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.'

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: a Homeric Western

‘Death is overcome when it is made welcome instead of merely being experienced, and when it makes life a perpetual gamble and endows it with exemplary value so that men will praise it as a model of “imperishable glory.” When the hero gives up a long life in favor of an early death, whatever he loses in honors paid to his living person he more than regains a hundredfold with the glory that will suffuse his memory for all time to come. Archaic Greek culture is one in which everyone lives in terms of others, under the eyes and in the esteem of others, where the basis of a personality is confirmed by the extent to which its reputation is known; in such a context, real death lies in amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, the absence of fame. By contrast, real existence – for the living or the dead – comes from being recognized, valued, and honored. Above all, it comes from being glorified as the central figure in a song of praise, a story that endlessly tells and retells of a destiny admired by all.’ (Jean-Pierre Vernant: A “Beautiful Death” and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic).

Legein's discussion of High Noon and tragedy prompted me to watch again one of my favourite Westerns, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid I have this to say:

If there's a more beautiful, poetic and Homeric American film than Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, a more relentless and uncompromising statement in American film of the tragic vision, in which life is brief, brutal and absurd, an American film more obsessed and haunted by mortality, in which death is portrayed as remorseless, beyond mediation or amelioration and from which there is definitely no return and that the only way to cope with death, let alone overcome it, is to embrace it, in which the nature of the kalos thanatos (beautiful death), as reserved for Billy the Kid, is demonstrated, then I haven't seen this film.

The above clip is of Slim Pickens (as Sheriff Baker) dying a Homeric death as Bob Dylan, who has a cameo role in the film as the knife-wielding Alias, sings Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Mama, take this badge off of me, I can't use it anymore. It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see. I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door. Mama, put my guns in the ground, I can't shoot them anymore. That long black cloud is comin' down. I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

It doesn't get much better than this in American film.

Godard’s Le Mépris: a mediation on Homer and the Mediterranean

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt), made in 1963, is, among other things, a meditation on Homer’s Odyssey, a celebration of Mediterranean landscape and culture and an exposition of the filmmaker’s love/hate relationship with America.

Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is invited by American film producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the screenplay of The Odyssey because he feels the version being filmed by the director, Fritz Lang – who plays himself – is too intellectual.

The American wants more sex in Lang’s Homer – and not just more sex, but more of everything, without being able to define what he wants more of, he just wants more – and although Paul is reluctant to undermine Lang, the money Jerry offers him for joining the project, which Paul thinks will please his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), overcomes his doubt and guilt.

In fact, Paul becomes so impressed by Jerry’s money and power, so enamoured with the glamour of filmmaking, so anxious not to alienate his benefactor, that he encourages his wife to go along with the advances of the voracious American, virtually offering her to him on a plate, prompting her to lose respect and love for her husband, to feel the ‘contempt’ which constitutes the title of the film.

Paul and Camille’s disintegrating marriage – revealed in an extraordinary 30-minute sequence of fighting, insults and arguing – encourages the writer to accept Jerry’s interpretation of The Odyssey as a tale of a poisoned marriage, of Penelope’s infidelity and Odysseus’ ennui.

For Jerry, Odysseus leaves Ithaca to fight the Trojan war because he is bored with Penelope, and stays away for so long because he can’t stand the prospect of returning to his wife, who far from being faithful and patient is, according to Jerry, resentful of Odysseus for abandoning her and cuckolds him with the suitors.

Lang, the personification of European sophistication and old world charm, always ready with a quote from Holderlin or Dante, hates this interpretation of Odysseus as a ‘modern neurotic’, but is impotent to impose his view on Jerry – the bullying, crude American film producer, who quotes trite aphorisms written on scraps of paper he keeps in his pockets, who expects the world to conform to his desires, and who ‘likes gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.’

When Fritz Lang defends his vision of The Odyssey – ‘it’s a story of man’s fight against the gods’ – and tells Jerry that in his film ‘finally, you get the feel of Greek culture’ – Jerry says: ‘Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my chequebook,’ echoing Gestapo chief Hermann Goering: ‘Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.’

The exchange is an early hint of the anti-Americanism which infamously characterises Godard’s films – though Le Mépris, infused with references to Rancho Notorious, Hatari, Bigger Than Life, Some Came Running, Rio Bravo, Griffith, Chaplin and United Artists, also shows how much Godard’s imagination has been shaped by American film and culture.

In Eloge de l’amour (2000) – in which one of the plot lines involves Spielberg Associates and Incorporated trying to buy the rights to make a French resistance movie – Godard has his protagonist Edgar say: ‘Americans have no real past… They have no memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the past of others.’

But in Détective (1985), Godard shows his abiding love for American film and American culture by dedicating his film to John Cassavetes, Clint Eastwood and Edgar G. Ulmer.

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Takeshi Kitano and Zeno's Paradox

I’ve been watching Takeshi Kitano’s recent film, Achilles and the Tortoise, which uses Zeno’s paradox of the same name as a metaphor for artistic and human failure. The film is an extraordinary combination of comedy, tragedy, pathos and so on, which in its depiction of frustrated desire and thwarted endeavour reminded me very much of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Kitano has been a truly great artist for a long time, and Achilles and the Tortoise confirms that he is a man that remains at the height of his creative powers. My admiration for this genius knows no bounds.
The above clip is from the start of the film, which explains Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise while, just in case you thought the film is an animation or set in ancient Greece, the clip below is more illustrative of the film and one of its themes, which is the insane and self-destructive lengths people will go to for the sake of art and self-expression.

The Balcony: Jean Genet and the spirit of Aristophanes

There is nothing more ridiculous than the nation – except, of course, when that nation is your own, in which case it is the repository of all that is virtuous and progressive. But when it comes to other nations, it is clear to us that their claims, myths, institutions and practises are absurd, embarrassing and pathetic. If they could see what we can see then they would be ashamed of themselves. Never mind. The absurdity of the nation is the theme of the hilarious excerpt above from the 1963 filmed version of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony, in which Peter Falk is the chief of police plotting from an S&M brothel to put down a rebellion that has broken out and restore ‘authority’. The play has been lauded for recapturing the spirit of Aristophanes and classical Athenian comedy.

Antigone: death-obsessed heroine of gloom

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With the backing of the king of Argos, Polynices attacks Thebes and attempts to seize the throne from his brother, Eteocles. Thebes repels the invasion, but in the process Polynices and his brother are killed. Their uncle Creon ascends to the throne and proclaims that Eteocles is to be buried with full honours deserving of a patriot and a hero; while Polynices will remain unmourned and unburied, exposed to the birds and dogs, a fitting punishment for a traitor. Defiance of Creon’s order will be judged an act of treason punishable by death. Antigone cannot accept Creon’s decree and secretly performs burial and mourning rituals over her beloved brother’s corpse. The devoted sister is caught, brought before Creon and makes no effort to disguise her guilt or contempt for the king and his ‘laws’, claiming she acted according to ‘higher’ laws, on the correct treatment of family dead as defined by Hades and Zeus…

Sophocles’ Antigone is probably the most popular Greek tragedy in contemporary times. Moderns have liked to interpret Antigone as a rebel who defies a tyrant and the state; a proto-feminist protesting patriarchy; or a dissident youth who refuses to accept the strictures of her elders. This famous BBC version of the play, with Juliet Stevenson as Antigone, depicts Creon as a cruel dictator, who has usurped the law in the service of his rule and deploys it as part of a cult of the ‘state’. (Throughout Don Taylor’s otherwise powerful translation, polis is translated not as ‘city’ but as ‘state’ – to emphasise, for Taylor, Creon’s totalitarian disposition).

However, this insistence on interpreting Antigone as a drama of the individual against the state is facile. A Greek-filmed version of Antigone (above), with Irene Papas in the lead role, has a more complex portrayal of Creon who, rather than an implacable tyrant, is shown to be a weak and vacillating ruler. Having made his decree against Polynices’ burial and stipulated the death penalty for anyone who should defy it, Creon is inclined not to invoke the law now that Antigone – his niece, member of the Theban royal family and betrothed to his son, Haemon – and not Argive sympathisers or traitors, has been revealed as the party guilty of tending Polynices’ corpse. However, it is the gloomy, death-obsessed Antigone’s almost deranged defiance of her uncle and king that force Creon into a corner, and compel him to assert his authority and insist on the defence of the polis and its laws.

Laurel and Hardy and the Greek exaltation of poverty

‘Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight… I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.’  (Albert Camus)

Poverty (Penia) is a goddess with two sisters, Amykhania (helplessness) and Ptokheia (beggary). In Plato’s Republic,  poverty is a terrible evil, a source of meanness, viciousness and discontent. Similarly, Aristotle, in the Politics, regards poverty as a social ill, the parent of revolution and crime. In Wealth (Plutus) – read an excellent, Australian-dialect translation here, by George Theodoridis) – Aristophanes asks what would happen to society if everyone suddenly became rich and answers, paradoxically, that inequalities, conflict and misery would increase. In the play, the goddess Penia appears as an old hag, who warns those who think bestowing wealth on all Athenians will be an unmitigated blessing that:

‘[Poverty] is the very fountain of all joy! Of all life, even!… If Wealth were to… spread himself around to everyone, who’d be doing any of the work then or even any of the thinking?'’

The goddess then goes on to suggest that the poor are in fact more virtuous than the rich:

’And let me tell you another thing about the poor. They are modest and civil, whereas the rich are all arrogant.’

The virtues – or otherwise – of poverty become of increasing interest in Greek ethics. Although never endorsing the alleged moral advantages of penury, Socrates does make clear, in the Apology, that he is indifferent to wealth and that a preoccupation with wisdom is far more important than, and perhaps even incompatible with, any pursuit of money or luxury.

The belief that neither wealth or poverty have much to contribute to virtue is shared by the Stoics and Epicureans – who regard poverty as just one of life’s many misfortunes, fear of which should be confronted and overcome. (Seneca advocated living rough from time to time, for a period of three to four days, to get used to poverty in case we should fall victim to it).

The Cynics, however, didn’t just denounce wealth as a prohibition to virtue, they went one stage further and developed a cult of poverty, embracing indigence as a positive way of life, ‘an unending task in which one strives for a more and more complete renunciation of possessions and the desire for material possession’.* Previous Greek virtues of beauty, honour and independence were turned on their head by the Cynics, who valorised, instead, ugliness, humiliation, dishonour (adoxia) and dependence – begging and, more radically, slavery, were positively accepted.**

Finally, we note that it was not a big leap from Cynic humiliation to Christian humility, from Cynic destitution to Christian asceticism, and from the Cynic exaltation of poverty to Christian love of the poor.

 *E. McGushin: Foucault’s Askesis.
**M. Foucault: The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II).

Agora: Hypatia, a martyr for philosophy

I managed to catch the Anglo-Spanish film Agora and an enjoyable romp it is too. The film is set in fourth century Roman/Byzantine Alexandria and purports to tell the story of the legendary philosopher Hypatia – neoplatonist, proto-feminist, Enlightenment heroine, described by her admirers as the 'last of the Hellenes' and as having 'the mind of Plato and the body of Aphrodite', who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians as the sect gained the upper hand over Greek religion and the Greek way of life.

Indeed, the film – no doubt to make a point about contemporary religious fanaticism – adopts wholesale the version of events that has Hypatia as a martyr for reason and philosophy, a victim of religious dogmatism and bigotry, and portrays the hateful Christians as a barbaric mob of class warriors and misogynists and Christianity as an ignorant, anti-Greek doctrine; but the crudeness of its legitimate message aside, the film is not bad at all.  

Knifer

Yiannis Economides’ vision is of spiritual, moral and cultural destitution and degraded human relations but you’ll have to ask him if he’s making a point about contemporary Greek reality or whether he’s saying something about the state of European civilisation or civilisation generally and so on. Whatever, the Cypriot film-maker’s third release, Knifer (Μαχαιροβγάλτης) – above, in full, with English subtitles – is a brilliant and deeply uncomfortable film noir.

And here is a piece in English on Economides, in which he describes himself as a ‘a peasant’ and ‘a bit of a punk’.

The patron saint of artists in Brazil

Here’s a clip from Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (1959), which relocates the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the madness of the Rio carnival and is an ecstatic, sensuous, feminine film celebrating Brazilian culture and black sexuality. Certainly, one of the most beautiful films ever made.

The Greek myth involves Orpheus – the progenitor of civilisation, the harbinger of music, poetry, writing, agriculture and medicine – descending into the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, having suffered a fatal snake bite, initially succeeding in his impossible task by winning over Persephone and Hades with his plaintive songs beautifully sung, but failing to heed the warning not to turn and look at Eurydice before they emerge into the light and consigning the poor woman to return to the land of the dead.

Orpheus continues to live his life, railing at the cruelty of the gods and vowing never to love another woman, and is eventually ripped to pieces by frenzied female devotees of the god Dionysus, furious at Orpheus’ repudiation of women and his disdain for their preferred deity, and in this way Orpheus is reunited with Eurydice, in death, for eternity in the Elysian Fields.

The Orpheus and Eurydice myth has become one of the most popular subjects in Western culture, inspiring novels, operas, films, songs, poems, paintings and so on.

Indeed, Andrew Motion, Britain’s poet laureate, has recently written that Orpheus is ‘the patron saint of artists’ and put the enduring fascination of the myth in the Western imagination down to its ‘astonishing creative powers, [its story of] perfect love, tragic loss, heroic bravery, recognisable human failure, noble grief, ignominious death, final union… a compelling tale of finding and losing, making and marring.’

Not that the Greeks would have shared Motion’s reading of the myth. Rather, they would have seen the myth as describing man’s encounter with death and destruction and as reinforcing the Greek view that life results from terror. Indeed, the Orpheus myth was the basis of the most enduring and death-obsessed mystery cult in the ancient world, Orphism.

In Orphism, life is preparation for death, one long process of purification and penitence for crimes committed against the gods – specifically the murder of Dionysus by the Titans, man’s ancestors – which saw the body as evil, a tomb for the soul, which is divine and immortal; and asserted that an initiate’s aim in life – using a variety of ascetic and ecstatic techniques, cleansings, baths and aspersions, following a strict set of rules in everyday life (such as, not poking the fire with a knife, not stepping over a broom, not looking into a mirror by light, not speaking without light) eschewing anything to do with birth or death, refusing to attend funerals and marriages, following a strict dress and dietary code (no meat, eggs, beans or wine), and practicing sexual restraint – was to liberate the soul from bodily taints, in this way facilitating the soul’s escape from constant reincarnation – from the ‘wheel of rebirth’ – and finding eternal blessedness.

Pythagoras was an Orphic initiate, and the Pythagoreans – with their insistence on the importance of mathematics in knowledge and ontology, their inclination towards the Apollonian over the Dionysian side of Orphism, their stress on ascetic over ecstatic practices – have been credited with turning Orphism into a form of logical mysticism; while Plato, though appalled by the wandering Orphic beggar priests who preyed on people’s fears and guilt and convinced them to engage in strange initiation ceremonies and services as a means to purify them of their misdeeds and save them from torment in the afterlife, was attracted to ideas of metempsychosis, the immortality of the soul, body-soul dualism, and even had Socrates in the Phaedo define the practice of philosophy in Pythagoro-Orphic terms, as a process of purging the soul in preparation for death, and had him reveal the core mission of the philosopher as the pursuit of death.