The text that follows is an edited version of a lecture I gave some years ago to introduce a series of Ferens Fine Art lectures at the University of Hull on the topic of Post-Impressionism. The initial focus was on the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1910, what it contained, and how the reaction to it was symptomatic of what was going on generally in the arts at this time. I have always thought that the period between roughly 1910 and 1914 was one of the most remarkable periods of creativity in the arts ever, and it was to be the topic of my PhD, but a book on Billy Wilder intervened; the thesis was never finished; and my career took a very different direction.
To begin with the quotation that provides the title of this essay, a famous quote from Virginia Woolf in an essay entitled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ published in 1924. “In or about December 1910,” she wrote, “human character changed.” Virginia Woolf was often deliberately playful and provocative in her artistic pronouncements; she was never, however, frivolous. The date she cited was carefully chosen: a conscious allusion to the first Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London, which was the first extensive viewing that the public in England had been given of the work of artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso. The change in human character that Virginia Woolf was suggesting was not so much of a change of personality per se but a way of perceiving personality (1910 was also the year when Freud was giving a famous lecture on the origins and development of psychoanalysis) and also of the way of portraying character, in paint and in print. In the early years of the 20th century, artists in different fields were seeking a new language or mode of expression to render what the art critic Roger Fry called “the sensibilities of the modern outlook”.
It was Roger Fry who had organised the Exhibition, which had actually been opened to the press on November 5th (Virginia Woolf had allowed a little time for its impact to be felt). Needless to say, some critics seized on the date of bonfire night as symbolically significant, Robert Ross, for example, immediately suggesting that what these painters were up to was roughly analogous to what Guy Fawkes had planned for the Houses of Parliament, revealing the existence, as he put it, “of a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting.” The Exhibition attracted huge publicity, and was widely denounced as being pornographic, degenerate and evil.
Whether Fry had anticipated such a response is difficult to say. The Exhibition had been organised in something of a rush. Desmond McCarthy wrote the introduction to the catalogue and he was terrified that, because of the last-minute changes, the numbers of his entries would get mixed up, and a portrait of a nude, say, would be catalogued as ‘station master at Arles’. Even the title was opportunistic rather than any carefully considered artistic statement. When they were stuck for a title, Roger Fry said: “Let’s call them Post-Impressionists – at any rate they came after the Impressionists.” It is worth recalling that, although the Exhibition was widely greeted as the latest outrage of the new century, most of it was taken up with works by painters already dead and with paintings that had been done in the 1880s and 1890s. It is also worth bearing in mind the identity of some of the paintings put on show which caused such an outcry – Cezanne’s ‘Madame Cezanne in Armchair’, Matisse’s ‘The Girl with Green Eyes’, Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, Gauguin’s ‘Christ in the Garden of Olives’, Picasso’s ‘Nude Girl with a Basket of Flowers’: i.e. some of the paintings that were to become amongst the most popular, and priceless, of the century. So why the outrage? Why did the Exhibition strike the critic of The Times as “the equivalent of anarchism in politics […] the rejection of all that civilisation had done?” Why did the critic Wake Crook say “the whole show was made to look like the outpouring of a lunatic asylum”? To account for this, the Exhibition must be characterised in a little more detail, indicating how far what the painters were doing seemed to differ from convention and expectation.
One characteristic, evident particularly in the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin, was an unrestrained, un-Edwardian emotionalism, expressed in striking, often lurid, colours, that were themselves expressive of the painters’ emotional intensity and suffering. Their contemporary equivalent in music would have been Gustav Mahler, who was to die in 1911 and whom, even as late as the 1930s, the critic Basil Maine was dismissing as a composer “totally foreign to our English temperament – it is as likely that we would take up Mahler in England as the French would take up Elgar”. (Times have changed: nowadays there is barely a major symphony orchestra in the land that has not performed the whole cycle of Mahler’s nine symphonies; he is performed as often as Beethoven.) Their equivalent in literature would be a novelist like Dostoyevsky, who in 1910 (nearly thirty years after his death) was virtually unknown in England, although in two years time, his novel The Brothers Karamazov is to be translated into English for the first time and is to be rapturously acclaimed. (It is tempting to speculate whether the acclaim would have been quite that intense if English sensibilities had not been stirred up, as it were, by the Post-Impressionists.) In 1910, though, emotional expressiveness in art of that extremity was still often viewed with alarm. For example, Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ – now one of his most famous and admired works – was looked on at the Exhibition with considerable puzzlement and even downright hostility. Robert Ross described it as “the visualised ravings of an adult maniac” (which is true, up to a point, though the sentiment could have been expressed with a little more artistic sensitivity and human compassion). Other interpretations of it ranged from its being a representation of a prairie fire or that of a smoking ham omelette. A clue to interpretation might have been given by the credo of Paul Gauguin who complained about “nobody being astonished anymore” and who sought in his art an increasing subjectivity. “Before the easel the artist,” he said, “is slave neither to the past, the present, nature nor even his neighbour. Himself, always himself…. I am content to search my own self and not nature.” Such art frequently portrays a mind on the rack, a personality with Freudian symptoms of psychological abnormality or hypersensitivity: only recall Gauguin’s portrait of Van Gogh as he painted sunflowers and how Gauguin got behind the physical surface. “It’s me, Paul,” Van Gogh is said to have observed when he saw it. “But it’s me already gone insane.”
Another controversial feature of contemporary art highlighted by the Post-Impressionist exhibition was its non-representational nature. “What is one to think of Paul Gauguin’s idea of oxen?” queried one critic who was reviewing modern French art at an exhibition in Brighton that had preceded the more famous one at the Grafton gallery. “They are wooden-looking beasts akin to those of the nursery Noah’s ark variety, and their landscape environment is innocent of any attempt at perspective.” The poet Wilfrid Blunt wrote in a very similar vein about the Post-Impressionist exhibition in a diary entry of 15 November 1910: “The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them…” Implicit in those comments was the assumption that the artists were aiming for naturalistic representation but failing through poor technique. On the contrary, as Roger Fry was later to argue, the Post-Impressionists were in the process of re-considering the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial art. As Fry wrote: “Where once representation had been pushed to the point where further development was impossible, it was inevitable that artists should turn round and question the fundamental assumption that art aimed at representation.” It might well be that the achievement of the Impressionist painters had been so great as to leave the modern artist feeling impotent, and believing that the future could only be a search for an alternative mode of expression rather than a continuation along a trail which these masters had effectively exhausted. It was a problem facing other early 20th century artists in different fields: where could musical Romanticism and tonality possibly go after the titanic operas of Wagner and the epic symphonies of Mahler? Where could narrative realism go after Middlemarch and Anna Karenina?
It might well be too that a different philosophical cast of mind was also present. As John Rothenstein said in his book The Moderns and their World (1957): “Yet there would seem to be other deeper and non-painterly causes at work. Whereas once it was taken for granted that an unremitting scrutiny of appearances might enhance both understanding and delight…in our own time it is the opposite that is taken for granted…. The radiance of human beauty and the majesty of the oak…are but constructions of the human mind…. What the eye sees is not what our forbears confidently thought that they saw.” One might link that with something that Picasso was saying at the time: “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them…. If a painter asks me what was the first step for painting a table, I would say measure it.”
What one is seeing, then, is a shift towards an inner rather than outer landscape in painting, a more symbolic and private form of representation. Picasso’s picture of 1910, ‘Girl with a Mandolin’ was more accessible and shapely than most Cubist paintings of the time but it still had that harsh geometric edge characteristic of Cubism- in an age which was felt to be becoming increasingly mechanised, technological, industrialised, regulated, and the individual increasingly dominated by machinery (the novels of D. H. Lawrence during the second decade of the century are to pursue that idea with a passionate urgency). If Van Gogh’s musical parallel, in terms of tortured extreme romanticism, was Mahler, Picasso’s analogous musical counterpart, in terms of a kind of steely harshness, was Stravinsky – whom Picasso was later to draw.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Picasso was to be as controversial a figure during this period as any other of the Post-Impressionists. When his picture ‘Mandolin, Wine Glass and Table’ was reproduced in the New Age magazine of 23 November 1911, there was a storm of protest. G. K. Chesterton, for example, dismissed it as “sodden blotting paper” and chastised critics who sought to defend Picasso after the artist “has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried it to dry it with his boots.” On the other hand, Middleton Murry, who confessed he did not ‘understand’ Picasso, was more prepared to be open to the experience, approvingly quoting the response of a woman friend to Picasso: “I don’t know what it is – I feel as though my brain has been sandpapered.” Once again it was Roger Fry who most eloquently responded to the spirit of what the artist was attempting, recognising that such art gave up all resemblance to natural form in favour of a purely abstract language of form – in Fry’s phrase, ‘a visual music’. “Such a picture as Picasso’s ‘Head of a Man’”, Fry wrote, “would undoubtedly be ridiculous if, having set out to make a direct imitation of the actual model, he had been incapable of getting a better likeness. But Picasso did nothing of the sort.” The critic of The Times in 1912 interpreted Picasso’s method as essentially a reaction against the limits of photography. Why should an artist attempt to duplicate what a photograph can do now – and the film camera?
The impact of the Post-Impressionist exhibition was not only immediate and powerful but also wide-ranging. It touched creative artists in fields other than painting. For example, when Katharine Mansfield saw Van Gogh’s paintings at the Exhibition, she told a friend that “they taught her something about writing…a kind of freedom, a shaking free.” Similarly, amid the derision of fellow writers like Chesterton, Arnold Bennett saw what these contemporary painters were doing as profoundly significant, with enormous implications for the future of literature. “Suppose some writer were to come along and do in words what these men have done in paint,” he wrote, “I might conceivably be disgusted with the whole of modern fiction and I might have to begin again….Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me and some of my contemporaries to admit that we had been concerning ourselves with inessentials, had been worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms? Well, that day would be a great and disturbing day for us.” Ironically, it is precisely on those grounds that Bennett is later going to be attacked by Virginia Woolf in the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ – that he, and writers like him, such as H. G .Wells and John Galsworthy, had indeed been concerning themselves with “inessentials” and “infantile realisms”. Bennett’s observation is a premonition of the direction modernist writing is about to take. Between 1910 and 1914, we have the publication of the first novels and stories of arguably the three most original writers of the century – James Joyce, Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence – all of whom are, to a different degree, experimentalists, who turn away from the novel of externally observed reality to the subtle dissection of mental states, who eschew the novel of plot in favour of a more overt preoccupation with language and form. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf defined a new era, and area, for fiction: what was needed, she argued, was a form that reflected the uniqueness of the individual mind and found a way of articulating the previously unexpressed and inexpressible. It was a call for a new kind of novel driven not by plot and the progress of man in society but by psychological experience, by sensory association, and driven less by prosaic incident than by poetic impulse and imagery.
The four years prior to the Great War are a golden period for literary discovery, experiment and achievement. As I mentioned, one of the discoveries was Dostoyevsky, interest in whom was fuelled by Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov in 1912, the novel which Freud was subsequently to call “the greatest novel ever written” and whose intense psychological analysis and spiritual torment would find a readier reception in a world where Freud’s ideas were starting to take root. Appearing in 1913 was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, inspired by the death of Gustav Mahler two years earlier: that extraordinarily potent, prophetic story of a decaying Europe heading for imminent disaster, symbolised through a dying artist and a plague-ridden Venice, both of whose inner diseases are not to be discovered until they are beyond cure.
Conversely, though equally significantly, it’s also the period of the English Nature poet, celebrated particularly in the runaway success of Edward Marsh’s anthology, Georgian Poetry, published in 1912 and which, as W. H. Davies was to put it, “performed a wonder – it made poetry pay!” D. H. Lawrence is said to have earned as much for his one poem included in the anthology, ‘Snapdragon’ as he earned from some of his novels. It is the era of Rupert Brooke, of Walter de la Mare, of John Masefield. George Orwell was to attribute a certain social accuracy to the Georgian phenomenon – as he put it:
Most middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm and naturally it was the picturesque side of farm-life that appealed to them- the ploughing, harvesting, and so forth…. Just before the war was the great age of the ‘Nature poet’: Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, the star-poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem, ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document.
Allowing for the fact that Orwell under-rates Brooke’s comedy and irony in the poem, one can agree that he puts his finger on a notable aspect of that poem’s appeal and that of Georgian poetry generally at that time: namely, its nostalgia. As the critic V. de S. Pinto commented: “Nobody would guess from Georgian poetry that there had been a Russian Revolution or that Germany was preparing to dominate Europe.” Closer to home, nobody would guess either from the poetry, or from Marsh’s subsequent anthologies, that the nation was experiencing an unstable period politically (an absence all the more remarkable since Marsh was Winston Churchill’s private secretary for the best part of 20 years). It is a period when the suffragettes were on the march; and when there was trouble in Ireland, almost boiling over into civil war at the beginning of 1914. In 1912, even the Titanic had sunk, for some artists an event of considerable symbolic significance, most memorably in Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ which seemed to see the event as perverse Divine intervention to undercut modern Man’s technological arrogance. However, the Georgian poets are still writing of a tranquil leisurely England in which W. H. Davies, in his 1911 poem, ‘Leisure’ can muse, ‘What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’; and where Rupert Brooke, at the end of ‘Grantchester’ can be asking: ‘Stands the church clock at ten to three;/ and is there honey still for tea?’ Not exactly a dynamic, forward-looking image, but it is possible to sense an underlying unease about all this, almost a desire for time to stand still out of a fear of what the future holds. Brooke’s image of wanting time to stand still and of the motionless clock-face, incidentally, is brilliantly picked up in a film version of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, not the famous 1935 Hitchcock version but the 1978 version starring Robert Powell – a story which is set on the eve of World War One (Buchan had begun writing the story in 1914) and where, at the film’s climax, the hero is clinging to the hands of Big Ben and trying to prevent the hands moving forward to noon, because there is a bomb planted there that will go off if the clock strikes and plunge Europe into chaos. Nevertheless, in a period of social and political uncertainty, the idyllic platitudes of Georgian poetry were probably so popular because they were profoundly reassuring. After all, as George Orwell said in a different context, if you were fighting in the First World War, which poetry would you prefer to read – that of Owen and Sassoon, say, which agonisingly evokes the awfulness of your situation, or a poem like T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’, which does at least take you away from the battle-field and remind you of some of the more commonplace anxieties of modern living?
What is intriguing about the Georgians in this regard is that their pastoral, paradisal vision is shared by others from a quite different artistic background. A number of artists at this time are preoccupied with the theme of the search for the lost paradise. You find it in Alain-Fournier’s great, one-and only novel of 1913, Le Grand Meaulnes, a heart-breaking tale of lost innocence and the search for the land of lost content (the author was tragically to be killed in the early years of the war); also in the contemporaneous and exquisite ‘Enchanted Garden’ movement that concludes the orchestral ‘Mother Goose Suite’ by Ravel, who coincidentally was once planning to set Le Grand Meaulnes to music. 1912 is also the year of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. It is almost as if they sense there is some mighty convulsion about to take place and they are trying to assert enduring values or find some private escape before the crunch comes. This sense of apprehension has been delicately caught in Edmund Blunden’s poem, ‘The Sunlit Vale’, a gentle rebuke to what one might call the ‘Greensleeves’ sentiment in the English temperament (and even Vaughan Williams had done a famous arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’ in 1912):
I saw the sunlit vale and the pastoral fairy-tale
The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by;
And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green,
But it looked like a lie,
Like a kindly meant lie.
We are also entering the film age. Between 1910 and 1914, an area of California called Hollywood will establish itself as the centre of the American film industry. The cinema is still in an age of innocence, being taken to its hearts by the masses but frowned on by some (not all) of the intelligentsia not simply because it is a popular mass art but also because it is a mechanical one, the product of a developing technology. Yet for artists in the Futurist movement, for example, with their embrace of modern apparatus, their love of speed and industrialisation and their rejection of tradition, this is all to the good: the cinema is a new art that has the potential of fulfilling their aims, and also the potential, as the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio declared, of surpassing all other art forms in terms of spectacle and fantastic visions. Indeed in 1916 the Italian film theorist, Ricciotto Canudo will refer to film as “the seventh art”, joining dance, poetry, music, sculpture, architecture and painting. And while some deplore film’s mass appeal, and feel it represents the contamination of art by crude commercial obligations and constraints, a great writer like Tolstoy, for example, is completely unfazed by the cinema’s connection with industry and commerce and indeed has a wonderful little parable about it. “In the reeds of film art,” wrote Tolstoy, “sits the toad, the businessman. Above him hovers the insect – the artist. The jaws of the businessman devour the artist. But that doesn’t mean destruction. It is only one of the methods of procreation. In the belly of the businessman is carried on the process of impregnation and the development of the seeds of the future…which will begin their brilliant, beautiful lives all over again.” Even a century later, there has been no more positive account given of the fruitful tension between art and commerce which has given us some of our greatest films.
In fact, a lot of artists will grow to love cinema’s earliest manifestations and its spirit of adventure, admiring the pluckiness of Chaplin, the mania of the Keystone Kops, the trials and tribulations of Pearl White, early silent Italian epics such as Quo Vadis (1912), which so inspired D. W. Griffith ,and Cabiria (1913), whose inter-titles were written by D’Annunzio. Like Post-Impressionist art, film will cause some writers to re-evaluate how they write. Innovative writers like Joyce and Virginia Woolf express interest in the cinema, perhaps for oblique reasons i.e. the novel’s reliance on narrative and representational realism, neither of which is of primary concern to Joyce and Woolf, can be taken over by film, which will displace the novel as the primary narrative form of the century, leaving the novelist free to explore new and different aspects of the form. Yet the opening chapter of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is dazzlingly cinematic in its manipulation of time without traditional transitions and its use of literary equivalents of flashback, flash-forward, parallel sequences, jump cuts, subliminal cuts etc. No wonder that a decade later, the master of Soviet montage, Sergei Eisenstein will be going round waving a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses under the noses of his film-making colleagues and declaring, “This is the Bible of modern cinema!”
The same tensions felt in painting and literature immediately before 1914 were also apparent in the music of the period – what one might cautiously characterise as a breakdown of order leading towards either new forms or disintegration. This is felt most strongly in the last-gasp Romanticism, early Modernism of Gustav Mahler, particularly his last completed work, the Ninth Symphony (“the most important symphony of the century”, as the critic Richard Osborne has called it, a judgment with which many great conductors would agree); and also in the work of Mahler’s pupil, Arnold Schoenberg, whose dissonances might come out of a reaction against an exhausted nineteenth century tonality or out of a response to a society on the verge of breakdown. How could a sensitive artist, he might ask, be expected to write romantic, harmonious music in such a situation? Nevertheless, even Richard Strauss, who was regarded as a modernist at that time, found Schoenberg a bit extreme: after looking at the score of Schoenberg’s ‘Five Orchestral Pieces’ of 1912, Strauss had written to Mahler’s widow, Alma that “only a psychiatrist could help poor Schoenberg now…he’d do better shovelling snow.” Still, like Mahler, Schoenberg was very conscious of his historical moment. When someone criticised him for writing such ugly and atonal music, he replied: “Somebody had to be Schoenberg, and no one else volunteered, so I was.” In 1908, in the vocal finale of his second String Quartet, a soprano voice sings the words of Stefan Georg: “I feel air from another planet…” The observation could be both musical and social, in the same way as Charles Ives’s ‘The Unanswered Question’, composed in the same year, poses similar questions: whither tonality? whither harmony? whither humanity?
The most striking musical event during the period – and the most notorious premiere in musical history – was the premiere in Paris on 29 May, 1913 of Stavinsky’s ballet score, The Rite of Spring, which provoked a riot. Indeed ‘striking’ might be the operative word: one observer has written that he felt an incredible throbbing in his temples which he thought must have been the effect of the score but then realised that the man behind him had stood up and started pounding out the rhythm of the music on the top of his head. According to Stravinsky’s own account, protests against the music were underway even before the curtain had risen and they exploded into uproar when the ballet started, the dancers being described by Stravinsky in his autobiography as “a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas”. He had stormed backstage to deal with the choreographer Nijinsky but then had to restrain him from running onto the stage to remonstrate with the audience. The scandal had the effect of validating the newness of the work and the authenticity of Stravinsky’s modernist credentials, and converting it into an instant classic. Indeed for a while afterwards, people would turn up for a performance in anticipation of a riot and were most put out when it failed to materialise. Siegfried Sassoon expressed his disappointment at this in his poem, ‘Concert Interpretation’:
No tremor bodes eruption and alarms.
They are listening to this not-quite-new audacity
As though it were by someone dead- like Brahms.
However one interprets the subject of the Rite of Spring (as the sound of the cracking of the Russian spring, or the necessity of conflict, or the primitivism within us all, which would link it with other key texts of modernism, like Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) or however one interprets its mood – brutal, barbarous, mechanical, destructive, vital, joyous – it remains one of the landmarks of twentieth century art, being musically to the 20th century what Beethoven’s 9th was to the 19th. T. S. Eliot was to say that he heard in it the sounds of the new century – the motor horn, the beating of metal, the roar of engines – but felt that Stravinsky had “transformed those despairing noises into music”. There will be something Stravinskian about Eliot’s great poem of 1922, The Waste Land, with its rigorous objectivity and anti-romanticism and its underlying theme of sacrifice and rebirth. I also think of Stravinsky when I read D. H. Lawrence’s great novel of 1915, The Rainbow and that remarkable scene of the pregnant Anna’s naked dance, as if she is seeking some kind of mystical experience or release – a desire to feel life in the body more than the mind. It’s a sort of Stravinskian dance of life. Her husband looks on, bemused and appalled, rather like the audience on Stravinsky’s opening night, but from another perspective, it could appear beautiful, different, liberating. Stravinsky always claimed the music came to him in a dream, hearing it in his head even before he had any precise idea of how to write it down in conventional musical notation. “I didn’t compose ‘The Rite’,” he would say, “I was the vessel through which it passed.”
These, then, are some (not all) of the most famous artistic highlights of the pre-First World War period; and, in conclusion. I would like to emphasise two points about them. One of the features of the arts at this time is its interconnectedness. A writer was as much likely to be influenced in his work by a painter or composer as by another writer, and this was true of artists in other fields. It is an extraordinary period of artistic cross-fertilisation. I have already noted the impact on the writer Arnold Bennett of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition. The composer Schoenberg had close connections with The Blue Rider school of artists and was no mean painter. Vaughan Williams said that the magical epilogue that concluded his ‘London Symphony’ of 1914 was inspired by a passage describing the Thames from H. G. Wells’s great Condition of England novel of 1909, Tono-Bungay. Rupert Brook’s poem ‘Grantchester’ will be set to music by Charles Ives. The impact of the composer Mahler on Thomas Mann was the main inspiration behind his novella Death in Venice. Kandinsky talked in musical terms about his painting, talking of the “silencing” or the “sounding” of one colour by another; and in the catalogue for the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, Clive Bell claimed that “we now expect a work of art to have more in common with a piece of music than with a coloured photograph.” In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky will write that “music, poetry, painting, architecture are all able in their different way to reach the essential soul, and the coming era will see them brought together, mutually striving to the great attainment.” That interconnectedness is one of the most distinctive and exciting aspects of the arts of that period and possibly one of the reasons why I love it, because I have always been deeply affected by something that Leonard Bernstein said in the first of his marvellous Harvard lectures of 1973 called The Unanswered Question about the importance of inter-disciplinary values and his belief that “the best way to “know” a thing is in the context of another discipline.”
My final point has to do with context. It is surely impossible to respond to the literature, music, painting of the period without being aware in each of a sense of crisis, collapse and a corresponding need for innovation and an affirmation of the new. The reasons for this could be artistic (the perceived exhaustion of Romanticism in music, realism in fiction, Impressionism in painting); or they could be social (the widespread political turbulence, or a premonition of impending crisis, as in that ominous second sentence of Death in Venice when Thomas Mann refers to “a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19-, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months.”) The Australian painter Sidney Nolan thought that Art sometimes acted as an Early Warning System, that one of the things that distinguished great artists was the gift of being able to sense something in the air. Van Gogh wrote of what he called “the miraculous regularity with which art is always the first to indicate the direction life is taking.” Leonard Bernstein thought Mahler’s 9th Symphony was the greatest of the twentieth century because of its prophetic quality; it saw into the future and, in Bernstein’s words, “in that foretelling, it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equalled since.” In their book entitled Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1996), the authors Allan Janil and Stephen Toulmin posed the following question: “Was it an absolute coincidence that the beginnings of twelve-tone music, ‘modern’ architecture…non-representational art and psychoanalysis were all taking place simultaneously?” There is a danger that, with the benefit of hindsight, one can impose a schematic and convenient pattern on a period and give it a coherence that might have been far from clear at the time. Nevertheless, I continue to contend that what was happening across the arts in that period – the strains, the tensions, the rejection or revision of tradition, the sense of a breakdown of order into chaos – was not coincidence but confluence. If there is a phrase for the whole experience, I would cite something that D. H. Lawrence said was the theme of The Rainbow and it could almost come from a Futurist manifesto: “The old world is done for, crumbling on top of us: there must be a new world.”
So, when Virginia Woolf wrote that “in or about December 1910, human character changed,” she might have been outrageous, eccentric, deliberately provocative: but she also had a point.
Neil Sinyard
Postscript
For anyone wishing to explore the topic further, I have attached a list of some Key Artistic events between 1910 and 1914.
As introductory reading, I can recommend the following:
J. B. Bullen (ed.), Post-Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (1988)
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-18 (1994)
Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New (1972)
Nigel Gosling, Paris 1900-1914 (1978)
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (1995)
Paul Poplawski (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literary Modernisms (2003)
Alan Rich, Music: Mirror of the Arts (1969)
Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (1998)
S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900-1920 (1988)
Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna 1900-1918 (1975)
SOME KEY ARTISTIC EVENTS 1910-14
1910
Art: First Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London; Picasso, Portrait of a Young Girl with Mandolin
Literature: E. M. Forster, Howards End; W. B. Yeats, The Green Helmet; death of Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain.
Music: Stravinsky, The Firebird; Elgar, Violin Concerto; Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; London premiere of Richard Strauss’s Elektra and Salome.
Film: D. W. Griffith moves his film operation to California in an area called Hollywood.
1911
Art: Kandinsky and Franz Mark set up ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ exhibition in Munich.
Literature: Rupert Brooke poems first published; Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes; H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica; D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock.
Music: Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier; Stravinsky, Petrushka; Elgar, Symphony No.2; Sibelius, Symphony No.4; Ravel, Daphnis and Chloe; Bartok, Bluebeard’s Castle; Debussy, Jeux; death of Gustav Mahler.
Film: The birth of the fan magazines and revealing of the identity of the Biograph girl, Florence Lawrence.
1912
Art: 2nd Post-Impressionist in London; Kandinsky writes On the Spiritual in Art; Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.
Literature: First English translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; Edward Marsh’s anthology Georgian Poetry; Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden. Death of August Strindberg.
Music: World premieres of Mahler’s Symphony No.9 and Das Lied von der Erde; Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire; Ravel’s Orchestral Suite Mother Goose.
Film: D. W. Griffith, The Massacre; Enrico Guazzani’s Quo Vadis; legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt is filmed in Queen Elizabeth and declares to producer Adolph Zukor ‘You have preserved the best of me in pickle for all time.’
1913
Art: The Armory Exhibition of Post-Impressionist Art in New York; Kokoschka’s Die Windsbraut (portrait of turbulent relationship with Mahler’s widow); Emil Nolde’s The Prophet.
Literature: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes; D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; May Sinclair, The Three Sisters.
Music: Stravinsky, Rite of Spring; Charles Ives, Fourth of July; Webern, 6 Pieces for Orchestra; Magnard’s 4th Symphony; first gramophone recording of a complete symphony (Artur Nikisch conducts Beethoven’s 5th).
Film: Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria; Victor Sjostrom’s Ingeborg Holm; Cecil B. DeMille’s Squaw Man; Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas; Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline.
1914
Literature: James Joyce, Dubliners and serialisation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion; Wyndham Lewis, Blast; John Buchan begins The 39 Steps.
Music: Holst, The Planets; Vaughan Williams, A London Symphony; Prokofiev, Scythian Suite.
Film: Sennett Tillie’s Punctured Romance.
The blow to Welles’s career and possibly his self-esteem was acute. He had gone into the project full of confidence, having adapted Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a screenplay in just nine days on King Vidor’s private yacht. He was familiar with the material, always claiming that his father, who was a friend of the novelist, was the model for the novel’s inventor-hero, Eugene Morgan, played in the film by Joseph Cotten. Welles had already done a radio adaptation in 1938, with himself in the role of the pampered son, George Minafer of a wealthy Indiana family who is to get his “come-uppance”. In the film, this part was played by Tim Holt, and Welles was to reflect later on whether this had been a strategic mistake; although his voice is heard as narrator, this was the only time when he did not appear in his own film. It is an aspect of the film which has prompted some speculation. Did Welles genuinely feel he might have seemed a little too old and forceful for the part, as he originally argued, or was the role of the spoilt son being doted on by a glamorous mother a little too close to home? Tim Holt’s uncompromising performance was perceived at the time as being a major impediment to audience identification: as the review in Variety put it, the movie “devotes 9000 feet of film to a spoiled brat who grows up as a spoiled spiteful young man”. There are others, however – this writer included – who feel Holt’s performance is superb, an unflinching, courageously conceived characterisation of an arrogant, unsympathetic yet ultimately pitiable human being.
A preview at Pasadena two days later went much better, only 10 cards out of 85 being overtly negative, but executive confidence in the film had been badly shaken. The film had gone over budget and was thought to be too long. Indeed, sensing that the length of the film might be a problem, Welles had apparently suggested cutting a substantial portion out of the film prior to the Pomona preview – roughly 20 minutes from the section where Isabelle reads Eugene’s letter to her collapse – which one of his most knowledgeable commentators, Robert Carringer has argued might well have contributed to the film’s poor reception there. “I was bargaining,” Welles said, arguing (I think rightly) that if the film were thought to be overlong and needed trimming, it was better to take out a single section than tamper with the whole thing and destroy the rhythm; and feeling that this concession of his would lead to the rest of the film being untouched. In fact, Wise and Welles’s assistant, Jack Moss restored the section that Welles suggested they cut but then took out another 15 minutes for the Pasadena preview. RKO were still not satisfied and by now had adopted a policy of showing double-features in its programmes. The sections of the film dealing with the social context and material relating to the Ambersons’ economic downfall were jettisoned; a new, “happy” ending was shot by the film’s assistant director, Freddy Fleck; and the film finally came in at 88 minutes, to be released in a double-bill with Mexican Spitfire sees a Ghost (1942) starring Lupe Velez.
So The Magnificent Ambersons is one of the great ‘Might-Have-Beens’ of film history, and all the more poignant because what is left is intermittently (and there is no other word for it) magnificent. It is a chronicle of the changing social and emotional fabric of American life as the nineteenth century moves towards its close. Like Citizen Kane, it is about dynastic decline and about the bond between a spoilt son and adoring mother that will ruin both their lives and their chance of happiness. In the first ten minutes, in which the story advances twenty years, Welles calmly establishes the society and the fashions of the period; comically depicts the clumsy action of Eugene Morgan which causes him to lose the hand of his sweetheart Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) to Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway); and briskly evokes the insufferable nature of the Minafers’ son George, who is the emotionally warped product, one feels, of an essentially loveless marriage. Everything has been steadily building to the first of the film’s great set-pieces, the Amberson ball in honour of George’s homecoming as a young man of 20, a sequence that is not only a marvel of cinematic virtuosity in itself but adumbrates all the key themes and relationships that are to be developed later.
There are at least three other great scenes in the film: the single-take strawberry shortcake scene, in which Aunt Fanny’s emotional agony will cut through the domestic teasing like a sharp knife; the dinner scene, when Eugene has to make a dignified response to an outburst by George (‘Automobiles are a useless nuisance’) that seems to come suddenly out of nowhere to dash the tranquil mood; and Uncle Jack’s quiet revelation to Eugene and Lucy, without looking either of them in the eye, about Isabelle’s fading health and the reasons for it. (Ray Collins as Uncle Jack never did anything finer on film: he brings to the part such sensitivity and vigour.) The critic V. F. Perkins has claimed with some justification that the film ‘has as many marvellous shots, scenes, ideas, performances as most film-makers could hope to achieve in an entire career.’ Yet, in contradiction to the Alfred Hitchcock canard that if you have four good scenes you have a movie, Ambersons never quite hangs together. The Variety review thought that one of the problems was that “it hadn’t a single moment of contrast; it piles on and on a tale of woe”, though the more I see the film, the more it seems to me the most richly varied in mood of all Welles’s work and undoubtedly his most tender. Like other grand American film epics that failed to find an audience – from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) – it might just have been the wrong film at the wrong time, a film about societal and familial breakdown appearing in a post-Pearl Harbour era where audiences were looking for family and social cohesion. What Kenneth Tynan called the film’s “naked emotional intimacy” did not offer the reassurance sought.
“It’s like meeting God without dying,” said Dorothy Parker on first encountering Orson Welles. Still in his early twenties, Welles’s fame had preceded him: the boy wonder who could read by the age of two; who could quote chunks of King Lear by the time he was seven; who had written a treatise on Nietzsche and published a best-selling book on Shakespeare before he was out of his teens. A voodoo version of Macbeth and an anti-Fascist modern-dress Julius Caesar had established his stage reputation as a stupendously original director. His sensational radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds on Halloween night in 1938 had been powerful enough to provoke mass hysteria on a scale unprecedented for the modern media, either before or since. When at the age of 25, he produced, directed, starred in and co-wrote his debut feature Citizen Kane and it turned out to have the artistry and authority of an authentic film ‘auteur’ before the term had even been invented, there seemed only one possible way Welles’s career could go: down.
It would be simplistic to view Welles’s subsequent career in terms of decline or anti-climax: there were great things still in store. Nevertheless, Kane was to prove an all-but-impossible act to follow. It was to be the first and last film in which he had total control. For nearly every subsequent film, there are at least two versions – the one that Welles wishes to make, and the one that was actually released. 
Yet to what extent was it the industry’s fault that, in Janet Leigh’s phrase, “his genius was not more fully used”? Was the betrayal in some way self-inflicted? Was there an element of playing the martyr almost as alibi for the possibility of artistic failure? Here was a man with gargantuan gifts – probably the most all-round talented artist the cinema has ever seen – who somehow, in some way, let it slip through his fingers: one even thinks subliminally of 
Welles was a fascinating and charismatic magician of the cinema, even as he metamorphosed from the Kane of his youth to the Falstaff of his later years: a crown prince who had become something of a court-jester. Even as one is dazzled by his direction, one should not underestimate Welles’s greatness as an actor, one who, in Derek Jarman’s admiring estimation, “could punch holes in the screen”. Yet even here how typical it is that his most memorable screen incarnation, Harry Lime occupies only about eight minutes of the film’s length and that his greatest moment on screen was a spur-of-the moment improvisation: his impromptu, off-the cuff speech on behalf of Lime (perfectly in character and delivered with matchless irony and breath control) about the Renaissance, the Swiss and the cuckoo-clock. As with Charles Foster Kane, so with Welles: you are left with a sense of sadness and waste. Yet, with Citizen Kane, you are left with a sense of awe at the creator behind it. Also, like the reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane, who has investigated the character but misses the key to the puzzle, you are tantalised by a mystery. The magnificence of Welles is as incontestable as that of the Ambersons but it is an incomplete magnificence, fragments more than monuments: why? Is the clue to this incompleteness professional, artistic or biographical? Might there be a “Rosebud” in Welles’s life? As Kane’s most faithful friend, Bernstein (and how curious it is that he has the same name as Welles’s guardian as a young man) says: “That Rosebud you’re trying to find out about… Maybe that was something he lost…”
Readers of this short article will be forgiven if their initial response is: “Frank who?” And if they then consult a variety of respected reference sources (e.g. Halliwell, Katz, the BFI’s screenonline website, Robert Murphy’s edited anthology of British and Irish directors, Brian McFarlane’s epic Encyclopaedia of British Cinema) they will be none the wiser, for he is not mentioned in any of them. A BFI Film Forever source cites a Frank Nesbitt who was born in Chicago in 1938 and died in 1990, but he seems to be simply the namesake of the director with whom we are concerned, who was born in South Shields on 27 June 1932 and died in Los Angeles at the age of 74. He directed three feature films in the 1960s and early 1970s whilst he was still in his thirties, but then, to the best of my knowledge, never made another film.
Plain credits on a parched, soil surface: Ace in the Hole announces itself immediately as a gritty film featuring characters with hearts of stone. The name that dominates the credits is writer/producer/director Billy Wilder; and Ace in the Hole (1951) is following on from such hard-hitting Wilder movies as Double Indemnity in 1944, The Lost Weekend in 1945 and Sunset Boulevard in 1950 which shone a harsh spotlight on unsavoury aspects of American life. Like other acclaimed writer-directors of the 1940s in Hollywood, such as Preston Sturges, John Huston and Joseph L.Mankiewicz, Wilder had become a director to protect his own scripts. ‘It isn’t important that a director knows how to write,’ he would say, ‘but it is important that he knows how to read.’
Passing the offices of the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin he will see his chance. As he enters the office, he passes a Native American cutting up pictures for the front page, ‘How,’ he says. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ replies the man. That’s a slight exchange but a significant one. It shows quickly Tatum’s cockiness, sarcasm, even racial insensitivity, all qualities that are to have some importance in the revelation of his character.
Cherish the moment when he enters the office and surveys a scene of busy routine, almost more like a schoolroom than a newsroom: it is one of the few occasions, certainly in the early part of the film, where he is quiet. But he is doing what he often does in such moments: sizing things up. He moves to the front of the frame as if in assertion of his own ego: no question in his mind that he should occupy centre stage. 
Whereas most people might say ‘Excuse me’, Tatum rings for attention: a slide of the typewriter carriage whose ‘ping’ announces his presence and demands service. It’s an incisive metaphor for the way he uses a typewriter to grab attention (the essence of his profession, in his eyes). When Herbie goes to tell his boss that Charles Tatum from New York is here to see him with a scheme that will make him $200, Tatum uses the typewriter carriage to ignite his match for his cigarette – nothing as ordinary as a matchbox for Chuck: he has, as one might say, flair. The brief exchange with the cub reporter, Herbie, played by Bob Arthur, has a nice moment too, presaging their future friendship. When Herbie returns Chuck’s ‘cagey, eh?’ there’s a flicker of acknowledgement in Chuck’s face as if sensing he has found someone with a little spark. 
There is another key detail in this scene: Mr Boot’s sign ‘Tell the Truth’ which Tatum surveys with some amusement. There’s a double-edged irony here: in one sense, the sign is a perfect representation of him, because precisely what he does is embroider the truth; but much later in the film, when he does try to tell the truth, nobody wants to listen.
Wilder once again makes shrewd use of Boot’s ‘Tell the Truth’ notice to make a point. Tatum advertises his credentials but shows how observant he is: he could lie pretty well, he says, but he would never lie to man who wears belt and suspenders, because that betokens a cautious man who would check his facts. (A similar character, incidentally, crops up in Wilder’s The Spirit of St Louis.) Boot is unfazed by this revelation of journalistic brilliance compromised by human frailty, but the character seems extreme even for Wilder (a director famously described by William Holden as ‘a man with a mind full of razor blades’) and at this juncture it might be worth saying something about the casting and screen persona of Kirk Douglas.
Yet I think Wilder still manages very cannily to suggest a vulnerability in Tatum that just occasionally pierces his armour of arrogance. I’m intrigued by the small detail that during the scene he keeps lowering his price, from 50 to 45, to 40 per week: for all the bravado, he really badly wants this job. He gives the reason why in a striking low angle shot that makes him look menacing but at the same time gives the impression of his momentarily staring into an abyss: that he’s burnt his boats as well as the bearings on his convertible and his only chance back now is a break in a small newspaper that will have the wire services clamouring for his skills. ‘When they need you, they forgive and forget,’ he says. It’s hard not to feel that Wilder might have had Hollywood in his mind when composing that line. When watching Tatum at this point – where there seems to be both fire and fear in what he says – I think of that Scott Fitzgerald maxim in his uncompleted final novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives’.
There’s a great shot when he comes out of Boot’s office and they point to his desk. The camera placement actually anticipates the very last shot of the film, when Tatum will be back where he started – only worse. He walks directly to the front of the frame at which point the screen goes black, in a device that seems to me Wilder has stolen directly from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, his famous ten-minute-take film of 1948, played out in continuous time and where the transition from one reel to the next was contrived through a character walking directly in front of the camera to enable the transition to be made. Whereas Rope used it to maintain an illusion of continuous time, Wilder deploys it to mark a time lapse. When Tatum strides back away from the camera, a year has passed: the camera’s immobility matches that of Tatum’s progress. There’s a nifty touch of costuming too: notice that now he is wearing both belt and suspenders, perhaps in mock homage to Boot’s hold over him; but he is also wearing a black shirt which sets him apart from the other people in the room but also has uncomfortable connotations from Europe’s recent past. He will be wearing it constantly as he begins to exert a dictator-like grasp of the media’s potential to help him develop his scheme; when this grip starts to slip, it will be signalled by a change of clothing.
‘Thanks, Geronimo,’ he says to his co-worker when his lunch is delivered. The casually racist remark rankles – as it is meant to do, for later he is to become involved in matters that the Native Americans hold sacred. To Tatum – and to invoke the title of another great newspaper movie – nothing’s sacred. Even the words of President Roosevelt are parodied when he cites that day as one that will live in infamy – they have stopped serving him chopped chicken livers. As he starts complaining about the food, it’s clear that something is eating him. Behind his desk is a sign that reads ‘New Mexico – Land of Enchantment’ – but for Tatum it is a land of entrapment, a ‘sun-baked Siberia’, as he puts it, and it sets him off on what is clearly a familiar tirade against the quality of life there and what he was used to. ‘No Yogi Barra,’ he shouts and then asks Miss Deverish if she knows who Yogi Barra is. (Actually Kirk Douglas himself didn’t pick up that reference and had to have it explained to him by his secretary – that Yogi Barra was a legendary catcher for the New York Yankees. Wilder always delighted in slipping in references to American sports.) ‘Yogi…’ she replies, ‘it’s a sort of religion, isn’t it?’ Tatum picks up the analogy and runs with it, but in her quiet way, Miss Deverish is alluding again to a potential religious sub-theme that will be developed later.
What I like about the little scene that follows between Tatum and Herbie as they drive to the hunt is its purpose of progression. Ostensibly, it’s just a nice contrast to the Albuquerque scenes which, in their interiority, were getting a little claustrophobic. We see Tatum relaxing, as before being chauffeured to his next assignment. It’s developing a bit further the budding friendship between Tatum and Herbie, with Herbie as a useful foil to Tatum: he gives him someone to talk to; his callow attitudes are contrasted with Tatum’s outrageousness, giving us something to measure it against; but Herbie almost at times becomes representative of the audience, taken aback by the way Tatum’s mind works. Whereas Herbie thinks the rattlesnake hunt might be more exciting than Tatum gives it credit for, Tatum suggests that the thing that would make it really exciting would be if 50 rattlesnakes escaped and they were rounded up until one was unaccounted for. ‘Where’s the last rattler?’ Herbie asks. ‘In my desk drawer, fan.’ Wilder is already preparing the way for Tatum’s handling of the cave-in story (and, in a way, also preparing the way for the appearance of the Sheriff, who keeps a pet rattlesnake in a box). When Tatum stumbles across it, it’s as if the groundwork has already been cleared in his mind. And we’re seeing the contrast between Tatum’s style of journalism and that of Herbie, brought up under the ‘Tell the Truth’ tutelage of Mr Boot. What has Herbie learned from Tatum? ‘Bad news sells best because good news is no news.’ 
There’s a nice sense of pacing and contrast in the next passage as well as delayed dramatic revelation that adds to the suspense. Wilder is close now to the core situation of his drama and he wants to lead you into it gradually and drop a few clues to add intrigue before the full revelation. The shot from inside the store window is an indicator of that. It is the most striking shot of the film so far and signalling something very significant is occurring inside or about to be revealed there. 
Narrative curiosity is sustained a little longer as Herbie comes across an old lady fervently praying. Herbie’s intrusion feels like something of a sacrilege (an anticipation on a minor scale of a future dramatic theme) but our curiosity is furthered by the fact that the woman takes no notice of him and indeed seems unaware of his entry. Clearly the subject of her prayer is the entire focus of her attention which in turns hints at its seriousness. It’s a nice touch that Herbie doesn’t immediately grasp the significance of all this, certainly in terms of its potential for a story: he’s just puzzled and intrigued. But when he comes out to tell Tatum about it, Tatum’s antennae are immediately on the alert (‘Praying?’) and almost simultaneously a police siren is heard, connecting these two things. There’s a dark irony here: a feeling that he instinctively and almost immediately senses that this might be what he’s been looking for – or, in other words, that this might be the answer to his prayer. There’s time for him to make another crack in racially-dubious taste – ‘Maybe they’ve got a warrant for Sitting Bull for that Custer rap’ – before they drive to investigate what is happening, passing the sign that advertises the mine that was discovered by the Indians 450 years ago. Entry is free: it won’t stay that way for long.
We are introduced to the film’s other key character, Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling) – a sweet-sounding name for one of the sourest characters in the whole of Wilder’s work. Skilful dramatist that he is, Wilder not only uses the character’s appearance for dramatic exposition but to push the narrative a little further, just through one phrase she uses about her husband: ‘dumb cluck’. It’s an immediate revelation of her attitude: that he had it coming, and that she’s more angry than anxious. At this point Tatum goes a bit quiet, letting Lorraine disclose herself in her own words, obviously sizing her up, and picking up not only her exasperation at her husband but her dislike of her surroundings. What he is not picking up – and could not possibly at that stage – is that the character sitting next to him will prove to be his nemesis.
A Deputy Sheriff (Gene Evans) is dealing with the situation – and not very sensitively or sympathetically. If he’s the deputy Sheriff, what on earth is the Sheriff like? Wilder again is using cunning delaying tactics to add greater impact to the later introduction of the Sheriff, who will be drawn into Tatum’s plan and whose clear disreputableness will be the yardstick by which the lowness of the scheme will be judged and condemned. I’ve always thought Wilder was taking a great risk here in offering such an unflattering portrayal of the forces of law and order at a time when such subversive characterisations could have been construed as being un-American. Even the Hollywood censor, blind to the blistering criticism of other aspects of the film, was to be perturbed by the fact that no obvious punishment will be meted out to a figure like the Sheriff who seems irredeemably corrupt. But then, as we shall see, the film’s distribution of punishment and retribution will be very idiosyncratic.
Tatum leads the way: it’s clearly a master/pupil relationship now, with Tatum giving Herbie another lesson in journalistic behaviour and Wilder taking us closer to Tatum’s strategy. Many people trapped down a mine is a powerful story (Wilder might have been thinking of films like G.W.Pabst’s Kameradschaft or Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down), but as Tatum demonstrated with his rattlesnake analogy, it’s even better when there’s just one: it gives the story ‘human interest’. (The original title of the film was ‘The Human Interest Story’ and an ironic phrase for someone who grows progressively dehumanised as the plan proceeds). There is a significant reference to Lindbergh here; Cecil B DeMille mentions him when he greets Gloria Swanson on the Paramount steps in Sunset Boulevard; and, six years later, Wilder was to make his most all-American film about Lindbergh’s solo cross-Atlantic flight, The Spirit of St Louis. But what brings Tatum up short (so much so that he momentarily stops at this point, forgetting the urgency of the rescue) is the example of Floyd Collins, the reporter who ‘crawled in for the story [about a cave-in] and crawled out with a Pulitzer Prize.’
The song, however, has lifted Leo’s spirits: Tatum’s too. Contact has been made, a bond established: ironic given the fact that Tatum is intending to milk the situation for what he can get out of it; doubly so, because he becomes Leo’s friend and finds himself fatally compromised by doing so. Herbie is struck by Tatum’s cheerful mood as he comes away from the meeting with Leo. ‘What is the story?’ he asks, to which Tatum replies: ‘Big.’ That line always reminds me of the moment in Citizen Kane when Kane says: ‘If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.’ Tatum has not only got Floyd Collins, but Floyd Collins with an angle. ‘It’s Floyd Collins with an angle,’ he muses. ‘King Tut in New Mexico; white man half buried by angry Indian spirits… Collins was buried alive for 18 days… if I had just one week.’ That is almost a giveaway to Herbie, and he has to backtrack quickly. ‘I don’t make things happen,’ he says, ‘all I do is write about them.’ That isn’t what he told Herbie in the car. He is about to embroider the truth. In the light of the preceding events, a shot of Papa Minosa – a personification of trust and honesty – at the cave entry is poignantly timed. Tatum can throw the Deputy’s torch back at him in a gesture of contempt and have our endorsement, but the old man’s trust will continue to be an implicit rebuke to Tatum’s deviousness.
Wilder adroitly picks up the pace now after the steady tempo of the cave sequence to reflect the urgency of the situation and Tatum’s expressed desire to get the rescue operation in motion. Nevertheless, we see how Tatum is still quite disconcerted by Lorraine’s seeming lack of wifely concern. She seems incapable of talking about her home or her situation in anything other than dull tones or without an edge of sarcasm or bitterness. Sometimes it seems to take even Tatum by surprise, partly no doubt because it doesn’t coincide with the story he is already composing in his own head, and partly perhaps because her cynicism is a little too close to his own for comfort. For all his expression of concern about Leo and the urgency of the situation, his first call is to his editor, Mr Boot about his front-page story: no question about Tatum’s priorities. Wilder’s only signal of Tatum’s possible uneasiness about that is his interesting body language around the phone. Firstly he moves to his right and closes the door to the room in which Mrs Minosa is praying: he doesn’t want her listening in to his exclusive story about the ‘Curse of the Mountain of the Seven Vultures’, which in turn implies his recognition that what he is doing is, to say the least, a bit unethical. And then he moves round in the other direction when he notices that Lorraine is watching him. That will make little difference as she is on to him already.
There are two great shots when Lorraine wanders on to the porch with her apple. Herbie is offering to pay for the gas; Papa Minosa wouldn’t dream of charging. (Wilder is very good at plotting the moments when Herbie has to leave the narrative, to make his delayed recognition of Tatum’s deceit more plausible.) Then she looks back through the window at Tatum on the phone, smiles and bites into her apple. The ‘innocence’ of Papa Minosa is well and truly undercut: Lorraine, the Eve in this despoiled Eden, knows the score (as Hugo Friedhofer’s music slyly underlines). Cut back to Leo in his mountain-trap, with a lizard crawling across the walls of the cave. It’s a reminder of the physical reality and discomfort of his situation, all the more telling because it’s going to be a good thirty minutes before we see him again: it’s as if he’s almost literally forgotten by some of those above ground who see him only in terms of a golden opportunity. Equally disturbing perhaps, Wilder, in developing his narrative, makes the audience almost forget him also.
The following sequence has always seemed to me an absolute master-class in screen writing and direction. The situation has been set up beautifully. We know the characters now; why Lorraine wants to leave; and why Tatum wants her to stay to add to the ‘human interest’ angle of his story. But what can he do to stop her boarding the bus that will her away? Cue the arrival of the Federbers (Frank Cady and Geraldine Hall) who have read about the story in the paper and have come to visit the site. Tatum comes out to join them and Wilder frames all four – hypocritical instigator, embittered deserter, morbid general public in the same frame. Wilder now cuts to a closer shot of Tatum and Lorraine as they both seem to grasp the significance of this arrival – when Tatum describes his relationship to Leo as ‘friend’, the word seems both ironic and sinister. ‘Wake up the kids,’ says Federber, ‘they should see this. This is very instructive.’ Off they drive to stake their claim to the best spot, as if they were attending a show – as it soon will be. In the meantime, Tatum makes one last pitch to Lorraine, his gestures becoming a little more violent to reflect his determination. (His inner violence will become less controlled as the film draws on and lead finally to his downfall.) There’s no pretence here, no appealing to emotion or sentiment: it’s entirely to do with what’s in it for them. ‘There’s three of us buried here’ he tells her, ‘only I’m going back in style.’ With a last crack about how they must have bleached her brains as well as her hair, Tatum returns to the store. 
Having laid it all out, Wilder can now let the camera do the rest. Lorraine stands still, like the camera, but, as we hear the bus approach, she backs away slightly, suggesting a tiny weakening of resolve. Bus stops, blocking our view, adding to the suspense, then moves off and out of frame, like a horizontal wipe. Camera stares implacably as Lorraine walks back to the store, Tatum in long shot opening the door, the two now accomplices more than antagonists, the closed door sealing the bargain.
When Tatum sees Lorraine and suggests she attends a special service that is being performed for Leo’s benefit, she retorts; ‘I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.’ Wilder always credited his wife with that line; it catches the character to perfection. ‘Another thing, mister,’ she adds. ‘Don’t ever slap me again.’ Originally Wilder had added another line to that: ‘I might get to like it’. He cut it, possibly because it hinted at a sado-masochistic dimension to their relationship that would have been too daring for the times (it would have certainly have been in contrast to her relationship with weak and uxorious Leo). As it stands, the line has a different inflection: it’s a warning from a woman who won’t be pushed around – and it’s an omen.
The scene in the press tent serves as a reminder that Wilder himself was a journalist in Berlin before turning to screenwriting (and before the political situation in Nazi Europe prompted him to flee Berlin. Germany in 1933 was, as he put it, ‘not a place for a nice Jewish boy to be.’). It seems less press tent than bear pit, each man snarling his desires. Wilder was to revisit the press pack in The Front Page (1974), and they are no more sympathetically presented there. Kirk Douglas always felt that this was one of the reasons why the film got unfavourable reviews. As he put it in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, ‘critics love to criticize but they don’t like being criticized.’ Enter Tatum. This is payback time and how he relishes being able to turn the tables on his journalist colleagues. When one of them attempts to plead collegiality and says that they’re all buddies and all in the same boat, he replies with pointed relish: ‘I’m in the boat, you’re in the water.’ As he indicates when he displays his badge, he has the law on his side (he has it in his pocket as well). And just before he leaves to see Leo (this gloating has made him a bit late for his usual visit), he drops the news that he has quit his job but retains exclusive rights to this story and is open to the highest bidder.
Yet even Tatum is taken aback by the sight of the ‘Re-Elect Sheriff Kretzer’ banner draped across the mountain. Even by the sheriff’s standards that’s a bit blatant and seems to draw attention to the mountainous proportions of the deception. Tatum is now a media star and consents to a brief interview with the radio reporter, though, as he says, with unconscious irony: ‘Every second counts.’ Tatum is the one who has extended this situation for his own benefit so there’s more than a little hypocrisy here; but what he doesn’t realise is that time is running out. And he pauses on his return to the cave when someone in the crowd, a Mr Cusack queries the rescue methods, Wilder emphasising the tension of the moment by moving into close-up to show Tatum and Smollett momentarily in uneasy complicity, before Smollett gets the nod from Tatum to get back to work while he handles this. A woman’s inappropriate intervention breaks the tension and lets them off the hook; and then Tatum, like the gambler that he is, takes a risk, betting successfully that Mr Cusack’s recommended method of rescue was not successful in the case he remembered. The danger passes, but it’s been a tense moment. We see Tatum giving the gullible crowd a wave before entering the cave – it’s an anticipation of William Holden’s cheery farewell wave to the fellow prisoners he despises in Stalag 17 before disappearing down the escape tunnel.
The cheer fades into the sound of the drill and we are in Leo’s world now. This is a great shot, because it’s a contrast and a shock. It’s the first time Leo has been seen in the film for a good thirty-five minutes. By delaying this reappearance, Wilder has ensured that we have almost forgotten him as well as the crowd above and we might feel a bit guilty. His deterioration is alarming, and the pounding of the drill is understandably shredding his nerves. ‘I can’t stand it,’ he says, ‘it’s enough to wake the dead.’ The line is a reminder of Leo’s original feeling that this is some kind of punishment for defiling an Indian burial-ground. There is also the almost obsessive use now of the word ‘friend’, which during the film has become progressively devalued (remember Lorraine’s disdainful look when Tatum has described himself to the Federbers as Leo’s ‘friend’; or the sheriff’s phrase ‘friend of the family’ to the other journalists to defend his ploy of giving Tatum exclusive access to Leo). The word is assuming ominous overtones and making Tatum feel a bit queasy. Like Tatum’s second scene with Herbie in the car, his second scene with Leo is distinctly different from the first. Tatum seems less sure of himself: no rallying sing-song here. Leo’s reference to his imminent fifth wedding anniversary is significant, for it will bring things to a crisis. This dismal scene has been ironically prefaced by Tatum’s cheery wave to the crowd; Wilder brutally rounds it off by cutting from Leo’s ‘She’s so pretty’ to a shot of Lorraine, in bright sunshine in contrast to Leo’s gloom, actually looking quite pretty. Leo’s absence is doing her good. The carnival is arriving. When Papa Minosa is protesting, she barely bothers to make eye-contact with him: she’s too busy counting in the trucks and calculating the profits. A siren announces the appearance in their press car of Tatum with Herbie. Kirk Douglas’s performance here eloquently conveys that his encounter with Leo has left him shaken. His response to Lorraine’s ‘Means everything’s going to be fine, doesn’t it, Mr Tatum?’ is a look of utter distaste at her lack of genuine concern, but not far removed either, one surmises, from a barely suppressed self-disgust.
Herbie’s entrance causes a distinct increase in tension, because, if Tatum is a lost cause, Boot thinks, Herbie isn’t: which way will he jump? At that particular moment Tatum does look a much more exciting and charismatic example and prospect than Boot. There is a particularly fine shot when all three of them are in the frame at the point where Tatum gets his all-important third call, this time from New York, as it brings all the tensions in the air to a point of crisis. Porter Hall’s performance here is terrific, as Boot never takes his eyes off Herbie, staring probingly like a stern father; for his part, Herbie won’t look at him. ‘He wants to be going, going,’ says Tatum about Herbie’s future, to which Boot replies, pointedly: ‘Going where?’ He exits, hat slightly awry, a physical sign of his emotional discomposure. Tatum dismisses him with a little nod of the head – Kirk Douglas’s head movements throughout the film are incredibly expressive, incidentally – but then deals with some relish with his old boss, Nagel.
Then there’s the carnival itself, whose set was huge – 235 feet high, 1200 feet across and 1600 feet deep, with over 550 extras whose numbers grew, as Wilder calculated, because of curious onlookers who came of their own accord to have a look. It is possibly the most spectacular set-piece of Wilder’s career, to convey his horror at the way human tragedy has been transformed into a mass spectacle. When the film flopped in America but did well in Europe, the head of Paramount, Mr Y. Frank Freeman (whose name Wilder, in conversation, tended to turn into a question) changed the title of the film, without consulting Wilder, into something he thought sounded more commercial, calling it The Big Carnival. In so doing, he highlighted the very aspect of the situation that Wilder was most strongly criticising. And then there’s the special train to the event, the Leo Minosa Special, people jumping off it before it has even pulled to a stop and swarming like locusts over the disaster area. ‘Who are these people?’ Leo has asked innocently, enquiring about the people up there who are taking such an interest in him. ‘They’re your friends,’ replied Tatum, but to Wilder, they’re a sensation-hungry mob, sunning themselves above Leo’s tomb and who will soon- albeit unwittingly- be dancing on his grave. ‘There’s the terrifying fact,’ said Wilder once in an interview, ‘that people are people.’
Against this disturbing backdrop of mass mentality, the personal stories continue. While Papa Minosa passes round drinks to the workmen on the mountain, Lorraine is being warned by Tatum against selling her story to the papers: she might make a slip. We see a slightly different side to Lorraine in this scene, someone with aspirations, a sort of tentative and defensive self-pride. But Tatum’s response is once again violent. ‘Why don’t you wash that platinum out of your hair?’ he sneers. The close-up of his fist in her hair is again shocking. In this context, it’s the equivalent of a screen kiss, or the nearest this dark film gets to one; and it crystallises in an image his pent-up aggression, tension, and inner turmoil. Why is he so obsessed with Lorraine’s hair? Because it’s fake: like him.
Tatum’s explanation for changing tactic here has a compelling application. ‘When you’ve a human interest story, he says, ‘you need a human interest ending’, and the priority now is to get Leo out alive, even if it will call into question their initial rescue methods. But Wilder is not going to be able to deliver a happy ending any more than Tatum; and it may be that he was unwittingly foreseeing the fate of his own film here. As T.S. Eliot said: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’ Closer to home perhaps it reminds me a little of Alfred Hitchcock’s comment about his film Sabotage where he said: ‘I should never have let that bomb go off…’ If you build an audience up in a certain way, they demand relief from that tension: if you can’t deliver, they get angry with you.
It is the next morning and the teller-type machine is unattended to: the star reporter has deserted his post. Another machine is now preoccupying him more: the oxygen machine that is alone keeping Leo going. Tatum now really seems squeezed for space in the frame as his options recede. While Leo is deliriously talking of his anniversary present to Lorraine, Tatum has other preoccupations. ‘Breathe!’ he shouts, but the shout is surely as much for himself as for Leo: if Leo dies, then Tatum is effectively finished too.
‘Up the stairs, up the stairs,’ Leo whispers deliriously. His words serve as a sound dissolve to the following scene as Tatum climbs the stairs on Leo’s behalf, the words still playing in his head. Lorraine’s behaviour towards Tatum here is intriguing. She’s changing her hair again as if in response to his previous criticisms and seems altogether more casual and friendly, the film surely implying that something has happened between them, which makes Tatum’s self-loathing even more acute and her surprise at his behaviour more intense. ‘It’s your anniversary, Mrs Minosa,’ he says, giving particular emphasis to ‘Mrs’, as if she – and maybe him too? – needs reminding of it. And there’s no sentimentality here. The fur piece that Leo has bought her is surely intended by Wilder to look pretty hideous, and Tatum’s insistence on her wearing it despite her protests a case of displaced guilt and anguish on his part as well as cruel indifference on hers. It is at this point that Tatum’s steadily increasing violence now oversteps the mark and, like seemingly everything else at this point, starts striking back at him. A struggle ensues; and as he starts to choke her, she stabs him with a pair of scissors. At this point Tatum becomes the third Wilder hero – like Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard – whose change of heart will also be followed by his murder at the hands of the woman he has involved in his scheming.
Tatum now addresses the crowd from the top of the mountain to tell them of Leo’s death. It’s only three days since he was waving to the crowd as a national hero on entering the cave; and before this particular day is over, he will have crashed to the floor. I am reminded of two roughly contemporary dynamic anti-heroes here: James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1948), spontaneously combusting, as it were, when he’s on top of the world; and Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949), who has looked down contemptuously on humanity from a vast height on the Great Wheel in Vienna but who will perish in the city’s sewers. When gigantic egos overreach themselves, their fall should be correspondingly massive. Tatum’s address to the crowd is like Moses castigating the worshippers of the Golden Calf; and I also have an image of what Leland Poague called a ‘demoniacal Cecil B. DeMille’ addressing his cast and crew. The ‘director’ is in a way dismissing his audience, having lost control of the plot and with a message too painful to bear. ‘Now go on home… all of you,’ he says. ‘The circus is over.’ In referring to it as a circus, Tatum almost gives the game away there, but the criticism is lost in the general melee; and in a sense he has handed a scoop to his rivals in the press, who scramble for their phones. That might be an act of penance and small redemption, but Wilder is dramatically quite canny here, I think, for he leaves Tatum with another ace in the hole (the truth about the deception) that could trump the news of Leo’s death. 
Tatum still has an ace up his sleeve (the truth), and one that might serve a dual purpose in both assuaging his guilt and topping all the other stories. But, alas, this time he has gone too far; the game is over. Gaines (like so many newspaper editors these days) isn’t interested in the truth if it doesn’t make a good story. I like very much the moment when Tatum asks Herbie if he believes him and Herbie says yes. A shadow suddenly falls across Herbie’s face for the first time, and in complete contrast to the open innocent face we have seen throughout the film: the curtain of experience has suddenly dropped and his vision of life darkened. As they leave, Tatum’s comment to Herbie about re-electing the sheriff is surely ironic: he knows that his revelation of the truth, if he ever gets to make it, will sink the sheriff’s political hopes. And the last shot of Papa Minosa amidst the debris of the deserted carnival is like the ending of Chaplin’s The Circus and every bit as forlorn: a tragic figure of solitude in a drama that, in no time, has just become yesterday’s news. 
We are returning to where we began, when Tatum first entered the office. It’s as if nothing has changed and the staff at the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin are so immersed in their work – or stuck in their ways – that no one seems to notice that a dying man has just staggered into the newsroom. Tatum will never deliver his story, but maybe Herbie will.
Tatum’s final call is to Mr Boot, the film’s symbol of dull old-fashioned journalistic integrity, with an offer he can’t refuse. ‘How would you like to save a thousand dollars a day?’ he shouts, as Boot appears from the newsroom. ‘I’m a thousand dollar a day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.’ And with a wonderful visual flourish, Wilder’s low-angle shot dumps Tatum in our lap, and delivers the film’s bleak moral with the emphatic thump of a Tatum headline: CORRUPT CAVE-IN REPORTER DIGS HIS OWN GRAVE.
