Adam at Six A.M.: a review

1970s American cinema was at a crossroads.  The musical-western-Technicolor extravaganzas that had dominated the 1950s and 1960s, and once so-wowed cinema audiences, were drawing less crowds.  They were stale in a contemporary world that had suffered the assassination of a president and the Vietnam War.  America had lost its innocence, and had gained a youth questioning how it had all come to this.  The ‘Young Beards’ took over from the late 1960s (Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola), and they made some loud, brash pictures.  But there was a second thread to 1970s cinema, not interested in chasing the youth money, as many of the pictures now were, but instead choosing to try and answer some of the questions of its demographic:  Why?  How?  What is the point?  Some mature, interesting pictures came out of that period: Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Two-Lane Blacktop.  What these pictures shared was a gaze not ordinarily seen in American cinema, at least not for a long time: the lives of the poor, the disenfranchised, the workers.  Many of the films that came out of that time are cornerstones of American film studies today.  Not all of them made an impact, though.

In 1970, a yet to be famous actor by the name of Michael Douglas was trying to make his name in his father’s industry.  He’d already done one film that reflected the youth dissatisfaction with contemporary American politics, in Hail Hero! (1969). For his second film, a journeyman TV director by the name of Robert Scheerer signed him up to play the titular Adam, in the film Adam at Six A.M..   Written by Elinor and Stephen Karpf, Adam Gaines is a lecturer in semantics at a Californian university.  At the start of the summer break, a relative dies and he travels back to the Missouri town where she lived, and dissatisfied with his Californian life, enlists as a labourer cutting down trees and falls for a local girl.

It is an entirely unconvincing film that everybody involved in seems to think is high art.  There is an intellectual debt to European cinema – Blow-Up is mentioned, particularly to draw a contrast between the ‘yokels’ who think the film a waste of time, and Douglas’s Gaines who tells them how wrong they are.  His position as a lecturer in semantics leads to an explanation of what that subject is, given to the same ignorant ‘yokels’ – and here is the big difference between European cinema and a film that wants to be considered in the same breath: a European film would not have semantics explained in dull exposition. In fact, such a film would never have explained the subject, but rather allowed us to see how the film plays out a semantic argument.  In this film, what people think they want is not what they want – and director Scheerer plays out the semantic arguments in obvious visual and textual ways, allowing no nuance or subtlety to develop in his picture.

That said there are some things of note here.  Occasionally – and it really is only once or twice – Scheerer’s direction takes on a greater visual quality that previously shown (there is a well shot, lit, and directed sequence of a character alone in the dark, with only the light of the phone-booth to keep him company, as he drifts further away from people he thought friends and a woman he doesn’t know but wants to).  The cast really go for it as well – Michael Douglas, looking as young as a student rather than a lecturer, commits himself admirably – star wattage is in evidence, even here.  Lee Purcell as the girl, Jerri Jo Hopper, is given a rather thankless duty as a girl who just wants marriage and a home of her own, but manages to do something with it.  She is a girl you’d want to marry, until you know she wants to marry and have the same life her folks had too: that is, she’s a girl who’d go to those musical-western-Technicolor extravaganzas and be happy – and aren’t we past that now?  Joe Don Baker manages to do something as well with another underwritten part, of the labourer best friend who wants to go into TV repair but can’t ever get the money because he’s spending it on booze and gambling.  

The end of the film has many of the characters riding off into the sunset, and Adam Gaines settling down to be with the woman he loves. But it’s not the end of the story – and here is where the fact that Gaines is a lecturer in semantics becomes important plot-wise, and so unsubtly done – for as he walks around a home filled with memorabilia for his forthcoming wedding, he reads the signs and in them sees his future.  One visual clue would have been enough in a European film, but in Scheerer’s the whole house is filled with them, it is a grotesque realisation of the nightmare that awaits Gaines if he stays in Missouri, if he stays with Jerry-Jo.  For after all, for these young men of America, isn’t the future in tackling injustice and asking questions, not settling for what your parents had and being happy?  As the ice-cream melts on the two-lane blacktop, the total rejection of past attitudes is forged, and Gaines is off to an uncertain future.

Adam at Six A.M. was never a hit in its own day.  It is too unsubtle to ever be a hit, and too weakly directed.  Its script is laboured, a bloated exaggeration of European art-house movies of the day.  It has some lovely scenery – the film was shot in the backwaters of Missouri – and Michael Douglas would go onto bigger, better things: as producer he would unleash some of those aforementioned great pictures into the world.  But this, it’s a relic of another age now, full of rusted ideas.  It could have been great, it just wasn’t.

Une Vie Sans Joie (1924): A Review

Une Vie Sans Joie (1924) aka Backbiters, and sometimes called Catherine, is the first film on which Jean Renoir – that giant of French cinema – received a directing credit.   He shared directing duties with Albert Dieudonné, an actor and writer as well as director, who had some major roles in the silent era (including in this) before retiring from cinema with the onset of sound (though he would be recalled from retirement in mid 1930s and early 1940s for a couple of roles).  Despite the co-direction credit, Une Vie Sans Joie is stamped with certain Renoir preoccupations and imagery that his hand is easy to detect – some sequences are so painterly in their use of light, that one might even detect the hand of Pierre-Auguste in certain scenes.

Looking back on this film, almost ninety years later, is really looking into history: the scenes of provincial life display rustic charm and ingrained poverty – at times it could be a Zola novel bought to life, but this was the reality of French rural life in the 1920s (though it could easily be rural life of the 1880s).  The Zola connection is not made lightly – Renoir would, two films on from this, film a version of Zola’s seminal classic Nana.  Cinematically this is also ancient – the acting, from Catherine Hessling as the lead to Maud Richard as Madame Mallet is over-emphasised in that silent movie way, almost as if they didn’t believe the camera could pick up the nuance of the face.  Catherine Hessling is given free-reign, mostly I suspect, because she was Renoir’s wife.  

Catherine Hessling as 'Catherine'

 

The story is also ancient: the maid to the Mallet family upsets the Madame and so is forced onto the street.  She finds accommodation but cannot pay the rent.  She hears of a job but Madame Mallet controls it.  Monsieur Mallet, who has always taken sympathy on her, hires her has his secretary but Madame Mallet controls her husband too well.  The ending, which should resolve these problems, instead resorts to a runaway tram, and an almost Keystone Kop-esque chase, filmed though in seriousness not jest.  I also suspect there was some disconnect between what Renoir wanted to achieve with this movie, and what Dieudonné desired.  The base comedy – the runaway tram, but also a scene of two men attempting to outdo each other with their ability to put up political posters that ends in slapstick – doesn’t always rest easy against the solemn tone of Catherine’s descent from satisfied life.

Jean Renoir in later years

 

As a beginning to a cinematic career, Une Vie Sans Joie displays certain skills.  When Renoir & Dieudonné’s camera lingers on faces, when it shows us those scenes of provincial life – the crosscutting between a carnival and seduction becoming death – it is a film that reveals talent, but too often it resorts to cheaper tricks, it is occasionally bathetic and most often relies on sentimentality to provoke a reaction.  Later in his career Renoir would show how to create a reaction in an audience without resorting to such base manipulations, but he wasn’t there yet.

'Joseph Anton: A Memoir' by Salman Rushdie - Review

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

A Review

When The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, it gained immediate attention –not for the reasons now known – but rather for its quality of prose.  It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year (losing out to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda), and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.  Many considered it a far superior novel to Midnight’s Children, which had won the Booker in 1981.  There was some uproar from the Muslim community in 1988, but it wasn’t until a few months into the following year, (14 February 1989, to be precise, and a date Rushdie will never forget) that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued his now famous fatwā calling for Rushdie's death.

The life that Salman Rushdie lived under the height of the fatwā has long remained secret.  He received state protection – something not all quarters of the British establishment felt he deserved – but despite the restrictions was able to find new love and raise his children.  I wondered, whilst reading his memoir of this part of his life, Joseph Anton, whether the British press’s disgust at the money being spent on Rushdie was seen as wasted as he seemed not to be suffering – he was in fact still writing, falling in love and raising a new son – and surely someone under such restrictions should be suffering… but such conjecture is not my job to make.

His memoir is named Joseph Anton after the pseudonym his protection teams made him use.  It is a name of his own construction, homage to two great writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.  Predictably the protection teams called him Joe.  Knowing that the working life of a writer is invariably dull, Rushdie spends much of this book skipping long passages of his subterranean existence – when he is writing – to focus on the key events of this long non-life.   The first week is shown in great detail – the funeral of his friend, Bruce Chatwin, the coming together of his remaining friends to help him deal with the immediate consequences of the fatwā.  One gains, from reading this memoir, a good impression of the British literary establishment in the late 1980s, early 1990s – they seem a crowd ready to fight for what they know is right, to offer support to their friend, and quite often a roof over his head for long periods.  He was certainly blessed with good friends.

Salman Rushdie

It is once life being lived under the fatwā becomes more established – a life always close to being torn apart, and lived on the razor’s edge, but where there is routine, ordinary life attempting to reassert itself from the centre – that the power of Rushdie’s strength of will really begin to shine through.  Rushdie presents himself as keeping his cool, even when those around him were losing their heads, and it makes one wonder about all those ellipses in his narrative – for sake of endearment, did he not want to show the moments when he almost lost his own mind?  The strains the fatwā places upon him and his fledgling relationship with Elizabeth West does seem to crack – there are fault lines visible from the outside, fault lines we know will break and bring about the end (but we are reading with hindsight, and Rushdie is presenting his life as if a novel, and constructing and assembling his narrative with the novelists touch, so perhaps we are reading too much into it.) 

It is the presentation of his life that provides the biggest problem in this lengthy book.  Rushdie made a decision early on, I guess, to present his life lived under the fatwā as a third person narrative – it is a tricksy decision, but one that makes logical sense: after all, during this time he was not Salman Rushdie but Joseph Anton.  The impact this decision has on the reader is to lessen the impact of events – we are shown events as they happened, viewing them from a distance, and so events as they happen feel less terrifying.  We get no real sense of what it was like to live under such a thing, emotionally and mentally and spiritually.  What we get is an intellectualisation of events, an incomplete portrait that never completely solidifies into a total image.  There is a flipside to this decision worth considering: if Rushdie had presented this material in the first person, he could so easily have slipped into self-pitying bathos, and such behaviour might have quite easily alienated some of his readers, and confirmed the worst suspicions of his detractors – that Rushdie cares only for himself and not for those who have been hurt or killed by his art.

It is also worth noting that his memoir is stripped bare – Joseph Anton’s narrative does not read like a typical Salman Rushdie novel.  Gone are the narrative games, the elaborate prosody, the poetic style typical of his novels.  This deliberate abandonment of literary style creates a stark, shocking intimacy that form a counterpoint to the distancing of the third person narrative. 

Salman Rushdi and Elizabeth West, in later days

What we get, then, in Joseph Anton is a partial portrait of what life was actually life under the fatwā, a great amount of detail into the considerations of the protection team and how they go about their business of keeping their ‘prot’ alive – but where the narrative really comes alive is in the details of the relationships surviving under this restrictions.  I’m not sure there has been a better book this year on father-son relationships, but through the course of these eleven years we see his son Zafar mature and become a man, and understand something of the relationship between father and son.   The portrayal of the relationship with Elizabeth West, made under the fatwā and lived entirely in its shadow, is moving and though it comes to a sadly mournful conclusion, it is nevertheless an important part of Rushdie’s story.

Joseph Anton is a fascinating, if not entirely complete, portrait of life lived under some very tough restrictions.  It is as much Salman Rushdie’s story as that of his family.  From its pages one will not learn very much about the mind-set that created and maintained the fatwā, or what it is to be a writer when faced with such opposition, but what you will get is an account of eleven years in one man’s life that are made more extraordinary than they should be by events beyond his control, and of his determination to beat it and live beyond it.

Dusklands: A Review

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.  I know this as a fact as every work published by him after this date is plastered with this fact.  Two things are wrong with this statement: 1) you don’t win a Nobel Prize, you are awarded one, and 2) having a Nobel Prize conferred on you doesn’t automatically make all of your work wondrous. 

I have always admired Coetzee – and admired is so the right word.  You don’t love Coetzee, in fact sometimes he repels you; sometimes he spits in your face and expects you to like him for it.  His prose is deliberately provocative, and it can be notoriously difficult.  I read Disgrace in hardback, in 1999, and about six years later I read Life & Times of Michael K.  Each successive new novel since Disgrace I’ve put on my ‘to read list’ and never gotten around to.  There always seems to be some other author I should buy first, read first, and be angered by first.  Then, the other day browsing a charity shop, I saw a collection of four early Coetzee novels and, on impulse, bought the lot.  You don’t see any Coetzee’s, other than Disgrace, in charity shops very often.  So last night, looking at these four Coetzee novels, I told myself I better start reading them, before they slip into my books cupboard along with all those other unread novels that gather there, waiting for me to read them.

I started with Dusklands.  It seemed appropriate, being his first novel.  I thought it might be interesting to see what protean Coetzeean elements were imbued in this novel.   Quite a few, as it happens.

Dusklands is essentially two short stories.  The Vintage edition I read clocked in at a meagre 125 pages.  The first tells the story of Eugene Dawn, a man hired by Coetzee to write a report into the Vietnam War and who is edging into madness.  The second tells of a different Coetzee, who is tasked with exploring South Africa in the 18^th century, and who becomes embroiled in conflict with the indigenous peoples.  Though they are separate stories, there are overlaps between the two in terms of theme and these thematic elements reverberate throughout the novel, building up depth and power. 

Of the two pieces, I found the second more interesting.  Both are very well written – you’d expect nothing less from a Nobel Prize ‘winner’ – but the story of Jacobus Coetzee has more visceral impact, and the historical questions raised seem pertinent even today (which is Coetzee’s point). 

Dusklands is not always an easy read, but it is an ultimately rewarding one (even if not all its elements work as well as they should).  I firmly believe that literature should challenge ones preconceived notions, as well as entertain, and Coetzee’s debut novel does both these things.  Of course we know he will go onto to do this sort of thing better, and with more style and power, but for the beginning of a career, Dusklands is pretty heady stuff.