On Location

Robert Evans and John Wayne on the set of Rooster Cogburn.

Image from art.com

The Marquee (70's Schlock Division)

My Week of Movie Watching

The Thief of Bagdhad – The Criterion disc. I wish I’d had a chance to see this when I was 9 or 10. It was entertaining in the grand Jason and the Argonauts style, and the special effects and especially the sets are impressive. Naturally, it has moments that are silly child-like fantasy, but that’s the audience it was make for. Conrad Veigt is terrifically slimy as the villain. Recommended.

Australia – Let me run down the list. A snooty damsel out of her element? Check. A rough around the edges he-man who gradually falls in love with her? Check. An evil rancher who wants to buy up the woman’s land? Check. A small boy who, due to a tragedy, comes under the care of said woman and man? Check. A friend of the he-man who heroically gives up his life to save his friend? Check. I could go on. There literally isn’t a single solitary cliché that this film doesn’t employ, thus it was a real slog for me. The only saving grace was the cinematography, which is spectacular. Not recommended.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua – Jamie Lee Curtis, Drew Barrymore, Andy Garcia….What were you thinking? This was a one-note joke that got old really, really quickly. Still, I think I liked it better than Australia.

Sex 101

Faye Dunaway

On Location

The Seven Year Itch - The making of an iconic image.

The Marquee

My 2006 commentary on Onibaba can be read here.

Cool

My Week of Movie Watching

Tell No One – Rent this film. I have a soft spot for twisty thrillers, and this French number from 2006 is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The premise – a doctor’s wife was murdered 8 years ago, but one day he gets an e-mail from her. As I watched this one, I thought, “There’s no way they can resolve all this!”…Luckily for me, I was wrong. Terrific supporting performances are everywhere in this one, and none of them feel superfluous. Hell, even the dog matters to the plot! This was really a treat. Rent it.

Deliverance – This is, I think, the third time for this one, and I like it more every time. I love the way the roles of the main characters evolve. Burt Reynolds’ alpha-male Lewis ends the film whimpering in a canoe, and Ned “squeal like a pig” Beatty goes from being a city slicker stereotype to a semi-plausible macho man. I once again watched to see if the films’ ambiguities are indeed ambiguous. Is Drew shot or does he jump to his death? (He almost certainly jumps) Does Jon Voights' Ed kill the right hillbilly? (Still not 100% sure.)

Osaka Elegy and Women of the Night – It’s great to see a couple of previously hard-to-see Mizoguchi titles get a proper release by Criterion. Elegy, from 1936, is the heartbreaking story of a woman who allows herself to be used by a wealthy man in order to save her family from financial ruin, only to have them turn on her because of it.

The searing Women (1948) tells the story of a trio of women and their attempts to resist the pull of prostitution in post-war Osaka. The two films mine similar ground – The plight of women in Japanese culture, and the indifference of powerful Japanese men to it. Both highly recommended.

Ocean’s Eleven – Da original – Hadn’t seen it. It was pretty entertaining, and it goes without saying that there’s cool everywhere you look. The dialogue has a terrific jivey rhythm. Such as:

“I can’t do it. I’ve got my wife to think of.”

“Think of her rich.”

“Think of me dead.”

Akim Tamiroff’s in there, too. You have to love an actor who has worked under Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, and Jean-Luc Godard. One small quibble – It’s never a bad idea to have Angie Dickinson in your movie, but she is utterly wasted here.

High and Low

The very title of Akira Kurosawas’ 1963 masterpiece begins to tell the story. High and Low is about extremes – Rich and poor, good and evil, Heaven and hell. It’s about a man who has everything, but faces a decision that would leave him with nothing.

The man in question is Kingo Gondo, played, as many of Kurosawa’s heroes were, by the great Toshiro Mifune. Gondo is a wealthy executive for a successful shoe company and lives his wife and young son in a beautiful, modern home on the top of a hill. The first shot in the film starts to point out the extremes – a view from Gondo’s living room of the bustling, sooty city below. Gondo’s house almost deserves a credit in this film; it’s so central to the story.

The film opens with Gondo in an informal conference with some other the other big shots from National Shoe. They want to put a flashy but cheaply made shoe onto the market but Gondo vetoes this. He states “I won’t put our name on junk.” Gondo is a man who has gotten to the top of the ladder through sheer willpower, but he’s also a man with strong morals, as the meeting demonstrates.

The executives have another bombshell to drop on him – They are planning a takeover, and they need his voting shares to achieve it. Gondo is hesitant, and grows angry when he is told that if he doesn’t go along, he could end up out on his ear. We find out after the executives have left that Gondo has his own takeover plan, having secretly bought up enough shares to gain control. He is about to finalize the deal that very night. This little bit of background on Gondo is vital, because it pre-establishes him in our minds as a guy who will do the right thing.

He gets his chance when he gets a call from someone who claims to have kidnapped his son and demands a huge ransom for his return. We’ve seen the son already, playing cowboys and Indians with a friend, and there was a little moment that the mother mixes the two boys up. It was innocent in this setting, but it becomes huge with the realization that the kidnapper didn’t get Gondo’s son, but rather the son of his chauffer.

It’s in these following passages, as Gondo realizes that he is still expected to pay the ransom that High and Low really elevates itself. Gondo, you see, is a principled man, but he is also proud and stubborn. It has taken him years to work himself into the position he now holds. If he were to pay the ransom – For a child that isn’t his – He would lose everything. If he doesn’t pay, he will be vilified for letting a child die.

Watch the way Kurosawa uses the apartment layout and the widescreen format during these scenes. The apartment is wide, but it’s also deep, and the director places the actors in this space in such a way as to amplify the tension that is developing. Note the poor little chauffer, looking forlorn and holding his son’s cap in his hands. Kurosawa places him in the rear and to the side to call attention to his sorrow, but also to his lower social standing. As the decision begins to weigh down on him, Gondo is shot sitting alone, back to the rest of the people in the composition. The decision is his alone. It’s a masterful use of the space, and it’s done so smoothly that it really doesn’t call attention to itself.

High and Low is a long film – It runs close to 2 ½ hours, and it’s unusual in that after the drama of the abduction and payout, Kingo Gondo basically disappears from the next chunk of the film, when the police take over in the search for the kidnapper. H & L is really two films, and the two are very different in tone. It’s to Kurosawa’s great credit that the two disparate halves make such a fabulous whole.

The thing that strikes me in watching the police procedural section is the way that the collaborative nature of the work is celebrated. The concept of a group working as one is a common motif in Kurosawa’s work – Think of the group of young samurai in Sanjuro, or the reporters at the beginning of The Bad Sleep Well. – But it is greatly expanded on here. One of the more memorable scenes is a large meeting of all of the cops on the case. There are probably two dozen cops in the room, and as the lead inspector runs down the details, the cops get up in pairs and present their findings. It’s a wonderful way of evoking the scale of the teamwork involved.

As this section of the film progresses, we get to meet the kidnapper. He’s a young medical student who lives in the slums and has a good view of Gondo’s house on the hill. The kidnapping drama unfolded in Gondo’s house (heaven), and now the action switches to the grimy city below (hell). The young man is seen perusing a newspaper at one point and sees a story of how Gondo has become a hero for his actions in saving the boy. The film doesn’t really comment on this, but it leaves the impression that for the kidnapper, bringing Gondo down from his lofty perch was part of the plan.

As the police close in on the kidnapper, the film descends deeper and deeper into the underworld. This culminates in an astonishing extended sequence in a heroin den. This is truly “hell”, inhabited by wraith-like addicts. It’s a marvelous, harrowing visual, unlike anything else Kurosawa ever presented onscreen.

Gondo returns to the film at it’s close, after the kidnapper has been captured. When we see him again, auditors are appraising the contents of his house. Considering all that he will lose, he seems okay with the proceedings. He said earlier that if he lost his fortune, it wouldn’t end his world, and that sentiment is evident here, as well. The final moments of H & L are what really make Kingo Gondo one of my favorite movie characters. When he finally sees the kidnapper face to face, he is filled not with anger, but with regret. He says to the young man “Why should you and I hate each other?” The scene is filmed in a prison interview room, and as each man speaks, the reflection of the other is imposed upon his face, as to suggest the way the two are tied to another.

Kurosawa is, of course, best known for his samurai epics, like Rashoman, Throne of Blood, and The Seven Samurai and rightfully so – They’re great films. My own tastes, however, seem to drift toward his “modern” tales of which this is Exhibit A. It’s based on a novel by American crime writer Ed McBain, but Kurosawa and Mifune have taken it and made it positively, undisputedly their own.

IMDb

Amazon

The Marquee

aka Gone to Earth

On This Date

Great Horny Toads!!! Remembering the great Mel Blanc, who died twenty years ago today.

Sex 101

Ursula Andress

The Newsstand

October, 1976

Cool

"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."

The Marquee (CC edition)

Que la Bete Meure (This Man Must Die)

A contribution to Ten Day’s Wonder – The Claude Chabrol Blogathon hosted by Flickhead.

A small boy in a yellow raincoat happily gathering clams on a foggy beach. A speeding black car with radio blasting. These two opening images, and the way they are intercut with each other create an uneasy feeling within the viewer. Something bad is going to happen here, and it doesn’t take long. The child wanders onto the street and is cut down by the car. The car contains a man and woman, and she reacts with horror. The man angrily tells her to shut up, and keeps driving. Claude Chabrol thus puts the pieces into play for his 1969 revenge-driven thriller This Man Must Die.

The story skips ahead 3 months, and we meet the boy’s father Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussay). Thenier is on a train, returning to the site of his son’s death for the first time since the accident. Outwardly, he seems stoic, but a visit to his house reveals cracks in his facade. He tells his housekeeper that she is never to speak of his son, and if she must, then she is to use the present tense. A visit to the boy’s room reveals how much sorrow and anger this man is holding inside.

The police visit to discuss the investigation into the accident. They don’t know anything yet, but the striking thing about this meeting is how involved Charles is. He throws out scenarios about the killer, and it becomes plain that he has thought an awful lot about this man, and who he might be. His theory is that the car must be damaged, and since the killer would be taking a great chance in having it repaired, perhaps he has done the work himself. Charles thus reasons that the killer may own a garage. We start to get an idea of the obsession that he is carrying around. We repeatedly see him entering his thoughts into a diary, including his ideas of how the man’s death will play out.

The problem is, however, that there were no witnesses to the accident, so he has no idea where to start looking. He sits on hills and muses about how vast his search is. “I have all my life”, and says he needs chance to intercede. “Chance is wonderful. And it exists.” Chance does indeed exist, and it comes in the form of an innocent detour in the road that leads to his car being stuck, and a farmer with a tale of a previous stuck car. “The guy was angry because the car was damaged. I remember it well – It was January the 3rd”

This meeting leads him to the woman in the car, an actress named Helen Lanson (Caroline Cellier). Thenier begins an affair with her as a cover for getting more information about the driver. At this stage, Thenier’s obsession begins to take on darker overtones. We know that Helen was in the car, but is not the villain here. Thenier’s using her seems somewhat cruel and selfish. There’s a marvelous scene in Charles apartment where she finally confronts him about why he wants her, and he takes her to bed in order to continue the charade. The most visible item in the apartment is a large chess set, and the parallel is subtle. He is playing a chess game of his own, and using her as one of the pieces. It’s also notable that when they wake up, the chess pieces are scattered everywhere, as if to suggest that the “game” has been disrupted.

The identity of the driver has been discovered by now – It’s Helen’s brother-in-law Paul (Jean Yanne), and Charles arranges for he and Helen to go and visit them. Paul, however, isn’t home when Thenier arrives, and one of the joys of this film is watching Charles make forced small talk with Paul’s family as they wait for him to arrive. Charles must be jumping out of his skin for wanting to finally confront this man, but he has to pass the time talking about the weather and the pollution in Paris.

When we finally meet Paul Descourt, he is what we might have expected based on his reaction to the accident. He humiliates his wife at the dinner table and berates his son mercilessly – Simply put, the man is a monster. This dinner scene is perhaps taken too far over the top – Paul is such an ogre that it begs the question of why anyone would marry him or associate with him, but to Chabrol’s credit, he pulls back and makes the character a bit more realistic from then on.

Chabrol sets up an interesting dynamic between Charles and Pauls’ son Phillippe (Marc Di Napoli). The boy tells Charles straight away that he wishes his father were dead, and a bond begins to develop. Charles is a writer, and young Phillippe is a quiet, sensitive soul with artistic leanings, and during an informal tutoring session, Phillippe admits that he wished that Charles were his father. This adds other things to the mix – Does Charles also want to liberate Phillippe from his father’s tyranny? Is Phillippe is filling some of the void left by his own son’s death?

Thenier gets a good chance to kill Paul early on. As the two men walk along a seaside cliff, Paul loses his balance, and hangs from a precipice. Charles even goes so far as to get a big rock, ostensibly to smash his skull with, but changes his mind when Helen arrives on the scene.

The relationship between Charles and Helen is a little hard to get a real handle on. Although he hasn’t really said so, at some point his feelings for her have become real, and one night as they lay in bed together she asks him why he didn’t let Paul fall from the cliff when he had the chance. Chabrol and cinematographer Jean Rabier arrange this scene in a really interesting way. Her face is half hidden by his, and his is half hidden by something in the foreground. The resulting composition makes it look as if they have one pair of eyes – That they are one being. Even so, he doesn’t let Helen in on his plans for Paul.

The chance for the murder finally comes in the form of a sailing trip that Charles and Paul are to go on. Charles will sail out and cause Paul (who can’t swim) to fall overboard, drowning him. As the weather worsens, Charles clearly enjoys watching Paul’s unease at being in the boat. He gets satisfaction in seeing the fear from his son’s killer. Paul, however, throws a delicious little twist involving the diary into the story. Charles has to spare his life, but he is not deterred. He tells Paul “I want your bastard skin – And I’ll get it.”

Charles and Helen are on the road the next day when the story takes another twist – Paul has been poisoned in his home. We have a pretty good idea what has happened, and Chabrol slyly confirms it for us in a little scene where Charles talks to a police captain back at the house. Just check out how Charles and the cop are standing and who is framed in the space between them.

The cops have the diary in their possession, and in it Charles’ plans to kill Paul. Charles points out that he would have to be pretty foolish to write down a plot to kill and then go ahead and do it when he knew the cops had the diary. The cop – no fool – acknowledges this, but also adds that he may have allowed the diary to be discovered for this very reason. It all becomes moot when someone else comes forward to confess to Paul’s murder.

This Man Must Die is a parable about revenge and its destructive consequences for the human soul. Charles, bathed in sorrow and hatred, dedicates his life to finding and destroying the person who killed his son. When the man actually dies, it comes at a huge price – The destruction of the life of someone who Charles has grown to love, and who has become a surrogate son. It likely occurs to Charles that he has it in his power to save this second “son”, but it will take an enormous sacrifice on his part. In a farewell letter to Helen, Charles quotes a verse from Ecclesiastes:

“The beast must die, but the man, too”

When the film started, we were at the ocean and one young man was about to have his life taken away. At its conclusion, we’re back there and another young man has gotten his life back. And a small white sailboat quietly becomes a speck on the sea.

IMDb

Amazon

My Week of Movie Watching

Barfly – I saw this again after quite a few years, and my reaction is very much like it was the first time. Although I have to acknowledge that Mickey Rourke does a fine job in this role, he just goes SO far into the role that it’s off-putting. Does that make any sense? I’m no fan of the way drunks are normally portrayed, but the way he slurs the end of his sentences, the way he walks like he’s going down a steep hill made me realize I was watching a performance. I also wish I’d heard a bit more of Bukowski’s poetry. I heard bit of him in the screenplay (“Surrendering to you would be like swallowing piss forever!”), but I really didn’t get a sense of his art.

The Black Stallion – Just a beautiful, beautiful film. It’s true that this one touches on all the clichés, but I loved it anyway. Mickey Rooney does a good little turn here, and the cinematography by Caleb Deschanel is astounding. If you have children at home, this is a good rental for them.

Key Largo – It had been years since I’ve seen John Huston’s great statement on heroism and personal responsibility. Edward G Robinson is terrific, as always, as the heavy. In truth, Key Largo is really HIS movie – He makes a far greater impression than does Bogarts’ slow-to-act ex army man. I also need to mention Lionel Barrymore’s turn as the wise old hotel owner. Recommended.

On Location

Anna Magnani and Sidney Lumet confer on the set of The Fugitive Kind. (1960)

The Soundtrack

Two clips featuring the music of Booker T and the MGs: The final drag race from American Graffiti featuring "Green Onions", and the trailer for Barfly, featuring "Hip-Hug Her".

Sex 101

Lana Turner