Z *****

Let's play a little game, shall we? I'm going to describe a scene and you tell me who directed it. Your knowledge of movies won't help you here. What will help is your understanding of a director's style.

The opening scene takes place at an automotive assembly line. As we go from station to station, the workers start putting the car together piece by piece. At the end we have a fully functioning Corvette. The car gets shipped from there to a warehouse and then to the dealer in Topeka. One morning a person comes to the dealership to buy a car and the salesman takes the buyer out on a test drive in the Corvette. The buyer likes the car, checks the tires, checks the engine, opens the trunk - and finds a dead body in there. Who directs it?

If you said Alfred Hitchcock, you would be correct. It is kind of a cheap question because Hitch never actually directed the scene I just described. He described it to me one night while we were having dinner at the Brown Derby. That's why I used it. It's a perfect Hitchcock scene if you want an example of his style.

There were several American directors in the 1940s and 1950s that had a distinctive style where you would be able to distinguish it within a few scenes - guys like Ford, Hawks, Welles, Hitchcock and, to a lesser extent, Wilder. These directors were the exception. The more common American director at that time was someone like William Wellman or Michael Curtiz (yes, I know Curtiz is Hungarian - name me one Hungarian movie he made) who both produced great, professional-looking movies, but you may or may not be able to tell they were directing just by watching the film.

The concept of a director's distinctive fingerprint on a film did not start until the 1950s and really did not take hold in America until the late 1960s. This "auteur" theory is European, French to be specific, and resulted in some really unwatchable movies for many years. You can film two people living in a closet (don't scoff, Warhol actually did) and call it art, but it doesn't mean a thing if no one sees it. If a crappy movie was shown in the woods and no one saw it, would it exist?

Now that I got that off my chest, I did like some of the early auteur films. Most of Fellini's work is very good (especially La Dolce Vita) and Renoir is just marvelous, but Truffaut is unwatchable and I have to be in a good mood and wide awake to get through Godard. The Americans who latched onto the auteur theory seemed to grasp that the point was to make an entertaining film as well as artistic. Of these, none is better than Scorsese.

As far as Europeans go, I have four favorites Fellini, Renoir, Milos Forman and the director of today's movie, Costa-Gravas.The plot is the critical aspect of Z. It is based on the 1963 death of Gregorios Lambrakis, the leader of the opposition party in Greece, who was killed in a "traffic accident." This event leads to a military coup in Greece four years later.

In Z, a similar event takes place where it appears at first that a political leader dies in what appears to be a car accident, but is actually an assault. Like the actual event, an investigator is appointed to find out what actually happened and instead of verifying the official version, he looks for the truth.

This plot is so important because it provides the director with two things - first, an exciting little-guy-against-the-establishment story and second, a story with a variety of view points. This allows Costa-Gravas to tell a story at breakneck speed while using the artistic techniques to replay the version through the eyes of the various witnesses.

Film has the potential to be the greatest art form in the world because it combines visuals with music and words while adding one last art form that is distinctive to film - the edit. Making that edit part of the story is what the auteur theory is all about and when that edit can be used to not only enhance an exciting story, but to tell it, then you are looking at the work of a great director and a great artist.

But if you're not able to find Z at your local movie house, I'm sure Titanic will be available. I bet Bosley Crowthers would have loved Titanic. I'm not sure of Bosley's opinion of Z because the New York Times had already fired him for his embarrassing review of Bonnie and Clyde and for being a no-talent hack by then. Actually, Bosley just disappeared after getting whacked from the times. Maybe he was in the back of Hitch's Corvette.