AMERICA WITHOUT FEAR OR
FAVOR (STAR WARS) 

('L'Amerique sans peur et sans reproche: Star Wars', 

Cahiers du Cinéma 283, December 1977) 

by Serge Le Peron

In pursuing the implications of the exceptional success of Star Wars and its huge appeal to filmgoers of all kinds, one ought not to lay too much stress on the film's status as 'science fiction'. For a long time science fiction has been the generic repository of fear, madness, disaster, paranoia, of the speedfreaks and depressives. All are absent from Star Wars, in the genre's finest authors (Dick, Ballard), the future is only secondarily the place of adventure and escape, distraction and entertainment; the genre's best films (2001 for example, but also Lucas's very interesting THX 1138) do not particularly offer themselves as 'modern fairy tales'. It's pointless to labour this.

Star Wars would rather be 'a romantic, confident, positive vision', atemporal, universal and of course unanimist — but a new kind of unanimism [1], one no longer concerned with some or other strategy of tension, no longer that of a necessary common front against an enemy within and/or without (disaster films like Jaws), but one which derives from a freely felt consensus, being dictated neither by the law of necessity, nor by a pronounced imperative or any kind of reason, without shock, jolts, fear or surprise but with pleasure and confidence. The encounter with science fiction in Star Wars, the fact that the action takes place in a science-fiction universe, doubtless permits such confidence to be retrieved and projected towards the future, a future offering immediate ideological benefit. But above all, the reference to science fiction has the immense advantage of allowing the creation of a fluid fictional space, without apparent anchorage, one that enfolds and solicits: something like the pacific and pacifying American Mother who gathers to her bosom, with all the soft technological refinements that are hers, all that the bellicose uncle (a certain Uncle Sam), because of the brutalities of his war machinery, had excluded. Young people, the hippies, counter-cultural figures were basically rejecting this childish make-believe. Now we are witnessing the full-scale return to the territorial waters of former years, to a floating mass with fluid contours, without frontiers; it's no longer 'to hell with frontiers'. Everyone is invited to play as before with what Welles called 'the biggest electric train set in the world' - the cinema, Hollywood — as a family (like on television), under the calm, honest eye of a mother ever-vigilant over morality (the moral). The America of President Carter? But in such a film it is also capital that talks.

Lucas comes from the ranks of those we used, some time ago, to call nostalgics, pessimists, depressives, and we now know that they were right to be so. It is also men like him who find themselves now entrusted with gigantic projects (like Star Wars) in the general fight against depression, and they certainly do this with the same eagerness with which they struggled against repression in the previous decade. There has been a sea-change (if not a change of base) in America. This is a period less of rebellion against the symbols of repression, more of a determined recharging of flat batteries — through the artificial injection of a lost imagination. The question is: what imagination? It is no easy matter to rediscover it. For a film-maker like Lucas, barely thirty years old and finding himself of the post-Westerns generation, the solution resides in a return to childhood; more precisely, in a return to the conditions of his childhood and the cinema of easy-going adventure movies in which he was cradled. Because of the lack of the 'positive' [2], in the available contemporary imagination (above all in science fiction), the solution is seen to lie in a synthesis of old forms. The problem, therefore, is technical; it is enough to return to the terms and themes of this cinema (those in fact brought out by film studies) and make them more sophisticated, dress them up in special effects, present them as signs to be recognized, decoded. 'Heroes as independent as they are enterprising, irredeemably evil bad guys', 'the triumph of good over evil', etc.

From this point it is a matter of making the screenplay scientifically conform to this program, following the computer logic which translates its question-signs into response-signs. Equally, story, characters, actors don't in themselves have great importance: they are there simply to attest to the intentions of the screenplay, they are the supports of these intentions. This is what gives the film its coldness (not an aggressively dry coldness; the film is more cool than cold) and the feeling that everything is already played out in advance (in contrast to the adventure films already referred to) and that the events are only detours in a standardized plot. You very quickly get the impression of a constant interchangeability (as with those standard parts of a machine which can be replaced by an identical part), and it is soon impossible to see Princess Leia Organa as anything other than 'the impeccably brave heroine' of the advance publicity, or to nod knowingly when the cliches of the Western crop up in the scene in the city of Mos Eisley, or to do more then see Peter Cushing as the sign of absolute evil because of his numerous shady dealings with Dracula and Frankenstein [3]. A reading without risks that rapidly becomes monotonous (one could also see the wheels turning in Jaws, but there were nevertheless a few moments when the film carried the audience with it, a few troubling passages).

And the whole thing (the vast apparatus of Production-Direction-Distribution), whilst functioning admirably (in the packed cinemas at the end of the film we applaud the heroes when they enter the royal hall on the planet Yavin, at the same time as the enthusiastic crowd on the screen), leaves the lover of fiction hungry for more; but logically so, for the fiction of Star Wars functions like nothing so much as a user-friendly computer in perfect working order [4].

One way or another, fiction requires passion; there is no great fiction without great passion and no great film without there being a great love story behind it. This is what differentiates the cinema from other media such as the comic strip, which gets by very well without it, or television, which serves here as the model of cinema (and perhaps is the key to its success). Like Inspector Kojak in the American television series, the heroes of Star Wars are not impassioned types; they act intuitively and are utterly disengaged. The passions that they come up against are fleeting and comprehensive, and without consequence. Rivals co-exist, calmly: an unthinkable state of affairs in the old adventure films where the rule was, in Gresham's Law [5] of Hollywood fiction, that the hero chased the other man. In the fiction of Star Wars one finds the binary system which is the working practice of capitalism today: two heroes, virtually equivalent (and in the princess's heart, as strictly equivalent as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in the heart of New York), and incredibly, deliberately desexualized [6]. 

The fictional system of Star Wars echoes the intense participation and great lethargy, deep involvement and great indifference that belong to the consumption of television. Where it all happens or in what historical period is immaterial; as is whether the young protagonists love one another or not (and whether the princess loves either of them); sex has no importance, nor does violence; nor even the dedicated totalitarianism of the 'Empire' (its nature, and what is implied by that); nor the death of Ben Kenobi (the old patriarch played by Alec Guinness). Everything is and is intended to be deliberately abstract, presenting itself as principle, postulate and conventional indicator and never the motor, dynamic force or launching pad of fiction.

Star Wars therefore breaks with the cinematic mania that in recent years has pushed films beyond any previously conceivable limits, towards extreme violence, hard pornography, disaster movies; the mania for bringing everything into the open in order to provoke a strong emotional response and a bellicose unanimism. In Star Wars all heterogeneity is admissible, all alterities and differences can be present, functioning in perfect narrative harmony, provided that all this takes place in the absence of sex. So the problem is resolved at its very root, if one can put it like that: no more sex, violence, passion, or even fiction, only cohabitation, intrigue, aloofness (such is the fate of these aloof heroes). Finish with sex and you finish with the risks of conflict, violent emotions, the force of fiction. No matter, the 'force' is elsewhere, as the film's poster ('May the Force be with you') puts it.

It is the quiet force of capital that has produced the film with remarkable economy; one precisely matched in the shooting and the special effects, in line with the film's ambition and budget [7]. It is a knowing film that renews the Hollywood spirit of wanting films to be in some way edifying; here, in what replaces fiction, is the film's whole concept.

This approach is one that has nothing in common with Kubrick's in Barry Lyndon where, for the battle scenes, he used long lenses to film thousands of extras as if he had only thirty, in story terms a pointless expense. Such is the twilight (noted by Oudart) of the Hollywood machine, clouded over by a crazy imagination which gives way to this calm and starry sky where technique triumphs over imagination; like all the rest, fed through the synthesizer. The story of the film's production would constitute a real science-fiction subject that would make one shudder.

Translated by Chris Darke

Notes

1. 'Unanimism': a literary movement, concerned with an idealist notion of the collective, which flourished in France after the First World War. Its adherents included the writers Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel.

2. In fact it is wrong to pretend that the adventure film had disappeared from the screens (for some time it had worked mainly on the principle of the shock effect), and even Lucas's childhood had not been one surrounded completely by reassuring mythological spaces. There is a Golden Age ideology in Star Wars, a rewriting of cinema's history, just as the auteurs of the Western were rewriting American history.

(Author's note.)

3. In the Terence Fisher films in question it is not so simple. Evil cannot just appear, it must be imagined as such on each occasion. In these films it is never a matter of a primitive accumulation, even if they are sometimes thought of as sequels to one another. Star Wars is happy to grind out the effects tat cinema (American cinema) has taken years to build up, and reduces the great cinematic myths (the adventure film in particular, but not exclusively) to narrative references, to the status of road signs. A sad fate, and a strange gift to the children. (Author's note.)

4. Kubrick has shown that even a computer can fictionalize better than this, if you take the trouble. One recalls the awful chess game with the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey: the cosmonaut who plays poorly and who strips the computer's electronic brain, provoking in the victim an uncannily human moan. (Author's note.)

5. Gresham's law is the economic theory that bad money drives out good money. 

6. This is all the more extraordinary if one recalls that in THX the two heroes were revolting against a world without either affective or sexual love, and that this was the motor of the fiction. (Author's note.)

7. In fact, the production costs of the film were remarkably reasonable ($9.5 million) compared to recent productions of the same type (King Kong [1976], for example), and considering the technical inventiveness which had to be demonstrated: the 360 special effects (most of them never seen before), the John Dykstra workshop, the two thousand units of sound on the soundtrack, etc. (Author's note.)

                              

    

Philippe Garrel: A week ago in Paris I showed "Actua 1" (1968) before Regular Lovers (2004)-- so I showed the newsreel right before the re-creation-- and the two really blended together. I think that from now on I will show "Actua 1" before Regular Lovers, which is from 2004-- 35 years after "Actua 1" -- and in which I actually redid shots from "Actua 1" when I thought that that film was lost. That duo works much better together. 

But in this case [the 2015 New York Film Festival screening] seeing "Actua 1" with In the Shadow of Women (2015), what does work is when you see the Resistance footage, the Liberation of Paris, because here you see history being written into the screen. It's a bit like what the people who saved France from Nazism said, "From the Resistance to the Revolution"-- and the master of that question was, of course, Eisenstein, who in 1927 re-created the Revolution of 1917. The effect of truth he achieved was that he got Lenin to come and play himself among the extras 10 years later, and that was, I believe, in the film October. What I'm giving now is a kind of cinema lesson-- I'm a professor first and foremost. I used to be a student of the New Wave, now I'm a professor.

As we were speaking of future generations earlier, when future generations see the Eisenstein films they think they are watching actual news footage, that they're watching newsreels of the Revolution, because Lenin is there; he has a little bit less hair but, for all the rest, it's Lenin.

What actually happened to me is that I got a phone call from someone who told me they'd seen a shot from Regular Lovers on French TV, when there were riots in the Paris suburbs, where they just inserted a shot of cars burning from Regular Lovers and used the fiction in the news. So, artists make objects that are proof of history.

It's like, for instance, the French director Jean-Paul Le Chanois, he made a movie Au cœur de l'orage, In the Heart of the Storm (1944-45), in which you see shots of the Vercors, the remote resistance dens, the Maquis, and what happened there is that he had filmed in that area but his film was damaged by humidity. So right after the war, when he found that his film was damaged, in '45, he asked real Resistance fighters to recreate what they had done and he filmed them. And today that footage is considered news footage, newsreel footage. It's like here in the US, you venerate Angela Davis, some shots of Angela Davis, some shots of the Berkeley riots, but there are very few actual, real documents and it's artists who reconstruct things, reconstruct objects, and who tell something of histories and ultimately make the news.
Caroline Deruas: [Regarding In the Shadow of Women:] Philippe, as always, has a very, not masochist but… He has a very masculine gaze and this time I wanted him to try to look on the other side...

Philippe Garrel: As Freud said we know very little about women's libido, because, as he said, women don't say as much when they're on the therapist's couch. It's an interesting search for a man to do… this is why I admire the New Wave. As I was saying earlier, because of its political side as it relates to "Actua 1", but also as proof of the communication between one man and one woman, whether it's a man filming a woman or… The New Wave was really a history of cinema as communication between man and woman. While I was watching the movie earlier, I was thinking of Cléo from 5 to 7, naturally, because Agnès Varda is here. It's something that was very powerful for our generation-- and it was for Chantal Akerman too-- which is that cinema was useful in our life. It's not that cinema helps to heal the wounds of love-- reality is reality and films can't change that-- but it's really something that shows the communication between man and woman, and I think that's the most interesting thing in life.

Caroline Deruas: I just want to say: there is a book behind the script of this film, a book by Mario Soldati, The Capri Letters, which has the same shape as the film, a parallel between women's libido and men's…

Clotilde Courau: [On working with Garrel:] I felt that the film is also about the notion of sacrifice. I remember talking with Philippe, talking a lot about the notion of sacrifice in love-- and resistance. Do women have that quality more than men? I don't know. We've been talking a lot about it. Working with Philippe, the great thing-- and I wish all the directors were doing the same thing-- is that we have to be together for maybe seven weeks, eight weeks; once a week we meet, and its not really rehearsing. It's not a play. We're spending time together. In Philippe's work it's not about finding the emotion, it's finding the truth of the situation and then the movements, and then everything will come from the truth of that moment. Finding the right place of that moment (…) We talked about libido. I also think it's a question of generation. I don't know if we have the same answers today. I don't know...

Philippe Garrel: There's something that relates to our species' evolution, something much slower than the movement of other ideas and gestures, but this movement exists over our whole lives, and we ourselves participate in our lives, in our evolution. Freud said that, and it's actually a scary thought, to think that things don't change so fast. Now, when I was in psychoanalysis with an older Moroccan analyst I told him I wanted to do a film about women's libido being as strong as man's and because he was a 92 year-old, he simply responded: "probably". If the speed of the species in our lives changes, if it moves in our life just a quarter of a millimeter, that's already very impressive: we're monsters of change. That's Godard who thinks that: we're monsters. At the end of his film France/tour/détour/deux/enfants he says "the monsters will go home", "the monsters will eat dinner"… But maybe it's also possible that we can't change the world at all when it comes to love.

(From the French interpreter's [name unknown! Please inform me if you know...] immediate translation of the post-screening talk by Philippe Garrel, Caroline Deruas, and Clotilde Courau following the October 6, 2015 screening of "Actua 1" and In the Shadow of Women at the New York Film Festival. Video  here.)

Brecht

for E.E.

The first frame of the third version of La Madre (J.-M. S.)

and the first frame of the second version.

FILM PHOTOS

The Iron Mask (1929) by Allan Dwan   

The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959) by Jean Renoir. 

These two filmmakers, in these exemplary films, the first following Griffith, the second Chaplin, give us the key to the vault, part of the great quest undertaken by the cinema: the human face.  Each illustrates in an exemplary way the fiction of a split. The man in The Iron Mask is twice cursed by the Sun-King: his face, because it is identical to another, must disappear from sight. The rule of dramatic balance in the cinema (familiar faces and the hierarchy that follows) is reversed: "secondary elements" (sets, background characters, decoupage… here: the camera's axis in relation to the table, an almost metallic light that equalizes the pitcher, the cup, the dish, the plate and the mask) are all there to serve what the missing face goes on to say.

At another extreme: Opale, the nocturnal embodiment of Doctor Cordelier (this is not twin against twin, competing for divine right and disputing the throne, but a man alone -- a modern Jekyll and Hyde -- torn between the rule of decency and the overflowing plunder inside of him), threatens to explode the frame: by his swollen face (that of J.L. Barrault), deformed, horrifyingly ugly, by his menacing growls, by these gestures that escape the body (the trampling of a little girl, the caning of an old man and a cripple over the course of the film), all these are "secondary elements" trembling at their base: at the dawn of the TV drama, Renoir, sensing the procession of innumerable, quiet daubs that could be born of this technique, doesn't shake the coconut tree (which never fails to pay-off) and makes the televisual version of Monsieur Verdoux.

Tails: Hollywood and its drapery in a patient search (abandoned today) for origins. Heads: a restorative destruction of any reference or reverence. Griffith and Chaplin, kept alive in the work of Allan Dwan and Jean Renoir, each in their own way, fill out a definition of the human face as a reflection upon and love of human history.

                                          Jean-Claude Biette

Cahiers du cinéma, spécial PHOTOS DE FILMS, Dec. 1978. Translated by Andy Rector.

Letter from Jane

by Tag Gallagher

In April of last year (1974), Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and director Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool) made a trip to North Vietnam (they were refused visas to the South). Introduction to the Enemy is a film they made of their interviews with a cross-section of the people. It cost $20,000. 

Some years ago I travelled in Algeria, and from that experience I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this portrait of Vietnam. There is nothing quite like a long and successful revolutionary war to invigorate and unify a people. Nor is it surprising that the Vietnamese are gracious and friendly to Americans, or the Algerians to the French. I suspect that today in North Vietnam one could have the unique experience of seeing an infectious paradigm of a society at its euphoric peak. For a sympathetic American such an encounter would place him or her in the position of a starving peasant gazing into a King's banquet hall.      

I can imagine this, partially, but I cannot find it in this film. Rather than respectful contemplation, these pictures bear a resemblance to the breezy sort of TV news report, complete with an on-the-spot commentator. The wisdom of this approach for Vietnam seems most dubious as one watches the ubiquitous Ms. Fonda gesturing and struggling to translate the simple French phrases of a Hanoi author whom she is interviewing. I am always happy to watch Jane Fonda, and to listen to her, and I am glad she was awestruck, but she tended to overwhelm the vibrations of the country and its people. The result of this is a sort of Alice in Wonderland, without the wonderland. 

                      

A woman -- the commanding general of the Viet Cong forces -- says that the U.S. lost because it tried to fight guerrillas with regular tactics; guerilla warfare is a people's war; the U.S. used helicopters to speed troops where they were needed; it failed to realize that the people are everywhere. But, unfortunately, nearly everyone Fonda and Hayden talked with seems to have responded by parroting the official line, and in the most ideological terms. I say "unfortunately" not because the filmmakers accept these replies unquestioningly, but because these verbal cliches are, for the most part, the closest the film gets to the souls of the people. It is not enough for a documentary to show smiling faces and to freeze a few close-ups. And a good documentary needs all the potent and concise editing that is lacking in these lackadaisical 65 minutes. 

A few years ago, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made a short called Letter to Jane (1972) which, by studying a magazine photo of Jane Fonda with some North Vietnamese soldiers, reached the conclusions that the culture gap was too vast for her to cross, and that her response, as shown on her face, was a reiteration of a cliched response going back to the New Deal. (Godard's later confession that he himself could never be anything but a bourgeois filmmaker clarified the meaning of his short.)

                                           

Well, it seemed to me that Introduction to the Enemy proves Godard and Gorin correct, for essentially the film is a sequel to that infamous still photo, and makes explicit a critique which had appeared too hypothetical. So I asked Jane Fonda what she thought of Letter to Jane:

"I never saw it," she replied, "but I read the script and then I filed it away as an example of..." (here ensued a choking 15-second struggle for the right words while swinging her arms like a helicopter) "...narrow-minded male chauvinist sectarianism." 

Tag Gallagher

Originally published in Take One, Jan-Feb 1975.

*

Editor's Note: 

Furthering a conflation of cinema, the image, reality, renown, ideology, history, and revolution -- part and parcel of both Introduction to the Enemy (seemingly in the negative) and Letter to Jane (in the positive) -- it's worth mentioning that Jane Fonda later chose to title her published journal of the Vietnam trip "Birth of a Nation".  Today, the film Introduction to the Enemy is completely unavailable, as if expunged: impossible to find commercially or in the underground trade. There is an entry for it, almost ironic, in the [Ted] Turner Classic Movies database; with the listing's empty "genre" and "user review" fields we are told less than: this film exists or existed. 

The same expurgation from history is true of another 1974 film made by a woman, a film in dire need of revival, and I'll take this opportunity to bring it up in the hopes that others will be interested and help make it available: Attica by Cinda Firestone, about the 1971 revolt of prisoners against unbearable conditions at Nelson Rockefeller's Attica Correctional Facility (near Buffalo, New York), where inmates successfully took 40 guards hostage, held discussions and spoke with press in the yard, practiced unheard of racial unity, and put forth a manifesto demanding the removal of the warden, better conditions, and amnesty. Rockefeller approved nothing but a military attack on the occupied prison, a repression and massacre that killed thirty-one prisoners, with the remaining inmates being beaten and tortured by guards after the restoration of the State's order. All of this is in Firestone's film... The importance of Attica today is inestimable.

           

Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.

LE SPLEEN DE PARIS, Baudelaire

ROBINSON CRUSOE, Buñuel

PHIL KARLSON CONFIDENTIAL

by Bill Krohn

     Phil Karlson is known for a handful of crime films he made in the 50s. That is a tribute to the strength of those films and a disservice to the director, who made over 50 features and won two Emmys for his television work, so the French Cinematheque is putting on the first comprehensive Karlson retrospective ever. (Forty-three films, October 3rd through November 22nd.)

     Why so long after the fact? Ironically the impact of the crime films may have hurt Karlson’s reputation. ‘These pictures have been copied and recopied so many times,’ he once observed, ‘Unfortunately Phil Karlson never got the credit for it because I’ve never been a publicity hound.’ Shame, modesty or self-preservation? Karlson’s films have had their political detractors, while the crime films have been damned and praised for their violence.

     Initially Karlson was a left-wing filmmaker who liked filming in natural settings. His black-and-white crime films were made during five years at the height of McCarthyism. Emerging from that dark passage, he consigned his gangsters to tv and replaced them with juvenile delinquents, surfers and even stranger ‘gangs’ during the Vietnam years, although the paranoia induced by the witch hunts never receded. ‘We’ve all had to make compromises,’ Richard Widmark’s sold-out Cold Warrior says to the Hungarian freedom fighters who just beat him to a pulp in THE SECRET WAYS.

     Karlson once said in an interview that he liked having three acts in a movie, omitting to stipulate that each act should be completely different from the others. This the first rule for understanding the most mysterious cinematic signature of the postwar era, and it applies to that signature’s surprising history too. Just leave your preconceptions about Phil Karlson, that phantom, at the door.

Monogram

     Born in Chicago in 1908, Philip Karlson, nee Karlstein, was half-Jewish and half-Irish (cf. THERE GOES KELLY). His mother was an actress from the Abbey Players in Dublin who became a star on the Yiddish stage in America. He inherited her artistic bent and studied painting at The Chicago Art Institute, but his father insisted he get a law degree at a California college. Doing odd jobs at Universal while studying, he rose through the ranks assisting on films ranging from Abbot and Costello comedies to A pictures with Marlene Dietrich.

     We lose track of him between 1941 and 1944, when he reappears with A WAVE, A WAC AND A MARINE, his first film as a director and the first of fifteen films he made for Monogram, the B-movie company to which Godard dedicated BREATHLESS. Anonymously produced by Lou Costello, Karlson’s Brechtian clown-show about the relationship between Hollywood and the war soared over the heads of Monogram’s rural audiences. So instead of making THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and DETECTIVE STORY, he would make KILROY WAS HERE, about a man haunted by a ridiculous wartime phantom, and THE MISSING LADY, a dirty Borgesian romp where the characters occasionally use the camera as a mirror to check their appearance.

     Monogram took the name Allied Artists for the first time to distribute BLACK GOLD, which Karlson filmed for a year on location between shooting cheapies in Hollywood to get the colors of the seasons right. The company took the name again to release PHENIX CITY STORY, becoming a powerhouse independent after that success, then another true story, HELL TO ETERNITY, in 1960. Only the studio where Karlson learned how to throw in a burlesque number to keep the second act from flagging would release a film where Act 1 is the internment of Japanese-Americans, Act 2 an orgy in Honolulu, and Act 3 the mass suicide of Japanese soldiers at Iwo Jima. During Act 2 Karlson’s camera, in the midst of war, tracks the libidinal currents in a room the way John Cassavetes would in FACES.

Exterieur nuit

     The last film Karlson made for Monogram before the start of the Cold War was LOUISIANA (1947), starring the Singing Governor, Jimmy Davis, and a rainbow of Southern musicians playing themselves and filmed in the locations where Davis had risen to power from a sharecropper’s cabin. Besides inventing the form Karlson would use in PHENIX CITY STORY, LOUISIANA introduced him to the South, a rich terrain for correcting the commercial miscalculation of A WAVE, A WAC AND A MARINE.

     This was accompanied by the switch to location filming in natural settings for BLACK GOLD, then in the programmers Karlson made in the 50s, often for independent producer Edward Small. In the 50s westerns the exuberant colorist’s palette darkens into the shades of film noir, while he indulges his love of Technicolor with romances set in the past but haunted by the same contemporary themes: conspiracy, men framed for treason, spies, imprisonment, the third degree, secrets passed to the enemy and other facts of life during the Red Scare.

     Karlson’s scenes of sudden violence are already above and beyond the call of genre – there’s an out-of-frame castration in THE TEXAS RANGERS! – although he learned at Monogram that less is more and never forgot it: a hat repeatedly knocked off, a sweater or petticoat ripped (KEY WITNESS, A TIME FOR KILLING) can be as jolting in the hands of a master as torture or rape.

     The violence escalated in the 50s, climaxing when the head of the Production Code Office wrote a letter after Allied Artists ignored five memos from his staff, asking ‘as a personal favor’ that ‘the shot of the tire rolling over the little Negro girl’s head be removed’ from the PHENIX CITY STORY script. But while the Code had kept Karlson from reenacting Huey Long’s assassination in LOUISIANA, now he would show the assassination of a political reform candidate in chilling detail, with the actor wearing the dead man’s clothes.

     The heroes of Karlson’s crime films make a stand to rally the community to the Law – they are opposed to vigilantism. Lynchings were on the rise in the South because of the civil rights movement, and Karlson had been a militant anti-racist since BLACK GOLD, where he told the true story of a horse owned by Native-Americans that won the Kentucky Derby, and added a Chinese jockey for good measure.

     The shadows that enfold KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL and 99 RIVER STREET are replaced by the sunbleached surfaces of the Alabama city where the Army battled the Mob in PHENIX CITY STORY, and that Sunbelt Noir look was kept for crime films made on location in Miami, Reno and Los Angeles. While those films are fictions, they scooped the A-picture competition on PTSD (5 AGAINST THE HOUSE), police torture (KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL) and witness sequestration (TIGHT SPOT). Later Karlson’s brutal actioners (particularly BEN, the sequel to WILLARD) would hold a mirror up to the impact on America of the Vietnamese War of Liberation.

Who is Phil Karlson? 

     To interpret this sinuous path we have to go to the films themselves, because Karlson moved through six decades of Hollywood history without leaving many traces, while assembling a cadre of collaborators and a galaxy of performers that makes Six Degrees of Phil Karlson the movie trivia game for the new millennium.

     Another cloudy portrait can be assembled from all the material memes – gadgets, tricks and gags – that recur without ever becoming themes. The geek in Karlson demanded real gadgets for his Bond parodies when the opposite would seem to be called for, but the modesty of the portable helicopter that is assembled and flown in THE WRECKING CREW makes its own comment on the competition.

     Our man loves technological progress, especially in the media. Telephone and radio; telegram and teletype; tape recorders; computers; television (and telethons!); phone tapping and surveillance screens are deployed as tools for the characters to communicate with, no social comment intended. The cinema of an artisan who doesn’t want to be known as an artist.

     Whatever he was doing during the war, this born filmmaker saw CITIZEN KANE and used brightly-lit deep-focus sets with white walls in his first film, which pits the entire Jewish burlesque tradition against the influence of Welles. Without abandoning his love of comedy teams and black music, Karlson subsequently identified with Welles’ master, John Ford (the Irish blood), and made THE BIG CAT (‘my answer to THE GRAPES OF WRATH’), which supplied the template for powerful social melodramas like GUNMAN’S WALK and THE YOUNG DOCTORS. After conquering the majors he returned to independent production and the landscapes of the South for WALKING TALL and FRAMED, and they made him a wealthy man.

     The formal system he invented at Monogram took the ostentatious use of deep focus (for example, young Charlie Kane seen through the window in the snow) and made it invisible by creating a little hole in the image, usually directly over the vanishing point, to isolate a piece of the background. Menaces, sexual opportunities, icons, paintings, phantoms, obtuse senses – an endless array of objects appear in The Hole. Its little music helps reduce the need for shot-reverse shot editing (that famous Karlson ‘speed’) and summons up a camera that becomes a mirror for the characters (literally in THE MISSING LADY, THE BRIGAND and THE BROTHERS RICO) in the offspace it projects.

     This means Karlson’s films are documentaries about their stars (Leo Gorcey, Thunderhoof, Dean Martin) made in complicity with them (Anthony Quinn and Katherine DeMille acting their marriage, Kay Francis playing a contented lesbian, Richard Widmark doing comedy, Dennis Hopper spouting poetic jive talk, Patricia Owens stripping). Sometimes the painter puts Hollywood fauna like Brad Dexter and Evelyn Keyes, or a big cat, next to the star to make the portrait more lifelike, and the mirror also captures magical presences: Sabu at 39, Ginger Rogers at 44. But a mirror leaves no recollection after we see ourselves in it, so Phil Karlson passed through Hollywood without being seen or remembered, until now.



                                             Bill Krohn

My thanks to Andy Rector, Aaron Graham and the late Michael Henri Wilson, PHILologue extraordinaire. 

(Still: SHANGHAI COBRA [Karlson, 1945])