I used to think of Billy Wilder primarily as a very witty, literate screenwriter who made sophisticated, Lubitsch-like films. But re-watching Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 recently, I was reminded again of how hard-edged Wilder’s sense of humour is. Of course, there was never any denying that he made some very cynical movies (most notably Ace in the Hole, which anticipates the evils of today’s media in its story of a reporter exploiting the situation of a man trapped in a cave). But because Wilder is such a clever writer who constantly comes up with lines that make you smile, and because his dialogues are so layered and fast-paced, requiring full concentration, you can sometimes lose sight of how dark some of his material is.
Take Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war in a German camp (or stalag) a few months before the end of the Second World War. The main plot involves their realisation that there’s a stoolie in their midst who smuggles information to the camp commandant; the finger of suspicion points at the unsocial Sergeant Sefton (played by William Holden) who spends much of his time trading with the Germans for special privileges (a few dozen cigarettes in exchange for a precious egg, for example).
The effect of this film is different from that of the obviously absurdist anti-war comedies – movies like Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The deliberate, over-the-top lunacy of those movies paradoxically makes it easier for us to see how serious-intentioned they are. Army surgeons cracking jokes while digging about in the bleeding innards of their doomed patients? Mushroom clouds spreading gracefully across the earth’s surface while a gentle Vera Lynn song plays in the background? How can this not be ironical? But Stalag 17 is harder to figure out, because its tone is more realist and because, in a couple of scenes, it steers close to making POW life seem like one long buddy picnic. There are Christmas trees, there is much hurrahing to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”, there’s a bit of fooling about with a genial prison guard, a bit of volleyball, and some ogling of the Russian women prisoners across the barbed wire.
Consequently, you might think this film is a bit flippant or at least that it’s somewhat sanitised (which it probably is, but that has more to do with the fact that it was made in 1953 than anything else). After all, when we think of Nazis as captors we reflexively think about the horrors of the concentration camps: we don’t think about the fact that the Germans would probably treat white American POWs towards the war's end at least marginally better than they treated the Jews. (In this case, being too nuanced is a step away from being callous. There’s something distasteful about a film depicting a German prison guard as genial, even if a few such men might actually have existed.) [Note: for a clarification of what I'm trying - unsuccessfully - to say here, see Feanor's comment and my reply to it.]
But despite its few instances of soft-pedalling, Stalag 17 is a very thoughtful movie. It never really allows us to forget its opening moments, when two prisoners are coolly shot dead by German guards while trying to escape, their bodies left to lie in the slush the next day while the camp commandant smilingly explains that “fortunately your companions did not get very far – they had the good sense to rejoin us”. And there are, in fact, a couple of scenes that seem to point the way forward to M*A*S*H*, which was made 20 years later in a more permissive Hollywood. In one scene, after the prisoners are given copies of Mein Kampf to read, they stick Hitler moustaches on themselves and make faux-speeches in a pidgin language that combines random German words (or German-sounding words) with American slang. “Everything is Gesundheit, Kaputt and Verboten! Is all you indoctrinated? Is all you good little Adolfs?” (Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John would have been proud.) In another scene, one of the men receives a thinly disguised Dear John letter from his wife, informing him that she found a baby on her doorstep, that it has her eyes and nose, and that he must believe her.
The execution of the two wannabe escapees is filmed matter-of-factly, much like the gangland massacre scene in Wilder’s Some Like it Hot - there’s no underlining the tragedy of the moment, no stretching it out or dolling it up with sad music; that’s not the Wilder way. And there’s an immediate cut to a shot of Sefton, collecting his winnings – a pile of cigarettes – because he’d bet the other prisoners that the two men wouldn’t make it out of the forest. Naturally this isn’t the sort of thing that would endear him to the others, but he’s only measuring the risks and being practical. As he tells the other prisoners, “Let’s say you DO escape this place and get back to the States. They’ll just ship you out to the Pacific, put you on another plane, you’ll get shot down again and end up in a Japanese prison camp this time. Well, I’m staying put and making myself as comfortable as I can.”
It’s an impressive anti-war speech, but in the context of the story it also indicates a selfishness in Sefton’s personality. Subsequent events allow him personal growth. When he finds out the identity of the real stoolie, he’s in a position to milk the knowledge for personal gain, but he makes another choice instead. And it’s typical of Wilder’s style that this is depicted as unsentimentally as possible, without turning Sefton into the Hollywood Hero who saves the day.
P.S. More on Wilder’s wry treatment of death. My Sunset Boulevard DVD has audio commentary by Ed Sikov, who wrote a book about Wilder, and from it I learnt that the original opening of the film was a scene set in a morgue, where the corpse of Joe Gillis (the movie’s leading man, also played by William Holden) engages in conversation with other dead bodies. But during a preview screening, audiences laughed so hard at this scene that Wilder had to come up with something different: hence the macabre yet beautiful shot taken from the bottom of the swimming pool in which Gillis’s body floats as policemen try to fish it out and newsmen take photographs.
[I’ve written earlier on this blog about Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen series; here’s the text of a story I did for Business Standard Weekend]
The literal English translation of the Malayalam word Randaamoozham is “next in line”. Slightly extended, it might be used to describe someone who is perpetually second best, forever the bridesmaid, and this made it a particularly apt title for M T Vasudevan Nair’s acclaimed retelling of the Mahabharata in the voice of Bhima, the second of the five Pandava heroes. Next in the line of succession to his elder brother Yudhisthira (and usually in the shadow of his younger brother Arjuna when it comes to charisma and skill in warfare), Bhima comes across as a gluttonous, slightly oafish he-man figure – or a comic foil – in many mainstream renderings of the great epic. But Nair (popularly known as “MT”) turned him into a three-dimensional figure, more sensitive and thoughtful than he is usually given credit for. “He took familiar building blocks and created an entirely new, incredibly compelling construct from them,” says Prem Panicker, senior journalist, Rediff.com co-founder and a long-time admirer of MT’s work.
When Panicker first read Randaamoozham as a youngster, it helped him realise that “the stories that made up the warp and weft of my ‘heritage’ are open to interpretation”. Returning to the book years later, he was struck by the nuances a familiar tale could yield if you changed the perspective even fractionally – “like a kaleidoscope, where every time you gently flick your wrist, strange and wonderful patterns emerge from the same broken bits of glass”.
A little over a year ago, he embarked on a whimsical, experimental project that quietly grew into a robust literary work: an English transcreation of Randaamoozham, serialised under the title Bhimsen on his very popular blog Smoke Signals. The series is now complete – it runs to 72 episodes and 135,000 words – and available in PDF format on the website. It’s an outstanding work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in an intimate, earthy version of the Mahabharata – one that places us right amidst the characters.
“Perspective tellings” of this complex, multi-layered epic are not, of course, new things. Many notable books and plays in this vein have been written in all the major Indian languages – Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi), Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and P K Balakrishnan’s Ini Nhan Urangatte (Malayalam) being just three among them – but unfortunately for the English-language reader, hardly any of these are available in high-quality translation. This makes Panicker’s Bhimsen an especially important work, one that remains deeply respectful of the original Randaamoozham while at the same time confidently building on it. It isn’t a straight translation. Using the blog-post format meant that Panicker had to carefully work out how to begin and end each chapter, which is a different process from flowing a story over the uninterrupted length of a book; each episode had to be relatively self-contained. He also drew on his own understanding of the Keralite martial arts tradition to embellish the descriptions of Bhima’s many hand-to-hand combats. And he expanded on the frequent tensions between the Pandava brothers, for Randaamoozham, as he points out, is at its heart the story of a family struggling to survive.
As a reader, if you come to Bhimsen having previously encountered only mainstream translations of the Mahabharata, there are two important things you have to deal with. First, this is not an omniscient-narrator telling: everything we read is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s personal experiences, his very particular biases and prejudices. This seems like an easy idea to process, but a reader who knows the Mahabharata well must keep reminding himself of it. It’s revealing to read the comments on Panicker’s original Bhimsen posts and note how frequently he got asked to add an extra sentence or two elaborating incidents that Bhima wouldn’t have had direct access to (“More details on the Abhimanyu killing please”) or justifying the behaviour of another character. A recurrent subject of such requests was Karna, who is presented here almost throughout as a negative figure, rather than the tragic anti-hero so many of us Mahabharata aficionados admire. But as Panicker shows us, when we are looking exclusively through Bhima’s eyes, it’s perfectly natural to view Karna as nothing more than an arrogant, mean-spirited low-caste man constantly trying to rise above his station in life by ingratiating himself with Duryodhana; an outsider meddling in family affairs and adding to the trouble. Other perspective tellings will, of course, present completely different pictures, which add up to create a fascinating tapestry, for these subjective renderings go a long way towards helping us grasp character motivations and appreciating the many moral complexities of the story.
The other thing to understand about Bhimsen is that there is no room in it for the supernatural or the divine; everything is explained in strictly realist terms. Thus, when the young Bhima is poisoned by Duryodhana, he doesn’t enter a magical snake kingdom at the bottom of the river and receive nectar that will grant him the strength of 8,000 elephants – instead he meets a tribe of Nagas, who heal and fortify him before sending him back home. Most of the “rakshasas”, such as Bhima’s wife Hidimbi and son Ghatotkacha, are similarly tribal-folk, people who exist on the fringes of the kingdoms that make up the narrative (and who are not particularly well-treated by the epic’s conventional heroes). Karna’s “Shakti”, the irresistible, one-use-only weapon supposedly gifted to him by Indra, is described with careful realism as an arrow that contains freshly extracted snake venom, therefore guaranteed to kill (and not replaceable because the warrior would have to carry a basket of live snakes around with him on his chariot!).
There are references to the Pandavas being the sons of Gods, but in his brusquely pragmatic way Bhima de-mythologises himself and everyone else, dismissing the bards’ songs as fanciful public relations exercises. (I could never listen to balladeers sing of my battle against Bakan without feeling the urge to laugh out loud. They called him an asura and invested him with all kinds of magical powers... but the battle itself was merely a matter of killing someone who needed it – a quick, clean kill with nothing to recommend it in terms of strategy and tactics.) Towards the end of the story, his mother Kunti even tells him about the human men who fathered her sons.
What this approach does is to flesh out the quotidian aspects of the great epic, making it more relevant to readers who don’t think of mythology as literal truth (and who aren’t very interested in its religious significance) but read it for what it tells us about human beings and their conflicts, about the everyday bustle of life. But it would be a mistake to think of Bhimsen as a radical, new-fangled attempt to “modernise” or “deconstruct” the Mahabharata. In fact, it draws on the earliest forms of the epic poem – notably the much shorter text called the “Jaya”, which we know about largely through references in other ancient literature, such as Bhasa’s plays, written around the 3rd century AD. In the afterword to Randaamoozham, Nair wrote that he stayed philosophically anchored to this “original version” throughout.
This is not to say that a minimalist Mahabharata is intrinsically more worthy or valid than the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. Both have their uses and both have something to tell us about the long, fascinating process by which myths are generated and regenerated over time. But at a time when religious fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when some people take chauvinistic pride in the idea that a sacred text has existed in exactly the same form for thousands of years, it’s important not to forget how old stories grow and change over time. After all, Randaamoozham is also a reminder that the particulars of myths vary as you travel from one part of this vast country to another. “MT brought to his narrative a Kerala-centric appreciation of interpersonal relationships within a rigidly hierarchical family structure, such as that of the Nair tharavad where the pre-eminence of the eldest male is the guiding rule,” says Panicker. This informs the relationship between Yudhisthira and the other Pandava brothers.
In her excellent book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger explores the vitality of Hinduism and the fact that its major texts have been subject to reinterpretation over the centuries, not set in stone. There is no better example of this than the Mahabharata, and Bhimsen is a worthy addition to the ever-growing canon of this dynamic epic – as well as a fine tribute to a modern classic of regional literature.
The complete text of Bhimsen is available here.
[Will soon put up the text of an email conversation I had with Prem about Bhimsen. Meanwhile, on a related but much lighter note, some old posts about Ekta Kapoor’s delightfully muddle-headed Kahaani Hamaari Mahabharat Ki, which was telecast for a few months last year before it died with the channel it was on: The tattoo menace, The squabbling sutradhaars, More on Vyasa and Ganesha, Little princes with big pecs, Low comedy from the Dwapara Yuga]
Just finished Paul Theroux’s new novel A Dead Hand, which features a Theroux-like narrator-protagonist – Jerry Delfont, an itinerant travel writer currently living in Calcutta, looking for a story, and suffering from a bad case of writer’s block or inertia. He has an impressive opening paragraph (or what he thinks is an impressive opening paragraph) that compares the city’s atmosphere to a bulging vacuum-cleaner dirt-bag, but that’s about it. In other words, he has a “dead hand” – “it seemed a true description of what I was facing, a limpness akin to an amputation” – and being middle-aged, he worries that this might herald a permanent decline.
But there’s more than one kind of dead hand in this novel. The other, more literal manifestation emerges soon after Jerry is approached by an American philanthropist, Mrs Unger, who asks him to investigate an incident involving a little boy’s corpse in a dingy little hotel room. Initially unwilling to get involved, Jerry finds himself besotted – in ways that he can’t fully articulate – by the enigmatic, maternal yet sensuous Mrs Unger. He also discovers that there’s nothing in the least dead about her hand: an almost magically skilled masseuse, she soon has him under her thumb, in more than one sense.
Paul Theroux himself isn’t the sort of author who you’d think struggles much when it comes to filling a page with words: he’s remarkably prolific, having averaged around a book a year for the better part of four decades – this includes the travel writing for which he is best known, as well as fiction that frequently draws on his experiences of traveling and living in different lands. He’s a polished, fluent writer – the quality of his prose is better than one usually expects from genre fiction (and A Dead Hand is very much a genre thriller). As in previous books, notably The Elephanta Suite, he has a way of capturing little things about India that might make Indians bristle – and even lead to accusations of an outsider being patronising or promoting stereotypes – but which have the ring of uncomfortable truth about them. “As I was leaving,” says Jerry at one point, “I heard him shout – a bawling in Bengali, the sort of rage I’d heard before in India, uninhibited indignation, pure fury, always a man screaming at a woman.” And this, when referring to certain middle-class Indians whose English combines grammatical incorrectness with a florid over-formality that suggests the colonial legacy: “They had the language for every occasion. It was still possible to be subtle, even sinuous, in a conversation, probably as a result of the weirdly Victorian verbosity, using politeness and amplification and elaborate excuses and courtesies.” On yet another occasion, Jerry says that “India’s human features” frighten him, but then speculates that “I saw doomed people where [Mrs Unger] saw life and hope, because I was doing nothing and she was bringing help.”
Also present here is some of the exoticising that so raises the hackles of many of us Indian readers - references to Tantric sex and Kali worship, for instance (see on left the international cover I found on Amazon.com, a Kali with a stylishly skewed third eye!). Of course, one mustn't confuse narrator with author: Jerry is given to painting with much broader brush-strokes than Theroux himself would. But he can certainly be seen as a version of Theroux, perhaps a more callow version. Or perhaps a lazier, less ambitious version, the sort of man who would hide behind the façade of “writer’s block”. This parallel is underlined for us midway through the book – in a passage that doesn’t take the main narrative forward but is very intriguing on its own terms – when Jerry has a brief meeting with the travel writer “Paul Theroux”, who happens to be visiting Calcutta. During the course of their exchange, we get a vivid, cynical image of an inquisitive writer as someone who pokes a wary animal: “It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction.”
Despite thoughtful passages like this, A Dead Hand has a peculiarly rushed and unfinished feel about it. The book’s target reader would seem to be someone who simply wants a cosy little Oriental mystery (the subtitle “A Crime in Calcutta” suggests as much), and in this sense it never quite satisfies. Early on, when we learn that Mrs Unger’s largesse extends to rescuing and caring for some of the city’s huge population of orphaned children, it isn’t too difficult to guess the general direction where the story is headed, and I kept waiting for a twist that would add a new, unanticipated dimension. However, this never quite happens; the book doesn’t seem to want to be a conventional whodunit (or whadhappened). But in that case, what is it? Is it more about slowly unwrapping the many veils that conceal the real Mrs Unger (something one can’t be sure Jerry has succeeded in doing by the end of the book)? Or is this inscrutable woman an elaborate symbol for Calcutta – and, by extension, for India? A Dead Hand raises these questions but leaves them dangling in the musty air of the dirt-bag.
Watched my DVD of Jules Dassin’s prison film Brute Force last week (and before you ask, I had no idea then that Madhur Bhandarkar’s latest exercise in social awareness, Jail, was about to be released). This is a very gripping movie, right up there with I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke in its genre. It’s widely seen as a commentary on the brutality of prison life and the need to make conditions more humane, but personally this wasn’t the aspect of the film I found most interesting. For starters, it’s difficult as an Indian viewer in 2009 to properly appreciate the reformist aspects of a 1947 movie set in Westgate Penitentiary, or to fully understand the context: there’s the disconnect that one frequently experiences while watching an old film about a social issue that has become either obsolete or changed in vital ways over time.
Secondly, I didn’t think the reformist stuff was the main strength of the film anyway; the characters are a little too simply drawn for that. There’s one all-out bad guy – the sadistic, upwardly mobile prison warden Captain Munsey, as smooth and repellent as a silkworm. He’s superbly played by Hume Cronyn, but the 
character is written as a caricature and a symbol: he’s so deplorable that the film pointedly associates him with both homosexuality (gasp!) and Nazism (he listens to Wagner records while beating up prisoners with a rubber truncheon that isn't just a rubber truncheon!).
In the opposite corner are six prisoners led by the handsome, brooding Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster). They share a cell and plan a breakout together, but they all seem more victims of circumstance than hardened criminals – ill-suited to any sort of jail, much less an overcrowded, unhygienic one supervised by Gay Hitler. The other authority figures are weak foils for the single-minded Munsey, who believes in ruling with an iron thumb, though there IS a benevolent doctor who briefly stands up to him and generally serves as a sutradhaar figure at the end.
For me, the strengths of Brute Force lay not in the message-mongering or the use of characters as symbols for ideologies but (clichéd though it sounds) in the sheer skilfulness of its storytelling: its low-key, mostly realist treatment of daily life in a claustrophobic, cut-off setting; the relationships amongst the prisoners (including the veteran Gallagher, who runs the in-house newspaper and who reminded me of Morgan Freeman’s stoical Red in The Shawshank Redemption); and the beautiful black-and-white photography with the many little nods to Expressionism (there’s a wonderful opening shot of the prison drawbridge in the rain, and a great silhouette of a suicide in his cell, his distinctive glasses dangling prominently from his nose). Other fine touches include the poster of a woman’s face in the cell where the break-out is planned; more a mask, an abstraction, than a real woman, this photograph is very different from the large Rita Hayworth poster that plays such a key role in The Shawshank Redemption. But it represents different things to each of the residents of Cell 17, reminding them of the girls waiting for them back home and of the circumstances that led them to prison.
In one of his first films, Burt Lancaster is a great physical presence – as he was throughout his career – but he also gives a surprisingly solid performance, many years before he started making conscious efforts to become a Serious Actor. In one of the many (slightly melodramatic) flashback scenes that give us background information on the prisoners, there’s a wonderfully performed moment where Joe’s girlfriend, an invalid, wonders aloud if people are good to her because they feel sorry for her. “I’m not 'people'. I’m Joe Collins, one guy” says Joe tersely, before quickly kissing her and getting up to leave. It’s the sort of tough-talk you expect from noir heroes of the time, but Lancaster brings a low-key realism to it, and that little moment tells us more about Joe than lines of exposition could: particularly his fierce individualism, which might end up hindering the getaway.
Jules Dassin is a director whom I always associate with the best qualities of film noir, though he worked in other genres too. My favourites among his films, Rififi and Night and the City, are taut, economical movies with hardly a superfluous shot in them. I’d place Brute Force just half a rung beneath them.
P.S. Another pleasing little connection I discovered between two very different types of movies: around the same time that Hume Cronyn was playing the fascist Munsey, he was co-writing the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope, the two young murderer-protagonists of which are also associated with both Nazism (through their espousal of Nietzsche’s Superman theory) and homosexuality. John Dall, who plays Brandon in Rope, strongly resembles Cronyn in this film - both physically and in his slightly effete way of talking. I had a vision of Cronyn (as screenwriter-cum-actor) performing scenes for the younger actor during rehearsals.
Take Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war in a German camp (or stalag) a few months before the end of the Second World War. The main plot involves their realisation that there’s a stoolie in their midst who smuggles information to the camp commandant; the finger of suspicion points at the unsocial Sergeant Sefton (played by William Holden) who spends much of his time trading with the Germans for special privileges (a few dozen cigarettes in exchange for a precious egg, for example).
But despite its few instances of soft-pedalling, Stalag 17 is a very thoughtful movie. It never really allows us to forget its opening moments, when two prisoners are coolly shot dead by German guards while trying to escape, their bodies left to lie in the slush the next day while the camp commandant smilingly explains that “fortunately your companions did not get very far – they had the good sense to rejoin us”. And there are, in fact, a couple of scenes that seem to point the way forward to M*A*S*H*, which was made 20 years later in a more permissive Hollywood. In one scene, after the prisoners are given copies of Mein Kampf to read, they stick Hitler moustaches on themselves and make faux-speeches in a pidgin language that combines random German words (or German-sounding words) with American slang. “Everything is Gesundheit, Kaputt and Verboten! Is all you indoctrinated? Is all you good little Adolfs?” (Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John would have been proud.) In another scene, one of the men receives a thinly disguised Dear John letter from his wife, informing him that she found a baby on her doorstep, that it has her eyes and nose, and that he must believe her.
P.S. More on Wilder’s wry treatment of death. My Sunset Boulevard DVD has audio commentary by Ed Sikov, who wrote a book about Wilder, and from it I learnt that the original opening of the film was a scene set in a morgue, where the corpse of Joe Gillis (the movie’s leading man, also played by William Holden) engages in conversation with other dead bodies. But during a preview screening, audiences laughed so hard at this scene that Wilder had to come up with something different: hence the macabre yet beautiful shot taken from the bottom of the swimming pool in which Gillis’s body floats as policemen try to fish it out and newsmen take photographs.
