last night's history of filmmaking double feature: shadow of the vampire and safe conduct

Shadow of the Vampire begins with a question that we've all asked ourselves at one time or another: what if Max Schreck wasn't an actor at all, but really was a vampire? Director E. Elias Merhige takes us onto the sets and locations of Nosferatu as FW Murnau (John Malkovich) creates the original classic vampire film with the help of a real vampire. It sounded like some kind of heaven to me, but there are really only two reasons to see it: to hang out on these German film sets in 1921, which feel marvelously real, and for Willem Dafoe's fantastic performance as Schreck. He's genuinely chilling, he's surprisingly funny, and sometimes both at once. Some of the supporting cast is inspired, like Cary Elwes as the cameraman/dispenser of pharmaceuticals, but Malkovich is, as usual, a little annoying most of the time. And the script makes very little sense, particularly in the final scene of madness when Schreck demands his promised tiend and a ridiculous battle ensues between heartless vampyr and heartless filmmaker.


Safe Conduct is funny and smart and very well-paced, which, at nearly three hours, it must be to survive, starting off at a fast clip and later mellowing so that we may spend more relaxed time with our hero (Jacques Gamblin). This is the life of a filmmaker in Paris under Nazi domination. Does one work with the Hun? or abandon one's craft for the duration? or secretly work against the oppressor from within his own system? The questions are hard, the caveats appended to any answer offered are troubling, and director Bertrand Tavernier doesn't shrink from the complexity of it, although he is also not averse to sprinkling a little sentimental fairy-dust, either.

It has Tim Piggott-Smith in it, always a good thing, in a wonderful late segment in which the hero, having spontaneously stolen some Nazi documents, finds himself bundled off to England by the French Resistance to convince the chummy, hard-nosed, tea-drinking Brits that he is no German spy trying to pass off false information. The best of it is that good and evil are not simple: every seemingly heroic act is going to rebound against somebody, either the perpetrator or an innocent, and the perpetrator must choose whether to confess his crime or watch an innocent suffer for it. It's beautifully filmed and the details feel true. It's a little pat, a little too well-tied-up, a little too much an encomium to France's Greatest Generation to feel completely satisfying, but for an exercise in tribute and sentiment it succeeds remarkably well.