The Great Movies III

The "implausibility" involves the complications of a theft of pearls, some swift stock-market moves, and Godfrey's plans for the city dump. OK, it's all implausible. That's what I'm here for. By pretending the implausible is possible, screwball comedy acts like a tonic. Nothing is impossible if you cut through the difficulties with an instrument like Powell's knife-edged delivery. He betrays little overt emotion, but what we glimpse is impatience with some people who will not do the obvious and, indeed, the inevitable.

The movie also benefits from the range of sharply defined characters, and the actors to play them. Even the biggest stars in those days were surrounded by other actors in substantial roles that provided them with counterpoint, with context, with emotional tennis partners. Notice here the work of Eugene Pallette, who bluntly speaks truth even though his family is deaf to him. By God, he's had enough: "What this family needs is discipline. I've been a patient man, but when people start riding horses up the front steps and parking them in the library, that's going a little too far. This family's got to settle down!" His voice is like a chainsaw, cutting through the vapors around him.

This movie, and the actors in it, and its style of production, and the system that produced it, and the audiences that loved it, have all been replaced by pop culture of brainless vulgarity. But the movie survives, and to watch it is to be rescued from some people who don't care that it makes a difference ... to some people.

here is an astonishing sequence in Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) in which his hero, the Inuit hunter Nanook, hunts a seal. Flaherty shows the most exciting passage in one unbroken shot. Nanook knows that seals must breathe every twenty minutes, and keep an air hole open for themselves in the ice of the Arctic winter. He finds such a hole, barely big enough to be seen, and is poised motionless above it with his harpoon until a seal rises to breathe. Then he strikes and holds onto the line as the seal plunges to escape.

There is a desperate tug of war. Nanook hauls the line ten or twelve feet out of the hole, and then is dragged back, sliding across the ice, and pulls again, and again. We can't see, but he must have the line tied to his body-to lose would be to drown. He desperately signals for his fellow hunters to help him, and we see them running across the ice with their dogs as he struggles to hold on. They arrive at last, and three or four of them pull on the line. The seal prevails. Nanook uses his knife to enlarge the hole, and the seal at last is revealed and killed. The hunters immediately strip it of its blubber and dine on its raw flesh.

There has been some discussion among critics of a possible interruption in the filming; we never see the seal actually being pulled up to the surface. Was the quarry shot with a gun that Flaherty did not want to show, because that would affect the purity of his images of man against nature? Such questions are part of a decades-old debate about the methods of a man who has been called the father of the documentary, whose films are masterpieces, and yet whose realities were admittedly assisted.

Seeing Nanook of the North at the Toronto Film Festival, magnificently projected in 35mm and accompanied by a live performance of a new musical score, I did not much care about the purity of Flaherty's methods. He shot his footage in 192o, when there were no rules for documentaries and precious few documentaries, certainly none shot so far north that nothing grows except a little moss, and three hundred Inuit could inhabit a space the size of England. (At about the same time, at the other pole, a photographer named Frank Hurley was filming Shackleton's expedition, which ended with his ship, the Endurance, broken by the ice, and the crew escaping to South America on a seven-hundred-mile journey in an open boat, with not a life lost. That film is also on DVD.)

We know, because Flaherty was frank about it, that he recruited the cast for his film. Nanook was chosen because he was the most famed of the hunters in the district, but the two women playing his wives were not his wives and the children were not his children. Flaherty's first footage was of a walrus hunt, and he revealed that Nanook and his fellow hunters performed the hunt for the camera. Nanook is not cinema verite. And yet in a sense it is: the movie is an authentic documentary showing the creation of itself. What happens on the screen is real, no matter what happened behind it. Nanook really has a seal on the other end of that line.