A Sailor's Life For Me.

Rating: 9/10 (6 July 2007)

I saw this for only the second time recently and I'm not sure I can judge it properly. You sort of have to BE there in order to fully appreciate something new, and I mean "appreciate" in the sense of "recognize the quality, significance, or magnitude of" the thing. Any artistic or scientific product has to be judged in the context of its time and I've only seen a couple of Charlie Chaplin's movies from that period.
This was released in, what, 1926? Eighty years ago. So imagine a viewer eighty years from now transported to our age, seeing only one or two movies, and trying to judge them. "Die Hard 2"? A MASTERPIECE. It's in glorious color, dodekaphonic sound, superwide screen, a story that blends drama, excitement, adventure, period airplanes, humor, all in one superb Gesamtkunstwerk. But a time traveler wouldn't think so if he knew that a hundred other action movies, more or less identical, were being ground out like Superburgers at a Sonic Drive-In.
That's the position most of us non film scholars are in with respect to films like "Battleship Potemkin." We KNOW it must be good because everyone says so. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, the Gay Revolutionary given to triadic arrangements. But in many ways it's primitive. The officers aboard the ship look like stereotyped sneering villains. The characters, good and bad, are made of cardboard. We don't really get to know any of them well. The miniatures are obvious toys. And the acting is uniformly over the top.
But from our current perspective, even with the most minimal of contexts, it's a gripping movie because of the theme and the way the director handles it. The first time I saw it the maggots on the meat were kind of disgusting. Shockingly disgusting material was still a rarity on the screen, though it's now commonplace. And the Captain of the ship is about to execute a dozen of his men because THEY REFUSE TO EAT HIS STUPID SOUP! Okay, that's one thing. But look at the way Eisenstein manipulates the detail in the scene when the execution is about to take place. The recalcitrant swine are huddled together on deck. A conventional treatment calls for them to cower against the rails and wait for the bullets. But no. Eisenstein spends time having them covered up with an ominous canvas tarp that gets several shots of its own. We can't see the men under the canvas. It's just a rough bubble with an irregular surface -- until one of the men under it faints and one of the bumps in the canvas slumps to the deck. Well, context aside, that's a pretty innovate statement. A less imaginative director would have spelled the whole scene out for us. The terrified faces of the men, the pleading, the sobbing, the praying. But Eisenstein trusts in the maturity of his audience and turns the incident into a rich display of mature taste. And that kind of realistic detail is used in other important scenes. When the wounded hero falls overboard he doesn't simply splash into the sea. Instead he lands on a snatch block, bent backwards, head and feet dangling a bit above the water, hanging for a moment while his mates dive in to save him.
The blood comes later and there isn't much of it but what there is, is powerful. One bullet on the Odessa steps generates a greater emotional impact than the sight of all the gallons of Haemocolor Number Nine Red that Bruce Willis has shed in all his action movies put together. We can make a good guess that the one shot of the bullet hole through the eyeglass lens was an innovation because it's been copied so often since -- from dramas like "The Godfather" and "Bonnie and Clyde" to parodies like Woody Allen's. A guy with no legs running away from the bullets. I'd guess that was innovative too.
The story is about the 1905 uprising that took place after the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war. It adumbrates the REAL revolution that came in 1917 during World War I. If the Czars knew what was good for them they'd have avoided wars whenever at all possible. (Change that from "Czars" to "heads of state.") Like all revolutions, though, this one left unanswered the question, "Who's running things around here?" Certainly the church would have nothing to do with it. The priest who tries to quiet down the mutineers gets bonked for his pains and the crucifix embedded in the wooden deck.
At any rate, historical context aside, it's a powerful movie despite any weaknesses. Eighty years, and we are still gripped by its images and its story. It can still rouse us, like those sleeping lions in Odessa.