The Moviegoer Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

at the Charles Cinema

... it's that irony, which is in all events, that defeats all the illusions we have about the choices that we make up for ourselves. LONG before the event, we have committed ourselves to courses of action which are folly and disaster. And all along the line we invent choices which we think are real but are just cover-ups.

I think that's the nature of the fake morality that we live by. We invent right and wrong, so that we seem to be making very good choices all the time-and that's a trap! Long before that, we've committed the disaster. And all these choices that we seem to be making are not choices at all.

That's why, long after terrible historical events pass, people say, "But I didn't know!" "I didn't know what was going on in these camps." "I didn't know that was what the war meant." "I didn't know that he was going to die." "I didn't know she was going to be so unhappy." These are the I-didn't knows. You've heard them all over. Popular fiction, whether in television, films novels, or plays, is made of these false I-didn't-knows. That's what you call sentimental writing. That's the pornography of feeling.. And that's the way we cop out, to use a favorite phrase of your generation.

from an interview with Abraham Polonsky in The Director's Event.

FROM its first shots Willie Boy feels bleak. We see a great deal of motion, physical action, without overt emotional content. Polonsky's feelings toward the characters do not accumulate in their figures; they are invested in their situation: they are felt in the separation of figure from background. the exact hollow space that allows each man a certain freedom of action.

The characters who emote stick out. The film's most successful performance, that of Robert Blake as Willie, is the most purely behavioral: it deals with details of movement and stance, with the way he turns his head to look at things, with the way he runs over rocks. Polonsky gives us his characters as he gives us events: coldly, with their conventional Hollywood gloss stripped away.

The film's intimate moments are divested of their sentimental privilege, leaving the characters nearly barren existences: but they are confronting those existences. We confront them constantly: and this generates a strange sense of time and event, which we usually regard as hopeful and progressive. Toward the end, a remarkable tracking shot holds Willie, running quickly through rocky foothills, constant in the frame. He is not running to escape somebody: he is simply running, that is his condition. He has willed it so. He knows that his effort will not generate the impetus to take him out of that condition.

Some scenes hold the promise of achieving romantic permanence, of defining by themselves the relations of the characters. We begin to acquire confidence in the things they say about each other. in the places where they are, in the ways they move. Then Polonsky cuts away to other characters in another place, destroying the security of the situation, destroying our involvement with the characters on their own terms. Night scenes will be going along, then an incredibly hard cut will hit the screen and it's day: dark/bright, right into your eyes. You stop seeing the characters actions as their self-expression within a secure situation. Their relation to their setting, their light conditions, their time becomes much more abstract and less necessary: emotions cease to follow the qualities of a particular place and become more purely the property of the characters. History and myth, with their conventional outlook on people's situations, are also devalued, and the characters, like us, left to confront the actualities of their situation.

Historical explanations, and moral explanations, and explanations of tenderness and love, and ALL such explanations, are irrelevancies beside the fact, as you look at the fact. Now, you look at this fact and face it. I say that to you and anyone. Know this fact and face it.

THE BEST things Polonsky does are cold, sharp, and clear, like the quick shots of men and horses falling under Willie's gun. His art is a restrained, strenuous lyricism of situations which have been flattened, made hard and spare. His is emotionally involved in these situations, but in their totality, without sympathy for one character's subjective or idealistic experience. By smashing the conventionally naturalistic, the smoothly progressing, he hopes to bring his audience to an overview which has strong tones of irony and fatalism.

Willie Boy repeatedly yields a feeling of lack of progress and climax. But it doesn't do so continually, as a unity. Sentimental situations are instead set up and undercut. Moreover, the film is filled with strange changes, apparent lapses, in tone. Economical establishment of character alternates with incompetent dialogue and playing. Subtle implication gives way to blatant statements about the situation. Redford's and Clarke's performances and even Katherine Ross's, seem insecure and inconsistent.

One could argue for these as further ways to disrupt the audience's confidence in the sentimental nature of events. They are just more strangenesses in a loosely structured film. But Polonsky's descents to cliche and sentiment finally interfere with our perception of the event in itself, instead of helping us see it in new lights. It's better to avoid overt sentiment, and show a totally different scheme of personal relations, than to use it in hopes of shaking the audience loose from its sentimental outlook. The audience for such cold, quirky films must be nearly as large as the audience for articles that don't tell what the film they're reviewing is about.

It was a mistake to put in conventional dialogue and performances: Polonsky couldn't control them. His genius lies in playing around with conventions, undercutting, flattening, splicing them together in a way that twists our conventional perception of them. He works minutely with the means of his narrative craft. The films that result depend intimately on their author's sensibility, a sensibility that allows involvement only on the condition of continual awareness of the total situation. Though Willie Boy does not employ this sensibility consistently, does not achieve a unity of attitude, we sense it working in every cold moment of a remarkably beautiful film.