Franklin J. Schaffner, an appreciation of his movies. Pt 3: Papillon, Islands in the Stream
This is the third part of a three part post on American movie director Franklin J. Schaffner. Part One is here and Part Two is here.
Papillon
Another courageous man, in the unlikely shape of a small-time Parisian crook, “Papillon” so-called because of the large butterfly tattoed on his chest. Set in the 1930’s, Steve MacQueen’s Papillon is sent to Devils Island, a horrific French penal colony in French Guiana, from which there is no return.
Once there, the convicts discover that the real prison is the island, a hostile jungle filled with poisonous snakes and savage crocodiles. If that were not enough the sea cuts them off from the mainland and is filled with sharks. For most prisoners acceptance comes quickly and they settle into the appalling conditions, their grim lives only punctuated by the sadistic brutality of the guards. Life is cheap on Devils Island and the prisoners quick learn that they are worthless, except as slave labour.
But not Papillon. He is determined to escape. Time after time he tries, fails and is horribly punished.
Schaffner gets a magnificent performance from Steve MacQueen. He ages, degenerates really, before our very eyes. No movie star looks here. As various wardens try to break his spirit, he changes into a damaged older man, his body battered, his skin grey from years in solitary confinement. However his spirit continues to carry him and it is this that we watch.
Schaffner’s jungle is beautiful but absolutely lethal. His human beings look weak and vulnerable in it. It serves to make McQueen’s bravery even more potent. Man against everything. At the end of the movie McQueen finally escapes and somehow it becomes a victory for every man.
Exposition and the story
One of the reasons that Franklin Schaffner’s movies were both intelligent and successful, was that he had a marvellous gift for exposition. Exposition, the telling of information onscreen, is the bane of every movie that tires to deal in complex ideas. Franklin Schaffner excelled at effortlessly communicating ideas and concepts that had to be understood for the movie to work.
In the Warlord he had to communicate the concept of Droit Du Seigneur (The right of a Lord to a bride’s first night of marriage) to an audience that had no understanding of it. He did these by making the subject a heated argument amongst the principal characters. In doing so he placed it in its historical, sexual and emotional significance, quickly and in a way an audience could understand.
In Papillon many characters walk on and off camera, and impart critical information about Devils Island and the penal system, as a way of seeking Papillon’s help or getting his favour. The Nazi counter-intelligence sub-plot which informs us about Patton is a stroke of genius. These movies are textbook examples of how to do exposition superbly.
Islands in the Stream
In my view one of the few movies that truly understands Ernest Hemingway. I suppose that it was no surprise that the man who told stories of Alpha males should film the great American novelist.
Again the teaming with George C Scott produced results. If Scott was able to look like Patton, he was almost a double for Ernest Hemingway himself, in Islands. Scott is Thomas Hudson, a sculptor, a father, a man who has dealt with his own demons by removing himself to a small Caribbean island. His only friends are a few rough men, sailors and roustabouts who accept him for who he is. A proud, troubled and difficult man, Hudson has a dark side that makes him aggressive and dangerous, especially when drunk. The loose community of the Island gives him the freedom to expose that side of himself, from time to time.
Islands roughly follows the story of Hemingway’s novel. In the first half, the movie concentrates on Hudson’s relationships with his sons and his divorced wife. It is notoriously difficult to film Hemingway and these are amongst the most moving, perceptive interpretations of Hemingway ever filmed. Franklin Schaffner captures the terse poetry of Hemingway’s language beautifully. In the key scene between Hemingway and his beautiful, intelligent wife, very few words are spoken, yet it is crystal clear that they are still very much in love. The scene is touching and ineffably sad. That said, the first half of the movie also contains a shark attack scene, which is one of the most tense, dramatic and thrilling scenes ever shot in a movie.
The second half of the movie finds Hudson motivated to help refugees fleeing the war in Europe, to enter the Americas illegally. This is different, action oriented, with a harsher tone. The scenes here are clever and exciting, but they lack the delicate, lucid beauty of the first half of the movie.
This is a good but flawed movie. The problem is not with the movie but the source material. The writing of Islands in the Stream was a problem for Hemingway. He started writing it and put it down. The second half was written some fifteen years later, after many life changes. The two halves were edited together after Hemingway’s death and published. So Islands is really two books, a meditation on art and family, and a story of hard decisions made in pursuit of freedom. The movie reflects that.
Franklin Schaffner made a good movie of all of this and that was huge achievement in itself. Worth seeing for the quality of the performances and the real questions of manliness and courage that the movie raises.
Life and the Spirit
In all of Franklin Schaffner’s movies there is an underlying connection to a greater spirit, a mystical energy that his warrior men are forced to engage with. In the Warlord, Charlton Heston tries to take the virgin Bronwyn by force, before invoking the Droit Du Seigneur. On both occasions strange events protect her, and force him to reconsider. By invoking the Droit Du Seigneur and then breaking his side of the agreement he unleases forces which, initially, he does not understand. Pagan idols gain a power over this most rational of men.
In Patton, there are strange, unsettling scenes where Patton tells of his belief in reincarnation. There is a surreal and strangely moving scene near the beginning of the movie where Patton is seized by a vision and directs his driver to an ancient battle site. Here, he goes into a virtual trance state and retells of his life as a Carthaginian commander, two thousand years earlier. His ability to understand and anticipate the Germans verges on the visionary, almost like the gifts of a religious mystic.
The most blatant insertion of a spiritual presence is in Papillon, where he has two surreal out-of-body visions which crystalise his determination to escape, at some kind of soul level. These scenes contrast completely and utterly with the brutal realism of the scenes of Papillon’s life in prison. The scenes are so powerful that they completely change our perception of the movie. Even the troubled Thomas Hudson in Islands is touched by something spiritual. As he lies dying, Thomas Hudson sees a bright, white light and the movie implies that he is seeing another existence, as a reward for his courage and endurance.
Somewhere in this attachment to the spiritual, is the essence of what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies great. To be a Schaffner hero for a moment and myself overreach, Franklin Schaffner reminds me of Holbein. Holbein was the dutch portrait painter who painted the powerful nobles of the English Tudor court of king Henry the Eighth. Like Holbein, Schaffner draws portraits of powerful men and also like Holbein, he searches for the mystical connection to whatever makes these men what they are.
The Big Why
The English philosopher R.A. Collingwood said that the purpose of Art was to ask the question but that it could not provide the answer. Seen in that context, all of the movies discussed above are art.
Franklin Schaffner movies take the view that assertive Alpha men are necessary, if only to nurture freedom.
In all of the movies discussed, each man has or comes to, a deep conviction that the world has to be made, that the world is a product of our decisions. That regardless of our good intentions, both good and ill spring from our actions, that no man can achieve a perfect result, a perfect victory. This integrity, this faith in the real world is what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies so vital. It makes the movies adult and big in spirit and explains why they retain their ability to engage us.
I described the endings of Franklin Schaffner’s movies as satisfying which they are. However he never tries to answer the big dilemmas that his heroes’ actions lead themselves to. The Warlord ends with Heston’s Norman knight, wounded in body and soul, journeying back to his Duke to seek forgiveness for the chaos he has unleashed. He is now a different man from when he left. How will he be received? Can he rebuild a life? Will be able to live happily with the woman he has sacrificed so much for? Does he deserve to?
In Planet of the Apes we never find out what happens to Taylor’s moral certitude (and superiority) when he finds out the truth about mankind. The ending is almost a Rorschach test, we can all read it differently. At the end of Patton, George Patton’s victory is flawed by political machinations and intimations of mortality. Is he right or are his enemies right, about the need for war?
In Papillon, Franklin Schaffner makes a virtue of a necessity. The story of Papillon has to end somewhere so we end with his successful escape. But so much has happened to Papillon, he is a different man from when he was first imprisoned and we have been through all of those changes with him. Quite simply, what will happen to him? How will he live?
Even Thomas Hudson, whose life has been a succession of hard choices, makes us question. Was there a value to his manly courage? Was it worth it to die, alone and apart from friends and family?
These are great movies made by a perceptive and intelligent director, who had the courage to ask the big questions about leadership and bravery in ways that still engage and excite us. Bravo, Mr Schaffner, wherever you are.
Details
The Warlord

Get it in the UK here and the US here
Planet of the Apes

Get it in the UK here and the US here
Patton
![Patton [1969] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51X9HVNWKEL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)
Get it in the UK here and the US here
Papillon
Get it in the UK here and the US here
Islands in the Stream

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