Ozu's The Only Son

The Only Son (1936) was Yasujirō Ozu’s first feature with synchronized dialogue. The musical score is by Senji Itō (who also wrote the music for Ozu’s Late Spring and Early Summer). The film is about the relationship between a widowed mother and her only child. He goes to Tokyo and loses touch with his mother for some years. Then – prefiguring Ozu’s later masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1953) – she pays him a visit.

One of the lighter scenes of The Only Son takes place in a cinema. As a treat, the son has taken his mother to see her first talking picture. It is an odd choice: Unfinished Symphony, a kitschy Anglo-German biopic about Franz Schubert, complete with strikingly Aryan heroine (the singer Marta Eggerth). The son is embarrassed as his poor mother keeps drifting off to sleep.

But these were troubled and violent times and Ozu’s focus in this film is on personal relationships in the context of grinding poverty. In an iconic scene, the son expresses regrets, telling his mother that he wishes he had stayed with her in rural Shinshū as she herself had wished instead of seeking to further his education in Tokyo, essentially at the expense of his mother’s (always tenuous) financial security and her comfort in old age.

The soul-crushing monotony of the provincial silk mill and the flat, ugly landscape of a poor sector of Tokyo, with tall chimneys belching smoke nearby, represent Ozu’s version of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.” But, unlike Blake – whose head was full of Christian myths and radical politics – Ozu is more interested in depicting the pathos and tragedy of life than in elaborating apocalyptic visions. Or, for that matter, in making strong political statements or agitating for some imagined social, political or economic remedy.

Culture – and, by extension, politics – is important and can modulate our personal realities but the pathos and tragedy of life is inescapable precisely because it is tied not just to culture but also to the biological cycle of life, aging and death. The quote (from the short story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) which Ozu chose to serve as the epigraph for The Only Son underscores this point: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.”

This is an extract from a piece which appeared in August at The Electric Agora.

A few comments on Ingrid Bergman's work in European films

One of the reasons the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman interests me is because her career illustrates both the connections between European cinema and Hollywood and some of the differences and divisions.

In the 1940s, Bergman took the English-speaking world by storm, but this was not her only public manifestation. She was renowned in her own country before she went to Hollywood and – surprisingly – she almost became a German film star (her mother was German) just before World War 2.

In 1938 Bergman went to Germany, having signed a three-film contract. She was pregnant at the time and only made one film there – a very light but strangely touching drama, Die vier Gesellen – before returning to Sweden to give birth. An offer from David Selznick took her to Hollywood soon after.

Die vier Gesellen was designed specifically as a vehicle to launch her German career. The film is very stylish, and veteran director Carl Froelich does a wonderful job bringing out the complexities and vulnerabilities of the main characters. Bergman is particularly good. She plays an ambitious young commercial artist who is in love with her former art teacher but is determined to prove herself in the tough, male-dominated commercial world of late-1930s Berlin.

Intermezzo (1939) was Bergman’s first American film. It was a remake of a film she had made three years before in Sweden which was co-written and directed by Gustaf Molander. The Hollywood version – directed by Gregory Ratoff who had replaced William Wyler who walked out after a dispute with producer David Selznick – is flawed by schmaltz, gratuitous moralizing and a dumbed-down script. Some scenes are positively ludicrous. By contrast, the original Swedish film – though melodramatic at times and made in a style reminiscent of the silent era – is intelligent, well-crafted and full of subtle and realistic touches.

After World War 2, Bergman continued to work in America but also worked in Europe. Notably, she appeared in films made by Roberto Rossellini, whom she married. Journey to Italy is set in and around Naples. Though Bergman, her co-star George Sanders and most of the other actors spoke their lines in English, the film was first released – dubbed into Italian – as Viaggio in Italia in 1954. The restored English-language version is generally recognized as a masterpiece. It has almost the feel of a documentary but is profoundly personal and (I would say) truthful. It is basically a study of a marriage in crisis but manages to incorporate a good deal of understated humor.

Late in life, Bergman returned to Sweden to make Höstsonaten with Ingmar Bergman. Höstsonaten (co-written by the director) incorporates thematic parallels and echoes of earlier films in which Ingrid Bergman appeared, notably Intermezzo.

Cinema: a personal perspective

[This is the first part of a piece I wrote recently for The Electric Agora. The final section of that piece – focussed on Ingrid Bergman – I will post separately at a later date. The EA article elicited some interesting comments, by the way.]

It is impossible to put an exact date on it, but around 1990 I changed my mind about movies – or at least new movies. I was increasingly indifferent to them. Even many films of a type I would normally have appreciated had become positively painful to watch.

An appreciation of the arts is a very personal and tenuous thing. It can be seen almost as faith-based. A character in one of Iris Murdoch’s novels used to visit the National Gallery in London and these visits were for him uplifting, like a religious experience. But for some reason he lost the faith, as it were, and the magic no longer worked. In this case, it was not the Gallery which had changed, but the man.

In the case of my about-face on cinema, however, the man stayed pretty much the same, I think. It was the films which had changed – and the world which they represented. I am not talking about the external world here so much as the ideas behind the films. The ideas and stories being offered were simply no longer interesting to me.

During my childhood years, we lived near one of those grand old Art Deco cinemas. It was family owned and its best days (the 1940s?) were long gone. It struggled to survive. Cutting costs to the bone, the management would show one classic mainstream movie (Lawrence of Arabia, say, or Born Free) for many months on end, sometimes for more than a year.

In terms of genre and content, as a child I favored science fiction in the tradition of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; as an adult, I gravitated to character-based narratives centered around families, friendships and ordinary life. In some ways my cinematic preferences were affected by my parent's views.

My father had grown up in the early days of film. Apart from Chaplin, whom he admired, he showed little interest in the cinema. He was a voracious reader, however, and a big fan of George Bernard Shaw. He approved of the 1938 film Pygmalion (for which Shaw himself wrote the screenplay). He enjoyed the musical My Fair Lady which was also based on Shaw’s play. But a combination of social conservatism and a predilection for solitary reading predisposed him to see the cinema as something of a passing fad for which he had little use.

My mother was much younger than my father and had more modern and progressive views. As a teenager she was influenced by Bertrand Russell’s popular essays. From her early years she had been an avid movie-goer and she talked to me about the actors and movies she had loved. Many of these movies were shown on television when I was a child.

Lately I have been watching or rewatching old English, European, American and some Japanese films. One of the things which I find interesting is trying to see patterns in my preferences. There are various personal factors at play, of course. One gravitates towards writers and directors (as one does towards personal acquaintances) with whom one shares temperamental or cultural affinities. There is also an ideological dimension. But I shy away from films which attempt to be in any way manipulative in this regard.

Any kind of “ism” or ideology is suspect as far as I am concerned. If ideology is taken to refer to a personal framework of values and moral priorities, however, the concept is unexceptionable and applies to us all.

Though each of these individual value frameworks is unique, it is the fact that they overlap with the value frameworks of others which makes them relevant and viable, which gives them traction in the social world.

Cinema, in its own small way, demonstrated the importance of a shared vision. The classic cinema experience – the crowd of silent strangers nestled together in the warmth and the darkness – works best when values are shared at a deep level.

That’s all over now, for me at any rate. But at least these old films still exist and are readily accessible to individuals interested to know how it was back then so that they might have a better sense of our cultural trajectory and – looking to the future – a clearer view of cultural and moral possibilities.

A voice in the night

From an aesthetic point of view, early television was inferior not only to cinema but also to radio. Image quality issues and low production values give much old television programming a tacky and tawdry feel. In a real sense, radio’s restriction to one sensory modality was a form of freedom. Almost from the outset, radio was a powerful and flexible medium with a remarkable capacity for direct and intimate communication. It engaged the emotions – and the visual imagination.

Because of its presence in the home and capacity for live programming, television posed a threat to radio that cinema had not, gradually replacing it in most of its traditional roles and formats. Cinema and radio, on the other hand, had peacefully coexisted for decades. In fact, the respective golden ages of cinema and radio could be seen to have coincided, or at least overlapped.

Though I have a broad interest in the music and popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s, it is generally serious film dramas which most interest me, especially in so far as they reveal the preoccupations, moods, manners, politics and underlying values of the time.

I want to say a few words here about an unpretentious little movie of the 1950s which was centered around one of the abiding preoccupations of American cinema: organized crime. It stars and is narrated by an actor who made his name in radio in the 1940s. Frank Lovejoy was often (but not always) cast as a reassuring character, an American everyman, encapsulating in his distinctive voice and (later) his screen presence a kind of middle ground of decent normality in a world in which such qualities were seen to be at risk.

On radio, he was the first narrator of the long-running crime drama series (based on stories from the files of the agency), This Is Your FBI. (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called it “the finest dramatic program on the air.”) But Lovejoy was probably best known for playing a Chicago crime reporter in another radio series, Nightbeat.

Social and cultural historian (and Jack the Ripper expert) Paul Begg writes:

Broadcast on NBC, Nightbeat … starred Frank Lovejoy as Randy Stone, a tough and streetwise reporter who worked the nightbeat for the Chicago Star, looking for human interest stories. He met an assortment of people, most of them with a problem, many of them scared, and sometimes he was able to help them, sometimes he wasn’t. It is generally regarded as a “quality” show, and it stands up extremely well. Frank Lovejoy (1914–1962) isn’t remembered today, but he was a powerful and believable actor with a strong delivery, and his portrayal of Randy Stone as tough guy with humanity was perfect.

Finger Man is a low budget but well-crafted crime drama in typical film noir style in which Lovejoy plays another “tough guy with humanity.” The film was directed by Harold Schuster. The script is credited to Warren Douglas, “based on a story by Morris Lipsius and John Lardner.” Lardner was a distinguished sports writer and war correspondent, a son of Ring Lardner and brother of Ring Lardner Jr., blacklisted screenwriter and one of the Hollywood Ten. The writing is taut and generally convincing, though very stylized.

A point of interest is that Lipsius, who had co-authored a dictionary of underworld slang, was a former criminal who had been recruited five years before by the Treasury Department’s undercover wing. The plot of Finger Man and many details of the script clearly owe much to Lipsius’s personal experience. Also, John Lardner had known Lipsius at least since 1951, as an article about him by Lardner appeared in the New Yorker in November of that year.

The main character/narrator of the film (played by Lovejoy) introduces the story by saying that these things happened to him, but he can’t give certain details as “there are still people around, people who never forget and I’d like to keep on living… My name? Let’s just say it’s Casey Martin.” Routine stuff, sure. And then there is Casey’s sister who is now a junkie and her cute little daughter. It’s Hollywood, but with an edge.

Martin is picked up on Christmas eve for hijacking a truck, but is promised a clean slate if he puts the finger on a major underworld figure, Dutch Becker. The eventual sting operation involves illicit alcohol.

In real life, Lipsius had facilitated the conviction of a powerful underworld figure, Irving Wexler, aka “Waxey” Gordon, via a plot regarding heroin deals. Undercover Treasury agents had, in December 1950 (was it Christmas eve, as in the film?), recruited Lipsius, an ex-convict, to befriend Wexler and set him up for what would be his final arrest on August 2nd, 1951. Wexler was convicted and died in prison. Wexler was also heavily involved in gambling and prostitution, like the fictional Dutch Becker.

The world of Finger Man (and many other noir dramas) was a Manichean world in which the forces of crime and depravity were in a constant battle with the forces of justice and decency and there was no certainty what the ultimate outcome would be.

This is how the Lovejoy character, as narrator, assesses his situation early in the film: “Well, there it was laid right in my lap. I come out clean or I come out dead. The Treasury Department and the police were on my side. Against me was a big-time hoodlum by the name of Dutch Becker – and the entire underworld from coast to coast. There wasn’t a gambler alive who’d make book with those odds.”

In trying to convince him to cooperate the Treasury Department secret service chief had appealed both to his sense of decency and to patriotism:

“You know the mobs, how they operate. One strong, ruthless man can tie a syndicate together. He pushes the buttons and pulls the strings and all over the nation his vicious rackets are set in motion. He’s a dictator. We’re after one of those dictators… Put the finger on him and you’re a free man… [Y]ou know Dutch Becker as well as I do. He has no conscience. He has no soul. It makes no difference to him if he destroys an individual or a family or a nation. And enough men like Becker could destroy a nation… We know that Becker is operating in at least nine states… He gets his cut out of everything rotten that’s sold. We want him.”

“Let me show you something,” the agent continues, shuffling through a batch of photographs. “Here’s a girl 17, dead before she even started to live. Sixteen. Twenty. There’s a girl 19. They found her in a trunk. She wanted to go home to her family but the boys couldn’t see it her way. The hospitals, jails, asylums and morgues are full of human beings who were destroyed by men like Dutch Becker.”

The narrator gives a few more details about him: “He was one of the biggest gamblers in the country. He was the king pin of an illegal alcohol ring. He employed beautiful girls as escorts, hostesses, shills and b-girls in his clubs and gambling houses. If they crossed him they were not very pretty to look at when he paid them. And he always did.”

The villain is effectively played by Forrest Tucker as a smooth psychopath. And Peggy Castle is believably vulnerable as Lovejoy’s love interest and a woman trying to escape from her past life as one of Becker’s girls. But what ties it all together – holding the line not for idealism but at least for some small measure of hope and decency – is Lovejoy’s voice and presence.


[First published earlier this year at The Electric Agora.]

The wisdom of Roman Polanski

The girl on the phone (it's Catherine Deneuve in the film Repulsion if you're wondering) featured in an illuminated hoarding promoting a program of old Roman Polanski films at a local cinema. The image is certainly striking. The old technology (big, old-fashioned receiver with coiled cord) gives this still a weirdness it would not originally have had, but does not make it quaint. There is a wildness in the pose and a confronting directness in the stare.

The accompanying quote (from Polanski) runs: "Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theatre."

Well, yes... Polanski made some great films but this famous remark of his is not a particularly penetrating one. It goes without saying, I would have thought.

I had a look at a list of Polanski quotes and he certainly wasn't averse, it seems, to stating the obvious – e.g. "Films are films, life is life." But then all of us say things like this. The problem for celebrities is that offhand remarks get written down and presented as some kind of wisdom.

The best comments in the collection I looked at were about the crucial importance of attention to detail, and about honesty in dealing with violence.

He also had some interesting things to say about neuroticism. He values certain forms of neuroticism in actors, and seems himself to exhibit neurotic tendencies.

Here he is sounding a bit like Woody Allen:

"Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling."

I can relate to that.

The spirit of the time

Just about every afternoon I have a (usually) quiet coffee at a bar that serves a cinema complex. Today something was up: I have never seen a crowd like this queuing for a film here. Quite a buzz. A movie had touched on something important; it was showing simultaneously on two screens. What was I missing then?

Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish Film Festival). Checked a few reviews. Predictably enough, it is highly political, screamingly anti-colonialist, utterly Romantic (in the original Rousseauian sense), a little bit psychedelic – and very, very spiritual.

Not my cup of tea.

Death of an art form

I have given up on movies. There was a time when I trusted sections of the cinematic establishment sufficiently to willingly suspend my disbelief and surrender an hour or two of my time and attention to their products several times a week. There were writers and directors whose cultural background and preoccupations I shared to a great extent and who had (as I saw it) something interesting to say. They were people I respected.

It's a trust thing. Art forms are always about trust, even if they are also about making money.

Whilst government subsidies may attempt to keep local film industries alive, they inevitably encourage ideological conformity and artistic self-indulgence. And the main targeted audiences for mainstream films are now younger and globalized. Lowest common denominator. You know the deal.

A recent Telegraph article mentions that one of the people working as a quantitative analyst for American film producers – a former academic statistician – happens to be a distant relative of Albert Einstein. Symbolic somehow, don't you think, emblematic of cultural decline?

Nick Meaney (who is not a cousin of the physicist) runs a company in South London which assesses the earning prospects of film scripts based on algorithmic analysis of human-input scores relating to hundreds of categories (strength of location, proposed actors, etc.).

Their results are, apparently, much in demand by film producers. And they suggest, by the way, that nine times out of ten the big names have no effect on the box-office figures (assuming the replacements are competent).

So not only are movies not movies in the way they were, the stars are no longer stars in the old sense. Does the explanation lie with the actors, their image-makers, the changed nature of the product or the audiences?

Stars didn't come much bigger than Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. But Meaney criticizes the movie classic Casablanca for being "too gloomy, downbeat and too long". He points out that it was only the sixth-best performing film of 1943.

It has performed rather well since, however.

I like Bogart's line as he (Rick) and Bergman (Ilsa) recall their last meeting in Paris at the time of the German invasion: "... You were wearing blue. The Germans were wearing gray."

Quantify that.