Arthur Penn: New Edition

The Miracle Worker

Introduction A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? W. B. yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” What immediately strikes one in the films of Arthur Penn may appear at first glance a superficial feature, but it leads right to the essence of his art: an intense awareness of, and emphasis on, physical expression. Physical sensation (often but not necessarily violent) is perhaps more consistently vivid in his films than in those of any other director. Again and again he finds an action—often in itself an unusual , hence striking, action—likely to communicate a physical “feel” to the spectator and devotes all his resources—direction of the actors, camera position and movement, editing—to making that “feel” as immediate as possible, arousing a vividly empathic response. Here, as illustration, are five examples, one from each of Penn’s films: 1. The Left Handed Gun. As the McSweens’ home is burned, Mrs. McSween, distraught, struggles helplessly to check the chaos around her. The sackers unwind reels of printed fabric, which brushes and almost entangles her. She collapses, despairing, on the steps of the shed, clutching handfuls of the contents of an overturned barrel (which, overturning, nearly hits her), holding them to her forehead, rubbing them in her hair. 2. The Miracle Worker. Annie Sullivan introduces herself to the blind and deaf Helen Keller by thudding down her trunk on the step on which Helen is sitting. The child senses the vibration , feels with her hand. Penn cuts to a close-up of the hands as Helen’s feels Annie’s, the delicacy of contact suggesting that 2 introduction the fingers are the child’s ears and eyes. Helen raises Annie’s fingers to her nose and smells them. 3. Mickey One. During the credit sequence, a girl sprawled across the hood of the car Mickey is driving presses her lips to the windscreen. The camera is positioned inside, so that we see the flattening of her lips, the misting of the glass by her breath. Mickey turns on the windscreen wiper, which rises up to touch the girl’s open mouth. 4. The Chase. At the height of the climactic riot, Mary Fuller, drunk and hysterical, suddenly stuffs part of the pearl necklace she is wearing into her mouth and bites. The necklace bursts. Some of the pearls stay in her mouth; others scatter on the ground amid car tires, etc. 5. Bonnie and Clyde. C. W. Moss’s “Daddy,” infuriated by the sight of his son’s tattooed chest, suddenly flicks hot thick soup (or pease pudding) across it from a saucepan with a large spoon. C. W. is in the right foreground of the screen, so that the soup is flicked toward the spectator. Obviously, all of these examples carry overtones and implications that go far beyond the immediate physical sensation: in The Left Handed Gun, the emotional associations of the stored goods, the basis of the family’s stability; in The Miracle Worker, the reaching out to a contact beyond the physical; in Mickey One, the strong phallic-erotic overtones; in The Chase, the sense of extreme emotional pressures. But in all five, the invocation of the spectator’s sense of touch is remarkably potent. I have selected a few striking moments; this physicality pervades all of Penn’s work. In no other director’s films (possibly excepting the Westerns of Anthony Mann) does pain consistently seem so real. The death agonies of Buck Barrow are but the extremist instance of a continuous characteristic: think of the wounding and subsequent deaths of Billy’s friends Tom and Charlie in TheLeftHandedGun or of the beating up of Calder in The Chase. Everything is done, through makeup, through the acting, through the whole presentation, to encourage the introduction 3 spectator to empathize as intensely as possible: when Bubber Reeves is shot at the end of The Chase, one feels the bullets going in. Obviously, any able director uses more of his actors’ resources than their facial expressions , but Penn seems to draw exceptionally on his actors’ bodies to build up characters from characteristic movements, gestures, ways of walking. Think of almost any Penn character, and you will get an immediate mental image of the way he walks, bears himself, uses his hands: Tom in The Left Handed Gun, Edwin Stewart in The Chase, C. W. Moss in Bonnie...