INFLATION
With Edward Arnold, Horace McNally, Esther Williams, and Vicky Lane.
It’s a virtual truism that rewriting history entails–and to some extent derives from–rethinking the present moment. Just as the recent change in presidents can be linked to the public’s revised reading of the last 4 (or 8 or 12) years, our highly selective sense of film history is determined not only by which films have survived but also by the present-day concerns that dictate what interests us about the past.
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Another kind of reevaluation of film history this week at the Film Center is the program devoted to American writer-director Cyril Endfield, who was forced by the Hollywood blacklist to move to England in 1952, after making seven features here; he continued working for another two decades and made an additional 14 features. For a number of reasons–Endfield’s work in low-budget genre filmmaking, the way his ouevre was split between two countries, the limitations of most accounts of the blacklist, and above all the unavailability of several key works–Endfield remained critically unrecognized throughout his career and for almost two decades afterward. Lately there’s been a gratifying effort in both England and the United States to make up for this neglect–including the Film Center’s pioneering retrospective last July, a subsequent Endfield tribute at the Telluride film festival, a column by Todd McCarthy in Daily Variety, several pages in Brian Neve’s recently published English book Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition, and programs currently being prepared for both BBC TV and National Public Radio. All the things that are so fascinating and impressive in Endfield’s work today, which we wouldn’t or couldn’t see 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, have to do with auteurism (his style and thematic preoccupations are both highly personal), with the visual and thematic characteristics of film noir, with our limited vision of the blacklist, with the way social criticism has evolved, and with the way film history gets written or rewritten.
As more Endfield works become available, this reevaluation and discovery will undoubtedly continue. At present, only four of Endfield’s important movies–his masterpieces Try and Get Me! (1951) and Zulu (1964) as well as The Underworld Story (1950) and Sands of the Kalahari (1965)–are available in this country on videotape or laserdisc. But two other important works, both of them scarcer than hen’s teeth and only recently located, are playing at the Film Center on Thursday, January 21. Both are genuine revelations and vital pieces of the Endfield puzzle. Indeed, based on what Endfield and his biggest early supporter, French distributor-critic-filmmaker Pierre Rissient, have told me, these should probably be considered his two most significant early works.
We first find the Devil cackling over shots of lightning bolts and documentary evidence of wartime devastation, announced by headlines: “World fronts explode!” “Shanghai smashed!” “Rotterdam destroyed!” “Flames!” and so on. Then we see him seated behind the glass desk in his futurist tycoon’s office, chortling to his sullen, sultry mistress (Vicky Lane), who periodically smokes long cigarettes or pours long drinks of dry ice: “Wonderful, wonderful! The best season I ever had!” A signed photo of Hitler rests on his desk and a black raven is perched directly over it.
