Curious that I do not remember this near-beheading incident from my school days; you’d think it would rank right up there with George Washington and the cherry tree. One of the many odd things about this film is the way Corraface, as Columbus, is so philosophical and cheerful about the prospect of losing his head. He seems to consider it just one of those things.
Columbus and his discovery of America are of course not Politically Correct subjects just at the moment (Native Americans point out, not unreasonably, that from their point of view he discovered nothing). And of course Columbus and other early European visitors brought disease and genocide as their cargos. Nothing if not Politically Correct, the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, supply a zoom shot to the Santa Maria at anchor at San Salvador, and we see a rat scurry down the anchor rope and swim ashore.
This shot symbolizes all the evil that Europeans brought to the New World, I guess. The Salkinds and their director, John Glen, are more generous in showing us what the visitors found here. True to the traditions of all historical romances set among native peoples, Columbus and his men encounter a large group of friendly Indians, of which one—the beautiful daughter of the chief—is positioned, at length, bare-breasted, in the center of every composition. (My survey of the other friendly Indians leads me to the conclusion that the chief’s daughter is chosen by cup size.)
Columbus sails back to Europe, there are various silly fights and killings among the men he left behind, and Brando utters another portentous word or two, after which the movie is over. Another Columbus movie is promised us this fall, starring Gérald Depardieu. It cannot be worse than this one. I am especially looking forward to the chief’s daughter.
The Clan of the Cave Bear
(Directed by Michael Chapman; starring Darryl Hannah; 1986)
What was it like, back there at the dawn of time? What was it like to be a human being, and yet have none of the things we take for granted, such as houses, feminism, and shoes? How did we take that first great leap out of the caves and into the Iron Age? Or, if you really want to roll back the clock, that leap out of the rain and into the caves?
The Clan of the Cave Bear attempts to answer those questions by making a great leap backward in the imagination, to that precise moment when the first Cro-Magnons were moving in and the last Neanderthals were becoming obsolete. Unfortunately, the movie never really does reconcile itself to the prehistoric past.
It approaches those times with a modern sensibility. It shows us a woman winning respect from a patriarchal tribe, when, in reality, the men would have just banged her over the head real good. It isn’t grim enough about what things were probably like back then. It tells a nice little modern parable about a distant past that is hardly less idealistic than the Garden of Eden. Instead of people who are scarred, sunburned, scrawny, and toothless, it gives us graduates of the Los Angeles health club scene, and a heroine who looks as if she just walked over from makeup.
It also packs a lot of things into a short span of that long-ago time. Although whole eons were available to it, the movie covers just a few short seasons, as a wandering tribe of primitive Neanderthals encounters an amazing sight: a Cro-Magnon woman (Daryl Hannah), tall and blond and smarter than they are. The girl is adopted into the tribe, and right away she causes trouble.
She can’t understand why the men get to have all the fun, and use all the weapons, and make all the decisions. One day she sneaks out and practices on the slingshot. On another day, she challenges the tribe’s attitudes about sex, seniority, and even about self-defense. In her spare time, she invents arithmetic and becomes chief adviser to the medicine man. This isn’t the first Cro-Magnon, it’s the first Rhodes Scholar.
The movie dresses its actors in furs and skins, and has them walk about barefoot and talk in monosyllables. But it never quite makes them seem frightened, ignorant, vulnerable, and bewildered. To capture the sense of wonder of those days when the human race reached its turning point, The Clan of the Cave Bear needs great images, not tidy little dramatic scenes with predictable conclusions. It needs sights such as the opening of 2001, when the bone went flying into the air. Or it needs the muddy, exhausted desperation of the characters in Quest for Fire, a movie that did feel like it took place in prehistory. The Clan of the Cave Bear is about the first generation of designer cavemen.
The performances are doomed from the start, because the actors are asked to play characters who are modern in everything but dress and language. Every one of these people has motives that are instantly recognizable and predictable. There is no sense of the alien and the unknown, no sense that these people have ideas and feelings that would be strange to us.
Even their quasi-religion is familiar: They believe each person has an animal spirit, which is its partner or symbol, and that if a person’s spirit is strong, it gives them strength. This is pseudo-anthropology crossed with Indian folklore and the Boy Scouts.
The ending of The Clan of the Cave Bear emphasizes its bankruptcy, because there isn’t really an ending, just a conclusion—a romantic shot of the woman continuing on her lonely quest. The great failure of the movie is a failure of imagination.
The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then. They are content to assemble the usual narrative clichés and standard story lines and apply them to some actors in costume. If modern men came from beginnings like this, why did they even bother to develop civilization, since they already possessed its most wretched excesses?
Clifford
(Directed by Paul Faherty; starring Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen; 1994)
I felt a little glow as the opening titles rolled up for Clifford: Martin Short . . . Charles Grodin . . . Mary Steenburgen . . . Dabney Coleman. Funny people. Even the technical credits were promising. John A. Alonzo, great cameraman; Pembroke Herring, skilled editor. I settled in for some laughs. And waited. And waited. In a screening of some 150 people, two people laughed, once apiece. The other some 148 did not laugh at all. One of the laughers was me; I liked a moment in a showdown scene between Short and Grodin. The other person laughed right after I did, maybe because he agreed, or maybe because my laugh is darn infectious.
A movie like this is a deep mystery. It asks the question: What went wrong? Clifford is not bad on the acting, directing, or even writing levels. It fails on a deeper level still, the level of the underlying conception. Something about the material itself is profoundly not funny. Irredeemably not funny, so that it doesn’t matter what the actors do, because they are in a movie that should never have been made.
The story opens in the year 2050, when a kindly old priest is trying to reason with a rebellious kid in a home for troubled kids. The priest (Short) tells the kid that he was once a troubled kid, himself. That sets up three flashbacks that make up most of the movie. To deal with the 2050 scenes right up front: They are completely unnecessary. Their only apparent function is to show Martin Short made up as an old man.
Now. Back to the main story, which takes place in the present. Martin Short stars as little Clifford, a brat, about ten years old, I guess. Short plays him with no makeup other than a wig and little boy’s suits, and the camera angles are selected to make him look a foot shorter than the other actors. Clifford is a little boy from hell, a sneaky practical joker, spoiled, obnoxious. We meet him with his parents on a flight to Hawaii. He wants the plane to land in Los Angeles so he can visit the Dinosaur Park amusement park. So he talks his way into the cockpit and shuts off the plane’s engines.