Movie break: An unusual example of 1970s optimism, and a transition between Kubrick’s 2001 and more fantasy-style outer-space movies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Part 1 of 2

[This is a BETA version of the first part of this review. Storm preparations (I’m within the path of Hurricane Sandy) and other factors make me slow down on my work on this. But it’s probably for the best; as the storm passes through, I can get a better sense of wonder and awe that can help inform my discussion of the movie in Part 2. And maybe I’ll be able to fathom such mysteries as, Did a black hole pass nearby the Earth in the past couple days that had a selective affinity for D batteries in northern New Jersey? They all just vanished from stores…. Good luck, folks who are in the path of Sandy!]

This movie is complex and still valuable, despite its numerous flaws. It can be seen as both atypical and not-quite-typical of the work of director Steven Spielberg. It is one of his 1970s successes that seem to fit squarely within his tradition of fantasy-featuring stories, especially his wildly famous (or notorious, depending on how you view Spielberg) E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982). And yet Close Encounters seems ’70s-bound and dated in some ways (as I’ll return to). And it is not quite a modern outer-space movie, aligned to fantasy, of the type you can see in such franchises as the Alien movies (employing the horror genre, with the original standing as Ridley Scott’s first notable success), nor is it the “space opera” type of film as was George Lucas’ Star Wars, whose first installment was in 1977, or the (broadly speaking) imitators of the Star Wars type of stories.

I. Introduction

“Science speculation” as Spielberg’s presumed genre for this film, fitting 1970s attitudes and following a historical development of consciousness

In the recent DVD that features the original 1977 cut of CE3K, as it’s nicknamed, as well as the 1980 re-release version and a more recent, 1998 director’s cut, Spielberg himself in commentary takes pains to explain the genre of this film as being “science speculation,” not science fiction. He also notes, as a separate matter, that it’s the film of his that most “dates” him, because the notion of the hero, the electric-company worker Roy Neary played by Richard Dreyfuss, going off into space with the aliens on their massive spaceship, as if he was fulfilling some kind of long-held dream, was something Spielberg sympathized with when he made the movie, but would never endorse today.

To understand how all these factors—the “science speculation” premise, and the more idiosyncratic idea of going off with extraterrestrials—came to shape the movie, you have to understand something about people’s mentalities in the 1970s that today’s young people would find as old-fashioned and bizarre as bell-bottoms or Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, or the idea of disco music being contemporary/“edgy”. Today comments get made about how the U.S. space program is reduced, or neglected, or whatever, compared to what it used to be—unmanned flights to Mars are about the only new big news (and even so this isn’t so “big” nowadays), and the Space Shuttle has been retired (and given budgetary concerns, people draw the line at any new manned Moon landings). But the space program was all cutting-edge and a source of wonder for people at large. Clips of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, in 1969, going “Wow!” at the sight of a manned ship landing on the Moon show what a place in public life the space program had.

Some honest-enough citizens might have complained at the time about U.S. poverty not being addressed while the country expended the huge sums to send space vehicles to the Moon, but the spectacle and achievements of the space program, which had its high-water mark from about 1969 through about 1974, were such that it comprised some remote, amazing, somewhat arcane national “item of business,” like some military action somewhere or the nuclear arms race, and yet it was also something we somehow could all “relate to.” That Neil Armstrong up there, he’s like me. I can be up there too. A man can actually go stand on the moon. (A philosophy professor I had in 1980 glibly joked about how now we could “put beer cans on the Moon.”) This was both an unprecedented scientific feat and relatable in some way. (An itch forms in my head—the Internet can be considered analogous to this idea of space travel, as a “big technical game-changer and yet access-provider to every Shmoe,” in some way…but let’s not start that discussion yet.)

Of course, the space program, in the 1960s and early 1970s, in some way was allied to the U.S.’s competition with the Soviet Union, and on the other hand it ended up being partially justified in terms of what technical benefits it incidentally brought to the average consumer—such as the invention of Teflon, which would end up in frying pans in our homes. But it also had, on the level of sheer meaning, a double nature: (1) it had an exalted status in terms of being something as unreachable as, say, the high-security development of a new nuclear weapon; and yet (2) it also was something that stirred the sense of “possibly being involved” within the consciousness of the man on the street.

It was in light of this double meaning that space travel, of course, started to appeal to people in the kind of “national stories” that could be so well engineered in movies. In the 1950s, though early technical developments were slow, outer-space stories started looking less like the bizarre fantasies as of the likes of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and started to seem—even while the Cold War heated up (the Soviets’ Sputnik satellite installment would be in 1957)—a little more realistic, such as in Forbidden Planet (1956).

II. Historical background

Kubrick’s 2001 as turning the corner toward space realism

My history here might be too sketchy or flawed for some, but suffice it to say that when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) came along (see my “Director’s dossier” on Kubrick), it was a huge landmark not simply for Kubrick’s career as a world-class director but as a way that popular art could be diverting and could actually give you a “window” onto the reality that formerly fantastic space travel was. It put you into an experience of so arcane and “way out of reach” as space travel, including into the intricate insides of a spaceship and faced with the weird sights you could be subjected to in a zero-gravity environment.

2001 also marked a major advance on special effects. In development for about four years, this film involved such advanced technology as used in movies that some of it was covered in an interesting article (“Special Effects in the Movies”) in the 1974 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1973; the 2001-related material is on pp. 28-31). More recently published biographical work on Kubrick also described some of the production stunts used to achieve the special effects, such as a big donut-like structure that was built to create the stage for the round section of the spaceship in which astronauts jog around the circular floor, seemingly immune to gravity.

This film was produced by film studio MGM, and took years in circulation to make back its cost (this delayed its appearing on television for the first time until 1977). In making the film, Kubrick, I believe I read, consciously wanted to go beyond the hokier Forbidden Planet way of depicting space. In any event, it’s obvious that this was the first film, at least of major note, for which high-tech special effects and the related tricky logistics made it years in the making and quite expensive for its putative genre. It represented a qualitative leap—in terms of the kind of technology involved, not necessarily the level of expense reflected in more old-time production values—from such material as the Cecil B. DeMille pictures or the famed historical epic Cleopatra from about 1963.

Other future- and space-oriented films such as George Lucas’ THX-1138 (1971) and the now not-much-mentioned Silent Running (1972; the latter also was looked at in the Britannica article just mentioned) would try to capitalize on the “realistic-space” mode of making a film (by the way, special-effects technician Douglas Trumbull worked on both 2001 and Silent Running, among other films—hopefully I’ll return to him in Part 2 of this entry). But 2001 was a major landmark in terms of how far you could go to make it so realistic that it was like a rich educational show at a planetarium.

For Kubrick, 2001 could be called a “continental divide” in his career; see my “Director’s dossier” on him for an outline on his films. Just prior, Dr. Strangelove (1964) seemed to reach its own height in terms of his career, when it combined his various cinematic and story-related attitudes (cool depiction, action sequences, satire, and more subtly comic approaches) in a film that would seem both radical in its irreverent attitude and a masterful model of how to be sane about an insane situation (the nuclear-arms disposition of “mutually assured destruction”). It also involved a lot of close attention to technical detail; supposedly officer-level members of the Air Force (or the like) were upset at the film, wondering if Kubrick had somehow had a spy get information on the insides of B-52s for his depictions (Kubrick had not).

When Kubrick finally did 2001, it was as if he’d built up his capital as a sober young director (yet with a sense of humor) who was intent on making serious statements about our lives and fates in the post–World War II era, and he delivered with a film that both “put us in the passenger’s seat” in space vehicles. Yet a certain emotional “poem” was being presented too: he presented an opportunity for viewers to take a wondering, even slightly dreading look at what we could discover in space. The big black monolith symbolized both the movie’s ambitious, somewhat arcane attitude, and its thematic topic: in the sheer mystery we are witness to, do we find God? Kubrick himself said something like that the movie was about looking for God, or wondering about God.

The monolith was a classic whatsit: is it a spaceship? An extraterrestrial life form? Is it good or bad? Can it tell us anything (i.e., tell the characters anything)? Is it a not-fully-developed plot device, or a sort of “deus ex machina”? If it allowed the apes early in the film to develop the ability to use tools, and then invent weapons, how could it later, technically, seem to swallow Dave, after he had been for a while in the big spaceship, just before the light show?

Even if you took all the films Kubrick did after 2001 into account, while admitting or arguing that they didn’t rise to its quality, 2001 still represents the crest of Kubrick’s creativity—and could be considered as strong a claim to fame as any single movie could be for a director. And it did this in the process of allowing middle class Americans to have a rich esthetic experience of what it means to be out in space—and at the same time to ask the question, what does our conquest of space mean in terms of the sheer wonder, awe, and even fear that lead us to ask whether God is here too?

It also served as a sine qua non for Spielberg’s Close Encounters. But we have to look at some other cultural precedents for that latter firm, first.

By the 1970s, people on the street were enthralled with speculative, or newly interpretive, ways to look at outer space; a fantasy mode wasn’t big yet

The foregoing ideas about movies and space may seem highfaluting, or an “ambitious” way to regard films—and the following may seem a bit crazy today—but people did think in these terms, and it certainly wasn’t just twerps as I was then.

Symbolism in 2001 explained by some

In my first year of high school, during the 1976-77 school year, I remember, 2001 was shown on TV. I heard some older student talking to others in a study hall about the symbolism in 2001—it seemed as if that kid (I never knew who it was) was in some sense “wise,” with me the young sort I was, not only the second-shortest in my grade and rather forlorn for various reasons, but yet to beef up my academic skills for college. (I was also starting to develop as a writer, what I wanted to do as one career route.) The older kid talked about what the monolith meant, and so on. I was amazed. Not that I was a credulous fool, I was amazed to hear such fancy, credible interpretation of a puzzling movie. The monolith meant this; the transition from the apes scene to the space scene meant that, or such. 2001, to me when I first saw it, had seemed hard to interpret, as it did to many. And it certainly presented itself as, on the surface, arcane and not making an large attempt to be easily understood.

Today, it probably still impresses many as a well-crafted movie; no longer quite as “massive” as it first appeared, it’s still a solidly made, still-watchable movie (even my younger nephew liked it in a recent year). But I think today it’s easier to interpret for many film viewers who’ve cut their interpretive teeth on the acres of science fiction that have been consumed since—and the general increase of a certain literacy in the U.S. in the past 40 or so years.

Erich von Daniken’s theories

More dubiously, in 1968 had come the publication of a book that was certainly popular by 1976, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which argued that pictures, stories, statues, symbolism, etc., in ancient cultures were evidence that spaceships with extraterrestrials had landed on earth in ancient times. (I believe I watched a TV program in the early 1970s that was based on this book, In Search of Ancient Astronauts. This book proved controversial almost right after it was published; see the Wikipedia article on the book for some indications of this.) In addition to many other things they allegedly did all over the world, such ancient astronauts, von Daniken claimed, even helped set up the “moa” (statues) on Easter Island. At the time, it all sounded pretty credible, or on the plausible side (to young half-educated sorts like myself). When I was in eighth or ninth grade, a teacher even had us do assignments discussing the von Daniken theories.

More soberly, in about 1979, another teacher at my high school, in the English department, had us watch 2001 as part of, I think, a science fiction class. This all may sound pretty nerdy today, but the important point is that popular art was used as means to have us square with the new discoveries we were making in outer space: what was out there, now that we could indeed travel to the Moon? The imagination was stirred; artists tried to extend speculation based on the foundation of what we already knew. For instance, what if a ship could travel as far as Jupiter, as 2001 depicted? (Not that this has ever been realistically achievable, in NASA’s eyes.)

CE3K came along just as Star Wars fantasy style was starting

All this is to show the environment in which Spielberg’s CE3K was made. Kids today who have grown up on Star Wars and other fantasy-related space-oriented fiction (whether books, movies, games, and/or whatever else) have looked at space as a sort of credible background for a more playful form of engaging the imagination. By the early 1980s, after Star Wars had been through two or three installments, space was a place for often-friendly “cartoon characters”—Star Wars’ Chewbacca and R2D2 and others…. Now space was an already familiar-enough “real place” in which to situate playful fantasies (per George Lucas), not a newly-familiarized but still awe-inspiring, intriguing place in which to situation speculation that hewed close to nonfictional attitudes (per Stanley Kubrick).

The change to the fictional mode almost made the ground uneasy beneath Steven Spielberg’s feet in the late 1970s. The change was such that, of course, what had initially been an idea he had when making CE3K, of an alien who stays behind on Earth, became—probably not least due to marketing considerations—formed into what surprised even Spielberg as proving to be his most successful movie, E.T., which in some ways still hewed to an extent to CE3K’s “science speculation” premise. Part of what made E.T. so popular was its playful, family-friendly side, not so much its awestruck nonfictional attitude.

Star Wars heralded a new space-story direction, but not so commandingly yet

When Star Wars was released in 1977, I think no one expected it would be the hit it became. I remember some of the movie theme music being big on the radio for a time. I never warmed to it much; my movie viewing was down in my early years of high school (if I saw movies, it was on TV, after they were no longer “current” in theaters); I wouldn’t start seeing movies a fair amount in the theaters until 1979. But for me, I think I found the whole Star Wars “cultural ethos,” if you want to call it that, puzzling. I knew the characters were a big hit to others; I was more a 2001 man, whatever wisdom led me to this when I was in my teens.

What George Lucas had the vision to recognize as an audience ripe for serving—and maybe he was surprised at what a hit it became, too—was those who liked the marriage of (1) a Saturday-movie-serials, almost-cheesy movie experience and yet (2) a fairly realistic outer-space background. I won’t further analyze this as to what it could objectively be said to comprise, or (subjectively) how it could be evaluated. But the fantasy/“space opera” approach to outer-space movies became a hugely popular—and industry-shaping—mode.

When Ridley Scott directed Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—neither of which I’ve seen (and would like to)—these took space (or future-life) movies into other genre directions: horror, and a sort of noir. So however artful and lovingly made space-oriented movies could be, genre treatment of space movies became the preferred norm. Realism—along with wondering about God, pessimism about man, whatever else—became old-hat, or not quite so desirable.

CE3K was arguably the last big-film gasp of cinematic awe at what space really meant

CE3K occupied an odd pocket in this development through the 1970s from 2001’s philosophy to the Star Wars philosophy. Spielberg’s own personal-life interest in space has been told as to why he developed CE3K, and I think he was really following his own muse at least as much as following market trends in making the movie. (I’ll try to look at this biographical aspect in more depth in Part 2.) But to a good extent, this movie could be called the last major attempt by Hollywood to address people’s almost religious attitude toward space: what, or who, was out there? Were they friendly? Could we (or they) relate?

In a way, CE3K seems to me to incorporate a lot more of 2001 than it does much of Star Wars or Spielberg’s own E.T. In fact, I am struck by how derivative of 2001 it seems in some ways. One particular way it shows this is in the use of John William’s nice and varying score. Williams is, by now, a longtime collaborator with Spielberg who is arguably the most important “analog-style” film scorer—using symphonies (and old-fashioned composition sense, maybe)—in terms of aiding a director’s work since Bernard Herrmann served Hitchcock. Though there are some “friendly” music styles in CE3K that are somewhat characteristic of Spielberg’s “friendly-cinema” approaches (which his detractors will readily point to as Exhibit A showing his “lightweight-ness”), there is also some atonal, mystery-conveying music, often linked to the extraterrestrial doings (especially toward the end). This atonal stuff sounds a lot like some of the darker music in 2001 (Kubrick used other composers’ already-recorded work, such as that of Gyorgy Ligeti; this is aside from the more famous, and older, music like the waltz [“Blue Danube”] material by Johann Strauss, or especially Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Also sprach Zarathustra).

CE3K was the last major movie that took the 2001 stuff a step further: with Kubrick, we were out in dark space where a mysterious monolith seemed to be causing trouble; now, in 1977, we are safely on Earth, and we want to know that extraterrestrials are friendly, or at least that they will somehow return our benevolent wonder/awe with some sign of wanting to be peaceful. Mystery and a bit of fear color our questions in the latter movie also; some of the sequences when the humans are first interacted with by aliens, especially in the scenes with Jillian Guiler and her son Barry, seem like mild horror sequences.

Mind you, when CE3K came out, the Moon landings had ended about 1974; the Vietnam War, for what that was worth as ironically stirring some enthusiasm for the space race, was entering into the past after the 1975 fall of Saigon. The Cold War under the partial “stewardship” of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was in a kind of not-entirely-encouraging stasis. If people were “religious” about receiving some “connection” from outer space, maybe it was because, after all our trauma of the 1960s and early 1970s, we wanted some hint, or source, of promise, some start of smooth, newly paved roads, coming from somewhere, and outer space seemed as good a “store” for this as any.

Now that I’ve described the historical background of this movie, both in movie history and in political/social history (as sketchy as these may be), we can look at this old movie with more appreciation, and analyze it a bit for what works and what doesn’t, and understand why it has a peculiar place in Spielberg’s canon—even in the list of notable movies by all major directors from the 1970s until now. And we can see that, despite its seeming old-fashioned today, it still may be seen to “speak to us,” even if this is, to an extent, as a time capsule of sorts.

And though it became an obvious springboard for Spielberg’s E.T., which in a sense stands for Spielberg’s strength as a popular entertainer and a unique brand in terms of what he synthesizes, CE3K also is a quintessential 1970s movie in a way, and that not because of any pessimism, interestingly, but because of a certain (tempered) optimism.

To be continued.

Movie break (& Quick Vu): A dense, flashy look at a lapsing and suffering world leader: Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), Part 2 of 2

Now, before I go on, / I want to make one thing perfectly clear: / I have had it up to here / With certain people! / People who say I am two different men: / An OLD Nixon…and a NEW Nixon! / I am just ONE Nixon! / Just the other day, I said to my wife, Pat, / “Thank God there is only one Nixon!” / And Pat agreed.

—from a feature, “The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Primer,” by Larry Siegel, in a 1974 Mad magazine “Super Special” reprising content from about 1969

Subsections below:

The still-historically-notable fount of criminality that was Watergate

A big movie still falls short of its enormous topic, but merits attention

An unfortunately skimpy look at the parade of contributing actors

Controversial aspects: The “Beast” theme and the Cuba/JFK/Castro theory

Closing remarks: From grand history to letting an old soul be

[Note: I am uneasy and sometimes angered about dealing with this entry—I’d considered putting it on indefinite hold and withdrawing Part 1—but I already posted Part 1, and people have shown interest in it, so I thought I’d live up to the responsibility I seemed to set up for myself and post Part 2. But there is so much to the topics of both Nixon the man and Nixon the troubling film that I suggest you look at this entry as incomplete, a set of thoughts to prompt further research for those interested, and an acknowledgement that in our tough times, this old sick horse of a historical story is still worth checking into at times. By the way, playtime is coming; my next film review should be on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Edit done 12/19/12. Edit 9/14/13.]

When Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968, his first campaign for office since 1962 when he lost the race for governor of California, the country was, as many know today, bogged down in the quagmire of the Vietnam War. The war situation was so bad—amid a few years of social unrest that comprised anti-war demonstrations by college students, race riots in various cities, and so on—that President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, ran for the Democrats, and among other contenders (between both parties) that included George Wallace (for the Republicans) and Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy (for the Democrats) was Richard Nixon.

Johnson’s reputation was tarnished by the Vietnam War, despite his monumental achievements that still affect us in no small way today: after he had shepherded the first civil rights legislation passed in Congress in about 80 years, in 1957, as president he expanded on the assassinated John F. Kennedy’s liberal agenda and, building on his masterful power and artfulness as Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, used all his accumulated ties and skills regarding Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other such laws expanding protection of rights, and started the Medicare and Medicaid programs. If it weren’t for Vietnam, Johnson may have cemented a reputation for himself as one of the top five or so most positively impacting presidents the U.S. has had. But Vietnam was a tragedy that all his leaderly skills couldn’t help him resolve.

Nixon inherited this mess when he was elected president in late 1968.

People have seemed to remember Nixon, in part, as if he were equivalent with the Vietnam tragedy, as Jane Fonda suggested in an interview within the past several years when she said she was among those who had been fighting Nixon for “eight years.” But of course, Nixon didn’t start (or escalate, through about 1968) the Vietnam War. He might have been known forever after as the president who ended the war—and certainly he made efforts to have this be known in the denouement of his long, complex career. But how his presidential career unraveled—and the story Oliver Stone’s Nixon tries to tell—shows that however unfair it is to judge him by a national problem he inherited, how he conducted himself in office still poses a rather unique lesson in, among other things, the fact that in a “nation of laws,” no one is above the law, especially when he egregiously flouts the law in so many instances, and as an attorney and with some power over the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI, and so on, he seems maniacally bent on coming up with every rationalization he can with which to cloak his defense of himself under the guise of “executive privilege” and related theories, after having incriminated himself in a host of illegal activities.

The still-historically-notable fount of criminality that was Watergate

Amusingly, various people have tried to paint Watergate as if all it was was a “third-rate burglary.” The Kissinger character in this movie says, “To be undone by a third-rate burglary is a fate of biblical proportions”—exemplifying the film’s summarizing strategy—and occasional flaws—in trying to address the enormous narrative task it has with a glib, drama-class line, or a remark made by an insider that seems more plausible as a summary in hindsight than something someone would have so cogently seized on at the time (such as the movie’s Al Haig advising Nixon that Gerald Ford, as the future new president, could always pardon him if he resigns now). Watergate, of course, was much more than a burglary; if only that’s all it was.

A book I have that was part of a wealth of main-product-and-extras that comprised the edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the yearbooks, an atlas, and so on that we got in about 1973 includes the not-insubstantial tchotchke of a book, The Graphic Story of the American Presidents (Chicago: J.G. Ferguson Publishing Company [distributed to Doubleday], 1973). It lists the presidents in reverse order, trying to give a fair account of each. And it starts with Nixon, looking so “modern” in photos. Since Nixon was the most recent president and the subject of 1973 news at a rolling boil, it goes on at some length about Watergate. The narrative seems breathless (though maybe a bit regretful)—written through mid-1973, with the writer not knowing the outcome yet—in recounting the unspooling story: “Public interest in these matters [surrounding the initial burglary] had not been great, because they had been overshadowed by events leading to the end of the Vietnam War and by the ceremonies surrounding the President’s inauguration to his second term. But now, with all these events in the past, the Senate voted unanimously on February 7, 1973, to establish a seven-member select committee…to conduct a year-long investigation of the Watergate incident and the 1972 presidential campaign. Other investigations of Watergate also were proceeding: a Washington grand jury was continuing to hear testimony on the Watergate burglary, a New York grand jury was exploring the campaign financing, and depositions were being taken in several civil damage suits in connection with the campaign and the Watergate incident. […] New and startling disclosures began to be revealed almost daily” (pp. 22-23).

I won’t tell very many of what this old book lists, but just consider the following passage (occurring amid others like it), and imagine if you heard about this as a matter emanating from the White House today: “In the days immediately following the President’s [April 30, 1973] address [announcing the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others], newspapers disclosed that [G. Gordon] Liddy and [E. Howard] Hunt had been part of what was called the ‘plumbers’ unit in the White House, using illegal methods to discover ‘leaks’ of information that the administration wanted kept secret. On May 7 it was disclosed that the President’s former White House counsel Charles W. Colson had used the ‘plumbers’ to forge cables to show to newsmen to make them believe President Kennedy had ordered the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem during the Vietnam War. … [On] May 14, the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony that the White House had tried to enlist the CIA in illegal domestic spy activity, and two days later heard the deputy CIA director tell of White House attempts to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate scandal” (p. 24).

This book came out before the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” in later October 1973, when, in response to a subpoena for some of his tapes, Nixon demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and in the chain of command, Richardson refused and quit, and his deputy William Ruckelshaus also resigned, and a lower-level staffer, Solicitor General Robert Bork, ended up doing Nixon’s bidding—firing Cox. (For his effort, you could say, Bork met with his own frustration when his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was defeated in 1987 during the Reagan Administration. Update 12/19/12, fixed 9/14/13: I figured right after I'd first published this that I was speaking rather loosely on the arguable association of Bork's part in Watergate and his 1987 rejection for the U.S. Supreme Court. To be sure, Bork was rejected for a position on the Supreme Court hugely along the lines of his ideology [and his uncompromising nature] in 1987. But I seem to recall that his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre" was mentioned somewhere--in the media?--during that 1987 period in which he was subject to hearings on his nomination. Anyway, he died Dec. 19--see a New York Times obituary here.)

The movie itself lists—as I take the movie on faith on this—a few of the famed Nixonian “dirty tricks,” noted (typically) in presidential chief aides H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman talking together as they know full well their administration, and their own fates, are unraveling: plans or a notion to firebomb the Brookings Institution; planting a forged cable on Kennedy (this was maybe the same thing I mentioned above)…a host of things, as if now all the sudden these two men had the conscience to realize how much bad had been going on, so no wonder things newly looked super-critical…. And later in the movie, a “smoking gun” is brought to light where instructions by Nixon to Haldeman were to have the CIA block an investigation by the FBI, or such.

The sleazy stuff—not just the cover-up of the Watergate break-in itself, but the earlier nasty retaliatory acts such as breaking into the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, who was responsible for the leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers, and many other instances of using illegal means or simply not heeding a sense of the rule of law and proper procedure—piled up over time into such an enormous amount that Nixon’s story became one of a president so corrupt that, despite his monumental achievements, he was his own worst enemy, to use a trite phrase.

A big movie still falls short of its enormous topic, but merits attention

Outside sources viewers can use; and why study Nixon?

People can take from my paltry description here a sense of the mess to be understood. They can read the history from their choice of sources: Wikipedia, an American history textbook, whatever…. This story—just of Watergate and Nixon’s presidency’s breaking down—was as complex and big as it was depressing. Add to this Nixon’s long career, and how do you make a movie of it?

I wrestled with how I would write this entry. At times I thought I would say, “Don’t watch this movie; it’s too flawed. And the Nixon story itself, as salutary in some ways, is too complex to do a decent blog entry on.” And certainly it would be a smear to suggest that Mitt Romney is another Nixon.

But if there is a lesson Nixon’s tale still holds, it’s that we mustn’t be blind to important factors in deciding who to elect president, and not let passions aroused by some ongoing national tragedy to obscure our view of who is running for office and claiming to be a national savior.

I will try to address this movie with a few scattered notes, reminding you again that you should not take it as a primary source on Nixon, but if you choose to watch it, get boned up (if you haven’t already) on Nixon so you can appreciate how the movie lives up to, and other ways does not, its ambitious aim.

(The screenplay was written by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, with help from Oliver Stone. I don’t know any more about them than the film’s Wikipedia article relates.)

Testing any film’s merits isn’t frivolous; how this film does

One point of my blog is to show how movies achieve, and sometimes fail, to address areas of life that, for some people, they are the main ways people get educated to some degree on these. Not everyone can read all the reputable books that are out there on various problems, whether political, historical, health-wise, family-related, or other. Movies seem to step into the breach in this regard, but of course movies can also fumble. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to see what good comes out of some of these (even severely flawed) movies, partly because some set of people expended millions of dollars, employed actors and other craft workers for beastly-long days, and tapped into the enthusiasm of many creative types to assemble a film on, as it sometimes happens, an important subject. The film then remains in collections of DVDs, or is available online, for any unsuspecting consumer to watch it. So it pays to try to understand—without trying to cover all the bases—how some films achieve their objectives, or not quite.

In a brief presentation on the old videotape I watched, Oliver Stone says his original cut of the film was 4:15—obviously much too long for releases expected to bring in big audiences. Even the combined Godfather films—the first two combined totaled over six hours—wouldn’t have been released in an individual version so long as even four hours; it took years of the first two being circulated and becoming unexpected monster hits before Paramount thought to combine them into an “omnibus” version. So, Stone says, he whittled the film down, with difficulty; the release version was about 3:10. (The complex editing process for the film, which is referred to in the Wikipedia article on the film, is somewhat reminiscent of that for Apocalypse Now, as director Francis Ford Coppola talks about that on the 2006 DVD of the film.)

Even at that length, I think the film tries to do too much—some things are handled too cursorily. Even the pivotal Watergate mess is handled sketchily—whether with the framing device of the overall structure, or with the unfolding drama within the last third or so of the film.

An unfortunately skimpy look at the parade of contributing actors

Many actors contributed to this film—so many that I wonder how the budget accommodated them, though I feel they (at least some of them) were paid on the low side, and maybe they participated just to be part of a movie statement being made about Nixon.

J.T. Walsh, often with a sort of painfully pinched look, plays one of Nixon’s key aides, John Ehrlichman.

Paul Sorvino, portly and with nerdy horn-rimmed glasses, plays Henry Kissinger, his voice apparently electronically altered to approximate Kissinger’s gravitas-conveying earthquake rumble. Incidentally, the movie does include the famous quote of Kissinger’s, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” though it has him say it in not the original context. People might forget that, during the Nixon administration, Kissinger mugged in a public-relations mode—despite his portly-professor appearance—as a sort of sex symbol, with his droll remarks meant for comedy.

James Woods plays chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, in what I thought is a sympathetic role for a staffer who was in an especially difficult role for Haldeman, Nixon’s facilitator/executor who ended up an unfortunate fall guy. Haldeman’s diaries from his days in the Nixon administration were published some years ago and are a fine first-person reflection of how things went there, both in the pre-exposure, hectic, seedy-behavior days and in the immediate wake of when the light of investigation was snapped on and “the cockroaches suddenly were in a panic.”

Ed Harris, his slightly homely face right for the murky-character part, plays Watergate operative E. Howard Hunt.

David Paymer plays aide Ron Ziegler.

Fyvush Finkel, an actor in Yiddish theater (and more mainstream venues) who isn’t well known to American audiences (and who appears as a dybbuk in the Jewish-folklore “short” at the front of the Coen brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man), is an advisor to Nixon during the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debates; I have a feeling Finkel may have done his role at “scale” pay, to make things easier for the producers, and did this film as a labor of love, to “pay his respects” to the old shaygetz that he may have felt Nixon was. (Please excuse my spellings of Yiddish words; I know their spelling tends generally to vary, anyway.)

Annabeth Gish plays Nixon’s younger daughter Julie. Though it shows Julie loyally believing in her dad at his time of being under siege, the movie misses the opportunity—though this probably speaks to there being too much to say—to show just to what extend Julie went to to defend her father, even while he exploited her (in a sense) for what good she could do him: in fact, she spoke publicly and earnestly in his defense, even while he knew, or should have, that she was wrong at least to some extent. Annabeth Gish first came to notice in the mid-1980s film Mystic Pizza, which also was a debut of sorts for Julia Roberts, who became a much bigger star. Gish has a face that seems adequate to conveying Julie Nixon’s being a lovely, devoted daughter, and turns out to represent virtually the only young-female presence in this film, which is, after all, a big story of “men behaving badly.”

Madeline Kahn plays Martha Mitchell, colorful wife of John Mitchell, who is played by E.G. Marshall with grave expressions in the film. Mitchell was Nixon’s Attorney General until Nixon had him be one of his fall guys.

Bob Hoskins plays FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, seeming to give enough of a quietly sinister air to him, with some riffing on the theory Hoover was homosexual, with a provocative scene of him flirting with a houseboy. Hoskins looks a little young for how old Hoover would have been in 1969-71, whenever he died.

Who can forget Joan Allen, as Pat, Nixon’s “silent better half” who was probably one of his very most important allies, along with, in headier times, the “Silent Majority” who elected him to office in 1968. When the movie first came out, I was (shallowly) tickled by an actress playing Pat Nixon who looked so much like her. Today, what is to be noted is Allen’s handling a role well enough that would be difficult to pull off well, a quiet, unpretentious woman who suffered through a lot while being “there” for her husband who only really lived when he dove into the alligator pool of yet another set of years of political commitment. The movie has Pat trying, at times, with bravado to confront Nixon with the reality of his life; an example is (again, the movie trying to convey a complex story with somewhat-artificial dramatic moves) Pat’s line (maybe slightly paraphrased), “It took me a long time to fall in love with you…. They [the public out there] never will love you, no matter how many elections you win.”

Mary Steenburgen plays Nixon’s mother, who is revealed in a flashback relatively early in the film in an earnest picture of his somewhat impoverished, stoic, religiously pious youth. Hannah Nixon is a religious sort—she speaks with “thees” and starchy, Puritan-like language, reminding us of the type of people in The Crucible (see my May 5 entry)—and her way with her children appears both poignant and a little sad, and also as if to suggest how Nixon got to be the world-class noodge he later was. (Unfortunately I can’t look at the concept of, or any of the historical basis for, how Nixon was “the Fighting Quaker” as is riffed on humorously in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.) Here, as a cutie-faced boy, he promises his mother, “Think of me always as thy faithful dog,” and we know from real life that Nixon signed some letters to home during his youth with something like “your faithful dog.” Nixon’s father Frank, played by Tom Bower, was—as Nixon says in the rambling, surprisingly touching goodbye speech rolled out under closing credits at the film’s end—in a series of jobs a streetcar motorman, a farmer, a lemon rancher…then a grocer. We see dad as the grocer in the flashback scenes; he is a stern sourpuss at the dinner table, with his humorless but sincere enough upbraidings of his family, though not insubstantial with a remark like “Struggle is what gives life meaning.” Nixon also, of course, had a number of brothers, two of whom—one in particular affecting him—died of tuberculosis. Nixon’s mother, in the film, haunts him like a potent article of guilt in a hallucination, with her sitting reproachfully in his White House room while he listens drunkenly, hungeringly to the famed tapes—she seeming to have more power to touch his conscience than even his wife Pat, who has just left the room after giving him her best reproachful shot.

Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, I think, does a very good job without emulating Nixon perfectly. He adds a little mouth-twisting, jaw-jutting mannerism that I don’t think was Nixon’s, and the film’s Wikipedia article suggests there was an issue with Hopkins’ accent for Nixon, but I think when portraying such an unusual sort as Nixon anyway, close enough is good enough. Hopkins gets the dorky attempts at physical grace at a social event, the nerdy stabs at bonhomie, the droll endearment-type little name for Pat (“Buddy”)…it all conveys a world-class noodge that does a lot to make Nixon sympathetic, or pathetic. In fact, Hopkins does so much to humanize him, not least with his suffering toward the end of the film, that we may have a hard time piecing together a coherent understanding of this man. In fact, I feel that Nixon and Josef Stalin are interesting to compare, because both were paranoid men who were master politicians and grossly abused power; and I’ve studied Stalin in some depth. And I feel I have a better feel for what the monstrous Stalin was about than I do about Nixon, who comes across as more divided and is harder to see “as one person” than does Stalin, who is a little easier to see as a devious sort who both could master loyalty from people and be horrifically apt to betray colleagues and deceive a wealth of others about his agenda. All this is a topic for another time.

Adding to one of the trickier parts of this movie, Tony LoBianco, who played the heroin-shipment point man Sal Boca in The French Connection (1971; see my May 24 blog entry), is here, old enough as to be white-haired, as a mob figure Johnny Roselli [sp?] or such. One of the film’s subplots—which I don’t know is fictional or not—concerns some plot that Nixon was, it is alleged, involved in as vice president under Eisenhower, where an attempt was planned to assassinate Castro right after Castro came to power, and involved the CIA partnering with the mob in Cuba, or some such thing. This is referred to a number of times in the film, once or twice as “Track 2” in relation to something else more officially planned as “Track 1.” (See subsection immediately below for more thought on this.) However, the film does, more broadly, represent Nixon as obsessing an awful lot about Cuba, almost as if his (and his party’s) regret—and recriminations at the Democrats—for Castro’s regime being allowed to set up shop so close to the U.S. was almost as much a sort point as the “loss of China” to the Communists in 1949. As I think was generally true about Nixon in real life, a lot of his dispositions and strategizing in the early 1970s were based on regrettable matters of the late 1940s and 1950s, however historically they may no longer have applied: for instance, it would have been in character, however much reflected in real-life comments, that Nixon felt that to hit back at Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 was the same as getting Alger Hiss in about 1948, as the film virtually quotes him as thinking. Another position Nixon took in 1972, actually being progressive rather than acting on an old (party-related) grievance or regret, was with the opening to China: no longer need he, or the country, regret the loss of China to the Communists in 1949 when, now, in 1972, the U.S. was in some sense partnering with China, and in the same stroke breaking any lockstep alliance between the Soviet Union and China. (Going to show the baby steps of 40 years ago preceding where we are now: China is now both the factory of many consumer goods used in the West, and a holder of U.S. bonds that is a worryingly essential prop to the U.S. government at present. Let’s add to this the fact that Nixon’s administration also started the “floating dollar,” making the dollar’s value depend on exchange rates rather than being tied to a precious metal or such—don’t quote me; I’m not an economist.)

Controversial aspects: The “Beast” theme and the Cuba/JFK/Castro theory

There are two elements of Stone’s story, which function within the story in a somewhat similar way, that are either questionable or objectionable. One is a sort of mystical theory that could be called something of an article of faith among the liberal artists who have tried to grapple with the historical dislocations of about 1963-75 or so. The other is the sort of theory that Stone puts into his historical films that raise the hackles of those who feel he is in crank mode, which might include me.

The mystical theory is reflected in two formulations of a theme in the Wikipedia article on the film: Screenwriters Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson “conceived of a concept [sic] referred to as ‘the Beast,’ which Wilkinson describes as ‘a headless monster that lurches through postwar history,’ a metaphor for a system of dark forces that resulted in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., [and] the Vietnam War, and helped Nixon’s rise to power and his fall from it as well” (from Bernard Weintraub, “Professor Stone Resumes His Presidential Research,” The New York Times [December 17, 1995], referred to in Wikipedia article; all references noted here are derived from that article without being independently checked). This theme seems to be most consciously articulated in the film when Nixon, at the end of speaking with concerned students at the Lincoln Memorial, remarks—after he has described how hard it is to get a handle on the forces he is facing as president—“maybe I am” talking about a wild animal, after all; the system was something that was nigh-impossible to tame, he says.

The Wikipedia article notes, “Stone said in an interview that Nixon realizes that ‘the Beast’ “is more powerful than he is…,” “the Beast” comprising “the military-industrial complex, the forces of money” (from Gavin Smith, “The Dark Side,” Sight and Sound [March 1995], referred to in Wikipedia article). In another interview he says, “I see the Beast in its essence as a System…which grinds the individual down… [I]t’s a System of checks and balances that drives itself off: 1) the power of money and markets; 2) [s]tate power, [g]overnment power; 3) corporate power, which is probably greater than state power; 4) the political process, or election through money, which is therefore in tow to the System; and 5) the media, which mostly protects the status quo and their ownership’s interests” (from Mark C. Carnes, “Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,” Cineaste, vol. XXII, no. 4 [1997]).

In some respects this—especially the last formulation—seems like a sociological interpretation; but when discussion of “the Beast” is done, it sounds mystical and dogmatic. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon’s allusions to “the Furies” or whatever it was in Gravity’s Rainbow that Pynchon seemed to posit as motivating harassing trends in history (it’s been many years since I read the whole novel). To me it doesn’t seem necessary for Stone to allude to this sort of thing in Nixon’s story, but as a sort of decorative “arabesque” to add some apparent logic to the shape of things as they developed up to and including Nixon’s term of office, it doesn’t seem terribly objectionable, as long as viewers remember it is a sort of literary affectation and not a real, empirically based statement of fact.

What is more objectionable is what sounds like more of a Stone theory of the type that seems to have marred JFK (which I never saw, but heard solid criticism about). There are a number of allusions in Nixon to some dark doings regarding Cuba and Castro that I am not enough of a Nixon expert to fully test as to veracity, though I have a feeling they are questionable at best and possibly false. I mentioned in my talk about Tony LoBianco above that a mob connection is alleged to have been (with obvious political risk to Nixon) part of a “Track 2” government plan to try to assassinate Castro, which Nixon is alleged to have been involved in around 1960. Whether there was such a “Track 2” plan I don’t know; that there was a mob connection seems even more dubious.

Fortunately, this whole thing is referred to enough times in the film that it doesn’t just slide past your awareness as if it was mentioned once, almost like a flaky passing notion; it comes up several times, and to me it repeatedly gets flagged in my mind—“Wait a minute, there it is again; I’ll bet that’s an Oliver Stone ‘conspiracy theory’ being wormed in.”

Even in the large sequence that is included in the videocassette version as an outtake, where Nixon meets with CIA director Richard Helms (played pungently but a little oddly by Sam Waterston), seems to be largely concerned with Nixon’s worry about paper records about the old Cuba plot—he wants the original papers dug up, and he wants no copies of them around (something that nowadays would be virtually impossible). If this has to do with a questionable theory inserted into the story about Nixon/the mob/“Track 2,” it’s just as well this sequence wasn’t included in the release version of the film—though it is well staged and edited, and even scored by John Williams. If it’s about an obscurantist theory, it’s just as well it was edited from a movie that, in its release form, turns out to be rather unwieldy and a lot to analyze, even when it sticks to accepted-enough facts.

This alleged “plot” seems to be of a piece with what is referred to in a tiny plot summary in the Wikipedia article on the film: “The movie also hints at some kind of responsibility, real or imagined, that Nixon felt towards the John F. Kennedy assassination through references to ‘the Bay of Pigs,’ the implication being that the mechanisms set into place for the invasion by Nixon during his term as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president spiraled out of control to culminate in the assassination and, eventually, Watergate.” This theory implies that Nixon set up preliminaries for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Usually the Bay of Pigs fiasco gets remembered as a Kennedy administration effort, though as one old source notes, the plan started under the Eisenhower administration (The Graphic Story of the American Presidents [Chicago: J.G. Ferguson Publishing Company (distributed to Doubleday), 1973], p. 63). Well, if Nixon felt some responsibility for Kennedy’s failure in the Bay of Pigs operation (I don’t know if he did in real life), even if Stone wanted to suggest this as one article of Nixon’s variously manifested paranoia, does this mean nothing more than a silly unsubstantiated fear or obsession on Nixon’s part?

I think if this interpretation of (one reason) why Nixon refers to Cuba as much as he does in the movie is considered to go along with the Nixon/mob/assassinate-Castro theory mentioned above, as if it all comprises a large part of Nixon’s paranoid motivation in the film, it seems it’s also of a piece with Stone’s separate theory about why Kennedy was assassinated (as presented explicitly in JFK), whether or not you would call Nixon some (unwitting) agent of “the Beast” that I earlier mentioned. I really can’t buy into this connection to the Kennedy assassination. Frankly, I never understood all the theorizing—by a wide range of people—about who killed Kennedy and why (aside from the loose-cannon activity of the loser/nut Lee Harvey Oswald), which seems to go along with a theory that if Kennedy had lived, we wouldn’t have had the Vietnam War, American history would have been more roses from 1963 on, and so on. To me some of the Kennedy-assassination stuff is well handled (pilloried) by Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977), where his character Alvie Singer, instead of enjoying intimate time with the character played by Carol Kane, is so obsessed with the Kennedy assassination that she mocks him by enumerating a long list of people and entities she posits he is believing are behind the killing, including the men’s room attendant at the Pentagon [?], and he says, “I would leave out the men’s room attendant.”

As far as Stone’s designing his movies is concerned, if he wants to present a controversial theory about Kennedy’s death in JFK, that is his prerogative, but if he is going to make an elaborate, researched film about Nixon, I have to give him demerits if he is going to import some, to me, crazy theories about Kennedy’s death. I mean, Nixon’s story is sad and tawdry enough without seeming to implicate him in Kennedy’s assassination, especially with a set of notions about the mob, a secret CIA-related role in a “Track 2” plan, or whatever. I have to admit I don’t know the full history here, but I am aware there is enough dubious about Stone’s version of the assassination that I think it begins to sound about as paranoid as Nixon could be in his own way; and Nixon’s real-life story provides enough paranoia and its associated negative impact on all and sundry without adding to it with a dubious Kennedy-related theory.

Closing remarks: From grand history to letting an old soul be

James Joyce, in his novel Ulysses, has his younger hero Stephen Dedalus (the other hero is the middle-aged Leopold Bloom) say at one point, “History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” For me, history is quite like this; whether I talk about what I’ve learned through books and classes alone—or try to add perspective by linking my own silly life to the great news stories within my lifetime, or trace connections between “starchy history” and real friends and associates I’ve known—still, chapters of history can seem like a big pile of haunting old pictures, trophies of past overdoing, spurs to a wild set of emotions you thought you’d gotten past.

Nixon is something like this: to try to dredge him up, package him in a story, figure out if the story is fair enough, remind young students of supplements that are necessary to touch base on before taking the story for what it’s worth…it all gets overwhelming. What is there to say about him now, and need we say it? This while we’ve got new crises waiting for our attention outside. New challenges to square with: money problems, the future of the young, national-security threats abroad….

And along with this, Nixon was also one man, a suffering person. He had a right to privacy too. He had the shame of how his presidency ended. He had his future to work toward, his family to provide for. He suffered a depression that almost ended his life immediately after he left office. But he forged on, and eventually—keeping up his effort to fulfill a role as an elder statesman—met with Bill Clinton in the White House within a year or so before he died.

Maybe Nixon, most relevantly today, exemplified what is a challenge for many of us, pretentious and unpretentious alike: in novelist Henry James’ phrase, the “complex fate of being an American.”

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

Hats off to this cultural figure, whose book Simple and Direct I read in 1977 and learned from as to how to write (not that all lessons sunk in right away, or consistently over the years). Here is a New York Times obituary on him, and here is his Wikipedia article.

Director’s dossier: Stanley Kubrick (1928-99)

(My occasional little feature “Director’s dossier” is a survey of a film director’s work to give orientation to one or more films by him or her, sometimes in another blog entry. This entry on Kubrick is actually, for immediate purposes, a preliminary to a review of a Steven Spielberg film, hopefully to be posted soon. The comments below are meant to be general.)

Stanley Kubrick, if he were working today the same way he did when alive, would be called an indie director, or even a European-style director (not simply for working in England as he did in his later years), because of the type of work he did, particularly as it aimed toward an artistic refinement. He was noted by many as a perfectionist—or an ultra-perfectionist; director Sydney Pollack made a point about him similar to this; other directors, he implied, could be called a perfectionist who actually are more slovenly, relatively speaking, than Kubrick was. Actor Richard Anderson, who appeared as a prosecuting attorney in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (and later was a fixture on TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man) characterized Kubrick as a “movie scientist,” as to how he approached making films, at every level as a director.

Kubrick planned all details of his films very closely (generally growing in how he did this for each film, over time), and became notorious for requiring many takes of shots of actors, often without giving them much guidance; he called for repeated takes (“Again!”), leaving some actors exasperated as to what he wanted. Then, when he had all the takes filmed, he apparently “printed” everything, and chose the takes he wanted for shots to appear in the final cut of a film. (It’s to be remembered that he didn’t do this with every shot in a given film.)

He made 13 films—a small output for many noted directors by today’s standards; but many of his films are standards by which others are judged or made, and some (less loved) are notorious for becoming a benchmark of sorts, or for being a basis for (playful) allusions in more modern works, whether in movies or on TV.

1953-64: Mostly black-and-white films, as by a director of noirs

His first seven films could be said to be, in loosely general terms, like noir films (which, within 1953-64, would have been late for the “proper” era for that genre)—films as if by Orson Welles or Billy Wilder:

Fear and Desire (1953), amateurishly done and pretty much disowned by Kubrick;

Killer’s Kiss (1955), interesting for its cinematography (from a glimpse I saw of it);

The Killing (1956), a film about a racetrack heist, starring Sterling Hayden as the heist mastermind, and interesting for a modernistic way, in indoor shots, the camera seemed to travel through walls; the time structure of the story also had modernistic dislocations;

Paths of Glory (1957), his first arguably great film, starring Kirk Douglas in one of his best-ever performances as a World War I, French field commander who acts as defense counsel for three soldiers who have been arranged to be put on trial as scapegoats for an infantry company’s failure to take an objective in a suicide mission; if you’re at all interested in Kubrick’s work, read about this film, and see it if you haven’t;

Spartacus (1960), Kubrick’s first color film and his only effort made in Hollywood (his experience here, while yielding a film noted as among the best of the sword-and-sandal genre, led him never to work in Hollywood again); interestingly, the cinematographer named in this film’s credits was the famed Russell Metty, but Kubrick seems to have been the de facto cinematographer for most of this film;

Lolita (1962), an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, disappointing if compared to the novel, which I think really can’t be filmed (director Adrian Lyne also filmed a version in the 1990s). Censorship restrictions that Kubrick had to address left the film in such a state that he felt if he knew what restrictions were ahead, he wouldn’t have made the film. On its own terms, it offers an intriguing, peculiar story; James Mason is good as Humbert Humbert, and Shelley Winters is good as Dolores Haze, mother of Lolita;

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Kubrick’s renowned satire of nuclear war, cowritten by Terry Southern; it is especially on the idea of mutually assured destruction, a relatively new concept to the public in 1964; possibly his very best film.

##

Dr. Strangelove was his seventh film; he had been working on films for a little over a decade, and believe it or not, for the next 30+ years, he would work on only as many films after this, six, as he had done before it.

1964-99: More richly produced (almost all color) films, and the anticlimactic phase of his career

The films listed so far, all in black-and-white, could have been made by a cool-eyed, cerebral director like Billy Wilder. Afterward, Kubrick would make all color films, and starting after his landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he would tend to be regarded as a master director each of whose releases was awaited as if it were an oracle.

If you were to ask me which his best films were, I would say, not entirely comfortably, the consecutively made Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange (1971), the last a controversial look at teenage delinquency (seen in a dystopian world) and what could be done about it. These three films could be considered to have taken a very measured, judicious approach in their manner of depiction (in terms of realistic [visual] depiction, if with a rather pessimistic or at least skeptical attitude toward individual character or the nature of Man, as some might say); and as a group, they thematically dealt with three aspects of what probably, in the 1960s, was most concerning (or inspiring) to people, or most defined the new aspects of the age: nuclear war and the role of the military in modern life; space exploration, and what it did in terms of our understanding of ourselves; and juvenile delinquency and “what the world is coming to.”

No director working today, arguably, has quite this kind of position, either in terms of how the director works or in what the public looks for from him; but also, today, much of the filmgoing public doesn’t tend to look to film directors this way anyway. (Among accomplished and acclaimed directors of today, Steven Spielberg comes close, in being able to deviate from what he is widely known for and make a film on a serious subject, tailored to middle class tastes, and be taken seriously. But his tendency often to make entertaining or somehow optimistic films puts him in a different class than Kubrick; more on this issue in a later blog entry.)

Kubrick’s films subsequent to A Clockwork Orange were well crafted (and from A Clockwork Orange on, his films were distributed, and funded, by Warner Brothers, while he ran his own production company in England), but they have been controversial or been seen as “not his best” by some segment of viewers or other, until his death:

Barry Lyndon (1975), a sumptuous, very much visually-oriented rendition of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel;

The Shining (1980), a rather clinical version of Stephen King’s horror novel;

Full Metal Jacket (1987), a version of Gustav Hasford’s novel on the Vietnam War, The Short-Timers; and

Eyes Wide Shut (1999), an adaptation of the novel Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”) by the Jewish-Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.

My favorites among these latter movies are The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, which in their respective, indulgent ways, take looks at family and domestic life that are quite different. I hope to do blog reviews on each of them before long.