Final Cuts Read online

  They were alone upon the deep when everything went wrong.

  Catrin Amour came pounding at Heinrich’s stateroom door well after midnight, in some cold, dead hour when the ship rolling gently through the swells lulled the soul into a sleep like death. Waking, he’d thought there’d been a disaster—a boiler that had blown out the hull, an iceberg collision, the Titanic torn asunder as the frigid deep engulfed her. It had been a disaster, of course, but a purely personal one that would cleave not the ship, but their little trio, along fault lines none of them had before acknowledged.

  Catrin was incoherent, sobbing. There had been an altercation. She could tell him nothing—she would tell him nothing—beyond that solitary admission, and he could have read that much in the bruise blossoming upon her cheek. He found her some ice, put her to bed, and spent the rest of the night pacing the tiny stateroom, torn between fury and fear.

  Catrin awoke toward dawn. Ignoring his protests, she let herself out into the corridor. She had to see Heldt. She had to apologize. She had to make things right.

  Heinrich thought it had ended there.

  But late that afternoon, Heldt found him alone on the foredeck, leaning against the railing and staring out over the heaving, black water. The sky smoldered. The wind coming in across the waves whipped their hair. The air smelled of brine.

  They stood there for a long time, the old man at a loss for words.

  Finally, Heldt said, “Something happened to me in the war. I never told you about it. This was in the summer of ’17, when the advance had ground to a halt. We spent most of our time hunkered down in the trenches, smoking and playing cards, while the boys behind us lobbed shells at the enemy lines. It was a gloomy day, and the night that followed was black as sin, moonless, with lowering clouds and gusts of icy rain. You couldn’t see much beyond three or four feet.

  “It was after midnight when we went over the top. It was chaos, Heinrich. You could hear the intermittent boom of the sixty-pounders and the chunk of the Lewis guns chopping rounds into the mud. Tracers slashed green streaks through the darkness. When a shell dropped, the sky would light up a smoky crimson, revealing the hellish doomscape around you: men screaming and dying, their bodies dancing grotesquely in the blizzard of .303s. And everywhere the stench of gas and gunpowder and the miasma of rotting corpses that had not yet been recovered—that might never be recovered.

  “And then I heard the whistle of a descending shell. The night exploded around me. I squeezed shut my eyes, I took a breath—

  “—and I was staring up into the flawless blue vault of a bright morning sky. I hurt—everything hurt, Heinrich—but I was whole. I’d survived. The explosion had driven me back into a deep pit in the wasteland. The stench of the place was unbearable. I haven’t the words to describe it.

  “A constant, low hum filled the air. It was the buzz of flies, Heinrich. Thousands of them. Dense, whirling clouds of them, their bodies glistening black and green when they came to rest upon me. I still hear that loathsome insect drone. I will see the sheen of their eyes until the day I die. I’d fallen into a pit of corpses, and the flies had come to feed.”

  The old man cannot bring himself to share the details that followed. Eleanor Farrell is already looking at him in dismay. Yet he can’t help recalling Heldt’s description of the flies gathering around his eyes, of the flies clogging his nostrils and worming their way between his lips.

  The rest, though—

  “I lurched up,” Heldt had told him. “Waving my arms to keep them away, I staggered toward the rim of the pit. I began to climb, clawing my way through mud and snarls of barbed wire and decomposing bodies.”

  He’d been almost to the top when the hand had closed around his ankle. Slipping to his knees, Heldt found himself staring down into the countenance of a wounded Tommy. Half his face had been shot away, revealing a complex ligature of muscle and tendon, with here and there a white grin of bone. His eyeball lay exposed within its shattered orbit. Flies massed everywhere upon this broken visage. They sipped at the wells of his nostrils and devoured the raw flesh that strung his jaw. They squirmed into the crevice beneath his eyeball to glut themselves upon his brain.

  “Kill me,” the Tommy whispered. Heldt reached for the blade sheathed at his belt. It was the only thing to do. It would be a mercy. And then he had a nightmare vision of his companions in the trenches—men who’d eaten and gambled and battled alongside him—Dreckfressers like himself, mud gluttons conscripted into a war they’d never chosen to fight, gunned down by British machine guns. He turned away.

  “Lassen sie schlemmen,” he said. Let them feast.

  He kicked loose the Tommy’s hand and clambered up out of the pit. He’d made it safely back to the German line by nightfall.

  The Hansa plowed on through the murky water.

  “Why did you tell me this?” Heinrich had asked at last.

  Heldt stared out at the sea. “That is when I learned the true nature of all things. Peel back the surface of the world, and it’s all butchery, isn’t it? Everything. Butchery and filth and corruption.” And then Heldt met his gaze. “There is nothing I will not do, Heinrich. Nothing.”

  * * *

  Miss Farrell’s little recorder winds the tape tight, and snaps off. She digs a fresh cassette out of her bag and gets the machine running again.

  “What happened in Hollywood?” she asks.

  The old man snorts.

  “Hollywood was Udo Heldt’s undoing,” he says. “In the end, Hollywood undid us all. Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe were widely admired. But they were not the kind of films Sol Wurtzel could make at Fox. He’d thought Heldt could be tamed, that his enormous talents could be channeled into more conventional pictures. But Heldt could not be tamed. He was a great filmmaker, but what made him great was that he had an unflinching vision. Strip him of that vision, and put him to work making romantic comedies—”

  The old man laughs.

  Not that Heldt would make romantic comedies—or any other movie Wurtzel sent him.

  They reached a stalemate: Heldt made no films at all.

  Catrin and Heinrich, meanwhile, both found work quickly enough. Catrin’s star never reached the heights it had risen to in Germany, but she was well-known and well-paid; in the day of silent film, language and accent were no barrier to stardom. Soon she and Heldt were living in the Hollywood Hills—unmarried, igniting the kind of small scandal that kept her safely in the public eye.

  And Heinrich’s skills were much in demand. His work was never less than professional, often excellent. He worked with most of the stars of the era—

  —here Eleanor Farrell glances around at the photos once again—

  —and the ones he didn’t work with he met. But Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe nagged him. With Heldt, he had been great. He wanted to be great again.

  By this time, the wounds inflicted on the Hansa had healed—imperfectly, true, but well enough that Catrin, Heldt, and Heinrich spent many long evenings together, hashing over the latest Hollywood gossip. Catrin contrived not to mention the occasional bruises that shadowed her face, and Heinrich contrived not to notice them. Udo drank, and late at night, when Catrin had retreated upstairs to bed, he talked film.

  He had seen everything. He saw every picture that came out of Europe. He screened all of der Blödsinn, the drivel—his word—produced in Hollywood. A withering critic, he scorned even the best films, reserving the occasional kind word for Heinrich’s work on otherwise worthless pictures, and for Murnau and Wiene and some few other Germans in their darker modes. “But even they flinch when they come hard up against the truth,” Heldt would say. Heinrich did not ask what he meant by truth. He remembered all too well their conversation aboard the Hansa. He would not forget the horror of the Tommy’s fate. He knew that he’d been obscurely threatened. Butchery, filth, and corruption—these words
lingered in his mind.

  But Heldt had still more to say on film in the abstract. Commercial pictures, with their neat plots and their happy endings, were a perversion of the cinema, he argued. The image may tell a story. It may coax and manipulate. It may deceive. But it must not lie. It may be a fiction, but inside the fiction there must be truth. “The biggest lie cinema tells,” he said, “is embedded in the very medium itself, is it not—the paradox of the moving image, which is still, and the still image, which moves.”

  So it went, Heldt’s talk of pictures and paradoxes—so it might have gone on forever, the old man supposes, but for what happened on Monday, October 13, 1924. The date is scored into the old man’s memory. It was the night Udo Heldt destroyed Catrin Amour’s film career; it was the night Das Gesicht was born.

  Catrin would never speak of what had happened. All the old man knew was that a hammering at his door once again woke him deep in the blackest hour of the morning. Swimming up out of the depths was very much like waking that night on the Hansa—a sense of confusion resolving into the certainty of disaster: icebergs, torpedoes, exploded boilers, something beautiful shattered and devoured by the deep, a world consumed by a war that would not end.

  It was Catrin, of course. Heinrich’s forebodings as he pulled on his dressing gown proved correct. Heldt had carved open her cheek. A doctor was summoned. The police were not—Catrin wouldn’t permit it. It was clear to all of them that her career in pictures was over.

  For a few weeks, they all waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. Heldt showed up neither in anger nor remorse. The picture Catrin was about to start shooting was quietly recast. The few rumors in the press were swiftly extinguished. The studios kept the gossip columns on a pretty short leash in those days. Catrin Amour, it became known, had tired of acting. She had chosen a life of seclusion. She might well go back to Germany.

  In the meantime, her slashed cheek healed into a puckered scar. The doctor had done his work as well as he could. So had Heldt. Catrin stayed on with Heinrich. He and Catrin were companions, nothing more. They never shared a bedroom. This was Catrin’s decision, not Heinrich’s.

  “I loved her very much,” the old man tells Miss Farrell.

  Miss Farrell says nothing. What is there to say?

  The reels of her tape recorder continue to turn, eating time.

  The old man clears his throat. “Then I ran into Heldt again. I was eating lunch at the counter of the Musso & Frank Grill, when he slid onto the stool next to me—”

  * * *

  “Why don’t you move on down the counter?” Heinrich had said.

  Heldt didn’t bother responding. “I want you to shoot a picture for me, Heinrich,” he said—though by this time the old man had started calling himself Henry King.

  “I asked you to move on down the counter.”

  “Just think about it,” Heldt said, and then he moved on down the counter, and out the door onto the street.

  The hell he would think about it, Heinrich told himself.

  Yet he thought about little else. He thought about Der Verdammte Schlüssel and he thought about Die Wölfe and he thought about the trivial picture he was working on now, and the featherweight of a director, who barely knew which end of the camera to point at his actors. Heinrich might as well have been directing the picture himself. He supposed he was.

  He mentioned the encounter at the Musso & Frank Grill to Catrin, who took little interest in the business these days—or anything else, for that matter. They rarely talked, and when they did talk, they said nothing of consequence. Heinrich had once told her he didn’t even see the scar when he looked at her. She replied that she saw nothing else. But when he said that he’d run into Heldt, a light came into her eyes that he hadn’t seen for months. He realized that she was still in love with him.

  Which is how, a few nights later, they wound up at Heldt’s house—though, of course, it was really Catrin’s house, too. That night Heinrich learned that she didn’t seem to resent anything Heldt did or wanted from her. It was her money that had paid for it, just as it was her money that Heldt had been subsisting on during their time apart. But Catrin didn’t resent it. It turned out that she’d even consent to go back in front of the camera for him. And it turned out that Heinrich would consent to stand behind it.

  But what was the project Heldt had in mind?

  He wanted to work inside the paradox, he said, where the still picture and the moving one meet. And then he went on to describe the film he had in mind. Das Gesicht, Heldt called it. The Face. It sounded like the most static—and least interesting—picture Heinrich could imagine. It would, nonetheless, be the most difficult challenge Catrin would ever confront as an actress. She would need to do the impossible. She would need to remain utterly still—utterly—for an hour and more.

  And Catrin was not alone.

  “Technically, it was the most difficult challenge I ever faced, as well,” the old man tells Eleanor Farrell. “Together, the three of us would make a great film—or we would fail. We made a great film, Miss Farrell. Thank God, it does not survive.”

  * * *

  “You will want to know how it was done, of course. Does it matter? Would you understand if I explained it? Alchemy, Heldt called it. But Das Gesicht—there is alchemy, and there is alchemy.”

  The old man shakes his head.

  “Did something happen on the set of Das Gesicht?” the young woman asks.

  “Nothing unexpected, Miss Farrell. I was present for the entire shoot—a single day, but a trying one. The finished film looked like a single take, but such a long take was, of course, impossible. It is impossible even now. Like all films, Das Gesicht was an illusion. Like all films, it was constructed in the editing room.”

  “What happened at the screening, Mr. King?”

  The old man sighs. He doesn’t answer for a long time.

  * * *

  “I wondered even then who would be interested in such a film,” he says when he finally resumes. “Technicians like myself, perhaps, who would want to know how we had pulled off the illusion of the long take. And there would be interest among Hollywood’s aristocracy, who would wonder if Heldt’s new film—privately financed and shot in a rented studio—could possibly live up to the achievements of Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe. But as for a real audience? The film had none. There would be no release. It was art for art’s sake, I suppose: an expression of a single man’s private obsession. He insisted that it would be his finest film.”

  “And Catrin Amour?”

  “She never spoke to me of it. She loved him, of course, as I loved her, perhaps to a greater and in a different degree. She loved him enough to surrender up her ruination for his art. As far as I could tell, she did so without ill will or regret. I never asked her why. Any such inquiry seemed to me somehow obscene. So we shot the film and retreated to the editing room, painstakingly matching up and splicing shots. The details”—the old man shrugs—“they will have little interest to you. You wish to know of the screening. You wish to know of the film itself. You wish to hear about Das Gesicht.”

  Eleanor Farrell does not respond.

  She lets the silence spin out, trusting, he supposes, that he will come to it in his time. And he will. Having come this far, what can he do but unburden himself? And so, slowly—haltingly—he begins to speak.

  Between the three of them—Heinrich, Catrin Amour, and Udo Heldt—they put together a select guest list: James Whale and Tod Browning and Lon Chaney were there, as Miss Farrell had said. But there were others, Barbara La Marr, Sol Wurtzel, Louise Brooks, and Nita Naldi. The great cinematographers of the day, G. W. Bitzer and John Arnold. Others. Perhaps twenty-five people, no more. The old man cannot recall them all, not after all these years. Heldt’s greatest regret was that the German directors he respected—Murnau, Wiene, Lang—would not be present—though
he told Heinrich that he hoped to take the film to Germany, as well.

  And so they gathered in a small screening room on the Fox lot. Heinrich was there, of course. And Catrin Amour came, too. Udo Heldt escorted her in just as the lights were going down, her face artfully veiled to reveal the unmarked arc of one high cheekbone—and to hide the scar that Udo had slashed into her face on the other side. The men murmured, standing to greet her. She merely nodded and let Udo lead her to her seat in the gathering dark.

  The room fell silent but for the whir of the projector as it cast out its light upon the screen. The title came up, white on black—

  —Das Gesicht—

  —and dissolved into darkness. Then the screen brightened to reveal an image of a woman’s face—Catrin Amour’s unmarred face—in medium-close profile and to the right of center, so that it commanded the screen without overwhelming it. She was beautiful, the old man says. Not even the tiniest imperfection was visible, not even a pore. There was an audible intake of breath at this vision: Catrin Amour, her lips relaxed into an enigmatic half smile, her hair falling in dark waves around her shoulders. Everything about the image was utterly still. If you saw it as the audience saw it, if you saw it here before you, the old man says, nodding at the pictures that surround them—if you saw it before you now, you would mistake it for a still photo—until the woman blinked. And when the woman on-screen did blink—when Catrin Amour blinked at last—someone laughed in the darkness, mirthlessly, a release of tension, nothing more.