an evening of maximilian schell

Cross of Iron: (1977. dir: Sam Peckinpah) Watching this film is like visiting the exact place in Quentin Tarantino's brain where Inglourious Basterds first took hold. Schell's Prussian, medal-obsessed Captain Stransky is one of those men who is so awful, so charmless and arrogant, that you'd leave the room if he walked into it. Schell gives him very exact and telling quirks and body language: the way he combs his hair, for instance, puts one oddly in mind of a serial killer. An under-achieving aristocrat stuck at the crumbling Eastern front where class means nothing, Stansky is fixated on cheating his way into obtaining the Iron Cross, as he is coward enough he will never earn it rightfully. In the final scenes, after a protracted and often near-fatal enmity with our Iron-Cross-wearing hero, Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn in another fruitful venture with Peckinpah), the story nearly flips out of its cynicism into a place of possible salvation, a surprise turn which Peckinpah dangles in front of us but never really has trouble resisting.

This is a very fine film in many respects, and its best scene is a tour-de-force for Schell and his Stansky: having gleaned that his lieutenant is gay, he coaxes the man and his young lover to confess it, then uses the knowledge for blackmail. It might have been the inspiration for that later scene in Basterds when Christoph Waltz's snakelike villain wheedles and wrenches the whereabouts of hidden Jews from a French villager. Although that later scene is more sublime and certainly more enjoyable, Schell's is so horrid in its unctuous manipulation that it is difficult to watch, impossible to look away from, and leaves one feeling soiled and skinless, as many of the best Peckinpah scenes do.



Julia: (1977. dir: Fred Zinnemann) I've loved this movie since I was a kid. It's well established now that Lillian Hellman made it up out of whole cloth and dressed it up, very effectively, as memoir. The book is good, and the movie is very, very good. It's one of the best edited films you'll ever see, and photographed to evoke flawlessly the atmosphere of the times. It's shaped like memory is shaped: moments from different years blend into one another apparently at random, as your life does, once it's stored in the brain. There may be an overuse of soft-focus (and I cringe at Jane Fonda's downturned inflections when finishing interrogatives, a pretention that only theatre students use); certainly there is some sentimental hogwash written into the script. (Absolutely it's hogwash that anyone who knew Lillian Hellman would want her looking after their child, and utter hogwash that she would break her heart looking for the little tyke.) Set historicity to one side, though: this is Lillian Hellman, a champion liar, and it's Hollywood Hellman, to boot. Look instead to the use of music as accent to the ominous, and use of distance and lightning-cut to suggest the fading or calling up of memory. These effects and more are masterfully used.

And here are great performances: not only Redgrave and Robards, and (inflections aside) Fonda, but Meryl Streep and Hal Holbrook and John Glover in secondary but memorable roles. And Maximilian Schell: this was the first time I saw him, and his performance was unlike anything I'd seen before. He is a resistance-fighter come to Paris at the behest of Hellman's friend Julia (Redgrave) to ask her help in smuggling money into Berlin. His manner is so singular that, when set beside the easy familiarity of Jane Fonda, he seemed almost totally unreadable to me in my youth. Now, many viewings later, it seems an unpretentious, straightforward portrayal, but looking closely I see the hallmarks of brilliance. In one moment Mr. Johann is the very soul of blandness; in the next, he is weirdly baleful. It is a perfect face for an undercover fighter, exactly controlled but with an underlay of anxiety tugging at the musculature. When he sits to eat, he clutches hold of his coat and eats quickly, his eyes never still, always checking the perimeter.

Sometimes it pays to watch a film first as a child: you can be fair certain that the things that stick with you, the strange things which remain in your memory, are the extraordinary ones, and Schell's performance, which might look lackluster at a first adult glance, is one of those extraordinary things.