The Great Movies III

And why am I bothering to describe this plot, which exists as such silly froth it makes P. G. Wodehouse look ponderous by comparison? Perhaps because the actors give it such goofy playfulness. Events conspire to transport all of the principals to Venice, created on a gigantic Venetian set where gondolas travel for yards at a time and seaplanes land at restaurants. It was here that Madge intended to introduce them; she still doesn't know they've met under Dale's impression that Jerry is Horace. I love writing sentences like that. "You two run along and dance," Madge tells them, "and don't give me another thought." That's when Dale decides, "If Madge doesn't care, I certainly don't."Jerry replies, "Neither do I. All I know is ..."

And then comes their third great dance number, covering most of the visible real estate in Venice and conveniently clearing a dance floor for their pas de deux. This is the number featuring Rogers's famous gown made mostly of ostrich feathers, which Astaire hated because they distracted from the clean lines of the dance (in "Swing Time," one of her beaded costumes actually swipes him in the face). The feathers are a challenge for Rogers, too, who has to work with and not against them. Her choreography causes them to undulate as if she herself is almost in flight; at the moments when, in Astaire's arms, she bends over backward almost to the floor, they underline the appearance of surrender.

Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live. Where everyone is a millionaire and hotel suites are the size of ballrooms and everything is creased, combed, brushed, shined, polished, powdered, and expensive. Where you seem to find the happiness you seek, when you're out together dancing cheek to cheek. It doesn't even matter if you really find it, as long as you seem to find it, because appearances are everything in this world, and ...

By general consent [one] of the best documentaries ever made."

So I wrote in 1994, in a review of what in fact is a better documentary, Ray Muller's Zhe Wonderful Horrible Life ofLeni Riefenstahl. I was referring to Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), about the 1934 Nazi Party congress and rally in Nuremberg. Others would have agreed with me. We would all have been reflecting the received opinion that the film is great but evil, and that reviewing it raises the question of whether great art can be in service of evil. I referred to Triumph again in the struggle I had in reviewing the racist Birth o fa Nation.

But how fresh was my memory of Triumph of the Will? I believe I saw it as an undergraduate in college, and my memory would have been old and fuzzy even in 1994, overlaid by many assertions of the film's "greatness." Now I have just seen it again and am stunned that I praised it. It is one of the most historically important documentaries ever made, yes, but one of the best? It is a terrible film, paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong, and not even "manipulative," because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer. It is not a "great movie" in the sense that the other films in this group are great, but it is "great" in the reputation it has and the shadow it casts.

Have you seen it recently, or at all? It records the gathering together, in September 1934 in Nuremberg, of hundreds of thousands of Nazi Party members, troops, and supporters, to be "reviewed" by Adolf Hitler. "Reviewed" is the operative word. Great long stretches of the film consist merely of massed formations of infantry, cavalry, artillery groups, and even working men with their shovels held like rifles.' They march in perfect, rigid formation past Hitler, giving him their upraised right arms in salute and having it returned. Opening sections of the film show Hitler addressing an outdoor formation, and the conclusion involves his speech in a vast hall at the closing of the congress.

Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the objects of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary Woodstock (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film's director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He shows the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Portosan Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. He shows the crowd sleeping in tents or in the rough, bathing in streams, even making love. He shows them drenched with shadows and wading through mud. He shows medical problems. He shows the crowds gradually disappearing.