James Baldwin on Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda and YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (Fritz Lang, 1937)

 

The following is excerpted from the chapter "Congo Square" in The Devil Finds Work: An Essay by James Baldwin (1976).

...The Scottsboro boys, for example - for the Scottsboro Case has begun - were certainly innocent of anything requiring vengeance. My father's youngest son by his first marriage, nine years older than I, who had vanished from our lives, might have been one of those boys, now being murdered by my fellow Americans on the basis of the rape charge delivered by two white whores: and I was reading Angelo Herndon's Let Me Live!. Yes. I understood that: my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already begun to hate them from the bottom of my heart.

Angelo Herndon was a young, black labor organizer in the Deep South, railroaded to prison, who lived long enough, at least, to write a book about it - the George Jackson of the era. No one resembling him, or anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene. Perhaps to compensate for this, Bill now takes me to see Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in the Walter Wanger production of Fritz Lang's YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. 

(...)

Sylvia Sidney was the only American film actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman - which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality. All of the others, without exception, were white, and, even when they moved me (like Margaret Sullavan [sic] or Bette Davis or Carole Lombard) they moved me from that distance. Some instinct caused me profoundly to distrust the sense of life they projected: this sense of life could certainly never, in any case, be used by me, and, while his eye might be on the sparrow, mine had to be on the hawk. And, similarly, while I admired Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney (and, on a more demanding level, Fredric March), the only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda. I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don't walk like that! and he imitated Fonda's stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away from the camera. My reaction to Sylvia Sidney was certainly due, in part, to the kind of film she appeared in during that era - FURY; MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE; YOU AND ME; STREET SCENE (I was certain, even that I knew the meaning of the title of a film she made with Gene Raymond, which I never saw, BEHOLD MY WIFE). It was almost as though she and I had a secret: she seemed to know something I knew. Every street in New York ends in a river: this is the legend which begins the film, DEAD END, and I was enormously grateful for it. I had never thought of that before. Sylvia Sidney, facing a cop in this film, pulling her black hat back from her forehead: One of you lousy cops gave me that. She was always being beaten up, victimized, weeping, and she should have been drearier than Tom Mix's girl friends. But I always believed her - in a way, she reminded me of Bill, for I had seen Bill facing hostile cops. Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a police station. The cops didn't like Bill, didn't like the fact that we were colored kids, and didn't want to give up the ice cream. I don't remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth's surface froze, and she got us our ice cream, saying thank you, I remember, as we left. YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE was the most powerful movie I had seen until that moment. The only other film to hit me as hard, at that time of my life, was THE CHILDHOOD OF MAXIM GORKY, which, for me, had not been about white people. Similarly, while 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING had concerned the trials of a finally somewhat improbable white couple, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE came much closer to home.

It is the top of 1937. I am not yet thirteen.

FURY, MGM, 1936, is, I believe, Lang's first American film. It is meant to be a study of mob violence, on which level it is indignant, sincere, and inept. Since the mob separates the lovers almost at the beginning of the film, the film works as a love story only intermittently, and to the extent that one responds to the lovers (Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy). It is an exceedingly uneasy and uneven film, with both the lovers and the mob placed, really, in the German Third Reich, which Lang has not so much fled as furiously repudiated, and to which he is still reacting. (The railroad station at which the lovers separate is heavy with menace, and the train which carries Sidney away to go to work in another town is rather like the train to a bloody destination unknown.) Lang's is the fury of the film: but his grasp of the texture of American life is still extremely weak: he has not yet really left Germany. His fury, nevertheless, manages to convey something of the idle, aimless, compulsive wickedness of idle, terrified, aimless people, who can come together only as a mob: but his hatred of these people also makes them, at least, unreal. God knows what Lang had already seen, in Germany.

By the time of YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, Lang had found his American feet. He never succeeded quite so brilliantly again. Considering the speed with which we moved from the New Deal to World War II, to Yalta, to the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, to Korea, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, this may not be his fault.

(One of the last of his films, entitled BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, starring Joan Fontaine, Dana Andrews, and Sydney Blackmer, is an utterly shameless apology for American justice, the work of a defeated man. But, children, yes, it be's that way sometimes.)*

Lang's concern, or obsession, was with the fact and the effect of human loneliness, and the ways in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated monster: whom we isolate because we recognize him as living within us. This is what his great German film, M, which launched Peter Lorre, is all about. In the American context, there being no way for him to get to the nigger, he could use only that other American prototype, the criminal, le gangster. The premise of YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE is that Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-convict who wants to go "straight": but the society will not allow him to live down, or redeem, his criminal past. This apparently banal situation is thrust upon us with so heavy a hand that one is forced - as I was, even so long ago - to wonder if one is resisting the film or resisting the truth. But, however one may wish to defend oneself against Lang's indictment of the small, faceless people, always available for any public ceremony and absent forever from any private one, who are society, one is left defenseless before his study of the result, which is the isolation and the doom of the lovers.

Very early in the film we meet the earnest and popular prison chaplain - a priest: we meet him as he pitches the ball to the men who are playing baseball in the prison courtyard. It is a curiously loaded moment, a disturbing image: perhaps only an exiled German, at that period of our history, would have dreamed of so connecting games and slaughter, thus foreshadowing the fate of the accomplice, who is, in this case, the priest. The film does not suggest that the priest's popularity had anything to do with the religious instruction he, presumably, brings to the men - his popularity is due to his personal qualities, which include a somewhat overworked cheerfulness: and his function, at bottom, is to prepare the men for death. His role, also, is to make the prison more bearable, both for the men in the courtyard and the guard behind the machine gun in the tower. And he is, also, of course, to prepare these men for their eventual freedom beyond these walls - which freedom, according to Lang's savage and elaborately articulated vision, does not and probably cannot exist.

The film has a kind of claustrophobic physicality - Sidney is the first seen, for example, behind a desk, trapped, and Lang forces us to concentrate on her maneuvers to free herself, smiling all the way. (She's trapped behind her desk by a telephone and an apple vendor who has come to City Hall, where Sidney works, to complain that policemen eat his apples for free.) The first reunion of the lovers takes place with bars between them: it takes a moment before they realize that the gate is open, the man is being set free. There is a marvelous small moment in the flop house, with Fonda pacing the room the way he paced the cell, and pausing at the window to listen to the Salvation Army Band outside, singing, if you love your mother, meet her in the skies. I cannot imagine any native-born white American daring to use, so laconically, a banality so nearly comic in order to capture so deep a distress. 

The genuine indignation which informs this film is a quality which was very shortly to disappear out of the American cinema, and severely to be menaced in American life. In a way, we were all niggers in the thirties. I do not know if that really made us more friendly with each other - at bottom, I doubt that, for more would remain of that friendliness today - but it was harder then, and riskier, to attempt a separate peace, and benign neglect was not among our possibilities. The Okies, of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, were still crossing the plains in their jalopy and had not yet arrived in California, there, every single one of them, to encounter running water, and to become cops. Neither Steinbeck nor Dos Passos had yet said, my country, right or wrong, nor did anyone suppose that they ever could - but they did; and Hemingway was as vocal concerning the Spanish revolution as he was to be silent concerning the Cuban one.

There is that moment in the film, in prison, when Fonda whispers to Sidney, through jail-house glass, Get me a gun. Sidney said, I can't get you a gun. You'll kill somebody! and Fonda says, What do you think they're going to do to me?

I understood that: it was a real question. I was living with that question.

It is the priest who covers for the trapped and weary girl when she attempts to smuggle a gun into the prison, and it is the priest whom Fonda murders, with a gun. And I wondered about that, the well-meaning accomplice and his fate: he is murdered because Fonda does not believe him, even though he is, in fact speaking the truth. But the prisoner has no way of knowing with whom the priest is playing ball at the moment and so dares not risk believing him, This dread is underscored by the film's last line, delivered (in the dying prisoner's memory) by the priest: The gates are open. I knew damn well that the gates were not open, and, by this time, in any case, the lovers were dead.

.

Que a pureza, afinal, é uma coisa que se ganha com o tempo, como o pó?

(That purity, after all, is something earned over time, like dust?)

"Les bons films, c’était quelque chose dont on entendait parler,
mais qu’on ne voyait pas. Cela pose de nombreuses questions
philosophiques. Le cinéma est fait pour montrer l’invisible:
c’est presque logique qu’il ne puisse pas se voir."

-Godard interview (2011) in Réponses à Hadopi by Juan Branco, Capricci.

Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or

The woman who sticks the hand around,
saluted by
— she, impervious to this street congregation —
the cop. She doesn't look at him

Books jump to guns!
lock box returns —

(Guns came from clay in Ice.)

film sonore et parlant

they are organs used for battle and information
The challis that sits awkwardly in the car
must be held up.

I don't hear the guitar anymore.

Happy May Day,

With water for the small grasses.

FOGO

"I want to make films in a kitchen." - Ford

From the John Ford section of "The Old Dependables" by Colin Young, Film Quarterly, Fall 1959.

But the impression I formed of Ford's present (1959) position in the film business was quite different. Talking with (Billy) Wilder, one is always aware of the danger of his cutting the whole thing short because he might suspect that he was with one of those "dead donkey-lovers." Talking with Ford is much worse. He is suspicious of the conversation from the start, as if any talk about film-making, especially about his films, was superfluous. He pretends to be not even certain of the studio he is in, though conceivably by now they might have begun to look all alike. With a patch over one eye and the other eye concealed behind dark glasses, he was likely to want to talk about his socks more than about his work. ("Do you know that I saw a pair of these socks in a shop window in Gourock, and the man wasn't going to let me have any, because he exported them all to a store in Beverly Hills, till I told him I'd always been buying my goddamned socks in that store. So he did me a special favor.") He wears what is by now accepted as a uniform-relaxed, informal down to the boots, an attire which shows so much contempt for the organization that it would be thought of as forced in a younger man, without the cragginess and the usefully intermittent deafness to go with it.

It is hard, in any one conversation, to be sure that Ford has said what he means. I had just asked him how much control he had over his scripts when the following dialogue ensued with his secretary, Meta Sterne. She came in to-announce that "the girl" was here to see him.

-What girl?
-The girl you've cast for Lucy, I guess.
-For who?
-For Lucy.
-Who's Lucy?
-The girl in the picture. The girl who gets
raped ....
-Get's what?

The secretary waited. This was perhaps not a new routine, or a unique one.

-Well, tell her to wait, she's not going to get raped yet.

Then, turning to me, he added: " That answers your question, doesn't it? I'm really going to have to read that story."

But "that story," he had told me just a few moments earlier, was the best one which has come his way for many years. It is the one on which he is already engaged, with Willis Goldbeck as producer, Captain Buffalo (a title which will probably be changed), from a story by the Saturday Evening Post writer James Warner Bellah. Set in the 1880's, it is an account of a crack Negro cavalry unit and the court-martial for rape of one of its members. "We have shaped the story to be told through a series of retrospects, as cutouts from the court-martial. As we develop it, he really looks guilty as hell."

It is not so long since Emmett Till's abductors were cleared of a charge of murder in Mississippi, even though everyone "knew they had done it" (in fact they later told newspaper reporter William Bradford Huie that they had). The 1880's are considerably before 1955, and although the trial which forms the basis of Bellah's story is military rather than civil, Northerners and Southerners will no doubt draw their own conclusions. Thus it might be in something of this sense that Ford admitted that the story was a tricky one to be tackling today. But he emphasized its story qualities, and nothing else, and went out of his way to explain that he had not come across as good a story as this for many years.

Woody Strode as Sergeant Rutledge

Emmett Till

On the other hand, when asked specifically if he had been making the films he wanted to make he answered with an explosive "No! I don't want to make great sprawling pictures. I want to make films in a kitchen." Captain Buffalo does not seem to be quite that. And neither does the one with which he wishes to follow it-a production of The Judge and the Hangman, which he described as a character mystery set in the Bavarian Alps.

When pressed about the amount of control he had over script, shooting, or editing, Ford took one of two lines. The first was the simplest, and one that most people would willing, I think, to accept. I had asked him which of his postwar films he had some particular regard for. "It is hard to say. I wouldn't like to lay special claim to any of them. And it's not really a very fair question. I might just as well ask you which of your film reviews of the last five years you particularly liked, when what you really wanted to do was write the great Scottish novel. "But," he added, "I've made some pretty good films in my time- Stage Coach, Grapes of Wrath, The Informer." (The first and last were made in collaboration with screenwriter Dudley Nichols.)

The implication was, then, he had made some pretty good films in his time, so do not press him too hard about some of the more recent ones. "The old enthusiasm has gone, maybe. But don't quote that-oh, hell, you can quote it."

It is all right, I think, to quote it, because it is not entirely true, and because even if it were true, the fact that his current films remain popular would be a remarkable tribute to his skill as a film craftsman.

But at other times Ford gave something of the impression of having been taken by surprise by changes within the film industry. He talked of "having noticed" that over the last five or six years the committee system of supervision had been creeping in, and that although his contracts still gave him right of first cut, the small print told another story. "But now that I am on to them," he added, "I'll be on my guard. Now I've realized what is happening to me, so now is the time to do the films I want to do. At 64 I am too old for anything else."

This explanation is hard to accept, and perhaps he did not expect it to be taken seriously. It certainly does not fit with what we have known of him in the past, or with the stories that he likes to tell of himself, especially when they apply to producers; for example, one that he told me on this occasion: When he was doing a picture on the Fox lot, the associate producer questioned the way he was setting up a shot. Ford asked him how he would like to do it, and the man explained it to him. Ford very obligingly made the changes, shot the scene that way, and then asked if it was satisfactory. When he heard that it was, he took the film magazine off the camera, and handed it to the associate producer with the words, "Here's your scene. Now I will shoot it my way."

It is quite possible that the days for that sort of thing have passed. Ford still shoots very economically, giving his editor very little room for decision, or alternatives. Thus when he told me that perhaps he would shoot Captain Bufalo in such a way that it could be cut only one way, he was not really saying anything new, although he seemed once again to want to give that impression.

He seemed less optimistic about the ultimate benevolence of producers than Billy Wilder, but said that in fact all that happened to Horse Soldiers after he left it was that some of the humor was cut. All the other changes had been made earlier, including the all-important one of lowering the age of the Southern lady, who is taken along as hostage, from 60 down to something much more romantic. The love story was completely manufactured. The studio publicity sheet, as is often the case, tells the whole story. "In order that The Horse Soldiers would prove great entertainment and not just a history lesson filmed in color and wide screen, screen writers John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin, also the producers, used much of the background of the book (by Harold Sinclair) for research material, but only five pages of the novel as the jumpingoff place for the screen story." And of course they jumped far and true.

Nevertheless there are scenes in the film, principally of large groups of men on the move, which have enough of Ford's original zest to suggest that he is not entirely right to think of himself as a past enthusiast. When he had finished with me, rather than vice versa (the half cigar he had cut off for me anyway was almost gone), he said with some apology in his voice, "Now we'll have to see about raping that girl." The girl in question came wafting in, fresh and eager. I seemed to have seen her in several of Ford's pictures, but since she was a newcomer, I must have been mistaken. If it had not been for something else Ford had let slip during our conversation, I might have questioned him further about the raping in Captain Buffalo. I had asked him what he thought of the present market for films. "Hollywood today," he said, "is a market for sex and horror. I don't want any part of that."

-Phi Phenomenon (1968, Morgan Fisher)

(...) FR3, with the INA as an intermediary, asked us if we could make a 1-hour film in two months. There was a contract to make them one hour per year. I told them no, two months for an hour is not enough time, because an hour is enormous and I need time to do it. I don't want eight weeks; I want a year to do an hour, at a minimum. For shooting. But when we learned that they had six hours, we said to them: maybe six hours, we could do that for you in three months. Because at that point you conceive it completely differently. To have the time to talk for six hours to your girlfriend, for example, is huge. Because if you have to say everything in an hour it may not be enough. You panic completely, you don't see why someone would say... -- but suddenly, with six hours, you say to yourself: 'Well, at least I can do a frank and honest conversation', at least I can do what is never done on television, which is not to cut, even a ten-minute section, after four seconds.

- Godard, "Fourth Voyage, Part Two: Masculin Féminin: 15 faits précis" from Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Caboose Books, Sept 2012. A happy occasion: this "Voyage" is available in full here, along with further information on the forthcoming release of the book in English.

appalling to read poems by shelley (not to speak of ancient egyptian peasant songs from 3000 years ago) in which he laments oppression and exploitation. is this how they will read us, still oppressed and exploited, and will they say: was it already as bad as all that?

- 16 Aug '38 - Arbeitsjournal, Brecht

So many alarming things have been said and written about our life, our world, our culture, that to see the sun, the clouds, to go out into the street and find grass, dogs, pebbles, moves you like some great boon, like a gift from God, like a dream. But a real dream that endures, that actually exists.

- 7 Dec, 1947 - Diaries, C. Pavese