2. GOING DOWNHILL

GOING DOWNHILL: FROM THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) TO THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s film, The Battleship Potemkin, debuted in 1925 but even today it has a kinetic, dynamic and modern feel to its montage sequences; at times, it has the immediacy of news footage. Breaking the rule of conventional narrative, the film lacks central protagonists. It is instead bound together by a theme: the masses must unite to obtain social justice. This story of revolutionary conflict is propelled by revolutionary technique, i.e., Eisenstein’s theory of montage: collision,  conflict,  contrast. Shots follow each other in conflict: directionally,  left to right, right to left; rhythmically, the crowd stumbles in panic, the soldiers march methodically; numerically, from a crowd to a single face; in angle, high to low; in light,  dark to bright.

The movie The Untouchables (1987), directed by Brian DePalma, written by David Mamet , is a Hollywood re-make of the TV series of the same name. It is a big-name, big-budget crime-drama cartoon (entertainment for the masses if you will). Seemingly, the film’s only connection to Eisenstein is in DePalma’s appropriation of Potemkin’s most famous moment, the Odessa Steps sequence where a baby carriage rolls down the steps. However, there is something more here that both unites and separates the films from each other. The Battleship Potemkin deals with the 1905 uprising against the Czar (an unpopular government);  The Untouchables is concerned with Prohibition (an unpopular law). A government that rules by force, rather than by consent is doomed to conflict and revolt. A law enforced by punitive legal coercion, rather than social agreement  is doomed to make criminals out of ordinary citizens and undermine respect for the law. These are provocative issues: hungry sailors were made into mutineers; the short-sighted morality of the Temperance movement in America helped fuel the rise of the Mob. What truly distinguishes these films from each other is their treatment of these topics.

The Battleship Potemkin is designed to inflame revolutionary fervor;  it is quite openly, a Soviet propaganda film. It is a tribute to Eisenstein’s talent then, how well the film succeeds on an emotional level, even as one rejects its simplistic political message. Czarist Russia was a combination of a medieval, feudal monarchy and totalitarian police state (serfdom had only been abolished in 1861). As the film opens, sailors aboard the Potemkin complain about the quality of the meat they are issued. The ship’s doctor examines the meat through his spectacles. In close-up, the meat is shown crawling with maggots. He pronounces it acceptable, enraging the crew. This sequence works on two levels: a basic injustice anyone can understand; and metaphorically, the ship as a microcosm of Czarist Russia, the rotten meat as a symbol of a corrupt society. The sailors are herded onto the main deck and threatened with execution by their commander for their refusal to eat the bad meat. An Orthodox priest upbraids them for their ”unruly spirit” (the Church allied with the State).The sailors mutiny and seize control of the ship. Their leader, Vakulinchuk, is killed during the struggle. The body of the revolutionary martyr is solemnly taken ashore and displayed to the people in a shrine-like tent (Christian iconography is exchanged for Soviet iconography). The citizens of Odessa, young and old, gather on the steps to bring food and support to the sailors. Without warning, Czarist troops descend to attack the crowd, which scatters in panic. A child is shot in the back, his grieving mother picks up the body. A group of desperate citizens decide to appeal to the troops (and by extension, the Czar) for mercy. All are gunned down. A mother is shot and her child in the baby carriage ( the future generation of Russia) rolls unchecked down the steps. The violence in this sequence is realistic and disturbing, but it also works symbolically as well as literally and emotionally. The film concludes with an extended suspenseful sequence of the mutineers aboard the Potemkin preparing to confront the other ships of their squadron. The other ships refuse to fire, their crews cheering the Potemkin’s sailors in solidarity.

If the the story is simple, it is also powerful, designed for the mostly illiterate peasant masses. If its revolutionary message is naive (for Czarist repression would soon be replaced and dwarfed by Soviet repression) it is at least sincere; Eisenstein uses all of his craft and technique to illustrate an important event.

In contrast, The Untouchables (1987) is a star-vehicle for Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert DeNiro. It is a movie that trivializes rather than explores, the violence and corruption of Chicago in the Thirties. In the opening scene Al Capone (Robert DeNiro) chatting with reporters, denies any connection to violence, ”It’s not good business”. The next scene shows a gangster leaving a bomb in a bar that refused to buy Capone’s beer. A child is blown up but it feels more like a cheap dramatic device,  stacking the deck (gangsters are babykillers!)  rather than a realistic portrayal of gangland violence. Kevin Costner plays the naive, aw-shucks treasury agent, Eliot Ness, who is determined to bring down Al Capone even as he battles corruption within the Chicago Police Department. In this quest, Ness is aided by a tough Irish beat cop, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery), who tellls him how to defeat Capone: ”He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.  He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”.

The basic message of this film, an old Hollywood standard,  is that a lawman must overcome his scruples and break the law in order to uphold it. The apparent contradiction of this stance and the moral danger of advocating it,  is rarely noted by Hollywood films,  this one being no exception. In the film’s climax, there is a bloody and ridiculous slow-motion shootout at a train station between Ness and Capone’s men;  men fire in turns,  blood spurts from headwounds. The violence is stylized, sanitized and offensive at the same time (there are no wounded screaming in pain or innocent bystanders hit by stray bullets). When the baby carriage rolls down the steps in this scene,  it rings false; as if DePalma was at a loss as to how to portray a gunbattle, either realistically or dramatically, so he needed to juice it up, raise the stakes (flatter film critics), by introducing a child in a baby carriage rolling downhill. The effect is more comic (and cynical)  than dramatic. One is not moved by the child’s dilemma so much as wondering in whether or not DePalma is desperate enough to kill another child to hold the audience’s attention.

The violence depicted in this film is degrading, without being accurate (either emotionally or realistically). Trickier, murkier issues that are raised by this subject matter are never touched upon: the social hypocrisy of Prohibition (inasmuch as the rich, the judges, and the cops were all drinking bootleg booze); the disturbing discovery of one’s own capacity for violence (Ness and his men gun down one gangster after another; Ness throws one off a roof ; the shrinking moral difference between the “legitimate” world of businessmen, politicians, and crooked cops who lie, cheat, and steal–and mob bosses who see themselves as realists who provide the people with what they want: booze,  gambling, and prostitution (as in The Godfather,1972). The Untouchables is not interested in its own story or issues. It uses its story (the Prohibition as backdrop) in the service of technique (making another big-budget star vehicle); while Eisenstein rightly,  if with political naiveté,  uses technique in the service of his story.

Once on CNN, I saw the funeral for a child who had been killed in the ethnic fighting in Bosnia. As I watched, the funeral party at the gravesite was shelled by the Serbs, wounding a grandmother, killing another child.The Odessa Steps sequence of The Battleship Potemkin felt like that; but I’m not sure if the cynical, empty Hollywood exercise of packaging violence (entertainment for the whole family!)  isn’t more horrifying.