Harlan Ellison's Watching (16 page)

Moral: If you believe all the shit the military feeds you in order to get you to re-up, you deserve anything you get. Or maybe it's: Those who live by the absurd, will die by the absurd.

In all fairness, I must confess to having been enthralled by a scene in which Wilfred
Lumpen
goes to his first movie. He sees the attractive strumpet in her bath. She goes offscreen to the right, and he moves far to the left, crawling over other patrons, in order to see around the corner of her bathroom. She comes back and goes offscreen left, he moves right. When she settles into her tub, he stands on the seat, so he can see down in. When that isn't elevated enough, he climbs up on the stage, begins pawing at her image, and finally crashes through the screen. There is a mad, Jacques Tati feeling to this sequence, and it is superbly done.

Again, in all fairness, I must confess to a recurring nibble at the back of my mind by the subdued Kafkaesque after-impression the film has given me. There is no doubt that Godard has tried to capture in seventy-nine minutes the total insanity of men who think there is either nobility or personal aggrandizement in war. There are scenes that almost succeed in this vein: the shooting of the partisan girl who recites a poem to the grinning faces of the execution squad . . . the husband's attempt to buy a Maserati with his conscription letter . . . an unrelated shot of the two swine soldiers speeding toward us down a road in a motorcycle and sidecar . . .

But the surrealism of the conception clashes with the intercutting of stock combat footage, with the asinine overplaying of the actors, with the unbelievably moronic subtitling (
merde
does not translate as "darn it"), by the wandering microcephalic eye of the camera which focuses on empty sky or fields for no apparent reason.

On one end of the stick we have this film, and on the other we have
The Green Berets
. Which is worse? Is there a coherent answer? History has not provided one. Contemporary events certainly don't. It is, perhaps, inescapable to observe that war is such a crippling, imbecilic endeavor that even those who wish to put an end to it, who wish to point up its essential inhumanness, become as ridiculous, as ineffectual as those who prosecute the wars. Is it, possibly, that we have all had our fill of war? To such an extent that films like
Les Carabiniers, Dark of the Sun, The Green Berets, The Longest Day
and all the way back to Robert Taylor manning his last machine gun on
Bataan
all become one; extended scenes in a film of no consequence whatsoever save to illuminate the fact that Man, unlike the lowest forms of animal life, never seems to learn from his mistakes?

Cinema
/Fall 1968

Fontenalle, French man of letters and aphorist, once proffered the definition of the creator as genius if he could "interpret abstract theory in a manner to wring the emotions." If we can credit this definition with any validity, then S. Lee Pogostin, the creator of a new film titled
Hard Contract
, is indeed not only a genuine genius, but a cinematic emotion-wringer of the first order.

For
Hard Contract
is the interpretation of the McLuhan theory that megadeath and overkill, mass media and the "cool" values of residents in the Global Village, have made murder not quite moral . . . but at least not quite so immoral.
Hard Contract
is that incredible rarity, a film of entertainment that comes to grips with second- and third-level philosophical concepts. A film of meaning. In short, something for the mind to masticate, as different from everything that has gone before in film as Poe was different from everything that had gone before in the short story.

But there will be a fight across the body of this film. Not only among those who find the mere concept of murder-as-an-irrelevancy odious, but among the locust horde of film reviewers who will find little trickery but overmuch honesty in this, a film for
people
, but certainly not for professional commentators.

For the film breaks almost every ironclad rule of not only traditional moviemaking, but of the
cinéma vérité
hornbook as well. Pogostin has, in point of fact, struck directly to the heart of the visual media by excluding, exorcising, denying and ignoring every hoary time-bleached cliché of scripting. His characters never say what is expected of them; as Pogostin phrases it: "When we see a scene in which a man and a woman are taking leave of a second man, and the men exchange the amenities, the banalities—'I'll see you tomorrow.' 'Yes, I'll see you at 3:00.' 'Take care of yourself.'—the audience has been conditioned by decades of films to
ignore
the words, and to
see
the way the second man looks at the first man's woman. In that look we know we are seeing the essence of the scene. All else is background noise. It is nonverbal communication, the essence of the visual expression."

And so, in
Hard Contract
, the characters seem to speak and act in a lean, sparse manner, moving along a plotline which is at best lightly sketched. And because of the innovative manner in which the characters seem to float in a kind of thespic "free fall," the audience is held much more tightly, straining forward to
hear
every word that is said. The best analogy would be the old saw about the only way to keep a bird from flying off is to hold it loosely in one's hand.

The plot, such as it is, concerns John Cunningham, a professional assassin. The compleat professional. A man so empathically tuned to his victims that—as we see in the opening sequence—he is able to stalk his victim by
preceding
him from a lunch counter to a skin flick theater,
knowing
the hit will go to the theater.

Cunningham—played no better or worse by James Coburn than any other role in which Coburn plays Coburn as himself (and, in fact, playing him precisely as he did the knife-wielding cowboy in
The Magnificent Seven
)—is assigned to murder three men in Europe. One in Spain, one in Brussels, and one as yet unlocated. In the process of stalking his Spanish hit, Cunningham becomes inextricably involved with a twice-divorced and highly-neurotic jet set beauty, played by Lee Remick. Till this girl, Cunningham's relations with women were as coldly professional as the novocained nerve he brought to the art of killing. But though he has always kept his emotions compartmentalized away from the whores who serviced him, and though she has never had an orgasm with a man, despite two marriages, something special happens between them, and Cunningham is suddenly stripped like a high tension wire and the bare copper exposed to caring.

From that point on, Cunningham's
modus operandi
deteriorates. He becomes steadily less a killing machine, an automaton of massacre, and more a human being. Until he is confronted, in the culminating scenes (played with bravura by Sterling Hayden, surely one of the finest and most underrated actors this country has ever produced) with
another
concept—this time one of behavioral psychology: it doesn't really matter what dark motives cause you to do wrong, to
stop
doing it, one first
stops
, then finds out why. In the abstract, the concept is fascinating, but set in the narrative arena of the numero uno killer facing the man who was numero uno twenty years before, it becomes compelling drama.

The strengths of Pogostin's personal vision are not merely in the complexities and innovations of the script. His direction—with the exception of one rather awkward scene in the bar of a hotel in Spain—is masterful, often daring, always clean and direct. Even audacious:

In Madrid's Prado, Pogostin must impart the core heartmeat of the "cool" overkill philosophy. It is an inordinately long vocalization of the basic theory, spoken by Cunningham's superior, Burgess Meredith (who is, as usual, merely excruciatingly excellent). Another director, surfeited with the Richard Lester tricky-toe technique, would have whipped here and there, intruding camera and self. But Pogostin fills his screen with Goya's "Firing Squad," a curiously affecting manifestation of death as a repellant. Then, holding his camera absolutely still, in noble defiance of all the tenets of directing, moves his players in and out, back and forward, offscreen and on, in front of the huge painting. Even during the screening I attended—with an audience noted for its bad manners—I heard not a sound throughout the scene. A very long scene of pure information.

Irrefutable evidence of Pogostin's singular talent as a director is offered by the performance he pulls from Lee Remick, an actress who, in the past, has risen to excellence but rarely. Due either to the unexpected nature of reactions in Pogostin's script, or his charisma as a mover of players, Miss Remick's performance here is a
rara avis
, as flowing as silk, as mercurial as quicksilver, as delicious as strawberry soup.

It is rare as the auk to encounter the first major film of a director as scintillant, as compelling, as memorable as this. Surely the same critical reviewers and audience who overlooked or bum-rapped
Mickey One, Paths of Glory
and
Pretty Poison
, but who leaped with cries of joy on
The Graduate
and
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
(two of the classic cop-outs of our time), will find
Hard Contract
the sort of picture they can neither dismiss out-of-hand nor champion with honest passion. It is the sort of picture that will force the fence-sitters to sit silently, the splinters paining them, as they inquire of one another, "Did I like that film?"

And they are to be pitied. For this is a film intended as a banner for a new generation of thinking, yet passionate, men. It comes before the filmgoer with all the verve and honesty of commitment, all the style and technique of an original mind, with pain and expertise and experience, and hope for a clearer understanding of ourselves in the Global Village. It offers not merely questions, but some solid answers. And it is entertainment of a rare high order.

In short, despite arguments to the contrary, this is a film not to be missed. The word through the underground, and the lines outside the Bruin Theater every night, indicate this to be so. For not to have seen
Hard Contract
this year is to be something less than
au courant
.

And in this long-fanged jungle world, not to be
au courant
is to be defenseless prey. You have been warned.

Los Angeles Free Press
/May 16,1969

Open to a portrait of the reviewer as a name-dropper:

So I'm sitting in Canter's at three in the morning, with Sal Mineo, and we're having matzoh ball soup and some conversation, when over walks Rob Reiner, and the first thing out of Rob's mouth is, "Did you see
2001
, and wasn't it a groove?" I sit quietly, spooning in bits of kreplach and hoping he won't ask again.

Mineo chimes in, "FanTASTic flick!"

I chew my matzoh ball.

They then launch into a highly colorful conversation about the psychic energy of the film, how it obviously applies to the ethical structure of the universe as expressed in the philosophy of the Vedantist movement, and the incredibly brilliant
tour de force
of Nietzsche-esque subplotting Kubrick pulled off. My gorge becomes buoyant. I can no longer deal with the realities of good Yiddish cooking in the presence of such rampant hypocritical hyperbole.

"Listen, you two loons," I begin politely, "you haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.
2001
is a visually exciting self-indulgent directorial exercise by a man who has spent anywhere from ten to twenty-five million dollars—depending on whom you're talking to—pulling ciphers out of a cocked hat because he lost his rabbits somewhere."

They stare at me.

It is maybe because in the telling, I have confounded my syntax to the point where even
I
don't know what I just said. "Well, uh, what did it, uh, mean . . . to . . . you . . . ?" Rob Reiner asks, a bit timorously.

So I explain the picture to them.

And then I realize it is the nineteenth time I've explained it to people in the week and a half since I saw the damned film, and once again I'm explaining it to people who came on like gangbusters with their total understanding and involvement with what Kubrick was "saying." I realize I am sick to tears of having to point out to phony and pretentious avant-garde types that all the significance they've dumped on this film simply ain't nohow, nowhichway, in no manner, present.

Now I will tell
you
. So you can tell your friends; and I can eat my matzoh ball soup in peace.

For openers, there is no plot. That simple. No story. I know this because I got it on the best authority—from one of the men listed in the credits as having
devised
the bloody story. He has said that after Kubrick had that staggeringly boring paean to the monkey wrench in the can (that first half that sent people stumbling from the theater half-asleep on the pre-premiere night I saw the film), he and some of the head honchos at Metro screened it, went ashen, and said to one another, "We ain't got a picture here." So they went out to the Kalahari Desert and shot the apes, and then they shot that Antonioni white-on-white bedroom, and they taped the second-thought sections on either side of the Man Against Space nonsense, and they called it the birth of the blues. So with that knowledge cemented into the forefront of your cerebrum, you can now see that any spiderweb superstructure of superimposed story you devised after you left the theater confused and didn't want to look like a
schmuck
to your friends, is just rationalization.