More about movies

“Indie” films really are the darlings of the hip film world. Take a film like Snow Angels, which probably won a bunch of awards at Sundance or some other festival. It has a cast of admired but not A-list actors who do a lot of indie work—Sam Rockwell, Tom Noonan, Griffin Dunne, Kate Beckinsale—and was filmed on a cheapo budget in an unnamed wintry small-town (possibly Canada). The acting is OK, the sets are OK, the direction is adequate but the script is bleak and quickly becomes a bummer. The movie’s story is about a series of losers, divorced parents mostly, and gets depressing when bad things happen. Skip it.

Another Wolfgang Staudte movie from DEFA, the 1952 Der Untertan (The Kaiser’s Lackey) is interesting for its historic parallels but not really engaging. It too is about a really unlikable character—the English title goes a long way to describing the slavishness of Diederich Hessling who has a petit-bourgeois upbringing in 1890s-turn of the century Germany (his father owns a paper factory), goes to University in Berlin to study chemistry, becomes a Herr Doktor, joins a dueling club, and is discharged from the army. He is a mean, expedient man. His politics are to the right of everybody and he worships Kaiser Wilhelm II above all else. Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, the film’s character and his milieu are apparently meant to represent the sort of German who was responsible for the Nazis coming to power. This is unfair to lackeys everywhere. The film was cleared for showing in East Germany, according to the commentator on the DVD, but was banned for about 8 years in West Germany. Maybe it struck too close to home in a country full ex-Nazis.

Saw Danton again recently, the Andrzej Wajda (pic above taken in 1983 when Wajda was in NYC for a Danton press junket) movie made in France with French actors playing Danton and his friends and Polish actors in the roles of Robespierre and his friends. Danton and Robespierre are the great rivals in this story, each testing their power. The movie is in French, so I guess the Polish actors really speak French, learned it phonetically or were dubbed. Anyway, it is a good movie and worthy of being mentioned around the Quartorze de juillet. I suppose it is really more about the Polish situation at the time, 1983, when martial law ruled the country in order to suppress the strikes and unrest rather than the French revolution and its internecine squabbles among revolutionaries. Danton is the great crowd-pleasing orator who believes the masses support him and Robespierre the cold-hearted, calculating intellectual who wants to consolidate revolutionary power. The movie doesn't really come down on one side or the other. In the end it doesn't matter because both Danton and Robespierre were guillotined by their fellow revolutionaries.

Stefan Lutak, 1920-2009

Stefan was a genuine East Village character. He had a long life and was a keen observer of the neighborhood, having settled in New York in the early 1950s, a Ukrainian immigrant and DP (that’s dispossessed person) from World War II. About 1965 he started renting the bar at 70 St. Marks Place and called it the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and he also moved into an apartment in the building. A few years later, the owners, who used to run Giuffre’s fish market around the corner on 1st Avenue asked him if he wanted to buy the building and the bar. Lutak scraped up the cash, probably with a mortgage, and became the owner and operator of the bar. I first noticed that bar through the window in 1963. Around 8:30 in the morning, the counter would be filled with older Ukrainian men downing shots of whiskey or vodka—were they getting ready for work or unwinding after work? It was a bar during the 1950s when the poet W.H. Auden lived in a book-darkened apartment next door (which he kept till his death around 1974). Auden would send his boyfriend Chester downstairs to the bar to pick up tough young Ukrainian men to bring back upstairs for brandy and conversation. When the young toughs realized what else the weird Englishman was proposing, they occasionally beat up him and Chester. That’s the old history of the bar.

I occasionally observed the recent history of the Holiday, from about 1993 to 2009. Often wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts, Stefan was in his element and the tiny semi-circle bar was crowded every night of the week; on weekends the tables in the back would be packed with young tourists. There were neighborhood regulars who were characters, some of them artists, musicians or would-be writers—quite a few painters, in fact: almost all of them have died, of booze, of cigarettes, of AIDs, of heroin ODs, of suicide, of old age. Some of them were lucky enough, or finally had money enough, to move away from the East Village and probably survived. In those days, Stef was drunk most of the time—his wife of about 30 years had died of cancer in the 1980s (there are two sons, now in their 50s)—but he seemed happy and sometimes sang in a terrible voice to the prettiest girls. He loved to talk about history. He would say, in his difficult-to-understand accent, “You only read history. I lived history.”

One day a young man wrote an article about Stefan’s history for one of the free newspapers. It detailed his experiences in World War II. Unfortunately, due to the language problem or more likely bonehead stupidity on the part of this aspiring journalist, he got the facts of Stefan’s history completely reversed. Stefan liked to talk about how he fought in the Battle of Stalingrad (July1942-Feb 43) which was perhaps the most significant battle in the European theater. The Germans besieged Stalingrad with a huge army but the Russians fought back fiercely. It ended with house-to-house fighting, a total bloodbath for civilians and combatants alike. Despite Hitler’s orders to fight to the death, the army of General von Paulus, 600,000 strong, surrendered. Very few were ever seen again. Perhaps 2 million Russian, German and their Axis allied Romanian, Croatian, Italian, etc. soldiers died in the battle and later in labor camps, along with who-knows-how-many citizens of Stalingrad. Stefan (who by an accident of geography was a Ukrainian born technically in Romania) was in the thick of that battle, but escaped by fleeing on foot. In the harsh winter, he claimed, he and another soldier trudged west on foot and eventually made it back to Ukraine. Where the young journalist got it wrong was in putting Stefan on the wrong side of the battle. Stef was a volunteer in the nationalistic puppet armies set up by the Wermacht that recruited anti-Bolsheviks and then pushed them into their battle with the Soviets. Not that it really matters much, but when I mentioned this to said aspiring young journo he acted shocked at having got it wrong. Three years later he wrote a retread article for another free newspaper using the same incorrect “facts.” He probably works for The New York Post today.

Stefan was very generous, not just with the liberally poured drinks. When someone needed money he would “lend” $100 that was rarely repaid. He ran many tabs for people; when they died without having paid the tab he would sometimes complain about how much they owed. But then he’d run a tab again for another mortal customer. He would complain about customers who were rowdy, or talked too much. Sometimes, he even 86ed a regular, who would likely as not be readmitted to the select bar group in a couple of weeks. Sometimes not. Some people were permanently banned.

More later.

Now about movies

I have been watching over the past few months several of the DEFA films now on DVD. These are films from the East German studio DEFA that have not been available in America until recently. For the most part they are pretty good, showing a lot of film technique mainly derived from expressionism that the Germans (then in the one Germany) developed with silent films in the 1920s and early 1930s. Think M, the great Fritz Lang picture about the serial child murderer in pre-Hitler Berlin. These are films that had a social conscience, and a sense of social satire. For example, in M, members of a German crime syndicate band together despite their differences and use their exploited workers, particularly the street beggars, to find the culprit in the face of police failure (on order of "round up the usual suspects") because fear of the killer is emptying the streets of patsies and murdering their profits. (To complete the irony, Peter Lorre as the pedophile murderer is tried by a jury of his peers--the criminals, thieves and murderers who captured him.)

The latest DEFA film I saw is Die Mörder sind unter uns (TheMurderers Are Among Us), the first film made in either Germany immediately after the end of the war. It opened in 1946 and was not a hit. The writer/director Wolfgang Staudte, based in Berlin, could not interest the West German authorities he showed the script to, but the Communist East Germans put up the money. Not a lot, I imagine, as it seems to have been filmed on location in a war-smashed Berlin in rubble. It is easy to see why the film drew lackluster interest—it takes place as the war ends and two people return to an apartment in Berlin, a young woman who has taken refuge in the country and a man who was in the Wermacht. It is the same apartment in fact, but this is just a device to throw two strangers together. It turns out the man, who is constantly drunk, is haunted by an atrocity he could do nothing to prevent, the murder of around 100 apparently Jewish civilians, ordered by his superior. The man, Hans, was a surgeon, an arrogant surgeon in training before the war. He becomes obsessed by his superior who is now a factory owner with lots of money, a family, and an elegant apartment. One nice scene is the midnight mass service on Christmas 1945 in a packed church with many candles and a beautiful altar. Snow is falling on the congregants -- the camera moves up to show that the church has only part of its outer walls, the rest having been smashed to smithereens by the bombings.

Clearly, this idea of responsibility for crimes against humanity was not popular in either Germany. Both Germanies were the same Germany that gave overwhelming support to Hitler (Fritz Lang above, by the way, left soon after Hitler’s rise to power and ended up in Hollywood).

More to come on these DEFA movies. Yesterday I saw the total hoot movie Taken, starring a low-key Liam Neeson with a script by the great comic book figure Luc Besson, responsible for The Professional with the fabulous Jean Reno. Neeson plays a near zombie pining to be involved in his teenage daughter's life. She is a total twit, shallow and boring, a cipher. The only near character in the movie, in fact, is the zombie Neeson. The key point of the movie is when Neeson in L.A. tells the kidnapers over the phone in Paris, "I have spent 30 years learning a special set of skills. I am going to hunt you down. And then I am going to kill you." It seems that zombie Neeson is a retired CIA assassin. He is a killing machine, almost as fast in hand to hand combat as Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy. Of course Neeson is 20 years older. By my count he kills 50 men in the movie, mostly the latest Hollywood scuzz, Albanians, but also a bunch of Arabs. Like any good Paris situated movie there is a high-speed car chase going the wrong way (see Ronin--a great Jean Reno movie--although Ronin always evokes for me the death of Princess Diana), and crooked French cops. Neeson goes to the Albanians' hideout with a French cop photo ID; he speaks English the whole time and so do they. Nobody questions this; plus Neeson struggles with using an American accent (although I'm sure there must be British operatives in the CIA). The outdoor action scenes are mostly filmed at night, probably to disguise the fact that sets were probably used. The movie is terrible. How do actors not get hurt in that incredibly fast martial arts? I enjoyed almost every minute of it.