Film Ignorance #6: Nosferatu

Film: Nosferatu
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: F.W. Murnau
Stars: Max Schreck
Year: 1922
Reason for Ignorance: Silent
Ignorance Rating: 57 (7 Votes)

I feel like I should begin by mentioning that I have seen more or less zero feature-length silent films that were not comedies of the Chaplin/Keaton variety. Accordingly, I'm reviewing this movie in a bit of a vacuum. But that's what this project is all about; by the end of Film Ignorance, I'll have viewed literally several more of these films.

In case you don't know, Nosferatu is F.W. Murnau's version of Dracula, but he couldn't get the rights to Bram Stoker's novel from Stoker's wife, so he just filmed the story of Dracula more or less exactly and just changed the names (hence, Nosferatu instead of Dracula).

Nosferatu isn't scary, not the way The Exorcist is, at least when you watch it on your laptop screen on the couch while nursing a sprained ankle 86 years after it came out. But it is impressively creepy. As one of the key examples of German Expressionism, it features many of the characteristics that make those films notable: grotesque make-up, eerie lighting, haunting shadows, decaying and desolate mise-en-scene. And the grotesquerie is not just limited to obvious candidates like Nosferatu the vampire and his mind-controlled minion Knock. The entire country, gripped by the plague of Nosferatu's feeding, has become a gross distortion of life; even our hero Hutter, with his Victorian clothing and haircut, strikes me as grotesque.

Knock (left) creepy. Protagonist Hutter: Also Creepy

We get a taste of this in the very first scene, in which our hero Hutter enters and gives his wife a beautiful bouquet of flowers. She recoils in horror, exclaiming: "But you've killed them." In the world of Nosferatu, the act of giving a bouquet has been transformed into an act of violence, the willful destruction of the natural world. Indeed, as creepy as Max Schreck is as the vampire, this is the scene that bothered me the most. It makes it clear that Murnau's vision is a totalizing one, and rendered the ultimate victory over the vampire merely a partial one. Hutter and his wife might get rid of the vampire, but they still live across the street from the foreboding gothic monstrosity that he purchased. With or without vampires, the world of German Expressionism is a terrible one.

Even if this weren't Nosferatu's shadow, it'd probably still freak me out

So, Nosferatu isn't a film that's going to scare you. And it certainly looks like a film that was made more than 80 years ago; the special effects are impressively understated and the film-craft on display is mind-boggling for the time period, but your average 21st century music video is superior in technical achievement. But Nosferatu is full of indelible images and remains, to this day, an amazing achievement in vision and mood. Now if only someone could write a decent soundtrack for it...

Film Ignorance #5: Ben-Hur

Film: Ben-Hur
Rating: Meh.
Director: William Wyler
Stars: Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins
Year: 1956
Reason for Ignorance: Seemed like it would be long, boring
Ignorance Rating*: 71

In 1927, the first year the Academy Awards were given, the voters couldn't decide whether to give the Best Picture award to the best picture created artistically, or the best picture in terms of technical achievement. They decided not to make a decision, but to give two awards: one for technical achievement, to Wings, and one for artistic achievement, to Sunrise.

Since then, I think we are supposed to believe that the technical achievement best picture award has disappeared, and the only Best Picture award remaining is for artistic achievement. Watching a movie like Ben-Hur, which won Best Picture and 10 other Oscars, that's hard to believe.

Ben-Hur is laughable in more or less every respect accept for spectacular technical achievement. The lead, Charlton Heston, was not a great nor even a good actor; if he could be wonderful in certain roles, he does not shine here. Indeed, his Best Actor Oscar for this performance seems to have also been awarded for technical achievement; Heston's giant forehead and massive frame are a spectacle in and of themselves, but any scene where he is asked to do more than glower is problematic (for an absolutely dead-on assessment of Heston's acting ability and the roles he was best suited for, see this post by literary critic/giant douche bag Stanley Fish: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/larger-than-life-charlton-heston/ )

The first hour of the film, which introduces the homoerotic love-hate relationship between Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince, and his old friend Messala, a Roman tribune, is dull to the point of madness. The next hour or so perks up a bit; it features David Lean favorite Jack Hawkins, the film's only good actor, as the Roman consul who commands the slave galley that Ben-Hur ends up on after Messala betrays and enslaves him. It also features a sea-battle that's mostly watchable. The final third isn't much more interesting than the first, except that it features the famous chariot race, one of the most exciting chase scenes ever filmed. The film's entire 3 hour and 32 minute run time is almost worth it for the chariot scene alone.

I am tempted to rate Ben-Hur "But...This Movie Sucks" but the performance of Hawkins, the delicious homoerotic subtext, and, above all, the chariot race elevate it to the level of Meh. The acting is terrible, the story cliched, Ben-Hur's faith and multiple chance encounters with Jesus and one of the three wise men complete hokum. Every single scene goes on longer than it should; every event is drawn out and given far too much significance by the excellent but bombastic score.

In short, Ben-Hur is the filmic expression of Charlton Heston himself. Massive, overblown, fitfully spectacular and certainly not possessed of good acting. Were it 2 and a half hours long, I'd give it a partial recommendation for the positive aspects I've mentioned. Since it's more than 3 and a half hours long, I recommend that you avoid it.

A final note: The Academy, I suppose, can be forgiven for mistaking Ben-Hur's epic bombast for epic excellence in the year it was released. But both AFI top 100 lists and filmsite.org's top 100 list all select Ben-Hur as one of the best hundred American films of all time. With historical distance, they should have known better.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.