As I mentioned before, I watched A Passage to India, and it really improved my mood. But it isn’t because it is a feel-good movie. The denouement is perhaps like that, but getting there is hell. The film is highly political and it plays a lot with the concept on the individual and collective levels. And it is in this way that the film is structured.

The first part of the film is focused on the collective. We see a lot of the British ruling class. They are, as a group, not very sympathetic. Just the same, you see their dilemma. None of them want to be in India. They remind me very much of the 1% in the United States. They are part of the power elite, but that mostly just allows them to see how the truly rich and powerful live. If they were truly successful, they’d be in England. And that fact is painfully on display in the film.

The description of The Ugly American seems quite fitting, “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they’re frightened and defensive…” Or more directly, there is George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant,” where he shows how imperialism was a trap for the British. The one good thing is that you know all these people will be released from their self imposed bondage within two decades.

Collective Conflict

Throughout this first part of A Passage to India, we follow two visitors: the young Adela Quested (Judy Davis) and the much older Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). They both want to see “the real India.” So they are sympathetic. But as the Indian protaganist, Dr Aziz, notes at the beginning, “They all become exactly the same. I give any Englishman two years… I give [the women] six months…” This is said somewhat in jest. Dr Aziz admires the British. This he will come to regret.

Mrs Moore and Dr Aziz meet at night, in a mosque. Dr Aziz is impressed with Mrs Moore’s respect for their customs (she removed her shoes before entering). This starts a series of events that leads to Dr Aziz taking Adela and Mrs Moore on a trip to the Marabar Caves. It comes about because he is too embarrassed to let them see his humble house. But throughout all of this, Adela has something of a sexual awakening. And she becomes attracted to Dr Aziz.

Adela’s sexual awaking is rendered with only images. It is director David Leen at his very best. Adela takes a bike ride and comes upon an abandoned Hindu temple with much suggestive sculpture. As she stares transfixed at a sculpture of a man and woman kissing, she hears cries. She’s surrounded by monkeys who make their home there. They chase her and she runs away, terrified.

Individual Conflict

There is a clear distinction between Adela and Mrs Moore. While the older woman always sees reality clearly and fearlessly, the younger woman lives in her own world. It’s impossible to say if the monkeys really exist. But whether real or not, they represent the fear she has of her own sexuality. And this scene is repeated roughly 45 minutes later on the expedition to the Marabar Caves. But in that case, Dr Aziz is present. What happens is never fully explained. But Adela runs screaming down the mountain and accuses Dr Aziz of trying to rape her. He is promptly arrested. And 45 minutes after that, Adela recants and Dr Aziz is freed.

So A Passage to India starts with the collective English contrasted with the collective Indians. And it ends (effectively) in a courtroom with Adela and Dr Aziz facing each other — representatives of their cultures. Dr Aziz cannot understand why Adela has acted as she has and he is not quick to forgive. And Adela cannot understand her own actions. Dr Aziz becomes more committed to Indian independence, just as his country would. And Adela goes back to England, just as her country would soon do.

A Passage to India as Allegory

It is only after the bonds of imperialism are cut that the British and the Indians can reconcile because it is only then that they can be equals. From the standpoint of a 1984 film, it ends in a most pleasant way. I suspect if I had read the book in 1924, I would have found it troubling indeed. One could, I think, write the same novel with Israel and Palestine.

Afterword

Speaking of Israel and Palestine, West Bank Story is a fun little film.

Elizabeth brought my attention to this article, Christopher Marlowe Officially Credited as Co-Author of Three Shakespeare Plays. The plays in question are the three parts of Henry VI. And the official source is The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition. This is interesting, but hardly surprising.

One of the editors The New Oxford Shakespeare is my favorite Shakespeare scholar, Gary Taylor. And Taylor has been trying to take the air out of “the bard” for most of his careers. In his book Reinventing Shakespeare, he spends a chapter mocking the idea that Shakespeare is a singularity — “The greatest writer of all time!” And he implies that Shakespeare may not even deserve being called great. (When pressed on the issue, he generally concedes — probably just because it is a silly question to argue about.)

Artists in Perspective

But this is all welcome after a couple of centuries of bardolatry. And what we see is that even minor plays of Shakespeare get lots of performances, while major works are ignored just because they were written by people like Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Beaumont & Fletcher, Middleton, and on and on. And what we’ve learned over the past few decades is that Elizabethan theater was very much a muddle.

A good example of both the muddle and the tendency to over-praise individual writers is Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. There are two versions of it. There is a short version and there is a longer version that contains humorous bits, mostly involving Faustus’ servant. When the shorter version was considered the better one (broadly 19th century), it was assumed that it was the true Marlowe creation. Then, when people noticed that the comic bits added to the overall theme of the play, people decided that it was the true Marlowe creation. As much as I admire Marlowe, I’ve always felt that the short version was his. He never showed much in the way of comedic talent.

And it isn’t just in the theater. Scholars spent roughly two centuries trying to figure out just what part of Mozart’s Requiem Mass was by the master and what part had been polluted by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr after Mozart’s death. Eventually, they decided that they couldn’t tweeze out the pure Mozart. The piece is what it is. And it is one of the great works of musical art. That’s all that really matters.

The Power of Collaboration

But we rebel against the idea of collaboration. We want to believe in the Great Artist creating Perfection Itself. But art never works like that. Even my beloved Don Quixote could definitely have been improved with a few collaborators — and an editor!

This is what we now know about Elizabethan theater: there was great collaboration. Plays weren’t owned by their writers. They were written for particular theaters that then owned them. So if a play seemed a little slow, another playwright might come in and punch it up. There were other times when plays seem to have been written in tandem: where some scenes were written by one playwright and others by another. What’s more, comedic scenes may have been improvised and later set down on paper.

Now you may be wondering how we can tell that a play was a collaboration. There are many ways this is determined. One of the oldest is to look at the spelling of words. There were no dictionaries so each writer had their own idiosyncratic spellings. The research that led up to this most recent conclusion is based upon the vocabulary used. One of the papers was co-written by a teach of mathematicians. (Hooray math!)

Did Marlowe Soil Shakespeare?!

Anyway, I’m sure there will be lots of people complaining about this. It still amazes me how much people make a fetish out of Shakespeare’s supposed unequaled greatness. I mean: have they not read Hamlet?! Or The Tempest? Really: any of Shakespeare’s plays? The best ones have much of admire. But they also have at least a fair amount to dislike, which is why the best modern productions savagely cut them.

None of this is a slight against Shakespeare. He was a top Elizabethan playwright. But none of them thought they were creating art; they all knew they were making money. And they produced good and even great work. But I don’t think we can say more than that. I don’t think anyone really needs to see Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet yet again. The more we know about the diversity of Elizabethan theater, the more likely we are to see plays that we haven’t seen before. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve been a fan of Preston Sturges for at least a couple of decades. But that is based on his first eight films. I haven’t seen anything after Hail the Conquering Hero. At least in the old days, it was hard to find the later films because they weren’t successes. So I didn’t go out of my way to find them, even though I owned all of first eight films. But recently in a comment exchange with James, he recommended that I watch Sturges’s 1948 film Unfaithfully Yours.

Thankfully, The Criterion Collection released Unfaithfully Yours on DVD in 2005. And as usual, they did a great job. It includes an introduction with Terry Jones; a group commentary with scholars (always the best for this kind of stuff) James Harvey, Diane Jacobs, and Brian Henderson; an interview with Preston Sturges’ last (fourth) wife; and some other miscellaneous stuff. I haven’t had a chance to check it out in detail.

Plot Summary

The film stars Rex Harrison (looking rather like Preston Stuges himself) and Linda Darnell as his wife. And it is about jealousy. Really: almost nothing actually happens in the film. It is mostly just Harrison getting more and more freaked out by his imagination. He starts as a man totally in love and trusting of his wife. But a seed is accidentally planted and it works on him as well as Iago did on Othello. But things turn out better for Harrison and Darnell.

I can see why Unfaithfully Yours didn’t play at the time. It has an unusual structure. The first half hour is spent with Harrison avoiding looking at the incriminating evidence against his wife that has been created. The next 45 minutes are spent at a concert where Harrison is conducting. Over the course of three numbers, he imagines confronting his wife and her suspected lover. In the first, he murders her and frames the lover. In the second, he’s very understanding — sending her away with a large check. And in the third, he plays Russian roulette with the lover.

The rest of the film shows him trying to realize each of his fantasies. This go hilariously wrong. That’s especially true of his perfect murder plot, which is 15 minutes of slapstick zaniness. Everything works out, of course. Harrison and Darnell end the film just as in love as they started. And hopefully, Harrison is a better man for it. But you have to wonder, given that he is a Preston Sturges character.

Why Unfaithfully Yours Is Better Today

Another reason people probably didn’t like it at the time is that the tone of Unfaithfully Yours is inconsistent. It’s funny throughout. But the fantasy scenes are funny in a different, darker, way. And I suspect that this left a lot of people cold. It also didn’t set them up for the final act that is a comedic tour de force.

But it is exactly the unusual structure and tonal shifts that make the film work so well for a modern viewer — especially one who is familiar with Sturges’ other work. It’s probably good to think about modern superhero films. They are all the same and they all do well at the theaters. If someone created a superhero film that broke with convention, it probably wouldn’t do well. But it would be one of the few films anyone could stomach in 70 years.

I highly recommend the film if you are the kind of person who isn’t wedded to the new releases. Now I think I’ll go watch it again.

I’ve watched two Alfred Hitchcock films this last week: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). In the past, I’ve said that Hitchcock was a great genre filmmaker. I think that is a case where my friends are right: I do overuse superlatives. Watching both of these films was depressing.

Foreign Correspondent is the better of the two. It can be forgiven its propagandistic character. But in terms of pure cinema, it’s boring. D W Griffith was doing far more interesting work 25 years earlier. And that’s to say nothing of Sergei Eisenstein. It’s a by-the-numbers directorial job. But overall, the film reminded me of nothing so much as what Howard Hawks would produce if he lacked the talent and care. And as much as I love Hawks’ work, film critics (rightly) don’t pick over his films for deep meanings.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is typical of Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s and 1960s. I think it is fine to use rear projection. But I can’t think of a major filmmaker who used it so obsessively and so badly. Every time it is used, it pulls me out of the story. And that’s especially true here where much of the early second unit work from Morocco is gorgeous. But it doesn’t too much matter because the story itself is so anemic, it could almost be an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

Greatest Film Ever

But it was Foreign Correspondent that really got me thinking. It was made less than a year before Citizen Kane and the contrast could not be more stark. Whereas Correspondent told an utterly predictable story in a totally conventional way, Kane presented a modern tragedy if a revolutionary way.

But okay, Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever blah, blah, blah. That’s always been a bit hard to stomach, but sure: Kane is a spectacular film. But where does this business of it being the “best” film come from? It’s a silly idea, so it should surprise no one that it comes from polling of film critics. It comes specifically from Sight & Sound magazine. Since 1952, they’ve been asking every ten years.

In 1952, Citizen Kane didn’t even make the list. The film was, of course, hugely influential among filmmakers. But critics had not yet been told that they should admire the film. It wasn’t until the 1962 poll that Kane showed up on the list at all — and at number one no less. It stayed there until the 2012, when it dropped to number two.

Alfred Hitchcock Becomes “Great”

What was the new greatest film ever made? Vertigo. That’s right: not only an Alfred Hitchcock film, but not even one of his better films. But I guess the critic community had to pick some Alfred Hitchcock film. And it couldn’t be an obvious one like Psycho. So why not Vertigo? It works as well as any other.

The interesting thing is that the critics who would now have us believe that Vertigo is the greatest film ever are only doing so because they’ve been taught to. Hitchcock didn’t even show up on the list until the 1982 poll, when Vertigo tied for 7th place with two vastly superior films: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

This turn toward thinking of Alfred Hitchcock as a great film director has everything to do with the fetish made of him by the French New Wave. And the modern critics just can’t get past that. They’ve all read Hitchcock/Truffaut. François Truffaut thought Hitchcock was great, so not only is Hitchcock great, but everything he touched is a masterpiece. It’s just sad. Of course, the same thing happened to Welles. But at least Welles was a brilliant and important filmmaker. The more important point is that it’s just not quite so cool anymore to obsess about him. Trust me: in 2032, Vertigo will not top the Sight & Sound list.

Where Are the Greats?

What’s absurd is that nowhere on the list is anything by Griffith (although Intolerance was number five in 1952). Eisenstein suddenly disappeared in 2012. That’s not to say that the 2012 list is a bad one. It’s a list that contains nine great films. And at the top of list is an odd, moderately entertaining film by Alfred Hitchcock. It shows what a joke film critics are.

1. Vertigo
2. Citizen Kane
3. Tokyo Story
4. Rules of the Game
5. Sunrise
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
7. The Searchers
8. Man with a Movie Camera
9. Passion of Joan of Arc
10. 8½

For the record, I think The Searchers is an odd film to pick for John Ford. And there are lots of Fellini films I like more than 8½. For that matter, many of these films are odd selections. But they are all important films — all except for Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock was not an important director.