filmscreed

Cool

2012-02-01T20:41:00.003-05:00

Dino

The Marquee

2012-01-15T15:43:00.002-05:00

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

2012-01-09T20:58:00.009-05:00

Karel Riesz’ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) is a testy, petulant, balled-up-fist of a movie. It’s portrayal of a young factory worker struggling to keep his life from sliding into a sea of boredom and ennui is one of the vanguard films of what was to become known as the British New Wave in the early sixties.

Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) is a Nottingham lad who has two facets to his life. By day he labors at a bicycle factory – Nights and weekends, he’s at the pub. Albert has a definite edge to him, that’s plain to see. Watch his swagger when he hits the town in his stylish suits or the smug way he exhales cigarette smoke. He’s a likable rogue, and it’s easy to imagine women being drawn to him.

Brenda (Rachel Roberts) certainly is. She’s with him as the film opens, and if the fact that she’s married bothers either of them, it’s hard to tell. That’s the thing about the blue-collar world of SN&SM – The people are beaten down by life, and they don’t seem to give much thought to anything outside their own orbit. Arthur likes this woman, and is romantic with her, but one doesn’t get the sense that his investment in her runs very deep. For her part, Brenda gives no indication that she wants out of her marriage (to a co-worker of Arthurs) – It’s more like she just feels a bit more alive when she’s with this wild young man.

This was Albert Finneys’ first starring role, and he is electric as Arthur. The role calls for Seaton to be a charming cad, but also to be selfish and thoughtlessly cruel. That is a hard package for any actor to shoulder, but Finney pulls it off beautifully. Watch him as he woos the pretty young Doreen (Shirley Ann Field). He is almost insanely cheeky and confident as he pushes through her defenses, and by the time the conversation is done, he’s got a date with her.

The thing that elevates this film to masterpiece, however, is the world that Seaton occupies. This is working class England in 1960, and the film illustrates a country still trying to regain its footings after the devastation of World War II. Most of the guys in the factories and pubs would have been veterans, and the realization that the better England and better lives that they hoped to find after the war aren’t going to be there. The cinematography by the great Freddie Francis helps add shading to the feeling of societal malaise that pervades the film. Everything looks sooty and worn out.

That’s the life that Arthur is terrified of. He tries to live his life as a rebuke to all of this, and says so at every opportunity.

“That’s what laws are for. To be broken by blokes like us!”

“Think of number 1. Share and share alike’s no good.”

“I’m out for a good time – All the rest’s propoganda!”

Arthur talks tough, but it’s hard not to see that he’s an empty shell. The idea of marriage amuses him, and we already know that fidelity and loyalty are foreign to him. He lies to every single solitary person that he encounters in this film, and seems to have no guilt about it. For all his bluster, Arthur realizes that he is probably going to end up just like those poor blokes that he so despises.

The film seems to reach a turning point when Arthur finds out that Brenda is pregnant by him. His reaction is what we might expect – That she has to “Get rid of it”, and it’s in these exchanges between Arthur and Brenda that the true soul of SN&SM resides. Arthur is supportive and not completely unsympathetic to Brendas plight, but the thought of the baby fills him with dread. It’s an inconvenience.

For her part, Brenda is the films most tragic character. Send by Arthur to see his aunt about an abortion, she comes back with a pitiful tale about being told to “Sit in a hot bath and drink gin.” She has allowed herself to become close to an attractive but irresponsible playboy, made a mistake, and now finds herself abandoned by him. She also faces the prospect of going to her husband with the truth about her pregnancy. When she confides to Arthur that she is going to keep the baby and confess her infidelity to her husband, it’s a beautiful, brave scene.

Near the end of the film, there’s a line that Arthur throws out about his parents that seems heedlessly cruel and unfair. When his cousin remarks that they seem happy, Arthur shoots back “They’ve got a TV set and a pack of fags, but they’re both dead from the neck up.” - Meaning that they have fully surrendered and are just marking time until death. As harsh as that sounds it’s not really wrong for most of the people we see. When Arthur encounters Brenda’s husband near the end of the film, instead of anger and violence he gets sadness and resignation. The man doesn’t feel the need to vent on this punk who cuckolded him, and this amazes Arthur. He would have respected the man more if he had tried to fight him.

The final passage of SN&SM is quiet and reflective, and anticipates what Arthur has fought his whole life against. Arthur and Doreen walk to a grassy hillside overlooking rows of factory houses, and Arthur remarks that when he used to come up there when he was a kid, there were no buildings. As the couple talks about getting married, Arthur hurls a stone at one of the houses. Doreen admonishes him saying “That could be our house” and Arthur replies, “It won’t be the last one I throw” By now, Arthur is starting down the path to surrender himself, and he knows it. Just like the blackberries gave way to urban sprawl, his youth will ebb away, and he will be like the rest. Dead from the neck up.

IMDb

Amazon

The Soundtrack

2012-01-03T20:32:00.003-05:00

I've gotten the urge to hear David Raskins' gorgeous theme from Laura...So here it is.

My Week of Movie Watching

2012-01-02T19:59:00.008-05:00

Topkapi – I’ve always had a thing for caper movies, and this lesser known 1964 offering from Jules Dassin is one of my favorites. Peter Ustinov plays a petty con man who finds himself swept up in a plot to steal a priceless dagger from an Istanbul museum. Melina Mercouri (aka Mrs. Jules Dassin) and Maximilian Schell star as the leaders of the thieves. The mechanics of the robbery are drawn out in detail, much like in Dassin’s Rififi, and the film greatly benefits from some splendid location cinematography by Henri Anikan. A couple of other notes: The film is always remembered for a peculiar mass wrestling match that has a definite homoerotic vibe. Images of sweaty, hulking males turned up in Dassin movies more than once. It is also cited as the inspiration for the TV series Mission: Impossible. Recommended.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail – You know those people who know entire Python routines by heart, and recite them back and forth to others?

“Bring me ….. a SHRUBBERY!”

“This is a happy occasion! – Lets not bicker and argue over who killed who!”

“I fart in your general direction!”

Sorry, I’m one of ‘em. I’ll be watching this film when they close the box on me.

Laura – Laura is always recognized as one of the great Noirs, but when you watch it, you sure can’t help but notice how many implausible plot points there are. For instance, how Detective McPherson allows one murder suspect to tag along as he interviews another one, or how when he finds the murder weapon, he puts it back in its hiding place rather than taking it. This movie might have been forgotten long ago, but for one thing – The performance by Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker. Webb as Waldo is so over the top pompous and supercilious that he is completely unforgettable, and he makes the film worth watching. That’s fortunate, because there’s not much going on with Gene Tierney in the title role or especially with Dana Andrews who doesn’t manage to inject the detective with even an iota of humanity. Not a great film, but recommended.

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-12-27T11:50:00.005-05:00

Band of Angels – Turgid Civil War melodrama from Raoul Walsh doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. Yvonne Di Carlo is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner who gets sold into slavery after it is discovered that she had a black mother. Clark Gable is the mega-wealthy man who buys her. A romance ensues, but the rich man has a dark past, and the approaching war threatens to destroy him. It’s impossible to not think of Gone With the Wind when watching this, and although that isn’t really a fair comparison, this film is bad no matter what you compare it to. It’s poorly acted, especially in the case of a few of the supporting roles, and Gable and Di Carlo never really strike any sparks on screen.

La Pointe Courte - Agnes Varda’s 1955 debut, and a real nice little surprise. It’s only 80 minutes long, and tells two separate stories. In one a married couple comes back to the husbands fishing village home to try to salvage their marriage. The other story follows the denizens of the village as they fight to retain their way of life against local government who has decreed that the locally caught shellfish are not fit to be sold. The film is strikingly shot on location in Southern coastal France, and is interesting because the two stories are presented in such different ways. The couple’s portion of the film consists almost entirely of them walking the area and talking about their lives. It’s very Bergman-esque, and in fact even uses a sequence in the belly of an old boat, much like in Bergmans Through a Glass Darkly. Since this predates the Bergman film by several years, one wonders if the Swede saw La Pointe Courte. The fishing village portions, on the other hand, look to be highly influenced by Italian neo-realism, and the films of men like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. This mash-up of styles works well for the material involved. The structure of the film is inspired by William Faulker’s The Wild Palms, which alternated chapters to tell a pair of short stories. The screenplay was written Alain Resnais. Check this movie out.

The Marquee

2011-12-23T11:34:00.001-05:00

The Big Snit

2011-12-11T21:52:00.003-05:00

Cool

2011-12-11T12:24:00.003-05:00

David Lean

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-12-08T19:56:00.007-05:00

Night Moves – This was my second time watching this well-regarded but underrated modern Noir. Gene Hackman plays an ex-football star turned private dick. An assignment to find a missing girl threads him through Hollywood stunt men, a nympho teenager, and a sunken treasure. I found the plot to be a bit erratic this time around. It’s hard to pin down how the various characters are supposed to be linked to each other. On the other hand, there are some good supporting performances (including a very young Melanie Griffith and James Woods). The sequence that ends the film is simply stunning, and pushes it over the hump for me. Recommended.

Bridesmaids – A raunchy comedy in the tradition of The Hangover. I liked Hangover, and I like this one a lot, too. The real discovery here is Kristen Wiig as Annie. She’s so sweet and vulnerable here, and yet so gut-busting funny, that I just fell in love with her. The scene where the girls try on wedding dresses just as they are overcome by a case of food poisoning is comedy gold. Recommended.

The Knack…and how it get it – I waited a long time to finally view Richard Lesters follow-up to A Hard Day’s Night, and I gotta admit that I was a bit disappointed. Nerdy teacher Colin (Michael Crawford) is driven crazy by the success his super-cool flatmate Tolen (Ray Brooks)has with the ladies. When sweet country girl Nancy (Rita Tushingham) arrives on the scene, it’s a free-for-all as to who will win her over. The film takes a lot of the frenetic style of HDN and gooses it even more. I liked the sharp cutting style, and the zany camera work, but I was a bit distracted by the way Lester used commentary by passers-by as a narration. Plus, it was hard to understand what the hell people were talking about. Sometimes, I felt like the film was trying too hard, in a “look at how cute I am” sort of way. There’s also a little jivey bit at the end about Nancy’s being “raped”, which is cringe-worthy to a modern viewer. Some fun things, but overall not recommended.

The Marquee

2011-12-07T20:50:00.002-05:00

On Location

2011-12-07T20:47:00.003-05:00

Jacques Becker checking out Dernier Atout (1942)

Sex

2011-12-04T19:50:00.002-05:00

A little extra Natalie Wood

"Throw more brandy!!!"

2011-12-04T19:39:00.003-05:00

Film-doms' most famous pie-fight - The Great Race (1965)

The Movies of My Life

2011-11-26T19:38:00.013-05:00

Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) is a film that I find myself returning to every two or three years. If pressed to tell you why, I’m not sure I could. Not with any degree of firm conviction, anyway. To say that it is a comedy is correct, on the face of it, but if you watched it expecting belly laughs like you might experience with, say, Laurel and Hardy, you’d be disappointed. I have seen it at least 4 times, and I have never really laughed out loud at anything onscreen. Playtime’s pleasures are more quiet and sly than robust.

I ‘ve always had this little crazy theory lurking in the back corners of my mind that Jacques Tati got the inspiration for Playtime from an ant farm. Yeah, an ant farm – That thing with a colony of ants sandwiched between two plates of glass. That’s what I feel like when I watch Playtime: It’s an observation of a species.

Tati had already has a big hit with Playtime’s predecessor Mon Oncle, which takes a look at the impersonal modern world, as M. Hulot struggles to cope with a futuristic house. As good as Mon Oncle is, it’s view of the modern world is a tad sour. Playtime, on the other hand, can be seen as a celebration of humanity on the face of the onslaught of modernism.

The film revolves around M. Hulots experiences in a world of glass and concrete. Early in the film, he has an appointment with some bureaucrat for some reason or another. This is one of the first of the film slyly humorous scenes. Hulot waits while an elderly security guard punches numbers into a huge bank of buttons and lights. He sits and waits, and finally we start to hear the clicking of shoes on a hard floor as the camera looks down a long corridor. Finally, a speck appears at the other end, and the man walks up to meet him. To describe this scene does it no justice, but in seeing it in a theatre, the ludicrousness of the little man, the long, long hallway, and the clicky shoes is disarmingly funny. It’s a normal human being doing a normal thing in an absurd scenario.

Take the sequence where Hulot is told to wait before the guy sees him. The waiting room is a glass cube, which is funny enough, but the walls are festooned with portraits of stern authoritative types, who all seem to be looking at him. Hulot can see the world outside, others can see him, but he’s still like an ant under glass.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Playtime is just a cute broadside against the modern world. To be sure, it isn’t an accident that the architecture is presented the way it is – Cold grays and blues, and right angles everywhere. Tati compensates for this with the people that he populates this world with, however. They aren’t cold automatons, but rather a living community. The subtle message of Playtime seems to be that even in this austere world, there is poetry. Whether it’s a man doing a bizarre ballet atop a rolling office chair, or an angry man slamming a noiseless door, Tati never makes his folks less than human.

The film tradition that Tati belonged to was that of the great silent comedians, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. More than any other characteristic of Playtime (and of M. Hulots Holiday, and Mon Oncle), I love his brazenness in essentially doing away with dialogue in his films. You can hear people talking in Playtime, like the gaggle of American women, or the little security man I wrote about earlier, but it really doesn’t matter what they say. The construction of he film is so clever that dialogue is completely irreverent.

The centerpiece of Playtime is an extended sequence at a posh new restaurant where just about anything that can go wrong, does. As the time for the party approaches, work crews are literally just finishing up the contraction, and there is a running gag about a floor tile that doesn’t want to stick. Look at the patrons of this place as they start to flow in – They are all well dressed, affluent and perhaps somewhat uptight. Being uptight just won’t do in this movie, however. Tati brings several gags to simmer simultaneously during this sequence. There’s a fish dinner that never seems to get to the correct person. There’s a waiter with a torn coat that the others come to borrow stuff off. There’s a serving window that is too small to pass a dish through. All this stuff is whirled together as a jazz band plays, and gradually you notice that everyone has loosened up and packed the dance floor. The rowdiness builds and builds until Tati finally boils it over, and then brings it all back to earth in what is probably my favorite Tati scene.

Tati doesn’t really believe in bad guys, and that helps give his films that sweet glow that they all carry. With no real rooting interest in the outcome, you just sit back and observe. This was always in evidence in Tati’s films, but in Playtime, it’s carried to its logical conclusion. Although the film ostensibly centers on M. Hulot, he isn’t really the “star”. Playtime is much more diplomatic than the earlier stuff in the way the focus is distributed. The American lady played by Barbara Dennick is essentially as important to the film as Hulot, and others get significant screen time, like a fun-loving loud American diner, and the long-suffering headwaiter.

Playtime doesn’t end with bang, either. There are no great romantic moments, no revelations, and no grand comic flourishes. After spending the raucous night at the restaurant, the people just quietly go their own ways. I couldn’t have made that ending sound more boring, but Playtimes closing passages are pitch-perfect. The tourist ladies climb into their bus, and they meld back into the city. The bus joins into a roundabout with all makes and shapes of other vehicles. It’s instructive to notice that after bathing most of the rest of the film in sterile grays and blues, that this scene is a cacophony of color and noise.

That brings home to me what I love so much about this movie, and about Jacques Tati. Even in a cold mechanical world, people are people, and they’re the best things going. You just have to look.

IMDb

Amazon

Roger Eberts Great Movies

Cinema Styles on Playtimes’ color palette

My essay on the restaurant scene

Sex

2011-11-24T20:47:00.002-05:00

Ingrid Thulin

The Marquee (Kubrick Gallery)

2011-11-21T21:17:00.010-05:00

The Killing

Killers Kiss

Cool

2011-11-20T14:55:00.002-05:00

Tati

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-11-17T21:39:00.007-05:00

Stage Fright – Another Hitchcock crossed off my list. SF was made in 1950, and was the last film before Hitch began his Golden Age with Strangers on a Train. This one centers on a man (Richard Todd) hunted for the murder of the husband of his lover (Marlene Dietrich). Stage Fright is interesting for the peculiar romantic quadrilateral that develops between Todd, Dietrich, Jane Wyman as Todd’s other girl friend, and Michael Wilding as an investigating detective who falls hard for Wyman. This one is interesting for about three quarters of its length, and then it falls off the rails. Dietrich’s character spends the whole movie acting as guiltily as she can, and then the movie throws a big curve at us, and it just feels contrived. A lukewarm recommendation.

Lacombe, Lucien – This 1974 Louis Malle film centers around a young Frenchman who is seduced to join the German police at the tail end of WW2. Malle makes Lucien a blank slate – He doesn’t seem to have any great affinity for the Gestapo, he just likes the idea of carrying a gun and seeming important. The core of the film is the boys’ relationship with a Jewish tailor and his beautiful daughter. The tailor (Holger Lowenalder) has lived a comfortable life, and is quietly realistic about what his future holds. Lucien begins by clumsily trying to seduce the daughter, but begins to build a cautious friendship with the old man, as well. Beautifully acted and photographed, and a harsh indictment of French corroboration. A great film.

Dinner for Schmucks – Some pretty good laughs here, mainly from Steve Carrell. The film centers around a corporate ladder-climber played by Paul Rudd who needs to bring a guest to his slimy boss’ “Dinner for Idiots” in order to secure his promotion and get a posh new office. When he meets Barry (Carrel), whose hobby is creating dioramas out of dead mice, it seems like a match made in heaven. The performances of the two leads reminds a bit of the great Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for the way it mixes a sweet doofus with a chronic tight-ass. The film kind of goes down the trail you think it will, but it’s a fun ride, nonetheless. Recommended.

Cool

2011-11-15T17:49:00.002-05:00

this isn't happiness

And Also Starring...

2011-11-14T21:35:00.005-05:00

The name Mike Mazurki is not likely one you’re familiar with. The face – now that’s a different story. If you have even a passing familiarity with the film Noir era of the 40’s and 50s, you have seen him.

As with Edward G Robinson, Mazurki’s facade masked an intelligent and refined nature. The university-educated Mazurki played some football and did some wrestling in his younger days, and it was his imposing bulk and tough–looking mug that got him in the door playing heavies in the glory days of gangster movies in the 1940’s. A look at his resume shows him popping up often in the best B movies of the era. There he is as the murderous Splitface in Dick Tracy. He’s fresh-from-prison crook Moose Malloy in Edward Dmytrks’ Murder My Sweet. He’s there playing nicely to type as a carnival strongman in the great Nightmare Alley, and most notably for me, as fiery wrestler The Strangler in arguably the greatest Noir of them all, Night and the City. He also got to help George Raft send up the gangster persona in Some Like it Hot, and has a smallish part in John Ford’s last great film, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn.

The Marquee (This 'n That)

2011-11-09T22:11:00.007-05:00

The Soundtrack

2011-11-07T20:04:00.003-05:00

Glen Hansard - Say It To Me Now (Once Movie) from Liam Cooke on Vimeo.

The opening credits of Once.

The Marquee (Happy Halloween)

2011-10-28T20:37:00.003-04:00

Sex

2011-10-06T19:29:00.002-04:00

Stephane Audran

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-09-29T20:58:00.007-04:00

In Bruges – Liked this a lot. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are a pair of mismatched hit men forced to cool their heels in Bruges, Belgium, whilst awaiting further instructions. Farrell is deeply depressed due to botched hit, which resulted in the death of a child. Gleeson is introspective and philosophical, and finds himself given the job of offing his friend. Ralph Fiennes has a show-stealing role as their nasty, nasty boss. This is a "black comedy" in the very best tradition of the both words. The subject matter is bleak, but the film has some big, big laughs. The dialogue between the two killers is some of the best I’ve heard in a long time. A final point – If you watch this film, you WILL want to visit Bruges. Highly recommended.

Captain Newman, MD – Not bad comedy from 1963 is set in an Army psyche ward, and actually has something to say about post-combat mental illness. Gregory Peck is the title MD, and Tony Curtis is his assistant – a kind of cross between Radar O’Reilly and Milo Minderbinder. Eddie Albert and Robert Duvall have roles as two of Newman’s more challenging cases. Like I said, it’s an OK movie, but I wish it taken a more serious path, because the comedic portions get in the way a bit. A lukewarm recommendation for this one.

The Marquee

2011-09-29T20:56:00.002-04:00

Room at the Top

Cool

2011-09-29T20:53:00.001-04:00

Gary Cooper

The Marquee

2011-09-27T07:21:00.002-04:00

Moments of Distinction

2011-09-20T20:48:00.003-04:00

No commentary really necessary - The great final passages of Five Easy Pieces.

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-09-18T20:08:00.007-04:00

Sleeping Dogs – This early effort from Kiwi director Roger Donaldson is a fantasy detailing the imposition of martial law in New Zealand. Sam Neill stars as a troubled writer who finds himself radicalized against his intentions. The great Warren Oates has a small role as the leader of a gang of American mercenaries. This one starts from an interesting premise, but falls short for me. The film’s plot – About how the government brutally cracks down on pro-union forces is presented with all the subtlety of a jackhammer pulverizing a walnut. Not really recommended.

Smash Palace – Another early Donaldson film, this one about an obsessive race driver who manages to drive his wife into the arms of his best friend. The performances are mostly good, especially Bruno Lawrence as the racer, but this film didn’t quite pull itself over the hump. The payoff at the end looks promising, but doesn’t quite deliver.

The Postman Always Rings Twice – This was the John Garfield / Lana Turner one from 1946. I know this is considered the definitive version (At least the definitive Hollywood version – The great Obsessione from Luchino Visconti is the best), but I consider the Jack Nicholson / Jessica Lange version to be better. Nothing against Lana - She sexy here, but the 1981 film is better able to illustrate the primal lust which this story requires. Due to the period, the ‘46 version couldn’t really go there. Still, I recommend it as one of the pillars of the film Noir era.

Le Plaisir – This was my second encounter with the work of Max Ophuls, and there will be more to follow. The title translates as “The Pleasure”, and the film consists of three stories built around the concepts of pleasure – The lengths people will go to achieve it, and the things that keep then separate from it. The bulk of the film is taken by the middle portion, in which the denizens of a respectable brothel venture into the country to attend a first communion. This chapter contrasts the women of the night encountering the holy ceremony of the communion and the so-called respectable men of the city turning on each other without the calming influence of the women. The real strengths of the film however, are the short opening and closing chapters. In the first, a stricken gala attendee is revealed to be an elderly man in disguise, who cannot bear the fact that his life is passing him by. In the conclusion, a seemingly idyllic marriage between an artist and his model turns to mistrust, violence, and attempted suicide. This is a great film, and Ophuls’ use of costume, music, and sweeping camera shots is masterful. Highly recommended.

Sex

2011-09-18T19:58:00.002-04:00

Lauren Hutton

The Newsstand

2011-09-18T19:54:00.002-04:00

March 4, 1963

Red Road

2011-08-29T20:32:00.009-04:00

Director Andrea Arnolds’ Red Road is the story of a woman who carries a crushing pain inside her, and because of a random encounter feels a compulsion to confront it. It’s a slow movie – There isn’t one instance of what film scholars call exposition: Having one character say something so that WE can understand something is going on. No, Red Road leaks its story out slowly, and then it lowers the boom on us.

When one watches watch Jackie (Kate Dickey) at work, you quietly note that this is lonely way to make a living. Manning a desk in front of a large bank of TV screens, she spies daily on the people of Glasgow as part of Britains vast web of closed circuit cameras. She picks out certain people, like the man who walks his bulldog every day and the cleaning lady rocking out with her headphones. Her little familiar smile makes it s evident that she is familiar with them. She watches them from habit, and always from a distance. That seems to be by choice.

Jackie starts to emerge as a person who is somehow disengaged from everyday life. It’s hard to know why, there’s just something about her that says “loner.” Her apartment doesn’t look like it ever sees company. She has a male co-worker that she has sex with, but it is passionless and abrupt. There is no indication of any real affection between the two.

One day she receives an invitation in the mail to a wedding, and we see the first clues as to what makes her tick. The wedding is of a sister-in-law, and Jackie is plainly uncomfortable here. There’s a little conversation with an older man, who says “We only want to say goodbye to him proper.” It’s not spelled out, but we can guess who this is – Her ex-father in law. So she was married to his son, who is now dead. The threads start to come together a bit.

Then, one evening at work, Jackie spies Clyde (Tony Curran) on her video screen, and everything changes. It’s evident that this is someone that she knows, but from where? Taking advantage of the cameras, she is able to essentially track this man everywhere, including to his home: The scuzzy high-rise apartments that give the film its name. Although the film makes the CC cameras a mere plot device, it also makes a quiet little statement about their existence and use. The Brits have made the decision to forego essential human freedoms in exchange for the appearance of safety. Red Road lays open this idea, and exposes it for all to see, without making judgments about right or wrong.

The melancholy Jackie that we saw at the film’s open is now replaced by one driven by an obsession – The man in the video. No longer content to merely observe, she begins to take an active role. She uses the cameras to establish that the man works for a locksmith, and goes as far as to call his workplace, and ask if they have done a background check on him.

The film only very sparingly doles out clues as to the relationship between Jackie and Clyde, and they are easy to miss. Jackie pulls out a newspaper with his picture on the front page that announces that he has been sentenced to 10 years in jail. She pulls out baby clothes, stuffs then with socks, and hugs them. She gets into bed with 2 cremation urns. These tiny little scenes fill in a lot of the back-story for us.

Jackies pursuit of Clyde takes her right up close, and she eventually meets him. Clyde is an intriguing figure. Our exposure to him has only been through Jackie, and we assume the worst, based on the signals she has given us. To be sure, he is no angel – he’s crude, and profane, but Jackies’ early encounters with him give us a whiff of a human being, as well. We learn that he has a daughter who thinks he is dead. “That’s what her Mom told her.”

Red Road’s cat and mouse game leads to a scene of immense, unsettling power, as Jackie has sex with Clyde. The scene is explicit, and is frankly uncomfortable to watch, knowing what we know about the relationship between the two. On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense that she is there, but the immediate aftermath indicates what her real game is, and suddenly we are forced to re-evaluate what we have just watched. There are at least 2 or 3 agendas happening in this one sequence. She is using the sex against Clyde, yes. She is probably also punishing herself for what she sees as her sins. Is it possible that she enjoys it, as well? Perhaps, at some subterranean level, this is also true. There have been a couple of hints in that direction. This remarkable sequence takes the loyalties that we have built up with these characters, and pulls them apart. We are left without moral bearings.

The film looks to be heading down a road of despair, but it is rescued by another unexpected appearance on Jackies video screen. In one tiny instant, she realizes that she has a piece of common ground with this man who she considered the distillation of evil. The resolution finally comes in a beautifully done encounter between Jackie and Clyde, as they revisit the site where their fates came together. Clyde tells his story of how he made a tragic error, and Jackie about how her last words to her daughter were to “Get out of my sight.” It’s a gorgeous, heart-wrenching scene.

At its root, Red Road is a story about catharsis. Clyde knows that he was responsible for the destruction of a family. Jackie feels that it was because if her that they were put in a position to die. In a perverse way, they are lucky that their paths crossed again. As we see Jackie in the films closing moments, she is different – better. Instead of sitting in front of a screen, she is down on the street with the people. She finally seems at peace. That’s the thing about cauterizing a wound. It’s painful, but in the end, the wound heals.

IMDb

Amazon

Cool

2011-08-26T14:06:00.000-04:00

The Marquee (The Duke plays hockey)

2011-08-03T20:36:00.002-04:00

Sex

2011-07-28T17:44:00.002-04:00

Monica Vitti smokes.

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-07-25T19:22:00.003-04:00

Pale Flower – I consider a bit of an aficionado of Japanese cinema, so I was taken aback when this one showed up as one of Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies”. I had never heard of it. Ebert invokes both Film Noir and the new wave in his review, and as contradictory as those influences sound, he hits the nail on the head. If Antonioni had gone to Japan and made a Noir, this is what he would have come up with. The film revolves around a hit man just out of a spell in prison for a murder. He falls under the spell of a mysterious gambling woman who seems to only be engaged by danger. There’s little dialogue, and you have to be a little patient with the film, as it settles into its tale of two people whose sexual circuitry is all messed up. The pay-off is worth it.

Prime Cut – Lee Marvin as a Chicago leg-breaker sent to collect money from a crooked meat packer/sex slave dealer played by Gene Hackman. I’m not really sure why this one went so wrong for me. Marvin is a mobster, but if you entered the movie 15 minutes in, you might never deduce that. Hackman, as great an actor as he is, never really convinces as a heavy (Hell, his characters’ name is Mary Ann!) I liked the way the action all occurs in sunny Kansas farm country, instead of a city, and there is a well-staged shoot-out in a field of sunflowers, but overall this one disappointed me.

The Marquee

2011-07-15T16:55:00.002-04:00

The Last Command

Sex

2011-07-07T07:05:00.002-04:00

Linda Darnell

Cool

2011-06-22T19:03:00.002-04:00

The Marquee

2011-06-14T21:17:00.002-04:00

Sex

2011-06-04T09:27:00.003-04:00

Gloria Grahame and Cyd Charisse

Between the Covers

2011-06-02T16:33:00.006-04:00

Xavier and Elijah are a couple of young Cree from the forests of Northern Ontario. They’ve grown up together in a life of hunting and fishing – Living off the land. Xavier is shy and backwards. He is a ‘bush” Indian, and barely speaks English. Elijah is worldlier – He went to an English school, and is cheeky and talkative. Despite their differences, they share a seemingly unbreakable bond. When these two enlist to fight in World War I, it’s an adventure- a lark. How little they realize…

I’ve not read or seen much that does justice to capturing the numbing, sick-in-the-pit-of the stomach fear of being in the middle of combat, but Three Day Road captures it perfectly. It’s all here: The mud and trenches, the blood and entrails…and the fact that the guy trying to kill you is right over there.

The two boys turn out to be natural snipers, and Elijah quickly evolves from an outcast to a kind of mythical killing machine. As his kill total skyrockets, so does his fascination with the hunt of his quarry. His obsession begins to take on dark overtones, as he begins to collect the scalps of his victims. I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s great novel Blood Meridian in this book, as both novels deal with characters that are adrift in a world where mercy is absent and brutality is celebrated.

Xavier, on the other hand, struggles hard to maintain his humanity in this inferno. His love for Elijah is tempered with sadness and disgust at his friends’ transformation into a monster. Xavier grows to hate the war, and ultimately the one he loves. The novels' conclusion may be somewhat inevitable, but it's the journey that's the thing, not the destination.

Note of interest: The story is influenced by the career of real-life Ojibwe sniper Francis Pegahmagabow, who was credited with over 300 kills in WWI. He is actually mentioned in this book as “Peggy.”

I watch the beast pull up and give one last great sigh, as if it is very tired from the long journey, smoke pouring from its sides. People wave from the windows and people on the ground wave back, just as I have watched them do for days. Then men and women and children who have arrived start stepping down into the arms of others. I see a few soldiers and search among them for Elijah's face with his sly grin. The crowd begins to thin, and once again I do not see an Indian soldier with one leg.

I am turning to leave when I see through one of the windows the silhouette of a man inside. He walks slowly along the aisle, on crutches, in a uniform, a small bag slung over his shoulder. I step away from the shadow of the wall. He wears a hat, just like the wemistikoshiw do, but this one is of their army and I cannot see his face for his looking down as he slowly makes his way down the steps on his crutches. He is an old man, I think. So skinny. This cannot be the Elijah I know. One leg of his pants is pinned up and hangs down a little way, empty.

When he is off the steps I begin to back away, thinking it is not him. He looks up and I see his face, thin and pale, high cheekbones, and ears sticking out from beneath his hat. I stumble a little, the blood rushing away from my head. The ghost of my nephew Xavier looks at me.

He sees me at the same moment, and I watch as his eyes take a long time to register what they see, but when they do he begins to rock back and forth on his crutches. He falls to the ground. I rush up to him, kneel beside him, grab his warm hands. He is no ghost. I hold him to me. His heart beats weakly. I am struck suddenly that he is very ill.

"Nephew," I whisper. "You are home. You are home."

The Marquee

2011-05-22T21:00:00.001-04:00

Cool

2011-05-20T21:02:00.001-04:00

Ralph Meeker

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-05-18T21:17:00.008-04:00

The Red Shoes – Ever since my wife and I saw Black Swan, I’ve wanted to show this to her. RS is still a great film, but perhaps not for exactly the same reasons that I remember. The big pluses are the performance of Anton Walbrook as the one-minded ballet director Lementov, and the set design and choreography (especially in the great extended Red Shoes sequence). The films falters a bit, (and I stress a BIT) where it comes to the romance between Moira Shearer and Marius Goring. The two lovers don’t really get a chance to deliver any heat – The film has to tell us how in love they are, because it’s not that evident. Still, recommended.

Rabbit-Proof Fence – The true life story of two young aboriginal girls who walk 900 miles across the Australian outback after being forcibly taken from their home by Government officials. This is the story of a monumental human achievement, and for all its terrific qualities, the film doesn’t do a great job of capturing the magnitude of what these girls did. I mean, the walk took 9 weeks, and the two don’t really look the worse for wear at the end. Still, this is a good film, and a biting indictment of a shameful racist law. Peter Gabriel does the soundtrack, and it’s top notch - Its organic, ethereal, and moody. Recommended

Woodstock (Blu-Ray Directors cut) and Monterey Pop – I love Woodstock, and I try to watch it every few years or so. Putting aside what I consider the musical highlights (Richie Havens, The Who, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Sly and the Family Stone and especially Santana) it is such a perfect time capsule because of the non-music. Everything that made the sixties the sixties is here - The fashion, the drugs, the attitude (“We live in a group – what you would call a commune”), and it’s to the films credit that it spends so much time on the stuff that was happening when the music wasn’t playing. I’m fascinated at how many of the characters one remembers – The Porti-San guy and the guy who pops out of the Porti-san. The girl who has lost her sister out there. The “Stay ON the grass” guy. The naked Frisbee girl. The yoga guy. Watch this if you haven’t. If you have, watch it again.

Compared to Woodstock, the Monterey Festival in 1967 was small potatoes when you look at the numbers involved (half a million versus less than 70,000), but Monterey was the template for what was to come two years later. Again, there were some terrific performances, Like The Who doing "My Generation", (and smashing the shit out of everything), Otis Redding, Janis Joplin doing "Ball and Chain", and of course Hendrix again. This was the concert where Jimi set his guitar ablaze, and my favourite shot in this film is a quick audience reaction shot right after Hendrix’ set. Instead of cheering and pandemonium, the reaction is gaping mouths and utter shock and awe. My only musical quibble is that Ravi Shankar’s set seems to go on forever, after most of the other artists only get a minute or two onscreen. It’s doesn’t compare to Woodstock in giving the viewer the sense of what the experience was like, but I still recommend it.

2012 – If you love lotsa stuff blowing up, this is for you, because basically the whole planet blows up. This one is entertainment for 16 year-old boys, I guess. The premise is that the sun starts acting up, the earths core is boiling, and we’re all gonna die. The film centres on a writer (John Cusack), and his estranged family, and how they can make their way to China to join an enormous “ark” that has been built covertly to save the earth’s best and brightest. Hollywood being Hollywood, the bad guys are US Government officials who are willing to kill anyone who endangers the plan. The same pattern happens again and again. There is a little scene where people talk to each other, and then they are interrupted by that damn apocalypse. Cusack and family somehow outrun earthquakes, meteor showers, falling buildings, you name it. Not recommended. Really, don’t bother.

The Marquee

2011-05-17T17:17:00.002-04:00

Jacob's Ladder

2011-05-11T19:56:00.003-04:00

Adrian Lynes Jacob’s Ladder is a maddening dervish of a movie. It’s dark, nervous, and soaked through with hallucinogenic angst. One could watch it through ten times in succession and still not have a grasp of what you have just seen. Despite all this, it works wonderfully as a portrait of a man’s descent into madness.

The Jacob of the title is Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a well-educated Viet Nam vet now working as a mailman. The film starts with a flashback back to the jungle, as Singer’s platoon is ambushed and suffers devastating losses. Singer himself is bayoneted and almost dies.

Pitch forward to the present, and Singer is now working in a post office, and living with a co-worker played by Elizabeth Pena. There are signs early on that there are some cracks in his psyche. Singer awakens from the Viet Nam flashback to find himself in an almost abandoned subway train. He asks a lady for help, and she is so silent and strange that it is frightening. That’s not the real kicker however – A cursory glance at a sleeping bum seems to reveal a tail like a serpent. These images defy logical explanation – This guy must be nuts, right?

Some more info is introduced. An old photo of Singers now-dead son Gabe (Macauley Culkin). We start to learn about his shattered marriage, and the tragic loss of this child.

A character from Singers past comes into play – A platoon-mate named Paul, who suffers from the same nightmarish visions. This starts to skew our view of what we are seeing, and when Paul’s car explodes in a ball of fire, it’s evident that there are more layers to this story.

The movie calls attention to the Biblical names of the main characters, and it’s interesting to investigate this in the context of the story. Jacob was the son of Isaac, and was known for having wrestled an Angel whilst on his way back to meet his estranged brother, Esau. The movie Jacob is wrestling, too, and a comment made by Jacob’s chiropractor (Danny Aiello) circles back to the biblical Jacob. “If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

Then there’s the case of Singers’ woman Jezebel. The name has become synonymous with deceit and treachery, and it’s not by accident that the character has this name. It is, however, a little hard to get a firm grip on Penas’ Jezebel. She’s got a streak of treachery in her, like when she incinerates Jacobs photos of his family. On the other hand, she does seem to genuinely love him, and saves his life at one point. Like I said, she’s hard to pin down.

It’s hard to gain a toehold in this film, because Lyne doesn’t ever give you a chance to reliably stand back and decide what is real. There are passages that are plainly hallucination, sure, but he doesn’t stop there. After Jacob almost dies, and is revived, he is suddenly back with his family. It would be reasonable to assume that the previous events are imagined, but then the screenplay does a sly thing – it has Jacob jokingly reference the hallucination. “You know Jezebel from the post office? I was living with her! She had these fantastic thighs..” I found this scene not reassuring, but disorienting, like I was being teased with another layer of fog.

There’s a scene where Aiello rescues Jacob from the hospital, and again, what seems like a reprise from all the madness and disorientation actually raises a lot of questions, like how did he know Jacob was there, and how does he just waltz in and take him away? I felt the film was maybe pulling a sleight of hand on me.

I’m making this movie sound like an impossible slog, aren’t I? It IS difficult, and disorienting, but it is to its’ credit that it manages to maintain its narrative drive, as Jacob plows forward in his quest to find out what is happening to him. There is a shadowy character that we have seen briefly who seems to be following Singer, and eventually, the two men meet face-to-face. It’s here, in a barren alley that the fogs lift, as Jacob learns about a hippie chemist who made a deal with the Army to stay out of jail, and how the job he was given went horribly wrong.

This final revelation seems to lift the cloak off of Singer, and as he goes back to his old home, which seems strangely preserved in time, we think back to what the chiropractor said “If you’ve made your peace, the demons are angels freeing you from the earth.”

I spoke above about the preponderance of Biblical names in JL. The one I failed to touch on was Jacobs’ dead son Gabe (or Gabriel). The Biblical Gabriel is an angel, who is considered a messenger from God. Thus, when Jacob encounters his son again in his old home, we know why the child is there. This passage is beautifully soothing after everything we have gone through with Singer, and the expression on the man’s face as his son speaks to him is absolutely perfect – It’s sadness, recognition, love, peace, fulfillment, and relief all rolled into one divine smile.

For all the misdirection and twists in this story, however, JL saves the biggest till the last. An epilogue flashes back to Viet Nam and we encounter Jacob after he has been brought to the hospital. Theories abound about what this scene means. Is it an hallucination? Is it what really happened, and everything we have seen the hallucination? I have my own theory about it. Coming immediately after Jacob has again encountered his dead son, I think that this scene is a “reboot”, where Jacob has somehow erased all the pain and paranoia of his post-war life. Just have a listen to the song playing in the background during this sequence. The singer is Al Jolson, and the song? The song is "Sonny Boy".

IMDb

Amazon

The Art of Showing Nothing - An Interview with Robert Bresson

2011-05-01T13:45:00.005-04:00

This is another interview from Charles Samuels landmark book Encountering Directors. Samuels spoke to Bresson in 1970, and the two covered most of Bressons’ work to that point in this lengthy conversation. Samuels’ discussions are notable in that he actually has the balls to tell these great filmmakers how they might have done their job better. Enjoy.

My commentary on Bressons' A Man Escaped

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-05-01T13:03:00.009-04:00

This is actually a few weeks worth.

The Kings Speech – It’s like someone sat down with a “How to win an Oscar” kit and put this movie together. First of all is the lead character with the disability (Much like Rain Man, Forrest Gump, My Left Foot, etc). Add in sumptuous costumes and set designs. Add a couple of high-profile stars in Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, and fill in with the cream of Brit character actors (Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Timothy Spall). Yeah, it’s easy to look at this film and be cynical, but I have to say I still enjoyed it. I never knew the story of King George and his stuttering, and the way that the abdication of Edward VIII is woven in is well done. Guy Pearce is terrific as the monarch who gave it all up. Recommended.

Mouchette – I always have hits and misses with the films of Robert Bresson, and this is one of the latter. The story concerns a troubled French girl, her dying mother, and her abusive father. Mouchette’s life is a hard one, and it gets worse as she suffers a rape at the hands of a man she trusts. Bressons’ protagonists are always tight-lipped, and Mouchette maybe more so that any other. The films’ heartbreaking finale will leave you grasping for answers. I sort of recommend this, but I don’t put it in the class of the great A Man Escaped, which I consider Bresson’s masterpiece.

Proof – Little-known Australian film from the early 90’s concerns Martin (Hugo Weaving), a blind man who takes photos of his everyday life and has a friend (a young Russell Crowe) describe them to him. There’s also a housekeeper (Genevieve Picot) whose relationship with Martin is a jumble of sexual attraction and calculated cruelty, and who begins a clandestine affair with Crowe. This film is low budget, and looks it, but it redeemed by stellar performances by the three leads. It’s definitely worth a look.

Between the Covers

2011-04-29T20:27:00.003-04:00

Wheeler Burden did not think of visiting Berggasse 19 until the third day in Vienna, or at least there is no mention of it in the journal he kept with meticulous care from almost the moment of his arrival. The first days he spent adjusting, you might say, to the elation of newness and the spectacle of this city he knew so well in theory but had never actually visited. Then the practicalities settled on him, followed by a deep feeling of displacement. Wheeler was a long way from home with no means of either identification or support. But before the gravity of the situation set in, he was almost able to enjoy himself. Much of the first day, of course, he was busy marvelling at his mere presence in such a magnificent and imperial city. It was 1897 Vienna, after all. The first hour, we learn from the journal, he spent clearing the fog from his mind and pulling himself painfully back to full awareness, emerging from the miasma of what seemed like a long uneasy sleep, and from the catastrophic precipitating event he was nowhere near ready to remember.

Wheeler wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed to 1897 Vienna. If that premise makes The Little Book sound like a Back to the Future-esque bit of triviality, rest easy. Guided by the notes of his old teacher, the venerable Anaud Esterhazy, Wheeler unravels the mysteries surrounding his family; His war-hero father, who was murdered by the Gestapo and his beautiful, yet repressed grandmother. Also making appearances are Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, and an eight-year-old Adolf Hitler. Turn of the century Vienna is captured beautifully here: A vibrant city of art and music, albeit one rife with an anti-Semitism that would plant the seeds for the horrors to come 40 years later.

An article on the creation of The Little Book, which was a decades long labour of love for author Selden Edwards.

Sex

2011-04-27T07:28:00.002-04:00

Britt Ekland

The Marquee (A gallery of Archers)

2011-04-05T20:06:00.004-04:00

The Marquee

2011-02-25T07:21:00.003-05:00

The Last Detail

The Marquee

2011-02-22T19:20:00.003-05:00

Cloak and Dagger

Sex

2011-02-22T19:18:00.002-05:00

OK - THIS is Lilli Palmer

Sex

2011-02-17T07:25:00.002-05:00

Lilli Palmer

The Marquee

2011-02-08T07:25:00.001-05:00

Cool

2011-01-19T21:56:00.003-05:00

Billy Wilder

The Marquee

2011-01-19T21:52:00.004-05:00

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-01-14T13:42:00.009-05:00

Iron Man 2 – A disappointment. The original is my favourite comic-book adaptation, so the sequel had its work cut out for it, but some of the failures are mystifying. First, take the villain Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) He’s a great invention, and the sequence where he attacks Tony Stark on the racetrack is terrific. But then he has no contact with Iron Man until the finale, and it is over all too quickly. The OTHER villain, the arms dealer played by Sam Rockwell can’t be taken seriously. Shouldn’t a villain seem formidable? Too much of this film was just empty sound and fury. I longed for a classic comic-book moment like the one in the first film where the prototype Iron Man emerges from the cave. Not really recommended.

Street of Shame – Another in Mizoguchis “Fallen Women” series. This one deals with the denizens of a Tokyo brothel in the post-war period, and focuses primarily on the financial hardships they face. The film features a back-story about a piece of legislation that would outlaw prostitution, and it’s striking to see the dilemma its passing would present. Most of the women hate the degradation and shame attached to their life, but they also realize that if the law passes, they have no other prospects. Poignant, sad, and heartily recommended.

My Architect – This documentary follows the efforts of filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn to learn more about his father, the renowned architect Louis Kahn. The film doesn’t arrive at many answers about the brilliant but erratic father, who had three separate families and was found dead in a train station. The real appeal of this film is in its presentation of the mind of a flawed visionary, who could create stunning works of art, but often had no clue about the practical aspects of his craft – Or of his family. A treat for an architecture junkie like myself is the exploring of some of Kahn’s major works, primarily the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Fort Apache – The first movie of John Ford’s “Cavalry” trilogy is a re-working of the George Custer story. Henry Fonda stars as Colonel Owen Thursday: A cold, brittle megalomaniac whose hubris results in the needless deaths of he and most of his men. John Wayne plays Captain York, who has a more sympathetic view of the Apache nation. On the plus side here are the performances of the two leads, and some magnificent shots of Utah’s Monument Valley. On the minus side is Fords penchant for salting his films with clunky comedic elements. In this case it’s a cadre of hard-drinking Irish sergeants, led by Victor McLaughan. As much as I admire most of Fords work, the man just had no instinct for comedy. A lukewarm recommendation.

Sex

2011-01-07T22:03:00.002-05:00

Ava Gardner

My Week of Movie Watching

2011-01-07T21:39:00.011-05:00

Black Swan – My only previous exposure to the work of Darren Aronofsky was Requiem for a Dream. Although I admired that film for its technical excellence and its go-for-broke storytelling, I have to admit that it left me depressed for days afterward. Thus, I went into Black Swan with a bit of trepidation. It turns out that BS is a great film, albeit one that also gets inside your head and stays there. Natalie Portmans performance as the doomed ballet dancer Nina is really a tour de force. It would have been really easy for an actress to look ridiculous in this, but she pulls it off. Vincent Cassel as the controlling director is worth a shout-out, as well. Barbara Hershey stars as Portmans controlling mother in a performance that has distinct Bergman-esque overtones. Recommended.

Kagemusha – First time seeing this Kurosawa epic. This one always gets grouped with Ran, and the two films tread similar ground. Both concern great dynasties that crumble due to arrogance and pride. Kagemusha follows a petty thief who is recruited as a double for a slain warlord. The films' central point is that it doesn’t really matter who is leading the clan, and that the warlord is strictly a figurehead. The climactic battle scene is really a marvel, as waves of men are sent into battle, only to be cut down. A masterpiece.

The Hitch-hiker – This Ida Lupino B flick from 1953 is a great example of a film being greater than the sum of its parts. Two fishermen (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) pick up a psychopath hitchhiker. That’s the movie. There is little interplay between the two men as to how to get out of their predicament. So, why does this movie “work”? The film develops it’s tension around whether the men will be able to get rid of the killer before the police realize he is with them, at which point he kills them and moves on to another poor soul. The reason this film works so well despite it’s lack of sophistication is the presence of William Talman as the mad hitcher. With his Jack-O-Lantern smile and his lazy eye (He sleeps with it open!), Talman’s Emmet Meyer is a truly unsettling presence - a low-rent cousin of Richard Widmarks’ Tommy Udo. This is not a great movie, but it’s sure a fun one. Recommended.

A pretty good week.

The Marquee (BB Division)

2010-12-28T21:29:00.009-05:00

Not a great poster, but hey, Bardot and Cardinale in the same film!

Now THIS is a great poster.

The Marquee

2010-12-26T22:13:00.004-05:00

La Bete Humaine

2010-12-24T11:28:00.014-05:00

In a just world, the three central characters of Jean Renoir’s Le Bete Humaine would never have met each other. Individually they are all decent people, but together, they form an admixture of jealously, lust, adultery, madness, and finally, murder.

Lantier (Jean Gabin) is a rail engineer who has no discernable life outside of his work. He even maintains that he is married to his locomotive. The opening credits allude to dark demons inside him, but they are nowhere to be seen as the film opens. Robaud (Fernand Ledoux) is a stationmaster married to Severine (Simone Simon), who seems a bit too young and beautiful for someone like him. Nonetheless, when we first meet these people they all appear to be content.

The “event” that starts the dominoes tumbling is insignificant - Robaud berates an unruly passenger who turns out to be a powerful businessman. Fearing that the man will make trouble for him, Robaud asks Severine to ask her wealthy godfather to intervene on his behalf. She does, but instead of moving forward, Robaud becomes obsessed with exactly what price his wife paid for his peace of mind. As he questions her, it becomes clear that Robaud has his own demons, and the contrast between the doting husband of the films opening and the violent cuckold presented here is startling.

Robaud decides that the godfather has to die for his sin, and has Severine arrange a rendezvous on a train. Robaud ambushes the adulterer in his compartment and stabs him to death. What I find fascinating about this crime is the motivations for binding his wife to the murder. She is present during the murder, and besides the fact that her involvement ensures her silence, there is also the idea that by killing her lover in front of her, he is rubbing her face in her infidelity. Severine, for her part, does not react with quite the horror and revulsion that we might expect. More like quiet resignation, perhaps, like she is somehow accepting of the penance.

The murder goes smoothly, except for one detail. When the killers emerge from the cabin, there is someone there, casually having a smoke – Lantier. The moment when the two confront Lantier in the narrow corridor is filmmaking at it’s best, as Severine sees him first, then Robaud gradually comes to the realization that she is looking at something, and then it hits them that this thing just got a lot more complicated. When the murder is discovered, Lantier starts to realize that he knows who the killers are, and that they must suspect he knows. When the police question him, he inexplicably says he saw nothing.

Lantier is the wild card here, and the killers are forced to make him an ally. The thing is, they can’t even begin to imagine the baggage their new partner has. As I mentioned above, the opening credits tip us off in advance about Lantier, and how he felt he was paying the price for the sins of the generations before him. It’s not immediately clear what that means, however. He seems normal enough with his railway buddies, but it’s in a meeting with an aunt early in the film that we start to see inside him. He encounters a girl who we surmise he has been involved with in the past, and as they draw close to a sexual encounter, he is suddenly overtaken by an impulse to kill her, but snaps out of it in time. In modern terms, we would say that Lantier is bipolar, and this knowledge casts new light on his loner lifestyle.

Now skip back the scene where the police interrogate him after the murder on the train. As he begins to talk, he makes eye contact with Severine, and Renoir lets the image of her face go out of focus for a second. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s a telling point of view shot that establishes a couple of things: First, that Lantier is attracted to this beautiful young woman, and second, we are seeing a possible hint of one of Lantiers murderous “black-outs.”

Severine starts a tentative friendship with Lantier, at first to ensure his complicity with the murder, but it gradually develops into some thing far more serious - a full-blown love affair. It’s during the development of this relationship that we start to see Severine more clearly. The two men have their issues, obviously, but what about her? Severine has her demons, as well. Trapped in an abusive marriage, she turns to another man who has the potential to be even worse. She seems to have a tendency towards self-destructive choices. During her time with Lantier, he shows an alarming fascination with the mechanics of the murder, but this doesn’t set off any alarms for her.

Lantier and Severine form a strange co-dependant union. She sees him as her salvation from the tyranny that she faces with her husband. He, in turn, probably believes that she can deliver him from the violent impulses in his head. It’s no surprise then, when these two damaged people decide to get rid of the one obstacle that keeps them apart – Robaud.

Lantier, however, finds himself unable to go through with it, and that tragically changes the dynamic with Severine. She looks at him differently from then on, and essentially ends the relationship. It’s only a matter of time then before Lantiers demons are released, and he commits an act from which there is go going back. He knows it, too.

It in the aftermath of Lantiers murder of Severine that my favorite images of LBM occur, as Lantier sorrowfully walks away from the murder scene, knife in hand. This is followed immediately by a shot of the broken Robaud standing in the same spot, looking at his murdered wife, and clutching a watch taken from the murdered godfather. It’s a beautifully lyrical way to tie the three principals together, and underscore the way that all three have been destroyed by their base urges.

IMDb

Amazon

Cool

2010-12-14T07:24:00.003-05:00

The Three Stooges (and Fred MacMurray) mug for Joan Crawford

On Location

2010-12-05T20:51:00.003-05:00

Howard Hawks and Angie Dickinson confer on the set of Rio Bravo.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)

2010-12-03T19:20:00.007-05:00

A contribution to the 1000 Films You Must See Before You Die blogathon hosted by Filmsquish.

When Georges Meiles made A Trip to the Moon in 1902, the Wright Brothers were still a year away from their first flight in Kitty Hawk. Viewed in those terms, Meiles masterpiece of interstellar adventure stands as a remarkable achievement in imagination.

The film, which clocks in at less than 15 minutes, can rightfully lay claim to being the cinema’s first science fiction work, as well as one of the first examples of a filmmaker putting a story on the screen, as opposed to simply filming an activity.

ATTTM is told without subtitles, but they really aren’t needed. The film opens with a group of scientists in a heated discussion, and a blackboard indicates the topic – How to get to the moon. The method is something you might expect them to come up with. A huge bullet-like capsule that is to be fired out of a cannon, but in looking at the craft, it is not dissimilar to that which the Apollo astronauts flew to the moon decades later.

The inspiration and concept for the film came from that great font of futuristic speculation, Jules Verne. His novel From the Earth to the Moon was published in 1865, and like much of Vernes’ work is eerily prescient about out the world to come. Meiles film shares that quality – That pedal-to-the-metal feel of an imagination running rampant.

Putting aside the scientific aspects of ATTTM, it’s also fascinating to consider it as a world of cinematic art. Meiles greatest contribution to film history is that he was the first filmmaker to truly incorporate what we now call “special effects” into the language of film. Stuff like fade-outs are invisible to the eye of the modern viewer, but in this film, in this context, they are magical.

ATTTM is also surely one of the earliest examples of a director focusing on casting, costumes, and set construction. Take for instance Meiles use of female ballet dancers in this film. There’s no reason for the arc of the story for there to be shapely female characters, but I guess they suspected even then that sex sells. Or take the acrobats who play the moon men. Their inclusion gives the aliens an otherworldly vibe which must have made them completely enthralling to audiences watching at the turn of the century.

It’s not hard to watch ATTTM and see how their concept of alien life was taken and expanded upon in countless Sci-Fi films throughout the years. The malevolent creatures of the Alien and Predator movies are direct descendants of Meiles Moon-men in their skeleton costumes.

Cool

2010-11-23T22:15:00.002-05:00

Sex

2010-11-17T19:41:00.002-05:00

Mathilda May

The Marquee (Gabin Division)

2010-11-15T17:37:00.004-05:00

My Week of Movie Watching

2010-11-10T21:01:00.006-05:00

Man Hunt – This Fritz Lang film from 1941 stars Walter Pidgeon as a man pursued by Nazis as part of a plot to frame him for an assassination attempt on Hitler, as a pretext for going to war. It’s notable for how it weaves real events like the Reichstag fire and the invasion of Poland into the plot. In essense, this was Lang’s “fuck you” to Nazi Germany. It’s terrific in some spots, like the beginning passages, as Pidgeon struggles to escape from a smooth Nazi officer (George Sanders). There’s a terrific sequence on the London underground where he is stalked by yet another Nazi, this one played by John Carradine. The film lags, however whenever the spy stuff pauses and the relationship between Pidgeon and a cockney prostitue played by Joan Bennett takes over. Still, heartily recommended.

The Big Combo – So-so Noir from 1955 concerns a cop(Cornel Wilde) in pursuit of a slippery gangster (Richard Conte). This film still gets talked about, and it’s always for the same thing – The oh-so-peculiar relationship between Conte’s two henchmen as played by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman. They are drawn in fairly standard terms for much of the movie, but when Van Cleef is awakened for a job, and he turns over to wake Holliman in the next bed, it’s a great WTF moment. In the same vein is the great line by Van Cleef as they hide out from the law – “They’ll be looking for us in all the closets.” Cinematography is by John Alton, who also lensed Noir landmarks Raw Deal and T-Men.

The New World – Terence Malick’s take on the Pocohontas story is a bit of a muddle, which is really too bad. On the plus side, it’s visually gorgeous, with almost every frame suitable to hang on your wall. On the minus side, like all Malick films, it is heavily narrated throughout. Voiceover narration was a strength in early Malick efforts like Badlands and Days of Heaven, but not here. Much like his most recent work The Thin Red Line, it suffers in the voiceover sections, because you can hear a screenwriter trying too hard.. Therefore, it’s a split for me – Lovely to look at, frustrating to listen to.

The Marquee (Peckinpah Division)

2010-11-08T18:13:00.007-05:00

L'albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs)

2010-11-03T18:22:00.013-04:00

Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs goes down to ground level with its peasant farmers and stays right there. Set around the turn of the century, it revolves around a communal Italian farm, where several families live and work together under the auspices of a wealthy landowner.

You notice right away that Olmi doesn’t take a Disneyesque approach to things. There are scenes of communal bliss, certainly, like the farmers singing together while they shuck corn, but there doesn’t appear to be much joy in daily life for these people. They work hard and long, and there are no frivolities. They’re simple uneducated people to whom there are three pillars of life: Work, family, and God.

I said “uneducated” just now. Early on, we eavesdrop on a meeting between one of the farmers and the local priest, in which the priest attempts to tell the farmer that his gifted young son needs to go to school, instead of becoming just another farmer. The father is hesitant, and his reasons are mixed. He is concerned about the long daily walk his son will have to make, but he is also uncomfortable that the boy will drift away from his family and his roots. The concepts of family and community are that strong in this place. Eventually, the father agrees.

ToWC is unusual in that everyone you see onscreen is a non-actor. The entire cast was taken from local peoples of the Bergamo district of Italy (Olmi grew up in the area). This harks back to the work of the great Italian neorealist filmmakers of the 40’s, and in particular Vittorio De Sica, whose masterpiece The Bicycle Thief is recalled in this film. Olmi was striving for the look and feel of a documentary here, and the non-actors help him achieve that. Take the memorable scene where the farmers slaughter a pig. There are no tricks here – a real pig is being killed onscreen – but instead of reacting with revulsion, I found a certain nobility in these people quietly going about this grisly, yet necessary task.

It’s tough to keep a family together here. One of the women is a widow with six kids, and it’s a constant struggle for her to keep things going. Her oldest son starts working at 15, just so he can help out, and there’s a fascinating scene where she meets with the priest about her predicament. The priest tells her that the local orphanage would be able to take her two youngest if she wishes. We would expect any movie mother to say “No! I’ll never give up my kids!”, but in this case, the woman is pragmatic. Certainly the idea scares her, but she also needs to think about the family as a whole, and whether she can provide for six of them. When she tells the priest that she needs to check with the oldest son, she’s absolutely serious. The son insists the family stay together, but his solution is heartbreaking in its own way. He will take an extra job, and the next oldest – all of 12 - will start working.

There are three generations in the farm community, and the movie makes a point of illustrating the interaction amongst them. The widows’ elderly father lives with them, and the film follows a touching little story thread where he and his granddaughter plan to grow tomatoes that will be ready before anyone elses in the spring. There is no false sentimentality in these bits, just the sense of a wise older man passing his knowledge to a child. That feeling of the passing of a way of life from generation to generation is one of the true joys in watching this film.

The widow, who already has enough to worry about, faces a crisis when the family cow falls ill. The veterinarian recommends slaughtering the animal, but she refuses to give up. She draws water from the river, while praying for God to provide his blessing. The animal recovers after drinking the “holy” water, and this sequence invites some discussion. Is Olmi suggesting that God has intervened and saved the cow? Isn’t this at odds with the films ultra-realistic styling? I personally think this sequence is more about the woman than the cow. I don’t completely discount the possibility of a miracle, but the main thing is that the woman’s faith never wavers.

I’ve made this world sound like a closed society, and that’s what it is. There’s not really a sniff of the outside world until well into the film when we follow a young couple on their honeymoon. There was a lot of political turbulence in Italy at that time as the country crept towards socialism, and when the couple arrives in the city, there are violent clashes in the streets. The contrast between the innocent young couple (They spend their wedding night in a convent!) and the bustling city is very stark indeed.

A capsule review of this film would mention the “crime” that the movie takes its title from, how the father of the young boy cuts down a tree to make a new pair of clogs that the son can wear to school, and is thrown off the farm by the landowner. That is certainly true, but this event is only part of a larger tapestry, and it is only significant to us because we have lived with these peasants for two hours. The act of the theft is freighted with deeper meanings, like the fact that after being opposed to the son going to school, the farmer is willing to commit a crime to ensure that he can continue. Also, what kind of man is willing to cast a family out of their home because of a hunk of wood? When the farmer and his family (Which includes a newborn baby) have to pack up and leave, the rest of the peasants watch from inside their homes. Olmi is not suggesting that the others are fair-weather friends, but is rather pointing up the hard reality that for the others, life has to go on. We’ve seen some of the others load up a wagon with rocks in order to cheat on the price for their crops, thuso they all know that that could just as easily be them.

Strangely enough, I thought of Bruce Springsteen while watching this film. In his song Reason to Believe, he ruminates on those to whom faith is as much an imperative as oxygen or water.

It struck me kinda funny. Seems kinda funny, sir, to me. How at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe.

That describes these people, boiled right down to their essence. They live in a harsh world, and most know that they can’t hope to achieve much beyond it, but they keep on going.

IMDb

Amazon

Cineaste interview with Ermanno Olmi

The Marquee

2010-11-02T17:35:00.002-04:00

On Location

2010-10-31T21:46:00.002-04:00

Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney kick back on the set of 1967's Two For the Road.

Sex

2010-10-31T21:35:00.002-04:00

Jacqueline Bisset, twice

Friday's Titter

2010-10-22T17:29:00.001-04:00

Cool

2010-10-18T20:35:00.003-04:00

Gene Kelly

The Newstand

2010-10-14T07:16:00.005-04:00

August 13, 1979

My Week of Movie Watching

2010-10-11T13:48:00.004-04:00

Emperor of the North – I was a bit saddened because I didn’t love this movie quite as much as I wanted to. Two of the great alpha-male actors (Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine), starring in a film made by a great alpha-male director (Robert Aldrich)? It can’t miss, can it? Alas, it can. Borgnine’s train conductor is so over-the-top loony and sadistic that you can’t take him seriously, and the film didn’t seem to know what to do with Keith Carradine as Marvins’ tag-along. On the plus side, the climatic battle between Borgnine and Marvin is terrifically bloody and exiting. The two men run through a cartoonish assortment of weapons - Knives, clubs, chains…an axe. All of this on top of a speeding train. A lukewarm recommendation.

Drunken Angel – Akira Kurosawa really became a legend with the release of Rashomon in 1950, but the man was already an established filmmaker at that point. This one, from 1948, stars his two greatest stars, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Shimura is the angel of the title – A gruff alcoholic doctor who makes it his personal quest to save a tubercular gangster played by Mifune. As a general rule, I like Kurosawa’s “modern” films more, and this one is very good. Mifune stands out as a tough guy who makes a lot of noise about not wanting to be saved, but who always seems to turn up on the doctor’s doorstep. Recommended.

The Marquee

2010-10-09T22:11:00.001-04:00

The Emperor of the North

Sex

2010-10-09T22:05:00.003-04:00

Nastassja Kinski

The Newstand

2010-10-07T07:11:00.003-04:00

July, 1970

Cool

2010-10-07T07:07:00.002-04:00

Belmondo

On Location

2010-10-03T11:11:00.003-04:00

"Yes, teacher!" Alfred Hitchcock and Suzanne Pleshette clown around on the set of The Birds.

The Marquee

2010-09-21T17:23:00.005-04:00

This great poster was shamelessly ripped off from Mike's Movie Projector. You gotta check this site out.

My Week of Movie Watching

2010-09-20T21:57:00.007-04:00

The Paradine Case – I’m starting to work my way through some of the lesser Hitchcock films that I still hadn’t seen. This one has its admirers, and there’s some stuff to like here, particularly another of Charles Laughton’s great droll supporting performances, and some amazing production design (This film has the greatest courtroom set I’ve seen). The big drawback for me was Aida Valli’s performance as the accused Mrs. Paradine. Gregory Peck’s defence attorney is supposed to fall in love with her, but honestly, there’s no reason why he would – She is so frosty that it damages the film.

Three Days of the Condor – Sydney Pollacks 1975 thriller about a CIA operative (Robert Redford) who steps out for lunch one day, and narrowly avoids being murdered along with the rest of his colleagues. I liked the sense of paranoia that this film produces, and I loved Max Von Sydow as an icy killer-for-hire, but I had trouble believing Faye Dunaways’ character would fall so quickly into bed with what could only logically be like a nut-job kidnapper – Even if he did look like Robert Redford. Recommended, though.

The Perfect Storm – The true story of the loss of the fishing boat Andrea Gail in a massive storm is one of the most relentless action movies I’ve seen. The film takes a little time to establish a bit about the characters, and then drops the hammer on them. The film is almost solid action for at least the last hour, and it struck me that filming it must have been a huge physical ordeal for the actors. They get whipped by wind, thrown around a lurching deck, and plunged under water. It’s a terrifically well done film, as it captures the frenzy of men trying to save themselves, when realistically, they have no chance. Made by Wolfgang Petersen, who also directed the great Das Boot. Check it out, too.

The Proposal – I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, this film wouldn’t go down the path it seemed to be. Corporate toady Ryan Reynolds is forced to marry his uber-bitch boss (Sandra Bullock) so she won’t get deported and he will get his big promotion. Then he takes her home to meet his family, and she melts and becomes human. I hoped the film would give her a Noir-ish ending, where she would agree to get deported, and he would get to go back to Alaska and marry his childhood sweetheart. But no, it threw together a smarmy ending that made me want to gouge my eyes out with a fork.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

2010-09-16T20:08:00.011-04:00

The Golden Age of the movie Western featured heroes who were pure of heart and straight as an arrow. Then, in the 1960’s, Westerns took a turn that reflected the one that society was undergoing. The movies started to question the concepts of morality and heroism, and more often portrayed a world where the lines were blurred.

If there is one film that could be said to stand at the crossroads between these two eras, It could very well be John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, from 1962. It revolves around two men, who could each be considered an exemplar of one of the eras mentioned above. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is the classic Western hero: Tough, no nonsense and with a hard sense of justice. Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) is a “new” Western hero. He’s an idealistic young lawyer and a pacifist.

Stoddard’s introduction to the town of Shinbone is a harsh one, and it serves as a wake-up call that his ideals are going to be tested in this new place. The vicious outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) holds up the stagecoach he is riding on, and gives him a savage beating. Valance is essentially a fleshed-out schoolyard bully, taking exception to Stoddards bag of law books and cultured mien.

The relationship between Stoddard and Doniphon is illustrated by their interaction with two other people. One is Valance, and the other is Hallie, a young woman who nurses Stoddard back to health when Doniphon brings him in after Valances' assault.

Valance is a fearsome character to the people of Shinbone. When he walks into the saloon, everything stops, and he takes what he wants with impunity. The one person who isn’t intimidated is Doniphon, and the film indicates that Valance is somewhat taken aback by Doniphon’s courage. Doniphon is openly dismissive of Stoddard’s plan to go after Valance via legal means, claiming it will just get him killed. At this juncture, it’s hard to disagree.

The other main character in this is Hallie (Vera Miles), who Doniphon loves and plans to marry. It’s fairly plain that she feels the same way about him, but as a rough and tough alpha male, he finds it a bit hard to be sweet with her. Things start to change when the sensitive and educated Stoddard moves in. There’s an important scene where Stoddard discovers that she can’t read or write, and cuts right through her humiliation to assure her that she can learn how in no time. I think this is the seed of the relationship between the two, as she begins to see that this new man might represent a whole new life for her.

Liberty Valance is above all about the changing of the guard in America – About how the resilient pioneering types (as personified by Doniphon) slowly gave way to a new, idealistic man with an eye to the future (Stoddard). The real joy in this film is in seeing this realization dawn on Doniphon. He may think Stoddard is naïve and foolish, but he respects him for his courage. That’s why he tries to teach Stoddard how to shoot. He knows that men like Stoddard will be important, as the West becomes a civilized society.

There’s a political undercurrent running parallel to the human story here, as well – The quest for statehood. It’s established that the large cattle barons call the shots, and that they enforce things their own way. (Valance works for them). Statehood would mean laws, education, and railroads – All the bells and whistles of modern society. This is another illustration of the films sense of inevitability. The times, they are a changing and the townspeople realize that Ransom Stoddard is someone that they want at the forefront.

The moment that the film builds toward, of course, is the final showdown between Stoddard and Valance. The tenderfoot lawyer has to strap on a gun and go out to face the outlaw. The films' title dispels any intrigue about the outcome of the gunfight, but after it’s over, it doubles back to reveal that Stoddard is NOT the man who shot Liberty Valance, after all. This revelation and the consequences of it have been discussed ever since the film first appeared. Stoddard, known for his pacifist views, is assisted in his burgeoning political career by his assumed killing of a hated outlaw. Doniphon, who knows the act will cost him the woman he loves, comes to Stoddard’s rescue in the shootout. The scene where Doniphon reveals the truth to Stoddard is exquisite in its sadness. He tells him “Hallie’s your girl now. You taught her to read and write, now give her something to read and write about.” I don’t think John Wayne was ever better than right there.

The action of MWSLV takes place as an extended flashback, as now Senator Stoddard and Hallie return to Shinbone after many years to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon, who has been forgotten in the town. With statehood, and the advance of the modern world there was no place left for a dinosaur like Doniphon, and he just faded away. There’s one throwaway line about the dead man that is telling: “He hadn’t worn a gun in years”. He knew his time had passed.

The film makes a point of showing Hallie returning to Doniphon’s old homestead, now in ruins. At one time, Doniphon was building an extension on the house, in anticipation of his marriage to Hallie. As she sees the old house, there’s a definite sense of sadness and regret in her eyes, as she contemplates this man who she once would have married. She doesn’t even know that Doniphon gave her up so that she could have the life of comfort with Stoddard.

The thing about Ransom Stoddard, then, is that he is a fraud. His political career and his marriage have been assisted by the lie that he killed Liberty Valance. When he tries to set the record straight, nobody wants to hear it. As a newspaperman tells him, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” I think that this inner conflict fuels Stoddards proposal on the train ride back to Washington. He suggests that they move back to Shinbone after he gets his latest bill through the Senate, and I love watching the dynamic between the two here. He knows that he owes everything to Tom Doniphon, and his suggestion that he comes back and “Maybe open a law office” is a nod to Doniphon, and to his wife, who never completely got over the other man. Her response says it all. “Oh, Rance! You don’t know how I’ve longed to hear that!” In essence, Stoddard is giving Hallie back to Doniphon.

John Ford admitted after making Liberty Valance that he wanted it to have the look of a silent film. This harkens back to his desire to pull the rug out from under the suppositions that the audience would bring to a Western. Thus, Ford foregoes the stunning location photography of films like The Searchers and My Darling Clementine, and gives us a studio film. If you look at the characters, you’ll see silent film stereotypes everywhere. Marvins’ Valance is one, for sure, and so are the oafish Marshal played by Slim Pickins and the politician played by John Carradine. Ford was saying, “Pilgrim, This may look like the old West, but it’s not.”

IMDb

Amazon

The Marquee

2010-09-15T22:08:00.002-04:00

Moments of Distinction

2010-09-06T17:16:00.013-04:00

The Film – North By Northwest, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

The Set-Up – Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is dropped off in the middle of nowhere for a meeting.

Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to refresh oneself on what a genius Alfred Hitchcock was. To create tension onscreen, many lesser filmmakers rely on crutches: Ominous music, shadows, claustrophobic set design. Fair enough – Those things work. Now consider this great sequence from North by Northwest. It is set in the middle of the day in a wide open space. There’s the tiniest bit of music, there’s barely any dialogue, and the only other character is quite obviously not a threat. Hitchcock creates unease with a LACK of unease, and that’s a neat trick, indeed. Check it out, there’s a car, which merely speeds by. Then another. There’s a brief shot of a crop duster, but nothing alarming about it. Another car appears from an area that we don’t expect, and drops off the other man. There are a few seconds, as the camera holds on the two of them on opposite sides of the road, that a bit of tension creeps in, but when Grant goes to talk to him, he is so harmless that it throws us off. It’s only when the other man says “That’s funny...That planes’ dustin’ for crops where there ain’t no crops.” that we really feel the vice tighten. This whole scene is drawn out over 10 minutes of screen time, and like I said, there is virtually no dialogue or music. It’s absolutely masterful in the way it manipulates the viewer.

The Newsstand

2010-09-03T07:17:00.001-04:00

August 8, 1938 - Frank Capra

The Lens of Leo Fuchs

2010-08-30T21:07:00.002-04:00

Mr. Cary Grant

Sex

2010-08-21T22:31:00.001-04:00

Anna Karina

The Lens of Leo Fuchs

2010-08-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

Jack Lemmon and Harold Lloyd

Cool

2010-08-18T20:16:00.002-04:00

The Marquee (John Ford's Men in Blue)

2010-08-16T17:48:00.005-04:00

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

My Week of Movie Watching

2010-08-09T22:31:00.005-04:00

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte – The thing I love about Robert Aldrich’s great southern Gothic nightmare is the way it doesn’t hurry. We are well into the film by the time it finally starts laying its cards on the table. The performances by the three principals – Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and Joseph Cotton are all excellent, but Agnes Moorehead also deserves her props for one of the really great scenery-chewing roles ever, as Davis’ housekeeper. A minor quibble – de Havillands exposition speech at the end detracted from things a bit for me, because I knew it was for me. Still, recommended.

Bonjour Tristesse – Otto Preminger number from 1958 about an irresponsible playboy (David Niven), his carefree daughter (Jean Seberg), and the mature woman who disrupts their lives, with tragic consequences (Deborah Kerr). This is supposed to be a statement on the shallow, frivolous lives of the idle rich, but a good deal of it is pretty flat and uninspired. I never really felt like I was watching real people. There is stuff to like here – There is some amazing location photography in the French Riviera, and Seberg is sexy as hell, playing younger than her actual 20 years. A marginal recommendation.

Nada – Claude Chabrol made this jet-black satire on revolutionary politics in 1974, and truth be told, it’s not his best work. It involves a small band of Marxists and their plot to kidnap an American politician. Chabrol gets the kidnapping out of the way fairly quickly, and then gets down to his real agenda, which is the endgame between the various forces on the side of the law, who all want their own results from the crisis. The government is not completely opposed to the idea of the politician being killed, because that would allow them to come down hard on the country’s leftists. It’s an interesting idea, but is so sour that it eventually stretches the limits of credulity.