L'INNOCENTE 1976

The hands of 69-year-old director Luchino Visconti are shown turning the pages of the 1892 Gabriele D'Annunzio novel upon which this, Visconti's final film, is based. 

During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, between panic attacks and bouts of binge-eating, I also managed to find time to watch a great many wonderful movies. A year-long, borderless flow from night to day provided the perfect conditions for indulging my passion for the long-form motion pictures: aka movies with lengthy running times. With no worries about having to get up early the next day (indeed, at the height of lockdown, “next day” was more an abstract concept than a reality), I breezed through Bergman’s 5hr 26min Fanny & Alexander; aced Scorsese’s 3hr 30min The Irishman, and Kubrick’s 3hr 7min Barry Lyndon felt like it was over before I’d even settled into my chair. 

Of particular interest and appeal to me during this period were the films of Luchino Visconti. And not simply because he’s a director whose visually sumptuous epics are as heedless of time constraints as I suddenly found myself to be. No, given the almost surreal socio-political climate of America in 2020, I drew ceaseless comfort and solace from Visconti's flagrant surrender to beauty and staunch respect for intelligence. But chiefly I reveled in the vehement strain of anti-Fascism that underscore the narratives of the deeply poetic and majestic films made by the late Italian director. His films--each a repudiation of moral ugliness and spiritual ignorance--were like an anchor to a sane and humane world that was slipping away.

I revisited old favorites: Death in Venice, Ludwig, The Damned, and Conversation Piece. And I also discovered a treasure trove of heretofore unseen-by-me masterworks that further solidified in my mind the conviction that Visconti is unsurpassed as cinema's painterly pundit of aristocratic foibles. A peerless chronicler of corrupted ideals and self-immolating passions. Each newly discovered (and gloriously restored) film felt richer than the last: Ossessione, Rocco & His Brothers, Senso, & The Leopard --his final film, the tragic L’Innocente, catching me totally off guard by being far more poetically moving than I'd expected. 

Giancarlo Giannini as Tullio Hermil

Jennifer O'Neill as Countess Teresa Raffo

Laura Antonelli as Giuliana Hermil

Marc Porel as Filippo d'Arborio

Italian aristocrat Tullio Hermil (Giannini) is the self-styled embodiment of Nietzsche’s Higher Man. A handsome, athletic gentleman of wealth, intelligence, and taste who, by nature of his philosophical beliefs and self-discerned status as a superior being, answers to no man, no social mores, and certainly no god. An avowed atheist, Tulio professes to be a self-regulating free man and free-thinker. One whose idleness of occupation (coupled with a self-serving disdain for convention) affords the unimpeded indulgence of all manner of hedonistic pursuits and sensual gratifications...all outside of the confines of his marriage.  

Given his libertine worldview, Tullio’s marriage to the docile and religiously devout Giuliana (Antonelli) suggests, at first glance, a contradiction. That is, until one is reminded that all narcissists require a mirror. And in the eyes of Giuliana—who remains somewhat masochistically devoted to him in the face of countless infidelities and humiliations—Tullio sees the confirmation of his superior image of himself. Ascribing nobility to Guiliana’s martyred suffering, Tullio reasons that if a woman so good and pure of heart can love a man who gives so little and treats her so shabbily, then that man must be a great man, indeed.

Übermensch or Überjerk?
After informing Giuliana of his plans to take temporary leave with his mistress, Tullio takes a moment to overshare ("No woman has ever succeeded in seducing me like she does") before asking her to remain his wife and be there for him as platonic companion and confessor.

But as is so often the case with individuals harboring a God complex (or Yeezus complex, for that matter); Tullio’s professed self-possession is simply self-absorption left to flourish in the absence of either introspection or self-awareness. And it’s Tullio’s arrogant lack of self-awareness that proves to be the source of his unexpected anguish when, after abandoning Giuliana for the beautiful Teresa Raffo (O’Neill)—a widowed countess arguably as independent-minded as Tullio, but lacking his gift for self-deception—he begins to suspect his wife of having fallen in love with Filippo d’Arborio, a dashing author (Porel) renowned for his compassionate nature.

Merely the thought of his wife’s infidelity is enough to throw Tullio into an existential tailspin that has him grappling not only with the untenable prospect of her choosing to exercise the same sexual agency he affords himself, but the dreaded notion that he, a man superior, should find himself falling prey to the lowborn sensations of jealousy, envy, and rivalry. Most confounding of all (more so for Tullio than the viewer), his suspicions have the effect of rekindling his passion and reawakening his love for his wife.

But is love something Tullio is capable of?  

Tullio's high opinion of himself induces the desire to vanquish all rivals 

Luchino Visconti used the traditional family saga to chronicle the dissolution of Italian aristocracy in The Leopard (1963). With L’Innocente, the classic romantic triangle scaffolds a critique of the hypocrisy and amorality of bourgeois society while delivering a bitter requiem to Italian patriarchy (perhaps even Visconti's own). The film is set in a world rigid in its governance and regulation of women's sexuality and bodies, but Visconti's vision—one less nihilistic than D'Annunzio's morally myopic and proto-fascist source novel I was inspired to read after watching L'Innocente...twice—questions the value of a life lived in pursuit of sensual experience if starved of a spiritual existence. 

"I don't have a hell to fear or a heaven to hope for."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given my cinematic attraction to high-style debauchery, grand passions, male nudity, and directors of whose visual style the term “operatic dimensions” is oft applied, I’ve a natural affinity for the films of Luchino Visconti. A born aesthete, Visconti’s eye finds rapturous beauty even in his stark neorealist melodramas. 

Inaccessibility and maturity of content played a part in my not seeing any of his films until college (Death in Venice being the 1st unless you count Visconti’s contribution to the 1962 anthology film Boccaccio ’70 which popped up often on late-late night TV). But my heel-dragging paid off in that I was introduced to the bulk of Visconti’s masterworks in pristine condition; when released on DVD/Blu-ray digitally enhanced, restored to their original lengths, and subtitled, not English-dubbed.

Making films that were political, sensual, and courageously Queer in subtext if not in theme, Visconti, like my other fave Ken Russell, was one of the last of the truly fearless filmmakers. The ambitious visual scope of Visconti’s films was matched only by how ambitiously his films sought to explore the dark extremes of human relationships. 

In synopsis, L’Innocente sounds like another one of those movies about men who profess to love women so much that they can’t seem to treat them like real people (making it something of a 19th-century cousin to Shampoo, Boomerang, Carnal Knowledge, and All That Jazz). Visconti takes the framework of the romantic tragedy to breathe life into the sexual double-standard narrative, making the struggle representative of larger socio-political conflicts related to morality and religion.

Luchino Visconti died on March 17, 1976 while L'Innocente was still being edited. The film didn't premiere in the U.S. until 1979. 

Didier Haudepin as Federico Hermil, Tullio's younger brother

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

“We’re intelligent, we’ve studied, we’ve traveled. We’ve enjoyed ourselves so much, we’re so rich…and then?"   Federico  L'Innocente -1976  

“We're rich, we’re famous, we’re beautiful…and miserable.” Holly  Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt -1977

Identical sentiments, albeit from absurdly dissimilar sources. Movies tasked with depicting the empty existence of the wealthy usually fail miserably when faced with the challenge of how to visually represent a world of material excess without inadvertently glamorizing what they’re trying to condemn. My theory behind movies that fall into this trap (e.g., both the 1974 and 2013 adaptations of The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street - 2013) is that the filmmakers themselves simply don’t believe it. The movie narrative dictates it, but these directors, like many working in an industry tentpoled on glorifying its own overindulgence in greed and money-worship, come across as being too in awe (and covetous) of wealth to even recognize when their opulence gaze turns more fetishistic and admiring than critical.

Visconti, the father of Italian neorealist cinema, was born into nobility (his full title is Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone). Yet when his filmmaker's gaze shifted from the gritty realism of Italy’s working classes to the ornate drawing rooms of the Italian aristocracy, his vision reflected the eye of someone both familiar and disenchanted with this world. A lover of beauty, Visconti’s films are overflowing with lavishly operatic images of wealth and elegance, but his aesthetic eye for detail works in service of creating a verisimilitude that draws us into this world; a world we know only from paintings and books. The breathtaking authenticity he brings to his films via costuming (Piero Tosi), production design (Mario Garbuglia), & cinematography (Pasqualino De Santis) create environments that don't call to mind enviable splendors and worlds of happiness and comfort. Rather, they bring forth images of ornamentally lush prisons or gilded birdcages entrapping his decadent and morally-adrift characters.

Luchino Visconti's films tend to reflect periods of social, political, or ideological change. Given the director's Marxist leanings, the displays of affluence and luxury in his movies are more representative of the moral dissipation of fashionable society than an opportunity for audiences to "ooh" and "aah" at the Lifestyles of the Rich and Fascist.

PERFORMANCES

If I think back to the first time I saw L’Innocente…replaying it in my mind, trying to figure out just what in particular it is about this movie that brought me to such stinging tears by the finale,  affecting me far more deeply than any of Visconti’s arguably more masterful works; I always come back to the same thing…the eyes have it.

Visconti’s gift for vivid tableau is ideal for capturing L’Innocente’s lives of stiff formality (where bedroom-hopping, fencing, and the occasional duel seem to be the only modes of physical exertion). Amid such evocative stillness and voices not always so artfully dubbed, it’s remarkable the degree to which the film’s talented cast can convey and communicate a wealth of complex emotions solely through their eyes. That they can do so with a depth and virtuosity that is often  positively heartbreaking confirms Giancarlo Giannini’s 1975 comment to the NYT: “The eyes are the most mobile part of the body.”

Giannini’s expressive eyes were practically his calling card during the early ‘70s when his films with director Lina Wertmüller made him the darling of the foreign film scene. So it's no surprise he’s able to make the rather repugnant Tullio creepily relatable (like Daffy Duck, he’s all our worst instincts consolidated) and imbue him with a kind of pitiable humanity lacking in the novel. Laura Antonelli, whose propensity for consistently doffing her period britches made her something of an arthouse pinup during the ‘70s, is hampered somewhat by a character so compliant she risks becoming infuriating before the story reveals her truth, but Antonelli is the heart of L’Innocente and gives one of those radiant, delicate performances that gets better each time you see it.

To my utter and unending astonishment, American actress Jennifer O’Neill turned out to be my personal favorite in the entire film. Indeed, it’s O’Neill’s mournful eyes - which Visconti is wise to keep his camera trained on in the film’s heart-rending final sequence - that remains the single most haunting image my mind returns to each time I think of how much I love this movie. Known more for her beauty than her acting chops (and she looks positively stunning here), O’Neill leaves her Summer of ’42 girlishness behind in Nantucket (along with her voice, mercifully, as she is dubbed in Italian by actress Valeria Moriconi), evincing a heretofore untapped womanly bearing that's alluringly hard-edged and impassioned. 

Rina Morelli as Mrs. Hermil (mother of Tullio & Federico)
L'Innocente was the actress' last film. She also appeared in Visconti's The Leopard 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

Depending on the translation, Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel is known as The Innocent, The Intruder, or The Victim (US). Each title suggesting a subtle shift in the narrative interpretation of the object of Tullio’s obsession. The book is written as a first-person, past-tense confessional told from Tullio’s point of view, his warped perspective the only version of reality to which we're we're privy.  

L’Innocente’s screenplay (written by Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, & Enrico Medio) is linear in form, providing glimpses of events outside the sphere of Tullio's awareness. In essence, we're given a God’s eye view of an atheist. While the novel remains staunchly immoral and self-serving in its point of view, the religious Visconti (“My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic” ) who was ailing and directed from a wheelchair, has no problem coming right out and labeling his protagonist a monster.

It was poignant watching Luchino Visconti’s last film L’Innocente, during the pandemic lockdown mere months after the insurrectionist riot of January 2021. When I saw L’Innocente I was seeing a work of the artist as revolutionary—an Italian bisexual Marxist, at that—wresting the mike from the hand of history and not allowing the oppressor to control the narrative. Visconti takes an amoral chronicle written by a poet dubbed “the father of fascism” and transforms a self-aggrandizing, masturbatory exercise in nihilism into a theological, protofeminist evisceration of the kind of louche narcissist who fancies himself as a towering superman, when in reality he is simply self-loathing and morally bereft.

"I wonder why you men raise us up with one hand and drag us down with the other? Why won't you let us walk by your side, as one being next to another? A woman next to a man. Nothing more, nothing less."

Luchino Visconti’s first film was Ossessione (1943) an unauthorized adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. That film’s realism, upfront sexuality, core antifascism, and Queer sensibility flew rebelliously in the face of Mussolini’s regime and was banned.

As much as I adore it, I don’t think L’Innocente is Visconti’s best film. But in its own way, it’s a work as deceptively and sublimely subversive as his first.

BONUS MATERIAL 

Can't tell you how happy it made me feel to see the handsome star of Luchino Visconti's very first film, return, handsome as ever, 33-years later, to make an appearance in the director's swan song.

Massimo Girotti as Gino in Ossessione (1943) - Visconti's first film

Massimo  Girotti as Count Stefano in L'Innocente (1976) - Visconti's last film

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

CHINATOWN 1974

"Mrs. Mulwray, I think you're hiding something."

Whether for the prestige, visual opulence, short-hand history, or easy-access sentimentality, period films and costume dramas have always been a Hollywood staple and a vital part of movie storytelling. But in the 1970s, the need for some kind of collective breather from the relentless tensions of the “Now” (i.e., Vietnam War, Watergate, impeachment, oil crisis, inflation) produced a market-surge interest in movies set in the “Then.” Particularly the then of the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of these films were escapist homages to retro genres (At Long Last Love -1975). Some were style-fetish showcases devoted to the detailed reconstruction of the fashions, furnishings, and décor of the era (The Great Gatsby -1974). And some were trenchant exercises in ‘70s disillusionment whose nihilist themes were tempered by the distancing device of taking place in America's recent past (The Day of the Locust -1975). Roman Polanski’s Chinatown managed to be all three.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray

John Huston as Noah Cross

The collaborative effort of the members of the “New Hollywood” Boys Club: producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Marathon Man), screenwriter Robert Towne (Shampoo, The Last Detail), and director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth), Chinatown had a bumpy, three-year journey to the screen (covered in deliciously intricate detail in Sam Wesson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last years of Hollywood). But when Chinatown premiered in theaters in the summer of 1974, the many arguments, rewrites, firings, walkouts, and endless weeks of tinkering proved not only to be more than worth the effort, but stood as evidence of the degree of care and artistry that went into fashioning a film that many today regard as a modern masterpiece of American cinema. 

Love the composition of this shot. Even the body language of the characters is perfect

Hardly considered the sure-fire success its current reputation would suggest, Chinatown struggled through disastrous previews and a difficulty generating pre-release interest in a 1974 movie marketplace dominated by the twin publicity blitzkriegs of Lucille Ball's ill-conceived Mame and Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby. Three-time Oscar nominee Jack Nicholson (his most recent being a Best Actor nod for 1973's The Last Detail) was hot at the time, but there existed considerable doubt among many as to how he would come across in this, his first stab at a leading man glamour role. 

Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway's post-Bonnie and Clyde screen output had proved erratic at best, with her The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) golden girl patina coming perilously close to tarnishing after a string of arty flops and effective but unfruitful supporting roles. Then there was Roman Polanski...with his days as New Hollywood's European wunderkind a matter of history and coming fresh off two back-to-back boxoffice bombs (Macbeth -1971 and What? -1972), his name carried about it an aura of fall-from-grace tragedy (the Manson murders) in a town ruled by superstition.

Darrell Zwerling as Hollis Mulwray

Further contributing to the uncertainty surrounding the film's reception was the fact that a quick recounting of Chinatown's plot-- "A private eye in 1937 Los Angeles investigates a mystery involving a real estate swindle and the city's water rights!" --didn't exactly set the pulse racing. 

But what Chinatown had going for it was that it was an original. Not an adaptation of a previously-produced novel, film, or theatrical production. As '70s movies became more formulaically bloated (The Way We Were -1973) and market-driven slick (The Sting - 1973), Chinatown's creative integrity vs its dubious box-office prospects felt like a throwback to Hollywood's very recent past. Back to the start of the decade when difficult-to-categorize films like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) were being made because they were stories the filmmakers wanted to tell, not because they were sure-fire blockbuster material.

The first time I saw Chinatown, it had me in its hip pocket the minute those stylish opening titles appeared to the accompaniment of Jerry Goldsmith's mysteriously forlorn theme music. And though the film had an alluringly old-fashioned sound and succeeded in creating a vision of a past that felt lived-in, not decorative, Chinatown somehow managed to sidestep things that might have made it feel imitative or as paying affectionate homage to another movie…Chinatown looked and felt like the genuine article.

It didn't seem quite possible that Polanski and Co. had managed to make a film that worked magnificently as a mystery (the particulars of the twisty plot--murder, political swindling, family secrets ---are not exactly easy-to-follow on first viewing); achieved a kind of visual poetry (the movie looks swelteringly hot! How did they do that?), and was propelled by the emotional connection of compelling characters whose fates you came to care about (the performances are uniformly first-rate...right across the board). 

Chinatown, in both style and execution, is a jet-black neo-noir that realizes--with a persuasive canniness I still can't quite put my finger on--both Robert Towne's goal of writing a story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler Dashiell Hammett, and Roman Polanski's desire to create: “A film about the ‘30s seen through the camera eye of the ‘70s.” 

Chinatown gets everything right. In creating the slightly artificial authenticity of Los Angeles in the '30s, Polanski nailed it when he observed "People know this time because of the movies, not because of what was real."

Given a contemporary sheen thanks to its widescreen Panavision color photography that "feels" like B&W, Chinatown evokes the classic detective movies of the past via its keen eye for period detail and avoidance of so many of the nostalgia-craze movie gimmicks of the time: no diffused lighting, no voiceover narration, no self-conscious “period” jargon, and no knowing winks to the audience. And here's a bonus...the actors actually look comfortable and convincing in their period clothes! (For the alternative, aka, kids playing dress-up, see Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby - 2013 or  Mank - 2020). 

The result is a movie that's as satisfying as a genre entertainment as it is a dark and existentially layered contemplation on corruption, the destruction of innocence, and, as per Towne, "The futility of good intentions."

Chinatown provides many memorable "goosebump moments," this scene being one of my favorites. I absolutely love Dunaway's delivery and the struck look in Nicholson's eyes when Evelyn asks about the mystery woman in Jake's past. As we'll discover, Evelyn & Jake are two people united by the things they're trying to forget.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

One of the main reasons Chinatown made such an impression on me is that it was the very first noirish private eye movie I ever saw. 

In 1971 LIFE magazine devoted its February cover to America’s burgeoning nostalgia craze, and by 1974, everything from fashion to music reflected the nation’s fascination with life enjoyed in the rear-view. The summer of 1974 saw San Francisco movie theaters so overflowing with retro fare, it took considerable effort to find a film set in the present day: Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, The Lords of Flatbush, That’s Entertainment!, Mame, The Three Musketeers, Daisy Miller, Thomasine and Bushrod, Blazing Saddles, Jeremiah Johnson, Huckleberry Finn (of all things), and Our Time (a little-seen coming-of-age movie set in the ‘50s that opened at the Alhambra during the summer I worked there as an usher). 

The Two Mrs. Mulwrays
Diane Ladd as Ida Sessions. There is a subtle wit to Ladd's performance as the prostitute/movie bit player hired to impersonate Evelyn Mulwray. Miss Session's attempt to affect an air of moneyed aristocracy hints at her lack of success as an actress.

When Chinatown came out I was a 16-year-old movie buff with a passion for contemporary films almost to the exclusion of all else. Back then, my appreciation for classic movies was largely academic and aesthetic (i.e., I enjoyed reading about them and decorated the walls of my bedroom with posters of Marilyn Monroe, Glark Gable, and WC Fields), not practical. Which meant I hadn’t yet seen The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, or any of those classics on The Late Show about hard-boiled detectives and dangerous women. At sixteen I was much too in thrall of the then taboo-shattering adult themes and newfound unrestricted nudity, sex, & violence of ‘70s films to ever find the Production Code coyness of old movies to be of much interest. That is, except for musicals. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971) ignited my love for old MGM musicals and the films of Busby Berekely, but that’s pretty much where my interest in “Golden Age" Hollywood films began and ended. 

The latter point, my love of musicals, goes to plain why, when That’s Entertainment! and Chinatown both opened on the same day in San Francisco (Wednesday, June 26th), I opted for That’s Entertainment!. An option I exercised for two more weekends before getting around to seeing Chinatown.

Roman Polanski as Man with Knife

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Maybe it’s the Blu-ray talking, but I’m obsessed with what a fabulous-looking movie Chinatown is. The Oscar-nominated team of cinematographer John A. Alonzo, production designer Richard Sylbert, and art director W. Stewart Campbell give Chinatown an atmospheric sheen that is often breathtaking in its evocation of sun-baked Los Angles in the late ‘30s. 

But despite the obvious care and expense lavished on every frame, Chinatown's distinction is that it is a period film that has no interest in romanticizing the past. With traditionally swept-under-the-nostalgia-carpet realities like racism and classist privilege flowing like an undercurrent in a narrative propelled by graft, collusion, murder, and incest; Chinatown’s surface sheen creates a dichotomy that challenges the dreamy ideals one associates with old movies. Cynicism has always been a part of the detective movie genre, but no matter how nihilist the theme, by fade-out, the requisite virtues of honor, heroism, and the triumph of good had to be reinstalled. Chinatown, however, ends with a punch to the gut and the ground knocked out from under us.

Me in 1974:  "Wow, even in so-called simpler times, rich people were greedy and corrupt!"
Me in 2021: "Wow, this movie is almost 50 years old and the rich are still as corrupt and greedy as ever!"

PERFORMANCES

Robert Towne wrote the character of J. J. Gittes with pal Jack Nicholson in mind, so the star-making role of the principled private eye with a taste for Florsheim shoes and words like “métier” fits the actor as perfectly as one of Jake’s tailored suits. This is my favorite of all Nicholson’s performances and arguably his last real immersion in character before entering the “Wink-wink, it’s me! Jack Nicholson!” phase of his career. The entire film is from his perspective...Chinatown is Jake’s journey. But its mystery, tragedy, and heart (and my favorite character) is Evelyn Mulwray.

Jane Fonda in Julia (1977) - Even Robert Towne had Fonda in mind when he wrote Chinatown

Both Robert Evans and Roman Polanski have made it known that Jane Fonda was their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for the role of Evelyn Mulwray. But when Fonda declined (something the actress denies), Chinatown gained Faye Dunaway…the jewel in Chinatown’s crown and the only ‘70s actress in my eyes to possess the combined intensity, inscrutability, aristocratic bearing, neurotic edge, old-fashioned movie star glamour, and grown-woman gravitas required to bring Evelyn Mulwray to life as something more than just another vaguely-drawn film noir femme fatale cliché. 

As Chinatown’s woman of mystery (she who must not be known until Act III), Evelyn Mulwrays’s impact has to be visual. A guarded woman who’s erected an immaculate façade to conceal just how badly she’s damaged, Evelyn intrigues because she is not at all what she seems. So defining a character trait is Evelyn’s appearance that when the film starts to peel away the layers of Evelyn’s very literal “mask” of makeup as her vulnerability is exposed, those moments achieve a poignancy that makes the film's tragic denouement all the more devastating. Faye Dunaway captures all this magnificently, but is seldom given credit.

Journalists applauded Polanski's time-consuming multiple takes and Towne's glacially slow writing pace as examples of their artistic perfectionism. Meanwhile, Dunaway's painstaking commitment to her character's obsession with appearance was dismissed as prima donna "difficulty" and made her behind-the-scenes clashes the only things people talk about when speaking of her contribution to Chinatown. Despite his early reservations, in the end, Robert Evans came to praise Dunaway's performance to the skies, albeit in his usual self-congratulatory way: "Dunaway's singular mystery on the screen was among the best casting choices of my career!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are a great many '70s films that I love in spite of (or because of) their flaws. But only a few I'd call perfect. Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) gets my vote for being a wholly perfect film, so does Ken Russell's Women in Love (actually a 1969 film, but I'm cutting myself some slack because it wasn't released in SF until 1970), and most definitely Chinatown qualifies. 

And by perfect I don't mean an absence of technical goofs or anachronism errors... it's more the feeling of everything fitting so well together that you can't imagine anything being improved upon. The feeling that a story has been told in precisely the manner the filmmakers wanted to tell it. In the case of Chinatown, everything falls into place so ideally, from the cast to the music to the dialogue to the score...watching it becomes an immersive, deeply satisfying experience that engages on so many levels. I never tire of revisiting it, and the film seems boundless in offering new things to discover even after all this time. But best of all, it still manages to move me. 

I'm no longer as totally destroyed by it as I was when I was 16, but at age 63, this masterwork of cinema persists in giving me waterworks every single time.   

Thankfully, films are frozen in time. People, alas, are not. In 1974, audiences drew subconscious parallels between the dogged tragedies of Roman Polanski's personal life and the cursed fate of J.J. Gittes. Today, I'm afraid the parallels linking Polanski and Noah Cross fairly hit one over the head.

BONUS MATERIAL

Actor Paul Jenkins, who plays Policeman #1 in Chinatown (1974), made his film debut as a policeman in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Chinatown was planned as the first film in a trilogy. A plan which ground to a halt after the weak boxoffice performance of the second entry, The Two Jakes (1990). Set in 1948, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel sorely misses Polanski's gift for cinematic storytelling and gets my vote for film most likely to convince you that Chinatown didn't need a sequel in the first place. Still, I did get a kick out of seeing these actors from the original return. 

Poster art by Jim Pearsall 

Chinatown was a summer release, opening on Wednesday, June 26, 1974, at San Francisco's Coronet Theater (which had just hosted The Great Gatsby for 11 weeks). I fell in love with the movie poster the instant I saw it, purchasing it a full month before seeing the film. The artwork captures just the right tone of nostalgia, the shadowy figure of the hatted and pinstriped Nicholson leaving no doubt as to the film's noirish roots, the dreamy image of Dunaway's face framed by the trails of cigarette smoke. the essence of romantic longing. 

The water motif is worked in with the wave crashing against Nicholson's sleeve, it being one of several elements of the poster that refuse to stay within the boundaries of the frame. From the lettering to the heat-glare effect of the coloring, everything about this poster is just perfect.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

THE TRIPLE ECHO 1972

"A triple echo is the sound a shotgun blast makes when fired in the country."  

A triple echo is also the sound of the triangular collision of three lives.

I first became aware of the late British director Michael Apted back in the early '70s as the filmmaker responsible for picking up the mantle and expanding upon Paul Almond's groundbreakingly innovative Seven Up! documentary series. Nine in total, these social documentaries spanned 1964 to 2019, chronicling the lives of its original subjects…14 children, each 7 years old…and checking in with them every seven years, from childhood to their 60s.

Over time, Apted established himself in feature films, gaining considerable success, if not Oscar recognition, for the superior celebrity biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and for taking on the James Bond franchise with The World is Not Enough (1999). A 3-time BAFTA winner and recipient of several DGA awards, when Michael Apted died at age 79 on January 7, 2020, he left behind a varied legacy of outstanding films reflective not only of his roots in television and years as a documentarian but his lifelong commitment to exploring the emotional truth of human relationships. 

The latter is a distinguishing characteristic of his impressive feature film debut, The Triple Echo.

Glenda Jackson as Alice Charlesworth

Brian Deacon as Pvt. Barton 

Oliver Reed as Sgt. Arthur

Because The Triple Echo has the confined, minimalist structure of a three-act chamber drama, before I learned that it was based on a 1970 novella by H.E. Bates (co-screenwriter of the 1955 Katharine Hepburn film Summertime), I was under the impression the film was adapted from a stage play. 

The time is WWII, the spring of 1943. The place is a remote farm in a hilly expanse of rural Wiltshire, England. A farm maintained solely and with some difficulty by Alice Charlesworth (Glenda Jackson), a solid, no-nonsense type whose husband is a POW in a Japanese prison camp. Alice’s reconciled solitude is interrupted one day when Barton (Brian Deacon), a young man from a nearby military training camp, accidentally trespasses on her land. Hostile wariness warms to measured affinity when the boyish soldier reveals himself to be a sensitive type enamored of nature, disdainful of authority, and a farmer’s son with a knack for fixing machinery. 

The Triple Echo marks the film debut of television & theater actor Brian Deacon 

From compassion and homesickness, the two strike up a tentative friendship. Out of loneliness and need—him: to forget the war, her: to remember who she was before the war—an incautious romance develops. (The film references but fails to specify the couple’s age difference. In real life, Glenda Jackson is Brian Deacon's senior by 13 years.) 

They spend their extended leave together on the farm. The undisturbed seclusion provides an artificial Eden so lullingly appealing to the discontented squaddy that when the time comes to return to camp, he decides to make his temporary absence a permanent one by deserting and going AWOL. Barton's abrupt decision precipitates an equally hastily-arrived-at solution from Alice: to elude detection and avoid capture, Barton must grow out his hair and nails, dress in women’s clothing, and assume the identity of Jill, a fictional younger sister visiting to help out on the farm. 

Confinement brings unforeseeable conflicts of personality, and almost immediately, their relationship begins to buckle under the day-to-day strain of impersonation, complicity, and apprehension. Alice, implicated in Barton’s desertion yet sensing she’s the only one to grasp its seriousness, grows more fault-finding and resentful as feelings of “caring about” splinter into “being responsible for.” Meanwhile, the battle-resistant Barton, holed up indoors and chafing at the irony of his great escape resulting in only a greater loss of freedom, finds himself embroiled in a battle with himself as he tries to simultaneously suppress and understand what both he and Alice perceive, but cannot find the words to talk about: his subtle, inner responsiveness to externally gender-identifying as a woman.

With its remote farmhouse setting; Alice trudging about in the mud in boots and trousers; and Barton-as-Jill secreted away indoors laboring over the cooking and ironing, it feels more intentional than coincidental that in falling so obligingly (yet acrimoniously) into a traditional gender role dynamic, Alice and Barton’s relationship comes to resemble that of Ellen and Jill (!) in D.H. Lawrence’s 1922 novella The Fox. A similarity reinforced by the Freudian emphasis on shotguns in both narratives, and the central conflict in each story being the intrusion of a third party—a fox/male character—whose attentions drive a fateful wedge between (and this is where I think '70s audiences were lost) two women.

The Sergeant (Oliver Reed at his charming-menacing best) and his buddy Stanley (Gavin Richards) make a nuisance of themselves once they discover the remote farmhouse is occupied by a "married crumpet" and her sister

In 2019 Glenda Jackson spoke on the topic of gender while starring on Broadway as King Lear: “When we’re born we teach babies….to be boys or girls. As we get older [she was 82 at the time] those absolute barriers of gender begin to crack.” She went on to observe how, having been just three years old at the start of WWII, she grew up in a world of women. Seeing women participate in every field of endeavor left her heedless of gender limitations. That is until the war ended, the men returned, and women were encouraged (strongly) to go back to assuming more traditional roles.

That the flexible quadrants of gender are a theme explored in the nearly 50-year-old The Triple Echo suggests that Glenda Jackson’s timely comments reflect what has been a career-long interest on her part in taking on roles that explore the entire spectrum of human experience. Whether they be queer identity, gender nonconformity, women’s autonomy, or sexual orientation, a considerable number of Jackson’s films have been about people and relationships that fall outside of the narrow confines of a gender binary paradigm:  Women in Love (1969), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Music Lovers (1971), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), and controversially, even her interpretation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in Hedda (1975). 

Michael Apted’s assured and nuanced The Triple Echo humanely explores a human reality...that long before there were terms like gender dysphoria, long before there was any understanding of assigned gender not always conforming to gender identity, there has been an unarticulated awareness that male-female / masculine-feminine are limited and inadequate qualifiers. That human beings are more complex than the simple roles they are assigned. And there have always been individuals who naturally resist being what the world tells them they must be. 

One of my favorite things about The Triple Echo is that the film refuses to disclose to the viewer any information about the characters that they themselves don't know. So Barton, in his youth, has no real understanding of what he's experiencing, while Alice picks up on things she herself doesn't have the words or sophistication to fully comprehend. The film's emphasis, that we must go on loving those we care about...even when we don't always understand them...is, to me, a profoundly sensitive perspective for a film to have.

I don't know how it performed in the UK, but considering Glenda Jackson’s popularity at the time and the opportunity the film posed to see her reunited with Women in Love co-star Oliver Reed, it's (somewhat) surprising The Triple Echo struggled to find an audience in the US. Today it remains one of Jackson’s least-familiar, least-seen titles, failing—at least to my knowledge—to even get a VHS release.  

Of course, it didn’t help that the poorly-marketed 1972 independent feature didn’t appear in most American markets until 1974, then hoping to ride the publicity coattails of Jackson’s recent Oscar win for A Touch of Class (1973). But by then, The Triple Echo came off as a late-in-the-cycle entry in the early-'70s trend in films exploring transgender and gender identity. Films that were either of the well-intentioned but-sensationalized variety: I Want What I Want (1972), or blatant exploitation: The Christine Jorgensen Story, Dinah East, and Myra Breckinridge--all released in 1970.

The audience for gender exploitation was likely unenthusiastic about Apted’s simple, arthouse approach. The nostalgia crowd was disappointed when the film's age-difference love story didn't turn into Britain's answer to The Summer of ‘42 (1971). And critics, left rudderless due to The Triple Echo arriving on the scene minus the guideposts of prior film festival wins determining its pedigree, didn't know what to make of a movie that was part love story, part unorthodox romantic triangle, part gender-identity character drama, and part nail-biting thriller.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Usually, when I say “Only in the ‘70s” about a film, it’s meant as an affectionate pejorative relating to the decade’s reputation for turning out offbeat, idiosyncratic films that could only have been made during that tiny window of time between the assembly line days of the studio system and the market-research era of the franchise blockbuster.

When I say The Triple Echo is the kind of movie that could only have been made in the ‘70s, I mean it as a badge of honor. With a small budget, minimal cast, and an intimate story that staunchly defies categorization; The Triple Echo feels like anything but sure-fire boxoffice hit material. But very much like a film Michael Apted wanted to make and a story he wanted to tell…market prospects be damned. And THAT is definitely something that could happen only in the ‘70s.

Critics in 1972 never tired of referencing how "unconvincing" Deacon is as a woman. In a rare instance of an informed contemporary mentality working in favor of an older film, to watch The Triple Echo today and catch yourself obsessing over a jawline or a hairdo (bad wigs, however, are fair game) or ideas of "pretty," is to confront how fragile and arbitrary our ideas of masculinity and femininity really are. 

I missed out on seeing The Triple Echo during its original run, finally catching it on TCM just a few short years ago after decades of having had it on my holy grail list of must-see, hard-to-find films. With Glenda Jackson starring, I knew I wasn’t likely to be disappointed, but I didn't expect to be so moved or impressed by a first directorial effort. 

Even as the story veers toward the melodramatic, culminating in the tragic, The Triple Echo maintains an emotional perceptiveness and authentic sense of time and place that give scenes the feel of having been culled from personal memory.

If director Michael Apted and screenwriter Robin Chapman reveal their filmmaking inexperience in a certain overstatement of symbolism (portents of doom abound), and an overreliance on ambiguity in characterization (Glenda Jackson’s complex, fully-inhabited performance tethers the more sketchily-drawn roles of Deacon and Reed); they display an uncommonly deft hand in managing the film’s many shifts in tone and in creating an accompanying atmosphere for the three distinct phases of the story.

In the film's first third, as Alice & Barton get to know one another, the look is sunshiny, and most scenes are set outdoors. The peaceful open spaces are punctuated by reminders of the war: the sight & sound of planes flying overhead, the carcasses of a downed airship overlooking Alice's farm like the eyes of TJ Eckelburg in The Great Gatsby.  

The fear of detention spawns a sense of confined imprisonment as emotional estrangement, and claustrophobic interiors characterize the second segment. The oppressively low ceilings and too-close walls are in stark contrast to what came before. The low-angle shot here not only calls attention to the lovers braced coldly with their backs to one another but also places Barton's lengthened hair and long painted nails in the forefront.

The third and final act, representing the completion of the triangle and the introduction of Sgt. Arthur's fateful dominance in the narrative, takes us back to the outdoors. But now the look is wintry, the atmosphere dark, stormy, and threatening.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What if who you think you're pretending to be is who you really are? 

There’s a scene early in The Triple Echo where Alice sees Barton out of his military uniform for the first time and comments on his looking so different: “I’m a master of disguise,”  he says. A throwback reference to an even earlier scene in which, after Alice remarks that he doesn’t look much like a farmer’s son, Barton complains of having been “made” into a soldier by the Army. 

So much of life is being who we have to be, what we're told to be, and what we're expected to be, it feels like a genuine stroke of luck if any of those align with who we actually are. 

Michael Apted has crafted a finely-observed film that, at times, feels like the most heartfelt fable about the subtle tyranny of identities assigned and roles assumed, 

With Glenda Jackson giving what I think is one of her best and most underrated performances, it may have taken me almost 50 years to see The Triple Echo, but I say in all sincerity that I know I'm able to appreciate it more today than I ever could in the '70s.

BONUS MATERIAL

The Triple Echo opened in Los Angeles without much fanfare on April 17, 1974 at the Music Hall Theater. 

In a move not uncommon in the days before home video and DVDs, The Triple Echo was re-released some four years later in September of 1978, this time at the bottom half of an arthouse double bill (paired with Chabrol’s Dirty Hands) and christened with the fuck-all, act-of-desperation title: Soldier in Skirts.  

Lotsa Larfs & Sex
It's difficult to imagine how anyone thought it a good idea to market
 Michael Apted's somber character drama as a proto-Bosom Buddies comedy.
Misconceived, misguided, and blatantly misleading.

The first thing I ever saw actor Brian Deacon in was John Schlesinger's 1983 HBO telefilm adaptation of Separate Tables with Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Before then I only knew of him as the husband of Rock Follies star and oft-parodied VO5 hairspray TV commercial pitchwoman Rula Lenska (the pair wed in 1977, divorced in 1987).

The Triple Echo is currently available for streaming through Amazon Prime Video.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021