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I SWEAR
I did not understand the title of that film, They
Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). I went into it
because I loved the music that was employed for the
drama. Big band music, white blues and ragtime. I could
not understand also why people would die or exhaust
themselves to win a prize. The setting was the Great
Depression and I believed it was also the mood for the
viewers. I remember dancers dragging their feet so they
could extend their stay on the dance floor. There were
various strategies. At a certain point, the leading man
was also carried on the back by the leading lady.
There
was something about the title. For a young viewer, it
felt good to be mystified by a film. A big gap was
existing between the title and the images that were
flashing across the screen. I thought it was poetic to
have a title that had nothing to do at all with the
story. At least, that’s what I thought as a high-school
student viewing a film so obscure it had the allure of
porn.
Then I
already recognized who the leading lady was: Jane Fonda.
The year before saw the release of Barbarella,
which Fonda also headlined. Extraordinary as the setting
of that film, she was ordinary there. In the film about
dance marathon, she was extraordinary. She was achingly
lovely and sad. They looked good together, also—Fonda
and Michael Sarazzin.
The film
was troubling then. It could trouble a lot of people
now. At the center of the competition was the emcee,
played by this very fine actor. He was the gleeful
torturer, egging everyone to dance, dance and die. The
dance floor had at least two potential winners and lots
of losers. The emcee appeared to be the baddest of
losers. He was a loser before everyone else was.
Years
later, I would see the emcee again in a film with a
compelling title: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo
Garcia. I felt it commanded me to commit that act.
Great film for someone beginning to see the charm and
power of film. He was Gig Young and he would get the
Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Rocky the emcee in
They Shoot Horses....
The film
Bring me the Head...was savaged by the critics
but more contemporary film readers would call the film a
noir Western. The film would be my introduction to Sam
Peckinpah who, I believe, is the only American director
who could find in Western tales the sense of gothic and
fun.
There
was another actress in They Shoot Horses...,Susannah
York, who seemingly patented a style that was part
dementia, part opera. Her name in the film was Alice
LeBlanc, a name that seems to have strayed from the
menagerie of women glistening in the closet of Tennessee
Williams. Alexandra de Lago, Blanche duBois....
Music
was at the core of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
One song, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” was the anthem
of the Depression before Barbra Streisand reinvented it
beyond recognition. You have to listen to Al Jolson to
get back the rhythm and poignancy of the song. Music was
all over the film, counterpoint and backdrop to this
tale of madness, sadness and hope.
At the
end, it was that title, liminal and almost irrelevant,
that helped viewers remember the film. It would take
years before I would recognize the mind and the heart
behind the film, Sydney Pollack, who won an Oscar
nomination for Best Director for his trouble. He would
go on to build a career as a director and as an actor.
He would make films like Tootsie, that earned him
more awards and mainstream recognition. But I would
always go back to that film where men and women danced
without hope for that was the wisest thing to do. If
poetry had images, sordid equivalents, then Pollack had
summoned them in that movie where no horses were shot
and killed, but where you felt there were human beings
waiting to be killed or would be better off killed
rather than see them live through life maimed and
half-dead.
There
would be more poetry, real and not pretty, in his films.
With Out of Africa (1985), poetry became a
significantly literal presence. The film is based on the
memoir of the Danish author Baroness Karen von
Blixen-Finecke, using the pen name Isak Danisen. Meryl
Streep, surreal and ethereal, almost coauthored the
memoir by just being in the film. Staring out into the
savannah, Streep was memorable as someone who could keep
to her heart things that another actor would have
gesticulated and articulated to dead plainness. Lovely
would never be used to describe Streep but, in this
film, she was as lovely as the unsaid things raging all
over the film.
Stripping all the lines to the minimum and allowing the
savannah and the hidden savagery to take over, Pollack
muted all the lines to give us once more poetry. Out of
the images, though, Pollack would engage us with the
literalness of poetry by allowing his character to
recite that old gem of a poem from A. E. Housman: “To An
Athlete Dying Young.”
The time
you won your town the race...And round that early-laureled
head/Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead...”
The
lines could go on and on. They were music playing in our
head. Accented and dreary, elegiac and lovely and
loving, the words flowed out of Meryl Streep’s lips. We
remember the scene and we remember the story.
Now that
filmmaker, Sydney Pollack, is gone and we are lesser by
one poet of the real and the gritty and the
extraordinary. |
