The posters for these three movies sure have a lot of warm colors, don't they? Must've been sales on yellow and red ink back in '44, '50, and '79.
Watching All About Eve now for the first time, my general impression is that it is a film that feels not unlike The Dark Knight in execution. Unfortunately, by that comparison I don't mean that All About Eve is an ultraviolent crime film about urban decay, social order, and a caped hero's battle with laryngitis, though that would have been something all right. No, what I mean is that, like The Dark Knight, All About Eve is a merely good movie buoyed to greatness by a single, titanic supporting character who not only is more charismatic and interesting than all other aspects of the film combined but gets all the best lines to boot. The Dark Knight has Heath Ledger's Joker; All About Eve has Bette Davis's Margo Channing. It's a tired thing to say, but I'll say it anyway because it's true: every time Bette Davis was onscreen, I could not look away. She plays Margo with an electric spitefulness undercut by just the tiniest bit of sadness, and it's riveting. As for the rest of the movie... it's fine. I enjoyed it. Anne Baxter's Eve (you know, the one the movie is all about) is a distant second for most interesting character, but the rest of the cast never even comes close to either the gripping venom of Davis or the coy puppeteering of Baxter. That's not to say they're bad; it's just the hazard of playing workman parts in a movie dominated by one or two larger-than-life ones. Also, that ending is awfully neat, being all symmetric with the beginning of the plot and all. I'd say it's at least a little too cute for the movie, although if you're looking for great final shots, this film certainly has one for the ages.
So, this turned out to be pretty much great. I can't decide if I'm surprised or not, given my sometimes enthusiastic but more often reserved feelings for film noir, but this movie riveted me from beginning to end. It delivers solid thrills and cool twists and be-u-tee-ful camerawork and lighting (per usual for ol' film noir), and the plotting is refreshingly straightforward. Something I'm embarrassed to be realizing just now: Billy Wilder is a great director. I don't know how I've never put it together before doing this series, but if nothing else, I should have been clued in by his credits on both Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Still, if this is the movie that finally caused me to stand up and notice that name, well, I guess I'm okay with that. The only gripe I have with Double Indemnity is maybe not even a gripe at all but more of a misreading. For about ninety percent of the film, I thought I was seeing something of an anomaly in film noir in that I thought I detected a fully formed moral conscience in the voiceover narration of our hero, Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff. At various points in the story, the film returns to a framing device of a visibly perturbed Walter recounting the story of his criminal liaison with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) into his boss's audio recorder. With each return to this frame, Walter appears more and more distressed, accumulating sweat and rumpled hair, while his voice in his narration becomes increasingly strained. I interpreted this decay of his physique (as well as the whole act of confession) as a sign of Walter's feeling remorse for the murder, fraud, adultery, et al. that he commits over the course of the film. As it turns out (spoilers) he isn't remorseful for his actions after all; he's merely dying of a gunshot wound he got when committing yet another murder. His confession isn't an attempt to do the right thing, just a final taunt to his boss. So yeah, Walter's just about as amoral as the rest of the canon of noir heroes. That that internal conflict wasn't actually happening was a tricky move by an already tricky movie, and I'm not sure that it makes the movie worse exactly. I suppose I'm just feeling a little foolish. And come on, wouldn't it have been at least a little cool for him to show some moral compunction?
People throw around the word "nightmarish" to describe all sorts of movies, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Donnie Darko. But Apocalypse Now is one of the few movies that I can remember actually giving me nightmares. And I was twenty-two years old when I first saw it. Now, there's the distinct possibility that I'm just a wimp, or that my mind was just in a weird state the night I saw it. I certainly wouldn't call it the scariest movie I've ever seen, at least not during the actual viewing. What Apocalypse Now is, though, is a particularly unsettling intersection of philosophy and technique, where the ideas at play in the narrative feed off the technical aspects of the film like cinematography, music, etc., and those aspects in turn feed off the ideas in the narrative until the whole thing is a kind of Mรถbius strip of filmmaking where it's hard to separate the fictional elements (e.g. the whole story) from the nonfiction elements (the process of making the movie). In most movies, the obvious artifice of the filmmaking provides a buffer between us and the events playing out onscreen; we can intuit that it's fake, so we can engage the film's ideas more obliquely than we could if we encountered them in real life. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but something about Apocalypse Now obliterates that buffer. The fact that the filming of Apocalypse Now was, by all accounts, one of the worst filmmaking experiences of all time for those involved surely plays a hand in this. Watching the movie, I feel like I am brushing up against a reality of man's essential depravity so tangible that I could reach out and touch its feverish face if I wanted. It's been called a war movie, and I suppose it does take place during a war, but really, it's not about just war. It's about something baser, something sick and colossal clawing up from our unconscious. And unlike most movies, I can't turn off the screen and feel better about it any more than I can close the blinds and feel better about a thunderstorm outside my apartment. Heart of darkness indeed.
It's going to be a while until I post next (like, at least a week), so hopefully this post can tide over all y'all rabid readers out there. As always, feel free to discuss any and every aspect of these movies with me. It's great to hear from folks.
If you want, feel free to read the previous entry in the series, #s 25-27, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next entry, 31-33, here.
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