NFR Project: "V-E Day + 1 (May 9, 1945)'

 

NFR Project: “V-E Day + 1 (May 9, 1945)”

Dir: Samuel Fuller

Pho: Samuel Fuller

21 min.

This was the first film future director Sam Fuller ever made. Fuller describes it best:

“The town of Falkenau was a respectful community with upstanding townspeople living in clean homes with flower boxes on their windows. It didn’t seem possible that just over the hill were hundreds of miserable people in subhuman conditions who had only two ways out. Quickly, in a gas chamber. Or slowly, by disease and starvation.

The commander of our battalion, Captain Kimble R. Richmond, took a squad into Falkenau and rounded up the mayor, the butcher, the baker, and other respected townspeople. He wanted to know how the hell they could go about their everyday lives while people were dying in the nearby camp. Every one of them swore that they didn’t have any idea of what was going on in the Konzentrationslager. Most said they were against Hitler. Captain Richmond was disgusted. We’d learned to doubt the avowals from civilians throughout our campaign. Every Arab in North Africa claimed he was anti-Nazi. Every Frenchman swore allegiance to the Free French. Sicilians hated Mussolini. Belgians hated Hitler. We’d discover, as expected, more and more Germans who’d never been members of the Nazi Party.

Captain Richmond ordered a delegation of townspeople to appear at the gates of the camp the next morning or face a firing squad. Richmond was going to make sure that these people found out what had been happening only a few steps from their front doors. That evening I was called to the battalion CP. Richmond and I had a good relationship ever since he’d been slightly wounded by a Nazi bullet that had punctured his steel helmet. When he came out from the clinic, he was looking for his helmet. He considered it his good luck charm. I was the one who’d been keeping it for him.

“Sonofabitch,” said Captain Richmond, smiling as I gave him the helmet with the bullet hole, “if you want a helmet like this, Fuller, you’ll have to get shot at!”

Richmond knew my mother had sent me a handheld Bell & Howell 16-mm movie camera. The captain wanted me to position myself the next day on a wall overlooking the concentration camp to film the gruesome spectacle. I was about to make my first movie.

I started shooting footage of Captain Richmond giving the upstanding citizens of Falkenau his orders. They were to prepare the camp’s victims for a decent funeral, then take them to the burial site on a wagon. That way, they could never say again that they didn’t know what was happening in their own backyard. I filmed a couple dozen corpses being taken out of that putrid hut against the camp’s wall and laid out one by one, wrapped in white sheets on the ground, then piled on the wagon. When the wagon was full of corpses, the townspeople pushed it out of the camp to the specially prepared burial site. POWs, mostly teenage Hitlerjugend, helped place the shrouded corpses in a mass grave. One of our chaplains said a brief prayer. Earth was then shoveled into the mass grave. As paltry a consolation it was, these Nazi victims were buried with dignity.

My twenty minutes of 16-mm film had recorded the sober reckoning of those civilians. The spectacle was heart-wrenching, leaving me numb. I’d recorded evidence of man’s indescribable cruelty, a reality that the perpetrators might try to deny. However, a motion-picture camera doesn’t lie. When I finally got home, in the fall of 1945, I put that footage away and never took it out again. It would be too painful to watch, bringing back all the horrors of the war years. Those twenty minutes were a testament to the victims at Falkenau and to all the millions of people who died in Nazi death camps.”

Fuller did eventually view this footage again, for the 1988 documentary Falkenau, the Impossible, which Fuller co-directed with Emil Weiss. Fuller revisits the scene of the crimes, watches the film. The footage is imbedded in that film.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Best Years of Our Lives.

NFR Project: 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

Dir: Elia Kazan

Scr: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis

Pho: Leon Shamroy

Ed: Dorothy Spencer

Premiere: Feb. 28, 1945

128 min.

The naturalistic drama is a rare bird in American cinema, and a specialty of its director Elia Kazan (1909-2003), whose first film this was. He was to go on as the prodigiously honored and vastly popular director of such films as Gentleman’s Agreement, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden. He is also noted for his testimony against supposed Communists in his industry to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. You loved him or you hated him.

All that lies in the future. Kazan came out of the performance collective known as the Group Theatre (1931-1941), which grew from the teachings of Russian performer and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). Kazan was noted for his ability to conjure great performances out of actors, particularly those in need of mentoring, such as Brando, Dean, and Peck. These were the early days of Method acting, which swept the industry in the 1950s.

The deeply felt tale of growing up in the slums of Brooklyn in 1912 seemed well-suited to Kazan’s strengths. He was able to get actors to play above their heads, to do extraordinary work. He helped two actors in the film win Oscars.

He did it by keeping the players close to the camera. This is a movie of faces, carefully scrutinized. The challenge to the actor is to present in a new way, to let them work, at their own pace, to the moment. This is most evident in his work with Peggy Ann Garner, who won a special juvenile Oscar for playing the young heroine Francie.

The film is adapted from the bestselling 1943 novel by Betty Smith. Francie is 13, has a little brother, Neeley, and lives with him and her father Johnny Nolan (James Dunn) and her mother Katie (Dorothy McGuire). Francie and Neeley are “ragpickers,” scavengers of the streets who sell their finds to the junk man for pennies. Her mother scrubs the tenement’s floors to make extra money. Katie is sister to Sissy (Joan Blondell), a serial monogamist.

Johnny is a drunk. An amiable, charming drunk, but a drunk nonetheless. He can’t hold down a job, save for performing occasionally as a singing waiter. He sings beautifully, and he dreams of a better life.

He and Francie have a special bond. He fudges some paperwork so that she can attend a better school nearby. Meanwhile, the family moves to a cheaper, smaller apartment. Katie becomes pregnant. One night, Johnny goes out into the snow to find and job and dies. The kids get after-school jobs.

The baby comes, and Francie and Neeley graduate from their respective schools. The kindly Officer McShane (Lloyd Nolan), proposes to Katie,.and he adopts the baby as his own. Finally, it seems the danger is over, the family will not starve.

At all times, Kazan eschews fancy camerawork. He stays on level or slightly below his players, trained on their reactions to the severe circumstances they find themselves in. Francie is a reader, a dreamer, a committed future writer. Kazan lingers on Garner’s faces as she takes in bad news, the way she melts into happiness onscreen. Dorothy McGuire is thoroughly three-dimensional, and James Dunn . . . Dunn was a real-life alcoholic Kazan captures the innate pathos of the alcoholic on Dunn’s face, and Dunn won Best Supporting Actor for the role.

What happens in this school-of-hard-knocks tale is covered compassionately and patiently. The actors are using the screen as a canvas, gaining power as the focus of the audience’s attention. We feel we are watching real life; there’s not a false note in any of the performances. This serious engagement with character swept the audience up in its commitment and energy. A story of poverty-level living in America, Tree is the indicator of a new direction in onscreen acting.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: V-E + 1 (May 9, 1945).

 

 

Book excerpt: from 'Pow! Zoom! Bang!: Comics and the Cinema': 'Wilson' (2017)

 

Wilson

Ad Hominem Enterprises: 2017

Source: Wilson – Daniel Clowes

Director: Craig Johnson  Producers: Jared Ian Goldman, Mary Jane Skalski  Screenwriter: Daniel Clowes  Cinematographer: Frederick Elmes  Leading Players: Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Cheryl Hines

101 min.

This movie is a hidden gem. It’s an old-school comedy odyssey for grown-ups, an excursion into the unique mind of the noted graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, who composed the screenplay as well. Thoroughly enjoyable, its quirky and profane observations on mundane life, and the characters who inhabit it are charming.

Woody Harrelson is here the title character, a befuddled middle-aged flailer at life with no filter whatsoever no family connections, and with exactly one friend (played by the great Brett Gelman, who steals his scene). Wilson is a great character to play, one who distinctively always says exactly what he thinks. This transforms his speech into a kind of offensive poetry. He constantly goes where he is not wanted, physically and mentally.

 His father dies, leaving him his absurdly large paneled station wagon to drive around in. He’s lonely. Only his faithful dog Pepper consoles him. Wilson, a stranger to Internet research, finds out that his ex-wife of 17 years has returned to their town in Minnesota. She, Pippi (Laura Dern) reveals that she did not abort Wilson’s baby all those years ago and that he has a daughter.

Wilson is ecstatic, and he hunts down and barges into his teenaged daughter Claire’s life, dragging Pippi behind him. They establish a weird kind of relationship with the girl (Isabella Arama), who doesn’t know what to make of them. Wilson is energized by the contact . . . but then he blows it all up when he and Pippi take Claire, without her adoptive parents’ permission, to meet Pippi’s mean, perfect suburban sister Polly (Cheryl Hines) and her completely successful family (everyone but Wilson and Pippi is well-off, it seems).

Pippi attacks Polly, the cops come, and Wilson gets three years in jail for kidnapping and child endangerment. Oddly, he perseveres and becomes his best self in prison, befriending everyone. In the blackest of comic observations, the movie says it’s where a soul such as his really fits in.

Pippi leaves him for her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, and is off to Australia. Released, he goes back to visit the lady who used to dog-sit for him, Shelly (the dependable Judy Greer, who’s made a whopping 179 films) and falls into a romantic relationship with her.

Claire gets back in touch with him, revealing that she is pregnant and moving to Portland. Wison considers moving, but for once in his life makes a smart move and stays where he is. The last image is he and Shelly loving his grandchild via livechat on his computer.

These are comic archetypes. Harrelson and Dern have a ball as Wilson and Pippi. He’s a wandering eccentric; she’s a good-hearted dimwit. Watching them metaphorically sticking their tongues in the light socket, over and over again, is entertaining but heart-rending at the same time. Our lead characters are inane, obtuse, deluded – but we end up rooting for them. It's classic comedy.

Direction Johnson does a great job with a top-notch cast, holding back from the characters ever-so-slightly, quietly watching their akimbo emotions splashing around the landscape, derailing their lives. If there is such a thing as deadpan naturalism, this would be a prime example of it. Wilson resolves itself, redeems its characters, even gives us a happy ending. It’s a kind of pilgrim’s progress.