Anne_Sharp

What surprised me most about this film, since it's famously the inspiration for the 1982 Blake Edwards/Julie Andrews musical "Victor/Victoria," is that it's so CLEAN. The fact that its release date is 1933 may mean it was produced under Nazi censorship, or on the other hand it might be an example of how innocent and yet sophisticated filmmaking could be in Weimar Berlin. Notably, there's absolutely no homosexuality in it; the Robert Preston character (a wonderful piece of clowning by Hermann Thimig) is straight, and the James Garner guy (the incredibly sexy Anton Walbrook) suspects all along that Viktoria is really female, and his courtship of her consists of teasingly playing up to her pretensions of maleness while tweaking her feminine tendencies. The through-line of this version is the charming reactions of the skittish young Susanna-Viktoria (an endearing performance by Renate Mueller that's a poignant reminder that it's possible for actresses to be both beautiful AND skilled performers--a point usually lost on Hollywood) to the strange and excellent adventures of passing as a man, and then falling in love while trying to pass as a man with the man she loves.

The structure of "Anita: Dances of Vice" is like a postmodernist updating of Karel Reisz's "The Loves of Isadora," with its framework of the fat, decrepit, middle-aged Isadora Duncan just before her death interposed with vignettes of herself as a revolutionary modern dancer. Even more it reminds me of Ken Russell's wonderful docudramas about composers and artists, with their combination of razzle-dazzle showmanship and compassionate insight into the personalities involved. But "Anita" is very much a tour de force on its own terms, stylistically and substantially.

As befits a German film about a German heroine "Anita" is filled with classic Germanic motifs. There is the Nietschean superwoman Anita who turns the tables on her audience: revealing her naked body, it is SHE who leeringly objectifies THEM, joyfully savoring their reactions to her defiant poses. The film is also filled with Doeppelgangers. There is the beautiful, sharp-as-a-tack Anita whose double is her raddled, cocaine-crazed dancing partner Droste; there is also the doubling effect of the terrifyingly seductive young Anita in her dancing days juxtaposed with the comical old fat woman who "channels" Anita's soul, articulating the meanings behind the dance. Naturally, the subject of Hitler comes up, with Anita explicitly embodying the anarchic life force that flourished between the two world wars--and that we would do well to recognize and respect in our own time, uncomfortable as it may make us.

I have very mixed feelings about the book "A River Runs Through It." Its "lyrical" passages about fly fishing bring to mind newspaper sports feature writing at its worst, and the creepy antics of its macho protagonists are not pleasant from a civilized female perspective. But the very point of the story it seems to me is that these men are so emotionally immature and alienated that their only true joy in life is the self-absorbed (and highly competitive) act of luring a strong healthy fish to its death. Maclean expressed these experiences with tremendous honesty that makes his painful attempts at "fine writing" worth squelching through.

The film version hangs on to the Hemingwayesque flourishes (replicated in its prettily photographed vistas of mountains and rivers and a tendency to hit overcrank when something significant is happening at the end of one of the fly fishermen's lines) but regrettably jettisons the honesty. The story's setting is changed from 1937 (in the depths of the Depression, when an ability to catch good fish for supper had a very different connotation) to sometime in the twenties, and the brothers are correspondingly in their early twenties, which gives their bawdy, irresponsible antics a much different connotation than it did when the same characters in the book pulled them well into their thirties. Refocusing the story line from the brothers' inarticulate love for one another to a standard "meet cute" romance between Norman and his future wife Jess was probably good for box office, but all I could think of watching Brad Pitt with his strawberry blond dye job and Emily Lloyd slinking around in her blonde finger-wave wig and fragile linen dresses was that Redford was reliving some fixation that originated twenty years previously during the filming of "The Great Gatsby."

I think this is a bad film, and I found myself horribly impatient with it. But I can also see why so many people enjoy it. The romance, the Sierra Club cinematography and cheap thrill gags like the pop-up scare after the whitewater boating adventure and the ride through a train tunnel in a tin lizzie are all calculated audience pleasers. And it's nice that Maclean's heirs got the royalties for the use of the old man's title.