1910s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Crime/Detective, Drama, Epic, Experimental, Historical, Thriller

Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)

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Director: D.W. Griffith
Screenwriters: Hettie Gray Baker, Tod Browning, D. W. Griffith, Anita Loos, Mary H. O’Connor, Frank E. Woods

By Roderick Heath

David Wark Griffith should have been on top of the world. He had just scored what is perhaps in sheer audience numbers still the biggest hit in cinema history, with The Birth of a Nation (1915). He was being hailed all around the world as the greatest innovator and aesthetic force the young art form had yet seen. And yet Griffith was stung and chastened by the levels of anger and accusations of culpability hurled his way in the face of his great success in propagandising on the behalf of the Ku Klux Klan and enshrining of racist pseudo-history in narrative form, an impact that had sparked riots and demonstrations. His emotional response to such a conflicted situation meshed with an artistic sensibility that now had the money and clout to realise itself on any project and scale he wished. His theme was to be prejudice as a human phenomenon, not so much as a mea culpa for The Birth of a Nation as a reaction to a reaction, with a narrative that takes more than a few pot shots at the destructive impact of the self-righteous. Faced with new expectations and intoxicated with the epic style of cinema he had discovered, Griffith decided to expand upon the scenario he was planning to film next, called The Mother and the Law. Inspired by the historical imagery of Cabiria (1914) and encouraged to push his experimentations in cross-cutting to a new level, Griffith decided to tell several different stories tethered together by unity of theme as well as cinematic technique.
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The Birth of a Nation’s controversial aspect only seems to intensify over time, whilst broadening awareness of other early creative voices has robbed it of some stature as a work of innovation. With its virtually antipathetic outlook and far more deliberated artistic expression, Intolerance has nonetheless still often struggled to shrug off its long-held reputation as an awesome folly that ruined its director-impresario. The colossally expensive and logistically demanding production became a singular moment in the early history of Hollywood, one that even inspired a whole movie, the Taviani brothers’ Good Morning Babylon (1987). The shoot pooled together many future Hollywood talents and mainstays as members of the cast and crew, and came to encapsulate the enormous ambition and reckless immodesty of the rising industry. Intolerance represented a grand experiment in what a movie narrative could look like and what ideas it could contain, and how far a mass audience was willing to go. Some still call it the greatest movie ever made. Certainly it’s one of the most influential. Even if Intolerance examined possibilities for commercial filmmaking that Hollywood as a whole would largely reject for decades, filmmakers far and wide took its cinematic lessons to heart. The montage ideas Griffith wielded became vital inspirations for Soviet film theory. Something of its influence echoes through to the conversing time frames of Citizen Kane (1941) and on to The Godfather Part II’s (1974) contrapuntal structure and the splintered evocations of The Tree of Life (2011).
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If The Birth of a Nation shocked many, including its director, by outpacing all concept of how cinema could hold and manipulate an audience, Intolerance mapped regions of artistry and technique not everyone found they wanted to annex – the New York Times review labelled it incoherent and even intertitle writer Anita Loos, who had worked with Griffith before, admitted she struggled to grasp Griffith’s technique. One critic of the day, Louis Delluc, commented that the audience was confused by the time jumps, as “Catherine de Medici visited the poor of New York just as Jesus was baptizing the courtesans of Balthazar and Darius’ armies were beginning to assault the Chicago elevated.” With most movies, leaning on title cards was a relative luxury at a time when a decent percentage of the prospective audience would have had literacy troubles from either curtailed education or coming to English as a second language. The nature of silent cinema made it a perfect unifier for such an audience. But following Intolerance demanded paying attention to the written intertitles. The film’s relative financial disappointment seems generally however to have been due more to its splashy roadshow presentation, and Griffith’s growing certainty that the approach to making and releasing films that had worked with The Birth of a Nation would, despite running contrary to the swiftly settling realities of Hollywood business, would consistently deliver success, including spurning star performers.
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Intolerance tells four interwoven stories. One is set in the present day of 1916. When the Jenkins family, a clan of rich mill-owners, crack down on their striking workers, the entire community is displaced and forced to survive as most finish up in a big city slum. Amongst their number are a girl, “The Dear One” (Mae Marsh), and “The Boy” (Robert Harron). After they eventually marry The Boy quits working for a gangster, the “Musketeer of the Slums” (Walter Long), but the Musketeer has him framed and imprisoned, whilst Dear One’s infant daughter is stripped from her by a band of social welfare crusaders. The Boy is later accused of killing The Musketeer, who was actually shot by his mistress, “The Friendless One” (Miriam Cooper). A second story unfolds in ancient Babylon, as “The Mountain Girl” (Constance Talmadge), after avoiding being married off at the behest of her brother (Frank Brownlee), falls in love with King Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) from a distance, and eagerly joins the warrior forces fighting off the besieging armies of Cyrus the Great (George Siegmann). The High Priest of Bel-Marduk (Tully Marshall), infuriated by his cult being displaced by that of Ishtar, decides to betray the city to Cyrus. The third story recounts the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell) manipulates her son Charles IX (Frank Bennett) into ordering a slaughter of the Protestants in Paris, an order that sweeps up young gallant Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) and his fiancé, “Brown Eyes” (Margery Wilson). The fourth tale recounts incidents in the tale of Jesus, “The Nazarene” (Howard Gaye), including his generous miracle as the Wedding in Cana and his crucifixion.
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In truth, only the first two of these stories really add up to much. The Massacre story amounts to a few brief scenes, and the Nazarene account is closer to a recurring motif, like the famous symbolic refrain of a young mother (Lillian Gish) rocking a baby in a cradle. This vision constantly punctuates the drama and often marks shifts between the narrative strands, emphasising Griffith’s concept of the world’s evil so often gathering to crush ordinary people. It feels at times like Griffith decided to get some use out of some unproduced three-reeler scripts he had lying around, which is basically true. The present-day tale and Babylonian legend tell counterpointing tales of communal dispossession and desperation, romantic frustration, and battle. Griffith’s overarching theme evokes human society as something being perpetually born, evoked in recurring cradle motif. That refrain contrasts the imagery of maternal care and vulnerable youth with the three fates sitting balefully hunched over in the corner, who are in turn echoed in the present-day narrative by the three prison guards ready to cut the strings that will hang The Boy. The Nazarene’s fair and compassionate preaching is contrasted with the various forms of bigotry and hypocrisy glimpsed throughout the film, and his eventual execution taken as a fitting extreme for this tendency of societies to consume their innocents.
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Despite Griffith’s disavowals, the difference in focus between The Birth of a Nation’s sectarianism and Intolerance’s anti-bigotry creed certainly suggests the result of a creative mind set at war with itself and emerging with a more universal message, and mediates the previous film’s bitter portrayal of racial conflict with the poetic invocation of interracial romance in Broken Blossoms (1919). Other variances between Griffith’s most famous films are consequential and go well beyond their divergent messages. Where The Birth of a Nation was intellectually under the sway of Thomas Dixon, Intolerance feels invested with Griffith’s more personal touch in conception, with stories, despite their scale and disparate time frames, unfolding in a manner and revolving around the sorts of characters clearly more in his wheelhouse. Particularly with the focus on female protagonists, the winsome naïfs and plucky tomboys, and varying figures of desperate, conflicted emotion. The Birth of a Nation loses its initial narrative and creative momentum the more Dixon’s plot and pseudo-history dominate it and the film as a whole, and despite its relative sophistication still depicts narrative cinema as a work in progress. By contrast, Intolerance is astonishingly complete and sophisticated, building in invention and dramatic intensity with symphonic zeal to its astounding last few reels. Both films are of course works of breathless melodrama that depend upon indicted avatars of social ills and images of urgent endangerment.
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But Intolerance’s psychology is cannier and its social panoramas less maudlin and more boldly critical. In this regard Intolerance is still surprising, and to a certain extent turning from The Birth of a Nation’s sensibility to Intolerance feels like moving from a 19th century view of the world to one infinitely more modern. The downfall of Babylon, brought about by the Bel-Marduk priests, the fate imposed upon Dear One and the Boy after their community is decimated by the decisions of Arthur Jenkins (Sam De Grasse), the Nazarene’s crucifixion, and the massacre of the Huguenots, are all tales where innocents fall victim to calamities brought on by members of society determined to defend their privilege and power. Griffith’s unvarnished portrayal of violent strike-breaking, with the Jenkins’ goons shooting at demonstrators, and the indictment of do-gooder organisations as one wing of a system of oppression that takes from the lower classes on both ends, have a boldness that still feel radical especially considering they were offered at a time when such labour violence was commonplace. If Griffith had made it a few years later he would’ve risked being labelled a Communist agitator. A further layer of irony is added as the strike is caused by a cut to the workers’ wages made by Arthur to help his spinster sister Mary (Vera Lewis) fund her interest in charitable organisations. She creates the Mary T. Jenkins Foundation, the same organisation that eventually takes away Dear One’s baby. Loos’ biting intertitles describe the crusaders as having turned to agitation after losing their looks, but the film offers Mary a measure of empathy early on as she realises the younger people in her social circle no longer consider her a peer, leaving her with an empty life she tries to fill through good works.
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It’s tempting to write off Griffith as an anti-intellectual, holdover Victorian artist who gave himself up to the emotional logic of any scenario he turned loose on. But the conjoining aspect of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance on the level of social enquiry is the search for a way of conceiving society as a whole, a hunt for metaphors and concepts that can explain why the world is perpetually balanced between cruelty and amity. Intolerance has been described as a screed against government and authority, although that’s only partly true. Griffith’s ambivalence about authority figures, from parents to political leaders, is certainly another note carried over from earlier films, expressed in his previous works like The Avenging Conscience’s (1914) portrayal of an adoptive patriarch who is both tyrannical and pathetic, as well as The Birth of a Nation’s portrayals of Abraham Lincoln and Austin Stoneman as people who, with varying purposes and ideals, manipulate others to perform acts of violence. The French royals in the Massacre strand are portrayed as either weaklings or truly malicious, but the Jenkins are allowed some ambiguity through their detachment from the consequences of their actions and Mary’s wish to have a positive impact on the world. Belshazzar in Intolerance has impressive lustre as the cheiftain and embodiment of a state, one who mesmerises the otherwise wild and wilful Mountain Girl and leads his armies to a victory. But even he is ultimately distracted by the hedonistic pleasures available to a man in his position, blinding him to betrayal.
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The labelling of many characters by titles rather than names evokes sentimental types but also has a proto-modernist aspect, acknowledging their functions and their blank, universalised identities. The recurring rhythms of social life the film identifies also sees people obeying those rhythms, and so subject to forces beyond their control. This is balanced by Griffith’s tendency towards homey moralism, as the present day narrative celebrates Dear One’s ability to maintain her virtue until marriage in contrast to the Friendless One’s decline into being a gangster’s moll, whilst the indulged sensuality of Babylon can be seen as an aspect of its decadent vulnerability. But Griffith keeps in mind the processes that mould people. The Friendless One, as her title indicates, is an outsider whose eventual recourses and crimes are rooted in experience and ambiguous social ostracism: she shoots the Musketeer in part to protect The Boy, who was kind to her, as well as jealous anger for the Musketeer’s lust for Dear One. Dear One’s childlike innocence is the product of a doting father, but as circumstances change she’s tempted to mimic the provocative walk and dress of her flashier rivals for male attention around the slum. This enrages her father, and he tries to sock The Boy when he catches him romancing Dear One. Her father dies soon after, unable to endure his collapse in fortunes, leaving Dear One to navigate her own path. The sequences where Dear One resists both The Boy’s sexual overtures in an attempt to penetrate her room, result in some deeply corny stuff – “Help me to be a strong-jawed Jane!” Dear One pleads heavenwards.
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The Nazarene portion of the film gives Griffith, despite its brevity, the chance for direct and specific comments on moral disparity, Jesus’s generosity at the wedding and intervention on the behalf of the fallen woman offered in stark opposition to the self-appointed economic and moral dictatorship of the Jenkins and the De Medicis, and his crucifixion also helps imbue the other stories with an aspect of symbolic force. The Boy and Dear One’s steady lurch towards matrimony is contrasted with the Wedding at Cana as an evocation of the pleasures of a custom well-obeyed, whilst Griffith cuts from the Foundation women’s planning aggressive interventions with Jesus intervening to save the adultress from her persecutors. The crusaders, labelled “The vestal virgins of Uplift,” even launch a crackdown on dancing, turning a bustling and lively dance hall into a deathly dull restaurant. The portrayal of the Foundation crusaders is a touch ungracious as it basically accuses them of being ageing pests, big, burly matrons and nasty cows, introduced with the same touch of a slow dissolve from an empty institution to one at full flight of business Griffith used with the black-dominated state congress in The Birth of a Nation. The context of Intolerance’s making, as women’s suffrage was making headway and the push for Prohibition was gaining speed, lends it both an aspect of reaction – damn these bossy mannish women trying to run us! – and also justified caution at attempts to use state-sanctioned force to make people behave themselves.
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The anger Griffith evinces at certain forms of sanctioned bullying and coercion to achieve supposedly beneficial results is plain and livid, and the crucial scene of Dear One’s child being essentially kidnapped is both straightforward melodrama and punchy social protest. Charlie Chaplin, one of Griffith’s admirers, would channel this sequence for his own take on slum life and parental care, The Kid (1922). Both Griffith and Chaplin understood clearly the intimate terror for people living in poverty of having their children taken away as an immediate underpinning for drama. Coercive power is wielded equally by the Musketeer, who frames The Boy when he cuts him loose, and by the gang of stern crusaders who bail up Dear One in her rooms, using details like the fact she’s been drinking nips of whisky to deal with a cold against her. “Of course, hired mothers are never negligent,” an intertitle notes acerbically when Dear One is reduced to trying to catch a glimpse of her baby through the barred windows of the Foundation orphanage. Griffith’s use of the close-up, swiftly becoming identified with his specific cinematic touch, provides his great weapon in evoking the emotional straits of his characters, moving in for visions of Marsh’s gleaming, teary eyes and Cooper’s brittle visage betraying a fracturing soul. Intolerance sees Griffith perfecting the language of cinema as we know it as a dialogue of distance that alternates description and experience, humans as beings in a setting and as personas in isolation.
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As if taking up the challenge of Giovanni Pastrone’s moving camera on Cabiria, Griffith and his stalwart cinematographer Wilhelm ‘Billy’ Bitzer went one further when time came to unveil one of the grand set-pieces of set design and crowd manipulation, by hoisting their camera on a crane and staging an advancing, descending dolly shot, a common filmmaking touch today but one that must have hit the audience of the day with vertiginous force. Griffith plainly liked this moment so much he repeats it a few times. The cross-threaded narrative that so challenged the audience of the day is to contemporary eyes entirely coherent thanks to an intervening century of being schooled and stretched with film language, but it’s still relatively rare in its method, cutting between each story, noting rhymes and deviations of fate and meaning. Inevitably for a film that takes on such a theme as Intolerance and with such evangelical fervour and disgust for inequity, the stories all have a rather dark cast, with three of the four tales concluding with their protagonists dead and their causes defeated, and the fourth, the modern story, putting its heroes through utter hell. In the Massacre story, Brown Eyes becomes the exemplary victim of Intolerance as her family is slaughtered around her. Prosper’s desperate dash through the streets to try and reach her is stalled so often she’s raped and slain with sadistic relish by a mercenary soldier who’s been awaiting his chance. Prosper, clutching her body, strides out into the street and bellows abuse at the soldiers, who respond by gunning him down.
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The Babylonian portion of Intolerance has always been its most famous, the source of its most anthologised and emblematic images and its repute as a great moment in moviemaking hype. To see the enormous recreations of Babylon’s walls and temples is indeed to feel like you’ve seen the apex of a way of doing things, the climactic ceremonies of invocation for the city’s propagation doubling as an act of pure cinematic worship executed at a time when labourers and extras were cheap as chips. Less than a quarter-century after cinema’s birth it was reaching its zenith in production ambition, and since them its horizons have only shrunk in such terms, preferring today to execute such visions through computer pixels. The lavishness isn’t just in terms of set construction, but extends to Griffith’s portrayal of the Babylonian court, where Belshazzar’s “Princess Beloved” (Seena Owen), who has encouraged the worship of Ishtar over Bel-Marduk, is the king’s living idol and mate. The pageantry and minutely detailed décor and dress overwhelm the eye, replete with marvellous shots like one of Belshazzar petting a pet leopard clutching a stem of white roses in its jaws.
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The intensifying editing rhythm of Intolerance’s later reels in moving between the stories is given extra propulsion by utilising the dancing of the Babylonians to give physical, human counterpoint to the rush of cuts and evoke a gathering, hedonistic frenzy, movements and gestures propelling the cinematic edifice itself. The city’s “Temple of Love” contains a coterie of heavy-breathing Sapphic priestess-concubines, proving sex stuff wasn’t beyond the prim Southern Baptist Griffith and anticipating his rival-follower Cecil B. DeMille’s similar excursions, although Griffith’s images are arguably racier than anything DeMille ever dared. Griffith doesn’t labour to be condemnatory either, but generally considers this mostly fictional concept of a bygone society on its own terms. He even expresses a certain outrage that Babylon is destroyed through betrayal and rapacious imperialism, and considers Belshazzar and his court as representing one apex of civilisation in beauty and good living. The story revolves however around the feral outsider The Mountain Girl, whose pluck, daring, and idolisation of Belshazzar stand in fascinating contrast to Brown Eyes’ incarnation of a standard damsel in distress and Dear One’s wan and victimised incarnation of a more passive and Victorian-era feminine ideal.
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Griffith’s receptivity to the energies of his female cast members and interest in woman-driven stories seems to have been one secret to his success, and his best-received subsequent works, Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms, Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), revolved around young women trying to survive a mean and battering world. Talmadge’s startling energy and expressivity comes damn close to stealing the whole film despite the structure’s resistance to such things. Talmadge pulls off a comedic coup in the scene where she casually makes a mockery of her brother’s attempts to have her sold off in marriage, when The Mountain Girl first sees Belshazzar and spins off into rhapsodies of romantic expression, and later anchoring the high tragedy of the story. And yet The Mountain Girl and Dear One are ultimately linked by their determination to fight for the man they love and their attempts to penetrate a mystery. Just as Dear One talks a friendly beat policeman (Tom Wilson) into helping her find who really shot the Musketeer, so The Mountain Girl uncovers the Bel-Marduk High Priest’s treachery by tracking his chariots out to Cyrus’ camp, and tries to warn Belshazzar. Caught in the middle is The Rhapsode (Elmer Clifton), a proselytiser for Bel-Marduk who falls for The Mountain Girl despite her disdain for him: “Put away thy perfumes, they garments of Assinnu, the female man. I shall love none but a soldier!”
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Intolerance presents The Mountain Girl as perhaps a creature that could only exist in the distant past, although she also seems designed to speak to all the eager young proto-flappers of the day. As Cyrus brings his armies to the gate, The Mountain Girl’s skill as an archer proves valuable in helping with the defence: Griffith cuts from The Mountain Girl hurling stones at the attackers to the more decorous if no less partisan Princess Beloved in a frenzy of inspiring fervour. Later The Rhapsode, drunk and thrilled by being chosen as one of the circle in on the High Priest’s plans, boasts to The Mountain Girl about the plot. The echoes of the ancient tale in the present-day one see aspects of Belshazzar, Princess Beloved, and The Mountain Girl in The Musketeer, The Friendless One, and Dear One, if greatly reconfigured, and the drab squalor of the slums sharply contrasts the splendour of the ancient world, if not the poshness of the Jenkins’ mansion. Belshazzar’s harem is sarcastically equated with The Musketeer’s pornographic décor and solitary concubine. Broken Blossoms would both narrow the focus of Intolerance’s preoccupations but also intensify them on a key frequency, reducing the matter to the outcast man, delicate woman, and brutal authority figure. The result was perhaps the purest statement of Griffith’s poetic streak, as intimate as Intolerance is grand.
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But aside from passages of the Babylon siege, which becomes interludes of pure spectacle, Intolerance retains its focus on the human level remarkably well; truly, Griffith’s feel for cinematic art seemed to intensify all the more precisely the more he was chasing a direct, near-physical relationship with his audience. The siege scenes are nonetheless still amazing, coming on with such ferocity in staging and cutting and shooting it’s hard to believe at points they were staged: where Pastrone’s siege sequences, whilst obviously the model, were nonetheless rather static and clunky, Griffith unleashes pure cinema, with shots of warriors plunging off the walls and siege towers blazing in the night. He even weaves touches of comedy, like two defenders getting knocked out by catapulted stones and falling into each-other’s arms like sleeping babes. The siege, dominating the middle half of the film, contrasts not great climaxes in the other stories but rather passages of imminent crisis, in The Boy’s return home from jail and conflict with The Musketeer, and Catherine swaying her son to order the massacre.
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The Boy’s trial and imprisonment awaiting hanging sees Griffith kicking up the rhythm another notch, as Dear One and the cop look desperately for a way to save him, and The Friendless One clearly eddies in guilt and confusion. After following Dear One and the cop to the governor’s house, The Friendless One confesses to them and joins their efforts to chase down the train the governor is on. Griffith unleashes his most frenetic and dazzling editing as he switches between this pursuit, Prosper’s dash to save Brown Eyes, and The Mountain Girl trying to outpace Cyrus’s chariot horde to warn Belshazzar. Griffith’s epiphany here, semi-accidental perhaps, involves modernity’s possibilities for altering ancient realities: where The Mountain Girl can’t save the day, arriving too late to rouse the Babylonians to a proper defence, the present-day dashes succeed by gaining the aid of a race car driver who outpaces the train. The Mountain Girl dies valiantly but forlornly in defending the palace, riddled with arrows whilst Belshazzar and the Princess kill themselves, and Cyrus howls in glee as he announces himself master of the city.
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The climactic image of the Babylonian story is possibly Griffith’s greatest, of the dead Mountain Girl, a look of sublime bewilderment on her face, resting amidst the carnage in Belshazzar’s palace, a pair of yoked-together doves from Belshazzar’s pet menagerie nestled by her body, oblivious animals detached from the human drama whilst also emblemising all its romantic tragedy. Griffith, to try and generate some more revenue out of his huge folly, would later release the Babylon section as a standalone feature called The Fall of Babylon, this time with The Mountain Girl surviving and escaping; he also released the modern story separately and toned down the anti-business and strikebreaking scenes. Only the present day story ends happily out of the narrative sprawl in Intolerance, albeit still with a bloodcurdling aspect. The Boy is saved just before being hung, and he and Dear one are reunited in the prison yard, her wild pleasure as she embraces him contrasted by his dead-eyed shock. The prison scenes see Griffith using blocking and framing to create semi-abstract effects – bustling bodies of convicts in striped uniforms enclosed by stark brick walls, faces appearing through barred portals – that carry on some of Griffith’s experiments on The Avenging Conscience in not just using editing and decor to construct his storytelling but also manipulations of what he puts before his camera to evoke shifting psychological landscapes.
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Carl Dreyer, another filmmaker profoundly influenced by Griffith, might have remembered these in the stark images of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as well as the transfiguring close-ups, and they also anticipate Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock’s explorations of dehumanisation through similarly skewed visual language. The film concludes with a coda diverging into outright allegory and summative preaching, echoing the similar note at the end of The Birth of a Nation but greatly expanding it for a dreamlike vision of warfare and bloodshed, complete with shells shattering urban buildings in fascinating special effects shots. Griffith here is reflecting on the omnipresent reality of the war consuming Europe at the time, and even sensing America would soon be drawn into it, with the resulting fear of the same destruction being wrought about its cities. But, again echoing the end of Cabiria if with a more dynamic use of the motif, an angelic host appears above a battlefield, arresting soldiers in the middle of mutual murder. The host initiates an age of loving peace, where prisons crumble to green fields and people celebrate by dropping flowers from ghostly zeppelins. A bizarre, silly, joyous end to a film that feels like cinema’s ever-flowing wellspring.

1950s, Drama, Foreign, Historical, Japanese cinema

Sanshô the Bailiff (1954)

Sanshô dayû

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

By Roderick Heath

Kenji Mizoguchi’s legendary 1954 film is an arresting blend: a story derived from folk-tale themes, essayed with a rigorous clarity of storytelling, and realised in the most beautiful and involving cinematic terms. Mizoguchi is often cited as being Japanese film’s most perfect and lucid stylist, and Sanshô the Bailiff would certainly bear that reputation out. If his great rivals Ozu and Kurosawa preferred, respectively, the quiet, intricate intimacy of close, deeply personal drama or an expressive, elemental sense of nature and the soul, Mizoguchi rather evokes both sensibilities and sets them in subtle conflict. These tendencies can be seen in the intricate way Mizoguchi offsets the rhythms of his human drama, replete with cruelty, parasitic and hypocritical governance and officials, hard moral choices, and bleak chances, with the calm abundance and simplicity of nature, imbued with an undercurrent of spiritual longing. His work in Sanshô is both utterly heartfelt but also the product of a thoroughgoing ironist, as ideal and actual, nature and humanity, baseness and transcendence lock in a defiant, grueling struggle.

The film opens with a storytelling technique reminiscent of the in medias res tradition of classical sagas, as the family of Masauji Taira (Masao Shimizu) makes the journey across Japan to join their patriarch at his distant job post. His wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), son Zushiô (Yoshiaki Hanayagi), and the daughter Anju (Kyôko Kagawa), whom he hasn’t seen since she was an infant, are going on foot, accompanied only by their female servant Ubatake (Chieko Naniwa). Camping one night in a district that is rife with slave traders, the family are visited by a priestess (Kikue Môri) who offers them shelter. But the offer was a ploy to get Tamaki and Ubatake into the boat of two slavers who try to leave the two children behind: in a panicked struggle, Ubatake falls from the boat and drowns and Tamaki is taken to Sado Island and forced into a life of prostitution. Zushiô and Anju are sold to the estate run by Sanshô (Eitarô Shindô), bailiff for the state of Tango and defender of the interests of the entrenched aristocracy—he manages the estate of the Minister of War—who maintains a strict and brutal hegemony over a large population of indentured servants. Sanshô’s son Taro (Akitake Kôno), quietly disgusted by his father’s inhumanity, learns of Anju and Zushiô’s parentage and advises them to conceal their real identities and wait to until they are older and stronger to break free.

Zushiô takes on the name Mushu, after the place of his birth, and Anju becomes Shinobu, and they survive for 10 years amongst Sanshô’s slaves. Zushiô becomes hardened and callous, emptied of any intention to escape and preferring to get in tight with the bailiff, even carrying out one of his standard punishments for attempted escape—branding on the forehead—on an old man. When Anju hears a newly arrived girl singing a song she heard on Sado Island, in which her and Zushiô’s names are mentioned, it seems to confirm that their mother is still alive and living under the name Nakagimi. Tamaki is indeed still alive, and her captors are so fed up with her attempts to escape they have hobbled her by cutting her Achilles’ tendons. Zushiô is initially contemptuous of his sister’s attempts to talk him into escaping, but when they obey Sanshô by carrying a old and sick slave woman, Namiji (Noriko Tachibana), into the forest to die now, Zushiô comes around. Anju insists that Zushiô take Namiji instead of her. But once he’s gone and the bailiff’s men are roused, Anju drowns herself in a lake to avoid inevitable torture. Zushiô finds shelter at a monastery where Taro has become a monk, and Taro and the abbot endeavor to help him make contact with the prime minister in Kyoto.

For many good reasons, the exalted spheres of Japanese cinema in the late ’40s and ’50s were preoccupied with a deeply ruminative, urgently humanistic philosophy that arose from the country having to contend with the wrenching cultural and physical fall-out of the Second World War. That soul searching tended to be explored through historical parable. Sanshô is one of the most sublime results of that era, and, in spite of its formal beauty and warm heart, it’s also a coldly realistic film that tells a grim truth about Japan’s feudal past that’s virtually unimaginable in the Technicolor plasticity of Hollywood historical movies from the same period. Nor is the film at all hesitant about describing the interests of power and varieties of exploitation—physical, fiscal, political and sexual. It’s made clear early in the film that Taira was sacked for attempting to ease the burden on his citizens rather than meet the demands of a militarist government. Sanshô himself is protected and honoured for his capacity to turn human suffering and ruthless oppression into piles of money for the government coffers.

Later, as he attempts to assert his claims, Zushiô finds himself forced to sneak about the prime minister’s residence to have any hope of seeing the all-powerful official, reduced to despairing pleading before being dragged away and imprisoned. Whilst the minister and the state he serves are capable of recognising nobility—Zushiô carries an idol that was given to his clan decades before by the prime minister’s ancestor—and restore Zushiô not only to rank but give him the governorship of Tango as compensation, he soon learns he isn’t entirely empowered to end slavery or even legally punish Sanshô when his misdeeds are restricted to a private estate. Justice is entirely subordinate to the regular running of the state’s machinery and the interests of powerful men. From the smallest to the highest level of the society portrayed, people make commodities of each other, and respect is a debased currency as hierarchy is constantly abused.

Mizoguchi doesn’t offer any actual portrayals of violence, and yet the key moments of corporeal cruelty that punctuate the film are all the more effective for their judicious presentation of how this mass of exploitation is enforced: even when the physical damage is only hinted at, it’s impossible not to cringe during the scenes of branding and Tomiko’s hideous punishment—the antithesis of torture-porn. The narrative’s steady, committed assault on the aristocratic family unit—mother turned to whore, children as forced labourers, father a figure of distant impotence—becomes a tour through the precincts of hell for the most stable and hallowed of social institutions. This necessary awareness of the true state of things is, however, inextricable with Zushiô’s final dedication to realising his father’s ideals: the secure walls of social roles that have been violated by his family’s travails give him an awareness of the terror and complexity of life that is alien to the invested folk around him, and drives his determination to keep the wheel in spin for people beyond himself and his kin.

For all the high tragedy, darkness, and cynicism that permeate Sanshô as a narrative, however, it’s also a cracking good yarn that powers on with Dickensian twists of fortune and fortitude of moral meaning. The breathless intensity of the storyline is undeniable, and that’s something of a lost art these days in so much cinema and literature—the capacity to retain the depth of great art and the force of fine melodrama in a singular shape. Mizoguchi and his screenwriters Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda make the teeth clench with clever delaying devices, like Zushiô’s initial failure to make the prime minister listen and in the finale in which he tries to track down the woman known as Nakagimi only to be put on to the overeager tart (Teruko Omi) who’s inherited that reputed name first. By this time, Zushiô has triumphed not only over Sanshô, but also over the self-interested world he represents; Zushiô used the power given him by the prime minister to ban slavery, against the protests of his advisors and knowing that his action will surely end his career nearly before it begins. Sanshô, in retaliation, sends his men to knock down the decree signposts, which is what Zushiô counted on, for he can now exert his right to seize Sanshô for destroying the governor’s property, leading to liberation of the estate’s slaves.

But it’s a victory for other people more than Zushiô himself, as he learns of Anju’s death and grimly weighs his future as the former slaves party, riot, and finally burn down Sanshô’s manor in a nihilistic consummation. Hanayagi’s performance is the most compelling in the film (although no one is less than excellent), essaying an individual who passes through almost insensibly strange contortions of luck and station. His character swings from extremes of stiff-necked, glowering inhumanity to frantic pleading and unendurable, almost metaphysical terror as he appeals to the prime minister, to troubled but determined efforts to live up to his father’s creed and rescue what’s left of his family life. With him stand Tanaka and Kagawa, two pools of feminine calm and rooted conscience driven to terrible ends by their determination not to cave in to mere force.

Mizoguchi’s formal invention in interpolating fragments of explanatory flashbacks has become a common device in filmmaking, especially Japanese genre cinema, and yet it seems uniquely fresh and concise here. In a few deftly composed minutes of film, Mizoguchi describes the characters who will preoccupy the drama, their reasons for being in their current predicament, and the dangers, both emotional and physical, that await them: revealing the circumstances by which Taira lost his job and with a brilliantly economical flourish, panning down from Taira’s humiliation by a samurai general to show Tamaki’s reaction, before dissolving back into the present-tense as she takes a cup of water from a river, lost in pained reverie even as she tries to reunite the family. As the family makes it trek, Mizoguchi offers precisely composed shots encompassing characters and landscape that suggest a harmonic completeness to their world, usually offering frames filled with water, earth, flowers, and sky. The relationship between the material and spiritual lives of the characters is constantly entwined with physical setting, courtesy of Kazuo Miyagawa’s photography.

In later scenes, as when Zushiô finally visits his father’s grave, he finds it caked in flowers brought by his grateful subjects; Mizoguchi restores here the pellucid beauty of the early sequences, once again including sea, sky, land, and humanity in the shot. Anju’s suicide, a careful composition of the dim light of dusk and the utter stillness of the water, evoke the soothing end of pain and a forlorn, beatific deliverance. When Zushiô finally finds his mother, now aged, blind, and devastated by too much loss, it’s on the edge of a beach that’s been turned into a wasteland by the literal calamity of a tsunami, but that all too accurately reflects the shattered lives and mental states of the last two Tairas. When Zushiô apologises in grief for not returning as a great man or saving Anju’s life, but having tried to stick by his father’s principles, Tomiko, grizzled and crushed but not lost, assures him that if he hadn’t done so, she’s sure they would never have been reunited at all. It’s a simple message, but delivered with force and conviction. In cumulative detail and effect, Sanshô the Bailiff is like the universe in miniature.

1970s, British cinema, Drama

Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

Director: David Lean
Screenwriter: Robert Bolt

By Roderick Heath

A contradiction of Ryan’s Daughter is that, in spite of the sheer expansiveness of its style and production, it’s an often painfully intimate tale. The film’s antiheroic romanticism is nailed solidly together by two rigid spikes: one, a bolt of irony that borders on cruelty as the characters’ fantasies seem to be fulfilled only to be snatched away to leave them squalidly floundering, and the other, a steely insistence upon moral backbone. David Lean’s penultimate film, the calamitous reception of which drove him from the cinema screen for more than a decade, nonetheless carries the flavour of a crucially personal piece of work—more personal, indeed, than the mighty but disjointed Doctor Zhivago (1965), his big previous success.

Although it retained the vast cinematic expanses of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter was, in many ways, a return to his roots, a point illustrated by his bringing back Trevor Howard and John Mills, who had been leading men in his Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946), as character actors. Like Encounter, Ryan’s Daughter is about an adulterous affair. Like Madeleine (1950), it follows a transgressive heroine who is harshly punished for the perception of that transgression. Unlike the crisp domestic simplicity of those earlier films, however, Ryan’s Daughter appropriates the whole of Ireland as its canvas, essaying in lustrous sprawls of earth, sky, and sea. Although, like Doctor Zhivago, it contrasts private passion with civil conflict and elemental force, the film’s far more focused, and the way those aspects relate are more acutely paradoxical.

It’s 1916, and Ireland vibrates with the spirit of revolt and detestation of the occupying English soldiers. Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) is the spoilt, starry-eyed daughter of Thomas (Leo McKern), the publican of a small coastal village where everyone is essentially faced with the same problem: soul-crushing boredom. Rosy reads romantic literature and harbours a crush on her former teacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), the closest thing to a bohemian in the district. The most respected figure in town is Father Hugh Collins (Howard), embodiment of muscular Christianity; the least respected is the deformed, childish Michael (Mills). But they are two men united in their love of fishing and their protective impulses for Rosy, and, like she and Charles, distinct from the townsfolk.

Rosy declares her love for Charles, and he, despite his misgivings over their age difference and his own lackluster temperament, gives in. Their wedding night is a calamity, and Rosy is soon driven in wayward circles by her dissatisfied yen until fate tosses her a dubious answer to her prayers: Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), a shell-shocked, limping British war hero who takes over a base situated close to the schoolhouse Charles runs. Charles waits moodily for their affair to burn itself out, and the townsfolk, getting wind of it, ostracise her, but a tenuous balance continues until an IRA hero, Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster), comes to retrieve a shipment of arms dropped off the coast by German ships.

Ryan’s Daughter’s genesis was when Lean and writing partner Robert Bolt planned to adapt Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Upon hearing that a rival version might beat theirs, they decided on a looser adaptation, and relocated the tale to a more dramatic location, while retaining the tart flavour of Flaubert’s work. For anyone paying attention, Ryan’s Daughter is often excruciating in the proliferation of humiliations small and large—sexual, emotional, and social. The hugeness of nature’s overflowing force contrasts the pettiness of the people, and yet connects to their slow-burning passion. For Bolt, the script was a love letter to star Miles, his wife, and for Lean, the film seems almost an emotional autobiography. At the time it might have looked out of date, but today it seems more a riff on certain clichés that inverts their meaning.

The characters, except for Doryan, who merely snatches at opportunities to alleviate his shellshock, are defined by attachment to private myths, but these can manifest in very different ways. Doryan, for lacking them, chooses self-annihilation. Rosy is the obvious linchpin, her expansive nature intricately connected to the rhythms of the world. Charles, too, is defined by his fantasies, as hinted by his love of Beethoven, and manifesting when he traces the prints Rosy and Doryan have left on the beach, imagining Doryan in the dress uniform of another era’s cavalier and Rosy in a refined yellow dress, as Maurice Jarre’s intelligent score spirals in Beethoven-ish vigour. It’s a scene that bares the workings of Charles the man, and explicates his reaction to Rosy’s adultery, feeding as it does his own need for oversized gestures even as it tortures him.

Michael is tormented by his adoration for Rosy, thinking, in his childish way, that if he does as the other men do at Rosy’s wedding, or if he imitates Doryan, that he might appeal to her. He tends to reflect the lacks of others back at them: the villagers’ casual cruelty in tearing off a lobster’s claw; the foolish enthusiasm in love of Rosie and Charles and of the villagers again in playing with weaponry; and echoing Doryan’s gammy leg when following him. The villagers cling to a different fantasy of transcendence, that of the rebellion, a fantasy consummated in aiding O’Leary haul the weapons from the grip of an apocalyptic storm. To approach Lean’s “epics” without a sense of his use of landscape as not merely backdrop but a spiritual barometer for his characters, a pantheistic linkage of human nature and elemental rhythm, is to miss much of their point. But it’s there in the throb and rush of the trains that drive through Brief Encounter and in Madeleine, where the electrified, sensual reels of the poor dancers offsets the surrender of bourgeois Madeleine to sexual passion. It’s present in the clawing trees and blasted spaces that terrify Pip in Great Expectations, and the manifestation of Miss Havisham’s diseased psyche that is her house, which Pip, unlike his counterpart in Dicken’s novel, awakens to and revolts.

Lean, the product of a Quaker upbringing in which a private ethical compass is paramount, rebelled and led an often errantly sensual life himself, full of fractious unions. He gravitated to such fraught tales of friction between just such a compass and fervent impulse. In his later films, there is a larger contrast between that sort of private confusion, and larger, less easily perceived patterns of duty and manipulation. In Ryan’s Daughter, Rosy’s need for eruptive passion hands the villagers a scapegoat when O’Leary is caught and the guns impounded right at the moment of their triumph. His capture was the fault of Rosy’s own father, equally given as he is to proselytising for the rebellion but happy to collect money as an informer who, finally, is forced to betray O’Leary.

At the film’s heart is sex—indeed, bad sex: subjects still new to the mainstream cinema at the time, the latter hardly tackled directly before. Specifically, it highlights the crushing failure that is Charles and Rosy’s wedding night, when he, crippled by anxiety and repression, and she, hoping for a transcendent glory, are both left stewing, having passed through a Hogarthian nightmare of a wedding feast in which the bored, horny locals mock the anxious couple, subject Rosy to a parade of meaty kisses, and pelt the windows of their room with grain. And yet, Charles is a strong, virile man—he’s Robert Mitchum, after all—and Rosy and he have a charged exchange when she encourages him to sit without his shirt after a day’s digging during tea so she can enjoy the sight of his body. Later, when Rosy and Doryan rendezvous for their first coupling, they ride into a dark forest, the floor of which is lined with purplish flowers, tinged both with unknowable threat and promise. Ironically, the following sexual coupling is the only misjudged one in the movie, using corny, natural motifs to reflect the tides of Rosy’s orgasm.

Rosy’s search for personal bliss explicitly contrasts the town’s search for communal excitement, cut off as it is from direct expression of passions. “It’s either married or virgin ‘round ‘ere,” Doryan’s predecessor as commander of the camp (Gerald Sim), warns him. Early on, the lads and lasses of the town stand on opposite sides of the single street, eyeing each other in teasing, frustrated ranks. When Michael comes between them, brandishing the colossal lobster he’s caught that seems to encapsulate both his own personal ugliness and the arbitrariness of cruelty, the young men fall on him to the wailing, hysterical delight of the girls. It’s a sexless orgy that anticipates the great communal frenzy on the beach, and then Rosy’s Calvary, during which the whole town delights in stripping off her clothes, cutting off her hair, and mocking her sensuality.

Despite the film’s breadth, the most telling details come in small, even barely perceivable gestures: when Doryan strips off his overcoat, halting a typist’s labours in recognising the telltale red ribbon on his tunic; when Rosy realises that her father is the traitor everyone thinks she is; the sand that confirms Rosy’s adultery, caked in her hat; when Rosy rushes out to greet Doryan in the night, thinking Charles is asleep, and a cut back to Charles watching them from their house immediately severs the romantic intensity of the moment, halting the swooning surge in the score with the force of a punch in the belly. Ideas are filtered through chains of imagery and totems of character.

How Lean shoots his characters, especially in the first 15 minutes, encapsulates their relationships to both the world and themselves. Rosy reigns on the clifftops and meadows, adrift like her wind-snatched parasol. Hugh and Michael are at home in the bitter honesty of the sea. Charles is constantly walking the sand of the beach, between the two realms, and discerns Rosy’s affair through the marks it leaves there. Doryan, when he arrives, is insistently associated with stark, rough-hewn stone and the ruins of the ship in which he finally destroys himself in an auto de fé. The townsfolk always appear in masses, sliced through by or enveloping the major figures. Like Zhivago and the Dickens works he adapted early on, Ryan’s Daughter is droll, but increasingly, unamusingly barbed in its caricature of self-important, self-appointed apostles who shrink before individuals whose authority of spirit is unquestioned, but, like termites, overwhelm the heroes with their numbers.

It’s perhaps legitimate to criticise the film for conflating disparate ideas—D. H. Lawrence sensuality in the woods abutting a Flaubertian scorn for provincialism and private fantasies, with some of Synge’s roughneck poeticism and acid portraits of the Celtic character for flavour. And yet it’s precisely the film’s contrapuntal rhythm contrasting those different aspects that is its soul and point, the alternations of whimsy and tragedy, ardour and humiliation. The smallness of gestures revealing the largest of failings, the contrasts that interrogate rhetorical tropes like “love” and “bravery,” the latter as crucial an element as the former. “A brave man’s a brave man,” Ryan says to Doryan as both compliment and rebuke when he comes to drink in the pub, “whether in Irish green, British khaki, or German grey.” Ryan works himself to a pitch of heroism in pulling guns from the eye of the storm, after calling up his English masters who will wait to deflate the heroic moment. Doryan, in listening to the Captain’s account of his own fear that he’ll disgrace himself in battle, can only tell him: “You don’t know what you’ll do.” All he remembers of battle is cowering and squirming in the muck. It becomes clear in the end that Charles, with his unflinching capacity to face the worst in himself and the world and still stand up, is the bravest chap around.

Mills won a Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Michael, and he does it supremely well, but it’s a gift considering the role, and Howard and McKern would have been just as rightly rewarded if they’d gained the statuette. Mitchum’s presence in the film is odd, and yet, on reflection, it’s hard to see anyone else doing a better job; his Irish accent is fine, and that resolutely down-to-earth style he possessed as an actor serves his character’s gentleness perfectly. Miles was Oscar-nominated, but lost to Glenda Jackson’s similarly lusty, ambitious character in Women in Love. Still, Miles plays Rosy beautifully, achieving that most difficult of arcs in film acting—not just growing older, but growing up. Broader, but enjoyable performances come from Marie Keen and Arthur O’Connell as the village’s chief bigots, Mr. and Mrs. McCardle, and Evin Crowley as the tarty, nasty Moureen, who blooms in girlish joy when she gets an excited kiss from O’Leary. Jones practically disappeared after this film, by his own choice, but he was extremely effective here, perhaps even more than Lean’s original choice Marlon Brando might have been: his Doryan is deeply alienated, almost operating on a different time scale to the rest of the characters, and certainly living in a different reality to them. He vaguely portends Michael Sarrazin’s Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), insofar as he looks like a romantic hero and yet is crudely stitched together, an alien being created by the shock of modernity.

It’s confirmed in the finale that heroism can be the opposite of what it can appear to be. Charles and Rosy have to muster real courage and walk out of the town pretending that their marriage is solid and that they don’t care about the locked doors and jeering whistles that send them off. They continue to maintain their self-possession even when the wind snatches away Rosy’s hat, revealing the horror that is now her hair to a stunned Michael. The end is, in a way, a cleansing fire, and, interestingly, Charles and Rosy are the only characters in a Lean epic to emerge in one piece, galvanised in personality and outlook. In bidding them farewell, Hugh crossly tells Charles that if they’re thinking they’re better off splitting up, “I doubt it! That’s my gift to you—that doubt!” It’s not much of a comfort, but we still feel like cheering.

2000s, Auteurs, Drama

Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

“The blood stays on the blade,” Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) tells his young son Amsterdam (Cian McCormack) as he slices his cheek with a razor blade, inducting the boy into a creed of macho lore. Priest shows him a medal of St. Michael: “He cast Satan out of paradise!” Father, holding an iron Celtic cross, leads Son and a gathering army of jostling tribes—Celts, Africans, sheer barbarians—out of an underground labyrinth. These warriors inclue Hellcat Maggie (Cara Seymour), who’s filed her teeth into fangs, McGloin (Gary Lewis), and Happy Jack (John C. Reilly). Their rise to the day passes through eons; from Neolithic depths to the medieval squalor of the Old Bakery building, used as a home by immigrant families. Pounding on the soundtrack is a “shammy,” a military march with a syncopated tin whistle, a Civil War style that eventually mutated into jazz. Like a negotiation between Agamemnon and Achilles, Priest briefly discusses payment to take part in battle with Walter “Monk” McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), who wields a club riddled with notches for men he’s laid low, before Monk kicks the doors open on the snow-crusted amphitheatre of Paradise Square, the Five Points, New York, 1846.

This great opening sequence lays out the scheme of Gangs of New York, a devolution of American society and a study of the nature of myth—the way cultural memory is transmitted through legendary narrative. Its plot evokes The Iliad, Gilgamesh, Saul and David, and many other legends, tied to a factual work of social history. The germ for the film was planted when, as a boy, Scorsese heard a piece of Catholic New York folklore, of communal resistance to an attempt by Protestant Nativists to burn down a Catholic Church. Scorsese re-encountered the tale in the book The Gangs of New York by demimonde historian Herbert Asbury, published in the 1920s. For 31 years, Scorsese tried to turn that work into a movie. He finally got the money from Miramax, shooting the film on detailed sets at Cinecitta, home of the Italian film industry and of so many epic film productions. The film was supposed to do for Scorsese what Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan did for Steven Spielberg—garner him an Oscar, which, of course, it did not. Scorsese wanted The Clash to act in the film when he tried to make it in the 1970s, and heavy doses of such punk spirit, period cynicism, and black comedy drive the film, rather than an easily laudable “quality” aesthetic.

The germ for the core subject of Gangs of New York was found in the true tale of Bill Poole, a Nativist-affiliated enforcer, probably assassinated by the son of an Irish immigrant he had murdered. Scorsese had screenwriter Jay Cocks pen a script, refined later by Kenneth Lonnergan and Steven Zaillian, telling the story of William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), who leads the Federation of American Natives to challenge Priest’s Dead Rabbits and allied Irish gangs in a fateful rumble. Bill claims the mantle of his father, killed in the War of 1812, as a defender of his nation from “the foreign hordes.” The gang members, outcasts and victims of Empires, drag power out of the earth and wield it fearlessly in this recklessly created New World. Their titanic street battle is a whirl of cracked skulls, torn mouths, gouged eyes, bitten-off ears. Bill kills Priest, whom he declares an honourable enemy. He outlaws the Dead Rabbits and orders Amsterdam committed to Hellgate Asylum.

When Amsterdam has grown into the glowering adult form of Leonardo DiCaprio, he is released from Hellgate, given a bible by the warden, and told “God has forgiven you. Now you must learn to forgive.” Amsterdam throws the bible off a bridge as he walks back to Manhattan, and retrieves from the now-emptied caves below the Old Bakery his St. Michael medal and a knife of his father’s. He is assaulted by, but easily beats, Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas) and Negro pal Jimmy Spoils (Larry Gilliard Jr.); Johnny had, as a boy, aided Amsterdam in his attempt to escape the Butcher’s men, and Amsterdam falls in with their gang of petty thieves. Monk now runs a barber shop. Amsterdam learns that Bill, in an annual act of political theatre, commemorates his killing of Priest by drinking a flaming glass of alcohol before his assembled court. Amsterdam determines to kill him in the act.

New York is kaleidoscopic with nationalities, brisk patricians and vigorous plebeians, a seething society trying to cut out its two cancers—slavery and poverty—before they become terminal. The Civil War is hurting. Irish immigrants streaming off the boats are shoved into uniforms and shipped off to fight the Confederates. The first draft in U.S. history is about to begin, spreading discontent amongst the poor who can’t cough up the $300 to be exempted. Bill likes to throw knives at Lincoln’s posters as his bully boys, who now include McGloin, assault Negro freemen. McGloin typifies the racism of Irish immigrants, displacing the loathing directed at them onto blacks.

Presiding over the city is the Tammany Hall boss William Tweed (Jim Broadbent). He governs through bribes, vote-cramming, dirt-dealing, and back-stabbing. Tweed makes overtures to Bill, wanting him to aid the Tammany machine with muscle work, clobbering political opponents and mustering the voting power of the slums. “The appearance of the law must be upheld,” Tweed asserts, “especially when it’s being broken.” Bill perceives himself the emperor of the underclass, his strength, the streets that converge on Paradise Square: “Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand it becomes a fist. And, if I wish, I can turn it against you.” Public utilities are a tool of such politics; volunteer fire services in the town war with each other and rob burning houses. A brawl between a team sponsored by Tweed and another gives Amsterdam and Johnny an opportunity to brave the flames and get the loot. From the window, Amsterdam catches sight of Bill riding on a fire engine to Tweed’s aid, bathed in demonic red with Melvillian portent. Amsterdam and his gang must share spoils with Happy Jack, now an extremely corrupt policeman, and with Bill, whom Amsterdam and Johnny pay off at Satan’s Circus, the saloon he holds court in. They’re treated to the sight of Bill stabbing a man he plays cards with in the hand for making small bets, then assuring the boys, “Come closer, I won’t bite.”

Bill gives the lads a lucrative score, a Portuguese ship in the harbour. They find the crew’s been massacred by another gang. Amsterdam steals away the captain’s body and sells it to science. Bill congratulates them: “They made the Police Gazette, a periodical of note.” He soon finds himself drawn close by Bill, a trusted lieutenant for his well-proven smarts and toughness; Bill clearly fancies Amsterdam as a surrogate son. Bill, who really is a butcher by trade, educates him in the finer points of knife fighting on a pig carcass. The Natives attend a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which an actor playing Lincoln preaches harmony. They pelt the actors with missiles. In the ruckus, an assassin tries to shoot Bill. Amsterdam reflexively tackles and kills him, and Bill’s wound is slight. Amsterdam is stricken over his confused impulses, and Monk, having recognised him, questions him pointedly about his intentions.

The link between the Democratic Party and the Irish that eventually produced JFK begins here, when Bill, having rejected entirely the idea of courting the immigrant vote (“If only I had the guns, Mr. Tweed, I’d shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil!”) forces Tweed to reject the Nativists and embrace the Irish. “You’re turning your back on the future,” Tweed warns. “Not our future,” Bill replies. The soundtrack jostles with folk music, Irish shanties, African laments, field-hand chorals, and Chinese melodies, all of which one day will be compressed into American pop music. Scorsese’s camera laps up the antique, pimped-up styling the gangs affect, eyeing the roots not just for his own films’ social studies, but for the popularity of gangster and Western films, punk music and gangsta rap, in the power-defying showiness of these criminal-warriors.

The film mixes physical realism and grand theatricality. Scorsese references Visconti again—he frames advancing soldiers after the Battle of Palermo sequence of The Leopard (1963). His staging of fights and baroque sense of period style evokes Sergio Leone, John Ford, even Samuel Fuller, as he has singers walking through shots, for example, when Finbar Furey, as a publican, plays to the camera like a congenial host to a patron, sings the period ditty “New York Girls” as we explore Satan’s Circus. Pitch-black comedy gives the film idiosyncratic punch, like in a public execution where the bailiff disgustedly announces crimes that includes “sodomy!” or when Bill pretends to cry over the corpse of a “poor, defenceless little rabbit” Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a pickpocket, comes into Amsterdam’s life. Rescued off the street as a child by Bill, she became his lover before having an abortion that left her scarred, something Bill can’t abide. Amsterdam and Jenny’s encounters are fraught with mutual loathing and sexual attraction, which comes to a head when she steals his St. Michael medal, prompting him to trail her across town to get it back. When churchmen who are rebuilding the Old Bakery as a Church hold a dance, everyone flocks there, including transvestite prostitutes who solicit incredulity from the ecumenical Minister (Alec McCowen). Johnny, severely smitten by Jenny, is heartbroken when she chooses to dance with Amsterdam. Their later attempt to rut on the docks ceases abruptly when Amsterdam realises she is “the Butcher’s leavings.”

After the assassination attempt, Bill and Amsterdam retreat to a brothel; Jenny tends Bill’s wound as the men lounge with bare-breasted prostitutes and smoke opium. Bill watches Jimmy Spoils dancing to a jig, and comments, “An Irish ditty mixed with the rhythms of a dark continent, stirred to a fine American mess.” Despite himself, Bill is aware of what is happening to his country. He beds three women, each a different colour, whilst Jenny and Amsterdam have a noisy quarrel (“Is there anyone in the Five Points you haven’t fucked?” “Yes, you!”) that turns into vigorous sex. Amsterdam awakens in the morning to Bill, seated by his bed with Old Glory wrapped around his shoulders, recalling how Priest had given him a severe beating in their first fight. Bill punished himself for flinching from Priest by plucking out his left eye (he now sports a glass one with an bald eagle painted in place of the pupil) before returning strong enough to kill Priest. At 47, Bill says he has kept power by “the spectacle of fearsome acts.” Jealous, Johnny spills Amsterdam’s ancestry to Bill. When, finally, Amsterdam throws a knife at Bill as he’s drinking his fiery liquor, Bill parries the blade with dazzling skill and plants his own in Amsterdam’s belly. He offers a spectacle of murder for the baying crowd, but, respecting the chance Priest gave him, restrains his abuse of Amsterdam to beating him terribly and scarring him.

Jenny spirits Amsterdam away to the caverns, where he spends months recuperating. He is visited by Monk, who gives him what he secretly preserved, Priest’s straight-razor, his symbol of blood responsibility. Monk expects to answer to God for his killings, as opposed to Bill, who considers himself a divine wind. “Your father tried to carve out a corner of this land for his tribe,” he recalls. “That was him, that was his Dead Rabbits.” Amsterdam re-emerges from underground and hangs slaughtered rabbits in the square to announce his return and the return of his father’s ideals. Soon Amsterdam draws all his friends back, hiding in and defending the Catholic Church’s construction. They embrace their religion as well as a mission to build a safe Irish enclave. When McGloin visits to pray, he’s outraged that Jimmy Spoils is present; when he squeals about it to the church’s long-haired, one-armed, radical priest (Peter-Hugo Daly), the priest wallops him over the head. In retaliation, Bill and the Natives come to incinerate the building, but find it protected by massed ranks including families. Even Bill won’t go that far. Johnny and Happy Jack soon die in tit-for-tat killings. Tweed proposes to Amsterdam that he swing Irish support behind Tammany. Amsterdam proposes Monk for the office of Sheriff. With the aid of Tweed’s electoral shenanigans, Monk gains “a Roman triumph.” But Bill, before shocked onlookers, viciously assassinates Monk.

Bills and Amsterdam’s relationship, like several in Scorsese’s oeuvre, is as a surrogate paternal relationship, man and boy drawn to each other through mutual appreciation of the others’ strengths, and ultimately drawn to destroy each other, loaded with jealousies and sexual strife. DiCaprio inhabits Amsterdam with a fair intensity, though he lacks indelible grit as a young hard case or ease with his deliberately weird Irish-American accent. Bill and Amsterdam act out several forms of division, with Amsterdam a man straddling Bill’s dinosaur bellicosity and thoughts of a new, more hopeful world. Jenny, daughter/lover to Bill, mother/sister/lover to Amsterdam, loves each in different ways. Her attraction is Amsterdam is at first that between two rodents—tough, cunning, ruthless, but morally innocent. Violence in this embryonic world flavors all things, including sexuality. Jenny kisses Amsterdam’s scars, marks of survival from Hellgate, after showing him her Caesarian scar, a sacrament of flesh for their physical and mental pains. Written on their bodies is the violent growth of their selves and the world about them.

Bill dominates the film, and not just because of Day-Lewis’s epic, perversely witty performance. He is one of the last Titans, a creature of great physical prowess with a warrior-poet’s soul belonging to a premechanical age. He is obsessed with purity, physical, racial, and cultural. In this regard, he resembles Travis Bickle. Bill’s sense of the physical is intensely spiritual, and enacts totemic punishment on flesh—cutting out his own eye, searing Amsterdam’s face for failing to act like a man. He cannot touch Jenny’s torn body lest it speak to him of the violence, decay, and waste that otherwise surrounds him. He respects the code of honorable warriors and detests the cult of commonality, which is why he feels justified in assassinating Monk dishonorably. It’s also one of his “spectacles of fearsome acts,” a declaration that he will not yield to Amsterdam’s efforts at egalitarianism without a fight. The death of the warlords will come by the sword.

Incensed by Monk’s death, Amsterdam challenges Bill to a gang fight. Simultaneously, the beginning of the draft causes New York’s working classes rise up with virulent fury. In all of Scorsese’s films, class and ethnic tensions simmer; here is a nightmare vision of when America’s mostly closeted skeletons of race and caste resentment emerge. Scorsese observes the root of American distrust of high culture; pop culture emerges from the chaotic swirl of the lower classes. The rich propagate high culture in their mansions; as rioters torch their shiny elegance, troves of classical-style paintings burn up. So, too, do political fliers showing the linked faces of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Jimmy Spoils is lynched by the mob along with many other blacks. Jenny only avoids being murdered by shooting a woman.

Warships pummel the city, soldiers shoot rioters, and the streets run with blood. McGloin is gunned down, and Amsterdam and Bill fight in a dust cloud before another shell plants a shard of shrapnel in Bill’s side. “Thank god, I die a true American,” he says before allowing Amsterdam the coup de grace; he dies clutching the young man’s hand. The city is a burning, shattered mess, corpses laid out in long lines. Amsterdam attests, “All that we knew was mightily swept away.” The final shot is as great as the opening, as Amsterdam and Jenny pay tribute at Priest’s and Bill’s graves, side-by-side in a graveyard overlooking lower Manhattan. As they leave the frame, the burning skyline of a haunted city fades through phases in the Manhattan skyline, finally resting at the end of the 20th century, the Twin Towers still in place.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Epic

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