Reviews

I originally saw Viva Maria! at a Toronto cinema in the mid-1960s in the company of three college friends and, upon emerging, I think that each of us would have cheerfully enlisted in a revolutionary cause of the kind depicted in the film. The Moreau-Bardot magic was irresistible! As I recall, the North American release of this film ended with the cheers of the crowd of San Miguel as the circus troupe departed. On a recently acquired laserdisc pressing of the film, however, I note that there is an extra minute -- the European ending in which the troupe returns to the European stage.

Pay particular attention to the musical score -- composed by Georges Delerue (1925-1992), most of whose work was for the European cinema but he was, from time to time, commissioned to compose for American and British films. He had a particular talent for evoking the nostalgic longing inherent in mediæval and renaissance themes. In fact, in a radio interview, Delerue once indicated that, where most film composers would start to experiment with tunes on a battered piano, he would often wander into archives of ancient music to get his inspiration. In the opening credits to Viva Maria!, a French ballad of the young heroine is picked up by the orchestra in a delightful example of Delerue's skill. (By the way, the film's credits do not seem to name the singer, but whoever he is, the man's diction is so clear that even an anglophone "retard" ought to be able to follow the French lyrics. If anyone knows who he is, I would be pleased to learn his identity.)

In isolation, this film is an interesting and rather enjoyable tale. It is only when you appreciate the underlying theme in the original 1895 novel penned by H.G. Wells that you discovers how the story had been "laundered" to be "politically correct" for American public release. In a land where "socialism" has almost always been a dirty word and at a time when the McCarthy political witch hunts (that hit Hollywood rather badly) were still a fresh memory and when the "Cold War" was at its height, M.G.M. Studios was not going to take the risk of preaching a cautionary story about how the seeds sown by the capitalist system could exact a gruesome nemesis in a distant future. Instead, the studio took the story, stripped it of its ideology and presented it as the adventure of a gifted Victorian inventor.

Throughout his career, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) placed his sympathies with the working class. In 1905, he joined the Fabian Society, a socialist think-tank whose ranks included George Bernard Shaw and that gave birth to the British Labour Party. It is not surprising that his ideology would embed itself in his writing -- and this was certainly true of his first novel, The Time Machine. The book tells of an enterprising inventor who crafts a device that can carry a human passenger forward or backward through time. The hero travels 800,000 years into the future and finds a world in which humans had evolved into two species: an illiterate and child-like race called the Eloi, devoid of technology but similar in appearance to modern humans who inhabited the surface of the planet; and the more repugnant Morlocks, technologically sophisticated and living in perpetual darkness in underground caverns. The hero gradually learns that it is the Morlocks who supply the Eloi with food, clothing and other basic necessities of life, but they exact a terrible price. At periodic intervals, the Morlocks "harvest" the Eloi for food.

(By his own drive, Wells, who lived an impoverished childhood and became literate only in his teen years, entered university where he studied biology under Thomas H. Huxley, the illustrious and outspoken champion of Charles Darwin. He was aware of the debates among evolutionary biologists of his day over the discovery of Neanderthal remains, about how two "distinct" species of humans -- Neanderthals and our Cro-Magnon ancestors -- existed in a prehistoric Europe and whether it was a peaceful co-existence or whether the two species competed, perhaps violently, for control of resources. Wells merely extrapolated the concept of two competing human species to a distant future.)

The hero in the novel also discovers how this world came into being. At some less remote future time, the industrialists collectively chose to establish their factories and means of production underground, leaving the surface of the earth green. Eventually, the politically powerful classes decided to banish all workers underground as well, leaving the world of sunshine and blue skies as a playground for the wealthy and the privileged -- a paradise that would eventually turn sour when the passage of time would adjust the genetic makeup of the two classes in their different environments and when a successful "slave revolt" would place the descendants of the workers in control.

Clearly, such a political fable could not be put on screen in the United States in 1960. If a cinematic version of the story was going to be made, another explanation had to be conjured up to account for the evolution of the two human species -- and it was found in the Cold War itself, a war that turns "hot" and forces huge populations underground for survival. Toady, however, almost forty years after the movie was released and more than a hundred hears since the novel first broke onto the world, that M.G.M. explanation seems horribly dated and it is the original Wells plot that holds up much better in today's international, political and industrial climate.

I just watched the 1997 movie "Anastasia" on a recently released laserdisc pressing. You know, I never cease to be amazed by the cavalier attitude with which the American entertainment industry treats other cultures and values. The opening words of the film say it all: "There was a time, not very long ago, when we lived in an enchanted world of elegant palaces and grand parties. The year was nineteen-hundred and sixteen and my son Nicholas was the Tsar of Imperial Russia." What is ever so conveniently never mentioned is that this "enchanted world of elegant palaces and grand parties" was created by a repressive and reactionary aristocracy at the expense of unimagined misery for untold millions of peasants and workers. And when that repression finally reached its explosive breaking point in 1917, the movie circumvents and trivializes it by introducing preposterously supernatural causes, without a hint of any underlying social injustice. Of course, Fox Studios defended itself by pointing out that it was in no way dramatizing historical events, but was intent upon creating a children's fantasy. But I have to wonder how Americans would react if a Russian film company marketed an animated children's fantasy about America's old South as an "enchanted world of elegant plantations and grand parties", a world that is rudely shattered when the "vile" abolitionist John Brown, who has supposedly struck an unholy alliance with Lucifer and the blue-coat brigades of Abraham Lincoln, interrupts a grand ball thrown by the genteel President Jefferson Davis at Richmond, Virginia, to celebrate the investiture of the gallant General Robert E. Lee as the commander of army of the newly born Confederate States of America. With a satanic leer from within a swirling cloud glowing in venomous green, John Brown spews out an apocalyptic curse of upon the cream of Southern gentry and their fledgling Confederacy. What a breathtakingly dramatic vision for the root causes of the American Civil War with which to impress young inquisitive minds, eh? But what about the reaction of the Afro-Americans whose ancestors paid for this "enchanted world of elegant plantations and grand parties" with generations of harsh bondage, to say nothing of today's legions of Civil War buffs and local historical boards on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line? Why, no problem! Just imagine their collective sigh of relief after they are comforted by a spokesperson of the Moscow movie mogul with some soothing remark like, "Now, folks, relax. Our film is definitely not depicting historical facts. It's just a fairy tale for kids." It's amazing how a re-assuring explanation like that can make all the difference in the world!