Today on TCM, a celebration of Ingrid Bergman will bring us many of the cinematic legend’s greatest films as well as some lesser known ones. Early in the day, her first film after exiting Hollywood, Stromboli, airs and it contains one of my favorite scenes in any movie of the decade. That scene comes when the fishermen of the island of Stromboli gather to net tuna for the village. The scene actually is of them catching tuna using a centuries old method of corralling tuna into a central area where a net at the bottom is raised up from underneath the tuna and they are hooked and dragged into a long boat. Simply watching this five minute sequence, apart from the rest of the film, is something I can and have done on multiple occasions. It’s a fascinating detail about the lives of the islanders and the fact that it is shown in long, uninterrupted detail is a part of what fascinates me. As I grow older, I find myself drawn into moments and scenes in movies where something detailed but undramatic plays out. Actually more than undramatic, mundane. Mundane action, done right, can be the most captivating part of any cinematic experience.
Recently, I was scrolling through movies I’ve seen a hundred times in an effort to watch, as I tend to do, one or two scenes from a movie with which I’m quite familiar. It’s a luxury we now have that decades of film fans didn’t until fairly recently. We can pick out favorite moments and watch them again or analyze a scene in a kind of self-made film class. At the time, I decided to take in two scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of The Shining. Of all the wonderful shots and scenes in that movie, the two I wanted to see were the interview scene between Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) and Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and the tour of the hotel scene involving Ullman, Torrance, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), Danny (Danny Lloyd ), and Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers). First, the interview.
During the interview scene, Kubrick keeps the camera set into medium shots of Ullman when talking alternated with medium shots of Torrance. Nothing fancy, no special lighting. The conversational tones are baseline and banal. They have the cadence of small talk which is, after all, what they are. “Why aren’t you open in the winter,” “How was the drive up,” “You come highly recommended,” etc. Basic, dull stuff. Even when the conversation turns macabre – the moment when Ullman informs Torrance of the regrettable Grady situation from 1970 – it does so in a banal way. Ullman says he has to mention it and he hopes it isn’t a deal breaker and so on. Barry Nelson, as Ullman, does a great little wince before saying that Grady killed his wife and daughters. It’s a wince that indicates not that this is something that troubles him but instead, this is something he hopes doesn’t queer the deal. It’s fantastic and it’s in these little moments that the cinema really can sing for me. In fact, that’s why I watched it again.
Then there’s the tour. On closing day for the Overlook, Jack and family show up and they’re given a tour of the hotel. Ullman shows them the rooms, the ball room, the main hall, their apartment. Dick Hallorann shows Wendy and Danny the kitchen, the meat locker, the pantry. Now, to be sure, important information is handed out the entire time. We get the back story, we get information about the all terrain vehicle and the radio room, we get info on the maze, and so on. But the action itself is mundane. If not connected to the larger story, all but meaningless. And yet I can watch it again and again. As Sheila O’Malley said when I brought it up on Facebook, “So many actors/directors focus on climax/big gesture and cannot at all manage the mundane. Small bits of behavior, elegantly played, that make total human sense, is one of my favorite things about the art form… It takes real skill to direct a scene like the one you mention in The Shining. No detail is irrelevant.” I couldn’t agree more. She also brought up a scene she loves, from Hondo, where John Wayne makes horseshoes while talking with Geraldine Page.
Others brought up favorite moments where the action is mundane but the detail is rich. Brian Doan revealed a personal preference for the research moments in All the President’s Men, shots like Redford talking on the phone and doodling. Fellow Morlock Richard Harland Smith mentioned Charles Durning in The Sting, momentarily using his water glass as a finger bowl before heading out the door with the G-Men from the FBI. Damian Arlyn mentioned the little bits of business in the opening of Die Hard. And there are so many more I have. The omelet making scene at the end of Big Night, which I mentioned here once before in a post on silent scenes in the movies, but it’s also a great scene of mundane action that’s captivating to watch. The opening moment of American Hustle, where Christian Bale spends minutes perfecting the most elaborate comb-over in movie history. Mundane action in the movies requires patience on the part of the viewer and the director. Director shy away from mundane action, “deeply afraid,” as Richard put it, “of boring their audiences.” And there’s the rub. Boring isn’t defined by non-action or action, but monotony. I can’t even count how many hyper action scenes I’ve watched that have bored me to tears. A chase that just goes on and on, a movie with one explosion after another, a “story” filled with nothing but big spectacle. Mundane action, done right, beats them all. It imparts information to the viewer in the most banal way imaginable, so under the radar that the viewer doesn’t even know they’re being given the keys to the kingdom. I wish more directors took chances on boring their audiences. We might all be a little more captivated as a result.