The Man with the Golden Arm

Nobody, including junkies, wants to watch most films about junkies, unless you have exceedingly excremental taste and can somehow trick yourself into believing there is any sort of truth in regard to the dope fiend lifestyle in senseless swill like Askhenazi pseudo-arthouse poser Darren Aronofsky’s pleb-tier clinical con-job Requiem for a Dream (2000) where the soulless smackhead lifestyle is romanticized in a rather retarded MTV-esque fashon full of debasing hip hop montage masturbation and pathetic plastic histrionics, among other aesthetically bankrupt would-be-artsy-fartsy asininities. Aside from being an absolutely aesthetically atrocious film that test the bounds of feckless art faggotry and too-cool-for-school cultural retardation, the film was clearly directed by someone that has no direct experience with heroin or junkies but of course an authentic portrayal of such human debasement would have never been such a big hit with packs of mindlessly rebellious teenagers and sapless liberal academics. While attempting to do their own best Harmony Korine/Larry Clark impersonation, the Safdie brothers utilized their typical cheap gimmick of poorly disguising autistic trash as provocative art for Heaven Knows What (2014) where they utilized real junkies yet managed to say absolutely nothing new or interesting about the junky experience. While I do appreciate films like Barbet Schroeder’s More (1969), Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970), Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971), and Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981) to varying degrees, none of these films also seem to provide the full junky experience, especially in terms of the vicious circle that comes with full-blown junkydom.  Thankfully, blue-eyed goombah god Frank Sinatra was able to provide the world with a fuller look at the perturbing perils of heroin hell.

 Needless to say, I never expected that a film from the mid-1950s starring alpha-wop performer Sinatra and directed by subversive Austro-American semite Otto Preminger (Bonjour Tristesse, Anatomy of a Murder) would provide in what is my best estimation the full junky experience, at least in a sort of soundly seedy post-noir sense where the most glaring trash on the streets is the people. Indeed, The Man with the Golden Arm (1956)—a film that could not be more immaculately and unforgettably titled—is far from a fun flick as a sort of cinematic equivalent to stale dog shit and old vomit boiling on a hot city sidewalk. In short, the film does what Preminger does best in terms of its hardly covert cynicism, misanthropy, and overall unflattering depiction of humanity; or, in this sad soulless case, subhumanity. In my admittedly counter-kosher yet reasonably artistically fair opinion, Preminger—an Austrian Jew that was oftentimes described as an ‘Nazi’ by collaborators due to his cold and sadistic authoritarian character (not to mention his strange fetish for playing Nazi characters, most famously in fellow chosenite Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953))—was no real artist and he never directed a true cinematic masterpiece despite coming pretty damn close with his classic film noir Laura (1944), but his strong and subversive character secured his place in cinema history as a somewhat memorable auteur that, for better or worse, helped to destroy the censors. As Andrew Sarris once stated of the filmmaker, “His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer […] Preminger’s legend is that of the cosmic cost accountant, a ruthless creature who will mangle the muse for the sake of a shooting schedule.” More than an accountant, Preminger—the son of a once-powerful Austrian public prosecutor who earned a ‘Doctor of Law’ at the recommendation of his father—demonstrated the antichristial spirit of a tyrannical Talmudic lawyer that prides himself on the malefic maneuvering and manipulation of the legal system, which is actually something he both personally attempted and depicted with his films, including The Man with the Golden Arm.

While Preminger apparently originally had little interest in directing a film about a dreary dope fiend, he was quite keen on destroying the Hollywood Production Code, which states in the ‘Crimes Against The Law’ section of film censor Joseph I. Breen's document: “The illegal drug traffic, and drug addiction, must never be presented.” While Jewish leftist actor John Garfield intended to play the lead in a projected cinematic adaptation of kosher quasi-commie Nelson Algren’s 1949 source novel of the same name, the outlaw film noir star died prematurely in 1952 long before Preminger became interested in the project (in fact, Preminger bought the rights for the project from Garfield's estate).  In the end, it was ultimately Algren's great misfortune that Preminger ever got interested in the project. Although the filmmaker originally had enough respect for the novelist to have him brought out from his home in Gary, Indiana to Hollywood to write the film’s screenplay, he apparently did not respect him or his screenwriting abilities too much as he soon replaced him with Walter Newman (Ace in the Hole, Cat Ballou) in an artistically disastrous scenario that haunted the writer for the rest of his life, or as hapa film historian Chris Fujiwara explained in his biography The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (2008), “For Algren, Preminger would become an obsession, a symbol of the crass arrogance of power, an enemy with whom he would grapple again and again in his writing and his reminiscences.” A man that was ruthlessly criticized by none other than his kosher-con racial kinsman Norman Podhoretz for glorifying ghetto trash at the expense of polite society, Algren had what might be described as the quintessential ‘Barton Fink Mindset,’ which is really underscored in a critique of Preminger where he states, “…the life of the common man has never filtered into Otto’s brains and emotions; or into his talent such as he has. The book dealt with life at the bottom. Otto has never, not for so much as a single day, had any experience except that of life at the top.” Unfortunately, the trouble with Algren's critique is that, despite being a Hollywood film featuring the novelty of a famous garlic-breathed singer-cum-star, Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm does an inordinately good job portraying the purgatorial (non)existence of poor dope-shooting and scam-running proles to the point where one feels like taking a shower after watching the film lest you succumb to an unnerving feeling of festering filth.

In his highly worthwhile text Opium, journal d'une désintoxication (1930) aka Opium: The Diary of His Cure—a delightful diary of self-deluding yet insightful spiritual degeneration that makes alpha-Beat William S. Burroughs’ books on dope seem all-too-soulless by comparison—French poet and cinemagician Jean Cocteau states, “The half-sleep of opium makes us pass down corridors and cross halls and push open doors and lose ourselves in a world where people startled out of their sleep are horribly afraid of us.” Undoubtedly, Cocteau’s words are a great way to describe the inordinately haunting and oftentimes debasing experience of watching The Man with the Golden Arm, which is set in a piss poor polack ghetto of the North Side of Chicago where people seem to thrive on nothing more than fear, paranoia, and a special sort of social parasitism where even the feral version of ‘man’s best friend’ is a commodity and suavely sociopathic dope dealers aggressively prey on (ex)addicts in the gleeful hope that they get rehooked. Indeed, as Burroughs once wrote, “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” As soon as the film’s protagonist Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) is released from a federal Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, he makes the mistake of heading back to his crud-crusted Chicago hellhole where his sinisterly slimy dealer Louie (Darren McGavin)—a virtual pimp of human souls that prides himself on underhandedly exploiting human weakness for maximum personal benefit—immediately begins offering him ‘free’ heroin (notably, the name of the drug is never mentioned). Unfortunately for street parasite Louie, at least initially, Frankie has big plans and wants to leave behind his previous criminal career as the ‘dealer’ in illegal card games to become the drummer of a big band. Of course, as Burroughs also wrote, “A junkie spends half his life waiting,” and while waiting Frankie cannot ignore the, “thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.”

Notably, in his book Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2008), English mischling psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple completely demystifies the deluded view of drugs, especially opiates and heroin, as a source of profound artistic inspiration and creativity and instead presents them as a patently pathetic tool of the self-destructively nihilistic and, in turn, oftentimes criminal. In short, it is rare for happy people to become heroin addicts and it is only natural that someone suffering from a spiritual void would try to fill said void with what Burroughs lovingly described as ‘Cocteau’s kick.’  Undoubtedly, such is the case of Frankie Machine who has somewhat tangible dreams but is living a virtual nightmare as the figurative emotional-punching-bag of a deranged wife named Zosh (Eleanor Parker) and the pawn of local small-time criminals. While Frankie deeply loves his ex-flame Molly (Kim Novak), he felt so guilty about (supposedly) crippling Zosh while drunk driving that he pathetically agreed to marry the crazy cunt while she was still in the hospital. In fact, Molly, who works as a server at a strip club, is the perfect dream girl as she encourages Frankie to pursue his dream of being a professional drummer while resentful wench Zosh berates him for even considering doing something that might better him and, in turn, give him a reason to leave her and move on with his life. Frankie also has a goofy best friend named ‘Sparrow’ (Arnold Stang) that runs a silly scam that involves peddling homeless street dogs to unsuspecting customers. While Sparrow is a good friend, he is also a bizarrely nebbish low-life and is involved with the same scumbags that plague Frankie’s life. In short, Molly is the only true bright light in Frankie’s increasingly darkening abyss of a life. Needless to say, anyone that has to deal with an insufferable bitch like Zosh would love to escape to the ecstatic warmth of a heroin high, so it is not long before dealer Louie finally convinces Frankie to embrace the narcotic void. As Louie gleefully states before Frankie shoots his first dope since his prison stint, “Monkey’s never dead, dealer. They monkey never dies. When you kick him off……he just hides in a corner waiting his turn.”

As one can expect from any serious self-destructive addict, the abject misery of Frankie’s personal life parallels the extent of his drug abuse, though the former oftentimes fuels the latter and vice versa; or, in short, the vicious circle that is dope fiend purgatory. Although Frankie knows what he must do due to lessons from a certain Dr. Lennox (who he proudly states of, “He was real good to me”) as demonstrated by remarks like, “See, part of the cure is to keep yourself busy doing things you enjoy. Like for instance, I wanted to learn to drum and music,” the totally callous and craven parasites of his subprole life keep scamming him into their sociopathic schemes. Indeed, aside from the fact that his wife Zosh is keeping him a virtual slave by pretending to be a wheelchair-bound cripple when she is actually perfectly capable of walking, Frankie’s old boss Schwiefka (Robert Strauss)—a man that unequivocally proves that sometimes it is perfectly fine to judge a book by its cover—wants to make him his virtual slave again for his illegal card games and dope dealer Louie largely makes that happen with his highly addictive street smack. While Frankie does manage to make it into the musicians union, he botches his big band tryout due to suffering from drug withdrawal. To make matters worse, Frankie gets caught cheating during a long poker marathon that brings disgrace to his bastard of a boss Schwiefka. When Frankie beats him during an unsuccessful attempt to rob his drug stash, Louie naturally goes looking for him and is in quite surprise when he accidentally discovers that Zosh can actually walk. Afraid that Frankie will surely leave her if he discovers her big lie, Zosh actually kills Louie by pushing him over the railing of her apartment stairwell where he falls a couple floors to his miserable death (admittedly, this is a fairly awesome and completely unexpected murder scene). Naturally, Frankie is immediately suspected of the killing due to being one of Louie's virtual dope slaves, but luckily he is hiding out at his great love Molly’s apartment while he withdrawals from dope.  Needless to say, Frankie certainly does not have luck on his side but he does have love in the form of gorgeous ghetto Fräulein Molly who demonstrates through sheer action that she is the only true good element in the protagonist's life (after all, even Frankie's best bud Sparrow is, at best, a sleazy street scavenger that regularly lounges around low-lifes).

Zosh is such a pathetically evil monster that she actually dares to confess to Molly in regard to her long-term plans for her husband, “He put me in this chair. And as long as I sit here, he’ll never leave me. He knows he belongs to me. I wouldn’t wanna live if he left me. And I’d rather see him dead too than have him go to you.” While Molly has come by to convince her to help in regard to his drug problems and being suspected of murder, Zosh—a woman so deranged that she regularly happily glances at a misspelled ‘romantic’ scrapbook chronicling her crippling and subsequent marriage to the protagonist—is only interested in keeping Frankie for herself and she will go to any low to keep him on her gutter grade femme fatale leash. In the end, Frankie, who has decided to leave town, finally discovers Zosh’s handicap ruse and so does the local cop Captain Bednar (Emile Meyer) who immediately realizes that she is actually Louie’s killer. With nothing left to lose aside from her miserable life, which is worth less than nil, Zosh impulsively decides to throwaway said miserable life by jumping off the balcony of her apartment building right in front of Frankie in what feels like a moment of karmic kismet where a murderess dispatches herself the same exact way that she killed her victim. In the end in what is ultimately a fittingly uncomfortable yet largely deserved ‘happy ending,’ Frankie and Molly leave town while perennial ghetto-dweller Sparrow predictably stays behind. Not surprisingly, Nelson Algren’s source novel ends on a more negative and decidedly anti-Hollywood note with Frankie pulling a Rozz Williams and killing himself on April Fools’ Day after being forced to abandon Molly while hiding from the cops. Needless to say, it always feels like a sick joke when ‘love conquers all’ in a Preminger picture.

In my opinion, Preminger might be an authentic auteur but he is also an obviously overrated auteur that never managed to direct a true masterpiece. Indeed, while Andrew Sarris was right when he wrote, “LAURA is Preminger’s CITIZEN KANE, at least in the sense that Otto’s detractors, like Orson’s, have never permitted him to live it down,” I do not think I would ever describe Laura as an unmitigated masterpiece yet, at the same time, none of Preminger’s subsequent output comes even close to it aside from The Man with the Golden Arm. While I have not seen all the director’s films (which would undoubtedly be an unrewarding and redundant task), I have seen most of the notable ones and they are largely too long, insufferably (socio)politically motivated, rambling, and plagued with a sort of obscenely obnoxious arrogance that the director was well known for. When Preminger attempted to make a virtual Zionist The Gone with the Wind via Exodus (1960), he only achieved bombastic banality and a sort of gratingly disingenuous humanism where he tries in vain to care about the plight of Palestinians in between glorifying Herzlian heroics. While the auteur was certainly successful in demonstrating his fetish for law and the manipulation of said law with his classic flick Anatomy of a Murder (1959), no courtroom drama deserves to be at the preposterous length of 160 minutes. With his (anti)Catholic epic The Cardinal (1963)—a film where the auteur gleefully associates both Catholicism and his seemingly much despised Austro-Kraut homeland with the social nastiness of National Socialism—Preminger was unable to hide his hatred for the Catholic Church and lead Tom Tryon (who was apparently at least partly inspired to quit acting due to his experiences with Preminger).  As for his Panavision Pearl Harbor epic In Harm's Way (1965), Preminger produced a particularly plodding piece of all-star stagnation where John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Henry Fonda seem like they are pretending to star in a John Ford flick and failing miserably at it.  While Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) is a particularly potent preternatural psychological-thriller that, in many ways, defies classification, Preminger, who was ironically not really fond of the film, would never again direct a truly worthwhile movie. When he was not shitting on the American South with unintentionally grotesque tabloid-like trash like Hurry Sundown (1967), Preminger was paying insincere backhanded tribute to the hippies due to their mindless subversion of traditional white Christian American society with insufferably kitschy, pseudo-psychedelic twaddle like Skidoo (1968), which is notable for featuring a virtual graveyard of washed-up actors, including Jackie Gleason, Frankie Avalon, Cesar Romero, and Groucho Marx.  As for Such Good Friends (1971) ghostwritten by Elaine May under the pseudonym ‘Esther Dale,’ Preminger made a valiant attempt at being a poor man's Woody Allen in an unintentionally absurd kosher sex-comedy that is about as hot as Whoopi Goldberg's nappy naughty bits.

Of course, one of the things that makes The Man with the Golden Arm so surprisingly enthralling aside from Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak’s performances is that, with the exception of the iconic title sequence by Saul Bass, it is not particularly Premingerian in the emotional sense and it actually feels sincerely sympathetic (as opposed to arrogantly cynical) in its depiction of human degradation and desperation. Aside from source Nelson Algren’s novel, the film probably owes its sense of humanistic authenticity to Sinatra who, unlike a lot of people that worked with Preminger, was unwillingly to take shit from the dictatorial director, which he was able to get away with due to his fame and popularity (notably, Marlon Brando, who snatched the lead role in On the Waterfront (1954) from Sinatra, was also interested in the role).  In fact, Preminger was so impressed with Sinatra that he wanted to use him in an adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, or as the auteur-cum-producer wrote, “Many years later Paramount asked me to direct THE GODFATHER.  I thought Sinatra would be wonderful in the lead and sent him the book.  I even offered to eliminate the character of the winger, who some people thought was patterned after Sinatra.  Nevertheless he said, ‘Ludvig, I pass on this.’”  Luckily, Francis Ford Coppola would ultimately direct the film as Preminger has never directed a film as nearly as aesthetically potent and truly epic as The Godfather (1972) despite his tackling of various films with long-running times.

As Chris Fujiwara noted in regard to the film, “Like THE MOON IS BLUE, SAINT JOAN, and, especially, PORGY AND BESS, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is in this sense an exception to the main movement of Preminger’s work after his departure from Fox and before SKIDOO: an abstract, hermetic film rather than one that involves itself with a reality that exists outside, and for other purposes than, the filmic project. The sets render Algren’s skid row as an isolated and self-contained world, accentuating both its hopelessness and its lack of historicity. This world has no past and no future; it is read for the bulldozers. The stylization of some of the performances—Robert Strauss’s and Arnold Stang’s, notably—suits this desperate and artificial quality perfectly.” Of course, this ‘artificiality’ that Fujiwara speaks of only underscores the protagonist’s increasing junky jadedness, dirtbag delirium, and lingering lovesickness, as if the character has been condemned to a completely colorless heroin habitué hell.  Indeed, the best compliment I can pay the film is that it is like the Fritz Lang's M (1931) of junky films as a boldly fucked flick that somehow manages to utilize studio artifice to underscore the metaphysical malaise of the urban underworld to the point where the viewer feels that they have actually spent a couple hours in heroin addict Hades.

If The Man with the Golden Arm is the junky cinematic jam par excellence where the viewer has the singular luxury of experiencing the spiritually necrotic nadir of narcotic nihilism, Jean Cocteau’s surrealist directorial debut Le sang d'un poète (1930) aka The Blood of a Poet—a film that the poet turned filmmaker alludes to in his opium diary when he states, “My next work will be a film”—is its European arthouse celluloid counterpoint as an oneiric Orphic odyssey as inspired by the auteur’s own apparently life-changing experiences with opium. In short, Cocteau’s film is arguably an example of the ‘positive’ effects of opium. Notably, Cocteau would argue in his drug diary, “Opium, which changes our speeds, procures for us a very clear awareness of worlds which are superimposed on each other, which interpenetrate each other, but do not even suspect each other’s existence.” While I can somewhat respect Cocteau’s somewhat naively romantic view of a drug that debased his soul and his words certainly make for a good description of the otherworldly experiences of the eponymous poet protagonist played by Enrique Riveros, The Man with the Golden Arm is unequivocally more in tune with the hauntingly hideous moral, emotional, physical, and spiritual lows associated with heroin addiction. In fact, I would warn the more impressionable art fags out there to stay steer clear of Cocteau’s Opium: The Diary of His Cure lest they catch a nasty addiction that won’t inspire much art but probably tons of all-consuming misery and quite possibly even death. After all, for every Bukowski and Burroughs, who were both miserable men, there are probably millions of degenerate drunks and junkies with failed artistic intentions and The Man with the Golden Arm does a rather respectful job depicting the perils of such a disgusting dead-end life.

As for a vaguely similar real-life parallel to the character of protagonist Frankie Machine in terms of a junky jazz musician that lives to lose, American jazz trumpeter Chet Baker is a good example and, in that sense, queer fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s documentary Let's Get Lost (1988) certainly makes for a great double feature with Preminger’s flick.  Needless to say, superficially romantic pop cinema like The Basketball Diaries (1995) is nothing short of a frivolous emotional con job if you are really looking to get down with dope fiends.  While by no means a bad movie, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996)—a film that seems more aesthetically inspired by psychedelic drugs than the opium oriented sort—has probably inspired more people to shoot junk than steer clear of it.  As for junky films directed by actual junkies, Richard Kern (Submit to Me, Fingered) of the so-called Cinema of Transgression movement is probably the most notable example and naturally his films are totally morally retarded.  Needless to say, most junky cinema is junk.

Notably, Andrew Sarris summed up Preminger’s artistically curious cinematic career as follows, “We are left with a director who has made at least four masterpieces of ambiguity and objectivity—LAURA, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, ADVISE AND CONSENT, and BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, a director who sees all problems and issues as a single-take two-shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other, a representation of the right-wrong in all of us as our share of the human condition. In the middle of the conflict stands Otto Preminger, right-wrong, good-bad, and probably sincere-cynical.” Indeed, aside from the occasional neo-Sirkian melodrama à la Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), not many films quite achieve the “sincere-cynical” of The Man with the Golden Arm where a marriage is depicted as something as spiritually deadly as narcotic addiction. And, undoubtedly, arguably more than any of Preminger’s other films, his junky flick depicts, for better or worse, the signature penetrating Premingerian moral ambiguity (or lack of morality) that Sarris relatively soundly describes.  In short, The Man with the Golden Arm is no pussy film, but a penetrating piece of understated pathos where one gets to the dead heart of addiction in a fashion that does not coddle the viewer or give them wild romantic ideas about addiction.

As someone that has personally known various junkies, including of the dead, undead, and almost-dead variety, The Man with the Golden Arm proved to be at least strong enough to make me (almost) consider taking a nice warm shower lest bask in the metaphysical grudge and grime, but I must confess that the film does not address the philosophical aspect of junkydom. Indeed, as Cocteau once wrote, “The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind. Every fortnight I change my programme. For me opium is a revolt. Addiction a revolt. The cure a revolt. I do not talk of my works. Each one guillotines the other. My only aim is to spare myself Napoleon.” Of course, one also argue that the opioid epidemic plaguing white mainstream America is also a (largely unconscious and supremely misguided) collective nihilistic revolt against Hebraic Hollywood and all it stands for as Tinseltown is merely the propaganda arm for the globalized crypto-kosher post-white multicultural America. And, of course, it was Preminger, who literally utilized The Man with the Golden Arm as one of his various cinematic weapons to crush mainstream white Christian morality, who helped to pave the way to this Hollywoodland hell. In that sense, I somehow feel much better about recommending Victor Sjöström’s silent dipsomaniac delight The Phantom Carriage (1921)—an aesthetically pioneering film that takes both a literal and figurative approach to depicting the haunting horrors of alcoholism—instead of Preminger’s lumpenprole dope fiend flick when it comes to films depicting the purgatorial perils of addiction.  Indeed, if non-junky Preminger's greatest contribution to the art of cinema was a junky flick featuring a popular wop crooner that was at least partly motivated by quasi-legal reasons, one comes to a rather dubious conclusion about his value and legacy as an artist.  In that sense, Preminger was probably on a similar moral plane as a junky, albeit with the spirit of a Wall Street cokehead type.  Of course, I say that as someone that considers transcendental European arthouse films like Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977) and Adriaan Ditvoorst's White Madness (1984) to be the absolute apotheosis of junky cinema, but such hermetic flicks were not made for the same American prole audience that The Man with the Golden Arm was meant to appeal to.  After all, even when it comes to junkies, not all people are equal.

-Ty E

The Skin (1981)

Aside from her fundamentally flawed SS sadomasochistic danse-macabre Il portiere di notte (1974) aka The Night Porter and to a lesser extent her dystopian sci-fi flick I cannibali (1970) aka The Year of the Cannibals and Nietzsche horn-dog hagiography Al di là del bene e del male (1977) aka Beyond Good and Evil, Italian auteuress Liliana Cavani—a filmmaker that is always more interesting when she is more intemperate artsploitation than plodding arthouse—has never been a filmmaker I seriously respected yet she certainly won me over with a recent viewing of her exceedingly eccentrically epic Curzio Malaparte adaptation La pelle (1981) aka The Skin.  Curiously feeling oftentimes more Fellini-esque than Fellini in terms of combining the post-neorealist humanism of something like I Vitelloni (1953) with the surrealist situational travelogue-like approach of Roma (1972) and a sort of primordial dago decadence à la Fellini Satyricon (1969), not to mention a weird inexplicable monster fish scene that recalls La Dolce Vita (1960), the film is, in my obscenely obnoxious opinion, Cavani’s greatest contribution to the art of cinema in terms of apocalyptic intrigue and downright sheer sleazy entertainment. Indeed, quite unlike the filmmaker’s other films which, not unlike those of cosmopolitan commie Bertolucci, are completely deracinated and rarely guido-esque in a flagrantly gommbah fashion like the films of Pietro Germi and Ettore Scola, this wayward WWII epic—a delightfully degrading tribute to human debasement and desperation—is shamelessly and insanely Italian in its essence to the point of bordering on full-blown whacked-out wopsloitation à la Scola's Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) aka Brutti, sporchi e cattivi. In fact, the film is the ultimate ‘antifascist’ flick in terms of completely contradicting the Mussolinian ideal and portraying the Italian people, or at least the Neapolitan people, as a superlatively shameless people without pride or scruples.

 Indeed, in the film, mothers literally sell their little boy’s buttholes to pedo-prone Moroccan Muslim invaders and fucked fathers hold group shows where American soldiers get to take turns fingering a rare teenage virginal vagina. Likewise, Sicilian slags—a less than gorgeous group that invades Naples and causes the drastic depreciation of dago pussy for everyone—are so desperate for the dollars of darkie GIs, who are quite stereotypically only interested in fucking blonde white women, that they wear blonde wigs on their overly punished sub-prole pussies. Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, but somehow I seriously doubt that the all-the-more-demolished krauts had reached such ungodly extremes of virtually transcendental whoredom, even if the kraut capitulation resulted in the unwanted births of various Günther Kaufmann bastard types. In short, The Skin—a sometimes vertiginously vulgar film full of venal vulgarians that manages to find a certain assuredly aberrant joy in the collective degeneration of a sub-piss-poor peoples—exemplifies the sort of scathing cynicism, shameless honesty (paradoxically combined with grandiose dishonesty), and ‘unflattering humanism’ that guidos do best. Forget Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), Cavani’s odious odyssey of obscenity dares to plunge the viewer into the true dark disgusting depths of despair and destitution that plagued the defeated peoples of the Axis Powers in a manner that no Teutonic filmmaker has ever dared to touch despite the New German Cinema obsession with WWII and its virtually post-apocalyptic aftermath.  Still, Cavani’s underrated flick makes for a great double feature with Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).

 While The Skins is uniquely unflattering in its depiction of Italians, it is strangely ‘pro-American’ in a sort of cynical backhanded Italian sense where the dumb uncultivated yank is ridiculed for his naiveté. Indeed, as Cavani stated in the featurette At the Frontier of the Apocalypse in regard to the source writer’s view of dumb yanks, “Malaparte sees the Americans in THE SKINS as a young and naïve people, which is somewhat true, and he’s very attached to them. He has a love for them. There’s a love for this quality, as if they were still clean, somehow untouched by sin, by the sin of war, the sin of butchery, by these things. He sees them in a positive way, as a person who has a positive view of the world would. And this comes out. He sees them as naïve because a city like Naples is the complete opposite of the American mentality. It can’t get any more different.” As to the right sort of symbol of strong puritanical American naïveté, Cavani felt that Burt Lancaster—a cultivated American that already contributed greatly to guido cinema via masterful Luchino Visconti flicks like The Leopard (1963) and Conversation Piece (1974)—was the right mensch for the job, or as she explained, “…I needed an American that didn’t seem malicious at all. That really represented the idea of the American liberator. In that sense, ariose, with traits of goodness. Rough, but rough like a father.” Of course, as the same singularly stoical actor that portrayed the strangely paternal and harshly heroic GI lead Major Abraham Falconer of Sydney Pollack’s underrated WWII flick Castle Keep (1969)—another apocalyptic Europa-in-ruins epic of eccentricity that combines tragicomedic realism and surrealism—Lancaster was the perfect man for the job, but great Latin lover Marcello Mastroianni shines no less as the lead.  Speaking of Pollack’s flick, Mike Nichols' similarly overlooked dark war dramedy Catch-22 (1970) seems like an obvious influence on The Skin, especially in terms of its playfully preternatural depiction of American GIs and unhinged depictions of guidette whores, among other things.

 As The Skin fleetingly makes reference to as if to absolve the writer of guilt, Curzio Malaparte—a half-German by birth that was born Curt Erich Suckert but a 100% Italian in terms of effortless charm and unscrupulous spirit—was originally a card-carrying fascist to the point where he was a vocal intellectual supporter of the rise of the National Fascist Party and Benito Mussolini, but he was too uncompromisingly individualist to properly play the game and opportunism eventually led him to switching sides to communism and Catholicism after WWII (though one would not realize that by watching the film).  In Cavani’s fucked flick, Malaparte comes off seemingly like a sort of spiritually decadent aristocrat of spirit that is easily able to adapt to the most ungodly and atrocious of circumstances, including being elegantly passive-aggressively hospitable to an uncultivated conquering army made up of largely blond-haired and blue-eyed soldiers that are quite generous when it comes to terms like “wop” and “greaseball.” For example, although ostensibly working from a pro-fascist perspective while a war correspondent on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, Malaparte’s oftentimes uncensored articles acted as the genesis for his unclassifiable magnum opus Kaputt (1944) that is more of a razor sharp amoral literary masterpiece of despair and destruction than a tribute to any sort of fascist ferocity or Mussolinian martial prowess. While Kaputt managed to achieve official Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum (‘List of Prohibited Books’) status and the author was once a hardcore atheist that later supported the atheistic commies, he was even trying to scam god at the end of his life by getting close to the Catholic Church. As to his contributions to cinema aside from being the debauched brain behind The Skin, Malaparte made one attempt at directing with the largely forgotten Il Cristo proibito (1951) aka The Forbidden Christ. Additionally, the writer's legendary house ‘Casa Malaparte,’ which he once proudly showed-off to legendary German general Erwin Rommel, appears in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) aka Contempt.

In The Skin, one certainly gets the sense that Malaparte—a man with a pseudonymous surname that means “evil/wrong side” (and is also a play on Napoleon’s family name ‘Bonaparte’ which in Italian means ‘good side’)—is the ultimate cultivated conman as a effortless charmer that knows how to tell a person to eat shit without even causing the slightest bit of offense yet you cannot help but love him, so naturally Mastroianni is the perfect man for the role. After all, not unlike Malaparte, Mastroianni was a sort of unofficial ambassador for the Italian people and Italian culture, which is exactly the thankless job that Mastroianni-as-Malaparte performs in The Skin—a film that probably deserves the distinguished honor of being the mostly uniquely unflattering tribute to Italy in all of cinema history.  Indeed, if you thought Spike Lee did a spectacular job of goombah-bashing in films like Do the Right Thing (1989) and Summer of Sam (1999), you have not been bombarded with rotten garlic that Cavani's film reeks of. Speaking of Lee, his hopelessly Hollywood-esque WWII flick Miracle at St. Anna (2008) penned by Judaic mulatto James McBride turns the Italian campaign into a negro fantasy with cardboard characters that includes a preposterous love triangle between an Italian partisan chick and two black GIs instead offering a honest look at the horrors and whores of war like Cavani's flick.

 In Teutonic dandy auteur Werner Schroeter’s brutally beauteous The Reign of Naples (1978) aka Nel regno di Napoli—a sort of Pasolinian neo-neorealist epic where communism and Catholicism battle for the soul of Italy while the people wallow in impoverished misery—a woman sells her daughter’s virginity to a negro sailor for a bag of sugar in what ultimately seems like a completely unbelievable scenario. Admittedly, I found this scene, which is apparently historically accurate, to be fairly disturbing despite Schroeter’s laconic approach to the material, yet it is nothing compared to the sheer and utter human depravity and abject desperation of the fittingly titled The Skin where human flesh of the most intimate sort is much cheaper than beef and pork. Indeed, as Malaparte (Mastroianni) somberly states, “We lost the war. Women and children lost if more than anyone else.” The year is 1944 and, aside from 112 German POWs that are being ‘fed’ by a scheming Camorra mobster named Eduardo Marzullo (Carlo Giuffrè), there are no more fascists or Nazis in Naples, or so do members of the United States Fifth Army learn as they arrive in town with the expectation of doing some serious fighting and instead find a virtual city-sized whorehouse. Led by the largely benevolent yet no-bullshit General Mark Cork (Burt Lancaster)—a man that hates his own elites and finds it easy to like a deceptively affable chap like Malaparte—the army and various other foreign soldiers certainly treat the city as one big giant bordello as the locals aggressively attempt to sell gash for cash lest they starve.

Aside from being hired by General Cork to broker a deal for the 112 German POWs who are being intentionally overfed by mob boss Marzullo with the intent of scamming more money out of the Americans, Malaparte is also assigned to act as the chaperon and sort of cultural tour guide of a bitchy blueblood female aviator named Deborah Wyatt (Alexandra King) who also happens to be the wife of a U.S. senator and is thus absurdly made an honorary Airforce officer. A supposed ‘Queen of the Sky’ that flies into Naples as part of a nonsensical publicity stunt that, much to General Cork's chagrin, is backed by both Eisenhower and FDR, Mrs. Wyatt—a superficially cultured dame whose beauty is only transcended by her hubris—is an uptight cunt that immediately demonstrates a sense of racial superiority over the lowly swarthy guido people that she has ostensibly come to pay tribute to. Of course, being a man of subtle almost-Svengali-like seduction talents that oftentimes relies on projecting a deceptive image of adoring obsequiousness, Malaparte effortlessly gets his revenge on Mrs. Wyatt when she least suspects it by forcing her to virtually bathe in her own sanctimonious hypocrisy. Indeed, Malaparte brings Wyatt to a virtual white slave market where Italian mothers pimp their prepubescent sons to Moroccan soldiers and the upperclass lady naturally completely loses it when she witnesses an Islamic pervert examining the anuses of these poor forsaken boys, thus resulting in her losing a not-all-that-small segment of her hair after the swarthy sexual savage takes a swing at her with a dagger (notably, said sand savage then proceeds to showoff his ‘white woman hair trophy’ to his equally thrilled savage comrades). Needless to say, the voyage to Italy does not end well for Mrs. Wyatt as she crashes her plane after Mount Vesuvius erupts and is subsequently the victim of a gang-rape scenario by her own American GIs in an unsettling scenario where the flying diva is brought down to the same level of abject degradation as the Neapolitan people that she previously looked down on in a scenario that would probably provide catharsis to certain guido viewers. 

 Aside from General Cork, Malaparte also befriends a young naïve but well-meaning GI named Jimmy Wren (Ken Marshall) who does not think twice about partaking in as much as guidette pussy as he can possibly penetrate, or so one would assume from all his bragging.  In fact, when a Judaic comrade named Goldberg complains, “Are you crazy? Every nigger this side of the Atlantic has been in them wop broads. You forget them movies about what happens to your pecker if you get the clap?,” Jimmy boy simply mocks his fellow GI for sticking to pathetically masturbating to porno magazines despite having unlimited vaginal opportunities in Naples. Despite partaking in prostitutes and even obtaining an Italian girlfriend (Rosaria Della Femmina), Jimmy eventually unexpectedly falls in love with a young Italian peasant girl named Maria Concetta (Liliana Tari) after encountering her selflessly comforting a dying GI whose guts and intestines are literally hanging outside his stomach. Needless to say, Jimmy suffers a mental breakdown of sorts upon discovering that his beloved Maria Concetta is part of a sick sideshow attraction as the supposed ‘only remaining virgin in Naples’ where he father charges GIs to finger her hymen-intact honeypot. In fact, Jimmy is so disturbed by this quasi-incestuous scenario that he angrily uses his fingers to break Maria’s hymen and then proceeds to wipe the fresh blood on her father-cum-pimp’s face in disgrace. Luckily, Jimmy finally gets over it and decides to bring Maria Concetta home as a war bride, or so he tells a less than enthused Malaparte who is probably not proud about being the member of a defeated nation where all the hot young girls are desperate to leave. Of course, despite the degradation that she suffers at the hands (or, in this case, fingers) of horny GIs, Maria Concetta is one of the lucky ones because, as Malaparte explains to Jimmy in regard to the prostitution situation in Naples, “Well, you know, the price of human flesh is below that for beef or pork. A week ago, you could get a 20 year old girl for 10 dollars. Now she’d be worth no more than four … bones and all. The Sicilian girls flooded the market. They’re older, so they cost less.”  Needless to say, the Sicilian streetwalkers are depicted as the most grotesque and ill-shapen of pussy-peddlers.

 As an ex-fascist turned reluctant pro-American that seems to simply opportunistically support whoever is winning, Malaparte may not seem like a serious man of principle but as he proudly proclaims to Miss Wyatt and some dinner guests, “The real Italian flag does not show three colors but the male organ. Morality, Honor, Family, the cult of religion are all there, between the legs.” In short, Malaparte is a covert pagan of sorts that has experienced what happens when civilization is stripped away and untamed libido reigns. Indeed, more than anywhere else, defeated nations reveal that sex sells and that everyone is willing to sell it if they are desperate enough, especially when conquering armies can simply pillage pussy for free as some of the GIs attempt to do in the film. Somewhat subversively, the film also dares to depict the racial character of sex and how certain groups are more hopelessly depraved than others. Indeed, whereas various Muslims are depicted as boy-buggering barbarians and “sodomite who likes sunflowers,” negroes are depicted as sort of anti-alchemists that love defiling golden hair. In fact, civil rights saint Emmett Till’s father Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army on July 2, 1945 after taking part in the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others while surviving in the Italian Campaign as an American soldier (notably, great modernist poet and fascist propagandist Ezra Pound, who was imprisoned alongside the colored lust killer, mentions Till in lines 171-173 of Canto 74 of his Pisan Cantos). Of course, in general, the American GIs, especially of the Anglo-Saxon sort, come out looking as the least sexually debauched. Needless to say, aside from the love affair between Jimmy Wren and Maria Concetta, all the sexual behavior depicted in The Skin is simply grotesque and that this completely loveless lust exposes human-beings as being nothing more than bestial animals, albeit worse as at least (some) humans have a conscience and thus should know better. In that sense, war and it its aftermath is where man is at his most unflatteringly atavistic, or so one discovers while watching The Skin. 

 Naturally, The Skin would not be the artsploitation war film par excellence if it did not conclude in a highly sensational apocalyptic fashion where a Boston Brahmin-like bitch crashes her plane and faces a world of pain in the form of rape-happy GIs and is forced to learn a little humility for once in her luxurious life. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Wyatt’s nightmarish night in Naples almost seems like the auteuress’ revenge as the American aristocrat is previously depicted going on a hateful anti-Italian rant and spitting the following acidic vile at protagonist Malaparte, “I hate your attitude, you Latin snob! Know-it-all! All of you! Backwards! Scummy! Oily! Hairy, dark, greasy gigolos! Wop! Wop! And you’re laughing at me? You can stick your flag right between your legs, up your ass!” Rather regrettably, Malaparte does largely prove to be a know-it-all as far as his patently pessimistic perspective is concerned and the film even concludes with the hapless hero becoming hopelessly dejected after witnessing a happy Italian peasant man celebrating the American occupation being completely crushed by an American tank in an allegorical scene that more or less sums up the cultural effect of the American occupation on Italy. Needless to say, it is no coincidence that the film concludes with the arrival of the U.S. Fifth Army in Rome through the rather paradisiacal Appian Way. As Malaparte somberly states to his young American ‘friend’ after witnessing the crushing of a fellow goombah by an American tank, “You can go, Jimmy. You are the winners.” 

 In terms of its absolutely scathing and sardonic sentiments that are in stark contrast to the heavyhearted humanism of classic Italian films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), The Skin is like the anti-neorealist film par excellence and a tastefully tasteless tribute to maestro Malaparte's almost otherworldly cynicism in relation to the American so-called liberation of Italy. Indeed, as Peter Bondanella noted in his classic text Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (1983), “Cavani investigates a moment of Italian history already familiar from many well-known neorealist films; however, she captures it from an entirely different perspective. In place of the nobler values of sacrifice and courage neorealist films celebrate, Cavani forces us to reconsider the dramatic story of occupied Naples as the relationship between the victor and vanquished. The director implicitly protests the cultural hegemony of America over Italy that began during the last year of the war. Malaparte’s grotesque realism survives from the novel […] The romanticism associated with the war by those who fought on the winning side, or who participated in the Resistance, is removed from Cavani’s story, and what remains is a tale of survival, of saving one’s skin in the midst of hardship, starvation, depravity, and uncertainty […] Cavani reminds us, human history is made at the expense of human sacrifice, literally from our hides.” As American half-wop Abel Ferrara’s rather depressing documentary Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009) reveals, it seems that Naples has yet to completely recover from the Second World War, but then again this is a historically degenerate place that, as depicted in The Skin, there is, among other things, an old ‘womb envy’ tradition of ‘gay birth’ where a gay guido pretends to go into labor and give birth to a sort of mock baby boy with a large cock after nine months of ‘gay marriage.’ Of course, this absurd ‘gay birth’ celebration is organically Neapolitan and should stay that way as it would be a shame if it replaced by American trash like Queer Eye and Drag Queen Story Hour in terms of representing gay goombah identity. 

 Despite being assuredly antifascist, The Skin does follow in a certain distinctly Italian tradition as exemplified by the proto-fascist aesthetic perversity of Malaparte and his contemporary Gabriele D’Annunzio who, on top of writing decadent Nietzschean literary, was the first ‘Duce’ and a great national war hero that Benito Mussolini stole most of his best ideas from. Of course, Cavani’s most (in)famous film The Night Porter is even more of a reflection of this sort of perverse fascist aestheticism, but I digress. In my opinion, what The Skin ultimately demonstrates is that Cavani is, at best, a sort of inordinately cultivated exploitation auteur that, due to her gender and propensity towards controversial subject matter, scammed her way into the arthouse, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, even in a film like Francesco (1989)—the second film of the director’s career-spanning St. Francis of Assisi trilogy—where Cavani attempts what Paul Schrader has described as ‘transcendental style,’ the almost absurdly amoral female filmmaker cannot help but include a scene where a completely unclad Mickey Rourke, who curiously portrays the titular lead, literally fucks snow. As for anyone that knows anything about Nietzsche or his philosophical weltanschauung, Beyond Good and Evil manages to make John Huston’s obscure cinematic disaster Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) seem like a respectable biopic by comparison. As for her Jun'ichirō Tanizaki adaptation The Berlin Affair (1985)—a film depicting a bizarre love triangle between a Nazi diplomat, his wife, and the daughter of a Japanese ambassador—it is about as erotic and aesthetically potent as a mid-1990s Showtime softcore flick, but I digress. 

Undoubtedly, there is no sharper contrast to the films of Cavani and novels of Malaparte than the writings of Italian ‘super fascist’ Julius Evola who denounced the stereotypical dirty debauched dago types that The Skin so unforgettably depicts. Indeed, in a chapter entitled ‘Latin Character—Roman World—Mediterranean Soul’ featured in his book Gli uomini e le rovine (1953) aka Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Evola makes a dichotomous comparison between two very different Italian types. Indeed, whereas the ‘Roman’ type is stoic, noble, disciplined, loyal, hierarchal, and orderly, the ‘Mediterranean’ type is histrionic, amoral, undisciplined, disloyal, resentful, disorderly, and proudly sexually ill-restrained. Needless to say, Evola believes that the Mediterranean type has come to define the Italian people, or as the magical baron once wrote, “The qualities of the ‘Roman’ type represent the positive limit of dispositions hidden in the best parts of our people, just as the qualities characterized as ‘Mediterranean’ correspond to the negative limit and the less noble part of it; these limits are also found as components in other peoples, especially in the ‘Latin’ group. However, we must realize that too many times behaviors resembling the ‘Mediterranean’ type have been identified, especially abroad, as typically Italian, and that the ‘Mediterranean’ component appears to have prevailed overall in Italian life following World War II.” Of course, The Skin and most of Cavani’s other films confirm Evola’s unflattering thesis. 

 When reading Evola’s remarks on Nietzsche, it almost seems absurdly ironic that Cavani—a woman that, not unlike fellow Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, certainly had a German obsession of sorts—would even dare to direct a biopic about the Teutonic philosopher yet, at the same time, some of his ideas also strangely support the Cavanian style of filmmaking and a sort of ‘Italian’ romanticism in general. Indeed, as Evola wrote, “Nietzsche himself warned against every morality that tends to dry up every impetuous current of the human soul instead of channeling it. The capability of control, equilibrium, continuity in feeling and in willing must not lead to a withering and mechanization of one’s being, as seems to be the case with some negative traits of the central-European and Anglo-Saxon. What matters is not to suppress passion and to give to the soul a beautiful, regulated, and homogenous, though flat form; but rather to organize one’s being in an integral way around the capability of recognizing, discriminating, and adequately utilizing the impulses and the lights that emerge from one’s deep recesses. It cannot be denied that passion is predominant in many Mediterranean Italian types, but this disposition does not amount to a defect, but rather to an enrichment, provided it finds its correlative in a firmly organized life.” Of course, it can be argued that, in terms of the artistic life she has lived, Cavani somewhat ironically achieved this lofty Evolian ideal. Additionally, The Skin undoubtedly proves that Evola, Malaparte, and Cavani share similar sentiments in regard to the racial differences between Italians and Anglo-Saxons. It is certainly hard for me to imagine some uptight WASP stating in regard to his daughter’s virginal vagina “It doesn’t bite” while exposing during some superlatively sleazy sexual sideshow attraction, but such is Cavani’s singularly sick cinematic realm of depraved dago sexual abandon and sodomic desperation. 

-Ty E

Slaughterhouse-Five

A nonlinear big budget Hollywood sci-fi arthouse flick addressing the Allied powers unofficial war crime of the totally terroristic firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War certainly seems like a sort of wishful alt-right fanboy fantasy yet, somewhat inexplicably, such an insanely idiosyncratic cinematic work actually does exist and naturally it is not exactly a famous film despite being based on a relatively famous novel.  Luckily, it is also a great film that, despite being nearly half-a-century old, is rather fresh despite technically belonged to a genre that does not typically age gracefully.  Indeed, Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)—a film based on American postmodern writer Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel of the same name—is, in my less than humble opinion, one of the greatest films of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ era and certainly more deserving of notability than the various classic films associated with the movement as directed by the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, Miloš Forman, and Arthur Penn, among countless others. Likewise, I would also argue that it is a rare film that, not unlike Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), is superior to its source novel (in fact, Vonnegut was quite happy with the film and would even state, “I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel”). Of course, the film’s director George Roy Hill is best known for the New Hollywood classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)—a sort of American Western answer to François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962)—which is a film that I have always found to be hopelessly soft, sentimental, and obscenely overrated.

Not unlike his American New Wave contemporaries Michael Ritchie (Prime Cut, The Bad News Bears) and Alan J. Pakula (Klute, Sophie's Choice), Hill is a good argument against auteurism as a talented filmmaker that, relatively speaking, lacked a potent personalized approach and signature style, which was arguably a benefit to a preternatural picture like Slaughterhouse-Five that could have easily been an absolutely abominable artistic disaster were it helmed by a more monomaniacal and/or fetishistic filmmaker (speaking of, Guillermo del Toro, who has certainly demonstrated his commitment to the cultural marxist cause by introducing interspecies miscegenation in the fiercely fishy The Shape of Water (2017), announced in 2013 that he plans to remake the film in collaboration with silly semitic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman). That such a film was ever made in Hebraic Hollywood—a place that, more than any other, clearly has no sympathy for the complete destruction of an ancient German city and countless priceless pieces of architecture—is nothing short of a miracle and virtual fluke of cinema history that reveals Hill's inordinate artistic integrity as a rare Hollywood filmmaker that was clearly not willing to bend-over for Zion (notably, underrated kiwi mischling auteur Vincent Ward would later depict the firebombing of Dresden in a somewhat less effective yet nonetheless still potent fashion in his rarely-seen film Map of the Human Heart (1992)).  Needless to say, had Hill prostituted himself by directing a holocaust film on a similar scale to Slaughterhouse-Five, he would probably be better remembered and more revered today.

 Notably, the full title of Vonnegut’s book is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death and the author is described on the title page as “A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES ON CAPE COD [AND SMOKING TOO MUCH], WHO, AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT HORS DE COMBAT, AS A PRISONER OF WAR, WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING OF DRESDEN, GERMANY, ‘THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,’ A LONG TIME AGO, AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE. THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE, WHERE THE FLYING SAUCERS COME FROM. PEACE.”  Indeed, as Vonnegut’s author description (possibly unwittingly?) alludes to, one of the greatest absurdities of WWII, not unlike WWI, is that German-Americans made up the largest ethnic to fight for the United States against Germany and Vonnegut—a battalion scout with the 106 Infantry Division that was captured on December 22, 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge—even had the singular displeasure as “fourth-generation German-American” of witnessing an irreplaceable Teutonic city from his ancestral homeland being completely eradicated by his own countrymen while a POW in what was ultimately a literal ‘holocaust’ (aka ‘sacrificial mass slaughter via fire’). Notably, Jean-Luc Godard of all people noticed the absurdity of this situation in his obscure feature Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) aka Allemagne 90 neuf zero where it is narrated, “The US never understood the war, or took part in it. At best, their fight was not the state’s fight, nor on the same battleground. The US can only imagine a civil war. It’s always themselves and their own defects, personified by the enemy, that they combat in all wars. For them, war is a moral dilemma. When they were English, they fought the English. When they became Americans, they fought Americans. Once sufficiently influenced by the Germans, morally and culturally, they attacked the Germans. The first American to take a prisoner in 1917 was Meyer. The prisoner’s name was also Meyer.” Of course, life’s great dark absurdities are what Slaughterhouse-Five is all about, hence its lack of popularity among the general public which prefers disposable neatly-packaged feel-good banalities to mercurial movies that challenge the mind and seep into the soul. 

 Alien abductions, the firebombing of Dresden, homicidal wop psychopaths with lifelong grudges, and a seemingly autistic affectless hero are just a couple of the seemingly discordant ingredients that make Slaughterhouse-Five so insanely yet ideally idiosyncratic, yet the film is no less exceptional in terms of its form as a nonlinear flick with a virtual ‘jigsaw’ approach to editing (courtesy of editor Dede Allen of such classics as The Hustler (1961) and Night Moves (1975)) that manages to mimic human memory in terms of switching back-and-forth between major events from the protagonist’s fairly eclectically traumatic life. Indeed, it is an extraordinary film about an extraordinary life as lived by a largely less than extraordinary individual that just floats through existence yet somehow achieves a sort of strange truly out-of-this-world transcendence in the end. While technically a sci-fi film and undoubtedly one of the first to deal with the theme of alien abduction, Vonnegut clearly has no special love for the genre and merely uses it trappings for mostly philosophical reasons (of course, for Hebraic Hollywood to make a film about the horrors of the Dresden Bombings seems like science fiction in itself, but I digress). Just as in the novel, the film is a quasi-existentialist work where the magnificent meaningless of life is given a vaguely optimistic spin where the viewer is asked to focus on the good and forget the bad, even in a demented culture-destroying world where the Dresden tragedy occurred. Notably, in a special introduction featured in the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, Vonnegut stated of the event, “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.” Undoubtedly, Vonnegut’s sentiments sum up the overall charmingly dispiriting spirit of the film, which is very much beauteous in a bitingly surreal fashion comparable to blood splattered across fresh white snow (which, quite fittingly, actually appears in the film). 

 Although a man that probably could be best described by the title of Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s unfinished three-volume novel The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943), the film’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks)—a tall blond American boy with an all-American Norman Rockwell-esque essence—has led a virtually magical life filled with great tragedy and heartbreak but also great wonder, intrigue, and splendor. A virtual cipher of a man that lead actor Sack portrays quite perfectly as far as effectively radiating a flat affect is concerned, Billy is clearly a model for the eponymous heroes of Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) and Forrest Gump (1994), Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), Léon in Andrzej Żuławski’s L'Amour Braque (1985), and Dougie Jones in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), among various other examples. Luckily, Billy’s character is perfect for such a story as it allows the viewer to more easily embrace a film that deals with both the very real horror of war and a sort of goofy science fiction that defies reason. Falling somewhere in between an ‘Everyman’ and Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ with a good bit of autism thrown in for good measure, Billy is also in many ways quite typical of an American male of his era in that he goes off to war, gets married and has two kids, has a relatively successful career, and then retires, but only two events from his life give it true meaning: the Dresden firebombing and alien abduction. Of course, the latter is pure fantasy and a sort of expression of Vonnegut’s own pseudo-metaphysical wishful thinking in regard to some intangible humanist heaven where even autists like Billy Pilgrim get to fuck premium grade pussy for eternity for an exceedingly erudite all-alien audience. 

 While the film begins during WWII with a seemingly lost Billy roaming around in a considerably chaotic snowy Europa, the film rather seamlessly weaves back-and-forth between his life, including before and after that war that seemingly left indelible scars on his curious psyche. The son of a fierce fat father that—to impress his equally big boorish friends—put him in a traumatizing ‘sink-or-swim’ scenario as a small child where he was thrown into the deep-end of a public pool while completely naked and a comparably ludicrously large-and-in-charge mouthy mother, Billy hardly has the makings of a martial soldier and he virtually sleepwalks through the entire war despite it also having a totally traumatizing effect on his life.  For example, when the Germans give him a woman's coat to wear in an attempt to emasculate him, Billy is completely clueless that he is being mock until a British POW makes it crystal clear to him and even then he does not seem to care.  Aside from surviving the horrors of the Dresden terrorist bombings and being forced to move countless charred kraut corpses with other GI POWs, Billy also witnesses the senseless execution of his sole friend Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche)—a kindhearted teacher and family man that acts as a sort of much-needed father figure for the hapless protagonist—who is punished for ‘theft’ by some overly enterprising SS men after randomly being spotted rather innocently grabbing a Hummel figurine from some ruins.  Undoubtedly, Derby's absurdly senseless death, which is over a cute inanimate object that, rather innocently and sentimentally, reminds the poor character of his son and that one of the SS men subsequently throws away like trash after having the middle-aged GI swiftly executed, completely personifies the spirit of dark tragicomedic absurdism that guides both the film and novel.  Although Billy made a short-lived but completely unforgettable friend in Derby while a POW, he also becomes the #1 eternal enemy of a psychotic Sicilian-American named Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman)—a loudmouthed lunatic of the suitably swarthy sort that, arguably quite revealingly, has turned irrational homo-hating into a sort of unintentionally humorous poetic art—that vows to kill him one day because he quite wrongfully believes that he caused the death of his comrade Roland Weary (Kevin Conway), or as he initially threatens the protagonist, “A fag frolic in Wyoming. I’ll be there, Pilgrim, waitin’ for you.” Needless to say, Lazzaro does kill Billy and, as someone hopelessly “unstuck in time” that experiences various events from his life at various times multiple times, the protagonist is well aware this death-by-dago awaits him. 

 While Billy survives the Dresden Bombing and, in turn, the Second World War, and then gets married, has two kids, and becomes a successful optometrist, he seems completely detached from his ‘life’ and instead seeks sanctuary in his beloved doggo ‘Spot.’ After catching his son Robert (Perry King) masturbating to a centerfold of a sexploitation starlet named Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine of Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974)), Billy also finds a rare source of solace in the sensual lady and the silly sword-and-sandal (aka peplum) films that she stars in (and that his incessantly nagging lard ass wife, who he clearly does not love, highly disproves of). The Tralfamadorians—a group of highly intelligent and sophisticated extraterrestrials who exist in all times simultaneously—seem to realize this and transport both Billy and Montana to a virtual human zoo located on their planet of Tralfamadore, thereupon leading to an unlikely love affair between the protagonist (who is now middle-aged) and voluptuous diva that eventually leads to the birth of one son. As Billy tries in vain to explain to his pedantic son-in-law in regard to the important insights that he has acquired from these aliens, “On Tralfamadore you learn that the world is just a collection of moments, all strung together in beautiful, random order. And if we’re going to survive, it’s up to us to concentration on the good moments and ignore the bad.” In the end, Billy even learns to accept his own rather absurd assassination at the hands of his deranged wop nemesis Lazzaro who kills him while he is giving a speech on the subject of Tralfamadore while in the guido’s shitty home city of Philadelphia.  Despite Billy’s insistence on remembering the good, the Dresden bombing, which acts both as the climax and ‘centerpiece’ of the film, sticks out the most in the end (as it should).  After all, it is hard to forget the complete incineration of a singularly striking place full of happy children and old people (as Hill underscores during the pre-bombing scenes) that the protagonist initially describes upon first seeing it as, “the Land of Oz.” Indeed, right before the climatic bombing scene, the viewer is teased with a quasi-travelogue of sorts featuring the most beauteous pieces of ancient Teutonic architecture juxtaposed with a composition by Johann Sebastian Bach in a virtually aesthetically angelic combo that arguably represents the height of apolitical German high kultur in an exceedingly ethereal scenario where it seems ‘nothing bad can happen,’ henceforth perfectly underscoring the true apocalyptic horrors of the firebombing of Dresden.

 When I was in college, I once had this insufferably whiny slave-morality-ridden professor—a seriously shameless shabbos goy that once asked all the Jewish kids in my class to stand-up in a bizarre scenario of seemingly worshipful racial fetishization—that used to use his monotonous lectures to cry about being persecuted for being a “polack” (which, considering his relatively young age, seemed rather unlikely) or to philo-semitically proselytize for the chosen amongst god’s chosen. During one fairly unforgettable lecture where he rather recklessly exposed the pathetic heights of his craven ressentiment-driven bloodlust, this exceedingly erratically effete professor did an impassioned speech on how good the Dresden firebombings were and even went on to describe in great detail the cultural importance of the city and how it was easily incinerated because it was largely made up of wood buildings due to being so ancient. After witnessing this bitchy biddy—a virtual middle-aged boy with the sad sick soul of a neurotic sex-starved old woman that probably still has not gotten over the ostensible trauma of a jock shoving him into a locker during high school—practically drool with a certain sadistic glee at the mere thought of the totally senseless brutal extermination of German woman and children and destruction of great German culture, I naturally came to the conclusion that those that ordered the senseless bombings were operating from a similar unhinged mindset.  After all, rabid Jewish United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. infamously came up with the Morgenthau Plan with the odious objective of turning Germany into a depopulated wasteland, not to mention the fact that Albert Einstein lied to FDR about Germany’s advancements in nuclear science so that he could get the Manhattan Project started in the hope that his ex-homeland would be nuked.  Of course, what makes Slaughterhouse-Five such a successful antiwar film is that it is not plagued with the sort of hatred or resentment that inspired the pseudo-heroic Morgenthau and Einsteins of the world or the literary frauds like Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosiński. Indeed, it is only because Germany was destroyed and Zion prevailed that we even know of the zio-media-hype names of Einstein and Wiesel today while ignoring real geniuses like Nikola Tesla and a peaceful Aryan humanist like Vonnegut (who, if he was not a leftist of sorts, would have surely been completely ignored). 

 

While Slaughterhouse-Five is unequivocally the greatest Vonnegut film adaptation of all-time as the novelist himself recognized, Mother Night (1996) directed by Christine (1983) lead Keith Gordon surely makes for a great double feature with George Roy Hill’s film. Based on the 1961 Vonnegut novel of the same name, the film, which features an iconic cameo from the German-American writer, centers around the considerably conflicted antihero of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—a character that seems to be inspired by both American modernist poet Ezra Pound and William ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ Joyce—who lives a sort of double life and overall schizophrenic existence as an American Nazi propagandist that quite deceptively uses his radio show to spread hidden messages that can only be decoded by Allied intelligence. Notably, the character also appears in Roy’s Slaughterhouse-Five during the early part of the Dresden bombing scene in a red-white-and-blue swastika uniform that whacked-out wop Lazzaro describes as a “fag outfit.” While neither film is even remotely ‘pro-Nazi,’ they both manage to question the official WWII narrative and, quite unlike virtually any Hollywood WWII films, make light of atrocities committed against the Germans (in fact, Mother Night director Gordon is a member of the tribe, but he doesn’t let his ethno-racial loyalties get in the way of a good weird paranoiac story, as the film even makes reference to the mass rape of German women by Soviet hordes). As for other Vonnegut adaptations, the Jerry Lewis/Sam Fuller vehicle Slapstick of Another Kind (1982) is one of the worst films ever made and Breakfast of Champions (1999)—a film that should have worked since it was directed by offbeat auteur Alan Rudolph who, not unlike his friend-cum-mentor Robert Altman, is totally suited for such subject matter—is a total mess that the author apparently felt was “painful to watch.” 

 As far as I am concerned, George Roy Hill is one of the most underrated filmmakers associated with the so-called American New Wave and Slaughterhouse-Five is superior to anything that was ever directed by more respected filmmakers associated with the movement like Paul Mazursky, Norman Jewison, Sydney Pollack, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, and countless others. A sort of spiritual cinema son of Hollywood maverick William A. Wellman (Wings, The Ox-Bow Incident) as both filmmakers were man’s men that served as fighter pilots and had a lifelong love of flying in general as demonstrated by their respective films, Hill brought a certainly inordinate masculinity to American cinema during an exceedingly emasculated (post)hippie era with underrated films like the mesmerizing männerbund aviation drama The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)—a film that pays tribute to the singular glory of Teutonic fighter pilots and the similarly daredevil-ish American pilots that, despite technically being enemies, respected them—and the vehemently anti-p.c. hockey dramedy Slap Shot (1977) starring Paul Newman in a rare lovably sleazy role. With The World According to Garp (1982)—a personal childhood favorite that, until relatively recently (last year), I could not recall the name of despite it being burned into my mind nearly thirty years ago—Hill directed a film that was clearly a (quite superior) model for Forrest Gump, albeit darker and more inordinately eccentric. While not one of his masterpieces, Hill brought some unexpected much-needed-nuance to the whole perennial Israeli–Palestinian conflict with his John le Carré adaptation The Little Drummer Girl (1984) starring Klaus Kinski of all people as a sort of Machiavellian Mossad agent in an uneven yet reasonably enthralling film where the Israelis ultimately come out looking like the most underhanded of international terroristic exploiters. In my less than humble opinion, it is a damn shame that Hill will always be best remembered for the softcore western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Americans love their westerns and hate their war crimes. 

 While the curious combination of real-life war atrocities and alien abductions might seem a tad bit silly, especially to those that take the Dresden firebombing seriously, the two things somehow work together perfectly in Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five and their seemingly discordant combo make even more perfect sense if one has consulted the UFO writings of the great ‘Aryan Christ’ Carl Jung. While Jung did not completely rule out the possibility of space aliens and flying saucers, he did feel that the whole UFO phenomenon that more or less kicked off during World War II was part of a psychological and, in turn, spiritual crisis that was plaguing the Occidental mind. Indeed, as Jung argued in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959), “One can hardly suppose that anything of such worldwide incidence as the Ufo legend is purely fortuitous and of no importance whatever […] The basis for this kind of rumor is an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need. This condition undoubtedly exists today, in so far as the whole world is suffering under the strain of Russian policies and their still unpredictable consequences […] Precisely because the conscious mind does not know about them and is therefore confronted with a situation from which there seems to be no way out, these strange contents cannot be integrated directly but seek to express themselves indirectly, thus giving rise to unexpected and apparently inexplicable opinions, beliefs, illusions, visions, and so forth. Any unusual natural occurrences such as meteors, comets, ‘rains of blood,’ a calf with two heads, and suchlike abortions are interpreted as menacing omens, or else signs are seen in the heavens.” Undoubtedly, despite his general autistic demeanor, Slaughterhouse-Five protagonist Billy Pilgrim—an absurdly lucky survivor of the hell-on-earth Dresden nightmare—is a man plagued with a certain ‘emotional tension,’ which he is ultimately relieved of with the best next thing to heaven: a sort of extraterrestrial fuck factory where he gets to make love with the literal girl of his dreams in a baroque out-of-this world setting where his alien overlords, the Tralfamadorians, tell him everything he needs to know about life and existence, thereupon elevating him of every single fear and worry that he has. In that sense, both Vonnegut’s novel and Hill’s film adaptation act as sort of esoteric escapism where the ‘emotional tension’ that has resulted in the UFO phenomenon is cured by said UFO phenomenon; or at least Vonnegut’s fantastic fictional humanist version of it. 

 Notably, in attempting to describe the nightmarish state of painting in the post-WWII UFO age, Jung remarked, “Just as women’s fashions find every innovation, however absurd and repellent, ‘beautiful,’ so too does modern art of this kind. It is the ‘beauty’ of chaos. That is what this art heralds and eulogizes: the gorgeous rubbish heap of our civilization. It must be admitted that such an undertaking is productive of fear, especially when allied to the political possibilities of our catastrophic age. One can well imagine that in an epoch of the ‘great destroyers’ it is a particular satisfaction to be at least the broom that sweeps the rubbish into the corner.” While Slaughterhouse-Five—a film that literally depicts one of the greatest cities in human history as a sort of grotesquely gorgeous rubbish heap as partly caused by largely cultureless American philistines—does have a certain ‘soothing’ quality, it is also indubitably an expression of the ‘beauty of chaos’ that Jung describes in our pre-dystopian age of ‘great destroyers’ of the innately cosmopolitan alien culture-distorting sort. In that sense, the film is more potent than ever, not to mention radically red-pilled compared to the rancid raunch and cultural retardation that epitomizes most recent Hollywood sci-fi flicks (and movies in general).  After all, you will not find another Hollywood movie that makes positive reference to English historian and supposed ‘holocaust denier’ David Irving who, as the film alludes to, was the first to seriously study the Dresden atrocity with his revolutionary text The Destruction of Dresden (1963).  As for Vonnegut’s novel, it might even eventually prove to have predicted the forsaken future of the U.S. when it notes that, “The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen. So it goes. It is all brand new.” Indeed, so it goes. 

-Ty E