Behold A Pale Horse (1964)

There is an unforgettable moment in Behold A Pale Horse when Fred Zinnemann brings two of Hollywood’s greatest action stars together at last, in an unforgettable sequence of unrelenting tension. We see Omar Sharif, dressed in a black priest’s robe, walking peacefully down a road in the French countryside when a car suddenly pulls up beside him, and Gregory Peck steps out. Angry and impatient, he grabs Sharif by the arm.

“Get in, priest!” he growls.

“Beg your pardon?” Sharif asks, confused.

“I said GET IN, PRIEST!” Peck roars.

He shoves Sharif into the car with two other people, interrogates him, mocks him and—at one unexpected moment—smacks him hard across the face. Up until now, we haven't been too involved in the movie. But now Peck and Sharif have finally been brought together, and suddenly we're drawn in.

A $3.9 million movie headed by a strong director with an impeccable cast, Behold A Pale Horse was a notorious box office flop in the summer of 1964, grossing a mere $900,000 and embarrassing Columbia Pictures’ reputation in international cinemas overseas. The movie, a political thriller about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, was made at a time when Franco was still in power in Spain; the Spanish government was reportedly so offended by the film’s subject matter that Columbia was even forced to sell its Spanish distribution business. Advertised as a reunion between Peck and Anthony Quinn after The Guns of Navarone (1961), and also as a reunion between Quinn and Sharif after Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Behold A Pale Horse promised audiences an action-packed Hollywood vehicle and gave them, instead, a moody, meditative morality play.

If Behold A Pale Horse has been all but forgotten today, it’s easy to see why. Shortly before his death in 1997, Fred Zinnemann admitted, “The film didn’t really come together… it was interesting, but it did not really feel right except in a few spots.” Zinnemann may have been ruminating over the film’s disappointing finale, in which Peck—portraying an aging Spanish assassin—walks out to San Martin for a final showdown with Anthony Quinn, who plays a military police captain. We expect Peck to kill Quinn at the end. Instead, Peck wastes his ammo on a former friend—a “traitor”—and dies in a hail of bullets, while Quinn walks off scot-free.

The movie's ending was not a happy one, but that's not the only reason why audiences didn't take a liking to it. The ending was bad for a variety of reasons. It offered no catharsis. It failed to deliver on the promise of the film's earlier, greater sequences. Most importantly, the dying actions of the protagonist were not in the least sympathetic. The Day of Jackal (1973), arguably Zinnemann's richest masterpiece, is another film that ends with the hero getting killed immediately after failing his mission, but at least in that film the hero has an excuse: he simply misses his target. The same cannot be said for Behold A Pale Horse, in which the hero fails not because of bad aiming, but because of his own stupidity; it doesn't make for very exciting cinema, nor does it do much in the way of inspiring intelligent critical perspectives. The film’s central question (why doesn’t Peck shoot Quinn at the end?) is not a very compelling one.

Watching Behold A Pale Horse today, I’ve found that the most compelling aspect of the film is the onscreen relationship between Peck and Sharif, both of whom are, in a sense, playing quintessential Zinnemann-type heroes in the film. Peck’s character, the Spanish bandit Manuel Artiguez, is a lone gunman plagued with feelings of self-doubt, much like Robert Ryan’s Joe Parkson in Act of Violence (1949) and Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon (1952). Sharif’s character, an innocent young priest named Father Francisco, is torn between following the customs of his church and doing what is right for his country. He might as well be a cousin to Audrey Hepburn’s Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story (1959). Whenever Peck and Sharif are onscreen, playing Artiguez and Francisco, respectively, they succeed in delivering material that is pure Fred Zinnemann. The other characters in the story—the ones played by Anthony Quinn, Marietto Angeletti, Paolo Stoppa and Raymond Pellegrin—are not nearly as interesting: they are bland, uninspired and two-dimensional, and they have no business being in a Zinnemann film.

Zinnemann’s decision to cast Gregory Peck as Artiguez (a role originally meant for Quinn) caused bitter sniping amongst critics at the time. They didn’t take too kindly to seeing Peck cast against type as a crotchety old Spanish mercenary. Richard Schickel complained in Life magazine, “What is needed is the internal stimulus of a powerful performance from Artiguez… what we have instead is gentle, attractive, intelligent Gregory Peck, an actor who sometimes smolders but is quite incapable of bursting into angry flame.”

It is possible that critics like Schickel were too accustomed to Peck’s image as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) to imagine him playing tougher characters by that point in his career. While Peck might not have been the right ethnicity for Artiguez (the character was based on a real-life anti-Franco rebel named "Zapater"), he got everything else nailed down perfectly about the character: his laziness, his grumpiness, his method of viciously pulverizing all those who lie to him or stand in his way. Zinnemann, who in his autobiography praised Peck as having turned in a “riveting performance," was right to cast him.

Peck’s performance in the film is matched by the equally riveting performance of Omar Sharif, whom Zinnemann had met through David Lean at a screening of Lawrence of Arabia. Zinnemann thought Sharif was a “terrific” actor with “an enormous capability.” Many of the best scenes in Behold A Pale Horse depict Sharif, as Father Francisco, reflecting quietly on individual circumstances, choosing his words carefully and responding to arguments with effective counterarguments. Consider the scene in which Captain Vinolas (Anthony Quinn) captures Artiguez’ ailing mother (Mildred Dunnock), and then asks Francisco—who witnessed her death—to reveal her dying words to the police. Francisco refuses, warning Vinolas, “If you try to force me to tell you something my vows forbid me to tell, then you are also desecrating the church.” Or look at the scenes in which Francisco is accidentally separated from his party of priests during a trip to Pau, as he finds himself wandering helplessly in the menacing streets all around the French underworld. In each of these scenes, Sharif’s panic and desperation are essential in order for the audience to identify with him.

Both Artiguez and Francisco are suffering an unbearable crisis of conscience. Artiguez is afraid he’s grown too old to kill Vinolas. Francisco wants to warn Artiguez of the trap Vinolas is setting up for him in San Martin, but isn’t sure if doing so would violate the doctrines of his church. Zinnemann first attempts to bring the two characters together when Francisco stops by Artiguez’ apartment to deliver a letter, which—for complicated reasons—finds itself flushed down a toilet. Normally the delivery of a letter in a Zinnemann film means bad news: think the opening sequences of High Noon or A Man for All Seasons (1966). When Artiguez and Francisco finally do meet, however, it results in the film’s single-greatest sequence, in which they sit across from each other in Artiguez’ darkened apartment, breaking bread and exchanging religious disagreements. When Francisco, for example, brings up the subject of a brain-damaged priest (Jean-Paul Moulinot) who may have been assaulted by Artiguez during a bank robbery, Artiguez is unsympathetic: “Priests should stay out of banks!” A discussion about a neighborhood in Lorca, however, leads to smiles, a toast over wine and an area of mutual understanding.

Unfortunately, when Zinnemann is left with the other characters, he finds less dramatic ammunition. The character of Paco, a 10-year old boy who asks Artiguez to kill Vinolas for executing his father, is admirably portrayed by Marietto Angeletti, but harbors a burning desire for vengeance that he is too young to fully understand. The occasional father-son type rapport between Peck and Angletti, while amusing, has none of the depth that we got between Montgomery Clift and 9-year old Ivan Jandl in Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). Both Paolo Stoppa, as the bandit Pedro, and Raymond Pellegrin, as Carlos—Artiguez’ best friend who is secretly Vinolas’ mole—are left with thankless parts.

But the most disappointing character is far and away Anthony Quinn’s Captain Vinolas, a surprisingly boring villain. We see him romancing a mistress and lighting candles asking God to help him slay Artiguez, but that’s it as far as his psychological troubles go. Zinnemann also fails to draw striking parallels between Vinolas and Artiguez. You’d think Quinn and Peck would have a lot in common, but the most Zinnemann can do is make them both out to be incredibly salty, lecherous men who can’t seem to resist checking out a fine woman’s ass.

To be sure, it sounds like everyone had a lot of fun making the film. Anthony Quinn would often bring his newborn son onto the set to watch bull fights; Zinnemann described Quinn as "colorful", “cooperative”, “professional” and “very entertaining" on the set. Omar Sharif was thoroughly impressed with Zinnemann’s directorial technique, raving in the New York Herald Tribune about how he believed the director had “a marvelous rapport” with his actors (Sharif would later dismiss Behold A Pale Horse as one of many “bad movies by good directors” he made late in his career, long before his excellent comeback in 2003's Monsieur Ibrahim). Gregory Peck’s biographer, Gary Fishgall, reports that the actor considered the overall shoot to be “a marvelous experience”; he was allegedly so impressed with Zinnemann’s technique that he believed it to exceed even that of Hitchcock.

The film’s technical aspects have aged nicely. The score by Maurice Jarre, while not one of the composer’s most memorable efforts, makes chilling use of drums and isolated guitar chords. The black-and-white cinematography looks beautiful today, although Zinnemann hated working with DP Jean Badal, admitting, "On occasion, I had wish-dreams about putting a match to his beard." The film's story was adapted by J.P. Miller (scribe of Days and Wine and Roses) from the book Killing A Mouse On Sunday by the great Emeric Pressburger, although Zinnemann, fearing the title sounded too Disney-like, had it changed. The current title of the film, taken from the Book of Revelation, is just as misleading, although perhaps it makes for a more appropriate title for a political thriller.

And yet, despite the solid craftsmanship of the film, one thing has always kept Behold A Pale Horse from going down in history as the masterpiece it should have been: that damned ending. It stops the movie from taking off around the tracks, just when it’s gaining momentum.

Oh, it starts out well. Artiguez sneaks into San Martin, climbs up a rooftop, aims his sniper rifle and locates Vinolas in his sights. Then he takes aim… only to shoot Carlos instead. It’s a truly crummy anticlimax—although Zinnemann, at the time, went to great pains to defend it. “In my opinion,” he told reporters, “Manuel, when faced with the choice of killing a lifelong enemy or somebody who he considers a traitor, would kill the traitor. Perhaps in some way his enemy is an honorable adversary, but a traitor is like vermin.”

A valid defense, but Zinnemann ignored the central problem behind Artiguez’ decision: how selfish it is. By refusing to eliminate a totalitarian Spanish dictator, Artiguez is not only doing Vinolas a favor—he’s depriving the people of Spain of the democracy they won’t be getting for several more decades. His decision to shoot Carlos, instead of Vinolas, feels more inspired by stupidity than anything else.

One striking detail of the ending that is often overlooked, however, comes in the seconds just before Artiguez dies in a hail of bullets on a hospital staircase. As Zinnemann’s camera spins faster and faster around the hospital ward, the last image that pops into Artiguez’ head is the memory of young Paco kicking a soccer ball into the air. It seems like a random image, at first, but maybe it’s reminding Artiguez of a time when he was younger, and was happier—before he devoted himself to a life of crime.

In a sense, the movie is Zinnemann's most potent description of a man whose entire life has ended in failure. Manuel Artiguez had this one chance to eliminate a lifelong enemy, and he blew it. He had a grand opportunity to lead his country one step closer towards freedom, and he threw it away. Life as a bandit, it seems, has condemned him to one sorry disappointment after another. Consider that scene between him and Father Francisco, in Artiguez' darkened apartment. The young priest can do nothing more except stare in amazement at this tired, pathetic old man. “Go ahead, priest,” Artiguez raves, “tell me I’m a bandit!” And Father Francisco has a simple, five-word answer for him: “You know what you are.”

Monsieur Ibrahim (2003)

Largely ignored by American audiences in 2003, Francois Dupeyron’s Monsieur Ibrahim can finally be seen for what it really is: a small gem of the highest order, a celebration of life’s discoveries, and one of the great pieces of French cinema to emerge out of the first decade of the 21st century. At a time when the world has just overseen a dynamic revolution in Egypt, what a pleasure it is to be returning to this film, which boasts a sensational, swansong performance from the world’s finest Egyptian actor: Omar Sharif.

Monsieur Ibrahim was one of the first films released in the new century to stress a message of tolerance between Jews and Muslims—it paved the way for masterworks like Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) that would later address the issue on a much more complicated scale. Dupeyron’s film, set in 1960’s Paris, focuses on the small-scale relationship between a Jewish teenager and a Muslim shopkeeper. The unlikely friendship between them is the heart of the film, and, like so many such friendships in various other films, it begins after one of the main characters commits an act of prejudice, and the other proceeds to show him his mistake.

We are introduced to Moses, aka Momo (Pierre Boulanger), as he looks out from his bedroom window at the downtown life on Blue Road, which crawls daily with rabbis, schoolchildren and prostitutes. Momo looks out longingly at that world: he’s not old enough for it, or so he thinks. The film details Momo’s journey into manhood, which he promptly ticks off after he smashes his toy piggy bank to pieces, thus “breaking” the bonds of his youth. A visit to the buxom, brown-haired Sylvie (Anne Suarez), the kindest of the local hookers, frees him from his virginity—but not, unfortunately, from his dreary existence at home.

Momo’s own daily life, it turns out, is sadly lackluster. He lives at home with a father (Gilbert Melki) who is cruel and unkind, and who never smiles once in the film except for in a fleeting moment, when Momo reminds him that it is his birthday. So boring is life at home that Momo frequently amuses himself by shoplifting from Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), who owns a general store across the street. Momo tries to justify his actions in thoughts that are heard in a voiceover: “I don’t care, he’s an Arab… he’s an Arab! Even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t care.” That’s why he is caught off-guard when he walks into the shop later on, and Ibrahim informs him, “I’m not an Arab, Momo. I’m from the Golden Crescent.” Is Ibrahim a mind reader?

And that’s just one of many cinematic touches swimming in Monsieur Ibrahim, a movie that is deeply in love with the cinema. Consider the sequence in which Momo walks out onto Blue Road one day and joins with a fascinated crowd, as they watch Jean-Luc Godard filming Contempt on the street. It’s a nice touch to Godard, but Dupeyron’s film actually owes a lot more to Francois Truffaut: the character of Momo is heavily influenced by Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows (1958). But there’s even more cinematic influence in the character of Ibrahim, which is evidenced in his remark to Momo about Brigitte Bardot’s great figure: “Imagine me in a boat with her and my wife. The boat sinks. What do I do? I bet that my wife knows how to swim!” It’s a clever reminder of the love triangle Sharif got himself caught in so many years ago in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), and the cheapness of Zhivago even carries over to Ibrahim when he charges Bardot herself (Isabelle Adjani) extra when she strides into his shop asking for a bottle of water. As Momo ashamedly learns, it’s because Ibrahim needs to “make up for all the cans you pinch.” But Ibrahim holds no grudges against the young Jewish boy.

“Listen to me,” he tells Momo. “You owe me nothing. If you have to steal, I’d prefer you do it in my shop.” Ibrahim repeats this to make it clear. It’s a sign that Ibrahim has put his trust in Momo, and it marks the beginning of the friendship between them that builds up the best scenes in the film. The film itself is not just about friendship, but about the problem of the pursuit of happiness, and it offers three solutions: smiles, sex and dance. Neither one can exist without the other. When one doesn’t work, the other makes a fine substitute. Dupeyron suggests that it’s all part of one big cycle.

For instance, Ibrahim observes that Momo doesn’t smile very often. Momo claims, “I can’t afford to… it’s for happy people.” “You’re wrong,” Ibrahim corrects him. “Smiling is what makes you happy.” And as Momo finds out, a lot of doors can be unlocked with a simple smile. Walking around, Momo tries smiling at various people, and sure enough, it works: on his math teacher, on the hookers, and even on the red-headed girl (Lola Naynmark) who hula-hoops under his window. That Ibrahim does a lot of smiling in the film is only natural, since Omar Sharif has always had the most infectious grin in the history of movies—there’s a moment in the film when Ibrahim and Momo have a conversation about braces, and it gives Sharif a chance to show off his famously gap-toothed smile. Pauline Kael once called Sharif “a walking love scene,” and, at 71 (the age he was when the film was made), Sharif proves that he still holds the market in that department.

When smiling doesn’t bring him happiness, however, Momo turns to sex as an alternative. And Momo isn’t the only one: he watches from his window one night and notices that his own father sometimes visits the hookers, one of them being Sylvie. The hookers have a hunch of their own that Brigitte Bardot might have slept her way to the top. Even Ibrahim has a healthy sex life: in a weird bit of grown-up advice, he reminds Momo, “It’s good to start off with professionals—but afterwards, when you complicate things with feelings, then you’ll appreciate novices.” It’s a red flag that even Ibrahim sometimes sleeps with the hookers: “You go, too! At your age!” Momo observes, to which Ibrahim replies, “Heaven is for all of us, not just minors.” (On the DVD commentary track, Omar Sharif tells a bizarre story about losing his own virginity at age 15; he claims that upon walking out of the hotel, he met Glenn Ford and then promptly convinced the bemused actor to autograph a porno movie poster for him.)

And dancing. Momo picks up a habit of dancing from the red-headed girl, whose name is Myriam and who teaches him how to jive—even when there’s no music. Soon Momo finds himself dancing in dark areas, always checking to see if anybody’s watching, always hoping that Myriam will show up sooner or later and dance right with him. Not surprisingly, Ibrahim is a dancer, too; in another helpful bit of advice to Momo, he tells the boy, “When you dance, your heart sings, and then rises to heaven.” In one of the most stunning sequences in the film, Ibrahim and Momo enter a tecche dancing hall and watch a group of Turkish Sufis spinning around and around in white gowns. “It’s like a prayer,” Ibrahim explains. “They lose all their bearings—that burden we call balance. They become like torches. They burn in a blazing fire.”

So, the movie says that smiles, sex and dance all factor into a sort of cycle of happiness. Momo’s habit of smiling at people works on everybody except his father, who looks upon Momo’s smile and then cruelly remarks that his teeth are crooked—thus killing Momo’s smile. In defiance, Momo has sex with various hookers, which works until he learns that his father has been run over by a train—thus killing Momo’s sex drive. When Momo and Ibrahim embark on a road trip to Turkey, Momo, fascinated by the dancing of the Sufis, tries dancing with the local Turkish kids—they are not amused, and their rejection (temporarily) kills Momo’s love of dance. And towards the end of the film, Ibrahim offers yet another alternative to Momo in his pursuits: “Slowness… that’s the key to happiness.” But then Ibrahim, in attempting to "slow" down time by driving up to his old home in the hills, is wounded in a car accident and dies. Thus, in an attempt to “slow” down time and revisit his past, “slowness” winds up killing Ibrahim altogether.

Dupeyron weaves this “cycle of happiness” quite effectively into his screenplay, which he adapted from a book and play by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. On the DVD commentary, Sharif describes Dupeyron as “a very intelligent, very pure and very fresh person… a little provincial, but very cultured.” The good relationship between Sharif and his director is deeply felt in each of the film’s scenes. It’s a miracle that Dupeyron convinced Sharif to be in the movie at all—Sharif had been in semi-retirement from acting at the time, and only jumped back into the profession after Dupeyron’s excellent script fell into his hands. The character of Monsieur Ibrahim is an excellent part for Sharif, who hadn’t had a great part for decades and whose career had gone downhill after the 1960’s (since Monsieur Ibrahim, Sharif’s career has, unfortunately, reverted to its original patchiness—Joe Johnston cast him effectively as a desert sheik in 2004’s Hidalgo, but then Roland Emmerich wasted him as the narrator of 2008’s 10,000 B.C.). Dupeyron recognizes the natural acting talent in Sharif, however, and it’s just one of so many things that has allowed Monsieur Ibrahim to age so gracefully.

Not only that, but the rapport between Sharif and Pierre Boulanger (who has every bit the charisma of a young Jean-Pierre Leaud) makes for some of the most impressive pieces of acting in the last decade of world cinema. Some of their scenes are humorous, as when Momo tries to give Ibrahim helpful hints during his driver’s exam—a reminder of the agonizing aura of a driver’s exam to which any beginning driver (this writer included) can testify. Some of the other scenes between them are more philosophical, such as their conversations about religion. Society would tell them that, being a Jew and a Muslim, they should despise each other, but they don’t—rather, they find comfort in sorting out their religious differences. “What does being Jewish mean to you?” Ibrahim asks. Momo is dumbfounded: “I don’t know… for my dad, it means being depressed all day. For me, it’s why I can’t be different.”

Because Ibrahim is a devout Muslim who lives his life by the Koran, there have been some ridiculous Internet theories about the film’s intentions—one of them being that it’s supposedly about a Muslim trying to corrupt a young Jewish child with Al-Quaeda worldviews. Some of the other theories I’ve read about the film are more plausible—for instance, the implications behind Ibrahim’s fatherly treatment of Momo. There’s a running subplot in the film about Momo’s long-lost older brother, “Paulie”, whom Momo himself has never even met; when Momo asks Ibrahim if he has ever met Paulie, Ibrahim firmly declares, “I prefer you a hundred times.” Momo’s father seems to dislike Ibrahim intensely, but never tells his son why. After Momo’s father is run over by a train, the police come to Ibrahim’s shop to ask questions—Ibrahim then takes them into a backroom so that Momo cannot overhear their conversation with him. When a woman (Isabelle Renauld) claiming to be Momo’s mother shows up at the flat, she reveals, “Moses was my first-child.”

What does all this mean? Was “Paulie” made up? Was Momo’s father, in fact, a stranger to the family? Is Momo, in fact, Monsieur Ibrahim’s illegitimate son?

I don’t know. Dupeyron’s film is as full of mysteries as it is full of pleasures. At the end of the DVD commentary, Omar Sharif spells out his feelings about the film in as direct a way as possible: “I’m glad I did this picture. It gives me a sort of inner happiness, a sort of peace at my age—a peace that I have made a little stagnant—about love between people, as opposed to hatred.” His joy is expressed in his onscreen performance, and it’s a joy that is shared by the writer/director—as well as the rest of the cast and crew. Monsieur Ibrahim is, above all, one of those rare films that looks like it was great fun to make. By the end, I was smiling, but not just because of the film’s good nature: because it’s the kind of film that encourages a smile, and because it believes that movies are still capable of such power.