Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

the allegory pokes through the surface instead of running smoothly beneath it. Nonetheless, there’s much of value in the film. Several magnificent sequences, including one of the finest slowmotion gunfights we've ever seen, testify to Kennedy’s skill as a filmmaker. The performances are fine, too; Raquel Welch plays Hannie with real intelligence and self-awareness. Culp’s performance as Price is extraordinarily subtle, and Christopher Lee shines with a beautifully controlled, fully-realized serenity as the slightlymore-than-human gunsmith. For all its flaws, Hannie-Caulder set us Off on a two-hour rap after seeing it. Burt Kennedy is back in the running, and about time too. Michael Goodwin & Naomi Wise THE OTHER A Twentieth-Century Fox release (1972) of a Rem-Benchmark Production. DeLuxe Color. 102 mins. Producer and Director: Robert Mulligan. Executive Producer: Thomas Tryon. Screenplay: Thomas Tryon, based on his novel. Director of Photography: Robert L. Surtees. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Editors: Folmar Blandsted and O. Nicholas Brown. Cast: Uta Hagen, Diana Muldaur, Chris Udvarnoky, Martin Udvarnoky, Norma Connolly. 1972 has thus far seen the ‘emergence” of two new major directors: Francis Ford Coppola, with The Godfather, and now Robert Mulligan, with The Other. The Other may be seen as Mulligan’s first major achievement; and it is as if all his previous films were exercises preparing the director for this achievement. As with Hitchcock in the ‘20s and 30s, Mulligan has been acquiring the tools with which to create effective popularist entertainment, with which to express a coherent and personal world view. The visual/thematic unity of The Other is no mere accident. It crystallizes all the elements already present in Mulligan’s style (such that it tempts re-evaluation of Mulligan’s previous films) and is ideally suited to the subject matter of Thomas Tryon’s novel. The film deals with mystical experience, “the great game,” an area of human potential that man seems destined to explore, but which may be full of dangers for the unprepared. It is certainly not an area for children haunted by unbearable tragedies as in Tryon’s story. Because The Other deals with the unknown, with suggestion, and with the detailing of evil, it belongs squarely in the tradition of terror films as headed by Psycho. But, like Carlos Castenada’s journey in The Teachings of Don Juan, the lure and promise of the mystical ultimately take on a greater weight than the illusory mechanisms with which we delight in terrifying ourselves. Hitchcock’s films are not about suspense, but they use the mechanisms of suspense to lead us through an experience that assists in self-awareness. Likewise, Mulligan’s film is not about terror; but it uses the mechanisms of terror to lead us into 32 an experience of the metaphysical. Mulligan again makes use of the distancing techniques of The Summer of ’42, not simply in evoking a sense of the past, but in seeking a visual correlative to the world of our dreams. The Other, then, stands as a metaphor for the function and meaning of dreams. This is not a film about neurosis, just as dreams are not in essence neurotic but rather curative of neurosis. Exit Freud; enter Jung. The Other takes us into ourselves, into our dream existences, and into the mythological bases of our memories. Perhaps the essence of Mulligan’s style lies in his manipulation of vantage points. We watch The Summer of ’42 almost entirely through a long-focus lens. Events and characters are in close-up, but the camera is not actually close to its subject. There is always a veil between the viewer and his memory. This veil is the visual correlative of the vantage point of memory. Another vantage point that Mulligan has investigated (To Kill a Mockingbird, Up the Down Staircase) is the point-of-view of children. The director evokes performances in child actors that capture the spontaneity of childhood’s vision. The camera is set at a level looking upward at the adult world through the eyes of a child. Thus, Mulligan can evoke equally the experience of childhood and the memory of childhood. In The Other, Mulligan changes our vantage point from sequence to sequence and even from shot to shot. As in the “game” that obsesses his main character, Mulligan’s cinema projects us into whatever vantage point we need to experience. This mobility of vantage point gives us the freedom to fly, the freedom to understand through the eyes of different characters, and the potential terror of not understanding. The skill with which Mulligan moves from one vantage point to another is devastating, and is the mechanism that gives The Other its simultaneous grip on our emotions and our intellect. Similarly, the ending provides both an emotional catharsis and an intellectual open gate. The story reaches a natural dramatic conclusion, but the viewer is sent off into his own world of continuing speculation. l’ve never seen an audience so slow to exit a theater. Because the exact meaning of the ending is open to speculation, Mulligan avoids the kind of simplified explanation that concluded Psycho, for instance. That the ‘explanation’ of the boy’s condition takes place in the middie of the movie serves to deepen, not diminish, our involvement (cf. Vertigo’s narrative structure). The abstract reverberations of certain essentially non-narrative shots (like the close shot of the broken lock after PEESETE © REDE Meni SS TT OEE SET TOO Ee ee John Dorr is a writer/filmmaker presently biding his time in Los Angeles looking for financing for two film projects. the fire) indicate to what an extent Mulligan has escaped the usual confines of dramatic storytelling. At first we are confused; we feel we have been deceived; and from this confusion, fear creeps in. But, as we begin to see the character from a new and more knowledgeable point-of-view his plight gains our sympathies despite the fact of his murders. It is the grandmother, not the boy, who becomes threatening in the fire scene. It is she, after all, who has abused “the great game,” and it is she who is destroyed by fire (the standard mythological fate of those who would break cosmic laws). Thus, the sadly lyrical final pan and freeze frame of the boy has the same sympathetic meaning as its origin in Les Quatre Cents Coups. We have seen many of Mulligan’s techniques before. But if Mulligan borrows elements from the common domain of other directors, it is neither in homage nor through lack of inventiveness. Mulligan’s vocabulary is no more or less eclectic than Hawks, or Dwan’s. His use of each technique is correct and knowledgeable; that it may have been used before is irrelevant. Perhaps this apparent eclecticism has been the blinder, the source of Mulligan’s reputation as a minor director. Yet it is precisely this suspicion of eclecticism that reinforces the sense of déja vu that is essential in linking our dream visions to their mythological bases. Mulligan’s is a style that seeks the common denominator of inner experience. The director lets us reexperience childhood — perhaps to free us from the phantoms that grew there and which have plagued us ever since, and perhaps simultaneously to help us remember the potential we once had, but somewhere lost. John H. Dorr LE SOUFFLE AU COEUR France (1970). 110 mins. Director and screenplay: Louis Malle. Photography: Ricardo Aronovich. Sound: Jean-Claude Laureux. Editing: Suzanne Baron. Production: Marianne Films, Vides Cinematographica Sas (Rome), Franz Seitz Filmproduktion (Munich). Cast: Léa Massari (Clara), Benoit Ferreux (Laurent), Daniel Gélin (Le Pére), Marc Winoncourt (Marc), Fabrien Ferreux (Thomas), Michel Lonsdale (Pére Henri). A decade ago, not only was the open sexuality of Louis Malle’s The Lovers subjected to minor cuts by censors, but its cool treatment of marital infidelity provoked cries in France about the undermining of the family. The French Ministry of Culture, after all, thought Vadim’s melodramatic Liaisons Dangereuses immoral and, to this day, has not sanctioned the showing of Rivette’s La Religieuse. Now Malle’s most recent feature has raised only a mild flutter: true, amidst today’s fleshly turmoil no one would be likely to remark on a little sexual explicitness, but the film’s young hero does sleep with his mother, and one would have thought