Noir City 2019: Nightfall/The Burglar

Tuesday was night five of Seattle’s Noir City 2019 film festival and it was entirely devoted to movies adapted from the works of David Goodis, one of the masters of American crime fiction.

Nightfall (1956)

Frankly, the premise for this film is a bit of a muddle.  Here's the best I could do: Two campers (Aldo Ray and Frank Albertson) encounter a pair of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) in the wilderness.  Aldo Ray’s pal is a doctor.  He's brought his doctor bag on the camping trip (sure, why not).  But the thieves' bag with the $350,000 looks just like the doctor's bag.  The thieves shoot the doctor dead, then they shoot Aldo Ray - but he fakes being dead.  In their hasty escape, the killers grab the wrong bag.  When they later realize that Aldo has their loot, they hunt him down, determined to get it back at any cost necessary.  Meanwhile Aldo meets a model (Anne Bancroft), and they start up a romance.

Brian Keith and Rudy Bond

A disappointment.  This film has all the right parts - directed by Jacques Tourner (who directed the 1947 classic Out of the Past) from an adaptation by Sterling Silliphant and Goodis himself - but when they come together the result is a little underwhelming.  Is it well-made?  Yes.  But a spark is missing from it.  It’s a can of soda gone flat.  And the story is a little implausible.  Aldo Ray is always getting out of jams due to amazing coincidences.  And I couldn’t help but find the initial killings and mix-up at the camp-ground unbelievable.  Aldo is shot and falls, but the bullet missed and piece of rock opens a bleeding wound on his head when he hits the ground.  The killers see this, think he’s dead, and leave.  Really?  Surely they would administer, as most professional criminals would, one in the head - just to make sure.  (By the way, One in the Head would make an excellent movie title.) 

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray

Nevertheless, the best part of this movie - and it’s worth seeing for this - is the moment in the end when the two thieves turn on each other.  They’ve been getting on each other’s nerves, and our nerves, too, and when they reach their breaking point and aim their guns at each other it’s an electric moment.  It’s like a gigantic coil suddenly gets twisted and is ready to spring.  How good is it?  It’s sit up in your seat good.  It’s that moment in Das Boot (1981) when the sub is at the bottom, the pressure gauge is past the red, and bolts start to pop off good.  Also good in this movie?  The acting.  Aldo Ray was very sympathetic as the poor lug who got stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Bancroft was cynical and fetching as his love interest.  Rudy Bond, sweaty and chortling nervously, creates a truly detestable bad guy.  I was never a big fan of Brian Keith (“Why is this high school wrestling coach in a movie?” I would always ask myself when I saw him), but after seeing Nightfall I’ll need to rethink my position on him.  I was clearly wrong about his abilities.  In the face-off between Rudy and him at the end, the former asks Keith “You don’t like me, do you?”  Keith’s response is a quiet, almost whispered, “No.”  Keith puts a lot into that “no” - it’s a confession, a regret, a death sentence, and so much more.  It was great.

The Burglar (1957)

Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea) pulls off a jewel heist, but soon the police are on him.  Worse still, another gang is on his tail trying to grab his take.  And then there’s Gladden (Jayne Mansfield), a member of Nat’s crew whose beauty and hotness keep causing trouble with the gang.

This film was an independent production and thus it's a little rough around the edges technically, but director Paul Wendkos, working from Goodis's adapted screenplay, tells the story with assurance.  He borrows a little too obviously from Orson Welles. Like Citizen Kane (1941) the film opens with a newsreel and there’s a chase through a funhouse at the end, a nod to 1947’s The Lady From Shanghai.  But Wendkos brings his own distinct voice to the material. Wendkos has also been accused of stealing from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), but that claim isn’t true.  The Burglar was filmed in 1955, but it wasn't released until 1957 when Jayne Mansfield was a star.  In fact. the entire promotional push of the movie was centered on her.  So Wendkos wasn’t stealing from Kubrick, he was on the same page as him (which is always best).

Mansfield does a good job in this film, as do Peter Capell and Mickey Shaughnessy as the other gang members.  But the film belongs to Duryea.  Arguably it's the best performance he's ever given.  Pensive, moody, old (he was in his late 40s when they shot this), world-weary - he’s probably the most sympathetic lead in the entire festival.  There’s something about an aging criminal which breaks the heart.  There’s a pathos to them that brings out our sympathy.  All those years but no big score.  Good enough to stay out of prison but not good enough to get out of the rackets.  A life of failure and puny accomplishments.  Duryea is perfect for this.  There was always something small-time about his thugs - that was a large part of their appeal.  They were tough enough to blackmail and threaten you, but they never had what it took to head up the syndicate.  They would never be the boss.  Duryea’s performance put me in mind of Jean Gabin’s performance in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954).  There too, a weary, aging, criminal takes center stage.  One of the most memorable scenes from Grisbi is the one in which the tired, worn-down Gabin sits quietly eating crackers from a box - there’s anger, regret, and exhaustion in his every move.  So, too, it’s in Duryea’s quieter moments during The Burglar that his character’s plight moves us so deeply. 

Dan Duryea and Martha Vickers

Martha Vickers plays Della, a woman who picks up Duryea at a bar.  A romance springs up between the two.  Vickers is very good and the scene with her and Duryea together at her place is the best in the film.  Like Nat, Della is one of life’s small-timers.  As she tells her life story, the two grow closer.  Literally.  With each dissolve Wendkos places them physically nearer, until in the end Duryea is holding her (above).  It was lovely.  In fact, I wanted that to be the movie.  When the film went back to its plot, I was disappointed.  I wanted to see if these two damaged people could make a life together.  I wanted it to get all Anton Chekhov, but it was not to be…   

Noir City 2019: The Scarlet Hour/A Kiss Before Dying

Monday was day four for Seattle’s Noir City 2019 film festival.  Kissing was the day’s theme, at least in the titles.  I was unable to attend the afternoon’s films - Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) - but I caught up with the evening’s double bill.

The Scarlet Hour (1956)

Pauline Nevins (Carol Ohmart) is having an affair with E.V. Marshall (Tom Tryon), a young man who works for her brutal husband, real-estate baron Ralph Nivens (James Gregory).  One evening while the lovers are parked in a deserted area of Los Angeles they overhear a trio of thieves discuss robbing a nearby mansion.  The take: $350,000 in jewels.  The lovers decide to rob the thieves themselves, take the money, and run off together.  But everything - brace yourself - goes wrong. 

According to Noir City host Eddie Muller, this is the most precious of all the rarities in this year’s festival.  Showing this film has been a project years in the making.  I wish I could say that The Scarlet Hour is an astonishingly good film, that it’s a hidden masterpiece come to light, a precious jewel from the archives.  Sadly, I can’t.  It’s not that this is a bad film, it’s just not a good one.  And the fault for that can be laid squarely on the two leads.  Tom Tryon is not much on screen.  He has no presence, no “it”, nothing.  In real life, he ultimately wound up working as a successful novelist, and I’m glad to see that he landed on his feet, just as long as those feet are not in front of the camera.  Carol Ohmart is a different matter.  She obviously photographs well (below), but if the picture is a moving one her magic begins to disappear.  The pretty face starts to look strange, the flaws in the features start to emerge (the mouth too small, the nose too thin in the middle).  Her eyes are her weakest facial feature, and for a would-be movie star, that’s fatal.  She tries her best but she just hasn’t got it.

Carol Ohmart

Who does have “it”, though, and has it in abundance, has it till she’s practically painting the whole screen with it, is Elaine Stritch, who plays Pauline’s best friend.  This was Stritch’s first movie and she steals every scene she’s in.  In fact, The Scarlet Hour is worth seeing for many of its lesser roles.  James Gregory is suitably loathsome as Pauline’s husband.  And E. G. Marshall is very funny and droll as one of the police officers handling the case.  Hollywood stalwart Michael Curtiz directed and his acute visual style manages to keep this film engaging.  This film also features a cameo of Nat "King" Cole singing "Never Let Me Go." 

A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

When college boy Bud Corliss (Robert Wagner) discovers that his girlfriend (Joanne Woodward) is pregnant he chooses to kill her rather than marry her.  That done, he soon sets his sights on marrying her sister (Virginia Leith).

If the weakness of the leading actors was the main problem with The Scarlet Hour, the strength of A Kiss Before Dying lies primarily in the magnificent performance by Robert Wagner as the murderous Corliss.  The young and handsome Wagner was playing wholesome, clean-cut roles in his career at that time and he leapt at the opportunity to muss things up a bit by playing a flaming psychopath.  Sixty years later his reptilian malignancy is still chilling.  The other performances by Woodward, Leith, and George Macready, as the girls’ father, are also outstanding.  Jeffrey Hunter, as the student who manages to uncover the murder, is also good.   A Kiss Before Dying is about as flawless as a crime film could be.  Director Gerd Oswald, working with a script by Lawrence Roman from the Ira Levin novel of the same name, has delivered a terse and compact masterpiece.  Once set in motion, the plot unfolds inexorably to its end.  Lucian Ballard’s cinematography, in CinemaScope and Technicolor, is breathtaking, especially when the characters go out into the open.  You can feel the power and majesty of landscape which would later become a trademark of the work he did with Sam Peckinpah.  

Jeffrey Hunter, Joanne Woodward, and Robert Wagner

Noir City 2019: City That Never Sleeps/Private Hell 36

Sunday was day three for Noir City 2019 here in the Emerald City.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see two of the day’s classics - Pickup on South Street (1953) and Pushover (1954).  However I did manage to make it to two other films. 

City That Never Sleeps (1952)

Chicago.  Over the course of a single night the fates of a diverse group of people - a stripper, a cop, a business man, a con artist, even a human mannikin - play out.   

I loved this movie.  In fact, hidden gems like these are one of the main reasons that one goes to Noir City.  The cast in this ensemble are fantastic.  Gig Young plays a married cop ready to leave the force and run away with his stripper girlfriend, Angel Face, played by Mala Powers.  Edward Arnold is a shady businessman looking to settle scores with a former protegé played by the bug-eyed William Talman.  Since Arnold’s wife is played by Marie Windsor (yes!), you know that things will not end well.  And then there’s the Mechanical Man - dressed in a tuxedo, his face painted in silver, he stands in a show window and moves robotically.  As passersby gawk at him a barker’s voice asks them to consider whether he is a man or a machine.  In truth, this poor bastard, played by Wally Cassell, is married to the stripper.  He loves her and doesn’t want her to leave him.  And to top everything off, the voice-over narration is from no other source than the city of Chicago itself.   

Wally Cassell and Mala Powers

This is a weird and wonderful movie.  Director John Auer has a unique and surreal vision which perfectly suits the nocturnal tone of the film.  Steve Fisher’s script is full of desperate characters at their wits’ end.  The Mechanical Man alone is a brilliant and haunting creation.  The language of the characters is tough, with the punchiness we expect from film noir.  At one point, for instance, Angel Face the stripper comments: “When I first came to this town I was gonna be - oh, there were a lot of things I was gonna do.  Become famous.  But Chicago’s the big melting pot, and I got melted, but good.”  Delicious.

Edward Arnold, Marie Windsor, and William Talman

Private Hell 36 (1954)

There's $300,000 in stolen money on the loose, and when the marked bills show up in Los Angeles, detectives Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) and Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) are put on the case to find it.  Their leads take them to Lilli Marlowe (Ida Lupino), a night-club singer with whom Cal promptly falls in love.  Soon they’re a pair.  But when Cal and Jack finally come upon the case full of loot, Cal breaks bad and starts to pocket the money. Jack doesn't like that at all, but he doesn't stop him.  

This is a very well-made “good-cop-gone-bad” thriller, and it has a wonderful plot twist at the end.  It’s tight, brisk.  Now, I’ll watch anything with Ida Lupino in it anyway, but throw Howard Duff into the mix and, to my mind, you can’t go wrong.  Though, to be honest, at times it feels like this film is about to go very very wrong.  It has an odd and unfocused feel to the performances.  This is probably due to the fact that, according to director Don Siegel (as relayed to us by festival host Eddie Muller), the cast was drunk during the entire shoot of this film.  The screenplay was written by Ida Lupino and Collier Young (who also co-produced the film with Robert Eggenweiler).  Young and Lupino were married when they wrote Private Hell 36.  But by the time production began they had divorced and she had married Howard Duff.  So everyone dealt with their emotional distress the way people did in those days.  They got stinking drunk.  Nonetheless, Lupino, Duff, and Cochran were professionals and they all put in solid, if somewhat distant and numbed, performances.  Cochran was technically the lead but Duff’s depiction of a good man trapped in doing bad was riveting.  He's a volcano ready to explode.  Lupino essentially reprises her role from 1948’s Roadhouse but I don’t mind; I’ve always been mesmerized by her combination of fragile beauty, hard-core toughness, and intelligence.  Leaving the movie I couldn’t help but think that there aren’t any contemporary actors who so embody the visions of masculinity and femininity as these three do.  These may be damaged people - on the screen and in real life - but there was something refreshingly genuine about them (although you might not think that to judge by the poster below).    

Steve Cochran, Ida Lupino, and Howard Duff  (FYI-This scene is not actually in the film.)

And what a great movie title!  It’s not quite my favorite, but it’s definitely top ten.  For now that top spot is held by Seijun Suzuki’s 1963 crime film Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!  One final note on Private Hell 36 - the Dialogue Director is listed as being one David Peckinpah, who would later work in Hollywood under the name of Sam Peckinpah.

Noir City 2019: The Well/Detective Story/The Turning Point

Yesterday was day two of Noir City 2019 here in Seattle.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to see the evening’s final feature, Angel Face (1953), but I managed to catch its predecessors

The Well (1951)

A 5-year-old black girl walks through a field.  She approaches a section of brush and suddenly drops out of sight.  She has fallen into a well.  It’s out of this inciting incident that director and writer Russell Rouse, along with his co-writer Clarence Greene, have fashioned a powerful and gripping tale about race relations in the US.  The young girl, it turns out, was seen talking to a white man before her disappearance.  Soon rumors begin to fly around in the small racially-mixed town where The Well is set (we don’t learn the state).  Racial tensions mount and soon start to explode.  Within hours the town is about to be torn apart by race riots.

Wow, Hollywood dealing honestly and openly about race.  How did that happen?  It didn’t.  The Well is an independently produced film and its non-studio status gave it a freedom which a studio production wouldn’t have.  As an indie film some of the production values (sets, costumes, etc.) are on the low side but the ones that matter (writing, direction, acting, etc.) aren’t.  The only “name” actor in it is Richard Rober, who plays the town’s beleaguered white police chief.  (Rober also played the sleazy Italian-American in the previous night’s The File on Thelma Jordan.)  Harry Morgan, of Dragnet and MASH fame, plays the man who consorted with the black girl before her disappearance.  Back in the 1940s and 50s Morgan had a solid career in movies as a heavy.  As with Fred McMurray, TV made him anodyne and lovable.  Many of the other actors were local people in the northern California town where the film was shot.  Under good direction non-actors can perform as well as professionals.  

This film is exceptionally good.  That’s it’s still relevant to us in 2019 is evident.  White gangs attack blacks.  Black gangs attack whites.  Some of the police target blacks for persecution.  Many of the blacks turn on the police and the entire system.  Demagogues whip up the crowds.  Small acts of inter-racial decency are swallowed up in the hatestorm.  Sound familiar?  In the US we call this situation “normal”, and, sadly, The Well will probably be relevant in 2051, and 2151, etc.  

In the last third of this film the tone changes.  It becomes a “rescue the kid from the well” story.  Many of the issues raised in the first two-thirds are dropped or left unresolved (just like in reality).  As a story about a well rescue, though, it’s still exceptionally good.  Rouse and editor Chester Schaeffer grab us, pull us in, and don’t let go to the end.  Not surprisingly, this film received Oscar nominations in the categories of film editing and for the screenplay.

Detective Story (1951)

Detective James McLeod (Kirk Douglas) of New York City’s 21st precinct is one tough, hard-boiled, unrelenting son of a bitch.  His main target is one Dr. Schneider (George Macready), an abortionist working out of New Jersey whose patients tend to wind up at the morgue.  McLeod’s on a one-man crusade to lock him up.  But when he discovers that his own wife (Eleanor Parker) was one of the doctor’s patients his world falls apart. 

Not good.  A mediocre play transformed into a mediocre movie.  It was originally written for the stage by Sidney Kingsley and like most poorly written plays it’s full of colorful side characters and lots of sub-plots and exciting incidents that don’t happen in real life.  Director William Wyler, though, was fascinated by the lead character and chose to adapt it.  Festival host Eddie Muller pointed out that the 1950s was a time full of authority figures, such as McLeod, whose narcissism and cruelty masqueraded as self-righteousness.  Wyler hated those types, as do most of us, and saw Detective Story as a way to criticize them.  Abortion is, of course, never referred to directly in the film and since today it’s considered, at least by most of us, as an acceptable medical procedure for a woman to choose, Detective Story’s misogynistic, shaming, and self-righteous tone on the topic has not aged well.  

Kirk Douglas

But if you like Kirk Douglas’s performances when he’s “over the top,” then Detective Story is for you.  He doesn’t just chew the scenery, he chews the costumes, the hair and make-up, the lighting, the camera.  It wouldn’t surprise me if he even broke into the editing room and gnawed on the Moviola for awhile.  On the other hand, Lee Grant plays one of the “colorful” minor characters in this film - she’s a shoplifter - and is a delight to watch.  This was her first film and she pulled it off with charm and style.  

The Turning Point (1952)

John Conroy (Edmund O’Brien) is a special prosecutor called in to set up a commission to crack down on the crime syndicate in an unnamed mid-western city.  Helping him in this task is Alexis Smith (Amanda Waycross), his girl friend and the commision’s secretary.  Also tagging along is Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), a cynical, wise-cracking reporter who just happens to be a childhood friend of Conroy’s.  Their task is not an easy one.  The tentacles of the syndicate run deep - even into Conroy’s own family - and there is much mayhem before the good guys prevail. 

This is a solid and entertaining noir directed by William Dieterle from a script by Warren Duff (who produced the noir gem Out of the Past) and based on a story by Horace McCoy.  Crime commissions were big in the 1950s.  The granddaddy of them all was the Kefauver Committee (1950-51) which turned its lights on organized crime.  The Kefauver Committee was wildly popular; its live TV broadcasts attracted tens of millions of viewers.  Eddie Muller even showed us the one signature move that it introduced into pop culture - hand over mic, and then lean over to whisper to your lawyer.  When that actually happens in The Turning Point the audience burst into laughter.  

William Holden and Edmund O'Brien

I liked this film.  The cast, which also includes Ed Begley as the head of the syndicate, were all very good, and its depiction of urban crime and corruption will thrill the heart of any noirista.  However, I did have one problem with The Turning Point.  Edith Head did the costumes for it and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a wonderfully dressed cast.  Those suits!  Those skirts!  It was very distracting.  This city may be overrun with corruption, murder, and extortion but its tailors are knocking it out of the ballpark every day.  This is one of those movies where the characters can just stand there and they emit beauty and cool like the sun emits light. 

Noir City 2019: Trapped/The File on Thelma Jordan

It’s February in Seattle and after two weeks of crippling snowstorms temperatures have returned to normal (mid-40s), streets are clearing, and everyone has gone back to their usual routine.  And on Friday night (also as per the usual routine of a Seattle February) Noir City - a week-long festival of classic, rare, and restored film noirs - has arrived.  This year’s theme is “Film Noir in the 1950s.”  Under the calm exterior of the Eisenhower era boiled the raging murderous and criminal passions which made America great (or at least made American movies great).  

Opening nights at Noir City feel like a party.  There was live music from the Casey MacGill Trio, the bar was crowded, and folks dressed up in vintage finery or its nearest equivalent.  In attendance was Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation (who organized the festival held under the auspices of SIFF).  Eddie is also the host of Turner Classic Movies’s Noir Alley.  Is there anything about film noir which he doesn’t know?  I think not.    

Trapped (1949)

Lloyd Bridges plays Tris Stewart, a counterfeiter behind bars for creating fake currency plates of impeccable quality.  The Treasury Department wants to spring him from jail so he can go undercover to break up a counterfeiting ring who have his handiwork.  Tris agrees.  But he has other plans.  Once free he turns on the Feds and decides to go after the plates himself.  

This is a tough, grimy docu-noir.  The first few minutes are taken up with extolling the virtues of the US Treasury Department in its many capacities.  Directed by Richard Fleischer from a script by Earl Felton and George Zuckerman, Trapped never entirely loses its documentary feel.  What makes it effective as a story, though, are the ongoing betrayals which drive the narrative.  No one is quite who they seem.  Once he goes rogue, Tris immediately sets off to see his gal, Meg (Barbara Payton).  She’s a cigarette girl at a nightclub.  One of the patrons there is a flirtatious low-level grifter played by John Hoyt.  He seems harmless enough - except that he turns out to be an undercover Treasury agent sent to entrap Tris and Meg.  It’s all one big hall of mirrors.  

Lloyd Bridges and John Hoyt

The leads are all very good.  Lloyd Bridges is very convincing as a criminal.  As he corners various associates of his you believe that he’ll do them harm, and he does.  He has just enough crazy behind those eyes.  Barbara Payton is lovely and cynical as Meg.  But to me it’s John Hoyt’s film.  That granite face!  Those steely blue eyes!  Hoyt usually played the bad guy but he’s equally good as the hero in Trapped.  The moment his real character is revealed we start pulling for him.  Another appealing aspect of Trapped (strictly in a noir sense, let me add) is its complete callousness.  This film has no compassion for its victims.  When Tris slaps around his former parter, who’s now turned into a drunken bum, there no sympathy for the poor bastard whatsoever.  And when one of the main characters is shot dead at the end of the film nobody expresses any concern for them.  The body falls and we all move on.

Looks like he picked the wrong week to quit smoking...Lloyd Bridges and Barbara Payton

Trapped is also an excellent instance of the good work done by the Film Noir Foundation and why it deserves the support of film-lovers everywhere.  The only copies available of this film were poor reproductions of a 16-mm version.  It was believed that all the 35-mm prints were lost.  But after years of looking, the FNF finally found one in a private collection from upstate New York which had been donated to the Harvard Film Archive.  The FNF, in conjunction with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, have been able to strike a new negative from it and thus put this tasty little treat back into circulation. 

The File on Thelma Jordan (1950)

When assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) first lays eyes on Thelma Jordan (Barbara Stanwyck) he falls for her head over heels.  She’s come to see him about a prowler who’s attempting to steal her old, rich aunt’s jewels, but instead Cleve and Thelma start up a torrid affair and soon the assistant DA’s marriage begins to fall apart.  Then one night old Aunt Moneybags winds up murdered (don’t they always) and the truth about Thelma starts to emerge.

This film is clearly a re-do of Double Indemnity (1944), complete with Barbara Stanwyck as the femme fatale (though without the ridiculous wig) and Corey as the beguiled official caught in her snares.  Both films even feature seedy Italian-Americans lurking in the background.  I tried hard to like Thelma Jordan, but to no avail.  Directed by Robert Siodmak, its 100 minute running time felt much longer.  Certain scenes are drawn out for no purpose and it seemed as though multiple different endings had been crammed together for this film’s conclusion.  If only Robert Wise had been the editor…  Also, I like Wendell Corey, but his performance in this film is weak, there’s no depth to it.  He looks too much like an actual assistant DA from 1950 - and they were an unexciting lot.  Unlike, say, Fred MacMurray or Charles McGraw, Corey doesn’t seem to have that dark underside which the enterprising female can use to her advantage and his ruin.  But no matter.  This is Barbara Stanwyck's movie.  Is she, as Eddie asserted, the greatest actress in the history of movies?  Perhaps.  But there's no doubt that Thelma Jordan is a magnificent showcase for her.  She's bewitching, elegant, tough, and sympathetic.  This film made Wendell Corey a star, but to my mind he was merely riding Stanwyck's coattails.  Then add in the fact that all her outfits (with or without coattails) were designed by Edith Head and you've got a film to delight any Stanwyck aficionado, or to turn the viewer into one. 

Barbara Stanwyck and Wendell Corey

On Becoming an Artist

Fortunately, very few children want to be artists or writers when they grow up.  That is something which - with the odd repellent exception - one simply ends up becoming or turns out to be.  Even though I enjoyed reading as a child, I think the last thing I would have said in response to the classic question was “a novelist.”  A pirate, a footballer, an archaeologist (yes, long before Indiana Jones), a bandit, a lion-tamer, even perhaps, in an attack of folly, a doctor…I’ve no idea what children nowadays would like to be when they grow up, but I’m sure they don’t aspire to devoting their lives to literature, painting or “serious” music.  Just as well, because, as I did fifty years ago, they would find it hard to identify with artists as they’re represented in films and, indeed, books, and they certainly wouldn’t want to emulate them.  The most worrying thing for those of us who have turned out to be novelists or poets or sculptors or painters or musicians is that not even as adults have we seen much reason to admire our predecessors as people.

     - Javier Marías, “Damned Artists!”  (2008)

ACT: Uncle Vanya

On Friday night I went to see Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at ACT in downtown Seattle.  What a magnificent production.  Director Jahn Langs and the cast and crew have given this play a vitality and emotional power you don’t often see on the Seattle stage.  Rarer still, this is an intelligent production, and the few liberties Langs has taken with the work add depth and dimension to Chekhov’s vision.

A few minutes into any Chekhov play and you realize that he is our contemporary.  His characters are the people we know in our own lives; what goes through their minds goes through ours as well.  Vanya, for instance, is a 47-year-old man living on a provincial estate.  He is very angry and disappointed with his life.  Most of it has been wasted and he knows it.  For years he idolized his sister’s husband, Serebryakov, a pompous professor.  He worked for Serebryakov, helped translate his works, committed whole passages of his essays to memory.  He believed in him.  But time has passed.  The sister has died, and Serebryakov remarried.  When the play opens the professor and his new young and beautiful wife, Yelena, have moved into the estate with Vanya.  Up close, Vanya can now see that Serebryakov is a talentless hack, a man twenty years behind the times, an idiot, a fool.  And the man for whom he has sacrificed his own life and any talent he may have had.  He seethes with regret, resentment, and depression.  And it doesn’t help matters that he’s also fallen madly in love with Yelena.  I think I know this guy.  Really, I do.  And if you’re honest with yourself you may be a little like him too. 

The other characters are also like the people who surround us.  There’s Astrov, a local doctor and friend of Vanya’s, who has a passion for saving the province’s dwindling forests.  Yet aside from his and Vanya’s long bull sessions he doesn’t ever actually do anything to preserve them.  Even as a doctor he performs his duties with great reluctance whenever someone in the village gets sick.  We like Astrov, but he’s all talk and no action.  And he, too, is madly in love with Yelena.

Mark Jenkins, Rob Burgess, Alexandra Tavares, and Amy Fleetwood (Photo Credit: Chris Bennion)

And what of the lovely and beloved Yelena?  She’s unbearably unhappy.  She hates the provincial life, and whatever love she felt for her sick, elderly husband has long since evaporated.  Vanya amuses her - why wouldn't he, they’re both “victims” of the professor’s insidious mediocrity - but when Vanya confesses his love to her she groans with irritation.  Instead, she loves Astrov.  Yet we sense that even there it is a love born of boredom and discontent rather than any genuine affection for the man.  Her one desire by play’s end is simply to leave - and to leave immediately.  She has, as many of us do, the mistaken belief that geography is psychology, that we’ll be happy somewhere else, we just need to leave here first.

And then there’s Sonya, the professor’s daughter via his first wife.  In many ways it’s her play.  Vanya is, after all, her uncle.  She is shy, hard-working, a little nervous, and, most importantly, plain-looking.  She, unlike Yelena, genuinely loves Dr. Astrov but he doesn’t love her at all.  She cannot compete with Yelena’s beauty and charm.  If Uncle Vanya is a play about wasted potential her situation is the most moving and heart-felt.  She doesn’t have much talent, and the talents of the other characters are fundamentally narcissistic and selfish.  But Sonya’s one potential - and it’s a universal one - it to love someone else completely and selflessly.  And that, too, is frustrated.

The cast in this production is fantastic.  There’s not a weak performance in the whole ensemble.  In the minor roles, Amy Fleetwood was very good as Maria, Vanya’s mother.  Sharva Maynard made a warm and outstanding Nanny; when the elderly Serebrayakov throws a fit, she effortlessly leads him offstage, recognizing that he’s just a big baby underneath all those years.  In the role of Telegin (a.k.a “Waffles”), a local deputy and hanger-on at the estate, Rob Burgess brought not only an easy and irresistible appeal to the role but also a fully-rounded humanity.  As events go from bad to worse, an agitated Waffles tries to interject himself into the situation only to be shoved aside, at times literally, by the leads.  Burgess makes us wince for the character every time this happens.  And Kevin Lin in the most minor role of them all - “Yefim, a workman” - does a good, solid job at it, especially in the second act where he is called upon to drunkenly sing and carouse with Astrov and Waffles.  He is a wonderful boon companion.

Kevin Lin, Rob Burgess, and Sylvester Foday Kamara (Photo Credit: Chris Bennion)

Peter Crook is an excellent Vanya, full of complaint and whining.  His Vanya is likable and entertaining but seems so small, and never more so than when on one of his self-pity jags.  His clothes are shabby and unkempt.  At one point he puts a tie on but it makes him look worse, like a Russian Willy Loman.  When he brings Yelena flowers, one simply cringes for him.  Langs treats Vanya in a very unique way in this production - specifically, Vanya doesn't leave the stage during the acts.  All the other characters come and go, but not him.  Every time he "exits" the lights change and Vanya merely stays in the darkened areas of the stage, watching the other characters interact.  It adds a haunting quality to the production, as if all these events were memories conjured up by Vanya at a later time.  Also, when left alone on stage some of the other characters will deliver mini-soliloquies about their feelings.  In this production, though, when left "alone" the lights shift again and the characters tend to address their feeling to the silent Vanya.  I found it very powerful.  It was as if Vanya could understand their thoughts even though he wasn't present.  At one point Vanya complains that he could have been another Dostoyevsky.  We seriously doubt that during most of the play, but during these spectral moments of Vanya's we wonder if in fact it shows that he does have the sensitivity to understand the people around him, that he really does have the great soul he imagines that he has. 

If, like me, you've always found Astrov a drab character - a bit of a bore actually - Sylvester Foday Kamara's performance will turn your opinion around.  His Astrov is full of charm and appeal; he's forthright and direct, a man's man.  You understand why all the women have a thing for him.  And you understand why all the men have a thing for Yelena the moment Alexandra Tavares walks onstage.  She's beautiful, lithe, confident -  with just enough aloofness to make her irresistible.  Tavares also endows Yelena with a lively intelligence.  She bitches about things with Vanya and eagerly listens to Astrov talk about the forests.  She doesn't wrap the men in this play around her finger, instead they leap on her fingers and happily form rings around them on their own.  For a play by Chekhov this production is not afraid to throw in a sexual charge.  At one point in the first act, for instance, Yelena leans back on a swing and the moment was electric; she looked like some Gil Elvgren pin-up magically come to life.  Later in the play when Astrov and Yelena kiss it is a hot and passionate embrace, not some restrained nineteenth-century affair.

Sunam Ellis (Photo Credit: Chris Bennion)

Mark Jenkins's Serebryakov is all fool.  One despises him from the start.  He was great.  This is the kind of depiction Vanya would like to see (maybe that's why he's loitering on the stage).  Jenkin's is a wonderful comic performer.  When saying goodbye to the other characters at the end of the play his verbal inarticulateness brought down the house with laughter.  Sunam Ellis is a touching Sonya.  We sympathize with her but we never pity her.  There's a toughness underneath all her nervous energy.  The end of Uncle Vanya belongs to Sonya.  Her speech to her uncle is one of the most powerful and moving moments in the history of theater and Langs has chosen to treat along the lines of the many soliloquies we've already seen.  Only this time Sonya delivers it to us, the audience.  It was a bold move and Ellis pulled it off beautifully.

Kudos also need to go out to Robert Aguilar's lighting design and Robertson Witmer's music and sound design.  They both deepened and enriched the production in striking ways.  One example - in the third act Astrov shows Yelena maps he's made of the region which document the increasing deforestation.  As he goes on painting a dire picture we start to hear - softly, in background - the chirping of birds.

This production is a collaboration between ACTLab and The Seagull Project.  The latter is an endeavor started many years ago to perform the complete cycle of Chekhov's four major plays.  With this magnificent production, that project is now complete.  So let me get on my soap box for a moment and advocate for a new Herculean project for these highly talented people to take on - namely, the full cycle of Henrik Ibsen's major plays.  They've already done the works of one of the founders of modern drama, so why not do another one.  They can call it The Wild Duck Project.   

For now, though, we have an unforgettable Uncle Vanya to enjoy (that is, until February 17th).  It's true that it’s all a big, heaping dose of The Human Condition.  But what keeps it afloat is Chekhov’s ability to depict it all with compassion, humor, and a seemingly bottomless sympathy.  You don’t leave the theater depressed after seeing Uncle Vanya (especially in this production), you leave feeling exhilaration.   Like the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, O’Neill, and others, Chekhov’s works make us confront our lives and experiences with an honesty which may be bracing and even disturbing at times but is ultimately uplifting.  In great drama we transcend our suffering through the telling of it. 

Sharva Maynard, Rob Burgess, Peter Crook, and Sunam Ellis (Photo Credit: Chris Bennion)