VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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      • American Graffiti
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      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
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      • Who is Harry Nilsson
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      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
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  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
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    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
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      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
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      • The Player
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      • The Tenant
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      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
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      • 400 Blows
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      • Missing
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      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
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      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
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THE TENANT
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Roland Topor, Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski
Starring Roman Polanski, Melvyn Douglas, Isabelle Adjani, Shelley Winters
Picture
 Roman Polanski directed, wrote and/or starred in some of the most enjoyable films of the last sixty years, including Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Tess, Frantic, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, and The Ghost Writer. Apartment life, demonology and stress are among his recurring themes. Often his films stand out for their playfulness, in the sense that a big toe on a small foot is playful. In his 1976 movie The Tenant, his playfulness doubles back on itself and ends up kicking the audience into mesmerizing terror. 
    Polanksi remains uncredited in the starring role of Trelkovsky, a Polish work-visa emigre living in Paris. While we never quite learn Trelkovsky's job, we see that it attracts a boorish bunch, including one lout who takes pleasure in playing bad music at all hours simply to annoy the sick woman who lives upstairs. And speaking of noise, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, the previous tenant in Trelkovsky's digs, must have made quite the crescendo as she fell from the apartment window and crashed through glass onto the sidewalk below. Even as Trelkovsky moves in, he begins a strange consumption with the story of Simone, despite not knowing her. He visits her in the hospital primarily to make sure that she will in fact die from her injuries in order that he may secure her apartment for himself. At the hospital he meets Stella, a friend of Simone. He tells her he knows Simone because that feels more proper than admitting he is ghoulishly waiting out her demise. He and Stella experience a quick and recurring fling, through which we learn that Simone was either a lesbian or, more likely, a man who dressed and lived as a woman.
    Immediately the people the new tenant meets begin trying to fit him into the mold already established by Simone, including bringing him the same drink in the cafe, converting him to her brand of cigarettes, and even giving him a kiss from an intoxicated admirer who shows up to court Simone the day after she has died. 
    To reveal more of the story would be to risk spoiling it and this movie has some serious surprises, including an ending that will make a point of messing you up. 
    Although many people consider The Tenant to be a grand artistic success, there is nothing about the direction or cinematography in this film that jumps up and grabs or slithers out and gnaws at us. The best reason to watch the film again after all this time is because Polanski proves himself possessed of considerable theatrical charm, as well as being an actor capable of tremendous understated humor and thoroughly convincing nervousness. In one memorable scene in his freshly-rented apartment, Polanksi discovers a neighbor from upstairs complaining to him about the noise his boorish guests are making. The actor's character responds by blending magnanimous charm and paranoia into his reaction. He wants to maintain the good will of his coworkers and yet is desperate to avoid annoying the landlord. About a million screwed up ways exist to poorly communicate this unease. Polanksi selects the one appropriate style. 
    Another acting phenomenon in The Tenant is Shelley Winters, a woman who by this time had already won and earned two Academy Awards for Acting, the first in 1960 for The Diary of Anne Frank and the second in 1966 for A Patch of Blue, a woman who made significant contributions to Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, A Place in the Sun, and I Am a Camera, a woman who had, over the years, been reduced to playing a villain in the TV show "Batman," to starring in the Roger Corman film Bloody Mama --in the former she played Ma Parker and in the latter Ma Barker--to a great performance in a shit movie called The Poseidon Adventure. Shelley Winters takes the role of the concierge and makes it into the ambiguously sinister role of a lifetime. Is she a scheming, plotting, ambitious bitch or simply a tired, unfeeling crone with a fondness for the gruesome elements of life? This was her last truly great performance and she played it as if every second counted, which of course it does. 
    The film is not perfect. For instance, the title character's paranoia comes from an unexamined place, one which some clues materialize to inform, but none of which hang all that well together. To an extent, the motivation for the paranoia doesn't matter because we are all so caught up in the behavior of the actors on the screen. But again, it is the ambiguity that helps propel us ass over teakettle right alongside Polanski as he causes us to wonder if he might be the man the people in his office speak about from a newspaper article, if he might indeed have a connection to Simone that spills over into one of lifestyle (which might well explain his paranoia, given the crowd he attracts), or if people actually are messing with him about the noises coming from his apartment or if instead he is making those noises and he just doesn't remember doing it. Even the presumed flaws in the film project a strong sense of suspense that lingers beyond the swinging doors of the theatre. 
    And besides, Bruce Lee makes an appearance. 
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links