“ Brother From
Another Planet"
and “The Fourth
M an"
hq E lean or M a lin
The B rother From Another Planet is nicelv
put together from beginning to end and is
loaded with laughs, given the serious subject
m atter — racism. By now everyone must
know the premise — a slave from another
planet escapes on a space craft and lands on
earth on Ellis Island. He cannot speak, possi
bly a condition imposed upon him because
of his enslavement. He looks m uch like the
rest of the black men in Harlem where he
ends up. except that he has three toes on
each foot. One foot was missing on his arri
val. and he had to regenerate it himself his
first night on earth. He is superior to earth
lings in several ways — an uncanny knack to
fix machines by touching them. He is also a
sensitive, able to see, feel, and hear things the
rest of us are unable to perceive, both past
and present. He is being pursued by a couple
of space m.p.'s, dressed in black, stiff looking
guys who track him with the aid of some kind
of interplanetary dictionary and culture
manual.
Director. John Sayles. who plays one of the
m.p.s. gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing
characters of different backgrounds and
points of view.
At a neighborhood tavern where several
scenes are set, the space trackers are shown
to be laughable, and draw immediate distrust
from the regulars. At a later time, two white
guys from out of town duck into the bar
looking for directions to the subway. They are
uneasy, and in trying to fit in they also look
foolish. They m ight just as well be from
HELEN L C T T E I E G E
PucToecAPny
another planet.
Mot speaking gives the part of the Brother
more potential, and Joe Murphv does a super
job of portraying this interplanetary fugitive.
The costumes are great, the cast is excellent,
down to the smallest roles, and. best of all.
though this is a “ message movie, it is always
entertaining. The misadventures the hero
goes through, the colorful characters he
meets and the satisfying resolution of the
storv makes this a great flick. Don't miss it.
The Fourth vIan. which plaved around
town during November and December, is the
perfect movie to go to if you are liberal,
agnostic and 7or of a literary bent. Written and
directed by the man who gave us Soldier o f
Oranqe. <a wonderful war movie), the
thoroughly engrossing plot is played out
through a series of literary technigues. Pre
sented as they are in filmic form, they work
beautifully. We find out in the beginning that
the main character in the story is homosex
ual. an alcoholic, and that he has vividly im
agined fantasies. He imagines he has killed
his voung lover: in the next scene, the young
man is again playing his violin, coolly inform
ing the main character (an author), that he'll
have to take the train to his lecture, it's the
voung man's turn to use the car. At the train
depot, the author sees a hunk of a young guy
in the magazine shop, is smitten, and follows
him out to the train. The young man departs
on the train to Cologne, and the author goes
off to his lecture in a little town on the coast
(of Holland).
While on the train he sees vivid images, so
intense he thinks they m ight be real.
This movie is even more visual than most
movies. The images are all of startling things,
like a poster for a hotel that, next view, has
blood on it. Blues and reds are the main
colors used throughout these episodes, and
details from one set of images will occur in
another.
At the train station, the author approaches
a man dressed formally, and inguires if he is
I 4 1
V f in«* I ( i n i s
IC * \ . H . y ml
j j j - 11 »<
the person sent from the literature club to
meet him. The man turns out to be an under
taker and he is picking up a casket. The
author thinks the ribbon on the casket has his
name on it. but the undertaker pulls up the
ribbon, and some missing letters appear to
form another name. “ Hermann. "
At the lecture, the author is filmed by a
voung woman dressed in red with a movie
camera. At the intermission, she invites him
to her home and he asks about provisions for
a hotel room. She says they have a reserva
tion for him at the town's finest hotel. He
looks across the street at the hotel, and it is
the same one in the poster earlier — not only
that, it s the same night view as on the poster.
He tells the young woman he will stay with her
if he misses the last train, and since it s im
portant to the plot, of course, he misses the
train.
The young woman drives him to her place,
a m ansion by the seashore, with a deluxe
beautv salon and luxurious living quarters
inside. The neon sign has some letters out.
It’s supposed to say “ Sphinx." but it says
"Spin." — the Dutch word for spider — in
stead. Another little word game and set piece
where missing letters fall into place.
That night the young woman seduces him
He has a dream the woman has emasculated
him with a pair of barber shears. In the dream,
she is wearing green Fingernail polish. The
wom an awakens him and e are relieved to
see it is a dream, which we know right away,
because she is wearing red Fingernail polish.
In the next scene, it is morning, she is wearing
a green uniform and painting her nails the
same seafoam green as in his dream.
This woman seduces the man materially
when she invites him to live with her. and
showers him with gifts. One gift is a shirt that
once belonged to her late husband.
She gets him to stay a few more days by
leaving an 8 x 10 glossy photograph of the
voung man he had seen at the train station (in
a red bikini), as as bait. His name is Hermann.
If there was anyone in the audience who had
not had any suspicions about this woman,
they sure did by now.
The young woman goes to Cologne to get
the young man and bring him to her home,
with the unspoken promise that the author
will have a chance to enlighten him sexually.
The young man is a gay basher, but the au
thor seduces him anyway. But just in his m o
m ent of trium ph, the author looks around
and sees they are in the crypt containing the
ashes of the spider woman's three loving
husbands who have gone before. The previ
ous night, he had stumbled upon movies the
woman had left accessible, and they were
movies of the three weddings and the three
unfortunate husbands. One died in a
parachute jum p, (in that section, the young
woman is shown with scissors, jokingly pre
tending to cut the lines. In another scene, the
voung husband gets out of the car (she is
shown in the car — just iv h o is taking these
movies?) in a jungle zoo environment, and is
killed by a lion. In the third scene, the young
husband takes off in a boat and is drowned
when someone in a speedboat capsizes his
craft.
Now. the author is drunk when he sees
these movies, and we wonder if he is en
hancing these moving images from the al
cohol or from his author's imagination. If the
woman did edit these movies down to the
wedding, then the death scenes, m ight she
then be very strange?
Anyway, they are in the crypt because the
author saw a woman he had seen earlier in a
vision and he followed her. He had seen the
door to the crypt in the same vision, and the
woman (in a blue coat) in the crypt, with three
hanging beef carcasses.
^he author, now in a state of panic, decides
*o ]et out of there right awav.
' m dvinq to tell vou the rest, but will exer
cise a lot o f restraint and just say that at the
end. we are left wondering if the young wo
man is a witch, or if the author has flipped out
because of the alcohol or his authorhood. His
thinking she is a witch, after all. m ight only be
a manifestation of his m istrust for women.
On the other hand, a female character who
appears throughout the movie in different
guises, turns up as the nurse in the emergency
room. The author thinks she m ust be the
Virgin Mary, com e to warn him about the
witch. Maybe she represents the other side of
the female character to the author. The
characters this woman plays are benevolent,
but enigmatic.
She says she is not Mary. The doctor's
m iddle name, however, is Maria, and he's a
Catholic with six children. But he thinks the
author has gone mad. The doctor is the man
who met the author at the train to escort him
to the lecture. He knows about the three un
fortunate accidents and he knows about the
author's alcoholism and the weak-m inded
ness brought on by his authorhood. He
sympathizes with the woman for her heart
break, and suspects the author of diminished
capacity.
This movie is witty, beautifully filmed, well
acted, not a frame is out of place. It is best
seen with a friend, however, as there will be
lots of questions you'll want to ask someone,
and you'll want to compare notes.
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MUSIC IN THE MOVIES
Rock, Jazz, Soul, Country, & Blues on Film
Northwest Film Study Center
January/February 1985
221-1156 fo r schedule
1219 SW Park Ave.
Portland, OR 97205
u
Just Out, January, 1985