Review: "Bartleby" (1970)

Herman Melville wrote "Bartleby, The Scrivener" and published it in a magazine anonymously while he was slaving away on his masterwork, "Moby Dick." The story of a lowly office clerk who (politely) refuses to do his work, many observers saw it as Melville's way of hashing out his writing demons. It is largely regarded as his greatest short story.

By the time he died, Melville's nascent fame had faded and he could no longer make a living at writing, so he was forced to take a job as a clerk at a customs and duties office. He died in the same virtual anonymity in which he first published "Bartleby," and he and his character's fates are disturbingly mirrored.

There have been a few adaptations of "Bartleby" as a radio play, stage play, an opera, and several films, including a comedic version in 2001 starring Crispin Glover and David Paymer, unseen by me (or most anyone). And the passively rebellious nature of Bartleby has been borrowed in numerous ways by writers and filmmakers, such as Ben Affleck's stubborn fallen angel in "Dogma" carrying the name.

I had never heard of the 1970 film version, and it's apparently dropped whatever status it once had in the public consciousness. It's a short movie, just 78 minutes, written by Anthony Friedman and Rodney Carr-Smith, with Friedman also directing and Carr-Smith producing.

It was the only film Friedman ever made, and Carr-Smith only made one other. The film is low budget, filmed in just a few locations along with some verisimilitudinous scenes shot in the everyday hustle and bustle of London.

Bartleby is very much in the mode of Chauncey Gardiner or Charly Gordon, seemingly simpleton characters whose naive innocence contrasts with the dark and oppressive world that they inhabit. In movies like this the story is not about Bartleby so much as using him as a tool to explore ourselves.

The lesson we're supposed to take away is not that Bartleby is an oddball, but that we're oddballs for not thinking more like him.

John McEnery is an interesting physical specimen for the part: young, tall and thin, with receding blondish hair swept severely over the top of his head. He only ever wears one suit, seems to come from nowhere, and apparently spends all his time not at work wandering around London, peering into storefront windows or other things that interest him.

Bartleby barely ever speaks, and rarely unless spoken to. His default mode is with his head hunched over and his eyes downcast, as if he is trying to disappear into the flooring.

Friedman shoots a lot of modernist architecture around Bartleby, showing him trudging up stairs or along streetscapes with antiseptic-looking buildings in the background. The very advancements that have made us so proud of ourselves -- phones, computers, transportation -- are baffling to him.

He applies for a job at a small accounting firm as an audit clerk. (Or "clark" as it's pronounced in the Brit idiom.) It's a tedious job -- checking row after endless row of numbers to make sure the accounts all add up. Bartleby previously worked at the post office, first in the "dead letter" (undeliverable) department, then later as a clerk.

The boss -- never named, nor is the business -- is played by Paul Scofield as an upper-crust type who favors pipes and three-piece tweed suits. He hires Bartleby, astonished that the young man makes no specific demands in pay. "The salary is not important. Anything reasonable will be sufficient."

Bartleby takes the ad-hoc work station in the little nook outside the boss' office and at first is very proficient in his work. But one day when asked to work on the Prebble account, he utters the words that soon become his mantra: "I'd prefer... not to."

He says this in a halting way, very politely, often with the preamble of "At the moment," as if this is a temporary situation that will change.

At first the boss is nonplussed, and assigns the work to other employees. But soon Bartleby's refusals come more frequently and more broadly: "I'd prefer not to do accounts anymore today."

Things go from there. The boss, who has a kindly heart, finds himself unable to simply fire the young man. A colleague that he lunches with weekly (Thorley Walters) urges him to do so, ultimately suggesting his weak nerve will impact his reputation as a businessman.

The boss seems to think that if he acts in a reasonable way, Bartleby will be reasonable in return. But things grow worse, and soon it causes strife with the other workers who have to take up the slack.

It reaches a head when the boss goes into the office on a Sunday -- cued by the ringing church bells -- and discovers that Bartleby is living there. He follows Bartleby on his excursions and confronts him, demanding to know why he refuses his simple demands for work.

Bartleby says that anything he would say would provide no satisfying answer, and hints cryptically that he explained himself on his job application. The story never returns to explore this.

The boss finally fires Bartleby, but he prefers not to vacate the offices. Ultimately the boss moves the business to another location, thinking he has washed his hands of the troublesome fellow. But the old landlord summons him back, complaining about the abandoned puppy of a man.

The boss tries one last time to reason with him, even offering to drive him to his own personal doctor. (In Melville's story and most adaptations, the boss actually surprises himself by inviting Bartleby to live with him, though not in this version.)

Bartleby is taken away by the police and placed in an asylum. The boss goes to see him a few times, the only visitor Bartleby has, and is confronted by a strange, painfully thin woman who seems to know them both. Bartleby deteriorates, preferring not to eat, and eventually dies.

I found it interesting that the boss' chief reaction to Bartleby's refusals and strange ways is not anger, but embarrassment. When the police arrive to pluck Bartleby out of the old office, the boss runs away, as if simply being near the scene will discredit him. Similarly, in the final scene he walks briskly away from Bartleby's slumped body, pausing long enough to inform a pair of nurses before scurrying away.

I found myself strangely moved and engaged by "Bartleby." It's a short, slow-moving picture without a whole lot of narrative. The characters are never explored in a traditional kind of storytelling way -- for example, we never learn anything about the boss' life away from work.

And yet, it's an odd and emotional tone poem of a movie. Bartleby is different from anyone else, and though passive by nature he's not afraid to be different. In one of his few monologues, he notes that most people are afraid to talk to themselves, though he is not.

Bartleby's little rebellions do not seem to have any purpose behind them, other than for their own sake. He chooses to take the left-hand turn while everyone else goes right. He does it perhaps because he simply wants to see what everyone else is missing.

"Bartleby" is a quiet, stubborn little gem.

Reeling Backward: "Carve Her Name With Pride" (1958)

One often encounters oddities in movies that would appear to have fallen out of the head of an addled screenwriter. But then they turn out to be true, or at least a lightly fictionalized version of the truth.

Such was the case of "Carve Her Name With Pride," a dramatization of real-life British World War II spy Violette Szabo, who was dropped into German-controlled France for several important missions. She was eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, where was executed. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, which roughly parallels our Congressional Medal of Honor. Szabo became only the second woman to earn that honor.

There's a scene after Szabo has been selected and trained by the Special Operations Executive and is about to be sent on her first mission when she is asked to select "her poem." This was a method of exchanging coded messages based on memorizing a poem, with certain keywords used for cryptography. She selects a poem written for her by her late husband, a French soldier who was killed in the war, "The Life That I Have," which is a bit of gooey romantic mush.

It sounds like a bunch of movie-making hooey -- except British agents really did use code poems, and "The Life That I Have" was one of the more famous choices. The only thing false about it was that it was written by Leo Marks, a famous cryptographer, and not Szabo's husband.

The film stars Virginia McKenna, a major Brit star during the 1950s and '60s, who won a BAFTA award for another WWWII movie previously featured in this space, "A Town Like Alice." She earned another British acting award nomination for "Pride," providing another strong, resolute performance.

McKenna's physicality contributes greatly to her success in these roles as a woman in dire circumstances who finds her courage through harsh experience. She is a willowy beauty, thin almost to the point of emaciation, with fine porcelain features and blonde hair. She doesn't look very tough, so when she excels in hand-to-hand combat training or wields a machine gun with great aptitude while mowing down Germans, it naturally makes the audience want to root for her.

About the machine gun scene: this apparently was a bit of Jessica Lynch-style propaganda trumped up by the military and passed along into the movie. In most likelihood, Szabo was captured when she ran out of ammunition. According to her Wikipedia page, German reports about the incident record no casualties.

My chief complaint about "A Town Like Alice" was that it included a love story with little relevance to the rest of the movie, and the same thing happens here. Szabo falls for Tony Fraser, a fellow agent played by Paul Scofield, and they end up working together. There is one touching scene after they've been captured where the men and women are separated on opposite sides of a barn, and they reach through the slats of wood to hold hands.

In general, though, the romance feels like something tacked on to give the film more feminine appeal.

Her treatment at the hands of the Nazis is rather cruel, and the movie is rather bold in depicting the fact that she was tortured -- though the camera is a little circumspect when the actual brutality begins, panning away while we hear her moans of pain. The filmmakers also aren't shy about showing how bedraggled Szabo looked after her interrogation, with McKenna looking positively wretched and, if possible, even thinner.

Directed by Lewis Gilbert, who helmed several James Bond films along with a number of very good movies, shows a steady hand for the material, keeping the focus on McKenna and how she reacts to everyone around her. He co-wrote the screenplay with Vernon Harris based on the book by R.J. Minney.

"Carve Her Name With Pride" is a serviceable piece of mid-century romantic drama with an espionage angle, featuring another memorable turn by Virginia McKenna. Perhaps as I traipse through her filmography, I'll come across a movie where wasn't made to mack on some chap needlessly.

Reeling Backward: "The Train" (1964)

For a film with a silly premise, "The Train" is a really gripping action/thriller. It's about a French Resistance member outwitting the Germans to prevent them from shipping hundreds of great paintings to Berlin in the waning days of the war. The protagonist, played by Burt Lancaster, demands early in the story why his men should risk death for a bunch of art. "The Train" never adequately answers this question.

In fact, the antagonist -- splendidly played by Paul Scofield -- articulates exactly thus in the movie's final moments. Alone, defeated, he confronts his opponent and taunts him:

"Labiche! Here's your prize, Labiche. Some of the greatest paintings in the world. Does it please you, Labiche? Do you feel a sense of excitement at just being near them? A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape. You won by sheer luck. You stopped me without knowing what you were doing or why...
"Now, this minute, you couldn't tell me why you did what you did."

And he's exactly right. Paul Labiche (Lancaster), the Paris train station master who's secretly the ringleader of a Resistance cel, had already refused to stop the train. If any action were to be taken, he would have preferred to simply blow it up. His primary mission was to make sure another train was delayed long enough to be destroyed in an Allied air raid. Once that was accomplished, though, Labiche suddenly finds an unexplained need to keep the paintings in France.

The Allies' thinking of why exactly they should stop the paintings from leaving is fuzzy. Surely they knew the Nazis would not destroy such prized art. And by August of 1944, with the liberation of Paris days away and the German war machine in full retreat, they must have known it would only be a matter of time before Berlin fell and the paintings were reclaimed.

The reason provided by Scofield's German colonel, Franz von Waldheim, holds no more water. He convinces his recalcitrant superiors to allocate a much-needed train to the paintings' transport by arguing that they're worth a billion German marks, and could supply their fatherland with a trove of weapons and supplies for its defense.

Not likely -- exactly which nation or private enterprise would be in the market of selling massive supplies of guns and artillery to Germany, when it was clearly losing the war? Even assuming they could somehow get through the Allied lines? Col. von Waldheim's claim that the art is a commodity that can be traded like gold was doubtless a ploy to convince his bosses in the Reich. He simply wanted the paintings for himself, or the glory of his nation. He makes it clear in the same final speech:

"The paintings are mine. They always will be. Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it. They will always belong to me, or a man like me."

Finally, there's the central question that goes unasked throughout the story: Why is it the Germans can locate an entire train when they're in critically short supply, but keep having to rely on French engineers to operate them? Especially when one after another turns out to be part of the Resistance? Surely there was a Franz or Hansel somewhere in the local German forces with knowledge of running a train. Or they could have even brought in a German civilian engineer.

And yet, despite all the illogic of the narrative, the film works on most every level. I credit the presence of director John Frankenheimer, who was brought in after Lancaster had original director Arthur Penn fired. Penn wanted to do a more contemplative film that would barely show any of the train stuff, but Lancaster desperately needed an action-filled hit. The studio gave Frankenheimer double the budget, final cut and (according to Wikipedia) a Ferrari to turn it into a taut thriller.

He succeeded. Although I do sort of wonder what the Penn film would've been like.

I really liked Michel Simon as Papa Boule, an ancient train engineer given the assignment of driving the art train. When he learns what is on board, he risks his life to race it out of the bombing attack. We sense that he does so based on his barroom musing that he once had a girlfriend who posed for Picasso; perhaps he thinks her portrait is among the absconded paintings.

Papa Boule has the face of a troll, and the temperament of one, too, but beneath that craggy surface beats the heart of ... well, not a poet, but someone who at least knows what poetry is.

After saving the train, he sabotages the engine by placing French franc coins in the oil line. When it is brought back to the train yard for repairs, the German major demands Papa Boule turn out his pockets, revealing the telltale oil-smudged francs. Old fool, the major says before taking the engineer away to be shot. Why didn't you simply throw them away?

"Four francs is four francs," he says, which is about the only thing you can say when you're about to be machine-gunned full of holes.

Jeanne Moreau shows up as a French tavern/hotel owner where Labiche holes up when he's on the run. She demands to be paid for every scrap of help rendered or damage sustained to her property, and spouts a lot of talk about how men are such fools to always be playing at war. As written, the role feels rote.

The action scenes hold up really well nearly five decades on. And that's because Frankenheimer crashes real steam locomotives on several occasions -- including a three-way pileup that puts any modern Jerry Bruckheimer CGI conflagration to shame. You can't fake the incredible mass of those machines, and the devastating effects when they collide.

There's also a really clever sequence where Labiche, now piloting the art train himself, tricks the German officers on board into thinking they're traveling to Germany, when in actuality they've turned around and headed back for Paris. They get a small army of station masters and collaborators to disguise the names of French towns with German ones, post guards in German uniforms, etc.

The premise of "The Train" may be silly, at least in my view, but that does not preclude it from being based on historical fact. The screenplay, by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis, was based on a non-fiction book by Rose Valland, "Le front de l'art."

In reality, though, the French Resistance stopped the train not through brave sabotage or explosive plastique, but by entangling it in bureaucratic red tape. Proving once again that in real life, desk jockeys trump action heroes every time.

3.5 stars out of four