Harlan Ellison's Watching

  It is possible the film gathered steam in the second half and roared on to be one of the great cinematic presentations of our time, but I will never know. When I found myself yawning, spilling popcorn just to have something to do, and praying for the next scene, any scene, I asked myself a question all filmgoers should ask themselves: "Why should I subject myself to this?"

  Consistent with the film, I got back an empty answer.

  Cinema / December 1965

  THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

  In sunny Burbank, California, where Pass Avenue intersects Warner Boulevard and Olive Avenue, there is a grass-covered traffic island on which stands a large billboard.

  The legend on the billboard reads as follows:

  THE HOME OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES

  "Combining Good Citizenship With Good Picture Making!"

  —N.Y. Times

  A screenwriter of my acquaintance, who had worked at Warners early in the Forties, when that sign was already long a landmark, several years ago (on a return to the lot) happened to mention to Jack L. Warner that the slogan really no longer applied, in that Warners was making "safe" films. Warner's reported reply was, "Let the young ones take the risks; we've got the quote."

  The sign is a paint-peeling relic, twenty and more years outdated, a bit of memorabilia that suggests Jack L. Warner has a tendency to live in the past; to let the times pass him by. But for those out there in The Great American Heartland who may never get to that intersection of Burbank thoroughfares, Mr. Warner has seen fit to release an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing epic of modern filmmaking so tuned to the whispers of the dead years, that any who wish may draw their own conclusions as to his harkening-back to the good old days.

  So hear ye! Hear ye! Gather 'round and listen to the drum rolls, the rah-ta-tah, the tintinnabulation of patriotism, the gospel of war, according to Jack L.

  And at a massed cost of $6,000,000, one might even vouchsafe that World War II was Mr. Warner's own private imbroglio. For surely no one man has made more bucks off our third most recent firefight than the vociferously vocal patriot who has caused The Battle of the Bulge to be made.

  As the credits brochure handed out at the screening informs us, "Mr. Warner viewed the making of Battle of the Bulge as an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II's most terrifying battlefield engagements, and at the same time he looked upon the picture as a vivid adventure for film audiences, as well as a resounding tribute to the Allied Forces which participated in those fiery days and nights combating the German invaders in the Ardennes."

  What the brochure does not bother to tell us is that this is yet another example of Warner's view of Men At War, through glasses which may not be rose-colored, but certainly use a prescription that is thirty years outdated.

  There is no need our dwelling at length in these columns on the dishonesty of the picture in terms of historical verisimilitude. The Department of the Army has already made its feelings public, and the shriek of the eagle may be heard abroad in the land. Nor any need to belabor the point that the film was obviously made not because it was "an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II's blah blah blah," but because it filled a large hole in the Cinerama production schedule. Make one fantasy, they said, so The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was made. Make one comedy, they said, so It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was made. Make one western, they said, so How the West Was Won was made. Make one war picture, they said, so The Battle of the Bulge was made.

  It is unfortunate no one has said, "Make a good film; forget the Cinerama tricks; forget the roller coasters and the onrushing tanks and the plunging trains and the flung spears; just make a helluva good picture, about people."

  There is no need to hammer these points, for they are self-evident in the production. The Battle of the Bulge is no more than a 1940s-style soap-opera shoot-'em-up of the type Warners released during the war years. It is bigger, brassier, louder, more colorful, but in the final analysis, it is easily dismissed because it proffers a brand of thinking that is only rational these days for Birchers and dogfaces who look back on WWII as a pleasant experience.

  This is not the face of war. The unifying facet of humanity is missing. There are great clots of armored Furies rolling across Belgian terrain, there are the usual stock cliché characters mouthing the usual stock cliché lines (not to be believed: General Grey to Lt. Col. Kiley as Hessler's panzers overrun them, "Looks like he's succeeded this time." Kiley: "He made one mistake." Grey: "What was that?" Kiley, with steely glare: "He got me mad."), and the attempt to convey a sense of order to an engagement that stretched down 85 miles of front and was fought in such a riot of disorder and counterthrust that even today Army historians are still finding missing pieces of the combat picture that explain why we won.

  But worse than the Philip Yordan–Milton Sperling–John Melson screenplay that gives us a ludicrous answer to why we were not ground beneath the treads of those elite tanks, is the ancient and creaking philosophy of "propaganda" that suffuses the film, the swindle of hackneyed ideas wrenched whole and corrupt from films made to engender a fighting spirit in a nation at war.

  It is a script filled with sound and fury, and like most of its ilk before it, this too is a tale told by an idiot. For Warners has eliminated the people in the war, and concentrated on the dubious joys of the spectacle of combat. It is the glorification of madness, without even the saving grace of being able to relate to the motivations of the men involved. Robert Shaw, as the German panzer leader, is wasted in a faceless color-me-rabid portrayal essentially as deep as a dish of tapioca pudding. Fonda, Ryan, Dana Andrews, the incredible Telly Savalas . . . all! Stick men! You drew them with wide, vapid smiles or beetled brows in your high school notebook. Comic book representations of flesh-and-blood men who lived and feared and came out the other side of the war with character in their faces. Character: something this film lacks in its totality.

  A totality that mirrors the Warner slant on war and its fascination for the common man. Every film that spurred us to more and better bombsights, flying forts, M-1 rifles and the firm belief that God was on our side . . . all the films that said Democracy, Mom's Apple Pie and The American Way Of Life were the answer. The films that lied to us, but served (I suppose) a necessary purpose in their time. But their time is past. Like the aging gunslinger in a settled frontier town, the citizenry does not want to hear how noble it is to die in combat. Or if they don't want to hear, they should be forced to hear. To hear the messages of Paths of Glory—that men are cannon fodder—to hear the shriek of Dr. Strangelove—that total war is total insanity—to hear that if we must make war, let us make it quickly and as humanely as possible . . . perhaps the arteriosclerotic leaders of the major powers out there in the arena, equipped with arbalest and mace, banging each other into senseless surrender. They must be told that we are a poor, puny race not one-millionth as old as the great lizards who died out with each other's fangs in their throats.

  They must be told the truth, not the candy-whip fantasies of the Jack Warners, who served their countries in good faith, but must now learn that the time of the gunslingers is past.

  Or, to sum it up emblematically: in a cutaway scene in The Battle of the Bulge, we are told that Bastogne was an important facet of the battle, and we see a bomb-blasted wall with a sign on it. The sign says THE BATTERED BASHERS OF BASTOGNE. No, Jack L. Warner, with your happy thoughts of bold strong men in combat, they were not called the battered bashers. They were called THE BLOODY BASTARDS OF BASTOGNE and that, that is where it's at.

  Truth is the only weapon that will save us. This film is a lie, and, as such, is a disgrace to the men who died, and the men who made their story.

  Cinema / March 1966

  JULIET OF THE SPIRITS

  Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits is a hysterical act of confusion. Having so stated, I will address myself to comments of other critics, who have been in this elevator before me; and having done so, I can go on to s
ome personal specifics I have not seen elsewhere in print.

  Ray Bradbury, who reviewed this film for a California newspaper, and conveyed his opinions in conversation to me, made the valid point that, in previous Fellini films, the maestro dealt with hurricanes at the eyes of which were human beings. Cabiria, Zampano, Marcello—each was a fixed centerpost around which all the madnesses danced. But the reactions were those of the principals, and what happened to them mattered a great deal. In Juliet, as Bradbury phrases it, "The gargoyles have taken over." The horned gods have deserted Notre Dame to caper and cavort, while the priests are outside in the rain, staring in. Giulietta Masina as Juliet wanders semivacuously through a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, grinning gamely and praying for sudden sunshine. What happens, happens; not to her as much as to the film itself.

  Another critic (whose name, I'm sorry, escapes me) made the comment that an overuse of technique does not represent expertise and boldness, but an escape into flummery and flapdoodle. That the best art, the most carefully-constructed art, is that which does not look like art at all, which looks effortless (e.g., Fred Astaire dancing, Walt Kelly drawing, Vonnegut or Sturgeon writing) until you try it. The technique should not be apparent to the eye. The bones of method and construction should not show through. Another valid point, in the light of Juliet, for there the technique is constantly omnipresent—Fellini somewhere in the projection booth reminding us this is his first color film, and look at the coy uses of same.

  While I almost entirely accept this point of criticism as bravely and succinctly tendered, in its aspects of truth, I reserve a caprice or two of dissenting opinion on grounds of past love.

  Fellini has delighted and moved me too often to suspect him of total bravura, and nothing else.

  But having only recently seen Modesty Blaise, with its surfeit of Losey technique . . . The Ipcress File and Darling and Help! and The Knack with theirs . . . I am compelled to accept the truth of the comment. Trick technique is on the rise; and while there may be those who contend A Thousand Clowns was flawed because it was a stage play filmed as a stage play with occasional returns to "the filmed portion of our show," I agree that crotch shots through keyholes as in The Ipcress File cannot hold a klieg to straight-on filming of Robards and Barbara Harris discussing the ethical structure of the universe.

  To be precise, I am not really sure what I think of Juliet, which is not really the way to come away from a film. The fault may well be mine, even though it isn't confusion, merely indecision. But this I do know:

  Fellini has come too far away from the writer as a necessary tool of the film medium. All well and good to say one is setting his innermost psyche down on film, very nice: but where is the story? It is still—and always will be—the job of the storyteller to communicate a pattern of events, a progression of character development, a sense of order and ethic. No matter what medium, the storyteller is the minstrel. He must tell his tale, not merely dazzle with pyrotechnics. Fellini seems to have fallen into the trap (though there are four credits listed for screenplay) of plot-by-committee. He shoots as he goes along, and as a consequence what he has told here is a traditional soap opera: the cheating husband, the wife on the verge of psychosis, the search for meaning, and the eventual realization that life alive is better than life half-dead, living in delusions and dreams. Stella Dallas did it regularly on the radio, and the chief difference between Stella and Juliet is that Miss Masina had the benefits of a charming Nino Rota soundtrack behind her.

  To address myself to the acting, for a moment, much of it seems to me of the "momentary impetus" school. People couple and grin for apparently whimsical reasons, having very little to do with the continuity of the skimpy plot. And this is unquestionably not Miss Masina's kind of picture. In earlier films she was the compleat gamine, a street urchin with a wry and winning smile. Here, she is a weary middle-aged woman, and the revelation is not a charming one. I do not care to see her standing there empty as assorted noxious fluids and vapors are emptied into her.

  In a way, she represents in this film what Mia Farrow represents on Peyton Place: a necessary vacuum whose removal would impel the instant implosion of all the other hysterical elements spinning around her.

  One can never dismiss Fellini. His work is too important. Even when failing, he does so brilliantly. But I would like to offer the suggestion to Fellini, with all due respect, that the time for self-indulgence has passed. He has plumbed his own libido, and sucked out his own id. We have seen his secret dreams and fantasies. We have seen his wife's secret world. I pray to God he has no children, for if he does, then we may look forward to their adolescent fantasies. Or, lacking offspring, perhaps we will see the dream life of Fellini's housekeeper, his agent, his barber.

  There is too little pure genius doled out in an eon to allow its waste on essentially unworthy projects. Yes, Fellini uses color brilliantly; yes, he knows film as few other directors ever have; yes, he is still the maestro and one cataclysm is not sufficient to sink Atlantis. But there is a cautionary note sounded by the direction and attitude of a film like Juliet. It is a discordancy, apparently tuned to the Lesters, the Schlesingers, the Furies, and Fellini.

  It is a back-turning on the past, on the validity of already proved methods. It is a losing-touch with the roots of the medium, with the lessons learned by men who were neither afraid nor untalented. And to scoff, as this film seems to do, is to play the clown.

  Fellini is too good for that. And to quote Lautrec: "A man may play the fool once, and be excused the role; but if he play it more than once, it must be assumed he enjoys the part."

  Cinema / July 1966

  YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW!

  Ten thousand times I have said if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and goes steady with ducks, chances are it's a duck. Recently, I was wrong. I saw something that looked like a duck, but it's really a turkey.

  Fully aware that I am a hostile minority in the country of the blind, I refer to You're a Big Boy Now! which will undoubtedly make twenty-two billion grupniks at the box office and garner for writer-director Francis Ford Coppola all manner of future assignments. I believe the operable phrase is "bright young man." Wrong. A genuine no-no.

  AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE, 1988: The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because this time s/he really didn't do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a cockeyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling ineptitude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all—can you figure out what the movie is about?—I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose sophomoric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that You're a Big Boy Now! is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I've written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a natio
nal tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won't be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I'll play the videocassette of the show, and you'll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I've had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host—whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter—let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing homosexual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man's life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heterosexual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the hell in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the hellfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera attitudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one's pimply ass to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I've ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that's quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote—size 20 triple-E by this time—thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy analysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn't, I would. This is why murderers who've gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.