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By Root 257 0

home to Los Angeles, but he knew that once he returned to the States, the great glow of this recent public appearance would quickly fade. The Americans looked at nothing but surface. He had no big stars this time around, his radiant blonds not in place. What would the Americans do with nothing glamorous to look at? This was why they were so good at those CinemaScope films, made to combat the lure of the home television sets, even if the screen held only wide, long landscape shots without a human being in sight. The Americans were good at lineups of Broadway dancers with legs kicking across the screen. They were exceptional at Bible stories acted out in tony British accents and couture costumes, or star vehicles with exquisite set design but not much of a script. They were good at hookers with hearts of gold. They were good at buckshot violence and bullet sprays, two-bit actors falling in familiar agony. At one time, even the Director would admit, they had been the best at women’s pictures, never enough ways for a woman to quiver at the hell of keeping the secret of an illegitimate child close to her heart, all the while weeping.

The problem with the Americans was that they had had no idea what to do with the violence since he’d given them permission, in his mind, to start filming it with his own bravura take, twelve years earlier. The Americans were always good at dying, but not death. Good at plot, but not fatalism. Good at cowboys shot down from the backs of horses, but not the finality of writhing in the dust. Good at the cars roaring lustily into each other as if no one were in them, but not the full horror of a body hurtling into the rigidity of the steering column. Good at the beautiful Radcliffe heroine succumbing to cancer in her bed, but not the ugly business of the night nurse wiping her clean at two in the morning.

What they didn’t know was that you take the little glimmer of the truth of death when you see it, and then have the nerve to give it light.

Like Gene Hackman being lured into the dark, dangerous silence of an abandoned warehouse, gun drawn in both fear and stubborn will, and the audience left in unfulfilled suspense.

Like the dance marathon contestant, played by Jane Fonda, shot in the head while standing on a California pier, yet falling in a field of tall grass.

Like the wondrous Altman western, with Warren Beatty again, the outlaw fatally wounded in the deepening snow.

Or like the Coppola picture he’d screened only two months ago, a man shot bullet dead center in the head, the bullet continuing its travel to shatter the window in the background. As real bullets must, the force they carry not to be impeded.

He’d seen how an audience rustled in the dark when they responded to a moment like this. He liked the feeling of unease, of excitement, of repulsion, the terrific jolt he received from knowing he had created an image that provoked people. In this film, he knew he had such a sequence. But even he had been astounded by the response.

The film had been slated to screen out of competition. The Director had, at most, modest expectations. The setting was not America, but London. There were no American stars, only Brits. The film had a washed-out color to it, an unfamiliarity. Gone were the actresses with the stylized wardrobes. Gone were the actresses as gorgeous centerpieces. Gone were the days when he could get away with suggesting the menace of violence. Now everyone had to see it. He was over seventy years old, and some people in the audience thought the Director had lost his sure hand when they witnessed the vulgarity of a rape, the pink bud of a nipple being loosened from behind a bra cup. They sat in silence as the killer removed his necktie to strangle his victim. That would have been enough in the old days, the hand on the necktie, the audience already aware that a man was wandering the streets of London strangling women. But this was no longer the old days. Some people groaned at the extended scene of the woman’s struggle, her fingers panicked at the tightening around her neck. Some