Supporting Actress Sundays: 1971
Nothing like a Tuesday post to tell you what happened on Sunday, but is anyone else having that sensation of end-of-summer time delay? If you read this blog, you probably also read StinkyLulu's religiously enough that you already know that the 1971 Supporting Actress Smackdown played out this weekend, distinguished from past Smackdowns by the large flock of participants (nine!) and by the huge divergences of opinion about almost every performance. It's a pretty fascinating roster, partly because, in an increasingly rare Oscar move, all of the turns are legitimately supporting ones; partly because the films are such a gaggle of oddities, blending very strong elements with very weak ones (except for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me?, which is almost entirely terrible); and partly because the turns themselves often blend strong and weak elements in unusual and difficult combinations. Just like last month, when my preferred candidate (and, in that case, Oscar's) got a pretty bad drubbing from the rest of the group, I once again backed the losing horse in the Smackdown derby: Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge, a film so lacerating in its anatomy of misogyny (and occasionally over-proud of its immersion in such misogyny) that it badly needs and greatly benefits from Ann-Margret's soft, discomfiting sincerity as one of the women that Jack Nicholson all but annihilates over the course of the film.My pals Stinky and Queering the Apparatus both raised articulate objections to Ann-Margret's work, but because the visual and tonal atmosphere of Carnal Knowledge verges so heavily on the sterile and abstract, I admired the inertia of Ann-Margret's performance, its unironic woundedness, her simultaneously dim and pointed pauses, and the sad way in which her voice and face and body hover away from the script instead of getting drawn into its angular shapes and severe rhythms. In a strange paradox, I think she's the least talented and resourceful of the nominated actresses (also to include Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, double Tony-winner Margaret Leighton, and the indomitable Barbara Harris), but, save for Harris, she does the ablest job of fighting for her character and shifting the ground of the movie, quite against the efforts of her director. Most of the directors of these films were greater hindrances than helps to their actors, but whereas Peter Bogdanovich turns the credible, interesting women in The Last Picture Show's script into glassy, symptomatic figures of Womanhood, and Burstyn and Leachman find no way out of his oppressive and reductive aesthetic, Ann-Margret inherits a glassy and symptomatic script and creates a real woman inside it—palpably real in her anomie and neglect, and her barely adolescent despair inside a ripely adult body—and she complicates rather than adhering to or betraying the style or flow of the piece. (And to Stinky's objections that Ann-Margret forgets that Bobbie is supposed to be fun, I'd counter that it's Nicholson and Garfunkel who keep insisting that she's "fun," but surely their myopic and cruel perspectives are not to be trusted, at least not necessarily.)
I'd seen Carnal Knowledge once before and found its atmosphere so noxious and its aesthetic so highfalutin in relation to its subject that I forgot how impressed I was with Ann-Margret, and I probably underestimated the film a little bit, too. I still wouldn't recommend it, exactly, although Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, and a late-arriving Rita Moreno are all quite good, and I wouldn't recommend any of the other films, either, except insofar as Oscar found five performances that are truly worth arguing over in this field, and all of them relate to their films (often redeeming whole chapters of their films) in curious and memorable ways, even when they don't always work out. Go read the post and the long necklace of Comments that have since been added, and keep chiming in... and come back for 1990 next month, when I suspect I will once again fall into a critical minority on at least two counts. But we'll cross that crazy grifter and that happy medium when we get to them.
Labels: 1970s, BestSupportingActress, BlogBuddies, Oscars
posted by Nick Davis at 10:10 AM
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Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus 
I have been consciously postponing Joan of Arc for a while now; you can smell the elephantiasis and the box-office desperation from a mile away. Joan of Arc is the sort of movie that was made so that it could be promoted, and somehow, even though Bergman won a Tony onstage in this role, her casting in the film seems calibrated more toward PR than dramatic plausibility. Her first scenes are uniquely uncomfortable, with the 5'10", 33-year-old actress failing to seem much like a willowy, agonized teenager living under her father's thumb and runneled with sublime ecstasy and terror after hearing her "voices." Happily, Bergman's performance becomes more emotionally credible and more technically proficient the nearer we get to Joan's imprisonment and martyrdom, even though the movie gets stodgier and more pedestrian. Falconetti's shadow threatens at all points to swat her off the screen, and she has a hard time raising a sword with authority, but the solidity of her face and her persona, which sometimes leads to flat-footed performances (see The Bells of St. Mary's), somehow redeem Joan of Arc from being overly wispy and sentimental about its heroine. I found myself rooting for the performance even when it wasn't working; she's missing three stars by a hair.
A stretch for the "Great Ladies of History" theme, since Fontanne's impersonation of Queen Elizabeth I (playing the same Maxwell Anderson script, in fact, that generated Bette Davis' turn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) is limited to the first scene of this unusual comedy. It's a tribute to Fontanne's talent, and consonant with her legendary status in the theater, and crucial to the plot to boot, that Fontanne is so succinctly fascinating in this one scene: look at how strangely but expressively she slumps on her throne at the close. But from there, as the curtain comes down on Elizabeth the Queen, The Guardsman really takes off, as Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, married superstars of the 20th-century stage, play married superstars of the 20th-century stage who love to trade barbs about who's the better performer. She's stunned by his chauvinistic assumption of his own superiority; he's horrified to be thought of as anything less than genius, and also nervous about his wife's wandering eye. From there follows a series of farcical impersonations, uncertain realizations, and some remarkably tart pre-Code innuendo. The plot, however light, is too much fun to spoil, but to whatever extent The Guardsman draws us into a comparative evaluation of these performers, Fontanne trumps her clever but hammy hubby. Her remarkable spectrum of acerbic laughs and wry interjections, complemented by inspired gestures and smart, sexy line deliveries, keep this dated material remarkably fresh. She still acts like a doyenne of the stage, with little sense of interacting specifically with a camera, but she's not "stagy," exactly, and though she never played another film role, one surmises that she could have done great things with Kay Francis' part in the same year's majestically saucy Trouble in Paradise, or with lots of Irene Dunne or Jean Arthur-type roles in future years. A foreigner to the screen, not 100% at home, but delightful nonetheless.
In the wake of 
For quite a long time into Mary, Queen of Scots, Vanessa Redgrave is an unmitigated disaster. She overdoes her usual mannerisms of the gaping smile and the twinkling eyes, making herself cloying and foolish instead of ethereal and incandescent. Her line readings often border on the laughable, when they don't stumble right into the laughable, and she's so thoroughly bested by the sharp, sexy, epicurean, and forceful Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth that Mary, Queen of Scots arrives as something of an annoying afterthought in what is putatively her own movie. What saves the performance, and the film, are the two direct confrontations between Redgrave and Jackson. Even here, Redgrave hasn't thought herself all the way through the character the way Jackson has, and she's still guilty of racing through lines and character beats that she might have handled more slowly. Still, her fury, jealousy, exhaustion, and unlikely self-beatification are tartly communicated, and her sparring with Jackson in their first, secret rendezvous in the forest describes a terrific arc from false friendship to heated rivalry to shrewd, reciprocal assessments. In a better year, Redgrave wouldn't be anywhere near this list, but she saves herself from outright embarrassment and yields some surprisingly memorable moments in this silly soap-operatizing of royal history.
Like Redgrave, Suzman transmits the impression that she is a much more interesting actor than her drab performance in this bloated film would have one believe, yet one is disinclined to make too many excuses for her Czarina Alexandra. True, in some impressive early scenes, her aloof, nearly agoraphobic take on the character strikes a welcome note of mystery in a superficial and almost comically inflated drama, the kind where Czar Nicholas (Michael Jayston) comforts his screaming child in the night with the words, "Oh, you're just dreaming about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand!" Barely half an hour into the film, however, Suzman gets stuck in the cluttered background of the film, fretting and doting over her frail heir, and enlisting unreasonably as a disciple of Rasputin (Tom Baker, one short skip away from Monty Python). Her reticence passes from interesting to unilluminating, and one ends the film knowing nothing about her, and barely caring to know.
The major disappointment of this batch is Jane Alexander's proficient but doomed work in Testament. When I say "doomed," I don't mean the plot of this post-apocalyptic family drama so much as the flat, slipshod direction that zombifies most of the cast, bungles all the edits, and refuses any trace of style. It's clear that the script is aiming for a ground-level view of massive cataclysm; occasionally, a terse vignette like that of a mother sewing up a dead child's body in her own bedroom curtains is allowed to do its chillingly intimate work. Much more often, though, Testament botches its aspirations toward subtlety with moist speeches, heavy symbolism, and scenes that push way too hard to underline director Lynne Littman's clunky interpretations of the patchy script. Within that context, Alexander saves what scenes she can, and her sour, haunted watchfulness is an interesting, unsentimental basis for the character when the director lets her get away with it. But in other moments, even Alexander is sunk by false theatricality (a stagy search for a teddy bear, an unpersuasive collapse into despair followed by an overly rhetorical kiss), and neither the dialogue nor the filmmaking supplies her with the tools to create a sustained, interesting performance. I know 
In her first of several teamings with director Mervyn LeRoy, and at the outset of a remarkable string of five consecutive Best Actress nods, Garson plays Edna Gladney, a Midwestern debutante who becomes a champion of orphans (though she hates the word!) and "illegitimate" children (though she hates the word!) in Fort Worth, Texas. As so often, there is something so precious and safe about Garson's radiant refinement—her gleaming smiles, her flaming red hair, her accent incongruously posh by way of Wisconsin—that one feels a bit duped in praising or enjoying her work, as though one has fallen for a crashingly obvious marketing ploy. But radiant she is, and particularly once the script catches up with her age, her emotional generosity, ease of movement, and expressive face and voice go an incredibly long way toward selling the treacly script. She also interacts beautifully with Felix Bressart, a gem as a loyal and wisecracking pediatrician, and on the few occasions when Blossoms allows Edna a moment of unsavory affect (envy, annoyance, self-pity), Garson's smart enough to underline it and spry enough to win us right back.
Hayward, predictably, is at her best as the taunting alcoholic we meet in the suburban frame story, slurring out some delicious dialogue without too much focus-pulling or fussy mannerism. (Some of the choicest bits include "Who said, 'To forgive is divine'? Probably not somebody I'd care to meet, anyway" and, on the subject of jealous husbands, "They want to think you've spent your whole life vomiting every time a boy came near you.") Still, the very ordinariness that grounds Hayward's work whenever she plays an addict or a rager (which was often) works against her when she's cast as a co-ed, a romantic dreamer, or the very kind of average gal she very much looks to be. She's trapped by unimaginative casting in a thin role throughout much of My Foolish Heart's extended flashback narrative, made worse by Mark Robson's stolid direction, which shares none of Hayward's enthusiasm for the character's darker shadings. Thus, we're only interested when she's nursing a cocktail or cozying up to a witty father (a terrific Robert Keith) who shows, as they say, a little too much friendly interest in his daughter.
Two things can happen in years when Oscar faces a paucity of obvious choices: either the voters challenge themselves to nominate strong work in the kinds of movies and roles they would usually avoid (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider, Samantha Morton in In America) or they pad the field with serviceable but unremarkable efforts that achieve little for Oscar besides filling the five-wide quota (Miranda Richardson in Tom & Viv, Susan Sarandon in The Client). Carol Kane's nod, garnered in a year so thin that former winners filed a protest, somehow falls on both sides of this fence. On the one hand, it's lovely to see Oscar pay such headlining attention to a modest, stylistically distinctive, culturally specific tale about Jewish immigrants and forced assimilation, even if nothing in Hester Street, only partially by design, accedes much beyond the thematic or narrative sophistication of The Jazz Singer. Kane isn't the helium-voiced, helium-minded daff we've come to know. She's lonesome, panicked, and finally angry, and she delivers almost her entire performance in Yiddish, to boot. However, she's also a bit overstated in her tremulousness, and she doesn't find much in her character beyond what is asked by the mannered direction and the quaint, predictable screenplay. Like her fellow nominee Glenda Jackson in Hedda, Kane stitches some smart, powerful moments into a somewhat routine performance, in a movie that vacillates between trying too hard and not trying enough.
What is it about Barbara Stanwyck that makes every one of her superb performances something of a surprise, no matter how many of them she gives? That low, husky voice, that downturned mouth, the narrow eyes, the nearly immobile features of her improbable face, the Brooklyn-bred, working-class butchness that pervaded her whole persona—all of these imply typecasting limitations that simply prove irrelevant to her greatest work, ranging all the way from film noir to screwball comedy to Westerns to melodramas to social realism to thrillers to B-movie macabre. Here, her flinty toughness offers an ideal through-line beneath her engaging, cackly impatience as Stella Martin, then her marital ambivalence as Stella Dallas, and finally her nimble balancing of the dear and the grotesque as one of Hollywood's most famously self-sacrificing mothers...though there's also a mean streak, a brutal cunning, and an obliviousness to Stanwyck's Stella that tend to vanish from popular memories of the character. Laserlike with her smart, forceful gestures and insinuations, keeping the movie alive even when the direction is flat, and interacting exquisitely with all of her co-stars, Stanwyck hits one of her highest peaks.
Cast here as a youngish Eleanor Roosevelt, Garson starts her performance on some bizarre and off-putting notes, quite literally: her version of Eleanor's fluty, fruity Old New York accent may well be expert mimicry, but like Jennifer Jason Leigh's take on Dorothy Parker, it's too mannered and outlandish to work as drama. It doesn't help that the script wheedles her for a Big Crying Scene (though Garson's unflamboyant build-up almost makes it work) or that it can't quite decide whether to canonize Eleanor or domesticate her (if you'll believe it, Eleanor sits for the climactic scene while FDR stands). The translucent likeability that anchors Garson's best work can't shine through in this fusty project, but she's still the most watchable actor on-screen, and she mines some persuasively intimate and character-revealing moments, as when she settles down silently in a chair and exchanges a silent, articulate smile with her newly afflicted husband.
The film and the performance get off to a worrisome start: as former hooker Loren wanes on her deathbed, her heart of gold at last giving out, aging playboy and longtime client Marcello Mastroianni ponders all the times he promised his love but ignored her pleas for marriage and respectability. Loren is timelessly fetching as she strides down a Neapolitan street in the film's most famous shot; still, it's all a little tawdry and clichéd, like Malèna played for casual laughs. Everything brightens considerably, though, when Loren "miraculously" revives, revealing her own duplicitous agendas, and she elevates the movie's second half into a tasty, energetic, and admirably humane comedy. She's sexy, clever, and funny, as three-dimensional in her personality as in her formidable physique. Loren won an Oscar three years previously for the sturm and drang of De Sica's Two Women, but here she shows more art and more charm—call her Irene Dunne Italian Style.
To respond to the two most common talking-points around this Oscared performance: yes, I think Anna Held is a crucial enough role with enough screen time to count as a leading performance, but no, I don't think that her famous, last-act telephone call to the Great Ziegfeld himself—congratulating him on his second marriage while bursting into tears of regret—is really all that special. Throughout, Rainer ratchets up the antic stage business and vocal affectations, landing somewhere between overripe comedy and overly emphatic imitation of the real Anna Held (who, to be fair, apparently did cut a fluttery, slightly outlandish figure). Ultimately, Rainer's approach kept me on the surface of the character instead of drawing me into her thoughts and feelings; the exception that proved the rule was her calmest scene, an encounter with Ziegfeld's lovely, young, and boozy new mistress, where Rainer underplays her moment of realization, her sorrow, her jealousy, and her frank pity for the latest fling who thinks she's a keeper.
Arthur was almost always the best thing in her movies, except when they were as all-around exceptional as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Mysteriously, the Academy ignored her sterling, smart, and infectious work in all those Capra vehicles that they rewarded so lavishly in other categories. The More the Merrier earned Arthur, arguably the ablest comedienne in classic Hollywood, her solitary nod. That's a shame, but the performance isn't: the script errs on the thin side, but Arthur's rising and falling inflections and inimitable timing anchor this comedy of human character, and she's a perfect match for George Stevens' sophisticated but unpretentious direction. She also projects a palpable lust for Joel McCrea's Joe Carter, as well as the dismay of a peppy professional who knows she is selling her personal life short with a stuffed shirt like Charles J. Pendergast. Altogether deserving of a prize, either as a career tribute or on this performance's own terms.
As an actress, Midler shares a certain off-putting quality with Billy Crystal: even when she's working at her best, she seems to demand our approval, almost impolitely; at the same time, she seems to confuse some of her more grating qualities with her better ones, and as she hustles from Big Acting to Big Singing to Big Speeches, she can really exhaust you. Nonetheless, for all of its attention-grabby textures and character concepts, The Rose is a laudably severe depiction of an erratic rock star's reckless immolation. Though you can see very clearly how Midler is building the performance—straining her voice, winning us back with her wide smile, zonking out in her druggie scenes—she has energy and tremendous push, and she keeps a clichéd character breathing for two solid hours. She doesn't try to steal moments from co-stars as good as Alan Bates and Frederic Forrest, and at crucial times, as when she stumbles into a drag revue starring a doppleganger of herself, her goosey verve and relentless drive are exactly what the movie needs, maybe even what the movies need.
What use was Merle Oberon, really? Her face has a hard, flat quality onscreen that seems to repel the audience's identification, and she seems insufficiently open to the actors around her. She's a disastrously unappealing Cathy in William Wyler's overrated Wuthering Heights, and even in films where she ekes out some passable moments—as in Wyler's These Three, or in this hoary melodrama about war's disruption of romantic destinies—I always feel like many other actresses could do just as well, maybe better. I'll give her this: Oberon is touching when she's finally reunited with the blind lover she has thought dead for many years after WWI. (Yes, it's that kind of movie.) She makes us eager to see and gauge her character's reactions, but then, she has a typically excellent Fredric March performance to work from. An easy scratch-off in a six-way 1935 race that already had one nominee too many.
I have found the Holy Grail, and it indeed embodies as well as reflects the glory of the Sacred Feminine... and yet, it doesn't have anything to do with the Priory of Anybody. (Though I must add, having finished The Da Vinci Code earlier in the week, for all its cleverly persuasive culture-jamming of organized religion into a tactical, guilty series of mostly pilfered symbols, I did not enjoy spending the last 149 pages of the book screaming, "It's apple, you lutzes!" I also recognize when I am in the presence of an anagram, because people don't say or write things like "O, Draconian Devil!" Not ever. Perhaps I should go see about becoming a premier cryptologist in France or a world-renowned "Professor of Symbology.")
Probably not a great idea to rush myself to judgment on such a ruminative and atmospheric film, but who said reviewing films was a good idea? Short notes 
Really, I blame the government, since I was up so late doing my taxes—why does the Connecticut Part-Year Resident form have to be so byzantine? But, my anger also lies with myself: tonight I lucked into an on-campus screening of a restored 35mm print of Victor Erice's 
The first shot of the film finds Claudine and her bumptious brood crossing a street, an image that will repeat at the film's conclusion with only one major change, which is either momentous or negligible depending on whether you favor a personal or a structural view of the film—an impossible choice, everywhere precluded. Claudine and Roop meet at work, though he works for the city and she for a family, and so nothing happening between them is happening on their own turf. Work keeps her from arriving on time to their first date, which begins in her own home, where she has to hide appliances and amenities from the surveilling eye of the Welfare Office case worker, who hears about Roop from Claudine's neighbors, whom we never meet because she never has any time to interact with them, because she's off working the job that the case worker also mustn't discover, in order to feed the kids who phone her incessantly on her first night in Roop's bedroom, which is no less permeable to espionage and intrusion than Claudine's bustling pad. Claudine doesn't keep this all in balance so much as she bends and flexes impressively to hit back as many of the balls as she can, and just as impressively throws her racket and stomps her foot when she knows she's losing a set. Meanwhile, she can't get away from her kids when she wants to but also can't find them when she wants to. Her eldest son Charles is absorbing himself in militant youth politics that the film ribs without dismissing. He swears that if Claudine really loved him, she would have killed him, in the manner of murderously protective slave mothers about whom he has heard, and yet his garbled, comically judgmental anger stems from evident and ubiquitous sources. Her eldest daughter Charlene all but draws knives on Roop when he comes a'courting, but later finds herself tearfully defending the achievements and battered honor of black men, when her unplanned pregnancy riles Claudine to majestic, literally violent fury ("I guess it's a shame you didn't get knocked up by Frederick Douglass!"). The film switches tones and registers on a dime, over and over and over again. Its candor in matters social, sexual, and political, just like its expressively bright color palette, is like an icy splash of river water, even though the film is as inveterately urban as a Spike Lee joint, and defiantly proud of its own dirt.
Like Within Our Gates, my #69 Flick, Chronicle of the Smoldering Years is a film that I like in no small part because I am rooting so hard for its point-of-view and its projects, including its own unlikely and prodigious existence on film. But also like the Micheaux picture, the film commands awe and respect for what it shows and does, not just for what it represents. Director Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina works powerfully with extreme long shots of crowds; he loosely strings his story around the tale of a serially displaced worker and sometime convict played by Yorgo Voyagis but remains clearly more invested in the massive, tidal clashes among the Algerian people and between Algeria as a whole and its imperial foes. The very first shots follow various rural Algerians already grown furious with the penury and difficulty of their lives, barging off to the city and its mirage of promises. Even these brisk and muscular shots, however, focalize the crowds of fellow citizens trying hard to keep their communities together at least as much as the outraged emigrés. Quickly following is one of the movie's most impressive sequences, a fierce skirmish between two colossal clans over a listless, shallow, and muddy river that lies in the desert like something half-dead and flung down. Then, mid-brawl, a rain falls, and the fantasy of a truce with each other and with the world is temporarily realized. The stakes and sources of these people's misery are not hard to discern, and Lakhdar-Hamina's filmmaking neither employs nor requires much subtlety in revealing them, but his steady refusal to individualize his tale is fresh and revelatory to audiences accustomed to tales of the noble outsider or isolated freedom-fighter. They also pose a challenge to the editing of the film, since the standard grammar of alternating crowd shots with close-ups on heroes or favored personalities is so clearly out the window much of the time. Beyond the Voyagis character, a couple of key relatives, and Lakhdar-Hamina's own admittedly romantic role as a mad prophet of colonial-Marxist rebellion, precious few faces hold themselves aside in this movie, but the progress of the movie never feels clunky or sluggish or ungrounded in human experience. You actually experience history in a different way, watching it happen to groups of bodies rather than unique victors or sufferers, and even more than the geography and perimeter of the film's concerns, hardly over-exploited in world film, the very approach is illuminating.
Lynch keeps daring us and daring himself, and the film world tenses with anticipation at each new step he takes—which, more than four years after the trip down Mulholland Drive, could hardly appear a moment too soon. There is no question in my mind that Mulholland is Lynch's best and richest movie, but if that masterwork is missing anything, it's the daft, piquant riskiness of a film like Eraserhead, which reflects not the trained professionalism that comes with decades in the business and a cohort of frequent collaborators, but from a pure will to test the on-screen viability of an almost id-level sensibility. Lynch is the credited director, writer, editor, composer, production designer, special effects technician, and sound-effects editor on Eraserhead, and I suppose I feel, with no particular justification, that assigning any more chefs to this dada dish could only have diluted the flavor. Though quite evidently a workshop for sonic concepts, experiments in framing, and poker-faced acting styles that would later be redrawn in finer detail, Eraserhead works marvelously on its own terms. A dreamscape to equal Un chien andalou, the film also traces a clear narrative line through nervous courtship, an excruciatingly anxious paternity, and a kind of fantasy life that isn't so much stifled as it is genetically rearranged by an oppressive, penurious existence in a post-industrial no man's land.
The throbbing knot of angry frustration that so thrillingly crystallizes The Brood—it is by several degrees the most focused and accomplished entry in Cronenberg's pre-Videodrome filmography—is also the explicit subject of the movie, where it is nonetheless aligned with monstrosity and the will to murder. On the one hand, divorced dad Frank Carveth is comfily outfitted with a placid demeanor as well as primary custody of his young daughter Candace. Frank tells Candy's teacher that his wife Nola "married me for my sanity, hoping it would rub off on her," and everything about the film implicitly defends his claim, from Art Hindle's collected performance to the preponderance of screen time afforded him by Cronenberg's script. By contrast, Samantha Eggar's Nola is a raving harpy, an absent mama, and a slave to psycho-clinical trends, having given herself over to the experimental regimen of "Psychoplasmics" founded by Dr. Hal Raglan, an unsettling figure who impersonates his own clients' most bitter antagonists in long role-playing sessions, until the patient's unleashed fury is literalized as nodes, rashes, or pustules on the surface of his or her skin. The Brood doesn't delve deeply into the internal operations or even the grounding logic of the Psychoplasmics enterprise; like the Cathode Ray Mission or the Black Meat factory in later Cronenberg films, this posthuman phenomenon titillates with the idea rather than the mechanics of somatic transformation. It is, however, the conceptual heart of the picture, however shrouded in mystery—a state of affairs that is underlined by The Brood's taut, pervasive emphasis on oblique framings and offscreen space. Cronenberg's contempt for Nola is as clear as his fellow-feeling with her cooler, calmer husband, and yet her operatic rage and her willingness to push her body and mind to new limits of being are what animate the picture, literally yielding its prime agents of horror, and conferring narrative possibility onto the static canvas of the director's own palpable anger. You can't watch The Brood without sensing its exorcising function in the life of its maker. The emotional strata of the film, no less than its tense images and grisly set-pieces, no less than Dr. Raglan's dissertation or Nola Carveth's otherworldly and abject progeny, embody "The Shape of Rage."
Swept Away, for all the jewel-toned lusciousness of its cinematography, is not designed to go easy on any scenery-seekers who wander in. The sparkling blue water, gleaming boats, and paradisical isle of Swept Away are among the first mirages of the "natural" that get slyly absorbed into the demagogic rattle-bag of the script, which appropriates as many capitalized Concepts as it can before giving them all an earthy, vigorous shake. Even better and more boldly, Wertmüller conceives characters who are as directly and constantly aware of these concepts as she is, and who invoke them with a shrill obnoxiousness that the film is willing, even proud, to assume as its own. "How sad to imagine this paradise full of shit, the sea a big, open sewer," pronounces Mariangela Melato's spoiled aristocrat, reaching new acmes of braying superciliousness. Here is a woman who looks at the ocean and the horizon and can't not think of them as hers, can't not think of them as somehow encroached upon by some unwashed someone somewhere. Even as the film strokes her with buttery light it slaps her around with sharp, arhythmic edits that only emphasize the way she herself brings up everyone and everything short. "You ludicrous, vain black midget!" she screams at a ship's crewman (Giancarlo Giannini, inevitably), who counters back with his own stampeding herd of epithets, of which "You dirty, social-democratic prickteaser!" is a roundly typical example. The collision of warring social vocabularies is never louder in Swept Away than when someone's insulting someone, which is often. Beyond the film's pugnacity in keeping up this bruising war of words, consider the achievements of Giannini and especially Melato, who have to preserve but also modulate this pitch of invective for more than an hour, well into their joint marooning on an uncharted island. This is the point when the script really shows what audacious stuff it's made of, countering her social Darwinism with his brutish misogyny, and then turning them both on to each other.
