THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (1969)

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“This is the story of the triumph of good over evil,” we are told by the opening titles. “Obviously it is a fantasy.”

It is said that Molière and La Fontaine used to frequent the Cafe de l'Alma in the Chaillot district of Paris. But today it is visted by a group of leaders, including The Chairman (Yul Brynner), The General (Paul Henreid), The Commissar (Oskar Homolka), and The Prospector (Donald Pleasence), who privately refers to them as, “Just faceless, ordinary monsters.” Together, they form the Board of Directors of International Substrate, and they have hatched a plan to dig up Paris in order to get to the oil that lies beneath the city.

Now, it is well known that all districts of Paris have their own dotty protectors, the Madwomen, if you will. The titular "Madwoman of Chaillot" is Countess Aurelia (Katharine Hepburn, in her best performance as far as I'm concerned), who prefers to live every day as one specific date. “First, the morning paper. Not these current sheets full of vulgar lies. I always read the Gaulois for March 22, 1919. It’s by far the best. Delightful scandal. Excellent fashion notes. And of course the last-minute bulletin on the death of Leonide Leblanc. She used to live next door. And when I learn of her death every morning it gives me quite a start. To recover from which, Chaillot calls. It is time to dress for my morning walk. That takes much longer without a maid . . .”

She’s not so mad as to imagine that life really is the same as that one March morning. Time is passing, of course, but it’s not like she has to acknowledge it. “Of course, in the morning it doesn’t always feel so gay. Not when you’re taking your hair out of the dresser and your teeth out of the glass. And particularly if you’ve been dreaming that you’re a little girl on a pony looking for strawberries in the woods. But then comes a letter in the morning mail. One you wrote to yourself, giving your schedule for the day. Then, when I have washed in rosewater and put on my pins, rings, brooches, pearls, necklaces, I’m ready to begin again.”

The Prospector’s son, a radical activist named Rodrick (Richard Chamberlain), brings the Board’s scheme to the attention of the genteel lady, as well as her cadre of peers, including the waitress Irma (Nanette Newman), the Folksinger (Gordon Heath) and her most confident of confidants, the Ragpicker (Danny Kaye). “The world is being taken over by the pimps,” says master Ragpicker.

The Countess is appalled, “The world is unhappy? Why wasn’t I told?”

So distraught is she by this news of scheming, of men living life as if it was disposable, Countess Aurelia gathers the other Madwomen of the districts—Josephine, the Madwoman of La Concorde (Edith Evans), Constance, the Madwoman of Passy (Margaret Leighton), (Josephine, the Madwoman of La Concorde (Edith Evans), and Gabrielle, the Madwoman of Sulpice (Giulietta Masina). Together with the street people, her people, she desides to hold a trial for these despoilers, in absentia. The rich men and their destructive ways are represented by The Ragpicker.

“Criminals are always represented by their opposites,” assured Josephine, who was to be the judge. The trial was absolutely necessary, for something had to be done.

“If you kill them, they’ll be missed,” protested Constance. “And we’ll be fined. They fine you for every little thing, you know?”

To which the Countess replies, “Do you miss a cold when it’s gone? They’ll never be missed.”

Thus, the Ragpicker prepares the case, defending against the charge that he and his ilk worship money.

“Worship money? Me?” says the Ragpicker. “I plead not guilty! I don’t worship money. It’s the other way around. Money worships me. It won’t let me alone. The first time money came to me, I was a mere boy. Untouched. Untainted. It came quite suddenly when I innocently picked a bar of gold bullion out of a garbage can while playing. As you can imagine, I was horrified. I tried swapping it for a little, rundown one-track railroad. To my childish amazement this immediately sold itself for a hundred times its value. I made desperate efforts to get rid of this unwanted wealth. I bought refineries, department stores, every munitions factory I could lay hands on. The rest is history. They stuck to me. They multiplied. And now I am powerless. Everyone knows the poor have no one but themselves to blame for their poverty. But how is it the fault of the rich if they’re rich? Oh, I don’t ask for your pity. All I ask for is a little human understanding.”

He continues, “Ah, without money nobody likes or trusts you. But to have money is to be virtuous, beautiful, honest and witty. To have none is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.”

“One last question,” asks the Countess. “Suppose you find this oil you’re looking for? What will you do with it?”

“I’ll make war! I’ll destroy what remains of the world!”

When the trial concludes the verdict is clear: guilty. But how to carry out the sentence, and what shall the sentence be?

The Madwoman of Challot began life as the play, La Folle de Chaillot, written by acclaimed writer Jean Giraudoux and was first performed in Paris in 1945, a year after his death. In 1949, fellow playwright Maurice Valency adapted the story into English and it was warmly received in the United States. Subsequently, the play was reworked by Inherit the Wind authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman) into the musical Dear World, which won star Angela Lansbury a Tony Award. That same year, 1969, screenwriter, producer and pulp writer (with wife Edith), Edward Anhalt (The Boston Strangler), adapted the Valency script for the big screen, which was directed by Bryan Forbes (Séance on a Wet Afternoon). The film premiered in October, was met with favorable reviews from critics and not-too-shabby attendence, then quietly bowed out of the limelight, fading away with the final breaths of the “Summer (and Autumn) of Love”.

Anhalt’s screenplay adheres closely to Giraudoux’s play and embellishes only where he needs to. Just the same, spending the first act with the odious Board members gets a little tedious. While it is indeed fun to watch Brynner rail against the indignities he must suffer every day when exposed to the world’s rabble, the sequence becomes a slog. After about ten minutes, you’ll catch yourself saying, “I get it. They’re evil, cruel capitalists. What else is new?” But if you can stick with the movie until Hepburn’s marvelous Countess is introduced, the movie becomes a delightful ride from there. Until it slows down again with the introduction of the other Madwomen. Their first scene together unfortunately drags as well, mirroring the Board’s callousness with their own fractured-mirror outlooks on life. But the reward for coming this far is without question Danny Kaye’s moment as the Ragpicker during the trial. Assuming the collective persona of all cruel overseers and misers, the Ragpicker seems to shock himself by the end with the imperious self-righteousness he finds within. It’s a chilling moment of black comedy and the centerpiece of the film (as, I’m sure, it was the centerpiece of the play) and Kaye left me breathless, at least. 

 
The particulars of The Madwoman of Chaillot are, unfortunately, timeless. The rich will always run roughshod over the poor and life is wasted on the forward-thinkers, only appreciated by the young and the mad. And while the underlying themes are also universal, this particular movie seems more appropriate today than it might have in the post-war Paris of the ‘40s or mid-war America of the late ‘60s. The Madwomen and the street people, including the idealistic Irma and Roderick, could easily fit the mold of the modern “Occupy” movement; the Board of Directors are an easy surrogate for Wall Street and Corporate Culture. As the opening title card points out, almost bitterly, the results are pure fantasy.

While Anhalt invented scenes involving The Prospector and his son inside their home (where Pleasance’s character collects and displays old bathroom doors, hanging them on the wall as modern art), they wisely resisted the temptation to update the play for modern times. The Café and the Countess’s domiciles exist in stasis, the first eternally quaint and the latter decaying along with its owner’s mental stability, yet still retaining its dignity. Certainly Roderick and the Board members are given a more modern cut of suit, no hippies or swinging Londoners lurk in the background of the frame. The story stays put in its fantasy time period and could be easily trotted out for any generation.

Unfortunately, it really could be applied to any generation, as class warfare is less cyclical than it is a never-ending hypno-spiral. But how lovely would it be if we could just round up our ruthless rulers, bankers, despoilers and pimps and just march them off the end of the Earth? It’s of course an insurmountable solution. The best we can do is get up, dress up in our best, and pick a personal time from our past where life was perfect, without the simple evil of reality shattering our illusions of happiness.

For therein lies the true tragedy of The Madwoman of Challot: in the end, the Countess’s world has been intruded. Tomorrow may again be March 22, 1919, but it won’t change the fact that yesterday was quite gloomy, cold and hard.

Again, we must bow our head in silent prayer to the Warner Brothers Archives for preserving this handsome oil painting brought to life (thanks to the photography of Burnett Guffey and Claude Renoir). At the moment, it’s available as one of their movie-only standalone DVD-Rs, but it’s better than nothing at all. Amazon also has made it available on their Instant Video Service.

For another take on the story, be sure to check out the novelization on Richard Chamberlain’s website.

 

And for another excellent review, head on over to Ferdy on Films.

RAW MEAT (aka DEATH LINE) (1972)

Like many travelers, a good deal of my first visit to London was spent underground in the Tube Stations. One of the most efficient mass transit systems in the world, the London Underground rail subway has 250 miles (400 km for the rest of you) of track running between 270 or so stations. In my experience, most of that is under construction, requiring a commuter to acquire the skills of a military general to navigate the correct transferring from one line to another in order to get to your destination. Getting off at Piccadilly Circus, for instance, in order to transfer twice more to reach Westminster Abbey, traveling through endless tunnels, visiting endless platforms, minding endless gaps, sometimes without encountering a single Brit, it’s easy to see why the Underground would inspire a movie like Raw Meat. 


Also known as Death Line, Raw Meat is what I like to call a “charming little cannibal movie” that takes place almost entirely in the London Tube. A popular urban legend concerning the Tube’s initial construction in the 1850s proposes that a cave-in trapped a group of both male and female workers. The company financing this end of construction went bankrupt and, without the funds to rescue the workers, left them to die. Of course, this being horror movie territory, the workers did not die, but survived in the collapsed section of tunnel, breeding amongst themselves and scrounging for food where they could, primarily subsisting on rats. And, also of course, each other. This horrible existence resulted in a Sawney Beane-style tribe of Victorian-era C.H.U.D.s who would, eventually, claw their way through the walls and stalk the platforms late at night in search of tasty commuters. (Don’t think this idea wasn’t rife in my head the later it got in our return to our hotel in Limehouse.)

In Raw Meat, a well-to-do gent in a homburg haunts ‘70s era London clip joints and strip parlours, paying for an enormous good time. After propositioning a woman he mistakes as a prostitute, he is attacked by (the cameraman) an unseen assailant and left to die on the stairs. An American student and his Brit bird girlfriend stumble upon the dying man. Being from New York, Alex’s instincts tell him to step over the obvious drunk and go about his business, but Patricia urges him to look in the man’s wallet for a diabetic card. They learn that he’s James Manfred, Officer of the Realm (OBE), so his drunken state on the stairs is, at that point in history, a peculiarity. But after convincing a policeman to check on him, the well-to-do not-drunkard has vanished.

Well, we can’t have O.B.E.’s going missing, now can we? This brings Inspector Calhoun and Detective Sergeant Rogers into the mix. Already quite plagued by a cold and a policewoman who insists on serving his tea in bag form, a missing upper-class geezer is all Calhoun needs, but it jogs his memory: other people have been reported missing from Russell Square Station, including a grocer from Kilburn not two weeks ago! At first, he suspects that the arrogant Alex is somehow at fault, but the investigation leads back to the OBE’s flat in London, where they discover a hidden room with a hidden camera. Likewise, they’re discovered by Stratton-Villiers, MI5, who tells them that James Manfred, OBE, is no longer their concern.

“Fuck you,” says Calhoun.

“Beyond even your notable working class virility,” says Stratton-Villiers, MI5.
Not one to be told one’s place, Calhoun resumes the investigation, which entails, for the most part, harassing Alex and Patricia. Meanwhile, the last of the Exceedingly-Lower Class, distraught over the death of his mate and their unborn child, feeds from the remains of James Manfred, OBE, and returns to the platforms to find a suitable replacement companion for the presentation of his bloodline.

Zooming by at a quick 87 minutes, Raw Meat manages to deliver chills, nausea and belly-laughs, sometimes all three at once, and is an exceptionally quirky little horror movie. Granted, we’ve since been fed variations of this story before, usually in a decidedly urban setting—The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Hills Have Eyes 2, The Hills Have Eyes 3: The Eyes Are Hillier—but that doesn’t take away from Raw Meat’s enduring effectiveness. At the time of its initial release, a three-minute unbroken 360-degree shot establishing “The Man”’s larder of corpses in varying degrees of decay sent many patrons running for the doors. And for 1972, a shot of The Man slitting Manfred’s throat so the mate can drink was reportedly too much for “proper” filmgoers, and this was after it was heavily edited by the BFC. (Raw Meat wouldn’t be seen in its uncut form until its official release in 2006.)

Apart from some genuine brutality and gruesome imagery, the primary delight of Raw Meat are the performances of Donald Pleasance and Norman Rossington as Calhoun and Rogers. As Calhoun, Pleasance is clearly having the time of his life, expertly utilizing the most effective weapon of the British police: sarcasm. He’s ornery, callous, cynical and positively delightful to watch. Rossington keeps up his end of the repartee as well as the frequently amused and long-suffering Rogers. (While the cameo by Christopher Lee as Stratton-Villiers is amusing, it only gives the viewer a jolt of delighted recognition. Any other actor in the role would have encouraged the editors to slice out the scene to preserve the pace.) It’s this bitter sense of humor courtesy of the coppers keeping the movie from sliding into the deep despair of those living below.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to posit that class warfare is an underlying and obvious theme of director Gary Sherman’s script. The investigation into missing persons doesn’t even start until a titled twit vanishes, and it’s up to the students to lead the working class to those living below even Fagin and his ragamuffins. For his part, Sherman treats his cannibals with as much dignity and sympathy as he can. The scene of The Man mourning his mate’s death is extremely touching, and our empathy is tweaked further when a blow to the head causes more damage than it should have, thanks to his inherited vitamin deficiency and, we learn, suffering of a form of bubonic plague. His attempts to communicate with Patricia at the end consist of the only English words he knows, variations of “Mind the Doors”, announced by the conductor of every train, at every stop, for more than a hundred years.

While the Dennis Gordon-Orr does a smashing job with the set design on the film’s limited budget, Alex Thompson’s use of shadow in near-darkness (cheating where there’s no other choice—how else can you explain a stark shadow cast upon a wall in supposed pitch-blackness?) is remarkable. Particularly striking is a scene between The Man and a trio of rail workers that takes place only in the beams and slashes of their flashlights. What Sherman doesn’t show is also notable. A second long, unbroken tracking shot leading from the lair and down the collapsed tunnel gives us the history that the dialogue hinted at: via sound effects and ambiance, we experience the Victorian-era mine workers just before, during and just after the cave in, with a pitiful ghostly whimper for help coming over the soundtrack just as we’re shown a skeletal hand trapped beneath a pile of rock. Aural memory has rarely been utilized so well in a movie before or since and it’s simply chilling.

Following Raw Meat, Sherman went on to direct the wonderful Dead & Buried, with a terrific Dan O’Bannon script—another sardonic movie about life and death and mostly death. Dead & Buried, in turn, lead to a number of ill-advised productions (Vice Squad, Wanted Dead or Alive) and the movie that nearly killed his career—Poltergeist III. Due to Heather O’Roarke’s untimely death a few weeks before the end of principal photography, Sherman was forced to film the rewritten ending with a body double, which resulted in not only an uncomfortable release, but a critically-disastrous one as well). After the stress of this production Sherman reportedly retreated to the relative comfort of directing and producing movies of the week. In 2000, Raw Meat / Death Line was chosen by a panel of British critics as one of "The Ten Most Important British Horror Films of the 20th Century". Take that BFC!

So before your visit to London, may I recommend picking up the official DVD of Raw Meat, criminally devoid of extras? If nothing else, it’ll remind you not to miss the last train.