Washington Ensemble Theatre: B

Saw Washington Ensemble Theatre’s production of Guillermo Calderón’s B last Sunday at the 12th Ave. Arts playhouse.  It was bad.  Set in a Latin American country (possibly the author’s native Chile), it tells the story of Alejandra and Marcela, two young woman committed to performing acts of terrorism.  Into their apartment comes Jose Miguel, also a terrorist, and bearing a package containing a bomb.  The girls soon discover, though, that the bomb is much more deadly than they expected.  They wanted a noise-bomb which would mostly break windows, but this one is packed with nails, ball bearings and feces.  It’s designed to kill as many bystanders as possible.  Jose Miguel insists that they use the deadlier one, but the girls balk at that.  Strife ensues, punctuated by occasional visits from Carmen, the girls’ loud and chipper non-terrorist next door neighbor who brings them baked goods. 

The main problem with this play is that none of these people are convincing as terrorists.  We never discover why they are terrorists; the reasons given are too vague or silly to be taken seriously.  We never find out what their cause is.  They’re certainly not fired with any revolutionary or religious zeal.  They all seem like normal middle-class 20-somethings who in their heart would prefer to just go to the mall.  A spa day is more their style.  In fact, get rid of the bomb and this is a new show on the CW.  Now maybe that’s Calderón’s point - that terrorists are a bunch of bourgeois phonies.  If so, it’s not a particularly interesting one and neither, it should be noted, is it true.  In short, it’s not clear that Calderón really has anything significant to say about this topic, so he just winds up falling back on hackneyed theatrical devices.  This is terrorism as a successful contemporary playwright imagines it, full of monologues and Pinteresque pauses and overly obvious awkward moments and clichéd comic characters and then more monologues…  Jay O’Leary directed and even though she's not responsible for the script a note from her in the program perfectly captures this play’s annoying theatrical twee-ness: “What is joy?” she asks, “Can you define it? Do you have it right now?  What happens when your joy is imprisoned?  Who is responsible for your joy's liberation?” etc.  Oy vey.

If, though, you need to see this play there are one or two good things you can look forward to.  The set by Lex Marcos is magnificent.  It’s a stark all-white apartment; it radiates Scandinavian cosiness.  In fact, if they had cancelled the play and let those of us in the audience lounge around on that set for a while - just ten minutes or so per person, hanging out, living the dream - that would have been much more satisfying than the actual play.  Ricky German did an excellent job with the costumes.  When Jose Miguel enters the apartment he’s wearing a large blocky bright red jacket.  Underneath he’s all in black, and on his face he wears a black and white mask.  It’s quite striking.  The minute he walked on stage I thought “Damn!  Somebody raided Grace Jones’s closet!”  The lighting design by Tristan Roberson is also very effective.  Sometimes when the bomb is handled or threatens to go off, the lights begin to dim and flickering wildly or the stage turns red.  And the finale is a wonderful chance for Roberson to display his chops.  As for the cast - Sophie Franco as Alejandra, Clarissa Marie Robles as Marcela, Craig Peterson as Jose Miguel, and Shermona Mitchell as Carmen - they gave it their all, but couldn't redeem the mediocrity of the script.

B will run at 12th Ave. Arts until January 28th.

Seattle Opera: Il Trovatore

Is there a sillier story in opera than Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore?  I don’t think so.  And the competition for that honor is intense: The Magic Flute, Tales of Hoffman, almost everything by Wagner, etc.  But at least those stories work on the level of myth or fairy tale.  Il Trovatore doesn’t have that excuse.  It’s set in the everyday world of common reality.  And yet the story is such a jumble of the improbable, the over-wrought, and the just plain ridiculous that it’s a wonder that it has never been laughed off the stage entirely (and since its premiere in 1853 many a critic has tried to do so).  By comparison the stories of Verdi’s other works of this period - La Traviata and Rigoletto - are realistic and believable (as opera, of course).  They’re about real people doing relatively real things.  But that doesn’t matter.  Despite its story, Il Trovatore is as much a masterpiece as the other two.  It’s a work of genius.  And I mean that literally.  Sometimes there are works of art (Gone With the Wind and Hamlet come to mind) whose story is so poor, whose source material is so meager that it’s entirely by the pure talent of their creator that they rise to the highest level of art. Il Trovatore is such a piece.

And if you have any doubt about that go see the Seattle Opera’s current excellent production of Il Trovatore and it will put your mind at rest on this point.  I greatly enjoyed it, but in all honesty it’s a strange production.  Some parts of it were poor but others were outstanding.  It does right what needs to be done right, although it tends to fall short in other aspects.   The evening got off to an unusual start when Seattle Opera’s General Director Aidan Lang came out before the performance to tell us that Adam Lau, who was singing the role of Ferrando, wanted us to know that his (Lau’s) voice wasn’t quite 100% but that he would soldier through the role nonetheless.  He just wanted us to know that he could do better.  OK.  Good to know.  When Lau came onstage in the first scene, which is dominated by Ferrando, you could feel the strain in his voice but he managed to pull it off.  

There were two stars in this show.  The first was the orchestra under conductor Carlo Montanaro (I’ll get to the second one in a moment).  They were magnificent.  You’re not likely to hear a better performance from the pit for Il Trovatore.  Montanaro and his musicians seemed to treat Verdi's score as if it were a symphony.  Every nuance, every subtlety of orchestration was given its due.  It was like hearing the music afresh.  In many performances of Verdi’s operas the orchestra takes second place to the singers, but not in this one.

Before I get to the singers, though, I’m going to have to delve into the fakakta story so you’ll know who’s who.  It’s medieval Spain and Leonora, a noblewoman, has fallen in love with Manrico, the troubadour of the title.  He loves her too, but so does the noble Count di Luna.  Sadly for the Count, Leonora doesn’t love him at all.  When Manrico and the Count meet they swear eternal and murderous operatic hatred towards each other.  So far, so good.  Manrico’s mother is Azucena, a crazy gypsy woman.  Her mother was also a gypsy woman and many years before the start of the play's action the Count di Luna’s father (try to keep up) accused her of being a witch.  Suspecting that she cast a spell on one of his children, he had Azucena’s mom burned at the stake.  As the flames engulfed her she called out to li’l Azucena to avenge her, who immediately did so by taking the Count di Luna’s dad’s ill child and throwing it onto the fire - although there are reasons to believe that the bones recovered from the ashes were not those of the noble child.  It shouldn’t require a degree in Convoluted Bullshit, to figure out that Manrico is actually the Count di Luna’s long lost brother.  But this won’t be made clear until the end of the opera.  

But until then it is the music which makes Il Trovatore irresistibly appealing and it’s the singers who make this performance so good.  The second star of the evening - and really the main one - was Leah Crocetto in the role of Leonora.  The night belonged to her.  From the moment of her entrance she dominated the show.  She has a voice of unique beauty, warmth, and fullness.  It easily reached the back rows (where I was sitting) and in its quieter moments it takes on a gentleness and expressiveness which one doesn’t normally get from a singer with that kind of power.  Sadly on opening night she missed the high C in the aria Tacea la notte placida but soon recovered, and the rest of her performance went off without a hitch.  She’s so good I even thought about buying another ticket just so I could hear her hit that high C.  Lester Lynch also shone as the Count di Luna.  The Count is a dreary fellow and hard to like, but Lynch made him human and understandable, which is a greater accomplishment than making him likeable.  He also brought a sense of vulnerability to the role.  At one point he softly sings Leonora’s name with such longing and tenderness it’ll break your heart.  Manrico was sung by Arnold Rawls and his performance was a little uneven.  There were times when his voice had difficulty rising about the orchestra.  He succeeded wonderfully with Ah si, ben mio, coll’essere, one of Il Trovatore’s least appealing arias, and yet for the show-stopping Di quella pira his voice seemed small and distant, almost as if he were singing it in a room next door.  I also had problems with Elena Gabouri’s Azucena.  She didn’t seem to have much range; for awhile I wondered if whatever was hindering Adam Lau’s voice was also effecting hers.  Still, Rawls and Gabouri got better as the night went on.  Their duet Ai nostri monti was beautifully performed and ended touchingly with Manrico giving his mother a goodnight kiss as she drifts off to sleep.

The problem I had with this production were the scene changes.  Il Trovatore has a lot of shorts scenes and making the smooth transitions between them can be a challenge. Experimental or adventurous productions can often get around these difficulties with great ingenuity but this production is a very traditional, even staid, one.  When the curtain comes down after a scene, it stays down.  And for a while, too.  Three or four minutes (yes, I counted).  This completely destroys the rhythm of the show.  We all sit there quietly in the darkness of the opera hall, waiting and waiting.  Coughs and sneezes echo through the cavernous space.  People check their cellphones.  There is much shuffling in seats.  Conversations start up.  At one point, someone in the second tier seats called out to the curtain “Need some help?” and got a round of applause and laughter.  I’m not saying that we took out a beach ball and began bouncing it around the audience like folks do at the ball game, but it was getting close.  These delays also had an alienating effect on the audience.  While waiting for one scene to start, the title card announced the upcoming location: “Outside the Torture Chamber.”  That one got a good laugh.  And when the curtain did come up it was basically the same set as before but with different props.  I anticipate that this problem will be fixed for future performances.

Il Trovatore will play at the Seattle Opera until January 26th.

T-A-S-T-E

Mary McCarthy

Though she [Alice Brayton] claimed off and on to be a Quaker I think she had no particular religion.  She was a natural rebel (that was the great thing about her), naturally independent in her views, and what she worshipped was a kind of intelligence that, given her self-imposed limitations, had to be visual and aesthetic.  Once I heard her enunciate almost fiercely the principle she lived for, standing by her mantelpiece, chin out, like one willing to be counted.  “Taste!” she cried, virtually shouting.  “T-A-S-T-E.”  She spelled it out as if we might fail to understand her and then struck her small chest.  “I have it.  T-A-S-T-E.”  She stared at us all belligerently.  “Yes, Miss Brayton.  Of course you have”  We laughed.  “Obviously you have.”  The proof was all around us, in the flames leaping in the fireplace, in the shaker of unbeatable martinis, in the sandwiches of thin-cut soft white bread, thick white meat of chicken, and Bertha’s [her cook's] mayonnaise.  But it was tasteless of her to say so.

     - Mary McCarthy, “The Very Unforgettable Miss Brayton” (1983)

NWFF: Seattle Arabian Nights Film Festival

Last Saturday I went to the Northwest Film Forum to see the Seattle Arabian Nights Film Festival - a dozen short films spanning the range of the Arab (as well as Persian and Uzbek) world or dealing with the Arab experience.  As with most film festivals there were one or two clunkers, but the overall quality was quite good.  A few titles, though, stuck out. 

Two of the best films in the festival were also the briefest.  From Australia came He’s Isis, written, produced, directed, and starring Mansoor Noor.  At only seven minutes it’s a very funny story about an actor, Omar (Noor), hired to play an ISIS terrorist on TV.  However, to the non-Arab director and film crew Omar just isn’t Arab enough to be convincing.  But when a real Arab ISIS terrorist suddenly shows up and takes over the studio, there’s total confusion among everyone about who’s the real Arab and/or terrorist.  A title card before the film says that this is a “tru-ish” story and the movie hilariously conveys the frustrations which Western-born-and-raised performers such as Noor have no doubt encountered over the years. 

Trapped, from the US, was written, directed, and shot by Mohamed Maged and it’s even briefer - a mere two minutes.  A man walking down the street finds himself suddenly trapped in one immobile shot.  Every time he walks out of one side of the frame he re-enters on another (as you can see in the trailer below).  He can’t escape.  Why?  What has he done to deserve this?  How will he break out?  I’m not telling.  I don’t want to ruin it.  Suffice to say that this award-winning film manages to be funnier, wiser, and more memorable than most full-length feature films you’ll ever see.  In fact, this is the kind of film you would get if Samuel Beckett and Nora Ephron collaborated together. 

When it comes to awards Iran’s Are You Volleyball?! seems to have won just about every single one out there.  In a nameless country Arab refugees live in a detention camp.  On the other side of the barb-wire fence is the American army.  There are daily altercations between the US soldiers and their prisoners, but the story soon focuses on the kids in the refugee camp.  Despite their living conditions they are a rambunctious lot.  One day they find a volleyball.  They start kicking it around the camp and a stray kick sends it over the fence to the Americans.  The Americans throw it back.  One of the kids gets an idea and challenges the Americans to a volleyball match; “Are you volleyball?!” he asks in broken English.  Hell, yeah, they are.  And so the volleyball game between captors and captives is on.  If this sounds familiar, it's because it is; the popular Indian film Lagaan (2001) had a similar premise (Brits vs. Indians in cricket matches during the Raj).  But director and writer Mohammad Bakhshi has wisely boiled this trope down to its essentials - the powerful vs. the powerless, and sports as a substitute for war.  And he pulls it off.  This is an engaging and enjoyable film.  One gets the impression that it's a shortened version of a full-length script.  For a fifteen minute film there’s a substantial amount of character development on both sides of the fence.  And the kids, of course, steal the show.  I will not tell you how it ends, except to say that it seems to me that Bakhshi himself was a little uncertain about how to end it.  This film's success and popularity may very well come down to the fact that it evades making a political statement.  Bakhshi takes refuge finally in the idea that through sports people from different walks of life can come together and recognize each other’s common humanity.   Which is, of course, either a hopeful or delusional position, depending on your outlook.  Nonetheless, this is a very good movie.

Two films that don’t envisage the Middle East’s problem being solved by good sportsmanship are The Last Breaths (written and directed by Mohamad Al-Sodani) and The Violet (written and directed by Baqer Al-Rubaie).  Both films are from Iraq.  Both are set in the wasteland of bombed out cities (the former in Mosul, the city in the latter is unnamed).  In The Last Breaths a woman enlists a soldier to help her find her lost son. They wander through a Children of Men-esque hellscape.  In the end she finds not her son but rather a roomful of boys.  In The Violet a young boy, the sole survivor of an attack on his family, wanders a ruined city looking for help.  Soon he meets a strange girl who gives him a magical tunic that allows both of them to wander the city unseen.  They look at snipers and watch TV in an abandoned hospital, all unobserved. Both of these excellent films convey the sense of trauma and dislocation which Iraqi society has endured for the past fifteen years.

My favorite film in the festival was White House, an Iranian drama written and directed by Arastoo Mafakheri.  A young muslim cleric, played by Bakhtiar Khalili, moves to a small and desolate Kurdish village where he falls in love with one of the local girls, even though the two of them only ever exchange glances.  But the hope of winning her inspires him.  Soon he's nesting, putting a fresh coat of whitewash on the dingy clay house in which he lives.  Meanwhile he continues to fulfill his religious duties.  One day, though, he's called upon to perform a marriage for one of the middle-aged men in the village who's taking a second wife.  That wife is the woman he loves.  He performs the marriage but soon leaves the village and, we're led to believe, his career.  Mafakheri directs with a sure hand.  Although much in this film is minimal and stark, he manages to suffuse everything with a richness and fullness.  The cinematography is outstanding, as is Khalili's performance.  This is the story of heartbreak, of a heartbreak so deep that it changes the course of one's life.  Mafakheri has created a moving and powerful film out of the slightest and most mundane matter.

And finally, from Uzbekistan, there was Tea, a tale about an old, bed-ridden Uzbek man who wants some tea.  The teapot next to his bed has run out.  He rings for help but the girl who responds doesn't understand his gestures (Is he mute?  Is there a language barrier?  We're never told). Then he notices a jar on a window sill.  In the jar - tea.  The rest of the film is taken up with his herculean efforts to get to that jar. Director Shokir Kholikov sets a maddeningly slow pace to this film - I cursed him for most of this film's ten minute running time.  But I was wrong.  The slow pace deepens the film.  We're mesmerized, entranced, by the old man's efforts to get that jar.  His perseverance becomes mythic.  It's not just tea; it's about human striving and desire, it's one of those human condition things.  If the end was a little too sweet for my taste (spoiler-when the old man finally gets the tea he gives it to a young boy - his grandson? - who was also reaching for it), that's no matter; the journey was worth it.  

Art Review: Ivy Jacobsen/Andrew Wapinski

Ivy Jacobsen, Peace Within (2018)

Enter “Nature’s Poems,” the new show of Ivy Jacobsen paintings at the Patricia Rozvar Gallery in downtown Seattle, and you are immediately struck by their beauty and vividness.  Plant life is her subject, but these are not still lifes.  Neither are they landscapes.  The backgrounds are of various striking but muted colors.  They’re misty, cloudy, dreamlike.  There’s a haze in the air.  And from the edges of the canvas in creep various vines, flowers, tree boughs, leaves, etc.  “Creep” is the right word; they seem to have the vitality - and sometimes even the consciousness - of moving creatures.  

As you look at the paintings you notice even more plants in the distance.  These paintings are layered.  The more you look, the more they reveal.  They visually unfold before you.  That layering is not just metaphorical either.  By using a combination of oils and resin, mostly on wood panels, Jacobsen creates various degrees of translucency and opaqueness.  On a few of the paintings, such as Peace Within (above), she actually places translucent painted layers on top of each other, thus creating real depth of vision.  I found the effect compelling, even hypnotic.  No reproduction, by the way, can do these works justice.  They must be seen directly to get the full effect.  For example, the small, colorful buds/leaves which adorn some of the flowers are in reality bright, thick daubs of paint which stick out from the surface.  When first seen they are an explosion of vibrancy and color.

Ivy Jacobsen, Vespertine (2018)

Jacobsen has admitted to being influenced by Japanese wood-block prints, and at first glance one would think that a Japanese or Chinese poem would be right at home in the lower left corner of Peace Within, but it would not.  It would clutter the painting.  The poem, or statement, if you prefer, is the painting itself.  I love these works.  I could get lost in the them for a long time.  Rest your eye anywhere on the vegetation of the haunting Vespertine (above) and soon your gaze is wandering along the tree limbs and clusters of leaves.  Things change.  Look at the foliage and your eyes are drawn to the empty space; look at the empty space and they're drawn back to the foliage.  The diminishing limbs become vein-like, some of them don’t behave like real tree limbs at all.  These aren’t really plants.  But no matter.  One keeps looking, exploring, drifting (what’s with that ominous darkness in the upper left?).  I said that these paintings are not landscapes, but there is something “scape”-like about them; one wanders through them, one inhabits them.  If the words weren’t so clumsy perhaps “reverie-scape” or “meditation-scape” would be the best way to describe them.  But whatever word you choose, viewing them is a memorable experience.  The show runs to January 31st.

Andrew Wapinski, Untitled XIV (2018)

Foster/White Gallery has new works by Andrew Wapinski - large, stark black and white paintings such as Untitled XIV (right).  Made using pigmented ice, acrylic, ink, and graphite on mounted linen panels these paintings are monumental studies in texture and technique.  As best one can tell, a linen-mounted canvas is laid on the ground and a layer of white gesso (a plaster) is applied to it.  Then the pigmented ice is placed on top.  As it melts, the pigment soaks into the gesso and linen forming the dark globule shape in the center.  The artist then scrapes off portions of the gesso to create the rough texture.  This process may be repeated several times to enrich the appearance of the pigment.  

Frankly, these paintings do nothing for me.  I think the artist was more taken by the technique of creating them than was warranted by the actual outcome.  Although there are several different paintings, they all look the same.  It’s monotonous.  If there were a video of the artist at work on these I would’ve watched that with eager interest, but the paintings themselves leave me cold (joke unintended).  Still, if getting lost in these sorts of paintings is your cup of tea you have until January 26th to drink your fill.   

Fintan O'Toole: Judging Shaw

Finished Fintan O’Toole’s Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS.  It’s very good - informative, well-written, thought-provoking.  O’Toole is obviously the ideal person to write a book on George Bernard Shaw.  Like his subject, he is Irish.  Currently a columnist for The Irish Times and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, O’Toole, like Shaw, began his career as a theater critic.  Over time he has begun writing on politics and economics.  His book Ship of Fools is an excellent account of the collapse of the Irish economy in the wake of the 2008 recession, and his weekly column in The Irish Times  (subscription required) makes O’Toole one of the few political commentators who deserve to be read on a global basis.  

O'Toole is also a deep and committed Shavian, and he moves with ease through Shaw's body of work, which is immense, and the end result is a book which serves as both an excellent introduction to GBS and as an entertaining and insightful one to those with long familiarity with his work.  O’Toole’s goal is to “reintroduce” Shaw to a new generation of readers, to “restore” him to the twenty-first century.  He dedicates the book to his father and writes in the introduction: 

To my father, a self-educated bus conductor, Shaw was a pure delight.  He was the big, sharp, shiny pin pricking the pretensions of church and state, of bosses and bishops.  He was, moreover, an ally.  Shaw was not, to men like my father, a guru to follow.  He was a kind of older, smarter, intellectual big brother, a pathfinder who had opened the way to the rough but exhilarating terrain of thinking for yourself.

Shaw in 1890

And that, I believe, captures Shaw’s ongoing appeal and significance.  After reading him your thinking is sharper, your mind less cluttered; you’re a little more on guard against the cant and hypocrisy which surround you.  It’s a bracing and clarifying experience.  Shaw’s critics usually deride him as being “all brain” (and let me add that if one is going to be "all" of any body part, the brain is probably the best part to be), not recognizing that that quality is precisely what makes him such an attractive author.  And it also helps that he was one of the best writers of English prose who ever lived.  

Judging Shaw is structured around different aspects of Shaw’s life.  There are chapters on Shaw and poverty, Shaw’s plays, Shaw vs. England, Shaw vs. Ireland, young Shaw’s self-creation as GBS (Shaw vs. reality?), the dark side of his later life (his admiration for Mussolini and Hitler, as well as his adoration of Stalin), etc.  The chapters are fascinating, often focusing on lesser-known but revealing aspects of their topic. 

In the chapter on Ireland, for instance, O’Toole focuses on Shaw’s attempt in 1916 to write a defense speech for Roger Casement to deliver at his treason trial.  Casement, whom Shaw knew personally, was an Irish diplomat and nationalist who sought to buy arms from Germany to support the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin.  Concerned that Casement and his lawyers would mount the conventional legal defense for him - and thus get him hanged - Shaw wrote Casement a speech for his defense.  Rather than trying to undermine the Crown’s case against him, Shaw’s Casement would argue that he couldn’t have committed treason against Britain because he’s not British, he’s Irish, and thus he can’t commit treason against a country he doesn’t belong to.  If you, the jury, want to ignore that reality and hang me, Casement would have asserted, go right ahead.  “I am not trying to shirk the British scaffold:” Shaw wrote for him to say, “it is the alter on which Irish saints have been canonized for centuries.”  Fearing the creation of yet another martyr to Irish independence, the jury might - just might - have spared Casement’s life.  When she heard of Shaw’s efforts to turn Casement’s trial into “a national dramatic event,” his Fabian colleague Beatrice Webb was disgusted.  She fumed in her diary: “His conceit is monstrous.”  In the end, Casement ignored Shaw’s advice, mounted the conventional defense, and was duly hanged.  

This book is also very physically attractive.  Each chapter ends with several pages of images - photos of Shaw, postcards, production notes, costume designs (like the the ones for Saint Joan on the right), facsimiles of letters, posters, etc.  It is a treasure trove of Shaviana.

But what of O’Toole’s stated goal of reviving Shaw for a new generation?  Does he pull it off?  Frankly, I’m always skeptical about such efforts.  An artist’s work either strikes a chord with later generations or it doesn’t.  Normally when one has to “make a case” for an author it’s because they’re a lost cause.  The common reader has abandoned them.  That’s not the case with Shaw.  It’s been said of Verdi that there’s not a moment of the day in which his music is not being performed or broadcast or listened to.  Well it’s probably safe to say that not a weekend passes without a play by Bernard Shaw opening somewhere.  The chances of him being forgotten are currently nil, but barring a sudden resurgence of interest in him due to Hollywood intervention (George Bernard Shaw: Zombie Killer!) I doubt that the appeal of his work will grow much larger.  

Fintan O'Toole

O’Toole can be confident that the case he makes for Shaw is a solid and sturdy one, but GBS may very well be a lost cause.  It’s unlikely that he could ever regain the status which he had for O’Toole’s father or for O’Toole himself.  We simply know too much about him.  His admiration for the twentieth century’s biggest monsters is disqualifying.  Shaw's reverence for Joseph Stalin was so deep that, before his death in 1950 at age ninety-four, he kept a portrait of the Soviet leader on his bedside table (right next to a portrait of Gandhi - go figure).  When the man who shows one “the rough but exhilarating terrain of thinking for yourself” winds up as a Stalinist apologist one can’t help but question the value of everything he’s said before.  It puts him under suspicion.  And he obviously forfeits the mantle of a sage.  All of which means that Shaw’s non-theatrical works will continue to be read by a devoted few (and Fintan and I will be among them), but he now belongs with those other artists and writers whose horrible political choices make them a problem: Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.  Still, this is an outstanding volume on Shaw, and O'Toole is to be commended for bringing much fresh and lively material and analysis to his subject. 

And finally, since no review of a book about Bernard Shaw is really complete unless it contains a sample of his writing, I can't help but include a quote from him.  As is well known, Shaw was one of the founders of the Fabian Society.  They were socialists who rejected revolution and violence as the way to overthrow capitalism, preferring instead the method of peaceful and legal reform.  Naturally this attitude filled many a Marxist with flaming contempt.  This wasn’t socialism.  Where’s the violent revolution!?  Don’t these English mamby-pambies understand that the immutable laws of history (thank you, Karl) require an apocalyptic confrontation between the capitalists and the proletariat?  There will be blood!  There must be!  The orthodox Marxists sneered at Shaw.  Fortunately, he sneered back and he could sneer better (he was, after all, Irish).  In the preface to the 1907 German edition of his The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw, who had held elected office in Britain for several years, tells us his response when confronted by the Marxist faithful:  

All they want to know is; Am I orthodox?  Am I correct in my revolutionary views?  Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities?  Because I am a genuine freethinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler...They ask 'Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet'...Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised modern Socialism…that I read [Marx’s] Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts and still consider it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds who read it, in spite of its unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which the author had either not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible.

Sartre in New York

Nature weighs so heavily on New York that this most modern of cities is also the dirtiest.  From my window I can see the wind whipping up heavy muddy litter, which flits around on the pavement.  Going out, I walk in blackish snow, a kind of puffy crust of the same hue as the sidewalk, as though that itself were buckling.  From the end of May, the heat descends on the city like an atomic bomb.  It is evil.  People go up to each other and say, “It’s murder!”  Millions of fleeing city dwellers take to the trains, leaving damp marks on the seats when they get off, like snails.  It isn’t the city they are fleeing but nature.  Even in the depths of my apartment I suffer the depredations of a hostile, muffled, mysterious nature.  I have the impression of camping in a jungle teeming with insects.  There is the moaning of the wind, the electric shocks I get each time I touch a doorknob or shake a friend’s hand, the cockroaches running around my kitchen, the elevators that make my stomach heave, the inextinguishable thirst that rages from morning to night.  New York is a colonial city, a campsite.  All the hostility and cruelty of nature are present in this city, the most prodigious monument humanity has ever raised to itself.  It is a light city; its apparent weightlessness surprises most Europeans.  In this immense, malevolent space, this desert of rock that tolerates no vegetation, they have built thousands of houses out of brick, wood, or reinforced concrete, all of which seem about to fly away. 

I love New York.

      - Jean-Paul Sartre, “New York, Colonial City” (1946)

Ideas

All my ideas come down to various discomforts debased into generalities.

      - E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (1971)

Top 10 Movie Deaths

What makes for a great movie death?  It’s tough to say; criteria are, of course, ultimately arbitrary.  But to my mind there are a few guidelines.  The death should be memorable.  And moving.  It should also be artful - well-written, well-performed.  It should display some thought and originality.  It doesn’t need to be gruesome or freaky - that would be a different list - it just needs to show that the artists took some effort to make the death unique.  Here, then, is my list of the best.

1.  Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) - Psycho (1960)

Obviously.  There’s no way Janet Leigh’s killing doesn’t hold the top spot on any “Top 10 Deaths” list - and it will for a long time, too.  Directors, writers, and actors have had over fifty years to outdo Alfred Hitchcock’s knife-job in the shower, but no one has even come close.  This movie, and this scene, have been analyzed seemingly ad infinitum so I don’t know if there’s anything special I could add to it.  Except for my own personal observations.  What pushes this scene into the sublime for me is what happens after the murder - from the shower giving out (which seems like the ultimate indignity - I hate that shower curtain!) to the slow rotating dissolve of the shower drain over Leigh’s open but lifeless eye.  It’s a poetic, beautiful and nihilistic reverie - and we don’t get many of those in movies.

2.  HAL (Douglas Rains) - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

By rights Stanley Kubrick could claim the top spot on this list.  No other film death is so meticulously drawn out, so artfully built, so layered, so large, such a show-stopper as the deactivation of HAL.  What the death of Isolde is to opera, what the final collapse of Lear is on the stage, that's what HAL's death is to movies.  Janet Leigh is swiftly butchered in Psycho but HAL is slowly taken apart piece by piece.  He's disassembled, dismantled.  Douglas Rain provides the unforgettable voice, but no actor could have performed this in the flesh.  Not Brando, not Nicholson, not Olivier, not DeNiro, no one.  In fact HALS's death is purely cinematic, it couldn't be done to full effect on a stage or in a novel or in any other medium but movies.  And let's not underestimate how relentlessly and smoothly Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C. Clark turn the screws on us.  From HAL's comical delusions ("Take a stress pill..."), to his begging, to his regression to childhood and singing of "Daisy Bell" this death has been assembled with a level of thought and finesse unequaled in cinematic history.

3.  Taketoki Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) - Throne of Blood (1957)
Toshiro Mifune plays the lead in Akira Kurosawa's version of Shakespeare's Macbeth.  His death at the end of this film is in many ways the precursor to the first two deaths on this list.  I don't know if Hitchcock ever saw Throne of Blood, but Kubrick most certainly did - the camera angle of the axe through the door in The Shining's classic bathroom scene is clearly an homage to Mifune's death scene.  The clip provided here simply doesn't do the scene justice.  It's the end of the line for Washizu.  His wife is dead and his enemies' army, disguised as a forest, are advancing on his fortress. Standing on a terrace above his own troops, he orders them into battle.  They don't move.  He yells at them, calls them "cowards" and "dogs".  Suddenly an arrow from out of the mass of troops hits the wooden post next to him.  He is startled.  Then a lone arrow hits him in the chest.  He screams, pulls the arrow out, throws it at the mutinous troops, yells at them more.  Then a bunch of arrows hit the post next to him.  Then two arrows hit him. Now the mutiny is on.  Soon the arrows are flying, turning him into a human pincushion.  He tries to escape but every exit is blocked by a fresh volley of a arrows. Kurosawa turns Washizu's death into a surreal, drawn out horrific nightmare. This was something new in 1957.  Kurosawa showed that an onscreen death could be more than just a plot point; it could be a disturbing, excessive, powerful yet exhilarating moment on screen.  Interesting production note: real arrows were shot at Mifune for this scene.  He wore wooden blocks under his clothes for protection but much of his fear and screaming was real.

4.  Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) - The Godfather (1972)
If the first three deaths on this list are loud and dramatic this one is quiet and intimate.  And unforgettable precisely because of that intimacy.  An old man plays with his grandson in the garden.  In the midst of their play he suddenly dies - heart attack, brain aneurysm, we never know.  And it doesn't matter.  The Godfather is mythic and operatic.  It has more amazing death scenes than almost any other film.  I could have chosen the death of Sonny (James Caan), or the shooting of Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden - literally choking on the bullet before his epic face plant on a restaurant table!), or the killing of Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), etc.  So many fabulous deaths!  But I've chosen this one death instead exactly because it's quiet and ordinary.  At this key moment in the story, director Francis Ford Coppola lowers the volume for effect.  Coppola has always struck me as being among the most musical of film-makers (his dad was a composer, for Christ's sake), and just as Wagner or Mahler knew when to diminish the whole orchestra and rely on a single violin or lone English horn for effect, so, too, does Coppola in this scene.  Brando's performance is a masterpiece of acting.  And Corleone's death is unique in another way: we go to the funeral.  That usually doesn't happen in movies; in fact, in no other movie on this list does that happen.  But it does in this one - and it needs to.  Cut the funeral scene and the film is weakened.  The Godfather is the story of a family, specifically of fathers and sons (it's actually a reworking of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, but that's another post), so when one generation passes, when there's a changing of the guard, so to speak, attention must be paid.  We need to mark the event, there needs to be - horrible word, but it fits - closure. 

5.  Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) - Ran (1985)
Sadly, the least known of the deaths on this list.  Ran is Akiro Kurosawa's retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear.  Lord Ichimonji decides to split his kingdom among his three sons and, as in the original, things go frightfully wrong.  Lady Kaede is married to one of his sons and she is a scheming little minx.  Imagine if Lady Macbeth or Richard III were suddenly dropped into King Lear and you get an idea of her impact. But she's more than that.  We are told several time that Lord Ichimonji has shed oceans of blood to gain and hold his kingdom.  Lady Kaeda's family were among his victims.  At one chilling point she casually remarks to her husband that the room in which they are sitting is where her parents were killed.  Despite her high rank she is one of the victims of the the powerful.  And that makes her sympathetic.  We feel for her, even though she has all the warmth of a rattlesnake.  As she wheedles and schemes her way through the film we're never quite sure what her game is, though we know it's not good.  She is never direct or candid.  The scene below is one of the last in the film.  Ichimonji is dead, so are two of his sons (the third, in the red coat, will soon commit harikiri), the rest of the royal family have been killed off, and the kingdom has been betrayed and invaded by a coalition of Ichimonji's enemies.  It's doom and destruction.  And when confronted in the scene below, Lady Kaeda finally puts her cards on the table.  And gets her appropriately grand and magnificent comeuppance.  I've seen Ran at least half a dozen times in the theater and Lady Kaeda's death always gets a cheer - not against her, mind you, but for her.  Her final moment is one of victory, of the revenge of all the victims of history's tyrants and warlords. And we love her for it.

6.  Pike and his gang, and 10,000 Mexicans (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, and many, many extras) - The Wild Bunch (1969)

The best shoot out in film history, and, like the shower scene in Psycho, still unsurpassed after all these years despite several brave attempts.  A word commonly used to describe this scene is “orgy” as in “orgy of violence” or “orgy of bloodshed” or “orgy of slo-mo deaths”, etc.  But “orgy” is the correct word.  Sam Peckinpah loves this - and so do we.  There’s a moment before the shoot out which captures the true greatness of what Peckinpah does.  Pike and his boys have walked into Mapache's (Emilio Fernández) compound to get back Angel (Jaime Sanchez), a companion of theirs whom Mapache has kidnapped and tortured.  Surrounded by his army, Mapache takes Angel, slits his throat, and throws him dying to the ground.  The bunch pull out their guns and shoot Mapache dead.  But - and this is the key part - none of Mapache’s men pulls out a gun.  They stand there and do nothing (see number 8, below), a few even have their hands up.  Pike and his gang look at each other.  Could they actually get away with this?  Could they just back out and leave?  Could this film end with them all riding off into the sunset?  “Well, what an adventure that was!”  No, no, no!  That can't happen!  We don't want that to happen.  Peckinpah has found out our dirty little secret: We want the shoot out.  We want the orgy of killing.  Peckinpah was always the filthiest of great directors; he understood that cinema could be its most sublime when it catered to our basest and most vicious desires. He was unafraid to toy with what was darkest in the viewer.  

7.  Kane (John Hurt) - Alien (1979)
Still frightening, still disturbing (human used as incubators) - this scene achieved classic status so quickly that John Hurt managed to parody it himself in Mel Brook's Spaceballs (1987).  As with so many other scenes on this list, it's the performer who makes it unique.  There are very few actors who could do frailty as well as John Hurt. Scrawny and pale, there was always something slight about his appearance.  And from the moment his face drops and he spits out his food in this scene, he's all vulnerability. If this were happening to Tom Skerritt or Yaphet Kotto you'd imagine it would play out differently.  You can picture them fighting back in some way, no matter how futile. But not Hurt.  His body writhes, his limbs flail, he yells, groans, shrieks.  Hurt had a magnificent voice (as anyone who recalls his death as the emperor Caligula in I, Claudius (1976) can attest to) and he uses it to full effect in this scene.  His entire performance sets us up for the bloody entrance of the film's true star - the alien.  Ian Holm also has a good death (and post-death) in this film as the evil cyborg Ash.  I've always felt that it would have been nice had he and Hurt switched roles.  It wouldn't have changed the film substantially, but they're both fantastic actors and it would have interesting to see.

8.  The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) - The Wizard of Oz (1939)
We all grew up with this death so we tend to minimize how great it is.  And, besides, we ask ourselves cynically, can a G-rated movie really have a great death in it?  Of course it can (FYI-2001 was rated G).  Consider how dramatically tricky it is to kill the Wicked Witch.  We're in the world of fairy tale and myth in The Wizard of Oz so certain requirements are unavoidable.  Dorothy has to kill the Wicked Witch.  No one else can do it.  But she can't do it intentionally - this is a children's story, after all.  So the Wicked Witch has to die by accident, but it can't seem contrived.  These difficulties are deftly solved by having the Wicked Witch set the Scarecrow on fire and making Dorothy's intervention with the conveniently present pail of water seem inevitable and even altruistic.  By the way, when I was a kid this scene of setting the Scarecrow on fire scared the crap out of me. Up this point in the movie the Wicked Witch has only threatened our heroes; this is the first time she actually harms one of them.  It takes her evil to a whole new and more intense level.  The fatal water itself serves the crucial fairy tale function of giving young spectators a reassuring message: no matter how big and bad someone seems they always have a weak spot.  And of course Margaret Hamilton's over-the-top performance makes this classic.  She's ironic, funny, and ends it all with a drawn-out whimper.  It's perfect.  Finally, I also like the fact that as the Wicked Witch is melting her minions just stand around and watch, but no one does anything.  No one tries to help her.  No one intervenes.  No one says "Quick!  Someone get a towel!"  Nothing.

9.  Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) - The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Most "Best movie deaths" lists include James Cagney's death as Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949).  "Made it, Ma!  Top of the world!" he screams from the summit of a gas tank the second before it explodes.  When I finally saw that scene in the context of the film it struck me as contrived and silly.  There are far better deaths in White Heat ("Oh, stuffy, huh?  I'll give you a little air!").  Cagney's death as Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931) is also remarkable; and I would include it in any "Top Fifty Deaths" list - along with an exegesis about its moving use in the "Proshai, Livushka" episode of The Sopranos (that's the one in which Livia dies).  But for me his death in The Roaring Twenties is the one that I always return to.  Cagney was a very physical actor (at heart he was a dancer), and Eddie's death -  running down the street, lumbering with each bullet he takes, knocking over a mailbox, etc. - is a bravura performance.  And it was a risky move to stage Eddie's final collapse on the steps of a church; it could've pushed the film into camp.  But it didn't.  The risk paid off, the scene is unforgettable.  In addition, the end of The Roaring Twenties is a two-fer because we also get the death of Humphrey Bogart who plays George, Eddie's loathsome criminal competitor.  His final sniveling moments ("Eddie!  Crazy!") are delicious.  (This may be Bogart's best screen death, too.)  And of course the film's ending is justly celebrated.  "He used to be a big shot," Gladys George mournfully says as director Raoul Walsh pulls back the camera for the final shot.
 

10.  Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Slim Pickens could claim two spots on this list: the first for his death in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and the second for his A-Bomb bronco ride to atomization in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), but I'm going to give his death in Pat Garrett precedence.  Why?  Because it's absolutely unique in its simplicity and directness.  One day Sheriff Baker and Pat Garrett (James Coburn) go to make an arrest. There is a brief and chaotic gunfight.  During it Baker is shot in the belly.  As the shooting winds down, he wanders off.  The wound is worse than he thought.  It's fatal, in fact.  His wife, who has followed him on this outing, also knows something is wrong and trails after him.  Suddenly we hear Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" softly start to play in the background.  "Mama, take this badge off of me.  I can't use it anymore..."  Pickens sits on a rock by the river.  He's going to die and he knows it.  He's seen his last morning; this will be the other date on the tombstone.  He and his wife (beautifully played by Katy Jurado) exchange glances but they know nothing can be done.  This is the only scene on this list which is actually about death.  All the other deaths I've mentioned are dramatic, they all have something to prove, they're show-offs.  But this one is mundane and real. This is how you and I will die - with that helpless and confused look on our face.  And that the actor doing this is Slim Pickens is even better.  He's an ordinary guy, an everyman. His death is our death.  All the other directors, writers, and actors on this list are on some level evading the brutal finality of what it means to die.  But not Peckinpah, in this scene he walks right up to it and stares it in the face.  It's a testament to his genius that he's responsible for this list's most overwrought deaths (The Wild Bunch) and yet its most simple, honest, and profound.