Arthur Penn: New Edition (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Studies) [Illustrated] 0814333583, 9780814333587

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arthur penn

contemporary approaches to film and media series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

arthur penn New Edition

Robin Wood with Richard Lippe

Edited by Barry Keith Grant

wayne state university press  detroit

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-8143-3358-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-8143-3927-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952317 “Arthur Penn in Canada,” interview by Robin Wood, from Movie 18 (Winter 1970–71): 26–36. Reprinted by permssion of Cameron & Hollis, Moffat, Scotland. “The Chase: Flashback, 1965,” from Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood. Copyright 1986 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Arthur Penn is one of the greatest directors in the world. —Ingmar Bergman

Arthur Penn on the set of The Miracle Worker.

contents

Foreword by Barry Keith Grant ix Preface by Richard Lippe xiii Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction 1 The Left Handed Gun 11 The Miracle Worker 22 Mickey One 31 The Chase 39 Bonnie and Clyde 55 Alice’s Restaurant 72 Shooting Little Big Man 94 Problems of Editing 109 Arthur Penn in Canada 118 With the Same Serenity: Little Big Man (with Aline Wood) 154 Inevitable Violence 165

viii  contents Rustling Up: Robin Wood on The Missouri Breaks 169 Arthur Penn 175 The Chase: Flashback, 1965 181 An Interview with Arthur Penn (Richard Lippe and Robin Wood) 202 Notes 237 Filmography 239 Index 255

foreword

The influential film critic Robin Wood had planned to revisit and revise his important early auteurist monographs for Wayne State University Press, as he had with his foundational Hitchcock’s Films, originally published in 1969 and later revised as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited twenty years later, by which time film criticism and Wood’s own perspective had changed drastically. Thus, it was expected that his revaluations of Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Satyajit Ray, Michelangelo Antonioni, and, of course, Arthur Penn would yield significant new insights about these directors. Unfortunately, Wood did not live long enough to complete this monumental critical undertaking. In 2006, three years before his death, Wood slightly revised his book on Hawks. Of all his monographs, Wood had written in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, the book on Hawks was the one least in need of “revisionist thinking” because, as he declared in Wayne State University Press’s revised edition of the Hawks book, “Hawks remains Hawks.” In 2006 Wood also completed for the press an expanded edition of his fascinating collection of essays, Personal Visions, originally published by a small art gallery in London, England, thirty years earlier. Although Wood was unable to reconsider his other auteurist studies, Wayne State University Press has been committed to keeping in print the work of one of the most important voices in the history of film studies. In 2013 the press posthumously published an expanded version of Ingmar Bergman, containing the original monograph from 1969 and four other pieces that Wood had written about the Swedish

x  foreword director since then, and now has followed it with this similarly expanded edition of his book on American director Arthur Penn. Of all the directors about whom Wood wrote at length, Penn was also the only one who subsequently did not continue to produce much significant work. (His final theatrical film, with some irony, is titled Penn and Teller Get Killed). After the promise of The Left Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker, The Chase, and Bonnie and Clyde, expectations among cineastes, including Wood, regarding Penn ran high for the future—but only, in the end, to be disappointed. Wood finished his original book as Little Big Man was in production, and he explicitly acknowledges his high hopes for the film, which later he judged somewhat disappointing. Wood concluded the original monograph writing about his visit with Penn on the set of Little Big Man and the new understanding that it gave him as a critic for how a director such as Penn actually works. Nevertheless, one can already sense Wood straining in his defense of Alice’s Restaurant, made between Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man and the last completed film that Penn wrote about in the original monograph. Of those directors about whom Wood wrote monographs, Penn is the only one with whom he had a personal relationship, and it seemed to have been special indeed, as Richard Lippe explains in his Preface. Penn welcomed Wood on the set of Little Big Man during production, and in the interviews one notes the bluntness (characteristic of Wood’s critical judgments) with which Wood sometimes offers negative views about various aspects of Penn’s films and the openness of spirit with which Penn responds, even agrees. Thus, it is especially unfortunate that Wood did not have the opportunity to rethink and write further about Penn. Surely Wood would have provided compelling analyses of Night Movies, which, as he informs us, he considered a major but neglected film of its time, and The Missouri Breaks, about which he had written only sketchily in short pieces. The astonishing opening sequence of the latter, sensuously shot by Michael Butler, initially evokes with great power the natural world and its beauty, only to be subsequently and suddenly sullied by a public hanging. The scene

foreword xi encapsulates Penn’s concern with violence and its place in American culture, as Wood all along insisted. Even the later less successful but nonetheless still interesting Four Friends, Target, and Dead of Winter in different ways and to different degree continue to explore the importance of violence in American life. For this reason alone, Penn is still a director worthy of serious attention, and no one has given as much critical attention to Penn as has Wood. The present edition contains the original monograph on Penn as well as seven other pieces written over a period of sixteen years: two interviews, three short pieces published in periodicals, a succinct overview of the director’s career written for a critical dictionary, and the extended discussion of The Chase that was the second chapter of Wood’s later important book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Arthur Penn was originally published in the United Kingdom by Ian Cameron and in the United States by Praeger in 1969. This edition, as with the previous books by Wood republished by Wayne State University Press, preserves the small format and the generously illustrated format of the original. Barry Keith Grant

preface

Between 1965 and 1971, Robin Wood wrote monographs on Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Penn, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and, in collaboration with Ian Cameron and Michael Walker, respectively, Michelangelo Antonioni and Claude Chabrol. Each of the monographs was a groundbreaking contribution to English-language film criticism. That the first three were devoted to American directors speaks of Robin’s commitment to the classical and postclassical Hollywood cinema as a form of collaborative filmmaking that allows for a personal vision. Arthur Penn provides insightful and eloquent analysis of the director’s films but additionally is a highly pleasurable book to read. It clearly conveys the exhilaration that Robin experienced viewing this filmmaker’s work. Penn’s films inspired Robin not only through their thematic concerns and stylistics but also with the intelligence, creativity, and moral responsibility that they express. It is evident in Robin’s writings on Penn that he values the director’s humanism and his visual emphasis on movement as well as the spontaneous reaction, the desire to protest. It is worthwhile to consider Arthur Penn in relation to the Bergman book that was first published two years later. When reading Ingmar Bergman, one finds a similar emotional commitment and intellectual awareness, but the tone is strikingly different, giving the impression of single-minded seriousness and reverence. In evaluating Robin’s writing on Bergman, it is necessary to consider his reaction to the films. Robin encountered Bergman’s films in 1958, the first year that he lived in Sweden and saw the films without subtitles; the impact

xiv  preface that they made on him was so strong that he immersed himself in the director’s work and continued to do so through the 1960s. Ingmar Bergman was the culmination of an intense period in Robin’s personal life in which he was trying to come to terms with his sexual identity in the oppressive confines of his British upbringing. Bergman’s vision of the “human condition” afforded Robin a degree of comfort in dealing with his compliance with the demands of “normality” as defined by patriarchy and the prevailing culture. It wasn’t until Robin’s acknowledgment of being gay in the early 1970s that he established and articulated a political identity. The back-cover description of the 1967 Studio Vista edition of Arthur Penn claims that it is the first book to be published about the director. Robin’s decision to devote a monograph to Penn’s relatively small output of five films in nine years indicates Robin’s strong connection to the work. As he points out in his discussions of the films, Penn, a postclassical filmmaker, employed the tradition of narrative realism using, for example, plot and characterization. He heightened these elements visually through his mise-en-scène, which often was used to depict the emotional and/or physical reactions of his protagonists. Yet Penn’s approach to his subject matter, America, and its history and mythology is analytical and, in Robin’s words, produces a meaningful “complexity” and “ambivalence.” The political nature of Penn’s films undoubtedly had significance to Robin even though he tended to emphasize their deeply felt humanity. Conceivably, Robin was prompted to write Arthur Penn on the strength of his reaction to The Chase, which explicitly depicts America’s capitalistic society in the process of a civil and moral breakdown. Penn presents a community out of control but avoids simplifying the reasons for its behavior. In his essay on Alice’s Restaurant, found in the 1969 Praeger edition of Arthur Penn, Robin approaches the concept of revolution through a comparison of Arthur’s film and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) and Le Gai Savoir (1968). He points to Weekend’s presentation of the hippies as an example of Godard’s lack of feeling in a concept-based film and questions what Godard “conceives

preface xv revolution for, as human life seems no longer to have much meaning for him.” In his 1986 essay “The Chase: Flashback, 1965,” Robin says that he wrote the original piece on the film “in the days of my critical . . . innocence, above all, of concepts of ideology, and of any clearly defined political position.” Yet he also goes on to say that “My evaluation of The Chase has not changed.” Robin’s perception of his 1960s’ self as a critic needs to be given a context. The “concepts of ideology” that he refers to was most likely unknown to the majority of Englishlanguage film critics at the time; they were introduced with film theory and the academic study of the medium that began at the end of the decade. Also, his admission that he didn’t have a “clearly defined political position” when writing Arthur Penn needs to be considered. The claim is credible, but perhaps it is more so the case that he wasn’t fully conscious of his political dimension. Given that Robin, in writing Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan in 1986, stood by his initial evaluation of The Chase indicates that the piece has a political substance that mirrored his present day position. Robin, I think, tended to underestimate the extent to which he innately brought a political perspective to his critical writing. This may have occurred in part because he saw his work as being highly personal and as such self-contained. Additionally, as he strongly emphasized F. R. Leavis’s teachings and the humanist element in a work of value, Robin’s criticism was taken as lacking in social consciousness, something in fact that neither Leavis nor Robin was guilty of. In the period in which Robin wrote the auteur monographs, the concept of the film director as being responsible for a film’s content and form had become accepted as a valid approach to film study. It was with the introduction of film theory and its emphasis on ideology that the discipline was challenged with the claim that the author did not write but was written. With Arthur Penn, it becomes evident that Robin was questioning the original notion of filmic authorship in a medium that is primarily a collaborative art form. His concern about authorship within mainstream cinema is also raised in Howard Hawks,

xvi  preface the monograph that followed the publication of Arthur Penn in 1968. Interestingly, both Penn and Hawks are directors who acknowledged their collaborative working relationship with actors and writers. Another connection that the two directors share is their respective rejection of the status quo, which is given expression through their protagonists’ anarchic behavior and status as outsiders. In befriending Arthur Penn, Robin was dealing with a filmmaker who was open to discussing the challenges that the studio system imposed on the director’s ability to fully realize his vision. (In the 1960s Hawks was in London to promote one of his films, and Robin was given the opportunity to interview him. It is highly likely that Robin questioned the director about his thoughts on the studio system. Unfortunately, the interview tape was misplaced at the British Film Institute and never recovered.) Arthur spent the most productive years of his career dealing with its policies and workings. His loss of control over the cutting of The Chase and subsequent disowning of the film is an extreme instance of his exasperation with Hollywood filmmaking. In the 1969 interview conducted on the location site of Little Big Man, Robin and Arthur discuss in some detail the way in which a director can unexpectedly be confronted by studio conventions; for example, in the construction of a film’s mise-en-scène, the cinematographer might light a scene according to the classical notion of what constitutes good lighting. Robin’s essay “Problems of Editing” on the editing of The Left Handed Gun and The Chase in the 1969 edition of Arthur Penn, included in this edition, similarly addresses problems regarding directorial input and creative expression. In his 1986 essay “The Chase: Flashback, 1965,” Robin returns to the definition of film authorship and offers his understanding of what it entails. Referencing the concept of ideology, he sees authorship as embodying both a director’s personal vision and perhaps predominantly his or her ideological beliefs. It was Robin’s refusal to totally abandon authorship and its connections to humanism that made him an outsider to the world of film academia. Whether he intended it as such or not, by choosing to begin Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan

preface xvii with an essay on The Chase, Robin suggests that Arthur’s work was a relevant aspect to his political evolution. Robin wrote the 1967 edition of Arthur Penn while he was living in England, teaching at a secondary school. In 1969 he and his family moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he was given an appointment at Queen’s University to teach film studies. During the first year of his three-year appointment, he invited Arthur to participate in an on-campus discussion of his films. Arthur accepted the invitation, and the meeting led to a long-standing friendship. In the late autumn of 1969, Arthur invited Robin to join him on location during the shooting of Little Big Man, which was partially filmed in Calgary, Alberta. During the stay, Robin interviewed Arthur as the two traveled back and forth from their accommodations to the shooting site. I am not certain when, but Robin and his wife, Aline, also met with the Penns during a visit to New York City. On a more personal note, which may have occurred when Arthur came to Kingston, Robin, who was experiencing financial difficulty and was uncertain where to turn, asked Arthur if he could lend him the funds to temporarily cover the debt. Arthur readily agreed to the request. The gesture can be taken as an illustration of their mutual sense of trust and friendship. He never forgot Arthur’s generosity. I think that Robin saw it as an indication of the kind of person Arthur was in both his professional and personal life. In 1972 Robin and his family returned to England, although their lives significantly had been altered. While living in Canada, Robin came out as gay, which led to the dissolution of his marriage. Additionally, he committed himself to John Anderson, a young man he met during this period. John joined Robin in England, and from 1972 to 1977 they lived in Coventry, where Robin taught at Warwick University. When Robin was offered a teaching position at York University, Toronto, he and John decided to return to Canada. Before leaving England their partnership ended, although they remained friends. I had met Robin in 1972 when he was invited to lecture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I kept in contact with him, and in 1977, we met again. The next year Robin and I began living together.

xviii  preface In the autumn of the year, Robin was invited to give eight lectures between August 16 and September 13 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The program was called “American Cinema: Into the Seventies—Arthur Penn and Contemporaries.” The Penn films screened were The Chase, Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, and Night Moves. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the program because of my work schedule. The oversized poster promoting the series featured a still from Little Big Man with an image of Richard Mulligan as Custer. Arthur was in attendance to discuss his career and films. Several years later in August 1982, Robin and I met with Arthur for a drink in New York City. I was too in awe of Arthur to remember much of the meeting other than that the three of us were desperate to get indoors and out of the overwhelming heat of that day. The next time Robin and I met Arthur was in 1985. He was in Toronto to work on Dead of Winter, which was being shot at a studio located outside the city. We invited Arthur over to our apartment, and after dinner we interviewed him for Cineaction, which had only recently begun publishing. As Robin says in his introduction, the result was more of a conversation than an interview. This occurred because the three of us were enjoying each other’s company. Arthur had a somewhat reserved manner but was open about his thoughts and feelings. He was unassuming and never gave the impression of being a celebrity. In addition to his obvious intelligence and seriousness of purpose, Arthur projected an engaging, low-key charm that made him very likable. We saw Arthur again in 1996. The occasion was the Toronto International Film Festival. He was invited because his made-for-television film Inside was being screened. Again, Arthur attended a dinner with us at our apartment. As it turned out, Inside was his final film, and our dinner together was the last time we saw him. As they did since 1969, Robin and Arthur kept in touch through the exchange of short letters or a card every now and then. After accepting Wayne State University Press’s offer to reprint his monographs, Robin contacted Arthur about an interview for the new edition. Unfortunately, the interview

preface xix didn’t take place. Arthur was willing to do it, but by the time Robin got around to actually considering the interview, he no longer had the energy to undertake such a project. During the course of his career, Robin had opportunities to meet with directors to discuss their work but seldom chose to do so. He felt uncomfortable about the experience, thinking of it as an imposition on his part. There is no other bond with a director that matches his connection to Arthur Penn. Obviously, Robin regretted that Arthur’s film career didn’t continue to develop significantly after Night Moves. But Robin respected Arthur’s refusal to compromise himself and his political beliefs. It was a position they both shared. Arthur Penn remains as fresh and engaging as it was in 1967. It is one of my favorite pieces of Robin’s writing, and I am so pleased that Wayne State University Press has made Arthur Penn available to the public once again. Richard Lippe

acknowledgments

Arthur Penn was originally published in the United States in 1969 by Praeger Publishers. © 1969 by Movie Magazine Ltd. “Arthur Penn in Canada” appeared originally in Movie, no. 18 (Winter 1970–71): 26–36. “Avec la même sérénité” was published in Positif, no. 126 (April 1971): 1–8, and is reprinted with the permission of that journal. “Inevitable Violence” appeared in The Times Educational Supplement, February 9, 1973, p. 102, and “Rustling Up: Robin Wood on The Missouri Breaks” appeared in the same publication on July 23, 1976, p. 46. Both are reprinted here courtesy of www.tes.co.uk. “Arthur Penn” was originally published in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary; The Major Film-makers (New York: Viking Press, 1980): 775–78, and “An Interview with Arthur Penn” was originally published in CineAction 5 (Spring 1986): 15–26. “The Chase: Flashback, 1965” appeared originally as the first chapter in Wood’s book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 11–25, and is reprinted here with the permission of Columbia University Press © 1986. Robin Wood’s work is reprinted here with the permission of Richard Lippe and the Estate of Robin Wood. Photos are from the personal collections of the Robin Wood estate and the editor. Special thanks to Matthew Penn for providing the cover photograph from the Penn family collection. This revised edition would not have been possible without the invaluable assistance of Richard Lippe, Robin Wood’s partner of many

xxii  acknowledgments years. I thank him heartily for his continued confidence in my editorial efforts. Annie Martin, senior acquisitions editor at Wayne State University Press, has been a staunch supporter of Wood’s work generally and this book specifically from the beginning. Yvonne Ramsey copyedited the manuscript with due respect for Wood’s original prose, and Carrie Teefey ably shepherded the manuscript through production. Thanks to Dr. Leslie Boldt, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Brock University, for advice on the translation of the article from Positif and to Stephanie Clayton, graduate student in the Interdisciplinary MA program in Popular Culture at Brock University, for tracking down some of this material.

Introduction A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? W. B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”

What immediately strikes one in the films of Arthur Penn may appear at first glance a superficial feature, but it leads right to the essence of his art: an intense awareness of, and emphasis on, physical expression. Physical sensation (often but not necessarily violent) is perhaps more consistently vivid in his films than in those of any other director. Again and again he finds an action—often in itself an unusual, hence striking, action—likely to communicate a physical “feel” to the spectator and devotes all his resources—direction of the actors, camera position and movement, editing—to making that “feel” as immediate as possible, arousing a vividly empathic response. Here, as illustration, are five examples, one from each of Penn’s films: 1. The Left Handed Gun. As the McSweens’ home is burned, Mrs. McSween, distraught, struggles helplessly to check the chaos around her. The sackers unwind reels of printed fabric, which brushes and almost entangles her. She collapses, despairing, on the steps of the shed, clutching handfuls of the contents of an overturned barrel (which, overturning, nearly hits her), holding them to her forehead, rubbing them in her hair. 2. The Miracle Worker. Annie Sullivan introduces herself to the blind and deaf Helen Keller by thudding down her trunk on the step on which Helen is sitting. The child senses the vibration, feels with her hand. Penn cuts to a close-up of the hands as Helen’s feels Annie’s, the delicacy of contact suggesting that

2  introduction the fingers are the child’s ears and eyes. Helen raises Annie’s fingers to her nose and smells them. 3. Mickey One. During the credit sequence, a girl sprawled across the hood of the car Mickey is driving presses her lips to the windscreen. The camera is positioned inside, so that we see the flattening of her lips, the misting of the glass by her breath. Mickey turns on the windscreen wiper, which rises up to touch the girl’s open mouth. 4. The Chase. At the height of the climactic riot, Mary Fuller, drunk and hysterical, suddenly stuffs part of the pearl necklace she is wearing into her mouth and bites. The necklace bursts. Some of the pearls stay in her mouth; others scatter on the ground amid car tires, etc. 5. Bonnie and Clyde. C. W. Moss’s “Daddy,” infuriated by the sight of his son’s tattooed chest, suddenly flicks hot thick soup (or pease pudding) across it from a saucepan with a large spoon. C. W. is in the right foreground of the screen, so that the soup is flicked toward the spectator. Obviously, all of these examples carry overtones and implications that go far beyond the immediate physical sensation: in The Left Handed Gun, the emotional associations of the stored goods, the basis of the family’s stability; in The Miracle Worker, the reaching out to a contact beyond the physical; in Mickey One, the strong phallic-erotic overtones; in The Chase, the sense of extreme emotional pressures. But in all five, the invocation of the spectator’s sense of touch is remarkably potent. I have selected a few striking moments; this physicality pervades all of Penn’s work. In no other director’s films (possibly excepting the Westerns of Anthony Mann) does pain consistently seem so real. The death agonies of Buck Barrow are but the extremist instance of a continuous characteristic: think of the wounding and subsequent deaths of Billy’s friends Tom and Charlie in The Left Handed Gun or of the beating up of Calder in The Chase. Everything is done, through makeup, through the acting, through the whole presentation, to encourage the

introduction 3 spectator to empathize as intensely as possible: when Bubber Reeves is shot at the end of The Chase, one feels the bullets going in. Obviously, any able director uses more of his actors’ resources than their facial expressions, but Penn seems to draw exceptionally on his actors’ bodies to build up characters from characteristic movements, gestures, ways of walking. Think of almost any Penn character, and you will get an immediate mental image of the way he walks, bears himself, uses his hands: Tom in The Left Handed Gun, Edwin Stewart in The Chase, C. W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde. It is a very superficial view indeed that sees The Miracle Worker—in which one of the leading characters can neither see, speak, nor hear, hence can be communicated with only through touch—as thematically marginal to Penn’s work: it stands apart only in its eminently “respectable” true-life subject matter, of the kind that wins Oscars for directors ready to give it the conventional “respectful” treatment. Although Helen Keller isn’t really the emotional center of Penn’s film, the first mental image anyone is likely to conjure up of it is the way Patty Duke moves. Such a mental image is basic to Penn’s work: it is, one could almost say, his starting point. It epitomizes, in vividly physical terms, the idea of a soul imprisoned in a physical existence that is inadequate to express it or fulfill its needs. Early in The Miracle Worker, Helen’s parents argue heatedly about her, while Helen, neither seeing nor hearing, stands between, feeling their moving mouths with her fingers and frantically moving her own, instinctively aware that some form of communication is taking place from which she is excluded. Suddenly, she raises her arm and slaps her mother viciously across the face. Frustrated energies and urges clamoring for an outlet and often finding it in the messy inadequacies of physical violence: Bonnie Parker, beating on the cross-bar of her bed, then dashing frantically down the stairs, hastily buttoning a dress over her naked body, movements clumsy, vigorous, and desperate, to team up with a young man she has seen try to steal her mother’s car. The opening of Bonnie and Clyde brings the spectator as close as a movie camera can to a direct physical apprehension of reality (each camera position is intensely characteristic) and

Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The Miracle Worker (1962).

introduction 5 suggests within a couple of minutes the inner drives that the body partly expresses, partly frustrates. The characteristic movement in Penn can be described as a groping outward from that starting point of the young Helen Keller, an incipient and demanding consciousness locked in the narrowest and cruelest of prisons, toward expression, contact, communication. From one point of view (it is not the whole story), the character at the opposite end of the spectrum is Calder in The Chase. If one cannot finally accept Calder as fully embodying the positive values implicit in Penn’s films, it is because too much of what so evidently fascinates and obsesses Penn is left aside. But Calder, alone among Penn’s protagonists, has a developed awareness that enables him not merely to participate in but to stand back and judge, the life in which most of Penn’s characters are more or less helplessly embroiled. The Chase implies throughout a tragic and despairing view of the society it portrays—and by extension, I think, of modern civilization itself. But the tragic sense of the film rises most powerfully to the surface at the moment when Calder, “the finished man among his enemies,” at last succumbs to the all-pervasive violence against which he has so far so uncompromisingly stood out and of which he has been one of the chief victims: when he is driven “to pitch / Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch, / A blind man battering blind men”—Yeats’s lines spring appositely to mind to evoke Penn’s view of life untranscended by the awareness of a Calder.1 The acute feeling for physical sensation, then, is balanced by an equally acute awareness of its limitations and attendant frustrations. In a number of cases, physical impediments are given great prominence: Helen is blind, deaf, and mute; Clyde Barrow is impotent; the Salvation Army hostel keeper who tries to bring Mickey One the Word of the Lord is afflicted with a bad stammer. In each case the sense of physical frustration is used to suggest the presence of frustrated urges and needs that are more than physical. To these examples one can therefore add others where there is no actual physical handicap but that have in common this sense of frustrated, perhaps scarcely formulated,

6  introduction needs: Billy the Kid’s inarticulateness and illiteracy; Mickey One’s burden of indefinable guilt; the complex pattern of suppressions and resentments, guilt, and hypocrisy in the society of The Chase; Bonnie Parker’s lack of any values that could provide a valid escape from her sense of constriction. Penn in his films to date has given us arguably the most complex and mature treatment of violence in the American cinema. The presentation of violence, the defined attitude to it, differs from film to film (e.g., from The Chase to Bonnie and Clyde). Yet one assumption remains consistent throughout: that violence in all its forms, from Helen’s fury at being forced to hold a spoon, through respectable society’s vindictive hunting down of Bubber Reeves, to Bonnie and Clyde’s armed robbery, is an inevitable outlet for frustrated urges that can find no other. The escalation of violence into a catastrophic situation beyond anyone’s control is a recurring motif in Penn and felt with terrifying intensity: The Left Handed Gun, The Chase, and Bonnie and Clyde are all built on overall movements of this kind, and certain local instances stand out with exceptional vividness: the progression from Billy’s first act of vengeance to the burning of the McSweens’ home in The Left Handed Gun, the escalation at the climax of The Chase. In every case the development into chaos is made possible—indeed, inevitable—by a lack of awareness, a partial or total blindness on the part of some or all of the participants. If the consciousness of a Calder, then, represents one of Penn’s major positive values, it is balanced by another not easily compatible, the response to which is at least equally strong: the feeling for physical sensation leads naturally to an attraction to the instinctive and spontaneous. Penn’s most characteristic protagonists—Billy the Kid, Bubber and Anna Reeves, Bonnie and Clyde—possess such qualities to a very marked degree: this is at once what makes them so attractive and what destroys them. Spontaneity is also a prominent feature in Penn’s style. The total effect of a sequence such as the burning of the McSweens’ home is so complex as to be difficult to put into words (and dangerous to attempt: one risks being misleading). There is intense horror, certainly, at the senseless and uncontrolled destruction

introduction 7

Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty). Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

arising from “spontaneous” behavior: Mrs. McSween’s reactions are central to the effect of the scene. At the same time, it is shot with an élan that does more than merely express the descent into chaos: there is an inescapable sense of the director’s delight, not of course in the destructive behavior shown but in the spontaneous flow of expressive visual ideas. The disturbing power of such a sequence lies in one’s sense that the communicated excitement of the creative act is closely related to the characters’ abandonment to destructive acts: they have in common the sense of a surrender to impulse. (I am talking here of the effect of the scene on the spectator and not suggesting that conscious and carefully worked-out decisions played no part in Penn’s mise-en-scène. Clearly, a scene of such virtuoso execution doesn’t just “happen.”) Again and again in Penn’s films (the supreme example is Bonnie and Clyde), what is felt as most admirable in the characters, their

8  introduction spontaneous-instinctive response to one another (Billy’s doggedly reiterated “I knew him” about his late boss, with whom he has exchanged a few sentences), is inextricable from all that is most destructive and disastrous in them. The films very powerfully convey a sense of the tragic impurity of human motivation, of human impulse, of human existence. “Complexity” and “ambivalence” are words one can hardly escape from in talking about Penn. Consider one fully representative sequence: that in Bonnie and Clyde in which the Barrow gang captures and humiliates Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger. Factually, the issue seems simple enough: Hamer is a defender of an unjust and corrupt social order; in his state, Texas, thousands are homeless and destitute. Instead of protecting them, he has left his territory to track down a gang whose outrages are committed against established society and for whose capture there happens to be a large reward. Hamer is not (given the sympathy that the film enlists on behalf of the criminals) a sympathetic character. The scene could easily have been played with him as a grotesque butt, in which case its emotional effect would have been simple. But instead of making Hamer merely pompous or merely repellent, Penn and his actor invest him with an immense and genuine dignity that produces in the spectator a direct effect quite independent of any question of his motivation. We do not feel, I think, that the man we are shown is activated solely by greed for the bounty. Consequently, we “feel with” his humiliation as intensely as we “feel with” the spontaneous fun being had at his expense; we are torn between identifying with Bonnie’s delight in her idea of having him photographed with the gang and with his sense of outrage. What is peculiarly characteristic of Penn is that such complexity of response is achieved without distancing the spectator from the action: we feel on the contrary very closely involved in it. Few directors provoke ambivalent reactions that are so immediately disturbing. Two moments in the sequence stand out: Bonnie’s kissing of Hamer and his reaction of spitting in her face; both are given at very close quarters, both provoke this duality of response particularly intensely.

introduction 9 We feel so much affection for Penn’s characters: even, often, for the obviously unpleasant ones. There is always something more to them than one could get down on paper in a list of their “characteristics”: an aliveness. Describe the characteristics of Joe Grant, the law enforcement officer in The Left Handed Gun, and one would find oneself with a character on paper almost wholly contemptible. Yet it doesn’t quite occur to us to feel contempt for the character on the screen: he is too well understood; he is a human being. It is not a matter of “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner”: we don’t pardon his petty viciousness, which we are made to see very clearly and critically for what it is. But we not only see Grant’s viciousness and weakness, we see a thinking, feeling, reacting person: we accept our common humanity with him, what he is is contained in us. Most directors are concerned purely with what the character is meant to be in respect to the whole, and it is a perfectly valid way of working, to keep in mind the total pattern and see that each part relates as it is necessary for it to relate. But Penn’s people seem often to have an extra dimension, an aliveness, something that cannot quite be neatly tabulated in terms of their role. Even Hamer, I think, is not entirely detestable. We hate his vindictiveness, his cruel treatment of the deeply hurt, blinded, and bandaged Blanche, his life devoted to the single purpose of hunting down and destroying, by any means, two human beings. Anyone else would simply have shown the vindictiveness, would have treated the character in terms of “characteristics.” With Penn, Hamer is alive and feeling: when he spits in Bonnie’s face, we recognize the gesture first as a spontaneous response from a living individual center, not as an action necessary to the total pattern or even as an “illustration” of character. Two important conclusions can be drawn from all this about the nature of Penn’s art. One is the openness of his response to experience, expressed in his ability to feel and communicate contradictory reactions to a given situation simultaneously. The emotional complexity of his work is the outer sign of a remarkably complete response to

10  introduction life, of a man alive in body, mind, and spirit, able to hold different and even apparently incompatible attitudes in balance. The second conclusion follows from the first: the incompatibility can be solved only in a tragic sense of existence. In calling Penn’s art essentially tragic, I do not just mean that it is full of violence and pain, sad, or pessimistic. It is rooted in a sense of human nature being in a state of constant conflict between irreconcilable pulls, each of which has its own validity. Tragedy is at a far extreme from nihilism: the sympathy, affection, and respect that Penn elicits for so many of his characters leaves one with the sense that life is as wonderful as it is appalling. D. H. Lawrence wrote that as a novelist he considered himself “superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet”: they each produced “tremulations on the ether” to which a separate part of man responded; only the novelist’s tremulations aroused a corresponding trembling in “whole man alive.”2 Just as in the nineteenth century the center of creative interest shifted from poetry to the novel, so in the post–D. H. Lawrence era it has shifted from the novel to the cinema. The cinema of Arthur Penn is the cinema of “whole man alive.”

The Left Handed Gun

Itself an excellent and self-sufficient film, The Left Handed Gun offers a remarkably complete thematic exposition of Penn’s work to date. Returning to it from his later films, one finds certain scenes somewhat labored and self-conscious (notably, the seduction of Celsa and the closing sequences after Billy’s escape from jail); even here, the use of heavily stylized and leisurely gestures and movements points forward interestingly to Penn’s total command of strong and meaningful gesture and movement in his later work. The Left Handed Gun is very clearly the work of the director who was to make The Miracle Worker and The Chase; what is most striking is its very close relationship to Bonnie and Clyde. Indeed, it offers so many parallels that there is a danger of missing major differences between the two films. We would take William Bonney (Paul Newman), on his first appearance, for a near-idiot were it not for the movements of his eyes and body. As he answers questions (all of which have to be repeated) with a monosyllable or a gesture, we become aware, beneath the inarticulateness and apparent obtuseness, of an animallike intuitive awareness of people. His eyes focus on first one and then another of Tunstall’s men as they speak, and his body half turns toward each, as if he were “feeling” them with some physical sense. This impression is subsequently modified (he is, at the start, in a state of extreme exhaustion), but throughout the film we have the sense of instinctual urges and perceptions reaching only partial conscious definition and never subjected to the test of rationality.

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Billy the Kid (Paul Newman).

The opening sequences juxtapose and contrast different sorts of “knowing.” Against Billy’s instinctual knowing is set the purely verbal factual knowing of the man who tells Tunstall about Billy’s past. He judges Billy solely by what he knows about him, and direct contact fails to modify his judgment in the least. Between the two is Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), one of the most entirely admirable figures in all of Penn’s work and killed in the first ten minutes of his first film. In Tunstall, the two sorts of knowing—the conscious and the instinctual—are harmonized. The relationship between him and Billy is beautifully realized in two short scenes (both of which were cut by the distributors for the film’s British release, perhaps on the grounds that no one is interested in little things like motivation, so let’s get on to the shooting). The first suggests the limitations of Billy’s way of knowing: nothing exists for him beyond what he has experienced or seen

The Left Handed Gun 13 for himself, and it doesn’t occur to him to look behind what he observes for motives, causes, purposes. The two men see a gypsy wagon moving across a hillside. From Mexico, Billy says. Yes, agrees Tunstall, they come from all over the world: Mexico, Spain, Hungary. . . . No, Billy insists, Mexico. He describes with considerable intensity the Easter ceremony of burning a straw man, clearly visualizing it all as he speaks. Why do they do that? Tunstall asks. Billy hesitates (he has never thought to wonder about it), then shrugs expressively: it’s no concern of his. The images of the straw man and the gypsies are to be taken up at important points in Billy’s later development. The second scene suggests Billy’s gropings toward a wider understanding, under Tunstall’s influence. Before these two scenes, we have been given the essential information about Billy’s past: his father abandoned wife and child when Billy was still young; at the age of eleven Billy stabbed to death a drunk who insulted his mother. Tunstall is sitting reading; Billy edges up, at once curious about the book and desiring contact. Tunstall shows a complete understanding of Billy—he realizes without being told that Billy can’t read; he senses the boy’s needs. He offers to teach him to read and also to explain things to him. He shows him a chapter heading, “Through a Glass Darkly,” explaining it as “something you see that you can’t make out.” Billy thinks, then suggests “An enemy.” “Or a friend,” says Tunstall. The scene is crucial to all that follows. Tunstall is clearly becoming the father that Billy never had: a possible opening out of Billy’s character and outlook is suggested in the touching sense of reciprocal sympathies, the young man’s groping toward a wider apprehension balanced by the old man’s evident pleasure in finding a “son” to guide. The killing of Tunstall the next morning is consequently felt as destroying a possible future for Billy, a progression toward wholeness. But Billy also links Tunstall with his mother (who used to repeat passages from the Bible to him that she knew by heart). Tunstall never carries a gun; he needs Billy’s protection as his mother used to need it. Hence Billy’s reaction to Tunstall’s death is to repeat the pattern laid down in his childhood: revenge is a psychological necessity

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Billy and Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston).

to him. It is also the only means left to him of expressing the strength of his feelings for Tunstall. Only at the end of the film is Billy beginning to learn, painfully, to look behind the surface appearance of things (himself included) and take into account the complexity and muddle of existence. For him, the main issue is simple: four men, one of them the sheriff, have been responsible for Tunstall’s death; there is no hope of appealing to the law, since the law is the corrupt sheriff; therefore, he must kill the four men. On the one hand, he fails to take into account—because he is incapable of examining it—the possible impurity of his own motivation: he mistakes personal psychological need, in which there is a further complication of pride and obstinate presumption, for the simple sense of moral outrage that, though genuinely there, is only part of

The Left Handed Gun 15 a complex whole. On the other hand, he fails to take into account the possibility that the four men may not necessarily all be equally guilty: that he is dealing with human beings, not cogs in a machine. He also fails to take into account the possible consequences of violence, both for himself and for others. The sequences culminating in the burning of the McSweens’ house take us right to the heart of Penn’s treatment of violence. From the scene of Billy’s vigil over the coffin in McSween’s house (another scene that the British distributors considerately removed in case we found it too taxing: happily, the 16mm prints are intact), where he becomes possessed by his sense of mission, Penn cuts to the joyous release of Billy’s mock parade to the Victrola music. The exhilaration is infectious: we don’t know the cause of it yet. The following scene in the hotel room—Charlie ( James Congdon) in the bathtub, Tom ( James Best) in long underwear—reveals that Billy has discovered the names of the four men. We share sufficiently the sense of moral outrage for our sympathies to be partly with the revenge, though there is already a fairly strong counterbalance: the physical details of the scene make the two young men whom Billy is trying to draw in seem very vulnerable—particularly Charlie in the tub, arms in the water up to the elbows so that he appears a limbless trunk. Charlie’s decision not to help (“No, sir,” with an awed and decisive headshake) and Tom’s sense of the outrage to justice in the murderers’ going free (his repeated “Ought not to”) are given exactly equal weight. The shooting of Brady and Morton precipitates one of those uncontrollable escalations of violence that Penn handles with such mastery. Revenge provokes revenge; the innocent suffer and die; the “worthy citizens” avenging the killing of their sheriff abandon themselves to an orgy of brutishly unreflecting destruction that ceases to have even a pretextual connection with justice or morality; we are close to the world of The Chase. Billy’s earlier “I’m the law,” at once heroic and presumptuous, gets its echo in Mrs. McSween’s helpless and desperate “Where’s the law?” as she watches her home burned down with her husband in it. There is a sense of violence constantly present in

16  robin wood society, just below the surface, awaiting a pretext to erupt. That the audience partly wanted the precipitating act of revenge has its clear relevance here. There is more positive feeling for the society depicted in The Left Handed Gun than in any of Penn’s subsequent films. One has, of course, to take into account here Penn’s feeling for time and place and the differences between the various societies depicted, but it seems to me that one can trace in his work a progressive disenchantment with established society, balanced by a correspondingly intense feeling of people’s need for it: another facet of the tragic tension that characterizes his work. The society of Madero is not created in much depth: the Mexican characters are comparatively conventional, Pat Garrett’s wife, for instance, having little of the presence that even the most minor figures in Penn’s films are usually endowed with. There is consequently little sense of implied background life to what we actually see. Nevertheless, the sequences of the party and (more especially) Pat Garrett’s wedding sufficiently realize the concept of social stability to make its subversion very disturbing. Social values, in fact, are most powerfully projected through the character of Garrett ( John Dehner) himself. The precariousness of social order, the constant presence of potentially subversive and violent forces within it, is subtly suggested throughout the film. One detail of background life in Madero we are shown is a cockfight. The celebration that culminates in the burning of a straw figure (to which fireworks are tied) suggests a delight in violence and destructiveness irrespective of its religious significance. Saval (Martin Garralaga), the gentle and tolerant man who protects and shelters Billy, is a gunsmith. His wife Celsa (Lita Milan) can’t quite conquer her desire to be seduced by Billy: the instinctual urge is stronger than even her fully developed sense of responsibility. The photographer at the wedding poses Billy with a rifle. It is, he carefully explains, not dangerous, but the use of it to lend glamour to the photograph sufficiently suggests the attractiveness of violence. Billy himself gradually becomes a figure of glamorized legend (“Killer of

The Left Handed Gun 17 the West,” etc.): in a clumsily explicit little scene, Garrett’s wife asks why so many people are coming into the town for Billy’s hanging— ”They’ve never seen anyone famous,” Garrett tells her. The point is made very strongly through Moultrie (Hurd Hatfield), the perverted southerner for whom Billy’s messy and inglorious career offers a vicarious fantasy fulfillment. The episode at the party involving Joe Grant (Ainslie Pryor), the law enforcement officer touring to “see how the amnesty holds,” makes especially real the pervasive sense of the precariousness of the order. (Although the characters are quite distinct, the scene interestingly anticipates the humiliation of Hamer in Bonnie and Clyde.) Grant is no monster: the character is created with such sureness of touch that the irony of the official upholder of order possessing those very traits that subvert it is not weakened by any implausibility. Grant cannot resist provoking Billy: he needs the glory of killing him to bolster his ego. And Billy, with his instinctive reaction against the man’s pretensions, cannot resist playing with and provoking Grant. The notch that Grant has marked in his gun to commemorate the man he has shot suggests again, in its pitiful self-importance, the glamor accruing to killing. The significance of the episode, in which order is all but destroyed by violent impulses arising almost casually from commonplace self-assertiveness, is summed up in Pat Garrett’s comment: “One shot. One ten cent bullet and that’s it.” But the fullest realization of the tensions underlying The Left Handed Gun is perhaps to be found in the sequence of the shooting of Hill (Robert Anderson), the last of the four men, during Pat Garrett’s wedding celebrations. The characteristically complex effect of the scene arises from our being sympathetically drawn to different characters and different sets of values simultaneously. All the thematic strands of the film come together in this scene, which must be seen in its context. The presence of Charlie, for instance, although he plays almost no part in the main action, is very important. His squirting of the wine, in the manner of the innocently homosexual horseplay that characterizes the young men’s relationship, brings into

18  robin wood the scene the uninhibited and infectious spontaneity that has evoked so strong a response earlier in the film (for example, the horny toad joke on Billy’s “corpse” or the flour fight with the soldiers). Yet it was Charlie’s “spontaneity” that made it possible for him to kill Moon when Billy, we feel, was going to spare him. Against this spontaneity, which Garrett never quite knows how to cope with (see his reaction outside the church after the flour fight), are set the social values of restraint and orderliness, embodied in Garrett himself and in the whole social setting: the scene opens with Garrett and his bride motionless amid a “composed” group, from which the camera tracks back to reveal the wedding photographer timing the exposure. We are drawn to Hill, the potential victim, neither stupid nor wicked, who claims to the end, convincingly, that he believed the four were going to arrest, not kill, Tunstall (yet—it is a typically complex touch—Hill is the one we were shown actually cocking his pistol as Tunstall rode toward them). It is Hill who makes nonsense, finally, of Billy’s simplified and absolutist morality: through him we understand so well how a basically decent man could be drawn into partial complicity in an evil action. Finally, there is Billy himself and his uneasiness as soon as he knows that Hill is present. To no extent do we endorse the killing of Hill, but this does not lead to a withdrawal of sympathy for Billy. For one thing, it is left an open question—which Billy himself clearly couldn’t answer—to what degree the killing is a matter of conscious intention. Propped up for the photographer, with the harmless rifle in his hands, Billy watches Hill move away. It looks as if he may let him go. He would almost certainly have spared Moon. Hill has pleaded his case credibly and stated that he would only use a gun if drawn on. (He is rebuked for interrupting and chivvied away by the indignant photographer: the touch of comedy adds to the complexity of tone and beautifully keeps in view the social values of the scene.) Then suddenly Billy shouts to Pat Garrett. Is he desperately begging Garrett to restrain him or issuing a warning that he can’t allow Hill to get away, his inflexible desire for what he sees as “cleanness”—the completing

The Left Handed Gun 19

Billy maps out the killing of Sheriff Brady for Tom and Charlie.

of the revenge—getting the better of his sense of the situation and the person involved? Clearly there is a confusion of both: Penn judges the ambiguity very exactly. Hill fires several times, wounding Tom in the stomach, before Billy retaliates, killing him. Pat Garrett’s ensuing passionate denunciation of Billy elicits a very direct response without cancelling out one’s sense of the scene’s overall complexity. If its progress is from that first composed group, bride and groom outside the church surrounded by stable society, to the disorder of terrified children, sobbing, cowering women, dead and bleeding men, bridegroom convulsed in an indignation that fuses the personal and the social, we cannot forget that the collapse of order and security has been precipitated by instinctual drives closely related to those that evoke so positive a response elsewhere in the film.

20  robin wood In the latter part of The Left Handed Gun, Billy is relentlessly led to confront the results of his obedience to half-comprehended urges: what he has done to Tom, to Charlie, to Hill and his widow, to Celsa and Saval, destroying not only his enemies (real and supposed) but his friends. Billy’s friendship (a friend: “something you see that you can’t quite make out”) is as disastrous as his enmity. The embryonic relationship with Tunstall (the last person in the world who would have wanted the revenge that is Billy’s only way of expressing his gratitude and devotion to him) is kept present by means of a series of unobtrusive reminders. (1) The burning effigy of straw that separates the seduction of Celsa from the shooting of Moon (though, through its implications, it also connects them). Billy, leaving Celsa, passes it when it has become a charred skeleton. (2) Tom’s death. Like Tunstall, he rides away from Billy over the crest of a hill toward the waiting bullets. (3) Billy’s encounter with gypsies who help him and with whom he rests. The scene is interesting in anticipating that of the Okie camp in Bonnie and Clyde but is not in itself very successful: rather conveniently treated (the gypsies haven’t the individuality that one expects from even the most transitory characters in Penn’s films), and arbitrary, an emotional effect intellectually conceived, a mere gesture toward significance. The image of the burning effigy is another matter. The immediate effect of dissolving straight to it from Celsa’s capitulation is most unfortunate: it looks like the crudest “flames of passion” symbolism. In fact, the image carries very complex suggestions and associations. In the scene with Celsa, Billy has burned his newspaper death notice and announced that he has come alive again. The burning of the effigy for the Easter celebrations carries obvious death-for-resurrection significance. When Billy passes, and touches, the charred remnants, there is clear ironic comment on his resurrection. Further, irrespective of any religious meaning (Penn is not a “Christian” director, and the overall tone of the film encourages us to look at the image from a non-Christian standpoint), the blazing effigy suggests the universal delight in violence and destruction, thereby extending the significance

The Left Handed Gun 21 of Billy’s own violent tendencies. It carries its reminder of Tunstall and of Billy’s conversations with him, suggesting the ironic wrongness of Billy’s deeds in relation to the man whose death they ostensibly avenge. More precisely, it reminds us of Billy’s inability to look beyond what he immediately observes (his shrug in answer to Tunstall’s “Why do they do that?”) to explore meanings and motives. Finally, with reference to the seduction of Celsa, the dissolve from blazing effigy to charred ruin anticipates the bitter, disheartening sequel to the seduction at the end of the film. One could object that the image is too loaded with meanings for its significance possibly to be grasped, but it makes, I think, its emotional effect without its multiple associations needing to be consciously examined. In the last stages of the film, after his escape from jail, Billy, finally isolated in notoriety, retraces crucial stages in his past and is forced by loneliness and pain into a partial self-realization: the house from which Tom rode to his death and where Charlie’s death was brutally hastened by Billy himself; the gypsies, with their undefined reminder of Tunstall; Saval and Celsa and the misery of Saval’s realization of his wife’s infidelity. And there is Moultrie, with his photographs of Billy at Pat Garrett’s wedding and of Charlie dead (“You can see the wounds”) and his pulp fiction accounts of Billy’s glorious career. The contrast between the legend (supported and admired by a whole society needing some vicarious glamour and violence) and the miserable human reality offers the film’s clearest anticipation of Bonnie and Clyde. But Billy achieves something that Bonnie and Clyde (wrapped up in the myth that they themselves, through Bonnie’s poems, partly endorse and live on) never achieve: the whole film moves toward the slow gesture with which Billy, beaten to the draw by Pat Garrett, reveals that both hand and holster were empty. In effect a suicide, it is also a tragic victory in the conscious acknowledgment that it implies. Billy is, to resort again to W. B. Yeats, “The unfinished man and his pain / Brought face to face with his own clumsiness.”3

The Miracle Worker

Of all Penn’s films, The Miracle Worker is the most direct, the least ambiguous, in emotional effect, and this has led many people, quite understandably, to regard it as a comparatively simple, minor work and not inquire into it too deeply. (On the lowest level, there is an inbuilt intellectual tendency to distrust a film that makes one cry so much.) This directness of effect is certainly no illusion, but it conceals a great underlying complexity. The extent to which one becomes aware of this depends partly on where one feels the center of interest in the film to lie: in Helen Keller or in Annie Sullivan. The spectacle of the deaf and blind child struggling to burst out of her imprisonment is so moving, and the performance of Patty Duke so extraordinary, that—despite the fact that Anne Bancroft’s performance is at least equally extraordinary—it is easy to focus attention on the recipient of the promised miracle rather than on its worker. A true reading of the film must, I think, start from the parallels insisted on, partly in the dialogue, partly visually, between the two. About halfway through the film, Annie Sullivan looks out of the window to see Helen, arms outstretched, face uplifted, groping her way toward the house. Dissolve into one of Annie’s memories that punctuates the action: she, in the horrific almshouse for the mentally and otherwise defective, gropes her way from the dim, gesticulating shapes of madwomen toward a group of officials and cries out to them, “I want to go to school.” As the image dissolves back to Helen, the two blindly groping figures are briefly superimposed: in Helen, Annie recognizes herself.

The Miracle Worker 23 Not only the connection it makes but the whole emotional power of the image is central to the film. The real subject of The Miracle Worker is not deafness or blindness, or even, centrally, teaching or communication, but the life principle itself: the way in which life energies, if they are sufficiently insistent, can drive through all barriers and obstacles to force an outlet, whatever harm is done them on the way. And Annie is at least as central to Penn’s development of this theme (“movement” is perhaps a better word) as Helen. In Helen the movement is more obvious, and it is through her that the overwhelming immediate effect of the film is made. The penultimate sequence, in which Helen at last realizes the connection between finger-spelled words and the objects they indicate, constitutes one of the most moving affirmations in the history of the cinema. What is conveyed is above all the ecstasy of suddenly breaking through frustrations to the potential fulfillment of the most fundamental of human appetites— the appetite to know, to express, to communicate, the very principle of creativity. The Helen we see at the end of the film may still be deaf and blind, but she seems almost the least handicapped of Penn’s protagonists: less, certainly, than Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. She has, indestructibly, the desire for fullness of life concentrated within her by the years of total darkness in an unusually pure and uncorrupted form. Like Annie in her prison, the experience has made Helen “strong.” And the strength, one feels, has been bought at less terrible cost: the Helen Keller whom Penn shows us (it will be understood, I hope, that I am concerned here with the film as an autonomous work, not with its fidelity or otherwise to what really happened) has it in her to be a more complete human being than Annie Sullivan will ever be. We are moved in this sequence by more than Helen’s or Annie’s personal triumph: by the communicated intense joy in life. Camera movement and editing involve the spectator to the maximum in Helen’s ecstasy; we turn from the film with a renewed delight in and wonder at our own existence. Especially, there is the use of the simple and basic symbolism of water and earth and the keys. Helen’s breakthrough happens when

24  robin wood

Helen’s moment of understanding at the pump.

the water from the pump runs over one hand as her other hand is held in Annie’s: physical sensation and consciousness (the finger-spelling) are suddenly fused, becoming all but interchangeable. From water Helen passes to soil—understood, then rubbed ecstatically on the face—and from soil to tree: the elemental symbolism of fertility appropriately linked with the released joy in existence. The simplicity is almost diagrammatical yet so intensely felt that there is no possibility of its being found spurious; the images, with their characteristic physicality, convey that duality of response to direct sensation and to consciousness that is so central to Penn’s art. The use of the keys is also very beautiful. Helen has previously taken them from the doors of the dining room in which Annie locked her for their battle and has given them into her mother’s keeping. Now she takes them from her

The Miracle Worker 25 mother’s pocket and finger-spells “Teacher,” then takes the keys to Annie. Helen’s intelligence (and she just missed being committed to an asylum for the mentally defective) is expressed in her ability to make the metaphorical connection, but the abstract idea is here fused with the concrete and practical—the gift of the keys is the bestowal of trust and the acknowledgment of a debt only at that moment understood. The affirmation is quite unambiguous and not in the least inconsistent: the positive feeling for life gives all of Penn’s films something of the effect of affirmation even when—as in The Chase or Bonnie and Clyde—their outcome is entirely pessimistic. But the affirmation of The Miracle Worker is not a matter of the simple optimism that a brief synopsis might suggest: it is an affirmation grounded in a sense of the complexities and confusions of human existence. Which brings us to Annie Sullivan. It is convenient to begin at the end, with the very last scene, and ask why Annie is suddenly able, sincerely, to tell Helen that she loves her, when she has found it impossible to do so all the way through the film. A whole complex of interrelated answers quickly presents itself. For the sake of clarity, I will tabulate them and show how they are all firmly rooted in the film and not the idle proliferations of a critic’s ingenuity.





1. Before, Helen was an animal; now, she is a human being. This is, clearly, why her father (Victor Jory) is able to love her at last, and Annie herself made a connection earlier between her inability to love Helen and Captain Keller’s. This is the only reason not connected with Annie’s personal psychology. 2. Earlier, Annie said, “I don’t even love her: she’s not my child.” Helen’s behavior in the final scene shows that now she is Annie’s child. In the previous sequence she recognized and accepted Annie as her teacher; now, by embracing her and lying in her arms, she accepts her as a mother. 3. But Helen is also Annie’s in another sense. Throughout the film she has sought, and on occasion explicitly demanded, absolute

26  robin wood



power over her. She insists on this as necessary for Helen’s development, but her manner suggests again and again that it is also a personal need of her own. Especially revealing is the moment when, in reply to Captain Keller’s suggestion that “God may not have meant Helen to have the ‘eyes’ you speak of,” she defiantly asserts, “I mean her to.” Earlier, with Helen’s half brother James (Andrew Prine), she rejected the idea that she or Helen might give up, saying that “giving up” was her idea of original sin. Annie, then, exempts herself from the supposedly all-reaching influence of original sin and frankly assumes the role of God. Even here, the motivation for this heroic arrogance is complex. Partly it is the result of the “education” in the almshouse that has taught Annie to fight uncompromisingly for everything she has achieved. But it is also compensation for the sense of disadvantage that seldom leaves her when she is in the company of adults. Her dark glasses do more than shade her eyes; they are a protection, to hold people at bay: James says to her at one point that she would not speak to him as she just has if she were not wearing her glasses. When she is behind her glasses she can fight. It is natural for someone chronically unsure of her ability to hold her own with people to compensate by seeking power where she has no sense of disadvantage. With Helen, Annie talks all the time in a relaxed, extrovert manner, often without her glasses on. The struggle to make Helen use a spoon comes across as at once an example of Annie’s instinctive knowledge of what is necessary for Helen and as a battle for power, with Annie driven on by a personal need. This ambiguity is fundamental to the total effect of the film. 4. To Annie, Helen imprisoned is Jimmy (Annie’s brother) dead. The connection is made visually as Annie, beside the sleeping Helen, whose superimposed figure repeatedly recurs during the scene, remembers the time when she found Jimmy’s body. Annie has strong guilt feelings about Jimmy—other memories have him pleading with her anxiously to stay with him, and in

The Miracle Worker 27

Helen and Annie.



one she tells him she will leave him in order to go to school. Her responsibility to Helen is inextricably confused with her responsibility to Jimmy. She can’t love the child, therefore, until the subconscious guilt is exorcized—until, that is, by saving Helen she resurrects Jimmy, which is another way in which Annie usurps the role of God, and one that suggests more clearly her need to do so. 5. But Helen, we have seen, is also Annie herself. Annie’s concern throughout is to triumph over her own disabilities—to prove that she can be a complete human being despite the ravages of her past experiences. She proves it, as it were, vicariously through Helen and loves Helen when it is proven.

These are, it will be plain, not so much five motives for loving Helen as five aspects, interconnected and interacting, of a whole complex

28  robin wood motivation. They throw light not merely on the end of the film but on Annie’s conduct throughout and suggest, I think, how central she and the film named after her are to Penn’s work. In fact, the title itself carries its small charge of irony. If we see a miracle in the film, it is surely Helen’s moment of realization at the pump, and it is made very clear that the realization takes place because Helen remembers the sound for “water” her mother taught her at six months. It is the first time she is able to connect objects with the concept of language. The “miracle,” then, is due largely to Mrs. Keller (Inga Swenson) and to whatever has preserved the memory of language, like an arrested seed, in Helen’s subconscious through the years. Yet the crucial factor that makes the miracle possible has nothing “miraculous” about it: Annie’s passionately committed, singleminded struggle. The action processes of Billy the Kid and of Annie Sullivan might seem at first glance to be at opposite poles, since in total effect as in general intention the one is destructive, the other creative. Yet they have a great deal in common. Both start from a noble enough concept, which one might define rather loosely as absolute justice in Billy’s case and educational vocation in Annie’s. And in both cases the concept, considered as motivation, is real enough but only a part, and perhaps the least decisive part, of the whole story. Beyond these concepts, both characters are partly blind: blind to their own tangled motives (a word whose root sense of “driving forces” is apt to slip away from it but is particularly appropriate here). Annie’s weak sight is doubtless in the factual data, but Penn uses it symbolically. The sense of someone driven on by intense personal needs that he or she very imperfectly understands is as vivid in The Miracle Worker as it is in The Left Handed Gun. Along with their blindness, Billy and Annie share an obsessive single-mindedness of purpose. Billy’s sense of mission as he stands over Tunstall’s coffin is paralleled in Annie’s sense of one exclusive purpose: finding Helen not at the station to meet her, she tells Mrs. Keller not to be surprised if, on the way to the Kellers’ house, she gets out to push the horse. Annie’s assumption of the role of God recalls

The Miracle Worker 29

The struggle over table manners.

Billy’s “I’m the law.” The affirmation of the one film and the tragedy of the other are but the two sides of a single coin. The sense of creative forces struggling for freedom and expression is as potent in the presentation of Annie Sullivan as in that of Helen Keller: the conclusion of the film conveys as well as Helen’s release an overwhelming sense of personal fulfillment for her teacher, a fulfillment rooted in Annie’s whole past. We are left, nonetheless, with the impression of a woman whose strength is the corollary of terrible, and permanent, deprivations: the very intensity of her obsession, the concentration of her inner drives—her greatness, in short—relate to her unfittedness for normal life. But for Helen’s recognition, she is isolated at the end as she has been, essentially, throughout the film. There is nothing sentimental or comforting in Penn’s treatment of a subject that would seem to lend itself to every sort of indulgence. At

30  robin wood the same time, there is no sign of inhibition or embarrassment passing itself off as “restraint”: the emotional effect of The Miracle Worker is as pure as it is strong. This is as good a place as any for a brief digression on critical method. I am perfectly aware of quoting film lines from The Miracle Worker as if Penn, not William Gibson, had written them. I am perfectly aware that Penn is not credited with the scripts of any of his films and that three of the five are adapted from plays by writers of some repute. I am also aware that the literacy and intelligence of the scripts contribute importantly to the films’ success. Ideally, one would wish constantly to be introducing little qualifications and acknowledgments into one’s text when quoting lines of dialogue. This is, however, a study of Arthur Penn, not of Gore Vidal, William Gibson, Lillian Hellman, etc. Penn’s films reveal a strikingly consistent personality; even when one is aware of tensions or contradictions within his work, these come across as the expression of that personality. The films also suggest a conscious artist with the developed technique to express what he wants or needs to express. When the genuineness and intensity of a director’s response are as evident as they are in The Miracle Worker, the film becomes his. These are Arthur Penn’s films; the lines in a very real sense belong to him even if he didn’t write them. One cannot always be acknowledging collaborators, but this doesn’t imply unawareness or denigration of their contributions.

Mickey One

Any anxieties one has about Penn are centered on Mickey One. It is not merely that the film is a failure—any artist is entitled to one failure out of five, or indeed to four out of five. One’s anxieties arise partly from the particular nature of the failure, and partly from the fact that of all Penn’s five films to date, Mickey One was the only one made from completely free choice and with Penn in complete control, producing as well as directing. It is obvious enough, I think, from the close thematic continuity of the films that Penn has never accepted subjects or scripts he hasn’t wanted to do, but Mickey One was clearly, as a project, especially dear to him. Should one see it as an isolated mistake or as the sort of film Penn would be making all the time if he could? There seems particular point in asking the question at a time when, after the worldwide box-office success of Bonnie and Clyde, Penn is presumably in a position to dictate his own contracts for a time (like Tony Richardson after Tom Jones [1963]!). One can only hope that the artistic fulfillment represented by The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde has encouraged Penn to reject the possible line of development that Mickey One signposts. Not that Mickey One is undistinguished. If one saw it in isolation, one would be tempted at first to suppose it the early work of an immature but talented young director; on second thoughts its remarkable assurance and perfection of technique would lead one to doubt this. There seems, indeed, a curious split between the immaturity of the overall conception and the extreme sureness and clarity of the execution. This technical assurance—the sense that Penn always knows

32  robin wood exactly where to put the camera and why, that he knows unhesitatingly how to express each idea—at first seems the film’s great virtue but ends by rather telling against it. When one has taken the immediate impact and admired the general aplomb, one is left with the feeling of an enormous bluff, or confidence-trick. Given the film’s half-baked and pretentious intellectual ideas, one can’t help feeling that a few signs of doubt on Penn’s part would have been only decent. Penn is a great American director. Though in an obvious sense more an “intellectual” director than, say, Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock (the substructure of ideas seems nearer the surface in his films), he belongs essentially to the great tradition of the American commercial cinema; the significance of his work as a director arises from his concrete handling of concrete materials—action, plot, dialogue, stars, camera, decor—with intuition playing a vital and vitalizing role. At the same time, Penn is clearly very much aware of the European cinema, the cinema of conscious intellectual ideas. To pass from Hawks to Antonioni, or vice versa, requires an act of adjustment that to pass from Antonioni to Penn does not. Mickey One has been called “an attempt to make a European film in America.” It is Penn’s attempt to deny the American side of his parentage. If one rejects one’s ancestry, one rejects, necessarily, a great deal of oneself; most of the richness and complexity of Penn’s other films is absent from Mickey One. Thematically the film is central enough, and stylistically in many respects characteristic; but so much of what is most important in Penn is missing. It is curious that what is, on the surface, much the most obscure of his films should come across as also much the simplest. Mickey One gives the impression of reversing Penn’s usual method of working. In the other films, he starts from the particular and the concrete (in three cases out of the four, from an actual basis in fact) and discovers the universal by a process of exploration; in Mickey One he appears to have started from an abstract conception, a large general statement, and tried to impose the concrete on it, and one is constantly aware of the imposition. The aim was clearly to make a film

Mickey One 33

Warren Beatty as Mickey One.

that would work on different levels simultaneously; the result tends to lurch from level to level with a confusion one cannot feel to be artistically resolved. Certain characters (e.g., the clown-artist with the dustbin lids, who seems to have strayed in from a Fellini film) appear almost exclusively symbolic; others ( Jenny Drayton) almost exclusively naturalistic. Penn fails to integrate them satisfactorily; the effect is particularly jarring in scenes where characters from different levels meet. The interest of the film is twofold: its thematic relatedness to Penn’s other work and the strength of some of its imagery. The protagonist of Mickey One (Warren Beatty) is, like Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde, a character with a fully developed popular image and a very uncertain sense of the relationship between this image and his real self: in this case, a successful (though not, to judge from what we see, very distinguished) nightclub comedian. Successful, anyway, before

34  robin wood the film starts. The credit sequence sketches briefly a fragmented life of luxury and irresponsibility. Near the end of it we see “Mickey” (we never learn his real name) watching a man being savagely beaten up, then turning to make love to a girl while the beating continues in the background: the empty, self-ignorant, pleasure-seeking life surrounded by shadowy violence and menace, watching faces and unexplained phone calls. The end of the credits leaves Mickey alone with a scarf a girl has been sensuously dancing with slung over a drummer’s stands by an empty dance floor and a sudden sense of indefinable guilt. “They” are going to punish him for something—he isn’t sure what. He tries to find tangible reasons for his punishment, for which an assessable penalty might be imposed, but Ruby Lopp (Franchot Tone), manager of the club where he works, suggests to him that he may now have to pay for everything. After flopping disastrously in his act, Mickey is seen running from Lopp out of a meat storeroom hung with carcasses. Lopp shouts after him that he can’t run away from “them”—”You’ll have to be an animal.” We are to see Mickey’s enemies, presumably, as both society (which has given him everything he wants in return for very little) and within himself. Lopp’s parting call suggests that the enemy is the human consciousness itself. The film ends with Mickey’s acceptance of his position, of the impossibility of escape and the necessity to confront whatever must be confronted, and this acceptance is led up to by one of the film’s key lines. Jenny Drayton (Alexandra Stewart) asks him, “Are you frightened, Mickey?” and he replies, “As long as I live.” The sense of continual precariousness and tension is part of what must be accepted. A recurring problem is our uncertainty as to just how to take Mickey: he is so loosely defined. He is established firmly enough on a naturalistic level as a nightclub entertainer, but Penn and his writer Alan M. Surgal are not content to work consistently outward from so concrete a basis, allowing universal implications to grow from a clearly defined situation. Instead, layers of symbolic meaning are imposed on the character. His relationship to the clown-artist, who takes Mickey to watch his artwork, happening, or what-not, entitled Yes,

Mickey One 35

Mickey with Jenny Drayton (Alexandra Stewart) and Ed Castle (Hurd Hatfield) in his office at the Xanadu club.

makes sense only if one sees Mickey as typifying The Modern Artist, with the sort of art Yes represents as one of the possibilities open to him: already a heavy burden for an indifferent-to-mediocre comic to have to carry. Further, again and again in the film one cannot escape the suggestion that Mickey is Modern Man, and that Penn is tackling, head-on, big general issues such as Alienation. The clown-artist is the film’s most obvious weakness, the crudeness of the actor’s performance only making manifest the crudeness of the conception. He is meant to represent a way of coming to terms with the modern environment by accepting and using it (his first appearance is in the middle of a used car dump, and at the end of the film he leads Mickey from the dump and the temptation of “total death” to make his acceptance). But the purely symbolic nature of the character enables Penn to evade all the awkward questions he raises,

36  robin wood about the conditions—moral, spiritual, psychological—necessary for making such an acceptance. There is also great doubt as to how seriously Penn takes him, and how seriously we are meant to. It seems a hopeful sign that Mickey looks (though even here one is none too certain) unimpressed by Yes, but the fact that it is Yes’s creator who leads him back from the car dump at the end carries a strong (though again imprecisely defined) symbolic significance. Both the weakness of Mickey One and its thematic centrality to Penn’s work can be illustrated by the sequence of Mickey’s audition. Part cajoled, part tricked into going on stage to face unknown watchers (who may or may not be “Them”), Mickey finds himself abandoned to an empty and darkened auditorium in which one dazzling spotlight (behind which are the auditors) mercilessly picks him out. Trapped, he tries to stall, makes weak, ineffectual jokes greeted by utter silence, sweats, panics, flees. The sequence suggests the inadequacy of the public mask to fulfill the private individual or provide any viable solution to his problems: as such, it offers a more explicit (and cruder) statement of one of the concerns of The Left Handed Gun and Bonnie and Clyde. Yet for all the clarity (indeed, insistence) with which the intellectual idea is projected, one is uncomfortably aware of the confusion of levels in the realization. Just what convention is operating? Are we watching naturalistic or symbolic drama? A comedian with a neurotic fixation about being persecuted, duped by a wellmeaning nightclub manager into an audition he isn’t ready for? Or Modern Man on trial? If the first, then why does nobody know who is in the light booth, and why does nobody try to find out? If the second, then how are we to adjust to it from the naturalistically explainable buildup between the manager and Jenny Drayton? It is difficult to escape the sense of shallowness, the lack of those rich and complex resonances that distinguish most of Penn’s work. The scene, for instance, where Mickey is set upon and beaten up by doormen from various nightclubs, each in different phoney national dress, makes no sense at all on the naturalistic level and conveys little beyond a general idea of our friend Modern Man in search of Identity

Mickey One onstage.

38  robin wood being battered down by Appearances and False Values. Penn brings to it something of the direct physical impact that characterizes his scenes of violence, yet this seems curiously irrelevant to the essentially abstract idea. A “symbolic” scene near the beginning has much greater force. Mickey throws himself off a train to find himself in a used car dump. Police officials are watching a reconstruction of a crime: the disposal of a body in a car being put through the destruction-by-compression process. The victim is related to Mickey through a reference to guilt about “sources of revenue—his own or anybody else’s.” He “never made it in court . . . total death,” as the car is brutally crushed into a packed tangle of metal. Mickey runs, in terror, to be pursued by cranes and other machines involved in work of destruction, which seem bent on crushing him. The sequence is shot and edited with characteristic physical immediacy, and here there seems less discrepancy between physical impact and symbolic meaning. The piles of wrecked cars provide a valid, if obvious, image for the impermanence, machine-dominance, and waste of industrial civilization, and Mickey’s fears of being overwhelmed and annihilated, with his very uncertain sense of identity (we have just seen him burn his Social Security card), are given fitting concrete expression. One can see why Penn, a conscious and articulate artist with a most alive, intuitive responsiveness to the “feel” of modern life, its insecurities, its sense of latent, but only just latent, violence all around, should have wanted to make Mickey One. The film is useful as a crystallization of certain of his leading concerns. One is very glad that, in his two most recent films, he has returned to his roots in the traditions of American narrative cinema, or to exploration, as opposed to explicit statement.

The Chase

Penn’s first indisputable (one would have thought) masterpiece has in fact, in England at least, had somewhat meager recognition, both from critics and the general public. The director’s intelligence informs every sequence: not merely a cerebral intelligence, but an intelligence in which emotion and intuitive perception have their essential roles, and in which the most rigorous clarity of vision is balanced (but not cancelled out or compromised) by emotional generosity. It is perhaps Penn’s completest film. Not that it is necessarily to be preferred to Bonnie and Clyde, but it contains certain features excluded from the later film, which give it in comparison an extra dimension. The Chase offers Penn’s fullest portrayal of a particular society, the analysis leading to uncompromising condemnation, by implication, of money-based society in general. By the end of the film everybody from the highest (Val Rogers) to the lowest (the Negro Lester) has been revealed as equally a victim. The essential nature of the society depicted (vividly particularized yet carrying the widest possible implicit significance) is suggested early in the film by the scene in Val Rogers’s bank: on the surface, an all-pervasive hypocrisy and wearing of masks; below it, the sense of frustrated and corrupted needs strong enough continually to threaten the brittle facade. The champagne toast to Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall) on his birthday, organized with obsequious efficiency by Damon Fuller (Richard Bradford), subtly conveys Val’s position. The whole presentation of Rogers is a good example of Penn’s quite unsentimental generosity. Rogers’s “image”—which he himself clearly accepts as real—of a thoroughly decent, responsible leading

40  robin wood citizen, unassertive yet perfectly in control, is not entirely unrelated to the reality. Penn shows us a man by no means inherently vicious: his subtle corruptness, revealed gradually as the film progresses, is felt as something inherent in his position rather than in his nature. Because he is rich, he is universally respected, but the respect is for the money, not the man, hence false and precarious. As the champagne glasses are raised, the girl assistants smile their adoration: they are perfectly sincere, insofar as they believe they are really feeling something for the man. And the extent of Val’s self-delusion is suggested by his evident pleasure at the tribute: he is as much trapped in money-values as anyone. Even in the apparently ordered world of the bank, the tensions and frustrations underlying the social performance rise uncomfortably near the surface. Emily Stewart ( Janice Rule), wife of one vice president, intermittent mistress of another, Damon, passes from taunting her husband Edwin (Robert Duvall) with his ineffectuality to blatantly arranging an assignation with her not overenthusiastic lover within her husband’s view and only just out of earshot. Sexual intrigue associates itself easily with business intrigue: Emily’s contempt for Edwin as a husband is scarcely distinguishable from her resentment at their not being invited to Val’s party. The debasement of sex, and of personal relationships generally, is intimately connected with the all-pervading money-values. The scene culminates in Emily’s insolently and publicly inviting Val to their party: the social masks are all but dropped. Throughout, the sense of explosive forces accumulating beneath the flimsy facade of propriety is very strong. The social analysis is developed through the film’s three simultaneous parties—Val’s, the Stewarts’, and the teenage party in progress next door to them. The three groups converge for the film’s climax, where the social distinctions insisted on by the previous separateness break down in a general anarchy as all civilized standards finally collapse. The parties—two of them observed in great detail—offer superficial contrasts and underlying parallels. One notices repeatedly the inadequacy of the codes of social behavior to cope with the violence

The Chase 41 latent in the personal relationships. Each party tends to move toward violent expression as suppressed energies force themselves increasingly to the surface. This is least obvious, necessarily, in Val’s more formal and elaborate party, with its respectable ostentation. Even here, however, barely suppressed tensions are kept continually in view. It is a mark of Penn’s seriousness that even the drunken middle-aged woman in the cowboy suit does not strike one as merely funny. Take, for example, the incident of the formal announcement of college endowments, with its suggestions of an auction sale with guests outbidding each other to purchase status and its complacent speech: “We Americans must lead the world’s ignorant masses. Only through books can man become free.” The irony is the more telling for the absence of any feeling of caricature: the pervasive moneyvulgarity, the background of shallow, purely material “culture,” of false values and false pretensions, highlights the speech sufficiently. Mr. Theodore Crane is giving $500,000 to endow a dormitory for women. Cry from a giggling, semitipsy blonde: “Why, you old goat. Are you up to it?” The sense of critical interaction here is typical of Penn: if the film satirizes the money-based self-importance of the donor, it certainly doesn’t endorse the equally money-based vulgarity of the young lady—they are but two aspects of the same set of values. The ensuing presentation to Val of a model of the college— ”One of the finest colleges that money can buy”—conveys the implication that even the best this society can show for itself is invalidated by corrupt values. The tension between surface and reality is expressed even more strikingly in the personal relationships. There is the pretense of married happiness by Val’s son Jake ( James Fox) and his wife (Diana Hyland): the pretense of a pretense, rather, as Val isn’t even meant to be fooled by it. All he demands is the merest show, and the pervading corruptness of values is suggested in the fact that the show, even when he knows it to be a mockery, can make him happy. Jake’s is clearly a money-and-status marriage: the “decent” and well-intentioned Val is behind it just as—being the chief representative of money-power—he

42  robin wood

Jake Rogers ( James Fox) and Anna Reeves ( Jane Fonda).

is behind most of the corruption in the film. In counterpoint with the scenes involving Jake, his wife, and his father at the party, we see Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) flinging mud at a “Val Rogers Properties” sign. The impotent and undisciplined action suggests the frustration of young people growing up in a money-orientated culture, feeling cheated, yet unequipped to focus their resentment into any form of purposeful rebellion. Most of them, anyway, are too well off. But if the harmfulness of values that ignore or deny the deeper human needs is very strongly felt in the film, so is their inability to hold in check the expression of such needs. When Jake learns that Bubber (his childhood friend, now married to the girl Jake loves) has escaped from prison, he leaves the party instantly, in the middle of his father’s speech, to go to Anna ( Jane Fonda). As he dashes away, Val is talking about “responsibilities” and about his son’s expected “wonderful,

The Chase 43 rich, fulfilling life.” Fulfillment itself thus becomes a mockery, like the sense of “responsibilities” that expresses itself in endowing a college and ruining the lives of those you love in the name of appearances. The Stewarts’ party, on the other hand, has the sort of atmosphere that passes for uninhibited but is really a matter of acting out neurotic tensions without the possibility of exorcising them. In the party’s rapid degeneration into an orgy of mock killing and mock suicide, accompanied by some real destruction as a shoe “grenade” hits the ice bucket and culminating in the firing of a real gun, we have reflected in miniature the movement of the whole film. Again there is a pervasive sense of real needs unrecognized or strangled in a society that has set up material values as the ultimate ends. None of the characters at the party are equipped for finding any sort of valid fulfillment: all are circumscribed by the deeply entrenched attitudes of society as a whole. Their spontaneously erupting “games,” mostly jarringly malicious, necessarily express the cumulated violence within them, their hatred of each other and of themselves. As the Stewarts’ party escalates into chaos, we are kept aware, through windows, of the teenagers’ party in progress next door, reflecting the adults’ in its air of imminent eruption. We have seen sufficiently by this time the world the young are growing up in, the values they are growing up to, the Americans who “must lead the world’s ignorant masses” in culture. Having come to investigate the pistol shot, the teenagers fall automatically into playing at Bubber Reeves, paralleling the violent games of their seniors. This extension to another generation, though only lightly sketched in, adds an extra dimension that takes on particular importance toward the end of the film. The teenage party is also used to reveal new aspects of the adult characters. Damon Fuller’s remark about “liking them younger and younger,” though disguised as a joke, comes across as somewhat more, in the context of his unsatisfactory marriage and halfhearted adultery, and gives a further suggestion of the pervasive corruption; Emily Stewart finds it rather thrilling. The incident provokes the one moment of genuine feeling during the party when Edwin says, “I

44  robin wood wasn’t thinking about things like that, Damon. I was thinking about myself at that age—the things I wanted and believed would happen.” It is typical of the characterization in Penn’s films that a man who has previously appeared largely contemptible should suddenly emerge here as the only person present at all worthy of respect. Penn’s characters sometimes tend toward caricature without ever quite slipping into it. The essence of true caricatures is that they are incapable of development, being exaggerated features seen in detachment from any context of human wholeness or complexity. Thus it is a major weakness of Dickens’s novels that so many of his characters cannot develop; they can only have arbitrary changes imposed on them by the author. Hence they become increasingly maddening at each reappearance, since all their author can do is put them through the same routine again: as they cannot develop, they cannot surprise us. This clearly isn’t so of Edwin Stewart—or of Blanche Barrow, or even of Eugene and Velma, in Bonnie and Clyde. If Edwin were mere caricature, it would be impossible for Penn to bring off (as he does, most touchingly) his moment of truth during the party, the genuineness of which makes his wife’s ensuing public ridicule of him as a “Saturday night philosopher” particularly brutal. Penn’s near-grotesques have the same kind (if not degree) of complexity as his central figures; one is struck repeatedly by details of behavior that at once surprise yet register as absolutely “right,” such as C. W. Moss’s sudden nostalgic revelation that he and his family were “Disciples of Christ” or Eugene Grizzard’s laugh when invited to join the Barrow gang. Set against this damning social analysis are the figures of Calder, the sheriff, and his wife Ruby (Angie Dickinson): they and their relationship provide the film with its chief moral positives that place the other characters in the necessary perspective. Calder’s mature poise serves as a touchstone by reference to which the others’ lack of awareness can be measured. Through Marlon Brando’s performance, Calder’s integrity becomes a convincing presence in the film. His withstanding of all the pressures brought to bear to implicate him in the general corruption is never felt as a matter of empty heroics: he is a man who

The Chase 45

Marlon Brando as Sheriff Calder.

knows his own real needs, as the characters who surround him do not. Supported by a stable and fulfilling—if childless—marriage and a firm confidence in his own identity, he is able to move easily on any of the town’s variously corrupt social levels without being contaminated. He copes with his social equals’ vulgarity by turning it neatly back on them. Emily invites him in to the party: “All you need to come to my party is a pistol and you’ve got one.” The tone of voice makes the sexual innuendo unmistakable. Calder coolly retorts, “With all the

46  robin wood pistols you got there, Emily, I don’t think there’d be room for mine.” The whole town, from Val Rogers’s vice presidents to Mrs. Reeves, assumes he is in Rogers’s pocket; Rogers, when pressed by circumstances, reveals that he (unconsciously) assumes it too. Yet Calder acts firmly and consistently from his own personal center, even when faced with the subtle moral blackmail of his debt to Rogers (who was responsible for getting him his position). Of central significance to The Chase—and, if Bonnie and Clyde can be taken as a reliable signpost, to Penn’s whole future development—is the way in which Calder, who alone embodies an aware and fully adult social sense, is driven to reject in despair the society he has striven to hold together. Brando’s perfectly controlled performance has been generally recognized, the presence of Angie Dickinson as Ruby much less so. Dickinson is a very considerable presence in every film she graces, but Hollywood has not always put it to the happiest use. Through her, Penn suggests something of what makes it possible for Calder to be what he is. The creation of the Calder-Ruby relationship is a triumph for Penn and his actors: there is nothing exceptional in the dialogue. What is conveyed is essentially a sense of commitment to each other, unemphatic, unostentatious, yet total. (Even here, their childlessness—unexplained, but we are left to presume it to be due to some physical disability or incompatibility—suggests the imperfectness of all existence.) Particularly, Ruby’s presence at three moments of climactic violence is crucial to the film’s effect. Through her is kept present the touchstone of civilized and adult standards, against which we can measure the ignominy of Val Rogers’s attempt to bribe Lester ( Joel Fluellen) with $100 and, when that fails, his vicious beating of him in a locked cell. The subsequent sequence of the beating up of Calder by a group of noteworthy citizens, in itself made uncompromisingly repellent, is given particular force by Ruby’s presence on the other side (again) of the locked door: the impression of mutual trust and interdependence previously built up is so strong that what could have been a conventional scene of a woman screaming while her man

Ruby (Angie Dickinson) and Calder after he is beaten.

48  robin wood is beaten up becomes almost intolerably moving. We experience it, as it were, through Ruby’s sense of exclusion, her helplessness, her agonized uncertainty as to what, exactly, is being done. Above all, there is Ruby’s intervention when Calder, after the shooting of Bubber Reeves, finally succumbs to the by now ubiquitous violence, uselessly beating the killer with unrestrained and animallike ferocity. It is the moment when the film’s tragic intensity is most manifest, and Ruby’s reaction is of key importance. It would be so easy, given the emotional pitch the film has by that time reached, to feel that Calder’s descent to violence is justified: it could have been presented as a moment of release, like the traditional Western ending where the hero who has stood out against violence at last reaches for his gun, with the audience’s full approval. Ruby’s horror (combined of course with other factors in Penn’s handling of the scene, such as the undignified messiness of Calder’s actions) unequivocally prohibits such a reaction. It is also a moment where the social and personal threads become indistinguishable. The scene brings home to us at once the collapse of the social values on which Calder has until now taken his stand, his descent into everything he has stood against (made possible only by final disillusionment), and the personal horror of the loss of dignity and self-respect in a man of exceptional strength and integrity. As for the ending of the film, if one is to find any hope to qualify its terrible despair, it must be in the unobtrusive strength of Ruby’s “Calder. Let’s go. Come on.” The implied total defeat and disillusionment as far as society is concerned is slightly offset by our sense of the durability, at least, of one personal relationship. But if the Calder-Ruby relationship gives The Chase its primary positive focal point, there is a strong secondary focal point that in many ways pulls against it, creating a powerful and disturbing moral tension in the film as a whole: the relationship of the three young people, Anna and Bubber Reeves and Jake Rogers. The Calders represent a moral positive founded on a high conception of society, the young people an asocial morality based on personal loyalties. Calder is above all conscious, his actions (until his breakdown) are dictated by

The Chase 49

Sheriff Calder takes a stand to protect Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford).

an enlightened awareness of the issues, an ability to stand back and shrewdly survey even while he is in the midst of events; the young people are above all spontaneous, acting from immediate impulses. To be able to respond to two partially opposed moral viewpoints simultaneously can be, if they are held in balance and with clarity, a sign of maturity and honesty rather than confusion. Something of the film’s attitude toward Bubber Reeves is suggested at the outset in the credit-title sequence, where the pursued are shown against natural backgrounds while pursuers are shown against ominously huge and luridly lit industrial erections. The three young people are presented quite unglamorously and unsentimentally as confused, fallible, and helpless, their actions involving them steadily deeper in disaster; yet for all their moral confusion, the comparative purity and naturalness of their responses to each other stand out

50  robin wood vividly against the money-based responses of their more “respectable” seniors. Jake, as Val’s son, is necessarily the most trammeled of the three, but certain even of his actions—the refusal to leave the used car dump with his father, which marks his rejection of all Val stands for, his moment of final commitment—have considerable moral force. During the party, one notes the honesty of Jake and his wife with each other about their relationship amid the surrounding hypocrisy—she asks him casually if he’s going to see his “friend” (Anna), and he as casually admits it. The precise nature of the values embodied by this group of characters can be made clear with a few examples. The implicit overall attitude to the relationship between the three is itself very unconventional in its openness. Anna is Bubber’s wife, Bubber is Jake’s best friend, Jake and Anna are lovers. Yet the film imposes no moralistic attitude to this situation on the spectator. Also—and this is perhaps another way of saying the same thing—there is no schematizing of the characters: they have to a marked degree the fresh and unexpected spontaneity of response one finds so often in Penn’s people. Anna is in love with Jake, yet her reaction to the news of Bubber’s escape is a spontaneous flow of sympathy toward him, an intuitive sense of need in someone she feels for. Her love for Jake is perfectly compatible with a sense of his weaknesses: she treats him (as in the incident of his gift of jewelry) always with a directness that expresses her ability to trust and act on her own instinctive responses. During the search for Bubber, Jake tells her he’s afraid he’s going to lose her and says he wants to marry her. Instantly, like a rebound, she slaps his face: “I’ve waited all these five years to hear you say that. It’s just like you to say it at the wrong time.” We register the action as the expression of a natural, intuitive decency. When they find Bubber, instead of the expected explosion (various characters—Edwin Stewart, etc.—have been anticipating that Bubber will try to kill Jake), their earlier comradeship is not only preserved but strengthened. The desperation to which imprisonment has driven Bubber (whose urge to freedom has the instinctiveness of a trapped

The Chase 51

Jake, Anna, and Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) reunited in the junkyard.

animal’s) is a decisive factor here: “When you’re willing to die, nobody can make you do anything anymore.” In extremis, the three discover an honesty and sincerity that entirely breaks down any tendencies toward conventional or “conditioned” emotional responses. Bubber’s natural acceptance of Anna and Jake is above all an acceptance of natural impulses. Society understands only its own conditioned responses: hence the assumption that Bubber will kill Jake and the assumption that Calder will support Val Rogers. The final condemnation of money-power comes most beautifully, and spontaneously, from Bubber Reeves. When he learns of Val Rogers’s offer of a car and a free escape, everything smoothed over, he exclaims, “He can do that? What a world!” Here, then, is the film’s

52  robin wood secondary positive moral-emotional pole; the unorthodox “natural” morality the three evolve carries great weight in the context of the depiction of the breakdown of conventional, artificial morality. The tension between the two poles can be suggested by reference to another example in the film of an absolutely natural, spontaneous reaction: Calder’s beating of Bubber’s killer. It is the implications of this secondary positive force that Penn explores in Bonnie and Clyde. The relationship of the two films is extremely interesting. One knows, of course, that in Hollywood accident or extraneous factors can play a large part in what looks like a director’s development, that the subject of The Chase was not entirely of Penn’s free choosing, and that Bonnie and Clyde had already been offered to other directors (including, rather appropriately, Jean-Luc Godard) before Penn undertook it. Nevertheless, one cannot resist seeing a logical connection between the defeat of Calder and Bonnie and Clyde, in which a Calder has no part to play: one could almost say that Calder’s defeat makes Bonnie and Clyde and the line Penn explores in it inevitable. The climax of The Chase offers a terrifying picture of social breakdown in which all the varied threads of the film are drawn together. The setting of the wrecked car “graveyard” takes us back to Mickey One and “total death” but here gains strength from being used dramatically, where in the earlier film it was exclusively symbolic. Val turns up to save Jake, then the guests from the Stewarts’ party appear, then the teenagers, as the news of Bubber’s whereabouts spreads. As the ubiquitous violence explodes (literally, with fireworks and blazing wheels) all around, we watch Val increasingly losing control: ultimately, the power of money evaporates as frustrated instinctual urges fulfill themselves in destruction. The treatment of the scene is so convincing in terms of character that it is only afterward one realizes how close we are, here, to allegory. The condemnation of society is implied in the confused ambivalence of the teenagers’ responses: Bubber becomes half folk hero, half scapegoat, glamorized and hounded, at once a symbol of rebellion and a necessary victim on whom violence

The Chase 53

Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall) looks on along with Anna as his son Jake dies.

can be unleashed with at least some show of social righteousness. What they can’t see him as is a human being, one of themselves. We see the beginnings of a Bubber Reeves myth (“Remember my sister?” a girl calls yearningly through the car window as he is driven to jail) that takes up one of Penn’s favorite themes. Only here, at the moment when Bubber seems in danger of vanishing beneath his own legend, do we learn that he has a name (Charlie) other than the childish nickname, almost immediately after which he is shot down on the jailhouse steps. The sense of violence as an epidemic spreading with alarming and uncheckable speed is greatly strengthened by the fact that Bubber’s killer is a man who has hitherto remained on the periphery of events, more spectator than participant, seemingly one of the least given to active violence.

54  robin wood Incredibly, some critics attacked The Chase when it came out in England for its emphasis on violence. Violence is a subject that an artist who is intuitively and intellectually alive to the world in which he exists can scarcely avoid today, and if there is a more responsible treatment of it anywhere in the cinema, I have yet to see it. In insisting on the topicality of the film, I am thinking of more than the clear reference to the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the shooting of Bubber Reeves. Although everything in The Chase is so vividly particularized, it would be a mistake to see it merely as a portrait of a localized society. (Whether or not it is a faithful portrait of contemporary Texas is a matter quite outside my competence and seems to me anyway of trifling importance. The society of The Chase can be taken as completely fictitious: its relationship to the fundamental realities of modern civilization remains unaffected.) It seems to me to offer tragic comment on the present world-spirit: the sense that the traditional social values of Western civilization have been worn so thin that they are no longer capable of holding the forces they have rendered the more explosive by suppressing. The film captures unnervingly that feeling of latent or erupting violence that has doubtless a particular relevance to the Deep South but is to some extent in the air we all of us breathe.

Bonnie and Clyde

Besides being the culmination of Penn’s work to date, a film of marked and consistent individuality in which every shot bears the director’s signature, Bonnie and Clyde is also the culmination to date of the long and honorable tradition of the gangster film. The influence of the New Wave has, clearly, played a part in determining its precise nature. Nevertheless, without denying the importance of the influence, it is necessary to insist that there is nothing in Bonnie and Clyde, stylistically, technically, thematically, that was not already implicit in The Left Handed Gun. The New Wave’s example of spontaneous inventiveness seems to have acted as a releasing rather than determining influence. Confronted by Penn’s use of slow motion, of special photographic textures (the reunion with Bonnie’s mother), of free intercutting of events separate in time and space (the car chase repeatedly interrupted by “cameos” of policeman and farmer giving their reactions to the robbery), one does not think of imitation (as one does, for instance, with the speeded-up motion and “free,” “lyrical” tracking shots of trees, etc., in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [1962]): Penn’s “Wave” liberties work on too deep a level and are too essentially inherent in the style and mood of an entirely coherent and consistently “felt” whole. It is legitimate, in view of this cross-fertilization, to place Bonnie and Clyde in a tradition of the gangster film (using the term very loosely) that includes not only Scarface (1932) and its forerunners, neighbors, and successors but also Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) (but not, for example, the 1940s Chandler/Hammett

56  robin wood cycle and its derivatives). Leaving aside all question of different kinds of gangsters (and whether the term “gangster” is in some cases applicable at all), one can see a far more essential link between these films: a link whose nature one can point to by adducing further a film such as Hawks’s 1952 Monkey Business (not a gangster film in any sense) and Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Cleopatra. We are brought face-to-face very quickly with the immorality of Bonnie and Clyde, which I shall not attempt to deny: immorality not from the point of view of repressive bigotry but of any sensible social morality. For all the blood and pain, for all that we see the protagonists meet peculiarly horrifying deaths and are shown quite unequivocally that “Crime does not pay,” the film is far more likely to encourage spectators to be like Bonnie and Clyde than to encourage them to be conforming, “responsible” citizens in society as it exists. The Bonnie and Clyde of Penn’s film (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway), however many banks they rob, however many men they kill, remain attractive and sympathetic characters: plainly, the most attractive and sympathetic in the film. Obviously, the intense identification that audiences feel with the characters is a major factor— the major factor—in the film’s immense box-office success: a success whose sociological implications become even more frightening when one sets it beside the comparative commercial failure of The Chase, a film equally violent but characterized by a very different (superficially, all but contradictory) moral attitude. We recognize that Bonnie and Clyde have to be shot down, just as we recognize that Prince Hal has to disown Falstaff and that Cleopatra must be defeated and trapped into suicide by Octavius Caesar. Yet Bonnie and Clyde, Falstaff, and Cleopatra dead continue to be more attractive and sympathetic than Texas Ranger Hamer, Hal, or Octavius living. Why? Because, even in death, they are more completely alive, and it is the insistence of life within them—of spontaneous, socially amoral, and subversive energies— that makes it necessary for them to be destroyed. That is why one can speak, in these cases, of the artists’ tragic sense. The essential link of which I spoke lies in the ambivalence toward the protagonists and their behavior, an ambivalence felt by the artist

Bonnie and Clyde 57

Bonnie and Clyde’s subversive energies make it necessary for them to be destroyed.

and communicated to the audience. Doubtless what I am saying is partly that Penn “romanticizes” Bonnie and Clyde, but I am saying it without the intent of condemnation that the term usually implies. The lives and characters of the real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow may have been, for all I know, entirely grubby and squalid. Penn uses them (as Hawks used, much less attractively, Al Capone/Tony Camonte and as Godard uses Michel Poiccard) as representatives of a spontaneous-intuitive aliveness that society even at its best can contain with difficulty or not at all: an aliveness that expresses itself in the overthrowing of restrictions, in asocial, amoral freedom and irresponsibility. We all respond to it, or if we don’t, we might as well be dead. Immediately, of course, qualifications have to be made to this account: it is, I think, a measure of the greatness of Bonnie and Clyde

58  robin wood that whatever statements one makes about it, qualifications immediately spring to mind, urging one to more precise and more complex definition. The term “romanticize” has come to carry overtones of the Women’s Mag. novelette, and the most cursory glance at Penn’s presentation of his gangsters will show how inapposite any such suggestions are here. Perhaps the word can be restored to something of its original dignity by relating it to the Romantic tradition itself, the movement that in English literature begins with Blake and has its last great explosion in D. H. Lawrence, and whose main source of vitality and impetus has consistently been the belief in the importance—even the sacredness—of the spontaneous-intuitive side of man’s nature. Bonnie and Clyde’s final images of the two white-clad bodies writhing in a progressively blood-soaked agony beside the white car, with their overwhelming sense of desecration, the overtones of man’s defilement of nature (machine guns glinting metallically amid foliage as flocks of disturbed birds flutter away), the feeling of ritual conveyed by the slow motion, are above all “Romantic” images, in the mainstream of the Romantic tradition. (They are also, such is the film’s complexity, ironic, the irony counterpointing and intensifying rather than destroying the “Romanticism.”) This “Romantic” tendency is not new in Penn: one recalls the credits of The Chase, with their industrial/ natural opposition, and the scene where Calder and Ruby, driving away from Val Rogers’s party (“What the hell were we doing there?”), see a wild horse bound across the road in front of the car, an image of natural freedom that relates to Calder’s desire to return to farming and immediately prompts him to say, “We’ll make it.” Comparison with Scarface is instructive. One can state one essential difference by saying that in Hawks’s film there is a greater distance between the spectator and the protagonist (not, I think, explainable in terms of the film having become dated—it is, in fact, still remarkably fresh and vigorous). We are introduced to Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) as an apelike shadow on a wall, and this image sets the tone for the whole presentation of him. The gangster’s irresponsibility and audacity certainly evoke a strong response—the violence is more

Bonnie and Clyde 59 consistently exhilarating than in Bonnie and Clyde because the exhilaration is given much less counterbalance in terms of our awareness of suffering—but total identification is impossible because we are consistently made to feel the gangsters as arrested or stunted human beings. Penn’s presentation of his gangsters is quite clearly not a matter of uncritical adulation—if “Romanticized,” they are never glamorized—but they are not diminished as Hawks’s are: we never feel superior to Bonnie and Clyde. Partly the distinction is stylistic: where Hawks keeps his characters for the most part in medium or long shot, Penn brings us physically so close to his that it is difficult to remain detached. When Bonnie beats on the cross-bar of the bed at the beginning of the film, the camera is as close as it can be in front of the bar and Bonnie’s face as close as possible to her fist: we are not allowed to look at her frustration objectively, from a distance, but at once her frustration becomes the epitome of all our frustrations. Hawks’s camera for the most part records: its objective movements are dictated by the desire for maximum clarity. The free, impulsive movements of Penn’s camera catch the spectator up very directly in the movement of the action—the emotional movement as well as the physical. There is also the simple historical point that Penn is able, with the relaxation of censorship, both official and unofficial, to present Bonnie and Clyde far more intimately than Hawks could risk in his depiction of Tony Camonte (the incestuous tendencies of Tony and his sister had to be presented in a way that would pass for a “beautiful relationship” with the simple- or conventional-minded). The other major difference between Scarface and Bonnie and Clyde might seem at first glance to pull the other way, against closer identification with Penn’s protagonists. The potential and ostensible (see the foreword of Hawks’s film) subject of Scarface, the outrages committed against society, is in fact scarcely treated by Hawks at all: “society,” for all the urban settings of restaurants, hospital, theater, is never felt as a major presence in the film, which is almost exclusively concerned with gang wars, treated by Hawks as kids’ games played with real bullets. Penn’s films, on the other hand, if one adds up all the details

60  robin wood and the incidental characters (who, as well as being vividly individualized with an extraordinary sureness, economy, and variety of touch, are representative figures), offer a satisfyingly inclusive depiction of a society, complex and nonschematized. To this portrait contribute the scene with the ejected farming family at the house closed by the bank; the background implied by the character of Blanche Barrow (Estelle Parsons); the escapist cinema of the “We’re in the Money” number, standing out brutally from the Depression background; the riverside camp of poverty-stricken outcasts; Bonnie’s mother and relatives; the grocer with the meat cleaver; Hamer, the Texas Ranger (Denver Pyle); Eugene and Velma (Gene Wilder, Evans Evans); C. W. Moss’s “Daddy” (Dub Taylor); the farmer in the held-up bank whose money Clyde doesn’t steal; the middle-aged waitress in the café just after Bonnie and Clyde’s first encounter and Bonnie’s own job as waitress; and the bank assistant who gets shot in the face and the cashier in the bank that has closed down. But we are far here from the social values implied in the sequence of Pat Garrett’s wedding in The Left Handed Gun: as in The Chase, we are left with the impression of a social “order” so corrupt as to be scarcely worth defending. In opposition to this, there is developed in the course of the film through the growth of the characters—particularly the women—a positive yearning and need for the stability that their lives so pathetically lack. It may be objected at this point that I am ignoring the film’s very acute “period” sense. I do so deliberately. Not because I don’t think it important: one could write an essay on Penn’s care in reconstructing the details and atmosphere of time and place in this and other films. But the specific is but one way of approaching the universal, necessary to many artists. Penn’s immersion in the realistic details of a particular epoch or locale clearly acts as a valuable release and stimulus for that freedom and spontaneity that characterizes all his work. Even Mickey One intermittently succeeds insofar as the physical particularities of the direction triumph over the abstract generalities of the script. What one should guard against in Bonnie and Clyde is the tendency to distance the film, to make it “safe,” by seeing it as a period piece: “That’s

Bonnie and Clyde 61

Bonnie and Clyde evoke a yearning that is timeless.

what things were like in certain areas of the United States in the ’30s.” The limitations of such a reaction are sufficiently demonstrated by the extreme spectator-involvement that the film provokes among audiences here and now. The photographs and song of the credit titles evoke a period and a specific reality very exactly, but they also evoke a yearning that is timeless, a permanent part of the human condition. Bonnie and Clyde are themselves the products of the environment they reject, their vision of life’s potentialities circumscribed by the values and attitudes of the society they outrage. The limitations of their backgrounds make it impossible for their rebellion to take any positive, constructive form—impossible, even, to deserve the name “rebellion,” which implies deliberate action and an awareness of the issues quite at odds with the casual and unreflecting drift into crime that Penn depicts with an effect at once comic, frightening, and exhilarating. The treatment is very complex: Penn is at pains to remove

62  robin wood any false glamour accruing to the characters, but even as he prevents them from becoming possible fantasy-fulfillment figures of any crude or obvious kind, he develops them as characters who evoke a strong positive response. The concept of the folk hero is important here: while examined in ways that would seem deliberately to undermine any tendency toward the creation of myth (with, indeed, the kind of ironic contrast between myth and reality pointed much as we would expect from the director of The Left Handed Gun), Bonnie and Clyde retain to the end the essential qualities of the heroes and heroines of folk ballads: they live from their spontaneous impulses, not from any codified morality or any reasoned or conscious attitude. The very title of the film encourages this view of Bonnie and Clyde; so, of course, does the banjo music used consistently to intensify the sense of spontaneity and exhilaration. The credit sequence provides an admirable starting point for the film, with its juxtaposition of actual photographs (a drab reality) and the song “Deep in the Arms of Love” (debased romantic dream). It implies at once the need to transcend or escape from commonplace reality and the lack of any spiritual or intellectual training for finding a valid alternative. The quite unglamorous commonness of Bonnie and Clyde is emphasized throughout the opening, from that first big closeup of lips to which lipstick is being heavily and crudely applied. Yet from the start one is made aware of an underlying aliveness, an innate sensitiveness of response, especially mutual response. Each immediately sees through the other’s pretensions—Bonnie knows that Clyde hasn’t the money to buy his dinner, let alone a car; Clyde can unerringly “place” Bonnie as a “waitress”—yet this in no way lessens the instinctive respect and affection that they feel for each other. They react intuitively to each other’s human reality—the shallowness of the pretensions doesn’t matter a bit. This whole opening sequence—indeed, like everything else in the film—is marvelously judged. The spectator is caught up, delighted, in the freedom of the characters’ behavior; at the same time, there is already implicit the sense that this delightful and infectious spontaneity, unhampered by any awareness beyond that

Bonnie and Clyde 63 of the moment, at once involves them in a course of action both destructive and self-destructive from which it will be difficult to retract. At first Penn involves us in the simple exhilaration, to which we surrender almost as unreflectingly as the characters: after the first robbery, undertaken with an entirely disarming casualness, the stolen car sets off in wildly uncontrolled zigzags to the joyous accompaniment of banjo music as Bonnie lavishes kisses and caresses on her newfound man. The process whereby we are made to confront and live through the full implications of the total irresponsibility we have so happily surrendered to is calculated with great exactness, though one scarcely thinks of calculation while watching a film that flows so freely. From the reckless gaiety of the first robbery, each act of violence is made to convey a slightly more intense charge of doubt, anxiety, and, finally, revulsion. The incident at the deserted farmhouse, where Clyde, the ejected farmer, and the Negro, Davis, take turns in shooting the bank notice and then the windows, begins by developing a feeling of exhilarating defiance of unjust authority and an unjust social order, and with it a sense of growing comradeship among the three men that makes nonsense of differences of upbringing or race (though even here the sense that it is the farmer’s own home that he is helping shoot to pieces gives a counterbalance of uneasiness: nothing in Penn is simple). But the farmer’s silent reaction to Clyde’s proud “We rob banks”—clearly not the response Clyde wanted—suddenly places Bonnie and Clyde in a different category. The effect is ambivalent, like so much in the film: we can feel the farmer as conforming, through cowardice or conventionality, to the social order that has ruined him; we can also see implicit Bonnie and Clyde’s whole future as outcasts not only from established society but from any kind of normal existence. There follows the attempted robbery of the bank that has closed down, which culminates in an almost identical action of shooting windows, but this time the cashier cowers in terror from a gun that might be turned on him: we feel a subtle modulation of mood from the previous incident. The next act of violence—Clyde stealing the groceries—culminates in the smashing of a man’s face (the grocer

64  robin wood who attacks Clyde with a meat cleaver), and for the first time we are confronted with the fact of physical suffering (wounds always look more painful in Penn’s films than in almost anyone else’s). The next robbery, of the bank, ends with the horrific shot of the bank assistant’s face blasted by Clyde’s gun point-blank through the car window. Throughout this carefully graded escalation of violence the sense of exhilaration and spontaneity is maintained, so that an extreme tension is set up in the spectator: a simultaneous involvement in and repudiation of the robbers’ actions. Certainly, we are too much “with” Bonnie and Clyde ever to extricate ourselves from complicity in their actions or participation in their inevitable punishment. The casual, unaware way in which they drift into a situation, which from the moment of the first killing is hopeless, is closely reflected in the way the spectator is trapped into this sense of complicity. Counterpointed with this development of the public aspect of Bonnie and Clyde’s careers—the actions that directly affect society—is the development of their private relationship; through the pattern of alternating development Penn suggests the interaction of the two. The stress laid on Clyde’s impotence is of course a further aspect of the deglamorizing process: it is not a characteristic common to many folk heroes. On the other hand, it greatly aids the corresponding humanizing process: Clyde’s sexual difficulties are but an extreme form of what a great many young men pass through in our society, and they enable Penn to comment ironically on another contemporary myth, that of complete sexual normality (in the psychological sense) being “normal” (in the other sense). The contrast between the intimate scenes we have witnessed and the image that Clyde (with Buck’s encouragement) presents to his brother (Gene Hackman) strikes sympathetic chords in more spectators than might be ready to admit it. It’s important that the audience is already sufficiently caught up in the exhilaration of total irresponsibility before the revelation of Clyde’s impotence to be carried through it without the risk of alienation: we never, I think, become tempted to regard Bonnie and Clyde as just a couple of psychotics; as well as having their own individual and complex life as fully realized

Bonnie and Clyde 65

Clyde with his brother Buck (Gene Hackman).

characters, they are an extension of impulses common to us all, their abnormalities an extension of abnormalities widespread in our civilization. They are, as Bonnie so poignantly tells Eugene and Velma in the car, “just folks, just like us.” A clear connection is established between Clyde’s impotence and his criminal tendencies. His gun is a phallus-substitute: as he lets Bonnie fondle it during their first meeting, holding it out to her surreptitiously, the matchstick in his mouth jerks excitedly up and down. Later, when they try to make love, after Bonnie has failed to rouse him, she is left pathetically caressing the revolver. The symbolism sounds crude in description but isn’t in execution: the treatment is too natural and unforced, and, in the earlier scene at least, too good-humored. Bonnie robs with Clyde as a substitute for intercourse: it is at least one exciting thing they can do together.

66  robin wood The essential beauty of Bonnie’s character—beneath the apparent shallowness, the tartishness, the impression given of previous promiscuity (her behavior toward Clyde in the early stages of their relationship suggests that she has had plenty of erotic experience)—emerges as her attachment to Clyde deepens. Her first reaction to his impotence is one of bitter indignation: she feels intensely humiliated when he repels her (overwhelming) advances. After the first killing, he gives her the chance to turn back while she still can, and she commits herself to him irrevocably by refusing: the mutual respect and tenderness revealed results in his attempt to make love to her, partly as an act of gratitude, partly because he wants to be able to. Her reaction to his failure shows a sensitivity that clearly marks the extent to which the relationship has released an emotional capacity in Bonnie of a depth previously unguessed at. One of the principles of the film is that as their personal relationship gets more valuable, their public situation becomes more hopeless, in fairly close ratio. Two linked episodes particularly emphasize both the “normality” of the gangsters and their irremediable isolation from any form of “normal” existence. The most striking is the reunion with Bonnie’s mother; the other is the incident that leads up to and indirectly precipitates it, the “kidnapping” of Eugene and Velma. The earlier scene is an admirable instance of the flexibility and complexity of Penn’s work at its best. Interpretative criticism has an inherent tendency to schematize, and it is precisely scenes such as this that can easily become coarsened in the process of analysis. What looks at first like a very funny caricaturing of respectability—to the advantage of the uninhibited gangsters—is in fact much more: a mutual interaction of the two sides that subtly modifies one’s attitude to both. Penn’s handling of the scene goes far beyond any facile point-making, flexibly exploring the complex potentialities of the situation. The key line is perhaps Bonnie’s “You’re just folks, just like us,” which has an immediate irony, coming from her: according to convention, it is Eugene and Velma who could claim to be “just folks”—at the mercy of brutalized gangsters. Yet the irony itself works complexly. It’s already established that

Bonnie and Clyde 67

Bonnie and Clyde attempt to make love.

the gangsters are (comparatively) natural and uninhibited, whereas Eugene and Velma seem slightly freakish: we are made suddenly to see conventionalized society as the more “abnormal.” As the scene progresses, exposure to the gangsters’ “naturalness” gradually relaxes the two, so that they do indeed become “just folks, like us”—positively human. Eugene loses most (not quite all) of his near-blubbery panic, discovering an unexpected camaraderie (his arm around Buck’s shoulder), until his laughter at being invited to join the Barrow gang shows that a part of him is almost tempted; Velma is betrayed by the relaxation into a moment of spontaneous honesty—she gives away her real age, before a somewhat appalled Eugene. On the other hand, as their “respectable” facade lapses, we are aware that the gang members are putting on something of a facade of their own. The previous scenes had shown tensions between them (especially Bonnie and

68  robin wood Blanche); for Eugene and Velma, their very naturalness has something about it of an act: they are getting it both ways, being the terrifying Barrow gang yet at the same time at pains to present an image of “just folks.” If the incident modifies, for a minute or two at least, Eugene and Velma, it has a more lasting effect on Bonnie. When she learns that Eugene is an undertaker, she promptly, in a moment of terrible premonition, has them turned out of the car. The next thing we know of her is her hysterical run (the next day) through the field of parched corncobs (a beautiful, disturbing image, drained of bright color, with cloud shadows sweeping irregularly across) and her sudden desire to see her mother. It is clear, I think, that this doesn’t result merely from Eugene’s being an undertaker, though that is felt as immediately precipitating it: Bonnie has made momentary contact with social stability, and Eugene and Velma, humanly inadequate as they are, have brought home to her, subconsciously, all that she has missed. The premonition of inescapable and perhaps imminent death intensifies the sense of loss. Hence, the scene with Bonnie’s mother is given the atmosphere of a dream, by the hazy photography, by the unobtrusive moment of slow motion as a child rolls down a bank. The setting is a waste ground, a no-man’s-land between society and outlawry, the only place where the two can momentarily touch. Bonnie’s mother and sister are not in the least sentimentalized. With the mother, indeed, Penn sketches in with his characteristically assured economy one of those old people who are among the typical products of a basically rural society overtaken by the values of the modern world: a woman of little awareness, bewildered by the world around her, with a confused sense of her own identity and the relations between things, her emotional capacity stifled, neither very loving nor very lovable. Yet he also gives her moments of merciless if limited clarity and insight that make her cruelly aware of Bonnie and Clyde’s precariously self-deluding fantasy of being able to settle down when they want to. Despite the total lack of idealization of Bonnie’s family and the social background they imply, Bonnie’s nostalgia is painfully real and

Bonnie and Clyde 69 meaningful to us. There is a beautiful unobtrusive moment where a small boy playfully beats Clyde with a leafy spray and a relative nervously makes to stop him: the man he is playing with is a notorious multikiller. Even Clyde has a slightly surprised look, as if caught for an instant between his public image and his private self. In the scene a mere casual “bit of business,” it poignantly suggests at once the humanness of the man and the hopelessness of his situation—again the characteristic ambivalence that makes Bonnie and Clyde so disturbing. We share Bonnie’s nostalgia, and yet the dreamlike atmosphere works directly on the spectator. Seen from the spontaneous “life” of the Barrow gang, it is society that seems unreal. Much of the poignance of the film’s later developments arises from the gradual discovery of incompatible needs within Bonnie and Clyde’s close, intuitive attachment. As Bonnie’s commitment to Clyde deepens, her need for stability develops; for Clyde, on the other hand, the public image of desperate bank robber and killer is a need at least equally strong. He can’t live without the assumed identity, even if the identity is false, leaving out of account (indeed, denying) everything that is most important in the human being, very much as Michel Poiccard ( Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Breathless needs the Bogart gangster persona whose adoption limits and ultimately destroys him. Is the overcoming of Clyde’s impotence too abrupt for psychological verisimilitude? It is a development that could perhaps have been prepared more thoroughly. Nonetheless, the complex of factors behind it makes it convincing in retrospect, however abrupt in presentation. For the first time since their meeting, Bonnie and Clyde have found, under the equivocal protection of C. W.’s ever-loving “Daddy,” something resembling the security of normal life. Previously, Clyde has tried to keep other people around as safeguards against the possibility of further intimacy between Bonnie and himself. During their first night together he slept outside; then C. W.’s snoring presence in the same room made it possible for him to share Bonnie’s bed (a poignant and desolate wordless scene with Bonnie lying awake in sexual frustration while Clyde, turned from her, pretends to sleep); then he

70  robin wood surrounds himself with Buck and Blanche, until Bonnie asks, “Don’t you want sometimes just to be alone with me?” (“I feel we’re always alone,” he responds evasively). Now, Buck is dead, Blanche is in a prison hospital, and C. W. (presumably) is kept occupied by “Daddy.” They have shared in a kind of communion of blood: isolated in the incommunicability of pain (hunched in opposite corners of the getaway car) but together in convalescence and united in the common involvement in bloodshed. But the vital factor, for Clyde, is clearly the decisive establishment of his public identity, through the publication of Bonnie’s poem. It is Clyde’s realization that the legend has—as the newspaper editor of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) has it—“become fact,” and through Bonnie’s poetic gifts, that enables him to make love to her: again, the motivation is partly gratitude but, more than this, a newly discovered confidence in himself, which the irony (the confidence rests on completely false foundations) makes the more touching. Penn’s tenderly ironic treatment of the whole scene is very touching, in fact, with Clyde delighted not so much by his own or Bonnie’s sensual gratification as by his discovery that he could do it. The shot of the sheets of newspaper blowing away has a characteristically complicated ambiguity: it conveys (supported again by the banjo music) abandonment, freedom, exhilaration; it also suggests a precariousness and fragility that carries multiple overtones, relating to the lovers’ relationship, their public identity, their situation. The same touching immaturity reappears in Clyde’s desire to marry Bonnie, to “make an honest woman of her,” now that their relationship has been consummated. Nowhere in Penn’s work is the contrast between legend and reality more poignant than in the discrepancy here between ferocious outlaw and hesitant, conventional adolescent. The image evoked of a future normal married life intensifies by contrast the sense of the hopelessness of the position. And when Bonnie yearningly asks Clyde what he’d do if they could begin all over again, his reply is that he’d live in one state and rob banks in others: he is incapable of abandoning his persona, on which his very

Bonnie and Clyde 71 potency depends. At the same time, the fact that he still needs such an outlet casts further doubt on the depth of his sexual awakening. Bonnie’s poem (reputedly the work of the real-life Bonnie Parker) is a fascinating example of doublethink, or Having It Both Ways. As she first reads it to Clyde, they are sitting in their (stolen) white car in the rain. The poem combines an image of the two as desperate and dangerous bandits with a contradictory image of them as essentially pure: “Honest and upright and clean”—an attempt to deny the irremovability of bloodstains. Hence the complex effect of the film’s ending, of which the sense of desecration is only one (though emotionally the dominant) aspect. The stolen white car and the donned white clothes symbolize an artificially assumed, and false, identity at the same time as they correspond to something that the spectator feels to be valid in Bonnie and Clyde. The image of the white bodies spattered with blood (and the slow motion, which as well as evoking a sense of ritual has the effect of hideously prolonging the agony) at last unifies the opposed images of Bonnie and Clyde and hence sums up the ambivalence of the entire film, an ambivalence that has its roots in Penn’s tragic sense of existence.

Alice’s Restaurant

“Everyone”—people say to me—“is making films about hippies now”: as if Arthur Penn were being merely fashionable, or trying to “keep up,” or trying to cash in on a popular interest. Which only goes to show how important it is to see an artist’s latest work in the context of his whole development. Living (and I mean rather more by the word than just existing) in the America of today, and with The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde behind him, it would be more surprising if Penn hadn’t made a film about the hippie movement: the logic is perfect and inevitable. Nor is it very surprising that, although plenty of people are going to see the film and Penn is assured of another commercial success and the consequent increase in the possibilities of working in the freedom he would like, explicit reactions have been somewhat lukewarm. This has little to do with the quality of the film and a lot to do with its nature—and with Penn’s critical intelligence. Alice’s Restaurant is unsensational, lacking the startling direct impact of Bonnie and Clyde: an essentially gentle film. People who don’t like hippies distrust it because it is so sympathetic to hippies; people who do like hippies distrust it because it exposes with the most rigorous clarity—the truest sort of clarity, born out of sympathetic insight, not distaste—the essential weaknesses and inadequacies of the hippie movement. Most “commercial” films about hippies tend to indulge the bourgeois prejudices of their audiences by exploiting the picturesque aspects of the movement, treating hippies as if they were some other animal. Penn gets inside, without ever being of, the dropout community presented in his film. One effect of the resulting complexity of

Alice’s Restaurant 73 attitude is to make us feel the characters as in essential ways very close to ourselves: we recognize that they are responding to problems of living that confront us all. There are, of course, hippies and hippies, in the cinema as in real life: Penn’s hippies in Alice’s Restaurant, Godard’s hippies in Weekend (1967). It is not, I think, primarily a question of true and false—of which director gives us the more realistic picture of hippies, though Penn’s are certainly closer to the professed attitudes of the mainstream hippie movement. In fact (making allowances for the stylized, fable-like nature of Godard’s film), both portrayals correspond convincingly enough to things one feels to be going on around one, as does Don Siegel’s again very different version of hippies in Coogan’s Bluff (1968). One is led to reflect that the word “hippie” itself has come to cover a great multitude of sins and virtues. The question is rather, why are these directors attracted to such different “faces” of what is really too diverse to be called a “movement” (though one doesn’t know what else to call it): Godard to militant, murderous hippies who can be readily assimilated into his postulated return to tribal savagery, Penn to a group whose outstanding characteristic is a commitment to passivity? The difference may seem superficially the more surprising in view of Penn’s fascination with violence: indeed, he has followed his most violent film with his least violent. The comparison is given added point by Godard’s well-known strictures on Bonnie and Clyde. These seem so irrational—so lacking in even the rudiments of critical objectivity—that one looks for some ulterior motive whereby to account for them. One hasn’t to look far. Godard has become single-mindedly committed to a belief in the necessity for revolution, and for the attempt to draw up a coherent ideological program. Bonnie and Clyde are hopeless, inadvertent revolutionaries: they become folk heroes through a conjunction of circumstances and never achieve any real awareness of themselves, of the roles they have come to play, or the relation between the two—they muddle through to their horrible and inevitable deaths. Socially, the film could be considered dangerous: it encourages revolt while totally

74  robin wood

Militant hippies in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967).

failing (or refusing) to associate revolt with any constructive ideology. Placing Penn’s film beside what one might call the “intention” level of Godard’s recent work, it could well seem merely irresponsible. Yet, while Godard’s work now seems consciously focused on the defining of an ideology, nothing very coherent or positive has so far emerged: what Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto discover most convincingly in Le Gai Savoir (1969) is, in their own words, “le néant,” and all that Godard seems able actually to commit himself to is the hopeful prospect of a return to zero. One respects the rigor of his radicalism: respects the uncompromising renunciation that the decision to make Le Gai Savoir represents (respects the decision, however, rather than the actual film). Yet such respect should not prevent one from taking stock of just what Godard has in fact renounced, as artist and human being (I mean of course the human being that is inseparable from the

Alice’s Restaurant 75 artist—the human personality the films express). The commitment to revolution involves commitment to the principle of the necessity for violence. Godard’s films explicitly accept that necessity and at the same time nullify it as a reality: they make violence stylized, painless, and often funny. There is no pain in Godard’s later films, just as there is no emotion. Human feeling, warm, outgoing sympathy, has always been very weak in Godard’s work, but lately it has been eradicated altogether—either deliberately, or it has just finally dried up. It becomes rather difficult to see, in human terms, what he conceives revolution as for, as human life seems no longer to have much meaning for him. Penn is at the furthest possible remove from such abstraction: he is the poet of flesh and blood. Bonnie and Clyde above all makes violence real, and makes pain real: it does all the things Godard can’t do if he is to make his revolutionary commitments acceptable (to himself, perhaps, as well as to his supposed audiences—whatever he now supposes his audiences to be). To put the point at its most crudely physical, it is one thing to make Weekend, another to imagine real bullets cutting into real flesh. Godard can’t afford to like Penn’s films. Further, Bonnie and Clyde, with its warmth and generosity toward human beings, is in overall effect tragic and pessimistic. Weekend is the work of a fanatical idealist who hates humanity so much as it is that he is forced into the terrible optimism of annihilating civilization and starting again. (I find it increasingly hard to distinguish Godard’s hatred of contemporary Western society from a hatred of humanity itself.) Finally, Bonnie and Clyde had an exceptional popular success that cut through all class distinctions between workers and bourgeoisie, all race distinctions between black and white. Godard desperately wants to make revolutionary films that will reach “the people,” the workers. If Le Gai Savoir—a film during which even seasoned intellectuals leave the cinema or fall asleep—is an example of how he intends to set about this (it was, after all, made for television), one can see why (all the other differences taken into account) he might bitterly resent Penn’s film and its success. The fundamental difference between Godard and Penn (respectively, the most abstract and the most concrete of major directors)

76  robin wood can be defined through one example: Penn’s use of Officer William Obanheim, the original “Officer Obie,” playing himself in Alice’s Restaurant. Godard can only allow himself to see the bourgeoisie as a set of two-dimensional caricatures or an abstraction; to Penn it remains an aggregate of individual human beings. That the character of Obie, one of the film’s chief representatives of “Establishment” respectability, should be presented so affectionately that the real man could be induced to undertake the role would doubtless seem from a Godardian standpoint evidence of sentimental weakness; to me, it is evidence of Penn’s refusal to abstract. Abstraction in some form and to some degree, with a consequent hardening of human responses, is the usual concomitant of revolutionary commitments such as Godard’s; it becomes that much harder to advocate bloody revolution if one sees its potential victims exemplified in the individual, and likable, human form of Officer Obie. In fact, if Godard is still capable of liking any film made within the traditional commercial framework (recent remarks suggest that he isn’t), that film might well be Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), which seems to offer the following propositions: violence is inherent and ineradicable in human nature (the scorpion-and-ant symbolism and the children delightedly watching), and therefore violence must be accepted; it is better if violence finds some positive (i.e., revolutionary) form of expression, putting itself at the service of some cause (while causes last). This account ignores some of the qualifying ironies of Peckinpah’s bitter film but doesn’t, I think, falsify its overall movement. What one admires (up to a point) is Peckinpah’s honesty in refusing to cheat by minimizing the effects of violence or by showing them only on characters whose destruction we can view with satisfaction. This is not the digression it may appear. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch are two outstanding landmarks in the American cinema’s emancipation from taboos on presenting extremes of violence visually, and one learns quite a lot about Penn in comparing them. The most obvious point of comparison (beyond the general one that both

Alice’s Restaurant 77

Officer Obie (William Obanhein) arresting Arlo (Arlo Guthrie) and Roger (Geoff Outlaw). Alice’s Restaurant (1969).

films show bandits achieving the status of revolutionaries despite themselves) is the directors’ use of slow motion, and it proves very revealing. (One had supposed here the direct influence of Penn’s film on Peckinpah’s, but this may not be the case: in conversation Penn suggested a common derivation from Seven Samurai [1954], and Peckinpah claims that he used slow motion in certain cut portions of Major Dundee in 1965, two years before Penn made Bonnie and Clyde.) The first rule about slow motion is that it confers a certain beauty on anything to which it is applied, however inherently horrible the image: in slow motion, even violent, clumsy, convulsive actions take on a degree of balletic grace. The effect of slow motion on the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde is very complex. For one thing, our feelings of tenderness and sympathy for the characters are very strong; though

78  robin wood we see far more than they see, we feel a close identification with them. Hence we experience the visceral impact of the bullets and the protracted, lingering feeling of the deaths with a painfully immediate empathy. Our physical-emotional reaction is intensified by the sense of desecration aroused by the blood-spattered white clothes. This is also, as Penn himself pointed out, the moment when Bonnie and Clyde finally pass out of reality into myth: the beauty conferred by the slow motion—beauty that intensifies rather than nullifies the horror of the scene—gives the deaths a ritualistic quality. But what is one to make of the far more widespread and apparently indiscriminate use of slow motion in the violent passages of The Wild Bunch? I find it very difficult to guess at Peckinpah’s intentions from the evidence of the film. He may have been trying to suggest the agonizing sense of time stretching out at moments of great stress, suspense, or pain (the sort of effect definitively achieved by Hitchcock in the overlapping forward tracks of the horse accident in his 1964 film Marnie). Something of this is present in the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, but it depends above all on our sense of identification with the victims, and we feel no identification whatever with most of the victims of violence in The Wild Bunch. And, because we watch the slow motion images there purely objectively, it is the aesthetic effect that quickly predominates—the great spurts of blood splashed across the screen in semisuspension take on a perverse abstract beauty curiously at odds with the apparent aim of presenting the effects of violence with uncompromising realism. One finds oneself asking at what point the acceptance of violence merges into a celebration of violence. And, although there is so much blood in Peckinpah’s film, there is surprisingly little sense of pain—the force of which observation will be plainer if one places The Wild Bunch beside Bonnie and Clyde (for example, the scenes depicting the death of Buck). Penn shows consistently in his films a hypersensitivity to pain, both physical and emotional, and the films encourage a corresponding sensitivity in the spectator; if The Wild Bunch sickens, it also to a considerable degree inures.

Alice’s Restaurant 79

The painful death of Buck. Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Penn is too fully and intensely human, both in body and in sensibility, to feel bloody revolution as anything but tragic. It is perfectly logical, then, that in making a film about dropouts from contemporary society, Penn should gravitate toward a nonviolent group whose password is “Peace,” who are groping toward new religious expression, and whose chief enemy is their own lack of certitude or definition (or ultimately, perhaps, quite simply the fact of death). Alice’s Restaurant seems to me a flawed film, but once one has recognized the flaw it ceases to be very important: being local, it is easy to set aside. The film originated in Arlo Guthrie’s recorded song-cum-monologue about garbage disposal and the draft. Besides its humor, and any efficacy it may have as protest (not great, I think:

80  robin wood it’s too essentially good-natured to arouse strong feeling), the record has its own peculiar charm that the film necessarily obliterates, as it depends on (a) the perpetually recurring guitar accompaniment and (b) the monologue’s construction, i.e., its existence as a self-contained entity. Guthrie’s narrative gives the deceptive impression of rambling inconsequentially, with its incessantly reiterated guitar tune, up to the point where he is asked at the draft interview, “Kid, have you ever been arrested?,” at which moment everything clicks neatly into place and, to point this, the accompaniment pauses for the first time in nearly fifteen minutes: it’s a magical moment, for which the film has no equivalent. What one regrets in fact is that the original Guthrie anecdote was retained in the film at all: the film must have outgrown it at quite an early stage. It is ironic that what provided the initial inspiration ends up as an intrusion, interrupting the flow of the film and distracting us from the characters and issues we are most concerned with. Penn recognizes the semi-independent nature of this section of the film, seeing it as an “interlude,” distinct from the rest in tone as well as narrative, but I think it is slightly more harmful than he allows: nearly twenty minutes of screen time is rather much for an “interlude,” and the difference in tone disrupts rather than counterpoints. The episode is often very funny, and some of its best jokes—the eventual disposal of the garbage in New York, the urine gag, the sergeant’s furtive disappearance behind the door marked “Secret”—are not in the original monologue as recorded. But the film suddenly descends to an altogether simpler level; its tensions and complexities vanish. The humor itself is much simpler than one is used to in Penn: even the funniest moments in Bonnie and Clyde are not free from qualifying emotional tensions. It is slightly disturbing to find Penn willing to present the “motherrapers, father-stabbers, father-rapers,” etc., on the “Group W Bench,” à la Guthrie as all nice fellows really, and with the low-angle shot of the sergeant pointing and bellowing, “Kid, we don’t like your kind,” the film descends to precisely the sort of comic cliché that the rec­ ord, with its quiet understatement, scrupulously avoids. The note of

Alice’s Restaurant 81 caricature that runs through the whole sequence is not only absent from the rest of the film but alien to it. Officer Obie himself changes: the caricature presented in the garbage disposal scenes is a simplification rather than a development of the touchingly bewildered figure, anxious to please yet uneasily aware of being out of his depth, who accepts Alice’s coffee during the decorating of the restaurant. To point out that the whole “monologue” sequence is accompanied by Arlo’s narration on the soundtrack and can therefore be understood as subjective rather than “realistic” in presentation helps a bit but not much: it explains the change of tone, but not its function in relation to the rest of the film. Further, I don’t think this “subjective” sequence, though we know it derives from the Arlo of real life, throws much light on the Arlo of the film. People who don’t know the record assure me that for them the disruption is less obvious, but I suspect that it may also be more insidious: it must be that much harder mentally to detach the “monologue” sequence from the main body of the film. For that is what I propose to do, for the remainder of this chapter: taking my cue from Penn himself, who agreed with me that, apart from one or two important details such as the presence of Shelly (Michael McClanathan) in the courthouse, the sequence could be detached and shown independently as a short (one would view it far more favorably as such). The excision made, Alice’s Restaurant seems to me a perfect work, one of its creator’s most assured and most personal successes. “Remember Alice?” Arlo asks, about a third of the way through the record. In the film we are in no danger of forgetting her (Pat Quinn): if we had to single out a central figure from its complex pattern of interweaving personalities, it would surely be her, with Ray ( James Broderick) a fairly close second, not because they occupy the most screen time but because they most engage the spectator’s emotions—they, and the triangular relationship of which the drug addict Shelly forms the third side. This aspect of the film offers one of the most moving embodiments of Penn’s view of human existence: a half-blind struggle

82  robin wood toward self-expression and contact in which creative and destructive impulses intertwine and merge indistinguishably. The scene in which Shelly and Alice make love offers, both in what it expresses and what it implies, a characteristically vivid and conveniently compact example of Penn’s ability to communicate the tangle of moral and psychological tensions that he sees as an inescapable condition of human action. He refuses to reduce the significance of the scene to any simple or clear-cut statement; as befits an artist in the great tradition of the American cinema, he is faithful first to the concrete realities of characters and context, rather than manipulating them to express ideas. Alice’s Restaurant, the second of Penn’s films to be made in complete freedom, suggests that he will never repeat the mistakes of Mickey One. As so often with Penn, a crucial factor in the scene—and made beautifully present for the spectator—is vivid physical sensation. When Alice comes to him, Shelly is cleaning a motorbike with an air blower, which he turns first on himself, then on Alice. The sexual symbolism is obvious but unstressed: it takes second place to the direct physical effect. One seems to feel the hot night, the cooling air; Alice’s thin, transparent garment is blown about her body, revealing its contours and its soft aliveness. But if one’s surface reaction is an empathic physical delight, this is troubled by various disturbing undercurrents. Ray is Alice’s husband and Shelly’s friend. Throughout the film one is aware of a tension between the freedom of the dropout community—freedom to obey natural impulses as they arise— and the characters’ need for stable, dependable relationships: a tension between incompatible “natural” needs that is fundamental to Penn’s view of things, implying as it does important yet irreconcilable drives not merely in this or that society but in the basic conditions of life itself. Ray is kept present in our minds during the scene: it is his motorbike that Shelly is cleaning, and he is cleaning it partly to make up to Ray for beating him in the rally. We remember Ray’s pique, intensified when Alice kissed Shelly (“Don’t you think he’s won enough for one race?”); the association of motorbikes with virility is again unstressed but continually felt. We sense the psychological confusions inherent

Alice’s Restaurant 83 in the three-sided relationship. Alice partly sees herself (and is accepted by others) as a mother figure: “Come to mama,” she says to Arlo and Roger when she secures their release from jail, and when she runs away from a situation whose tensions have become unbearable, she refers to herself as “the bitch with too many pups—couldn’t take them all milking me.” She is to Shelly both mother and mistress. Similarly, Ray acts as father figure to Shelly (and to the whole church community), but at the same time one senses latent homosexual feeling between them: it expresses itself most noticeably in their horseplay in the restaurant kitchen, where Ray, forcing overseasoned food on the younger man, ends up in a “sexual” position over him, and where one feels that Alice’s eruption is provoked by more than the hindrance to her work. Yet the lovemaking cannot be seen as only mutual self-indulgence with disturbing (and slightly perverse) overtones. Alice comes to Shelly partly because she is concerned about his drug addiction and wants to help him. He tells her—perhaps rather too emphatically— that he’s given it up and will never go back to it; Alice looks sceptical. The lovemaking develops out of this and, seen in this light, reveals further undertones: it is as if Alice were giving herself to him partly as a reward, partly to seal an unspoken contract. It is, up to a point, a positive and constructive action, fulfilling some of Shelly’s immediate needs. Yet it is also, in the long run, unwittingly cruel and irresponsible: the satisfaction is only transitory and partial, and what Shelly needs above all is stability. Alice seems simultaneously to hold out the possibility of this and to withhold it, and the resulting frustration helps precipitate his death. Such personal issues are given a wider significance by the context that partly determines their nature: the context of the aspirations, part valid, part suspect, embodied in the church and its fluctuating community of hippies. I know of no other film that expresses so touchingly the sense of needs left unfulfilled—undefined, even—by the collapse of established religious beliefs and values. This is a theme that runs through Penn’s work like a leitmotiv. It is there at the outset in The

84  robin wood Left Handed Gun: Billy’s inability to make contact with the concepts underlying the Easter burning of the straw man or with the tenets of the Bible. It becomes more explicit in Mickey One (“Is There Any Word from the Lord?”). It recurs again in Mrs. Henderson’s enthusiastic but utterly ineffectual prayers in The Chase. In Bonnie and Clyde it is never raised explicitly, but one is aware throughout of a lack of any directing or controlling sanctions that could give valid purpose to the characters’ lives. All of Penn’s work is concerned with impulses that could be called, in the wildest sense, religious—man’s blind reaching out toward what lies beyond him, his efforts to break out of the immediate “reality” that imprisons him—and with the failure of those impulses to find satisfaction. In Alice’s Restaurant this theme moves for the first time right to the center of the film and emerges explicitly as its dominant concern. Again, the treatment is anything but schematic: a complex pattern of interconnections emerges. On his way to visit his dying father in the hospital, Arlo passes a Revivalist meeting in a tent and pauses to watch the worked-up histrionics of the preacher, which culminate in a very suspect miracle. We feel that we are seeing the tail end of a once rich and fertile popular tradition. The congregation sings a hymn, “Amazing Grace,” a version of which Woody Guthrie used to sing: “Seems like Woody’s road might have run through here sometime,” Arlo comments. The tradition referred to here has two distinguishable branches: folk song and folk culture on the one hand (represented in the film by the dying Woody) and orthodox Christianity on the other (the church). Arlo moves repeatedly from Woody to the church community throughout the film and is ultimately failed by both as far as (in his own words) “finding out what my thing’s going to be” is concerned. The hospital scenes with Woody ( Joseph Boley) are moving by virtue of their intimations of past vitality, present vulnerability. An ageing Pete Seeger sings Woody’s songs at his bedside; Arlo arrives and joins in: “Let’s go riding in the car-car.” Woody, mind and senses atrophied by incurable nerve disease, smiles at his son for the first

Alice’s Restaurant 85 time—his one clear moment of recognition. It testifies to the vitality of the folk tradition to which Woody belonged, but it also leaves one questioning the degree of ultimate satisfaction and sense of meaning (in the face of death) that such a tradition can offer. The values of freedom and alive spontaneity associated with folk art contrast poignantly with the enclosed hospital room and Woody’s inertia. “Amazing Grace” recurs twice in the film: it is sung in the church by the hippie community during the Thanksgiving celebration, and it accompanies the end credits (played on the guitar). It is also referred to once verbally in a line that is one of the keys to the film. Arlo arrives at the church just as the Christian ministers have moved out and Ray and Alice are moving in. Ray declaims histrionically from the pulpit: “A place to be the way we want to be—at last.” Alice chimes in, “What more do we want?” “Amazing grace,” Arlo immediately answers her. But “amazing grace” never descends, though by the end of the film Arlo and his girl may be moving very tentatively toward it, and the hymn’s key line, “I once was lost but now am found,” becomes one of the film’s unobtrusive ironies. Ray fails because he looks for grace in the wrong places: outside himself, instead of within. At the outset of his experiment in living, he tells Arlo that if they’d had the church earlier “things would have been different” for Roger (Arlo’s friend, who has been getting pushed around by the police). Arlo agrees but looks unconvinced. At the end of the film, with Shelly dead of an overdose in a sordid flophouse, Ray talks of selling the church and buying land to farm. “We got to have room,” he says, then adds, echoing the earlier words about Roger, “I bet what happened to Shelly never would have happened” if they’d had their “couple of hundred acres up in Vermont.” He has learned nothing: he is still projecting his inner failure, his personal insufficiency, on to external circumstances. Arlo leaves, with his girl, by way of comment. But underlying Ray’s personal failure is the gap left by the failure of Christianity. The visual beauty of the scene of the church’s deconsecration—the evocation of a traditional sense of holiness—is at once

86  robin wood intensified and rendered poignant by the desolation, the feeling of things at an end (the congregation is composed almost entirely of old ladies; the use of long shot emphasizes the great empty spaces around them). The church changes hands—the orthodox ministers give way to seekers after a new “holiness.” But we gradually realize that they have nothing from which to construct a new religion but the rags and tatters of the old. The inadequacy of such materials comes across touchingly in the scenes of religious ritual—Thanksgiving, Shelly’s funeral, the final “wedding”—which have a wistful, tentative quality. The Thanksgiving celebrations—in which the ass, Arlo’s Thanksgiving present to Ray and Alice with its traditional Christian associations, is a striking visual presence—supply the film’s calmest and happiest moments and suggest the most positive aspects of the “hippie” aspirations: particularly the sense of a truly multiracial society forming and living harmoniously, a point that the film never has to obtrude because it is simply and beautifully there. At the same time, various factors introduce an element of uneasiness. There are the motorcycles that zoom into the church, nearly killing a baby, reminding us of the undercurrents of violence and aggression existing in any community but likely to be especially strong in one composed largely of dropouts and misfits (however dedicated to “Peace”). The communal singing of “Amazing Grace” is introduced with a montage of Stockbridge churches, suggesting the possibility of peaceful coexistence within established society through certain shared Christian values, but immediately afterward comes the garbage disposal sequence culminating in the arrest of Arlo and Roger—peaceful coexistence proves short-lived. Arlo accompanies the singing of “Amazing Grace” on the harmonium; near him, side by side, sit Karin (Kathleen Dabney), the girl with whom he has been having a brief liaison, and Mari-Chan (Tina Chen), the girl in whom he has just begun to show an interest. There is no sign of tension; the girls’ proximity suggests, very simply and unobtrusively, how well the moral freedom of the hippies can work, given essentially stable and balanced characters. In close juxtaposition with this, however, we see Ray and Alice making

Arlo and Mari-Chan (Tina Chen). Alice’s Restaurant.

88  robin wood for the belfry (their bedroom) while Shelly watches them with ambiguous jealousy, feeling himself rejected by both and excluded from their relationship. The temporary nature of the gathering is underlined by these suggestions of precariousness. There is also the pervasive threat of conscription, the recurrent reminders of Vietnam, that qualify every move toward stability in the film: the opening draft interview, the Negro Jake’s metal hook, the suggestion (during the Thanksgiving gathering itself ) of escape to Canada. The gift of the ass is a good example of the instability of the values on which the community is based. It is clearly meant to refer to the group’s aspirations to “holiness,” yet it is also a joke about holiness: the precise “tone” of the gift, so to speak, is uncertain. One is reminded of E. M. Forster’s comments on the Hindu celebrations in A Passage to India: “By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment.”4 But here the effect is of instability rather than all-inclusiveness. And the ass that looked on at Christ’s birth, and on which Christ rode into Jerusalem to be crucified, becomes an animal on which to flee the draft (“I was wondering how I was going to get my ass over the border”). The hippie funeral derives its poignance not only from the snowy setting but from the lack of any real unity: the mourners are scattered haphazardly over the cemetery, no one seems to know quite what to do, the little broken fragments of ritual—the few carnations and chrysanthemums strewn with the falling snow on the coffin, the girl singing—seem more pathetic than meaningful, and the centaur painted on the coffin, emblem of harmony between nature and human consciousness, contrasts with the unstable young motorcyclist more than it describes him. The song about “aging children” beautifully defines the characters of the film: they have recaptured something of the innocence of children but find themselves quite unfitted to cope with the questions of meaning and purpose posed by the facts of transience and death. All of these issues come to a head in the “wedding” of Ray and Alice, where the inadequacies of the hippie movement (as presented)

Alice’s Restaurant 89 to provide foundations on which to secure existences can be built combine with the personal inadequacies of Ray, each illuminating the other. In most respects Ray is a highly characteristic Penn protagonist (though he emerges as rather less sympathetic than his predecessors). He sees himself as a savior: when he takes over the church, his first action is to place himself against a wall in an attitude of crucifixion, a typically histrionic gesture (and typically accompanied by a self-conscious glance around to make sure his audience—Alice—is appreciating it) expressive of unacknowledged neurotic tensions. A desire for martyrdom, a desire for power: something of the real Ray is revealed in the scene where he finds Shelly’s drugs in the young man’s “mobile,” beats Shelly, strikes Alice, and, when Arlo tells him to “cool it,” answers him, “I’m in my church. Where are you?” It is true that Arlo is nowhere (we see no home and never think of him as having one); yet, equally, the possessiveness and presumption implicit in Ray’s remark (“my church”) strike us as half-pathetic, half-distasteful. Ray may have “his” church, but it is Arlo who is the more stable personality. Ray embarks on his idealistic venture, in fact, with a fatal lack of selfknowledge or insight into his own motives: essentially, he is another “blind man bettering blind men.” His histrionics conceal him from himself as well as from other people. He is afraid to develop a relationship to any depth of intimacy: he obsessively surrounds himself and Alice with crowds of people, ostensibly from altruistic motives, but really, one feels, to prevent his wife from getting too close to him. Similarly, he enters into a muddled and complex relationship with Shelly that he can’t see through to any fulfillment, at once arousing responses in the younger man and cheating them of satisfaction. It is appropriate that Ray’s “Flower Car” becomes Shelly’s hearse. The “wedding” is notable for the general uncertainty of tone: nobody knows how serious it’s meant to be, including Ray and Alice themselves. When Ray suggests it to Alice, he says it’s to be “a real wedding—not like our two-minute special in the courthouse. A real church wedding.” In fact, it succeeds in being that only insofar as it takes place in a church. The idea is beautiful: a wedding performed

90  robin wood among and by friends as a communal act, in an atmosphere of natural, unconstrained holiness and freedom. But as with all the other celebrations in the film, the realization falls short of the conception. The ceremony, with a local friend officiating as preacher, is an uneasy parody of the Christian service (“for bad or for better, for drunk or for sober,” etc.) that undermines the traditional sanctities without replacing them with anything new. (Again, comparison with the “inclusion of merriment” in Forster’s Hindu festivities is revealing.) In the ensuing celebrations, Ray sends up balloons, using them as a characteristically histrionic bit of symbolism for ascending to heaven, but heaven merges uneasily into the effects of marijuana (“We’re going to get higher and higher”). The party takes on something of the flavor of a Revivalist meeting, with Ray trying to lead a dance and improvise a chant (“It’s up there”), but the response is halfhearted. Meanwhile, Alice sits in a rocking chair largely ignored and forgotten, at moments trying to play along, at others looking tired and sceptical. Arlo and Mari-Chan prepare to depart; Ray tries to keep them, suddenly and inconsequentially revealing his idea of selling the church (which a few minutes before he was going to “reconsecrate”). The underlying sadness and desolation of the whole sequence are crystallized in the shot of the balloons slowly descending over the litter of food and decorations in the now half-deserted church, shown subjectively from Ray’s viewpoint as he glances in from the porch. With no stable tradition or set of values from which to draw sustenance, the characters of the film are thrown back on their own inner resources, their weaknesses and inadequacies mercilessly exposed. The fact of death becomes the crucial test and is applied particularly to the two young men in the film, Arlo and Shelly. For Arlo it is continually in the background in the form of his dying father and his hereditary nerve disease, which Arlo hadn’t got but may develop. Shelly’s preoccupation with death and his attempts to evade its challenge are suggested more obliquely. Soon after his arrival at the church, we see him looking at a memorial tablet embedded in the wall: “In Loving Memory. . . .” He hurls a ball at it, as if impotently

Alice’s Restaurant 91

Ray ( James Broderick) at the wedding.

trying to smash it and what it stands for. It stands in fact for two things: the sense of stable family relationships as well as a memento mori. Another memorial similarly disturbs him later, in the courthouse. Shelly dies because life—both his inner life and the life around him—offers him no stability: he can draw no real strength from his messy and uncomfortable relationships with Ray and Alice and falls back on drugs, both as an escape from the constant awareness of death and a means to the terrible release of death itself. Arlo, on the other hand, moves toward a more courageous and explicit awareness and a more active choice. He tells Mari-Chan that death “sort of sets you adrift—makes you feel your life is going by. All of a sudden I feel in a hurry to find out what my thing’s going to be. Who. And where.” The sequence in which these lines occur comes shortly after the death of Woody, and

92  robin wood Mrs. Guthrie’s words that there will be no funeral—they will take the ashes out to Coney Island and scatter them. The scene opens with a close shot of a flaming, red-hot furnace: we assume we are at Woody’s cremation. But it proves to be the furnace of the pottery in which Mari-Chan is firing her pots. Thus, the fact of death is juxtaposed with—even superseded by—the idea of creation. Arlo reveals throughout the film a delicate instinctive moral sense in his spontaneous yet discriminating responses to the various women who approach him: Renée (the girl with a cold in her nose), Ruth (the middle-aged club owner who talks with a sort of nostalgic disillusionment about “movements”), Karin, and Alice. His choice of Mari-Chan (it is the first time we see him taking the initiative in a relationship) emerges out of these progressive discardings. Mari-Chan herself remains something of a cipher, but she is the only character in the film (apart from Arlo himself, with his music) whom we see engaged in genuine creative activity—Shelly’s mobiles represent attempts at artistic expression whose inadequacy he is half aware of and a hiding place for his drugs, the association of the two suggesting the confusion of impulses within him. Arlo’s relationship with Mari-Chan is only very tentatively and delicately sketched but is sufficient to convey, if no solution to the film’s omnipresent and disturbing questions, at least a healthily positive orientation. And their final withdrawal from the church—despite Ray’s entreaties—has positive force as comment on Ray and evidence of determination to search further. But the film ends with Alice, and she is the character with whom the spectator’s emotions are most intensely involved. Whatever her relationship to the real Alice Brock, she emerges in the film, through Pat Quinn’s remarkable performance, as one of Penn’s most fully realized and complex characters, presented with his characteristic combination of sympathetic insight and rigorous clear-sightedness. That extraordinary last shot of the film inevitably evokes comparison with the last shot of Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1969). The resemblance is purely coincidental, as neither director had seen the other’s film at the time of shooting. Both shots are similar (and similarly complex)

Alice’s Restaurant 93 in technique, combining a simultaneous tracking-out and zooming-in with a lateral movement of the camera; both show a woman left behind. Their function, however, is quite distinct. Chabrol’s shot, while not strictly subjective in physical viewpoint, is subjective in effect, expressing the husband’s spiritual movement toward his wife as the policemen lead him away from her. There is no subjective effect in Penn’s: Arlo and Mari-Chan have gone, and we have the feeling that their gaze is directed toward the future, not to what has been left behind. Instead, it is we who contemplate Alice at such length, during a darkening of the sky that intensifies the scene’s unrest and was apparently one of those happy natural accidents that Penn knows how to employ, like the cloud shadows sweeping over the maize field in Bonnie and Clyde. And what we see in Alice, surely, is a reflection of ourselves, of our own confusions and doubts in a world of shifting or disintegrating values. I don’t think that Alice’s Restaurant is, as a friend suggested, the first genuine “folk” film. Much of the material may have been provided by those actually involved in folk culture (or its present-day extension, the hippie movement), but the film as a whole is decisively dominated by Penn’s personality and outlook, its themes are developments of the themes of his earlier films, and the characters and the way they are treated are in direct line of descent from their predecessors. And that outlook has only very limited affinities with folk art and the hippie movement, although it is intensely sympathetic to both. Penn’s love of the spontaneous and impulsive—of the whole side of us that is rooted in our physical-instinctual being—is balanced by a movement toward full awareness and conscious evaluation that sets him apart from his characters (though he never for a moment condescends to them). Folk art, the hippie community, and Arlo Guthrie are the material of Alice’s Restaurant; it is (with the exception of the section derived from the recorded monologue) very much Arthur Penn’s film.

Shooting Little Big Man

Arthur Penn’s seventh film, due for release in the winter of 1970, is Little Big Man, from a novel by Thomas Berger.5 The screenplay is by Calder Willingham, the cameraman is Harry Stradling Jr., and the stars are Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Richard Boone, and Martin Balsam. The film is in Panavision, a big production financed by CBS, and will probably run for about two hours, forty minutes— Penn’s longest and most expensive film to date.6 Shooting was completed in the winter of 1969, and at the time of writing, Penn and the indispensable Dede Allen are “extracting” the film from “the basic raw material” (his own description of the editing process).7 Berger’s novel is about a white boy called Jack Crabb (Hoffman) brought up for five years by the Cheyennes (with whom he earns the name Little Big Man), then shuttled by circumstances back and forth between the Cheyennes and the whites. Crabb, who claims to be the only white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn, tells the story himself in rambling reminiscence, at the age of 111 (in the film this is updated to 121). His narrative forms a picaresque, freely episodic novel of over four hundred pages, characterized by a brutal and ironic humor, encompassing most of the half-historic, half-legendary figures of the West—Custer, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill—as well as numerous fictitious characters, both Indian and white. In the course of the narrative, Crabb acquires two wives, one white (a Swedish girl called Olga), one Cheyenne (Sunshine). The book’s most interesting achievement is, through Crabb’s alternation between the white and Indian worlds, the development

Shooting Little Big Man 95 within a single consciousness of a dual outlook—white world seen through Indian eyes, Indian through white. This may be difficult to realize in cinematic terms, perhaps, though both Penn and his producer, Stuart Millar, hope that something of it will emerge. Calder Willingham’s script seems admirable qua screenplay: spare and skeletal, providing a firm structure and strong dialogue but with no pretensions to self-sufficiency, leaving the essential creation of each scene to the director. It is a remarkable feat of compression and reorganization. Of the semihistoric figures, all but Custer and Hickok have been eliminated; elsewhere, while the alternating rhythm of the narrative has been retained, its structure has been tightened by the telescoping of certain characters so that in the film an earlier character recurs, whereas in the novel an entirely new one appears. For example, in place of Crabb’s niece Amelia, whom he rescues from a brothel in the last third of the novel, the film brings back Mrs. Pendrake (Dunaway), Crabb’s white “mother” by adoption who very quickly reveals erotic designs on him. This substitution, which apparently has Berger’s enthusiastic assent, provides a very logical development for the Mrs. Pendrake of the earlier scenes. Faye Dunaway’s part nonetheless remains relatively small: it is Little Big Man’s film, and Hoffman appears in every scene. Another change, while less immediately striking, seems even more important. In Berger’s novel, Little Big Man remains to the end an essentially passive figure: even when he is jolted into deliberate activity, as he is by the abduction of his Swedish wife by Indians, he fails to sustain his purpose. In the script, he gradually develops a strong emotional commitment to the Indian cause and by the end is a far more conscious and positive figure than he ever becomes in the book, although, this being a Penn film, he affects the outcome of events only in a confused and ironic way. The change first becomes noticeable in the protagonist’s attitude to buffalo hunting: in the book he joins in the slaughter of buffalo for hides quite without conscience; in the script he is invited and refuses, acknowledging the dependence of the Indians on the buffalo herds for meat. The script builds to a passionate

96  robin wood protest at what was done to the Indians. One might criticize this for making explicit what in the novel is expressed very obliquely, through irony. Yet I think it will emerge logically from the film. Where the script can be faulted is in the partial softening of the Cheyenne character, though more by omission than by actual distortion. It is greatly to Berger’s credit that he gains our sympathy for the Indians without sparing us any of the aspects of their behavior that are likely to appall the white sensibility: after battles, for example, the Cheyenne women—gentle and tender wives and mothers, perhaps, in their daily lives—go out with knives to mutilate the bodies of the dead soldiers. Such details have scant representation in the script. A “romantic” idealization of the Indians is a perfectly logical corollary of the social attitudes of The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde, but the validity of any idealization is weakened by a reluctance to face the harsher and more disquieting realities of whatever is being idealized. The film has been shot in Hollywood and on location in Montana and Alberta. At Penn’s invitation, I spent four days at Calgary, watching the shooting. The location was forty miles from Calgary at the foot of the first foothills of the Rockies, where about fifty tepees had been erected within the bend of a river. The team had come to film scenes of life in an Indian village, culminating in the massacre at the Washita River when Custer slaughtered an entire Cheyenne community—men, women, children, and even the ponies. But Penn had come to Canada for snow, and when I arrived there was no sign of it: green grass, bright sunshine, sparkling water, the Rockies clearly visible in the distance, and everyone anxiously glancing around for signs of heavy cloud. So Penn was shooting one of the last scenes of the film, where Old Lodge Skins, Jack Crabb’s Cheyenne “father,” played by a seventy-year-old Indian chief (Chief Dan George) prepares to die. He emerges, blind and aged, from the tepee and asks Jack, who is lame from wounds received at the Little Big Horn, to lead him up the mountain. He feels that not only his own life but the way of life of his people, the “Human Beings” (the Cheyennes’ name for themselves), and even the race itself are nearing their ends. “Oh, it will

Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) and Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George).

98  robin wood take them time, but the whites will rub out the Human Beings, my son. . . . This was a perfect place until the white men came. Buffalo and game were everywhere. The grass was green, the water sweet, and the sky blue.” It was the ideal introduction to the film, a moment of extraordinary Pirandellian intensity, the lines spoken by the old Indian, acting blind, against a background of grass as green as one could wish and under a sky as blue, to cameras trained on him by white Americans under a white American’s direction. Snow fell dutifully all that night, and next morning the location was transformed. All bright colors had disappeared. Under a thick gray sky from which snow continued to fall heavily, the river flowed darkly through a white world against which stood the dun tepees capped with snow and black firs. Dean Tavoularis, art director on Little Big Man (and previously on Bonnie and Clyde) told me: “Indian things can look very circusy and kind of Halloweenish. We tried to mute all the colors down and marry them to the ground.” I watched Penn shoot several tracking and panoramic shots through the village, with quite complex interweaving actions—Indians engaged in various activities— in foreground, middle distance, and long shot. One panning shot, for example, has young Indians fishing in the river in distant long shot; an Indian on a horse starts up the bank, winds through the village in medium long shot, moving out of and later back into the image; smoke issues from the vents of tepees; children play and chase each other in the snow; a horse drags a load of firewood on wooden runners; the camera picks up the horseman again as he rides off to the right. The extras (all North American Indians) are wrapped in blankets colored with what look like natural dyes: dull maroon, dirty pink, steely blue—the only colors other than grays, blacks, and browns. The subdued coloring and the sense of constant movement in the environment—the carefully organized details of Indian life—should give the snow scenes a restrained visual poetry. Arthur Penn is as far removed as possible from the stereotyped image of the movie director: the loud-mouthed dictator glued immovably to the director’s chair and bellowing orders through a

Shooting Little Big Man 99 megaphone. It would probably take an unprepared onlooker some time to decide, on the set of Little Big Man, who was the director. But although he is so quiet and unobtrusive (I heard him raise his voice perhaps twice or three times in four days, to call for silence), one soon realizes that Penn is omnipresent. There were times when he would be standing beside me, then, when I turned, he had disappeared, and I would at last make him out again in some distant part of the set rearranging a detail with a technician or an actor. Penn doesn’t dominate; he pervades: discussing and rehearsing with the actors; checking the image through the viewfinder; rearranging details of makeup, dress, and props; and discussing with his assistant director points of background movement involving untrained extras, not above lending a hand to help move a tepee a few feet. Above all, one sees him listening and comes more fully to appreciate the collaborative nature of his art. He will listen to suggestions from anyone but especially from his actors. Yet equally one senses that the real decisions are always Penn’s, that he makes the suggestions of others his own by adopting them and assimilating them into his own sense of how the shot in question should go. Penn gets such marvelously alive performances from his actors because he respects them. There is likely to be a close relationship between a director’s treatment of his actors and his attitude to the characters the actors are creating. Thus Josef von Sternberg’s vaunted total control over his players’ every gesture and expression is closely related to the sense of fatality in his films. The quality of Penn’s characters, even very minor ones (there are about ten good examples in Alice’s Restaurant alone), as people living and responding spontaneously, links with his love of spontaneous contributions from his actors, his fondness for encouraging the unrehearsed response. Dean Tavoularis had come to Little Big Man straight from Zabriskie Point (1970). Understandably, as an art director he had found working for Antonioni more fulfilling: he was given much more to do. But he spoke of Penn with great respect and expressed the essential difference between the two directors’ approaches rather well: “Arthur is very intent on getting

100  robin wood that moment of truth between two actors going through a scene. It is very interesting to watch him work, as he goes over and over the scene until it happens.” For Antonioni, on the other hand, the art director is probably a more important collaborator than the actors: he “treats his actors as part of the visual whole—there is none of the search that Arthur goes through to get this thing going between actors.” Penn likes working with intelligent actors who want to contribute actively to the film, and they like working with him. He spoke of Marlon Brando, for instance, with the greatest warmth and enthusiasm. Brando has a reputation for being “difficult” with directors, but clearly there was no difficulty during the filming of The Chase (with one rather extraordinary exception: Brando didn’t want Calder to beat the killer of Bubber Reeves—the moment to which the whole film moves). But actors such as Brando and Dustin Hoffman are more intelligent and sensitive, have greater artistic integrity, than some of the directors they work for. If Hoffman protested, during the filming of The Graduate (1967), that Mike Nichols was sacrificing motivation and human reality for the sake of “cute” and shallow effects, can anyone deny that Nichols’s victory in the finished film proves the protest fully justified? In Little Big Man, Penn is working within the classical Hollywood tradition from a script not his own: an admirable opportunity to observe the contribution that a director can make during shooting. I watched Penn work on the scene in which Little Big Man’s Indian wife Sunshine (Amy Eccles) introduces her three sisters, all widowed by the whites, with a view to getting her husband to accept them as extra wives. In the script, the scene runs as follows: EXTERIOR—JACK’S TEPEE—SUNSHINE AND JACK—DAY SUNSHINE (feels of her swollen belly): Your new son is kicking very hard today. I think he wants to come out and see his father. JACK: Tell him to wait till I finish my dinner. SUNSHINE: I’ll tell him, but I don’t think he’ll wait much longer. (speaks to baby, gravely) Stay in there, don’t come out till your father

Shooting Little Big Man 101 eats. (a bit slyly) It’s a good thing I have a strong brave husband who brings in so much game and food. JACK (happily): Mmmm-hmmm . . .  SUNSHINE: My strong husband brings in much more than we need. JACK (sleepily): Ummm-mmm, be quiet, woman. I’m meditating. SUNSHINE (silent for a moment, but obviously has something important to say): There are many Human Beings here, many bands from many places. But it’s sad . . . many husbands have been rubbed out by the white man. JACK (with mild annoyance): The rattle of your tongue disturbs me, woman. SUNSHINE: It’s sad because many women sleep alone and cry. JACK (not really unkind, calm and matter-of-fact): Be silent now, or I’ll beat you. SUNSHINE (pauses): Yes, but I think my sisters are here. JACK (opens his eyes): Your what? SUNSHINE (meekly): My sisters. Digging Bear, Little Elk, and Corn Woman. I think they are here. JACK: What do you mean, you think they are here?! SUNSHINE (very meekly): I believe they are. You bring much more food than we need. (Jack stares in consternation and Sunshine bows her head, sniffling) It is very sad. They have no husband, and they cry. JACK: That’s too bad! . . . I’m sorry. SUNSHINE: Digging Bear had a baby and lost it, and so did Corn Woman. Poor Little Elk never had any baby at all. JACK: All right, what do you want me to do about it? SUNSHINE (smiles): I knew you would understand. There is no breakdown of this dialogue into close-ups, two-shots, etc., no indication of camera positions or angles. Penn shot it intact a large number of times using about four different setups (and different lenses) so that the scene was covered in medium two-shot from different angles, in close-up of Hoffman, and in close-up on Amy Eccles

102  robin wood (the Chinese girl who plays Sunshine). Altogether, the actors played through the scene at least a dozen times, not counting rehearsals. This shooting method—not uncommon in essentials but carried to extremes by Penn—has advantages from various viewpoints. It enables the actors to develop their own performances, discovering new possibilities of expression and embellishment; when new or inexperienced players are involved (there are many in Little Big Man), repetition before the cameras is much the best way to help them gain the confidence necessary to build their characterizations. There is the accompanying danger of boredom for the experienced performer, but as Penn suggested to me, even boredom can at times goad actors into sudden, new, spontaneous impulses. The length of the take enables the players to feel the continuity of the scene, without having their performances fragmented more than necessary into predetermined close-ups, medium shots, etc. For Penn and Dede Allen, when they edit the film, the method provides an enormous range of choice: even failed takes may provide expressive fragments that can be used. One begins to appreciate how the richness and concentrated density of effect in so many scenes in Penn’s films are achieved. This whole shooting and editing method relates very interestingly to Penn’s themes and attitudes, the view of life that his films express. The behavior of his protagonists is always instinctive and empirical, at worst a blind muddling through, at best (Annie Sullivan) a creative groping after expression and control. They are always too involved in the struggle of existence to dominate and order it externally; instead, they pursue their inner drives toward what they want, hardly knowing in advance what it is. The chief difference between their efforts and Penn’s is that his are usually successful. Only minimal alterations were made to Calder Willingham’s dialogue as the scene between Jack and Sunshine evolved: for example, Hoffman, repeating the sisters’ names in comic incredulity. The only major change to the script was Penn’s decision to shoot the scene in the snow. There was much discussion on the location about the probability of Indians cooking and eating outside the tepee with snow actually falling. I think that the license, if it is one, will be justified by the

Jack Crabb with the Cheyennes.

104  robin wood results: it will intensify the sense of Jack’s Indianness at this stage in his life, his adaption to a hard and stoical existence. The scene’s surface comedy will be counterpointed by the setting of desolate snowy wastes. Penn introduced some background detail into the scene—a depleted Indian family gathering at their cooking fire in long shot, stoic old man and children—that should heighten this effect. In the course of shooting, small touches began to accumulate of the kind that, apparently insignificant individually, lend a scene character and particularity. Instead of having Sunshine merely prepare dinner, Penn had her serve it and Jack eat it: “Be quiet, woman, I’m meditating” became the more prosaic and practical “Be quiet, woman, I’m digesting.” Characteristically, Penn had rejected authentic Indian spoons in favor of the more directly physical effect of fingers dipped in hot gravy. As take followed take, the “buffalo stew” became hotter and hotter over the fire; at last Hoffman resorted to the expedient of dropping lumps of snow into his food to cool it. Finally, Penn had Amy Eccles scrape the leftover scraps back into the cooking pot with her fingers. And so the scene began to take on a highly characteristic physical immediacy together with its complex tone of humor and uneasy melancholy. Yet Penn feels very intensely the limitations of working within the classic Hollywood tradition, even to the point where he denies the possibility of him making Little Big Man a truly personal film. Watching the shooting at Calgary makes it easy for me to understand his position without necessarily agreeing with it. The point is the more worth making in that, in this instance, there is no question of the usual tensions—domination by the producer, studio interference— one thinks of as jeopardizing the work of Hollywood directors. The producer, Stuart Millar, a man of charm and intelligence, is a personal friend of Penn’s and obviously trusts him absolutely. Millar, who has been personally involved in the project from a very early stage, visits the set daily, taking the keenest interest in the shooting, metaphorically (and unobtrusively) patting people on the back, but never interfering. Two things chiefly worry Penn—in conversation he reverts to them repeatedly: the great weight of machinery, both literal and

Shooting Little Big Man 105 metaphorical, involved in a big production, and—curious as it may at first seem—the sheer professionalism of the technicians, experts who have their own highly developed but orthodox and “anonymous” ways of doing things and resent being asked to do them differently. Anything personal and unorthodox that Penn wished to do would have to be enforced against a great deal of opposition, perhaps one part spoken to four parts silent. One realizes why only a certain kind of sensibility can flourish in the traditional Hollywood setup: a sensibility, first, that can express itself adequately in traditional forms and by traditional means (the sort of professionalism that Penn finds an obstruction obviously suits Hawks, for example, perfectly) and, second, that is itself insulated within a certain professional toughness. I wouldn’t dream of describing Ford, Hitchcock, and Hawks as insensitive, but neither would I use the word “sensitivity” of them in quite the way I would use it of Penn. For a man of his sensitivity, it is the intangibles that really count: the sense of being surrounded by a great pressure of wills not necessarily hostile but with a purely professional rather than creative interest in their work. I asked Harry Stradling how he liked working for Penn. He said he liked it fine—Penn doesn’t ask for many tracking shots. Stradling is one of Hollywood’s great professional cameramen—Penn himself spoke of him with respect—but for him, and for the rest of the crew of more than 150, Little Big Man is clearly just another job, to be executed with the greatest possible efficiency and the minimum of personal engagement. The film will not, then, emerge as the direct personal statement that Penn would like to be making. Yet it seems to me that it may well be a more personal work than he realizes, involved as he is in executing another man’s script and frustrated by the sense of the limitations and obstacles in the way of direct personal expression. When one considers the various stages in the creation of the film, Penn is seen to be the one constant factor. Choice of subject: Berger’s novel may not have been an entirely free choice in the way in which the subjects of Mickey One and Alice’s Restaurant were, but neither was it in any sense imposed on Penn, and he has long been interested in the project of

106  robin wood making a film about the Indians and their fate. Beyond this, the novel’s central figure reveals certain clear affinities with Penn’s protagonists. Near the end of the book Jack says to Old Lodge Skins (the lines are not used in the screenplay): “Grandfather, few people have your great wisdom. The rest of us are often caught in situations where all we can do is survive, let alone understand them. So with me, Little Big Man.” If Billy Bonney had been more articulate, he could have said the same to Mr. Tunstall, and (with a similar proviso) the words might have been echoed by Mickey, by Bubber Reeves, by Bonnie and Clyde, by Alice, Ray, and Shelly. Preparation of the script: Penn made it clear that the screenplay is Calder Willingham’s own—he contributed less of the dialogue than usual in his films. Yet the script grew out of consultations between Willingham and Penn over a period of years. Shooting: Penn, whatever restrictions on his freedom he may feel, demonstrated to me very convincingly that his influence is all-pervading. Editing: Penn is resuming his “frequently heated, but always loving” dialogue with Dede Allen. There is more than one kind of auteur film. The rushes of Little Big Man looked very promising and often very Penn-like in their aliveness; some of the long takes were so beautiful that I found myself regretting that they would probably be fragmented in the editing, until I began to sense, as take followed take on the screen, the impact, richness, and complexity that selection and cutting would give. The seemingly simple choice between alternative takes from an identical setup must often present great problems. I saw the rushes of a scene where Jack and his Swedish wife Olga (another promising newcomer, Kelly Jean Peters) watch the contents of their home being sold by public auction, Olga crying hysterically. In one early take, and only one, the wind blew Olga’s hair across her face, giving her a more vulnerable look; in other respects the take was inferior to later ones. What considerations guide a director’s choice? I was struck even more by the possibilities that editing offers for controlling and changing the emotional emphasis of a given scene, for increasing or diminishing its complexity. In medium shot, Olga seemed predominantly a comic creation, her hysterics verging on caricature;

Shooting Little Big Man 107 in close-up, huddled against Jack’s chest, though there was no detectable change in the actual performance, she seemed genuinely pathetic and lost. On the strength of what I saw, I look forward to Little Big Man with high expectations. If the film has a deficiency, I think it may be in the realization of the Indian characters. If so, it will be a case of an honorable near-miss rather than a disaster. Great care has been taken over the details of Indian life: Penn seemed to me to be catching beautifully all its exterior features, its physicality, its hardness, and to be successfully avoiding the merely picturesque. It was pleasing to discover that certain characters and details from the novel that necessarily seem odd or alien have been retained, notably the “Contrary,” Younger Bear, a Cheyenne who has elected to do everything backwards except fighting. I saw the rushes of a scene where, going to bathe, he “washes” himself in dust then “dries” himself in the river. Some of the older Indian extras were able to remember “Contraries” from their childhood. There is also the heemaneh, or homosexual Indian, Little Horse, who dresses as a woman and is accorded an honorable place in Cheyenne society. In most Hollywood adaptations, these would have been the first characters to be eliminated. Then again, careful thought has been given to casting the Indian parts: Old Lodge Skins, his wife, Little Horse, two of Sunshine’s sisters, are all played by real Indians. Where it proved impossible to find an Indian suitable for a part, Penn and Millar took a hint from the end of Berger’s novel, where the aged Little Big Man, in an old folks’ home, complains of television Westerns in which Indians are played by Italians or Russians, and adds: “If the show people are fresh out of real Indians, they should hire Orientals to play them parts; for there is a mighty resemblance between them two, being ancient cousins. Look at them without bias and you’ll see what I mean.” Yet for an artist, care and thought are no substitute for intuitive insight: however much research he does, however much detail he works out, there is still the problem of “realizing” characters who are the products of a culture not his own, who think and feel with subtle differences. Necessarily, the Cheyenne characters speak English,

108  robin wood but for a director as physical as Penn, the way a character speaks is inseparable from the way he moves, the gestures he makes, from all that sense of inner life that Penn’s characters communicate. The problem begins as a verbal one and quickly becomes much more. I watched the rushes of a scene near the end of the film where Younger Bear (a spirited and intense Latin American actor called Cal Bellini), whose life Jack once saved, tells Jack, after rescuing him from the Little Big Horn massacre, that they are even at last, and next time they meet, “I can kill you without becoming an evil person.” There were many takes, and the divergence between them was noticeably greater than in any of the other rushes I saw, as if Penn and Bellini were trying out every possible delivery of the lines in a somewhat desperate attempt to find the right one. We can be confident that Penn won’t give us stereotyped Hollywood “redskins”; it remains to be seen whether his Indian characters will achieve quite the living particularly we have come to expect in his films.

Problems of Editing

The Elizabethan-Jacobean drama presents innumerable problems of authorship, ranging from the minuscule to the enormous. The possibilities of collaboration, revision by other writers, and excisions from and additions to the texts by producers, actors, etc., are responsible for many critical and scholarly headaches and temptations (it becomes so easy to attribute to Shakespeare all the lines you admire and discover “internal evidence” for attributing those you dislike to other hands). Who really wrote the suspect “witch” scenes in Macbeth? Why is the play so short? Who wrote the Jupiter scene in Cymbeline? Is Titus Andronicus really Shakespeare’s? How much of Henry VIII is by John Fletcher? It may be easy to guess that Shakespeare took over Pericles at the beginning of Act III, but did he write all that comes after and none before? What kind of collaboration was the play the result of ? It would presumably not have been very difficult to find these things out at the time. No one bothered, because no one took Shakespeare seriously enough. Multiply these problems by several hundred, and you will have some idea of the problems that are going to confront scholars and critics of the American cinema in the coming centuries. The concept of the American cinema engaging scholars and critics in the kind of way the Elizabethan drama has for the past three hundred years will doubtless still seem merely amusing to many people, including, ironically enough, many of those Shakespearian academics who are wrestling with precisely the sort of problems I have in mind. But it sounds much less silly now than it did a mere ten years ago, and no one who is

110  robin wood really aware of the way things are going can doubt that by the end of the present century, the study of Hollywood films will have become academically respectable and from an artistic, not merely sociological, viewpoint. In some ways, one’s heart quails at this, the scholars having done so much to turn Shakespeare—the most alive and passionate writer of all time—into a stuffed museum piece (“Did their Catullus walk that way?”). One has nightmare visions of the issuing of annotated editions of Bringing Up Baby (1938). But whether we like it or not it’s going to happen, and it will at least mark the acceptance of the Hollywood cinema into the mainstream of Western culture and the development of the arts, where it belongs, along with Renaissance painting, Elizabethan drama, the Viennese symphony, and the Victorian novel. What is needed, and urgently, is a work of the most rigorous and detailed research into what happens to individual films by important directors: who exactly did what; what degree of control the director had over (a) the script, (b) the shooting, (c) the editing; what cuts were made, and at what stage (editing, censorship, distribution); what things the director was prevented from doing; and what scenes were shot by other directors or by assistants. The difficulties of such an undertaking would be daunting, in many cases already insuperable (one cannot imagine that our hypothetical researcher would always get the degree of cooperation he would ideally require). Meanwhile, occasional critics like myself can make minor contributions whenever any reliable information comes their way. Penn attaches great importance to the editing of his films. The work on the set with actors and camera crew, though “sometimes passionate and very rewarding,” is for him “the making of a kind of basic raw material from which one will eventually extract a film.” In view of this, it is obvious that The Left Handed Gun and The Chase, the editing of both of which was taken out of Penn’s hands entirely, pose particular problems for the critic. Ultimately, I think, we can only attempt to evaluate the films as we have them, rather than the hypothetical works that Penn himself might have “extracted” from the “raw material” he had made, and in discussing these two films I have taken what may

Problems of Editing  111 seem the easy, but is also in practical terms the only possible, way out. There can be no doubt, however, that both films would have been appreciably different if Penn had retained control of them to the end and little doubt that they would have been appreciably better. Penn seems on the whole less upset over the fate of The Left Handed Gun than over that of The Chase, although the treatment accorded it would appear even more drastic: at least everything in The Chase was shot by him. His first cut of The Left Handed Gun ran for three hours, forty minutes (he admits to inexperience, on his first film). He intended that a great deal of this length should be removed but isn’t at all happy about the final editing. Some scenes move more slowly and laboriously than he intended: he agrees with me, for example, that the scene of Celsa’s seduction is somewhat turgid as it stands. The crude “flames of passion” symbolism of the blazing straw men (discussed earlier) is not his: he had a long take of the straw figure blazing and burning down and intended to use only the end of this (the editors used the beginning). On the other hand, a lot of what Penn describes as “remarkable footage” of spontaneous play between the young men was jettisoned. There is still quite a bit of this in the film (in the bathtub scene where Billy plans the initial revenge, in the flour fight, and when the gang arrive for Pat’s wedding), but apparently it was meant to recur much more and to lighten the tone considerably. Penn conceived the whole film as—although perhaps rather longer than it stands—faster moving and lighter in “feel” (more, one guesses, like Bonnie and Clyde). The ending of the film (Mrs. Garrett appearing from nowhere to lead Pat home after Billy’s death) wasn’t shot by Penn. The ending he did shoot, and likes, shows Mexican women with candles gathering around Billy’s body, preparing to carry it in procession through the streets. Finally, Penn had no control over the music and (rightly, I think, for the most part) detests it: there is a particularly clumsy and absurd moment in the scene where Billy returns to the abandoned hut after his escape from jail and finds the dead Charlie’s homemade flute. The music wells up on the soundtrack as he raises the flute to his lips, pauses abruptly for him to blow three notes, then

112  robin wood surges in again. The only music Penn wanted anywhere in the film (apart from the mechanical music player in the hotel) was Charlie’s flute. He equally detests the ballad that accompanies the credits, not for what it says, but on the grounds that since High Noon (1952) the accompanying ballad had become the sort of cliché he wanted to avoid. There are two main objections to the editing of The Chase, one general, one local. The general one is that again and again throughout the film, the take selected by the editors is not the one Penn would have chosen. Usually, he told me, it was the more conventional take that was retained, in preference to the more spontaneous and exciting one; especially, he regrets the loss of various takes in which Brando improvised around “stilted and excessively expository” passages in the text. The local objection is to cuts, which can be pinned down with some exactitude. There are a number of scenes or parts of scenes detailed in the final shooting script that Penn says he shot but are absent from all prints of the film I have been able to see. When they disappeared is uncertain: some were doubtless removed by the editors (working under instructions from Sam Spiegel); others may be distributors’ cuts, to reduce the film’s length; and some of these may have been made only in the British copies (though a print I saw in Finland was identical with those shown in Britain). Whatever the explanation, I have never seen, in about eight viewings of the film, the following passages (in chronological order as they occur in the script).8

1. Between the scene of the spreading of the news of Bubber’s escape and the introduction of Jake, a scene in Briggs’s real estate office. Briggs (Henry Hull) tells a Negro called Sam that he is “respectful toward colored people” but goes on to raise the interest on Sam’s overdue mortgage payments. As the film stands, we only glimpse Briggs’s office and scarcely have time to associate him with real estate. The scene defines his character clearly and takes up the theme of the status of Negroes, which should run through the film as a recurrent motif.

Problems of Editing  113

Ruby and Calder. The Chase (1966)





2. Between the introduction of Jake and the introduction of Anna, a scene in the “barracks area” where the Mexicans employed by Val Rogers live. Jake stops there on his way to Anna from the (potential) oil field. The workers complain that they haven’t been given a raise in salary; the sycophantic foreman calls them ungrateful—Mr. Rogers has installed a television for them. The foreman’s wife shows Jake pictures of his wife Elizabeth that she has cut out of the society section of a magazine. The scene adds further detail to the social structure, tells us something important about Val before he appears, and establishes Jake’s ironic yet impotent attitude to his father and his equally ironic attitude to his wife. 3. At the end of the scene where Calder tells Mrs. Reeves (Miriam Hopkins) of Bubber’s escape, a continuation inside the house

114  robin wood







where the Reeves discuss the escape and Mrs. Reeves wonders where she “went wrong” in bringing Bubber up. 4. Between Calder’s visit to Sol’s café and Bubber’s climb into the refrigeration truck on the train, a scene on a bus showing Anna on her way to the motel for her rendezvous with Jake. A man advises Anna to put the package she is carrying on the seat beside her, to keep a Negro woman off. Anna at once makes room for the woman. The man gets an attractive white girl, who got on the bus at the same stop as the Negress, to sit by him, making a remark about “keeping his suitcase handy.” The girl calls across to the Negress, addressing her as “Mama”; they find a seat together, and the man goes to sit beside Anna (who puts her package in the way, but he removes it). He then tries to interest Anna in “buying a pretty girl like you a drink.” Anna encouragingly says she’ll tell him a secret: “My mammy was a nigger, my pappy was a spick, and they were both Jews. My grandma never married because she was a Chink. And I’m not sure that I’m over a bad case of the measles.” Besides continuing the “color” motif, this scene decisively establishes Anna’s character at the outset: as the film stands, spectators only gradually come to realize how they are to take her. 5. Between the brief sequence of Edwin waiting in his car near the jail and the scene where Ruby shows Calder her new dress (Val’s present to her), a short exchange on the jailhouse steps between Cutie (one of the teenagers) and Slim (Calder’s deputy). Cutie mentions the teenagers’ party arranged for that evening and (humorously) asks for protection from Bubber. 6. Various small bits for minor characters at Val’s party, rather caricaturish. 7. Elizabeth watching Jake’s departure from the party; she gets into her car and drives off. 8. A dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Briggs ( Jocelyn Brando) before they reach the Reeves’s house on their evening walk. They see a poster advertising a nude show. Mrs. Briggs: “You know,

Problems of Editing  115









Billy, I don’t think I ever saw a naked woman.” Briggs: “I never have, either.” Then they see the gentlemen from the Dentists’ Association outing emerging rowdily from the hotel. Mrs. Briggs: “What do you think they had for dinner?” Briggs: “Dirty jokes.” Mrs. Briggs: “I never heard a dirty joke.” Briggs: “I never have, either.” 9. After the meeting between Bubber and Lester, a sequence at the Stewarts’ party. The guests watch a television news report—pictures of the body of the man Bubber’s fellow fugitive killed. Then a scream from the bushes next door: Cutie thinks she’s seen Bubber. It turns out to be a young Negro, Roy (who doesn’t appear at all in the prints I’ve seen). The male guests catch him, and he says indignantly, “You got a private street with a white sidewalk?” Archie (Bubber’s eventual killer, who never speaks in the film) takes him by the lapels and nods slowly. Calder arrives in time to break things up. 10. After Jake’s and Anna’s fruitless search at the broken-down summerhouse, a scene where Mrs. Henderson (Nydia Westman), the half-crazy old religious lady, comes to tell the Reeves about the murder and prays. Mr. and Mrs. Reeves go upstairs and get things out to sell: Mrs. Reeves mentions selling the house; Mr. Reeves protests, then gives in. Meanwhile, Mrs. Henderson wanders around below, singing hymns. 11. During the climactic fireworks in the car dump, a scene with Lester’s wife and children in front of their house. Roy and others move out cots, etc., in case the house catches fire. Later, as Bubber is led away, there should be shots of the house burning, Lester’s wife and children weeping. 12. There is a short scene missing at the end, and the order of the scenes on either side of it has been reversed. The last three sequences should run: (a) Anna outside Val’s house; she receives the news of Jake’s death (the end of the film as it stands). (b) Ruby packing things in the car. Edwin in his car—he has decided to leave. Emily drives up in her car, persuades him to stay;

116  robin wood they drive home in their separate cars. (c) Ruby and Calder leave (according to the script, Mrs. Henderson is present again here—the only person to watch them go; there is no sign of her in the scene as it stands). This is clearly how the film should end: in fact, in my first few subsequent viewings of The Chase, the ending with Anna and Val always took me by surprise—I had remembered the “right” (and logical) ending. The last shot, with Anna walking slowly toward the camera as the credits come up, looks corny as well as inappropriate. Finally, it should be added that Penn disowns and detests the credit sequence, which he didn’t shoot. I don’t share his dislike, but certainly the credit sequence sets a tone that may partly account for the charge of “hysteria” often leveled at the film (wrongly, in my opinion). Penn wanted plain credits. It is evident that the aspect of the film that has suffered most in the cutting is the social background—especially the sense of omnipresent racial tensions. The moment near the beginning when the Negro boy in the car sees the escaped convicts and is told by his mother not to meddle in “white folks’ business” would make far more sense could one see it as the first statement of a recurring motif: as it stands, it seems a slightly opportunistic irrelevance. None of the cut portions are strictly necessary to the film from a narrative viewpoint; none add ideas or themes that aren’t present elsewhere. There can be little doubt, however, that these scenes and details would add flesh to the film, giving aspects of it stronger emphasis and greater depth and fullness. In view of all this, and of Penn’s virtual disowning of the film, it would seem to be difficult rationally to defend my judgment of it as a masterpiece. Yet further viewings since I wrote on The Chase have given me no wish to retract. What is on the screen was all (the credit sequence apart) shot by Penn; if it is edited wrongly and the takes we see are sometimes “second best,” this only proves that however important editing may be to Penn it isn’t the whole of his art and that Penn’s

Problems of Editing  117 second best is better than most people’s best. The Chase continues to look to me very much like a Penn film, and I must insist that Penn himself, far from offering an authoritative judgment, is probably the last person in the world to go to for an impartial view of what actually reached the screen: the intense frustrations and disillusionments he experienced on the film make his feelings about it not only understandable but inevitable. I am sure that The Chase as it exists in Penn’s mind is an even greater film than the one we have, but the spectator has the advantage over him of having no ideal Chase in his head against which to judge the current version and can therefore view it without prejudice.

Arthur Penn in Canada Movie 18 (Winter 1970–71): 26–36.

This interview was conducted on three successive mornings in November 1969 during car journeys to shooting locations for Little Big Man. Text approved by Arthur Penn. RW: Hitchcock said that for him the film is complete with the finalizing of the shooting script. Welles said that for him the essential creative act takes place in the cutting room. Where do you consider that you make your films? AP: I would think more in the cutting room. I think it was George Stevens who said that the filmmaking process could be divided into three parts, the preparation of the script, the actual shooting, and the editorial process, and that the first and third were the more important. I would subscribe to that. The actual shooting, although sometimes passionate and very rewarding, is, however, the making of a kind of basic raw material from which one will eventually extract a film. That is absolutely not true in Hitchcock’s case. He goes in and his shot is defined to carry out the intention of an idea, and it does, usually, awesomely well. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for me. RW: There is far more cutting in Alice’s Restaurant than in your previous films. AP: It is related to the nature of the material. There is a lack of linearity. There isn’t a steady scene in Alice’s which is self-contained and carries through to its own intention. There is a constant group of parallel themes which are running off at the same kind

Arthur Penn in Canada  119 of nervous time, and I think the necessity to switch back and forth, and not to stay with one experience to its termination accounts for that. I think it is more a result rather than an intention or a deliberate technique. RW: How far do you supervise the editing of your films, and how far is the editing already in your head when you’re shooting? AP: Well, the editing in a certain sense is in my head—one can’t really shoot without having a kind of final assemblage in one’s head. But, for instance, I am at this moment shooting the latter portion of Little Big Man on a cold snowy day in Canada, and it is difficult for me to predict at this moment what the rhythm of this scene should be at the end of, say, two and a half hours of film. I could give an educated guess, but I wouldn’t want that to be my sole option when the time came to put the film together; consequently, there are other variables which I shoot, in terms of close ups and other angles, which would give me the opportunity to alter the rhythm of a scene. I am becoming more and more taken with rhythm in film—not any kind of deeply advanced theory but something visceral. And to answer your question about the editing room—I don’t in that sense supervise cut by cut, since I have an extremely brilliant editor [Dede Allen], but what I do say to her very often is “That’s not happening right, that’s just not up at the tempo I think it should be,” and we often argue back and forth, where she’ll say, “But isn’t this the value that you think most important?” and I’ll say, “No, I don’t think it’s most important. I think it’s a value, but I don’t think it’s as important as, let us say, a kind of reckless energy at this point that should be accumulating in the film, that isn’t, and if we stop to make so fine a point we’re going to lose that kind of thrust.” So in that way I participate in the editing, but it’s really an ongoing dialogue between Dede and me for months, and it’s frequently heated, but always a loving one. RW: The way in which you shoot—cutting each scene down into several pieces, filming each piece in fairly long takes, but several

120  robin wood times with the camera position changed with different lenses for close-up, medium shot. . . . Is this common practice now as a way of shooting? What advantages do you feel it has? AP: I think it is fairly common practice, although I think I do it more than anyone else. But it has several reasons. They may be acceptable to everybody except the man who has to pay the bill for the film being put out, but the reasons are these—here we are in the middle of Canada some sixteen weeks into the film, and we’re shooting a scene which comes somewhere near the end of the film. There is a given rhythm to it that we all feel standing on the set. That is not necessarily the rhythm that is going to be required in that scene when we put it all together in a warm movie theater and we are just fifteen minutes beyond a bag of warm popcorn at the intermission of the film. Also there is the possibility that the actor in doing a multiplicity of takes will get over a certain alien sense in front of the camera and do something which seems accidental, but is the lifelike touch that one waits for. If one does films in small pieces, the opportunity to capitalize on those little touches is available. If you’ve done it in a long master crane shot, which booms up and around, and through two tepees and across two mounted braves, there may be a piece of magic somewhere buried in there. To go back and get it again is very nearly impossible. I don’t much like the dolly shot in a sequence where human beings are having an intimate exchange. Actually, this afternoon I am going to use a couple of long dolly shots through the village, but they won’t be based on that—they’ll be in preparation for Jack Crabb’s narration and reminiscence over the film. But in a dialogue scene, I like it to have the previous arrhythmic, spastic sort of interchange that I think dialogue does have, even at its most tranquil level. RW: The first impression one takes away from your films is of the almost universal excellence of the acting, sometimes by players whose work has not previously been very distinguished—for example, Janice Rule in The Chase.

Arthur Penn in Canada  121 AP: Of Stevens’s three stages, the one in which one can be less than excellent is the middle stage. We often see in the films of many of the finest directors something which would pass only for acceptable representational acting. Mastroianni was telling me only a couple of months ago that it is not uncommon for Fellini to take somebody off the street who looks like what he wants. He says to them, “Just count,” and has another actor come in and lay on voice. That is a sort of synthetic construction of the middle third; in other words, that middle third is relatively controllable. However, I do like good acting. I’ve been around good actors almost all my professional life, beginning in the early days of live television, where I worked with so many fine actors, then into the theater, where again I had the opportunity, plus years at the Actors’ Studio, plus frankly just years with an entire generation of American actors who were concerned with acting, which was a relatively new phenomenon after the war. Previous to that the standard of the American stage had been to imitate the British drawing-room comedy. With the Group Theatre and then the outgrowth of the Group Theatre and those members of it who taught acting, a new generation of American actors developed. I was, in a sense, peripherally a part of that and learned the acting craft that way, also with some study with Michael Chekov. So I have the ability, I think, to interest an actor and also to provide certain conditions which perhaps in previous performances they have not had, that will permit them to emerge as, say, in the case of Janice Rule, or of other people, who are not wanting in talent. They have such a quantity of talent, in fact, that it often befuddles and jeopardizes other directors who tend to say “No, don’t do that! Just do this.” You know, somewhere inside every fat person there is a thin person trying to get out—well, inside many an actor whose basic talent we don’t observe very frequently there is a good actor fighting to get out, but he is not fighting strongly enough, or hard enough, or against the Establishment enough. So one of the pleasures in

122  robin wood working with actors is to be able to work in their language with them, and sometimes to be able to stimulate them to unusual performances. RW: This is very different from, for example, Hitchcock’s or Antonioni’s approach to actors. AP: I would say so—which again substantiates that Stevens distinction. Such distinctions are essentially artificial except as an exaggeration for understanding, but in Antonioni’s films one does not point to the conspicuously good acting as the substance of the films, and yet the films are remarkable—or some of them are. RW: Yes, in fact Antonioni is supposed not to talk to his actors at all about such things as motivation, or what’s going to happen next. This, I imagine, is quite alien to your way of working. AP: I would think so, yes. I can’t think of depriving anyone of any information that might produce some kind of insight or some kind of appropriate behavior—it seems to me that the insights, the quirks, the twitches and turns that are original in Antonioni’s films are Antonioni’s, that the people are rather automatic and kind of beautiful statuary, and I understand that, for example, his experience with Richard Harris was one of considerable hostility, because Harris was making the demands that an actor has every right in the world to make and was receiving none of those answers. RW: I stressed that particular contrast, because I was talking yesterday to Dean Tavoularis [the art director of Little Big Man] about this, and he made some very interesting comparisons between working with you and working with Antonioni. He stressed that from the point of view of the art director, it was perhaps more fulfilling working with Antonioni, who was so obsessed with the overall visual look of a scene, whereas you were primarily interested in actors. AP: I quite understand it, but I know that very often Antonioni would simply wait for the right weather conditions and the right

Arthur Penn in Canada  123 look and the right light and so forth, and I understand that impulse in filmmakers. On the other hand, particularly under the pressures of the Hollywood film as we are designating it, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it with the enormous expenditure, where when you get all the climatic conditions marvelously arranged and there are the mountains beautifully in the distance and the sun is on them you say, “Actors, act instantly! This minute, now!” because everything else is right. What you get is automatons who function in front of the camera—albeit wonderfully on occasions, but also on occasions not. RW: Did you at any stage in the making of Alice’s Restaurant consider jettisoning the original Guthrie monologue, altogether? RW: Well, only once, and then really very briefly. On deciding to make Alice’s Restaurant, my first, almost mindless, impulse was to try and expand the eighteen-minute record into a full film. It was very quickly apparent to Venable Herndon and myself that it was not possible to do that—it would not hold up. It would also destroy the form and wit of the original and become a laborious piece. We then decided to penetrate the background of that piece, and we began to develop an enormous body of personal materials, about Arlo, about Woody, about Pete Seeger, about Ray and Alice Brock, about the life of the church. Much of it I had known personally, having been a resident in that immediate area. And so at one point, far along in the script, we suddenly found we had a picture that was not really about the eighteen minutes in “Alice’s Restaurant.” On the other hand, it seemed absolutely cavalier to think of jettisoning it, and we couldn’t call the picture Alice’s Restaurant and have Arlo Guthrie in it and not have that part of it, so what we did was to retain it almost intact, in about the same length that it is on the record—I think in film time it occupies some eighteen or twenty minutes, very like the record, but that’s it. But it’s a sort of independent, tiny homage to the record. It’s like a vaudeville turn, really, and

124  robin wood it serves a kind of leavening process. I find it amusing, and I think that the audience is happy to laugh at that point in the film, and I’m happy to have them laugh. RW: Why does Alice deliberately obstruct when Ray is projecting the film of Shelly and his motorcycle? What do you see as going on in her head when she does that? AP: Oh, I don’t know that I can think of any kind of conscious thought in her head. I think she really wishes to intervene between that relationship of Ray’s and Shelly’s in some way and feels that Ray’s retention of it on film excludes her. So she bodily interposes herself—as I say, without conscious thought, but much in the same way that a child will interpose himself between adults in a conversation where a demand is being made, where the child feels that somehow the material that’s under discussion is also in his province and that not sufficient attention is being paid to him. That’s one of the reasons. Another was that when I was at the church they frequently showed films of racing, and the interesting thing about it was that they treated the film so cavalierly. My experience of seeing films almost constantly is to go into a viewing room, sit down and look at a piece of film, and it’s rather a holy experience. But they would run it on the kitchen wall, and people would walk in and out and get a beer and walk right through the beam of the projector. It was treated in a very haphazard way, and I thought that was a very nice thing to do. So I thought it was important here to make that point also—that film to this group of people was different from what it is to me—and to most of the people that I know. RW: Is the church still operating like that? Are Alice and Ray still there? AP: Yes. Ray is still there. Alice is divorced, and she is living in Stockbridge, but she is not living with Ray. RW: Did you experience any difficulties in making such an intimate and revealing, and often critical, film about people still alive and presumably actually around during the shooting?

Arthur Penn in Canada  125 AP: They all gave their permission, they all read the script, and none voiced objection to the content. Ray, who is a flamboyant personality, on a couple of occasions went into slightly histrionic episodes about how the invasion of the film company was not dissimilar to the invasion of the American forces in Vietnam, and here we were making an anti-Vietnam film, and how could we do something as abusive, and intrusive, as this? The analogy fell apart rather quickly, and Ray, when bad humors had passed, was the first to admit it rather sheepishly and laugh and have a beer. Alice, on the other hand, said to me on one occasion after reading the script, “Don’t be too nice to me. Tell it the way it was. Tell it the way you think it was.” Rather a forthright statement, I must say, and it left me with nothing but admiration for her. RW: Do you think the film had any direct effect on them and possibly on their relationship? AP: I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since the film opened. I’ve only had a letter from Alice, since I literally finished working on that film the day before I started working on Little Big Man—I had no occasion to see them. I know that Arlo saw the film—I was with him on several occasions when he’d seen it, but Alice hadn’t seen it until after I’d left New York and was in the West. But I did have a note from her saying “It’s a beautiful film, and I’m very grateful, thank you.” RW: Arlo’s girl in the film remains something of a cipher. Was this intended? AP: Well, I suppose it was. I didn’t understand how a girl operated with Arlo at that point in his life. I really knew nothing about it. Arlo is something of a closed person and difficult to know. I could find out nothing specific, and I thought afterwards that perhaps the best and most honest thing to do would be to make no conjecture other than that there was a sexual relationship. But the extent of it was usually, you see, “Well, she’s a groovy chick,” and any inquiries would result in that, and I thought that

126  robin wood

The freewheelin’ Arlo Gurthrie. Alice’s Restaurant (1969).

all that I could do would be to apply a meaning that might not at all be accurate. And it turned out to be so. He was going at that point with another girl, and then that relationship broke up almost immediately, or was breaking up during the filming, and I knew nothing of the content of the relationship nor why it was breaking up and consequently was not competent to insert any of that into the film. RW: She really was his girl, then, in real life? AP: No, there was another girl that he was going with—who also appears in the film, incidentally, in another role. . . . But, no, this girl is an actress named Tina Chen. RW: What nationality is she meant to be in the film? Are we supposed to think she’s Vietnamese?

Arthur Penn in Canada  127 AP: We’re supposed not not to think that! We’re certainly to be aware that she’s Eurasian and that there is some kind of international reaching out. RW: In an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma some years back, you said you’d like to make a film about the position of Negroes in the States, but you didn’t feel equipped to do so because it was all too close. Yet one can sense this desire in nearly all your films. The Miracle Worker, The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant all contain references either direct or oblique to the status of the Negroes in America. AP: The best I can say is that they are sort of analogies, because I still feel ill-equipped to represent the black world responsibly, that is in terms of the internal texture of it, in the genuine interior life of it, with anything but at best an educated guess. It would be, I think, a reckless thing to do. On the other hand, for instance, I am making a partially educated guess about the red man. But I feel the situation socially is not nearly at the same point. I’ve been asked to do a number of films about the blacks, most particularly the autobiography of Malcolm X, which is a film I’m most tempted to do, although I won’t do it, but I enjoyed the book enormously. Enjoyed is not the word, but it revealed a great deal to me. Whatever references are visible in my work, they are as analogies rather than as specific statements about the black world, with the fervent wish that someday I may be able to do it. RW: It even turns up in The Miracle Worker, where Annie uses the colored boy in a way in which one feels she couldn’t have used a white child. AP: Yes, I think that was true of the time. The kind of response to command, the almost passive dutiful child, was probably representative of the black child in Alabama of the late 1880s and would probably have not worked nearly as well with another white child who was fighting for his own ego. I think that the black child today would not submit to that, and that the drive to

128  robin wood the establishment of a firm and prideful ego is certainly the key to the black movement in the United States today. RW: What made you decide to use a Negro woman for the first draft interview in Alice’s Restaurant? AP: Well, I thought it was one of the few occasions where there was an opportunity to balance things out by showing the odd social order which sometimes puts people like the black person at the very service of the Establishment; it is one of the more subtle ensnaring ways in which people are kept in their peculiar kind of ill-defined ghetto by carrying out the intentions of the Establishment. RW: In this film and in Mickey One especially, you seem very concerned with the gap left by the general collapse of religious faith which perhaps goes right back to The Left Handed Gun with Billy and the straw man. In Alice’s it seems to me that you treat it fully for the first time. AP: I don’t understand that in myself at all. I have had no religious training in my life. I have never held any religious beliefs. I’ve had almost no exposure to organized religion, except as a sort of passing observer—sometimes in the South where I witnessed things rather like that Revival tent. I’ll tell you what I think is one of its most appealing aspects to me: the very theatricality of it. It’s one of the few areas of modern life that is genuinely theatrical. I like that impulse, and on finding it missing, I grieve for it and grieve that there isn’t a good deal more celebration. And in that sense perhaps something personal could be said about it. As a child, I was brought up by my mother, who was divorced from my father, and we were very poor. And one of the symptoms of that great poverty, which was in the midst of the Depression, was that there was no celebration of any holidays, and even minimal celebration of, for instance, one’s birthday. Maybe some tiny kind of thing would pass hands rather cursorily, and that was it. My wife is the strongest and most outspoken opponent of that, and she will have no more of it. We have a great

Arthur Penn in Canada  129 number of celebrations, of almost anything. It’s perfectly possible for us to celebrate the fact that it’s Tuesday, and I must say that I like that part of it—that part of life. . . . And she does make a great thing out of Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year and the children’s birthdays and Halloween and holidays I’ve never even heard of. I find it very pleasing. So perhaps that religious aspect is related to that—only in the celebratory sense. I’m still not speaking, I think, to the very essence of it, but as I say, I frankly don’t understand the essence of it. RW: You show continuity between the Revivalist meeting in the tent and the hippie movement by using the same hymn, which turns up again on the guitar right at the end of the film accompanying the end credits. AP: I can explain that by simply saying that Arlo introduced it to me very quickly. He came over to the house the very first time that I met him. After a little while, and having some food together and partaking of the intoxicants of life, he sat down and played “Amazing Grace” for about two hours in various versions and sang, and we all sang, and it was really rather moving. I asked him about it, and he said he’d once done it on a radio station, and then he said, “That’s the only version that I know. You people who know others, send them in.” He had something like 115 other versions of this hymn come in. It’s an early American protestant hymn—and a marvelous one, I think. I know that is a meaningful thing to him, and I must say that the phrase “Amazing Grace” is a very meaningful thing to me as a kind of poetic utterance. If I had to counter most of my misanthropic feelings, it would be that there is a kind of grace that I really do believe in among us, that is perhaps the last hope, and that at some point we will exercise grace one to the other. RW: You are on record as saying that The Chase is a Hollywood film and not a Penn film. That may have been an extreme reaction provoked by the difficulties you had with it. Has time modified that at all?

130  robin wood AP: Well, it has ever so slightly. I’m sufficiently subject to personal responses to say, now that the film is being received rather more warmly than it was then, it’s a little bit easier to acknowledge it as my own. On the other hand, I recognize how meretricious that is. The very process of making the film, that is shooting it, but not editing it, seems to me to be the absolute paradigm of the Hollywood film—how films are made in Hollywood through the years. I didn’t edit a foot of it, so that it is hard for me to recognize, although I know I shot every bit of it that’s on the screen. It doesn’t represent my selection, for instance, and where I figured that we’d shoot eight or nine takes of a given sequence, very often the choices that were exercised here were the very opposite ones to the ones that I would have made. RW: You mentioned some extraordinary takes, particularly of Brando, which you would have liked to use. AP: Well, they’re very hard to reconstruct. They were just moments of improvisation really, where somehow we felt the text was stilted and excessively expository. After wrestling with it for a while, I suggested to Marlon that he improvise it, and he did, and he improvised it breathtakingly. It was inarticulate perhaps, it was not structured in full and complete sentences, but it was passionate and moving and raw—really raw—and I found that quality absolutely missing in the scene when I finally saw the film on the screen. It was a great loss to me, because I thought that that was some of the best acting I’d ever witnessed. RW: To go back earlier: when you made The Miracle Worker, you’d already produced it on stage and for television. Did you feel any important differences between the treatments? To what extent did you feel yourself engaged in a fully creative act as opposed to an interpretative act, or do you think it is impossible to make any distinction? AP: No, I think it’s very possible to make a distinction, and I do feel that there is a strong difference. The stage and television are essentially verbal media—television slightly less than the stage,

Arthur Penn in Canada  131 but nonetheless quite strongly so, since, to use the McLuhan definition of the television image, a low contrast image is a low meaning image. The verbal level of the play, particularly in the theater, was so strong. Consequently, we had to create a kind of antagonist, a natural antagonist in the role of the father who kept imposing arbitrary time limits on Annie’s experiments with Helen—”Two weeks, Miss Sullivan, two weeks, and then she comes back to us!” That kind of thing was necessary in the theater, because it seemed to Bill Gibson and to me that we could not really develop scenes of conflict without it. When I came to make the film, it was unfortunately not clear to me until after the film was made that I did not need any of that—that Helen’s affliction in its full visual impact was sufficient antagonist for any number of protagonists, and we didn’t have to go into all this arbitrary dialogue, and almost a sort of play on manners, based on napkins and feeding and Southern table mores, to make our point. The point was visible from the instant the credits came on. And it is interesting that I really take more pleasure in the credits, and in the flashbacks of Annie’s childhood, than I do in almost anything else in the film. I feel that those are the most filmic, cinematic aspects of the film. And the others are, for better or for worse, the best I could do with what I think of as a sort of stage play on film. RW: Little Big Man. Could you talk about how you came to find Berger’s novel in the first place, what attracted you to the idea of filming it, and how faithful to it your adaptation is? AP: I was working on another film about Indians with Jack Richardson, an original film, and it was going moderately well, but not very well. We had some shape to it, but we were having difficulty really getting it properly defined. Then in the course of that I read a review of Little Big Man, and I thought it would be an interesting piece of research. I found it really quite charming, funny, and it had a lovely tone of irony, which I thought would be a very effective tone for a film about

132  robin wood Indians. And so we acquired it. It’s very difficult to be faithful to a novel, faithful in the sense of reproducing the incidents in a novel on film, because there are so many which are purely literary incidents in any good novel, which would not be good film. The example I gave you about The Miracle Worker might very well carry over to a novel as well—richly descriptive pieces of prose, with all kinds of ironies implicit in the sentences, and tangential remarks that add an exquisite flavor to it, might not be reproduceable on film, or at least not by me. What we are trying to do is to get as close as we can to the flavor of the book by doing a kind of odd juxtaposition of scenes: rather sentient, feeling scenes among the Indians immediately beside bizarre scenes in the white world. Bizarre scenes in the Indian world, the oddities of the Contrary, for instance, the character of the heemaneh, Little Horse, the kind of homosexual for whom there is a very clear and satisfying role in the Indian community—those things we are attempting to retain in the film. On the other hand, matters have had to be compressed simply to get them into the film, and others again are simply eliminated because we can’t find the time. RW: How much control have you had over the development of the script—complete control? AP: Oh yes. As complete as one would have with an author who is really writing the script—that’s Calder Willingham—the control being wholly personal and human. I may not like something, but I can’t say to him, “You must change it because I don’t like it. If you, the author, like it deeply, then I will abide by it.” I can tell him my reaction to it and it may not be wholly sympathetic, but I can’t say, “Will you take it out, because I don’t like it.” We’ve had a very rich and I think a rewarding open dialogue for several years over this. But it is not, in any sense, a sort of auteur film. It’s not that at all. It is a film made of another piece of material by an extremely good writer, and it is in that sense, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, rather a classic Hollywood film.

Arthur Penn in Canada  133

The scuttling Jack Crabb. Little Big Man (1970).

RW: Could you enlarge on that and explain exactly what distinction you have in mind? AP: The distinctions are first of all excessively restricted in order to make the differences clear. I’m not so sure that I subscribe entirely to the clear and simple concept of the auteur film, as one pole in opposition to the other pole which might be called the classic Hollywood industrial film, which has a kind of anonymity built into it by the sheer quantity and numbers of people—and also its absence of mobility. I think that one of the most extraordinary aspects of a large Hollywood film is that the number of people involved makes it almost impossible for the director to follow an impulse. The impulse has to be thought out, planned out, and preselected to the degree that it is no longer an impulse,

134  robin wood but is a determined sort of battle plan. By the time it reaches that stage it’s being executed by men who are absolute specialists, who have taken it over and have rendered it more or less anonymous by the fact that they have translated it into “Oh, that is one of those shots where you do this.” I would give Alice’s Restaurant as an example of the American version of the auteur film—it was perfectly possible for us, for instance, to be chewing along, and when the prediction came that snow was due next morning we simply dropped everything we were doing and went out and did that entire sequence of the funeral in the snow all in one day, and it was done very simply. Here we are, and I am confronted with the problems of snow in Little Big Man; the necessity for snow is lengthy, and the result yesterday was an almost near-paralysis of the entire set because there was no place to put the equipment, and the equipment was skidding. The provision for placing the equipment and camouflaging it, and the equipment itself, finally became the major target of how we were going to film, which was how do you avoid the equipment? RW: There have been many films made in the classic Hollywood manner which seem to be auteur films in that they are so clearly stamped throughout by their director’s personality: for example, John Ford’s cavalry Westerns and two films you told me you admire, Red River and Rio Bravo, which couldn’t have been made by anyone but Hawks. AP: Oh, I don’t think that auteur films are an impossibility in the Hollywood system. I think Citizen Kane is one of the greatest examples of that in the sense that it is made by only one man—one kind of intelligence was visible in every frame of that film. And certainly in the work of Hawks and Hitchcock and John Ford, though let me say that in making their kinds of film, I don’t think it is too difficult to do that. First of all, there is an enormous history with these men of a certain kind of successful film; secondly, they are orthodox films at the superficial

Arthur Penn in Canada  135 level, that is to say at the level at which the studio heads read the script—it’s John Wayne squaring off against Monty Clift, you know, and they are going to have a big fight. That sort of thing is very clearly understood. What’s happening now, of course, is that the themes in films are becoming a bit unrecognizable to the studio heads. Consequently, films like Easy Rider might never have been made were they to have gone through the filtering process of the various intellects which run a given studio, the end result of which is that somebody writes a check for x dollars in order to make that film. They might all along the way make tiny suggestions to bring it more in line, like, “Well, maybe they don’t ride motorcycles, they ride cars, and maybe they don’t smoke pot, and if they met an attractive girl . . . ,” and pretty soon you end up with your beach party film. I’m being facetious about it, but what I am saying is that with committees, someone comes up with a camel one day, and they try to figure out a horse. And that has classically been true of the larger and more unusual of the Hollywood films. For instance, at the same level we can point to Ford and Hawks and Hitchcock, one has also to point to the record of Welles in Hollywood, where his auteurship was constantly whittled down and driven finally to a point where it’s almost pathetic in the latter films, where you can see a man fighting inside the structure of the films for an identity which is being obliterated by the very process of Hollywood. If you continue to be a Hollywood director, one of your basic life decisions is at what point you give up the struggle. And quite a number of talented people have given up the struggle rather early. RW: Perhaps one can distinguish between two kinds of auteur films: one, the head-on Bergman variety to which Citizen Kane is really closer than it is to the classic Hollywood film, because it is completely controlled by one person—films which make direct personal statements—and on the other hand, films which, although filmed from somebody else’s script, perhaps not even from the

136  robin wood director’s choice, are in quite subtle ways permeated by the director’s personality. Seeing the shooting and some rushes of Little Big Man, I’m beginning to feel this is going to happen, that there is quite a lot of you there in quite subtle ways, in the sort of performances you’re getting. . . . AP: The sort of individual stylistic implant comes about sometimes quite spontaneously as, for example, in the dailies you have been seeing of Little Big Man. Last night we saw a shot of the death of Wild Bill Hickok, and one thing that I might call a Penn touch, if you will, is of his face upon the instep of a man’s shoe. That happened because we were in an actual saloon, in very confined circumstances, and it’s very difficult to photograph the man’s face if it is literally on the floor, so that getting the head up off the ground is a constant problem in film. Either you dig the camera in below floor level or you get the face up, and we talked about various ways of getting the face up. Then it struck me that it would be fine if he had fallen against the boot of one of his fellow poker players, having been shot in the back, and that a man with a dying man’s face resting on his boot would become paralyzed and simply keep it there, and not move, and not respond, so that it becomes an object, and that’s what happens. Hickok’s face is sort of dug into the instep of the boot; he utters his last words to Jack and dies on a size nine boot. Now that was unplanned—it simply took place a minute or two before we came to that sequence, and it was based entirely on expediency. That becomes a sort of auteurish touch, as it were—I only mean it as a touch. I’m not suggesting that the auteur theory might really be extended to that; that’s absurd. But it is a personalized touch. So one can invest someone else’s script with a whole series of personalized touches. The sort of distinction we are making is between the moderately auteur and the very auteur kind of film, one where you work through somebody else’s material and leave an imprint on it of your own, and the other which is something which is generated sort of viscerally out of you and is deeply

Arthur Penn in Canada  137 involved with the psychological and social and political drives of your own life. RW: In the scene that you were shooting yesterday outside Little Big Man’s tepee, you have Little Big Man and his Indian wife Sunshine talking about their coming child, a rather charming scene where she says that the baby is about to come out and he says, “He mustn’t come out ’til I’ve eaten,” and she then pats her belly and says, “Don’t come out ’til father’s finished eating.” In the background to this, in long shot, you have another Indian family gathering around the fire, an old Indian standing up over the fire looking out, snow falling, and beyond this Indian family again snowy wastes, quite empty. The scene goes on from this rather touching moment into something more obviously comic, with Sunshine first praising Little Big Man for bringing home so much food and then immediately mentioning her sisters—“We have so much for ourselves”—and she starts to talk about her sisters. A lot of different emotions are involved in this one little sequence, I think. AP: One, it is a superb comic sequence from the book; two, we were confronted with a need to tell about the destruction of the Indian man in battle with the Whites, leaving behind an extraordinary number of Indian women in proportion to the Indian men. The result of the scene is that Sunshine is going to ask her husband to be husband to her three sisters as well, who are childless. It is a kind of life-thrust of a tribal character to keep her people alive, without ever enunciating it that way. Putting it in the terms of the scene, it becomes really quite a comic thing. Jack, being a white man and coming from a sort of white moralistic background, is appalled at the idea in the beginning. Later on he comes to see the wisdom of it, without ever having one of those stunning sociological insights, and finally he does participate as husband to all four of the sisters, and it pleases his wife enormously. It is not unknown that in moments of great distress and near-genocidal moments, this kind of suspension

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RW: AP:

RW:

AP:

of so-called morality does take place—preservation of the species takes over. It’s not our intention ever to specify that as being the driving impulse of the scene, yet that’s the sort of intellectual canopy under which the scene exists. I hope that will be extracted from it, but we’re not imposing it on the scene. I hope it turns out to be more comic than anything else and that results we have been speaking about, the sociological, genetical ones, might be there upon reflection, but essentially the scene is there to do its kind of comic duty . . .  To which the snow seems to add a sadness, and the old Indian who stands gazing straight ahead in front of the fire . . .  . . . a certain kind of melancholy: “Where have all the young people gone?” There is that, and there is also the sense that Jack is at his most Indian at that point in the film. In his constantly shifting identities—we have shown him earlier being very white in his period with the Pendrakes where he was learning these kinds of moral limits very severely—here he is most Indian and suddenly having to abandon his white moral limits. . . . I think it’s one of the best parts of the film—one of the best-written and best-conceived parts. One detail—when Little Big Man was given his dinner by Sunshine, the stew was very hot, and Dustin Hoffman took handfuls of snow and dropped them into the food to cool it. Whose idea was that? Calder Willingham’s, yours, or Hoffman’s? Probably Dustin’s, with certain limitations set up by me. In other words, there were rather crude Indian spoons which the prop men were all too eager to press onto the scene, and I felt it would make the scene a little more alive if there was the obstacle of being hungry and having a too warm meal, and then one’s wife was talking about something to which one was not particularly committed. . . . I like to provide actors with those sorts of problems—not solve them, but give them the problems themselves, and then a good actor can solve them himself.

Arthur Penn in Canada  139 Dustin is very quick—he leaped to that and decided to pop some snow into his buffalo stew. RW: So that’s a sort of combined Penn and Hoffman touch. AP: Yes, they usually are . . . they are very seldom simply applied from the outside. The idea of a controlled accident, or of a controlled act of invention, is usually one based on a kind of deprivation. You know the willingness of an entire crew to make things easy for actors. An actor’s psychological need is to have things made easy for him; he likes to be in the bosom of his family, and psychologically that’s a bit of posture. I don’t mind that being true everywhere except in the instant before the cameras, when I think there should be a certain number of genuine live obstacles provided for the actors that they have to solve themselves, in the course of which these accidental inventions occur, and I am delighted with them when they do. RW: Another detail was Sunshine emptying the unfinished scraps back into the pot, to preserve them for the next meal. AP: That was entirely mine, but I just thought that the life of the Plains Indians was never that amply provided with sustenance, and certainly the idea of having a communal pot would be perfectly natural to a communal society. RW: Accounting for the failure of Land of the Pharaohs, Hawks said that he didn’t know how a pharaoh talked. Are you experiencing any difficulties of this kind in directing Indian characters? AP: Yes. There is no question about it. We decided early on to accept a kind of colloquialism which was inherent in the Berger novel and to use it as if it were the language of the Indians. For instance, the Indians don’t say “killed” in this picture, they say “rubbed out,” and we chose kind of modern slangy expressions to make that Indian vocabulary. Nonetheless, on observing the Indians closely, one is impressed by the fact that they have a different and less verbal level of communication than, say, the white American culture, and it does provide little obstacles—for

140  robin wood Dustin, particularly, when he has to play in the Indian world and he feels he is called on to verbalize too much. If this film turns out not to work, I don’t think that is going to be the problem, although it may be symptomatic of the problem, which is that we have simply not created a really sound Indian life. RW: You say that Alice’s Restaurant is an auteur film. How did you manage to set this up with all the difficulties that you have been talking about? AP: One of the ways was by doing everything rather inexpensively: everything from my own salary, and the amounts that we were able to pay the actors, to the size of the crew, to the amount of equipment we had, the number of cars. We enjoyed a greater mobility as a result of having fewer and fewer and fewer bits of machinery, so that it was perfectly possible to suddenly whip out and do something, and we managed to do it at quite an inexpensive level for an American film. I must always qualify that—it’s different from film anywhere else in the world, and that basic principle must not be overlooked. The unions’ demands on the American film industry are very high, and they provide an enormous obstacle for one to overcome in order to get down on film a rather simple and tender and personal thing. There are ways around it if one is a young filmmaker and just starting out, but if one is a known filmmaker, then a certain number of union personnel are assigned from the outset of the film, and expenditure increases. It is very difficult to keep a film even relatively inexpensive for somebody of some sort of reputation in America. . . . One can’t make Easy Rider more than once—that doesn’t happen. RW: You part wrote Alice’s Restaurant. You are credited as coauthor of the script. Would you like to talk about your collaboration on it? AP: It’s always sort of unfair to distinguish what I did as against, say, what Venable Herndon did. We did a good deal of it together—in conversation, in mutual insights, or in contradictory insights. But we did spend a number of months just banging

Arthur Penn in Canada  141 away at it daily, three and four and five hours a day working out the ideas of the film, the structure of the film. I would say that the majority of the language actually spoken on the screen is probably from Venable’s text, but again it’s very difficult to say that, because often that would come out of an almost improvisational exchange between us which would contain certain elements of the dialogue, which he would then incorporate into it. And then again, there are certain elements that are incorporated directly from Arlo: “I didn’t drop out of school, school dropped out from around me”—this was entirely Arlo’s remark, among many others. But, on the other hand, we often see screen credits on French and Italian films where there are four or five writers and the director listed as the authors. That’s not so legally done in the United States, although it is often in fact the case that the director contributes to the screenplay. That happened on The Left Handed Gun and to a certain extent on The Miracle Worker, it happened on Mickey One, it happened on The Chase to a certain extent, it happened to a minor extent on Bonnie and Clyde and even to a lesser extent here on Little Big Man, but one doesn’t get credited because there is a guild limitation, a union limitation, and you can’t claim authorship in quite the same way here. Evidence has to be shown of your participation in the actual writing of the script before a committee of the Writers’ Guild. And that, I think, is somewhat demeaning. I think it was a protective device—in the old days it was necessary to keep everybody in the studio from becoming the author of the script, and the author of the script being rendered an office boy. I think the reverse of that condition is now true, where there are often writers, but very often the filmmaker himself does a great deal of the actual conceiving and working out and frequently contributes to the dialogue. It becomes ungainly and impolitic really to make that claim, but probably it could be made by Hitchcock and by Hawks and by Ford on their films, although it hasn’t been made. I wouldn’t believe screen credits as being the line of

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Billy and Tunstall. The Left Handed Gun (1958).

definition about who really participated and consequently who is an author and who is not. That, I think, is one of the basic misconceptions of the auteur concept and why its applicability is often underestimated in relation to American films, as against European ones. I don’t think that in theory one can simply ignore the disciplines that are inherent in a highly skilled and highly technical organization—they also can be very valuable. They were to me. In a number of films they taught me what I could and could not do, or at least taught me what the limits were, and whether I wanted to violate them or not became a question of my choice. There are enormously valuable skills, frankly, to be gained by having a highly industrialized medium available. But the attrition at the other level is also very great. One is a social creature, and one is

Arthur Penn in Canada  143 also a member of a crew, no matter whether one is the director or not. Somehow when you’re out, particularly out of Hollywood, as we are here in Canada, or in Dakota, a kind of homogeneity of unit shows up, and then it is very difficult to be both an employer of those skills, and an offender of those skills. There are certain things one does that have the complete acquiescence of the crew, but one can also have the sense of “That is not how it is done” in a highly ritualistic way: “That is not how we do it, my son”—it almost began to sound like Indian talk. That feeling is often communicated by the complex Hollywood crew. I really don’t think it’s necessarily the crews themselves nor the technical skills themselves. I think it’s far more the supervisory personnel of the studio. What one finds in the United States, perhaps to a slightly lesser degree now but nonetheless still, is that the crew—and that includes the cameraman, the sound man, the makeup, the costumes, literally everybody—are more responsible to the studio executives than they are to the individual director, because the studio executives represent a continuity of employment for them, and the individual director does not. It boils down to as simple an economic fact as that. If they were to do things which were aberrations in some studioindustrial terms, they might very well end up on somebody’s list as being somehow nutty or kooky or incompetent, and consequently there is a sort of baffle or an insulation of competence that you have to get through in order to get the imperfect, albeit highly personal and sometimes revealing, moment of truth on the screen, and one has to filter that through all kinds of the most subtle censorship. It’s inaccurate to call it censorship—it is will in another direction. RW: Some directors tend to drive things that they want to do to extremes, which would be modified and held in check within the more restrictive framework. It was interesting recently seeing Ride the High Country [UK title Guns in the Afternoon] a few days after The Wild Bunch.

144  robin wood AP: I thought that Ride the High Country was a nifty, really a terrific film, and The Wild Bunch was really rather a lousy one by a talented man—full of excesses, full of scorpion symbolism, and kind of mindlessness. I mean that image of the scorpions being devoured by the ants just seemed like 1A filmmaking of a very low order . . . and the cuts to the children, and the innocence of the children, and the implicit violence in the children . . . the cheapest level of symbolism is there, I think, and that wasn’t true of Ride the High Country. Ride the High Country had a kind of wry, spare, bone-hard character—it’s not full of the best acting in the world, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the nicest things about it is its sort of raw-boned, monosyllabic, saddlesore character. RW: Are there any cameramen whom you’ve got on with particularly well, whom you liked working with, and who have made a creative contribution to the film? AP: Quite a few of them have. I think Stradling does, I think Burnie Guffey did on Bonnie and Clyde, although it was difficult for Burnie, because we were asking him for a different sort of film style than he liked. It was costly to him, and he had an ulcer attack in the middle of the film, because clearly what we were asking for was not what his best impulses dictated to him. But again, that sense of a cameraman being perhaps what Coutard and Decaë might be in France is not true in the United States. Again, the question of constant employment is very seldom related to the director. It is related to the studio, and to the establishment of continuity: they want to know what their next film is going to be, and whether they are going to have a year of gainful employment rather than wait around for Penn to get another idea, another impulse to do a film. In France, Decaë and Coutard and Ghislain Cloquet work with a limited number of people, you know. I just had a letter from Ghislain Cloquet the other day, and he’s been working with Robert Bresson, and he has a few contacts from that, and he makes their films and works

Arthur Penn in Canada  145 with them and they become a kind of collaboration. That is not true in the United States. Cameramen are somewhat more interchangeable, but the level of technical norms set—about what goes into the camera and what comes out of the lab—is based on interchangeability. It’s not based on individuality. One cameraman is sick, somebody else can be dropped in there, and you’d be hard-pressed to notice the distinction in their work— not because the men themselves haven’t an original eye, but because they have to prove their competence at the level of executing the norms. When they have executed them competently enough in a sense to obliterate their individuality, they then have become full-fledged members of the establishment, and then are interchangeable. It’s a rather ironic and bitter fact, but it is a fact of an industry, as against an individual artistic effort that one might say is characteristic of the French cinema. RW: What are your feelings now about Mickey One? It’s the only one of your films that I don’t like. AP: Well, I still do like it. I regret that I didn’t make clear the narrative level of that film, because there is a strong narrative possible there that would have made that film, I think, a good deal more understandable. But I was intoxicated by the . . . maybe that might be a very good example of what you were talking about earlier on, one’s having total freedom, and one’s having certain limitations. I’m not so sure that total freedom is necessarily good. Perhaps it would be accurate to cite that as an example—a perfect example to the degree that I was intoxicated by the idea of total freedom. I felt that one did not have to deal with the philistine qualities of telling the pure narrative, and deal with the subtext as being subtext. I instead shot the subtext and left the narrative out for the most part. Many of my kind of high-blown analogies of that film as being really the outpost of the McCarthy era, and of the entire sense of nameless guilt, simply never got on the screen. In retrospect that is very disappointing, because I think it was a film filled with

146  robin wood

Intoxicated by the idea of total freedom. Mickey One (1964).

good ideas, most of which ended up in discussion and not on the screen. RW: What about the character of the Japanese artist? He seems one of the major weaknesses of the film, because he seems such a symbolic character and thrust at the audience as a symbol. AP: Yes, he is. I really intended him to be the survivor, out of the junk of the atom bomb, and out of the junk of the industrial waste that a city throws off—that somehow one can convert that from base metal to something finer. That was the idea. But I must say by the time it’s on the screen, I can’t fault Peckinpah that much on the low level of symbolism. RW: One doesn’t know how Yes, his artistic creation, is to be taken, whether it is meant to have validity or not. At least, I’ve never been sure. AP: It’s meant to . . . 

Arthur Penn in Canada  147 RW: I couldn’t help thinking of Yes in fact with Shelly’s mobiles in Alice’s Restaurant, which clearly are not meant to have very much artistic validity. AP: No, they aren’t. But then Shelly is absolutely the reverse of that kind of man . . . no, they are just palpable evidence in the case of Alice’s Restaurant of a man’s wish to do something else with his hands and with his life, but that’s about all. They are not very talented, and they are not very meaningful. The work of the survivor in Mickey One was meant to be meaningful. RW: The protagonists of your films, with the partial exception of Annie in The Miracle Worker, seem always to get involved, sometimes through their own actions, in situations that they can’t cope with or control. Does this correspond to your personal view of things? AP: I think so. I think that there is very little that one can do about one’s fate. I mean in terms of external results—how much effect one has upon what occurs in one’s life. How one lives with it is quite another matter, and what one’s own evaluation of one’s behavior is, is again quite another matter. The interior part of the life is different from the exterior part, but I would say that for the most part, my sense of the exterior side of living is that it is a very haphazard thing at best. The forces are really so strong in all directions that I find it difficult to think of anyone taking control of his life to the degree where the outcome is genuinely within his grasp. RW: Does Little Big Man follow this pattern in any way? AP: Yes, Little Big Man very definitely follows this pattern. In fact, Little Big Man is that character really to a fault, in the sense that he makes very little effort to affect his life, to choose a goal and achieve it. He relates to goals that are assigned to him by others and either completes them or fails them as the events dictate—in the course of which one gets a rather good view of the West as it might well have been at that point of the invasion of the white into the Indian world. Little Big Man is that nonactive character

148  robin wood to a fault. I don’t, as I say, personally subscribe to that as a way of living. . . . I think one must protest at it—resist it—and one struggles against it constantly and violently, but I think in the final analysis I would have to say I don’t know that the protest and struggle necessarily result in palpable and visible change. RW: In my book, I suggested that you belong to what one might loosely call the Romantic tradition, in which I placed Blake, Lawrence, Yeats—a tradition that lays particular emphasis on spontaneity, on living from impulses, living from instincts. Do you accept that placing? AP: Well, I’d be delighted to accept it. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ll accept it! I think I would say it is true of my work with the actors. I don’t know that I could lay claim to that as a lifestyle, although there is much about it that I could wish to lay claim to. RW: You seem to admire spontaneous behavior in your characters, and to be drawn to it, even when it is destructive for the characters. I’m thinking of, for example, Bubber Reeves in The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde. Although you’re critical of them and see their limitations, you seem also very much drawn to them because, in a way, they are free and spontaneous and impulsive. AP: Yes, I certainly do like that in any storytelling—I like the socalled inappropriate behavior, the so-called inappropriate affect, to borrow the psychological term, because it seems the very essence of the truth about human behavior—that one laughs at the angriest of moments, there are tears at the most seemingly inappropriate moments. There are odd mixtures of behavior that have a ring of veracity about them that the rather clearly delineated behavior of most acting in most films does not. I think Bergman is master of it, actually. To have done as erotic a scene, although I don’t think that was his impulse, in Persona by having two women sit in a faintly darkened room at a considerable distance from each other, and one tell of a sexual experience, which is probably in part true and in part a certain fantasy embellishment, was a remarkable accomplishment. I can’t think

Arthur Penn in Canada  149

Shooting practice outside the house foreclosed by the bank. Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

of anyone else who would have the sheer gall to do that—and yet the truth of it absolutely rang in my head like a bell. I cherish that in actors. RW: It has been said that Bonnie and Clyde is a dangerous film because it encourages revolt, without suggesting or implying any coherent or positive ideology, or program. Do you feel that there is any truth in this? AP: Well, I don’t believe that there is revolt without a program which will emerge from it. Activists who generate revolt don’t necessarily have any clearly defined ideological goals: a revolt comes out a social condition. I don’t think it comes out of abstract goal definition, and an attempt to achieve these goals. The activists revolt; there then comes a group of intellectuals who

150  robin wood ascribe to the revolt’s aims, goals, and then we see through history how the impulse of the revolt, and the aims as defined by the intellectuals who inherit the revolt, don’t necessarily meet at all, and there is a sort of subsequent subrevolt underneath it, a great lurching and often a great bloodbath that takes place afterward when somehow the revolt has followed its form. So I don’t think that is a particularly valid criticism, because you can level that criticism at almost any revolt in history and find the same things wanting. RW: It’s well known that Bonnie and Clyde was scripted before it was offered to you—in fact, it was offered to Godard and Truffaut, I believe, before that. Would you like to talk about the particular contributions which you feel that you made? AP: There was a kind of reorganization that I was responsible for through the middle of the film from the original script. The family reunion occurred rather earlier in the script than it does in the film, the picking up of the undertaker and his girlfriend, and the discovery that he is an undertaker—the kind of foreshadowing of death that punctures Bonnie’s romantic escapade—was in a different position. There wasn’t a kind of crewel toward the family reunion that there is in the present version, and I know that I am responsible for that. But, on the other hand, that was an excellently written script from the very beginning. The style and tone of the film was really set in that case by the writers, and it was in that sense one of the easier films to do. There was a wonderful panache in the writing. Each little scene had its clever little end, and off it went, and it was a very good script to work from. There was a sexual complication in the original script which didn’t strike me as being particularly apposite: C. W. Moss as really lover to both Clyde and Bonnie. I felt that deeply engaged and involved sexual triangulation might not necessarily result in the behavior that the film required of Bonnie and Clyde, that is this kind of substitute experiences. I felt that that in itself was so complicated and

Arthur Penn in Canada  151 detailed and restrictive that perhaps we wouldn’t have the kind of people who drove seven and eight hundred miles a night, which was true of the real Bonnie and Clyde, and was meant to be true of our characters. Now I may be absolutely wrong in my judgment, but I simply didn’t know how to do ménage à trois in that way. Also, the character of C. W. Moss did not seem to merit that level of sexual intimacy at the same time that he was going through the sort of social pariah-hood, and so I asked Benton and Newman to consider that. They did, and they altered the script to the form it took in the film, and that was something which they apparently did willingly and without too great resistance. RW: In fact, small resonances of this still turn up in the film—the way in which Clyde uses C. W. Moss by having him in the same room, in order to prevent himself from having to be intimate with Bonnie at a time when he can’t be. You’ve got a rather similar kind of triangular relationship with Alice, Ray, and Shelly, who one feels could easily become involved in a homosexualheterosexual triangle. There are hints of this, I think. AP: Yes, there are. I think in Alice’s Restaurant they are acted out more completely, although not the homosexual act itself, but the romantic aspirations of that kind of attachment between Shelly and Ray and between Shelly and Alice are acted out to greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. But I thought we were dealing, in the case of Clyde, with a man who was sexually far more crippled and inhibited and that it would if anything paralyze him even more if he really literally had consummated a homosexual behavior or consummated a heterosexual behavior in the presence of another person, particularly of another man: he would somehow be rendered immobile. I admit there is not a very sound intellectual basis for this—rather a completely personal and psychological one, but I think I can substantiate a pretty good case for it, although perhaps others could make out an equally good case for the homosexual triangulation.

152  robin wood RW: You mentioned Bergman earlier. . . . Bergman has called you one of the greatest directors in the world. Do you feel any affinities existing between your work and his? Your films seem unlike in all obvious ways. Is there anything in his films that attracts you? AP: Well, let me begin with blind worship. . . . There are so many things that attract me about his work that I can’t begin to even enunciate them, except to say that they are to me the essence of film poetry; they are the most exquisitely personal work done out of the most profoundly honest self-confrontations. His willingness to enter into what must be enormously painful areas of his life, again and again and again, in order to understand them and plumb the truth of them, seems to me to be the very essence of the poetic experience. And then to be gifted with the means of expressing that and re-creating it for others to comprehend is a blessing that one might call genius, and I have no hesitation about that—about calling Bergman a genius. It is much less the content and the particular imagery than it is the experience of a Bergman film that I would wish to emulate. I think I would be demeaning my own response to his work to speak of it in terms of this image or that relationship or this way of telling a story in sort of technical terms. That would be to debase the kind of experience I have at a Bergman film, which is really holy and kind of aesthetic, and terribly full, and it is that that I respond to more than anybody else’s work. I don’t think I could do justice to his work by isolating and delineating specifics. RW: Would you single out any particular films of his that you especially admire or respond to? AP: I think the recent group of films have been extraordinary from, I think, Winter Light on. That immediately suggests that there are no extraordinary films among the earlier ones, and that is not true either. But I seem personally to have responded in a different and more intense way to the films up through Persona and Shame, both of which absolutely left me staggered. I couldn’t

Arthur Penn in Canada  153 get my breath for days afterward, and they obsessed me and I was obsessed by them. His reference to me was one of the most startling things I have ever come across in print. RW: For better or for worse, Jean-Luc Godard is probably the most important figure in modern cinema as an influence in the historical sense of development. I wanted to ask you where you stand in relation to him, what you think of his work and the way his work has developed. AP: Well, I think his work is remarkable. I’ve always thought so from his very first film. I think he is an innovator of the most extraordinary capability. He is the man who must come along in any medium and break all the rules and change the organization of the material; he is a man of very considerable ideation. I think he is a profound man. I don’t think he is a very passionate one or compassionate one, and I must say I find life missing from his films, which is not to say that I don’t find them fascinating— but I find them always less than engaging emotionally, less than engaging at a human level. They are all to a greater or lesser degree philippic, with a kind of political creed nailed to the foreheads of the couple of people who are in front of his cameras. As we were saying the other day, increasingly it tends to be less than a couple of people, and usually one, and it is becoming an image of Godard himself. Now that kind of passion I can’t deny, and, I say, it is brilliantly and artfully done, but I want far more somehow in a film, although I can view a film like Weekend with awe at the skills, the downright boldness of the man, the outrageous boldness which is a quality I would give a good deal to have more of. But, oh, I do long for a moment when that man comes out from behind his dark glasses!

With the Same Serenity Little Big Man Aline and Robin Wood, Positif, no. 126 (April 1971), 1–8. Translated from the French translation of the lost original into English by Myriam Lacroix and Gabrielle Grant.

About a third of the way into Little Big Man, Jack Crabb marries a Swedish woman, Olga, and the young newlyweds get their picture taken in front of the store they have just purchased together. Inside the camera’s viewfinder we see an image of the happy couple, inverted and frozen. Jack is proudly pointing up at the store’s sign above the awning, and a voice (that of the photographer, one supposes) asks them to “Preserve the moment.” The voice is in fact that of Arthur Penn, and the phrase is the title of a book of photos by his brother, Irving.9 But there is more here than the mere homage, the private reference, intended by Penn: this incident helps define, if only by contrast, the essence of his outlook on life. A few seconds after this shot, Jack Crabb, seemingly distraught, trips while crossing over the doorstep while Olga hangs on to his neck. Within a few minutes he declares bankruptcy, and the couple’s goods are put up for auction. Penn then cuts abruptly to an Indian attack against a wild stagecoach, after which Jack is thrown into the water and Olga is kidnapped. Penn’s last four films since The Chase unfold in a fully cohesive movement: a movement toward progressive disintegration and loss. This element was already fully anticipated in The Left Handed Gun, and even the denouement of Mickey One, which appears to be more optimistic, is none other than the acceptance of perpetual terror as a condition of existence. The obvious subject of Little Big Man is the progressive extermination of Indians by whites, but on the other hand, the progressive deterioration or elimination of white

With the Same Serenity  155 characters, Jack’s parental substitutes, also appears throughout the film. The quasi symmetry of this construction grants to each one of the white characters (with the exception of Custer) two matching sequences. In the first sequence, Mrs. Pendrake is the wife of a pastor; in the second, she has become a prostitute. In his first appearance, Wild Bill Hickok tries to maintain a precarious reputation as a sharpshooter; in his other scene, he is killed by a young boy. The grotesquely comical crook Merriweather presents a striking summary of this general movement of loss: when he appears for the first time, he is already missing an arm and an ear, and shortly after he loses an eye; when he reappears later in the film, he has lost a leg and his scalp. The Swedish wife, almost childish in her vulnerability, degenerates, in the Cheyenne camp, into a virago who beats her husband. Custer’s psychopathy escalates, and finally he loses his mind on the battlefield. Yet the principle of loss is never more clear than in the development of Jack Crabb himself. His white wife is kidnapped by Indians, and his Indian wife is massacred by whites; the characters who successively fill the role of father figures die one after another or he rejects them. At the end (and at the beginning) of the film, Jack is an incredibly old man living in an old folks’ home—he leads an existence that, it would seem, is completely isolated. For the characters in Penn’s films, life is characterized either by a desperate fight for control over situations that escape them or, as a last resort, by helplessly giving in during a course of events that they implicitly know they cannot control. Of all the protagonists in the seven films Penn has directed to date, only Annie in The Miracle Worker successfully dominates the chaos that she faces. It is characteristic that this be by the means of a half-blind and instinctual fight rather than by the methods of an enlightened rationalism. Even Pat Garrett is deprived (by what is basically the suicide of Billy) of any feeling of satisfactory authority, and Calder in The Chase (of all of Penn’s characters, perhaps the most mature and the most responsible) submits in the end to the chaos that surrounds him and recognizes his defeat. Irving Penn, artist of the fixed image, tries to capture and immortalize the

156  robin wood essence of life by “preserving the moment”; Arthur Penn, artist of perpetual movement, is almost obsessed by the practical impossibility of capturing or holding on to anything. Neither the white nor the Indian triumph in Little Big Man. Contrary to the majority of his heroes, Penn is a cultured man, with a clear and conscious mind, and his method of creation—filming each scene from many angles, creating abundant and complex material from which, while editing, he then “extracts” (his term of choice) the completed film—reveals how much he feels personally for the pragmatic fight of his characters for order. It is clear that the desolate and desperate picture of human existence that has been sketched so far, though without a doubt deducible from Penn’s films, in some ways clashes with the effect that it produces as a completed piece. All three times that Old Lodge Skins says his “heart soars like a hawk,” the spectator’s heart soars with his. Penn’s piece is essentially positive in spirit, though pessimistic in its admitted significance. This isn’t really a paradox, in the same way that an affirmation does not need to be logical to be true. These films’ themes of desperation and loss, and the desolation with which they end, must be opposed by liveliness, a liveliness solidly anchored in a sense of human value. Penn’s evolution since Mickey One demonstrates a remarkable logic, despite the fact that two out of four of his films—The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde—were based on topics proposed to him rather than discovered by him. The Chase culminates in the disintegration of the incurably corrupt society within which it takes place; Bonnie and Clyde deals with people who are banished from society without having any alternative to it; Alice’s Restaurant shows characters fighting—though in vain—to build an alternative society. Little Big Man continues this logical progression; the Cheyennes are significantly linked with the hippie characters in Alice’s Restaurant. However, though the church community in the latter is inherently sown with the seeds of its own demise, the Cheyennes are destroyed solely by external agents, their only weakness being their inability to properly defend themselves. Though it takes place in the past and is partly based on historical

With the Same Serenity  157

The Cheyennes recall the hippies of Alice’s Restaurant.

events, Little Big Man implicitly furthers Penn’s contemporary explorations of values by which to live. Bonnie and Clyde vividly evokes Depression-era America by layering many specific details, and the greatest care was also visibly taken to re-create the details of Cheyenne life. However, Bonnie and Clyde explores the 1930s only superficially and it would be inaccurate to think of Penn’s depiction of the Cheyennes as being of documentary caliber. Rather, he uses the Cheyennes to incarnate substitute essential values, and he does not fear idealizing them. This becomes clear when one compares the beginning of the film—the kidnapping of Jack and his sister by the Cheyennes—with Thomas Berger’s take on it in his novel. In the film, the wagon train is attacked by Pawnees

158  robin wood and everyone is massacred except for the children, who, having successfully hidden, are found and rescued by the Cheyennes, who happen to pass by. This implies that the Cheyennes would never have committed such a massacre. In the book, however, the pioneers were massacred by the Cheyennes, who were prey to rowdy episodes of intoxication—this included Old Lodge Skins, who, in the film, never loses his dignity. The abrupt transitions, from farce to tragedy and vice versa, have thrown off many spectators. However, though the film’s tone is very varied, its breaks are not as harsh as one might think. Not a single sequence—not even the Washita Massacre—is devoid of comical elements, and none of the scenes where the comical tone dominates is devoid of serious implications. The fundamental opposition upon which rests the logic of the transitions is less based on tone than on the types of characterization, which aim to differentiate white society from that of the Cheyennes. This can be described as the opposition between the natural and the unnatural, between an artificial and imposed morality and one that is flexible and can adapt to changing needs, a morality anchored in respect for the individual nature of each and every human being. With the exception of Jack, an element of caricature can be found in every white character—they resemble silhouettes in a comedy of manners, and their traits are usually satirical. This is not the case in the way the Cheyennes are represented, where comedy arises only from the strangeness of their customs by contrast with the habits and ambitions of the whites. Even those Cheyenne characters who, upon first encounter, seem very exaggerated—Younger Bear, the Contrary, and Little Horse (Robert Little Star), the heemaneh—are in fact very different from the types of caricatures that compose the white world. The traits shared by all the whites (with the exception of Olga) are those of deceitfulness and artifice; or, like Merriweather, they purposely aim to cheat others; or, like Mrs. Pendrake, they are forced to play a role; or, like Custer, they become so infatuated with their own character that the actor and the role become so tangled that they eventually deceive themselves.

With the Same Serenity  159 One might see them as more stylized versions of the characters that represent society in The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde, who, unlike more antisocial characters that are moved by spontaneous impulses (Bubber and Anna, or Bonnie and Clyde themselves), are motivated by exterior consideration or are pushed by frustrated impulses. The Contrary and the heemaneh are very different from these types of characters. The Contrary took on his role as a self-imposed discipline, as a free choice, and his function has nothing to do with deceitfulness. The heemaneh is nothing but himself, because Cheyenne society permits and encourages him to be. One might first be troubled by what seems like a great error in judgment in the scenes that depict him, as it is the only time that the audience laughs cruelly and at just the wrong times. After further reflection, however, it becomes obvious (considering the extraordinary conciseness and economy of the film) that Penn has presented the character in the only honest way. A man with pronounced effeminate traits, living in a society that accepts him completely and does not shame him in any way, will naturally express his characteristics freely and without constraint and will allow them to blossom to an extent that might seem exaggerated to a public conditioned by current social attitudes. The opposition is made clearer by comparing Little Horse, the effeminate man, to Caroline (Carol Androsky), Jack’s sister, the woman who dresses as a man. Little Horse is what he is, without ambiguity, but Caroline’s exact identity is still veiled with doubt. She desires men and, as a teenager, is disappointed when the Cheyennes do not rape her. She takes on a masculine role in order to face life in the West but reverts to her femininity with dizzying speed as soon as she believes that she has a man for herself, which she sees in the long-lost brother she has just covered in tar and feathers. When she finds Jack, she attempts to project her own masculine tendencies on him by forcing him into the role of a gunfighter but takes her masculine role back on just as quickly when Jack fails. One feels that her dismay—which is grotesquely comical, like that of most whites in the film—could also have been shown to be quite tragic. Whereas Little Horse has a

160  robin wood recognized and accepted place in his community, Caroline, in hers, can in no way be herself. The moral center of the film is therefore the Cheyennes, particularly their chief. Old Lodge Skins is the father figure (or more precisely, the grandfather figure) toward whom Jack turns on many occasions, the only one he never rejects. The poles of reference are decisively established in the sequence where Jack first meets Merriweather with the Reverend Pendrake (Thayer David), who is by far the most repulsive character in the film. (It is significant that both occupy, in the film’s white society, seemingly opposed moral stances: Pendrake is the spokesperson for the official moral code, and Merriweather is clearly immoral. Pendrake’s obsession with food and stuffing himself is in fact parallel to Merriweather’s greed. As one gets fatter, the other is diminished, yet both are isolated in their own egocentricity and eventually self-destruct.) Merriweather says to Jack: “[Old Lodge Skins] gave you a vision of moral order in the universe, and there isn’t any,” and it is under his influence that Jack decides “Well, maybe we’re all fools and none of it matters.” The placement of each Merriweather scene is meaningful; they both occur immediately after a meeting with Mrs. Pendrake and happen at moments when Jack’s deception of the white world reaches its culminating point. Merriweather in fact appears as the truth that explains the white world—egotistical and cynical under his rigid and conventional moralism that, attacked and beaten mercilessly, remains indestructible. The scenes involving Louise Pendrake offer an admirable example of the film’s complexity of tone: comedy dominates, yet there is a troubling underlying note, which is repeated more forcefully each time. The scene where she is bathing Jack—probably the most purely funny scene in the movie—culminates when, as she is drying him, she kisses him, and her eyes betray her sensuality and her need for tenderness. Later, in the brothel, she automatically begins to undress for Jack, telling him for the first time that when he was young, she had approached his bed in the night and had wanted to wake him. Separated from her by a curtain of pearls and by his conjugal experience

With the Same Serenity  161

Mrs. Pendrake (Faye Dunaway) gives Jack a bath.

with Sunshine, all he is able to say is: “You should have woke me up that night years ago, Mrs. Pendrake.” In addition to its vivid evocation of something having been wasted, this moment is also one of the most significant of the film, as it defends a more “natural” (Cheyenne) sense of morality against a more repressive Christian morality and the sexual degradation that is its result and corollary. The brothel scene is comparable to a previous scene that is comedic in a very different way, where Jack, more Cheyenne than ever, marries all three of Sunshine’s sisters on the same night. We are told that Cheyenne men only marry one woman, but the whites have killed so many men that there aren’t enough left, and the sisters are left childless widows. “Natural” ethics (therefore adaptable) are in support of Jack’s decision to sleep with three women who need a man as much as the tribe needs children—a decision inspired, clearly, more by the coldness of the night and by

162  robin wood Sunshine’s absence, who left to give birth to Jack’s child, than by moral considerations. After the brothel, Jack returns to alcoholism and the gutter and once again meets Merriweather, who incarnates the lowest degree of morality. But this time, although he appears to have reached the depths of moral degradation, Jack refuses Merriweather’s job offer: he will not kill buffalo for their hides and deprive Indians of their resources. The “moral order of the world” taught to him by Old Lodge Skins is affirmed in full opposition to Merriweather’s pursuit of selfinterest in a universe devoid of meaning. The more one considers the apparently incoherent episodes in the life of Little Big Man, the denser the structure of interrelations they reveal. Having found himself mixed up in the massacre of a group of Cheyennes among a calvary unit, Jack declares that “Life wasn’t fit to live, and the only thing to do was to mingle with the twinkling stars.” In the minute that follows, he finds Sunshine in labor and helps her give birth. The Cheyennes, with their tents in earth colors, as if growing from the soil, and their blankets in natural colors that harmonize with all the landscapes, designate themselves as “Human Beings.” This takes on a particular scope of meaning if we consider the role assigned to them by Penn. One could defend the hypothesis according to which Indians in the Western represent to the American subconscious the wild, the natural—or in Freudian terms, the “id.” We can thus roughly see the psychological attitude of Western filmmakers by the way in which they treat Indians: for example, we can take the Indians in Fort Apache (1948), The Big Sky (1952), and Run of the Arrow (1957) to arrive at some valid considerations about Ford, Hawks, and Fuller. Penn is fully conscious of this dimension of psychological significance. His usage of a primitive people to represent the ethical center of the universe of Little Big Man confirms his place in the grand tradition of Romanticism. D. H. Lawrence, for example, would certainly have approved the words of Old Lodge Skins and the weight of significance given them by the context of the whole film: the Cheyennes, he says, believe that everything is alive, “but the white man, they believe that

With the Same Serenity  163 everything is dead. . . . If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out.” But Little Big Man would not entirely be a Penn film if its morality was as simple as this leads us to believe. The Cheyennes, with their adaptability, their acceptance of ephemerality, and their apparently indifferent yet responsible attitude toward human relations, offer a partial response to the uncontrollable chaos of existence in Penn’s universe. However, his adherence to this ethic is tempered by other tendencies. The moral complexity of The Chase came from Penn’s sympathies for both cool composure (Calder) and instinct (Bubber and Anna). In Alice’s Restaurant there was a dilemma between his sympathetic interest for the freedom of the hippie world—his pragmatic and flexible attitude with respect to human relations—and his feeling that a form of permanence and stability are necessary. This dilemma is also found in Little Big Man. While watching the “great copulation” scene (as heralded by Old Lodge Skins), we do not forget that Jack’s feelings tie him to Sunshine. There is no visible dilemma in his behavior, which afterward gains the complete approval of his wife (“I knew you were a good man”). But there is tension on the level of implicit values: we are invited to give our consent to Jack’s pragmatic morality of passing fancies with the sisters, but it is difficult to reconcile this with the necessity of permanence that the film stresses. Jack’s adoration of Sunshine is (according to the standards presented in the film) very anti-Cheyenne. The Human Beings are used to easily accepting death: Old Lodge Skins has had a succession of wives (the role of which, it seems, is hardly more than housewife and bed companion), and the sisters are very inclined to be consoled in their widowhood. The moral complexity culminates in the scene that follows the Washita Massacre: the extermination of men, women, children, and horses has for a counterpoint the comical walk of Old Lodge Skins, who walks serenely toward the river, certain of his invisibility. He could say “Today is a good day to die” and accept the massacre of his people with a peaceful spirit; he is the moral center of the film, and his calm arouses a deep sympathy. And so Penn immediately takes us to the death of

164  robin wood Sunshine and her baby and to Jack’s cries of agony, laying in the snow as in a simulacrum of their death. The moral and emotional complexity of this sequence reveals rather than confusion an admirable openness of spirit. This grand overture moderates the sadness of the end of the film by introducing a fragile attempt at the belief that it is possible to perpetuate “natural” values. Jack, having accepted the values taught to him by Old Lodge Skins, the father figure he finally chooses, transmits them (having himself become a venerable father figure) to the young reporter (who resembles Arthur Penn, though the director denies any such intention on his part). The final shot—a long close-up of Jack, alone with his memories in the old folks’ home—is as desolate as are Penn’s usual film endings but also communicates a sentiment of perenniality. In the final episode of Jack’s tale, Old Lodge Skins decides to die and hikes a mountain in hopes of finding a sufficiently majestic peak. But the magic does not work, and he is woken by raindrops; in this moment, the film’s comedic, poignant, and positive elements mingle beautifully. He accepts life and death with the same serenity. We never see Old Lodge Skins die.

Inevitable Violence Times Educational Supplement, February 9, 1973, 102.

Of the older generation of filmmakers, John Ford has been most consistent in elaborating an image of America. It is not a static image: to follow his films from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) to Cheyenne Autumn (1964) is to trace a steady progress into disillusionment, a growing awareness (implied rather than explicit) of the widening gulf between the idealized and optimistic vision embodied in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, and the discouraging realities of contemporary American society. The Fordian values were too deeply rooted for him ever to be able to confront that disillusionment, which would have involved confronting modern America: it manifests itself indirectly, in the way all movement toward a future drains away from the films, in the increasing strength of nostalgia and a pervasive half-acknowledged bitterness. Ford’s heirs are Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah. They take over where he left off, sharing his central preoccupation with American civilization but accepting the disillusionment with full consciousness. Both began their film careers with Westerns; both have returned repeatedly to the genre or its derivatives (Penn’s The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde both treat themes traditionally belonging to the Western). Their films are vivid embodiments of the unresolvable tensions inevitable for artists who reject the society they live in without being able to accept or construct any defined ideological program that might oppose it, an intensely American predicament that drives both directors to take as typical protagonist the antisocial outsider rather than the committed revolutionary.

166  robin wood

Doc (Steve McQueen) and Carol McCoy (Ali McGraw) in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972).

Given the basic similarities, the differences are mutually illuminating. Penn’s characters are either essentially gentle, nonparticipating dropouts (Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant, Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man) or are caught up helplessly in events they can’t control (Bubber Reeves in The Chase; Bonnie and Clyde). Peckinpah’s are more deliberately aggressive and much less innocent, more responsible for their actions: their assertive maturity emphasizes by contrast the childlikeness of Bonnie and Clyde and the passivity of the Alice’s Restaurant hippies. Where Bonnie and Clyde are mercilessly slaughtered, Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch deliberately provoke their own deaths in a general holocaust, while in The Getaway (1972) Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw are actually allowed to escape with their loot from the bank robbery after annihilating most of their enemies.

Inevitable Violence  167 Both directors see the inevitability of violence in the American social situation, but their attitudes are very different. In Penn’s films, the pain and horror of violence get the emphasis. To Peckinpah, violence is inherent in the conditions of life itself and must be accepted. For Penn as an artist, the chief danger is ineffectuality: the hiatuses in his work suggest that it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to make films, and one senses a relation between this and the high value that his work places on tenderness and sensitivity. Peckinpah, on the contrary, lacking perhaps Penn’s self-doubts, is at present in the midst of a remarkably creative period. For him, the chief danger is brutalism. His attitude to violence is always equivocal: in the slow-motion blood ballets of The Wild Bunch (1969), acceptance of its necessity escalates into ecstatic, mindless celebration. One can see Peckinpah going the way of Ted Hughes, whose work shows a progress from the acceptance of violence as a condition of life in the early poems to the celebration of total insensitivity in Crow. Straw Dogs (1971) offered a remarkable cinematic equivalent for Hughes’s poetry, in its force and vividness and expression as much as in theme and attitude. The warmth and generosity of Junior Bonner—one of 1972’s very few outstanding films— seemed a welcome complement and corrective. The Getaway, a characteristically vital and inventive movie, confirms both one’s admiration for Peckinpah and one’s anxieties. Particularly worrying is the equivocal presentation of Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri), the gangster whose systematic humiliation of Harold (the veterinarian he has abducted and the film’s chief representative of established society) drives his victim to hang himself. Rudy’s brutalism is never securely placed, and one has a sneaking suspicion that Peckinpah half admires it, even finding Harold’s suicide funny. The assertion of masculinity is often a central thrust in Peckinpah’s work, its corollary being the tendency of his men to treat women as sexual objects rather than partners, a tendency from which the director is not clearly dissociated. The scenario of The Getaway makes a malefemale partnership the central issue, and the film’s finest sequence is its

168  robin wood

The problematic assertion of masculinity in Peckinpah’s films. The Getaway.

last (a succinct recapitulation of the father-son theme in Junior Bonner), in which the couple’s union is confirmed by the blessings of the father figure who aids their escape—significantly, a junk collector, himself in trouble with the police. What one most regrets in the film is Ali MacGraw’s uninteresting performance in a role that cries out for an Angie Dickinson: whether the blame is hers or the director’s, it leaves a hollow where the heart of the film should be and a question mark to the problem of Peckinpah’s treatment of his female characters where there was opportunity for a decisive answer.

Rustling Up Robin Wood on The Missouri Breaks Times Educational Supplement, July 23, 1976, 46.

The Missouri Breaks raises with particular vividness the problems of discussing authorship in the American commercial cinema. It is directed by Arthur Penn, who has a habit of taking over apparently heterogenous projects, often at a late stage in the elaboration of the script (The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde), and converting them, with only a minimum of structural alteration, into landmarks in a strikingly consistent development. The original screenplay this time is by Thomas McGuane, and in its outline it follows remarkably closely that of the recent Rancho Deluxe (1975), also written by McGuane but directed by Frank Perry. Beyond this, the film must be seen in the context of the overall development of the Western, the Hollywood cinema, and American civilization—of the social/cultural/ideological process in which individual work and individual artists are caught up. The plot similarities between the two films can be swiftly indicated; they help to highlight the differences. The primary conflict in both is between a cattle baron and a group of rustlers. In both, the rustlers attempt to deceive the rancher by installing themselves right under his nose (in Rancho Deluxe by recruiting two of his men and in The Missouri Breaks by buying an adjacent ranch). After a particular outrage (the holding to ransom of a prize bull, the revenge murder of a foreman), the rancher brings in a recognized expert—in Perry’s film a “stock detective” (Slim Pickens) and in Penn’s a “Regulator” (Marlon Brando). A three-way conflict develops as the attempts by rustlers and expert to outwit each other are accompanied by growing tension between expert and rancher. In both cases, the expert appears to be

170  robin wood

Rustler Tom Logan ( Jack Nicholson) and rancher’s daughter Jane Braxton (Kathleen Lloyd). The Missouri Breaks.

either idle or incompetent and antagonizes his employer with his arrogance; in both, when the conflict erupts, the expert expresses his indifference about salary but insists on carrying out his job to its conclusion, as a matter of persona/professional pride. The most striking general common feature of the two scripts is McGuane’s tendency to conceive each episode in terms of some deliberately novel or eccentric idea. Perry, whose previous work (e.g., Diary of a Mad Housewife, 1970) has been consistently vulgar, facile, and opportunistic, executes Rancho Deluxe at precisely this level. Each scene is played for its potential cuteness, and the film generates no moral tension or resonance: the rustlers are amiable young men, the detective an endearingly crafty old one, and the film has no ambitions beyond casual amusement. The screenplay of The Missouri Breaks is in

Rustling Up  171 itself more serious (the film opens with a hanging and culminates in a series of violent deaths; no one dies in Rancho Deluxe to disturb the predominantly comic tone); the degree to which Penn has infiltrated and made his own what is clearly a McGuane structural pattern remains remarkable. The central tension in Penn’s work has always been that between impulse and control: a tension, one might retort, central to the human condition, but it has always been invested by Penn with a particular intensity and, in the earlier films, an exact balance of sympathies (the Billy the Kid/Pat Garrett opposition of The Left Handed Gun, the marriage of instinct and reason in Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, the equal valuing of Bubber Reeves and Sheriff Calder in The Chase). The Chase (in Penn’s words, “more a Hollywood film than a Penn film”) marks a watershed both in his work and in the development of the American cinema: one of the first “apocalyptic” Hollywood films, it presents the disintegration of American capitalist society as irrevocable. From there on, Penn has moved consistently outside established society to search for alternative (and always extremely vulnerable) groups embodying values of freedom, generosity, spontaneity, a mutual human responsiveness: the Barrow gang of Bonnie and Clyde, the hippie community of Alice’s Restaurant, the Cheyennes of Little Big Man, the rustlers of The Missouri Breaks. This change of emphasis has been accompanied by a corresponding change of attitude to the figures embodying consciousness and control and dedicated to the preservation of the established order. The last such character presented sympathetically in a Penn film was Brando’s Calder in The Chase; it is particularly fitting that the renewal of this felicitous actor-director relationship should place Brando in roughly the same position in the Penn symbolic structure but now viewed unequivocally as a monster. It would be wrong, however, to see this development exclusively in personal terms. Penn’s last three films have all been concerned to invert the central Hollywood myths: the role of the cavalry as righteous defenders of civilization and agents of Manifest Destiny (Little Big

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Private detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) brings light to the shadows of the urban jungle. Night Moves (1975).

Man), the morally and professionally infallible “private eye” bringing light to the shadows of the urban jungle (Night Moves), the gunfighter as heroic champion of law and order (The Missouri Breaks). The tendency (by no means restricted to Penn—think of, among many others, the films of Robert Altman) should be seen less as the desire at last to tell “the truth” than as a reflection of marked changes in American values and the national consciousness. The Missouri Breaks offers a succinct rewriting of the Western myth of the development of American civilization: the rancher Braxton has brought thousands of head of cattle and hundreds of volumes of English literature to the wilderness, together with the civilized values of home, family, law and order. We are told that his wife, after three years of “weighing every word,” went off with “the first unreasonable man she could find.” The hanging that opens the film marks the moment

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Logan observes Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) in the bathtub. The Missouri Breaks.

when law and order harden into repression; after it, Tom Logan ( Jack Nicholson), leader of the rustlers, scents “something new in the air.” The “something new” soon takes on the bodily form of Robert E. Lee Clayton, the hired regulator. Clayton is an extraordinary creation. Between them, Penn, McGuane, and Brando have pushed to its logical conclusion, its reductio ad absurdum, the mythic figure of the lone hero from the wilderness, defender of civilization, righter of wrongs. From Hopalong Cassidy to Shane, this figure must be unattached, especially to women and the trammels of home, psychologically unexplained and inexplicable, superior and charismatic. Clayton, at once superhuman and subhuman, has no identity—only a succession of flamboyant costumes and a series of accents. The “only woman he ever loved” is his horse (who,

174  robin wood appropriately, urinates during his love song to her on his harmonica). Tom Logan’s definition of a regulator is “someone who shoots people and don’t ever get near them.” Clayton establishes his distance from humanity at every point, refusing all personal contact: his first outlandish appearance from under a horse’s neck is immediately followed by his theatrical display over the foreman’s coffin. His dominance depends on distance: his binoculars and his Creedmore rifle that can kill at five hundred yards—hence the appropriateness of his death, with him and Logan at close quarters, photographed in extreme close-up. Each of his killings emphasizes his own distant omnipotence and the human vulnerability of his victims: one shot while copulating, one while defecating, etc. Both castrated (“You ain’t even there,” says Logan, peering into the suds of Clayton’s bath) and castrating, he ends (in the great tradition of screen monsters) himself vulnerable and pathetic even while detestable. Against him is set, with a touching tentativeness, as life against death, Tom Logan’s attempts to invent gardening for himself—his pride in saving apple trees from blight and in devising a primitive irrigation system: a simple creative achievement that, to Clayton, is “not worth a spit.”

Arthur Penn Richard Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary; The Major Film-makers, Vol. 2, 775–78. Kinugasa to Zanussi © Martin Secker & Warburg, 1980.

Arthur Penn’s is a cinema built on tensions and paradoxes. A gentle, sensitive, civilized man, he has made films notorious for their violence. His general orientation is toward author-director’s cinema, the European art-movie, and he admits to idolizing Ingmar Bergman; yet his films are intensely American in subject matter and usually rooted in the traditions of genre cinema, and he has only once directed from his own scenario (Alice’s Restaurant [1969], coscripted with Venable Herndon, based on Arlo Guthrie’s record and on factual material). He has worked in both theater and television, and the style of his films can be partly described in terms of a tension between these two “pulls”: one thinks of him primarily as an actor’s director, yet he talks of editing as the most important aspect of the cinema, the essential creative act, and shoots a great deal of material (either using several cameras or refilming the same segment of action from different setups) from which he subsequently “extracts” (his word) the film. The richness of his films arises, nonetheless, above all from the remarkably alive, responsive performances he elicits from his actors. On two occasions (The Left-Handed Gun [1958], The Chase [1966]), the editing has been taken out of his hands; yet the films not only survive but impress as indisputably personal works. The Chase, which he himself partly rejects as a Hollywood film rather than “a Penn film,” remains arguably his best work to date, central to his preoccupations, consistently vivid in its realization. Through all this one can trace a coherent psychological pattern: on the one hand, a reliance on, and respect for, the instinctual (American

176  robin wood cinema; the gravitation toward Westerns and gangster movies; the spontaneous, intuitive work with actors); on the other, a persistent yearning after intellectual control (European cinema; the desire to be total author; the conscious, objective decisions involved in editing). The oppositions are hardly as neat as this makes them appear: there is no reason, for example, why conscious intellectual decisions shouldn’t play an important role in the direction of actors. Yet anyone who watches Penn direct is struck by the spontaneous, participatory nature of his involvement. He even at times mimes the action from behind the camera during shooting, out of view of the actors, as if to obtain the performances he wants by some kind of sympathetic magic. This psychological pattern is reflected in the films, which consistently express in dramatic terms the struggle between spontaneous impulse and conscious control, the “holiness” of the first (in Blake’s sense: “Everything that lives is holy”)10 counterbalanced by the necessity for the second. Much of the quality of the films grows out of the interaction of these opposed drives—out of Penn’s implicit acknowledgment of the validity of each and the resulting sense of a dislocation or disharmony inherent in man’s nature, in the human condition. Made in 1958 when he was thirty-six years old, Penn’s first film, The Left Handed Gun, is centered on the struggle of Billy the Kid (Paul Newman) toward consciousness and self-awareness. His confused impulses of violence are complexly motivated, hence complexly evaluated, originating in a sense of moral outrage at a monstrous criminal act defended (indeed instigated) by the law, escalating into a willful and futile destruction. Against him are set two authority figures presented, if less inwardly, with great sympathy: Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), the gentle pacifist father-substitute whose murder provokes Billy’s career of destruction, and Pat Garrett ( John Dehner), the sane, steady, settled defender of law and order. Penn’s fourth film, The Chase, repeats this pattern, the values embodied in the spontaneous, instinctive Anna and Bubber Reeves ( Jane Fonda and Robert Redford) set against the efforts at control of Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando).

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Billy the Kid’s confused impulses of violence are complexly motivated. The Left Handed Gun (1958).

Penn doesn’t, as a rule, write his own scripts (though he admits to contributing in various degrees to all of them); on the other hand, he never accepts subjects unless he finds them congenial and feels he can make them his own by a process of assimilation and transmutation. He has associated himself repeatedly with William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, producing it on stage and television and in 1962 directing the film version. It is easy to see why: the subject matter offers marvelously intense and concentrated expression to Penn’s preoccupations. The child Helen Keller (Patty Duke), unable to see, hear, or speak, is a creature given over to uncontrolled, animallike impulse. The education she receives from Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) is essentially the process of transforming an animal into a human being. It

178  robin wood is Annie who is both the center of the film and a central Penn figure. Herself half blind (a factual datum turned to expressive symbolic use), acting from personal psychological needs as much as from a dedication to her vocation, she comes as near as any character in Penn’s films to reconciling the authority of conscious control with the vitality of instinctual drives. Penn’s work also needs to be seen in its social context of contemporary America, the desperation that is never far below the surface appearing to be the response of an alive and humanly engaged man to a society at once exploitative and disintegrating. The desperation and bewilderment are most explicit in Penn’s least satisfactory film, Mickey One (1965)—significantly, a film made in complete freedom that Penn celebrated by indulging (and, one hopes, exorcizing) his desire to make a European “art” movie. The film emerged as an unprofitable expression of confusion, a generalized statement of urban nightmare, suggesting by contrast how the apparent constraints of genre and popular narrative can act not only as necessary restraints but as positively enriching elements. Some of Penn’s most brilliant and affecting set pieces work within more clearly defined things falling apart: the burning of the McSweens’ home in The Left Handed Gun; the climactic chaos of The Chase; the police siege, pursuit, and death of Buck (Gene Hackman) in Bonnie and Clyde (1967); the drift of the wedding celebrations of Alice’s Restaurant into drugged apathy and disillusionment; the Washita River massacre in Little Big Man (1970). Despite the fact that Penn’s choice of subjects has often been limited by commercial interests and that several of his early films were adapted from plays or (in the case of The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde) made from scripts already in an advanced stage of elaboration before he took them on, Penn’s work so far reveals a remarkably logical inner development. Only in The Left Handed Gun is there a favorable portrayal of established society, and there it is a relatively primitive community (presided over paternally by Pat Garrett) that bears little resemblance to contemporary America. Mickey One portrays modern America in terms of complex, indefinable menace. In The Chase,

Arthur Penn  179 society falls apart: the real climax of the film, and perhaps the most intense expression Penn has given us of the tragic, desperate side of his view of life, comes when Calder, the film’s one responsible and balanced adult, succumbs to the mindless violence of his environment by savagely beating the murderer of Bubber Reeves. In Bonnie and Clyde Penn moves the center of the film outside society, which is presented as variously corrupt, limiting, or ineffectual. The heroes are now the spontaneous, undisciplined, ultimately self-destructive outlaws; the authority figure (Hamer, the Texas Ranger) is presented with marked hostility. The swing to the values of impulse is expressed stylistically in the richly inventive detail and irresistible élan that made the film Penn’s first spectacular commercial success. But Bonnie and Clyde offered Penn no possibility of any constructive alternative to the society they rejected: he presented them as unwitting folk heroes, as much products and victims of their society as outlaws, never achieving awareness of themselves or of the processes they were involved in. In his two subsequent films, Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man, Penn has attempted, somewhat tentatively, to explore possible alternatives. Alice’s Restaurant, though sadly imperfect (the twenty minutes that recapitulate the narrative of the original Arlo Guthrie record rupture the tone and constitute a serious flaw), is perhaps Penn’s most personal film. It is also his gentlest, taking its tone from the pacifist and largely passive hippies who populate it. Penn’s interest gravitated to the community in the deconsecrated church in Stockbridge—to the attempt to found and develop a society of dropouts. The film, predominantly elegiac, analyzes the failure of the venture. The community is built on no firm or vital traditions, only on the vestiges of the tradition it has supposedly cast off. The one common bond—the belief in individual freedom—proves too negative to hold the group together. Significantly, the authority figures of the film are much weakened, either actually dying (Woody Guthrie) or ineffectual (Ray, nominal head of the church community) or fatuous establishment figures (Officer Obie). The film, like its characters, lacks any vital or informing sense

180  robin wood of direction: its movement is toward disintegration, and the personality of Arlo Guthrie, which Penn tries to invest with a certain affirmative potential, is too slight to counterbalance this movement. The hippies of Alice’s Restaurant become, essentially, the Cheyennes of Little Big Man. Here, white civilization is vigorously, if somewhat simplistically, ridiculed; the film is a moral fable whose positive values are embodied in the Cheyennes, the “Human Beings,” who preserve a kind of natural sanity, tolerance, and goodwill in contrast to the psychopathic world of the whites. Penn partially fails, as Nicholas Ray partially failed with his Eskimos in The Savage Innocents (1960), and for the same reasons: the presentation of the Cheyennes is confused and blurred by a divided impulse, the desire to re-create “real” Indian culture partly conflicting with the desire to create an “ideal” alternative to the white world. Penn clearly wants to confront the tensions of his own society directly, but he has so far evaded such a confrontation. His problem is that of the artist who is antagonistic to his society yet is unable to elaborate any consistent or constructive ideology with which he might oppose it; he therefore centers his films on outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde or marginal groups too weak to affect the course of things, like the hippies of Alice’s Restaurant, or he escapes into the indirectness of generalized parable, as in Little Big Man. The hiatuses in his work may suggest the increasing difficulties he has in affirming anything or even in offering confident statements. Yet he remains an immensely sympathetic figure, with a relatively small but vital body of work that demands recognition and respect.

The Chase Flashback, 1965 Chapter 2 of Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 11–25.

This essay constitutes a flashback in two senses. The minor sense: I wrote a chapter on The Chase in a little book on Arthur Penn published about fifteen years ago, in the days of my critical innocence (or culpable ignorance, as you will)—innocence, above all, of concepts of ideology, and of any clearly defined political position. The major sense: the film was released some years before the period with which this book [Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan] is concerned. My evaluation of The Chase has not changed, but my sense of the kind of importance to be attributed to it has changed somewhat: I now see it as a seminal work, anticipating many of the major developments that took place in the Hollywood cinema during the decade following its production, hence a fitting starting point for this investigation. The present account will differ from the earlier, not only in approach but in ambition. There the aim (within the framework of an uncomplicatedly auteurist study) was to provide an appreciation of The Chase as “an Arthur Penn film,” despite the obviously collaborative nature of the project and despite its auteur’s own explicit reservations, marking a phase in a personal development. Here, while reaffirming my admiration for the film (and for Penn’s work in general—Night Moves is among the finest Hollywood films of the 1970s), I use it partly as a pretext for a number of more widespread concerns that are basic to this book: to establish a far more complex attitude toward the auteur theory; to introduce certain critical/theoretical concepts fundamental to my present position, which will reflect in particular on assumptions about “realism” and the “realistic”; to initiate a discussion of the

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Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) and Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). Night Moves (1975).

differences (specifically, the ideological differences, though of course all differences are in a looser sense ideological) between the classical and modern Hollywood cinema (one can take 1960 as a convenient, though to some degree arbitrary, point of demarcation). We may begin with Penn’s own attitude to the film and with the bourgeois myth of “the artist” that would have us attach a definitive importance to it: the myth of the artist as a superior being, donating to the world works that are the result of his conscious intentions and over which (at least if they are successful) he is assumed to have control. It may appear superfluous, after two decades of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, to attack the “intentionalist fallacy” yet again, but it dies hard, as anyone involved in film education will be aware. If the director says his film is bad, how can the critic assert

The Chase 183 that it is good? If the director claims total unawareness of certain layers of meaning in his work, then how can those layers of meaning exist outside the critic’s imagination? If the director (“the artist”) says he had no control over a given film, then how can that film be worth defending? One of the major concerns of twentieth-century aesthetics has been progressively to answer, and in effect dismiss, such questions: first, through the “primitive” use of psychoanalysis (the artist is not aware of his own unconscious impulses), a use that proved perfectly compatible with, and assimilable into, traditional aesthetics; then, through Marxist concepts of ideology (where traditional and modern aesthetics part company), revealing a whole range of cultural assumptions, tensions, and contradictions operating through codes, conventions, and genres, largely beyond the artist’s control; finally, through the sophisticated use of psychoanalytical theory that seeks to explain not merely the individual “case” but ideology itself, the construction of the subject within it, the relationship between subject and spectacle. Yet an important sense remains in which the production of a work is an intentional act—(the intentions of several or many may of course be involved)—and the discernible presence of authorial “fingerprints,” “signature,” “touch,” etc., remains one of the clearest tokens of the specificity of a particular text. The error of primitive auteurism lay in its reduction of the potential interest of a film to its authorial signature, so that a film was worth examination only insofar as it could be shown to be characteristic (stylistically, thematically) of Ray, Mann, or Hawks, for instance: the rest was “interference,” “an intractable scenario,” attributable to the imposition of unsuitable projects or the misguided commercialism of producers. In discussing Hollywood movies now, I prefer to speak of the “intervention” of a director in a given project (even if the project was of his choice, even if he also wrote the screenplay), seeing him as more catalyst than creator. There is a level on which The Chase is palpably “an Arthur Penn film”: the level of performance. The core of Penn’s work, the source of its energy, has always been his work with actors, and the surface aliveness of the

184  robin wood film, and much of its emotional intensity and complexity, derives from the responsiveness to his intervention of a magnificent cast. I acknowledge this at the outset because it is not a level with which the present discussion will be explicitly concerned, yet it must certainly affect any reading of the film in ways that may be too oblique to be precisely defined. Suffice it to say that if The Chase had been directed by a Michael Winner or a J. Lee Thompson, it is probable that, however resonant the project, it would never have caught my attention. As for Penn’s partial rejection of The Chase, the critic’s perspective on a film is likely to be very different from the filmmaker’s. Penn worked on the elaboration of the scenario in close collaboration, first with Lillian Hellman, then with Horton Foote; he established and retained a marvelous rapport with the actors. What made the experience of the film unpleasant to the extent that he is still almost traumatized by the memory of it is the fact that he was denied the right to edit. He attaches a definitive importance to editing—the process of “extracting” the film from the “raw material.” From his viewpoint, to deny him the right to edit is effectively to destroy the film, to make it no longer truly his: it becomes, in his own words, “a film that I cannot embrace.” He has two specific complaints. To begin with, in the first takes the actors followed the script; then, getting into their roles, they became freer and more spontaneous and (especially in the case of Marlon Brando) began to improvise, so that later takes were far more developed, Brando in particular giving an apparently extraordinary performance. The editor (acting presumably on instructions from Sam Spiegel, the producer) in most cases returned to the script and the earlier takes, jettisoning the rest (though some of Brando’s impromptus remain in the final cut). Second, the intended effect of the ending was destroyed by the editor’s reversal of the last two scenes: the scene in which Anna ( Jane Fonda), waiting outside the hospital, is told of her lover’s death was meant to precede the scene in which Calder (Brando) and his wife Ruby (Angie Dickinson) drive away. I shall return later to the question of the ending. As for the first complaint, The Chase as we have it is above all an ensemble film; if

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Marlon Brando as Regulator Lee Clayton. The Missouri Breaks (1976).

Brando’s role stands out from the rest, it is because of the character’s position within the diegesis (his authority and his isolation as sheriff ). Brando’s performance in the discarded takes was doubtless remarkable, but Brando’s performances tend often to be so remarkable that they seriously unbalance the film. This happens, in my opinion, in Last Tango in Paris and in Penn’s own The Missouri Breaks; though Penn disagrees, I think it might have happened in The Chase. More generally, Penn complains that the editor chose inferior takes throughout: “It is not the verbal content of the improvisations that I so sorely miss but the quality of performance that was present in the more loosely performed ‘improvised’ takes. The failure in the editor’s choices is not with his adherence to the text—written by at least three and perhaps four people—it is with his blind and heavy choice of the most conventional take against those which are eccentric, antic and unorthodox.”

186  robin wood As the material Penn shot is inaccessible (and perhaps no longer in existence) I cannot comment on this, beyond saying that the film as we have it demonstrates effectively that Penn’s worst, “most conventional” takes are ten times as exciting as most directors’ best. One should also take into account Penn’s attitude to Hollywood. A New York intellectual with one eye on Europe, he shows little positive interest in the Hollywood genres for their own sake: they are at best vehicles for making “significant statements,” at worst obstructions to be attacked and destroyed. He shows little sense that the genres—Western, melodrama, horror film—are inherently rich in potential meaning. His remark that The Chase is “a Hollywood film, not a Penn film” was obviously intended to be derogatory. I think it says far more than he intended—that the layers of meaning of which Penn appears to be unaware in the film are intricately bound up with, determined by, its place in the evolution of genres and the ideological shifts that evolution enacts. It is as a Hollywood film that I shall discuss The Chase here. In order to gain the kind of perspective on films that is impossible (or at least highly improbable) for their makers, I want to introduce concepts drawn from the work of two diverse but variously influential aestheticians. In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich offers one of the classic statements about representation—about the relationship between reality and art. He quotes, with qualified approval, Zola’s definition of a work of art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” and goes on to “probe it further.”11 It is insufficient to treat representation as reality mediated simply by the individual artist: many other factors contribute to the mediation. Basic is the choice of tools and materials. Two landscape artists, trying faithfully to reproduce the same scene, one using a hard pencil, one working in oils, will offer two very different versions of the reality in front of them; their different media will influence them to see it differently, the former seeing everything in terms of line and shape, the latter in terms of mass and color. It is easy to extend this to the cinema and its available technology. The

The Chase 187 reality that the screen so seductively offers is at all points mediated by the choice of camera, lens, and focus; the argument can be developed to include editing and camera movement. Nor is this simply a matter of availability: also important are the conventions dominant within a given period. Even at the level of technology and shooting/ editing method, The Deer Hunter (1978) cannot be My Darling Clementine (1946); try to make a classical Hollywood film in black and white in the 1970s, and the overall impression will be affectation (The Last Picture Show [1971]). But what most concerns me here, for its bearing on Hollywood genres, character types, and narrative conventions, is Gombrich’s perception of the extent to which art is dependent upon the availability of “schemata” (established patterns, formulas, stereotypes), and the degree to which the nature of the particular work is determined by the particular schemata at the artist’s disposal. Gombrich offers numerous examples from art history, from which I shall select two. Perhaps the earliest instance of this kind dates back more than three thousand years, to the beginnings of the New Kingdom in Egypt, when the Pharaoh Thutmose included in his picture chronicle of the Syrian campaign a record of plants he had brought back to Egypt. The inscription, though somewhat mutilated, tells us that Pharaoh pronounces these pictures to be “the truth.” Yet botanists have found it hard to agree on what plants may have been meant by these renderings. The schematic shapes are not sufficiently differentiated to allow secure identification.12 The implication is that the illustrations, while intentionally drawn from life, were heavily influenced by the schemata of plant drawings available. When Dürer published his famous woodcut of a rhinoceros, he had to rely on second-hand evidence which he filled in from his

188  robin wood own imagination, colored, no doubt, by what he had learned of the most famous of exotic beasts, the dragon with its armoured body. Yet it has been shown that this half-invented creature served as a model for all renderings of the rhinoceros, even in natural history books, up to the eighteenth century.13 Gombrich goes on to quote James Bruce’s claim that his 1789 illustration of a rhinoceros, “designed from the life,” contrasts with Dürer’s (“wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts”) and to show that Bruce’s picture still, nonetheless, derives from the Dürer tradition rather than from “nature.”14 Gombrich concludes that “the familiar will always remain the starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar. . . . Without some starting point, some initial schema, we could never get hold of the flux of experience. Without categories, we could not sort out our impressions.”15 The usefulness of this—suitably modified and extended to encompass movement and narrative, the term “schemata” covering characters and narrative patterns with terms such as “genres” and “cycles” substituted for Gombrich’s “categories”—in exploring a traditional art like the Hollywood cinema should be clear. Crucially, it offers an invaluable corrective to all those naive notions of “the realistic” (whether merely descriptive or, as is almost invariably the case, evaluative) that still obstinately linger on. Whenever filmmakers or critics lay claim to a new realism, we would do well to remember Mr. Bruce’s rhinoceros, adopt a certain skepticism, and examine the work in question in relation to the available schemata. An acquaintance (not a casual moviegoer but a person in a position of responsibility in film culture) once informed me confidently that Mandingo (1975) must be a bad film because it showed a southern plantation and mansion in a state of decay, and “in reality” they were extremely well maintained. Leaving aside the assumption of an absoluteness that allows for no exceptions (all southern mansions?), such a comment naively confuses the highly conventionalized genre of melodrama (only in relation to which can the film be properly understood) with

The Chase 189 some vague notion of documentary reconstruction, assuming, with equal naïveté, the superiority of the latter mode. The decaying mansion of Mandingo relates to one of the most important and enduring schemata of American culture, the “terrible house,” whose line of descent can be traced from Edgar Allan Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) to Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]).16 The TV movie The Day After (1983) represents an immediately topical instance of this misconception at time of writing. It has been widely advertised, and generally received, as offering a “realistic” depiction of the aftermath of nuclear war. It may be accurate enough (though surely reprehensibly understated) in the information it offers as to the physical effects of nuclear attack; as a narrative, however, it relies extensively on the disaster movies of the 1970s, both in overall structure and in specific, detailed narrative strategies. Critics who have noticed this see it as invalidating the film, in my opinion quite unjustifiably: “the familiar will always remain the starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar.” The Chase itself was savagely mauled by the majority of critics on its release because of its alleged exaggerations: “Texas isn’t really like that”—a perception as misguided as it is irrelevant. I shall at this point list some of the traditional schemata that structure The Chase, using as a convenient touchstone Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)—convenient because it is likely to be familiar to readers, because it shares so many of the later film’s schemata, and because there is obviously no question of any direct link between the two films, the notion of schemata going far beyond any question of influence.

1. “The Law,” embodied in a male authority figure, the superior, charismatic individual (Lincoln; Sheriff Calder). 2. Woman as the hero’s support and inspiration (Ann Rutledge; Ruby). 3. The innocent young, accused of murder, in need of the authority figure’s protection and defense (the Clay brothers; Bubber Reeves).

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Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore) and Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).

4. The lynch mob—townspeople, normally “respectable citizens”—who attempt to break into the jail. 5. The mother of the accused (Mrs. Clay; Mrs. Reeves) and her anxiety for the safety of her son(s). 6. The young wife of the accused (Hannah; Anna), also concerned for his safety. 7. Religion (Lincoln’s appeal to the Bible in the lynching scene; Mrs. Henderson and her reiterated “I’m praying for you”). 8. Phallic imagery linking violence with sexuality (the lynch party’s battering ram; the repeated, explicit play on the connotations of pistols—”With all those pistols you’ve got there, Emily, I don’t think there’d be room for mine”).

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9. Books and learning as emblems of progress (Lincoln’s Blackstone; the university model presented to Val Rogers on his birthday). 10. The emblem of a lost happiness/innocence (the memory of Ann Rutledge; The Chase’s ruined building. As the parallel here is somewhat weak and inexact, I shall adduce two examples from outside Young Mr. Lincoln: the “Rosebud” of Citizen Kane [1941] and “the river” of Written on the Wind [1956]). It becomes clear at this point that Gombrich is not enough. Before examining in detail the implications of the recurrence of these schemata over a quarter of a century (they can be traced back, of course, to earlier times and forward to the present), we must pass beyond him, exposing his limitations. They could perhaps be said to expose themselves, in the passage following directly on from the last sentence I quoted: “Without categories, we could not sort out our impressions. Paradoxically, it has turned out that it matters relatively little what these first categories are.”17 If the absence here of any political dimension, of any concept of ideology and of schemata as its concrete embodiment, is not immediately obvious, this is because Gombrich restricts his examples entirely to flora and fauna; had he included examples from representations of the human form (the nude, for instance), the absence could not have been so easily covered by the assumption of neutrality. For Gombrich, apparently, the schemata are without important inherent meaning, abstract counters that the artist can use as he pleases. The untenability of such a position becomes even more obvious when one applies it to the larger narrative forms such as the novel and the cinema. Gombrich’s tendency, in fact, is generally to depoliticize art and aesthetics. He ends the chapter I have been drawing upon (“Truth and the Stereotype”) by remarking that “the form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency,” but he never

192  robin wood effectively follows through the implications of such a perception. It is time to turn to Roland Barthes, the Barthes of Mythologies. Barthes’s concept of “myth” can be defined by means of the famous example he offers. In a barber’s shop, at the time of the Algerian uprisings and attempted suppressions, he picked up a copy of Paris-Match; on the cover a black soldier, in uniform, was looking up, presumably at the French flag, and giving the salute. A simple image conveying, on the surface, a simple statement: here is a black soldier saluting the flag. But beyond the simple statement (the level of denotation), this simple signifier carries a wealth of surreptitious meaning (the level of connotation): the blacks are proud to serve the mother country, France; they are dignified and ennobled, and their lives are given meaning, by this service; imperialism is justified, indeed admirable, as it brings order, civilization, and discipline (embodied in the uniform) to the lives of the subject races (“natives” being by definition lax, unruly, and childlike). In other words, the simple, seemingly innocent, and “real” image (black soldiers do, after all, salute the flag of the country they serve) insidiously communicates at unconscious levels a political (here deeply reactionary) statement.18 To Gombrich’s invaluable concept of schemata, then, it is necessary to add Barthes’s concept of myth—roughly speaking, schemata with their political dimension restored, the image as purveyor of ideology. Applying the notion of myth to the recurrent schemata of the Hollywood cinema, one recognizes the full significance of the obvious point that no direct connection exists between Young Mr. Lincoln and The Chase. What is involved is far greater than a specific resemblance based on chance or influence between two films made about twenty-five years apart: the schemata belong to the culture and carry cultural meanings that the two films variously inflect, the inflections determined not merely by two auteurs but by the complex culturalhistorical network within which they function. We can now consider the ten schemata, starting from the position that both films (vehicles of myth from the classical and postclassical periods, respectively) are centrally concerned with America.

The Chase 193

Lincoln as repository and dispenser of the Law in Young Mr. Lincoln.

1. The male authority figure, the symbolic Father, repository and dispenser of the Law, combines myths of individualism and male supremacy that are central to capitalist democracy, enacting the functions of control and containment. In Ford’s film, Lincoln quells the lynch mob (that doesn’t break into the jail), subsequently solves the crime and saves the lives of the Clay brothers, restores the family, and walks out of the film to become president of the United States. In The Chase, Calder fails to control the mob (the unruly respectable citizens break into the jail and beat him to a pulp), fails to save the young man’s life, and drives out of the town defeated on all fronts. Lincoln from the outset knows by some kind of Divine Grace that he will succeed, confidently presenting himself (despite his total inexperience) to Mrs. Clay as “your lawyer, Ma’am”; all Calder’s assertions of confidence prove unfounded (for example, his assuring Lester of the safety of the

194  robin wood jail, where “we won’t have any of our citizens bothering you”: Lester is savagely beaten in his cell by the town’s supreme citizen, Val Rogers). Lincoln, above all, maintains his control over himself; Calder loses even that, succumbing finally to the all-pervasive hysteria and violence in his beating of the man who shoots Bubber Reeves. The collapse of confidence in patriarchal authority is also variously inflected in the presentation of Val Rogers and Mr. Reeves, whose ineffectual, last-minute attempt to make contact with his son by addressing him as “Charlie” provides one of the film’s most poignant moments. 2. In Young Mr. Lincoln, Ann Rutledge dies but lives on as the protagonist’s spiritual support (it is “her” decision—the stick falling toward the grave—that sends him to study law). The myth of woman as man’s supporter/inspiration/redeemer is of course long-standing; The Chase does not explicitly challenge it, presenting Ruby as intelligent, sympathetic, and (above all and sufficiently) a wife. Yet the myth makes sense only in relation to the myth of the patriarch: if the hero’s charismatic and legal authority becomes invalid or ineffectual, the myth of woman-as-supporter collapses with it. Hence the emphasis on Ruby’s helplessness: locked out of the cell in which Val Rogers beats up Lester, she is subsequently locked out of the room in which the respectable citizens beat up her husband and is finally unable to restrain Calder when he surrenders to the epidemic of useless violence. Where Lincoln leaves the film under Ann’s spiritual guidance to become president, Calder leaves the town under Ruby’s supervision (“Calder. . . . let’s go”) to drive—nowhere. Ruby’s last line itself relates significantly to an obstinately recurring motif of the American cinema, the line (invariably spoken by the man to the woman) “Let’s go home” (or variations on it: “I’ll take you home,” “We can go home,” etc.). Here, the man no longer has the authority to utter it, and there is no home left to go to. 3. In Young Mr. Lincoln, the innocence of the young accused is unambiguous: the brothers, representing simple “manly” virtues, are central to Ford’s idealization of the family, the celebration of family life being central to the film. Bubber’s innocence is far more equivocal:

The Chase 195 if he escapes the pervasive ugliness and corruption of the society, his chief characteristic is confusion on all levels, as shown by Emily’s describing his stare “like everything’s going wrong and he just can’t figure out why.” If Matt Clay represents a confidence in the values of the American pioneer past, Bubber, though among the film’s more positive characters, represents an uncertainty about the values of any possible American future. 4. Ford presents the lynch mob as essentially good citizens whose energies (finding release, initially, in the Independence Day celebrations) get temporarily out of control. They need to be reminded of what is “right”—of a fixed and absolute set of values ratified by biblical text—whereupon their basic soundness is reaffirmed. Their violence is taken as given, a fact of nature that demands no explanation, as unquestionable as the morality that subdues it. Such simple dualism has become impossible in The Chase: the violence is merely the logical eruption of the corruption, frustration, and entrapment of the society. The citizens can no longer be told, effectively, to go home to bed (they would scarcely know which bed to go to); there are no texts, no absolute morality, to which appeal can be made. Further, the constitution of the mob is now quite different. In Lincoln it is composed of an earthy, vigorous proletariat still in close spiritual touch with the original cabin-raisers; in The Chase it is composed of the dominant classes, the affluent upper-middle and upwardly mobile middle, the wealthy patriarch Val Rogers (who virtually owns the town) in their midst. Calder’s own position, unlike Lincoln’s, is itself compromised: he owes his appointment as sheriff to Rogers and, however he may struggle to preserve his personal integrity, is never allowed to forget the fact. 5. Ford’s idealization of motherhood is central to Young Mr. Lincoln and to the ideology it embodies. The mother is reverenced as the rock on which the family, hence civilization, is built, and she never has to ask herself, like Mrs. Reeves, “Where did I go wrong?” At the same time, she has no voice, no potency, in the male-dominated world of money, law, authority. Her simplicity (the guarantee of her sanctity

196  robin wood and moral strength) is repeatedly stressed: she can’t read or write. By the time of The Chase, confidence in this central, supportive role has crumbled away. It is remarkable that, given the very large number of characters of all ages in the film, there is only one mother: Mrs. Reeves, hysterical, ineffectual, consistently wrongheaded, ultimately rejected by her son. This collapse of confidence in the figure of the Mother (for Ford, the spiritual core of civilization) points directly to a collapse of confidence in the family structure and, beyond that, in traditional sexual relationships generally. 6. It follows from Ford’s veneration of the mother that nothing in Young Mr. Lincoln questions the rightness and sanctity of marriage: Hannah, waiting anxiously, dutifully, and passively for the outcome of the trial, is simply the Abigail Clay of the next generation. Against this we may set Anna Reeves and the uncertainty about traditional marriage ties introduced through her relationship with both Bubber and Jake Rogers. Her eventual commitment to Bubber carries considerable moral force (as does her active and forceful participation in events), but it has nothing to do with the sanctity of the marriage tie: she realizes that it is Bubber who really needs her. 7. In Young Mr. Lincoln, the Bible (and its later substitute, the Farmer’s Almanack—God and Nature conceived of as one) is the ultimate sanction, and Lincoln’s authority is seen as God-given; in The Chase, religion is reduced to the helpless, absurd, and annoying mumblings of Miss Henderson, who is represented as mad. It no longer underpins and validates the system; it has become marginal to the point of irrelevancy. 8. The link between violence and male sexuality, which is implicit and probably unconscious in Young Mr. Lincoln, is fully explicit in The Chase. Ford’s work is consistently preoccupied with the ways in which “excess” energies can be safely contained (communal work, communal dances and celebrations, communal comic brawls), much of its complexity arising from the fact that both the energy and the forms of containment are highly valued. By the time of The Chase, all sense of the worth of the culture in whose name the containment is

The Chase 197 enforced has been undermined, and the energies themselves are seen as corrupted. Against Ford’s dances—celebration of energy and community—set The Chase’s three parties, which culminate and coalesce in the destructive chaos of the fireworks display in a wrecked car junkyard: sexual games, erupting into games of violence, which escalate in turn into real violence ending in total and irreparable breakdown. 9. Lincoln’s progress in Ford’s film is stimulated by his learning from the books passed on to him by the Clay family: he is guided toward his destiny as president by Ann Rutledge and Blackstone’s Commentaries, by women and nature, law and learning. In The Chase, the concept of progress through learning has been debased to status-seeking display (the competitive money grants for the university) and hypocrisy (the remark that “only through learning is progress possible” delivered as an empty platitude). 10. Hollywood’s emblems for a lost innocence/happiness suggest a steady descent into disillusionment. Ann Rutledge, though dead, becomes the spiritual support of Lincoln’s career; Kane’s “Rosebud” epitomizes not only a lost childhood but an alternative, perhaps more fulfilling life uncorrupted by power. By 1956 “the river” of Written on the Wind represents only the illusion of past happiness (even as children, the characters were never really happy). In The Chase, the emblem of a nostalgically viewed childhood innocence has become an irreparably ruined, skeletal shed. The Chase amounts to one of the most complete, all-encompassing statements of the breakdown of ideological confidence that characterizes American culture throughout the Vietnam period and becomes a major defining factor of Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. It achieves this as a Hollywood film: the ideological shift registered in the use of the ten schemata I have presented goes far beyond any overt social-political comments (on the position of blacks, etc.), which, like Penn, I find somewhat crude and obvious (though they make their contribution to the overall structure). It is the first “American apocalypse” movie, the first film in which the disintegration of American society and the ideology that supports it (represented in

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A powerful statement of the breakdown of ideological confidence during the Vietnam era. The Chase (1966).

microcosm by the town) is presented as total and final, beyond hope of reconstruction. The ideological force of all the available schemata taken up by Ford in Young Mr. Lincoln (and therein celebrated as myths) is here definitively undermined. Yet the work of the film is not merely negative: out of the collapse, a new positive movement, though extremely vulnerable and tentative, begins to manifest itself. One sees this most plainly in the attitude that the film defines toward sexuality and sexual organization. The question “Do you believe in the sexual revolution?” is explicitly raised in the dialogue, and it seems fitting to conclude a discussion of The Chase by attempting to define the answer that the film provides. Three attitudes to sexual relationships are dramatized in The Chase,

The Chase 199 two of which are defined very clearly, the third remaining tentative and somewhat confused. 1. Traditional patriarchal monogamy: the Calders, Mr. and Mrs. Briggs, Mr. and Mrs. Reeves. The Calder relationship seems to be endorsed by the film—it is presented as strong, stable, and mutually supportive. Yet if patriarchal authority is overthrown, the ideological strength of the relationship logically falls with it. The film sets up fascinating parallels between the Calders and the Briggses: the monogamy of both relationships is emphasized, along with the subordination of the woman to the man; the barrenness of both is made explicit (Ruby wonders if they should have adopted children, Mrs. Briggs wonders whether having children or not having children is worse); Calder and Briggs are the only two who respect the law (Calder’s caustic “That makes two of us”). The Calders are presented positively, the Briggses negatively—opposite poles of the film’s value structure. This makes even more interesting the sense that the latter are a dark reflection of the former. There is a marvelous moment when the two main sexual worlds of the film make passing contact, the moment when Briggs (his wife as usual in tow, hanging on his arm) comments to Emily outside her house on the “permissive” behavior at her party (“Changing partners?”) and adds “But my wife and I, we’re old-fashioned.” As he says it, Mrs. Briggs stares at him with a look bordering on pathological hatred: it brilliantly epitomizes the repressiveness of patriarchal monogamy and the frustrations of women within it. The Reeves couple appears to offer the inverse of this with the woman as dominant partner but is more accurately a variation on it: all of Mrs. Reeves’s emotional energy has been displaced onto her male child, hence her hysteria when he “goes wrong.” If the Calders are viewed as heroic, the overall sense of the film reveals them as defending a system that has become obsolete. Finally, all they can do is drive away from the ruins. 2. Permissiveness: the “sexual revolution” as understood by the Fullers, Stuarts, etc., taking the form of squalid and furtive adulterous intrigue undertaken for its own sake, out of boredom, frustration, or a desire to get even with one’s spouse, with a strong insistence

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Jake and Anna. The Chase.

on phallocentrism (Edwin “doesn’t have a pistol”; Damon obviously does). If the film implicitly undercuts traditional monogamy, it openly attacks this permissiveness as purely destructive and motivated by destructiveness, rather than by any impulses of concern, tenderness, or generosity. Yet permissiveness is clearly but the other side of the coin (suggested by the Briggs/Emily exchange referred to earlier)—the logical result of the collapse of repressive and artificial proscriptions. 3. The attitude dramatized in the Bubber-Anna-Jake triangle. During the episode in the junkyard, the three try to work out what is potentially a new morality (it is significant that the film roughly coincides with the growth of the hippie movement): a genuine new morality, as against the immorality fostered (“permitted”) by the old morality. Central to it is Anna’s recognition that she is able to love two men at

The Chase 201 once, her relative autonomy of choice, decision, and action (unique among the women of the film), and Bubber’s acceptance of her and Jake (his wife and best friend) as lovers. This goes against both traditional monogamy, by rejecting its artificially imposed, legalized repressiveness, and permissiveness, by rejecting its egotistic heartlessness and phallocentrism. Monogamy and permissiveness are both based on an obsession with sexuality (the one with its containment, the other with its supposedly free expression): within both arrangements, sex becomes the central criterion by which behavior is judged, the notion of fidelity or infidelity restricted to the simple act of intercourse. The Bubber-Anna-Jake story enacts the tentative dethronement of the sexual act, without at all diminishing the importance of sexuality as human communication. It suggests that sexuality is not incompatible with friendship, with sharing, with an unrestricted human concern. Significant in relation to this is the older generation’s total inability to understand or predict the behavior and motivation of the younger characters. Hence Val Rogers assumes without hesitation that Bubber will kill Jake when he finds out that he and Anna are lovers; hence Mrs. Reeves can find no word for Anna but “whore.” Anna—her activeness, her autonomy, her refusal to allow herself to be defined by a relationship with a man—is at the heart of the film’s tentative, uncertain positive movement. Herein lies the appropriateness of the ending as it stands, albeit unsanctioned by the film’s director, an appropriateness both within and outside the fiction. The Calders drive away, defeated. The film abandons them to end on Anna Reeves, the character, still able to learn, reflect, develop, and Jane Fonda, the actress, walking toward her problematic future career, both cinematic and political. Like young Mr. Lincoln, she walks out of the frame, leaving behind a film and a society that can no longer comfortably contain her.

An Interview with Arthur Penn Richard Lippe and Robin Wood, Cineaction 5 (Spring 1986): 15–26.

I first met and interviewed Arthur Penn in 1970, during the making of Little Big Man; the interview was first published in Movie 18 [and is included in this volume]. At that time, Penn’s career seemed to have developed an irresistible impetus that would secure him a prominent place in the American cinema of the next decades: The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, and Alice’s Restaurant (the films that, with Night Moves, represent the summit of his achievement to date) had followed each other in rapid succession, establishing their director commercially as well as artistically. In the fifteen years that have ensued, however, Penn has been able to make only four films, of which only Night Moves can be judged a complete artistic success (it was a commercial disaster). This February, Penn was in Toronto as executive producer of Dead of Winter, a Gothic thriller scripted by two school friends of his son’s (he has since taken over the direction). Richard Lippe and I seized the opportunity to invite him to our apartment for dinner and an interview that proved to be more like a conversation (we have tried to preserve its informal and relaxed tone). We wanted to discuss his work since Little Big Man and, especially, the problems faced by filmmakers of ambition, intelligence, and integrity within the contemporary Hollywood situation. RW: I thought we might talk first about the conditions of working in Hollywood. . . . There seem to be so many problems in getting interesting projects set up . . . and a kind of narrowing

An Interview with Arthur Penn  203 of the traditional genres to a few very stereotypical plots and film types. AP: Absolutely—well you know it’s really an antiquated medium in the States because the studios which had existed under another environment—economic, cultural, etc.—had been signatories to contracts with the unions which are now proving to be onerous. The cost of labor is so outrageously high that ordinary average films are slipping upward into the twenty million–dollar bracket very easily and, given that, and given the demise and retirement of the sort of patriarchal figures who used to run the studios, they’ve now become sort of relatively minor possessions of these conglomerates and multinational companies. You know, as Coca-Cola, Gulf and Western, Rupert Murdoch at Universal. Every studio you can really talk about is really one of these sort of relatively minor income-producing units of a great big multinational conglomerate. And what they then do as a result of that is instead of being studios with an ego all their own, they become this kind of corporate entity, and then the natural progression is that the executives who are put into those companies are essentially company men. They’re business school graduates, they’re cost-effective, and you begin to have that kind of thinking. Whatever one may think about the old moguls, there was a certain passion, a love for movies. And whether it be Goldwyn or Warner or Harry Cohn or Louis B. Mayer, there was something, however dreadful they may have been individually, there was at the heart of it that movies were their life. And that’s not true of these people; these people could just as well be selling cereal or automobiles or whatever. And immediately you come there with an idea; their first impulse is to categorize the idea: What is it most like? What did that do? What’s its market expectations? And with that kind of thinking, you’re automatically filtering and censoring the aberrant, odd film, the one that we all love, you know the one that is not like

204  robin wood every other film or every other automobile we drive that one sees on the street. And that’s the nature of it now, so there is this kind of a priori censorship. It’s not the right word, but it’s not the wrong word either. You know there’s something inherent in the American phenomenon. Capitalism has reached the point where there is this a priori censorship which is in effect—it’s in effect in this peculiar way, which is, if you want to be paid well to make your movie, you are automatically a participant in this structure. As a participant in the structure you’re as culpable as they are. I don’t mean to say, to be exonerating myself as the sort of pure artist—it’s quite the reverse. I’ve been every bit as culpable as they. Personally speaking, I think I’m at the old crossroads where I need now to change my life and to move away; the idea of making film outside of the U.S. or in the primitive circumstances in which I originally began is terribly attractive. RW: We read in Variety that there’s the possibility of your doing a film in France on French money? AP: Yes, I’m working on that idea at the moment. I was approached while I was in France by several French producers who suggested that I might want to make a film in Europe. But, and this is the unfortunate part, they all suggested that the films needed to have American stars. There are no stars, other than American stars, who are world stars, and since it’s now a world market, however one would think about it, that immediately begins to be both attractive and something of an impediment, because very many of the agents for these film stars just won’t talk to you in any other terms except “so-and-so gets five million.” That’s it, and that’s an immutable fact. As soon as you have one of those immutable facts in the beginning, where everybody says to the hierarchy, “Well, if he’s getting his full money I want my full money, etc.,” and we’re in that terrible game. RL: Would it be easier for you to set up an independent production on the strength of your name and what you’ve accomplished?

An Interview with Arthur Penn  205 AP: No, there’s nothing inherent in that that’s particularly advantageous; in fact, it’s a little bit disadvantageous. It’s a lot easier if you’re sort of an unknown, for instance, and set up and do a little scratch, nonunion film. As the unions know about you and know your reputation, they tend to come in and say, wait a minute, what about some teamsters, what about I.A. camera people, what about so-and-so, and before you know it you’ve got a big workforce. It’s a real dilemma. It’s not confined only to the movies, it’s confined to the basic American capitalist structure at this point, in which labor has this peculiar position which is that they don’t participate in the ownership of it; therefore, they get these enormously high wages instead of having some kind of rooting interest. In the absence of that kind of participatory rooting interest, it seems to me to be somewhat close to the heart of the matter. RW: This also seems to be underpinned, the whole situation seems to be underpinned by the current ideological climate in an age where there’s a massive swing to the right and the projects that do make money are generally ultra–right-wing projects, reactionary and even crypto-fascist films. The whole Rocky-Rambo syndrome becomes more scary as times goes on. AP: Yes it does, and it’s extremely symptomatic of both the culture and of the movie “industry,” which now begins to be the appropriate word for it—it is now an industry in the same way that munitions are an industry. You know, all my life I’ve resented that word as being applied to the movies. But now I think it’s perfect. I think it is industrial—it’s product-designed, massaudience designed, and what ideology creeps into it unfortunately is of the extreme Right or, I’m not sure whether you characterize it necessarily as Right, it’s a kind of desperation today. The Rambo image is such a desperate image of lonely, obsessive power and trying to rectify wrongs that have been done in the past by some other forces, and certainly the—I was going to say

206  robin wood implicit but it’s really explicit—choice of the kind of constant Soviet enemy as the figure is so dangerous, so dangerous to the thinking—it just terrifies me. RW: The desperation of all that seems to go with the whole sense, I think, that capitalism may be entering into some kind of ultimate crisis as prophesied by Marx over a hundred years ago, a series of escalating economic crises which we’ve certainly been through and now this kind of desperate need to be reassured in what amounts to a kind of hysterical way or a fantasy way, the alternative to the Rambo-Rocky films is sheer fantasy, explicit fantasy, which carries the same kind of reassurance but in a way that we don’t actually have to admit that we believe it. AP: But the Rambos and the Rockys are so close to home . . . and there’s something indisputable about the numbers that those films are able to assemble at the box office. Those paid admissions are shocking because they’re paid for that and they’re not paid for a quite wide spectrum of other kinds of films. And it’s also fascinating that the very same actor, Stallone, put him in Rhinestone and nobody shows up. In anything but these roles nobody goes. RL: Do you think that to a certain extent that kind of audience response is planted by publicity and media hype? AP: Well, you see, it seems to me that that’s calling into play the very best of these kind of industrialists who are running the studios now. Give them something like that to do and they do it brilliantly based on selling it before it’s even hit the marketplace, before one foot of it has been turned in the camera. They know how to do that, much as they know how to sell automobiles a year ahead or whatever, you know, they sell all products superbly, when the audience knows what the ingredients are going to be. What they can’t sell is the unknown, the mysterious, the unexpected, the aberrant, the anomalous; that doesn’t sit well. RW: Do you think After Hours could have any importance, I don’t mean so much as a film itself, but for what it was trying to do?

An Interview with Arthur Penn  207 Scorsese seems to have set out very deliberately to prove that it is still possible to make a low-budget film on a little subject without any really big stars, and the film does appear to have done rather well commercially within a certain range. It’s been running for months up here. Only in one theater, of course. AP: Yes, exactly, and that’s almost a holy action. But when a picture stays in one theater it doesn’t really generate income. It does all right; it keeps the theater occupied. I have nothing but admiration for Scorsese for doing it. And indeed he proved all those points, but unfortunately what the film’s also proving to the financiers is that that’s not a very productive use of their money. They would say, I could take my money and put it into stocks or bonds or whatever and have a better income than that film is generating. I’ve even heard this kind of gossip about the movie studios—that the executives of the conglomerates say about movies, we could take that 250 million dollars a year that are allocated to . . . production, invest it elsewhere and make a better return than we’re making on films. Unfortunately, that’s proving to be true. The number of films that are going to be made by the studios are diminishing at an alarming rate. I think Coca-Cola says Columbia is not to make more than about five. MGM at the present moment is caught up in this terrible period of acquisition by Ted Turner. So far the only film that has a go-ahead is this little film, Dead of Winter. It’s a very inexpensive film, done under these peculiar circumstances. RW: By a completely unknown director. AP: Exactly. And what’s marvelous about Mary Steenburgen is that she was perceptive enough to see in this something wonderful to do, and Roddy McDowall did that too, while a number of others just turned it down. Agents, they said—I wouldn’t even send it to them. No way. It’s a tough time. RW: You’ve either told me in the past or I’ve read about a number of projects that you were working on or trying to get set up, a project about strip mining you mentioned at one point, a film

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Dr. Joseph Lewis ( Jan Rubes), Mr. Murray (Roddy McDowall), and Katie McGovern (Mary Steenburgen). Dead of Winter (1987).

called The Last Cowboy was actually mentioned in Variety, and didn’t you also mention a comedy? AP: Quite possibly I did mention a number of comedies. RW: I wondered what had happened to all those, why they didn’t get off the ground? AP: The Last Cowboy didn’t get off the ground because it was about the last cowboy. It was about agribusiness taking over the ranges and the last individualistic spirit. Cowboy was based on pieces of material that appeared in the New Yorker, factual pieces. Our screenplay followed the same configurations. What’s naive about it is that within the very companies themselves are these warring factions. One section of the company will buy the rights to The Last Cowboy with that very title, and then comes the screenplay and they say, “But it has a terrible downer ending. It has to have a happy ending.” And then they say, “Well why

An Interview with Arthur Penn  209 don’t you make a movie called The First Cowboy?” You know, but if you’re going to buy The Last Cowboy you’re caught in this . . .  RL: Did this project get very far along before it was . . .  AP: The Last Cowboy? A couple of drafts of the script. I was with Warner Bros. and I was working with a writer who was handsomely paid by Warner Bros. to write a script. So then came those terrible meetings. They said “we like the script but we just don’t like the ending,” and that was a real question of conscience on our part. How can we possibly do this story without having this ending. RW: You could have tried to do a Douglas Sirk happy ending. AP: I suppose I could, but I’m not much good at them. RL: You can’t really tack on an ironic happy ending—the whole film has to carry through that irony on various levels. AP: Exactly. It had some wonderful scenes, marvelous. So I don’t know, I don’t know. With a film like that . . . I’m trying . . . to lure a few of my friends to go out and make a film elsewhere. RL: Could you get together a group of people and have the film financed and produced independently, giving you the control you wanted? AP: It’s extremely difficult . . . for instance, I’m talking about a film now that would involve four of us. It wouldn’t take a great deal of money either, but nonetheless the picture would still cost in the vicinity of six or seven million dollars. It just does. And once you’re into that cost, without our taking our fees, it gets to be very difficult even though the studios, I think, would be very responsive. It means that all of the artists have to make the essential sacrifice, which I’m certainly prepared to do. I don’t know how many of my fellows would be prepared. It’s a little easier for directors to be this cavalier about that because we have longer careers, but actors feel that terrible clock ticking away. They’re up there in that high money-earning period for a relatively short time, and their agents certainly know that. Very, very few of them have endured much beyond ten years.

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Danilo Prozor (Craig Wasson) and his parents (Elizabeth Lawrence, Miklos Simon). Four Friends (1981).

RW: You managed to make Four Friends without any stars whatever. Craig Wasson was barely known at that time. The only other familiar face to me was Lois Smith. Was that easy to set up? Did it have anything to do with Steve Tesich’s success with Breaking Away? AP: It had. It has a little to do with that and a little to do with my reputation, and it had to do with the last of a company, in this case Filmways, which was sort of breathing its last. It didn’t have a lot of money so it gambled on two films, Four Friends and Blowout. Neither was the kind of film I would gamble on to save a company. But, on the other hand, they didn’t have the bigger sums to go for the bigger stars, so they thought they could get the best of the recognizable names this way. So they did. I

An Interview with Arthur Penn  211 regretted deeply that the film didn’t make money for that company. I appreciated their last gesture. RW: Nor did Blowout. AP: And that had Travolta. RL: And it was much more expensive. AP: And certainly Travolta at that point was a huge name. RW: We watched Four Friends again the other evening. I still find it a very strange film. I’m somewhat unsure what you were trying to do in that film. AP: I’m pretty much unsure myself. RW: It seems interesting to me but a failure overall. It doesn’t seem very clearly focused. I don’t know what you feel about it. AP: I don’t feel that. RW: There seems a problem with the central character, possibly I think, Craig Wasson, who is always somewhat bland, uncharismatic. Also, just what we’re to make of Danilo and what attitude the film wants us to take toward him. He seems such a schmuck most of the time. AP: [Laughter] RW: The film seems to be inviting us to have much more sympathy with him than I certainly ever have. AP: The informing idea of the film was that it was an era in which it was very difficult to have a conventional hero or to have somebody who could genuinely enlist your sympathy. We were all quite strange during the ’60s; people were acting, I don’t know, odd in a rather marvelous way. I still think quite romantically about the ’60s but, in this case, I think we were talking about someone coming up off the canvas after the blows of the ’60s and being at that sort of beginning turning point of where the country, I think, is now. And Danilo as an innocent. I guess that can’t sit well, but that was the view of Danilo . . .  RW: The scene where he watches the burning of the American flag is striking because one suddenly realizes at that point how

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Georgia ( Jodi Thelen) and her friends Danilo, David (Michael Huddleton), and Tom ( Jim Metzler). Four Friends.

completely unaware he is of everything going on because he’s kind of stunned by it. AP: To have the nonpoliticized figure at the center of the film is of course very hard to do, but it was what we were attempting to do. That is to say, in a highly political time, a nonpoliticized figure and one whose parents have left their political scene in Europe and have come here and brought him up in this American vacuum, and that’s why he was interesting. It’s a very hard task. RL: Also he’s growing up in the Midwest, in Indiana, bleak and culturally deprived. Georgia [Jodi Thelen] is seemingly some sort of catalyst in this situation—I’m not sure what Georgia’s function is in the film. She has all these pretensions of dancing and being extraordinary. But Georgia never fulfills any of this, and yet she has the function of being some sort of myth figure for Danilo. I’m not sure how the romance and the time it takes for

An Interview with Arthur Penn  213

AP:

RW:

AP: RW:

AP: RL:

AP:

RL: AP: RW:

them to come together connects with the political concerns and how Georgia fits into this. She doesn’t really. She’s just really quite the opposite. It’s hard for me now to recall our discussions. She was intended to represent the wildly reckless, ebullient part of the American spirit— no limits, no boundaries, no limit to her ambition, her expectations of herself, that sort of marvelous promise of America. Whether America ever fulfills it is still very much open. I think a problem is that I take very little sense of promise from Georgia. She seems quite ridiculous and somewhat grating from the start. The first time I saw it I blamed Jodi Thelen for this as a performer, but I’m now not sure how else it could be played. I think it’s the way the role is written. And directed . . .  I don’t think so. I don’t see how else, as written, it could be directed. I was puzzled that anyone would invite Georgia on a second date, yet all these men are so fascinated by her. Well, there’s something about her, this alive raging spirit that’s very attractive. Both times I saw it she reminded me a bit of Liza Minnelli and in particular the Sally Bowles character in Cabaret, the kind of “world is my oyster” attitude. She seemed directed towards imitating that. That’s very true. It’s not Liza Minnelli I was using as the image but Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, a creature in an alien society who just doesn’t want to be held in by the limiting aspects of that society and zooms out of there and burns very brightly. The film is called Four Friends—what about the other two friends? They seem to be almost nonexistent. That was a misnomer. I always wanted to call the film Georgia, and in Europe it is called Georgia. I think Reed Birney steals the movie. He has this extraordinary presence. What has happened to him? I’ve never seen him before or since.

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Georgia and Louie (Reed Birney). Four Friends.

AP: It’s a sad story of being the unusual actor and doing well and then not being able to be employed again. You have so many of these kind of cipher actors—who’s that chap in Star Wars? RL: Mark Hamill? RW: Or Harrison Ford? AP: One of the things that makes me laugh is Harrison Ford being nominated. RW: Mark Hamill is very good in The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia. AP: Really? Maybe he’s learned something. RW: Of course he’s never been allowed to do anything like that again, which, of course, confirms what you’re saying. AP: They want and expect Luke Skywalker. It’s a terrible thing. Poor Jodi Thelen, who is a wonderful actress, I think, and a most

An Interview with Arthur Penn  215 attractive person, couldn’t even work anymore. She got into a Neil Simon play, and she lives in New York now because she wants to be in theater. RL: Your films are frequently characterized by intensity and excess in confrontational situations. In Four Friends this excess seems almost to produce irony in certain scenes—for instance, the last appearance in the film of Lois Smith, where she identifies herself as wife and mother, both of which roles she has now abruptly lost, and utters that terrible scream. Such incidents seem abrupt and not contextualized in the way one expects from Hollywood narratives. AP: What we undertook there, you see, was a kind of fractured narrative. We’d start the narrative off, and then another voice would be heard—another narrative voice leading you into a sequence. We kept talking about change and discontinuous change, that’s the technique of the film. And it was really to break the narrative—the expected narrative form. I don’t know how to evaluate the attempt, but I like the idea of doing a different form. I don’t know whether we succeeded or not. There were certainly different opinions of the film. It has very strong supporters in Europe. Too many of them regard it as my best film. I don’t think it is by a long shot. I’m always astounded when I hear that. RL: You begin with Danilo’s narration, then pass to that of the old woman and subsequently to the friend who is the son of the undertaker. AP: I must say that I take responsibility for that. I imposed that idea on Steve Tesich. I thought that there wasn’t enough thrust in Danilo as a central character for him to be the narrative vessel in which the story would be contained. Confronting that fact, I thought that we should give voice to these other perspectives. RW: I like that. AP: I like that too. I don’t know if it was entirely successful.

216  robin wood RW: I think the problem is that Danilo simply isn’t very interesting. If the film could have been structured more on alternative narratives, giving other characters greater prominence and greater equality, it might have been a much stronger film. AP: I wish there had been a really radical voice in that film. RW: I think the scene in the film which I dislike the most is the one intercutting the jolly folk dancing with the decadent party, which seems to me making such an obvious point without any irony. AP: Or, I hope there’s irony. [Laughter] RW: It seemed to me an invitation for everyone to go out and participate in jolly folk dancing. [More laughter] AP: Oh, God, no—there’s nothing I hate worse than folk dancing. RW: But the contrast between the two seems so strong and so simple. AP: I was talking about a kind of bonded culture, which brings over the mores of the old country and stays in this terrible, suffocating bond, and about the broken, open forms of another kind of culture. Those were my intentions. RL: Throughout the film Danilo vacillates between extremes. Is Georgia’s function to draw him out of this pattern and effect a workable compromise? In the beach scene at the end of the film, she tells him that next time it will be her turn to choose. She prevents him from retreating into his past. AP: Yes, that closed, suffocating, homeostatic grouping. RW: I think one needs Danilo getting more involved in Georgia’s culture. AP: Quite possibly. You see, I guess I was counting on his love for her, the unspoken part, the good part of Danilo would come out. I don’t know about the balances in that film. It was such a damned hard film to keep hold of. I probably lost control of it. RW: It’s very hard to keep hold of for the viewer as well. AP: I don’t know what it was, then, that spoke so passionately to the Europeans.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  217 RW: But Europeans are so often right about American movies. RL: Was the film commercially successful in Europe? AP: Quite—based largely on the fact that it was so critically successful. Informally the critics get together and vote on the best film, and they picked Georgia. RW: We hear that Target has also been very well received in Europe. Is that true? AP: I haven’t heard. CBS, for the second time in my life after I made a film for them, goes out of business. [Laughter] On Little Big Man they went right out of business, and on Target, so there’s no one to hear from. It’s apparently doing well, but I never hear from anybody because there’s nobody in charge anymore. Everybody was fired right as the film came out. They just disbanded the entire film unit. RW: What was your involvement in Target? How did you get into that? AP: I got into it because I just had the impulse to make a film. I’d been approached about a film called Falling in Love. Ulu Grosbard was working on Target at that time. When I was approached about that film, I thought to myself, “I don’t believe this story one bit. I don’t know anything in the world that can help this story.” Ulu’s awfully good, and so is Streep—wonderful—and they couldn’t make it work. And I wouldn’t have done any better with it. If anything, I probably would have done less well. But by that point, my juices were already going to make a film. It’s like becoming aroused in some way, you know, you get ready to go. And there I was in this state when I realized, in my discussions with them, that we were never going to reconcile our differences. I said, for instance, that there was no way the story could progress if the people were of the same social order. They are two people living in the suburbs, and they are essentially the same person. It’s really a story about someone falling in love with themselves. And they kept saying Brief Encounter, and I said no, Brief Encounter has class difference, and there’s every

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RW:

AP:

RW: AP:

difference in the world and why don’t we split this and make one of them an urban dweller and somebody else a suburb dweller but institute difference. But the folks at the studio couldn’t see that. I don’t know how it was set up in the first place, but it looks like an old-fashioned star vehicle. They say, “We’ve got these two stars under contract”—as would have been the case back in classical Hollywood—”we’ve got to make a film for them. Let’s have them fall in love. He can be a commuter, she can be a commuter.” But that was not the case. Because neither Streep nor DeNiro was really in it yet. They wanted to work together again, and along came this vehicle. They were all married then, Ulu was a great friend of theirs and, Bing! So Ulu left Target, which he’d been working on, and I was just in that state so Sam Cohen, who is our mutual agent, said “Well, I don’t know if you want to read this thing,” and he brought Target to me. And I said that I thought it was attractive. Now I have to say that I was in this overaroused state; I wanted to make a movie. And the fact that it was set largely in Europe was extremely tempting. A lot of other things came into play—the possibility of working with Hackman again . . .  Was Matt Dillon already cast? No, Hackman wasn’t even cast, but I thought Hackman right off the bat, and that was so attractive. So, I haven’t got apologies; I took it fully with my eyes wide open knowing the limitations of it, knowing the kind of film it was. But I thought also there was another part of it, and this is a question of vanity. I thought, dammit, I’d like to show that I can do this kind of high-kinetic film, action movies. They’re always talking about action movies—dammit, I can do those, I can do them better than those damn whippersnappers. People talk about action films, and I think, God, they’re really pretty awful. So it was one of the things I really imposed. I mean, I wrote that whole sequence on the bridges in Hamburg.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  219

Arthur Penn directing Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon in Target (1985).

RW: In most action films one sits through the plot scenes in order to get on to the next action bit, but I think in Target the opposite is true. The Hackman-Dillon confrontations are the core of the film. AP: There was certainly a limitation inherent in that movie to that relationship—it couldn’t go much beyond “Gee, Dad, you’re not the guy that I thought you were.” RW: The film is very much concerned about families—the three families—the Hackman-Hunnicutt-Dillon family, the lost family of Schroder, and the CIA, which is on at least two occasions referred to as the family. What were you trying to do with that, and what is the relationship between the CIA as family and the other two families? AP: Ironic, in that instance. And ironic also in varying degrees with Schroder. For me, families contain such a variety of ingredients, some very good, some very bad, some very difficult.

220  robin wood But I can’t take the one about the CIA being called family too literally. RW: I think possibly a problem I have with the film is that the central family, the Hackman-Hunnicutt-Dillon family, is so conveniently conceived. The film would be really interesting if it went further in trying to rethink the family and certain structures of the family, how fathers and sons can relate and how they relate to the women. The film seems to be another of all these restorations of the father movies in which the father is reinstated as the seat of all authority and the son has to learn to respect him. AP: That’s a perfectly reasonable criticism and one that I can’t respond to except to agree with it. Unfortunately, it’s not a film about the family; it was not intended to be about the family. It was a schematic film about how do we get into a kind of action sequence where people are bonded in this particular way, where father and son are bonded into a mutuality, but at no point, neither the beginning twelve or thirteen minutes, in Dallas, with the most conventional American family, was there an attempt to give that description of the family or the politics of the family. It was a simple-minded film. RL: Was there any consideration given to making the Hackman character more responsible? There is the whole thing where Matt Dillon confronts him with “Did you kill people?” Hackman is evasive and more or less “No, I didn’t. I was just pushing a pencil,” and he’s taken off the hook rather quickly. RW: He seems to admit that he was responsible for people’s deaths. AP: Yes, he does. It’s not an elegant and thought-through film. It was designed for quite other purposes on my part. I don’t know whether it was a life crisis of my own, where I wanted to say that I was still alive and functioning. Maybe I was also taking as a clue the kind of mindlessness of other action films that are popular, in that I made it mindless without entering into any of the other considerations, which are the usual considerations

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Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman) and his son Chris (Matt Dillon). Target.

into which I deeply enter and which distinguish my films from other films. RW: Actually, I wish you functioned like that more regularly, because everyone has the right to make two or three films that are below his best in order to make the great film. That’s the way the old Hollywood worked. People kept working, but it seems so difficult to keep working nowadays. AP: I would like to go right on now and work on another film—my juices are flowing and I’m really hot to make some films, but the ones I want to make, I can’t make. RL: Are you satisfied with Target in terms of what you wanted to do with it? AP: Yes I was, but I just wish that I could have put a disclaimer on that saying “Don’t take this seriously, it’s just a movie.” [Laughter]

222  robin wood RW: Since the ’60s directors of your caliber are always expected to make masterpieces, which never used to be the case. Lang could make half a dozen basically little B movies with no big stars, low budgets, and often quite unpromising material, with which he often did wonders. AP: Yes, and Ford and Hawks, they all made terrible films. RW: Now every film that you or Scorsese makes is expected to be a masterpiece. AP: It’s not going to be, and we’re all incapacitated by that. What happens then is the studios will say “Don’t go near Penn or Kubrick or Scorsese—you’re going to get caught up in one of those arty intellectual films that’s not going to be a moneymaker.” And it is a fact of present life. I don’t know Stanley Kubrick that well, but he’s trapped in it now. He can’t make the films he wants to make. He won’t make the films they want him to make, and he’s going through year after year of being unproductive. RW: This does seem about the bleakest period in the Hollywood cinema. There are so few films coming out now that I admire. AP: And even when there are, for instance, gifted young people like Robert Zemeckis, the material with which they’re engaging seems to me so unworthy of them. You can’t make a good film out of Back to the Future . . . or Romancing the Stone is a well-made movie about nothing. They get away with it because they have nothing to live up to. Of course, this is no excuse. You go for so many years without making any money, and you live in this community where people make huge amounts of money. By the time I’d made three or four films, I hadn’t made any money out of them. I was working with people who were getting fortunes, and I had not made any money. The only money I ever made was in the theater at that point. And, by God, you get to the point where, whatever the circumstances, you think “I want a piece of the pie or a piece of the apple,” but you’re biting into the fruit that eventually gets you trapped.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  223 RW: I suppose Scorsese comes as close as anyone to a director who’s gone on doing what he really wants to do. His work continues to be so intensely personal and idiosyncratic. Somehow he seems to get away with these incredibly offbeat subjects like Raging Bull and King of Comedy. AP: And After Hours. But, you know, with enormous disappointments. Right up to the wire they cancelled The Last Temptation of Christ. Heartbreaking! RW: They’d actually gone as far as scouting locations. AP: Those are killing to the spirit. At that point you’re so committed. I admire Marty a lot. I admire his resilience, although I know he’s paid a big price. There comes a point, too, when you think “I’ve got to score . . . I want another picture like Taxi Driver.” Because otherwise you feel so immobilized because you can’t get films made. The last two or three films were not megahits in the Hollywood terms. These guys are in there for a very short tenure. They have no memory, no knowledge of film, no interest really. They want to know what your last product did at the box office. I never thought that I would find myself defending the old Hollywood system. RW: What about Dino De Lauretiis—he seems to have adopted Michael Cimino? Which is brave after Heaven’s Gate. AP: It was brave, and Cimino came through for him in the sense that he did a very responsible job for him . . . fiscally . . . with Year of the Dragon. He’s got a lot of skill. It’s not a film that I liked. RW: I think it has about half a dozen absolutely stunning scenes. AP: And it has about half a dozen absolutely abhorrent scenes that I found deeply offensive. RW: Well, it seems so totally unable to find any coherent attitude toward the leading character. AP: The givens of the leading character are so grandiose as to make him impossible. He is the Vietnam hero, the most decorated cop of the police force . . . 

224  robin wood RL: . . . and a Dirty Harry type . . .  AP: . . . and he’s all of thirty-one or something. How did he do all that? RW: And the casting of Mickey Rourke is all wrong anyway. I read the novel when I heard Cimino was filming it. It was the most dreadful novel I’ve ever struggled through. None of the good scenes of the film is in it. I imagined Clint Eastwood in the part at his present age. AP: But all I kept thinking was, how could this callow youth have done all of this? And the attitude towards women is despicable. The attitude towards sex is despicable. RW: I’m never sure about that. It’s all bound up with the film’s inability to make its mind up about the hero. It’s never clear to me when he’s being endorsed and when he’s not by the film as a whole. It’s the women who are used to condemn him repeatedly, and what they say is absolutely true. RL: Except that the Ariane character goes back to him at the end, which doesn’t make any sense at all. RW: The ending is disastrous with the Mahler Resurrection Symphony on the soundtrack. AP: Really dreadful. And after that rape . . . and then when somebody else rapes her, there comes that terrible “Vengeance is mine.” The fact that he raped her is overlooked. There is a kind of heavy-duty narcissism in Cimino which serves him well on certain occasions and serves him ill on others. RW: All of his films are very confused. They’re made with an extraordinary flare and an extraordinary passion but conceptually so confused. AP: What I think he proved with this film is that he can stay within the boundaries of narrative. In Heaven’s Gate there was a mastery demonstrated but at the expense of the film. That roller-skating scene was breathtaking—breathtaking scene after breathtaking scene but at the expense of certain characters, the narrative, and

An Interview with Arthur Penn  225 certainly at the expense of United Artists. There isn’t an awful lot to celebrate at present in American film. RW: Part of the problem is that there isn’t an awful lot to celebrate in America, and I think that’s why somebody like Cimino has enormous problems, because the impulse behind his work always seems to be a desire to affirm. It’s there consistently throughout his work, to affirm something, in terms of values, and that’s what’s wrong with Year of the Dragon—he’s trying to affirm something that can’t be affirmed anymore, a system that’s been discredited. And he should know that. RW: Would you like some wine now? AP: Yes I would, thank you. RL: Arthur, have you considered going back to the stage to work again? AP: I’m going; I’m going to do a play. It’s a nice play; it’s a terrific play called Hunting Cockroaches. RW: You could have some practice in this apartment. Just stick around ’til it gets dark. [Laughter] AP: I think that’s true of anywhere . . . it’s written by a Pole who’s an émigré, and it’s about Polish emigrés in New York who are caught between their cultures, a nostalgia for the culture they left behind but not a nostalgia for the horrors of that culture. But it’s done in a most inventive, lively, unusual way—a free form. People come out from under the bed and start scenes and then go back under the bed and disappear. RW: When’s it going to open? AP: I’m going to try it out this summer, and we’re going to do it in the fall. I don’t know if this is just arrogance on my part, but I’m going to try to persuade the producer to go to Broadway. At this moment, my own impulse is to say, “Let’s confront the culture, with its absence of theater, its absence of drama, its absence of films, rather than take the other way out, which is

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RW:

AP:

RW: AP:

to go off-Broadway and to hope you’ll get recognized. I think we should go right at it. Broadway has some wonderful theater buildings, and we should change the landlords’ grip on them.” I can make a persuasive case for my position, but it’s going to be their money. I don’t know how well I’m going to be able to convince them, but that’s what I’d like to do. As you’re so involved in theater, have you ever considered doing the kind of filming that Altman’s been involved in, converting plays into films? Certainly Altman is a very good model to use, someone who has always found a way around orthodoxy. I’ve got to do more of what he does. We’re beginning to become quite good friends. And a way of escaping from the twenty million–dollar budget. He moved to Paris while I was there making Target, and we saw a good deal of each other. He set up a place there with a cutting room in his house, and he brought Scotty, his right-hand woman, over, and in his wonderful way, he really got right to work. He filmed from a Marsha Normand play called Laundromat. It’s pretty good; it is just what it is, a one-act play on film. I don’t have that kind of enthusiasm for those small pieces, but what I complain about in the theater constantly is that I wish to God we had a kind of theater where I could use my kinetic skills. I would like to do a sixty-person mob scene, I’d like to do a big play with a lot of people, stuff that I can do in film. But the idea of going back to the kind of small playlet that I did so many of in my television days—Horton Foote, Sam Shepard, Marsha Normand plays—doesn’t seem appropriate. On the other hand, he’s much to be admired, Altman is. He’s indomitable, he never stops working, he’s productive. What comes to mind is that Pauline Kael once said that the three most interesting directors working in American film, Altman, Scorsese, and Coppola, are all three Catholics. And, whatever other similarities she was talking about, there aren’t very many of those people who are whole; those are injured, injured careers—deeply

An Interview with Arthur Penn  227 injured. There’s something very wrong, the situation that nips these artists in the bud in that way. RW: An actor you should work with is Aidan Quinn. AP: Yes, he’s good, isn’t he? I saw Desperately Seeking Susan, and then I saw A Lie of the Mind, the Sam Shepherd play. Gee, he’s good— he’s sympathetic, tender, strong; I really liked him very much. RW: He’s a sort of anti-Rambo. AP: He’s certainly just popped into my consciousness. God, that’s the most attractive young man I’ve seen in a long time on the screen. RL: Did you like Desperately Seeking Susan? AP: I did. I thought between the two of them—Madonna and Roseanna Arquette—they made one terrific character. But it keeps slipping in style. RW: I thought it was quite a nice little thing, but it could have done so much more. RL: I saw The Miracle Worker again recently. It’s a wonderful movie. I hadn’t seen it for a long time. AP: It’s a movie about which I have pretty mixed feelings. I like what it does, and I like the fact that it’s so emotional. There are parts of it that I thoroughly dislike. RW: It’s the only film where I start crying before the credits begin. RL: I think the structure is a bit awkward; the episodicness of the film doesn’t quite work. AP: What doesn’t work for me is that we have the family there being the antagonist, the obstacle, the very conventionality of that family, Captain Keller, and all that struggle . . .  RL: . . . Yes, and the Andrew Prine character, with the reversal at the end where he stands up to his father and tells him he was wrong . . .  AP: . . . all that, you see, was effective on the stage, and I just didn’t have enough sense about cinema at that point to know that it shouldn’t be in the movie, that the camera could tell us about that child’s impediment in a way that we could never depict on the stage and that would be the eloquent antagonist the film

228  robin wood should rage against, that terrible visitation on the child. The camera does it, and then to have people have to talk, when Annie says she wants to take her down to the summerhouse and teach her, and Captain Keller says, “Two weeks, Miss Sullivan!” RL: That whole “two weeks” business seems so arbitrary. AP: You see, it was necessary on the stage. I didn’t know enough when we moved it over onto film to reduce that aspect of it. So that part of it was theatrical in the bad sense. RL: One of the very nice things about it is that it is such a nonsentimental film even though it’s such an emotional film. I felt that you really were avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentalizing the story. It’s extraordinary to find in a film of the early ’60s a character like Anne Bancroft’s—a very wonderful, powerful woman who is still very human, again not compromised or sentimentalized in any way. The film was projecting very strong images of women twenty-five years ago in a way that was very uncharacteristic of that period. AP: Oh, totally. Anne came along there as a new kind of figure, a new kind of heroine, both in the theater in Two for the Seesaw and in this play, carving out a new kind of early feminism for herself. She was remarkable, so gifted. Unfortunately, the theater died, just as film is gradually dying—it died out from under her. Just not enough roles to keep her engaged. RL: I thought Jane Fonda was actually quite good in Agnes of God. She created a role that was essentially nonexistent, under-written, out of her own strength of presence, although I didn’t like the movie; I thought it was quite awful. AP: Jane Fonda is really a terrific actress, as Anne is. They’re really up there. Jane can do some really remarkable work, though she hasn’t always done it. RW: Her career has been very unsatisfactory into the ’80s. Even the things she’s tried to develop herself, like Nine to Five, have been so compromised.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  229 AP: And schematic rather than organic. They’re not made out of passion, rather, “Let’s talk about the working woman” . . .  RL: . . . “but not offend anybody very much.” AP: We’re really at a hard time. It’s not just films, although I think films are the strongest and most exact model of what’s wrong in America right now. I think nobody is doing good work. RW: Part of the problem seems to be that protest has nothing very clear to focus on as it had with Vietnam and Watergate. I think the energy is there somewhere but it can’t seem to be mobilized, and therefore any sort of left-wing or radical position isn’t popular, it doesn’t make money, and we’re back where we started with, with the businessmen and the accountants and the business deals. AP: Every culture, at certain times, gets these kind of impoverished periods, I mean artistically impoverished, for a variety of reasons. I wouldn’t begin to know how to diagnose this period, because it’s filled with enigma for me. I don’t know anybody who isn’t prepared to acknowledge that he’s an engaging figure. So we’re suddenly talking about “the great communicator,” I mean this media of it. It’s very hard for me and my friends to make sense of it. It’s very peculiar. I watched it the other day on the State of the Union address. Absolutely beguiling, in which he was saying things that are absolutely impossible: we won’t raise taxes, we’re going to balance the budget, we’ll maintain the high military budget—it’s absolutely blue-sky time. It’s as if he was turning on the entire country with something he was smoking. But there we are. The politically astute columnists take exception to it, but the people in the street don’t. Up goes the stock market, and as somebody pointed out, Manhattan is a fascinating place that has thirty thousand millionaires and thirty thousand homeless. RL: We were talking about the Rocky and Rambo films and the resurgence of Russia as the monster. This seems a very dangerous game to be playing, and nobody seems to want to take it seriously.

230  robin wood AP: It’s a wonderful way of not looking at your own monster inside your own self. It’s very good to lay off everything that’s wrong with the world onto this alien tribe. RW: The bourgeois media have always tended to link any left-wing position with the Soviet Union—a boogeyman that makes it even more taboo to adopt any left-wing position. AP: On the other hand, it’s very difficult to have a responsible Left. As much as we can excoriate the Right, we can excoriate the Left. We haven’t done a good job of it, those of us of that persuasion. We haven’t done an eloquent job of trying to express what we see as a better culture, a better society. It’s damned difficult, it’s just damned difficult. We have a little playwright and directors’ unit that we run at the Actor’s Studio every Monday— Kazan and I started it, and we have some very good people in it. Mailer is in it, and Don DeLillo—all of them, if you asked them, would define themselves as men of the Left, including Kazan, very much so, and yet you don’t see any work from any of us that helps to define what we mean by that. And that’s pretty impoverished. RL: The problem today seems to be a lack of focus, a kind of splintering. Take, for example, feminism, which as a movement has become increasingly fractured, especially with the current pornography debate. And yet the Right, at the same time, is consolidating. AP: It’s consolidating better than we are. The Right is consolidating; they’ve got a network, they’ve got spokesmen. RW: And money. AP: Money was never the power of the Left. It was really a force for social change, a sense of injustice. It wasn’t money that unified the Left, but it’s what gives the Right its peculiar power. And in this media time, they’re able to buy visibility. But I think we’re at a philosophical deficit. It’s very hard to say feminism is a big enough issue to militate the Left.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  231 RW: Because the dominant ideology has made sufficient allowances for it. AP: It’s wonderfully resilient. RW: You make a few movies like An Unmarried Woman and you’ve dealt with feminism, you’ve said, “Oh yes, that’s fine, the family is great.” That’s just one tiny example. Yet I think there is a certain amount of consolidating going on in intellectual circles, anyway, which is at once preserving things and developing them, ready for when society wants them. AP: Well, I wish I really felt that. I don’t. RW: I think the whole coming-together of the Freudian and Marxist traditions and feminism is very interesting. It’s happened in the last ten years or so. AP: Yes, but there’s also, it seems to me, another kind of movement afoot. There was just a piece in the New York Times Magazine— something about the Yale critics. There’s a big movement afoot there, and I can’t begin to explain it—they’re called deconstructionists. But it seems to me that at the level of criticism, and probably at the level of the art that invokes the criticism, the issues are not being dealt with; the social issues are simply not the currency of our time. I mean, even feminism is only one part of the issue—one cut of the pie. RW: The whole semiotics-structuralist tradition that has led to deconstruction has become so academic, so hermetic. AP: Yes, absolutely. RL: And there’s such an enormous and widening gap between the intellectual elite and the world at large. AP: Oh, it’s huge. You probably don’t see it as much over here, but to walk around Manhattan and see the homeless, the hungry. It’s just appalling. I saw a woman pick a carrot out of the gutter on Columbus Avenue where now the rents for a store are twelve, fifteen thousand dollars a month. You know, money is flowing on that street, and here is this woman picking a filthy carrot

232  robin wood out of the gutter in front of a Korean vegetable store. It’s very peculiar—society is so hard to describe. RL: And this is presented by the media as quaint—”bag ladies are characters.” AP: And if they really wanted to do, they could be running a salon or something. And the truth is that these people are desperate. We’ve got genuine psychotics walking around. I mean, the double bind that’s given to these poor people—”We’ll let you out of the asylum if you promise to get your own medication.” That means be your own keeper, which is what they weren’t able to do in the first place. So there they are, people who, in order to save money, the entire culture has cut loose from any kind of help, except that they can go and get free Thorazine. It’s terrible, terrible. And the increase and frequency of that, it’s just amazing, it’s hard to walk a block in New York now without seeing someone sleeping on a grate or in a doorway. There’s a kind of heartlessness to our society that’s really shocking. RL: That extraordinary juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty . . .  AP: . . . and maybe in there lies some clue to Rambo. If you’re going to do anything about it, you do it yourself, you become supermuscled and superpowered and superarmed, and you go out there and by yourself you blow the system apart. Because the system is going to deceive you. I mean, the figures in Rambo, on whose behalf he is supposedly doing this, are also the ones who are responsible for deceiving him, so there’s nobody to be trusted. I saw Rambo on an airplane, and I couldn’t believe it, I literally couldn’t believe it; I was just appalled. RW: I see fewer new films now than ever before. AP: Yes, I can imagine, and that must be terrible for you. RW: I used to enjoy going to the movies so much, and now it’s at best a duty, at worst a punishment. AP: There must be another and better way. RW: I hope so.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  233

Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks (1976).

MAX: Meow. Meow! RW: Tell us about The Missouri Breaks. AP: It was a situation where each of us had read the script and turned it down. I discovered this later. And Elliot Kastner got together with any two of us and he would say to Brando, “I’ve got Nicholson and Penn to do this, will you do it?” When Brando agreed, he said, “I’ve got Brando and Penn to do this, will you do it?” And pretty soon, we were all locked into it. It seemed so unreal that I didn’t really pay much attention to it, and lo and behold, the deal was made. And from that point on, from the making of the deal to starting the film, it was six weeks. So what we did was go to Montana and build the principal house, and we used a lot of leftover sets from Little Big Man, which were still standing around. They weren’t in very good shape, so we propped them up and then we started to make the movie. And a lot of each day was spent fleshing out scenes, which were

234  robin wood extremely sketchy. That was the best part of the movie, watching these two guys improvise and develop scenes, but we always knew that we didn’t have an ending. One of the cleverest solutions was Brando’s. He said, “I don’t understand who this character is, so I think he should be somebody different every time we see him.” And I quite agreed with him. I didn’t know how to play a regulator either, this dispassionate killer . . . at least in Shane, they gave him a costume, they gave this terrible black vengeance motive. The fact of the matter is, we had a very good time making the movie, although we did have a sense that we were sinking, and then of course, when we got to the ending, we knew we were drowning. And that’s when I called Robert Towne and said, “Bob, come and help, I’m desperate, I don’t know what to do.” He wrote the ending that we have. It’s not much of an ending, but it’s the only ending we could work out, given what we had. RW: Was the script actually incomplete? AP: No, there was an ending of sorts, but it just petered out. The really interesting thing is that the writer, Tom McGuane, had recently made a movie for Elliot Kastner called Ninety-Two in the Shade, and Kastner, for some reason that I’ve never understood, had suddenly decided that McGuane could recut it himself. The recutting took place in England while we were shooting the film, so McGuane left the States and went to England while we were waiting for the ending. I don’t know quite why that happened. I should ask Elliot someday. I haven’t seen him for quite a while. RW: Another film made around the same time, written by McGuane, Rancho Deluxe, has almost exactly the same structure as The Missouri Breaks. Rather oddly, given your description of the making of the film, The Missouri Breaks comes across as far more serious. [Laughter] AP: Rancho Deluxe is more of a piece, but it’s more frivolous. RW: It doesn’t have any of the disturbing elements that Missouri Breaks develops, irrespective of whether you were just having fun or not.

An Interview with Arthur Penn  235 AP: Oh, we were taking it seriously, but we knew we were in a very leaky boat. Terrible things were written in the press, terrible stories were being filed from Montana that Nicholson and Brando were at one another’s throat and that I was having a terrible time with them. Absolutely none of it was true. We had a very good time. RL: Was Brando’s love scene with the horse in the script? AP: No. It’s a marvelous scene. Brando said, “Give me a horse and a mule and let’s go, let’s try it.” And all I had to do was keep the camera going. I knew there was going to be no stopping him once he started. Ten years ago you could shoot a film in that manner. You couldn’t do that today.

notes

1. William Butler Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 232. 2. D. H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers (1936), edited by Edward McDonald (New York: Viking, 1968), 535. 3. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” 231. 4. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Baltimore: Penquin, 1936), 284. 5. Little Big Man was released in the United States on December 23, 1970. 6. The actual running time is 139 minutes. Richard Boone does not appear in the film. 7. See Penn’s remarks at the beginning of the interview “Arthur Penn in Canada.” 8. Some of these scenes are included in the DVD version (Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, 2004) of the film. Scene 1 is present, as is scene 2, although the foreman’s wife does not show but instead only mentions that she cuts out the society page pictures of Jake’s wife. In scene 6 such bits of business are indeed there in the scene, but there may have been others to which Wood refers here as well. Scenes 9 and 10 are there as is 11, but the scene contains no shots of Lester’s family. In scene 12 there are only two actions—the Calders leaving and Anna outside Val’s house, leaving over the closing credits as Wood notes. Scenes 4–5 and 7–8 are absent. 9. Irving Penn, Moments Preserved: Eight Essays in Photographs and Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).

238  notes 10. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edition, edited by David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 45. 11. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon/Bollingen Foundation, 1960), 64. 12. Ibid., 78. 13. Ibid., 81. 14. Ibid., 80–81. 15. Ibid., 82, 88. 16. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Andrew Britton’s analysis of Mandingo in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 252–72. The essay originally appeared in Movie 22 (Spring 1976): 1–22. 17. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 88. 18. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, translated and edited by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 116.

filmography

The Colgate Comedy Hour ( January 20, 1952) Director: Jim Jordan. Associate director: Arthur Penn. Writers: Jesse Goldstein, Joe Quillan. 60 min. Cast: Eddie Cantor, Adele Jergens, Robert Clary, James Dobson, Shirley Mitchell, Doris Singleton, Sharon Baird, Kirk Douglas The Colgate Comedy Hour (April 27, 1952) Director: Ernest D. Glickman. Associate director: Arthur Penn. Writers: Norman Lear, Ed Simmons. 60 min. Cast: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Kitty Kallen, The Four Step Brothers, Danny Arnold, Harvey Wheelwick “Café Society” ( July 3, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Robert Alan Aurthur. 30 min. Cast: Oliver Andes, Frank Overton, Rod Steiger, James Westerfield “Death of the Old Man” ( July 17, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Frank Telford. Producer: Arthur Penn. 30 min. Cast: Mildred Natwick, William Hanson “Comeback” ( July 24, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse)

240  filmography Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: David Shaw. 30 min. Cast: John Fletcher, Murray Hamilton, Jessie Royce Landis, Jack Warden “One Night Stand” ( July 31, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Robert Alan Aurthur. 30 min. Cast: James Dunn, Conrad Janis “The Tears of My Sister” ( July 14, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Horton Foote. 30 min. Cast: Angela Adamides, Catharine Doucet, Frank Overton, Lenka Peterson, Katharine Squire, Kim Stanley, Edgar Stehli “Crip” (August 21, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Stewart Stern. 30 min. Cast: Evelyn Varden, Leo Penn “Prophet in His Land” (September 4, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Doug Johnson. 30 min. Cast: Buster Crabbe, Tony Randall “A Gift from Cotton Mather” (September 11, 1953) Episode of The Gulf Playhouse (First Person Playhouse) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Paddy Chayefsky. 30 min. Cast: Joseph Anthony, Mildred Dunnock, Kim Hunter “John Turner Davis” (November 15, 1953) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Horton Foote. 60 min. Cast: Larry Gates, Nan McFarland, Frank Overton, Clifford Tatum Jr.

filmography 241 “The Strong Women” (November 29, 1953) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Paddy Chayefksy. 60 min. Cast: Kathleen Comegys, Kim Stanley, Warren Stevens “The Glorification of Al Toolum” (December 27, 1953) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: David Shaw. 60 min. Cast: Murray Hamilton, Walter Matthau, Betsy Palmer, Van Dyke Parks, Maxine Stuart “Buy Me Blue Ribbons” (February 28, 1954) Episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Sumner Locke Elliott. 60 min. Cast: Geoffrey Lumb, Enid Markey, Roddy McDowall, Gale Page, Natalie Schafer “The King and Mrs. Candle” (April 18, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Sumner Locke Elliott. 60 min. Cast: Raymond Bramley, Joan Greenwood, Jerome Kilty, Irene Manning, Helen Raymond, Cyril Ritchard “The Broken Fist” (March 21, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: David Shaw. 60 min. Cast: Sidney Armus, Claude Dauphin “The Joker” (May 2, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: N. Richard Nash. 60 min. Cast: Martin Balsam, Eva Marie Saint, Andy Savilla, Maurice Shrog, Adam West

242  filmography “The Lawn Party” (May 23, 1954) Episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Tad Mosel. 60 min. Cast: Patricia Fay, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Larry Gates, Jeff Harris, Jane Moultrie “Adapt or Die” ( June 15, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Harry Miles Muheim. 60 min. Cast: Stefan Gierasch, William Hawley, Marcel Hillaire, Geoffrey Lumb, Walter Matthau, Hildy Parks, John Qualen, Gus Raymond, Adam West “Man on the Hunt” (August 19, 1954) Episode of Justice Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: George Bellak. 30 min. Cast: Harvey Lembeck, Patrick O’Neal, Lenka Peterson “Stars in the Summer Night” (August 22, 1954) Episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Tad Mosel. 60 min. Cast: Robert Blackburn, Lili Darvas, Shaun Dooley, Michael Gorrin, Luba Kadison, Janine Manatis, Peter Mark Richman, Bryan Russell, Katherine Squire, Ralph Stantley, Raymond Van Sickle “The Happy Rest” (October 4, 1954) Episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: N. Richard Nash. 60 min. Cast: Wallace Ford, Julie Harris, E. G. Marshall, Mildred Natwick “Man on the Mountaintop” (October 17, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Robert Alan Aurthur. 60 min.

filmography 243 Cast: Sidney Armus, Gordon B. Clarke, Steven Hill, Loretta Leversee, Anne Meara, Peter Mark Richman “State of the Union” (November 15, 1954) Episode of Producer’s Showcase Director: Arthur Penn. Writers: Russell Crouse, Howard Lindsay. 90 min. Cast: Joseph Cotten, John Cromwell, Nina Foch, Margaret Sullavan, Ray Walston “Beg, Borrow or Steal” (November 28, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Jay Presson Allen. 60 min. Cast: Sylvia Field, Anthony Ross “Catch My Boy on Sunday” (December 12, 1954) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Paddy Chayekfsy. 60 min. Cast: Martin Rudy, Sylvia Sidney “The Assassin” (February 20, 1955) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Bernard Wolfe. 60 min. Cast: Jacob Ben-Ami, Nehemiah Persoff, Gaby Rodgers, Jo Van Fleet “My Lost Saints” (March 13, 1955) Episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Tad Mosel. 60 min. Cast: Tirrell Barbery, Lili Darvas, Eileen Heckert, Richard Kendrick, Hanna Landry, Barbara Robbins “The King and Mrs. Candle” (April 22, 1955) Episode of Producer’s Showcase

244  filmography Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Sumner Locke Elliott. 90 min. Cast: Cyril Ritchard, Joan Greenwood, Theodore Bikel, Richard Haydn, Irene Manning “The Pardon-Me Boy” (May 15, 1955) Episode of Philco Television Playhouse Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: J. P. Miller. 60 min. Cast: Harry Bellaver, Jackie Cooper, Peggy Maurer, Carlos Montalban, Joanna Roos “The Battler” (October 18, 1955) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Sidney Carroll. 60 min. Cast: Richard Collier, Marty Green, Phyllis Kirk, Dewey Martin, Bill McLean, Ben Miller, Irving Mitchell, Paul Newman, Frederick O’Neal “The Heart’s a Forgotten Hotel” (October 25, 1955) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Arnold Schulman. 60 min. Cast: Paul Hartman, Edmond O’Brien, Sylvia Sidney, Clifford Tatum Jr., Arleen Whelan “Daisy, Daisy” (November 22, 1955) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Sumner Locke Elliott. 60 min. Cast: Al Checco, Agnes Doyle, Tom Ewell, Edith Meiser, Jane Moultrie, James Reese, Lou Vernon, Jane Wyatt “The Waiting Place” (December 20, 1955) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Tad Mosel. 60 min. Cast: Louis Jean Heydt, Dorrit Kelton, Jack Mullaney, Louise Platt, Kim Stanley

filmography 245 “Lost” ( January 17, 1956) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writers: Burton Roueche, Arnold Schulman. 60 min. Cast: Frank Campanella, Chris Gampel, Sally Gracie, Anna Hegira, Fred Herrick, Steven Hill, Dots Johnson, Frank London, Vivian Nathan, Katherine Squire, Sada Thompson “Adam and Evening” (March 13, 1956) Episode of Playwrights ’56 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Arnold Schulman. 60 min. Cast: Sidney Armus, John C. Becher, Rudy Bond, Johanne Douglas, Allen Leaf, Lori March, Nehemiah Persoff, Ian Tucker, Estelle Winwood “The Miracle Worker” (February 7, 1957) Episode of Playhouse 90 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: William Gibson. 90 min. Cast: Teresa Wright, Burl Ives, John Drew Barrymore, Akim Tamiroff, Katherine Bard, Patty McCormack, Carroll McComas, Pauline Myers, Jason Johnson, Cheryl Weinberg, Miles Clark “Invitation to a Gunfighter” (March 7, 1957) Episode of Playhouse 90 Director: Arthur Penn. Writers: Hal Goodman, Larry Klein, Leslie Stevens. 90 min. Cast: Hugh O’Brian, Anne Bancroft, Gilbert Roland, Pat O’Brien, Ray Collins, Milton Parsons “Charley’s Aunt” (March 28, 1957) Episode of Playhouse 90 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Leslie Stevens. 90 min.

246  filmography Cast: Art Carney, Orson Bean, Richard Haydn, Tom Tryon, Venetia Stevenson, Jackie Coogan, Melville Cooper, Sue Randall, Jeanette MacDonald, Gene Raymond, Charles Bickford “Portrait of a Murderer” (February 7, 1958) Episode of Playhouse 90 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Leslie Stevens. 90 min. Cast: Donald Keith Bashor, Richard Bissutti, Rudy Bond, Sidney Clute, Ned Glass, Tab Hunter, Frank London, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Patterson, Barbara Turner “The Dark Side of the Earth” (September 19, 1957) Episode of Playhouse 90 Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: Rod Serling. 90 min. Cast: Van Helfin, Earl Holliman, Kim Hunter, Dean Jagger, Jerry Paris, Ian Wolfe The Left Handed Gun (1958) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Warner Bros. (A Harroll Production). Producer: Fred Coe. Writer: Leslie Stevens from the play by Gore Vidal. Cinematographer: J. Peverell Marley. Art director: Art Loel. Music: Alexander Courage, ballad by William Goyen and Alexander Courage. Film editor: Folmar Blangsted. 102 min. U.S. release: September 26, 1958 Principal cast: Paul Newman (William Bonney), John Dehner (Pat Garrett), Lita Milan (Celsa), Hurd Hatfield (Moultrie), James Congdon (Charlie Boudre), James Best (Tom Folliard), Colin Keith-Johnston (Tunstall), John Dierkes (McSween), Bob Anderson (Hill), Wally Brown (Moon), Ainslie Pryor ( Joe Grant), Martin Garralaga (Saval), Denver Pyle (Ollinger), Paul Smith (Bell), Nestor Paiva (Maxwell), Jo Summers (Mrs. Garrett), Robert Foulk (Brady), Anne Barton (Mrs. Hill) The Miracle Worker (1962) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: United Artists (A Playfilms Production). Producer: Fred Coe. Screenwriter: William Gibson,

filmography 247 from his play of the same name. Cinematographer: Ernest Caparros. Art director: George Jenkins, Mel Bourne. Music: Laurence Rosenthal. Film editor: Aram Avakian. 106 min. U.S. release: July 28, 1962 Principal cast: Anne Bancroft (Annie Sullivan), Patty Duke (Helen Keller), Victor Jory (Captain Keller), Inga Swenson (Kate Keller), Andrew Prine (James Keller), Kathleen Comegys (Aunt Ev), Beah Richards (Viney) Mickey One (1964) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Columbia (A Florin/ Tatira Production). Producer: Arthur Penn. Screenwriter: Alan Surgal. Cinematographer: Ghislain Cloquet. Production designer: George Jenkins. Art director: William Crawford. Music: Eddie Sauter, improvisations by Stan Getz. Film editor: Aram Avakian. 93 min. U.S. release: September 27, 1965 Principal cast: Warren Beatty (Mickey), Alexandra Stewart ( Jenny), Hurd Hatfield (Castle), Franchot Tone (Ruby Lopp), Teddy Hart (Breson), Jeff Corey (Fryer), Kamatari Fukiwara (the Artist), Donna Michelle (the Girl), Ralph Foody (police captain), Norman Gottschalk (the Evangelist), Dick Lucas (employment agent), Jack Goodman (cafeteria manager), Jeri Jensen (Helen), Charlene Lee (the singer), Benny Dunn (nightclub comic), Denise Darnell (stripper), Dick Baker (boss at Shaley’s), Helen Witkowski (landlady) The Chase (1966) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Columbia (A Lone Star/Horizon Production). Producer: Sam Spiegel. Screenwriter: Lillian Hellman, based on the novel and play by Horton Foote. Cinematographer: Joseph LaShelle and (uncredited) Robert Surtees. Production designer: Richard Day. Art director: Robert Luthart. Music: John Barry. Film editor: Gene Milford. 135 min. U.S. release: February 17, 1966 Principal cast: Marlon Brando (Sheriff Calder), Jane Fonda (Anna Reeves), Robert Redford (Bubber Reeves), E. G. Marshall (Val Rogers),

248  filmography Angie Dickinson (Ruby Calder), Janice Rule (Emily Stewart), Miriam Hopkins (Mrs. Reeves), Martha Hyer (Mary Fuller), Richard Bradford (Damon Fuller), Robert Duvall (Edwin Stewart), James Fox ( Jake Jason Rogers), Diana Hyland (Elizabeth Rogers), Henry Hull (Briggs), Jocelyn Brando (Mrs. Briggs), Katherine Walsh (Verna Dee), Lori Martin (Cutie), Marc Seaton (Paul), Paul Williams (Seymour), Clifton James (Lem), Malcolm Atterbury (Mr. Reeves), Nudia Westman (Mrs. Henderson), Joel Fluellen (Lester Johnson), Steve Ihnat (Archie), Maurice Manson (Moore), Bruce Cabot (Sol), Steve Whittaker (Deputy Slim), Pamela Curren (Mrs. Sifftefieus), Ken Renard (Sam), Eduardo Ciannelli (Mr. Sifftefieus) Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Warner Bros. (A TatiraHiller Production). Producer: Warren Beatty. Screenwriters: David Newman and Robert Benton. Cinematographer: Burnett Guffey. Art director: Dean Tavoularis. Music: Charles Strouse, with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Film editor: Dede Allen. Special consultant: Robert Towne. 111 min. U.S. release: August 13, 1967 Principal cast: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Michael J. Pollard (C. W. Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche), Denver Pyle (Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss), Evans Evans (Velma Davis), Gene Wilder (Eugene Grizzard) Flesh and Blood (TV movie, 1968) Director: Arthur Penn. Producer: Arthur Penn. Screenwriter: William Hanley. 100 min. U.S. broadcast: January 26, 1968 Principal cast: Edmond O’Brien (Harry), Kim Stanley (Della), E. G. Marshall ( John), Kim Darby (Faye), Suzanne Pleshette (Nona), Robert Duvall (Howard)

filmography 249 Alice’s Restaurant (1969) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: United Artists (A Florin Production). Producers: Hillard Elkins and Joe Manduke. Screenwriters: Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn, based on the recording “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie. Cinematographer: Michael Nebbia. Art director: Warren Clymer. Music: Original music by Arlo Guthrie, musical supervision with additional music composed and arranged by Garry Sherman. “Songs to Ageing Children” by Joni Mitchell, “Pastures of Plenty” and “Car Song” by Woody Guthrie. Film editor: Dede Allen. 111 min. U.S. release: August 20, 1969 Principal cast: Arlo Guthrie (Arlo), Pat Quinn (Alice), James Broderick (Ray), Michael McClanathan (Shelly), Geoff Outlaw (Roger), Tina Chen (Mari-Chan), Kathleen Dabney (Karin), Police Chief William Obanhein (Officer Obie), Seth Allen (evangelist), Monroe Arnold (Blueglass), Joseph Boley (Woody), Vinnette Carroll (lady clerk), Sylvia Davis (Marjorie), Simm Landres ( Jacob), Eulalie Noble (Ruth), Louis Beachner (Dean), MacIntyre Dixon (first minister at deconsecration), Rev. Dr. Pierce Middleton (second minister), Donald Marye (funeral director), Shelly Plimpton (Rennie), M. Emmet Walsh (Group W sergeant), Ronald Weyand (first policeman), Eleanor Wilson (landlady), Simon Deckard (doctor), Thomas De Wolfe (waiter), Judge James Hannon (himself ), Graham Jarvis (music teacher), John Quill (second policeman), Frank Simpson (sergeant), Alice Brock, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays Little Big Man (1970) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Cinema Center (A Stockbridge-Hiller Production). Producer: Stuart Millar. Screenwriter: Calder Willingham, from the novel by Thomas Berger. Cinematographer: Harry Stradling Jr. Art director: Dean Tavoularis. Music: John Hammond. Film editor: Dede Allen. 139 min. U.S. release: December 23, 1970

250  filmography Principal cast: Dustin Hoffman (Little Big Man), Chief Dan George (Old Lodge Skins), Faye Dunaway (Mrs. Pendrake), Amy Eccles (Sunshine), Kelly Jean Peters (Olga), Cal Bellini (Younger Bear), Martin Balsam (Mr. Merriwether), Richard Mulligan (Gen. George Armstrong Custer), Jeff Corey (Wild Bill Hickok), Carol Androsky (Caroline Crabb), Robert Little Star (Little Horse), Ruben Morreno (Shadow That Comes in Sight), Steve Shemayne (Burns Red in the Sun), Thayer Kennedy (Rev. Silas Pendrake), William Hickey (historian) Visions of Eight (1973) Director: Milos Forman (“The Decathalon”), Kon Ichikawa (“The Fastest”), Claude Lelouch (“The Losers”), Yuri Ozerov (“The Beginning”), Arthur Penn (“The Highest”), Michael Pfleghar (“The Women”), John Schlesinger (“The Longest”), Mai Zetterling (“The Strongest”). Production company: Bavaria Atelier, Wolper Productions. Producers: Stuart Margulies, David L. Wolper. 110 min. U.S. release: August 10, 1973 Night Moves (1975) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Warner Bros. Producer: Robert M. Sherman. Screenwriter: Alan Sharp, based on his novel of the same name. Cinematographer: Bruce Surtees. Production designer: George Jenkins. Music: Michael Small. Film editor: Dede Allen, Stephen A. Rotter. 100 min. U.S. release: June 11, 1975 Principal cast: Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Edward Binns ( Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Kenneth Mars (Nick), James Woods (Quentin), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Janet Ward (Arlene Iverson), Anthony Costello (Marv Ellman), John Crawford (Tom Iverson) The Missouri Breaks (1976) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Devon/Persky-Bright. Producers: Elliott Kastner, Robert M. Sherman. Screenwriter: Thomas

filmography 251 McGuane. Cinematographer: Michael C. Butler. Production designer: Albert Brenner. Art director: Stephen Myles Berger. Music: John Williams. Film editor: Dede Allen, Gerald B. Greenberg, Stephen A. Rotter. 126 min. U.S. release: May 19, 1976 Principal cast: Marlon Brando (Lee Clayton), Jack Nicholson (Tom Logan), Randy Quaid (Little Tod), Kathleen Lloyd ( Jane Braxton), Frederic Forrest (Cary), Harry Dean Stanton (Calvin), John McLiam (David Braxton), John P. Ryan (Si), Sam Gilman (Hank Rate), Steve Franken (The Lonesome Kid), Richard Bradford (Pete Marker) Four Friends (1981) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Cinema 77, Filmways Pictures, Florin. Producers: Gene Lasko, Arthur Penn. Screenwriter: Steve Tesich. Cinematographer: Ghislain Cloquet. Production designer: David Chapman. Art director: Dick Hughes. Music: Elizabeth Swados. Film editor: Marc Laub, Barry Malkin. 114 min. U.S. release: December 11, 1981 Principal cast: Craig Wasson (Danilo Prozor), Jodi Thelen (Georgia), Michael Huddleston (David), Jim Metzler (Tom), Scott Hardt (young Danilo), Elizabeth Lawrence (Mrs. Prozor), Miklos Simon (Mr. Prozor), Michael Kovacs (neighbor), Beatrice Fredman (Mrs. Zoldos), Reed Birney (Louie) Target (1985) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: CBS Productions. Producers: Richard D. Zanuck, David Brown. Screenwriters: Howard Berk, Don Peterson. Cinematographer: Jean Tournier. Production designer: Willy Holt. Music: Michael Small. Film editor: Richard P. Cirincione, Stephen A. Rotter. 117 min. U.S. release: November 8, 1985 Principal cast: Gene Hackman (Walter Lloyd/Duncan Potter), Matt Dillon (Chris Lloyd/Derek Potter), Gayle Hunnicutt (Donna Lloyd), Josef Sommer (Tabor), Ilona Grubel (Carla), Randy Moore (tour director), Tomas Hnevsa (Henke), Jean-Paul Dubois (Glasses)

252  filmography Dead of Winter (1987) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: MGM. Producers: John Bloomington, Marc Shmuger. Screenwriters: Marc Shmuger, Mark Malone. Cinematographer: Jan Weincke. Production designer: Bill Brodie. Art director: Alicia Keywan. Music: Richard Einhorn. Film editor: Rick Shaine. 100 min. U.S. release: February 6, 1987 Principal cast: Mary Steenburgen ( Julie Rose/Kate McGowan/Evelyn), Roddy McDowall (Mr. Murray), Jan Rubes (Dr. Joseph Lewis), William Russ (Rob Sweeney), Ken Pogue (Officer Mullivay), Wayne Robson (Officer Huntley), Mark Malone (Roland McGovern) Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Lorimar Film Entertainment. Producer: Arthur Penn. Screenwriters: Penn Jillette, Teller. Cinematographer: Jan Weincke. Art director: John Arnone. Music: Paul Chihara. Film editor: Jeffrey Wolf. 89 min. U.S. release: September 22, 1989 Principal cast: Penn Jillette, Teller, Caitlin Clarke (Carlotta/Officer McNamara), David Patrick Kelly (the fan), Leonardo Cimino (Ernesto), Celia McGuire (Officer McNamara), Bill Randolph (floor director) The Portrait (TV movie, 1993) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Turner Pictures. Producer: Philip K. Kleinbart. Screenwriter: Lynne Roth, based on the play Painting Churches by Tina Howe. Cinematographer: Richard Quinlan. Production designer: Robert Guerra. Music: Cynthia Millar. Film editor: Janet Bartels-Vandagriff. 89 min. U.S. broadcast: Feburary 13, 1993 Principal cast: Gregory Peck (Gardner Church), Lauren Bacall (Fanny Church), Cecelia Peck (Margaret Church), Paul McCrane (Bartel), Donna Mitchell (Marissa Pindar), Joyce O’Connor (Samantha Button), Mitchell Laurence (Ted Button), William Prince (Hubert Hayden), Augusta Dabny (Elizabeth Hayden)

filmography 253 Lumière and Company (1995) Director: Short films by forty directors including Arthur Penn. Producers: Neal Edlestein, Fabienne Servan-Schreiber. Art director: Anne Andreu. Music: Jean-Jacques Lemetre. Film editor: Roger Ikhlef, Timothy Miller. 88 min. U.S. release: December 20, 1975 Inside (TV movie, 1996) Director: Arthur Penn. Production company: Elkins Entertainment, Film Afrika Worldwide, Logo Entertainment. Producers: Hillard Elkins, David Wicht. Screenwriter: Bima Stagg. Cinematographer: Jan Weincke. Production designer: David Barkham. Art director: Emilia Roux. Music: Robert Levin. Film editor: Suzanne Pillsbury. 94 min. U.S. broadcast: August 25, 1996 Principal cast: Nigel Hawthorne (Colonel), Eric Stoltz (Marty), Louis Gossett Jr. (Questioner), Ian Roberts (Moolman), Louis van Niekerk (P. Martin Strydom Sr.), Janine Eser (Christie Malcolm), Jerry Mofokeng (Mzwaki), Patrick Shai (Bhambo), Ross Preller (Potgieter), Joshua Lineberg (Koos), Desmond Dube (Scabenga) “The Fix” Episode of 100 Centre Street (November 5, 2001) Director: Arthur Penn. Writer: David Black. 60 min. Series stars: Alan Arkin, Paula Devicq, Joseph Lyle Taylor, Manny Perez

Arthur Penn on the set of Penn and Teller Get Killed.

index

Boldface page numbers indicate images. À bout de souffle, 55, 57, 59 After Hours, 206–7, 223 Agnes of God, 228 Alice’s Restaurant, xiv, xviii, 72–93, 77, 87, 91, 99, 105, 106, 118–19, 123–27, 126, 128, 129, 134, 140–41, 147, 151, 156, 163, 166, 171, 175, 178–80, 202 Allen, Dede, 94, 102, 106, 119 Altman, Robert, 172, 226 Anderson, John, xvii Antonioni, Michelangelo, xiii, 32, 99–100, 102 Arquette, Roseanna, 227 authorship, xv–xvi, 106, 109–10, 133–37, 140–42, 169, 181–83 Back to the Future, 222 Balsam, Martin, 94 Barthes, Roland, 192 Bellini, Cal, 108 Benton, Robert, 150–51 Berger, Thomas, 94, 95, 105, 106, 139, 157 Bergman, Ingmar, xiii–xiv, 135, 148, 152–53, 175 Berto, Juliet, 74 Big Sky, The, 162 Birney, Reed, 213

Blake, William, 58, 148, 176 Blowout, 210–11 Bonnie and Clyde, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 31, 33, 36, 44, 46, 52, 55–71, 57, 61, 65, 67, 72, 73–74, 75, 76–78, 79, 80, 84, 93, 96, 98, 106, 111, 127, 141, 144, 148–50, 149, 156, 157, 159, 165–66, 169, 171, 178–80, 202 Boone, Richard, 94 Brando, Marlon, 46, 100, 112, 130, 171, 173, 184–85, 233–35 Breathless (1959). See À bout de souffle Breaking Away, 210 Bresson, Robert, 144 Brief Encounter, 217 Bringing Up Baby, 110 Brock, Alice, 123–25 Brock, Ray, 123–25 Bruce, James, 188 Cabaret, 213 Cameron, Ian, xiii Chabrol, Claude, xiii, 92–93 Chandler, Raymond, 55 Chase, The, xiv–xv, xvi, xviii, 2–3, 5, 6, 11, 15, 25, 31, 39–54, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 60, 72, 84, 96, 100, 106, 110–17, 113, 120, 127, 129–30, 141,

256  index Chase, The, (cont’d.) 148, 154–55, 156, 159, 163, 165–66, 169, 171, 175, 176, 178–79, 181–201, 198, 200, 202, 237n. 8 Chekov, Michael, 121 Chen, Tina, 126 Cheyenne Autumn, 165 Cimino, Michael, 223–25 Citizen Kane, 134. 191. 197 Cloquet, Ghislain, 144–45 Cohen, Sam, 218 Coogan’s Bluff, 73 Coppola, Francis Ford, 226 Coutard, Raoul, 144 Day After, The, 189 De Lauretiis, Dino, 223 Dead of Winter, xviii, 202, 207, 208 Decaë, Henri, 144 Deer Hunter, The, 187 DeLillo, Don, 230 DeNiro, Robert, 218 Desperately Seeking Susan, 227 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 170 Dickens, Charles, 44 Dickinson, Angie, 46, 168 Dillon, Matt, 218 Duke, Patty, 3, 22 Dunaway, Faye, 94, 95 Dürer, Albrecht, 187–88 Easy Rider, 135, 140 Eccles, Amy, 101–2, 104 Falling in Love (1984), 217–18 Fellini, Federico, 121 femme infidèle, La, 92–93 First Blood. See Rambo: First Blood Part II Fletcher, John, 109 Fonda, Jane, 228 Foote, Horton, 184, 226

Ford, Harrison, 214 Ford, John, 70, 105, 134–35, 141, 162, 165, 189–98, 222 Forster, E. M., 88, 90 Fort Apache, 162 Four Friends, 210–17, 212, 214 Fuller, Samuel, 162 Gai Savoir, Le, xiv, 74, 75 gangster fims, 55–56, 176 genre, 165, 175, 178, 183, 186–89, 203 Getaway, The (1972), 166–68, 168 Gibson, William, 30, 131, 177 Godard, Jean-Luc, xiv-xv, 52, 57, 73–76, 150, 153 Goldwyn, Samuel, 203 Gombrich, E. H., 186–88, 191–92 Graduate, The, 100 Grosbard, Ulu, 217–18 Guffey, Burnett, 144 Guns in the Afternoon. See Ride the High Country Guthrie, Arlo, 79–81, 93, 123, 125, 129, 141, 175, 179–80 Guthrie, Woody, 84, 123 Hackman, Gene, 218 Hamill, Mark, 214 Hammett, Dashiell, 55 Harris, Richard, 122 Hawks, Howard, xiii, xv–xvi, 32, 56–59, 105, 134–35, 139, 141, 162, 183, 222 Heaven’s Gate, 223, 225 Hellman, Lillian, 30, 184 Herndon, Venable, 123, 140–41, 175 High Noon, 112 Hitchcock, Alfred, xiii, 32, 78, 105, 118, 122, 134–35, 141 Hoffman, Dustin, 94, 95, 100, 104, 138–40 Hooper, Tobe, 189 Hughes, Ted, 167

index 257 I Am a Camera, 213 Inside, xviii Junior Bonner, 167, 168 Kastner, Elliot, 233–34 Kazan, Elia, 230 King of Comedy, 223 Kubrick, Stanley, 222 Land of the Pharaohs, 139 Last Cowboy, The, 208–9 Last Picture Show, The, 187 Last Tango in Paris, 185 Last Temptation of Christ, The, 223 Laundromat, The, 226 Lawrence, D. H., 10, 58, 148, 162 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 74 Leavis, F. R., xv Left Handed Gun, The, xvi, 1–2, 3, 6–7, 8, 9, 11–21, 12, 14, 19, 28–29, 33, 36, 55, 60, 62, 83–84, 110–11, 128, 141, 142, 154–55, 171, 175, 176, 177, 178 Little Big Man, xvi, xvii, xviii, 94–108, 97, 103, 119, 122, 125, 131–32, 133, 134, 136, 137–40, 141, 147, 154–64, 157, 161, 166, 171–72, 178–80, 202, 217, 233 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The, 55 MacGraw, Ali, 168 Madonna, 227 Mailer, Norman, 230 Major Dundee, 77 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, 70 Mandingo, 188–89 Mann, Anthony, 2, 183 Marnie, 78 Mastroianni, Marcello, 121 Mayer, Louis B., 203 McDowall, Roddy, 207

McGuane, Thomas, 169–71, 173, 234 McLuhan, Marshall, 131 Mickey One, 2, 5, 6, 31–38, 33, 35, 37, 52, 60, 82, 84, 105, 106, 128, 141, 145–47, 146, 154, 156, 178 Millar, Stuart, 95, 104, 107 Minnelli, Liza, 213 Miracle Worker, The, 1–2, 3, 4, 11, 22–30, 24, 27, 29, 102, 127, 130–31, 132, 141, 147, 155, 171, 177–78, 227–28 Missouri Breaks, The, 169–74, 170, 173, 185, 223–24 Monkey Business (1952), 56 Mulligan, Richard, xvii My Darling Clementine, 187 Newman, David, 150 Nichols, Mike, 100 Nicholson, Jack, 233, 235 Night Moves, xviii, xix, 172, 181, 182, 202 Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, The, 214 Nine to Five, 228 Ninety-Two in the Shade, 234 Normand, Marsha, 226 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 54 Peckinpah, Sam, 76–78. 146. 165–68 Penn and Teller Get Killed, 253 Penn, Irving, 154, 155–56 Perry, Frank, 169–70 Persona, 148–49, 152–53 Peters, Kelly Jean, 106 Pierrot le Fou, 55 Poe, Edgar Allan, 189 Quinn, Aidan, 227 Raging Bull, 223 Rambo: First Blood Part II, 206–7, 229, 232

258  index Rancho Deluxe, 169–71, 234 Ray, Nicholas, 180, 183 Ray, Satyajit, xiii Red River, 134 Rhinestone, 206 Richardson, Jack, 131 Richardson, Tony, 31, 55 Ride the High Country, 143–44 Rio Bravo, 134 Rocky, 206–7, 229 Romancing the Stone, 222 Rourke, Mickey, 223 Rule, Janice, 120, 121 Run of the Arrow, 162 Savage Innocents, The, 180 Scarface (1932), 55, 57–59 Scorsese, Martin, 207, 222–23, 226 Seeger, Pete, 84, 123 Seven Samurai, 77 Shakespeare, William, 56, 109–10 Shame (1968), 152–53 Shane, 234 Shepard, Sam, 226–27 Siegel, Don, 73 Simon, Neil, 215 Sirk, Douglas, 209 Smith, Lois, 210 Spiegel, Sam, 112, 184 Stallone, Sylvester, 206 Star Wars (Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope), 214 Steenburgen, Mary, 207 Sternberg, Josef von, 99 Stevens, George, 118, 120, 122 Stradling, Harry, Jr., 94, 105, 144 Streep, Meryl, 217–18 Straw Dogs (1971), 167 Surgal, Alan M., 34

Target, 217–21, 219, 221, 226 Tavoularis, Dean, 98, 99, 122 Tesich, Steve, 210, 215 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974), 189 Thelan, Jodi, 213–15 Thompson, J. Lee, 184 Tom Jones, 31 Towne, Robert, 234 Travolta, John, 211 Truffaut, François, 150 Turner, Ted, 207 Unmarried Woman, An, 231 Vidal, Gore, 30 violence, xi, 2, 3, 6, 15, 38, 54, 64, 73, 75–76, 78, 167, 175, 196 Walker, Michael, xiii Warner, Harry, 203 Wasson, Craig, 210 Weekend, xiv, 73–75, 74, 153 Welles, Orson, 118, 135 Westerns, 48, 162, 165, 169, 172, 176 Wild Bunch, The, 76, 78, 143, 166–67 Willingham, Calder, 94, 95, 102, 106, 132, 138 Winner, Michael, 184 Winter Light, 152 Written on the Wind, 191, 197 Year of the Dragon, 223–25 Yeats, William Butler, 5, 21, 148 Young Mr. Lincoln, 165, 189–98, 190, 193, 201 Zabriskie Point, 99 Zemeckis, Robert, 222 Zola, Emile, 186