The Apu Trilogy

The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. The three films, which were made in India by Satyajit Ray between 1950 and 1959, swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India--whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances. Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture.

Ray (1921-1992) was a commercial artist in Calcutta with little money and no connections when he determined to adapt a famous serial novel about the birth and young manhood of Apu--born in a rural village, formed in the holy city of Benares, educated in Calcutta, then a wanderer. The legend of the first film is inspiring; how on the first day Ray had never directed a scene, his cameraman had never photographed one, his child actors had not even been tested for their roles--and how that early footage was so impressive it won the meager financing for the rest of the film. Even the music was by a novice, Ravi Shankar, later to be famous.

The trilogy begins with "Pather Panchali," filmed between 1950 and 1954. Here begins the story of Apu when he is a boy, living with his parents, older sister and ancient aunt in the ancestral village to which his father, a priest, has returned despite the misgivings of the practical mother. The second film, "Aparajito" (1956), follows the family to Benares, where the father makes a living from pilgrims who have come to bathe in the holy Ganges. The third film, "The World of Apu" (1959), finds Apu and his mother living with an uncle in the country; the boy does so well in school he wins a scholarship to Calcutta. He is married under extraordinary circumstances, is happy with his young bride, then crushed by the deaths of his mother and his wife. After a period of bitter drifting, he returns at last to take up the responsibility of his son.

This summary scarcely reflects the beauty and mystery of the films, which do not follow the punched-up methods of conventional biography but are told in the spirit of the English title of the first film, "The Song of the Road." The actors who play Apu at various ages from about 6 to 29 have in common a moody, dreamy quality; Apu is not sharp, hard or cynical, but a sincere, naive idealist, motivated more by vague yearnings than concrete plans. He reflects a society that does not place ambition above all, but is philosophical, accepting, optimistic.

He is his father's child, and in the first two films we see how his father is eternally hopeful that something will turn up--that new plans and ideas will bear fruit. It is the mother who frets about money owed the relatives, about food for the children, about the future. In her eyes, throughout all three films, we see realism and loneliness, as her husband and then her son cheerfully go away to the big city and leave her waiting and wondering.

The most extraordinary passage in the three films comes in the third, when Apu, now a college student, goes with his best friend, Pulu, to attend the wedding of Pulu's cousin. The day has been picked because it is astrologically perfect--but the groom, when he arrives, turns out to be stark mad. The bride's mother sends him away, but then there is an emergency, because Aparna, the bride, will be forever cursed if she does not marry on this day, and so Pulu, in desperation, turns to Apu--and Apu, having left Calcutta to attend a marriage, returns to the city as the husband of the bride.

Sharmila Tagore, who plays Aparna, was only 14 when she made the film. She projects exquisite shyness and tenderness, and we consider how odd it is to be suddenly married to a stranger. "Can you accept a life of poverty?" asks Apu, who lives in a single room and augments his scholarship with a few rupees earned in a print shop. "Yes," she says simply, not meeting his gaze. She cries when she first arrives in Calcutta, but soon sweetness and love shine out through her eyes. Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, shares her innocent delight, and when she dies in childbirth it is the end of his innocence and, for a long time, of his hope.

The three films were photographed by Subrata Mitra, a still photographer who Ray was convinced could do the job. Starting from scratch, at first with a borrowed 16mm camera, Mitra achieves effects of extraordinary beauty: Forest paths, river vistas, the gathering clouds of the monsoon, water bugs skimming lightly over the surface of a pond. There is a fearsome scene as the mother watches over her feverish daughter while the rain and winds buffet the house, and we feel her fear and urgency as the camera dollies again and again across the small, threatened space. And a moment after a death, when the film cuts shockingly to the sudden flight of birds.

I heard a distant echo of the earliest days of the filming, perhaps, when Subrata Mitra was honored at the Hawaii Film Festival in the early 1990s, and in accepting a career award he thanked, not Satyajit Ray, but--his camera, and his film. On those first days of shooting it must have been just that simple, the hope of these beginners that their work would bear fruit.

What we sense all through "The Apu Trilogy" is a different kind of life than we are used to. The film is set in Bengal in the 1920s, when in the rural areas life was traditional and hard. Relationships were formed with those who lived close by; there is much drama over the theft of some apples from an orchard. The sight of a train, roaring at the far end of a field, represents the promise of the city and the future, and trains connect or separate the characters throughout the film, even offering at one low point a means of possible suicide.

The actors in the films have all been cast from life, to type; Italian neorealism was in vogue in the early 1950s, and Ray would have heard and agreed with the theory that everyone can play one role--himself. The most extraordinary performer in the films is Chunibala Devi, who plays the old aunt, stooped double, deeply wrinkled. She was 80 when shooting began; she had been an actress decades ago, but when Ray sought her out, she was living in a brothel, and thought he had come looking for a girl. When Apu's mother angers at her and tells her to leave, notice the way she appears at the door of another relative, asking, "Can I stay?" She has no home, no possessions except for her clothes and a bowl, but she never seems desperate because she embodies complete acceptance.

The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood. The mother has gone to live with a relative, as little better than a servant ("they like my cooking"), and when Apu comes to visit during a school vacation, he sleeps or loses himself in his books, answering her with monosyllables. He seems in a hurry to leave, but has second thoughts at the train station, and returns for one more day. The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children.

I watched "The Apu Trilogy" recently over a period of three nights, and found my thoughts returning to it during the days. It is about a time, place and culture far removed from our own, and yet it connects directly and deeply with our human feelings. It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.

The 400 Blows

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.Francois Truffaut

Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea.


Francois Truffaut and his on-screen alter ego, young Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel.

Antoine Doinel was played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, who has a kind of solemn detachment, as if his heart had suffered obscure wounds long before the film began. This was the first in a long collaboration between actor and director; they returned to the character in the short film "Antoine and Collette" (1962) and three more features: "Stolen Kisses" (1968), "Bed and Board" (1970) and "Love on the Run" (1979).

The later films have their own merits, and "Stolen Kisses" is one of Truffaut's best, but "The 400 Blows," with all its simplicity and feeling, is in a class by itself. It was Truffaut's first feature, and one of the founding films of the French New Wave. We sense that it was drawn directly out of Truffaut's heart. It is dedicated to Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic who took the fatherless Truffaut under his arm at a time when the young man seemed to stand between life as a filmmaker and life in trouble.

Little is done in the film for pure effect. Everything adds to the impact of the final shot. We meet Antoine when he is in his early teens, and living with his mother and stepfather in a crowded walkup where they always seem to be squeezing out of each other's way. The mother (Claire Maurier) is a blond who likes tight sweaters and is distracted by poverty, by her bothersome son, and by an affair with a man from work. The stepfather (Albert Remy) is a nice enough sort, easy-going, and treats the boy in a friendly fashion although he is not deeply attached to him. Both parents are away from home a lot, and neither has the patience to pay close attention to the boy: They judge him by appearances, and by the reports of others who misunderstand him.

At school, Antoine has been typecast by his teacher (Guy Decombie) as a troublemaker. His luck is not good. When a pinup calendar is being passed from hand to hand, his is the hand the teacher finds it in. Sent to stand in the corner, he makes faces for his classmates and writes a lament on the wall. The teacher orders him to decline his offending sentence, as punishment. His homework is interrupted. Rather than return to school without it, he skips. His excuse is that he was sick. After his next absence, he says his mother has died. When she turns up at his school, alive and furious, he is marked as a liar.

And yet we see him in the alcove that serves as his bedroom, deeply wrapped in the work of Balzac, whose chronicles of daily life helped to create France's idea of itself. He loves Balzac. He loves him so well, indeed, that when he's assigned to write an essay on an important event in his life, he describes "the death of my grandfather'' in a close paraphrase of Balzac, whose words have lodged in his memory. This is seen not as homage but as plagiarism, and leads to more trouble and eventually to a downward spiral: He and a friend steal a typewriter, he gets caught trying to return it and is sent to the juvenile detention home.


The film's most poignant moments show him set adrift by his parents and left to the mercy of social services. His parents discuss him sadly with authorities as a lost cause ("If he came home, he would only run away again''). And so he is booked in a police station, placed in a holding cell and put in a police wagon with prostitutes and thieves, to be driven through the dark streets of Paris, his face peering out through the bars like a young Dickensian hero. He has a similar expression at other times in the film, which is shot in black and white in Paris in a chill season; Antoine always has the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind.

Truffaut's film is not a dirge or entirely a tragedy. There are moments of fun and joy (the title is an idiom meaning "raising hell''). One priceless sequence, shot looking down from above the street, shows a physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris; two by two they peel off, until the teacher is at the head of a line of only two or three boys. The happiest moment in the film comes after one of Antoine's foolish mistakes. He lights a candle to Balzac, which sets the little cardboard shrine on fire. His parents put out the flames, but then for once their exasperation turns to forgiveness, and the whole family goes to the movies and laughs on the way home.


There is a lot of moviegoing in "The 400 Blows,'' with Antoine's solemn face turned up to the screen. We know that young Truffaut himself escaped to the movies whenever he could, and there is a shot here that he quotes later in his career. As Antoine and a friend emerge from a cinema, Antoine steals one of the lobby photos of a star. In "Day for Night'' (1973), which stars Truffaut himself as a film director, there is a flashback memory to the character, as a boy, stealing down a dark street to snatch a still of "Citizen Kane" from in front of a theater.

The cinema saved Francois Truffaut's life, he said again and again. It took a delinquent student and gave him something to love, and with the encouragement of Bazin he became a critic and then made this film by his 27th birthday. If the New Wave marks the dividing point between classic and modern cinema (and many think it does), then Truffaut is likely the most beloved of modern directors -- the one whose films resonated with the deepest, richest love of moviemaking. He liked to resurrect old effects (the iris shots in "The Wild Child," narration in many of his films) and pay tribute ("The Bride Wore Black" and "Mississippi Mermaid" owe much to his hero, Hitchcock).

Truffaut (1932-1984) died too young, of a brain tumor, at 52, but he left behind 21 films, not counting shorts and screenplays. His "Small Change" (1976) returns to the sharply remembered world of the classroom, to students younger than Doinel, and recalls the almost unbearable tension as the clock on the wall creeps toward the final bell. Even while directing a film a year, he found time to write about other films and directors, and did a classic book-length, film-by-film interview with Hitchcock.

One of his most curious, haunting films is "The Green Room" (1978), based on the Henry James story "The Altar of the Dead," about a man and a woman who share a passion for remembering their dead loved ones. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thinks "The Green Room" may be Truffaut's best film, told me he thinks of it as the director's homage to the auteur theory. That theory, created by Bazin and his disciples (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), declared that the director was the true author of a film -- not the studio, the screenwriter, the star, the genre. If the figures in the green room stand for the great directors of the past, perhaps there is a shrine there now to Truffaut. One likes to think of the ghost of Antoine Doinel lighting a candle before it.

Au Hasard Balthazar

Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a donkey from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself--a dumb beast, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. Balthazar is not one of those cartoon animals that can talk and sing and is a human with four legs. Balthazar is a donkey, and it is as simple as that.

We first see Balthazar as a newborn, taking its first unsteady steps, and there is a scene that provides a clue to the rest of the film; three children sprinkle water on its head and baptize it. What Bresson may be suggesting is that although the church teaches that only humans can enter into heaven, surely there is a place at God's side for all of his creatures.

Balthazar's early life is lived on a farm in the rural French district where all the action takes place; the donkey will be owned many of the locals, and return to some of them more than once. A few of them are good, but all of them are flawed, although there is a local drunk who is not cruel or thoughtless to the animal, despite his other crimes.

Balthazar's first owner is Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), who gives him his name. Her father is the local schoolmaster, and her playmate is Jacques (Walter Green), who agrees with her that they will marry someday. Jacques' mother dies, and his grief-stricken father leaves the district, entrusting his farm to Marie's father (Philippe Asselin), in whom he has perfect trust. Marie loves Balthazar, and delights in decorating his bridle with wild-flowers, but she does nothing to protect him when local boys torment the beast. The leader of this gang is Gerard (Francois Lafarge), and when Marie glances up to the church choir during Mass as Gerard sings, he brings an evil even to the holy words.

Marie's father is a victim of the sin of pride. Although he has managed the farm with perfect honesty, he refuses to produce records or receipts to prove himself, after rumors are spread by jealous neighbors that he is stealing from the owner. To the despair of Marie's mother (Nathalie Joyaut), he follows his stubborness straight into bankruptcy. Balthazar becomes the possession of the local baker, and is used by the baker's boy (none other than Gerard) to deliver bread. Gerard mistreats and abuses Balthazar, who eventually simply refuses to move. Gerard responds by tying a newspaper to its tail and setting it on fire. Eventually under Gerald's mistreatment thedonkey collapses and there is talk of putting it down.

But the town drunk, Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert), saves him and brings him back to life, and then there is Balthazar's brief moment of glory when he is hired out as a circus animal--the Mathematical Donkey, who can solve multiplication tables. This life is soon brought to an end, as Balthazar becomes the property of a recluse, and then finally wanders back on its own to the stable where it began its life, and where it finds Marie's father and even Marie.

But this is not a sentimental ending. Marie is a weak girl, who rejects the sincere Jacques when he returns as a young man, to say he still loves her. She prefers Gerard, who mistreats her but seems glamorous with his leather jacket and motor bike. What we see through Balthazar's eyes is a village filled with small, flawed, weak people, in a world where sweetness is uncommon and cruelty comes easily.

That is what we see -- but what does Balthazar see? The genius of Bresson's approach is that he never gives us a single moment that could be described as one of Balthazar's "reaction shots." Other movie animals may roll their eyes or stomp their hooves, but Balthazar simply walks or waits, regarding everything with the clarity of a donkey who knows it is a beast of burden, and that its life consists of either bearing or not bearing, of feeling pain or not feeling pain, or even feeling pleasure. All of these things are equally beyond its control.

There is however Balthazar's bray. It is not a beautiful sound, but it is the sound a donkey can make, and when Balthazar brays it might sound to some like a harsh complaint, but to me it sounds like a beast who has been given one noise to make in the world, and gains some satisfaction by making it. It is important to note that Balthazar never brays on cue to react to specific events; that would turn him into a cartoon animal.

Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn't prevent us from supplying them -- quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson's civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us. In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience.

Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy. It is worth noting that both Ozu and Bresson use severe stylistic limitations to avoid coaching our emotions. Ozu in his sound films almost never moves his camera; every shot is framed and held, and frequently it begins before the characters enter the scene and continues after they leave.

Bresson's most intriguing limitation is to forbid his actors to act. He was known to shoot the same shot 10, 20, even 50 times, until all "acting" was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: By simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.

Given this philosophy, a donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it comunicates its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered ith snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted. Returning home, it is relieved to find a familiar place. Although some humans are kind to it and others are cruel, the motives of humans are beyond its understanding, and it accepts what they do because it must.
Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.

The final scene of "Au Hasard Balthazar" makes that argument in a beautiful way. The donkey is old and near death, and wanders into a herd of sheep--as, indeed, it began its life in such a herd. The other animals come and go, sometimes nuzzling up against it, taking little notice, accepting this fellow animal, sharing the meadow and the sunshine. Balthazar lies down and eventually dies, as the sheep continue about their business. He has at last found a place where the other creatures think as he does

The Band Wagon

The opening credits of Vincente Minnelli's "The Band Wagon" play over a top hat and cane, which would remind us of Fred Astaire even if he weren't the star of the movie. Then we join an auction of movie memorabilia. The top hat and cane don't sell, even when the auctioneer pleads, "50 cents, anyone?" They belonged to a has-been hoofer named Tony Hunter, and now we see him, played by Astaire, on a train to New York City. Maybe he can make a comeback on Broadway. From the way he sings "By Myself," he doesn't seem hopeful.

"The Band Wagon" (1953) came only a year after the same writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, wrote "Singin' in the Rain." Both are great backstage musicals, one about Hollywood, the other about Broadway, one starring Gene Kelly, the other Fred Astaire. "Singin' in the Rain" is a comedy, but "The Band Wagon" has a note of melancholy along with its smiles, a sadness always present among Broadway veterans, who have seen more failure than success, who know the show always closes and that the backstage family breaks up and returns to the limbo of auditions and out-of-town tryouts.

The movie takes a would-be musical through all the stages of writing, casting, production, choreography, rehearsals, failure on the road and eventual triumph on Broadway. It's so happily aware of its genre that we actually do hear mention of renting a barn and putting on a show. But it draws on experience with the actual working conditions of Broadway professionals, just as "Singin' in the Rain" knew a lot about how movies are made. "Singin' in the Rain" was the work of a fresh newcomer (Stanley Donen was 28 when he directed it). "The Band Wagon" is informed by a Minnelli who, at 50, had logged a long tour of duty in show biz, not least as the husband of the complicated Judy Garland.

When Astaire made "The Band Wagon," he was 54 years old but hardly washed up. In recent years, he had made "Easter Parade" and "Royal Wedding," and his future held "Funny Face" and "Silk Stockings." But in the movie as in life, he is insecure about his gifts; "Fred rehearsed until he drove you crazy," remembers co-star Nanette Fabray, and he was uneasy about co-starring with Cyd Charisse. "She's rather tall, isn't she?" he worries in the movie, and Fabray assures him, "It's a stage illusion."

It wasn't. Charisse was fully as tall as Astaire, taller with heels, and she had classical dance training; Astaire's Tony Hunter complains about "this little ballerina's snide insinuation that I'm only a hoofer." Real insecurities and rivalries were right beneath the surface of the fictional ones created by Comden and Green, and real personalities are not far offscreen; they even based the writers Lily and Lester Marton on themselves (Minnelli cast them as Oscar Levant, who looked like Green, and Fabray, who had Comden's spirit).

The Astaire and Charisse characters are brought together by Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), a director-producer-star with artistic pretensions, who thinks the lively little musical by the Martons should be reworked as a version of "Faust." The Cordova character is said to be inspired by Jose Ferrer, who at the time was starring in one Broadway show and producing three others, but in the ego and the big plans there's also an echo of Orson Welles.

Buchanan, an actor from Scotland who kids his own patrician stage presence, has fun with a character who lacks any practical knowledge about what a production can afford and what an audience will endure. (One of the movie's charms is the moment when he concedes he is wrong and Astaire is right, and they do a soft-shoe to "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan.")

Astaire and Charisse get into a furious fight the first time they meet, and then, in the scene where the movie's magic first begins to work, they make up wordlessly in the "Dancing in the Dark" sequence under a full moon in Central Park. (The critic Douglas Pratt recommends watching this scene with the audio turned off: "It is haunting.") Here and throughout the movie, Charisse is a sexy and capable partner for Astaire, who said somewhat enigmatically, “When you dance with her, you stay danced with.”

The overblown Faustian musical is a flop in New Haven; a stagehand observes, "You've got more scenery in this show than there is in Yellowstone National Park." As the depressed actors and dancers gather in a hotel suite, they cheer themselves with the "I Love Louisa" musical number, "but only for the time it takes them to sing and dance," writes the critic Joe McElhaney. "The moment the song is finished everyone goes into a depressed slump."

Levant in fact looks like he's depressed most of the time. A real-life hypochondriac whose character recites a list of complaints early in the movie, Levant was a friend and good-luck mascot for Arthur Freed, the key producer during MGM's golden age. That's how he got so many good supporting roles (as in "An American in Paris"), despite often looking grumpy and exhausted. "Oscar needed someone to yell at," Fabray remembers in an interview on the DVD. When he blew a line, he'd blame it on somebody -- usually picking on Fabray, who was appearing in her first movie. After she told him to go to hell, she says, he backed off.

All of the interviews with the surviving cast members suggest the film was an unhappy shoot, although they don't quite say why. Minnelli's offstage marriage problems with Garland may have been one reason, Astaire's ambivalence about Charisse might have been another, Levant's daily appearance represented what he liked to call "a pharmaceutical miracle," and Buchanan was undergoing painful dental surgery. Still, a great musical emerged from the shambles, just as it does in the story.

Despite the elegance of "Dancing in the Dark" and the long "Girl Hunt" ballet sequence toward the end (with Astaire as a private eye and Charisse a slinky dame in red), my favorite musical number is an early one, "Shine on Your Shoes." Liza Minnelli, then 7, followed her father around during the filming, and remembers him scouting Penn Station for ideas about the soundstage sets.

Minnelli saw Leroy Daniels, a real shoeshine man who sang and danced as he worked, and that not only inspired the number, but got Daniels a trip to Hollywood and a scene where he co-stars with Astaire. He's a gifted performer, his timing as precise as Astaire's, and perhaps because he's the real thing, we sense a freshness and joy. Note, too, Astaire's casual strength when he lifts himself on the arms of the chair so he can kick in mid-air.

Most of the scene's charm is because of Astaire and Daniels, but some, too, was contributed by Minnelli. McElhaney recommends watching the "Shine on Your Shoes" number, but not focusing on Astaire and Daniels: "Instead, only take note of the direction of the extras; watch it again, and only note the function of the decor and the camera movements; then watch it one final time putting all of these elements together." What that exercise would illustrate is that for Minnelli, the whole screen was always in play, not just the foreground and the stars.

Many of the movie’s songs, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Deitz, already existed; MGM in those days didn’t simply recycle Broadway hits but created new musicals from scratch, often using songs it already owned. That works here because, after dumping the Faustian musical, the performers decide to put on a revue. One song written new for the movie would become a touchstone: Deitz and Schwartz’s “That’s Entertainment,” which celebrates show business in a way as joyous but not as zany as Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘em Laugh” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” One of their older songs that makes an unconvincing reappearance is “Louisiana Hayride,” originally written in 1932; although in a revue anything, so to speak, goes, the hayride seems like a stretch.

Another musical sequence, the bizarre "Triplets," shows Astaire, Fabray and Buchanan all apparently midgets dressed as babies, sliding down from their high chairs and dancing. Since we see their feet hit the floor and special effects seem impossible, how did they do it? By balancing on artificial legs strapped to their knees, Fabray reports; they fell dozens of times before getting it right, and relied on pain-killers.

All of these backstage details seem like a distraction from the magic of "The Band Wagon," but part of the film's appeal comes from our sense that what we see is not far removed from the actual process of making the movie. It's entertainment, all right, but it's also hard work, and Astaire chain-smokes all the way through it. "I don't think a dancer should smoke," Charisse tells him early in the film, but by the end, she's bumming a cigarette.

In a Lonely Place

The courtyard of the Hollywood building occupied by Humphrey Bogart in "In a Lonely Place" (1950) is one of the most evocative spaces I've seen in a movie. Small apartments are lined up around a Spanish-style courtyard with a fountain. Each flat is occupied by a single person. If you look across from your window, you can see into the life of your neighbor.

One apartment is occupied by Dixon Steele, an alcoholic screenwriter who has some success but is now in the midst of a long, dry spell. Across from him is Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a would-be actress and a smart cookie. Steele is a bitter, angry man. Drinking at noon in his usual hangout, he succeeds in insulting his agent, punching a man who is cruel to an aging has-been actor and then getting in a fistfight with the son of a studio chief.

This concise opening scene, set in a bar inspired by Bogart's own hangout, Romanoff's, establishes Dixon Steele's character and summarizes some of the things we sense about Bogart, that enigmatic man. They both drink too much. They're both idealists who sympathize with underdogs. They both have a temper. Steele has, and Bogart was always able to evoke self-pity; remember his Dobbs in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Bogart was at his best in conflicted roles, at his weakest in straightforward macho parts. Steele's qualities make him an ideal partner for Laurel Gray, who has been around, knows the ropes and is more likely to fall for a wounded pigeon than a regular guy.

"In a Lonely Place" has been described by the critic Kim Morgan as "one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever committed to film," and love is indeed what it's really about. It has the look, feel and trappings of a film noir, and a murder takes place in it, but it is really about the dark places in a man's soul and a woman who thinks she can heal them.

As carefully constructed by Bogart, who produced it, and directed by Nicholas Ray, from a great noir novel by Dorothy Hughes, it's at pains to make its man and women adults who know their way around. Neither is a victim, except of their own natures: Dixon Steele a drinker with rotten self-esteem, Laurel Gray a woman who should know better than to invest in him.

In the film, Steele is given the job of adapting a trashy best-seller. He needs the work, but he can't even bear to read the novel. A friendly hat-check girl named Mildred (Martha Stewart) tells him she loved it, and he hires her to come home with him and tell him the story. On their way through his courtyard, they pass Laurel Gray, and Gloria Grahame is perfect in how she conveys to him that she notices him. The storytelling session drags on, Mildred becomes a bore, and Steele sends her away. The next morning she's found murdered. Steele, seen to leave the bar with her and with a long rap sheet involving assaults and fights, is the logical suspect.

Did anyone see Mildred leave his apartment? Yes, as it turns out, Laurel says she did, and provides an alibi when she's brought to the police station. Something happens between Laurel and Dixon in the captain's office that is unmistakable -- and later that day they act upon it, no small talk, hungry with passion and hope.

Laurel gets Dixon off the sauce. He starts writing again. They're helplessly in love, a little giddy with happiness. But the possibility lingers that he did murder the girl, and that Laurel testified for him out of instinct more than certain knowledge. An idyllic interlude on the beach suddenly turns ugly and leads to worse. We, and Laurel, are presented with the possibility that her life is in danger, especially if he drinks again. Ambiguity about the true Dixon Steele provides the soul of the film. The fact that they truly love each other its poignancy.

This is a crisp black-and-white film with an almost ruthless efficiency of style. It taps into the psyches of the three principals: Bogart, who bought the story to produce with his company; Nicholas Ray, a lean iconoclast of films about wounded men (James Dean in "Rebel Without Cause"), and the legendary Gloria Grahame (1923-1981), whose life story inspired Peter Turner's extraordinary book Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool. Turner was the last of her many loves. She was married to Nicholas Ray but that ended during the making of this film, when Ray found her in bed with his 13-year-old son by an earlier marriage. (She and the boy, Tony, were married from 1960 to 1974.)

Life on the set was obviously fraught with emotional hazards. Ray had modeled the movie's apartment complex on an apartment he once occupied at Villa Primavera in West Hollywood. When he moved out on Grahame, I learn from critic J. Hoberman, Ray actually moved onto the set and started sleeping there. The relationship between Dixon and Laurel mirrored aspects of Bogart's own with the younger, strong-willed, nurturing Lauren Bacall. Yet perhaps they all sensed that they were doing the best work of their careers -- a film could be based on those three people and that experience.

"In a Lonely Place" is a superb example of the mature Hollywood studio system at the top of its form. Photographed with masterful economy by Burnett Guffey ("Knock on Any Door," "Bonnie and Clyde"), it understands space and uses the apartments across the courtyard to visualize the emotional relationship between Dixon and Laurel. Visible to each other, dependent on each other, they never officially move in together but remain enclosed, and no matter what they say, apart. Notice the way Guffey focuses light on Bogart's eyes during a frightening speech when he imagines how Mildred was murdered.

"You know, Miss Gray," he says, "you're one up on me. You can see into my apartment but I can't see into yours."

"I promise you, I won't take advantage of it."

"I would, if it were the other way around."

Bogart is so good at playing vulnerable men. It's strange he has an enduring image as a tough guy. It would be more accurate to say he was tempered by experience. A decade before this film, in "Casablanca," he was already the man drinking alone late at night, afraid of hearing an old song.

About Grahame's characters there was often a doomed quality. She and Lee Marvin had an iconic scene in "The Big Heat" (1953) when he threw a pot of boiling coffee in her face. In "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), she plays the grown-up Violet, who in the nightmare sequence, becomes a prostitute. She won an Oscar for "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952), playing an actress who hates the producer who betrayed her. And she gained the unfortunate nickname "the can't say no girl" after performing that song in "Oklahoma!" (1955).

If there is one key element of film noir, it is the flawed hero. That, usually joined with a distinctive visual style and tone, defines the genre. The hero is sympathetic but weak, often haunted by mistakes in the past or fatally tempted by greed or lust. He is likely to discover himself capable of evil he had never dreamed of, and is consumed by guilt and fear.

Bogart embodies this noir quality flawlessly in "In a Lonely Place." He plays a good man with a hot temper who can fly into a rage when he drinks. This gives Dixon a Jekyll and Hyde quality that Laurel awakens to, leading to later scenes of terror. The monster inhabiting him is an acting-out of self-loathing, which infects his success and dooms his happiness. He foresees his fate when he quotes to her a line just written in his new screenplay: "I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me."

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The last words in David Lean's ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' are ``Madness! Madness ... madness!'' Although the film's two most important characters are both mad, the hero more than the villain, we're not quite certain what is intended by that final dialogue. Part of the puzzle is caused by the film's shifting points of view.

Seen through the eyes of Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), commanding officer of a battalion of British war prisoners, the war narrows to a single task, building a bridge across the Kwai. For Shears (William Holden), an American who escapes from the camp, madness would be returning to the jungle. For Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), the Japanese commandant of the camp, madness and suicide are never far away as the British build a better bridge than his own men could. And to Clipton (James Donald), the army doctor who says the final words, they could simply mean that the final violent confusion led to unnecessary death.

Most war movies are either for or against their wars. ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957) is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. Like Robert Graves' World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. By the end of ``Kwai'' we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave.

The film is set in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, along the route of a rail line the Japanese were building between Malaysia and Rangoon. Shears is already in the camp; we've seen him steal a cigarette lighter from a corpse to bribe his way into the sick bay. He watches as a column of British prisoners, led by Nicholson, marches into camp whistling ``The Colonel Bogey March.''

Nicholson and Saito, the commandant, are quickly involved in a faceoff. Saito wants all of the British to work on the bridge. Nicholson says the Geneva Convention states officers may not be forced to perform manual labor. He even produces a copy of the document, which Saito uses to whip him across the face, drawing blood. Nicholson is prepared to die rather than bend on principle, and eventually, in one of the film's best-known sequences, he's locked inside ``the Oven''--a corrugated iron hut that stands in the sun.

The film's central relationship is between Saito and Nicholson, a professional soldier approaching his 28th anniversary of army service (``I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time''). The Japanese colonel is not a military pro; he learned English while studying in London, he tells Nicholson, and likes corned beef and Scotch whisky. But he is a rigidly dutiful officer, and we see him weeping privately with humiliation because Nicholson is a better bridge builder; he prepares for hara-kiri if the bridge is not ready on time.

The scenes in the jungle are crisply told. We see the bridge being built, and we watch the standoff between the two colonels. Hayakawa and Guinness make a good match as they create two disciplined officers who never bend, but nevertheless quietly share the vision of completing the bridge.

Hayakawa was Hollywood's first important Asian star; he became famous with a brilliant silent performance in Cecil B. DeMille's ``The Cheat'' (1915). Although he worked onstage and in films in both Japan and the United States, he was unusual among Japanese actors of his generation in his low-key delivery; in ``Kwai'' he doesn't bluster, but is cool and understated--as clipped as Guinness. (Incredibly, he was 68 when he played the role.)

Alec Guinness, oddly enough, was not Lean's first choice for the role that won him an Oscar as best actor. Charles Laughton originally was cast as Col. Nicholson, but ``could not face the heat of the Ceylon location, the ants, and being cramped in a cage,'' his wife, Elsa Lanchester, wrote in her autobiography. The contrasts between Laughton and Guinness are so extreme that one wonders how Lean could see both men playing the same part. Surely Laughton would have been juicier and more demonstrative. Guinness, who says in his autobiography that Lean ``didn't particularly want me'' for the role, played Nicholson as dry, reserved, yet burning with an intense obsession.

That obsession is with building a better bridge, and finishing it on time. The story's great irony is that once Nicholson successfully stands up to Saito, he immediately devotes himself to Saito's project as if it is his own. He suggests a better site for the bridge, he offers blueprints and timetables, and he even enters Clipton's hospital hut in search of more workers, and marches out at the head of a column of the sick and the lame. On the night before the first train crossing, he hammers into place a plaque boasting that the bridge was ``designed and built by soldiers of the British army.''

It is Clipton who asks him, diffidently, if they might not be accused of aiding the enemy. Not at all, Guinness replies: War prisoners must work when ordered, and besides, they are setting an example of British efficiency. ``One day the war will be over, and I hope the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built, and who built it.'' A pleasant sentiment, but in the meantime the bridge will be used to advance the war against the Allies. Nicholson is so proud of the bridge that he essentially forgets about the war.

The story in the jungle moves ahead neatly, economically, powerfully. There is a parallel story involving Shears that is not as successful. Shears escapes, is taken to a hospital in British-occupied Ceylon, drinks martinis and frolics with a nurse, and then is asked by Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins) to return as part of a plan to blow up the bridge. ``Are you crazy?'' Shears cries, but is blackmailed by Warden's threat to tell the Americans he has been impersonating an officer. Holden's character, up until the time their guerrilla mission begins, seems fabricated; he's unconvincing playing a shirker, and his heroism at the end seems more plausible.

Lean handles the climax with precision and suspense. There's a nice use of the boots of a sentry on the bridge, sending hollow reverberations down to the men wiring the bridge with plastic explosives. Meanwhile, the British celebrate completion of the bridge with an improbable musical revue that doesn't reflect what is known about the brutal conditions of the POW camps.

The next morning brings an elaborate interplay of characters and motives, as the sound of the approaching train creates suspense, while Nicholson, incredibly, seems ready to expose the sabotage rather than see his beloved bridge go down. (The shot of the explosion and the train tumbling into the river uncannily mirrors a similar scene in Buster Keaton's silent classic ``The General,'' in which the train looks more convincing.)

Although David Lean (1908-1991) won his reputation and perhaps even his knighthood on the basis of the epic films he directed, starting with ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' in 1957, there's a contrarian argument that his best work was done before the Oscars started to pile up. After ``Kwai'' came ``Lawrence of Arabia,'' ``Dr. Zhivago,'' ``Ryan's Daughter'' and ``A Passage to India''; all but ``Ryan'' were nominated for best picture, and the first two won. Before ``Kwai'' he made smaller, more tightly wound films, including ``Brief Encounter,'' ``Oliver Twist'' and ``Great Expectations.'' There is a majesty in the later films (except for ``Ryan's Daughter'') that compensates for the loss of human detail, but in ``Kwai'' he still has an eye for the personal touch, as in Saito's private moments and Nicholson's smug inspection of the finished bridge. There is something almost Lear-like in his final flash of sanity: ``What have I done!''

Beauty and the Beast

Before Disney's 1991 film and long before the Beast started signing autographs in Orlando, Jean Cocteau filmed "Beauty and the Beast" in 1946, in France. It is one of the most magical of all films. Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup, here is a fantasy alive with trick shots and astonishing effects, giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal. Cocteau, a poet and surrealist, was not making a "children's film" but was adapting a classic French tale that he felt had a special message after the suffering of World War II: Anyone who has an unhappy childhood may grow up to be a Beast.

Those familiar with the 1991 cartoon will recognize some of the elements of the story, but certainly not the tone. Cocteau uses haunting images and bold Freudian symbols to suggest that emotions are at a boil in the subconscious of his characters. Consider the extraordinary shot where Belle waits at the dining table in the castle for the Beast's first entrance. He appears behind her and approaches silently. She senses his presence, and begins to react in a way that some viewers have described as fright, although it is clearly orgasmic. Before she has even seen him, she is aroused to her very depths, and a few seconds later, as she tells him she cannot marry--a Beast!--she toys with a knife that is more than a knife.

The Beast's dwelling is one of the strangest ever put on film--Xanadu crossed with Dali. Its entrance hall is lined with candelabra held by living human arms that extend from the walls. The statues are alive, and their eyes follow the progress of the characters (are they captives of the Beast, imprisoned by spells?). The gates and doors open themselves. As Belle first enters the Beast's domain, she seems to run dreamily a few feet above the floor. Later, her feet do not move at all, but she glides, as if drawn by a magnetic force. (This effect has been borrowed by Spike Lee.) She is disturbed to see smoke rising from the Beast's fingertips--a sign that he has killed. When he carries her into her bed chamber, she has common clothes on one side of the door and a queen's costume on the other.

Belle has come to the castle as a hostage. She lives at home with her father, two unkind sisters and a silly brother, whose handsome friend wants to marry her. But she cannot marry, for she must care for Poppa. His business is threatened, and he learns on a trip to a seaport that he has lost everything. On his way home, through a forest on a stormy night, he happens upon the Beast's castle, and is taken prisoner and told he must die. The Beast offers a deal: He can go home if he will return in three days, or he can send one of his daughters. The other sisters of course sniff and make excuses, and their father says he is old and nearly dead and will return himself. But Belle slips out and rides the Beast's white horse, which knows the way to the castle. And the Beast's first words tell her, "You are in no danger."

Indeed she is not. The Beast has perhaps intuited that a daughter who would take her father's place has a good heart. He tells her that every night at 7 he will ask her the same question: "Will you be my wife?" She shudders and says she will never marry him, but eventually her heart softens, and she pities him and sees that he is good. He gives her a magical glove that allows her to travel instantly between the castle and her home (emerging whole from the wall), and there is intrigue involving the key to the garden where his fortune is held. The sisters plot and scheme, but Belle of course prevails. Her father rises up from his deathbed, the Beast sinks into a final illness instead, and when she begs him to rally, his dying words are pathetic: "If I were a man, perhaps I could. But the poor beasts who want to prove their love can only grovel on the ground, and die."

Then there is another death, of the faithless family friend who wanted to marry her, and as his body turns into that of the Beast, the Beast comes back to life and turns into a prince who looks uncannily like--the dead friend. And no wonder, because all three--friend, Beast and prince--are played by Jean Marais. Odd, how appealing Marais is as the Beast, and how shallow and superficial he seems as the pompadoured prince. Even Belle doesn't leap cheerfully into his arms, but looks quizzically at her new catch and confesses she misses the Beast. So did Marlene Dietrich, who held Cocteau's hand during the suspenseful first screening of the film at a Paris studio. As the prince shimmered into sight and smilingly presented himself as Belle's new lover, she called to the screen, "Where is my beautiful Beast?"

Although he made many films, Cocteau (1889-1963) did not consider himself primarily a filmmaker but a poet; he also painted, sculpted, wrote novels and plays, and stirred the currents of the Paris art scene. His first film, the surrealistic "Blood of a Poet," was made in 1930, the same year as Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's notorious "L'Age d'Or." Both films were produced by the Viscount de Noailles, who delayed the release of Cocteau's after the other film inspired riots (Bunuel wrote of filling his pockets with rocks to throw at the audience if they charged the screen). Cocteau's film included images that became famous, as when a mirror turns into a pool of water, and when a mouth wiped off a painting affixes itself to his hand.

"Blood of a Poet" was an art film made by a poet. "Beauty and the Beast" was a poetic film made by an artist. He made it at the urging of Marais, his lover of many years, who was tall and imposing, with an extraordinary profile and matinee idol looks--a contrast to the skinny, chain-smoking Cocteau, whose months of shooting the film were made a misery because of a painful skin disease that required penicillin every three hours.

Because Cocteau was not sure he had the technical mastery for such an ambitious production, he recruited the director Rene Clement ("Purple Noon," "Diabolique") as his technical adviser; the gifted cameraman Henri Alekan to handle the tricky changes between outdoor realism and indoor fantasy, and the theatrical designer Christian Berard to design the makeup, sets and costumes (his ideas were based on the illustrations of Gustav Dore). The costumes were so elaborate they were said to be "as much as the actors could stand up in." All of Cocteau's thoughts on this process are preserved in his journal, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, which shows him persevering despite his health. His entry for Oct. 18, 1945: "Woke up with unbearable pain. As I can neither sleep nor walk up and down, I calm myself by picking up this notebook and trying to shout my pain to the unknown friends who will read these lines."

We exist. His film has made us the friends. Watching it again tonight, I felt an unusual excitement. Its devices penetrate the usual conventions of narrative, and appeal at a deeper psychic level. Cocteau wanted to make a poem, wanted to appeal through images rather than words, and although the story takes the form of the familiar fable, its surface seems to be masking deeper and more disturbing currents. It is not a "children's film." Is it even suitable for children? Some will be put off by the black and white photography and the subtitles (brief, however, and easy to read). Those who get beyond those hurdles will find a film that may involve them much more deeply than the Disney cartoon, because it is not just a jolly comic musical but deals, as all fairy tales do, with what we truly dread and desire. Brighter and more curious children will be able to enjoy it very much, I suspect, although if they return as adults they may be amazed by how much more is there.

Casablanca

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making ``Casablanca'' thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an ``A list'' picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of ``Casablanca'' was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,'' convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In ``Casablanca,'' he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. ``What is your nationality?'' the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, ``I'm a drunkard.'' His personal code: ``I stick my neck out for nobody.''

Then ``of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, ``As Time Goes By.'' He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (``I thought I told you never to play that song!''). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (``Round up the usual suspects.'')

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as ``Havana,'' Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of ``Casablanca'' is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

Gone With The Wind

"Gone With the Wind'' presents a sentimental view of the Civil War, in which the ``Old South'' takes the place of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O'Hara her comeuppance. But we've known that for years; the tainted nostalgia comes with the territory. Yet as ``GWTW'' approaches its 60th anniversary, it is still a towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story, and tells it wonderfully well.

For the story it wanted to tell, it was the right film at the right time. Scarlett O'Hara is not a creature of the 1860s but of the 1930s: a free-spirited, willful modern woman. The way was prepared for her by the flappers of Fitzgerald's jazz age, by the bold movie actresses of the period, and by the economic reality of the Depression, which for the first time put lots of women to work outside their homes.

Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do with myths of delicate Southern flowers, and everything to do with the sex symbols of the movies that shaped her creator, Margaret Mitchell: actresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae West. She was a woman who wanted to control her own sexual adventures, and that is the key element in her appeal. She also sought to control her economic destiny in the years after the South collapsed, first by planting cotton and later by running a successful lumber business. She was the symbol the nation needed as it headed into World War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie the Riveter.

Of course, she could not quite be allowed to get away with marrying three times, coveting sweet Melanie's husband Ashley, shooting a plundering Yankee, and banning her third husband from the marital bed in order to protect her petite waistline from the toll of childbearing. It fascinated audiences (it fascinates us still) to see her high-wire defiance in a male chauvinist world, but eventually such behavior had to be punished, and that is what ``Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn'' is all about. If ``GWTW'' had ended with Scarlett's unquestioned triumph, it might not have been nearly as successful. Its original audiences (women, I suspect, even more than men) wanted to see her swatted down--even though, of course, tomorrow would be another day.

Rhett Butler was just the man to do it. As he tells Scarlett in a key early scene, ``You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.'' For ``kissed,'' substitute the word you're thinking of. Dialogue like that reaches something deep and fundamental in most people; it stirs their fantasies about being brought to sexual pleasure despite themselves. (``Know why women love the horse whisperer?'' I was asked by a woman friend not long ago. ``They figure, if that's what he can do with a horse, think what he could do with me.'') Scarlett's confusion is between her sentimental fixation on a tepid ``Southern gentleman'' (Ashley Wilkes) and her unladylike lust for a bold man (Rhett Butler). The most thrilling struggle in ``GWTW'' is not between North and South, but between Scarlett's lust and her vanity.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were well matched in the two most coveted movie roles of the era. Both were well-served by a studio system that pumped out idealized profiles and biographies, but we now know what outlaws they were: Gable, the hard-drinking playboy whose studio covered up his scandals; Leigh, the neurotic, drug-abusing beauty who was the despair of every man who loved her.

They brought experience, well-formed tastes and strong egos to their roles, and the camera, which cannot lie and often shows more than the story intends, caught the flash of an eye and the readiness of body language that suggested sexual challenge. Consider the early scene where they first lay eyes on one another during the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Rhett ``exchanges a cool, challenging stare with Scarlett,'' observes the critic Tim Dirks. ``She notices him undressing her with his eyes: `He looks as if--as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy.' ''

If the central drama of ``Gone With the Wind'' is the rise and fall of a sexual adventuress, the counterpoint is a slanted but passionate view of the Old South. Unlike most historical epics, ``GWTW'' has a genuine sweep, a convincing feel for the passage of time. It shows the South before, during and after the war, all seen through Scarlett's eyes. And Scarlett is a Southerner. So was Margaret Mitchell. The movie signals its values in the printed narration that opens the film, in language that seems astonishing in its bland, unquestioned assumptions:

``There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.''

Yes, with the capital letters and all. One does not have to ask if the Slaves saw it the same way. The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of slaves (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the crimes of slavery). But to its major African-American characters it does at least grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted person in the entire story (she won one of the film's eight Oscars), and although Butterfly McQueen, as Prissy, will always be associated with the line ``I don't know nothin' about birthin' babies,'' the character as a whole is engaging and subtly subversive.

Remember that when ``GWTW'' was made, segregation was still the law in the South and the reality in the North. That the Ku Klux Klan was written out of one scene for fear of giving offense to elected officials who belonged to it. The movie comes from a world with values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own--and yet, of course, so does all great classic fiction, starting with Homer and Shakespeare. A politically correct ``GWTW'' would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.

As an example of filmmaking craft, ``GWTW'' is still astonishing. Several directors worked on the film; George Cukor incurred Clark Gable's dislike and was replaced by Victor Fleming, who collapsed from nervous exhaustion and was relieved by Sam Wood and Cameron Menzies. The real auteur was the producer, David O. Selznick, the Steven Spielberg of his day, who understood that the key to mass appeal was the linking of melodrama with state-of-the-art production values. Some of the individual shots in ``GWTW'' still have the power to leave us breathless, including the burning of Atlanta, the flight to Tara and the ``street of dying men'' shot, as Scarlett wanders into the street and the camera pulls back until the whole Confederacy seems to lie broken and bleeding as far as the eye can see.

And there is a joyous flamboyance in the visual style that is appealing in these days when so many directors have trained on the blandness of television. Consider an early shot where Scarlett and her father look out over the land, and the camera pulls back, the two figures and a tree held in black silhouette with the landscape behind them. Or the way the flames of Atlanta are framed to backdrop Scarlett's flight in the carriage.

I've seen ``Gone With the Wind'' in four of its major theatrical revivals--1954, 1961, 1967 (the abortive ``widescreen'' version) and 1989, and now here is the 1998 restoration. It will be around for years to come, a superb example of Hollywood's art and a time capsule of weathering sentimentality for a Civilization gone with the wind, all right--gone, but not forgotten.

The River (Le Fleuve) (1951)

Jean Renoir's "The River" (1951) begins with a circle being drawn in rice paste on the floor of a courtyard, and the circular patterns continue. In an opening scene, the children of a British family in India peer through porch railings at a newcomer arriving next door. At the end, the same children, less one, peer through the same railing at a departure. The porch overlooks a river, "which has its own life," and as the river flows and the seasons wheel in their appointed order, the Hindu festivals punctuate the year and all flows from life to death to rebirth, as it must.

The film is one of the simplest and most beautiful by Jean Renoir (1894-1979), among the greatest of directors. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, who was born in India and lived there many years, it remembers her childhood seen through the eyes of a young girl named Harriet (Patricia Walters), who falls in love with the new neighbor. He is Capt. John (Thomas E. Breen), an American who lost a leg in the war and now has come to live with his cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields).

We meet Harriet's family: Her parents, her three sisters, her brother Bogey. We also meet Mr. John's daughter Melanie (Radha), whose Hindu mother has died, and Valerie (Adrienne Corri), whose father owns the jute factory that Harriett's father manages. There are others: The family's nanny, the young Indian man who courts Melanie, the Sikh gatekeeper, the young Indian boy who is Bogey's playmate.

Although the film covers one year, the impression is of an endless summer day during which the girls play and write in their journals, observe the flow of life outside their gates, and are fascinated by Capt. John. At the time of the Hindu festival of light, there is a little party at the family home with music from a wind-up phonograph, and each of the older girls asks Capt. John to dance before he finally settles in a corner with Valerie. It becomes clear to young Harriet, despite her crush on the captain, that he has eyes for the red-haired Valerie. What she does not notice is that he is also attracted to his half-Indian cousin Melanie, and she to him. One day both Melanie and Harriet follow Valerie and Capt. John out into a grove, where they kiss. "It was my first kiss," Harriet remembers, "but received by another." Melanie must have felt the same.

To some degree, the girls are in love with Capt. John because he is the only eligible man in their lives. No other characters appear or are discussed; that he is sad and detached they can overlook. Harriet impatiently wants to be old enough to be visible to Capt. John. "I want to be outstandingly beautiful," she tells her pregnant mother. Harriet's narration is spoken by an adult voice; we understand these events take place around 1946.

Capt. John has come to live in India, he tells the Anglo-Indian Melanie, because with one leg he feels like an outsider. "I'm a stranger wherever I go," he says, and she replies quietly, "Where will you find a country of one-legged men?" She is a stranger, too, because of her mixed race. "I don't know where you belong," her father tells her.

Certainly all of their lives stand apart from India; we never hear a conversation between Melanie and her Indian suitor, or between Bogey and his Indian playmate, and the nanny is limited to nannyisms; she is not even given the Indian title ayah by which all nannies were known. Scenes of the real India outside the compound are mostly in long-shot.

The film is not constructed around high melodrama, but its deepest feelings are expressed when the two outsiders, Melanie and Capt. John, speak with each other, almost in code. Melanie has an enchanted scene in which she tells a story about the meeting of Prince Krishna and his bride, named Radha. The actress Radha was a dancer, and her character's story leads into a dance scene that allows some of the color and mystery of Indian religion to enter the isolation of the British family's compound.

"The River" and Michael Powell's "The Red Shoes" are "the two most beautiful color films ever made," Martin Scorsese says in an interview on the new Criterion DVD of the restored print. I saw the movie for the first time when Scorsese's personal 35mm copy played at the Virginia Film Festival some years ago; when I mentioned it to him, he said, "I watch that film three times a year. Sometimes four."

On the DVD, he says it reaches him more powerfully than "Rules of the Game," considered Renoir's masterpiece. Some will agree, some will not. "The River" is like an Ozu film in the way it regards life without trying to wrest it into a plot. During the course of the year, the girls fall in love with the same unavailable man, there is a death and a birth, and the river continues to flow.

Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, directed his first film in 1924 and was considered a grand master when he fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood in 1941. There he worked with mixed success until, by the time he made "The River," he was almost unemployable. The film was financed by an outsider, Kenneth McEldowney, a Hollywood florist who loved Godden's novel.

Renoir insisted on filming it on location in India, which he did with his nephew Claude Renoir as cameraman (and young Satyajit Ray as an assistant director). It was the first Technicolor film made in India. The budget was small. There were no stars, and some of the players had never acted before. Much of the atmosphere flows from Renoir's documentary footage, showing a bazaar, life along the river, annual festivals, boatmen at their work, and Hindus descending flights of stairs both grand and humble to bathe and pray in the water.

The British family lives apart from this India, and knows it. Behind the walls of their garden is a separate world, protected by the stern Sikh gatekeeper; only Bogey's young playmate climbs the walls. Together, the boys sneak out to the bazaar and watch a snake-charmer, and Bogey finds another snake in the roots of the giant banyan tree right outside the garden -- a tree whose roots fall down from the branches to reach for the ground, and among which gods and spirits are said to live.

There are subdued issues here involving colonialism and racism. Does Capt. John shy away from romance with Melanie because she is not white? Is Harriet's father being paternalistic when he "loves" the sight of the laborers bearing their vast bundles of jute into the factory? The issues are there, but they are not called into focus, and the life Harriet shows us is the only one she knows.

The center of her world is a cubbyhole under the stairs, where she keeps her poetry and journals, and it is a betrayal when Valerie snatches away a notebook and reads Capt. John some of the younger girl's love poems. India itself is on the brink of independence and partition, but Harriet is on the brink of adolescence, and that is much more important to her, as perhaps is natural.

Films have grown so aggressive and jittery that it takes patience to calm down into one like "The River." Its most dramatic moment takes place offscreen. Renoir is not interested in emotional manipulation but in regarding lives as they are lived. Not everyone we like need be successful, and not everyone we dislike need fail. All will be sorted out in the end -- or perhaps not, which is also the way time passes and lives resolve themselves.

Nothing is really finished at the end of "The River." Despite Jane Austen's insistence that a man like Capt. John "must be in want of a wife," he is still in want as the film ends. Harriet has not yet grown up. Melanie has still not found a place for herself. Renoir's way of bringing his story to a conclusion is a form of understated poetry. All three girls receive letters from Capt. John. All three open them and begin to read them while sitting on the steps, and then from within the house comes a baby's cry. The nanny emerges to announce: "It's a girl!" And the three girls jump up and rush into the house, the letters fluttering forgotten to the ground behind them.

A new print of "The River" plays Feb. 24-March 3 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport. "The River" is available on DVD, as are these other titles in the Great Movies series: Renoir's "Rules of the Game" and "Grand Illusion," Powell's "The Red Shoes" and Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy" and "The Music Room."

The Red Shoes (1948)

There is tension between two kinds of stories in "The Red Shoes," and that tension helps make it the most popular movie ever made about the ballet and one of the most enigmatic movies about anything. One story could be a Hollywood musical: A young ballerina falls in love with the composer of the ballet that makes her an overnight star. The other story is darker and more guarded. It involves the impresario who runs the ballet company, who demands loyalty and obedience, who is enraged when the young people get married. The motives of the ballerina and her lover are transparent. But the impresario defies analysis. In his dark eyes we read a fierce resentment. No, it is not jealousy, at least not romantic jealousy. Nothing as simple as that.

The film is voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don't watch it, you bathe in it. Yes, the ending is a shocker, but you see it coming and there's no way around it; the movie tells us a fairy tale and then repeats it as real life. It's the Hans Christian Andersen fable about a young girl who puts on a pair of red slippers that will not allow her to stop dancing; she must dance and dance, in a grotesque mockery of happiness, until she is dead. This is a dire subject for a ballet, you will agree; the movie surrounds it with the hard-boiled business of running a ballet company.

"The Red Shoes" was made in 1948 by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, British filmmakers as respected as Hitchcock, Reed or Lean. Powell was the director and Pressburger, a Hungarian immigrant, was the writer, but they always took a double credit as writer-directors, and were known as The Archers; their logo was an arrow hitting its target, announcing such masterpieces as "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "Black Narcissus," "Peeping Tom," "The Thief of Bagdad," and "A Matter of Life and Death," the David Niven classic that played in America as "Stairway to Heaven."

Pressburger had written a draft of a ballet film in the 1930s, and after the war, after their enormous success with "Black Narcissus" (1947), which made a star of Deborah Kerr and won Oscars for cinematography and art direction, they had another look at it. Powell had grown up on the French Riviera; his British father ran a hotel on Cap Ferrat, and he often saw the Russian impresario Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes wintered nearby in Monte Carlo. The Archers used Powell's notions about Diaghilev and the earlier script to create the story of a proud, cold, distant impresario who meets his match with a fiery ballerina. Pressburger may have been inspired by a famous scandal in 1913 when Diaghilev's great but tortured star, Vaslav Nijinsky, married the Hungarian ballerina Romola de Pulszky. He fired them both.

Casting is everything when the characters must move between realism and fantasy, and "The Red Shoes" might have failed without Moira Shearer and Anton Walbrook as the stars. Shearer and Walbrook have distinctive, even idiosyncratic personalities, and they bring an emotional realism to characters who are really, after all, only stereotypes. Walbrook plays Boris Walbrook, the imperious manager of the Ballet Lermontov, a company ruled by his iron will. He is arrogant, curt, unbending, able to charm, able to chill. Shearer plays the dancer Victoria Page, whose friend Julian Craster (Marius Goring) bursts into Lermontov's office to complain that his composition has been stolen by the company's conductor. Julian is hired by Lermontov, Vicky wins an audition, and when the company's leading dancer resigns to get married, they are told "we have three weeks to create a ballet -- out of nothing."

Moira Shearer, let it be said, is a great beauty: "Her cloud of red hair, as natural and beautiful as any animal's, flamed and glittered like an autumn bonfire," Powell wrote in his autobiography, the best ever written by a filmmaker. "She had a magnificent body. She wasn't slim, she just didn't have one ounce of superfluous flesh." Of Walbrook he wrote: "Anton conceals his humility and his warm heart behind perfect manners that shield him like suit of armor. He responds to clothing like the chameleon that changes shape and color out of sympathy with its surroundings."

Quite so. In "Colonel Blimp," Walbrook makes a German aristocrat sympathetic. In Max Ophuls' great "La Ronde" (1950), he is our urbane and charming guide to a decadent society. In "The Red Shoes," he creates a deliberate enigma, a man who does not want to be understood, who imposes his will but conceals his feelings.

Vicky Page is his opposite: Joyous and open to life. Shearer, who was 21 when she was cast, was at the time with the Sadlers' Wells Company, dancing in the shadow of the young Margot Fonteyn. She didn't take movies seriously, waited a year before agreeing to star in "The Red Shoes," went back to the ballet, and possibly never knew how good she was in the movie, how powerfully she related to the camera. "I never knew what a natural was before," Powell told the studio owner J. Arthur Rank. "But now I do. It's Moira Shearer."

The movie tells parallel stories leading up to its 17-minute ballet sequence. While Vicky and Julian are falling in love, Lermontov and his company are creating the new ballet. There is a key scene where Lermontov and all his colleagues meet in his villa to hear Julian play the new ballet for the first time. "I was determined to shoot it in one big master shot," Powell wrote, and it is a masterpiece of composition, of entrances, exits, approaches to the camera, background action, and the vibrating sense of a creative team at work. "There are lots of clever scenes in 'The Red Shoes'," he wrote, "but this is the heart of the picture."

The other key scenes are the ballet itself, and the sequence leading up to the ending. No film had ever interrupted its story for an extended ballet before "The Red Shoes," although its success made that a fashion, and "An American in Paris" and "Singin' in the Rain," among others, have extended fantasy ballet sequences. None ever looked as fantastical as the one in the "The Red Shoes," where the little shoemaker puts the fatal slippers on the girl. The physical stage is seamlessly transformed into a surreal space, where Shearer glides and flies, enters unreal landscapes and even does a pas de deux with a newspaper that takes the form of a dancer, turns into the dancer, and then into a newspaper again. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff wrote about how he manipulated camera speed to make the dancers seem to linger at the tops of their jumps; the art direction won an Oscar, mostly because of this scene (there was also an Oscar for the music, and nominations for best picture, editing and screenplay).

After Vicky and Julian are married and Lermontov fires them, he persuades her to dance "The Red Shoes" one more time. Julian walks out of the premiere of his new symphony in London to fly to Monte Carlo and accuse her of abandoning him. What will she choose? The dance, or her husband? She puts on the red slippers, and in a brilliant closeup the slippers force her to turn around, and seem to lead her as she runs from the theater and throws herself in front of a train. Discussing the script, Pressburger argued that Vicky couldn't be wearing the red shoes when she runs away, because the ballet had not yet started. Powell writes: "I was a director, a storyteller, and I knew that she must. I didn't try to explain it. I just did it."

That brings us back to the tension we began with. Why does Lermontov object so violently to the marriage of these two young people? Is it sexual jealousy? Does he desire Vicky, or, for that matter, Julian? Lermontov is a bachelor with the elegant wardrobe and mannered detachment that played as gay in the 1940s, but there is not a moment when he displays any sexual feelings. He would rather die than appear vulnerable. My notion is that Lermontov is Mephistopheles. He has made a bargain with Vicky: "I will make you the greatest dancer the world has ever known." But he warns her: "A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer -- never." Like the Satan of classical legend, he is enraged when he wins her soul only to lose it again. He demands obedience above all else.

That leaves us with Vicky's choice. She can return to London with Julian, or leave him and continue her career. Why does she abandon these choices at the height of her youth and beauty, and kill herself? The answer of course is that she is powerless, once she puts on the red shoes.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

It has always been a question whether "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925) is a great film, or only a great spectacle. Carl Sandburg, one of the original reviewers, underwent a change of heart between his first Chicago Daily News review (he waited for the Phantom's unmasking "terribly fascinated, aching with suspense") and a reconsideration written a month later ("strictly among the novelties of the season"). It was not, he added on the level of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or "Greed," mentioning two of the greatest films of all time.

He was right about that, and could have added the greatest of all silent horror films, Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922), whose vampire may have influenced Lon Chaney's performance as the Phantom. But as an exercise in lurid sensationalism, straining against technical limitations in its eagerness to overwhelm, the first of the many Phantom films has a creepy, undeniable power.

The story is simply told -- too simply, perhaps, so that all of the adaptations, including the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, have been much ado about relatively little. In the cellars of the Paris Opera House lives a disfigured masked man who becomes obsessed with the young singer Christine. He commands the management to give her leading roles, and when they refuse, he exacts a terrible revenge, causing a great chandelier to crash down on the audience.

Christine's lover, a pallid nonentity, is little competition for her fascination with the Phantom, until she realizes with horror that the creature wants her to dwell in his mad subterranean world. She unmasks him, is repelled by his hideous disfigurement, flees to the surface and her lover, and is followed by a Phantom seeking violent revenge. There is no room for psychological subtlety here.

It is the idea of the Phantom, really, that fascinates us: the idea of a cruelly mistreated man going mad in self-imposed exile in the very cellars, dungeons and torture chambers where he was, apparently, disfigured in the first place. His obsession with Christine reflects his desire to win back some joy from a world that has mistreated him. Leroux and his adapters have placed this sad creature in a bizarre subterranean space that has inspired generations of set designers. There are five levels of cellars beneath the opera, one descending beneath another in an expressionist series of staircases, ramps, trapdoors, and a Styxian river that the Phantom crosses in a gondola. The Phantom has furnished his lair with grotesque fittings: He sleeps in a coffin and provides a bed for Christine in the shape of a whale boat. Remote controls give him warnings when anyone approaches and allow him to roast or drown his enemies.

To Christine, he offers wealth, luxury and opera stardom, and she is in no peril "as long as you do not touch the mask" -- oh, and she must love him, or at least allow him to possess her (although his precise sexual plans are left undefined). Perhaps warned by the fate of the hero in her current production of "Faust," she refuses this bargain, although for an engaged woman, she allows herself to be dangerously tempted.

After taking over the leading role from an ominously ill prima donna, she follows a mysterious voice, opens a secret door behind the mirror in her dressing room, descends through forbidding cellars, is taken semi-conscious by horseback and gondola deeper into the labyrinth and sees the coffin where he sleeps. At this point, her sudden cry of "You -- you are the Phantom!" inspired me to write in my notes: "Duh!"

Her lover, the Viscount Raoul de Chagny, is likewise not a swift study. After the Phantom has presumably claimed dozens of victims with the falling chandelier and threatened Christine with death if she sees him again, Raoul agrees to meet her at the Masked Ball. This is held in the Opera House on the very next night, with the chandelier miraculously repaired and no mourning period, apparently, for the dozens of crushed and maimed. Christine tells Raoul the Phantom will murder them if they are seen together, but then, when a gaunt and spectral figure in red stalks imperiously into the grand hall, Raoul unmasks himself, which is, if you ask me, asking for trouble.

Christine determines to sing her role one more time, after which Raoul will have a carriage waiting by the stage door to spirit them safely away to England. This plan is too optimistic, as the Phantom snatches Christine from her dressing room, and the two are pursued into the bowels of Paris by Raoul and Inspector Ledoux -- and, in a separate pursuit, by the vengeful stagehand Buquet (whose brother the Phantom murdered), leading a mob of torch-carrying rabble. The hapless Raoul and Ledoux are lured into a chamber where the Phantom can roast them to death, and when they escape through a trapdoor, it leads to a chamber where they can be drowned.

All of this is fairly ridiculous, and yet, and yet, the story exerts a certain macabre fascination. The characters of Christine and Raoul, played by Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, essentially function as puppets of the plot. But the Phantom is invested by the intense and inventive Lon Chaney with a horror and poignancy that is almost entirely created with body language. More of his face is covered than in modern versions (a little gauze curtain flutters in front of his mouth), but look at the way his hand moves as he gestures toward the coffin as the titles announce "That is where I sleep." It is a languorous movement that conveys great weary sadness.

The Phantom's unmasking was one of the most famous moments in silent film. He is seated at his organ. "Now, when he is intent on the music," Sandburg wrote, "she comes closer, closer, her fingers steal towards the ribbon that fastens the mask. Her fingers give one final twitch -- and there you are!" There you are, all right, as Chaney, "the Man of 1,000 Faces" and a master of makeup, unveils a defacement more grotesque than in any later version, his mouth a gaping cavern, his nose a void, his eyes widely staring: "Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!"

The other famous scene involves the falling chandelier, which became the centerpiece of the Webber musical and functions the same way in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film version. In the original film, it is curiously underplayed; it falls in impressive majesty, to be sure, but its results are hard to measure. Surely there are mangled bodies beneath it, but the movie stays its distance and then hurries on.

Much more impressive is the Masked Ball sequence and its sequel on the roof of the opera house. The filmmakers (director Rupert Julien, replaced by Edward Sedgwick and assisted by Chaney) use primitive color techniques to saturate the ball with brilliant scarlets and less obtrusive greens. Many scenes throughout the film are tinted, which was common enough in silent days, but the Masked Ball is a primitive form of Technicolor, in which the Phantom's great red cloak sweeps through the air like a carrion bird that enfolds him.

And on the roof, as Raoul and Christine plot, he hovers unseen above them on the side of a statue, the red garment billowing ominously. Chaney's movements in all of these scenes are filled with heedless bravado, and yet when he pauses, when he listens, when the reasons for his jealousy are confirmed, he conveys his suffering.

In a strange way, the very artificiality of the color adds to its effect. True, accurate and realistic color is simply ... color. But this form of color, which seems imposed on the material, functions as a passionate impasto, a blood-red overlay. We can sense the film straining to overwhelm us. The various scores (I listened to the music by the great composer for silent film Carl Davis) swoop and weep and shriek and fall into ominous prefigurings, and the whole enterprise embraces the spirit of grand guignol.

"The Phantom of the Opera" is not a great film if you are concerned with art and subtlety, depth and message; "Nosferatu" is a world beyond it. But in its fevered melodrama and images of cadaverous romance, it finds a kind of show-biz majesty. And it has two elements of genius: It creates beneath the opera one of the most grotesque places in the cinema, and Chaney's performance transforms an absurd character into a haunting one.

The new film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" opens nationally on Wednesday. See also the Great Movie reviews of "Nosferatu," "The Man Who Laughs," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Orpheus".