Arthur Penn: New Edition

Alice’s Restaurant

The Chase Penn’s first indisputable (one would have thought) masterpiece has in fact, in England at least, had somewhat meager recognition , both from critics and the general public. The director’s intelligence informs every sequence: not merely a cerebral intelligence, but an intelligence in which emotion and intuitive perception have their essential roles, and in which the most rigorous clarity of vision is balanced (but not cancelled out or compromised) by emotional generosity . It is perhaps Penn’s completest film. Not that it is necessarily to be preferred to Bonnie and Clyde, but it contains certain features excluded from the later film, which give it in comparison an extra dimension. The Chase offers Penn’s fullest portrayal of a particular society, the analysis leading to uncompromising condemnation, by implication, of money-based society in general. By the end of the film everybody from the highest (Val Rogers) to the lowest (the Negro Lester) has been revealed as equally a victim. The essential nature of the society depicted (vividly particularized yet carrying the widest possible implicit significance) is suggested early in the film by the scene in Val Rogers’s bank: on the surface, an all-pervasive hypocrisy and wearing of masks; below it, the sense of frustrated and corrupted needs strong enough continually to threaten the brittle facade. The champagne toast to Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall) on his birthday, organized with obsequious efficiency by Damon Fuller (Richard Bradford), subtly conveys Val’s position . The whole presentation of Rogers is a good example of Penn’s quite unsentimental generosity. Rogers’s “image”—which he himself clearly accepts as real—of a thoroughly decent, responsible leading 40 robin wood citizen, unassertive yet perfectly in control, is not entirely unrelated to the reality. Penn shows us a man by no means inherently vicious: his subtle corruptness, revealed gradually as the film progresses, is felt as something inherent in his position rather than in his nature. Because he is rich, he is universally respected, but the respect is for the money, not the man, hence false and precarious. As the champagne glasses are raised, the girl assistants smile their adoration: they are perfectly sincere, insofar as they believe they are really feeling something for the man. And the extent of Val’s self-delusion is suggested by his evident pleasure at the tribute: he is as much trapped in money-values as anyone. Even in the apparently ordered world of the bank, the tensions and frustrations underlying the social performance rise uncomfortably near the surface. Emily Stewart (Janice Rule), wife of one vice president, intermittent mistress of another, Damon, passes from taunting her husband Edwin (Robert Duvall) with his ineffectuality to blatantly arranging an assignation with her not overenthusiastic lover within her husband’s view and only just out of earshot. Sexual intrigue associates itself easily with business intrigue: Emily’s contempt for Edwin as a husband is scarcely distinguishable from her resentment at their not being invited to Val’s party. The debasement of sex, and of personal relationships generally, is intimately connected with the all-pervading money-values. The scene culminates in Emily’s insolently and publicly inviting Val to their party: the social masks are all but dropped. Throughout, the sense of explosive forces accumulating beneath the flimsy facade of propriety is very strong. The social analysis is developed through the film’s three simultaneous parties—Val’s, the Stewarts’, and the teenage party in progress next door to them. The three groups converge for the film’s climax, where the social distinctions insisted on by the previous separateness break down in a general anarchy as all civilized standards finally collapse . The parties—two of them observed in great detail—offer superficial contrasts and underlying parallels. One notices repeatedly the inadequacy of the codes of social behavior to cope with the violence The Chase 41 latent in the personal relationships. Each party tends to move toward violent expression as suppressed energies force themselves increasingly to the surface. This is least obvious, necessarily, in Val’s more formal and elaborate party, with its respectable ostentation. Even here, however, barely suppressed tensions are kept continually in view. It is a mark of Penn’s seriousness that even the drunken middle-aged woman in the cowboy suit does not strike one as merely funny. Take, for example, the incident of the formal announcement of college endowments, with its suggestions of...