In Clive James recent book Cultural Amnesia; he writes about people who matter, most of them though, I am very sad and embarrassed to say, I never heard of ( for that matter, I just noticed that I had been reading his works for years in the New Yorker, but never noticed the ‘by-line’ until the other day ) but well I should have.
The book is set up in alphabetical order and its subjects include such persons as Louis Armstrong, Dick Cavett, Miles Davis, Sergei Diaghilev, Francois Furet, Chris Marker, Michael Mann, Thomas Mann, Erik Satie, Margaret Thatcher, Isoroku Yamamoto, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and many others. Each person’s section begins with a brief biographical introduction followed by an essay of sorts on that particular person. The biographical information is terse and leaves a feeling of wanting to know much more of the person. The essays provide the most interest, relating the person in question with all sorts of other persons, other arts, and simple, often times intensely personal observations. I cannot say that I agree with all his observations, for who could ( I do not share his perception of John Coltrane’s music and the music of that period of Jazz in particular that he sets down in his essay on Duke Ellington ) but there is certainly something about Clive James way of weaving one bit to another and another and another.
A portion of the section on Arthur Schnitzler follows below and how James weaves an isolated quote into an examination of the manifest absurdity within the mentioned films, the blockbuster, a few actors ability and personal idiosyncrasies, the nature of a ‘star’ to an actor, historic detail, and more…
Of the great unknowns, Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) has his section and in the essay portion contains a marvelous review of sorts on ‘Where Eagles Dare’ a wonderously hilarious World War II adventure. I quote at length ( it is lengthy but can be read in convenient sections without missing much at all ), because Clive James tells and writes it all so well:
‘Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931 ) was a giant of literary Vienna in its most fruitful era. A practicing physician before he turned professional writer, he brought a view steeped in the harsh realism of the consulting room and the surgery to his stories, novels, and plays. The most conspicuous, and most enduringly controversial, element in this clinical realism was his exploration of the erotic. As a physician he knew a lot about it at secondhand…’
‘there are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and the most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long as they might fondly imagine.’-Arthur Schnitzler, Buch Der Spruche und Bedenken, p. 78-
‘… Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity might look like the only explanation for the sort of newspapers, magazines, television programs and movies that make us ashamed to be living in the West. At first blush, the mass media seem to offer the ideal chance of examining stupidity in isolation. But once again, the trick is not easily worked. There is a possibility, amounting to a probability when the really big money is involved, that the stupidity is being manufactured by clever people whose commercial motives put their case, scope and integrity into abeyance. This non-anomaly becomes most obvious in the case of Hollywood's blockbuster movies, or the long haul of creative intelligence takes a spiral route towards the big haul at the box office. Every onlooker fancies his power of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening weekend. But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case. Where Eagles Dare has always been my favorite example: since the day I first saw it, I've taken a sour delight rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness on screen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail---and, alright, in order to have a wonderful time. There's something precious about the intellectual squalor of Where Eagles Dare: it is a swamp with the surface of green pulp squeeze from emeralds. You can't get the same charge from Delta Force movies, or from the adventures of Jean-Claude Van Damme and the brainless universe where men with guns are helpless against a man fighting with his feet. Where Eagles Dare is the apex of a form: it shows that there is somewhere to go beyond The Guns of Navarone, a numbskull stratosphere in which not even The Wild Geese could fly. Where eagles dare, the sense of the ridiculous winks out to a dot, and the vision is filled with the vaulting pretensions of latter-day schoolmen who believe, if only ad hoc and pro tem, its cinematic sense can exist in vacuo: detached, that is, from any other sense; a voluntary brain-death. The whole complex phenomena is epitomized by Richard Burton's hairstyle.
Schnitzler, let us remember, said that the flight into stupidity is a flight away from responsibility. But soaring beyond any human absurdity that even Schnitzler could imagine, Richard Burton's hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare is a flight into stupidity and away from the barber. Burton plays a British agent who is possibly also a German agent, although we can be fairly sure that he will turn out to be a British agent in the end, because Richard Burton's agent would never agree to a deal by which his client was shot at dawn. Burton the almost certainly British stage is sent, with Clint Eastwood and other agents---some of who actually do turn out to be German agents—on a mission to a castle deep behind German lines, there to rescue, or possibly confirm the credibility of, or perhaps betray the real identity of an actor pretending to be an American general in possession of the plans for a Second Front. The actor playing the actor need not detain us, and considering how he acts it is a wonder that the Germans have detained him. (There is a lot more to wonder about the behavior of the Germans, but we'll get to that later.) The actors who matter are Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Clint, already a top box office draw at the time, has been cast as a simple, straight-talking American assassin who helps a fiendishly ingenious British spy: it's the same relationship as Felix Leiter to James Bond, but beefed up to equal status to meet the requirements of the American marquee. Apart from saying "hello" so as to make Germans turn around before he shoots them with the silenced pistol---if he had merely mouthed "hello" before shooting them in the back, it would have been a different kind of movie, i.e., a realistic one ---Clint's character has nothing anachronistic about him except his cataleptic taciturnity, which we are glad to recognize as a minimally equipped actor's career-long habit of overdoing the understatement. Burton's own style of acting is equally dissonant with the time, but in the opposite direction: he always overdid the overstatement, and from the beginning to the end of his career on screen he looked exactly like a stage actor projecting to the upper circle, except when a director with animal-training skills (Martin Ritt in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to take one of the few examples) either whipped him into submission or else slipped a sedative into his morning triple. Burton always moved his lips so much when he enunciated that they would stick out past the end of his nose, and there are episodes in Where Eagles Dare in which they practically leave the frame, as if yet another triple was waiting out there, begging to be imbibed.
It isn't the stuff he does with his face, however, that makes Burton look out of place in this castellated anteroom of World War II. It is the stuff on top of his head. It's his hairstyle. It was probably still all his own hair at that stage, but it's a hairstyle: an item, that is, which not even women found it easy to obtain during World War II, and which for men was unknown. (In the movie, Mary Ure has obviously taken a hairstylist into action with her, but we never see him: although if he'd wandered into a shot holding a crimping iron he would have looked no more futuristic than her miraculously smooth coiffure, shining with a blonde luster that Eva Braun, even with her connections, could only dream of.) The high command of the Romanian army did indeed issue an order that no officer below the rank of major could wear makeup, but the British army and the German army both made a policy of short back and sides for all ranks, and the German army was particularly close-cropped. Yet Burton, intending to be accepted as a German officer in order to penetrate the enemy redoubt, has gone to action sporting a page-boy hairstyle so fulsome that it spills abundant curls and waves below the back of his collar. Burton had a big head anyway. I interviewed him once, and found out why he always looks so stocky on screen: it was because his upper works were so broad you had to lean sideways to see past him. Even if close-shorn he would have had to wear a cap rare for its size in the whole of the Wehrmacht. But with his hairstyle added to his massive cranium, his cap has to be big enough for a buffalo, and it still does nothing to disguise---does a lot, indeed, to emphasize,--- the anomalous abundance of hair protruding at the back. On several occasions in the movie has to pass a German checkpoint, and you can only deduce that the garrison has been recruited from an institute to for the blind. Later in the war, when regular German forces were in a state of collapse, Volksstrum units were organized from the old, the adolescent, the lame and the sick, but I can't remember that very many sightless people were issued with the Panzerfaust and asked to shoot in the direction of the noise kicked up by Allied tanks. Here at the castle there is no discrimination against the optically handicapped.
Whether as a single, double or triple agent (“Triple, please," you can imagine him saying) the Burton character would have been barely free of his parachute harness before being placed under arrest. He would have been locked up on the basis of his appearance alone. Every other anachronism is explicable, within the screenplay’s purely cinematic parameters. In the German pub below the castle, Burton, Eastwood and the other agents---the others are notable chiefly for their expandability---talk very loudly in English. Yes, English is their chosen language when they discuss their plans about fooling the Germans, and they do not lower their voices when members of the garrison pass by closely behind them. It could be said, however, that a convention is being observed here, and that our agents are really speaking German. (It could also be said that if they were speaking German, the closely attendant Germans would be even more likely to notice that plans to fool them were being loudly discussed, but let that pass.) There is also the consideration that English seems to be the adopted language of every German in the area. Similarly, it could be put down to an equally hallowed cinematic convention when the German commandant arrives in the castle courtyard by helicopter. There were no operational helicopters in World War II, but there were no operational cannon ancient Rome either, and Shakespeare still put a few in. Shakespeare pioneered Hollywood's flexible attitude to temporal authenticity, as any what Hollywood mogul with a tertiary education will be glad to tell you. For every howler in the movie there is a good justification, the principal one being that the people who made the movie must have known it was howler, but correctly judged that nobody they cared about would notice. In the majority of big-budget war films since World War II, and all the small budget ones, the enemy has always fired a special kind of bullet that goes around, instead of through, the actors on our side, occasionally penetrating only at the shoulder or in a sexually neutral section of the upper thigh. In Sands of Iwo Jima John Wayne finally got killed by Japanese bullet while he was sitting down, but only after the Japanese machine gunners had vainly fired thousands of bullets at him when he was running very slowly. In Where Eagles Dare, whole German machine-gun nests equipped with multiple examples of the lethal MG42 (rate of fire: 1200 rounds per minute) are unable to graze Richard Burton's hairstyle. Big enough for slowly moving cow to graze it, for cinematic reasons it is impervious to speeding lead. But there are precedents for that. There is no precedent for the hairstyle per se.
This is where the pundit clinches his seemingly open-and-shut case for Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity as the principal motivation of the film’s creators, or perpetrators. He might concede that some of the perps are technically clever, but in that case he will insist that there is still a collective purpose: the system itself. And he will be right, but not as right as he thinks. He has overlooked the factor of star power, which is what made him see the movie in the first place. Letting Burton keep his everyday or hairstyle was a studio’s only chance of getting them into this sector of World War II. (He kept a less a bit less of his thatch for his cameo appearance in The Longest Day, but it still wasn't buoyant enough to get him arrested by his own side, let alone by the enemy. ) And Burton wasn't being stupid either. He realized that the point was not to look like a British agent plausibly pretending to be a German officer: the point was to look like Richard Burton. The reality of star power depends on exactly that. Malleability is for actors. For screen stars, recognizability is what matters. Much later, and in a better movie, Robert Redford proved it all over again by declining at the last moment to adopt an English accent when he played Denys Finch Hatton in Out of Africa. He was right. Out of Africa was a serious venture, but it was still a blockbuster and it needed Redford as a draw on the marquee, not as a paragon of authenticity on the screen. Redford was content to leave all that to Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. He wasn't just content, he insisted. And it was by making such demands that he became Robert Redford. If we doubt the value of that, we should remember that he would never have been in a position to set up the Sundance Festival, and thus alter the whole course of independent and intelligent film-making in America, if he hadn't been Robert Redford in the first instance. He is a very clever man, and so, between drinks was Burton, who could recite English poetry by the mile. Burton was clever enough to intuit a deeply awkward truth, and incorporate it in the hairstyle he carried into action in one of the most lucrative movies he ever made. To one side of the world's great events, there is the interpretation of them. To one side of the interpretation, there is entertainment. And to one side of entertainment, there is absurdity. But if the absurdity is correctly judged, he will be found entertaining, even by those who are well aware of the real importance of the events being travestied. There can be a willing, mass participation in the flight into stupidity, because there can always be an agreed moment when the flight away from responsibility becomes irresistible. To pick that moment takes a kind of talent, it might be a spoiled talent, but mediocrity will never make it…’
Quite a bit remains within the remainder of this essay and for that matter the book in its entirety.