Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (24 page)

The performances throughout are flawless. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, in the title roles, surpass anything they have done on the screen before and establish themselves (somewhat to my surprise) as major actors.

Michael J. Pollard, as C. W. Moss, the driver and mechanic for the gang, achieves a mixture of moronic good humor and genuine pathos that is unforgettable. When Bonnie tells him, "We rob banks," and asks him to come along, he says nothing. But the expression on his face and the movements of his body create a perfect, delightful moment.

Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons play Buck and Blanche Barrow, the other members of the gang, as inarticulate, simple, even good-willed. When Buck is reunited with his kid brother, they howl with glee and punch each other to disguise the truth that they have nothing to say. After the gang has shot its way out of a police trap and Buck is mortally wounded, Blanche's high, mindless scream in the getaway car provides, for me, a very adequate vision of hell.

This is pretty clearly the best American film of the year. It is also a landmark. Years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 196os, showing with sadness, humor, and unforgiving detail what one society had come to. The fact that the story is set thirty-five years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it's about us.

MAY 30, 1968

At the height of the street fighting in Algiers, the French stage a press conference for a captured FLN leader. "Tell me, general," a Parisian journalist asks the revolutionary, "do you not consider it cowardly to send your women carrying bombs in their handbags, to blow up civilians?" The rebel replies in a flat tone of voice, "And do you not think it cowardly to bomb our people with napalm?" A pause. "Give us your airplanes and we will give you our women and their handbags."

The Battle of Algiers, a great film by the young Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, exists at this level of bitter reality. It may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel, and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war; The Battle of Algiers has a universal frame of reference.

Pontecorvo announces at the outset that there is "not one foot" of documentary or newsreel footage in his two hours of film. The announcement is necessary, because the film looks, feels, and tastes as real as Peter Watkins's The War Game. Pontecorvo used available light, newsreel film stock, and actual locations to reconstruct the events in Algiers. He is after actuality, the feeling that you are there, and he succeeds magnificently; the film won the Venice Film Festival and nine other festivals, and was chosen to open the New York Film Festival last November.

Some mental quirk reminded me of The Lost Command, Mark Robson's dreadful 1965 film in which George Segal was the Algerian rebel and Anthony Quinn somehow won for the French. Compared to The Battle of Algiers, that film and all Hollywood "war movies" are empty, gaudy balloons.

Pontecorvo has taken his stance somewhere between the FLN and the French, although his sympathies are on the side of the Nationalists. He is aware that innocent civilians die and are tortured on both sides, that bombs cannot choose their victims, that both armies have heroes and that everyone fighting a war can supply rational arguments to prove he is on the side of morality.

His protagonists are a French colonel (Jean Martin), who respects his opponents but believes (correctly, no doubt) that ruthless methods are necessary, and Ali (Brahim Haggiag), a petty criminal who becomes an FLN leader. But there are other characters: an old man beaten by soldiers; a small Arab boy attacked by French civilians who have narrowly escaped bombing; a cool young Arab girl who plants a bomb in a cafe and then looks compassionately at her victims, and many more.

The strength of the film, I think, comes because it is both passionate and neutral, concerned with both sides. The French colonel (himself a veteran of the anti-Nazi resistance), learns that Sartre supports the FLN. "Why are the liberals always on the other side?" he asks. "Why don't they believe France belongs in Algeria?" But there was a time when he did not need to ask himself why the Nazis did not belong in France.

Note: This review is curiously brief, perhaps because of space constraints. I wrote about The Battle of Algiers at greater length in the Great Movies series.

DECEMBER 30, 1969

There are some things that refuse to be covered over. It would be more convenient, yes, and easier for everyone if the official version were believed. But then the facts begin to trip over one another, and contradictions emerge, and an "accident" is revealed as a crime.

The film Z is about one of these things: about the assassination, six years ago, of a leader of the political opposition in Greece. It is also about all the rest of them. For Americans, it is about the My Lai massacre, the killing of Fred Hampton, the Bay of Pigs. It is no more about Greece than The Battle of Algiers was about Algeria. It is a film of our time. It is about how even moral victories are corrupted. It will make you weep and will make you angry. It will tear your guts out.

It is told simply, and it is based on fact. On May 22, 1963, Gregorios Lambrakis was fatally injured in a "traffic accident." He was a deputy of the opposition party in Greece. The accident theory smelled, and the government appointed an investigator to look into the affair.

His tacit duty was to reaffirm the official version of the death, but his investigation convinced him that Lambrakis had, indeed, been assassinated by a clandestine right-wing organization. High-ranking army and police officials were implicated. The plot was unmasked in court and sentences were handed down-stiff sentences to the little guys (dupes, really) who had carried out the murder, and acquittal for the influential officials who had ordered it.

But the story was not over. When the Army junta staged its coup in 1967, the right-wing generals and the police chief were cleared of all charges and "rehabilitated." Those responsible for unmasking the assassination now became political criminals.

These would seem to be completely political events, but the young director Costa-Gravas has told them in a style that is almost unbearably exciting. Z is at the same time a political cry of rage and a brilliant suspense thriller. It even ends in a chase: not through the streets but through a maze of facts, alibis, and official corruption.

Like Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed Battle of Algiers, Costa-Gravas maintains a point of view above the level of the events he photographs. His protagonist changes during the film, as he leads us from an initial personal involvement to the indictment of an entire political system. At first, we are interested in Yves Montand, the wise and gentle political leader who is slain. Then our attention is directed to the widow (Irene Papas) and to the opposition leaders who will carry on (Charles Denner and Bernard Fresson).

And then, in the masterful last third of the film, we follow the stubborn investigator (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as he resists official pressure to conceal the scandal. He puts together his evidence almost reluctantly; he has no desire to bring down the government, but he must see justice done if he can. His sympathies are neutral, and a truly neutral judge is the most fearsome thing the Establishment can imagine. What good is justice if it can be dealt out to the state as well as to the people? (The implications here for Chicago's conspiracy trial are obvious.)

The movie at first seems to end with triumph. The rotten core of the government is exposed. The military men and the police chief are indicted for murder, official misconduct, obstructing justice. One of the assassinated leader's young followers races to bring the widow the good news. He finds her waiting by the seashore. He is triumphant; justice will be done; the government will fall. Irene Papas hears his news silently and then turns and looks out to sea. Her face reflects no triumph; only suffering and despair. What is really left for her to say?

Nothing, as we know now. The right wing won in the long run and controls Greece today. This film's director, writer, composer, and Miss Papas are all banned in Greece ("banned"-that terrible word we heard from Russia and South Africa, and now from Greece). Even the letter Z (which means "he is alive") is banned in Greece.

When this film was shown at the San Francisco Film Festival, it was attacked in some quarters as being anti-American, But does it not tell the simple truth? We do support the Greek junta. We do recognize the government that murdered Lambrakis. We did permit the junta to prevent free elections in Greece. And in Vietnam, the candidate who placed second in the "free elections" we sponsored sits in a Saigon jail today. His name is also banned.

OCTOBER 23, 1970

The title of Five Easy Pieces refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels twenty years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, Five Easy Pieces becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.