Martin Ritt (1964)
The Rashomon season at BFI this summer included a programme of films designed to illustrate the Kurosawa classic’s international influence – including The Virgin Spring, which seems to me a greater film than Kurosawa’s, and this deservedly obscure Americanisation of the story. (I actually saw The Outrage on Film4, which also decided to exhume it this year.) It wasn’t Martin Ritt’s fault that the cast included William Shatner pre-Star Trek but it’s his presence that retrospectively puts the seal on the absurdity of the enterprise. (Ritt is to blame, though, for letting Shatner give an abominably sanctimonious performance.) Michael Kanin had adapted Rashomon for the stage in 1959 but in the original Japanese setting. Kanin’s screenplay for The Outrage transposes the story to the American West. The film’s opening mimics Rashomon in a spirit of reverence rather than of self-aggrandisement. A Preacher (Shatner), a Prospector and a Con Man (respectively a priest, a woodcutter and a ‘commoner’ in Kurosawa) assemble at a railroad station with a metaphysical storm raging around them. The actors turn up and settle into position stagily. As the Prospector, Howard Da Silva speaks woodenly and cautiously – the way the actors sometimes do in Hollywood Shakespeare, seemingly daunted by the cultural authority of the original. The lines may be in English but they sound like a foreign language.
Once we get into the various stories of what happened in the woods, The Outrage becomes pitifully unlike Rashomon. The accounts have no intensity – the relative openness of the landscape and the fact that Ritt keeps cutting back to the narrator (especially in the bandit’s story) both have a dramatically diluting effect but it’s the acting that’s chiefly ludicrous. As a Mexican desperado, Paul Newman gives a rare ridiculous performance, with a disfiguring black wig, a gravelly hyper-Hispanic accent and gestures to match: his histrionic over-enthusiasm sort of replicates Toshiro Mifune’s acting style but lacks its self-belief. Claire Bloom as the defiled wife runs Newman a close second in the comedy stakes with her overworked Tennessee vowels: it’s not that easy to think of an actress less suited to playing the po-waht-tresh the woman is supposed to be. (It would have been more fun to see Elizabeth Taylor in the role.) Laurence Harvey as the husband does better. He has what may be the advantage of being gagged for quite a lot of the time but, even then, does amusing expressions that suggest a growing impatience with the whole enterprise. Once the gag comes off, Harvey does a rather funny caricature of a snooty Southern chauvinist. This seems to relax Bloom and Newman – all three of them seem to be playing for laughs by the time we reach the fourth account of what happened (the Prospector’s). As the Con Man, Edward G Robinson, if a little and understandably half-hearted, is the only performer who brings American zest and individuality to his character. The burden of demented laughter, shared out among the cast of Rashomon, falls in The Outrage almost entirely on Robinson and he shoulders it pretty well.
Robinson’s wit, and one of the few sharp lines in the script, undercut the sententious melancholy of the other two men waiting for the first train out of town. When the Prospector announces that great evil has been done and a man murdered, the Con Man replies, ‘Only one? Slow day … ‘ The solemnity of the prologue and epilogue isn’t that convincing in Rashomon: here it makes no sense at all, given the dullness of the four testimonies – especially the account given by the dead husband through a medium, an Indian (Paul Fix) who has none of the fascination of the corresponding character in Kurosawa’s film. The moral weight of the rape and killing is also reduced here by the fact that the last of the testimonies explains the husband’s death as an accident and serves to reduce the protagonists to (in the Con Man’s word) ‘pipsqueaks’. Some very talented people were involved in this debacle including, as well as the director and the stars, James Wong Howe and Alex North.
27 August 2010
