Contempt  (Le Mépris) • 1963 • Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

“The cinema is an invention without a future.” -- Louis Lumière, inventor of motion pictures
— written on the wall of the screening room in Contempt

Jean-Luc Godard is the original, and still reigning, tortured intellectual of the cinema. Deeply in love with the Classic Hollywood films of the 30s, 40s and 50s, yet disdainful and deeply ... contemptuous... of the philistine restrictions and lack of freedom of commercial filmmaking as only a French intellectual could be, Godard rarely became comfortable with his material in the manner of his Hollywood idols, and many of his best films are more easily enjoyed not as ‘movie movies’ but rather as joyful, sensual and hyperkinetic exercises in the sheer joy of filmmaking itself. In the way painters who love painting relish in the texture of the pigment and the brushstroke, we can almost see Godard fondling the film as he edits it himself (as he often has) using the Arriflex to make love to his actors, the scenery, the physical texture of the world, and the process itself as an end. Beneath the cool renegade posture, and all the self conscious artistry for its own sake, however, lay the heart of an unabashed romantic, and, though it may seem ‘uncool’ to say so, the films in which Godard gave free (or freer) reign to his love of emotional storytelling, and a more (relatively) conventional structure, became his finest films; including Breathless, Bande Apart (The Outsiders), Passion and, arguably his best, the ravishing Contempt.

If you're going to be alone in a vast and pitiless universe, it might as well be here...

Often dismissed as his ‘big budget’ ‘accessible’ film, Contempt, while certainly less maddeningly oblique and mystifying as the wacky, disturbing, and deliberately artificial Weekend, or as seemingly impenetrable as Hail Mary, is still hardly mainstream moviemaking. Composed of five or six long passages, or collections of related scenes, which while not actually in real time, are so deftly handled as to seem so, Contempt tells the story of semi-successful screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli), who, while settling into a new apartment in Rome with his complex and troubled wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), is tempted into writing a Sword and Sandal version of The Odyssey for vulgar but charismatic producer Jerry (Jack Palance) who is desperately

Along with the rest of the cast, and most of the audience, Jack Palance can't take his eyes off Brigitte Bardot...

trying to head off the artier digressions of his director Fritz Lang (played by the great one himself) while attempting to lure Camille away from Paul. Along the way Paul commits an unpardonable crime of the heart, which we see as it happens, but which Paul is only able to begin to figure out as he starts to weave into his Odyssey script the threads of his own dissolving marriage.

Some things can't be undone; some looks can't be un-seen

"Every morning, to earn my bread, I go to the market where lies are sold... Full of hope, I get in line amongst the sellers” - Bertolt Brecht “On Hollywood”, quoted by Fritz Lang in Contempt

The Immortal Fritz Lang says goodbye to Hollywood in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt

Contempt was made in 1963, at the tail end of the first of the many roller coaster cycles in 60s-70s Italian popular moviemaking, Just three years earlier, La Dolce Vita was made at the height of the Peplum boom (Hercules and his hundreds of movie children), and derives much of its fizzy, jacked-up energy from a Rome that was riding high on one money making muscle-bound epic after another. A scant 3 years later, the epic fad was fading, (Paul’s one big success, we learn, was the Italian equivalent of The Three Stooges Meet Hercules) taking the Italian film industry into the first of several periodic depressions, and Contempt derives much of its melancholy from the deserted streets of Cinecitta, its sets and screening rooms decaying under the bright Roman sun. Godard seemed to be simultaneously bidding a heartsick farewell to the dying Hollywood of its glory days (and his youth), the grandeur of European filmmaking, and his fading initial faith in the power and hope of The New Wave. He was also beginning to say goodbye to his wife. (Though he and the gorgeous and talented Anna Karina stayed together for two more years, their marriage was already deeply troubled). It is the unwinding of Paul and Camille’s marriage that provides the emotional metaphor that seamlessly ties together what might have become another Godardian polemic into a deeply affecting whole that sweeps the viewer along with a power unequalled by Godard before or since. The ‘Chapters’ (briefly: the tender opening love scene; the protracted argument between Jerry, Paul and Lang about the heart of their Odyssey, the betrayal of Camille, the long, nightmarish confrontation between Camille and Paul in their apartment; and the spacey, tragic conclusion in Jerry’s villa on Capri) are punctuated by majestic, airy shots of ancient Greek statuary, as the Gods look down on the mortal downfalls playing out before them, appearing periodically like a mute Greek Chorus that speaks instead with the achingly beautiful music of the great Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim, Agnes of God, Platoon).

The Gods Look Down...

As we look up...

Georges Delerue was, in many ways, the French Ennio Morricone, a vastly prolific composer who enlivened and ennobled even the most mediocre material, and provided the emotional core of a handful of film classics; and, as Morricone’s score for Once Upon a Time in America is inseparably intertwined with the heart and pulse of that film, so Delerue’s elegaic, heartbreaking music is inextricably imbedded in Contempt, carrying its rhythms from passage to passage, act to act, uniting its multiple personal and cultural tragedies, and carrying us into the hearts of its often difficult and cynical characters.

The visual accompanist to Delerue’s symphonic requiem is the stunning photography of Raoul Coutard. At one point Lang, half-joking, says that Cinemascope is “suitable only for funerals and snakes”, but Godard and Coutard clearly revel in the widescreen saturated colour and brilliant clarity of their emotive vistas, and viewers who have only seen Contempt in its wretched, cropped tape and TV versions will be astonished by the revelatory beauty of this film, so long rendered grungy and cheap in its video incarnations, when seen in all its restored “Franscope” (a cheaper but no less stunning French knock-off of Cinemascope) glory. 

The final scenes in Capri are among the most extraordinarily beautiful ever captured on film; the hallucinatory blue of the sea, and razor sharp detail of stone, vegetation and architecture would be mindboggling as a travelogue; as the backdrop of this multilayered tragedy, they are as indelible and compelling as cinema ever gets.

“The Cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires...”
Andre Bazin, from Contempt

The heart of the film, however, is in its most intimate and difficult moments, in the long central section, in which we see a relationship disintegrate before our eyes in a matter of hours. Long, naturalistic, often improvised scenes can, and often have, seemed arch, artificial and ultimately tedious, in the New Wave, in Godard's lesser work, and certainly in the work of his legions of imitators; but here, what could have been pretentious and tiresome becomes almost unwatchably poignant and heartbreaking, as the passionate, quietly underplayed brilliance of Godard, Piccoli, and the oft-underrated Bardot delivers the most wrenching breakup this side of Scenes from a Marriage, as we see the pain of Godard’s own marriage being explored on the spot in the same way that Paul is using The Odyssey to understand his own predicament; revealing all the petty, irrational and irreparable ways human beings tend to self-destruct in the midst of their most powerful moments of love and passion. 

Marriage counseling, à la Française...

The smoldering focus of Bardot’s performance cannot be overstated; the laserlike anger and hurt at Contempt’s crucial moment of ‘betrayal’ is immediately clear to us, even as Paul cluelessly proceeds to seal his fate. Jack Palance on the other hand is, shall we say, unhampered by the need  for subtlety; but here, his larger than life intensity is perfectly channelled by Godard into the raucous embodiment of that callow indifference so many directors seem to bring out in so many producers, while still keeping Jerry three- dimensional: even in his crassest moments; Jerry, like Paul and Godard himself, also reveres the great gods of Hollywood, and Olympus.

In the end, this episodic film and its disparate “acts” are unified by three indelible images which express all the longing, sadness and hope of this farewell love letter to the power of dreams, of the Hollywoodian, artistic and personal varieties. All three are funeral-like in nature, but carry the whisper of hope that attends all deaths. Along about the middle of the film, as the two artists and their producer end their marathon of bickering, cajolery and manipulation, Fritz Lang emerges into the sunlight, accompanied by Delerue’s inexpressibly sad yet irresistably uplifting theme, and we seem to see the death of all that was best about the grand classic Hollywood era exiting before us. Yet Lang continued to make films long after he had permanently gone out of fashion, often potboilers very much like the film-within-a-film in Contempt, and his simple dignity and perserverance refuse to leave us with out hope. 

The Ending-Within-an-Ending of the Movie-Within-a-Movie....

The final shot of the film pans up to the placid stillness of the sea, in an echo of Ulysses’ futile journey, yet again, it seems to beckon us as well, to possibilities yet unspoken, bringing us ‘back’ to the ‘conclusion’ of the film, which, in true Godardian fashion is the first, great shot of the film: In lingering long shot, Godard follows a lone camera crew as they follow an actress down a deserted Roman street in a seemingly endless tracking shot.

One of the great Movie-Within-a-Movie shots of all time...

This too, seems funereal, yet as the film crew-within-a-film crew reaches us in closeup, Raoul Coutard (playing himself) swings his ‘scope camera down to focus on us, as if to say, as so many great artists have, “its all up to you now”.... 

It's all up to you now...

Up to us now, to keep alive the importance of art, of storytelling, of love, against all rational objection, in the face of all difficulty. It’s something Godard has done all his life, despite wild up-and-downswings in popularity, acceptance and fashion, and, against all odds, continues to do to this day. In the face of a film as surprising and wondrous as Contempt, we can do no less.  

There are undoubtedly better reasons to see Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, but we can't think of one just now...

 

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly • 1966 • Directed by Sergio Leone

In 1965, as Sergio Leone’s For A Few Dollars More was enjoying a runaway success in Italy (it was the most profitable Italian film to date), its screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni brought his good friend Ilya Lopert of United Artists to the Supercinema Theater in Rome to see it. Greatly impressed by the vocal enthusiasm of the packed-to-the-rafters audience, Lopert offered three times what producer Alberto Grimaldi was expecting for the rights to For A Few Dollars More, and, in true Hollywood fashion, sought to secure the rights to Leone’s ‘next film’ in advance. There was, in fact, no ‘next film’, but with an assenting nod from Leone (who spoke little or no English) Vincenzoni began to riff… The story, he said, concerned three rogues in search of a treasure at the time of the Civil War, to which few words Lopert replied: “Okay, we’ll buy it.” And so, after one of the shortest pitch meetings in film history, was born one of the great westerns of all time, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
 
 
Though somewhat miffed that his next film’s concept had arisen from a colleague’s bluff and not his own inspiration, Leone was smart enough to recognize that with United Artist’s backing, he could finally realize his ambition of creating a truly personal film. Since his early days as an (at first uncredited) director of sword and sandal films, through the world wide success of the first two Eastwood films, Leone had felt constrained by the constant second guessing and interference of his producers and collaborators. Now, armed with the largest budget of his career, and his sudden reputation (in Europe at least) as a director to be reckoned with, he could make a film from the heart. Leone also realized that Vincenzoni’s casually-tossed off story synopsis dovetailed perfectly with the film that was already growing in his mind: Leone wanted to take the established Western myth of the triumph of untarnished good over unvarnished evil and turn it inside out.

At last, The credit truly meant something.... Sergio Leone had arrived.

 

Though Leone’s world view has often been inadequately explained as merely cynical, Leone, like his childhood inspirations, (the locally performed commedia-inspired puppet shows, with their raucous, amoral but lovable characters, and the colourful tragic-comic adventures of Don Quixote), saw the world as a raucous, jumbled mix of honor, brutality, romance and betrayal in which humor and savagery were inseparably mixed, and in which the traditional notion of strictly admirable heroes and purely evil villains was not particularly useful. With these formative attitudes as his starting point, Leone set out to paint a vast historical canvas on which the adventures of his flawed but fascinating characters would get at some deeper truths lying behind the spectacle: like his inspirations, a popular entertainment with an underlying understanding of the human condition just below its surface. It is this beautifully realized ambition that gives The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.(TGTGATU) its uncommon and enduring resonance and power.

Though The Italian Western had already been born two years earlier with Leone’s tribute to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, For A Fistful of Dollars, and undergone further refinement in its masterful sequel For A Few Dollars More, the style, flavor and tropes that would be relentlessly imitated for much of the next decade were forged, cemented, and reached world wide acceptance in TGTBATU. From its first moments, as Luigi Laudini’s savage, throat grabbing credits (an innovative combination of real and re-created Mathew Brady tintype and gaudy 60’s animated slices of color) slashed their way across the screen, their booming cannon-shots a literal shot across the bow to the traditional western, accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s daring, seminal music; what had already been apparent to western buffs and inner city audiences became clear to everyone: Something New Had Been Added.

Through a combination of audacious, vibrant animation...

 

...and faux Daguerreotypes, Luigi Laudini's gripping, and influential, credits immediately set the tone for TGTBATU, not to mention a generation of Spaghetti Westerns to come...

Audiences enthusiastically embraced its audacious, confident mixture of cynical violence, gripping emotional drama, humor, and its affectionate, in your face parody of western convention. Time after time TGTBATU fearlessly flouts movie western convention and gets away way with it; starting with those startling, freeze frame written-out identifications of its principal characters.

And what characters they are. From the moment fugitive bandit Tuco (the late Eli Wallach in a career-defining role) mows down the first in a string of hapless opponents and comes crashing through a storefront window (”The Ugly”) we find it impossible to resist this amoral rogue. Wallach’s Tuco is a sensual, Rabelesian incarnation of ancient characters, from the rascally Brighella of Leone’s puppet show inspirations, all the way back to the ‘trickster” character of Native American lore, 

If you have to shoot, SHOOT... Don't talk... The late Eli Wallach in a defining role as Tuco Ramirez.

and a recurring character thread in most of Leone’s work; an attractive and charming brigand capable of cold-blooded murder one moment and sincere, tearful regret the next, whose worst transgressions and misdeeds cannot prevent us from sympathizing (and perhaps identifying) with him. The introduction of Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) is no surprise: his freeze frame “The Bad” comes after he has slaughtered an entire family for ‘a scrap of information’ and murdered the man who hired him to do it.

Angel Eyes indeed... Leone's closeups had the magical effect of magnifying the charisma of his actors in an electric, hyper-real manner that was often imitated, but never even remotely equalled...

Van Cleef (a Hollywood bit player who spent the last years of his life an unlikely B-movie star thanks to Leone’s ability to hone in on even the most unlikely actors’ essence, and render them physically, vividly compelling) plays what seems at first to be a version of his far more complex Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More, but is, in TGTBATU, an incarnation of pure, rapacious evil; more a plot device, (albeit a chillingly believable one) than a character (tellingly Van Cleef’s character is named Sentenza, as in Death Sentence, in the Italian dub). But it is in the appearance of bounty hunter Blondie, just in time to save Tuco from a trio of competitors, that Leone’s most enduring contribution to film iconography stepped into film history.

Clint. The Man With No Name... 'Nuff said.

There is arguably no film ‘hero’ more instantly, mesmerizingly and hypnotically fascinating than Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; clad in gambler’s hat and serape, eyes in an unknowable squint, the movements of his half smoked cigar punctuating that hissing, hypnotic whisper; and while no one could guess at that time that this charismatic gunslinger would himself become one of the great directors, it was clear to film audiences, male and female alike, that a star had been born. When Blondie’s freeze frame “The Good” appears as he is betraying his partner Tuco, leaving him to walk eighty miles of desert back to town alone, we know we are in Sergio Leone’s personal, and peculiar, moral universe.

Though it was clear from the earliest frames of The Colossus of Rhodes, and certainly in For a Fistful of Dollars, and For a Few Dollars More, that Sergio Leone was not an ordinary journeyman director; in TGTBATU, Leone comes into his own, not only in the complexity of the themes which are the undercurrent of what seems, on the surface to be merely a terrific western, but in his absolute mastery of the film medium. The long sweeping pans and crane shots which seem, in a few brief moments to define a place and time, the attention to detail, physical, historical and emotional which provide the emotional weight to those great vistas, and the love of texture, both visual and auditory, all gloriously inform and fill out every nook and cranny of the screen in TGTBATU. Leone loved the details of the physical world; the look and feel of things (his widow Carla says his favourite pastime was endlessly polishing his beloved antiques collection) and TGTBATU revels in every crunch of boot on gravel; every rustle of wind, every slurp of food (the two most terrifying scenes in TGTBATU, the murder of the farmer, and the interrogation of Tuco by Angel Eyes) are accompanied by the sensual eating of meals) 

In Sergio Leone's universe, Food (Life) often precedes Death...

and in the texture and appeal of objects like the gun collection that Tuco lovingly assembles and disassembles before using them to rob their owner. Leone is supported in these obsessions by long-time collaborators set designer/art director Carlo Simi, the extraordinarily authentic nature of whose creations undoubtedly sprang from the fact that he was a practicing architect; and the equally extraordinary Tonino Delli Colli (Lacombe Lucien, The Name of the Rose) who captures Simi’s creations and Leone’s obsessions with a breathtaking clarity, and the eye of a painter. 

Leone, Carlo Simi, and Tonino Delli Colli together render vistas of breathtaking realism and painterly beauty...

With their help, Leone achieves that peculiar combination of hyper-realism and intensified fantasy which was his own peculiar and inimitable (though many certainly tried) style of filmmaking. Leone’s fellowship of creators is completed by the dynamic and heartrending music of a young Ennio Morricone,

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, circa 1966

whose music becomes a mature and fully developed presence in TGTBATU. From the mournful majesty of the theme which accompanies Van Cleef’s approach at the doomed farm in the opening sequences, to the war theme, whose discordant trumpets convey both the surface glory and the essential tragedy of war, to what is probably the most universally recognized piece of film music ever, the aaahh ah ah ah aaahh… main theme, it is impossible to imagine TGTBATU without Morricone’s resplendent score.

Though considered a classic western, TGTBATU is, in a certain sense, not a western at all, as its episodic, picaresque journey takes place against the vast, constant backdrop of the Civil War, and forms a context of corruption and senseless, unthinking brutality against which the actions of our two deeply flawed ‘heroes’ seem positively noble by comparison. The war weaves a thread throughout the film, from the early scene in which a legless veteran puts Angel Eyes on Blondie and Tuco’s trail for the price of a drink, to the fly-ridden mission hospital run by Tuco’s monastic brother, to the horrific prison camp of “Betterville”,  to the ghostly retreat of the defeated Confederate army across the dusty wasteland; culminating in the film’s justly celebrated set-piece: the siege and destruction of Langstone Bridge. This epic and sorrowful sequence evoking, (and easily equal to), historic cinematic evocations of the futility and ugliness of war from DW Griffith to Lewis Milestone to Kubrick; is Leone, Simi and Delli Colli at their best; their long, corpse-filled trenches and vast rows of booming cannons (which would become the centerpiece of the hugely successful American TV ad campaign) etched in equal measures of expansive historic scope and grimy blood soaked detail. The sequence also signals the deepening development of character missing in TGTBATU’s predecessors, as Blondie and Tuco take time out of their treasure hunt to fulfill the dying wish of the Union commander by blowing up the bridge, thereby ending the battle; their skeptical and larcenous partnership gradually turning into a grudging friendship. (It is also hard to imagine the Man with No Name of the first two films stopping to offer his last cigar to a dying soldier). 

Blondie and Tuco's fulfillment of a dying Union commander's last wish...

...and Blondie's comforting of a dying Confederate soldier provide moments of humanity not found in the first two 'Dollar' films.

Against this backdrop, TGTBATU‘s irreverent journey become increasingly surreal; alternately stretching out certain sequences with a resolute unwillingness to rush its evocative, moody visuals, at others collapsing time and physical space in an almost absurd fashion (Angel Eyes goes, seemingly in a few weeks, from being a lone bounty hunter to second in command of “Betterville”, and Blondie and Tuco fail to notice that they are one shrubbery away from a monumental battle until sentries improbably appear from out of frame to confront them) that betrays TGTBATU as the bizarre, almost dreamlike journey across the landscape of human folly that it is.

All of the above notwithstanding, it must be emphasized that TGTBATU is no rarified art-house musing on the nature of existence, but a rousing good action film that can be, and often is, appreciated simply as a ripping good western. Full of violent, splendidly wrought gun battles, genuinely funny moments of sardonic humor, intrigue, double-and-triple crossing, and thrilling action set-pieces; and fleshed out by a superb cast of Italian character actors and Euro-Western regulars, 

Great Faces (and Actors) all... The irreplaceable Italian character actors Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega, Aldo Guiffre and Aldo Sambrell.

(Mario Brega as Angel Eyes’ loutish sidekick, Luigi Pistilli as Tuco’s priestly brother and especially Aldo Guiffre as the tormented Union commander are standouts), The Good, The Bad and the Ugly just happens to have been made by an exceptional crew of film artists, at a rare and signal turning point in cultural history, and can be appreciated as either a whacking good cowboy movie, or as a deceptively deep piece of personal filmmaking; or, hopefully, as both. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the perfect ambassador to represent United Artists’ 90th Anniversary, and it is even better than you remember it.

The author wishes to express his appreciation for, and highest recommendation of, Christopher Frayling’s monumental Leone biography “Something To Do With Death”, whose extraordinary insights and biographical information were very helpful in writing this article.