Vigo’s Secret (L’ATALANTE)

From the Chicago Reader, March 29, 1991. —J.R.

L’ATALANTE

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jean Vigo

Written by Vigo, Albert Riera, and Jean Guinee

With Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Gilles Margaritis, and Louis Lefevre.

“What was Vigo’s secret? Probably he lived more intensely than most of us. Filmmaking is awkward because of the disjointed nature of the work. You shoot five to fifteen seconds and then stop for an hour. On the film set there is seldom the opportunity for the concentrated intensity a writer like Henry Miller might have enjoyed at his desk. By the time he had written twenty pages, a kind of fever possessed him, carried him away; it could be tremendous, even sublime. Vigo seems to have worked continuously in this state of trance, without ever losing his clearheadedness.” — François Truffaut, 1970

L’Atalante is one of the supreme achievements in the history of cinema, and its recent restoration, playing this week at the Music Box, offers what is surely the best version any of us is ever likely to see. Yet the conditions that made this masterpiece possible were anything but auspicious.

When Jean Vigo started to work on his first and only feature in July 1933, he had no say over either the script or the two lead actors. Read more

Rediscovering LAND OF THE PHARAOHS

Mea culpa: How could I have excluded Howard Hawks’ masterpiece Land of the Pharaohs from the list of my thousand favorite films in Essential Cinema? Clearly I had better taste in recognizing the film’s greatness in 1955, at age 12, before being brainwashed by such factoids as the movie’s commercial failure or complaints about the contemporary-sounding dialogue in a film set in ancient Egypt (“the feeling is mutual”), amplified later by Hawks and/or his screenwriter William Faulkner saying “I didn’t know how a Pharaoh talked.” But surely the ruse of having Jack Hawkins speak with an English accent and allowing Dewey Martin in his slave part not to lose his American accent wasn’t the worst of solutions. In any case, did anyone ever fault Rio Bravo because Hawks, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett didn’t know how 19th century cowboys talked? I’d rather praise Land of the Pharaohs for its contemporary relevance 68 years later, with Hawkins as its ruthless Pharaoh and Joan Collins as his equally greedy Queen and successor epitomizing the dog-in-the-manger capitalism of Donald and Melania that currently rules the Republican Party. Or for Alexandre Trauner’s spectacular set design and the film’s intricately choreographed movements and layers of extras. Read more