"An essential moment, beyond all the formal planning"

[The full version of my Yahoo! film column for this week]

A few days ago I saw an old Alfred Hitchcock interview in a documentary titled “The Men who Made the Movies”. Among other things, the Master discusses his method of preparing such sequences as the shower killing – made up of 70 “pieces of film” – in Psycho.

“It has to be written out on paper,” he says, “You can’t just walk on to the set ... well, you can if you want to...” (disdainful shrug) “... but I prefer to do it this way. However tiny and however short the pieces of film are, they should be written down just in the same way as a composer writes down those little black dots from which we get beautiful sound.”

As you can tell, Hitchcock was fussy about getting a film ready long before the actual shoot took place – which makes sense of his famous remark that he never felt the need to look into the camera on the sets, and that he often felt bored and distracted during the actual filming. “I almost wish I didn’t have to go to the set and shoot the film, because from a creative point of view one has gone through that process beforehand... by the time the script has been finished, I know every shot and every angle by heart.”

In this light it’s notable that one of Hitchcock’s greatest champions, the critic Robin Wood, admitted late in his life that for all their artistry, Hitchcock’s movies “went dead” on him more easily (when he re-watched them for the umpteenth time) than, say, the movies of Howard Hawks, who was much more open to improvising with his actors and crew.

But by that logic, Victor Erice’s 1972 Spanish film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) should be dead on arrival; this is a movie made so meticulously and self-consciously – with so much attention to the composition of nearly every frame – that it makes Hitchcock’s work seem laidback in comparison. While The Spirit of the Beehive is a very beautiful film to look at (especially in the Criterion Collection transfer), it also has a cold and detached quality that makes it easier to admire from a distance than to take to one’s heart.

Its narrative is a series of discrete episodes about the many terrors and wonders of childhood – beginning with a little girl’s discovery of cinema. In a makeshift screening room in her small village, six-year-old Ana watches the 1931 Frankenstein along with other children. “I would advise you not to take the film too seriously,” director James Whale warns the audience in the pre-credits introduction, but Ana is traumatised by what she sees– and her elder sister Isabel makes it worse by telling her the monster really exists.

Later, they play morbid games in an empty house that seems much too large for their small family. During a stroll in the forest, their father – a beekeeper – warns them about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms. And in one of the film’s most arresting vignettes, Ana and Isabel visit the solitary railway track that runs near their village and watch, petrified, as a large black train passes by, billowing smoke. (The almost primeval appeal of the locomotive is a reminder that one of the first true movie “monsters” was the Lumiere Brothers train that seemed to head straight towards a startled audience. But watching this scene, I also recalled another great movie moment that involved two fascinated children waiting to see a train – in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.)

The Spirit of the Beehive is a slow-paced film and Erice exercises tight control over his mise-en-scene and his symbolism. (For example, the bees – operating with mechanical precision – can be seen as representing an efficient yet emotionless society; Spain was under Franco's dictatorship at the time.) When I first watched it, it took me a while to understand the principal relationships, even though the family consists of just four people: the beekeeper, his wife and the two little girls. Soon I realised that this was because Erice deliberately avoids showing all the family members together, even when they are in the same room. One vivid scene with the four of them eating together at the dining table, but no two of them ever in the same frame, has the remoteness of the spacecraft scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey – it creates a distancing effect that’s central to the story.

And yet, this most carefully planned of films contains a single spontaneous shot, lasting just a couple of seconds, that shows us the precise moment when little Ana’s interior world becomes filled with dread. She is watching the scene in Frankenstein where a little girl offers a flower to Boris Karloff’s monster. Completely immersed, Ana leans forward slightly and moves her head for a better look; her mouth opens a touch.

How pleasing it is to learn that this wasn’t a rehearsed scene. Luis Cuadrado, the cinematographer of Spirit of the Beehive, was sitting on the floor in front of his young performer, holding the camera in his hand (and handheld shots are not the norm in this film!), recording her expression as she really watched Frankenstein for the first time. What he captured was a completely artless reaction: by all accounts, the real-life Ana Torrent (who played Ana) was just as affected by Karloff’s monster as her character was supposed to be, and the experience of shooting The Spirit of the Beehive remained a disturbing memory for the actress well into adulthood. In other words, that shot is a meeting point between film as a medium for fictional narrative and film as a record of reality.

In the documentary “The Footprints of a Spirit”, included as an Extra on the Criterion DVD, Erice says:

“It’s such a premeditated film, but what I consider the most essential moment in it goes beyond all that formal planning. It’s unrepeatable, something that cannot be directed. That’s the wonder and the paradox of cinema – it’s the best moment I’ve ever captured on film.”

Coming from a director who was known for his fastidiousness, I find this admission both moving and illuminating. It’s almost as if one of those worker bees broke away from its hive-mates for an instant and danced a little jig by itself, before getting back to its regimented work.

P.S. For all of Hitchcock’s careful pre-planning - and his occasional treatment of actors as chess pieces - it would be naive to imagine that his movies contained no improvisations or on-the-set additions. Watch the intense sequence in Psycho where Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is interrogated by Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) and you have a classic example of two Method actors improvising as they go along, playing off each other’s reactions in a way no director could possibly have foreseen. And despite Hitchcock’s supercilious attitude to actors (“they ought to be treated as cattle”), Perkins has said that the director was very open to his suggestions, such as the idea of having the nervous Norman perpetually chewing candy. Perhaps old Hitch wasn’t as averse to film sets as he would have us believe.

A rambling tribute to Red River

Howard Hawks’ 1948 classic Red River is usually described as a Wild West version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and this is certainly true at a superficial level. Basic plot: in the 1850s and 1860s, the single-minded Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) builds a cattle empire and then initiates a drive – with a herd of thousands of animals – from Texas to Missouri. Along the way he becomes so tyrannical and insensitive towards his men that his adopted son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) leads a rebellion against him.

But there's a lot else going on in this multi-layered film. It's a psychological drama built on ambition and lust for power. It’s also an intriguing (though not fully developed) look at gender and familial relations – about fathers and sons, about men who haven’t had a strong female presence in their lives, and about women who shake them up. The film buff can see it as an identifiable Hawks creation, with some of the motifs that ran through this great director’s varied body of work. And there’s even a bit of horror movie buried in it, with innocents being pursued (and haunted in their nightmares) by a seemingly omniscient bogeyman, ready to jump out of the darkness. Who knew that John Wayne could be a prototype for Freddy Krueger!

All that said, Red River is first and foremost a brilliant Western, with everything you could want from the genre. It has an acute sense of history – the struggles of the pioneers and visionaries of the Old West, the constant need to shrug off painful losses, look ahead and move on – and strongly written supporting characters, such as Dunson’s old buddy Groot (played by the always-wonderful Walter Brennan). The location shooting is outstanding; there are cattle-drive and stampede scenes that equal any of John Ford’s action setpieces. (What an experience it must have been to see all this on the big screen!) The film is driven by visual storytelling, a point underlined by the fact that though we get occasional glimpses of a scroll of paper with a handwritten version of the narrative on it, the scroll rarely appears on the screen for more than two or three seconds. It dissolves in and out before the viewer has had time to read the full page – you’re left with a basic impression of the first couple of sentences, which is all you really need, because the camera is speaking so eloquently.


Much of the interest in the film today centres on the contrast in acting styles between old-school leading man Wayne and the young, introspective Clift, who was one of Hollywood’s first major performers from the Method school. Actually the contrast isn’t as pronounced as you might think, because Wayne smartly underplays his role, especially when he portrays Dunson as middle-aged. Here, the swaggering, crinkly-eyed Western hero of the 1930s is replaced by a terse, tight-lipped man, and there’s no doubting Dunson’s hard-headedness. In his overall demeanour one sees something resembling the dogmatism of the religious fundamentalist, and indeed his modus operandi is to calmly outdraw and shoot someone, and then nobly read from his Bible over the dead body. There’s something vaguely touching about this the first time he does it (the victim is the henchman of a powerful land-owner, and at this point Dunson can still be seen as a heroic figure), but soon it becomes creepy. Incidentally the Bible theme leads to an amusing monologue, delivered in a sing-song voice by one of the other men:

Always planting and reading! Fill a man full of lead, plant him in the ground, and then read words at him! Why, when you’ve killed a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?

Montgomery Clift's Matthew, on the other hand, is dreamy-eyed and often smiles shyly. He’s a sensitive, almost new-age Western hero who sighs “I’m sorry” after he happens to raise his voice slightly during a conversation – compared to him, even Henry Fonda’s reticent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine seems like a rugged frontiersman. Despite the Mutiny on the Bounty comparisons, Matt is no Fletcher Christian. Shortly after leading the mutiny, he says of Dunson, “He was wrong”, but then adds with a conflicted look on his face, “I hope I’m right.” This introspection and self-doubt is in direct opposition to Dunson’s proclamation “I’m the law.”

The emotional vulnerability of Clift is on view throughout the film, but one sees a different sort of vulnerability from Wayne, and it’s especially effective because this is the old-world macho man who doesn’t usually show weakness. Wayne is startlingly good in the scenes just after Dunson leads the shooting of three men who were talking about quitting: watch the paranoid way in which he jerks his head around and says “Where are you going?” when he sees Matt walking away, or the way he looks at another man who he thinks might be reaching for his holster. You get the sense that Dunson inwardly realises he is being unreasonable, but that he can’t swallow his pride. Soon he becomes a control freak, refusing to sleep so he can keep an eye on all the men, all the time (this is, of course, an indication that he realises he can no longer trust anyone).

The sleeplessness motif will be repeated later in the film, when Matt and his men are plagued by nightmares about the vengeful Dunson tracking them down. (“Every time you turn around, expect to see me, because one day you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”) You won’t see many other great Westerns populated by insomniac and fearful men, but like I said, this film is a genre-bender. The fog in the night scenes also creates a look and atmosphere that is very unusual for a Western – you can cut the tension with a knife.

In fact, some of the later scenes in Red River remind me of two other great films made in the same year: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (with gold prospectors driven by greed, eventually in danger of losing their sanity) and – would you believe it – Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet. Think about the Danish prince being approached on a misty night by his father’s ghost, and then watch the scene in Red River where Matt wanders restlessly about on a foggy night, dreading Dunson’s arrival.

In Olivier’s film, the role of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude was played by an actress who was more than a decade younger than Olivier – this underlined the story’s Oedipal theme, turning the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius relationship into a twisted romantic triangle. In Red River, the main female character Tess has a similarly ambiguous relationship with both Dunson and Matt.

Men, women and Hawks

Many of Hawks’ movies are about men who live in a confined, emotionally limiting world, surrounded mostly by other men (or, in one memorable case, by dinosaur bones!) until a woman comes along and becomes a disruptive force, or a stabilising influence, or both. (On occasion, it’s possible to read the male relationships as being deeper than just strong friendship – watch the way the young cowboy Cherry Valance looks at Matt the first time they meet, and the subsequent gunplay between them, and tell me it isn’t vaguely homoerotic.)

There are two women in Red River; they are never seen together, but there is a strong symmetry in their roles, and in how they affect the central relationship between Dunson and Matt. Very early in the film, the young Dunson loses his girl Fen in an Indian attack (after he’s told her not to accompany him – he’ll return for her later). The very next morning, the boy Matt comes into his life, eventually becoming his adoptive son. Fourteen years later, shortly after the conflict between Dunson and Matt, Tess (Joanne Dru) enters the picture, becomes romantically involved with Matt, and sets about playing agony aunt and relationship-mender (in a striking scene where she wears a flowing black gown, she looks very much like a maternal, Madonna figure).

When Matt leaves Tess behind, promising to return for her later, it’s a repeat of Dunson’s promise to Fen, but with a twist: shortly afterwards, Dunson arrives and agrees to take Tess with him. He’s showing some flexibility for the first time, which represents a major progression in his character – it should help the viewer prepare for a reconciliation and a happy ending.

Unfortunately, the actual climax – with Tess breaking up a display of machismo between Dunson and Matt – is too abrupt, and jarringly shifts the tone from grand tragedy to homely farce. I think this same ending could have worked better if it had been drawn out a little more, and if the Tess character had been given more importance in the lead up to it. Perhaps she could have been played by a bigger star – someone like Barbara Stanwyck, or even Olivia De Havilland – so that she became the film’s belated third lead. (And how about Lauren Bacall, who had stood up so well to Humphrey Bogart in two earlier Hawks classics, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep?) But the role as it’s written is too marginal – almost an afterthought – to sustain such an idea. Tess isn’t quite the equal of the “Hawksian women” from other films. (While on that, see this piece by Germaine Greer.)

If it were possible for an otherwise great film to be ruined by its last one minute, this would be a candidate. But Red River is such a complex and satisfying movie in other respects that it almost doesn’t matter; when you think about it a few days after watching it, you’ll only remember the good bits. And wish you could see it in 70 mm.

Related posts: on the John Wayne star persona in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and on A Streetcar Named Desire (which also had two leads who represented different acting styles – also see the comments discussion).