this, in that we if ever we needed a powerful movement back towards a realistic cinema it is now, when the world is in a crisis of self-delusion, and in such danger of self-annihilation. But rather than face the truth, we prefer to bury our heads in the sands of Disney-fied escapism.

And it's not as though de Sica comes up a piker when looking at the "traditional" values of cinema. Flying in the face of the whole supposedly "found imagery" of the documentary style of shooting, it's clear that many of the film's best moments (including the astonishing finale) had to be carefully set-up and/or painstakingly choreographed. The guy knows how to frame a shot, as the film is an endless parade of striking images that are reminiscent of Matthew Brady's photography of the US Civil War or Ansel Adam's famous photos of the Great Depression. Neo-realism may have been a guiding principle, but de Sica was not dogmatic. When a moment needed to be manufactured for the greater good of the overall effect, realism took a back seat to the greater truth.












As you hinted at in your review, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films that confront the truth as honestly, poignantly and unflinchingly as The Bicycle Thief. As such, I understand Max's initial reaction to the film's FIN, and not just cuz he has been tainted by unrealistic expectations. The emotional payoff in this film IS disturbing, not just cuz it ain't conventionally happy, but also cuz it asks us to take these final steps in the shoes of the father and child. Yes, the world is a terrible place, systemically corrupt, where justice and mercy are almost entirely theoretical. Yet, it beats the alternative. The road's full of potholes, and the signs are written in another tongue, but you keep walking, hand in hand (if you're lucky.) As ambiguous restorative endings go, this one is right up there with (wait for it) Chaplin's smile in City Lights. The perfect marriage of comic and tragic, heartwarming and heartbreaking.

In a nutshell, this film IS life.

Then Ben:

And you told me that you'd need to get back to me about Bridge Over the River Kwai. Hello, TBT - no waiting! I am flattered that my commentary inspired you to respond right away. But it is really a testament to the film, isn't it? I didn't tell you we watched the film a number of days ago, that I simply could not comment on it without dwelling on it (and talking to Max), that after seeing it, I had a vivid dream featuring my dead mother... oh man.

I was fascinated by your investigation of the TBT/Citizen Kane competition and pleased for you to have it validated by academic authority, especially since that authority posits that the competing paradigms are synthesized in the French New Wave. I haven't seen enough of the latter to generalize but I will say that The 400 Blows in general and the ending in particular is tapping into the legacy of TBT in a way that I cannot articulate but feel deeply. A while back I spoke of this ending being a genuine ending, a definitive stop that is all too rare in cinema, and in connection to this I believe I brought up Nights of Cabiria and (wait for it) City Lights. All of these films, even Chaplin's fantastical fairytale, are operating with certain realist principals and I am interested in how this is manifest in their genuine endings. Because the curious thing is that the definitive stop in the drama is simultaneously a signal that we just witnessed but one chapter in an ongoing story, that life goes on, that the struggle carries forward. The film ends but the message continues, if you know what I mean. Citizen Kane, on the other hand - and I don't mean to make too much of this, just thinking out loud - comes to a definite stop too, hey, the guy dies, but there is no existential momentum after the final frame passes though the projector.

I cannot help but speculate that this difference I am considering is a reflection of the ongoing ideological/aesthetic debate between art for art's sake and art for an ulterior purpose, most acutely expressed during the Cold War as battle between bourgeois formalism and socialist realism. Citizen Kane has a lot to say about megalomaniacal ambition and the absolute alienation of the individual it ultimately engenders, sort of Macbeth with printer's ink all over his hands instead of blood. But as you have said yourself, the film is most of all a tour de force of cinematic inventiveness. No wonder it quickly resulted in a mythology about Welles himself which, given his subsequent career, resulted in a persona blurring of Hearst-Kane-Welles that is now impossible to escape when experiencing the film. It's all just a stone's throw away from Hollywood's cult of the personality, celebrity as capital, ironic considering how Welles fled Hollywood for Europe and tragic considering that by then it was basically too late. Because Welles was not without philosophic depth and radical political concerns. And of course, he was an artistic genius. But Citizen Kane is not nearly as great as film as TBT because Citizen Kane is at bedrock about itself, so when it ends, it's over, but TBT is at bedrock about life, so when it ends, it keeps on playing.

But wait. You want a self-consciously cinematic gesture in cinema? A meta-statement that would make any postmodernist's term paper? Look no further than TBT. Pay attention to the posters the man is hired to plaster all over Rome. They're movie posters. American movie posters. Hollywood. The latest Rita Hayworth picture, to be precise. But in fact, that postmodern term paper isn't going to make it past a dim-witted paragraph because this is not irony pertaining purely to form - it is critique emergent from reality. Economically ruined (for some more than others), governmentally crippled, militarily defeated, nationally shamed, Italy after the war, a good job is advertising on behalf of Yankie cultural imperialism, slapping up posters for escapist clap-trap insidiously promoting the most banal and phoney features of the American Dream. De Sica is having none of it. On so many levels. On so many levels!

It is factual that the ruling class has always pacified the masses with bread and circuses. The great trend throughout history when it comes to popular entertainment provided or sanctioned by the state has been recreational escapism, (unlike the cultural recreations from the church which center on terrorism). Democratic developments in modernity have introduced contradictory tendencies in recreation, but it remains basically true that realism - of any sort - constitutes a danger to the power elites in the system. You say that if a film like TBT were made now, it would be unable to find an audience, so pacified by escapist clap-trap is everyone today. On the one hand, I would not disagree with you, especially when I am overcome by cynicism about other people in general. But on the other hand, I would disagree with you by repeating the position I put forward in our discussion of Darwin's Nightmare; namely, that the mode for realism in film with solid radical potential has shifted away from art as such to documentaries. At the same time - and to give postmodernism its due for a change - the documentary is undergoing a transformtion that incorporates and legitimates the subjective voice that was hitherto associated with artistic expression and prohibited from the documentary domain. I have even brought this up more than once over at Matt's House because I see it as perhaps the most vital area for film theory today. (So far, the fish aren't biting). Of course, whatever the form (or the content even), there will always be an aspect of escapism about going to the movies. Or to get at this critique of recreation from the opposite direction - and I know I've laid this line from Gill Scott Heron on you before - the revolution will not be televised.

And Dan:

Yes, it is a testament to the film that it takes such terrible toll on us emotionally, and provokes such intellectual probing. I have seen the film exactly once, under anything but optimal conditions (I was much less interested in ancient film history back then, plus it was an old VHS copy, full of nicks and scratches), yet it has stuck with me like few other films. It's the humanity of the film that is so truthful, that endures. De Sica's sense of social injustice is deep, and the film is full of despair and throttled rage, but in the end, de Sica loves people, and he can't help but end his films with a breath of hope, and touch of affection. Because of this, Chaplin is an obvious forebearer, but another is Jean Renoir. What's that line you quoted from Truffault? Renoir's secret weapon is his empathy? Clearly true for de Sica as well, and when you wed it with a social conscience, a keen intelligence and a long history of engagement in the film industry (de Sica was a very successful actor before he became a director) et voila! Art.

Funny that, while loving both films, I can watch Citizen Kane repeatedly, yet feel somewhat reticent about revisiting TBT. It's not that I'm afraid it won't stand the test--the film clearly has all its chops down--but rather than I'm a little leery about revisiting the powerful emotions that the film stirs up in me. My connection to that father and son goes right to the core of me (I have a LOT of unresolved father issues, so that may play a part in it as well) and I'm not ready to go back there just yet. This is why I said I could identify with Max's response. The film cuts deeply; it probes some of our richest horrors. And you can only go back to that sort of place so often. Kane, on the other hand, is a character far removed from my working class lineage, personal experiences and beliefs--as you noted, a kind of Macbeth-ian figure (another story I have no problem getting reacquianted with every year)--that I can watch from a healthy distance and with a certain fascination the disintegration of the Welles' creation. His world never was or will be mine, but that father and son in post-war Italy sure as shit feels like it could have been mine.

Here are some links to a bunch of reviews I did for Apollo Guide





The best of the lot: Al Pacino's Looking For Richard which--don't let the Shakespearean milieu frighten you off--is a helluva lotta fun to watch.





I also reviewed a boxed set of lesser-known Jimmy Stewart films. A mixed bag, ranging from the pretty good (Next Time We Love, and Shenendoah) to the not quite good enough (Thunder Bay, The Glenn Miller Story, You Gotta Stay Happy.)


Lastly, here's my take on the Douglas Coupland screenwriting debut, Everything's Gone Green, which, since no one won it last week, will be offered up again as a Grand Prize for the screen cap quiz again this week. Tune in later today for caps from the two films you'll need to parse.









Oh, and appropros of nothing more than my childhood obsesssion with Canada's National Pasttime, I say with some sadness that John Ferguson has died of cancer at the age of 68. Not merely the toughest sob to strap on the blades (he once cold-cocked Bobby Hull, himself an ox-strong bastard), he was a helluva competitor who was (I hear) a great storyteller, one whom you'd love to raise a glass or two with. He established the enforcer prototype, the stone-fisted body-slammin' prick whose presence, at least in theory, allowed the skilled players a little more room on the ice to ply their trade. He retired at 32, then spent the second half of his life in hockey management of one sort or another, proving the dude offered more than a fist in a glove.



Au Revoir, John.