Philip Kaufman

Male Relationships and Codes of Honor

briefly became a judge. (He refused to impose the death penalty and was therefore jailed again for the crime of ‘modernisme’” [23]).15 Of the two films, Quills is not only more narratively dramatic and dynamically stylized but a deeper exploration of the artist’s role in society . It elaborates on the triangle so often found in Kaufman’s films: however, rather than merely romantic, the form conveys a philosophical tension among the three “points” of priest, scientist, and artist (who is the source of conflict between the other two). Wright proposes a corollary in his introduction to the published version of the play when he discusses Sade and Royer-Collard: “[T]he censor has always been the artist’s most reliable muse; there is nothing more seductive or inspiring you can say to a would-be provocateur than ‘Don’t do that’” (xx). Even more than the stage version, Kaufman’s film presents numerous visions of art, from the “sanctioned” bust and painting of Napoleon to the subversive Justine, under whose influence Simone seduces the architect hired by her husband. The fact that the inmates’ choir sings beautifully fulfills the Abbé’s view of art as compensatory; but the play they perform—a distorting mirror about an old doctor and his teenage convent bride—wreaks havoc. Sade’s tales can be both liberating and incendiary. “Art should raise questions, be resonant, and come up in your dreams,” Kaufman concluded. In the Marquis’s refusal of hypocrisy, questioning of why violence is sanctioned while sex is taboo (an ongoing reality in how films are rated), and insistence on freedom of expression, Sade may be a paradoxical hero for our own time and place. Male Relationships and Codes of Honor From the 1970s into the early 1980s, Kaufman’s cinema examined camaraderie , conflicts, and codes of honor among men, whether riding horses and firing weapons in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, riding spaceships and orbiting the earth in The Right Stuff, or hunting whales and surviving the Arctic in The White Dawn. Along with the Bronx street-gang setting of The Wanderers, they provide him with an opportunity to explore not only heroism—male and flawed—but representation , or how events become legends. After Kaufman left Harvard Law School, he began working on a Ph.D. in American history. Instead of completing a doctorate, however, he wrote the screenplay for The 54 | Philip Kaufman Great Northfield Minnesota Raid in 1968 and turned it into his first serious commercial film by 1972. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid Based on the true story of the Jesse James gang, the film’s action unfolds almost one hundred years earlier, in the post–Civil War Missouri of 1876. Since it was made during the Vietnam War, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) reflects on past and present American history. Kaufman’s style is gutsy in its deglamorizing realism; unlike most Westerns up to this time, it glorifies neither the cowboy nor violence. His focus is not the famous hothead Jesse James (Robert Duvall) but the cool and introspective Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson), who expresses “wonderment” about what he sees, from horseless buggies to a steampowered calliope. Even though the Missouri legislature votes to give the James and Younger brothers amnesty, Pinkerton’s chief detective (Herbert Nelson) is hell-bent on destroying these popular heroes. “Legislators are here to make laws. We’re here to make examples,” he declares (foreshadowing the doctor who imposes his control in Quills). His armed men remain on their trail and shoot Cole after using prostitutes as bait. While Cole is healed by an old woman’s magic, Jesse and his gang ride out to attempt a bank robbery in Northfield. Cole and his men try to prevent the heist, but when they learn that the amnesty has been rescinded, Cole enacts a shrewd plan to fill the Northfield bank with money to steal. But the initial euphoria as they convince the townsmen to put their money in the bank—because they fear robbers—gives way to failure before a time-controlled vault. Jesse gratuitously begins shooting, and they are captured. At the end, a bloody Cole, being transported to jail, staggers to his feet and is applauded by crowds. The voiceover tells us that Cole was locked up for twenty-five years. But, as Michael Dempsey wrote in Film Quarterly in 1972, a “synopsis takes no account of the swarming minor characters who bounce around inside the film’s narrative...