House of Strangers: Philip Yordan and tragic mythology

House of Strangers is an American film noir from 1949. Thematically and stylistically the film is a precursor to The Godfather. The protagonist in House of Strangers is Max Monetti – played by Richard Conte – the smartest and toughest of the four sons that belong to successful immigrant banker, Gino Monetti, played by Edward G. Robinson. Conte later portrayed Don Barzini in The Godfather but, in his heyday (1940s and 1950s), Conte specialised in depicting tough, working-class, immigrant heroes – Conte himself was the son of Italian immigrants. Notably, Conte played Nick Garcos in Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949) based on A.I. Bezzerides' classic crime novel Thieves' Market.

The plot of House of Strangers revolves around the hatred of three of the sons for their overbearing father and the misplaced loyalty that Max shows the old man that lands Max in prison for seven years, coming out of which he vows revenge on his less scrupulous siblings, who've since taken over their father's business, declaring: 'Vengeance is a rare wine. A joy divine; says the Arab. And I'm gonna get drunk on it.'

Revenge is, of course, a major theme in Greek classical culture, which regarded it as a demonstration of hubris, a move towards becoming apolis, that is someone who 'exits from the political community of men (and the concrete result cannot but be death, flight, or exile)' [Castoriadis, Cornelius: Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation].

These themes of revenge, hubris and becoming apolis are often present in the best film noirs and Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, which sometimes allow the hero to accept the strictures of civilised society and rejoin it, and sometimes reveal that there's no way back for him into society and 'death, flight or exile' is all he can expect.

The screenplay for House of Strangers was written by Philip Yordan, who penned a number of significant film noirs – House of Strangers, The Chase, Edge of Doom, The Big Combo, Detective Story – and Westerns – Broken Lance, Johnny Guitar, The Last Frontier, Day of the Outlaw, The Man from Laramie – in this period. Yordan admitted the influence of Greek tragedy in his work:

'I detest a certain type of modern would-be "hero", people who are obsessed only by getting their daily bread. I have tried to react against this petty bourgeois mentality and attempted to discover again the purity of the heroes of classical tragedy. I have always wanted to re-create a tragic mythology, giving a large role to destiny, solitude, nobility.'

The Blue Angel: Gena Rowlands and Marlene Dietrich

Josef von Sternberg’s film The Blue Angel (1930), with Marlene Dietrich, is an extraordinary depiction of loneliness and humiliation, hubris and tragedy. (See the English-language version of the film in its entirety above).

Writing in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Ray Carney reveals the influence of The Blue Angel on John Cassavetes.

Carney says of Gena Rowlands (John Cassavetes’ wife and star in many of his films):

‘It’s indicative… of many of her enduring attitudes that, after she saw The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich became her idol as an actress. Rowlands was fascinated with Dietrich’s blend of feminine sexual allure and almost masculine toughness and swagger. She watched the film over and over again… and even adopted a few of Dietrich’s gestures and mannerisms (sitting backward on a chair and such).’

Carney also tells us how The Blue Angel inspired Cassavetes in relation to his The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975):

‘Cassavetes and Rowlands were both fans of Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Rowlands loved the toughness and unsentimentalilty of Dietrich’s performance. Cassavetes liked the film for a different reason – because it was about an artist-surrogate who creates an artificial, artful world in which to live. (The filmmaker once asked me to give him a rare photograph I had from it, as well as a photograph showing the set of Yen’s palace in [Frank Capra’s] The Bitter Tea of General Yen, another film with the same subject). It’s not accidental that there is a photograph of Dietrich visible on the mirror of the strippers’ dressing room in the first version of [The Killing of a Chinese Bookie]. Although none of Cassavetes’ interviewers picked up on the allusion, in several post-release statements, Cassavetes wryly implied that he had modelled the character of Mr Sophistication [picture above] on Professor Rath.

‘Another reason Cassavetes was fascinated by The Blue Angel was that the film focused on the situation of a scorned, humiliated stage performer, an emotional event that spoke to Cassavetes for personal reasons. Notwithstanding the macho-man image he so diligently cultivated (or perhaps because of it), he often thought of his own life as a series of public humiliations – from his grade-school, high-school, college and drama-school days; to his years of unemployment and unsuccessful audition experiences – like the time he was jeered off stage as an MC at a burlesque house (an event dramatized in Shadows in Hugh’s nightclub debacle); to the various and sundry fiascos associated with his appearances at screenings and on television shows; to his run-ins with directors when he was acting (some of which are dramatized with the character of Myrtle in Opening Night).’

Ben Gazzara on John Cassavetes: ‘He wasn’t a filmmaker; he was a poet’

 

‘It breaks my heart to have this era come to an end. Ben meant so much to all of us. To our families. To John. To Peter [Falk]. To have them gone now is devastating to me.’ Gena Rowlands

Sadly, the actor Ben Gazzara has died. He was involved in many notable films but was defined by his collaboration with John Cassavetes, for his roles in Husbands (1970); Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975) and Opening Night (1978).

Above is the documentary the BBC made on the filming of Husbands, which starred Cassavetes, Gazzara and another (recently deceased) Cassavetes’ stalwart, Peter Falk.  The documentary captures something of Cassavetes’ intensity as an artist and his working methods, though these are wrongly described in the introduction to the programme as relying on improvisation.

In fact, rather than improvisation, Cassavetes’ method was to revise and rewrite his scripts during rehearsals in light of things he and his actors discovered about the characters and story. Other directors would approach their films having already decided what lines their actors would speak and made up their minds as to how and where they expected actors to move and behave. But for Cassavetes’, film – all art – was not a technical endeavour; it was a process of exploration, an odyssey, a way of life, so that the film was shaped and emerged only in the making of it.

The myth of Cassavetes’ improvisational style – only his first film Shadows was properly improvisational – obscures his brilliance as a writer; his ability to convincingly convey the impression of spontaneous speech and deeply-embedded emotion – the inarticulate outpourings of men and women struggling to fathom their lives or the world. His characters often appear to be improvising, to be making it up as they go along, because Cassavetes wrote it that way and because this is what Cassavetes believed people do in real life, make it up as they go along. A lot of Cassavetes’ genius, as well as the hostility with which mainstream critics and audiences reacted to his films, can be attributed to his determination to show, against Hollywood, that people don’t know what they’re doing, that they can never make sense of themselves no matter how hard they try and that we all make it up as we go along, with all the danger, awkwardness and inevitable failure this implies. In other words, for Cassavetes, echoing another Greek: all that we can know is that we know nothing, and that, not unlike Socrates, Cassavetes pokes and prods – even tortures – his characters, takes them apart (always sympathetically, never cynically) to reveal to them their flaws and weaknesses and make them think again about who they are.

Below is a clip of Ben Gazzara talking only last year about working with Cassavetes on Husbands:

Scorsese, Kazan and American ideology

Above is clip from A Letter to Elia, Martin Scorsese’s tribute to Greek-American film-maker Elia Kazan, most known for Panic in the Streets, Viva Zapata!, On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America, America; the latter being a reincarnation of his family’s journey from Anatolia to America, a journey that Kazan mythologises as one taken from slavery to freedom. Kazan’s espousal of this central myth of America, that it is a land of liberty and progress whereas the ‘Old World’ is a place of oppression stifled by tradition, is problematic and, in his work, only really affects America, America and, I suppose, to some extent, On the Waterfront; and, indeed, it’s difficult to know the degree to which Kazan believed in American ideology – in the documentary Kazan says criticism of America makes him ‘bristle’ – or whether he adopted it in order to justify, to himself as much as anyone else, his notorious decision to name names during the McCarthy communist witch hunts. For all its noisy championing of individual liberty, America places a higher value than Europe on conformism and a lesser one on dissidence and radical critique, which you would have thought a country as weird and destructive as America badly needs, especially from its thinking film-makers. 

See entire film here.

Ben Gazzara talking Killing of a Chinese Bookie

My favourite interpretation of John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie is that Cosmo Vitelli and the strip-club he presides over, as father-figure, lover, director, producer and all round life and soul, is a metaphor for Cassavetes the artist and his films; his metaphorical depiction of all the rubbish an artist has to put up with in order to assert his vision. Poor Cosmo has to deal with gangsters and money men trying to take his club away from him; recalcitrant performers who don’t understand his vision or insist on bringing their personal problems to work: a public indifferent or even contemptuous of his art; and so on.

This interpretation of Killing of a Chinese Bookie always made a lot of sense to me, and it’s one Ben Gazzara, who played Cosmo, gives credence to: ‘I remember when we shot the scene in the limo, where I’m alone without the girls, and John was on the floor, holding the camera. Between takes, he explained what the film meant to him: “All these people who destroy art, who persecute you, who make you do things and never leave you alone.” He began to cry. I thought: My God, it’s really a personal thing for him. The gangsters were a metaphor, Cosmo was John. The club was where Vitelli created beauty, with its girls, music, jokes and spectacle… and the gangsters were the system, which was so hard on John.’

Above is a clip of Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and below he – and producer Al Ruban – discuss the hostile reaction the film received from audiences and critics on opening, causing it to be withdrawn after a week.

The Mask of Dimitrios

I’ve been reading Harry Petrakis’ novel Nick the Greek, an interesting and entertaining piece of Greek-Americana which is about the greatest gambler of all time, Nick Dandolos, who originated from Rethymnon. Dandolos, apparently, won and lost millions, although Petrakis suggests that an authentic gambler isn’t motivated by money, but by an extreme form of philotimo, a fearless gesture informed by self-abnegation and, ultimately, self-destruction. There’s a good chapter in Nick the Greek in which Dandolos spends time in Paris gambling and womanising with a fellow Greek high-roller, a sympathetic portrait of the arms dealer, the original ‘merchant of death’, Basil Zaharoff (Vasileios Zacharias). Zaharoff is supposed to have provided the inspiration for the character of Dimitrios Makropoulos in Eric Ambler’s brilliant noir novel The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), which relates the obsessive quest by an English writer to trace the career of the Smyrniot Makropoulos, who is a thief, killer, spy, assassin, drug dealer, drug addict, white slave trader and all the rest, a quest that takes him on a journey through inter-war Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and France. The book was made into a classic film noir in 1945, a clip from which is above.

Capra and Cassavetes

‘Frank Capra… in my estimation is the greatest of all American directors, a man so beautiful, so forgiving, so democratic, so damned talented, so full of life and energy that his films patrol the imagination of America today’. John Cassavetes

As you settle down this Christmas to watch Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, remember that you are not watching a sentimental or light-hearted film, but a film about a desperate man, George Bailey, in irreconcilable conflict with the full range of social, bureaucratic and discursive conventions conspiring to thwart his hopes for self-expression and self-realisation; a film which depicts a ‘wild-eyed’ dreamer relentlessly frustrated and disappointed, who goes from one crisis to the next, suffers one wound after another, until his sense of defeat and estrangement is so great that he wants to kill himself.

This, at least, is the interpretation of It’s a Wonderful Life provided by Raymond Carney in his book, American Visions: The Films of Frank Capra, which touts Capra as a ‘poet of suffering and tragedy’ and aims to rescue his films – which include other classics such as American Madness, Forbidden, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Ladies of Leisure, Lost Horizon, It Happened One Night, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe – from accusations of ‘sentimentality’ ‘corn’ and fatuous celebrations of the American Dream, and establish him in a tradition of artists – such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, William James, Edward Hopper and John Cassavetes – who examine the conflict between what American society offers and what it delivers, the gap between imagination and reality in which alienation exists, who are advocates for the man or woman who dares to dream or desires too much, and defenders of the visionary individual battling against systems, ideologies and cultures out to repress, control or crush passionate impulses and creative energies.

The phone scene (in the above video) gives a good idea of the almost unbearable emotional strain and tension that Capra makes George Bailey endure in It’s a Wonderful Life, the turmoil and suffering that permeate the film and which not even the film’s notoriously ‘happy ending’ can heal.

Indeed, in relation to the ending, Carney says that even though George doesn’t commit suicide and seems to have found renewed reason to live thanks to the love of his family and friends, he has gone through too much to be so easily redeemed or reintegrated into society.

‘Capra wants us to know that George Bailey's life is wonderful – not because his neighbors bail him out with a charity sing-along, and certainly not because of the damnation of his life with the faint praise embodied in Clarence [his guardian angel's] slogan, "No man is a failure who has friends," but because he has seen and suffered more, and more deeply and wonderfully, than any other character in the film.

‘This Cinderella, unlike the one in the fairy tale… is returned to the hearth… [but] with no future possibility of escape and with only the consciousness of what has just been lived through in the preceding dark night of the soul as consolation – [although] that, Capra argues, is enough. The adventure of consciousness that George has lived through in dreamland is greater than any of the romantic adventures he has talked about going on – but it is at the same time only an adventure of consciousness.’