Summer Film Roundup, Part 5: Epics East and West

Russian Ark (2002)

A cinematic tour de force to end all tours de force: 300 years of Russian history filmed in a single Steadicam shot, with absolutely no cuts, thus going Hitchcock (see Rope, with its illusion of a continuous 80-minute shot) one better. Digital video and the Steadicam made the continuous shot possible, and as last year was the 40th anniversary of the invention of the Steadicam, one way to celebrate it is to see this remarkable work, which was "filmed" digital direct to hard disk so that no image information was lost during compression. (Don't ask me for more details -- that's technically as far as I'm able to go.) Whereas the 1948 Rope took place in one room with a handful of characters, Russian Arc unfolds in the 36 huge rooms of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, filled for this production with over 2,000 actors and extras in full period costume and makeup.  With the exception of several botched attempts within the first 20 minutes,  the entire thing was filmed in one unbroken performance; because the crew had only a single afternoon allowed by the Hermitage to film, the fourth try had to be the lucky charm because they couldn't stop for any mistakes as the daylight necessary for the opening scene was gradually away.  The Steadicam, operated by a single valiant cameraman with Herculean strength and stamina, glides through scores of tableaux, following an eighteenth-century French Marquis as our tour guide through coronations, ballroom dancing, the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and the fall of the Romanovs.  It took years to plan the film on paper so that all the technicians and actors would know exactly what to do at the right moment; the lights and microphones were hidden in all the right places, and the seemingly impossible was achieved. The result is dazzling, a visual feast and a history lesson to boot.  Director Alexander Sokurov pulls off an epic feat worthy of Tolstoy.  It's unexpectedly moving, despite the lack of a traditional narrative  or the emotional involvement in a handful of characters we can relate to.  But anyone with a love of art and history, and what's possible with near-heroic actors and technicians, and cinematic technology that doesn't solely rely on CGI effects, cannot help but find this film something of a sui generis marvel.  This is a film where you find yourself rooting for the cameraman. And for any true cinephile, that's not such a bad thing.

Hearts of the West (1975)

Speaking of traditional narrative films and emotional involvement with a handful of characters  you can relate to... 

...Hearts of the West is an immensely enjoyable confection of Hollywood entertainment about a young would-be writer of pulp westerns who gets roped into being a movie cowboy. Strong performances by Jeff Bridges, Alan Arkin, Andy Griffith, and Blythe Danner, along with a host of topnotch character actors. The crackerjack script by Rob Thompson grabs you with the first scene and carries you through to the very end when you feel that satisfied movie sensation to the full.  If Russian Ark is a bit to rarefied for your taste, come out west with Jeff Bridges and dive into a story that's unimpeachable fun.  If you find it just a tad too sentimental or corny, you can always return to the Hermitage.

How the West Was Won (1962)

If neither Russian Ark nor Hearts of the West leave you satisfied, you can turn to a combination of the epic ambitions of the first and the frontier fantasies of the latter -- yes, I'm talking about the Cinerama event of 1962, How the West Was Won. Scorned by critics and viewed by many today as a hoary relic of old Hollywood's unabashedly triumphalist view of the American West, I was surprised to find myself quite entertained and at times rather moved by this big flawed film.  Certainly it can be a bit sentimental and soap opera-ish; and, as in the critics' (inexplicable, to me) longtime favorite, The Man Who Shot Liberty, also released in 1962, Jimmy Stewart is embarrassingly too old for his part, playing a trapper courting and eventually marrying a young frontierswoman played by Carol Baker.  Stewart was 53 at the time playing a man of about thirty while Baker was 30 playing a young woman of around 20.  (But he was still a bigger star at the time than she was. Did she trap the trapper or was it the other way around?)  Still, in the 19th-century, with women dying in childbirth a common occurrence, it wasn't unusual for older men to marry much younger women, though perhaps not of the caliber of Carroll Baker.  (In real life, Baker outlived her third husband, the slightly younger British actor Donald Burton, and she's still going strong at age 86.) 

Only two films were ever made in the original Cinerama format: How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, also released in 1962, the first and final year for true Cinerama narrative films  The rest were documentaries, like the film which introduced the new widescreen process, This is Cinerama (1952).  Directors didn't like working in the 3-camera Cinerama format: the camera was huge and unwieldy and the only shots which could be taken where long shots and medium shots. Close-ups tended to distort the face. Actors didn't much care for it either. Some were intimidated by the giant apparatus looming in front of them, and most of them complained that it was impossible to look directly into another actors of face without appearing on screen as if they were looking off to the side. So the actors had to perform scenes actually looking off to the side so that it would show up on the screen as if they were facing one another.  Say goodbye to method acting . Audiences weren't crazy about aspects of Cinerama either. Sure, the giant curved screen offered spectacular cinematography, but because three projectors were needed to show it in theaters, the three images were imperfectly joined when projected, revealing two discernible vertical seams separating the three pictures posing as one. The lines were particularly visible in shots which showed the sky or a clear background; fortunately the three directors of How the West Was Won -- John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall -- cleverly devised camera shots with trees or vertical posts arranged so that they would disguise the distracting vertical seams.  But the image was far from perfect until many years later when the Cinerama films were digitally remastered to eliminate as much of the vertical lines as possible. Later Cinerama films are Cinerama in name only: 2001: A Space Odyssey was billed as Cinerama but actually shot with a 65 mm camera and the film transferred to 70 mm stock and projected on a curved screen. (And this is the last time I go technical on you.)

Amusing to think that only five or six years later this film could never have been made. The culture changed so dramatically in those half a dozen years that audiences, particularly young ones, would have hooted and booed at the end when the film's narrator, Spencer Tracy, tells us that the bravery and courage of the pioneers made the taming of the West and our modern cities possible; as he speaks we see gorgeous shots of untouched western landscape dissolving into Los Angeles freeways, obviously without a touch of irony on the filmmakers' part.  By 1968 to 1970 and beyond, audiences were flocking to see revisionist westerns like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch or Arthur Penn's Little Big Man. (But 1968 was also the year John Wayne made the unapologetically patriotic, pro -Vietnam war film The Green Berets, so obviously the counterculture hadn't seeped into every corner of the culture.) 

Having said that, I must say that How the West Was Won is fairly sympathetic to the Indians -- sorry, Native Americans -- and the solid performances by Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Widmark, George Peppard, the aforementioned Jimmy Stewart and Carroll Baker, and a couple of nice turns by John Wayne and Harry Morgan as Generals Sherman and Grant make it more than worthwhile.  

I have a special shout-out for the late Eli Wallach, not only because he is superb as the mustachioed train bandit, but also because I had the good fortune to act on stage with him on two separate occasions. I observed him during the rehearsal process, playing with his own lines like a sculptor playing with clay, and generously helping other the other actors find more interesting possibilities in playing their own characters. Over Chinese dinner before one of the performances he told me that he had played Italians and Mexicans in his youth and in his old age was now playing Jews, the group to which she actually belonged. But he was also a gent and a mensch and a vastly talented actor whose work I'll continue to enjoy for years to come. His life was...epic.