INTIMATE ENEMIES (L'Ennemi Intime, 2007)

France has had a problem with Muslims dating back to the Battle of Tours, when Charles Martel repelled Islam from the high-water mark of its eighth-century incursion into western Europe. A millennium later, France was on the offensive. The conquest of Algeria began in 1830. For France it became a true colony, a place for French people to settle in and virtually an extension of the French homeland. The war for Algerian independence began in the 1950s. I would call it France's Vietnam except that France had its own Vietnam before we Americans did. Yet the Algerian conflict arguably caused even more trauma in France than the Vietnam conflict did in the U.S. In France, reactionaries conspired to overthrow the government rather than accept negotiations leading to Algerian independence. Despite their fury, independence came in 1962.

At one time, we might have been expected to root for France in the conflict and see them as the standard-bearers of civilization and modernity. Today, we're more likely expected to root for the Algerians because, after all, it was their country. Yet Florent Emilio Siri's L'Ennemi Intime finds little to choose from between the French and the FLN or the fellaghin fighters in the countryside. On this film's evidence, Algeria endured not so much a war for independence as two factions of thugs battling to rule a passive majority without caring much for them. Intimate Enemies has no heroes, though it may seem reactionary in its refusal to concede much moral ground to the Algerians. Both sides commit atrocities on both small and large scales, torturing individuals and massacring entire villages. The civilian villager is forced to choose between terror and terror and pays dearly for the wrong choice. Islam has little to do with it all, from what we can tell, since the FLN, like many Third World insurgencies of the era, were secular and socialistic. In time, they would have to deal with a true Islamist insurgency against their "people's government," characterized by the same sort of massacres we see in the movie. Siri's film shows terror stripped of its religious trappings and its nationalist romance. It's a powerful anti-war film for that reason.

Intimate Enemies has a conventional story at its core: the new, green officer arrives in the "forbidden zone" and has his ideals shattered by the savagery of counterinsurgent warfare. The contrast between naivete and ruthless realism isn't absolute, however. The new lieutenant succumbs to the temptation of terror, while the hard-headed sergeant (a Vietnam vet) feels an empathic guilt that drives him to subject himself to the same torture he inflicts on the enemy.

The film really lives up to its title in its portrayal of Algerians fighting alongside the French. We're reminded that many fighting for and against France in 1959 had fought for France -- Free France, that is -- during World War II. The most detailed and complex of the Algerian characters is Danoun, a scarred veteran of the assault on Monte Cassino in Italy. He's an irreconcilable enemy of the fellaghin because the insurgents massacred his village and his family. When the French respect a captured fellaghin who had also fought at Monte Cassino, Danoun, who had struck up a friendly chat with the prisoner earlier, shoots him in the back when the French officers are willing to let him go. Nothing else matters than his current grudge against the fellaghin, yet he proves something of a coward in battle conditions, and when the sergeant orders him at gunpoint to crank up the electricity so the sarge can experience torture, Danoun seems as much tortured by fear and anguish as the sergeant is by the voltage.

While Danoun remains loyal throughout, other natives waver. One seemingly reliable scout seems to go over to the fellaghin, apparently disgusted by a napalm strike, only to be tortured and left for the French to finish off for mercy's sake. A boy becomes the sole survivor of a massacre by fellaghin by hiding in a well; rescued by the French, he becomes a mascot for our main characters, only to turn fellaghin after witnessing another massacre, this time by the French, and the torturing to death of an old man by the once-idealist lieutenant. None of these characters seems imbued by any overriding national consciousness. Each has all too personal reasons for choosing or switching sides. The French, of course, have no choice of sides, though one of our main soldiers chooses another option to quit the war altogether. For French and Algerians alike, the war is a personal ordeal, traumatically different if not unique for each fighting man. Flags and slogans offer neither solace nor escape.

Nearby Morocco substitutes for Algeria and offers Siri and cinematographer Giovanni Fiore Coltellaci an epic landscape against which to shoot their intimate war drama. Siri stages some decent action scenes emphasizing the chaos and panic of guerrilla combat as nature in the form of trees or sheep gets in the way of the combatants. The acting ensemble is solid with Mohammed Fellag as Danoun the standout performer. In some ways L'Ennemi Intime is a generic war film, very much like an American Vietnam film without the jungle or the rock soundtrack. But seeing a generic story in a fresh setting can help us see the whole genre with fresh eyes. The Algerian war is so unfamiliar to most global viewers that Intimate Enemies seems less like a generic war film or a transplanted 'Nam film. That allows us to see war here the way the auteurs see it, and few war films I've seen from any country emphasize as strongly as Siri does how each soldier, despite being part of an army and representing a nation, is morally and psychologically on his own.

SOLOMON KANE (2009)

The Puritan wanderer Solomon Kane was one of the early creations of the short-lived, now legendary pulp writer Robert E. Howard, predating Conan the Barbarian in print by four years. In the movies, more than a quarter-century passed after the first Conan movie before Solomon Kane made it to the big screen, and then three more years passed before Michael J. Bassett's Euro production was released in Howard's homeland. At first glance, the picture owes its existence less to John Milius's Conan the Barbarian than it does to Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean. I don't mean to suggest that Bassett's film is a comedy -- it takes itself very seriously -- but the Pirates films made the 17th century setting of the Kane stories a safe period to set a fantasy film in. In fact, Solomon Kane takes inspiration from many sources. Some of the interior sets and creature designs may remind you of Pan's Labyrinth, while some of the outdoor action suggests Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. A scene in which Kane (James Purefoy) is crucified will even remind you of the Milius Conan, if not of another 1982 film, The Sword and the Sorcerer, in which the hero decrucifies himself. Alas, it can't live up to that picture's glorious idiotic moment when the hero leaps off his cross, catches a sword in mid-air, and goes to work slaying his enemies. Instead, Kane bellows with rage and flops into the mud.

It might be argued that writer-director Bassett takes influences from everywhere but the Howard stories, but we have to concede that Bassett got the look of the character pretty much right. Like Milius's Conan, Bassett's Kane doesn't adapt a particular Howard story. Instead, Bassett gives us an overdetermined origin story, and while Milius's film is also an origin, it had the simplicity of a revenge tale as well, while Bassett ensnares himself in nearly every origin-story plot thread that could be imagined. For starters, it's a tale of redemption, starting with Kane as a freebooter sacking a North African fortress, only to find himself attacked by a Devil's Reaper claiming his soul. His narrow escape leads Kane to seek shelter in a monastery, adopting ways of peace in the belief that the devil will take him should he ever kill again. But Solomon Kane is also about "fathers and sons," but more about sibling rivalry. Flashbacks reveal that Solomon, the second son of honorary Englishman (and Conan alumnus) Max Von Sydow -- is it that the great Swede now speaks the language better than most natives, or do some people think he is English? --  was to be relegated to the priesthood (a dangerous profession in Elizabethan England) but ran away from home after accidentally shoving his bully of an older brother off a cliff. This pretty much gives away the identity of the bad guy stomping around in a leather mask, but Bassett muddles things by insisting that this menace is only a minion of the real big-bad, the priest-turned-sorcerer Malachi (Jason Flemyng), whom we don't even see until the film's last act. His face is tattooed with Latin script in another apparent homage to the Milius Conan, and that's the most interesting thing about him. He ends up overshadowed not just by Solomon's final duel with his brother, who gets set on fire during the fight, and by his own summoning of a giant fire demon out of a mirror. Needless to say, by now Solomon has done a lot of killing, but he's been assured by the dying vow of the late Pete Postlethwaite that any killing he does to save Pete's daughter is O.K. with God.

Is there an original idea to be found in Solomon Kane? It seems not, though there are a few creatively directed moments. One of the best, it turns out, is a tangent from the main story in which Solomon encounters a minister whose congregation has been cursed by Malachi and transformed into flesh-eating subhumans. The slow torchlit reveal of the lot of them, both sexes bald and greenish in the light, packed in a cellar beneath a trapdoor, is the most genuinely creepy moment in the picture. The main story is a dispiriting muddle of "begins" cliches, again begging the question of why modern movie audiences supposedly can't accept the idea of a hero walking the earth without knowing how or why he does so, or being reassured somehow that he is reluctant, conflicted, etc. To my knowledge, Robert E. Howard never felt a need to account for Solomon Kane's childhood or family rivalries. Bassett's attempt to do so doesn't enhance the legend but serves only to make his film more like all the other modern films that find heroism so exceptional that it must be explained by factors other than a commitment to justice or the common good. This grows tiresome and seems to reflect a distrust of moral certainty, if not heroism itself, at least among self-styled creators. There's certainly room for skepticism about moral certainty (or certitude) in movies, but by now it's gotten monotonous. Solomon Kane is itself a monotonous picture, more often merely miserable than spooky and too predictable to be epic. The picture isn't awful, but it's disappointingly uninspired and a disservice to Robert E. Howard's legacy.

Depression Fighters: THE PRIZEFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1933) and CARNERA THE WALKING MOUNTAIN (2008)

When I first saw Wilson Yip's martial arts biopic Ip Man (2008), the film's backdrop of economic deprivation during the 1930s immediately reminded me of Cinderella Man (2005), Ron Howard's Depression-set biopic of boxer James J. Braddock. If three films make a genre, then Renzo Martinelli's 2008 biopic consolidates a global "Depression fighter" genre and simultaneously achieves the genre's reductio ad absurdam. If, after watching Ip Man, I had concluded, "Any country can do this!" I would have balked at Italy's turn. That country's combat-sport hero of the era was Primo Carnera, a figure for whom the "print the legend" approach probably isn't an option. The legend of Primo Carnera, after all, is that he was a fake, a bum, a talentless lummox whose path to the heavyweight championship was paved with fixed fights and whose reign ended the moment he met a real fighter in a real fight. The legend was locked in place by the 1956 movie The Harder They Fall, which didn't fool Carnera by making its dumb-ox patsy a South American, yet casting Carnera's real-life nemesis Max Baer as the fighter who destroys Humphrey Bogart's hapless protege. Carnera reportedly sued the producers for defamation, but another half-century would pass before anyone attempted a cinematic rehabilitation of the fighter's reputation. In Martinelli's account, Carnera (Andrea Iaia)is a guileless giant who can and would fight for real and takes offense when his initial manager (F. Murray Abraham) pays his first foes to take dives in order to protect his novice prospect. That Carnera could do real damage is indisputable; at least one opponent died after fighting him. While some historians suspect that the fix was in when Carnera beat Jack Sharkey for the crown in 1933, The Walking Mountain (a mundane rendering of his more alliteratively lively nickname, "the Ambling Alp") portrays the fight as an honest triumph for its hero.

Walking Mountain stresses how Carnera inspired pride in Italians and Italian-Americans (and spared his children the poverty he suffered in childhood; an epilogue notes that two junior Carneras grew up to be doctors) but avoids engagement with the political implications of that fame. Martinelli doctors newsreel footage to show his Carnera alongside Mussolini and has the actor give the Fascist salute in the ring, but these are just matters of period detail for the director -- one wonders how the dreaded Uwe Boll handled the political angle in his 2010 Max Schmeling biopic, for comparison's sake. Carnera suffers, I think, from ignoring politics simply because there has to be a political context in the global boxing ring when Carnera, representing Fascist Italy, Schmeling, representing first Weimar and then Nazi Germany, and Max Baer, a Jewish-American who wore the Star of David on his trunks, all wore the championship belt. I'm not saying poor naive Primo has to answer for Mussolini's crimes, but I do feel that the political drama of the period would add to the drama of the fights, as it does when filmmakers contemplate the rivalry of Schmeling and Joe Louis. And Walking Mountain can use all the dramatic help it can get. Martinelli doesn't do a very good job with the fight scenes. His staging of the Carnera-Sharkey fight is less dramatic than the actual newsreel footage. In filming the climactic Carnera-Baer bout he falls between two stools, unable to decide, it seems, whether Rocky or Raging Bull should be his model. The beating Carnera takes at Baer's hands ought to be a moment of supreme comeuppance, like Jake LaMotta's last fight with Sugar Ray Robinson in the Scorsese film, but Martinelli is incapable of investing the action with anything like Raging Bull's thematic force, much less Scorsese's expressionistic exaggerations. In part that's because Martinelli wants to emphasize Carnera's courage and perseverance under extreme adversity as the champ struggles to fight with an injured ankle while Baer gets away with all manner of dirty tactics. Nor, despite some scenes when Carnera is mean to his wife, do we get the feeling that Primo has this beating coming, especially since we understand him to be innocent of all the chicanery that advanced him early. Overall, Martinelli seems more interested in making a period piece by artificially aging or decolorizing his footage than in making his story more than a collection of fight-film cliches. But he doesn't even get the period right all the time. One anachronistic scene shows the filming of a TV preview of the Carnera-Sharkey fight of 1933 -- a year when TV was still almost purely experimental.

One angle Martinelli might have worked was whether fame went to Carnera's head. It would have been interesting, given the importance of Carnera's rivalry with Baer, had Martinelli done something with the two fighters filming W. S. Van Dyke's The Prizefighter and the Lady in Hollywood before their title fight. In the M-G-M production, Carnera plays himself as the heavyweight champion, while Baer plays a toned-down (and anglicized?) version of himself as "Steve Morgan." Reportedly, Baer was so impressed with himself as an actor that he wore Steve Morgan's robe to the ring for his real fight with Carnera, months after they filmed a kind of pre-enactment of the battle for the movie. Baer was already considered the top contender after having KO'd Schmeling, and Prizefighter has to be considered a unique instance of using a fictional film to promote a real-life fight. In fact, the film plays out like a Bizarro-world version of the historic bout, with Baer's Morgan taking a massive beating at Carnera's hands as a kind of Scorsesean comeuppance for the fictional character's arrogance and his betrayals of a long-suffering wife played by Myrna Loy. But before it ends the fight becomes more Rocky than Raging Bull -- as is usual with fight films -- as Steve Morgan mounts a major comeback once his spurned, sometimes-sozzled manager (Walter Huston, here billed below Carnera and ex-champ Jack Dempsey) and his still-faithful wife give him their tactical and moral support. It's an original-style Rocky finish -- the fight is a draw and Carnera retains the title, but is treated as a victory for Morgan. It was really the only finish the film could have. I can't see either fighter agreeing to appear if the script had one of them losing.

The Max Baer biopic is an event waiting to happen. His reign as champion has been bracketed by two other pictures, Walking Mountain and Cinderella Man, both of which portray Baer as a boorish, brutish villain -- though the Carnera picture has the bad guy gain respect its hero in the approved Apollo Creed manner. You'd think someone would want to make a picture about a proud Jew who beat the crap out of a "Nazi" and a "Fascist," yet the consensus of filmmakers who've actually used Baer as a character is that he was a creep, a jerk, an asshole who could kill people with his gloved hands. For all I know, the Carnera-Baer fight was the only heavyweight title match pitting two fighters credited -- if that's the right word -- with killing opponents against each other. The filmed record shows that Baer was a dirty fighter and a supreme trash-talker and taunter. He does not seem to have been a nice man. Yet he was considered handsome for a fighter, especially by contrast with Carnera, and M-G-M thought they could make him a sex symbol. According to one contemporary report, Clark Gable was originally slated to star in Prizefighter until someone from the studio saw the Baer-Schmeling fight. The promotion for the picture heavily emphasized Baer's sex appeal, as did the fighter himself. He pitied the German women who were unable to see him on film after the Nazis banned the picture.

As an actor, Baer makes an honest try and isn't awful, but he lacks essential movie-star charisma. His face and voice simply aren't expressive enough, though his arrogant personality sometimes shines through. He isn't helped by a corny rise-fall-and-rise story and the hackneyed heart-interest elements. There's a weak subplot featuring Otto Kruger as history's least assertive gangster, the Loy character's erstwhile boyfriend and employer who supposedly has a hate on for Steve Morgan yet can't motivate himself to do anything about it. His idea of ultimate vengeance is to invest in the promotion of the Carnera-Morgan fight so that Loy will see her hubby humiliated and abandon him. But he's still an old softy, unwilling to take what he thinks is his, and where's the fun in that? Fortunately, Van Dyke milks the climactic fight for maximum drama, starting with a slow build-up, Madison Square Garden style, to establish authenticity. He films the entire ritual of the ring announcer introducing the judges, the timekeeper and the old-time fighters (including a professional wrestler, Strangler Lewis, clearly regarded as the boxers' peer) before the fighters arrive. The director makes Carnera look as powerful as the fighter probably ever did; taking deep breaths with a massive chest and with his arms stretched over the ropes between rounds, he looks like he should have broken Baer in half in real life. It goes to show that looks aren't everything.

Apart from the fight, the highlight of the picture is Max Baer's big musical number. Prizefighter is a semi-musical -- Loy gets to sing (or lip-synch?) two songs -- and part of Steve Morgan's decadence is his decision to go on a vaudeville tour. There's something surreal about the concept; this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about what a fighter shouldn't do, but by filming it over a period of weeks in Hollywood, Baer is doing in real life what the film says his fictional self shouldn't do. As for his big number, "Lucky Fella" isn't as blatantly lewd or as relentless a parade of flesh as many Pre-Code spectaculars, but it's rather suggestive in its energetic way. The star is supported by perhaps the most athletic cohort of chorines assembled in the era for a satire on the rigors of a training camp. Van Dyke takes an anti-Berkeley approach to the scene, emphasizing the stagy artifice for added amusement as Baer and his harem run frantically in place, the girls collapsing one by one as the landscape rotates past them, symbolizing the hero's sexual prowess until a final girl defies the odds -- but look at the damn thing yourselves. MaxiesGal uploaded this priceless clip to YouTube.



A Baer biopic would almost be worth it just to have someone recreate this scene. But we're more likely to see Spike Lee finally film his and Budd Schulberg's Joe Louis screenplay -- Schulberg wrote the story for The Harder They Fall, by the way -- before anyone tells Baer's side of the story. Maybe Max Jr., the erstwhile Jethro Bodine, has the rights tied up. But if there's an interest in the ways mighty men survived hard times by fighting, there should be a market for Max Baer, warts and all. I suppose we like these boxing (or martial arts) stories because, unlike the stories of stars of team sports, they're all about individual accomplishment. In a way, a fighter is the ultimate self-made man, even when surrounded by managers, trainers, family etc. As such, he may be a special symbol of hope in tough times. He inspires even as he loses, even when he loses badly, as long as he doesn't stop trying -- or so filmmakers always hope.

UNITED RED ARMY (2007): "There's no such thing as an anti-revolutionary cookie!"

In recent years, filmmakers from around the world have been probing the minds and motivations of the violent radicals of the generation before violent radicalism was identified with Islam. Koji Wakamatsu's three-hour epic belongs in the same category with Olivier Assayas's Carlos, Uli Edel's Baader-Meinhof Complex and similar subjects, and falls in between those two in terms of length. United Red Army is probably the most horrific of these films and the most discrediting toward leftist extremism -- as long as you take the atrocities presented as characteristic of extreme leftism.

Wakamatsu takes time getting going because he needs to present the political context that makes the story plausible. Like similar groups around the world, the United Red Army (I'll spare you the details of its institutional evolution) arose from anti-imperialist anger against the American war in Vietnam, and from specific Japanese anger at their own government's complicity in the war. Like the Weather Underground, the URA was a fringe extracted from a mass movement through a commitment to "all-out war" against the establishment. They were the people presumably most frustrated at communist parties' failure to spark popular revolution or even seize power through a coup d'etat, and the most likely to take their frustration out on each other. The joie de vivre and solidarity of youthful idealistic radicalism curdles into holier-than-thou recrimination and an overpowering urge to see someone punished for everyone's sins.

One reason the first hour seems slow is because it takes a long time for our main cast to make the cut, so to speak, as early members are captured or killed by the authorities. It could be frustrating to see characters introduced who seem to be important, only to see them end up in jail or fleeing the country. One attractive woman seems set to be the primary character, only to depart for Lebanon; we learn later that she survived the decades to officially disband the URA in the 21st century. But this is all necessary to see how power ends up in the hands of a singularly unworthy individual by default. Tsuneo Mori (Go Jibiki) is shown chickening out of an early action and exiling himself to a backwater town to be a labor organizer. He is forgiven and invited to rejoin as a common soldier because the rapidly-depleted revolutionary bands need manpower. As more leaders are caught, Mori rises to the top, where his presumably guilty conscience leads him to become a pitiless judge of everyone else's revolutionary inadequacies. He makes a point of saying that other people's records of actual activity or heroism won't count in the future. All that seems to matter, once the URA settles in for a Valley Forge-like winter in the mountains, is that revolutionary communists "self-criticize" at the drop of a hat.

 

If Mori or his eventual consort Hiroko Nagata (the austerely yet demonically beautiful Akie Namiki) isn't satisfied with the detail or sincerity of the self-critique, it's up to the whole URA to break down the recalcitrants' resistance by physically beating them down. At this point, in the arduous central act of the picture, the Army seems less like a revolutionary cell and more like a cult -- I'll leave it to the political philosophers to clarify the distinction. If you don't join in beating someone, you become suspect and subject to beatings. If you stupidly play along and confess to some personal ambition, Mori hypocritically labels you a "Stalinist" and has you put to death. More horrific yet than outright murder is the punishment meted out to Mieko Toyami (Maki Sakai), a good-natured, slightly frivolous revolutionary who's clearly out of her depth in military training. Her supposed vanity -- demonstrated by brushing her long hair -- provokes lethal hostility compounded by contempt in Nagata. When Toyami cluelessly confesses that she doesn't really understand what's required in a self-criticism, but is willing to do one because she wants to live, even that's the wrong answer. Wanting to live is counter-revolutionary. But the leaders accommodate her at first by allowing her to do a self-criticsm by dragging the body of a previous victim (all of whom, it must be understood, actually died of "defeatism") and digging a grave for it. It isn't enough; Nagata and Mori goad her into doing a true self-criticsm, without "help" from the rest of the gang, by beating her own face into a bloody pulp. In a moment of sadism, Nagata then mockingly puts a mirror in Toyami's face. Her face and hands ruined, Toyami is tied to a post and left to die deliriously despite Mori's command to shut the fuck up. In the end, history and the film tell us, the URA killed nearly half its own members, 12 out of 29, over the winter of 1971-2.

The final act begins with the URA's dispersal from winter quarters. Mori and Nagata manage to get captured, presumably without a fight, while another band makes a desperate march across a snowy mountain. Wakamatsu shows us the faces of all those killed as this band struggles on, as if to say that their comeuppance is imminent. Actually, it isn't. A handful of survivors invade a household and take a woman hostage, holding out for days against an eventual police siege. A break in the revolutionary tension finally comes when one idiot dares criticize another for taking an extra cookie from the confiscated stores. The guilty one has finally had enough of the insanity, protesting, "There's no such thing as an anti-revolutionary cookie." But the ultimate confession, perhaps the one real self-criticism in the group's history, comes as the band prepares for a last police attack. They start to talk about owing a brave sacrifice to all their lost comrades, as if they themselves, for never resisting Mori and Nagata, were not responsible for all those deaths. Finally, one of them breaks down and denounces the lot, including himself, for having been cowards all along. They are all taken alive. Mori found it in himself to commit suicide in 1973, while Nagata died in prison less than a year ago, after nearly forty years in captivity.

United Red Army can't help raising the old question of whether there's something inherently murderous about Marxism-Leninism, and parts of it could well be run on Fox News as proof for the proposition. But the film itself is a vindication of nothing. If anything, Wakamatsu appears to agree that the leftists were right in their original protests against imperialism. What happened afterward may be as much a question of cult dynamics as of ideology. In any event, to state the obvious, this sort of vanguardism is no substitute for a popular mass revolutionary movement, however necessary a vanguard may seem to be for the existence of such a movement. But enough of politics. If you can get past the dry docudrama newsreel-fueled opening, Wakamatsu's film becomes a powerful and often visually striking film that makes the most of locations including the director's own home. Heretofore, Wakamatsu has been more a cult than canon director in America, best know for sex-and-violence films like Go Go Second-Time Virgin. United Red Army represents a dramatic rise in stature in his mid-seventies, late in a long career. Like his peers in the failed-revolutionary genre, Wakamatsu has told a necessary tragedy, forcing our attention to a subject that requires the attention of intelligent, conscientious people. Whether you conclude that the URA's means discredit their ends, or that the idea is still good but desperately requires different means, United Red Army is one of a class of movies that might be considered objectively indispensible.

Wendigo Meets DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE AND THE VOIVODE (2009)

When I told my friend Wendigo about a new Dracula documentary available for streaming on Netflix, we both felt it would be interesting to check it out as a kind of update of the 1970s book tie-in documentary In Search of Dracula. That earlier film was virtually a Mondo Dracula from the golden age of exploitation documentaries that could be sold as a virtual horror movie thanks to Christopher Lee's participation. The new film from Michael Bayley Hughes is both more modest and more ambitious, claiming to be the first movie that tells the true stories of both Bram Stoker and his subject. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller appears on screen frequently and was a script consultant; her participation made it credible for Wendigo, who has corresponded with Miller. There's still something of the Mondo method to this movie. It travels to the novel's locations, from the Borgo Pass to Whitby, and lingers in Romania to investigate the Dracula-centered tourist industry that's grown there since In Search of Dracula was made and Communism fell. Like many a Mondo movie, it has an eye for the tellingly tacky and sometimes salacious detail. Those bits may make the film entertaining for those who find its main storyline a little dry.

Wendigo wants to send a shout-out to his virtual friend Elizabeth Miller.

Under Miller's influence, Hughes takes the anti-In Search of Dracula approach, refusing to equate Stoker's character with the historical voivode Vlad Tepes. He emphasizes the shallowness of Stoker's research and his creation of a fantastical Transylvania that Romania has a hard time living up to. Hughes practices biographical criticism on Dracula, stressing how Stoker's personal experiences before his research for the novel shaped some of its scenes and moods. Wendigo found a lot of Hughes's interpretations tentative or merely conjectural. The filmmaker proposes that many events "may have" influenced Stoker without really nailing down any proof, from a legend about poet Christina Rosseti's wondrously preserved corpse to the mummies kept in an overrated state of preservation in a church near one of his homes. This sort of stuff is inevitable in almost every literary biography these days, but Wendigo was at least happy that Hughes got the key point right about Dracula and Vlad.

Bram Stoker is remembered by a Whitby re-enactor (above) and a Romanian hotel (below)

But there wouldn't be much of a movie if they didn't talk about Vlad at all. Wendigo found the Romanian half of the picture "interesting but odd." Again, Hughes scrupulously distinguishes the fictional vampire from the famous voivode. It seems, however, that the Romanian tourist history makes no such distinction. Stoker draws tourists there, and they honor the author with a statue for that, but they exploit the interest in Dracula by selling Vlad paraphernalia. Wendigo finds that a sad way for Romania to sell out their own history, and we suspect that Hughes shares Wendigo's point of view. The director focuses on the vulgar in time-honored Mondo fashion, from voivode knicknacks and mugs to the Miss Transylvania beauty contest in Bistrita. There's also some of the same sort of peasant footage we got in In Search of Dracula, with Hughes stressing how the peasantry is still largely unchanged since the Seventies.

Faces of Transylvania

Overall, Wendigo was underwhelmed by Vampire and the Voivode as a movie. It's informative enough, especially on Stoker, but given the film's own ballyhoo it has surprisingly little to say about the actual writing of Dracula. Hughes neglects to mention one of the by-now best known tidbits about Stoker, his modeling of the vampire on his employer, the Victorian master thespian Henry Irving, and ignores Stoker's own account of an erotic dream that inspired the episode of Dracula's brides. We both objected to the claim that no other work of Stoker's endures, when movies have been made of at least two other novels -- and more than one from The Jewel of Seven Stars. Visually, Hughes went easy on re-enactments. His attempts are so minimal as to be funny, consisting of a guy dressed up as Vlad striking poses and an elderly, confused-seeming man wandering around with a candelabra in a supposed recreation of a scene from the novel. The picture is heavy on talking heads, some adding to the amusement by dressing in costume like Harry Collett as a Whitby coachman, but few apart from Miller really added to its credibility.

Wendigo found V&V in many respects less scholarly than In Search of Dracula, if more respectable in its conclusions. He would have liked more readings from Dracula or from chronicles of Vlad, but for whatever reason V&V was surprisingly lacking in these. Intellectually, Wendigo's more in a agreement with this movie, but he still considers In Search Of the more entertaining film. Either way, the definitive documentary about Dracula as a historical and cultural phenomenon remains to be made.

Wendigo Meets THE COUNTESS (Die Graefin, 2009)

In modern folklore, Erzsebet Bathory is the female Dracula, the "Blood Countess." In history, the Hungarian noble was accused of shedding the blood of innocent girls to retain or regain her youthful beauty, not by drinking the stuff but by bathing in it. In fiction, she has been imagined countless times as a blood-drinking vampire, a force of evil persisting into the present day. In cinema, the past decade has seen a point-counterpoint debate over the historical countess's character. Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory, which Wendigo and I haven't seen yet, portrays its heroine (according to reviews) as a misunderstood Renaissance woman and a victim of chauvinism and superstition. In the following year, Julie Delpy, best known in the U.S. as the co-star of Beyond Sunrise and Beyond Sunset, released her version, an all-out auteur attack -- she wrote and directed the film and composed its score while playing the title role, -- that has it both ways to an extent. Delpy's Bathory is a victim, but also a victimizer, an aristocratic woman of her time if not ahead of it. We watched it last weekend on a Netflix stream.
In Delpy's account, Erzsebet was acclimated to cruelty at an early age, compelled to watch peasants being beaten and convinced that people deserved harsh punishments. It's not a big deal while she stewards her husband's lands (and apparently enjoys the love of a local witch) while he fights the Turks, but upon his death she begins to feel anxious. She's courted by another powerful noble, Count Thurzo (William Hurt), who covets her lands, but she covets Thurzo's son (Daniel Bruehl). The boy seems to love her sincerely, or at least with the naive ardor of youth, but dad's having none of it and sends the kid off to Denmark. He convinces Bathory that the boy had abandoned her for another, younger woman, making her hypesensitive about her looks.

Erzsebet takes her frustrations out on her servants -- and after beating one girl with a hairbrush she becomes convinced that the blood splashing on her face has softened her wrinkles. Her witch companion sees no such improvement, but the countess won't be dissuaded. Delpy has shown us that she saw an image of exaggerated aging in her mirror before; now the compensatory illusion launches her on a course of infamy. While the film is narrated by young Thurzo, who tells us only that he has heard or read many stories, we seem to be getting Delpy's objective account of what happened. In that account, Bathory becomes a torturer and murderer, but you can also see how the pressures of her political situation (she must keep an army in the field without compensation from the twittish King of Hungary) and the habits of aristocracy molded a woman who might have turned out differently in other circumstances. Delpy takes the legend to its conclusion, with the condemned countess walled into her bedroom, and adds a closing twist: the only time Bathory actually bites someone to draw blood, the victim is herself....

While The Countess is no vampire film by any stretch of imagination, Wendigo wanted to make it part of the series exactly because of Bathory's close linkage to vampire lore and literature going back to Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla and beyond. Dracula maven Raymond McNally has even argued that Bathory, rather than Vlad Tepes, may have been more influential on Bram Stoker's imagination via Carmilla. Delpy briefly teases that a decadent aristocrat who seduces, then submits to Bathory may be a real vampire -- his family is at least the subject of vampiric speculation -- but she isn't out to foreshadow any future vampiric career for the Countess. Nevertheless, since Bathory is a proto-vampire in the popular mind, any Bathory film is virtually a vampire movie.

Since we haven't seen the Jakubisko Bathory, our only point of comparison with an all-out Bathory movie is Peter Sasdy's Countess Dracula, and Wendigo considers Delpy's Countess superior to Sasdy on just about every level. Delpy is obviously more concerned with fidelity to history than Hammer was, though the sparsity of the record compels her to speculate at times, but even conceding artistic license to Sasdy Delpy outdoes his picture in script and direction. The most Wendigo will grant the Hammer is that Ingrid Pitt looks and sounds more like his mental image of Bathory, and may have been a better actress in the role overall than Delpy was. Wendigo thinks that Delpy may have bitten off more than she could chew in writing and acting a script in what to her is a second language -- English, that is. While she's given herself an out by emphasizing how cold Bathory was, her delivery too often seemed rushed and uninflected, as if she wasn't the best judge of her own line readings, though she's usually expressively convincing. What she does conveys effectively, and most impressively for Wendigo, is Bathory's complete failure to understand that she had done anything wrong. Delpy gives herself a speech like something out of Monsieur Verdoux in which the Countess complains that she's condemned for killing, but warriors are lauded -- but Delpy the director handles the speech just right, showing herself as self-righteous if not self-deluded.

As a director, she labored under some budgetary limitation that kept her from really showing us this mighty army Bathory's husband had created and the Countess herself maintained. Instead, Delpy gives us symbolic images of the husband fighting and chopping heads, then sitting on a pile of corpses -- one of the first hints of gruesomeness to come. Lack of extras aside, she makes excellent use of costumes, locations and sets to give a convincing picture of Bathory's aristocratic milieu.

Delpy must have realized that a Bathory movie would most likely be seen as a horror film, whatever her intentions. She doesn't flinch from violence and gore, including mutilated corpses and some alarming self-mutilation. One hair-raising early moment comes when she cuts her breast open in order to insert a lock of young Thurzo's hair -- that can't be healthy! She's also liberal in showing us mutilated corpses and suggestive scenes of torture, but she never really crosses the boundary into bad taste and silliness. The Countess is less torture porn than kin to the "history of cruelty" pictures I've reviewed on my own, where torture and bloodshed are emphasized to illustrate the injustice of the past. For today's audiences, however, it may prove neither fish nor fowl. The gore in it may be just enough to repel Delpy's usual American fans -- The Countess didn't get a theatrical release here -- but it may not go far enough over the top to meet the expectations of exploitation film fans.

Wendigo thinks that Delpy succeeded in her stated intention to show "the psychology of human beings when they're given power." Her Bathory is a product of her culture, where nobility as a class thought themselves divinely privileged and entitled, but treated each other just as ruthlessly as they treated peasants. Wendigo also detected some defining insecurity, if not self-loathing, in Delpy's Bathory, who after all starts cutting herself before she bleeds others. The insecurity may have come with her status as an aristocratic widow with an army whom the King owed money. As Wendigo notes, she was an inconvenient woman whom enemies might want to get rid of on the least pretense. There's also, ultimately, insanity -- a chilling scene inside her final prison when the Countess prays to God for vindication, and for blood. Worst of all, there's an utter absence of compassion, best illustrated for Wendigo when Bathory watches her most faithful lackeys brutally executed without batting an eye. That lack of compassion, which may simply have been bred out of her at an early age, belies her sanctimonious griping against double standards at the end, and in showing this Delpy is at her best as both actress and director.
While The Countess doesn't count as a vampire film, Wendigo would recommend it to vampire-film fans, who may imagine themselves familiar with the Bathory legend, as an introduction or approximation of the real "Blood Countess." It might be an object lesson. Erzsebet Bathory was not a supernatural monster, but this film's Bathory is indisputably evil without any redeeming glamour. Her life and career, at least as Delpy renders them, are sufficient material for a horror movie.

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (Nanjing! Nanjing!, 2009)

The "Rape of Nanking" has been a hot topic in Chinese cinema lately. China's official nominee for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar this year is Zhang Yimou's Flowers of War, a high-profile international project thanks to the participation of Christian Bale. The presence of helpful Europeans (even Nazis) in the ravaged city has made the Massacre a popular subject worldwide. The German businessman John Rabe, the equivalent for China of a righteous gentile and a minor but important character in Lu Chuan's epic, was the subject of an entire Sino-German film in his own right a few years before Nanjing! Nanjing! appeared. The Massacre has the same appeal for Chinese, apparently, that the Holocaust has for Europeans and Americans, and its recent popularity as a cinematic subject may well reflect a little "Holocaust envy," that supposed feeling of jealousy toward Jews over their having suffered the worst thing that could possibly happen to a people. It's more likely, though, that the Chinese suffer from Holocaust Movie Envy, given how City of Life and Death is visually imitative of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- with a little Pvt. Ryan ultraviolence thrown in. On the other hand, filming the Nanking story in black and white makes sense, since it reproduces the immediacy of newsreels. Anyway, it's not the first Chinese film in recent times to take the monochrome approach; the more controversial Devils on the Doorstep did the same thing. Moreover, Lu Chuan's first object may not have been so much to imitate Spielberg but to answer a more recent, nearly monochrome film: Clint Eastwood's paean to the valiant Japanese, Letters From Iwo Jima. Nothing gets a Chinese riled up, I suspect, as a sympathetic account of Japan's war, and the recent spate of Nanking movies may be meant as a reminder to the moviegoing world of why Japan deserved everything it got by war's end. Chinese cinema has been unforgiving toward Japan for generations, from the stock Jap villains of kung fu films to the atrocity porn of films like Men Behind the Sun. Nanjing! Nanjing! takes the trouble to give us a "good Japanese," but he appears so exceptional that he does little to humanize the enemy in general; if anything, his example damns the majority further -- and that may be the point.

Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) is one of a number of characters, mostly Chinese of course, followed by Lu as the Japanese tighten their grip on the erstwhile capital city in 1937. We also encounter a plucky (not to mention lucky) Chinese child soldier and some members of John Rabe's Nanking staff, among others. I found Kadokawa the most compelling character simply because he wasn't just an archetype of resistance or suffering. He's not the first cinematic soldier to seem too sensitive for his job, but you can hardly blame him for his reactions -- you can blame his buddies for their complacency, their casual viciousness, their treating it all as a lark once the last patches of resistance are wiped out. By comparison, Kadokawa seemingly can't help forming personal bonds with people, especially the unfortunates, Japanese and Chinese alike, recruited or impressed into being "comfort women." A curious effect of this film is that, for all the wartime violence, which is, after all, the sort of stuff we've all seen before, what horrifies the most, more than the explosions, the hangings and the severed heads, is the treatment of the female victims. What the Nazis did for mass murder, it seems, the Japanese did for mass rape -- not so much industrializing it as systematizing it. Rape trails war everywhere, but the Japanese in World War II seem unique in apparently asserting their soldiers' entitlement to sex. Rape may have happened on a comparable scale as the Soviets drove through Germany, but we don't get the same impression of perverse order portrayed here, where the Japanese occupiers can flatly demand that the Chinese deliver up a quota of women for "comfort." The most profound moment of pathos in the picture is when, one by one, women raise their hands to volunteer so that the rest of the captive community will at least be promised food and supplies for the winter. Kadokawa encounters one of these women and, as usual, makes an attempt to be a gentleman. As usual, it's in vain. These women's experience is summed up when their naked bodies are dumped into a big wheelbarrow and hauled away by swastika-wearing flunkies. Never did the Japanese seem fitter allies for the Nazis.

Since resistance by the Chinese seemed futile at an early point, I spent the film waiting for Kadokawa to snap or rebel. The moment finally comes when it can help the child soldier and another of the main characters, and it's thankfully not overstated. It's more of a simple refusal followed by a more profound refusal. The effect remains contradictory; if Kadokawa is meant to give the Japanese a human face, the failure of the rest to emulate him, one way or the other, arguably dehumanizes them even further. But you can probably excuse a Chinese filmmaker for drawing that conclusion, history being what it is. People like Kadokawa will probably be exceptional in an army, however Chinese (or Americans, for that matter) might want to flatter themselves otherwise. That point easily gets lost in an atrocity film, the point of which is to highlight one nation's crime against another. City of Life and Death really hasn't much story to tell apart from the atrocity. Some characters survive, some don't; hence the American title. Kadokawa goes a long way toward breaking up the monotony, but viewers may find the film hard to get through just the same.

This is a stark triumph of production design and black and white cinematography, and Lu Chuan shows some mastery of widescreen composition in just his third feature. Nanjing! Nanjing! is definitely an eye-opening film for people unfamiliar with the Chinese theater of World War II and one of its vilest episodes, but it may make you avert your eyes as well. In any event, it sets a formidable standard for Flowers of War to match, and proves another compelling chapter in the global revival of World War II cinema.