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Electric Chairs To Highchairs

DANIEL

Directed by Sidney Lumet (Paramount)

by John Ned Mendelssohn

In the early 1950’s, a wily amoral demagogue named Joe McCarthy managed to infect the entire land of the free and home of the brave with the dread of Communist subversion. The lives of countless hundreds of innocent people were disrupted. And two lives—those of a young Jewish couple convicted not of revealing secrets of the atom bomb to agents of Soviet Russia, but of conspiring to reveal them—on the electric chair.

Imagining the devastation the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s executions must have wreaked on their children, E.L. Doctorow produced one of the most extraordinarily affecting novels of the 70s. To read The Book Of Daniel was nearly to be consumed by retroactive outrage at the horrors of that most shameful epoch in modem American history.

To see Sidney Lumet’s film, though, is only to be perplexed, and grievously. Aiming to be all the more affecting for its determinedly dispassionate tone, it elicits only incredulity at how such emotionally explosive source material could have become so impotent on the screen, especially in view of Doctorow’s own very active participation, both as scenarist and executive producer.

You’ve got to accord the filmmakers some credit for their refusal to stack their deck. If they portray, say, the judge who condemns Daniel and Susan Isaacson’s parents as a giggling old buffoon, they also have Mandy Patinkin play Daniel’s doomed father as a smug pedagogue who gently browbeats his little boy into mouthing the Party line, as an arrogant fool who seems to believe that his moral superiority makes him invulnerable to redneck mobs.

And Timothy Hutton’s snide adult Daniel is an absolute monument of cynicism. He could hardly be less sympathetic until the utterly preposterous final scene—-when, after having buried all the demons of his traumatized adolescence along along with his suicidal sister, he happily attends a sun-dappled anti-war rally with his own little brood while Caroline Doctorow warbles sunnily on the soundtrack.

Once every reel or so, we’re treated to screen-filling close-ups of him describing various forms of execution that have enjoyed voguishness through the past few centuries. The more horrible the torture he describes, the more dispassionate his face and tone. Oh, God, we’re apparently meant to say—behold the extent to which his parents’ electrocution has inured him to horror. But the reverse psychology fails utterly—these scenes serve only to alienate us from him further, as we’re alienated from virtually every other major character in the film, with the exceptions of Ed Asner’s compassionate defense attorney and Lindsay Crouse’s brave Rochelle Isaacson, Daniel’s condemned mother.

If we feel little for the adult Daniel, we feel only very little more for his adolescent counterpart, or for the younger incarnation of his sister. The young actors who play them at the time of their parents’ arrest and trial start out taciturn and wind up positively zombie-like. Mumbling through his sinuses, young Ilan M. Mitchell-Smith is simply unintelligible much of the time.

If the film lacks the character with whom we can empathize, it likewise lacks one that we can disdain in any satisfying way. The weak-willed Judas Selig Mindish, who’s intimidated into providing the testimony that ultimately electrocutes the Isaacsons, appears at length only as a hopeless senile old man whose tears at the sight of the grownup Daniel may as well be tears of joy as of shame. Unlike the book, the film allows us to ponder his motives only from a very great distance.

To give credit where it’s due, Lumet does manage at least one extremely striking image. Shortly after their parents’ indictment, the assembled masses at a huge rally pass Daniel and Susan over their heads like buckets at a blaze. Once on stage, the children cower in fear and confusion as the huge crowd roars its sympathy at them. Talk about your lynch mob mentality.

The cinematography and set decoration too make up for a lot. Shot through the sort of amber filter that made The Godfather so sublimely pretty, many of the flashback sequences are quite gorgeous to look at. And seeing the Coca-Cola fans with which the characters try to cool themselves at an outdoor speech, the buses in which they ride, and their exquisite old wooden radios, we’re reminded of how much more beautiful everyday things used to be before they were streamlined into their current vapid ugliness.

Ultimately, though, you could hardly ask for a film that falls shorter of its source material. Which you simply must read.

What Do It Mean?

MIDNIGHT MOVIES by J. Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum (Harper & Row)

There are still certain thrills, even in our present enlightened age, which are disturbing enough to have to be segregated into—contained in—dead of night “rites of intensification.” Hence, the midnight movie. A good midnight movie articulates, often thru a purposeful alteration of conventional genre metaphors, certain anxieties that mainstream movies either ignore, repress, treat diffusely, gingerly...thus, during the late ’60s and early 70s, a period of intense social upheaval at home and the Vietnam war abroad, two of the most popular (and apt) midnight movies to emerge were George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (’68 and the first of a long line of horror films featuring evil, or at least chaos, triumphant) and Alexandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (70), films wherein our society and its most famous counterculture, respectively, self-destructed. The mainstream’s nod to Vietnam may have been the recycled World War II cliches of The Green Berets (’68), but on the afterhours circuit the war’s very real devastation to the national psyche was being achnowledged. Likewise, the reactionary mystical paranoia of El Topo addressed the waning counterculture’s angst far more succinctly than a piece of situational ethics dreck like (insert here the name of a couple dozen “youthoriented” post-Easy Rider flicks).

How do I know all this? Well, I read the book and it’s a pip. In it, the authors have undertaken to put the midnight movie in its proper historical context—and tho there is some brief mention of the religious aspects of movie-going thru the ages (the adoration of stars, the ritualistic visits to the dark movie palace) and a mention of a few of the earlier outre flicks and midnight showings, it’s a phenomenon that apparently began properly with the NYC underground movie scene of the late ’50s and early ’60s, gestated during the turbulent ’60s and came into its own during the deceptive social quietude of the ’70s, arriving at its current situation where there is a well-established midnight movie audience and repertoire.

And, as befitting a phenom with an established ’toire, this detailed exegesis attempts to explain its history, traditions, and current possibilities. Beginning with an in-depth look at the origin of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (’75) (“fueled by rock ’n’ roll, camp, and memories of the late ’60s counterculture [which had inherited a lot, in turn, from Parisian surrealism”]) the book goes on to describe, scene-by-scene, the aforementioned Dead and El Topo as well as all of John Waters’s stomach churners from Mondo Trasho (’69) thru the Divine/Tab Hunter pas de deux, Polyester (’80), and the author’s personal favorite, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (’77), “the most original and audacious film ever to become a midnight blockbuster.” These entertaining summaries are supplemented by enlightening biographies of each of the directors—we learn of Lynch’s abstract art background, “Decadentimmoralist” Waters’s suburban Catholic upbringing, “gory-populist” Romero’s cold war/EC comix childhood, and “macho-messianic” Jodorowsky’s adventures in the third world avant-garde scene. The more one learns of the directors, the less of a cypher each movie becomes.

This is a scholarly book, but not in a way that might put you off. Despite the academic trappings—the bibliography (which includes Sontag, Sartre, Artaud, and Genet, as well as Kael, Sarris, and Ebert [Ebert?]), the grad school chapter headings like “George Romero And The Return Of The Repressed,” and the penultimate did-we-leave-anyoneout heading “Rock, Drugs, Drag, Camp, Punk, Gore, and Agit-Prop” (aw-right!)—despite all that, this is an eminently readable book with Hoberman and Rosenbaum (weren’t they in Hamlet?) tempering their analytic bents with genuine enthusiasm and vice versa.. .and essential work to be put on your bookshelf next to John Brosnan’s The Horror People, James Roy MacBean’s Film And Revolution, and, lest we forget, Please Don’t Shoot My Dog: The Autobiography of Jackie Cooper, whose author’s name eludes me at the moment.

Richard C. Walls