Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

Throughout American history, there has been prejudice of various sorts, which has been reflected in the movies.  In an effort to make amends for discrimination against one group, however, a movie may end up being oblivious to the prejudice it shows toward another.

In particular, in a movie in which a black man is put on trial for raping a white woman, he always turns out to be innocent at the expense of the woman.  Given all the black men that have been lynched in America for supposedly raping white women, perhaps these movies were thought necessary as a way of condemning this practice.

On the other hand, we have recently been made aware of just how much prejudice there is against women who have been raped, making it difficult for them to get justice. Our belated enlightenment on this issue makes us reevaluate the movies in which white women were to blame in some way whenever black men ended up being tried for raping them.

There are basically three ways in which women are to blame in these movies:  the woman lied; the woman imagined it; the woman was provocative.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is the most well-known movie in which a white woman lies about being raped by a black man.  Another is Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976).  In this movie, two white women lie about being raped by nine black boys. Now, it might be pointed out that since the movie was based on a true story, we can hardly criticize those who made this movie for making the women to blame for the false accusation.  On the other hand, had the two white women been telling the truth, and were indeed raped by nine black boys, we would never have seen a movie about that story because it would never have been made.  This true story was selected as the basis for a movie precisely because the white women could be blamed for the black boys being tried for rape.

In A Passage to India (1984), it is not an African American who is accused of raping a white woman. But the man is a native of India and has dark skin.  Moreover, the movie takes place when India is still a colony of Great Britain, and the British are prejudiced against the natives.  So, it’s close enough.  In this movie, the woman becomes hysterical, owing to repressed sexual urges on her part, and imagines that she was raped so vividly that she believes it actually happened.

Sergeant Rutledge (1960) falls into the third category, in which, unlike in the first two categories, where no rape actually occurs, in this movie, a woman really is raped. Because she is also murdered, she is not the one that accuses a black man. Nevertheless, she is still at fault for being raped because she was asking for it.

The movie is set in Arizona in 1881.  Much of the story is told by witnesses testifying during a court martial. One of those witnesses is Mary Beecher (Constance Towers), who comes across as a strong, independent woman, who also serves as the love interest for Lieutenant Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter).  As depicted in a flashback during her testimony, we see that Mary has been left alone at a train station in the middle of the night.  She discovers that the man running the station is dead, an arrow sticking out of his chest.  As she runs out of the station, Sergeant Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode) grabs her and puts his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Although Mary is not the woman in this movie that is raped, the idea of a white woman being raped by a black man is suggested by this scene, and that is certainly what Mary thinks is about to happen to her.  He explains to her that she mustn’t scream because there are Apaches nearby.  He hands her a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, implying competence with a gun, and that she will need it because the Apaches will show her no mercy. This too suggests the possibility of rape by men that are not white. Minutes later, when a couple of Apaches attack, she shoots one of them before he can kill Rutledge.

As we later find out, Lucy Dabney, a young white girl, has been beaten, raped, and strangled. Rutledge, a first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry, accidentally came upon her dead, naked body.  As he covered her with a blanket, her father, Major Dabney, Rutledge’s commanding officer, entered the room, and, believing Rutledge to be attacking Lucy, pulled out his pistol and shot him, causing a minor wound.  In self-defense, Rutledge shot Major Dabney in return, killing him. Realizing he would be blamed for Lucy’s rape and murder, as well as for killing her father, he decided to desert.  That is why he happens to be at the station in the middle of the night.

Most of the women we see in this movie are the officers’ wives, led by Mrs. Fosgate (Billie Burke), wife of Colonel Fosgate (Willis Bouchey), who presides over the trial.  The women are a bunch of simpleminded biddies, whose purpose in life is to be scandalized by the shameless behavior of others, and who are obviously overprotected by their husbands. No, I take that back.  These women are so addled and confused that they need protecting.  They seem to be of a totally different species than Mary.  We cannot imagine Rutledge handing Mrs. Fosgate a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, and expecting her to kill an Apache, if need be.

During another flashback, representing Mrs. Fosgate’s testimony, we find that one of the things that met with the disapproval of these women was the behavior of Lucy. The women chastised her for riding a horse astride. But Lucy said, in front of Chandler Hubble, who we eventually find out is the one that actually raped and strangled her, that as long as she says her prayers and behaves herself, her father doesn’t care if she rides around like Lady Godiva. It is also worked into the conversation that her mother is dead, which explains why she does not behave with the proper sense of decorum. And those women also express misgivings about how friendly Lucy is with Rutledge, which is just one of the ways the movie lets us know that white folks regard black men as being a threat to white women.

The soldiers of the colored regiment are intelligent, brave, and of good moral character.  In praising this movie for how it portrayed African Americans, critics fail to notice, or prefer to overlook, just how demeaning this movie is in its portrayal of women.  And while on the subject, we never see the wives of any of the black soldiers. We have to wonder, if there had been black women in this movie, would they too have been simpleminded biddies?  Alternatively, since this movie is at pains to present a positive portrayal of African Americans, would the black women have been depicted as fair-minded and intelligent, and thus superior to the white women?  This movie escapes the horns of that dilemma by not having any black women in the movie at all.

Toward the end of the trial, Cantrell, whose job it is to defend Rutledge, beats a confession out of Hubble while he is on the witness stand, forcing him to admit that he was the one that raped Lucy. But while the blame has shifted from Rutledge to Hubble, the movie qualifies that blame by portraying Hubble as having acted under a sexual compulsion, triggered by Lucy’s behavior.  He pleas for understanding:

Don’t you understand?  She…, the way she walked!  The way her body moved. She drove me crazy! I had to have her!  I had to! I had to!  You know I had to!  God help me! God, help me!

You see, what with Lucy having her legs spread-eagled when she rode a horse and putting the image into his head of her being naked on that horse, well, it was just too much for him, especially since his wife is deceased, thereby depriving him of a normal sexual outlet.  The point seems to be that it is up to women to comport themselves in such a way as to not unleash the demon in men such as Hubble.  Of course, we accept this only because Hubble is white.  It would be unthinkable to have it turn out that Rutledge, a black man, had such a strong desire for Lucy that he just couldn’t help himself.

And so, just as Rutledge, a black man, had to be found innocent of raping and killing Lucy, so too was it felt necessary to make excuses for Hubble, a white man, who actually did what Rutledge had been accused of. Toward that end, those that wrote and directed this movie showed no hesitation in blaming Lucy for what happened to her.

Being a relic of its time, there will never be a remake of this movie.  It was praised back then, and to some extent still is, not for its entertainment value, which is minimal, but for having the correct moral posture regarding African Americans.  This was not entirely new in 1960, but is now something that has been routine in movies for decades, so a remake would serve no useful function.

But let us imagine a remake anyway.  There would have to be a complete reworking of the way women are portrayed.  In this imaginary remake, the officers’ wives are intelligent, and in many ways wiser than their husbands, to whom they give sound advice.  They are shown to have doubts as to Rutledge’s guilt, whereas most of the white men are prejudiced against him.  Because the white women are portrayed in a positive manner, it is safe to have black women in the movie too, the wives of the black soldiers, and they too are shown to be just as intelligent as the white women.

Lucy’s mother is still be alive and has raised her properly.  Lucy is just an innocent young girl who never dresses, talks, or acts in a provocative way.

As for Hubble, his wife is still alive, and she is an attractive woman, thus providing him with a normal sexual outlet.  Nevertheless, he rapes and murders Lucy simply because he feels like it, not acting under a compulsion, but of his own free will.  Such men exist in the world and always will.  The fact that Hubble is a white male means it is perfectly safe to make him an unregenerate villain. It would have been safe to make Hubble such a villain in 1960 too, but those making the original movie had such disregard for women that they preferred to apologize for him at the expense of the rape victim.

By making the updated version this way, the black man accused of raping a white woman could be shown to be innocent of the charge without making it be the woman’s fault, which would be more in keeping with twenty-first century sensitivities.

Rock Around the Clock (1956)

In this movie, a lifeless and somewhat ridiculous plot acts as a frame story to showcase some rock-and-roll bands when that kind of music was becoming popular in the 1950s. Young people in their rebellious stage like to shock their elders, so naturally we have a scene in which Bill Haley and the Comets perform at a prestigious and very proper girls’ school, which scandalizes the matronly chaperones. The Comets wear suits and are clean-cut, singing songs without suggestive lyrics, but no matter, because the beat alone is indecent. So the movie has it both ways, allowing teenagers to enjoy the fantasy of shocking their elders, while the real elders watching the movie in the theaters would be reassured that rock and roll was quite harmless.

Part of the plot of this movie is that dancing is on its way out, by which is meant ballroom dancing. But the dancing done by teenagers to rock and roll is alive and well. It is basically jitterbug (also known as swing, boogie-woogie, and the bop). In a sense, however, this died too. Once the twist became popular in the early 1960s, partner dancing, in which couples make contact with each other, pretty much came to an end, to be replaced by various forms of free style, in which couples never touch each other. To see partner dancing any more, other than for slow songs, you either have to go to a country-western nightclub or to a dance studio where ballroom dancing still lingers on.

Partner dancing in the movies is one of two kinds: either the dancers are professionals, or they are just barely able to shuffle around the dance floor. The reality would be somewhere in between, with amateurs doing a fairly decent job of cutting a rug. In this movie, the brother and sister who dance together are obviously professionals. They become part of the act with the Comets, the idea being that they will show teenagers at the performances how to dance to rock and roll, to break the ice and get others on the dance floor. Of course, all those supposedly novice teenagers who venture onto the dance floor are professional dancers themselves. In fact, having that brother-and-sister team dance like that in real life would intimidate ordinary would-be dancers, making it less likely for them to get out on the floor.

Unfortunately, most of the songs performed in this movie are not that good, and in several cases, no one dances at all, usually because the beat is too fast, even for professionals. There are a couple of good numbers from the Comets and a couple from the Platters. The rest are mediocre, which, when combined with the boring plot, makes the movie a disappointment.

Repulsion (1965)

In Repulsion, a movie written and directed by Roman Polanski, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman with some kind of psychological problem concerning sex. She lives with her sister, whose sexual relations with her lover disturb Carol. Carol is very much upset that her sister is going on a two-week vacation. During that vacation, Carol descends into madness. A man who has been harassing her and stalking her breaks into her apartment because he just had to see her. She bludgeons him to death. Then the landlord stops by to get the rent and decides to rape her as long as he is there. She slices him up with a razor and he bleeds to death. Then her sister returns to find the corpses and a catatonic Carol. In the very last scene, we see a photograph, previously alluded to from a distance, of her family taken years ago. In it, we see everyone smiling and looking at the camera, except for a pre-adolescent Carol, who is looking with dread at a man to her left, presumably her father. In real life, such a picture would mean nothing, but its emphasis in the movie after what we have seen tells us that she was molested as a child, which further explains why she was so upset that her sister was going away. As a child, she would have been safe from her father as long as her sister was around.

The idea that Polanski, having made this movie illustrating the terrible consequences of child molestation, would then go on to molest a child himself is ghastly. Having made such a movie, he doubtlessly had thought the matter through. For him to molest a thirteen-year-old girl when he believed that such an act could produce consequences like those in this movie is especially disturbing.

Re-Animator (1985)

There are two mad scientists at Miskatonic University, and that is one too many.  First, there is Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), a brain surgeon and a member of the faculty, who is motivated by sex, fame, and power.  The principal goal of his research is the location of the will in the brain.

The other mad scientist is Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student. He cares nothing about women or fame, being single-mindedly dedicated to conquering death.  Toward that end, he has developed a reagent, a green, glowing liquid with powers of reanimation, capable of bring the dead back to life. Hence, he is the title character in Re-Animator, the movie loosely based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. West is so cold and devoid of feeling that he is indifferent to the pain he causes when he reanimates the dead, supposing himself to be doing them a favor.  Throughout the movie, when West injects his reagent into a corpse or a dead cat, he brings them back to life all right, but they are screaming in agony.  This Grand Guignol masterpiece is replete with hilarious scenes of horror and gore.  I especially liked the one where Hill inserts a cue tip deep into the brain of a cadaver.  Perhaps he was hoping to find some will-residue on the cue tip when he pulled it back out.

West is openly contemptuous of Hill, whose intellect he regards as inferior to his own. Having previously accused him of plagiarism, he says to him, right in front of the other students in Hill’s class, “You should have stolen more of Dr. Gruber’s ideas.  Then at least you’d have ideas.”

Hill finds out about West’s reagent and tries to coerce West into letting Hill get credit for it. While Hill’s back is turned, West whacks him in the head with a shovel and then uses that shovel to chop his head off. He places the head in a bowl, but it keeps falling over.  Off to one side, there is a paper spike.  West puts that in the bowl and jams Hill’s head down on it, making it stand upright.  Ah, that’s much better!

He reanimates the separated head and body, all in the name of scientific research, of course. The body knocks West out while he is examining the head, and then it picks up the head and the bowl it is in, steals all of West’s reagent, and leaves. After kidnapping Dean Halsey’s daughter, Megan (Barbara Crampton), with whom Hill is obsessed, he has her stripped naked and strapped to a table. Then Hill’s head lasciviously watches as his headless body feels her up.  After that, Hill’s body holds Hill’s severed head and moves it around so that he can violate Megan with his tongue.  This scene of ludicrous love is interrupted when West shows up, leading to a final struggle between the two mad scientists, with Hill in control of reanimated corpses from the morgue.

During the final struggle, West overdoses Hill’s body with two syringes full of reagent.  In response, the intestines of Hill’s body wrap around West, dragging him to his doom.  Unfortunately, Megan is also killed in the chaos.  Dan (Bruce Abbott), another medical student, who is in love with her, rushes her to the emergency room.  Standard methods are employed to revive her, but all fail.  Dan looks at Megan, brings his lips to hers, and tenderly kisses her.  For a moment, we think that she will be revived in a fairy-tale way, like Sleeping Beauty.  But no, she’s still dead.  With grim determination, Dan picks up a syringe and fills it with the reagent.  He injects it into her brain.  Darkness closes around.  And then we hear her scream.

There are many versions of this movie.  Usually, a director’s cut has more than was shown theatrically, but not so here, where the director’s cut resulted in many scenes being deleted that should have been left in. First of all, these include scenes that make it clear that Hill has mesmeric powers. It is fitting that the man whose research focuses on the location of the will in the brain should have the power to control the will of others. More importantly, it helps us understand why Hill has so much influence over Dean Halsey, Megan, and even West, though only briefly; we understand how he can control his own body with his severed head; and we understand how he can control the corpses he has reanimated in the morgue. Without these scenes of mesmerism, we don’t fully understand how he can do these things.

Second, the deleted scenes make for a smoother plot.  For example, Hill is jealous of Dan because he is Megan’s boyfriend.  In the director’s cut, when West tells Dan that Hill wanted to make him “disappear,” we wonder if West is just making that up; in a deleted scene, we see Hill telling West that Dan will be made to disappear.

Third, several of the deleted scenes further develop West’s character. Both in his physical appearance and his manner, he reminds me of Dean Stockwell’s portrayal of Judd in Compulsion (1959). Judd, of course, was that movie’s version of Leopold in the notorious Loeb and Leopold case, in which two psychopathic geniuses from wealthy families decide to commit the perfect crime in order to prove they are Nietzschean supermen. Without seeing the deleted scenes, I might not have made that connection.  It may be that the director, Stuart Gordon, never intended such a connection, but he should have, because it fits perfectly.

Fourth, there is a deleted scene where West is discussing with Dan what they are going to do about Dr. Hill. West seems to be bothered in some way, and he lurches toward his room. When Dan goes to see what West is doing, he finds him with a syringe and a bottle of reagent, about to mainline himself. West assures him it is just a weak solution, only enough to keep the brain sharp, so he won’t have to sleep. Dan helps his shoot up, after which West is rejuvenated, in complete command of every faculty, and ready to make a plan.

Gordon said he deleted these scenes because he felt that they slowed down the pacing, and that is a shame. The scenes are included in the DVD, and it is worth making the effort to watch them. Not every deleted scene should have been kept in, of course. The dream sequence, in particular, does not belong in the movie, and its deletion was appropriate.  Supposedly, there is a version called the “integral cut” that puts the deleted scenes back in.  That sounds great, but as I have not seen it, I cannot vouch for it.

Rancho Deluxe (1975)

In the late sixties and early seventies, the anti-establishment feelings engendered by opposition to the Vietnam War resulted in a lot of movies that equated crime with freedom. Somehow, those who broke the law and flouted convention were better than those who obeyed the law, held down regular jobs, and led respectable lives. Rancho Deluxe is clearly in that mold.

In particular, Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Cecil (Sam Waterston) are small-time cattle rustlers, who kill a cow every now and then and sell the meat. John Brown (Clifton James) owns the cattle and wants to catch whoever is stealing them. When Jack and Cecil steal Brown’s prize bull and ransom him for a great deal of money, they begin to think about making a bigger haul.

Meanwhile, Curt (Harry Dean Stanton) and Burt (Richard Bright), ranch hands who work for Brown, figure out that Jack and Cecil are the rustlers. Instead of telling their boss, they end up agreeing to work with Jack and Cecil to make a big score. And while this is going on, Brown hires Henry (Slim Pickens), a senile old detective who can hardly walk, to solve the crime. He is so feeble he has to be helped by his niece Laura (Charlene Dallas), who is an innocent do-gooder. At least, so it appears. In reality, Henry is neither senile nor crippled, and Laura is not his niece, but his partner. Henry knows that a big-time heist is always an inside job, and he arranges to have Laura seduce Curt and get the information from him about the caper. They foil the thieves, who are sent off to prison.

But as I said, this movie was made back when criminals were romanticized as free spirits. Consequently, it would not do to send them to a real prison. Instead, they are sent to a ranch penitentiary, where they ride the range herding cattle for the state of Montana, so it really does not seem like punishment at all, but just another way of being free.

Jaws (1975) and Poltergeist (1982)

In producing the movie Poltergeist, Steven Spielberg employed the structure that worked for him in Jaws. In the latter movie, there is an Everyman, Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider), and his family, corresponding to Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) and her family in the former. The shark is a monstrous creature terrorizing Amity Island just as the demons terrorize the Freeling household. In Jaws, we have the mayor who lets the expected revenue from tourism jeopardize the safety of those who plan to swim in the ocean, while in Poltergeist, Steve Freeling’s boss jeopardizes the safety of the Freeling house and the entire neighborhood in an effort to save money by not moving the bodies of a cemetery before building houses on top of them.

Once the shark proves to be too menacing to ignore, a scientist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), is called in from the Oceanographic Institute, just as three parapsychologists are called in to investigate the weird happenings in the Freeling house (one gets the feeling they inspired the movie Ghostbusters (1984)). But science alone cannot do the job. Therefore, someone with personal, practical experience is needed. In Jaws, this takes the form of Quint (Robert Shaw), an old salt who has been a sailor all his life and has dealt with sharks many times. In Poltergeist, we have Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), a woman with psychic powers, who knows how the other world operates.

Ultimately, however, it is Everyman Brody who kills the shark, when science and practical experience fail, just as Diane must save her children herself after the parapsychologists and the psychic have failed to completely do the job.

Unfortunately, the final attack by the demons after everyone thinks it is safe is a little too much. It would be like having the shark make one more attack after Brody thought he had finally killed it.

Phantom Lady (1944)

Phantom Lady has one of the most contrived and illogical plots in cinematic history. Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) and his wife have an argument, and he leaves their apartment and goes to a bar. Shortly after, his wife is strangled by Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), with whom she was having an affair. Because there is no evidence connecting him with her murder, the police never suspect him, and so all he has to do is take the trip to Brazil as he already planned to.

But no! He decides that he must make sure that Henderson is suspected of the crime. So, he only pretends to get on the ship going to Brazil so that he can follow Henderson around (he catches up with the ship later by taking a plane to Havana). He sees that Henderson meets a woman (Fay Helm) in a bar, whom he persuades to go to a show with him, inasmuch as he already has tickets. She agrees, and they take a cab. They sit right up front, and it turns out that she is wearing the same unusual hat worn by the star of the show, Miss Montiero (Aurora Miranda). The drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.) takes a fancy to the woman with Henderson and flirts with her.

So, Marlow figures he must bribe the bartender, the cabdriver, and the drummer to say they never saw the woman, thereby depriving Henderson of his alibi. Marlow does not have to bribe Miss Montiero, because her vanity won’t let her admit that someone in the audience wore the same hat that she did, which she apparently disposed of. Of course, other women in the show might have remembered Miss Montiero’s hat, and other members of the band might have noticed the woman in the front row with the hat, but Marlow does not bother to bribe any of them.

As a result, the bartender says he saw Henderson at the bar, but not the woman; and the cabdriver says he picked up Henderson and drove him to the show, but there was no woman with him. And so, without an alibi, Henderson is convicted of murder on the flimsiest of circumstantial cases and sentenced to be executed. However, no one in the movie seems to realize that the bartender and cabdriver have provided Henderson with an alibi anyway. Whether he had a woman with him is irrelevant. For that matter, if Marlow was going to bribe these characters, he should have told them to deny seeing Henderson rather than deny seeing the woman with him. Had he done that, then the woman would be the only one who could provide Henderson with an alibi, and the frantic search for her by Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), Henderson’s secretary, would have made sense.

It gets worse. Although there are only a few weeks until Henderson will be executed, Marlow returns from Brazil and decides to murder the drummer when he sees Carol trying to get information out of him. Even so, there still would be no evidence connecting him with that murder either, except that he picks up Carol’s purse, which she left behind when the drummer became angry, and puts it in a drawer in his apartment.

These do not exhaust the absurdities in this movie, which pile up on top of the ones already discussed, but there is no point in beating a dead horse. And because we immediately become aware of these absurdities as they unfold, watching the movie can be an exasperating experience.

Pépé le Moko (1937)

The title character of Pépé le Moko, played by Jean Gabin, is a gangster from Paris who manages to elude the French authorities by hiding out in the Casbah, a tortuous citadel in Algiers.  His nemesis is Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), who bides his time waiting for Pépé to leave the Casbah so that he can be arrested.  Gaby (Mireille Balin) is the mistress of a rich businessman.  She and some friends visit the Casbah, during which she meets Pépé.  They fall in love, and so much so that Pépé can no longer stand being cooped up in the Casbah, which leads to him to leave so he can be with her all the time, giving Slimane the chance he has been waiting for.

You can tell when a movie is trying to impose an attitude on you, but it just doesn’t take. We are obviously supposed to regard Pépé as a charming rogue, but he is rude and inconsiderate. We are supposed to feel sorry for Inès (Line Noro), who truly loves him, but it is hard to care about a woman who will allow a man to treat her like dirt.

We are supposed to believe that Pépé and Gaby truly love each other, but I could not begin to swallow that one. Though Pépé appears to be about thirty years old, and supposedly has had his way with countless women, yet we are asked to believe he would fall madly in love with Gaby at first sight, acting as if he had the emotional maturity of an adolescent half his age. And she is a hard boiled, gold digging mistress of an older man, so true love at first sight does not suit her very well either.

We are not supposed to like Slimane, but I kept pulling for him to catch Pépé and put him in prison as he deserves. But nothing so mundane. When Pépé realizes he cannot have the woman he loves, he carves himself up with a knife. Oh well, at least the bad guy died in the end.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

The Many Versions of Once Upon a Time in America

After going for more than a decade without making a movie, Sergio Leone finally completed Once Upon a Time in America in 1984.  As he was and still is my favorite director, it was with great expectations that I went to the theater to see it.  I was disappointed.  I couldn’t believe how flat and lackluster it was. That December, I watched Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert give their lists for the best movies of 1984 in their show At the Movies.  Siskel said his pick for the best movie of 1984 was Once Upon a Time in America.  I was stunned.  But he immediately explained himself.  He dismissed the theatrical release that I had seen as worthless, and said he was basing his pick on the version released in Europe. Ebert said he would have picked that movie to be the best as well, but he felt he was limited to movies as they were when they came to American theaters.

Soon thereafter, I saw the European cut on cable.  Unlike the theatrical release, which was 139 minutes long and told the story in chronological order, the European cut, which is 229 minutes, is filled with flashbacks and flashforwards, and includes the scenes in the opium den.  Furthermore, the European cut has a composition by Ennio Morricone, “Poverty,” that fills one with a feeling of loss, which is essential to the movie, but which was completely absent from the theatrical release. Suffice it to say that the European cut is every bit as good as Siskel and Ebert said it was.

After seeing the movie on cable, I decided it was time to buy a video cassette recorder so I could have my very own copy of the movie on video tape.  However, the version on video tape was in standard format, not widescreen.  Somewhat later, the movie was released in widescreen on laserdisc, which I bought.  In order to get the entire movie on that format, there were two discs, each of which had to be turned over to watch what was on the other side.  However, someone made a mistake in producing these discs, so that side one of the second disc, labeled Part 3, was the last part of the movie, which meant side two, labeled Part 4, needed to be watched first.  But the way this movie jumps around in time, you might not realize at first that you were watching the movie out of order.  If ever there was a movie where such a mistake should not have been made, this was it.

In any event, I knew from the credits that the movie had been based on the semi-autobiographical novel The Hoods by Harry Grey, a gangster who had written the novel while he was serving time in Sing Sing, so I looked for it in the bookstore.  Instead, I came across a paperback with the title Once Upon a Time in America.  It was my first experience with a novelization, a book that reverses the normal order of things and uses a movie as its source.  Someone decided to publish that instead of issuing a reprint of The Hoods.  In what follows, when I refer to the novel on which this movie is based, I am referring to The Hoods, not the novelization.

Recently, an “extended director’s cut” of 251 minutes became available on DVD.  In some cases, the additional material helps prepare us for stuff that comes later.  In others, it helps us to better understand what is going on.

According to Christopher Frayling, in his book Sergio Leone:  Something to Do With Death, Leone had ten hours of footage to start with, which he edited down to six hours, thinking about releasing the movie in two parts, but finally settled on a version close to four hours long [page 458].  There are rumors of a 270 minute cut that will probably never be seen, not even on DVD, because the actors never dubbed in their voices on the additional material [page 462].

And finally, there is the additional footage that existed only in Leone’s mind, as when he wanted the scene where Noodles (Robert De Niro) is making his way to an opium den in Chinatown to be filmed in Hong Kong [page 458].

The Basic Story

I have no wish to try the reader’s patience by presenting a complete synopsis, but only to mention what I think is absolutely essential for even a minimal discussion of this movie.  There are three time periods during which the action of this movie takes place. The movie is not explicit about the dates of the first two, and different sources vary slightly in this regard.  I have picked the dates that make the most sense.

1920.  Jewish teenagers in the Lower East Side of Manhattan are budding criminals in 1920.  They agree to put half the money they make in a suitcase, kept in a locker in a train station.  One of those young hoodlums, Noodles, is in love with Deborah, and his best friend is Max.  Noodles kills a rival gangster and then stabs a policeman, for which he is sent to prison.

1932-33.  Noodles gets out of prison in 1932.  He rejoins the gang, and they get into more serious crimes, such as the holdup of a wholesale jewelry establishment, where a woman named Carol (Tuesday Weld) is employed.  She is in on the heist, and during the excitement, she encourages Noodles to hit her.  He does that, and then he rapes her as well.  She eventually becomes the girlfriend of Max (James Woods).

The gang also makes a deal with Jimmy O’Donnell (Treat Williams), a union boss, helping him succeed in a strike.

When Noodles finds out that Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) is leaving for Hollywood to pursue her acting career, instead of marrying him as he hoped, he becomes so angry that he rapes her.

Note 1:  The rape of Deborah is perhaps the most unpleasant, prolonged rape ever shown in a major motion picture, worse even than the rape of Carol, which was bad enough. Audiences and critics alike were scandalized.  Leone only made matters worse when he said the rape was “an act of love by a man who has lost the only thing he has ever wanted” [page 448].  And, indeed, such a remark would be regarded as outrageous by anyone that regards love as something beautiful, so that Noodles’ love for Deborah is being thought of as excusing what he did.  Instead, this remark is only intended to be an explanation, an explanation that also sees the ugly side of love.

Note 2:  The extended director’s cut introduces the character Eve as a woman Noodles picks up in a nightclub right after he rapes Deborah. He hires Eve to pretend to be Deborah and tell him that she loves him. In the European cut, she just seems to show up out of nowhere later on.  By “later,” I mean that in the chronological sense, not in the movie sense.  As far as the movie is concerned, she is the first person we see in the opening scene.

Max wants the gang to knock over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which would be suicide for all of them.  To keep that from happening, Carol tells Noodles to figure out some way to get them all arrested and put in jail, long enough for Max to forget about that crazy idea.  Noodles takes her advice.  He calls the police and tells them about a shipment of alcohol they will be transporting on the last night before the repeal of Prohibition.  Things go terribly wrong, and Max is apparently killed.

Note 3:  Lying in the street beside Patsy and Cockeye, two other members of the gang since boyhood, is a body, presumably Max, burned beyond recognition.  This is not meant to fool us.  We know that when someone in a movie is supposedly dead, but the corpse is disfigured beyond recognition, that person is probably not dead. This is only meant to deceive Noodles and anyone else in the movie who was not in on it.

Note 4:  The scene in Miami where Max announces that he has dreamed of robbing the Federal Reserve Bank of New York all his life is hard to accept because it is the first time anyone has heard about it. We should have been prepared for this, perhaps by having Max say something to that effect to Noodles when they were teenagers.  In fact, that is what happens in the novel.  This is also the scene where Eve shows up, seemingly out of nowhere in the European cut.  The extended director’s cut introduces us to Eve earlier on, but it does not include any earlier remark by Max about robbing the Federal Reserve Bank. One might suppose that such a remark was filmed, but never made it into the movie. However, in the scene where we first hear about Max’s lifelong dream to rob the Federal Reserve Bank, Noodles acts as though this is the first time he is hearing about it as well.

Noodles tries to ease his guilt by going to an opium den, which is part of a Chinese theater, where the audience watches a show consisting of shadow puppets.  An attendant fills an opium pipe for him, which Noodles puffs on and then goes to sleep. But he is awakened later by the attendant, who tells him a couple of gangsters are in the theater looking for him, because he ratted out his friends, and he needs to get away. He finds out from Fat Moe, Deborah’s brother, that the gangsters have already killed Eve.  Knowing he must leave town, Noodles goes to get the suitcase with the money the gang has accumulated over the years, but it is filled only with newspapers.

1968.  Thirty-five years later, Noodles returns to his old neighborhood, owing to a letter he received informing him that the bodies of his friends have been moved to another cemetery, but which really tells him that someone knows where he has been hiding all this time.  At the cemetery, inside a mausoleum, he finds a key to another locker at the train station.  It turns out to hold a suitcase full of money, with a note saying it is payment for his next job.

He finds out that Carol has been living in the Bailey Foundation, which is a rest home established by a Mr. Bailey, who is presently the Secretary of Commerce.  She tells him that Max wanted to die because there was insanity in his family, which he was afraid he had inherited and would go crazy himself some day.  So, he put the idea of informing on the gang in her head, so that he could commit suicide by cop.  While she and Noodles talk, he sees a picture of Deborah with a lot of other people at the Bailey Foundation on opening night, taken some fifteen years earlier. Carol says she is some famous actress, whom she does not know.  From there, Noodles locates Deborah, who is performing in Antony and Cleopatra.

Note 5:  In the extended director’s cut, we see Deborah’s performance as Cleopatra when she commits suicide, which in turn is a premonition of Max’s real suicide.

Noodles talks to Deborah after her performance.  He knows she has been living with Secretary Bailey for years.  Bailey has a teenage son, supposedly by a woman he married, but who later died. However, we can’t be sure this is true, and we wonder if he is Deborah’s son as well.  When Noodles sees Bailey’s son, played by the same actor who played Max when they were young, he realizes that Secretary Bailey is actually Max.

Having been sent an invitation to attend a party at Secretary Bailey’s mansion, Noodles decides to accept, even though Deborah pleads with him not to.  At that party, Max tells Noodles that he, Max, will be assassinated before he can testify in front of a Senate committee, so he says he wants Noodles to kill him instead, as a way of letting him have the revenge he deserves.  Noodles refuses even to acknowledge that he is talking to Max, calling him “Mr. Bailey,” indicating that he prefers to continue believing that he was the one that betrayed Max rather than the other way around. Noodles leaves, and as he walks down the street, he sees what appears to be Max walking behind a garbage truck that can grind up stuff. The grinder suddenly starts making a lot of noise, after which the man is nowhere to be seen.

Note 6:  In the theatrical release, there is no garbage truck.  Instead, Noodles hears the sound of a gunshot, from which we are to suppose that Max shot himself in the head.  As for the European cut, it is not certain that Max did get himself ground up in the garbage truck.  Twice before, Max pretended to be dead but really was not:  the first time, when he pretended to have drowned in 1920; the second time, when he pretended he had been killed by the police in 1933.  And now, in 1968, it may be that Max is only pretending to be dead for a third time.

Note 7:  The Hoods was published in 1952, and it ends with Noodles telling us how he got away, but can’t say where he has been hiding out all these years.  Consequently, the part of the movie where Noodles comes back in 1968 is not based on the novel.  And yet, according to Frayling, Grey told Leone that one of the liberties he had taken with the truth was in having Max be killed in the novel.  In actuality, he admitted, “Max” was still alive.  In fact, “Max” had recently wanted to pull off a holdup with Grey, but Grey’s wife threatened to leave him if he went along with it.  A few weeks later, Grey saw “Max” being arrested on television.  So, the idea that Max is really still alive, if not based on the novel, was the nevertheless inspired by Grey in a conversation he had with Leone.  [page 401]

Note 8:  Halfway through the movie, in the extended director’s cut, we see Noodles looking at the garbage truck.  Right after that, he sees a car that has been following him around suddenly explode, a car belonging to Secretary Bailey, but who was not in it at the time. This prepares us for the idea that there are people who want to kill Secretary Bailey before he can testify in front of a Senate committee, fearing he will confess to the various forms of corruption he has been involved in over the years, thereby implicating others.  The man behind this determined effort to kill Bailey/Max is Jimmy O’Donnell.  He indicates that Max’s son will also be killed if Max doesn’t cooperate by signing over most of his wealth, with twelve percent being left for his son if he does sign.  Max signs the papers.  Before Jimmy leaves Max’s office, he lets Max know that it would be for the best if he committed suicide.  He tells Max that he is going to join the party, and it will please him if he hears a gunshot before the party is over.

Time

According to Frayling, the passage of time is the central theme of this movie [page 392].  This is not time understood as an abstraction, as merely that in which events may or may not occur.  Rather, time is to be understood existentially, in it’s significance for the person whose life at first is naively experienced, and then comes to be colored by memories, with regrets about the past and with a sense that the future is slipping away, with a feeling of time that has been lost.  This is why the flashbacks and flashforwards are essential to the movie, so that the significance of the present is bound up in things that happened in the past and will happen in the future.

When Noodles and his gang are just boys, but before they meet Max, they try to roll a drunk for his watch. However, Max manages to get to the drunk first and take that watch.  Then Whitey, a corrupt cop, whose beat is the gang’s neighborhood, takes the watch from both of them.  They get the watch back from Whitey when they take a picture of him having sex with Peggy, an underage prostitute. Max still has that watch when Noodles finds him again in 1968.  Needless to say, the watch is a physical representation of time.

As noted above, when Noodles and Max were young, he and the other members of the gang agreed to save half the money they made in suitcase, stored in a locker in the train station.  The key to the locker was given to Fat Moe.  He attached it to the key to his clock.  When Noodles realizes he needs to go into hiding, he takes both keys with him.  When he returns thirty-five years later, he hands Fat Moe the key to his clock, which he then uses to wind the clock for the first time in all those years. The idea, of course, is that it is as if time has stood still, in the sense that nothing of significance in their lives has happened during those years.  This is confirmed when Moe asks Noodles what he has been doing all these years, and he says, “I’ve been going to bed early.” Perhaps this is an allusion to Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the opening line is, “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

This theme is reinforced by various pieces of music in the 1968 section that have something to do with time:  “Summertime,” “Night and Day,” and “Yesterday.”

Deborah/Dream/Love/Opium

Early in the movie, Noodles remembers how he used to stand on a toilet and peek through a crack in the wall to watch Deborah (Jennifer Connelly, playing her as a teenager) dancing in the storeroom of her father’s kosher restaurant. There are stacks of flour in the storeroom, and the dust from the flour creates a haze, giving the scene a dreamlike quality.  At other points in the movie, Noodles looks at her through rising steam, creating a similar effect.  She dances to “Amapola,” a song comparing a pretty girl to a poppy, the flower from which opium is derived. Together these elements form a constellation of themes running through this movie: Deborah/dream/love/opium.

Noodles/Reality/Sex/Filth

Deborah knows that Noodles is watching her, and so, on another occasion, she surprises him by opening the door of the restroom, saying, “That record’s just like Ex-Lax. Every time I put it on, you have to go to the bathroom.” It is important that she does not enter the restroom. Previously in the movie, in a scene that, quite frankly, grosses me out whenever I watch it, Noodles goes into the communal restroom for the floor of the tenement his family lives in. He sits down on the toilet. Peggy also lives with her family on that floor. When Noodles realizes Peggy is coming to use the restroom too, he unlocks the door so that he can expose himself to her.  Unlike Deborah, Peggy walks right in, and Noodles spreads his legs. He gets up from the toilet and starts making sexual advances. She says she is about poop in her pants, after which she plops down on the toilet he just got up from, telling him to get out. Throughout the movie there are innumerable references to garbage, excrement, and anal sex. Taken together, all this leads to an opposing constellation of themes: Noodles/reality/sex/filth.

The Beginning and End of Prohibition

As the movie jumps back and forth in time, it always seems to heading toward the end of Prohibition. When Noodles and Max first become friends, Prohibition has only recently become the law of the land. Their friendship comes to an end just before the repeal of Prohibition becomes effective, when Noodles believes he has caused the death of Max.

Furthermore, Noodles’ love for Deborah begins around the same time, in the early days of Prohibition, and his dream of marrying her comes to an end when he rapes her.  Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Deborah when she is grown up, said she understood that “the point of the part is that she is an imaginary woman” [page 446]. In brutally raping her, Noodles drags her out of the dream/love/opium constellation into his own world of reality/sex/filth.  The next day, he sees her sitting by a window of the train that will take her away, and when she sees him, she pulls down the shade, shutting him out of her life forever.  Just before she got on the train, we saw her picking up the December 5, 1933 copy of the New York Times, announcing the repeal of Prohibition, ending at 5:32 PM that day.  The beginning of Prohibition is the beginning of Noodles’ friendship with Max and his love for Deborah; the end of Prohibition is the end of that friendship and the end of that love.

The newspaper Deborah buys at the station is regarded by some critics as a goof, because in subsequent scenes, reference is made to the fact that Prohibition has not ended yet, though it soon will.  And then, when Max, Carol, Noodles, and Eve go to Miami, we see them reading the November 24, 1933 copy of the Miami Herald, which says that Prohibition will end in December.

However, a scene occurring many years later, in 1968, makes it clear that this connection to the end of Prohibition is not intended to be understood realistically. After Noodles leaves Max’s mansion, and we have seen the garbage truck move on down the street, this is followed by a bunch of revelers coming down the street in a car that appears to be from the days of Prohibition, as we hear the song “God Bless America,” sung by Kate Smith. The sounds they make and the background music are identical to what we heard at the beginning of the movie, as Eve prepared to enter the apartment she shared with Noodles. They are the sounds of people celebrating the end of Prohibition. In other words, even in 1968, it seems we are still approaching the end of Prohibition.

An Opium Dream

It still seems to be the end of Prohibition because what happens in 1968 is actually just a dream, a dream that is taking place at the end of Prohibition. As Frayling points out, one problem with this theory is that Noodles would not know about 1968 technology, like television [page 424].  But that can be justified as dramatic license:  1968 as we know it to be must stand in for 1968 as Noodles might have imagined it in 1933.

After Noodles rapes Deborah, he tries to forget what he did by spending time in an opium den. This is referred to, but not seen. We do see two scenes of him in the opium den, however, both of them being after he thinks he has killed Max. The first time is at the beginning of the movie, where we see him leaving; the second time is at the end of the movie, where we see him entering. Bookending the movie in this way, with the leaving being seen in the beginning and the arriving at the end, we are encouraged to see the movie as Noodles’ opium dream, an obsessive dream that could be starting all over again. The shadow puppets Noodles looks at after he enters the Chinese theater, while waiting to get into the opium den, reinforce the idea of a dream, of an illusion. As his dream takes place at the end of Prohibition, the scenes set in the future are not real, but only part of his wish-fulfilling dream. In that dream, he denies the reality of Max’s death, and imagines that it was really Max who betrayed him, stealing all the money the gang had accumulated. Furthermore, by having Deborah be Max’s lover, and possibly be the mother of Max’s child, his dream makes it appear that she betrayed Noodles, in a way that would make sense only to Noodles’ way of thinking, thereby alleviating his guilt over having raped her.

Note 9:  It is natural enough to suppose that the scenes that take place before Noodles goes to the opium den, right after thinking he has caused Max’s death, are veridical. However, his opium dream may even be encompassing earlier events, even those in 1920, memories distorted by the opium and his desire to understand the past in a way that absolves him of any guilt.  After all, the flashback to Noodles’ childhood days begins in 1968, when he stands on that toilet, remembering how he used to spy on Deborah.  If the 1968 portion of the movie is a dream, then the flashback in 1968, representing his memory, would have to be part of that dream.  A scene that was filmed, but not included in the movie, Frayling characterizes as “Noodles’ opium-rich flashback to himself, Max and the gang as children” [page 459].

When Max offers Noodles the chance to get his revenge for stealing all the money, taking his girl, and ruining his life, Noodles magnanimously refuses to accept this reality, saying that he prefers the delusion he has lived with all these years, the one in which he betrayed Max.  But this too is just part of the dream.  Having convinced himself that it was really Max who betrayed him, he gets the benefit of seeing Max ground up like garbage, while at the same time casting himself as the true friend after all.

Note 10:  Noodles never minded making a deal with the Italians when he was young, helping them save shipments of alcohol that had to be thrown overboard, but he never wanted to get involved with them in a big way, with Frankie (Joe Pesci) in particular.  And he didn’t mind assisting Jimmy O’Donnell and his union to win a strike, but once again he didn’t want to get involved with the unions in a big way, especially with “party leaders” like Sharkey, presumably communists, who were behind the labor movement.

Max, on the other hand, wanted to get involved with both Frankie and Sharkey, believing that more money and power could be acquired by being a part of the organizations these men represented. When Noodles said he didn’t want anything to do with these organizations, Max said, “You still think like some street schmuck.”

In the extended director’s cut, Jimmy O’Donnell, speaking on behalf of those very organizations that now want Max out of the way, puts pressure on Max to give up his wealth and his own life as well.  This is another aspect of the wish-fulfilling dream that Noodles is having, one that vindicates him, proving that he was right all along to avoid entanglements with politicians and the syndicate.

In the final scene, which is in the opium den, we see Noodles take a puff on the opium pipe. The expression that suddenly appears on his face is one of happiness, but it is only the false kind of happiness that opium provides, a temporary illusion in a world of filth.

Cinematic Influences

In Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a previous movie by Sergio Leone, there are quotations of old movies, especially Westerns.  According to Frayling, there are many such connections for Once Upon a Time in America as well.

First of all, the Noodles of the novel was influenced negatively by gangster movies:

Noodles was at pains to distance himself throughout the book from phoney ‘moving picture holdupnicks,’ ‘loused-up stories of hoodlums’ and the fast-talking heroics of Hollywood professional criminals.  [page 383]

Leone didn’t care for the novel as literature, but in his conversation with Harry Grey, he became aware of cinematic influences on the author himself:

And yet, as Sergio Leone was quick to notice, the book seemed to have been written by the screenwriter of a low-grade ‘B’ movie.  The first-person narrator even reminded him of a Hollywood voice-over:  ‘The grotesque realism of this elderly gangster who, at the end of his life, couldn’t stop himself using a repertoire of cinematic citations, of gestures and words seen and heard thousands of times on the big screen, stimulated my curiosity and amused me.  I was struck by the vanity of this attempt and by the grandeur of its bankruptcy.’  When the fable takes over from the actual life of the author, ‘that could be a great subject for a film.’  [page 384]

Frayling then goes on to point out connections between events in the book and classic gangster movies produced in the 1930s and 1940s.

The novel in turn had some influence on Leone’s previous films, the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West stemming from Cockeye’s harmonica in the novel, though that became a pan flute in Once Upon a Time in America.  The conflict between Noodles and his brother regarding their sick mother is reflected in the conflict between Tuco and his brother, Father Ramirez, in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), regarding their parents.  Juan’s dream of robbing the bank at Mesa Verde in Duck, You Sucker (1971) corresponds to Max’s dream of robbing the Federal Reserve Bank. [pages 387-88]

Just as the basic structure of Once Upon a Time in the West was based on Johnny Guitar (1954), the basic structure of Once Upon a Time in America, according to Frayling, is Citizen Kane (1941):  Noodles corresponds to the investigative reporter trying to get to the bottom of a mystery; Carol, who is a resident in the Bailey Foundation, a rest home for old people, corresponds to Jed Leland; Fat Moe corresponds to Bernstein; Deborah to Susan Alexander; and Max, as Secretary Bailey, corresponds to Charles Foster Kane [page 421].

Within that basic framework, quotations from gangster movies abound, as noted by Frayling:

In some sense, the trappings of the genre were a ruse, as Leone was at pains to point out:  ‘It is not a film about gangsters.  It is a film about nostalgia for a certain period and a certain type of cinema and a certain type of literature.’

Nevertheless, the ‘citations’ were certainly there:  from the Chinese theater (The Lady from Shanghai, 1948) to the contract killing (The Killers, 1946) to the gangster revisiting his childhood neighborhood (Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938; Dead End, 1937); with one protagonist feeling nostalgic about the anarchic early days (High Sierra, 1941), the other becoming increasingly megalomaniac (White Heat, 1949), and both having to confront a complicated new world of unions and politics (Bullets or Ballots, 1936).  The suitcase at the train station recalled Cry of the City (1948) and The Killing (1956); Noodles’ relationship with Deborah resembled Eddie Bartlett’s with Jean Sherman in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and the elderly Noodles’ arrival at Senator [sic] Bailey’s Long Island party mirrored Police Sergeant Bannion’s arrival at the affluent mansion of Mike Lagana, head of the crime syndicate, in The Big Heat (1953).  [page 422]

One connection that Frayling fails to mention is Cody Jarret’s fear of inherited insanity in White Heat, which may be why Cody preferred literally going out in a blaze of glory, just as Max feared going insane and brought about his own end, in which he too was burnt to a crisp.

The opium dream itself has its citation, “reminiscent of John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), where Walker’s (Lee Marvin) tale of revenge may be just wish fulfillment as he is left for dead on a deserted Alcatraz.” Leone preferred the ambiguity of a double reading, as what actually happens, and as opium dream [page 424].

The citations listed above are mostly conceptual, as opposed to those of Once Upon a Time in the West, which are in some cases conceptual, but in many cases visual, so that if you have seen the movies being quoted, the images alone will establish the connections.

Frayling provides even more connections, too numerous to go into here.  Suffice it to say that in this movie, art reflects life, life reflects art, and then art reflects life reflecting art.

Knife in the Water (1962)

Andrzej and Krystyna are married and sick of each other.  They pick up a hitchhiker and end up offering to take him sailing without bothering to find out what his name is.  But his name really does not matter. What matters is that he has a knife.

According to Chekhov, if you make people aware of a gun early on in a story, sooner or later someone in the story will have to shoot the gun. If the gun is not going to be fired, it should not be in the story. Now, knives are more common than guns, and are used for mundane purposes, such as cutting the meat on one’s plate, so the rule that applies to guns cannot automatically be applied to knives. Unless, that is, it is a wicked-looking, gravity-propelled, telescoping knife with a four-inch, locking blade. When you put a knife like that in a story, then Chekhov’s law applies to that weapon as well, and it is required that someone get cut with it.

But no one does. Not only is this knife referred to in the title, but it is introduced early on and emphasized again and again. The tension is built up as the knife is used to play a dangerous game of stabbing between the fingers of a spread out hand. It is used again when it is several times thrown across the cabin and into the wall. And it is used to cut the halyard when the sailboat runs aground. This would be like having a gun in a movie that has the word “gun” in its title, with people showing off their marksmanship or using it for some ordinary practical end. It would not satisfy our need to see the gun used for a more deadly purpose, just as these various employments of the knife do not satisfy our expectation that someone will be stabbed with it. But no one is.

Finally, Andrzej takes the young man’s knife and throws it in the water. The idea is that the young man was very fond of his knife, and Andrzej threw it in the water out of spite. But in that case, the object might just as well have been a harmonica that the young man was fond of. As it is, the fact that no one got stabbed after all the emphasis placed on the knife leaves us disappointed, especially since we put up with a lot of boring nonsense waiting for something to happen. Roman Polanski, who directed this movie, must have eventually figured this out and tried to make amends by having Jack Nicholson get his nose sliced in Chinatown.