Harlan Ellison's Watching (9 page)

You see, I was the only Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland, and you wouldn't think that in Ohio—the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland—one would encounter much bigotry. You'd be wrong. They used to beat the shit out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anybody else in town, but that humble greatness wasn't what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business. They actually believed Jews ground up Seventh Day Adventist babies to make
matzohs
at Channukah. They called me a kike. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't care for the tone of voice. So I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.

So I made my own worlds.

Worlds cobbled up from the dreams and visions to be found in comic books with Plastic Man and Airboy and the Heap and Hawkman and the Boy Commandos and the Spirit; worlds found in the radio programs I devoured so avidly my ears grew mouths:
I Love a Mystery, The Shadow
, Lux . . . presents Hollywood,
Quiet, Please, The Land of the Lost, Grand Central Station, Let's Pretend
. Worlds in the pulp magazines:
Startling Stories, Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces, The Spider, Black Mask
.

But most of all . . . the movies.

Oh, God, the movies. For four hours every Saturday afternoon I was taken away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood and was permitted to ride beside Don "Red" Barry, swashbuckle beside Jon Hall, sleuth beside Sidney Toler, drool over Ann Rutherford and June Preisser, know fear as Kent Smith knew it and shudder helplessly as Rondo Hatton stalked the streets as The Creeper.

I was a child of the Forties. In a time before the word "alienation" slipped from everyone's lips as easily as a rolling stone gathers no moss, I was a thoroughly, hopelessly, totally alienated kid who could not exist in the real world. And though the studio money-grubbers who churned out those wonderfully awful potboilers could never have known what succor they were bringing to my parched soul, they provided me the only world to which I cared to belong. The world of dreams, of celluloid escapes, of glorious moviegoing.

(You know one reason I hate my sister, Beverly? She is eight years older than I am, see. And when my Mom and Dad would be at the store, downtown, working on Saturday, I was entrusted to her care. She had to get me downtown on the bus, to see the movie. Then she could go off and do whatever dull dumb things girls did in Painesville on Saturday afternoons. Had to be dumb, didn't it? She wasn't at the
movie
, fer chrissakes! But she used to torment me. She'd dawdle, and chivvy me, and tell me she wasn't going to take me, and then she'd put her dress up in back so her slip showed, and say, come on, let's go. And I'd say, we can't go with you like that, and she'd torment me with, sure we can, come on. And I'd sit down on my bed and start to cry, because I knew damned
well
we couldn't walk up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue and get on that bus and go downtown with her dress up in back so her slip showed. And she'd do that to me for an hour before we left. We always did, of course, but by the time we got downtown I was a nervous wreck. That's one of the reasons I hate Beverly. But that's another story.)

The Lake Theater on State Street in Painesville was the Taj Mahal to me. It was dark and filled with endless magics. Sounds no mortal ever heard: the choking gurgle of a
thuggee
victim being strangled for the love of Kali; the special whimpering bark as Lassie told some halfwit nit of a child actor that the baby was in a burning building; the insidious laugh of Victor Jory as The Shadow; the thunk of crossbow arrows plonking into the drawbridge of evil King John. Sights no mortal ever beheld: Sabu changed into a dog by Conrad Veidt; Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, beating the shit out of a gang of bullies somehow vaguely reminiscent of the thugs that played in the schoolyard of Lathrop Grade School; Kirk Alyn leaping off a building shouting, "Up, up, and awayyyy!" There was no end to the magic to be found in that dark cavern.

For four hours—with Bingo and two features and three cartoons and a TravelTalk and a singalong—I was in Heaven. A special dark Heaven even more private than the bathroom, which is the only place a little kid can go to, to be alone.

And I knew some day I would have adventures like that. Some day I would walk streets paved with gold, and all the bullies would step off into the gutter when I passed, and my Mother and Father would say, "The kid really knows how to live," because I'd be in business for myself, and even if my partner Miles Archer had been murdered and I
didn't
know whether the fat man or Joel Cairo had the black bird, even so . . . I'd be competent and tough, and I'd win out.

That was how it was when I was a kid.

Is there nobility in the moviegoing experience? Don't ask me, friend. I don't know from nobility; all I know from is survival and dreams.

And thank
you
, Val Lewton.

Melville once ventured, "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." Even when the flea is photographed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, its volume is a flashy but transitory offering. Melville dealt with whales, consequently.

Unlike most of the flea-marketeers of Hollywood, director John Frankenheimer is a man who would deal with whales, had he his choice. It is the choice of the louse as opposed to the air-breather. And in so doing, his sphere of attention becomes more cerebral, the purview of his cinematic documents ceases to be merely entertainment (which is that matter lightly dropped on the viewer, like tapioca pudding, e.g., Doris Day flicks) and becomes "art" (which entails active participation and, like a steak, mastication).

The Train
is art, and as a result, many things can be said of it, not the least of which is that it is a
good
picture. In fact, it may be
too
good for the people who will eventually decide whether or not it is successful, at the box office. This is, I feel, a sin not of the producer, but of the culture, of the motion picture—goer. In the main, he has been surfeited with such an endless glut of pap films—usually because these were the ones he patronized most in the past, thus by his attentions demanding more of the same, and getting no better than he deserved—that a film of some depth and contrast leaves him confused and disgruntled; and rather than acknowledging that his imaginative faculties have atrophied, as with
Lord Jim, Dr. Strangelove
and half a hundred other superlative films, he will condemn the work set before him. It is a hideous conceit.

And I fear
The Train
will be another victim.

Behind and beside me in the theater, during the special screening, safe in the dark to express remarks of denseness and silliness that a lighted room would either force them to rationalize as "opinions" or keep unspoken, I heard typical moviegoers ask each other what the hell was going on up there, at points in the film any relatively cogent and informed person should have found self-explanatory. Again, I assert, this is not the fault of Frankenheimer & Co. but of The Great Unwashed (a term of surpassing arrogance and disdain I have hesitated to use before, but which seems frighteningly applicable here). And the answer to the problem is beyond me: the filmmaker can either pander to this Howdy Doody mentality, and bring forth an endless stream of Fanny Hurst/Gidget/Tammy/Ross Hunter charades, or go his way as has Frankenheimer or Kubrick or Richardson and woo his own Muse, letting the stock options fall where they may.

The latter course is one of courage, for it entails risk, loss of financing, and the roar of corporation executives. It is to Frankenheimer's eternal credit that he did not take the easy way out for, to repeat,
The Train
is a work of brilliance, perceptivity, depth and meaning. It approaches questions of morality and conscience that demand grappling. In short, this film, unlike much of what makes money these seasons, does not pass through the viewer like beets through a baby's backside.

Set in Paris, 1944, with the Allies always just "a few days away from liberation" of the open city, a small group of French Resistance operatives set themselves the task of rescuing a trainload of art treasures, masterpieces, "the heritage of France," from being shipped to Germany by the Nazi Colonel who has, for four years, pathologically kept the paintings from being damaged, ostensibly because they are convertible to gold needed for the war effort, but in reality because he is a man possessed of taste and discrimination, a man awed by the genius unleashed on those canvases by Matisse, Braque, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Picasso. His one single driving thought is to get those irreplaceable treasures away. He is a dedicated man, a man with lofty motives, serving a beast master, and himself part-beast.

He is a man doing the wrong thing—for the right reason.

His opposite number is a man of controlled brutishness, a Parisian railroadman named Labiche, who counts the cost of sabotage in human lives. X number of lives to stop this train, X number for that train. Only the most valuable trains—munitions, troops, etc.—are worth expending the lives of his fellow saboteurs. He rejects the plea of the drab little Frenchwoman (sensitively played by Suzanne Flon, who will be best remembered, perhaps, as Lautrec's mannequin love in
Moulin Rouge
) who has been Colonel Von Waldheim's assistant, to stop the Colonel from ferreting away with the golden heart of French culture. Paintings mean nothing to him; there's a war on; what has art to do with it? Not until Von Waldheim executes old Papa Boule, the engineer Labiche has assigned to the train, for trying to sabotage the locomotive pulling that fabulous cargo, does Labiche swear to stop the train. But still, the paintings mean nothing to him. Crated in their boxcars—7 Van Gogh, they are stenciled, or 4 Roualt, like herring, like machine parts, like piece goods—they are merely a symbol of frenzy to Labiche.

He will stop the train, he will defeat the Nazi, Von Waldheim. And therein lies the beautiful dichotomy of the story.

Because he is doing the right thing—for the wrong reason!

In essence, this 133-minute film is a titanic duel between the personalities of Von Waldheim: dedicated, brutal, ascetic, implacable yet sensitive, determined . . . and Labiche: physical, vengeful, cunning, artless yet graceful, equally determined. And while the paintings mean nothing to Labiche, they mean everything to Von Waldheim, they are his obsession.

In the final moments of the film, after a staggering loss of life over the inanimate cargo, when the battle has been won, Von Waldheim, even then, is able to tell Labiche that the paintings are his, will always be his, will always belong to him or a man
like
him, to men with the eyes to see beauty. He tells Labiche that he has won, but without even knowing why, or what he was doing, that the paintings mean as much to Labiche as a string of pearls to an ape.

And Labiche looks at the jumbled jackstraw tumble of French hostages Von Waldheim has had machine-gunned off the train, and kills the Nazi. The camera spastically intercuts between the jumbled crates of great paintings half-unloaded from the derailed train, and the dead Frenchmen. Cut and intercut, and only a dolt could fail to see the unspoken question: Were these paintings worth all these wasted lives?

It is a breathless visual posture of Frankenheimer as master of his craft, as symbolist, as preacher, as capturer of art for the masses, that does not demean the intellectual's praise. It sums up one of the basic questions of man in conflict with himself to preserve culture and civilization:

Is the life of a man greater or lesser than the art he produces in his most noble moments? Is it possible to equate the continued value of history and cultural heritage his finest work represents, weighed against common flesh, mortal clay? It is a question to which philosophers have only imperfect answers, and in restating the question in modern, cinematic, bold terms, Frankenheimer (and I would presume scenarists Franklin Coen and Frank Davis) has rendered a service. For more than entertainment has been provided, for those who would care to exercise their wit and intelligence.

Even serendipitously, this film provides marginal treasures, unexpected, and easy to love: a visual paean to the "high iron" of steam locomotion, a reverence for the filth and sweat and bravery of men who pushed the steam horses; a sensation of grandeur the diesel engineers of today cannot possibly feel about their semisilent zip-machines. It is a final hurrah voiced in closeups of sooty engines, long shots down on marshaling yards, pans and zooms to and away from specific bits of iron that speak of the majesty of the whistle-screeching, thunder-making days of railroading, now almost entirely passed into history.

And more: England's incomparable Paul Scofield as the many-faceted Nazi Colonel, rendering a portrayal of complexity and even—impossibly—compassion, with a minimum of arm-waving, with a reserve of style that bespeaks great talent. His every moment on the screen is a gesture of possession; he strides across this film as palpably impressive as the train itself, and in time, the train dwindles in import, and the man trying to rule it becomes the central figure of the drama, despite the plotting of script which offers us Burt Lancaster as Labiche. Correction. It offers us