The Wind Cannot Read

Did I say I was running out of material with 'The Mind Benders'?

Scratch that.

'The Mind Benders' is freakin' 'Rashomon' compared to 'The Wind Cannot Read'.

Directed by - it's that man again! - Ralph Thomas from a novel by Richard Mason, 'The Wind Cannot Read' is the kind of they-don't-make-'em-like-that-anymore melodrama that perfectly demonstrates why they don't make 'em like that anymore.

The title is from a Japanese poem which states:



A decent metaphor for a narrative about transience, uncertainty and those twists of fate which blow us off course and against which it is as futile to struggle as a rose petal against the wind.

And if you think my emphasis of the title is heavy-handed, wait till you see how Thomas gets stuck into it. He structures the opening sequence - which, to be fair, contains some effectively grim imagery of emasculated survivors, the bones of the not-so-lucky and the dark shapes of the vultures who have picked them clean - around the retreat from Burma, RAF pilot Michael Quinn (Dirk Bogarde) and two of his fellow airmen almost at death's door by the time they make it to safety. They stumble upon a beautifully cultivated garden with - yep - a sign urging them not to pick the flowers. Thomas slaps the poem over this image, then follows it up with the title in letters so big and garish they fill the entire screen.

Later, just for good measure, he includes some husky-voiced crooner singing "the wind cannot read" at the exact moment that Quinn first lays eyes on Sabby (Yoko Tani). Our boy's been sent to India by this time, studying Japanese while he recuperates so that he can be useful in an intelligence role. It's here that he crosses swords with up-his-own-arse officer type Fenwick (Ronald Lewis). Predictably, Sabby just happens to be the class's new instructor. Equally predictably, it's Fenwick who discovers Quinn and Sabby's taboo-busting, definitely-against-regulations cross-cultural romance.



The ensuing complications are interrupted when Quinn gets orders to return to Burma. It gets even more melodramatic than that, but on the slim chance you're keen on seeing 'The Wind Cannot Read' (word of advice: have a book to hand; maybe some knitting), I won't spoil it for you. Just don't say the title didn't tell you so when it finally lumbers to an end. Oh, and look out for a young Donald Pleasance in the last sequence.

Quinn and Sabby's romance - progressing from tentative courtship to marriage - occupies two thirds of the film and is played out against a tourist board vision of India where everybody wears bright colours and mostly ride on elephants, the beggars are clean and Thomas shoots the Taj Mahal from every conceivable angle during a pointless scene that seems to have been concocted purely to accommodate this barrage of National Geographical style shots.

Actually, a back copy of National Geographical would probably hold more interest than 'The Wind Cannot Read' - you'd at least learn something about the countries visited and there's always the off-chance of some bare-breasted tribeswomen.

But I digress.

What makes it worse is that 'The Wind Cannot Read' could have been, Mason's tortuous narrative notwithstanding, an interesting project.

David Lean began pre-production on 'The Wind Cannot Read', under the auspices of producer Alexander Korda. He wrote a screenplay in colloboration with Richard Mason and began scouting locations. When Lean discovered 22-year-old Japanese actress Kishi Keiko, he was convinced she was perfect for Sabby. Determining to capture the real India on film - as well as telling a passionate and poignant love story - Lean's enthusiasm was running high. Then came a series of conflicts with Korda - over the script, over casting - which remained unresolved when Korda died in early 1956. By this point, Lean was already in talks with Sam Spiegel for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Everything fell through and the property passed to the Rank Organisation; Lean turned his attention to 'Bridge'; and Keiko - who had been brought over to Britain in a storm of publicity and talked up as the next big thing - was robbed of a potential breakthrough role for western audiences and returned home.

When the project passed to them, Thomas and his partner/producer Betty E Box worked from Lean's script (although the credits suggest Mason wrote the script single-handedly) as well as using some of the locations Lean had already scouted. But Ralph Thomas was no David Lean (his pedestrian direction sucks the life out of scene after scene) and it's impossible to watch 'The Wind Cannot Read' without a frustrating curiosity nagging away at you as to what might have been.

Although Lean would certainly not have cast Bogarde (Kenneth More was his preferred choice), it's certainly down to Bogarde's popularity that 'The Wind Cannot Read' was a box office hit. In his magnificent biography of David Lean, Kevin Brownlow records that the director's response, when he saw the eventual film, was to ask Thomas for a share of the profits.

HELLRAISERS: The Night of the Generals

An all-star production of the over-produced, over-publicized, over-long archetypally ’60s variety, ‘The Night of the Generals’ blends murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and war movie tropes into a heady cocktail of WTF. We’re talking two and a half hours of hopelessly confused narrative digressions and howlingly incongruous scenes.

Occupied Poland, 1942: Major Grau (Omar Sharif) attends the scene after a prostitute is murdered in a dingy tenement building. Dressed in an ankle length greatcoat and black boots, he questions a witness who is hesitant about co-operating. And with good reason. “He was an officer,” the witness mumbles fearfully. Grau asks how he knows. “He was wearing trousers like yours.” Trousers, that is with a red stripe. The kind of natty apparel you don’t get to strut around in till they make you a general.

Like me reiterate at this point that Grau is dressed throughout this scene in a long greatcoat and high boots. His trousers are obscured. The man could be wearing a freakin’ kilt! Also, he’s played by Omar Sharif, whose swarthy Egyptian looks, while toned down with a dusting of white powder, remain more swarthy and ethnic than you’d credit anyone with in a military hierarchy based on Aryan purity.

The incongruities continue. The Polish hooker is revealed as a German agent, only for this tantalising subplot to disappear. A Corporal who’s a talented pianist complains at having to play Chopin when Wagner is his composer of choice. (Aside from the orchestral piece ‘Siegfried-Idyll’, Wagner’s entire output was opera or lieder; he wrote no piano music.)

Then there’s the lurching flash forwards to the mid-Sixties as Interpol agent Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) – a man whose connection to the events of the war isn’t established until halfway through the film – plods around tracking down the surviving protagonists and asking them blandly procedural questions in a manner that makes ‘Midsomer Murders’ look like James Ellroy on crack.

Oh yeah, and no sooner has the mise-en-scene returned the audience to Poland in 1942 than it’s suddenly Paris in 1944 and everyone’s been transferred and have co-incidentally met up again. Or maybe it’s not such a co-incidence, since ‘The Night of the Generals’ takes another lurch at this point and the 20th July plot (you know, the old bomb-in-a-briefcase under the table, let’s kill der Führer routine) is in full swing and all but one of the potential murderers are involved in the conspiracy.

But wait, you protest. The 20th July plot took place back in Germany. What’s all this malarkey about the conspirators being in Paris? Well, they’re waiting for word that the craply-moustachioed one is toast, whereupon they can establish a new government and curtail the war and … oh, what the hell? The point is, the conspirators have to keep the non-conspirator out of the way for a couple of days, and some fucking genius involved in the production of this Euro-pudding decided that huge amounts of tension and suspense could be wrung from one of the major characters being driven around Paris interminably and having a Stendhal Syndrome kind of turn when he goes to view some allegedly decadent art (you know, the kind that features naked women). This character being a hardcore Hitlerite and having a tendency to viciousness, could he be the murderer?

There is absolutely no mystery to ‘The Night of the Generals’. No suspense. It is by turns ludicrous, clichéd, overacted and pedestrian in its direction. It boasts a powerhouse cast – Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (two Blofelds in the same movie! playing Nazis!), Christopher Plummer, Coral Browne, Philippe Noiret, John Gregson and Nigel Stock – all of whom are miscast, underused or saddled with appalling dialogue: Noiret’s is exposition-heavy and, although at ease in English-language productions elsewhere in his filmography, he seems distinctly unconfident here; and pity Pleasance, desperately trying to breathe life into a clunker of a line like “am I to assume that if Stage 1 meets with resistance we will go to Stage 2 and possibly Stage 3” (I can only quote Paula’s monumentally derisive comment: “Wow, so there isn’t a Stage 1a, 1b or 1z, then?”)

All, I should say, except Peter O’Toole. He takes hygiene-obsessed General Tanz (ostensibly the most one-note character in the whole piece) and imbues him with the insouciance of T.E. Lawrence (or at least the version of Lawrence essayed by O’Toole in David Lean’s epic), the provocative and oddly threatening dandyism of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, and an icily ironic remove that pre-supposes Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Armed with cap, boots, swagger stick, leather gloves and a piercing thousand-yard stare, O’Toole stalks through the film, disdaining Anatole Litvak’s somnolent direction, rolling the deficiencies of the script around in his mouth before spitting them out, and making mediocre material memorable simply by treating it, imperiously, with the contempt it deserves.

Phenomena

Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the daughter of an eternally-absent movie star, is packed off to the prestigious Richard Wagner School for Girls in Switzerland, under the care of the equally musically named Frau Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi). The beheaded corpse of a Dutch tourist, Vera Brandt (Fiore Argento) has just been discovered, another victim in a spate of grisly murders. The school is abuzz with fear and intrigue. The girls are cliquey and snide. Jennifer is scorned for her perceived fame. The prissy headmistress (Dalila di Lazaro) takes against her from the start. She makes just two friends - room-mate Sophie (Federica Mastroianni) and, away from the school, entomologist Dr John MacGregor (Donald Pleasance).

She meets MacGregor after a sleepwalking incident. Lost and confused, miles from the school, she is rescued by MacGregor's assistant, Inga, who takes Jennifer to the wheelchair-bound scientist's home/laboratory. Oh, yeah, Inga's a chimpanzee, by the way. I am not making this up.

Jennifer and MacGregor hit it off immediately, bonding over their mutual love of insects. MacGregor studies them; his field is insect communication - he believes them to be telepaths. Jennifer proves his thesis and then some. Our girl actively empathises with them. A firefly leads her to an important discovery following Sophie's murder. A couple of million flies angrily descend upon the school when Jennifer is tormented by her classmates. The headmistress reveals herself as something of a religious fanatic. "Satan is sometimes referred to as Beelzebub," she muses; "the lord of the flies", and on this basis plans to have Jennifer bundled off to the nearest psychiatric hospital.

In the meantime, MacGregor has been helping Inspector Geiger (Patrick Bauchau) with his enquiries, studying the insects feeding off the recovered remains of Vera to pinpoint her time of death. This, and his burgeoning friendship with Jennifer, bring him to the killer's attention. The inevitable attack on him is witnessed by Inga who, unable to intercede, later finds the killer's discarded straight-razor and goes looking for revenge. Yes, that Inga. You know, the chimp.

Let me say it again: I am not making this up.

As you might have gathered, 'Phenomena' is ever so slightly bonkers. Although many of the director's fans rate it low in his filmography it is, in many ways, archetypally Argento. There's the wonky science from 'The Cat O'Nine Tails' and 'Four Flies on Grey Velvet'. There's the protagonist's visual impairment from 'TCONT': while Arno is blind and witness something only by overhearing it, Jennifer sleepwalks and witnesses a murder while not conscious. There's the telepathy subplot from 'Deep Red' that gets Helga killed in that film and Jennifer's life put at risk in 'Phenomena'. There's a pounding rock score that features compositions by former Goblin frontman Claudio Simonetti, as well as songs by Iron Maiden and Motorhead. There's plenty of prowling camerawork, editing that's as sharp as the aforementioned straight-razor, and a handful of scenes, particularly an extended finale, which are as tense and gloriously grand guignol as anything Argento has committed to film.

So why its reputation as second-rate Argento? The ludicrous plot probably has something to do with it ... but when has Argento ever been beholden to logic, narrative coherence or anything so conventional? Take 'Suspiria': it's an exercise in illogicality, but as a work of film art it's as gorgeous as it is demented.

No, I think 'Phenomena' suffers from the place it occupies in Argento's filmography. From 1975 to 1982, Argento was in his element: 'Deep Red', 'Suspiria', 'Inferno', 'Tenebrae', two deliriously over-the-top horror movies bookended by the two finest examples of the giallo in all of cinema. Compared to these, 'Phenomena' does, unfortunately, seem a little by-the-numbers. It doesn't even feature one of Argento's technical trademarks, like the two-and-a-half minute Louma crane sequence in 'Tenebrae' or the swooping ravens' POV shot in 'Opera', the film that followed 'Phenomena'.

It would be all to easy to make a case for Argento's career as a study in decline since 'Tenebrae'. But 'Phenomena' has its moments - along with a good performance, despite the often awful dialogue she's saddled with, by the young Jennifer Connelly (she was fifteen at the time and her star quality was already in evidence). Donald Pleasance gives sterling support in one of his better post-'Halloween' appearances. Argento's assistant director and protege Michele Soavi pops up in a supporting role as Inspector Geiger's assistant. And on the subject of the good detective, 'Phenomena' is that rarest of gialli: one that features a halfway competent copper, even though his complacency proves his undoing in the final reel.

Finally, 'Phenomena' has the most manic climax of any Argento movie. There's never been a deus ex machina like it!