Return From The Ashes (1965): Do You Recognize the Stars of This Film?

A weird, almost perverse conglomeration of diverse story elements, Return From the Ashes seems immediately...odd right from the opening scene, and enjoyably stays that way throughout its longish running time. In a scene I'm still trying to figure out, the movie begins with Mischa on the train returning to Paris. A small boy named Robert is kicking the window wall of the compartment, annoying the hell out of everyone seated there...except Mischa, who stares blankly out into space. Suddenly, the little boy, a brat who won't stop his noise when his mother asks him to, opens the outside compartment door and falls, presumably, to his death. Everyone is horrified, of course...except Mischa, who again doesn't react. The passengers are angry with her, until they notice her camp numbers tattooed on her arm, and that's when composer John Dankworth's beautifully slinky little organ theme pops up, promising, incongruously, fun and intrigue. Who was the boy? What does his fall have to do with the rest of the movie? Is his death merely there to show how far Mischa has been damaged by the war? But then why does she call herself "Madame Robert" when she checks into her hotel? And if she was so unmoved by his death, why does she later tell Stan that Dachau made her realize she was a Jew and a mother? Would a mother react that way to a little boy falling off a speeding train? I'm still not sure what that opening scene means...but I love its mysteriousness, its weird humor (after all...that's just what that little brat deserved, most of the compartment's occupants may have thought), and its dark obscurity (the movie is heavy with dark, shadowy lighting and framing, just like Thompson's earlier masterpiece, Cape Fear). And that peculiar, eerie mood runs through the whole film.

Return From The Ashes (1965): Do

Download

Based on a novel by French author Hubert Monteilhet, Julius J. Epstein's screenplay (no less than Casablanca, Tall Story, Send Me No Flowers, and Cross of Iron just to name a few of his diverse scripts) moves from this wowzer opening to a sick, funny flashback sequence set in 1938 which grotesquely apes a traditional romantic comedy "meet cute" sequence. Michele aggressively picks up Stan after losing three games of chess-for-money to him, before she returns to his horrible, empty flat, where he's been keeping a stray alley cat in a cage...to eat (it's the fattest one he had caught so far, suggesting he had been living on them). There in his flat, they discuss Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as Stan enthusiastically reads a section that confirms his belief in no morality, no sin (Schell's oily, slick charm and clipped, blank reactions are used to great effect by Thompson). Epstein doesn't spare Michele, either, having her actively enjoy her sick, opportunistic relationship with the unloving Stan, where she openly tells him she enjoys dribbling out money to him for sex. There's no redemption for Stan (he can't even commit totally to his fraud; he physically recoils from her occasional need to have him love her), while her suffering at the hands of the Nazis (which isn't shown) is the only event that brings her back to audience sympathy. Importantly here, she shows Stan how she, too, could be the kind of survivor who lives on alley cat meat: at Dachau, she prostituted herself in the infamous "House of Pleasure" so she wouldn't starve. Thulin, in another failed bid for international movie stardom after the disastrous 1962 remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is remarkably good in this scene and throughout the film, giving a sensitive, evocative portrayal that's way outside the script.

Many great writers have obliquely treated this morbid theme. In Homer, Virgil and the Inferno, Odysseus, Aeneas and Dante visit the Underworld, interview the dead about their posthumous existence and return to the terrestrial world. But the inquisitors remain alive and the dead remain dead. In Edgar Poe's stories "Berenice" (1835) and "Ligeia" (1838) the living are nearly dead and the dead, with a remnant of consciousness, still living. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) the vampire returns from the dead to sustain himself on the blood of his victims, but offers no account of how he feels...

My main issue with the book is its poor treatment of a personal bugbear, the issue technological innovation and change. Innovation to Milward is important in the sense of labor saving and increasing the organic composition of capital, but there is no well argued model or conceptual framework for explaining how the devaluations which innovation brings are geographically distributed through monopoly capitalism. Monopoly theories of innovation assume that innovations are controlled by monopolists to maximize the returns they yield from them. Consequently, devaluations of capital are managed to maintain profitability, and do not change the geographical balance of power within capitalist relations of production.

The study of history is based on the premise that to understand the present it is necessary to have knowledge of the past. The resources and institutions that we have are legacies from the past; understanding them is crucial to any analysis of contemporary problems. Our species, H. Sapiens, is a social one; society, social norms and attitudes are a result of a series of interactions taken in the past. To argue that history, the path taken, does not affect the present, and will not affect the future is not credible. A more pertinent and insightful question concerning the importance of history is: How much does the past matter? The answer depends upon the particulars of the question and the historical circumstances. The past matters a great deal when assessing rates of return to competing investments in Denmark or Afghanistan, but it matters much less in a similar comparison between Denmark or Finland. The legacy of the past affects contemporaneous societies, but it does not condemn them to a predetermined future path. Societies do change, and the changes do affect their abilities to produce economic goods and services. Will these changes be beneficial or detrimental? An honest answer is that we do not know; that is why we do history and study current events.

2ff7e9595c