Blog-a-thon Entry #5Contemplative Cinema at the Drive-In:Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Note: For a variety of reasons I hadn't intended to post an entry in the ongoing Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-thon. Indeed, as had been the case with the recent Film Criticism festa, I thought there no conceivable upside if I so much as tried to participate (a judgement that, I think, bore some wisdom). But a comment I left in jest on this Blog-a-thon's mission control center led to an invitation to take part; and here we are. Having no time, none, to churn up anything new, I thought it the better part of valor to instead go with something relatively recent.

This is an article I wrote for the November, 2006 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal . . . yes, I actually wrote it . . . on Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971); a film that represents one of the few instances where non-traditional cinematic expression (or, for our present purposes, Contemplative Cinema) sought a rough co-existence within a realm many would consider one of the crassest motion picture sub-markets going: the Drive-In circuit.

My deepest thanks to one of the truly indispensible editors in this racket, Gary Morris, for giving me leave to reproduce its contents here.

*****

In their April, 1971 issue, the editors of Esquire magazine boldly declared an as-yet unreleased film from Universal Pictures entitled Two-Lane Blacktop “Our nomination for the Movie of the Year.” They didn’t bury this pronouncement in the text of an accompanying article. No. They put it right on the cover, where anybody walking by a newsstand or glancing at a coffee table or waiting patiently for an appointment with their shrink could see it. Then, almost as a way of insuring that raised eyebrows would ensue, they kicked everything up a notch by publishing, in its entirety, the film’s screenplay.

By publishing standards of the day, this was a strange and audacious commitment. Screenplays have rarely been known for their readability, and mass-market publications simply didn’t go out of their way to reproduce their contents; or, for that matter, gush so extravagantly and with such bald certainty over films that were technically still in production at press time (it is, of course, a far more common occurrence here in the age of Ain’t It Cool News). What was going on? This wasn’t the overheated enthusiasm of undisciplined fan magazines like Film Culture, after all — such presumptive fanfare had been de rigeur in that quarter since about 1957 — this was Esquire, for pity’s sake. The same Esquire launched by the Hearst corporation in 1933 as a kind of periodical devotion to the sensibilities of literate, chest-beating Hemingway manqués; serving up everything from cheesecake Calendar Girl pinups to works of fiction and nonfiction by many of the day’s finest authors (even Papa himself). By the Spring of 1971, thanks to its having incubated the New Journalism revolution, Esquire was arguably one of the ten most respected publications in America, maintaining an astonishingly high level of literary excellence with apparently little effort. Yet here they were, throwing the full weight of their credibility behind what looked to be yet another Youth Culture cash-in out of Hollywood.

Only at this many years remove does the rationale for this decision appear, well, rational. Cinema — or rather, the formal appreciation of cinema — was an approved cultural fashion in many areas of American life, owing no small debt to the advance in the preceding decade of various so-called New Waves in Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and South America. Attending this had been a gradual absorption into the bloodstream of this country’s filmmaking of what can only be described as the drive-in aesthetic pioneered by marginal outfits like American-International Pictures in the late 1950s. There was, at all levels, a greater interest in fast and tawdry expression, generally, though not always, aimed at a younger audience. Along with the collective crashing of New Waves, it had the effect of flooding sensibilities so completely that film genres heretofore ignored by mainstream culture as no more than oatmeal for the feeble-minded or cheap diversion for the Clearasil set were regarded with a more discerning, somewhat more appreciative eye. American Cinema, at least its industrialized sector in Hollywood, seemed to have been revitalized overnight, and it soon dawned on a once-passive segment of the movie-going public that a much broader spectrum of film artistry — a true American New Wave, if you will — was within reach. No one who still had the sense they were born with could witness the rise of a New & Improved motorcycle picture like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and the fall of bellowing cinematic mastodons such as Hello, Dolly and delude themselves any longer into thinking that this was all some kind of coincidence.

For many it was the herald of a new time; a precise time; a time when, say, knowing the difference between Satyajit Ray and Nicholas Ray ceased to be what it always seemed to have been: the preoccupation of fanatics and geeks. Now it was socially acceptable, in some circles even desirable. Who could have believed such a moment, brief as it ultimately was, would come to pass? For others — those who took their new-found 'passion' for film (a favored construct of White, forward-moving members of the American middle class; a key Esquire demographic after WWII) and wore it stylishly, like a suit hand-tailored in Milan — it was a chance to look a bit more worldly, a bit more tuned-in to the currents of a vital culture than they had been in 1965. Just as today (for this rancid posture continues to infest what we still, without cracking a smile, call our film culture), these audiences were unshakable in the conviction that their treks to the art houses and revival houses were qualitatively different from all that low, indiscriminate, mere movie-going which other, more limited palettes — the slobs who piled into drive-ins and grindhouses; who didn’t give tuppence for which Ray was which and never would — always settled for.

But even if Esquire‘s Two-Lane Blacktop cover appears reasonable in this climate, it still made them look like the biggest trend whores on the planet after the movie tanked that July; a circumstance they acknowledged rather shamefacedly three decades later. The changes wrought in Hollywood filmmaking — so elemental and enduring that this period currently stands as the single most romanticized epoch in the history of American cinema — were well-enough established that a backlash had an almost biological inevitability to it. It was also, to some degree, a well-deserved backlash; for while much critical rapture has been righteously squirted upon the so-called New Hollywood of the early ’70s, there came with the wheat a vast quantity of irredeemably modish chaff which, save for a handful of titles, has thankfully faded into the deepest obscurity. The minute self-styled maverick studio executives of the day like James Aubrey over at MGM caught wind of the unhinged social consciousness (and cachet) of the youth market — a segment of the audience now pursued with greater abandon than ever before — it seemed like every other film coming out of Hollywood was purporting to embody some sort of comprehensive distillation of the Now; to the point where the whole gaudy enterprise had become one of the more tiresome manifestations of pre-fab counterculture ever concocted.

While no amount of pseudo-contemporary swill such as The Sporting Club or The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart could make anyone long for the return of Thoroughly Modern Millie (maybe), there was an unnerving, almost militant wrongness about these movies nevertheless. Their desperation to catch up with the times was too leaden, too naked; the perspiration stains they left on those who had transit with them were bound to get annoying. This was that hour.

More than any film of the period, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop fell victim to Hollywood’s piggy-back on an already overtaxed zeitgeist. It barely registered with audiences; and even the mass-market critics who found in it cause for admiration all tended to linger on the elliptical, ghost-like plot, the nameless characters, the bare minimum of dialogue and explication, the wisp of a denoument; most of them choosing to write about the film as another entry in the Now ledger that somehow succeeded in spite of itself. “Existential,” the all-weather white flag of rhetorical surrender, was hauled out repeatedly that summer. But this also was inevitable. Confronted by a strange, aphoristic movie about a society built around gas stations, AM radio squawks, hamburger joints, cheap motels and lounges — whose very identity had become inextricably bound to the empty symbology of the automobile — anyone could have predicted that film critics would either dismiss it outright as a failed, pretentious hot rod picture or fall back to the safe house of standardized critical terminology.

Far from a land bursting with rude vitality, the American Southwest of Two-Lane Blacktop is the most disillusioned place on earth. Not physically blighted as it had been in the 1930s, or as ruggedly depersonalized as our dense, logo-rotten vistas today, but pretty darn bleak. It’s there in the inert, benumbed, interchangeable towns; all half-lit electric signs, peeling paint, tired Coca-Cola machines. It’s there in the people we see on the margins, their general isolation from the larger world, their collective and total absorption in cars — slick cars, badass cars, chopped-down, tuned-up, beaten, dead, and rusted-out cars; cars left to rot, cars that barely move, and cars that never seem to stop. They're everywhere you look. As the only tangible forms with any life in them, automobiles hold an easy dominion in the mise-en-scene of Hellman’s film without once crowding the expanse of the Techniscope frame; almost as a tacit form of mockery toward the empty spaces they and their drivers pass through en route to wherever something might be happening.

You would think no one had an interest in anything else. Like refugees from a Nathanael West novel, they gather of an evening beneath the blackened, starless heavens to watch two of those dream machines race up (or down) a tiny ribbon of highway; they stand awestruck in a loose circle around a tricked-out 1955 Chevrolet piloted by two automaton drag race hustlers (Dennis Wilson and James Taylor), speaking of its wonders with muted reverence as though such chariots represented the glue that holds their universe together; the more restless among them take to the road as hitch-hikers, moving from car to car in search of a deeper connection with everything they represent, whatever that might be. But there’s no connection to be had; not for them, not even for the motorists behind the wheel. As that obsessed, weirdly upbeat character (Warren Oates) in the driver’s seat of a shiny new Pontiac G.T.O. could tell you (if he were only aware of it), you can live on these highways, forever bounce like a red rubber ball from one end of the country to the next, and never really move an inch.

Which is not to say that his is a dreary voyage, however aimless it might appear. Hell no. Compared to those two jokers in the Chevy — a grim duo by all measure — this guy exists in an invariant state of exaltation; loaded up with everything a man could need to make him the best-heeled desert nomad this side of Howard Hughes: a dapper wardrobe (wool slacks, white shirts, ascot; a panoply of Sy Devore cashmere sweaters, each a different color), enough stimulants squirreled away in the trunk to keep his synapses running at Mach 3 for a decade, an unending stream of hitch-hikers to share his ride (he’s always going where they're going). The car makes this life possible, you see. He lives for it, and it’s all he ever talks about; tirelessly reciting its unseen gifts to his passengers as though the vehicle stats sitting in the glove box were a rare and beautiful swell of prose set down by an unknown hand in an office somewhere in Detroit. Zero to 60 in 8.4 seconds; quarter-mile in 13.4. 390 horsepower, 500 foot pounds torque. Who knows what any of it means, and who cares? Like Homer’s Catalogue of Ships or the recorded succession of generations in the Old Testament, these are just the maddening, mind-numbing details without which the wild poetry of the whole would rest uncompleted. It’s a 1970 Pontiac (need any more be said?), and it’s the most real thing he’s ever laid his hands on.

Reality, we discover, is a highly tenuous thing to him. For example, his favorite topic of discussion (apart from the enduring majesty of the G.T.O.) is how he got that fine canary yellow baby in the first place. No two versions are ever the same — he bought the car in Bakersfield, he won it in Vegas, he’s test-driving it for Detroit; take your pick — each account part of a tale of life-altering triumph (or tragedy) that somehow put him on the road and kept him there. What’s remarkable is that, despite his shape-shifting history, he never fails to disclose himself with anything less than unwavering candor. Implicit is the notion that every story he unfurls could be true. And that’s all that matters. In its telling, each tale becomes an individual thread in a communal narrative that, like any true mythology, is totally impregnable to the depredations of reason. He’s not a schizophrenic (not yet), nor is he a middle-aged fantasy merchant deep in flight from the real world. Through the light cast by Warren Oates’ justly celebrated performance, he’s the proxy for every imagination that ever bought into the cruel, delusive mythos spun around the internal combustion engine; a kind of spiritual cousin to Flannery O'Connor’s most touching creation, the lost, half-maddened Bible student Enoch Emory of her 1952 novel Wise Blood, abjectly searching the darker corners of someone else’s lies for a moment of ultimate transcendence that cannot be his.

The centerpiece of Two-Lane Blacktop is a race; an Arizona to D.C. contest between the G.T.O. and the ’55 Chevy, with the winner receiving full title to the loser’s vehicle, pink slip and all. In the film’s longest, most complex sequence, a gavotte of circling intentions where the race is proposed and its terms agreed upon, the driver of the G.T.O. stares at this adversary vehicle. “I can take him,” he says quietly, his eyes and voice betraying a sudden, forbidding intensity, “I know I can take that antique.” Well, he has his work cut out for him. That antique is a monster in every respect: a soulless, primer gray, no-frills behemoth; built, rebuilt, customized, and fine-tuned to the performance standard of a cut-price spaceship; tended to with monk-like devotion by two long-haired zombies who’ve made for themselves a totally joyless existence driving from one hick burg to another, challenging everyone who thinks they have the fastest set of wheels in town. “They’re not for you,” the G.T.O.’s pilot says to a post-pubescent hitch-hiker (Laurie Bird) who manages to attach herself to the three of them, “All they think about is cars.” Which is absolutely true. No one in Two-Lane Blacktop has a life or a presence that isn’t tied in one way or another to the automobile, no one has a past (except for the guy in the G.T.O.; and he’s got so many they cancel each other out), no one has a name.

Where any other film would have devoted the balance of its narrative to the ensuing race, drawing what suspense could be gotten from this time-worn storytelling model, Hellman and his principal screenwriter, Rudolph Wurlitzer, utterly refuse to have truck with such weather-beaten material. Their race is not some metaphorical struggle between two mighty kings of the road; it’s more like a self-deceiving ritual carried out by two of its prisoners. It is at best a listless affair — virtually a pretext for its principals to move in and out of each other’s space — with all the competitory spirit that might have been its motor rapidly falling to the lethargy everything else dwells in. It begins . . . and then it drifts away.

Little wonder then that critics still reach for the word 'existential' when writing about Two-Lane Blacktop; though, in fairness, Monte Hellman’s career to that point does make the reach somewhat easy. As one of several directors of note to labor for Roger Corman’s cinema packing plant of the 1960s, Hellman’s career pursued a common trajectory (work, both credited and uncredited, on orthodox drive-in fare such as The Beast of the Haunted Cave and Corman’s anybody-can-direct opus, The Terror) to a less common failure. He had latched onto the director in 1959, the story goes, after investing in a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Hellman staged in Los Angeles. Despite the good luck charm of Corman’s overextended guidance, Hellman failed to vault himself to the mainstream glory directors like Francis Ford Coppola or (later) Jonathan Demme achieved (Two-Lane Blacktop is the only film Hellman has directed for a major studio); establishing instead a remarkable facility for imbuing low-budget commercial subjects with a contemplative sensibility more akin to a Japanese New Wave stalwart than, say, Jack Hill. It was the incredible austerity of Hellman’s revisionist genre films — Flight to Fury (1964); his Western diptych, Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967) — that gave anyone all the indication they would ever need that this was not a director the mainstream could assimilate with ease. By the time he made Two-Lane Blacktop, the manner of Hellman’s work was so much like that of so-called Art Cinema that it fairly begged to be hit with the most debased critical nomenclature going; linguistic shortcuts like 'existential' that Hollywood product was burdened with only rarely.

And this would have been no more than another fine joke on the institution of film criticism, were it not for the fact that Two-Lane Blacktop is anything but existential (whatever definition you choose for that vacant term). It’s not a Youth Culture cash-in. It isn’t satirical or even vaguely ironic. With a single-minded focus on the automobile and all its accumulated symbolic stature in American life, Hellman and Wurlitzer afforded themselves a closely observed vision of such chastity that one would think the two had resolved from the first to gather up all the bright white expectations of the 20th century and, with embittered intent, deliver them to their absolute terminus; using the talisman of an age, in other words, to chart the putrefaction of a moribund ideal.

When Senator John F. Kennedy pledged to get this country moving again in 1960, after all, he was talking about an unbridled, insurgent America; not the one Woody Guthrie said was made for you and me. It was a time in history when America’s benign self-image went on an open rampage. We’d already stomped Fascism into jelly, hadn’t we? Now the world would reap the benefits. It was literally that simple. In the aggregate, Kennedy’s pledge was the liberal-internationalist ethos of the 1950s reaching its fullest articulation. Our leaders dreamed in their slumber of a New Frontier the way cinephiles dream of New Waves. And such was this country’s idealism as that decade closed that nobody — except perhaps a handful of septuagenarian anarchists in public library reading rooms — would ever dare despoil the grandeur of everything that lay ahead of us with a lot of cynical, retrograde questions about where America would be moving to when all was said and done.

Back in those days (before the whole thing hit a speed-bump in Southeast Asia) you had public intellectuals on the left-liberal end of the spectrum like John Kenneth Galbraith writing books calling us — in celebration muted but no less affirmative — an affluent society. That was bad enough. What made it worse, everyone seemed to be nodding their heads in a terrible unison. Imperialism? Class warfare? Be serious. That kind of hand-wringing was SO 1930s; as quaint as a WPA mural in a Midwestern Post Office, as useful as a flickering broadcast of The Crowd Roars on KTLA at three in the morning. In the gleaming palace of the post-war era we lived and thrived on one big middle-class pasture of plenty, unencumbered by the outmoded whining of that Great Depression now so safely in the distance.

If this was true, and ours was indeed the ultimate triumph of the industrial age and the fulfillment of its heartfelt promise to make this country and the lives of all her citizens richer, fuller, more meaningful — a process said to have been set in motion by mass production of the automobile several decades earlier — then what better evidence could be cited, we were told, than the easy-to-afford gadgets that were supposedly a fact of life for everyone who wasn’t living in a refrigerator box outside the Hollywood Ranch Market? It was no accident, was it, that one of the great symbolic confrontations of the Cold War — the so-called “Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 — took place in the presence of a roomful of sparkling household appliances furnished by the Amana Corporation. Like Nixon on that occasion, we drew strength and succor from our machines, and in them we saw an awesome reflection of ourselves. Writers like Vance Packard and Sloan Wilson could sit back with their Götterdämmerung resignation and sneer at the status seekers and the men in the gray flannel suits all they wanted; fact was, every Pontiac, every color television set, every three-speed blender in America stood as proud testament to a hard-won supremacy. And now we were ready to hurl it at everyone.

Not everybody around the globe was quite so captivated by the spirit of the adventure as we were. Atavists in the Third World (some of whom probably never saw a toaster-oven in their lives) would soon be dragging their dusky heels as they were wont to do, calling it 'Pax Americana' or something (the ungrateful wretches); all six syllables dripping with seven different kinds of scorn. To them our touring military/industrial fantasia was just a new and improved, whiter-than-white colonial con-game — the old feudalist racket, only this time sporting a trim waistline and a world-class haircut. Nobody, save for the crypto-fascist murderers we installed to lead our client states, wanted any part of it. But being the planet’s first superpower (the comic book implications of that term have never been coincidental), we owed it to the rest of the world to remake its so-called underdeveloped regions in our image before the feared, and usually imaginary, Soviet proxies got there first. Spreading what it pleased us to call our way of life was a missionary enterprise we accepted soberly, but also with great enthusiasm. It represented the drawn desire of our hearts. Everyone said so.

Of course, the last thing leaders who talked about getting America moving again had in mind was anybody stuck riding a gas pump or slinging hamburgers in Taos, New Mexico or some other dried-out husk of a place (the only advantage they could claim was that it was safer than harvesting rice in the Mekong Delta). Oh sure, the American people thought they had a stake in the great post-war global adventure — much of our popular culture told us nothing else — but they weren’t going anywhere, not unless it was in a uniform. They weren’t supposed to.

“You can never go too fast,” the driver of the Chevrolet says at one point; giving cheap voice to a principle as ultimately hollow as the adrenaline-rush allure of speed itself. Informed by a sense of sheer, unutterable melancholy and disillusionment, Two-Lane Blacktop — a film that, not so ironically, was everything Esquire claimed it to be and more — is in the end an unhappy record of that hollowness in all its corroding purity; a visible inventory, from first frame to last, of everything left behind when America got moving again.

Blog-a-thon Entry #4:Alfred Hitchcock PotpurriThe Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #12

Who would have guessed that another Blog-a-thon would be upon us so soon? Not I, for one. But thanks to the prodigious efforts of Squish over at The Film Vituperatem we here at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger . . . find ourselves once again unable to resist the essentially communal spirit of the hour. And what better (or easier) entry could there be for a Blog-a-thon devoted to Sir Alfred Hitchcock than a whole mess of images, a Musical Indulgence and . . . you guessed it . . . Part Twelve of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes; entailing discussions of two films from 1942, Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt.

Saboteur is a film that only those who go in for Alfred Hitchcock's by-then patented suspense mechanisms could think a major work. Clearly Hitchcock himself has little regard for the film, spending, as he does, most of his retrospective analysis on its failings; as if in this discussion, some two decades later, he were still trying to figure out what went wrong.

To use the term 'discussion' to describe what transpires in relation to Shadow of a Doubt is, however, stretching the term a bit, since Hitchcock really doesn't get to say very much.

If you've been following this series, then I don't have to tell you who does most of the talking, do I.

It is, of course, not the first instance where François Truffaut spends an inordinate amount of time explaining to Hitchcock his own movie (it's not the last, either). By now, the Master of Suspense probably realized this was going to be a regular feature these talks, something one sits through and endures as best as one can. Short of calling in Security gorillas to bounce the team of François and Helen off the Universal lot . . . then working them over with beaver-tail saps before dumping them in Griffith Park . . . there wasn't a whole lot he could do but wait for the next question to arrive (I imagine he spent these lulls actively fantasizing about how he'd change the menu at Chasen's if only they'd let him). As I say, this is not by now an unusual occurrence in these recordings, but it's an especially annoying one this time because Shadow of a Doubt may be the finest film Alfred Hitchcock directed in the 1940s.

Ostensibly the story of a young girl who slowly comes to discover that her elegant, charming, and most favored uncle is what we now call a serial killer, Shadow of a Doubt is at once a droll portrait of wholly American innocence and a night-filled document of its sundering. It has to be remembered that, despite the best efforts of novelists such as Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, our popular culture had not yet even begun to exhaust the theme of foul, unutterable doings just beyond the facade of small-town American life. Indeed, Hitchcock's is really the first film to take up the theme full-on. And while there have been those who will argue that Thornton Wilder's presence as co-scenarist played more than a subordinate role in creating the film's sense of social dread . . . after all, Wilder was not that many years removed from his bleak stage masterpiece Our Town . . . it doesn't fully account for Hitchcock's absolute engagement with it. His shepherding of this fundamentally dark tale evinced, in a way no film of his had before, an intense focus not just on the mechanics of telling its story, but on bringing what light his art could bear to all of its larger implications.

The key question, of course, is exactly what it was that so inspired Alfred Hitchcock on this occasion; why this project and not, say, Foreign Correspondent? While avoiding an outright spoiler, I can safely say you will not learn the answer to that question here. François Truffaut, unfortunately, seems to have little interest in it. I daresay he thought he already knew everything he needed to know.

Blog-a-thon Entry #3:Some Remarks on Robert Aldrich's Attack (1956)

I don't know if there's any way I can state the following without sounding a craven, rationalizing fool, so I'll just have to risk it. What a few of you are about to read is something I wrote very quickly, within the last 24 hours; and under normal circumstances I would not regard this a piece finished to my satisfaction. But I did want to participate in the Aldrich Blog-a-thon today, so I'm posting it with this caveat. It is at best a draft of something I may re-visit in the future, no more than that.

Since we have that out of the way, here 'tis:

When Jack Palance's Lieutenant Joe Costa suddenly returns from what seemed a certain death in Robert Aldrich's Attack (1956) – his left arm hanging lifeless, rendered to ground beef by the tread of a German tank – he becomes, through a fateful marriage of Joseph Biroc's noirish lighting scheme and Palance's one-of-a-kind cheekbones, a gargoyle; an insane, barely ambulatory throwback to the resurrected war dead of Abel Gance's J'Accuse, only here wielding a much more narrow indictment. He has sworn to almighty God to use what minutes of life are left within him to once and for all rid the world of Captain Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert), the equally insane Commander of Fox Company whose repeated, last-minute withdrawals of tactical and artillery support have resulted in nearly two dozen needless combat deaths.

It's not that Cooney does this out of total incompetence. Screenwriter James Poe (adapting Norman Brooks' stage play Fragile Fox) portrays Capt. Cooney as a more than adequate strategist, good at both forging a plan of action on short notice and maintaining the bearing of a Commander in the United States Infantry . . . at least when he’s not under any stress. When it comes time for him to saddle up the reserve and join those forces he’s already committed to the fray, forget it. He instantly falls to pieces, starts guzzling Bourbon, goes catatonic or murmurs with growing insistence about pulling back, surrendering.

Cooney doesn't really belong anywhere near a Commissioned rank in this man’s Army, and not just because of his open displays of physical cowardice. More than anyone in the film, he's got 'Civilian' written all over him. Vain, self pitying, overly sensitive to the slightest criticism (however justified), he also has all the flabby gregariousness of a small-town businessman whose most fearsome tests of mettle prior to this have been with his local Chamber of Commerce (indeed, Cooney at one point laments the un-businesslike inefficiency of the Army). "Who wants this?", he weeps near the end, while the mortar shells fall and his sanity is about to expire for good. “I didn’t ask for this.” Which is absolutely true. His Captaincy was, for all intent, presented to him gift-wrapped by Lt. Col. Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin) as a favor to Cooney's father, a local Judge and ruler of a political fiefdom back in Kentucky that holds the key to Bartlett's ambitions once the small matter of the War is behind them all. Bartlett is none too thrilled with having to carry this big baby through the charade of making him look like an officer, but it has to be done. If he’d only stop committing entire platoons to combat right before every ounce of nerve flees from his being, thereby insuring the deaths of far too many, then they could go on about their hideously corrupt scheme and no one would be any the wiser.

Elaborating somewhat on Samuel Fuller’s pulp war picture template (itself a jaundiced twist on the terse lyricism of films such as William Wellman's Battleground), Robert Aldrich skillfully injects a measure of ambiguity in Attack – a film that might have been, in other hands, a live-action EC War Comic on the order of Two-Fisted Tales – without ever threatening to derail the story’s immediate, visceral impact. When you think about it, this was not a small achievement. Pulp melodramas, after all, do not bear subtleties and refinement with much ease. That’s just their nature. And like all such narratives, the conflict between Capt. Cooney and Lt. Costa, which is the core of Attack, is as fertile a field for action-packed histrionics as a filmmaker was likely to find. Yet somehow, in opting for a strategy of what we might call Serial Nuance, portraying his chief antagonists as both seriously flawed human beings as well as victims of rough equivalence, Aldrich manages to enhance, rather than mute, his film’s polemical thrust.

For despite the monstrous nature of his deeds, Capt. Cooney is not a monster. Aldrich and Poe make this clear. Cooney is a man whose personal agenda – he's gone along with this squalid setup mainly to come out at the other end with a fraudulent medal; one he hopes will redeem him in the eyes of his old man – has forced him to make deadly common cause with Bartlett's more mendacious ambition. And it's getting a lot of U.S. Infantrymen killed as a result. His awareness of his own guilt in this regard is enormous (there are times when he can barely look anyone, even his subordinates, in the eye for more than two seconds), and it only gives nourishment to the demons that brought him to this hellish state in the first place. "I'll bet Cooney never figured on a war when he joined that National Guard unit", Costa reflects with great bitterness early on. "He probably thought it was going to be all Cornpone and Chitlins and . . . ", he pauses for a second; as if, in regarding the irony, he suddenly perceives a tragic dimension to the man he hates which he neither anticipated nor wants. " . . . and a chance to wear his uniform at the Saturday Fox hunt."

But if Cooney's guilt is rapidly consuming him, Costa's hatred of Cooney is just as rapidly turning him into something of a maniac. After a classic Aldrich prologue depicting the mortal consequences of Cooney’s garish inaction, Costa enters a perpetually simmering state of rage and stays there. He knows why Cooney is where he is in the Command structure (Bartlett’s post-war ambitions are an open secret among the officers), and he knows that no amount of wanton bloodshed born of bad leadership will remove him. When the tired, depleted Fox Company is once again called to action, Costa sees that the only thing to do, short of killing Cooney outright, is put the fear of God into him. He threatens his Commander’s life before witnesses; swearing that if he “plays the gutless wonder” once more, he’ll shove a grenade down his throat and pull the pin. When Cooney not only turns chicken again but descends into abject, gibbering psychosis (and from there into flat-out sadism), Costa goes off another, perhaps deeper end: performing acts of extreme, almost lunatic physical bravery for the sole purpose of getting back so he can put a round between the Captain’s eyes.

In their 1995 study, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, James Ursini and Alain Silver ungrammatically detect a common element in this state of affairs (“Costa’s rage is as inappropriate to a field officer as is Cooney’s terror”) and . . . run like hell from it. To me, however, it’s a point that should not rest without comment. The notion that Cooney’s extreme cowardice and Costa’s relative absence of same are both manifestations of the same madness was no doubt a difficult one for viewers to accept at first blush. Then and now, people are more naturally inclined to see the latter as admirable and the former as beneath contempt. Additionally, the film’s clear suggestion that this lunacy is endemic to militarism on a basic institutional level was so new to American cinema, it seemed almost nihilistic (which is no doubt why the Defense Department flatly refused to cooperate with the production on any level).

Attack has long been considered one of the few genuine anti-war statements to emerge from Hollywood which, if true, is a remarkable status given the film’s setting: the European theater of combat in the closing months of World War II. It was, as we know, the largest military engagement in our history, supported by all Americans save for Quakers, Pacifists, The Nation of Islam and native Fascists whose sympathies had always been with the Third Reich. If there was ever (to use Studs Terkel’s phrase) a ‘Good War’, a war waged at least in part against an enemy force that richly deserved its total annihilation, this was it.

Like all media during our involvement in that conflict, the American film industry unhesitatingly gave itself over to the production of Propaganda works at the behest of the War Department and the Office of War Information; mainly, but not always, for the purposes of boosting morale both on the front-line and here at home. It was all about creating a righteous image of unlimited American determination and sacrifice; a cult of mutual cooperation that would see us through to a victory which would justly be ours. Movies of that time (and by no means was this limited to war pictures) reflected a monolithic, wholly nationalized sense of esprit de corps where such phenomena as internecine conflict in the ranks or even vaguely pacifist sentiment could never be alluded to. This wasn’t a method of insuring that everyone was on the same page. It was a compulsive denial that any other page existed.

Prior to WWII, there had been a fair amount of antiwar sentiment in American cinema, largely in embarrassed remembrance of the bloodthirsty xenophobic material in Propaganda films of the Great War – a model best typified by Erich von Stroheim’s hurling an infant out a window in the midst of a rape scene in Allen Holubar’s The Heart of Humanity. Drawing its aura of grief, in the main, from such works as Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth (“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstruous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons”), the inherently pacifist character of Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Stuart Walker’s The Eagle and the Hawk or Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby may have been the polar opposite of cinematic rallying cries of the Second World War, but their spirit of protest was mournful rather than enraged. These films were elegies, they were not bills of indictment.

There’s absolutely nothing elegiac about Attack. Setting its central conflict deep within the American Army’s officer class during the least controversial military engagement in its history, exploring the underlying insanity at the heart of all warfare, seeing it as an institution virtually designed to exploit the absolute worst in everyone it touches, Robert Aldrich emerged with nothing less than the most radical war picture of the 1950s.

Blog-a-thon Entry #2:A Post on Avant-Garde Cinema in America

This is a description of a blog post on the subject of Avant-Garde Cinema in the United States. The post consists of 7 paragraphs, is exactly 1,500 words in length, and was composed by its author between the hours of 7:00 PM and 11:00 PM on Tuesday, August 1, 2006. It begins with specific information about the post's contents, the hour of its creation, and then moves into a series of observations on non-narrative, structural forms of cinematic expression throughout most of the 20th century. In the interim, the author briefly lists some of the terms used over time to designate these works, such as Avant-Garde Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Underground and Independent Cinema, before remarking that those are just the terms which come to him offhand. He then observes that any species of cinema which goes by that many names is perhaps too multi-varied in content to comfortably fit within any one of them, and that when one discusses the avant-garde one is more accurately discussing a cultural attitude rather than a particular work or body of work or mode of expression.

With a weakness for history, the author then outlines the dawn of this filmmaking in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, citing seminal works by Melville Webber & James Sibley Watson (The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928; Lot in Sodom in 1933), as well as Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich's The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra from 1928, and Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning in 1931. The author then states that the earliest avant-garde works in the United States owed a great deal more in terms of their formal grammar to both so-called German Expressionism and the more baroque, montage-oriented cinema coming out of the Soviet Union in the 1920s than they ever owed to the thriving avant-garde of France in that same period. After pointing out that this condition would change, albeit gradually, the author of the post then names several film artists who kept the movement, if movement it could be called, alive in North America until the mid-1940s. The artists mentioned in this sentence include such diverse voices as Joseph Cornell, Norman McLaren, John and James Whitney, Harry Smith, Willard Maas, and the only filmmaker who, it is said by the author, truly bridged the two periods, Maya Deren. The author then makes the point that Deren's earliest films bear a deeper mark of the French avant-garde school than any American so-called experimental works prior to their creation, and then asks a question: Why did it take roughly two decades for a school of filmmaking that would have such a defining influence on the American avant-garde to assert its aesthetic presence? Having only a vague outline of an answer . . . largely concerned with the propensity for trends and events from overseas, working almost in concord, to inform the direction of even the most putatively independent art in this one . . . the author of the post steals into the next point.

Moving abruptly away from an historical treatment to a polemical consideration of America's problematic approach to Modernism, the author recalls Cecilia Tichi's 1987 study Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature and Culture in Modernist America, where she posited the view that the rise of old Modernism in American culture and the advance of what came to be known as the Machine Age were not coincidental to one another. She spots a rough interrelationship (if not an outright commonality) between the two that informed the character, if not always the content, of America's Modern art to a greater degree than the influence of its counterpart expressions in the Old World. In this realm the very thing-ness of a creation . . . its standing, if you will, as an object of art (accent on 'object'), bereft of any non-quantifiable, and therefore 'useless' dimension . . . assumed a sharper focus in developing critical evaluations than anyone could have thought possible in the days when Impressionism held its dominion. The hideous secret laying at the foot of this putative connection, of course, is the implication that Modern Art in America, rather than standing as a reaction to the soullessness of industrial capitalism, was in fact an outgrowth of that socio-economic disease. The author then advises readers who may balk at this suggestion to remember that so many of the museums and temples of Modernism still with us today were underwritten and patronized by the same Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Carnegie, Whitney) who were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of thousands and the economic misery of generations. Fully in keeping with the fundamental social disengagement of the enterprise, American Modernism gave birth to a body of critical theory wholly preoccupied with examining a work of art through its component parts, a relentless emphasis on formal properties. As theory it was pointless; as literature it was fiction without narrative.

But nothing prevented this theory-driven form of criticism from being carried over into considerations of America's Avant-Garde Cinema after the second world war; even if, unlike all other mediums of expression upon which it had been applied, the films themselves militated against such treatment. Given the overwhelming power of Cinema, the values (or, as the author of the post puts it somewhat nastily, the absence of values) at the heart of formal/textual analysis proved not only inadequate in comparison to direct experience, they served to invade and sever and destroy whatever bond might be forged between the filmmaker and his or her otherwise disinterested audience; replacing it with an empty discourse where critics state and restate official pieties to one another ceaselessly in a squalid, insular exchange of platitudes, long ago drained of meaning, materiality and relevance. The author seems to think that those who would analyze a work of Cinema as if dissecting an organism with a scalpel are at best neglecting to recognize that they're cutting into, pulling apart and ultimately killing a living thing.

After that hair-raising passage, the post rolls into a treatment of the explosion in non-narrative cinema which took place in the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (roughly coinciding with the rise and solidification of Television in our culture). It betrays yet another jaundiced view, this time the tendency by some of the principal figures in the avant-garde to organize and make of alternate voices an institution. The author's disdain stands in stark contrast to his considerable affection for most of the films and filmmakers of the period, yet he believes it utterly. He even, in one sentence, adopts the stance that if one admires, say, Jonas Mekas as a filmmaker, there's something terribly contradictory in also admiring the idea, if not the reality, of such Mekas-generated entities as Film Culture (the magazine he founded in 1955 which was, to the Underground, what Photoplay was to Hollywood), the Film Makers' Cooperative, and good old Anthology Film Archives. He avows that Mekas was the single most indispensible figure in the history of Avant-Garde film in America, and that one would be hard put to read even the smallest degree of cynicism into any of his labors on its behalf. But this small truism, to him, does little to diminish the bigger truism that, regardless of anyone's intentions, artists and critics organize only to exclude. Their cooperatives and collectives and fronts and movements and guilds result almost organically in the establishment of bloated social structures, dominated not by art, but by strategic alliances that resemble nothing so much as the old Soviet politburo . . . or the Republican Party in the United States.

Without really exploring his fundamentally conflicted attitude . . . a line of inquiry that, if the author really cared about it, might have yielded some insight into the sensibility of anyone who numbers themselves among the ranks of avant-garde enthusiasts . . . the author plunges forward with yet another list of names: Kenneth Anger, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Jordan Belson, Bruce Bailie, Marie Menken, Stan Vanderbeek, Curtis Harrington, Bruce Conner, Paul Sharits, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, Storm deHirsch, Ernie Gehr, Shirley Clarke, Hollis Frampton. He remarks that he could probably go on, cheerfully typing them for an hour or more, all the while not coming to his fundamental point that the avant-garde reflected in this roll call is as diverse and extraordinary a panoply of filmmaking as any on earth, and that to corral and brand it all with an inelegant umbrella term such as The New American Cinema (to name but one), while certainly making it easy for true enthusiasts like Mekas to conjure the Us vs. Them ether that became so vital to its public identity, ultimately serves it ill.

Not wishing to further be a forum for its author's opressive, Bressonian negativity, the post sidesteps his last observation . . . how the rise of a more democratic spirit of protest in the United States in the late 1960s and the overall decline of the avant-garde were, like everything else, anything but coincidental . . . and abruptly terminates, right in the middle of the last

Blog-a-thon Entry #1:Robert Altman and the Nixon of Our Dreams

(I wanted to participate in the Robert Altman Blog-a-thon this week, despite having little time to come up with anything new, so this will have to suffice. This is a piece I wrote for the November, 2005 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal on Altman's 1984 triumph Secret Honor. My deepest thanks to a great editor, Gary Morris, for permitting me to repost its text here).

Of all the Presidents the United States has had to endure over the last couple of centuries, this country's relationship with Richard Nixon — and make no mistake, it was a relationship, in every complex sense and syllable of that word — was easily its most perverse. A first-year student of behavioral psychology could quickly skim the record wrought by our three decades of interaction with his public life and write it off with a shudder as codependent, borderline sadomasochistic. To members of what Meg Greenfield so aptly called "the Nixon generation", this mendacious, altogether dysfunctional specimen of humanity held a queasy fascination that proved all too absorbing. He was like a hideous anomaly rushing unbidden into a once paradisical dream, thus transforming it to the condition of a nightmare. And he became so indispensable to our recollections upon a cold awakening that, without him, no memory of that dream would be possible, or even worthy of the remembrance.

For it was a soul-splitting emanation of our culture, a majestic, boundless dream-vision of American life in the latter half of the 20th century that Richard Nixon attached himself to. And no matter how many opportunities he gave us or how impassioned our desire, we would never find it in our hearts to cut him loose; not entirely, and not until he did the job for us. "I did not elect myself", a defiant Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) exclaims in the final moments of Robert Altman's Secret Honor (1984). "They elected me. Not once. Not twice. But all of my goddamned life. And they'd do it again, too . . . if they got the chance".

And you know something? For once, he's right.

Subtitled A Political Fable, Secret Honor recasts Richard Nixon's political career as the center of a New Left parable; a storybook tale for the barricades about a man helplessly stranded in a moonscape of poisoned idealism, trying to put sense to his own role in its creation, and dwelling within the lightless passages of its unseen realm. Late one evening, former President Richard M. Nixon (Hall) skulks into the study of his estate in Saddle River, New Jersey — a quietly ornate affair, dripping with oak, possessing all the comfort and warmth a top-dollar video surveillance security system can provide — for a climactic battle in the wresting war he's been waging against History since his resignation from the Presidency in 1974. He's armed and ready (with a nickel-plated .45), and he's going to tell it all, posterity be damned. Getting down to business, he dons a red velvet smoking jacket, opens a bottle of Chivas Regal, and pours himself a good one; to loosen his tongue and get him through the ordeal if nothing else. After several minutes' struggle with a cassette recorder, Nixon begins outlining his case against the foul injustice of an official history that, to him, knows no rules of charity or mercy.

"Your honor", he begins, "may we take the matter of the pardon first? It was a complete fake. It solved nothing. Because . . . if I had gone to trial . . . and all the rest of it . . . if I had gone to prison. Why, I would be a free man today. A free . . . man". But Nixon's formal plea for the restoration of a good name that was never his soon collapses into a rambling, profane, almost stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about his life; a private oration wild and barbarous that continually swirls in a tormented stew of remembered triumph, vile regret, oaths of vengeance upon all who, living or dead, have earned his righteous enmity — be they named Hiss, Hoover, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Kissinger, they all stabbed him in the back at one time or another — and a cautionary narrative of ambition and loss, purportedly revealing the locus of ultimate power in America.

It began in 1945, he tells the passive recording device whirring steadily on his desk. A young lawyer of low birth and high ideals, he answers an ad placed in the Whittier Daily Journal, his hometown newspaper, by an organization of businessmen calling itself the Committee of One Hundred. They're looking for a young man, preferably a veteran, to run as the Republican candidate for Congress in California's 12th district. He auditions for the Committee, getting off a heartfelt speech in which he promises to honorably advance a platform of what he calls "practical liberalism", and in time they anoint him as their man for the 1946 Congressional race. To celebrate, the Committee members bring him to their retreat, Bohemian Grove, deep within the Redwoods of Sonoma County. And it is there, among the armed guards and the hookers shipped in for the occasion and the distant sounds of the Committee members singing football songs in the drunken bosom of that ancient forest, that Nixon begins to see and know his sponsors for who they are.

The Committee of One Hundred are not just a group of California-based business leaders acting in the interests of public enterprise. They are the New Money leviathans of the American Century and, unlike the robber barons of old, those genteel amateurs, they aren�t out to monopolize railroads and other transient, nearsighted forms of industrial expansion. They seek nothing less than exclusive title to the future of the Western World. Chumps like Nixon — the prototypical hick idealist secretly looking to peddle his ass to the highest bidder — are simply the handmaidens of that effort.

"They gave me the blueprint . . . for my life!", Nixon confesses, and the totality of their vision for his future has him possessed from the first. Each one of his sponsors, after all, is what he has yearned to be since he drew breath: A self-made winner in life's lottery; so different in every respect from those blackballing princes of the Eastern establishment who wouldn't give him the time of day when he got out of law school. "These guys weren't . . . homos from Westchester County or Cambridge", Nixon recalls from his study almost a lifetime later. "This was not Old Money or The Better Sort. These guys were Armenians and Italians and Irish. You know . . . assorted White trash. Men! And what they wanted was a political laboratory, and that is what they made California into . . . as a kind of a proving-ground for later on. Can't you see why all this was music to my ears?"

But that was 1945; long before the Committee's patronage got him to the White House, and their China Plan committed him to acts of inconceivable treason. "You know what I did? I sold my soul at Bohemian Grove. For shit", he admits. Nixon's crimes, we learn, were finally greater than anyone imagined. And Watergate, the purported cause of his undoing, was the deliberately placed tip of the wrong iceberg.

As a play — and it was brought to the screen with little alteration — Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone's Secret Honor is an expert meshing of fact with fiction, creative conjecture with the public record. Its liberal use of the fictitious is not an exercise in revisionist history so much as it is a deft construction of the myth its subtitle promises. This is mainly because its theatrical examination of what lay beneath the surface of Richard Nixon's career — and by extension its study of the corruptions inherent to the American Success ethos (a very old warhorse) — is inspired by one of the everlasting cultural phenomena of the last century, the Conspiracy Theory; a multimillion-dollar industry that the play's principal author, Donald Freed, has been toiling in for several decades now, and which (as is true of any other fundamentally capitalist enterprise) ultimately knows no politics, save for those of the bottom line.

The central assumption behind Secret Honor — that a small handful of über-capitalists and totalitarian think tank habitués sit around in some remote setting like those fascist windbags in Pasolini's Salo and determine this country's fate — is by no means a new one, and variations on it are to be found all across the ideological map, embraced by every strain of thinker from far-right nuts on the short-wave band to well-respected icons of the academic Left like Noam Chomsky. It has operated in our culture as both a creed and a fashion, and no doubt it will continue to inflame people's fancies to the last syllable of recorded time (a cursory glance reveals it to be the organizing principle around which virtually every conspiracy theory that ever gained purchase on the popular imagination has been generated). Indeed, raising the specter of Bohemian Grove — long a recidivist bugaboo in conspiracy musings of the American Left — is sufficient to place this work firmly within a tradition of public dread old as the Bohemian Club itself; so loaded is the place with diabolical significance for so many. The very name takes a seat alongside other such emblems (the Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones, COINTELPRO, the CFR, 544 Camp St., Halliburton, the list goes on) as a kind of cultural shorthand signifying the essential bestiality of a vaguely defined American ruling class.

Surf the Internet for an hour or so (as I did) and you'll find there's no end to the stories about what allegedly goes on up there: old politicians, globalist rotarians, corporate vultures gathered together among the redwoods in twisted concord, engaging in everything from pansexual orgies to rituals of blood sacrifice conducted in the shadow of a colossal owl made of stone (the kind of DeMille-inspired excess that spelled imaginative Paganism back in the 1950s, when most of the first wave of professional conspiracy theorists were in their pietistic formative years). If that isn't exhausting enough — and one wonders exactly where these old piles of bones find the energy for such shenanigans — the standard itinerary for a Bohemian Grove bacchanal includes policy addresses by every big-name swine in the book, where nothing less than the manifold destiny of the Free World is weighed and then decided by the assembled elite.

In Secret Honor this species of conspiracy-sowing, often too outlandish to be anything more than perversely entertaining here in the bleachers, yields what may be its most chilling harvest in cinema, largely due to the skill and conviction with which Freed and Stone and Altman weave it into the tapestry of Richard Nixon's life. It's easy, after all, to believe that Nixon's appalling success for so many decades was the product of manipulation by forces larger than any we can reckon. It grants us a measure of relief; letting us, the voters, off the hook for repeatedly bestowing upon him the means to carry out his hideous emanations of statecraft (of course, the Nixon Presidency now seems an ethical Arcadia in contrast to the present gaggle of bozos and war criminals in the Executive branch).

But Secret Honor isn't a recklessly cynical conspiracy workout in the manner of Nixon — that Ken Russell-ized travesty from 1995 which was about nothing more than Oliver Stone's desperation to prop up the already decaying house of cards that was JFK. Nor, for that matter, is it as joyfully scabrous an assault as Emile deAntonio's Millhouse: A White Comedy (1970). Departing from the tradition of mass-market conspiracy works, it is not a film of misanthropy or splendid malice, but true belief and a large measure of sympathy. Robert Altman may have approached the play's premise from a slightly more jaundiced perspective (he'd already made considerable sport of power elite hysteria in his 1979 film Health), but it's clear the co-authors really believe Nixon was ultimately a pawn of Mephistophelian capital, and that the mensurable truth of his life lies only a short distance from their 'political myth', if anyone cares to look for it. It is a conviction that carries Secret Honor to its triumph every bit as much as Altman's peerless execution. And that is no mean achievement.

Donald Freed would later state that Robert Altman's chief contribution to Secret Honor was having the courage to film it at all. Indeed, Altman has echoed this self-diminishing sentiment when discussing the film, insisting that all he did with the play was film it, give it cinematic flesh, just as he had with Streamers and Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Nothing more than that. It's a fundamentally deceptive posture, implying as it does that Altman could have approached Secret Honor with the same degree of committment he had directing episodes of The Whirlybirds back in the 1960s and emerged with a film so extraordinary. While the play made it to the screen virtually intact — so much so that Robert Harders, who directed its stage run and continued to work with Philip Baker Hall during production of the film, was given an Associate Director credit — it would be foolish to believe that he had no intention for this piece larger than figuring out where to put the camera.

Filmed in seven days at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Altman had a Visiting Professor gig in their Department of Communications (a species of celebrity babysitting if ever one existed), Secret Honor has some of the most engaged, focused filmmaking of his career. There were times previous to this (particularly in a number of his late '70s works), where his methods seemed fog-shrouded and meandering; as though he'd mostly forgotten whatever it was he had in mind but decided to go for it anyway before lassitude overtook him completely. Though the formal strategies in Secret Honor weren't substantially different, they seemed less played-out, less fatigued than what had come just before. The zooms and pans and restless camera moves on this occasion were the mark of a Robert Altman more alert than he had been in years; perfectly matching Nixon's wild, distracted inner state as he spills everything he has to spill. And despite his repeated assertion of a hands-off policy with regard to Philip Baker Hall's performance, Altman's filming style — not to mention broadening the dimensions of the set — gave the actor a physical latitude that allowed his Nixon to breathe in a way he never could have before, to exist in a realm other than one of stage-bound claustrophobia.

Philip Baker Hall's Nixon is a man with so much to say, so much in his mind to expel that he can barely complete a thought before the next one starts to pour out. Like a needle dropping and being lifted randomly across an old Caedmon LP of Dylan Thomas, he'll howl and rant with a kind of righteous, paranoid omnipotence, and in the next moment his voice will fall, deepen to a register trembling from all the sorrow that ever was. He was in his early fifties when he played Nixon for the first time at the Los Angeles Actors' Theater (where Altman caught the production in its initial run); an actor of immense obscurity who, whatever his previous accomplishments on the stage, was never able to advance his profile beyond small, second-tier character jobs in television. Forget about being bankable, by 1983 Philip Baker Hall wasn't even conventionally unbankable. But Altman was adamant about his repeating the role on the screen.

It's the film's everlasting triumph. In order to find another performance like it in cinema you have to go all the way back to the full-bore theatricality of a Charles Laughton or John Barrymore; actors who thrived on the knowledge that, whether on stage or on film, every eye in the house was trained on them. There is, in fact, a more than tiny resemblance between Hall's Nixon as he rages maniacally from one end of his study to the next — as though trying in vain to outrace his thoughts — and the feral performances Barrymore gave in films like Twentieth Century or Hold That Co-ed. It's not a species of camp or old-school hamminess of the George Arliss variety that Hall engages in. What he recaptured through his Nixon was a spirit of luminous madness that had been refined out of screen acting (generally replaced by more dour histrionics); crucified upon a cross of joyless nuance by otherwise fine directors like Elia Kazan — and many more not-so-fine ones. By taking Nixon to both comic and tragic extremes, by playing him to that proverbial hilt, he achieves the rhetorical truth Freed and Stone were aiming for, that they knew was there all along.

And this is, in the end, why Secret Honor is the finest film ever made about Richard Nixon and all that he wrought in American life. Its Nixon is Our Nixon; the man we couldn't get rid of because we didn't really want him to go. To borrow Tom Wicker's phrase, he is truly "one of us", the avatar of an American loser straight out of Sherwood Anderson or Nathanael West; a grotesque fun-house-mirror image so beguiling we don't dare take our eyes off of him, lest we miss something we may never see again.

He's not the Nixon of the Hiss Case or the Watergate tapes; of flickering kinescopes or other people's memoirs.

In all his tortured and ruined majesty, he is the Nixon of our dreams.