378
JOHN FRASER
movies, a sword ceases to be a picturesque ornament and becomes
simply a murderously pointed piece of steel giving an overwhelming
advantage to the man holding it. (Here, too,
in
contrast to all the
gallant conventional sword
fights
in other movies, there
is
simply
the
will
to murder.) The same kind of point can be made about
Jack Palance's gunning-down of Elisha Cook, Jr., in
Shane,
with its
sudden bringing into focus of the dreadful potentials of that pictur–
esquely noisy piece of metal known as a "revolver."
And in a number of incidents, furthermore, one also has the
penetration of a slightly different kind of barrier or shield, namely
the kind behind which one tries to hide (or empathetically to hide
others) when one invokes the idea of
status,
whether social, psycho–
logical or moral. For example, I have heard more than one person
comment, rightly it seemed to me, that the most shocking moment in
Polanski's
R epulsion
was when Catherine Deneuve's clippers suddenly
bit deliberately into the finger of her client. The deliberateness was
part of the shock, of course, as was the extreme normality of every–
thing else in the context. But the most important reason, it seems to
me, was the complete relaxation and trust in the presence of edged
tools that had suddenly been violated, the sudden disruption of an
entire social convention in which, by virtue of the mere fact of being
a "client," one was safe. (Hence too, no doubt, the peculiar fas–
cination evoked for so many years in England by the idea of the
throat-slitting Demon Barber, Sweeney Todd, and the nastiness of .
the barbershop "execution" in Windust's
The Enforcer
and the
flesh–
creeping comic effectiveness of W. C. Fields's
The Barber Shop.)
Often, of course, the kind of shock that comes when the normally
sacrosanct is violated is unequivocal, and calls for no special comment
at this point. It is simply and purely unfair and awful, for example,
when in
Huckleberry Finn
the middle-aged Boggs
is
coldly gunned
down at the very moment when everything is working conventionally
in his favor - his age, his harmlessness, his painful sobering up,
his
terror, the presence of his daughter hurrying forward to take
him
home. And of course the Odessa Steps sequence in
Battleship Potem–
kin
is an absolute anthology of violences to the normally sacrosanct,
culminating in the revelation that even to be a middle-aged and
respectably dressed gentlewoman was no protection against the troops.
But at times, I think, there is something equivocal about such via-
