Sinister Madonna

Many years ago and far away when mastodons loomed large in Braintree and I was a callow Yardling, people at Harvard knew motion pictures from weekend escapism, late-night television, or reading period orgies at the Brattle. Movies killed time and blew your mind. They were a cheap date. True, we had our complement of film societies and encyclopaedic experts. And true, too, there were few among us who wouldn't offer up, if pressed, a definition of the Bogart mystique or a guarded speculation as to what Truffant was really up to. But by and large the motion picture was pretty small beer.

To be truly informed about the movies seemed to presuppose a staggering technical knowledge of cinematic processes and a large tolerance for the infuriatingly abstruse and imprecise rhetoric associated with film criticism. It was too much work.

For a student to make a movie--even an extremely short movie--was so prohibitively difficult, expensive, and lonely a business, that only a few tried, and their results were usually too miniature or inept to gain widespread attention.

But the old order changeth, making way for the new. Today, a preponderance of people in the theatre, both here and elsewhere, can be observed regularly discussing movies, or discussing their own work in terms of the cinema. At Harvard, the success of the Carpenter Center has both reflected and stimulated a generally increased awareness of film work. And now Timothy Hunter, the energetic president of Ivy Films has accomplished the quite remarkable feat of producing the first feature-length motion picture by an undergraduate in 18 years: a good silent movie called Sinister Madonna.

Hunter's story is based loosely on a novel by Sax Rohmer, the creator of the formidable Fu Manchu. Fu, you may recall if your youth was as misspent as mine, was a satanic supermind who ran a terrorist organization called the Si Fan, "to which fully one-third of the world's colored races belong," and while he never quite achieved the complete global domination he so earnestly sought, Fu Manchu sure came close as dammit on a number of occasions.

Fu himself has been cut from this movie, and his sometime antagonist, steely-eyed Sir Denis Nayland Smith, reduced to an Adams House sophomore with identity hang-ups, but it is to Hunter's glory that something of the spirit of the Asiatic fiend lingers on.

The sophomore (Stephen Lerner) is blessed with a pleasantly pneumatic Cliffie (Kim Brody), who enthusiastically responds to bouncy fun-and-sex whenever they meet, and a good-guy roommate (Jerry Heist). The movie begins with Lerner's discovery of a dinner-jacketed corpse in what I take to be the foyer of A Entry. The dead man, actually a boy of approximately Lerner's age, is wearing a handsome scarab ring and clutching a curved dagger of ominously Eastern design. These melodramatic artifacts it transpires, are linked with the title character, (Ellen Anschuetz), a chic but enigmatic actress who is mistress of an elegant home on Francis Ave. She gets her property back with the help of her hirelings, a butler (Peter Jaszi) and a murderous Stillman nurse (Erica Ivers). The pair arranges the deaths of the roommate and girl friends, deaths which are duly certified by Stillman doctors and reported in the CRIMSON. In fact, however, through the agency of a potent serum they do not die at all but are transformed into zombies in the Francis Ave. house. I shall reveal no more of the plot which is fun and has its share of suspense.

Hunter's camera creates characterizations with considerable skill. Lerner, who has the lean chops and darting eyes of a nouvelle vague flesh peddlar, is obviously claustrophobic beneath the heavy angles and oppressive ceilings of Adams House. But outside his own room, he pays for a heightened freedom of movement with his inability to be at ease or in scale against alien objects or in alien environments. He's lost, often quite literally, insuch differing surroundings as a mortuary-like IAB shower room and the lush mechanical complexity of the Loeb shop.

He's a materialist, I would guess, from the way he handles objects and from his obvious rage at ambiguity. If there's a door, he'll open it; it there's a curtain, he'll pull it aside. We're tipped off at the beginning of the picture when Lerner's and the camera's preoccupation is with the ring and the dagger, rather than with the body, which is scarcely examined and then only for a second's slap across the cheeks to be sure it's really dead. In the film's most immediately powerful sequence, he spells out his self-disgust by carving "FOOL" in his forearm with a razorblade. The scene is beautifully shot with relentlessly detached clinicism that is almost unbearable. In Lerner, Hunter has faithfully recorded the conventions of the French/American tough guy: his slovenlieness, his resistance, his attempt to be sphynxlike. But in the character's most Bogartian moment, a curl of the lip at an actor who is strutting out a characterization in front of the mirror in the Loeb green room, Lerner fails to convince us that he isn't posturing a bit himself. He, too, is fascinated by mirrors, particularly the fold-out, floor-length mirror in the Loeb costume loft which he slowly swings around, hypnotized by the multiple possibilities of his own image.

Lerner's vulnerability to the camera is in sharp contrast to the elusive and inviolable presence of the title character, her features frozen in that maddening half-smile which is traditionally associated with the Mother of God. Hunter scarcely gives her a motion until her third appearance, when she shows up outside a magnificently imposing Widener Library, takes Lerner's arm, and leads him away without betraying a flicker of interest in her own action. Usually, there is an obvious gulf (sometimes a mite too obvious) between her and Lerner or between her and the camera's eye. It is achieved by a variety of techniques: camera angles, simple positioning, and just plain props like the bookstore window in her second appearance or the long dinner table of her eighth.

But it is to Miss Anschuetz's and her director's credit that the power of her static presence is so firmly established that in scenes where she appears only as a blown-up photograph on the wall, we are very much aware of her proximity to the sequence. In fact, we feel that she is there. In the one scene where she actually enters a room already dominated by her photograph, we are pretty sure that she's there twice. The sequence indicates that she and Lerner make love after the dissolve, and the physical duality of her image is an obvious but successful reminder that her surface can never really be animated or her enigma cracked. She is completely and very dangerously a virgin, whatever she does. The black cowled, nunlike presence which dominates the gothic dining room turns out to be her hooded photograph on a tripod. The eye socket of a black cowled skull in another room is the scareb ring's proper resting place, a fact which informs Hunter's close-ups on her eyeball. The only violence done the lady in the course of the picture is a systematic stabbing of her photograph, a truly shocking scene made horrible by the image's natural failure to change expression. It is the attacker who is exposed, and ultimately destroyed, by the action. The scene is Lerner's turning point, representing the fullfillment of his obsession with her image. So violent are the visual metaphors for the title character's aggressive composure, that one wonders whether, for the director at least, the film's title doesn't imply a redundancy.

The film's faults are major but understandable. There's budget movie's inevitable problem with continuity. Lerner in white shirt and dungaree jacket rounds a corner to become Lerner in De Pinna pullover. More seriously, Hunter is not always successful in staging the actions he photographs. The clumsiness of the amateur actors in the several fight scenes betray the excellent cinemastic ideas which inspired them. Too often, Lerner's delayed reactions suggest a bored actor. And in several sequences, Miss Anschuetz looks like a very beautiful child twisting her features to burlesque a temptress. The best major performance, I think, comes from Erica Ivers as the villainous nurse.

It is not surprising that a first film should be influenced, and Hunter (who knows his Hitchcock and Welles very well) has had the wit to pick good models. I wonder, though, whether his larger view of human relationships and actions hasn't been over-determined by the number of movies he's seen. Is it intentional that the triangle of Cliffie, hero, and ellusive temptress so closely parallels the triangle in Vertigo? I suppose it is, but I can't help preferring the Hunter who very logically (and rather sweetly) sets the recently de-zombied roommate to opening a pile of mail which has collected during his zombiedom.

There are any number of critical theories running around the world, each more insistant than the last that it alone is on to what the cinema should be. In last month's Cahiers Jean-Louis Comolli called for salles claires, half-lighted movie theatres to point up the auteur's conscious intent. Good films, like this one, create their own clarity.