44. Lot’s Wife: Two Film Reviews by Louise Ebersdorf
Prestige. That is my Pippa’s principal argument for calling my revived Ebersdorf Ballet Company simply “The Ballet” (sans quotes). Two words will be enough to draw a new audience, my girl Friday claims. Extra data, in the current info-glut of Google News or The New York Times, is simply Too Much. And the name would indicate, in addition to cultural distinction, a return to basics. Ideologies and political programs may come and go, but true beauty is forever. I would, of course, require a reference to the guiding light of the company (perhaps “Artistic Director – Louise Ebersdorf”, no quotes) somewhere adjacent. Prestige, indeed.
But, of course, mere reliance on the past is never going to be enough. That way lies the fate of Lot’s wife, the indulger of nostalgia who was turned to stone. Luckily, we have Cheryl and Sandy as our house choreographers, both of whom are sprigs off the solid-oak tradition of The Ballet. And should I allow guest dance-makers, there’s the possibility of introducing our New York audiences to Isabella Belladonna and her hit opus, La Sirène. That might placate Le Swing’s Mme Beach. And wouldn’t you know it, Albertine and Paco want in as well: they see their promised Catalytics spectacle (using my prize pets) as a candidate for inclusion in the company’s first season? Actually, I can see my famed furry ones on the stage of the Louise Theater: an Avant-garde Animal Act! As my bright Pippa has suggested, we could simultaneously program Cheryl’s Nekomata pas de deux, which portrays a legendary Japanese cat demon. And then perhaps a version of Balanchine’s 1927 futuristic hit La Chatte? (Master Raro could take on the Lifar role? A shared production with Le Swing?) That would make a sleek evening of three feline ballets. I walk a very fine line here between innovation and tradition. But don’t I always?
That’s what maenads are for – traversing the fine lines. If you are a designated cultural leader like me, you are ritually exposed. I’m like the ancient Greek or Roman grand matron who gathers her band of sisters around her for a trip into the mountains to forage for tender young victims to be dismembered and devoured. All in the name of a heightened consciousness, including aesthetic equivocation, poetic paradox, and ready ambivalence! Our god – in this case, The Ballet – demands such rites.
Pippa has suggested I view and review the film work of the great Barbara Stanwyck, the American movie maenad par excellence! (Somehow, I never met her in “real life”. She was a very private person off-screen.) But I always respected Missy’s artistry as an actress – not only the famed precise comic timing but that hardly less celebrated steel-in-the-blood intransigence featured in many of her roles. What her audience loved was that prole skepticism she was able to give her characters, each new persona endowed with a questioning habit as a sign of critical intelligence. Stanwyck had the ability to access the emotional logic in her reactions to all dramatic challenges. You trusted her.
This actress’ skills at comedy are on full display in her two triumphs from 1941: The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire. In them, Stanwyck eats men alive. I have always admired the Preston Sturges script for Eve more than the direction of his film. Perhaps it was the casting of Henry Fonda as the ultimate nerd that makes Stanwyck’s fun and games with him seem too easy and heavy a victory. Not that she isn’t blindingly virtuoso in her acting throughout. It may be that there is some kind of underlying male hurt being recalled and enacted by Fonda and his writer-director that reduces my ability to respond fully to their work. Howard Hawk’s Ball of Fire, on the other hand, has the perfect directorial tone for its hilarious script. I only wish the movie’s ending were equal to its exposition. As Sugarpuss in Ball, Stanwyck is a comedienne for the ages. Every shift in her manipulation of Gary Cooper’s Professor Bertram is almost musical in its clarity of line. Stanwyck is mistress of the comic cadence. I watch in awe.
Stanwyck had a magical sense of what the camera lens can catch of a performer, and she was unafraid of self-exposure. She was a Camerapuss throughout her career without being a conventional beauty. And she was game. For example, Stanwyck was not a dancer, but she could fake it. Watching her “tap” alongside Buddy Ebsen (she makes no sounds) or lead a conga-line in Ball of Fire is a delight because she makes her moves look improvised. You suddenly realize that she is reconstituting the mood of one of those fabled 1920s parties, where the guests would make up a number on the spot, like Gershwin inventing a new rhythm on an available keyboard. With Stanwyck, you are at that party.
But it is in her dramatic and film noir movies that Stanwyck explores truly Dionysian experience. Somehow, the actress becomes even more “filmic” in the values she must produce – more intimate, more delicately shaded, more ambivalent. We enter psychological territory to be found in no other film actress’ art. The skill was always there, although sometimes waiting its turn. In the 1933 Baby Face, her character’s career flies literally under the banner of Nietzsche’s Will To Power. A juicy quote from that work sets her protagonist in motion. And in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931), her Florence Fallon, a young Amiee Semple McPherson revivalist, turns banshee to drive her late minister-father’s parishioners literally out of the doors of their church.
Pippa has introduced me to a Stanwyck film I somehow had never seen (it is on YouTube currently, screening without charge), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), directed by Lewis Milestone. After a prologue introducing the three main characters as youngsters, two of whom are complicit in the death of Martha Ivers’s rich aunt, the film follows Sam (Van Heflin) as he returns to Iverstown after years in military service and becomes involved with the now industrial entrepreneur Martha (Stanwyck) and her husband, Walter (a very young Kirk Douglas in his first film), the local district attorney. Sam is a gambler, and he also becomes involved with a young woman, Toni (played by Lizabeth Scott), freshly sprung from jail where she had landed on a false charge of theft. Sam stirs guilt feelings in Walter because it appears that earlier he and Martha sent an innocent man to the gallows to cover up their involvement in the aunt’s death. Their marriage has been one of criminal convenience since a munificent inheritance was involved. Walter loves his wife, but the reappearance of Sam reminds Martha of her love for the “dirty boy from the wrong side of the tracks” who could have been her rescuer had he not run off to join the circus. Assuming that Sam has returned for blackmail, Walter tries to run him out of town, but Sam catches on and encourages Martha’s romantic nostalgia despite himself. He can already see that here is a woman whose fatal flaw is loving a memory. He has been her dream from childhood. And now here he is, out of the past.
The result is a role for Stanwyck that allows her to display love-hate and infinite gradations of power-madness and psychic dissolution. There is a campfire scene where she attacks her beloved Sam with a burning torch and then ends captive in his arms for a passionate embrace. No screen actress switches motives or synthesizes neuroses like Stanwyck.
In her favorite Parker Tyler mode, my assistant Pippa has informed me that the script (by Robert Rossen, from a story by John Patrick) follows a pattern of Dionysian ritual (“The Reception of Dionysus”) out of late Roman religion. The film’s narrative traces the outline of a mystery cult’s rites, specifically of the arrival of the god Dionysus in a newly votive city, whether Athens or Rome or a burg beyond. How will he be received? As the richest woman in Iverstown, Martha is the high priestess domina figure, an appointed representative of the Queen of the city, making ready to accept the god’s advent by welcoming him to her bedchamber. That would make Walter, her husband, the representative of the King, usually out drinking with the boys. Van Heflin as Sam would be the deity Dionysus himself, passing through town and causing social havoc. (It’s a proven narrative formula – see Picnic, Orpheus Descending, Teorema.) When Walter has Sam beaten up and dumped at the city limits, the modern reprisal would stand for the punishment and suffering of the antique rite’s god, who was dismembered and eaten in one version of his myth. Sam’s errant girlfriend, Toni, would be one of the raving maenads or bacchantes following their wild deity in the god’s processional thiasos. When the movie’s Queen and King eventually experience a double self-sacrifice at the end of the film, they may be said to have achieved a Dionysian higher consciousness through a new enactment of ancient ritual.
Only Barbara Stanwyck could save this modern retelling of myth from the lower realms of camp. She succeeds through acting artistry. (The worst element in the film is the histrionic musical score by Miklos Roza. He clearly sees the conductor’s baton as an unrelenting thyrsus.) But Stanwyck is there to lend the proceedings a central calm and, when required, a convincing madness. The movie not only has exact 1940s small-town details out of a John O’Hara short story, it has the narrative conventions that made for consensus art at the height of the movie-going habit across our land. Here is the type of movie-movie that one can imagine the aging J.D. Salinger showing his young high school friends via a 16mm print in his decades-long retreat in order to share with them what consensus could imply about the shared American values that he exploited in his own fictions. But Stanwyck takes her audience into psychological states beyond the conventional, and this is why Pippa and I can recommend the film in 2020.
Notice the way this actress paces her performance. She doesn’t even appear in the movie until a quarter of a way into its length, and a number of her first scenes are dominated by Heflin and Douglas. She is savvy at giving them their dramatic opportunities. Martha’s intimate side, exposed in the childhood bedroom scene that climaxes a guided tour of her manor, allows the actress to play with vulnerabilities and fantasy. Stanwyck makes every detail read. The encounter with Sam in her factory office shows Martha’s love of social power and her willingness to give this up (at least half of her fortune) if Sam will return to her as her lover. The script then permits Stanwyck to contrast a later show of control (her confrontation with Toni in a hotel room) with a scene of psychic confusion (the campfire confession).
It is the final sequences at Martha’s mansion that unleash Stanwick’s unique range. When Sam responds with pity rather than love (“You’ve always lived in a dream”), she pulls a revolver on him. When Sam fails subsequently to murder Walter, her lingering disappointment (“I thought you loved me”) have a Lady Macbeth force. And when Walter presses a pistol into her ribs, Stanwyck provides just a hint of a smile in acceptance of what fate will bring: either more proof of her husband’s weakness of will or a welcomed oblivion. We are in the land of the artful irrational, thanks to Stanwyck’s guided tour.
Pippa and I also screened a 2014 German film, Phoenix, for a contemporary version of what a fixation on the past can exact – or sometimes grant. The movie is directed by Christian Petzold, whose Transit was perhaps the best film that Pippa and I encountered last year. (Its competition would be 2018’s Happy Like Lazzaro from Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher.) Petzold is a Berlin School director from the 1990s, and among his earlier films I had previously seen (and admired) only the 2012 Barbara. In Phoenix, the Jewish Nelly, a cabaret singer (played by a brilliant Nina Hoss) has survived Auschwitz and at the beginning of the movie is returning to Berlin after the end of World War Two, when much of the city lies in ruins. She has been facially disfigured by the camp’s guards and, with the help of her friend Lene, she is to undergo plastic surgery in order eventually to be reunited with her husband, a cabaret pianist, Johannes (Johnny, played by Ronald Zehrfeld). She thus hopes to reconstitute her pre-War life and marriage. The reconstructive surgery does not fully restore Nelly’s former appearance, so when she succeeds in finding the husband with whom she is still deeply in love, Johnny does not recognize her. He tells her that his wife is dead and that he plans to collect her family inheritance through the invention of a double – using Nelly herself as the substitute.
This narrative twist is reminiscent of Hollywood film noir works, not only Hitchcock’s Vertigo but the movies of Robert Siodmak (The Killers, The Dark Mirror, The Phantom Lady). Petzold plays with the idea that the German past is simultaneously inescapable but also unreproducible. It must be faced by the German people if something new and authentic is to be forged post-War. Petzold’s filmmaking genius is to show how only an oblique, comfortless approach to self-recognition (or -reinvention) may be possible. Only in this way can his Nelly possibly find an authentic new identity.
Peltzold achieves his ends by a fascinating ambiguity in the observant Nelly, as she is conscripted by her Johnny to masquerade as her pre-War self so as to collect that inheritance. In his plan, Nelly will be said to have survived her ordeal and to have returned to the devastated capitol and her husband and friends. We watch as Nelly undergoes Johnny’s crash-course for restoring her to a simulacrum of herself. We ask ourselves, can she continue to love him under these dubious circumstances? Will she eventually revenge herself upon him – or will his efforts to restore her looks and behavior show that he has some modicum of affection for her? Will he realize the trick she is playing upon him?
Petzold constructs a microcosm of Germany attempting to redefine itself following participation in the Nazi era. (Perhaps only in this way can “collective guilt” be considered rationally. Dwight Macdonald in his journal Politics once held that Max Lerner finger-pointing is morally dubious. In Phoenix, Petzold may have found a way to consider the issue in small and from within.) Evidence accumulates that the earlier wartime Johnny may have been guilty of turning Nelly over to the authorities – thus ensuring her internment – and we may intuit a growing love-hate conflict within the post-War Nelly, especially when her friend Lene commits suicide after warning her of Johnny’s possible betrayal. You see how this film enters territory that The Strange Love of Martha Ivers explores. It does so without histrionics.
The final scene of the movie – an unforgettable false reunion sequence involving Nelly singing Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” as Johnny accompanies her on a piano before a group of their assembled friends – is delicately calibrated. Why does Johnny allow himself to indulge his manufactured “double” in such an impromptu display? Perhaps because Nelly has been showing her independence of late, and the song itself is famously in a parlando style. It can be half-spoken or softly sung. So maybe Nelly can get away with a further charade. I will leave the mystery as to her “success” unresolved, so you can enjoy discovering the film’s climax for yourself. The movie is available for streaming from Criterion.
Here at Ebersdorf Tower we not only walk the line between artistic inheritance and fresh invention; we maintain strict vigilance in these matters. The prestige of the past is a tool for the present. To work!
L.E.
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