Spielberg's War Horse: Saving Mr. Ed

By Steve Evans

Friends, film lovers and cinephiles everywhere, I come not to bury Steven Spielberg, but to praise him in a back-handed way, and to paraphrase Shakespeare, since Spielberg and I might as well borrow from the best.

Here is a filmmaker who knows how to tell stories, such as his recent offering, War Horse. He also knows how to press emotional buttons that make his skill at audience manipulation almost the equal of Hitchcock. Spielberg may hold aspirations as great as Shakespeare's, but the most famous film director in the world forever falls victim to his own emotional excess.

Spielberg cannot resist pouring on the schmaltz. It is his fall-back plan time and again. His safety net. Ever since he turned 30, around the time Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg has rarely been able to rise above a cloying level of sentimentality comparable to the films of Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life), whose detractors derisively referred to as "Capra-corn."

For those who enjoy a director yanking on their heart-strings, Spielberg will satisfy those cravings with War Horse, as unabasedly old-fashioned and sentimental a picture as he has ever made. To see War Horse is to wonder if Ingmar Bergman actually directed The Color Purple or Always.

Never a man to trust his audience, Spielberg uses John Williams' War Horse musical score to highlight, amplify and hammer us over the head with every point he wishes to make (and a few he probably doesn't):

1. War is bad.
2. World War I was especially nasty.
3. Horses are pretty and have expressive eyes.
4. Horses are brave.
5. A boy and his horse should not be separated.
6. Chance may favor the prepared mind, but random chance is the guiding force in the world.
7. Convenient coincidences help move your story along. Do it fast enough, and few will notice the plot holes.

I will not dwell on the plot of War Horse, which is thoroughly reviewed across the Internet. Nor will I find fault with the technical execution of this beautifully crafted film. It is the sort of good-looking event picture that fairly overwhelms with the smell of the money that must have gone into its production.

And yet.

I argue principally that Spielberg persists, after 40 years of making films, in holding his audience by the hand and explaining every detail to them as a parent might talk to a slow child.

I still think Spielberg's Jaws is one of the most effectively terrifying and brilliantly constructed thrillers in the history of the cinema. It holds up well. But after that seminal film came out in 1975, something switched on (or off?) in Spielberg's brain. He discovered that by telegraphing his every intention -- giving a shout-out to the cheap seats -- he could pack more people into the movie theater, especially the dull-witted folks who might need a little help with story exposition and those slippery, elusive themes that occasionally transform mass entertainment into Art.

In the years after Jaws made him rich, Spielberg's relentless appeal to the common man resulted in movies that were simply...common. This is a director who never seems to have much faith in the intelligence of his audience. Two exceptions come to mind: Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. He won directing Oscars for both. They are arguably his best films.

Still, in the concluding scenes of Schindler's List, when Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) undergoes an emotional breakdown and the people he has saved swarm around him to give comfort...ah...the music swells on the soundtrack and we all weep in catharsis. It is one of the most overwrought moments in the last 50 years of the cinema and nearly undermines the devastation that has gone before it.

Steven Spielberg has the clout and resources to produce the very best films that money can buy, but he almost always relies on the assumption that everyone in his audience has the intellectual and emotional development of a nine-year-old.

War Horse may be the most expensive ABC After School Special ever made, which is unfortunate. Rated PG-13 and replete with harrowing combat scenes, the picture clearly was not intended for children, although its message is well-suited for kids.

Spielberg may not have much faith in the brain pans of those who pay to see his films, but he could elevate his art while simultaneously stoking his ego and enhancing his reputation for all posterity -- factors that seem important to him, judging from his interviews and comments through the years -- if he would simply stop insulting our intelligence.

On the other hand, the director may have access to information that I do not. If he has learned conclusively that people who still go to the movies are, in the aggregate, dim and unsophisticated, then he has hit upon a successful formula that may serve him well for the balance of his career.

That is a prospect more frightening than anything in Jaws.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Plan 9 From Outer Space: Revisiting a Classic

By Steve Evans
Like many of the bonafide classics in my collection, I find myself revisiting this odd little picture at least once a year.

Plan 9 (1959) is surrealism on a budget. It is also twisted, completely insane, goofy-ass weirdness; yes, and a helluva lot of fun. I've come to see this picture and other titles in director Ed Wood's awful oeuvre as the work of a consummate confidence man who managed to churn out entertaining work in spite of himself. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp is an interesting point of entry for the uninitiated. Brave hearts would do well to dive right in; rent Plan 9 from Outer Space and see for yourself what real guerilla filmmaking is all about.

Like Woods’ Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, Jail Bait, The Sinister Urge and his freshman effort, the semi-autobiographical Glen or Glenda?, Plan 9 is compulsively watchable, like rubber-necking a bad traffic accident. Wood’s dialog – he wrote all of his own scripts – spins around like a Moebius loop, saying nothing, going nowhere. Consider these choice Plan 9 samples:

“…and remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Jeff Trent (a civilian): “I’m muzzled by Army brass!”

Air Force Captain: “Visits? That would indicate visitors.”

Lieutenant John Harper: “But one thing’s for sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible.”

Criswell: “Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it... for they will be from outer space.”

Yow. Has there ever been a broader spectrum of weirdos, wannabes and hangers-on than the people involved in this picture – in front of and behind the camera? Hell, morphine-addicted Béla Lugosi (at left) was billed as the star and he died after three days’ worth of shooting. Most directors would have scrapped production, but not Ed Wood. His novel solution? Wood hired his wife’s chiropractor and draped him in a vampire cape with instructions to keep his face covered. Nevermind that the chiropractor was a good 10 inches taller than poor Béla and looked nothing like him.

Examples of Wood’s ingenuity are the stuff of near-legend. Don’t have permission to shoot in a cemetery? No problem. Build one with cardboard tombstones that wobble when the actors walk by. Don’t have a budget for flying saucer special effects? Not to worry. Buy a couple of model kits, string them up on fishing line, and wave them in front of the camera. Stock footage is also helpful, both in saving precious production dollars and padding out the running time.

Sound harsh? Not at all. Let me be clear:

Plan 9 is not the worst picture ever made, as some critics have complained, and Wood is certainly not the worst director (imagine what he could have created with Michael Bay’s budgets). To condemn Wood for toiling in obscurity, with inadequate funding for his projects, is to miss the point. Wood endures (and endears) not because of his incompetence, but in spite of it. Those who would dismiss this great auteur are themselves mere jackals of bourgeois sensibility, snobs who cannot appreciate the not-inconsiderable achievements of a determined man with no talent and even less money who produced half a dozen pictures of such mesmerizing awfulness that all are fondly remembered more than 50 years later. Will anyone still watch Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor or Armageddon half a century hence?

Movie making is hard, damn work, with incredible financial risks. And like creating any work of art, releasing a film also requires thick skin. Critics are ready to pounce on a picture they are incapable of creating themselves.

For an alcoholic transvestite and hopeless dreamer, Ed Wood certainly had balls. He held grand ambitions in his heart. Wood was as dedicated to filmmaking as Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock. He just wasn’t any good at it.

And so, I submit that the only sin a film can commit is to be boring. Plan 9 is anything but.

Personally, I'm holding out for a director’s cut with the Criterion treatment on a two-disc special edition.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.

Vengeance is mine: The Virgin Spring

Today I contemplated, as I sometimes do, that unique paradox of the human condition: the thirst for revenge. Yes, that all-consuming desire to get even with those who wrong us, juxtaposed against the futility – perhaps the folly? – of seizing our own justice. Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, can acknowledge that at least once in our lives we harbored a need to strike back savagely against someone who had committed an unspeakable and incomprehensible act of cruelty against us. The desire to settle the score wraps itself around the spinal cord, creeps upward, and penetrates subconscious thought with all manner of delicious scenarios that result in the excruciating pain and suffering of the evil person who has caused us harm. Yes. And yet, how we answer that call for vengeance is a measure of character that only each individual can demonstrate through his reaction to those who trespass against him. Do we choose to forgive or do we fight to the death? It’s really one or the other. Philosophical method suggests there is no middle ground. And if we choose the satisfaction of blood, that ol’ Biblical eye for an eye, what then? What have we gained? Where is God when we so desperately need someone to adjudicate our sins before we make them worse?

This is the theme that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman explores in one of his greatest works, Jungfrukällan, known in this country as The Virgin Spring (1960). I offer a review of the stunning Criterion edition of this film, below. Ah, but please note: here be spoilers that reveal significant plot points.

“You saw it, God. You saw it. The innocent child's death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don't understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness.” ~ Töre (Max von Sydow)

Criterion presents a sumptuous edition of master director Ingmar Bergman's harrowing tale of revenge and redemption in 14th century Sweden. One of the most visually beautiful of all black-and-white films, The Virgin Spring won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1960. The picture remains a powerful parable of good and evil, of faith lost and recovered. Adapted from a folk ballad, it is a study in contrasts, but not extremes. Set in a society struggling with the transition to Christianity from Norse paganism and a feudal economy, the film depicts savage violence that begets savage retribution. But there is also hope, and light and shadow, dappled in shades of gray both symbolic and literal, as with the stunning chiaroscuro cinematography—one of many quiet wonders in this rich, deeply moving cinematic experience that challenges, provokes and ultimately rewards the careful viewer.

A bit of plot:

Medieval Sweden. A devoutly Christian farming family begins their morning ritual with prayer. The family patriarch Töre (longtime Bergman collaborator Max Von Sydow) and his wife Märeta (Birgitta Valberg) intone their prayers before joining the servants for breakfast at the family table. Their pagan foster daughter Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom, The Seventh Seal), who is unwed and pregnant, despises the couple's biological daughter Karin. As played by Birgitta Pettersson, Karin is a spoiled and foolish girl who would rather spend all night at the village dance and sleep through the next morning, than join her hardworking family for breakfast.

Töre directs his wife to rouse Karin and get her ready for the long journey to the village church where Karin must deliver the family's votive candles. Religious custom dictates that only a virgin may offer candles to the Virgin Mary. Karin insists on wearing her finest embroidered dress. Ingeri accompanies her on the journey and they debate many aspects of life, although Karin is mostly frivolous in her thoughts. Disgusted with the naïve and vain girl, Ingeri lingers at a hermit's shack, leaving Karin to continue her journey alone on horseback. Later, Karin encounters two corrupt goatherds and their young brother wandering the woods with their flock. Frightened by their intense stares, she offers to share her simple lunch with the men, but their tone changes abruptly. Drooling over the young woman, licking their tongues over rotting black teeth, the men rape and murder her, then strip the valuable clothes from her body as a light snow falls silently on her corpse in the cold forest. Ingeri arrives on this obscene tableau. She grabs a rock to strike the attackers, but she is paralyzed; unable or unwilling to fight.

Now desperate for food and shelter, the goatherds make their way back along the path Karin had traveled. In a righteous twist of fate, the men arrive at the farm of Töre, seeking refuge from the cold. They are oblivious to their mistake. Later, when the herdsmen offer to sell a beautiful, embroidered dress to Karin's mother, the shock of realization creases the woman's pale face as she examines the garment made by her own hands. She knows her daughter is dead. Trembling, she confronts her husband with this discovery.

Swift and terrible retribution comes to the goat herders at dawn.

As Töre grieves the death of his only child—railing against the unknowable motives of God—his foster daughter Ingeri abandons her pagan beliefs, cleansing her spirit with a symbolic Baptism in the forest.

The plot description above, revealing though it may be, does not begin to cover the layers of symbolism and meaning with which Bergman constructed this disturbing film. By turns deeply religious and blasphemous, his characters whiplash across extreme emotional reactions brought on by unbearable trauma. Faith, compassion, and inner strength are as thematically critical to The Virgin Spring as human cruelty and revenge. But again: This is a film of jagged contrasts delivered with impeccable talent from all involved.

Bergman was reportedly influenced by director Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai) when filming Jungfrukällan (literally, The Virgin Spring in Swedish), especially in the long passages of silence where characters say more with their expressions than words could convey. He delivers an uncompromising presentation of psychological motives driving people to acts of which they would not have believed themselves capable.

The cinematography by famed director of photography Sven Nykvist is achingly beautiful, and by itself sufficient reason to watch and own this film. Scholars could conduct a seminar on lighting and cinematography technique using this film as text. A frequent Bergman collaborator (he also shot Persona, The Serpent's Egg, and Fanny and Alexander), during his long career Nykvist also framed exquisitely photographed films for Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors), whose own admiration for Bergman has been well documented.

Disc extras include a beautifully illustrated 28-page booklet of essays and notes on the making of the film and its cultural impact. The booklet includes the complete text of the 13th-century ballad on which the film is based. Special features also include an introduction by director Ang Lee (The Ice Storm), a commentary track by a Bergman scholar, and an improved English subtitle translation (which is to be preferred over the optional English-dubbed audio track).

Video and audio are peerless.

Caveat lector: Despite far more graphic atrocities depicted in contemporary film, the rape and murder of young Karin still has the capacity to shock and devastate. It is a desolating, unforgettable moment that will lease permanent space in a viewer's mind. Töre's animalistic revenge for his daughter is less disturbing, but only by a matter of degrees.

This is a poignant and unflinching art film, shamelessly copied and degenerated 13 years later as the sleazy exploitation horror movie Last House on the Left, directed by Wes Craven. In a film that uses extreme contrast as a stylistic device, the distinctions between The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left could not be more profound. The former is the work of a cinematic visionary conveying a message of hope, faith, and human frailty in the face of helplessness and rage. The latter is the work of cretins with cameras whose pornographic violence exists as an endurance test for people so jaded they feel nothing unless bludgeoned with cruelty for its own sake. It is mentioned here solely in the interest of a thorough review.

I continue to be impressed with the cineastes at the Criterion Collection. They are, quite simply, the best in the business, delivering time and again the absolute reference standard in important classic and contemporary films on DVD. This is a company that truly wields the power of the DVD format for presenting major cinema. Criterion always includes generous supplemental features that give insight and context into great works of art, of which The Virgin Spring is a pristine example. This disc comes highly recommended as an addition to any serious film collection. It is essential viewing.

An emotionally devastating experience, The Virgin Spring elicits a deep appreciation of life through its depiction of senseless death and the futility of revenge. Bergman, who died in July 2007, urges his audience to cherish the time we do have, even in the face of incomprehensible cruelty.

That sweet sentiment softens a harsh reminder of the fleeting hours ahead.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.