THE MOVIE PROJECTOR

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2010-08-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

AN IMPORTANT NOTE TO MY READERS

2010-08-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

I have encountered serious problems while changing the template of THE MOVIE PROJECTOR. I am currently in the process of rebuilding the site, which is already up and running. In the meantime, please bear with me. Unfortunately, as I import my old posts, all the comments that were left will be lost.

I have changed the URL of THE MOVIE PROJECTOR to the following: www.themovieprojector.blogspot.com

Please visit the new MOVIE PROJECTOR, where I will have an all-new post up soon, and change your links and bookmarks to the new URL. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,
R. D. Finch

Aparajito (1956) / The World of Apu (1959)

2010-08-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

Aparajito
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.

Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.

The young Apu explores Benares

But not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.

The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studies

During this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.

The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.

Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.

The adult Apu and Aparna

Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tears it to pieces, tosses it into the wind, and watches impassively as it flutters away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at lasts grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.

Apu and Kajal embark on a new life together

So many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.

Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. The river, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as the raindrops gather, accumulate, and become a rushing torrent. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.

Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.

Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty human drives can coexist in one person. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.

The Milky Way (1969)

2010-07-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel

The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.

In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.

Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.

As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.

Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.

What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I don't think any other filmmaker would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.

Reign of Terror (1949)

2010-07-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

***
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

Anyone interested in the works of Anthony Mann, the subject of a recent three-week long retrospective festival at the Film Forum in New York, would be well advised to take a look at his unusual 1949 film Reign of Terror (also known as The Black Book). It was shown at the Film Forum on Bastille Day, July 14, and on the same day on the Turner Classic Movies channel, where I saw it.

Reign of Terror, which takes place in France in 1794, five years after the French Revolution, opens with the public condemnation and execution of Danton, engineered by Maximilien Robespierre (Richard Basehart). Immediately afterward, Robespierre finds that his secret black book, containing a "hit list" of the other rivals he intends to denounce and persuade the street mobs to condemn to the guillotine, has been stolen. Robespierre wants to be proclaimed absolute dictator of France in a few days' time, but he realizes that if his enemies make public the contents of his black book, this will never happen and he himself will almost certainly be condemned for his aspirations to power. To find the missing book, he sends for a judge from Strasbourg known for his harsh sentencing of enemies of the Revolution (500 condemned in one month alone). This "hanging judge" is assassinated, however, and his place taken by an impostor intent on exposing Robespierre's treachery, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings). The rest of the movie is essentially a thriller that details D'Aubigny's attempts, aided by his mistress Madelon (Arlene Dahl), to avoid detection and find the missing book.

Those familiar with the films noirs of Mann from the late 1940s and the Westerns he made in the 1950s, considered landmarks of their genres, will recognize elements of both in Reign of Terror. Made almost at the end of Mann's series of noirs and just before his first Western, it can in many ways be seen as a transition between the two. Themes found in Mann's versions of both those genres are also present in Reign of Terror—impersonation, underworld power struggles, loyalty and betrayal, order versus anarchy, the crushing of ordinary people by the lawless, interpersonal conflict that can erupt into what for its time must have been quite shocking physical violence. D'Aubigny might almost be an undercover agent in one of Mann's noirs, like Dennis O'Keefe's character in T-Men, and Robespierre the leader of a criminal gang the agent infiltrates. Similarly, he resembles one of the heroes portrayed by James Stewart in the Westerns, a man trying to bring a criminal to justice, as in The Naked Spur. The black book itself acts as the movie's "McGuffin," in the same way as the stolen loot O'Keefe seeks to retrieve in Raw Deal or the rifle James Stewart tries to track down in Mann's very first Western, Winchester '73.

The rather bland Cummings might seem a surprising choice to play the hero in a romantic intrigue, but he is actually good, playing the role straight, his voice pitched lower than usual, in a restrained performance quite different from the glib, almost camp persona of his 1950s television sitcoms. Basehart is even better as the notorious Robespierre. The highlight of his performance comes near the end of the film with his impassioned speech to the bloodthirsty mob after the contents of the black book are indeed revealed. When he tells the mob that to die for liberty would be a privilege, is he sincere or is it a clever ploy devised by a master strategist to win their sympathy and save his own life? The scene is especially intriguing coming soon after another scene in which he attempts to cajole a young boy into revealing the whereabouts of the black book with gentle, silver-tongued blandishments as cunning as those of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Film noir stalwart Charles McGraw also makes a strong impression as Robespierre's uncouth, sadistic chief henchman. But the acting honors in the movie surely must go to Arnold Moss as Robespierre's ally/rival Fouché. He is by turns menacing, sarcastically flippant, and slyly calculating. One moment he seems trustworthy, the next moment entirely duplicitous.

Robert Cummings and Arnold Moss search for the black book

But the thing that will keep your eyes glued to the screen the whole time is the sheer visual panache of the film. Cinematographer John Alton and Mann made a formidable team in the three noirs they worked on together (four, if you include Mann's uncredited contribution to He Walked by Night, also with Basehart), but to my mind, visually Reign of Terror surpasses even the most impressive of those. The movie may technically be a historical thriller, but it is in many ways a film noir masquerading as a costume picture. The high-contrast lighting, camera placement and movement, dynamic composition, and depth of field all bear the clear stamp of film noir. At the same time, Mann's use of outdoor locations, uncommon in the generally set- and interior-bound early noirs, points ahead to his Westerns. Near the beginning of the movie is a striking landscape shot of a lone horse rider seen from a distance slowly moving horizontally across a gently arcing hill, the hill and tiny rider silhouetted against a cloudy sky just after sunset, a shot that wouldn't seem out of place in a Western. The film includes a thrilling action sequence that also prefigures Mann's Westerns, in which D'Aubigny escapes Robespierre by jumping through a glass window (which in a Western would most likely have been the window of a saloon). This is followed by an extended chase with D'Aubigny and Madelon in a wagon, pursued by mounted horsemen through the streets of Paris and then through the countryside, again a scene that might have come directly from a Western.

Receiving credit as producer is the great William Cameron Menzies, noted production designer (Gone With the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and occasional director (the 1936 version of H. G. Wells's futuristic Things to Come, the 1953 sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars). IMDb lists him as an uncredited art director on Reign of Terror. Even though he doesn't receive formal credit, his hand is evident throughout the film in its production design, and he should receive recognition at the very least as an indirect contributor to the film's strong visual appeal. The baroque bedchamber of D'Aubigny's mistress Madelon, the bakery containing Robespierre's headquarters, Robespierre's torture chamber in the basement of the bakery, his private quarters with their bookcase-lined walls that conceal a secret room—all these settings are tremendously atmospheric, far more so than their economical and rather minimal construction would lead one to expect.

Reign of Terror might fall short of greatness, but it does contain enough spectacular parts to make it a pleasure to watch. Connoisseurs of artistic mise en scène will find much to relish here, and because the film stands on the cusp between Mann's noir and Western periods, admirers of his work will find it indispensable to an appreciation of his development as a director.

Le Corbeau (1943)

2010-07-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: France
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

The French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), best known for two films he made in the mid-1950s—The Wages of Fear (1953), which won the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and Les Diaboliques (1955)—is often referred to as "the French Hitchcock." In those two films, Clouzot's signature use of suspense acts not just as a means of achieving moments of heightened tension and excitement, but as a sustained mood that barely lets up until the movie's shocking conclusion. In his second full-length film, Le Corbeau (1943), the suspense, while just as effective, is derived more from the conventional "whodunit" approach of the classic mystery.

Based on a true incident that had happened years earlier, Le Corbeau concerns a rash of poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" (The Raven) that tear apart the fictional Saint-Robin, a small village in provincial France. At first the letters are aimed at a relative newcomer to the village, Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing him of performing abortions, which he denies. Soon others in the village start receiving vicious anonymous letters too, and not only do the accusations seem believable, but in some cases we know they are true. Clearly the writer of the letters not only knows a great deal about the secret lives of the villagers, but is also a cunning judge of character able to accuse people of things they might not actually have done but are only too capable of. The number of suspects is large, for nearly everyone in the village has a grievance against someone else. But who in the village is so filled with generalized malice that he or she would go to such extremes to destroy its social fabric?

In a 1974 series on the history of French film made for French television, Clouzot explained the importance of suspense in his movies by saying that suspense is the element that keeps the viewer watching "everything else." In Le Corbeau that "everything else" consists of quite a lot. For one thing, there is Clouzot's strong sense of visual theatrics (another trait he shares with Hitchcock), beginning with the shots of the village cemetery that open the film, suggesting that this is a dark place with many buried secrets. Although most of the letters are delivered by post, a couple of times they are publicly delivered in passages of great visual drama. One time this happens at the funeral of a man who has been driven to suicide by one of the letters, a funeral the entire village attends, when a letter accusing a female villager of being responsible for his death tumbles from a funeral wreath on the back of the horse-drawn hearse bearing his coffin to the cemetery. The entire village then becomes a frenzied, vengeful mob who chase her through the streets of the village to her home and nearly kill her. Another time, in the local cathedral where the priest is sermonizing about the evil of the letter-writer, the entire congregation looks up to the highest gallery and watches in stupefied fascination as another letter slowly flutters to the floor.

A key scene in the film occurs when Dr. Germain discusses the evil behind the letters with his friend Dr. Vorzet, a psychologist (and ironically the man with whose wife he is secretly having an affair). The scene is staged in a darkened room illuminated by one overhead light—a lamp with one naked bulb and a small shade that directs the light downward—hanging just above Germain and Vorzet. Vorzet tries to convince Germain that any of the villagers might be The Raven because good and evil co-exist in all people and it is impossible to suppress the evil in one's nature completely. He illustrates this by reaching up to start the overhead lamp swinging lamp back and forth, casting each man now in darkness, now in light. When Germain reacts skeptically to Vorzet's ideas, the psychologist asks him to reach up and stop the swinging light. When he does, he immediately burns his hand and instinctively withdraws it, while the lamp keeps on swinging, continuing to cast each man in an unstoppable alternation of light and shadow. The scene uses dialogue, staging, lighting and photography to focus the overriding theme of the movie—that in the right circumstances everyone is capable of evil, a theme that given what we now know of the ignoble actions of many ordinary French citizens during the Nazi occupation, must have had extra resonance at the time.

Mirroring Dr. Vorzet's cynical view of humanity, Clouzot's depiction of life in the small town is relentlessly caustic. Aside from Dr. Germain, who seems sincere although hardly without flaws (besides the affair with Madame Vorzet, he also gets a handicapped young woman pregnant after a one-night stand), nearly everyone else in the movie—no matter how sympathetic they seem at first—is corrupt in some way. These nasty small-town provincials are driven by the basest, most petty, most selfish of human impulses. Narrow-minded and suspicious of outsiders like Germain, they are also filled with envy, lust, and greed directed at one another. Above all, they are hypocrites who conceal their true natures while projecting their vilest urges and motives onto their fellow villagers. The greatest effect the letters have on the community is to lead its inhabitants to expose their true selves, an ugly and dismaying sight indeed.

Although Le Corbeau was a big hit in France when it was first released, it was not without controversy. Leftists and the Resistance denounced it not only because it was made by Continental Films, a German-controlled production company established during the Occupation by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, but also because of the savage—and in their eyes unpatriotic—way it depicted life in provincial France. Likewise, the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy government were displeased with the film because they felt it surreptitiously condemned the practice of denouncing those working for the Resistance, a practice the Nazis encouraged. Clouzot suffered reprisals from both groups of the film's detractors. Just days before the movie's release, Continental fired Clouzot, who had also been in charge of the studio's screenwriting division. After the war, he was accused of collaboration because of his association with Continental Films and banned from the French film industry for life. Later this was reduced to two years.

Le Corbeau is a very accomplished work and in its perversely bleak way quite enjoyable. Its unsparingly negative view of human nature, plainly the product of a filmmaker of a highly pessimistic temperament, and its expert manipulation of audience response through the precisely targeted use of suspenseful situations as the film works its way to its grim conclusion anticipate Clouzot's later and better-known masterpieces. It is well worth seeking out, especially for those interested in pre-New Wave French cinema or in the suspense genre.

For more about Continental Films and the French film industry during the Occupation, I recommend Bertrand Tavernier's excellent film Safe Conduct (2002), which details the experiences of two men working in the French film industry during this time.

An Interview with the Author

2010-07-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

In early July, after more than 100 posts, The Movie Projector observed its second anniversary. To mark the occasion, my good friend Alta Rigaud asked to interview me about the blog and the way I write it.

How did you start writing The Movie Projector?
Back in 2008 I started reading the blog Maximum Strength Mick by the San Francisco Chronicle movie reviewer Mick LaSalle. His blog was going strong then, and some of the questions he posed his readers were so intriguing that I started responding to them. I guess I had a lot of pent-up opinions about movies, because I found myself leaving very long comments on his blog. It seemed like once I started writing, I couldn't stop. When I found how easy it was to set up an account on Blogger at Google, I thought, "Why not put all this in your own blog, since you're doing all this writing anyway?"

Where do you watch the movies you write about?
I live in a rural area with only one movie theater. It's a bit of a drive to get there, and I don't really enjoy the experience of being in a theater audience anymore. So I watch my movies at home. Because of my preference for older films, I watch a lot on Turner Classic Movies. (I have satellite TV and a DVR.) Occasionally something I'm interested in will play on the Independent Film Channel, but not often. I used to watch AMC but because they now show commercials, don't always letterbox, and sometimes even edit the films they show, I avoid them unless it's something older that wasn't filmed in widescreen and isn't likely to be edited for content. I have a subscription to Netflix and watch a couple of movies a week from them. I'm one of the 40% of Americans with no access to high-speed internet (unbelievable, especially as my phone company's Verizon, and they won't upgrade their lines because it's such a sparsely populated area with so few customers), so I can't yet stream movies from Netflix. I also request movies from my local public library, which has a fantastic collection, especially of classics like those in the Criterion Collection. I get a couple of films a week from the library. I've only ever bought one DVD (Terrence Malick's Badlands because it wasn't available anywhere else) but otherwise never buy DVDs because I'm just too frugal (euphemism for cheap) to spend money on something I'll probably only watch once or at the most twice.

How do you choose your subjects?
I always write about a movie I've just seen, either for the first time or again after a number of years. You might say that certain movies ask me to write about them, so to speak. Sometimes I know while watching that I'm going to write about this film, if not, within a day or two at the most. I'll jot down thoughts while watching or shortly after and use those as a starting point. I don't try to cover the movies as thoroughly in an essay style as I used to. I found it was taking too much of my time and cutting especially into my reading time—I'm a compulsive reader (I like mysteries) as well as movie watcher. I've found that sticking to the review format tends to focus my thoughts and reduce the amount of time I spend on a post. One curious thing I've discovered is that I like to include a photo or two from the film in each post. I used to choose them after the post was finished, but now I like to do that soon after I start it. I've found that searching for the right images often acts as a sort of visual aid that either inspires me to keep on or moves me in a certain direction.

What do you look for when watching a movie?
For the total film experience, I look for a film that moves me on three different levels: emotionally, intellectually, and visually. The balance of these elements varies, and I find that extra strength in one or two of these areas can counter-balance a slight weakness in the other(s). But the really great movies, the ones I call masterpieces, have a strong effect on me in all areas—my heart, mind, and eye.

Do you have any principles that guide the way you write about movies?
I don't like the overly academic style of writing about film and try to avoid it, although I know that my writing seems rather formal—even to myself—compared to some blogs I read. I admire a colloquial writing style in others, but it doesn't really come naturally to me. I do like to analyze, though. It's just in my nature. So when I watch a movie I ask myself how much I enjoyed it and then try to figure out why I responded to it the way I did and what in particular I liked or didn't like. I tend to write about movies I like, but occasionally I'll write about one that I didn't respond to so positively, usually because it's highly regarded and disappointed me. I find that doing that once in a while keeps my critical observations sharp. One quality I value in writing about movies is concision. The writers about film that I most admire, whether professional critics or amateur bloggers, have this. I try to get in, make my point, and move on without belaboring the idea or, as I read in some blogs, repeating it over and over in different variations. At the other extreme from the overly abstract way of writing about movies, I also try to avoid just recounting the plot of the movie at length. I try to summarize the plot in a paragraph or two. I've read some blogs that are just plot descriptions that go on and on and contain very little interpretation, and I find that approach dull. I'm especially fond of describing a particular scene in detail and showing how it fits into the overall feeling or meaning of the movie. I enjoy doing that a lot.

What's the hardest part of writing your posts?
I'm a perfectionist. I never just write and post. I tend to write a first draft (this is often done a couple of weeks before the post is published) and then make lots of revisions. Even after posting, I can't resist going in and tweaking a word or phrase here and there. I know the shelf life of any post is about until the next post appears, but I take writing seriously (I taught it for a number of years) and like to prolong the probably illusory notion that what I put into words will last.

Could you explain the RECENTLY VIEWED section of your blog?
After I'd been blogging a few months and was watching more films, towards the end of 2008, I started keeping a record of the movies I was watching and rating them in a notebook to keep them straight in my mind. I decided to add this section to the sidebar at the same time because I thought that knowing what movies I choose to watch and what I think of each one would tell the reader a lot about me, that is, about my likes and dislikes and my tastes and preferences. There was probably also the thought that it might inspire readers to watch some of these movies that I didn't write a post about. I know that I watch movies all the time because I was intrigued by what some other blogger wrote about them, or because reading about a certain movie reminded me I'd been meaning to watch it but never had and it was about time I got around to it.

I noticed that you also rate the movies in this section using a four-star rating system.
I decided to follow Leonard Maltin's four-star rating system because that's how I think of movie ratings. A lot of people prefer the five-star system, but for me that creates too many fine distinctions, and I have trouble enough making up my mind about anything. Having more choices would only complicate matters for me. I assign a star rating based mostly on how I respond to a particular film, but in my explanation of each rating I do acknowledge that some of my ratings reflect my own tastes and preferences, or that I think people with certain tastes or preferences would find a movie of greater interest than the general viewer. For instance, I gave Julie and Julia ***½, which was higher than most, because I'm such a Francophile as well as a foodie and a huge fan of Julia Child. Also because I was so relieved that Meryl Streep, whose performance looked almost like a caricature in the snippets used for publicity, not only got all the mannerisms right but also created a real three-dimensional character that was just beautiful to a Julia groupie like me who used to watch her original show on PBS. I'm basically a pretty easy rater except for the very highest **** rating, but then I don't spend time watching a movie unless I'm reasonably sure based on what I've read about it that it will appeal to me and is of an acceptable level of quality. I hardly ever start watching a movie then turn it off, even if I'm not having that great a time with it, so I guess I have a built-in risk aversion where films are concerned.

In the ABOUT MYSELF section, you say that your favorite films are the classics. Can you explain that statement?
About the middle of the 1980s I stopped going to the theater because I found the disrespectful attitude of many people in the audience too distracting, and by that time movies were available on VHS. Also it was getting rarer to see foreign language movies, which I've had a fondness for since taking film classes in college. I continued to read reviews of current releases and to follow the annual awards. By about 1990 I began to find that of all the movies released in a year, there were on average only two or three that really appealed to me, and then those didn't always turn out to be all that satisfying. (I'm talking mostly about American movies here.) It was participating in the best of the decade polls at Wonders in the Dark that really drove home the message that most contemporary movies aren't my cup of tea. I realized that my preference for classic films was genuine and not just a matter of being out of touch with what's out there. Only rarely do modern movies and directors, especially American ones, give me the kind of pleasure the classics do. Even the most highly praised ones often disappoint me.

Can you give an example of a well-received recent movie you found disappointing?
I just watched The Hurt Locker. Even though I'm not a big fan of combat movies, I thought it was a well-written character study of an almost pathologically obsessive personality who only feels fully alive in the midst of extreme risk, and Jeremy Renner gave a brilliant performance in the lead. But that shaking camera! Despite the movie's strengths, I had to force myself to watch it to the end and stop fuming about that camera. Hadn't the director ever heard of the Steadicam? Did she really think all that jarring was adding authenticity and tension to the movie? At a few points, when it seemed called for, this approach worked for me, but for the most part I found it intrusive and annoying, a constant reminder that somebody is trying to pull my strings and just won't let up. Couldn't she see in the rushes how much better the movie was in the few moments when the camera stopped shaking? Most of the movie obviously used planned camera set-ups, so to persist in that style was to me artificial in the extreme. To think that a movie whose main stylistic influences seemed to be The Blair Witch Project and Cops won the most prestigious critics' awards and an Oscar for directing just amazed me. I could only assume that the awards-givers responded to the timeliness of the subject and the perceived political stance of the movie (I couldn't tell there really was one beyond the generic idea that war is hell) more than to the actual experience of watching it. Anyway, that's why I prefer to catch up on the classics I've missed. There are still plenty of them out there, and I'm far more likely to enjoy them than most current features.

Do you subscribe to the auteur theory?
To a certain extent, yes, but mostly to predict the likelihood of my liking a film. I still prefer to judge movies on a case-by-case basis, although even that tends overall to support the auteur view of directors. A proven great director is clearly more likely to make a great movie than a mediocre director. Still, mediocre directors can occasionally hit the jackpot when all the elements fall into place, and great directors are still capable of making a stinker now and again. Terrence Malick has an unbroken record, but he's only made four movies. Fellini once observed that even the best directors tend to have a period of greatness that runs at most about ten years, and I think that was a very perceptive observation. And let's face it, moviemaking is much more of a collaborative process than the extreme auteurists are willing to grant. When I read a critic in The New Yorker call Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor a "masterwork" a few weeks ago, I couldn't believe it. That was a movie I could hardly watch with a straight face, it was so shoddily made, so outrageously exaggerated and unrestrained, and to read a professional critic take it so seriously was for me an illustration of auteurism gone mad.

Is there a particular director whose work you have problems with?
I have a love-hate relationship with John Ford. There's no question the man knew how to tell a story (although he might have moved the camera around a bit more—to me he's almost the anti-Ophuls), and he made a large number of masterpieces. But he also made a large number of movies that are a distinctly mixed bag, with elements of greatness dragged down by elements that are cringe-worthy. In particular, I find many of his movies compromised by over-sentimentality and cornball attempts at humor. A couple of years ago I saw The Searchers for the first time. I know a lot of people consider this his greatest film, but something about it made me reserve judgment. A few weeks ago I saw it again, and there it was—those things that seemed out of place in a movie with so much greatness. Ken Curtis, Vera Miles, and Jeffrey Hunter when he is younger were horribly embarrassing in the unsubtlety of their characterizations. And that scene in the fort of the madwomen who've been rescued after years of captivity by the Comanches. Just dreadful. And the ending that comes from out of the blue with no motivation or explanation. Howard Hawks did such a better job with this kind of ending in Red River. On the other hand, there's Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and some that I think just miss masterpiece status—They Were Expendable, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Fort Apache. And even though I couldn't bring myself to give The Searchers a full **** rating, I still gave it ***½ for coming close.

Have you recently discovered any directors whose work you especially like?
I'd never seen a movie by the French director Bertrand Tavernier, although I knew of him, until a little more than a year ago. The first movie I saw by him, Coup de Torchon, was excellent, very dark and very funny at the same time. It's based on a novel by Jim Thompson. Then I saw A Sunday in the Country—a masterpiece—followed by Life and Nothing But, another masterpiece. He's especially good at evocative period settings, but he doesn't use that as a substitute for superb storytelling, characterization, and acting, or for creating an atmosphere that just emotionally pulls you in like a magnet. And he lets all these things work their magic without a lot of directorial intervention—what some call "invisible technique." I just saw It All Starts Today, a movie with a modern setting and a more contemporary semi-documentary style, and it was great too.

Who do you think is the greatest director of all time?
Of the dozen or so possibilities that come to mind, I would have to say, based on the number of masterpieces and near-masterpieces they directed and the overall consistency of their work, it's between Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman. Hitchcock's more fun, but Bergman's deeper. I'd go with Bergman by a nose. My favorite Bergman film of all is Wild Strawberries. My favorite Hitchcock film is North by Northwest, which is also my favorite movie of all time.

What is the biggest thing you've gained from writing the blog?
It's inspired me to watch many more movies than ever before. I think of myself as a cinephile, yet I marvel at how many essential movies from my self-proclaimed period of interest, that is, 1930-1980, I have yet to catch up on. The blog is helping to give me the motivation to do this.

These Are the Damned (1963)

2010-06-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey

Black leather, black leather
Smash smash smash
Black leather, black leather
Crash crash crash
Black leather, black leather
Kill kill kill
I got that feeling
Black leather rock

So goes the song chanted by a group of leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding British Teddy Boys at the beginning of Joseph Losey's astonishingly bizarre film These Are the Damned, released in April as part of the Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films collection. Part romance, part thriller, part teen alienation picture, part nuclear age angst movie, part government conspiracy paranoia, part science fiction—the film synthesizes elements from all these genres into a unique form that defies categorization. It does, however, plainly show what David Thomson identifies as Losey's defining trait as a director—his blending of the apparently contradictory qualities of "subtlety" and "hysteria."

The movie opens with an American tourist, Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), guide book in hand, being brazenly picked up on the street in the southern English coastal town of Weymouth by a young woman, Joan (Shirley Anne Field). It turns out she is acting as bait to lure gullible male tourists into being robbed by a gang of motorcycle thugs led by her sadistic brother, King (Oliver Reed). When the bloodied Simon is taken to a hotel by a couple of friendly strangers (who are actually military officers in civilian clothing) to recover, he meets their colleague Bernard (Alexander Knox, like Losey a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who relocated to Britain), a scientist working with them on a top-secret government research project, and Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors), the Swedish sculptor who is possibly Bernard's former lover and who has rented his cottage, The Bird House, located next to the research center, for the summer season.

Later as Simon, recovered from the attack, leaves Weymouth in his boat, he reconnects with Joan, now fleeing from the possessive brother who seems to have an unhealthy obsession with her sex life. ("You think I'll let a man put his filthy hands on you?" King angrily asks after she admits her attraction to Simon.) Pursued by the brother and his gang, Joan takes off with Simon in his yacht and the two begin an affair. When they are followed by the gang and forced to hide out, Joan directs him to the secluded Bird House. Soon all these characters—Simon, Joan, King, Freya, and Bernard—meet up again and become involved in the top-secret government project, which involves psychological experiments on a group of decidedly spooky children. When the two lovers realize the children are being held against their will, they determine to help the children escape.

These Are the Damned was distributed by Columbia but was a Hammer production, and it shows, especially in the lurid and rather misleading publicity for the movie, clearly intended to capitalize on the success of Village of the Damned (1960). Like many Hammer horror films, especially those with a modern setting, it deals with outsiders who find themselves enmeshed in the peculiar goings-on in a strange place where they have just arrived. But just as Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho, Losey subverts audience expectations by turning a predictable genre on its head, in this case by transforming what at first seems an odd but basically conventional Hammer thriller—two lovers on the run from a pack of predatory monsters—into a movie about repressed incestuous impulses, fear of nuclear destruction, distrust of government, the inhumanity of scientific research, existential angst, and the social disintegration of the modern world.

One thing that distinguishes These Are the Damned from typical Hammer fare is the attention paid to the visual element of the film. It is the haunting look Losey creates for the movie that gives the film its thematic gravity and visual urgency. That this is going to be no ordinary Hammer horror film is apparent from the opening shots. The first thing we see is a static, picture postcard view of the sun-drenched southern English coast in high summer, the gently curving cliffs receding to the horizon, crowned by lush meadows, with waves breaking languidly at their base. After a few moments the camera pans to the right, and when it stops we now are looking at the edge of the clifftop stretching horizontally across the CinemaScope screen, a group of grotesque post-modern sculptures silhouetted against the blank sea and sky. These are the sculptures of Freya arrayed outside The Bird House, and most seem to be either monstrous, gargoyle-like birds (she refers to one of her works in this style as "my graveyard bird") or misshapen human forms that resemble nothing so much as the anguished victims at Pompeii.

Such strong visual contrasts are found throughout These Are the Damned. The traditional streets of Weymouth typified by the clock tower where Simon first meets Joan, with its unicorn statue and large plaque of Queen Victoria, contrast vividly with the fortified, ultra-modern research facility where Bernard conducts his experiments on the children, with its array of high-tech gadgetry used to spy on the children and its walls decorated with semi-abstract paintings whose dominant mood is of dread and alienation. The open-air scenes of sea, sky, and meadows and The Bird House, built right into the cliff so that its whitewashed walls and grass-covered roof seem almost a natural extension of the landscape, form striking counterpoints to the futuristic underground dormitory excavated deep in the cliff face where the children live, deprived not only of natural light and air, but of any direct human contact except with one another.

This is a movie whose details of plot and production design cumulatively relay an atmosphere of hopelessness, a movie that shows the futility of any attempt to escape by the people trapped in the bleak world it depicts. Bernard, the representative of order (government) and knowledge (science), decries the "senseless violence" of youth culture yet has no qualms about subjecting the children in his experiments to psychological cruelty. He regretfully accepts the inevitability of nuclear war and the destruction of the human race while at the same time coldly sanctioning the deaths of those who oppose his scientific aims and even committing murder himself. The ultimate irony of the film is that those individuals with the most humanity are in the end destroyed by those with the least humanity, who justify their actions as a means of ensuring the survival of humankind after a nuclear holocaust. One of the most weirdly entertaining movies of the Cold War is also one of the darkest, most disturbing, and most cynically anti-authoritarian of that anxiety-ridden time.

Love Me Tonight (1932)

2010-06-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: US
Director: Rouben Mamoulian

It's quiz time. Naming only one film and its director, answer all the following questions:

1. Name a director who used fast-motion, slow-motion, zooms, and split screens in a musical film. [Hint: The answer is not Richard Lester.]

2. Name a film in which all the following can be found: deep-focus photography, rooms with ceilings, extremely low and high camera placement, elaborately choreographed tracking and crane shots, and repeated shots in which the camera moves into and out of the windows of a palatial home. [Hint: The answer is not Citizen Kane.]

3. Name a film in which a well-known singing and dancing actor performs a musical number with his oversized shadow projected onto the wall behind him. [Hint: The answer is not Swing Time.]

4. Name the director of an early sound film set in France which integrated songs, sung dialogue, rhyming dialogue, natural and ambient sounds, ordinary speech, and overlapping sound. [Hint: The answer is not René Clair.]

5. Name a director who used a distinctively light, whimsical, and subtly erotic touch in a film starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. [Hint: The answer is not Ernst Lubitsch.]

As you've probably already surmised, the answer to all of the above questions is Love Me Tonight and its director, Rouben Mamoulian. The plot of the movie may be just a lighter-than-air bauble based on the mistaken identity/impersonation trope so common to the musical genre, but the cleverness with which that device is developed and the imaginative ways it is used for visual, verbal, and musical invention provide an hour and a half of non-stop enjoyment and awe. In the France that exists only in movies, a Parisian tailor named Maurice (Maurice Chevalier) follows an aristocratic client, the Viscount Gilbert (Charles Ruggles), who owes him a considerable amount of money, to the family château to collect on the debt. There he falls in love with Gilbert's cousin, an aloof widowed princess (it is strongly hinted that her marriage to a much older man was never consummated) named Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald) and for reasons too complicated to explain concisely, pretends to be an aristocrat himself as he redirects his pursuit of the money owed him to the pursuit of Jeanette.

Maurice Chevalier sizes up Jeanette MacDonald's bust

The film opens with two mind-boggling sequences which set the tone of startling originality that is maintained for the duration of the movie. The first thing we see are stock shots of early morning Paris with no sounds but the chiming of a lone church bell. Then we see a montage of Parisians beginning their day, with street sounds added one by one until the soundtrack becomes a percussive symphony of ambient sound, the rhythm of two cobblers hammering nails into the soles of boots emulating a heartbeat. Finally, on top of this intricate continuo of sound effects music is laid, and the camera moves through the open window of Maurice's room. As he dresses, he speaks the first line of dialogue in the film—"Lovely morning song of Paris, you are much too loud for me"—and immediately launches into the movie's first song, "That's the Song of Paree."

A bit later Mamoulian uses the song "Isn't It Romantic?" to unify a dazzling six and a half minute long sequence that gradually shifts the scene from Maurice's tailor shop in the morning to the country château in the evening. Chevalier begins singing the song to a customer, and the song then passes seamlessly from one person to another until it reaches Jeanette: from Maurice to the customer, to a taxi driver the customer encounters outside the shop, to a composer the driver picks up as a fare, to a group of soldiers on the train the composer transfers to, to a gypsy boy the soldiers pass while marching through the countryside, who then carries it back to the gypsy camp outside the château, and finally to Jeanette, who has come onto the terrace outside her room to take in the night air. To say that the sequence has to be seen to be fully appreciated is an understatement.

Bojangles of Montmartre?

In addition to its astounding cinematic creativity, Love Me Tonight has much else to recommend it. Chevalier has never been more charming, and it's easy to see why for a few years in the early 1930s he was such a big star in this kind of movie. Jeanette MacDonald is also at her peak—naïve but spirited, deadpan funny, and very sexy, a far cry from the image she later cultivated after moving from Paramount to MGM. As well as the ever-reliable Charlie Ruggles, the cast includes Myrna Loy as Jeanette's sex-mad young cousin and C. Aubrey Smith as the pompous family patriarch. Most unusual of all, the family includes three elderly aunts (one of whom is played by the delightful Elizabeth Patterson) who are presented at first like the three witches in Macbeth, mixing a potion and chanting a spell to summon up a Prince Charming for the sex-starved Jeanette (with the unexpected result of provoking Maurice's infatuation with her), and later like the three Fates, embroidering a needlework tapestry that directs the movie to a happy conclusion.

As a pre-Code production, Love Me Tonight is cheerfully risqué, and was apparently even more so in its original release version—about fifteen minutes longer and now lost—with things like see-through night gowns and repartee about visiting the "Virgin Springs." One of the film's biggest assets is its music score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Of all the great American songwriters of the twentieth century, I don't think anyone wrote lovelier melodies than Rodgers or wittier, better crafted lyrics than Hart. Love Me Tonight has two of their best, "Lover" (sung by MacDonald while driving a pony trap) and the lilting "Isn't It Romantic?" my own favorite Rodgers and Hart song. Paramount must have really liked "Isn't It Romantic?" because for years they used it in many other movies, often played in the background by the orchestra at a night club. Rudy Vallee sang it to Claudette Colbert in Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story (1942), and Billy Wilder used both it and "Lover" in Sabrina (1954).

The American musical film of the 1930s was dominated by the Astaire-Rogers movies, the working-class Warner Bros. musicals choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the Continental musical confections of Ernst Lubitsch, and in the last year of the decade by The Wizard of Oz. But to my mind the greatest American musical of this period is Love Me Tonight, and the significance of its innovations not just to musicals, but to cinema in general, cannot be overstated. As Arthur Knight put it in The Liveliest Art, compared to the musicals that preceded it, Love Me Tonight "is freer, lighter, more imaginative than ever before. Greater liberties are taken with reality, and . . . trick sound is combined with trick camera to create a world of gay illusion. . . . The experience of making such musicals provided directors with new insights into their craft which carried over into the more serious forms."

House of Strangers (1949)

2010-06-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Joseph L. Mankiewwicz won Oscars for writing and directing the sardonic comedy A Letter to Three Wives in 1949 (an accomplishment he would repeat a year later with All About Eve). That same year he also directed House of Strangers, a work quite different from his Oscar-winner. So overshadowed was this film by A Letter to Three Wives that I was barely aware of it until Dave Hicks included it in his film noir countdown at Goodfella's Movie Blog. With my fairly narrow view of that nebulous genre, I wouldn't really call it a film noir myself, although the lighting and cinematography by Milton Krasner have the noir-inflected look of many American films of the time, but its inclusion in the countdown and the comments made about it intrigued me enough to make me seek it out.

Based on a novel by Jerome Weidman, House of Strangers is about an Italian-American banking family, the Monettis—patriarch Gino (Edward G. Robinson) and his four sons, Max (Richard Conte, in a strong performance), a lawyer; Joe (Luther Adler), the eldest; Tony (Efram Zimbalist, Jr.), a dandy; and the none-too-bright Pietro (Paul Valentine), who dreams of being a professional boxer. Opera-loving Gino rules his family and runs his bank with a domineering attitude born of his willful personality. Max has his law office right inside the bank, but Gino keeps his other sons in menial positions of little responsibility and no status. Understandably, these three are resentful of both Gino's treatment of them and the obvious favoritism he shows towards Max. When Gino is arrested and charged with illegal banking practices, the dynamic is in place for a power struggle to see who will succeed him as head of the Monetti dynasty.

Modern viewers will detect in House of Strangers many resemblances to The Godfather, beginning with the very first scene, as Max walks down an open-air market street in New York's Little Italy and up to the door of the bank. Viewers of the time almost certainly would have seen similarities to the plays of Arthur Miller from the late 1940s—All My Sons and Death of a Salesman—with their emphasis on troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Those familiar with Shakespeare will immediately notice parallels to King Lear: the egotistical patriarch, the favored child, the patriarch's fall from power, and the struggle between the loyal child and the envious siblings to determine who will assume the king's position. House of Strangers also throws in a love interest for Max, Irene Bennett (Susan Hayward, who was just perfecting her persona of forceful femininity and is quite good), a WASP socialite who attempts to deflect the headstrong Max from the seemingly inevitable showdown with his brothers.

In the last year or two I've become aware that Edward G. Robinson—whom I had always thought of as an actor primarily of the 1930s, along with James Cagney the film epitome of the anarchic gangster figure of that era—was actually one of the best American screen actors of the 1940s, giving performances in that decade that are remarkable in both their intensity and their variety. Equally adept at playing villains or victims, men of great malevolence or great integrity, Robinson gave masterful performances in one film after another: as Wolf Larson in The Sea Wolf, in Double Indemnity, the two films he made for Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, The Stranger, as the vicious gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo. In House of Strangers, his Gino Monetti is in a way a summation of the roles he had played during the entire decade, as he mines those performances to embody in one personality many of the qualities of character he had expressed in the previous ten years. It is quite possibly the most complex, most paradoxical, and grandest performance of his entire screen career.

Robinson's Gino Monetti is an observant judge of character, yet a man who seems blind to the contradictions in his own nature that drive his actions. He seems sincere in his desire to offer financial help to those whom other banks won't touch, yet as his trial reveals, he is not above exploiting them for exorbitant profits. He says the harsh treatment of his sons is intended to help them build character, which they clearly lack, yet he consistently undermines their self-confidence as he ruthlessly dominates them, openly bullying and humiliating them. He claims to be building a dynasty for his sons to inherit, yet he resists sharing power with them, instead clinging stubbornly to power himself, ruling from his palatial mansion with arbitrary tyranny and behaving in his office at the bank like a Renaissance prince granting audiences to subjects seeking his patronage. He is a shrewd, self-made businessman proud of his initiative and self-reliance, yet independent to the point of foolhardiness, as his disdain of banking laws and consequent legal problems indicate. He is in every way a classic tragic figure—a proud, inflexible man oblivious to his own flaws, his ego spinning so out of control that it causes him to self-destruct.

The movie's only glaring weakness is its almost complete lack of period detail. I wondered why at the beginning of the film Joe's office has a prominently displayed bust of Mussolini, but it was quite far into the movie before it became clear that the opening and closing scenes that frame the flashback structure of the film are set in the late 1930s, before the US entered World War II, and that the bulk of the movie takes place during the banking reforms of the early 1930s. The costumes, decor, and music don't adequately convey this fact, prolonging the confusion about when the events are taking place, when an on-screen title or two would have cleared up this point right away. Aside from this, I was quite impressed with House of Strangers. Joseph L. Mankiewicz had a nearly unbroken run of good films for several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. House of Strangers is one of the best of this period and has been unjustly neglected.

Trivia note: The young actress who plays Joe's wife is Diana Douglas, married at the time to Kirk Douglas and the mother of Michael and Joel Douglas.

The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

2010-05-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

***
Country: US
Director: Orson Welles

What a dilemma The Lady from Shanghai provokes. Orson Welles is in my directors' pantheon, so I want to like the movie more than I do. Individual parts of it contain moments of great brilliance, originality, and imagination—all the things I admire in Welles. But as a whole the film lacks coherence. The result is that it seems better in retrospect than it does during the actual watching of it. I suppose that's because memory can be selective, focusing on the best things in the movie, whereas while watching it I'm constantly aware of its flaws.

The paradox is that this failure to cohere both is and isn't Welles's fault. His original cut was taken out of his hands, tinkered with for nearly two years by Columbia, and reduced by about an hour before being released. Yet if Welles had shown more artistic self-control and greater ability to follow through on the project—problems that seemed to plague his entire career as a director—maybe the studio powers wouldn't have felt compelled to take the movie away from him and reshape it. Some of Welles's movies managed to withstand such tampering. The Magnificent Ambersons was revised by people who were sympathetic to the elegiac mood he had aimed for and able to preserve that mood more or less intact. Touch of Evil was a brilliant movie in its original release version and improved even further in the 1998 version after being re-edited according to Welles's notes. The Lady from Shanghai was not so fortunate as those two films, and the greatness that comes through so clearly in its best parts must forever remain a potentiality, a frustrating tease to admirers of Welles like me.

The plot of the movie is in the classic film noir mold of the late 1940s. A loner, Michael O'Hara (Welles), an Irish seaman who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, meets a beautiful, mysterious woman by chance one night in New York. The woman, Elsa Bannister (a rather enervated Rita Hayworth, her normal ardor damped down by her cropped, icy blonde hair), is trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man (Everett Sloane, who's terrific—alternately sinister and funny). Her husband, a rich, brilliant criminal defense lawyer, has some kind of hold over her and has apparently blackmailed her into marriage. She also believes she's in danger and seeks O'Hara's protection while at the same time obviously coming on to him.

At first he resists her advances then finds himself lured into signing on as a seaman on the yacht (tellingly named the Circe) she and her husband are sailing from New York to San Francisco. Soon he is not only her protector but her lover. To get the money to run away with her, he agrees to a very unlikely scheme proposed by the husband's business partner (Glenn Anders, who with his flamboyant performance manages to steal every scene he's in) that involves O'Hara's helping him fake his suicide. Of course, nothing in the situation is what it seems: the true purpose of the shady scheme is entirely different from what O'Hara has been told, Elsa is just as likely a manipulative opportunist as a helpless victim, and O'Hara is soon set up as a fall guy and framed for murder.

The plot is really just a framework for a series of elaborately photographed and edited set pieces. It's questionable whether the rather conventional plot merits such stylistic exuberance, but I for one am willing to accept this as a way to add visual appeal and the veneer of substance to an intriguing but superficial melodrama. The opening sequence in Central Park and the streets of New York, the beach party in Mexico so reminiscent of the picnic in Citizen Kane, the aquarium scenes (despite the detectable use of back projection), the Chinese opera in Chinatown in San Francisco, the finale at the amusement park Fun House culminating in the famous shoot-out in the Hall of Mirrors—these are all justly renowned and leave an indelible impression.

And yet as I watched, I found myself wanting more. While these set pieces can be enjoyed as eye-catching ends in themselves, I kept craving greater narrative coherence. It's clear that the extensive re-editing and reduction of the film's length weakened it. It has a jumpy, decidedly unfluid feel to it, lurching ungracefully from one segment to the next. This air of fragmentation does nothing for the opaque plot. In its final form, the movie is the Last Year at Marienbad of film noir—arty eye candy with a nearly impenetrable plot. In Marienbad that's just fine because it's the whole point of the film. But The Lady from Shanghai is a conventional mystery, the kind of story that doesn't completely satisfy unless it can untangle its snarled plot and offer a lucid explanation of mystifying events. The surviving version of the movie just doesn't adequately do that.

The astounding Hall of Mirrors finale was perhaps intended as an allusion to the convolutions of the film's plot, and the final shattering of the mirrors to signify the return to order from a state of deception and illusion. But the memory of this sequence most viewers retain is of multiple reflections fragmenting into yet more reflections, not the simple reality of the final images. That is in a way appropriate, for even though its many exhilarating moments give tantalizing glimpses of what might have been had Welles been able to see the film through to completion, in the end The Lady from Shanghai delivers not clarity, but confusion—beautiful confusion, but confusion nevertheless.

Charulata (1964)

2010-05-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

In colonial Calcutta in 1879 a young married woman named Charulata lives the sheltered, pampered life of the idle rich. She spends her days in an opulent house—a traditional two-story dwelling built around an open courtyard but furnished in the style of Victorian Britain—playing cards, doing embroidery, and reading romantic novels, her needs seen to by servants. Her husband, Bhupati, who is several years older than Charu, is completely occupied with publishing his political newspaper. Charu's boredom and loneliness and the distance between her and her husband are established in the first sequence of the film as she listens attentively to the street noises outside for signs that he is returning home. Each time she hears someone passing, she runs to the window, flicks open the shutters, and peers at the passerby through a pair of opera glasses. Finally Bhupati arrives home—and goes directly to his study with a book in his hand while Charu looks on in silence from down the corridor. Later that evening he tells her that a young cousin who has recently graduated from university, a relative so close that Bhupati calls him "Brother," is coming to stay and asks her, "You feel lonely, don't you, Charu?" "I've got used to it," she answers.

The lonely Charu finds the playful, high-spirited cousin, 23-year old Amal, a poet and musician and student of literature, a fascinating antidote to her sober, unimaginative husband. Basking in the attention Amal shows her—discussing poetry, music, and literature with her, singing to her, sitting with her in the garden while he writes poetry, encouraging her to take up writing—she soon develops a romantic passion for him, which she believes he secretly returns. When he reveals that Bhupati is paying him to "educate" her, she is crushed. Then when his poetry is accepted for publication, she is devastated by the prospect that he might be lured away from the household by literary ambition and in frustration takes up his suggestion that she write about events from her life. So good is her writing that Amal begins to see her in a new light, finding himself attracted to her.

Adapted by Ray from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata shows Ray's decidedly literary approach to cinema, with a carefully engineered plot, characters of great complexity, and clearly delineated themes. All three main characters are memorably conceived and interpreted, but this is really Charu's story, a sort of pre-Women's Lib feminist tale of an unfulfilled young woman's initiation into consciousness. By the end of the film, Charu has experienced liberation of her emotions and her creative impulse and has reached a new understanding with her husband, each now more aware, and respectful, of the other's needs. Encircling this story is Ray's perennial fascination with the dialectic of opposing forces in life—politics and art, intellect and emotions, the outside world and the inner lives of individuals. At one point Amal turns philosophical: "Birth and death. Day and night. Joy and sadness. Unification and separation." Each of these things exists, he tells Charu, because of its opposite. That idea seems to sum up Ray's humanistic view of the way the oppositions in life, and the oppositions of human personalities, play against each other but in the end inevitably reach a state of equilibrium, each complementing and sustaining its opposite.

In Charulata Ray takes his style further into experimentation than one might expect from his earlier work. At one point, Charu comes into the room to find Amal sitting at the piano playing and singing a tender love song that begins, "I know you, I know you, O foreigner." Within a few moments the scene has become a dreamy musical interlude, the piano replaced with an offscreen orchestra, and Amal singing directly to Charu, ending the song with a spontaneous alteration of the opening line of the lyric: "I know you, I know you, O sister-in-law." Charu reacts to Amal's performance with the rapture of a woman being serenaded by her beloved. In this stylized sequence, a directorial flight of fancy in an otherwise realistic film, Ray seems to enter into Charu's mind, showing an embellished version of reality colored by her romantic longings.

Ray also experiments with photography and editing. The camera seems to move and track a great deal. Several times Ray discreetly zooms toward or away from an object. When Charu is sitting in a swing in the garden, the camera swings back and forth with her. He also uses the subjective camera at a couple of conspicuous points, one time when the characters are looking through a kaleidoscope and again during that love song when Amal is stepping towards Charu in rhythm to the song and we briefly see her from his point of view, the camera jarring at each step. And when Charu finally sits down to write her autobiographical story, superimposed over her face is a brief montage of scenes from her childhood, scenes that suggest a more rural and less privileged background than that of her husband.

Twenty years later Ray returned to the same themes in The Home and the World (1984), a movie with many similarities to Charulata and also adapted from a novel by Tagore. (Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Amal in Charulata, would take the role of the neglectful older husband in the later film.) As much as I like The Home and the World, I have to admit that Charulata strikes me as a more passionate, adventurous, and emotionally involving film, one of the best I've ever seen by Ray, very close in quality and appeal to Pather Panchali, one of my favorite movies of all time. (One caveat: although the version I got from Netflix, released by Bollywood Films Ltd., has an adequate film transfer, there are many annoying shortcomings in the subtitles—the most amusing of which is calling the Liberal Party the Libel Party—that you have to be prepared to bear with.)

For more about the life and films of Satyajit Ray, see the website Satyajit Ray World.

Bigger Than Life (1956)

2010-05-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

As Bigger Than Life opens, we see the long horizontal façade of a school building stretched across the huge CinemaScope screen. A bell rings, and elementary school students come pouring through the doorway, walk toward the camera, and separate to the left and right as they reach it. Among the last children to leave are three sets of twins—two boys, two girls, and finally a boy and girl—who walk toward the camera without separating. What an appropriate beginning for a movie that is essentially Nicholas Ray's 1950s suburban version of Robert Louis Stevens's classic doppelgänger tale Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, beautifully restored and newly released by Criterion.

The main character is Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher at the school. With a modern two-story house, attractive wife (Barbara Rush), and son about the same age as his students, he seems to be living the kind of middle-class life found in television sitcoms of the time. But all is not well with the Avery family. Ed is having difficulty making ends meet on his teacher's salary and must supplement his income by working on the sly three afternoons a week as a dispatcher for a local taxi company. More distressingly, he is suffering some kind of major health problem, from time to time clutching his stomach in severe pain, having headaches and dizzy spells, and occasionally even blacking out. When his wife finally persuades him to see a doctor, Ed is diagnosed with Periarteritis nodosa, chronic inflammation of the arteries, a severe condition that if untreated will kill him within a year. Fortunately, a newly released "wonder drug," the steroid cortisone, deals successfully with his symptoms and offers him a hopeful prognosis.

What Ed doesn't realize is that the drug can have severe psychological side effects. He soon begins acting erratically, swinging between euphoria and moodiness. Within weeks he has become a full-blown madman—behaving impulsively, erupting into sudden rages, and exhibiting symptoms of extreme megalomania and paranoia. Subjecting his students and family to tyrannical whims and edicts, he institutes a fanatical reign of terror in his classroom and at home. He pompously tells members of the P.T.A. that their children are spoiled and backward, with the mental development of gorillas. He forces his son to endure a merciless regimen of physical and mental training. He finally announces to his wife that she is his intellectual inferior, that he has "outgrown" her, and that he is leaving her to embark on a lifelong project to write a book that will revolutionize education. The wonder drug has transformed the affable school teacher and loving husband and father into a human monster.

James Mason confronts his monstrous alter ego in the bathroom mirror

Two things lift Bigger Than Life above its occasionally trite plot and its pat conclusion. One is the amazing performance by James Mason, who also produced the film, as Ed Avery, a performance that alone makes the movie well worth seeing. Ed's startling change from a reserved, rather meek man dedicated to his profession and his family into a pill-popping psychotic wracked by delusions of grandeur is unnervingly convincing. As his life spins more and more out of control, he alternates between obliviousness to the behavioral changes taking place in him and, in moments of lucidity, horrified awareness of his rampant mental deterioration. It is a chilling, expertly calibrated performance, one of Mason's very finest and almost certainly the most ambitious of his notable career.

Also impressive is the vision of this suburban horror story created by director Nicholas Ray. Ray studied architecture before turning to a career in films, and strongly evocative interiors are often an important part of his movies. In Bigger Than Life the contrast between the innocuous, rather bland middle-class interior of Ed's house, where much of the film takes place, and his extravagant behavior is a striking one. Yet there are subtle indications of Ed's already existing subconscious dissatisfaction with his conventional life. The distorted shape of the CinemaScope screen, especially noticeable in these interior segments, suggests a personality that already senses the need to expand to fill the empty spaces in its life. The walls of the house, covered in framed maps and travel posters of places like Rome, Paris, and Florence, hint at a desire by Ed to leave behind the ordinariness of his present life for something more fulfilling. The images of doors and doorways that fill the movie echo this same sense of entrapment in present circumstances and the repressed longing to break free. There are literally countless shots of people opening or closing doors, coming through doorways, standing in open doorways or in front of closed doors, or simply photographed from a distance through doorways of all sizes and types. Ray uses all these things to intimate that the changes in Ed's personality are not so much metamorphosis as the unleashing of unconscious urges previously held in check.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the movie is that it is based on an actual case history recounted in the New Yorker by Berton Roueché (1910-1994), a journalist who worked nearly fifty years for the magazine, writing for its "Annals of Medicine" section. The true medical mysteries that form the basis of his articles are fascinating stories of people with mystifying symptoms—many of whom are dismissed as hypochondriacs or told that their problems are psychological and referred to psychiatrists—whose illness is finally diagnosed through the perseverance of an individual doctor or researcher. The several collections of these articles Roueché published are highly recommended, as compellingly readable as the best mystery fiction.

Knife in the Water (1962)

2010-05-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: Poland
Director: Roman Polanski

In 1961 Roman Polanski made the last of his nine short films, a 10-minute long silent called Mammals. In the film two men in a snowy wilderness compete to see who will ride on, and who will pull, the sled carrying their belongings. Mammals—a slyly ambiguous black comedy that can be interpreted alternatively as a Marxist satire on capitalist exploitation of workers or as an observation that the exploitative impulse is an innate human characteristic which can never be completely subdued—is reduced to its essential elements: two men, one sled, and vast expanses of snow. Knife in the Water, Polanksi's first full-length feature made the next year, is again reduced to essentials: two men and a woman, one sailboat, and vast expanses of water. Again the movie is about competitive conflict between its characters.

The film begins with a thirtyish man and woman driving down a country road bickering. So involved in their argument are the couple that they nearly run over a young hitchhiker who in desperation has resorted to standing in the middle of the road to get someone to stop. The driver's rage at the hitchhiker's brazenness soon turns to apparent friendliness when he invites the hitchhiker to accompany him and his wife on an overnight excursion on a nearby lake in their sailboat. No sooner are they on the boat than Andrzej, the older man, begins ordering the boy around, telling him, "If two men are on board, one's the skipper." "Or the drill sergeant," retorts the boy, who quickly catches on that Andrzej is playing mind games with him but decides to go along for the ride anyway. What follows is an hour and a half of sometimes civil, sometimes hostile antagonism between the two as each tries to outwit and dominate the other—an extended male pissing contest on a sailboat.

There are many areas of conflict between the two. Andrzej is a writer who has enjoyed some material success, as his ownership of a car and boat in 1962 communist Poland attests. The younger man is an impoverished student who criticizes the older man's preoccupation with success and acquisition. The writer's life is one of middle-aged regimentation; he has planned exactly one day and night on the lake before returning to town. The student's life is one of youthful spontaneity; he has simply taken off for the weekend on an unplanned adventure. Most contentious of all is the presence of the wife, Krystyna. Has her husband invited the student to come sailing with them in an exhibitionistic desire for an audience to their rather theatrical bickering, à la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Has Krystyna gone along with his impulsive gesture because she sees the young man's obvious sexual interest in her as a possible weapon to use against her husband?

Polanski keeps the psychodrama pumping steadily throughout the entire movie, the compact plot constantly taking unexpected turns and frequently veering into dark humor. But equally fascinating is the film's visual virtuosity. From the moment it opens—with the couple photographed through the windshield of the car, the passing trees reflected in the windshield and superimposed on them as they argue—we are aware that this is going to be a film whose images alone will hold our attention. I can't say with certainty that this is the first time this kind of shot was ever used, although it is the earliest example I can think of, but I do know that I've seen it duplicated in countless later movies and even television programs. With much of the first half of the film taking place on the deck of the sailboat, and much of the second half in the even more confined setting below deck, Polanski continually devises imaginative ways to show the spatially limited action, often posing his actors in tableau-like compositions but keeping the film moving with rapid cutting between shots. The film is also filled with less functional compositions of breathtaking abstract beauty. In Knife in the Water Polanski achieves the kind of artful integration of narrative and image that only the most masterful filmmakers are capable of.

One of the film's most striking compositions—a secular icon?

Few film directors have begun their careers as auspiciously as the 29-year old Polanski with Knife in the Water, creating a masterpiece their first time out—Orson Welles, John Huston, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut immediately come to mind. Even given Polanski's impressive later career, Knife in the Water is still one of his best movies and one of the key European art films of the 1960s. (The movie received an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film of 1963 but lost to Fellini's 8½.) Visually fascinating and emotionally lacerating, it is the product of a brilliant young filmmaker on the verge of an illustrious career.

Three Comrades (1938)

2010-05-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Frank Borzage

Andrew Sarris has called the director Frank Borzage "an uncompromising romanticist . . . [with] a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity," a description of Borzage's work well illustrated by Three Comrades. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), the movie opens on Armistice Day in 1918. Three war buddies from the German military—Erich (Robert Taylor), Otto (Franchot Tone), and Gottfried (Robert Young)—are celebrating the end of World War I in a tavern and making plans for the future. When a German officer proposes a toast in honor of all those who have died in the war—German, British, French, American, and Italian alike—the three young men are clearly in accord with his feelings. Meanwhile, at a nearby table three stiff-necked officers bristle at these sentiments of reconciliation with former enemies, foreshadowing future confrontations between nationalistic fascists and those who believe in tolerance and peace like the three young comrades.

Two years later the German economy has collapsed and the three young men, their lives permanently marked by their war experiences, are barely eking out a living from the garage and taxi service they run. When they drive to a rural tavern to celebrate Erich's birthday, they encounter a young woman named Patricia (Margaret Sullavan), a "fallen aristocrat" who has lost her money in the postwar financial crash. All three are enchanted by her, but it is Erich with whom she falls in love. Against this background of economic hardship and political unrest, the lovers struggle to maintain their relationship and the three comrades their close friendship. Complicating the situation even further, Patricia is seriously ill with tuberculosis and Gottfried has become involved with a pacifist political group that is the target of the nascent fascist movement. Still, the four are able to maintain a camaraderie that cannot be touched by the problems of the time. "Where you walk," Otto says to Patricia at one point, "we three walk beside you."

Franchot Tone, Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young

Throughout the film Borzage deftly maintains a fine balance between the romantic and the realistic. Always in the background, and at times irrupting into the foreground, is the threat to love and friendship caused by economic difficulties and political discord. But the main emphasis of the film is the romance, and ultimately the marriage, between Patricia and Erich. Although events of the time are never neglected, it is plainly the personal element of the story that most interests Borzage—the emotional effects of outside events on these four people and the way they are unable to avoid the complications to their lives caused by those events. The realistic underpinnings of this deeply romantic film give it a profoundly moving, richly emotional quality that a strictly sentimental love story could never attain.

Borzage's sensitive direction, the elegant cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Gigi), and the unobtrusively fluid editing all contribute to the strength of the movie. But this is above all else a movie about the emotional lives of its characters, the kind of film dependent on actors to put the story across. Borzage uses Taylor's pretty-boy blandness to good effect, making obvious the appeal of his hopeful, boyish personality to the world-weary Patricia. Young, who has the smallest role, is perhaps a bit mild as the most political of the three comrades, an idealist whose war experiences have transformed him into a committed activist. I kept wondering if a more passionate actor like the young James Stewart might have made a stronger impression in the role. Tone, as the most intelligent of the three, has never been better—by turns relaxed and intense, and although clearly in love with Patricia himself, deferential to her stronger feelings for Erich. Together the three men form a sort of trine of the masculine personality: emotions, action, and intellect.

Regular readers of The Movie Projector will be aware of how much I admire Margaret Sullavan and how strongly I feel that she deserves to be better known. (For more about her life and career, see my post on The Good Fairy.) In Three Comrades she gave probably the best performance of her relatively brief screen career, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress. (She lost the Oscar to Bette Davis for Jezebel.) Her marvelous Patricia, a woman of outward frailty and inner strength, is the glue that holds the movie together. Having lost her money and her health, she has resigned herself with stoical acceptance to a forlorn future. Yet she hasn't altogether lost her sense of humor—even if it has a touch of the gallows in it—or her capacity to accept and return love when she finds it. She is too much of a realist to nurture the false hope that her happiness with Erich will last; she is enough of a fatalist to know that forces outside their control make that unlikely. But she is completely willing to live for the present in the glow of their feelings for each other while she has the chance. When she recognizes that the time to let go of Erich has come, she does so with selflessness and grace. It is a performance of rare delicacy, nuance, and serenity.

One last thing I should mention is that Three Comrades is the only screenplay officially credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was not pleased with what MGM did with his script, though, and understandably so. In 1938 MGM still wanted to protect the distribution of its movies in Germany and actually submitted the script to the German ambassador to the US, who wanted certain changes made. All overt references to anything that might be construed as reflecting badly on contemporary Germany or the Nazi party were modified or removed. Even though in retrospect it's easy to see implicit criticism of Nazi Germany and the post-World War I attitudes which brought the Nazis to power, this criticism is so generic that there is no denying that the movie sidesteps crucial political issues. It wouldn't be until the powerful anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm (again starring Sullavan) in 1940—with World War II begun in Europe, although the US was not yet involved—that Borzage was able to criticize the Nazis openly.

I Vitelloni (1953)

2010-04-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini

What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.

The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.

I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).

With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.

But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.

Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.

One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.

No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

2010-04-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.

Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.

Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.

This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.

This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.

The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.

Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.

In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

2010-04-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Max Ophüls

David Thomson calls Letter from an Unknown Woman "a perfect film." I wouldn't go that far myself, but it is a very good one, not quite of the same caliber as La Ronde, Lola Montès, or the sublime Madame de, but in quality still close to those masterpieces. The film follows the lifelong infatuation of a woman, Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), with a concert pianist, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan). She first encounters him as a teenager when he moves into the apartment building in 19th-century Vienna where she lives with her widowed mother. She is separated from Stefan, on whom she has developed a girlish crush, when her mother remarries and the family moves to Linz. As a young woman, Lisa cannot free herself from her romantic obsession with Stefan and refusing offers of marriage, moves back to Vienna to become a salon model. She sets about stalking Stefan and after he finally notices her following him one night, he seduces her and has a brief affair with her before abandoning her and leaving Vienna. Lisa, pregnant by Stefan, has her baby and decides to keep him. Several years later she marries a wealthy older man and lives a comfortable but passionless life with him until one night she encounters Stefan at the opera. Seeing him again revives her feelings for him, and she arranges a rendezvous at the very apartment house where as a girl she first met him (a detail that gives the movie a wonderful circularity, in a way a foretaste of La Ronde). When she arrives, she realizes that he doesn't even remember her from any of their past encounters, that the passion she has nursed all those years has been completely on her part, and abruptly leaves.

As this brief synopsis makes clear, Letter from an Unknown Woman has much in common with the later work of Ophüls. It deals with sexual liaisons, marital infidelity, and the emotional damage that can result from fervent romantic passion. It is as fatalistic—its tragic outcome as inescapable—as Madame de and even ends the same way, in a duel that Stefan, like Vittorio de Sica's Baron in that film, is fated to lose but refuses to evade. It uses the device of a letter from Lisa to Stefan (the letter of the title) to provide the framework for the film's episodic narrative structure in the same way as Peter Ustinov's ringmaster's spiel in Lola Montès or Anton Walbrook's direct-to-camera narration as the storyteller in La Ronde or even the diamond earrings as they pass from one person to the next in Madame de.

Letter from an Unknown Woman has none of the detached irony and wit of those later films, though, going instead for the straight-ahead romantic approach of the Hollywood "women's picture." Even though it contains many elements of the conventional Hollywood soap opera—unrequited love, self-destructive romantic passion, illegitimate child, separated lovers, tragic ends for practically everyone involved—the movie seems far above the sentimental tearjerkers that were a staple of the studio years. For one thing, the emotions seem wholly genuine, not the synthetic passion of the standard tearjerker. The reason for this is the way Ophüls treats the story. The subject and the plot may be super-romantic, but the way he tells the story is realistic—restrained where most movies of this type are exaggerated, matter-of-fact where they bludgeon the audience with contrived and highly manipulative sentimentality.

The real impact of the movie comes not from ersatz sentiment, but from the authenticity of the emotional situation it depicts. Lisa has completely invested herself in an almost religious devotion to her intense feelings for Stefan. At the end of the movie, just when she believes that her most cherished desire is about to be realized, she suddenly sees that her entire emotional life has been based on a vain and pathetic self-delusion. The person she has made the center of her world literally doesn't even know she exists; her feelings for him not only have never been returned, but haven't even been recognized. The result of this epiphany is nothing less than emotional devastation. Anyone who has experienced anything resembling Lisa's situation will understand the power of her response and will also recognize that the authenticity of Ophüls's vision comes not from genre conventions, but from acute observation and personal memory.

The greatest practical obstacle Ophüls must overcome to get the viewer to accept the movie's premise is to make plausible Fontaine's portrayal of Lisa at three distinct periods of her life: as a teenager, a young woman in her mid-twenties, and a mature woman in her mid-thirties. Admittedly, making Fontaine, who was in her early thirties when the film was made, believable as Lisa requires a huge stretch of credibility, but he and Fontaine just manage to bring this off. Together, they convey these three different ages of the character through subtle adjustments in her appearance, through changes in her hair and costume that reflect her advancing age and social station: the lank, shoulder-length hair and the shapeless clothing that emphasizes her slender, undeveloped figure as a teenager; the middle-class shopgirl attire and pinned-up hair of her twenties; and finally the elegant, low-cut formal gowns, brilliant jewelry, and stylish coiffure as a chic socialite in her thirties. Ophüls also has Fontaine subtly modulate the timbre of her voice and the increasing self-assurance conveyed by her physical bearing as she matures. We see the continuity of the person over the years, but these subtle outer changes make it just believable that a compulsive Lothario like Stefan, who looks upon women more as objects than as individuals, might not. The lovely Fontaine was hardly a great actress, but with the help of Ophüls she gives one of her most accomplished performances, one that ranks right up there with those she gave for Hitchcock in Rebecca and Suspicion, in a part similar to those two but more demanding.

Viewers who prize directorial prowess will find much to admire. There are, of course, the customary extended takes and elegant, gliding camera moves of Ophüls. Then there is the vivid way that, confined to the studio and working on what was clearly a limited budget, he captures the look and atmosphere—and at the same time suggests the pervasive class divisions—of late 19th-century Austria. (The cinematography, by Franz Planer, is especially gorgeous in the pristine print recently premiered on TCM.) The cobbled streets, bourgeois beer gardens and exclusive restaurants, opera houses, modest apartments with their shared courtyards and opulent townhouses, and the clothing the people wear, from everyday street clothes to elaborate military uniforms and the formal evening wear of the rich—all these details relay the movie's setting as graphically as in the later films. We are always aware that the events in the movie occur in a distinct place and time, a place and time quite different from our own and forever locked in the past. The film is as much an elegy for a vanished way of life as it is a tragic love story, and it is this melancholy mood of the transience and the often illusory nature of both love and life that, as in much of Ophüls's work, lingers after the movie has ended.

Dangerous Liaisons (1988) / Valmont (1989)

2010-04-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dangerous Liaisons
****
Country: US-UK
Director: Stephen Frears

Valmont
***
Country: France-US
Director: Milos Forman

Released less than one year apart, these two movies were based on the same source, the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782. Dangerous Liaisons was adapted from the stage play by Christoper Hampton produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985. Hampton is a prolific British playwright, translator of plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Molière among others, and screenwriter who won an Oscar for his adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. Valmont was adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière, a multiple award-nominee and winner whose credentials are also impressive. He has done screen adaptations of works by esteemed writers like Flaubert, Proust, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. As well as Milos Forman, he has worked with such noted directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Andrzej Wajda, and in the 1960s and 1970s on no less than six films of Luis Buñuel.

When these two versions of the same novel were released, Dangerous Liaisons got a great deal more attention—better reviews, more award nominations (seven Oscar nominations and three wins to one nomination for Valmont), and considerably better business. Dangerous Liaisons cost about $14 million to make and had a domestic gross of more than $35 million, while Valmont's budget was $33 million with a domestic gross of only a little more than $1 million. Yet Valmont has its admirers. David Thomson states flatly that "Valmont is the better film." So after I saw Valmont recently for the first time, I decided to go back and rewatch Dangerous Liaisons, which I hadn't seen since its release and which I recalled as being outstanding. My conclusion, based on watching the two movies about one week apart: I'll go along with the majority view and say that Dangerous Liaisons is clearly the better of the two.

Glenn Close, John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons

Both movies contain the same basic plot elements. In late 18-century Paris two aristocrats, the widowed Marquise de Verteuil and the Don Juan-like Vicomte de Valmont, wager on the seduction by Valmont of two young women—Cécile, the virginal teenaged daughter, just out of a convent school, of a close friend of the Marquise and Madame de Tourvel, a young married woman whom Valmont has determined to seduce. Valmont's prize if he succeeds: a night with the Marquise. The rest of the movie deals with the machinations of the two in their conspiracy and with the repercussions, both expected and unexpected, of their efforts.

Annette Bening, Colin Firth in Valmont

Yet despite the similarity of plot, the two movies are quite distinct in tone. Forman, who has a tendency to trivialize his plots and characters, does just that in Valmont. He makes the movie an amusing but superficial comedy of sexual manners and hypocrisy. Frears, on the other hand, takes an altogether darker approach, making his version a trenchant commentary on the sociopolitical climate of prerevolutionary France and a probing examination of the psychology of two warped individuals.

Forman's Marquise (Annette Bening) is motivated by personal revenge: Her lover has suddenly broken off with her after becoming engaged to young Cécile. Whereas the Marquise is perfectly acceptable as a mistress, he insists on a virgin for his wife, and the humiliated Marquise is determined to use Valmont to play a dirty trick on her former lover. Frears's Marquise (Glenn Close) is a far more complex and dangerous person. For her the wager with Valmont is not about personal revenge but, as she explains to him in a speech with a clear feminist slant, about exercising power in the only way open to her sex, a sort of revenge both on social conventions which leave no other outlet for her ambitions and on the males who create and perpetuate those mores that disenfranchise her sex.

Bening's Marquise is an idle, self-absorbed woman who sees the manipulation of others as an amusing game to ease her boredom, oblivious of the harm she might be causing to her human playthings. Close's icy Marquise is altogether scarier, a malevolent puppeteer who looks upon others not as playthings but as victims, who sees the control of others as a means to effect their psychological devastation and social ruin. Her pastimes are not mere frivolities, but all-out warfare, and the bedroom is her battlefield, where harm done to those caught up in her intrigues is not collateral damage but the main objective.

Similarly, Forman's Valmont (Colin Firth) seems far less malicious than Frears's (John Malkovich). The very casting of these two actors in the role—the essentially likable Firth versus the smarmy, saurian Malkovich—indicates how differently the two directors view this character. Firth's Valmont, like Bening's Marquise, is a narcissistic sensualist driven by the compulsion for self-gratification. Malkovich's Valmont, like Close's Marquise, is obsessed with power and control. For him the fulfillment of his libidinous impulses is less an end in itself than the felicitous by-product of the need to dominate others.

At one point in each film Valmont concocts a charade to win the sympathies of Mme de Tourvel, who has become aware of his scandalous reputation as a serial seducer. The way this is presented in each film makes a good comparison of the very different ambiances the two directors are aiming for. In Valmont the scene takes place when the Vicomte is out rowing on a lake. He leaves his manservant on the shore and rows to the opposite bank, where Mme de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) is sitting. Telling her he cannot swim, he threatens to drown himself if she will not have him. When she calls his bluff, he throws himself into the water and stays under for an alarming amount of time. Just when she is about to panic and call for help, he pops to the surface and confesses his deception. In the meantime the servant has jumped into the lake to save him and begins to flounder, and Valmont, now standing up in what is clearly about three feet of water, ends up rescuing the servant. It's an amusing sequence, but fairly predictable and not far removed from the farcical sort of scheme Bertie Wooster might have devised to get the attention of an attractive girl in a story by P. G. Wodehouse.

In Dangerous Liaisons, Valmont does something very different. He stages a theatrical scene intended to improve his image to Mme de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer). Knowing that the footman she has sent to spy on him will be nearby to witness the scene, he contrives to be out walking with his servant when they pass the hovel of peasants being evicted for being unable to pay their taxes. Offering to pay the taxes, he saves them from eviction and succeeds in convincing Mme de Tourvel of his humanity and charity. The entire scene is a cynical fabrication intended to deceive, while the equivalent sequence in Valmont is a fairly transparent ruse intended—and played—more to amuse than to mislead.

And because class conflict exacerbated by excessive taxation to support the extravagant lives of the nobility and to pay off the huge debts of the Seven Years' War was one of the main causes of the French Revolution, Frears and Hampton give the episode a caustic historical-political undertone. (Earlier the Marquise remarks to Valmont that the "century is drawing to a close." The French Revolution occurred in 1789, seven years after Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published.) They even manage to make an implicit criticism of the ethos of greed, arrant materialism, and the widening gulf between rich and poor of the Reagan-Thatcher era, at the height of which the movie was made. Touches like this give Dangerous Liaisons real bite in comparison to Valmont.

Dangerous Liaisons bests Valmont in other ways too. The dialogue is snappier and more witty, peppered with irony and double-entendre. The pacing of the movie is brisker, using ellipsis and narrative jumps to avoid the lulls and sometimes laborious elaboration of action in Valmont, with its more leisurely rhythms and nearly 40 minutes' longer runtime. Frears's film is also better structured and edited than Forman's. For a large portion of the first half of Valmont, Firth disappears completely while Forman concentrates on Bening, something Frears avoids by cross-cutting more frequently among the various plot strains. But probably the biggest advantage Dangerous Liaisons has over Valmont is its cast. It's true that the more forceful conception of the characters by Hampton is in large part responsible for this. Close, Malkovich, and Pfeiffer are simply given more to work with, but even so they make much stronger impressions than do their counterparts in Valmont. Glenn Close in particular dominates the movie with her predatory Marquise de Verteuil and received an Oscar nomination for best actress (with Pfeiffer receiving a nomination for best supporting actress).

L'Eclisse (1962)

2010-03-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

2010-03-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: China
Director: Mu Fei

I had never heard of this movie before I spotted it in the library recently. Reading on the DVD case that it was chosen the best Chinese film of all time by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society in 2002, I just had to watch it. I haven't seen many films from Mainland China, and those I have seen were all made in the last twenty years or so. But I must say that this one is an unpretentious gem which deserves its status as a classic.

Spring in a Small Town—the last of only six movies directed by Mu Fei, who died in Hong Kong in 1951—seems on its surface quite simple. There are only five characters in the movie and just a handful of locations, and the plot can be summed up in a few sentences. In China just after the end of WW II a man weakened by illness (it is described at various times as tuberculosis, a heart condition, and depression), the son of a family that has lost its wealth, lives in the half-ruined family home with his unhappy wife, his 15-year old sister, and an elderly family servant. Into this placid existence comes a visitor whose presence brings the somber household to life but at the same time causes a great deal of emotional tension. The visitor, a medical doctor, is the best friend of the husband but also happens to have been the first love of the wife.

The action in the film is largely psychological and interior, and much more is suggested than openly expressed. This is a movie where an apparently calm surface conceals turmoil and unsuspected depths just underneath, where the characters' emotions are reined in and rarely revealed to one another, where the most commonplace things—unemphatic gestures, brief glances, ordinary conversations—can hold great meaning. Yet these small things evoke strong emotional responses in the viewer—no easy thing to accomplish in such a circumscribed narrative context.

Mu Fei's subdued direction shows great confidence in the power of location, situation, and acting rather than directorial flourishes to put across evocative emotions, yet in no way does the movie seem impersonal. This unobtrusive style applied to an uncomplicated story resembles in spirit the postwar humanist realism of movies like Forbidden Games, Umberto D, and Pather Panchali. The few outdoor locations are particularly well chosen. The ruined city walls where the movie opens and where characters often meet are a reminder of the isolation of these people and of the precariousness of their existence amidst encroaching decay. The river where, in an especially lovely sequence, the principal characters spend a day out boating suggests liberation from the tedium and limitation of their daily lives. In interior shots the director shows great attention to architectural pattern and detail and also great care with the atmospheric use of lighting, especially in scenes that take place at night.

Equally responsible for the film's greatness are the restrained, naturalistic performances of the three main actors, each of whom immediately establishes a dominant mood for his or her character that never wavers. As the visitor, Wei Li is a bundle of repressed conflict between the loyalty and sympathy he feels for his sick friend and the powerful emotions caused by unexpectedly encountering his first love again. Wei Wei, superb as the wife, is also torn between conflicting feelings—on the one hand resignation to the barrenness of her present life with her husband, on the other the longing for emotional fulfillment awakened by the reappearance of a more vital man from her past. Perhaps most impressive of all is Yu Shi as the sickly husband, a non-reactive man fading away from his own passivity, but acutely aware of his responsibility for his wife's disappointment and of the hopelessness of their situation. His facial expressions, his posture and bearing, his lethargic movements all deftly portray a man defeated and profoundly sad. In one poignant scene he sneaks into his wife's empty bedroom, walks to her bed, gingerly caresses her pillow for an instant, then, overcome with emotion, flees.

One final comment: The visual transfer of this movie is only fair; you have to imagine how splendid it would look in a pristine, restored state. Even so, Spring in a Small Town is so affecting and so subtly nuanced that I really can't recommend it more highly.

For another view of Spring in a Small Town read Allan Fish's excellent review at Wonders in the Dark.

Black Angel (1946)

2010-03-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

***
Country: US
Director: Roy William Neill

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) was an American author who after writing several unsuccessful literary novels in the 1920s and 30s turned to genre writing and, sometimes publishing under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, became a prolific writer in the thriller and mystery genres. His eerie, convoluted tales, whose surprise endings were often based on far-fetched psychological premises, proved to be ideal fodder for the movies of the 1940s and early 50s, and according to Wikipedia more screenplays for films noirs (apparently using a pretty broad definition of the term) were adapted from his works than from those of any other writer. As a failed writer of serious literature, he reportedly had little respect for these commercial novels and short stories, considering them little more than potboilers. But he was unquestionably successful at producing them and earned a comfortable living from their sale. Robert Siodmak's early film noir The Phantom Lady was based on one of his novels as was The Leopard Man, one of the Val Lewton horror films. In the late 1960s François Truffaut made two movies adapted from his work, The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window was an elaboration on Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder."

In 1946 Universal released a nifty little psychological noir called Black Angel, based on Woolrich's 1943 novel of the same title. The film is essentially a murder mystery that centers on the killing of a blackmailing floozie named Mavis Marlowe. The two main characters of the film are a former nightclub singer, Cathy Bennett (June Vincent)—whose husband, Mavis's former lover and one of her blackmail victims, is arrested for the murder, then convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to die—and Mavis's ex-husband, the alcoholic songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). Cathy is convinced that her husband, whom she still loves even though he was cheating on her with Mavis, is innocent and persuades Martin to join forces with her to find the real murderer. As the execution date draws nearer, the two locate intriguing clues that at first seem to be drawing them closer to the real killer but always end up leading them down blind alleys.

The most promising clues have to do with the shady owner of a nightclub, Marko (Peter Lorre), another of Mavis's blackmail victims. To get more information about Marko, Cathy and Martin audition for, and get, a job performing at Marko's club as a singer and piano accompanist. A great deal of the action takes place at the club, and highlights include their humorous audition—a bizarre touch of black comedy in an otherwise somber movie—a couple of good song performances, some imaginative camera work in the eye-poppingly elaborate nightclub set, and a very suspenseful sequence with Cathy trying to burgle the safe in Marko's private office before he returns.

The cast is uniformly good. The attractive, sweet-natured Vincent is a bit lacking in charisma but still makes a determined heroine and is quite a good singer too. This was the biggest movie role she ever got, but she did a great deal of work in television in the 1950s and 60s. Lorre, of course, is a reliably sinister presence. Broderick Crawford, in one of his first roles after military service in WW II, plays the detective investigating the murder, and his performance is a revelation. He acts with uncharacteristic restraint, giving the quietest, most controlled, and most sympathetic performance I've ever seen by him. This movie makes it clear that Crawford's physique and vocal timbre resulted in typecasting that severely limited the range of characters he was allowed to play. Best of all is Duryea, whose atypically introspective performance is quite affecting. Duryea made a career of playing despicable rats in movies like Scarlet Street and Winchester '73, and he was great in those roles. But this film makes it clear that, like Crawford, he was capable of much more. He succinctly underplays his part and convincingly comes off as a nice guy. He is in a sense the real victim of the movie—a hapless loser whose creativity is stifled by his alcoholism, a man in love first with a woman who despises and exploits him, then as he falls in love with Cathy, with a woman who cannot return his affection.

This was the last film directed by Roy William Neill (he died in 1946), best known for Universal's Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone. Like the best of those movies, Black Angel shows him as a craftsman-like director capable of finding and revealing the strengths and subtleties in his material and especially suited to atmospheric stories of crime and suspense. If he had lived longer, he might well have become one of the more dependable directors of the American noir movement of the late 1940s.

My Oscar Picks, Part 2: 1945-1955

2010-03-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

In this post I'm continuing the process I began last time of comparing my own Oscar picks from among the nominees with the real winners. As before, the opinions expressed in this post are strictly those of the author and are not intended to be taken as objective judgments.

1945

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: The Lost Weekend
My Pick: The Lost Weekend

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend
My Pick: Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend

BEST ACTOR:
The Winner: Ray Milland, The Lost Weekend
My Pick: Ray Milland, The Lost Weekend

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce
My Pick: Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: James Dunn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
My Pick: Robert Mitchum, The Story of G.I. Joe

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Anne Revere, National Velvet
My Pick: Eve Arden, Mildred Pierce

This wasn't a particularly strong year in American movies, so the best were pretty easy to identify. Both Milland and Crawford got the roles of their careers and made the most of them. Interestingly, neither was the first choice for the role. Milland got the part after Paramount rejected Wilder's first choice, Jose Ferrer. Crawford was cast only after Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, and Ann Sheridan turned down the part. I departed from the Academy's choices only in the supporting actor and actress categories, awards that seemed to me based on the sentimental nature of the parts. This was the only nomination Robert Mitchum ever received, for what at the time was his most noticeable part in a major picture. (In the New York Film Critics Circle awards, Mitchum was the runner-up to Milland for best actor.) As well as Eve Arden, Ann Blyth was also nominated for Mildred Pierce, and at this time it was rare for a nominee to prevail when more than one actor was nominated for the same picture. Blyth's role was showy but her acting awfully unsubtle in comparison to Arden, one of the great supporting performers. This is for me her best work, a distillation of her screen essence. Biggest omission: John Ford, best director for They Were Expendable.

1946

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: The Best Years of Our Lives
My Pick: The Best Years of Our Lives

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner, William Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives
My Pick: Robert Siodmak, The Killers

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Fredric March, The Best Years of Our Lives
My Pick: James Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Olivia de Havilland, To Each His Own
My Pick: Celia Johnson, Brief Encounter

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Harold Russell, The Best Years of Our Lives
My Pick: Claude Rains, Notorious

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Anne Baxter, The Razor's Edge
My Pick: Anne Baxter, The Razor's Edge

The Best Years of Our Lives was not only timely but also an excellent movie. Wyler was such an impeccable craftsman that he was incapable of making a sloppy film. But The Killers, which wasn't nominated for best picture, is not only an essential film noir but also a real director's movie, so I went with Siodmak for best director. I'm a great fan of Fredric March, but I think Dana Andrews gave the better performance in The Best Years of Our Lives, the best of his career, and he wasn't even nominated. James Stewart in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life—one of the greatest, most moving screen performances of all time. It would be impossible for me even to consider any of the other nominees for best actor. Best actress was the weakest it had been in years. The two best performances of the year—Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase (directed by Siodmak) and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious—weren't even nominated. Olivia de Havilland took best actress for her performance in the soapish To Each His Own. (That Oscar might also have been a reward for her courage in standing up to Jack L. Warner even if it meant not working for a couple of years. A second good performance playing good and evil twins in The Dark Mirror, again directed by Siodmak, probably helped too.) For the first time I went with a British actress, Celia Johnson, in Brief Encounter. Teresa Wright wasn't nominated as best supporting actress for The Best Years of Our Lives, so I stuck with Anne Baxter, the best of those who were nominated. Harold Russell's win was plainly a sentimental one, especially in view of the special award he also received from the Academy for his brave and heartfelt performance. I chose instead Claude Rains, nominated several times before but always bested by someone else. Who else could have actually made you feel sorry for such an unrepentant villain? Biggest omission: Notorious—for picture, director, actor, or actress.

1947

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Gentleman's Agreement
My Pick: Great Expectations

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Elia Kazan, Gentleman's Agreement
My Pick: David Lean, Great Expectations

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Ronald Colman, A Double Life
My Pick: John Garfield, Body and Soul

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Loretta Young, The Farmer's Daughter
My Pick: Susan Hayward, Smash-Up

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street
My Choice: Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Celeste Holm, Gentleman's Agreement
My Choice: Celeste Holm, Gentleman's Agreement

I disagreed with most of the Academy's selections this year. Gentleman's Agreement is another of those noble but dull pictures chosen to show Hollywood's endorsement of Right Thinking. Who today would seriously consider it a significant film? Great Expectations, on the other hand, is to my mind the best movie version of a Dickens novel ever, and also one of the best movies of any kind ever made. Oscar went with sentiment over merit and adhered to the Career Achievement concept with its award of the best acting prizes to Colman for his flashy performance and Young for her earnest one, two respected veterans who finally got a role that justified honoring their entire body of work. I went instead for two younger actors who both gave bold, intense, and exciting performances. I did agree, though, with the Academy's choices in the supporting categories. The supporting actor field was especially strong this year—any of the five nominated performances would have been a worthy choice—but I stuck with Edmund Gwenn's Kris Kringle. Biggest omission: Robert Mitchum, Out of the Past.

1948

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Hamlet
My Pick: The Red Shoes

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
My Pick: John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Laurence Olivier, Hamlet
My Pick: Laurence Olivier, Hamlet

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Jane Wyman, Johnny Belinda
My Pick: Olivia de Havilland, The Snake Pit

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Walter Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
My Pick: Walter Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Claire Trevor, Key Largo
My Pick: Claire Trevor, Key Largo

For the second year in a row, I went with a British film for best picture. Michael Powell, who was never nominated for best director, is in my directors' pantheon, and The Red Shoes is my favorite of his many fine movies. (Anthony Lane recently wrote a loving review of this film in the New Yorker, well worth checking out.) This was a great year for John Huston, who directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the finest American film of the year and arguably the first revisionist Western—although the location was transplanted to Mexico—in which he grafted his noir sensibility onto that most American of genres. In addition, he was responsible for my picks for the two best supporting performances of the year as well as two notable performances—Humphrey Bogart in Sierra Madre and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo—either of which would have been worthy of a best actor nomination. I concurred with the Academy's award to Olivier for best actor for his Hamlet, but I don't see how they failed to give the best actress award to Olivia de Havilland. Jane Wyman's award would have been understandable in another year but not in this one, in which de Havilland gave the best performance of her career and one of the very best of the decade by any American actress. The reason de Havilland lost was likely that just two years earlier the Academy had given her a premature Career Achievement Oscar for To Each His Own. Oscar doesn't tend to repeat itself that soon if it can be avoided. Biggest omission: John Wayne, Red River.

1949

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: All the King's Men
My Pick: The Heiress

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, A Letter to Three Wives
My Pick: Carol Reed, The Fallen Idol

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Broderick Crawford, All the King's Men
My Pick: Gregory Peck, Twelve O'Clock High

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Olivia de Havilland, The Heiress
My Pick: Olivia de Havilland, The Heiress

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Dean Jagger, Twelve O'Clock High
My Pick: Ralph Richardson, The Heiress

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Mercedes McCambridge, All the King's Men
My Pick: Mercedes McCambridge, All the King's Men

All the King's Men strikes me as an uneven picture that plays like a superficial condensation of the 464-page long Pulitzer Prize-winning novel it's based on, carried largely by the strength of the performances. The movie's deficiencies in both narrative and character development are all the more surprising given the screenwriting experience and proven ability of its writer-director, Robert Rossen. A much better movie about the contemporary South—Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust, based on the novel by William Faulkner—didn't receive a single nomination. I went instead with yet another literary adaptation directed by William Wyler. While Mankiewicz's winning picture is quite enjoyable, it has nowhere near the gravity and artistry of Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, the reason I chose Reed for best director. Gregory Peck did what to my mind is the best work of his career in Twelve O'Clock High, and I chose his rounded and subtle performance as the best of the year by an actor. The Academy's choice, Broderick Crawford, was certainly striking as Willie Stark, but I found his performance compromised by the opacity of the character, whose transformation from idealist to corrupt demagogue (the gruff Crawford is much more convincing as the latter) is presented as a fait accompli rather than explained. De Havilland gave another brilliant performance in The Heiress, easily outacting any of the other nominees. For supporting actor, I went with Ralph Richardson as de Havilland's cold father in The Heiress. Biggest omission: James Cagney's unforgettable Cody Jarrett in White Heat.

1950

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: All About Eve
My Pick: All About Eve

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve
My Pick: Carol Reed, The Third Man

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Jose Ferrer, Cyrano de Bergerac
My Pick: William Holden, Sunset Blvd.

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday
My Pick: Bette Davis, All About Eve

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: George Sanders, All About Eve
My Pick: George Sanders, All About Eve

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Josephine Hull, Harvey
My Pick: Thelma Ritter, All About Eve

Another historical year for the number of high-quality pictures released. Best picture was a close call between All About Eve and Sunset Blvd. A tie would have been justified, but I went with Eve by a nose. For best director I chose Carol Reed for The Third Man (not nominated for best picture), the movie that the British Film Institute named the best British film of the 20th century. I divided the acting awards between Eve and Sunset Blvd. Davis's incredible failure to win best actress for her Margo Channing is probably down to the fact that costar Anne Baxter was also nominated, thus splitting the vote. Draining more votes away from Davis was Gloria Swanson in her comeback performance as the demented has-been Norma Desmond. Another factor at play was that at the time nobody had won three times for best lead performance, and perhaps the Academy voters were reluctant to break that precedent for Davis, who had recently left Warner Bros. after a string of flops. As for Holden, nothing in his ten-year-long career had suggested he was capable of this level of acting, and perhaps Academy voters were simply caught off-guard. Maybe they were too mesmerized by Swanson's flamboyance in the same picture to recognize the subtlety of Holden's introspective performance. Or maybe his opportunistic Joe Gillis simply hit too close to home for comfort. In the supporting categories, I went with George Sanders as the acidulous Addison de Witt and Thelma Ritter as the wise and loyal Birdie in All About Eve. (Maybe Mankiewizc should have gotten a special award for creating the most amusing character names.) Biggest omission: Humphrey Bogart's Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place.

1951

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: An American in Paris
My Pick: A Streetcar Named Desire

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: George Stevens, A Place in the Sun
My Pick: Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Humphrey Bogart, The African Queen
My Pick: Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire
My Pick: Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Karl Malden, A Streetcar Named Desire
My Pick: Karl Malden, A Streetcar Named Desire

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Kim Hunter, A Streetcar Named Desire
My Pick: Thelma Ritter, The Mating Season

The most astounding year for misguided awards since 1941. I can only infer that even though its preoccupation with sex had been toned down from the stage version, A Streetcar Named Desire was just too shocking and unconventional for the Academy. Instead, they went for the charming but innocuous An American in Paris (far from the best Hollywood musical) for best picture and gave a Career Achievement Award to George Stevens for his tasteful direction of A Place in the Sun. It is incomprehensible that Marlon Brando was denied an Oscar for the most innovative and influential performance by an actor of the decade. That Humphrey Bogart got a Career Achievement Oscar for his emasculated character performance in The African Queen is simply a travesty, a repudiation of the forceful screen persona he had worked so hard to establish during the previous ten years. At least the Academy realized that Vivien Leigh, playing a delusional middle-aged version of Scarlett O'Hara, was as in 1939 the only reasonable choice for best actress. For best supporting actress I chose Thelma Ritter for the second year in a row for this, her best comedy performance, over Kim Hunter, who I thought was overshadowed by her costars. Biggest omission: Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train.

1952

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: The Greatest Show on Earth
My Pick: High Noon

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: John Ford, The Quiet Man
My Pick: Fred Zinneman, High Noon

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Gary Cooper, High Noon
My Pick: Gary Cooper, High Noon

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Shirley Booth, Come Back, Little Sheba
My Pick: Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Anthony Quinn, Viva Zapata!
My Pick: Jack Palance, Sudden Fear

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Gloria Grahame, The Bad and the Beautiful
My Pick: Jean Hagen, Singin' in the Rain

In this year's best picture race a bloated, lavish entertainment once again prevailed over a smaller, more intimate picture. Maybe Westerns weren't taken seriously; a Western hadn't won since Cimarron in 1931 and wouldn't again for several more decades. Or maybe the possibility that High Noon could be interpreted as a condemnation of McCarthyism (this during the height of the Cold War and the Hollywood blacklists) scared off the Academy. (I've never particularly seen the movie in this light myself, always focusing more on the universality of its depiction of collective cowardice.) High Noon's director was snubbed too, in favor of veteran John Ford for the ultimate expression of his Irish fetish in the cornball (but in its way amusing) blarney of The Quiet Man. At least Gary Cooper, perfectly cast as the laconic sheriff under pressure, was justly rewarded for his performance in High Noon. Shirley Booth took best actress for her turn as a pathetic frump in Come Back, Little Sheba, but I have to admit that this is a performance I find wearing and that after a while begins to irritate. I can understand how living with her would drive Burt Lancaster to drink! Instead I went for Julie Harris as Carson McCullers's Frankie in another Zinneman film, the underappreciated The Member of the Wedding. She's not wholly convincing as a 12-year old but might pass for a mature 14-year old. Still, it's a mighty impressive performance, a unique character played with amazing concentration and conviction. I have a weakness for psycho characters, even if the Academy doesn't, and for supporting actor went with Jack Palance's psycho in the Joan Crawford damsel-in-distress melodrama Sudden Fear. I like Gloria Grahame a lot, but apparently the Academy didn't like the bad girls she played to a tee (including the one in Sudden Fear) and rewarded her instead for this rather bland, minuscule part. For supporting actress I picked Jean Hagen's broadly comical Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain. Biggest omission: Singin' in the Rain for best picture.

1953

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: From Here to Eternity
My Pick: From Here to Eternity

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Fred Zinneman, From Here to Eternity
My Pick: Fred Zinneman, From Here to Eternity

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: William Holden, Stalag 17
My Pick: Montgomery Clift, From Here to Eternity

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday
My Pick: Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Frank Sinatra, From Here to Eternity
My Pick: Frank Sinatra, From Here to Eternity

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Donna Reed, From Here to Eternity
My Pick: Thelma Ritter, Pickup on South Street

The Academy made up for its mistakes of the year before by giving Oscars to Zinneman and his follow-up picture. This is a movie that still impresses me today. Its narrative strategy of relating two connected but parallel stories that barely intersect seems years ahead of its time. William Holden got his Oscar for playing a softened version of essentially the same character as in Sunset Blvd. but in a different environment and with a more acceptable outcome, thus removing any implicit criticism of the Hollywood establishment. He was probably helped by the dual nominations for best actor for From Here to Eternity. Burt Lancaster's performance in the movie seemed to attract more attention than Montgomery Clift's, but I went with Clift as the tortured Private Prewitt. Audrey Hepburn hit the big time with an irresistible performance, and there was no way anyone else was going to get the Oscar for best actress this year, a sentiment with which I completely concur. Donna Reed was impressive in the Zinneman picture, but the great Thelma Ritter, who for me can do no wrong, gave her best performance ever in a rare dramatic role in Samuel Fuller's Cold War film noir Pickup on South Street, and I went with her for best supporting actress for the third time in four years. Biggest omission: The Naked Spur—for picture, director, actor, supporting actor (Robert Ryan), or supporting actress (Janet Leigh).

1954

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: On the Waterfront
My Pick: On the Waterfront

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront
My Pick: Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront
My Pick: Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Grace Kelly, The Country Girl
My Pick: Judy Garland, A Star Is Born

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Edmond O'Brien, The Barefoot Contessa
My Pick: Edmond O'Brien, The Barefoot Contessa

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Eva Marie Saint, On the Waterfront
My Pick: Eva Marie Saint, On the Waterfront

For once the Academy's concept of best largely conformed to mine. I departed from their choice in only two categories, but those departures were significant ones. Alfred Hitchcock, like Cary Grant and Greta Garbo, is one of those classic film artists whose lack of an Oscar is frequently cited as proof of the Academy's disconnect with quality and consequent irrelevance. Rear Window (not nominated for best picture) is without a doubt Hitchcock's most loved film, by cinephiles and ordinary moviegoers alike. It satisfies and entertains in an exhilarating way that no other American movie of the year does, and those qualities are clearly down to Hitchcock's expertise in the manipulation of material, actors, visual realization, and above all audience reaction to achieve precisely calculated effects. Grace Kelly, who appeared in no less than five films released this year, was a lovely and enchanting actress, especially when directed by Alfred Hitchcock. But her Oscar for her dowdy performance in The Country Girl has always mystified me. Perhaps it was a reward for deglamorizing herself and playing against type, hardly the last time this would happen. Judy Garland, on the other hand, gave a big, flavorful, and variegated performance in A Star Is Born. (She is said to have lost to Kelly by just six votes, one of the closest races in Oscar history.) Garland, who hadn't appeared on the screen in four years, was probably hurt by the feeling that she was past her prime (while Kelly's star was on the rise) and by her reputation for neurotic, unprofessional behavior. Also unhelpful was the fact that the movie was butchered after previews. The film's director, George Cukor, certainly attributed her loss to pre-release tampering with the picture by Warner Bros. and has stated that neither he nor Garland could bear to watch the release version of the movie, knowing what had been removed. Garland's brilliance shines through even in the truncated version that remained after re-editing, but it wasn't until the restored version of 1983 that the full genius of her performance (or of costar and fellow nominee James Mason's) could be appreciated. Biggest omission: James Stewart, Rear Window.

1955

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Marty
My Pick: Marty

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Delbert Mann, Marty
My Pick: Delbert Mann, Marty

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Ernest Borgnine, Marty
My Pick: James Dean, East of Eden

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Anna Magnani, The Rose Tatoo
My Pick: Katharine Hepburn, Summertime

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Jack Lemmon, Mr. Roberts
My Pick: Jack Lemmon, Mr. Roberts

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Jo Van Fleet, East of Eden
My Pick: Betsy Blair, Marty

Many people find Marty overly sentimental, but I've liked this movie since I first saw it many years ago. I find its sentiment honest and, by Hollywood standards, pretty restrained, and for once Paddy Chayevsky's writing isn't saddled with a heavy-handed Message. If East of Eden, The Night of the Hunter, or Rebel Without a Cause had been nominated for best picture, making a choice would have been much more difficult. I was tempted to diverge from the Academy's choice of best director because Elia Kazan was nominated (Nicholas Ray, who would have been my first choice, wasn't), but in the end I didn't really see any reason to split the picture and director awards. Ernest Borgnine got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the lead in Marty. However, I went with James Dean. Admittedly, his equally fine performance in Rebel Without a Cause the same year influenced me in this choice. Dean was probably too young and too radical in his acting style to prevail over Borgnine, and the Academy voters might have been thinking that if he turned out not to be a flash-in-the-pan, he would have more chances to compete for the award. I like Magnani very much, but subtlety was not part of her acting style, and nowhere is this more apparent than in her English language movies. I adore Hepburn's finely calibrated acting in Summertime and for best actress went with her graceful performance instead. I didn't find Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden that impressive, most of her costars giving stronger performances—including Julie Harris and Raymond Massey, neither one nominated. For best supporting actress I preferred Betsy Blair's touching performance as the repressed, parent-dominated teacher in Marty. Perhaps all those other wins for the picture hurt her chances, and the Academy felt compelled to recognize East of Eden with some award. Biggest omission: The Night of the Hunter—best picture, director, actor, or supporting actress (Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish).

THE SUMMING UP 1934-1955

BEST PICTURE
Agreed: 9
Disagreed: 13

BEST DIRECTOR
Agreed: 11
Disagreed: 11

BEST ACTOR
Agreed: 6
Disagreed: 16

BEST ACTRESS
Agreed: 7
Disagreed: 15

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Agreed: 12
Disagreed: 8

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Agreed: 11
Disagreed: 9

During these years, I disagreed with the Academy most often in the lead acting awards. The reason is likely that these are the awards most influenced by personal popularity with peers, by box office success, and by sentimental appeal. But I must say that even though the Academy didn't duplicate my pick all that often, the choices they did make were generally acceptable ones—good performances that I can live with. The majority might not have been my own preference, and it's shocking how many memorable performances weren't even nominated, but looking back over the list of winners, I can't think of any winning performances that were downright mediocre. Although I disagreed with the best picture awards less often, I would say that those were, in comparison, far more serious disagreements. The Great Ziegfeld over Dodsworth, The Life of Emile Zola over The Awful Truth, How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane, Gentlemen's Agreement over Great Expectations, An American in Paris over A Streetcar Named Desire, The Greatest Show on Earth over High Noon—to my mind these are all horribly misguided awards. I think that this pattern of making forgivable mistakes over the acting awards and horrendously glaring mistakes over the best picture award is one that has continued to plague the Academy even beyond the years under consideration in these last two posts, and I expect this pattern to persist for as long as the Oscars continue.

My Oscar Picks, Part 1: 1934-1944

2010-02-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

With the Academy Awards coming up soon, I thought it would be fun over the next two weeks to compare past winners in the major categories with my own picks from among the nominees, from 1934, the first year awards were given for the calendar year, through 1955. I tended to divide the best picture and best director awards more often than the Academy for the simple reason that the nominations in these categories don't always coincide. (The entire Academy chooses the best picture nominees; only members of the directors' branch choose best director nominees.) With two exceptions (I'll explain why) I chose only from among the actual nominees, so there were times when my own favorite wasn't in the running, although this really didn't happen all that often. In truth, I haven't seen every single picture and performance that was nominated in every single year, but then I imagine the same applies to quite a few real voters. Here, then, are my picks preceded by the winners. I also included what I thought was the gravest oversight in the nominations for each year. (For the other nominees, click on the link to the Official Academy Awards Database in the sidebar and search by category and year.)

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this post are strictly those of the author and are not intended to be taken as objective judgments!

1934

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: It Happened One Night
My Pick: It Happened One Night

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Frank Capra, It Happened One Night
My Pick: Frank Capra, It Happened One Night

BEST ACTOR:
The Winner: Clark Gable, It Happened One Night
My Pick: William Powell, The Thin Man

BEST ACTRESS:
The Winner: Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night
My Pick: Greta Garbo, Queen Christina

This year there were twelve nominees for best picture and three nominees in most other categories. Write-in votes were allowed on the final ballot, and Bette Davis, not nominated for her breakthrough performance in Of Human Bondage, was expected to win best actress as a write-in candidate. She actually came in 3rd (the Academy announced the order of the top three vote-getters in 1932/33, 1934, and 1935), after Norma Shearer for The Barretts of Wimpole Street. I'm a huge fan of Davis—she's my favorite movie actress of all time—and also of Colbert. But I still went with my own write-in candidate, Greta Garbo for Queen Christina. With only three nominations in all categories but best picture, the other choices were pretty easy. I differed from the Academy only in my choice for best actor—William Powell as Nick Charles in The Thin Man, who surprisingly came in 3rd after Frank Morgan for a supporting performance in The Affairs of Cellini. Biggest omission (besides Davis and Garbo): Twentieth Century—for picture, director, actor, or actress.

1935

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Mutiny on the Bounty
My Pick: The Informer

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: John Ford, The Informer
My Pick: John Ford, The Informer

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Victor McLaglen, The Informer
My Pick: Fredric March, Les Misérables

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Bette Davis, Dangerous
My Pick: Katharine Hepburn, Alice Adams

There were twelve nominees again for best picture and five nominees in most other categories this year, although still only three for best director. Curiously, there were six nominations for best actress and four for best actor. Three of the latter were for Mutiny on the Bounty, a surefire vote-splitter that guaranteed McLaglen would win. Of the three nominees from Bounty, Charles Laughton got the most votes, coming in 3rd after write-in candidate Paul Muni for Black Fury. (Has anyone ever seen this?) Since this was the last year write-in votes were permitted, I exercised that prerogative and for best actor chose Fredric March as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. Even Davis acknowledged that her win for best actress was a consolation prize for being overlooked the year before and that she had expected the Oscar to go to Hepburn, who came in 2nd. Although all four major awards had gone to a comedy the year before, this year the Academy initiated a trend of favoring heavy emoting over comedy, a trend that continues to this day. Biggest omission: George Cukor, best director for David Copperfield.

1936

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: The Great Ziegfeld
My Pick: Dodsworth

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Frank Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
My Pick: William Wyler, Dodsworth

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Paul Muni, The Story of Louis Pasteur
My Pick: Walter Huston, Dodsworth

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Luise Rainer, The Great Ziegfeld
My Pick: Carole Lombard, My Man Godfrey

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Walter Brennan, Come and Get It
My Pick: Walter Brennan, Come and Get It

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Gale Sondergaard, Anthony Adverse
My Pick: Gale Sondergaard, Anthony Adverse

Ten movies were nominated for best picture, a practice that lasted through 1943 and which has been revived again this year. For the first time, awards were given for best supporting actor and actress, in part because of negotiations between the studios and the recently formed Screen Actors Guild. Walter Brennan won the first of three awards in five years in this category, and until 1968, when Katharine Hepburn won her third Oscar, was the only person to have won three times for acting. (Maybe that early, record-setting winning streak accounts for not being nominated for his great later performances like those in To Have and Have Not, Red River, Bad Day at Black Rock, and Rio Bravo.) It's clear that I'm a big admirer of Dodsworth, choosing it in three major categories. The Academy chose The Great Ziegfeld for best picture, continuing a trend begun earlier (and repeated more than once since) of choosing slick, large-scale spectacles over smaller, more thoughtful films. For best actress I went with Lombard's ditzy but sweet heiress, the only time she was ever nominated. I've always thought the Academy chose Rainer in a much smaller (really, a supporting) role largely for her emotional telephone scene, not the first time voters were swayed by one big, showy scene that stuck in the memory. Biggest omission: Modern Times—for picture, director, or actor.

1937

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: The Life of Emile Zola
My Pick: The Awful Truth

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth
My Pick: Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Spencer Tracy, Captains Courageous
My Pick: Fredric March, A Star Is Born

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Luise Rainer, The Good Earth
My Pick: Greta Garbo, Camille

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Joseph Schildkraut, The Life of Emile Zola
My Pick: Roland Young, Topper

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Alice Brady, In Old Chicago
My Pick: Dame May Whitty, Night Must Fall

This was one of Hollywood's strongest years, perhaps the strongest until the landmark year of 1939. With so many worthy choices, it's not surprising that I was at odds with the Academy in all but one category. With its award for best picture, the Academy began a trend of choosing a noble but rather dull movie that projects a good image for Hollywood, a self-important message picture that shows the world Hollywood has The Right Attitude. My pick was The Awful Truth, the movie I've called the definitive screwball comedy and which for me typifies the perfect balance of entertainment and sophistication that was Hollywood's forte. Spencer Tracy was a wonderful, unfussy actor, but in the years he gave his best performances, he seemed to be bested by someone else, like Fredric March's unforgettable Norman Maine. The best actress category often has the weakest field of nominees, something that still continues. But that certainly wasn't the case this year. All the nominees gave strong performances, and several equally worthy performances weren't nominated at all: Jean Arthur, Easy Living; Carole Lombard, Nothing Sacred; Katharine Hepburn, Stage Door; Sylvia Sydney, Dead End. I was torn between Garbo and Irene Dunne for The Awful Truth but in the end went with Garbo because of her performance's gravity and range. Biggest omission (aside from the actresses mentioned above): Cary Grant, The Awful Truth.

1938

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: You Can't Take It with You
My Pick: Pygmalion

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Frank Capra, You Can't Take It with You
My Pick: Frank Capra, You Can't Take It with You

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Spencer Tracy, Boys Town
My Pick: Leslie Howard, Pygmalion

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Bette Davis, Jezebel
My Pick: Bette Davis, Jezebel

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Walter Brennan, Kentucky
My Pick: John Garfield, Four Daughters

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Fay Bainter, Jezebel
My Pick: Fay Bainter, Jezebel

The best film nominated this year was actually Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion; another foreign language picture wouldn't be nominated until Z in 1969. But since I consider the Oscars at this point awards for English language movies, I went with Pygmalion, the first time I chose a British film. I would have chosen its directors (Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard) also, but they weren't nominated. Best actress was a fairly easy choice; best actor wasn't. Again, a good performance by Spencer Tracy in the rather sentimental Boys Town was overshadowed by the work of others. James Cagney's turn in the trite Angels with Dirty Faces was powerful but seemed to me pretty old hat by this time, distinguished from his other performances in this vein largely by the supercharged drama of the final scene. I went with Leslie Howard as Prof. Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, one of the great roles of drama that Howard, who co-directed the movie version, does full justice to. The biggest oversight was Brennan's win over Garfield, hardly the last time a reliable veteran playing a likable character would be chosen over a newcomer saddled with The Curse of the Unsympathetic Character. Biggest omission: Bringing Up Baby—for picture, director, actor, actress, or supporting actor (Charles Ruggles).

1939

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Gone with the Wind
My Pick: Gone with the Wind

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Victor Fleming, Gone with the Wind
My Pick: John Ford, Stagecoach

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Robert Donat, Goodbye, Mr. Chips
My Pick: James Stewart, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind
My Pick: Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Thomas Mitchell, Stagecoach
My Pick: Thomas Mitchell, Stagecoach

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind
My Pick: Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind

I had very little disagreement with the awards this year. Despite its skewed version of American history, Gone with the Wind is simply great popular entertainment, whereas Stagecoach is great popular art, my own favorite Western ever. I'm not sure that GWTW can really be said to have been directed by Fleming, even though he received sole credit for it. At least two other directors worked on the picture, not counting the contributions of its autocratic producer, David O. Selznick, or of William Cameron Menzies, whose sketches for production design were essentially storyboards. Donat's surprising win is probably attributable to the emotional appeal of his role and to Clark Gable and James Stewart splitting the vote, with voters reluctant either to award all four major awards to one picture (especially as Gable had already won in these circumstances) or to recognize a young and relatively unproven actor like Stewart. Stewart's snub strikes me as one of the all-time biggest Oscar mistakes, one that would have unfortunate repercussions the next year. As in 1937, all the best actress nominees were strong, as were several non-nominees: Jean Arthur (again), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Claudette Colbert, Midnight; Norma Shearer, The Women; Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz (although she did receive special recognition for outstanding juvenile performance of the year). Still, best actress was owned by Viven Leigh from the start, and it is inconceivable that anyone else would have won. Biggest omission (besides those actresses): Lon Chaney, Jr., best supporting actor for Of Mice and Men.

1940

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Rebecca
My Pick: The Philadelphia Story

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath
My Pick: John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: James Stewart, The Philadelphia Story
My Pick: Henry Fonda, The Grapes of Wrath

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Ginger Rogers, Kitty Foyle
My Pick: Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Walter Brennan, The Westerner
My Pick: Walter Brennan, The Westerner

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Jane Darwell, The Grapes of Wrath
My Pick: Judith Anderson, Rebecca

Another impressive year for Hollywood, a worthy follow-up to 1939. Of the ten best picture nominees, I would rank five as masterpieces. Two other movies I consider masterpieces, His Girl Friday and The Shop Around the Corner, weren't among the ten nominees and in fact didn't receive a single nomination. In the end I went for the picture I like the best. The lead acting categories exemplified two trends that I find lamentable. Stewart's win was another example of the Oops, We Made a Mistake Syndrome like Bette Davis's win in 1935, in which a superior performance is ignored in the rush to atone for a previous oversight. Henry Fonda would have to wait forty years for his Oscar. Rogers's win was an example of what is referred to as a Career Achievement Award, in which a popular actor giving a good performance in a good part is rewarded for years of hard work as a tireless trouper. There's nothing wrong with that except that it vitiates the notion of recognizing the year's best performance. This year the competition for best actress was fierce, and the nominees didn't even include Rosalind Russell for His Girl Friday or Margaret Sullavan for The Shop Around the Corner. For best actress I went with Kate Hepburn for her best and most typical performance. Darwell's award is attributable to a combination of the Career Achievement Award and the One Big Scene Syndrome (that speech at the end about the indominability of The People). I went instead for Judith Anderson's deliciously malevolent Mrs. Danvers. Biggest omission: Cary Grant for either The Philadelphia Story or His Girl Friday.

1941

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: How Green Was My Valley
My Pick: Citizen Kane

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: John Ford, How Green Was My Valley
My Pick: Orson Welles, Citizen Kane

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Gary Cooper, Sergeant York
My Pick: Walter Huston, All That Money Can Buy (The Devil and Daniel Webster)

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Joan Fontaine, Suspicion
My Pick: Bette Davis, The Little Foxes

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Donald Crisp, How Green Was My Valley
My Pick: Sydney Greenstreet, The Maltese Falcon

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Mary Astor, The Great Lie
My Pick: Mary Astor, The Great Lie

What can I say about the best picture and directing awards for this year? The incomprehensible wrongness of these awards speaks for itself. How Green Was My Valley presents in sharp contrast John Ford's strengths and shortcomings: sequences of great emotional and visual pull alternate with sequences of mawkish sentimentality and awkward staginess. There is no way that this movie is in the same league as the rightfully legendary Citizen Kane. My contrariness continued with all but one of the remaining awards. The Maltese Falcon was at least nominated for best picture and supporting actor, but evidently John Huston and Humphrey Bogart didn't then enjoy the respect they would later have. Mary Astor, so memorable in Falcon as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, was nominated for best supporting actress and won for a more flamboyant (arguably, actually a lead) performance in a different picture altogether. Barbara Stanwyck was nominated for Ball of Fire, not The Lady Eve, as I would have expected. If she had been, she might well have gotten my vote. Under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Fontaine gave the second of the two best performances of her career and took home the Oscar, but I preferred Bette Davis's controlled monster Regina, for me her best performance of the 30s and 40s. Biggest omission: Sullivan's Travels—for picture, director, or actor.

1942

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Mrs. Miniver
My Pick: The Magnificent Ambersons

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: William Wyler, Mrs. Miniver
My Pick: William Wyler, Mrs. Miniver

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy
My Pick: James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Greer Garson, Mrs. Miniver
My Pick: Katharine Hepburn, Woman of the Year

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Van Heflin, Johnny Eager
My Pick: Van Heflin, Johnny Eager

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Teresa Wright, Mrs. Miniver
My Pick: Agnes Moorehead, The Magnificent Ambersons

For best picture I chose Orson Welles's melancholy contemplation of loss and change—even in its truncated form, a masterpiece—over the meretricious Mrs. Miniver. Lillian Hellman tells the following anecdote about Mrs. Miniver: Seeing her in tears after a screening of the film, William Wyler asked if she was really that moved by the experience. "I'm crying," she answered, "because it's such a piece of shit." I can see her point: it might have been what those involved thought America needed to spur it to join the war (although by the time the picture was released this was a moot issue, since the US was already in the war), but today it feels awfully sanctimonious and manipulative. Still, I went with Wyler for best director because Welles wasn't nominated, because Wyler did his usual professional job, and because the other nominees were so weak in comparison. James Cagney trounced the competition for best actor with his energetic impersonation of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. For best actress I again chose the divine Kate in her first teaming with Spencer Tracy, as a self-centered, independent woman whom the gruff but patient and down-to-earth Tracy humanizes by teaching her to control her ego (and enjoy baseball too). Biggest omission: Orson Welles, best director for The Magnificent Ambersons.

1943

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Casablanca
My Pick: Casablanca

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Michael Curtiz, Casablanca
My Pick: Michael Curtiz, Casablanca

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Paul Lukas, Watch on the Rhine
My Pick: Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Jennifer Jones, The Song of Bernadette
My Pick: Jean Arthur, The More the Merrier

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Charles Coburn, The More the Merrier
My Pick: Charles Coburn, The More the Merrier

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Katina Paxinou, For Whom the Bell Tolls
My Pick: Katina Paxinou, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Every time I watch Casablanca, I grow more fond of it and am more impressed by Curtiz's masterful direction. Why, then, did the Academy not see that Bogart's Rick was a performance that would last, whereas in time Paul Lukas's Nazi-fighter would fade? Lukas's award is an example of the recurring practice of rewarding a sincere performance more for the nobility of the character being played than for the actual best performance of the year, something that seems to happen especially during times of national stress, particularly when the alternative is someone playing a morally ambiguous or outright monstrous character. (Adrien Brody's win over Daniel Day-Lewis in 2002 is a recent example.) Although the Academy has traditionally been chary of recognizing relatively unknown young actors for breakthrough performances, it has seldom shown this same reluctance toward actresses, and this year gave the award to 24-year old Jennifer Jones for her first major picture, The Song of Bernadette. I think Jones was a better actress than she is generally given credit for (especially considering her troubled personal life and her Trilby-Svengali relationship to David O. Selznick), but I see her Oscar as a duplication of Lukas's for best actor, an award that put the nobility of the character before the quality of the performance. For best actress I went with the shamefully ignored Jean Arthur, who received her only nomination for this, her best and most charming performance. Biggest omission: Henry Fonda, The Ox-Bow Incident.

1944

BEST PICTURE
The Winner: Going My Way
My Pick: Double Indemnity

BEST DIRECTOR
The Winner: Leo McCarey, Going My Way
My Pick: Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity

BEST ACTOR
The Winner: Bing Crosby, Going My Way
My Pick: Bing Crosby, Going My Way

BEST ACTRESS
The Winner: Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight
My Pick: Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Winner: Barry Fitzgerald, Going My Way
My Pick: Clifton Webb, Laura

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Winner: Ethel Barrymore, None But the Lonely Heart
My Pick: Ethel Barrymore, None But the Lonely Heart

I like Going My Way; it's an enjoyable, lightweight sentimental heart-warmer. But I have no doubt that Wilder's pitch-black Double Indemnity is the best picture of the year. I also like Bing Crosby as the easygoing Father O'Malley in Going My Way and chose him over Barry Fitzgerald (who was simultaneously nominated for best supporting actor for the same role and won). I think Fitzgerald is a great character actor, but I have a low tolerance for this kind of cornball blarney and believe he gave better performances than this one. For best supporting actor I went instead for Clifton Webb's delightfully campy Waldo Lydecker. I like Ingrid Bergman too and think she was very affecting in George Cukor's florid take on Gaslight (which contrary to much critical opinion I prefer to its rather enervated 1939 British version). But in Wilder's nasty Double Indemnity Stanwyck gives the best performance of her impressive career, the definitive film noir femme fatale. Biggest omission: Meet Me in St. Louis—best picture, director, or actress (Judy Garland).

In a Lonely Place (1950)

2010-02-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

It's taken me more than one viewing to warm completely to In a Lonely Place. In the film Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter who finally gets the chance to work on an adaptation of a best-selling novel. Unfortunately, the novel is clearly trash, and the assignment clearly hack work. Still, it just might jumpstart his failed career. After Dix is wrongfully implicated in the murder of a hatcheck girl from the Hollywood bar he frequents, he begins a romance with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor in the Hollywood bungalow court where he lives, who gives him an alibi but isn't really sure he's innocent. (Grahame, who was married to Nicholas Ray at the time, is quite good in one of her rare lead roles—watch the way emotions subtly register on her face in close-ups.) To complicate matters further, during the war Dix was the commanding officer of the detective investigating the murder (Frank Lovejoy), a man whose contented family life and straightforward view of the world are the opposite of Dix's isolation and tangle of confused attitudes.

I think what initially distanced me from the film is something I now see as one of its prime virtues—that while it contains elements of familiar genres of the time, in the end it doesn't really conform to any one of them. It resembles those pictures like A Star Is Born and Sunset Blvd. that show the unflattering side of Hollywood. Like those films, it depicts life in the motion picture industry as a precarious one where it is too often necessary to sell out to achieve career success, where success can turn to failure with one flop, where those branded as failures are shunned as pariahs. It is a story of postwar alienation, of a man who seems unable to return to civilian life and simply resume where he left off. It is also in part a murder mystery, a police procedural, and one of those films in the Hitchcock/Lang vein that show a falsely accused man trapped in a web of circumstance. It is at the same time the story of an unlikely romance between two people very different from each other. Yet the film never settles completely into any of these predictable genres.

Equally unpredictable and category-defying is Bogart's interpretation of Dix. In the end, though, it is his character that ties all those disparate elements together, for ultimately the movie is a character study of one of the most intricate and compelling men to be found in films of the era, a man whose personal and professional lives have hit bottom and whose greatest obstacle to his way back is himself. Bogart makes the most of the role and delivers one of his most intriguing performances. He seems to bring something of nearly every part he had ever played to Dix. With his sudden rages and explosive aggression, Dix can be as scary as any of Bogart's early gangsters, even though these outbursts are always followed by remorse. Dix is as coldly cynical as Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, as disappointed and bitter—but still susceptible to the allure of love—as his Rick in Casablanca, at times as caustically witty as his Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This is a man whose self-loathing is projected onto the entire world around him and whose mistrust of other people approaches the paranoia of Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Yet Dix is not merely a synthesis of Bogart's previous roles, but rather a unique creation that advances Bogey's screen persona further into anguish and ambiguity than he had ever taken it before.

By the end of the movie, most of Dix's problems have sorted themselves out. But the one thing that can't be put right is his relationship with Laurel. His need to control her—his suspicion, possessiveness, and demands for total, unquestioning loyalty—eventually prove too much for her. "Dix doesn't act like a normal person. . . . I'm scared. I don't trust him," she finally admits, realizing the relationship is doomed. Cleared of a murder charge and with his script finally completed, Dix may be a free man with a revived career. But that freedom and success will not be shared. Dix is a man driven by self-destructive inner forces beyond his control, a man destined to be marooned by his own inability to trust others.

Raw Deal (1948)

2010-02-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

From the mesmerizing opening sequence, it's clear that Raw Deal is something special. A car pulls up to a fortified fence labeled "State Prison" and as the gates open, we hear, over eerie theremin music, Claire Trevor in an ominous voice-over: "This is the day . . . the last time I shall drive up to these gates." As she walks down a long hallway, dressed entirely in black and wearing a black widow's veil, cocooned in silence except for the click of her high-heeled shoes on the floor, she continues, "I don't know which sounds louder—my heels or my heart. It's always like this when I come to see him." The man she has come to visit is her lover, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), and very soon he will be escaping from prison to claim his share of the loot from the robbery for which he has been jailed.

The escape from the prison in Oregon has been engineered by a vicious hoodlum named Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the man Joe worked for and for whom he has taken the rap. From his headquarters in Corkscrew Alley in San Francisco, Rick has dispatched his henchmen, Fantail (John Ireland) and Spider, to make sure the jailbreak will fail. But Rick's plans to get rid of Joe go awry when Joe takes hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), the secretary of the lawyer who was arranging a parole for him, and pursued by both the state police and Fantail and Spider, sets off with the two women on an odyssey to San Francisco to find his double-crossing ex-partner, get his money, and leave the country.

Raw Deal is one of several films noirs that director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton made in the late 1940s, and arguably the best of them, an underappreciated gem that approaches the caliber of the best examples of the genre from this period. Martin Scorsese, in his film A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), cites the Mann-Alton collaborations as notable films of the time, ones that with their distinctive style and visual atmosphere had a huge impact on him as a young moviegoer and later as a film director. On the basis of this movie, I would say that his admiration is clearly justified. For one thing, Raw Deal is a brilliantly edited movie. With its fluid alternation of close-ups, medium shots, and long shots, and its creative combining of sound and image, it is virtually a textbook of film editing. Even more impressive is Alton's photography. Masterfully executed lighting effects, stunning use of deep focus, creative alternation of the static and moving camera, inventive camera placement (with the camera often mounted very low looking sharply up, or very high looking sharply down)—again the film is virtually a textbook of cinematography.

Another virtue of Raw Deal is the way Mann tells the story in such a dynamically visual way. The film contains several standout set pieces. During a stop along the way, at an isolated taxidermy business on the beach in northern California called Grimshaw's, O'Keefe has a long, very physical fight with Ireland in a back room full of stuffed animals, the lengthy scene filmed in near-darkness (above). In a sequence that predates Fritz Lang's The Big Heat by several years, Burr hurls a dish of flaming cognac in the face of a woman in a restaurant after she bumps into him and spills her drink on his jacket. (This is filmed by having Burr appear to toss the flaming liquid directly at the camera—actually probably at a pane of glass in front of the camera.) "She should've been more careful," he says nonchalantly afterward! The movie's finale, a nighttime confrontation and shootout in Corkscrew Alley as Burr watches from a window above, is another stunner. For any fan of American film noir, Raw Deal is simply a must-see.

High Sierra (1941)

2010-02-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Raoul Walsh

In 1936 Humphrey Bogart got a contract at Warner Bros. on the basis of his sizzling performance as the gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. For the next five years Warners couldn't figure out what to do with him, typecasting him as a vicious thug in pictures like Dead End (1937) or giving him roles for which he was clearly unsuited, like the stableman (complete with unsteady Irish brogue) besotted with Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939). It wasn't until Bogart got the lead in High Sierra (a part he campaigned hard for after several other actors turned it down) that he got a role which allowed him to showcase the paradoxical qualities of toughness and vulnerability in the same character that later became a trademark of his screen persona. The movie made him a star.

In High Sierra Bogart plays Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a jailed criminal who has seen better days. His former gang boss bribes corrupt officials to pardon Earle so that he can lead one last big heist, a jewel robbery at a swanky mountain resort in California, that will set them up for the rest of their lives. From the beginning, it's clear the plan has big problems. The inside man at the resort (an unrecognizable Cornel Wilde) is clearly unreliable. The two men who are supposed to help Earle in the robbery are rebellious and, worse, at odds over a woman (Ida Lupino) who ends up falling for Earle. And Earle becomes enamored of a handicapped young woman (Joan Leslie) he meets on the way to California who doesn't return his affection but is willing to let him pay for a healing operation before dumping him.

The screenplay was co-written by John Huston. High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, which Huston wrote and directed later the same year and which also starred Bogart, are seminal forerunners of film noir, the genre that dominated American films of the late 1940s and early 1950s and was a huge influence on the French New Wave. These two pictures are the transitional works between the two studio genres that prefigure noir—the gangster movie and the private detective movie—and full-blown film noir of the postwar period. Between them they contain most of the key elements of film noir: a self-sufficient outsider as the movie's hero, criminal activities (High Sierra's focus on a heist anticipates noir masterpieces like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing as well as countless other examples of the genre from the late 40s and early 50s), treacherous comrades, lurking danger, pervasive cynicism, and external circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome from which there is no escape. Add to the proto-noir sensibility of these two movies the high-contrast Expressionistic look of Citizen Kane, also released in 1941, and a good case could be made that this was the year American film noir was born.

Aside from its importance as a defining moment in Bogart's career and in film noir, High Sierra is tremendously entertaining. Bogart lands on his feet in this movie, and as an actor he never faltered again. (Although plainly the main character, Bogart was second-billed after costar Ida Lupino and even received a lower salary, an indication of his status at Warners at the time and of the studio's uncertainty about him as a leading man. After this picture, he would always receive top billing.) Lupino, whose character, like Bogart's, is at once gutsy and sensitive, expertly conveys these contradictory traits. Like Bogart, she would become a specialist in this kind of role. Raoul Walsh's direction is typically forceful, creating a vivid atmosphere of isolation and doom against the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada. The end of the movie—as Bogart drives higher and higher into the mountains, pursued by the police, and the trap tightens—goes beyond the Production Code stricture that crime must be punished and pushes into the noir concept of a flawed but somehow noble man betrayed by people and by fate.

THE MOVIE PROJECTOR Returns Feb. 1

2010-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

THE MOVIE PROJECTOR will return on Monday, February 1, with a few changes. The scope of the site will still be eclectic, with the emphasis on classic films (those made between roughly 1930-1980), my chief area of interest. The focus, however, will be more limited: I will be writing mostly in the brief review format, in each post typically reviewing one film I've recently watched. And I will no longer be posting on a regular schedule, as I have in the past. For the present, this will all be on a trial basis, and after a few weeks I'll see how satisfied I am with it.

The impetus for this change is my desire to find a less labor-intensive way of blogging. I've found that the ambitious goal I set for myself of producing an analytical essay each week is simply too time-consuming and has begun to feel too much like an obligation. The work I've done at THE MOVIE PROJECTOR has been satisfying, but it has begun to distract me from other important things in my life.

I've also found it increasingly difficult to come up with original subjects that are meaningful to me, films that are fresh enough to me and that make a strong enough impression on me to inspire me to write about them. From the first, I decided that unless I had something new to bring to the discussion, I wanted to avoid writing about movies that have endured what has been called "analysis to paralysis." I admire and love Trouble in Paradise, Citizen Kane, All About Eve, Vertigo, The Seven Samurai, and Persona, but does the world really need my thoughts about such films, which have been the subjects of extensive academic analysis and some of which have had entire books written about them? My posts have been inspired mostly by my recent movie-viewing experiences, films of the period I'm interested in that are new to me or that I have rediscovered. I like to think that my posts might inspire some readers to seek out these films to enjoy for the first time or to revisit, although I sometimes get the impression I'm preaching to the converted.

Finding titles that haven't already been well covered is becoming ever harder. Since I started THE MOVIE PROJECTOR a year-and-a-half ago, many excellent blogs about classic movies have come along. WONDERS IN THE DARK, with its decade countdowns anchored by the concise reviews of Briton Allan Fish, is virtually a reference source for the great movies of the past. John Greco's TWENTY FOUR FRAMES is very strong on the movies of the 50s and 60s, especially those with a noirish slant. Alistair Rupert does a great job of covering the 40s, both obscure and better-known works, in his CLASSIC MOVIES DIGEST. Judy at MOVIE CLASSICS focuses on the rarities of the 30s, especially the earlier part of the decade. C. K. Dexter Haven's HOLLYWOOD DREAMLAND shows a real classic movie fan's enthusiasm for the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Although Richard Hourula covers all the decades at RIKU WRITES, he returns time and again to films and subjects from the 30s and 40s, always eager to add more about Fred and Ginger, Bogey and Cagney, John Ford and William Wellman. A newer site I enjoy is CLASSIC FILMBOY'S MOVIE PARADISE, which has lately been covering topics revolving around the 40s. Several other sites concentrate exclusively on film noir of the late 40s and early 50s, a genre that is a particular favorite of mine. Dave at GOODFELLA'S MOVIE BLOG recently launched an ambitious countdown of his 100 best films noirs. The existence of these and other classic film sites makes me wonder how relevant THE MOVIE PROJECTOR is.

Still, I'll soldier on awhile longer, hoping I can find enough movies that I feel strongly enough about and that haven't already been thoroughly exhausted as blog fodder to provide me with something to write about. Even then, I anticipate that I will invariably write about films other classic film bloggers have already written on. Posting on a film someone else has already covered is bound to happen now and again, and when it does, I apologize in advance for the overlap and will try not to duplicate the efforts of others but to find something original to say, or at the least a different approach. In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who regularly visits THE MOVIE PROJECTOR and especially those who have taken time to leave comments and encourage me in my efforts. I'd also like to thank all those who have provided links to THE MOVIE PROJECTOR at their own sites.

THE MOVIE PROJECTOR adopts a new mascot. Farewell, Buster. Welcome, Cary.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 5

2010-01-04T00:00:00.001-08:00

The Summing Up

In the previous installments of this series I've written on the five movies that for me are the unequivocal American masterpieces of 1962: Lawrence of Arabia, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Miracle Worker, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Ride the High Country. In truth this is not all that large a number of great American movies for any single year. What really distinguishes the year 1962 in American pictures for me, though, is the addition to these five masterpieces of an unusually large number of films that fall just short of masterpiece status but are nonetheless excellent works.

Although many knowledgeable film lovers consider To Kill a Mockingbird a great movie, I would add it to this latter group, probably as first runner-up. Mockingbird has many fine qualities, but I don't think it quite reaches the level of the five I have identified as the great American movies of the year. Its condemnation of racism is laudable and important, but in narrative terms I find that the emphasis on this theme essentially turns the movie into a courtroom drama that proceeds in lockstep to its inevitable conclusion. I prefer the greater emphasis of the novel on the less dramatic but more moving childhood memory aspects of the story.

I am also not a big fan of Gregory Peck, and for me his rather wooden acting style makes the nobility of Atticus Finch seem stiff and just a bit dull. (I realize that I am likely in the minority here.) I would have preferred a warmer actor like Henry Fonda or Joel McCrea or even William Holden as Atticus Finch. I do think, however, that while Mockingbird falls short of masterpiece status, it is still an excellent movie and am including it on the following list of other notable American movies of the year:

Cape Fear
Days of Wine and Roses
Experiment in Terror
Hatari!
Lolita
Lonely Are the Brave
The Longest Day
Lover Come Back (shown in Los Angeles in late Dec. 1961, probably to qualify for the Oscars—it did receive a nomination for best original screenplay—but not in general release in the US until Mar. 1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (a good year for John Frankenheimer, who also directed All Fall Down and The Birdman of Alcatraz)
Sweet Bird of Youth
To Kill a Mockingbird
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

For the record, here are the five films nominated for the Oscar as best picture of 1962:

Lawrence of Arabia (the winner)
The Longest Day
The Music Man
Mutiny on the Bounty
To Kill a Mockingbird

Several notable British and foreign language films were also first released in the US in 1962. Some of these presage the directions American films would take later in the decade—on the one hand, greater realism; on the other hand, a greater degree of auteur-inspired stylization.

Through a Glass Darkly (Sweden)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1961
Divorce, Italian Style (Italy)
L'Eclisse (Italy)
Shoot the Piano Player (France)
Jules and Jim (France)
Last Year at Marienbad (France)
Sundays and Cybèle (France)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1962
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (UK)
A Taste of Honey (UK)
Whistle Down the Wind (UK)

Finally, a few observations about some of the memorable performances of the year. This was an especially fine year for acting—another reason 1962 was such a great year—and when Oscar time came, all the nominations for best actor and best actress were for once well deserved. But several other nomination-worthy performances didn't make the cut, especially in the best actor category: James Stewart and John Wayne, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Joel McCrea, Ride the High Country; Kirk Douglas, Lonely Are the Brave (according to Michael Douglas, his father's favorite movie he ever made); James Mason, Lolita (he was the very personification of Humbert Humbert); Jason Robards and Ralph Richardson, Long Day's Journey Into Night; Robert Mitchum's menacing psycho in Cape Fear; Paul Newman, Sweet Bird of Youth; Robert Preston's exuberant Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man; Tom Courtenay's sensitive performance as a juvenile delinquent in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

As for actresses, even though I'm a huge fan of Bette Davis and consider her without question a superior actress to Joan Crawford, I feel Crawford—restricted to acting largely with her facial expressions and voice—gave an unusually thoughtful and controlled performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? that compared quite favorably to the Oscar-nominated Davis's flamboyant gargoyle. And what about Jeanne Moreau's unforgettable Catherine in Jules and Jim? After all, performances in foreign language films were just beginning to be recognized by the Academy: Sophia Loren had won the year before for her performance in the Italian film Two Women, and Marcello Mastroianni received a best actor nomination that very year for Divorce, Italian Style.

In the supporting categories, the following noteworthy performances were overlooked by Oscar: Lee Marvin, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (the definitive version of his early villains); Ross Martin's chilling psychopath in Experiment in Terror; Charles Bickford, so touching as he mourns the loss of his daughter to booze in Days of Wine and Roses; Edgar Buchanan, Ride the High Country; Brandon de Wilde, All Fall Down; Brock Peters, To Kill a Mockingbird; Walter Matthau as the genial sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a performance more subtle and sincere than his later hammy ones; Charles Laughton and Don Murray, Advise and Consent; Eva Marie Saint, All Fall Down; Vera Miles, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and Shelley Winters, hilariously vulgar in Lolita.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

2009-12-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American movies.

Lucy's Character Actors and Actresses

2009-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Always on the lookout for a new approach to writing about one of my favorite subjects in classic movies—character actors and actresses—I recently came up with one that combines my love of character performers with another of my loves: the television series I Love Lucy. I first started watching the show as a child during summer vacations. Every morning at 9 a.m. I would be plunked in front of the TV set to watch Lucy come up with another outlandish scheme that involved Ethel, Ricky, and Fred. Over the years I've seen all of the Lucy episodes, some many times.

When Lucy went to Hollywood during seasons 4 and 5 of the show, each week she featured a big-name guest star like William Holden or John Wayne who played straight man to Lucy for the privilege of plugging his or her latest movie to Lucy's huge TV audience. But before this Lucy often used relatively familiar character actors and actresses not as guest stars but in their well-known capacity as character performers. One thing I began to notice as I rewatched I Love Lucy after becoming more familiar with American movies from the 1930s-1960s was how often these former studio character actors appeared in episodes of the show and how much they contributed to it.

There are several reasons for this. The 1950s were the decade in which these people were transitioning from working for the movie studios, then in decline, to working in television. Most of the established studio character performers had second careers in which they became regular fixtures of the Westerns, mysteries, anthology series, and sitcoms that were the staple programming of television in that decade. Lucy was well known as one of the great social networkers of Hollywood. She had been in the movies for twenty years before getting her own TV series, working her way up from bit parts, often uncredited, to supporting roles at RKO and finally landing a contract at the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, MGM—the culmination of years of unflagging ambition and patient hard work. During those years Lucy had worked with many of the character actors who appeared in her show, and it's likely that she personally knew most of them. Lucy and Desi owned Desilu, which produced not only her own show but many of the TV series of the 1950s—everything from sitcoms like December Bride to adventure series like Whirlybirds. Many of the character actors who worked on I Love Lucy also worked in other Desilu series and later appeared in the two Lucille Ball series that followed I Love Lucy.

I've chosen fifteen character actors and actresses whom I recall from episodes of I Love Lucy, many of them episodes from the years before Lucy Ricardo went to Hollywood. A few of these I've written on in a more general way in previous posts (I've provided links to those posts), so I'll deal with them first.

•Edward Everett Horton. He appeared in season 1 in the episode "Lucy Plays Cupid" as Mr. Ritter, the grocer Lucy tries to fix up with her elderly neighbor (a hilarious Bea Benadaret, actually Lucy's first choice for Ethel Mertz, here playing a character much older than she really was). The only problem is that Mr. Ritter mistakenly believes Lucy is hitting on him for herself and wants to leave Ricky and elope with him, forcing Lucy to get up to various shenanigans to disabuse him of this notion. The comfortable rapport between these two consummate professionals was quite apparent in the many scenes they had together. Lucy had previously appeared in three movies with Edward Everett Horton, the first of which was the Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat (1935), in which Lucy played, uncredited, a clerk in a florist's shop. Click here for more about Edward Everett Horton.

•Elizabeth Patterson. The first episode she appeared in was "The Marriage License" in season 1. In this episode Lucy believes that an error in her marriage license means that she and Ricky aren't legally married, and she and Ricky return to the justice of the peace who married them to get remarried. Elizabeth Patterson plays the wife of the justice of the peace. The two actresses had never appeared together before, but Lucy must have liked her work because she later gave her a semi-regular role as the Ricardos' neighbor Mrs. Trumbull, and she appeared as that character in ten episodes between 1952-1956. Click here for more about Elizabeth Patterson.

•Elsa Lanchester. In season 6 of the series, Elsa Lanchester plays the bossy woman who drives Lucy and Ethel to Florida after Lucy loses their train tickets in the episode "Off to Florida." After finding an axe in the trunk of the car, the pair become convinced that Lanchester is the notorious axe murderess who has just escaped from prison. Lanchester had never worked with Lucy before but did later appear in an episode of Here's Lucy. Click here for more about Elsa Lanchester.

•Strother Martin. In the same episode Elsa Lanchester appeared in, Strother Martin plays the waiter/cook at a greasy spoon where the women stop on their way to Florida. When Martin appeared in that 1956 episode, he had played small parts in movies like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) but would become really established as a recognizable character actor later, especially in Westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Perhaps his best-known film role is as the Captain of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke (1967).

•Charles Lane. Often considered the quintessential character actor who most classic movie fans instantly recognize but not many can actually name, Lane (1905-2007) appeared in an incredible 350 movies and television shows, including four episodes of I Love Lucy. My favorite is the one from season 5 called "Staten Island Ferry," in which Lucy and Fred fall asleep on the Staten Island Ferry after taking too many seasick pills in preparation for their ocean voyage to Europe and barely make it to the passport office in time to get their passports. Lane plays the officious passport clerk who refuses to keep the office open late for them. He had appeared with Lucy in seven movies in the 1930s and 1940s and later would appear in six episodes of subsequent Lucy series.

•Jack Albertson. The only Oscar winner among this group (best supporting actor for 1968's The Subject Was Roses). Albertson has more than 160 movies (look for him as the mail sorter at the very beginning of Miracle on 34th Street) and TV series in his résumé, everything from The Twilight Zone and Dr. Kildare to Bonanza, but dozens of sitcoms, many produced by Desilu. He was a regular in 88 episodes of the Freddie Prinze series Chico and the Man (1974-1978). In season 5 of I Love Lucy in the episode "Bon Voyage" he plays the helicopter dispatcher who saves the day when Lucy misses the boat to Europe and has to be airlifted to it. I've always wondered if this episode used stock footage of helicopters from the Desilu series Whirlybirds.

•Charles Winninger. This veteran character actor played Fred's former vaudeville partner Barney Kurtz in the episode "Mertz and Kurtz" in season 4. Highlights of the episode include Lucy pretending to be the Mertz's maid to impress Barney and as a finale an elaborate old-time vaudeville show with Winninger and the entire cast performing at Ricky's night club. Lucy had worked with Winninger in one movie in the 1940s. His most famous role was as Cap'n Andy ("HAPPY New Year!") in the original Broadway production and 1936 movie version of Show Boat. He also had memorable parts in Destry Rides Again (1939) and as the tipsy Dr. Downer who misdiagnoses Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) in Nothing Sacred (1937).

•Allen Jenkins. With his aquiline features, nasal voice, and Brooklyn accent, he appeared in nearly 150 movies and TV shows, sometimes as a menacing hoodlum, more often as a slightly dim comic cop or gangster. He played both of these many times as a Warner Bros. contract player in the 1930s but worked in all genres, even Westerns and musicals. One of his most memorable roles was as a sinister thug named Hunk, gangster Humphrey Bogart's crony in Dead End (1937). In the early 1940s he played George Sanders's comic sidekick "Goldy" Locke in the Falcon series. He and Lucy were both in the RKO picture Five Came Back (1939). He appeared in three episodes of Lucy in seasons 1-3, each time playing a policeman with whom Lucy has a run-in.

•Ellen Corby. Later famous as Grandma Walton on the TV series The Waltons in the 1970s (she won three Emmys and one Golden Globe for the series), Ellen Corby played in more than 200 films—everything from Laurel and Hardy movies to classics like It's a Wonderful Life, Shane, and Vertigo, often uncredited—and TV shows. She received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for I Remember Mama (1948) and won the Golden Globe for that performance. She had worked with Lucy in two films in the 1940s. In season 6 she played Lucy's former high school drama coach in an episode called "Lucy Meets Orson Welles" in which Lucy unwittingly becomes Welles's assistant in a magic show. She later appeared in two 1962 episodes of The Lucy Show.

•Will Wright. A familiar face with over 200 acting credits, Will Wright had appeared with Lucy and William Holden in Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949). Probably his best-known role was as the house detective in the Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film noir The Blue Dahlia (1946). He was in two episodes of Lucy. The one I especially remember is "Tennessee Bound" from season 4. On their way to California, the Ricardos and Mertzes make a detour to visit their old friend Tennessee Ernie Ford and are caught in a speed trap in a small town and thrown in jail. It turns out that what the sheriff (Wright) really wants is an audition with Ricky for his chubby, petite twin daughters Teensy and Weensy, who end up performing "Ricochet Romance" for Ricky before Tennessee Ernie shows up to rescue them. After Lucy et al. finally reach California, she slips in a plug for the actor's Beverly Hills ice cream parlor—located across the street from Lucy's onetime home studio, RKO, which Desilu bought in 1957—when in one episode bored Lucy says to Ethel something like, "Let's go to Will Wright's ice cream parlor and try the other 30 flavors."

•Eduardo Ciannelli. Born in southern Italy, he trained as a doctor before turning to acting. With more than 150 acting roles to his credit, he specialized in ethnic, especially Italian, roles, often of unsavory characters. He and Lucy (unbilled) appeared together in Winterset (1936). Two of his most memorable roles were as the sadistic mob boss in the Bette Davis movie Marked Woman (1937), a character supposedly based on the gangster Lucky Luciano, and as the fanatical leader of the Thuggees in Gunga Din (1939). In the 1950s he divided his work between Italy and the US. He appeared in season 6 of Lucy in the episode "Visitor from Italy" playing Mr. Martinelli, the owner of the pizza parlor where Lucy substitutes as a pizza chef and performs one of her most memorable bits of slapstick trying to perfect the art of tossing pizza crust in the air.

•Hans Conried. His eccentric manner and speech made him instantly identifiable. Probably best remembered as the mad piano teacher in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), he was credited with more than 200 roles dating from 1938, including The Big Street (1942) with Lucy and Henry Fonda. He had a continuing role as Uncle Tonoose in Danny Thomas's Desilu-produced sitcom Make Room for Daddy. He actually appeared in two episodes of Lucy, but the one I vividly recall is the one from season 2 called "Lucy Hires an English Tutor." Filmed while Lucy was pregnant, the premise is that Lucy wants her baby to speak English perfectly, so she hires a pernickety speech tutor (Conried) to coach her. The rub is that the fussy academic actually wants to be in show business and only took the job as a way to get an audition with Ricky.

•Mary Wickes. The gawky, buck-toothed actress worked in movies and TV for sixty years, from 1935 to 1995, and is probably best remembered for one of her earliest parts, as the nurse tormented by Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). She was in the season 1 episode "The Ballet" as the demanding French ballet instructor Madame Lamand, whose class Lucy attends when she wants to get a part as a ballerina in Ricky's show. The episode gave Lucy another opportunity to indulge her penchant for physical comedy. Wickes had never worked with Lucy before this, but the two must have gotten along well because she later appeared in seven episodes of The Lucy Show and nine episodes of Here's Lucy.

•Olin Howland. He was in more than 200 movies and TV shows between 1918 and 1959, the majority of his movie roles so small they were uncredited, often playing hicks or bumpkins. I saw him not long ago in Nothing Sacred (1937) as the laconic railroad station agent, the first person Fredric March meets in the small New England town where he has gone to interview Hazel Flagg. In season 4 of Lucy he plays George Skinner, the owner of the isolated motel/cafe in Ohio where the Ricardos and Mertzes are forced to spend their first night on the way to California in the episode "First Stop." The way he switches hats as he switches roles from desk clerk to cook and back again is hilarious. Of course, their room turns out to be miserably uncomfortable, with lumpy mattresses and trains thundering past just feet from the window every couple of minutes. Yet Skinner behaves as though his establishment is the Hilton as he shamelessly overcharges his hapless guests for everything.

•Madge Blake. The petite actress with the mellifluous voice was 50 years old when she appeared in her first movie, playing Spencer Tracy's mother in Adam's Rib (1949). Probably her most famous role was as the chatty gossip columnist Dora Bailey, who emcees the movie premiere Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen attend in Singin' in the Rain (1952). On TV she played Aunt Harriet in 88 episodes of Batman and had continuing roles in The Jack Benny Program, Leave It to Beaver, and The Real McCoys. She appeared in two Lucy episodes, the one I recall more vividly being the season 3 episode "Ricky Loses His Temper." That's just what he does when Lucy develops an obsession with buying hats. The result is one of those bets that so often formed the premise of an episode: Ricky bets Lucy he can avoid losing his temper longer than she can resist buying another hat. Lucy, however, doesn't take into account the persuasive sales technique of kindly hat store owner Madge Blake, who maneuvers her into buying a new hat on the sly, confident that Ricky will lose his temper before he finds out about her illicit purchase.
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The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers

2009-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fred Astaire (1899-1987) has more than fifty acting credits in his résumé. A multi-talented man—actor, singer, choreographer, and above all dancer—he was notorious for his unyielding perfectionism: Johnny Mercer once called him "an impeccable workman." Astaire is a true Hollywood legend for his performances in musical movies, but he also turned in charming light comedy performances in non-musical movies like The Pleasure of His Company and The Notorious Landlady and the rare dramatic performance in movies like On the Beach and The Towering Inferno. The ten musicals he made with Ginger Rogers—nine at RKO in the 1930s and one more at MGM in 1949 (The Barkleys of Broadway, in which Ginger replaced Judy Garland)—are not only landmark films of the American cinema, but adored by fans of musicals and many non-fans alike. At least two of them—Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936)—are among the very best American movies of the 1930s of any genre.

Of all the famous screen couples in the movies, Astaire and Rogers are probably the best known and revered—even more so than Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall—and deservedly so. Their screen personalities seemed the perfect complement. As Pauline Kael once wrote, "She gave him sex, and he gave her class." After they stopped making movies together, Ginger concentrated on non-musical pictures while Fred made many more musical films. But he rarely made more than one or two musicals with any one actress-dancer as his partner. Whether this was by chance or whether he was reluctant to become identified again as one-half of a famous screen couple is difficult to say. Some of the musicals he made are run-of-the-mill, but some of them are excellent, rivaling the best movies he made with Ginger Rogers and easily surpassing the lesser ones.

Here are my five favorite musicals Fred Astaire made without Ginger Rogers.

• A Damsel in Distress (1937).
Directed by George Stevens, who also directed Swing Time, this movie takes place in England. Astaire plays Jerry Halliday, an American singer-dancer vacationing in London, who becomes involved in a matchmaking scheme hatched by the servants at the estate of a young noblewoman, Lady Alice Marshmorton (Joan Fontaine). People who write about this movie tend to emphasize what the movie doesn't have—namely, Ginger Rogers—and the blandness of the young Fontaine as a romantic interest for Astaire. While such complaints are justified, I prefer to think of what the movie does have.

The delightful script by P. G. Wodehouse (based on his novel and play) with its dimwitted nobles, crafty servants, and series of misunderstandings is absolutely typical of that writer, and anybody familiar with his comic stories and novels will recognize his usual bag of tricks. It also has the archetypal screwball comedy situation (think It Happened One Night) of a young woman infatuated with an ill-chosen suitor who must be won over by an unconventional suitor (in this case, Astaire) who offers her the opportunity to break out of her constrained existence. The movie has great songs by the Gershwins, including "Nice Work" and "A Foggy Day," the hilarious George Burns and Gracie Allen as Astaire's agent and his dotty secretary, and the classic, Oscar-winning "Fun House" production number (above). Not only an excellent Fred Astaire musical, but an excellent musical, period.

• You Were Never Lovelier (1942).
When you see Rita Hayworth in this movie, you'll be tempted to agree with its title, even if you've seen Gilda. In this, the second of two films she made with Astaire, Rita plays Maria Acuña, the daughter of a rich Buenos Aires night club owner (Adolphe Menjou). Fred plays Robert Davis, a professional dancer who has just lost all his money at the racetrack and is desperate to get a job at Menjou's club to earn enough money to get back home. Menjou, in the meantime, is talked into a scheme to trick the eldest of his three daughters, played by Rita, into believing she has a mystery admirer by sending her orchids every day himself. In the mistaken identity device common to so many Astaire-Rogers movies, she erroneously believes Astaire is the mystery admirer. When Astaire gets a look at Rita, it's love at first sight and he immediately goes along with her assumption. It's never in doubt that despite Menjou's opposition and Rita's pique at being duped, the two will eventually get together.

The score is a bit short of memorable songs, although it does include "I'm Old-Fashioned" and the Oscar-nominated "Dearly Beloved" by Jerome Kern-Johnny Mercer. The real attraction here, though, is Astaire's dancing with the gorgeous Rita. Astaire never had a more able dance partner (although Cyd Charisse was a very close second). With Ginger, we were always aware of how hard she was working to keep up with Astaire, but Rita's dancing looks as effortless and lighter-than-air as Fred's. The most startling number is when the two dance "The Shorty George," an incredibly athletic jitterbug number. The sight of Rita in a tight white blouse, white pleated mini-skirt, white bobby socks, and two-tone saddle shoes leaping several feet in the air over a recumbent Astaire is not easily forgotten.

• Easter Parade (1948).
This movie, MGM's highest-grossing release of 1948, was originally set to be directed by Vincente Minnelli, but according to Hollywood lore MGM dancer-choreographer Charles Walters (he had choreographed Judy's "The Great Lady Gives an Interview" number in 1946's Ziegfeld Follies) replaced him at the last minute when Judy claimed her psychiatrist warned her that working with her husband would further strain her rocky marriage. Although Walters later became an accomplished director of light comedies, it's likely that the film was largely planned by Minnelli before he left the project.

In the movie Astaire plays Don Hewes, one-half of a famous song-and-dance team along with Nadine Hale (a delightfully bitchy Ann Miller), with whom he is also romantically involved. When the self-centered Nadine deserts Don for a solo career, Don makes an impulsive declaration that he could could replace Nadine by turning any ordinary showgirl into a star and begins looking for a new partner. After we see Miller's sizzling performance of "Shakin' the Blues Away," it's clear this is going to take some doing. (All the songs are by Irving Berlin and include "Steppin' Out with My Baby," performed by Astaire.) He finally settles on Hannah Brown (do you think the writers had ever heard Bessie Smith sing "Pigfoot"?), played with charming self-effacement by Judy Garland. It takes Astaire a year to do it, but he finally manages to fulfill his boast while shedding his feelings for Nadine and falling in love with the unpretentious Hannah.

Astaire was reportedly appalled by Judy's temperamental behavior during the filming, but onscreen he seems to bring out the best in her. She appears so genuinely relaxed and happy as she places Astaire's silk top hat on his head while singing "Put on your Easter bonnet" to him that this is the mood I always like to recall her in. The real musical high point of the film, though, is the comic novelty number "A Couple of Swells" (above). Judy might not have been in the same class as Astaire's more accomplished dance partners, but her skillful impersonation of a physical klutz in this number makes you realize she was a better dancer than she is given credit for. She also acquits herself well in a solo number, "Mr. Monotony," that was cut from the final film but can be seen in That's Entertainment! III. In it the svelte Judy wears the Trilby hat, man's tuxedo jacket, and black fishnet stockings she would later wear in the finale of the Walters-directed Summer Stock (1950).

• The Band Wagon (1953).
This movie has impeccable credentials: story and screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (with uncredited contributions by Alan Jay Lerner), production by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed, musical numbers staged by Michael Kidd, and direction by Vincente Minnelli. Many consider it the best musical ever made after Singin' in the Rain. (I don't quite agree, but it's certainly among the best ten ever made.) Astaire plays Tony Hunter, a musical star who is close to being a has-been (how's that for irony?) but who is offered a role in a Broadway musical by his friends Lester and Lily Martin (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, clearly modeled on Comden and Green themselves). But Astaire regrets getting involved when he finds that the director of the play, Jeffrey Cordova (played by the British musical comedy artist Jack Buchanan), wants to stage it as a pretentious, deadly serious modern version of Faust. One thing he doesn't regret, however, is his costar, the ballerina Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse), with whom he begins to fall in love after a moonlight coach ride through Central Park, interrupted by a sublimely romantic dance to "Dancing in the Dark" (above, and my own favorite number in the movie).

After a disastrous preview, Astaire takes the show in hand ("Hey, boys and girls, let's put on a show!" he actually says tongue-in-cheek to the dispirited cast) and creates a triumph. Like many of the musicals of the 30s, The Band Wagon is back-loaded with one fantastic musical number after another, including "Louisiana Hayride," the hilarious "Triplets" with Astaire, Fabray, and Levant as squabbling infants, and best of all the renowned film noir spoof "Girl Hunt." The movie also contains Fred tap-dancing to "A Shine on Your Shoes" (according to Liza Minnelli, her father's favorite musical number he ever filmed) and the iconic "That's Entertainment." Charisse had limitations as an actress, but as a dancer she was easily a worthy match for Astaire.

• Funny Face (1957).
Fashion magazine editor Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson, above left) wants to do an issue on "clothes for the woman who isn't interested in clothes" and commissions fashion photographer Dick Avery (Astaire, whose character is clearly based on Richard Avedon, who served as an advisor on the film) to photograph the issue. Deciding the studio isn't the right background for the shoot, the two hit upon the idea of using a real Greenwich Village bookstore to stage the photo session. It's here that Avery meets Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a frumpy young intellectual working as a clerk in the store. He later devises a scheme for the three to travel to Paris, where Dick will photograph Jo modeling a special couture collection for Maggie's publication. All three will get something they want out of the trip: Maggie will get a special issue for the magazine, Dick will get a chance to court Jo, and Jo will get the opportunity to meet her idol, a famous French existentialist philosopher.

The French locations are ravishingly photographed by veteran cinematographer Ray June (who received an Oscar nomination), and the music, mostly by the Gershwins, is most appealing. All three stars are in fine form. Under the direction of Stanley Donen, Astaire creates one of his most unique and likable characters—a polished sophisticate rather than the wisecracking joker or showbiz workingman he usually played—and gives one of his greatest performances, in which acting, singing, and dancing are given equal emphasis. Hepburn gives another in her series of legendary performances of the 1950s. David Thomson calls Funny Face "the movie that embraced her different atmospheres—from blue stocking to a Vogue Ondine." She even gets to sing—solo and in her own voice—a wistful version of "How Long Has This Been Going On?" The Astaire-Rogers movies were boosted by great supporting players like Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick, and Funny Face is too, for the flamboyant Thompson, who appeared in only four movies, steals every scene she's in. She gets her own solo number, "Think Pink," at the very beginning of the movie and has a hilarious number with Astaire where they disguise themselves as beatniks and perform "Clap Yo' Hands" in a bohemian coffee house. To call Thompson multi-talented would be an understatement: She was a lyricist, radio and night club performer, and for many years worked under Arthur Freed as a vocal coach, arranger, and composer at MGM, where she wrote and arranged Judy Garland's "The Great Lady Gives an Interview" number from Ziegfeld Follies (1946). She was also a published writer, the author of the Eloise series of children's books.

My favorite sequence in the film is when Astaire is photographing Hepburn in the Louvre and she runs repeatedly down the staircase where the Winged Victory of Samothrace is displayed on a landing, while Astaire tries to get the shot just right. Finally the frustrated Hepburn, wearing a flowing gown, shouts to Astaire, "Take the picture!" and he does. The resulting freeze-frame is a shot in which Audrey's pose and costume duplicate those of the statue behind her. Two timeless icons together: one flesh-and-blood, the other marble. As the saying goes, that one shot is worth the price of admission.

MY RATINGS OF FRED ASTAIRE-GINGER ROGERS MOVIES

****
Top Hat (1935)
Swing Time (1936)

***^½
The Gay Divorcée (1934)
Follow the Fleet (1936)
Shall We Dance (1937)

***
Flying Down to Rio (1933)
Roberta (1935)
Carefree (1938)
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)

**^½
The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)

Brief Reviews

2009-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

THE SON (2002) * * *
In my continuing efforts to update my knowledge of the foreign language films of the last twenty years, I recently watched my first work by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, from Belgium. It's the thirteenth film of fifteen they've co-directed, most of them also written and produced by the Dardennes. It's also one of their most highly lauded, having received a special jury prize at Cannes and been nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The main character is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, above, who is excellent and received the best actor award at Cannes), a carpentry instructor at a school for troubled teenagers, and the film opens with the director of the school proposing to enroll a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), in Olivier's program. But when Olivier sees the student's dossier, he has a strong reaction and tells the director his class is full. Olivier eventually relents but seems obsessed with the boy—stalking him, stealing his keys from his locker and sneaking into his apartment, and behaving bizarrely whenever around him.

Olivier seems to have no life outside his work, although we do get a glimpse of his austere apartment, where we witness an uncomfortable encounter with his ex-wife. He also seems to have no emotions aside from the extreme agitation he expresses when alone or around Francis. Francis, on the other hand, grows more attached to Olivier despite his cold treatment by the older man and at one point even asks Olivier to become his legal guardian.

For nearly the first half of the film, we are given no context for the relationship between the two or for Olivier's strange attitude toward the young man. So reticent is the film on this point that it almost seems Olivier might be a pedophile trying to resist his impulses toward Francis. He's not, but the exact nature of the relationship is only hinted at in a couple of places before being revealed midway through. For the first half of the film we are given little but Olivier's unrelenting anxiety around Francis and the mystery of its cause. This rather contrived approach strikes me as less ambiguity than coyness on the part of the directors, and I think it is a misstep that weakens the movie by forgoing any attempt at engaging the viewer's emotions in favor of piquing our curiosity and testing our patience by withholding information, a strategy I found more tedious than suspenseful.

The look of the film is certainly startling, though, and along with Gourmet's intense performance is one of the movie's great strengths. The directors shoot almost everything in tight close-up, following the actors with a hand-held camera. This might sound gimmicky but doesn't come off that way, instead lending the movie a sense of immediacy and authenticity and keeping the focus firmly on characters rather than on events or pictorial composition. It also emphasizes the emotional repression of Olivier.

I did observe that the movie was co-financed by Belgian television (which might partly account for the talking heads style) and also read that it was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The version I watched was in widescreen (with a 1 : 1.66 aspect ratio), and I couldn't help noticing that the tops of the characters' heads were often out of the frame. I'm wondering if the movie was originally filmed in an aspect ratio of 1 : 1.33 and later cropped for theatrical distribution. This would tend to emphasize even further the closeness of the camera to the actors and could account for the awkwardness in framing that was frequently noticeable.

The acting and direction of The Son are unquestionably impressive. The script, however, has weaknesses that are impossible to overlook. That the movie becomes so much more compelling in its second half makes the first half seem all the more obscure and padded. On the whole, I would say this is a good movie whose potential greatness is undermined by some of the artistic decisions of the Dardennes in their capacity as screenwriters.

YI YI (2000) * * *
If The Son gives us too little information, this movie, a multiple-prize winner from Taiwan, goes in the opposite direction and gives us too much. I knew I was having problems with this narrative overload when halfway through the nearly 3-hour long film I began fidgeting and checking to see how much longer it was going to run. The movie opens with a wedding that introduces us to the main characters, an upper middle class Taipei family, each of whom is confronting his or her own problems.

The father is coping with strains not uncommon to middle-aged professionals everywhere: a marriage that has grown stale, ethical problems at his work (an IT firm), doubts about the life decisions he has made, and the nagging feeling that his life is going nowhere. The wife, a lawyer, is dealing with both her seriously ill mother and severe depression. The teenaged daughter experiences a disappointing first love, while the young son is being bullied by schoolmates and family alike.

The problem is that with all this potent material to work with, the director, Edward Yang, simply doesn't know when to stop. For one thing, he tends to overindulge a fondness for slow, lingering shots. (Perhaps it's understandable that Antonioni was reportedly one of Yang's favorite directors.) These can be quite effective when used sparingly—for example, when a character who has just had a moving experience simply sits for a while and absorbs it—and as one who generally abhors aggressively kinetic music video-style editing, I feel guilty complaining about this.

But Yang uses the dilatory approach even when there is no good reason. For instance, someone opens the door to the apartment and walks in: First we have a shot of the empty hallway lasting several seconds. Then we hear a door off the hallway open and close, and a few seconds later someone walks into the hallway, turns, and walks toward the camera for several more seconds. Now we cut to the same person walking into the living room, who then walks away from the camera for several seconds before putting down his things, wandering around the room for a few seconds, and slowly sitting down on the sofa. None of this is in aid of any discernible thematic or even dramatic purpose: these people have problems, but ennui doesn't appear to be one of them. What should have taken a few seconds has lasted 30-60 seconds. Calling Jean-Luc Godard!

Even more distracting is the overdevelopment of subplots that eventually become full-blown digressions that divert attention from where it should be—on the father re-evaluating his life. In particular, far too much time is devoted to rambling subplots about the flaky brother-in-law and the young son (after all, the movie isn't The 400 Blows). Not content to show us the touching story of the daughter's unhappy first romance, in a startling shift of tone Yang embellishes it with a gratuitous and sensationalistic conclusion that involves sexual abuse of a student by a teacher and a triple murder. These and other divagations at times turn into soapish melodrama that undercuts the film's otherwise mature and thoughtful tone.

The strong parts of Yi Yi are very good indeed, and it is well worth watching just for these. But at points the film seems in danger of foundering under the weight of its accretion of superfluous detail. There is no denying that Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, was a director of great talent. But Yi Yi, his eighth and last film, is kept from greatness by its overly ambitious desire to include everything and leave out nothing.
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The Theater of Life: Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach

2009-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

"Theatricality always fascinated Renoir."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)

The theater has intrigued many of the great filmmakers, inspiring them to examine the blurring of the distinctions between acting and life. Impersonation, disguise, deception, and hiding behind a false personality—all of these examples of the irruption of theatricality into real life and staples of many genres in literature and film—are devices found, for instance, in a number of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers (The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho to name some of the most obvious). Ingmar Bergman was intensely interested in the interplay between personality and performance and probed the subject time and again, from his first masterpiece, Sawdust and Tinsel, to Persona to his last theatrical feature, Fanny and Alexander. Aside from Persona, few movies I've seen have been so thoroughly steeped in the parallels between the theater and reality and in the concept of life as performance as Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).

In the movie, the great Anna Magnani plays Camilla, the lead actress in a troupe of Italian commedia dell'arte players who travel to Peru in the 1700s. When they arrive, they find the whole trip has been a fiasco. There is no theater for them to perform in, the local innkeeper who has engaged them practically places them in servitude to pay off the cost of their passage, the local nobles shun them as too common, and the natives who attend their performances are unskilled in the respectful behavior of theatergoers. Camilla, who has spent the five-month sea voyage sleeping in a magnificent golden carriage being shipped to the colonial viceroy and seized upon it as the symbol of the golden opportunities waiting in the New World, is bitterly disappointed at the bleak reality she finds there.

When the viceroy, Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), becomes besotted with her, the fortunes of the troupe begin to change. For the rest of the movie, she not only becomes involved in romantic intrigue, but also becomes the center of political intrigue when Ferdinand gives her the coach she covets as a present. This causes a revolt by the nobles, who proceed to depose Ferdinand and sue the bishop, who is the ultimate authority in all such decisions, to support their wishes and order the viceroy's execution.

The movie is part romantic farce, part social farce, and part political farce. These strains intersect in a very funny sequence in which Ferdinand races from room to room as the council of nobles meets in one room in an attempt to force him to sign a decree taking the golden coach back from Camilla and giving it to them, while the furious Camilla waits for him in another room obstinately refusing to relinquish the coach, and her competitor for his affections, Ferdinand's haughty former mistress, a widowed noblewoman, waits in yet another room trying to persuade him to give up the common Camilla and return to her. The sequence is staged, acted, and filmed in a style straight out of French farce.

The viceroy is attracted to Camilla not only by her earthy dynamism and anarchic spontaneity—a sharp contrast to the affected languor of the local noblewomen, with their mannered behavior and highly artificial appearance—but also by the fact that it is only with her that he can abandon his role as a political figurehead and be himself. This is expressed in their first meeting, at a formal dance for the nobility at the viceroy's palace, when he ushers Camilla to a secluded balcony and removes his wig, complaining that it's far too hot to wear something so absurdly uncomfortable. With everyone else he is formal and calculating, forever in the midst of a political or romantic power game in which he must be constantly on his guard to press his advantage and protect his position. But with Camilla he relaxes, and in the entire movie, it is only when he is with her that he ever laughs.

The central irony of the movie is that the nobility are in a way professional performers just like the actors, their lives governed by prescribed conventions of behavior every bit as formulaic as the set plots of commedia dell'arte that Camilla and her troupe perform nightly. The difference is that the actors have a real life when they are not onstage, and the nobles don't. For the professional performers, there is a clear distinction between acting and being. For them these are discrete states: they are either "on" or "off."

In the lives of the nobility, by contrast, this distinction does not, indeed cannot, exist. They are always "on," always performing, and they don't even seem aware of it. Everything about them—their arch posing, elaborate wigs and attire, pompous manners and diction, and stately dances—exists to sustain the grandiose illusion of entitlement that keeps them in power and wealth. The actors know the difference between acting and life and drop their stage roles when they are not working, but the nobles can never afford to drop their masks, for it is through the manipulation of appearances that they maintain their control over society.

For the viceroy and the other nobles, the golden coach itself is a symbol of privilege. Ferdinand freely acknowledges that this was the purpose of ordering the coach, as a symbol to impress upon the natives (and even though he doesn't say so, clearly upon the other nobles) his social and political status, to remind them as they see him riding in it of the hierarchical power structure of colonial Spain and of his own supreme position in the colony. This is why the nobles become so incensed when Ferdinand gives the coach to Camilla, because he treats it as a personal possession, not as a symbol of power and wealth. And they tell him openly the reason they insist on having it for themselves is the impression it will make on the natives when they see their social superiors riding in it—yet another example of illusion and performance merging with reality.

Romantic complications ensue when Camilla, already being pursued by Felipe, the leading man in her troupe, becomes involved not only with the viceroy, but also with the local celebrity, a toreador named Ramón. While attending a bullfight (itself another kind of highly ritualized performance), she becomes so caught up in the drama of the situation that she impulsively throws the golden necklace the viceroy has given her to the victorious toreador, who interprets it as a token of her affection. In another farcical and highly theatrical scene, Felipe and Ramón fight a duel over Camilla with swords while the viceroy, who has refused to give in to the demands of the nobles over the coach and resigned himself to the loss of his power and his life, says goodbye to Camilla on the night before the bishop arrives to sign his death warrant.

But in the end the viceroy is not deposed or executed. The resourceful Camilla outwits all of her noble adversaries by grasping, as they do not, the power of theater over life. How, you may be asking, does she put this knowledge to practical purpose? By recognizing that there is one powerful person with more invested in the maintenance of position through symbolism, ritual, and performance than the nobles themselves: the bishop, the man who has the final say in all that happens in the colony. For what could possibly be more theatrical than the pageantry of the Roman Catholic church? Costumes, props, music, stylized movement, elevated language—the church incorporates in its rites the same elements as the theater. By making a gift of the golden coach to the bishop, Camilla not only saves Ferdinand's life, but proves herself the most masterful dramatic strategist—and plotter—of the lot by correctly gauging the irresistible appeal of the coach's grandeur to the bishop's vanity. In thanking Camilla for her gift, the bishop actually says with a straight face that now when he is driven to give the last rites to a dying peasant, he will arrive in a vehicle befitting his position as spiritual head of the colony!

The Golden Coach benefits greatly from its Technicolor cinematography by the director's nephew, Claude Renoir, who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his movies. Filmed at Cinecittà in Rome, the movie has a gleaming, silvery glow that mirrors the sunblanched desert tones of the sky, sand, stone, and stucco of its setting. The film also benefits from the music of Vivaldi, which is contemporary with its setting and which Renoir says he used as an inspiration while planning the movie. But above all it benefits from the presence of the magnificent Anna Magnani. When unrestrained, Magnani can sometimes be just a bit too much larger-than-life. But here she has just the right amount of exuberance, willfulness, and voluptuousness. It's easy to see why the viceroy becomes so enamored of her, for her appeal shines through not so much in physical beauty as in her sensuousness, her liveliness, and her robust enjoyment of life—all qualities lacking in the effete noblewomen the viceroy normally socializes with and romances.

But most of all, Magnani's beauty is expressed through her huge, soulful, bovine eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final scene of the movie. Like Olivier's Henry V, The Golden Coach opens and closes in a theater, and the entire movie is framed as a stage performance. In the last scene, the curtain descends, and the camera draws back to show the proscenium. Don Antonio, the manager of the troupe, stands to the left and delivers an epilogue on the superiority of the theater to "so-called real life." As the camera moves in for a medium close shot of Magnani, standing dead in the center of the stage in front of the curtain, she mutters distractedly, "Felipe, the bishop, Ramón, the viceroy . . . disappeared, gone."

"Do you miss them?" Don Felipe asks her.

"A little," she answers wistfully, raising those dark, melancholy eyes and looking directly into the camera, which lingers on her face in a haunting final shot that in its power and beauty rivals the last shot of Garbo in Queen Christina.
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Brief Reviews: Two by Samuel Fuller

2009-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) * * ½
"The picture that breaks the shock barrier!" proclaims the trailer to this movie directed by Samuel Fuller. The real shock here is that the man who directed Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One could have made such a preposterous movie as this one, evidently in perfect seriousness. In the film Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an investigative newspaper reporter of overpowering ambition, is convinced he will win a Pulitzer Prize by impersonating a madman, having himself admitted to a mental hospital, and solving the murder of a patient that took place there a year before. He plans to do this by pretending to have an incestuous sexual obsession with his sister, who is actually his girl friend, Cathy (Constance Towers).

This plot allows Fuller to portray mental illness in the most outrageous ways, his concept of mental illness consisting of a pastiche of a little bit of knowledge and a large helping of myth, imagination, and misinformation. The patients at the hospital show the most clichéd symptoms of psychosis, shuffling around like zombies, lounging about in catatonic stupors, or indulging in compulsive repetitive behaviors. In their "mad" scenes, the entire cast tends to overact without restraint. Fuller also throws in gratuitously lurid details (Cathy is a stripper in a sleazy nightclub) and dialogue: "My love for you goes up and down like a thermometer," Johnny says to an imaginary Cathy his first night in the hospital. "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me," a friendly orderly confides to Johnny. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Johnny gets trapped in the "nympho ward," where a pack of wild-eyed females surround him, throw him to the floor, and maul him.

Eventually Johnny gets around to interviewing the three witnesses to the murder, lunatics who fortunately snap into lucidity just long enough to reveal important evidence about the crime. These characters allow Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, to inject into the plot commentary on some of the big political issues of the time—political defectors, segregation, and the Cold War. They also allow him to depict some of the more dramatic psychotic disorders—delusions of grandeur, dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder, and regression to an infantile state. By the end of the movie, Johnny has solved the murder but been so traumatized by his experiences in the hospital that he develops a bad case of "catatonic schizophrenia."

Is there a reason to watch this movie? Well, yes, especially for fans of Fuller. Despite its sensationalistic excesses (and frequent unintentional hilarity), it is so flamboyantly directed, so imaginative in its visualizations (especially considering that it was shot in ten days on one set), and so unexpectedly and consistently over-the-top that it never fails to entertain.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951) * * *
In an excerpt from an interview I saw recently on Turner Classic Movies, Samuel Fuller spoke of the transition from being a journalist and novelist to becoming a movie director. He said he realized that as a film director he didn't need to use words to tell the story, that he could do this with the camera and the images. If Shock Corridor—with its long-winded speechifying and constant voice-over internal monologue narration by the main character—belies this observation, The Steel Helmet, in contrast, clearly illustrates it.

The movie takes place during the Korean War and was filmed during the early days of that conflict. Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, excellent in the first of six films he made with Fuller), the lone survivor of a massacre by North Korean troops, tries to find his way back to his unit, along the way picking up a young Korean orphan and joining another group of soldiers who have become separated from their unit. After groping their way through a dense fog, the group eventually stumble on a deserted, pagoda-like Buddhist temple and hole up there, unaware that a North Korean sniper is hiding on the upper level of the building.

Visually, Fuller makes the most of the sequence in the fog and especially the temple, where much of the movie takes place. His camera glides around the interior of the temple and moves fluidly from level to level. Interspersed as a sort of unifying image are recurrent cuts to the giant statue of the Buddha dominating the interior of the temple, with its serene facial expression that forms such a contrast to the tension between the soldiers and to the danger they face from both the sniper inside the temple and the enemy troops closing in from outside.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it seems a trial version of Fuller's nearly three-hour long WW II epic The Big Red One (1980), with many elements from The Steel Helmet worked into that later masterwork and more fully developed. The Steel Helmet opens with a shot of Sgt. Zack lying in a field of dead soldiers with a bullet hole in his helmet, prefiguring the scene on the beach during the Normandy invasion in The Big Red One when The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) shoots a bullet through the helmet of a fallen soldier as a warning of what will happen to any soldiers who might pretend to be hit. The gruff Sgt. Zack, with his half-smoked cigar permanently stuck in his mouth, resembles both Fuller himself and Fuller's alter ego in The Big Red One, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine). The Korean orphan brings to mind the dying boy Marvin rescues from the concentration camp. At one point in The Steel Helmet Sgt. Zack tells of an enlisted man he served with in WW II who kept a detailed diary of his experiences, just like Pvt. Zab in The Big Red One. And he also reminisces about his sergeant in that war and quotes him as saying on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, "There are two kinds of men here: those who are dead and those who are about to die." This is, in fact, the most familiar line of dialogue from the later film, repeated verbatim by Marvin as he directs his soldiers when they land on the beach at Normandy. (Interestingly, Robert Mitchum has a very similar line in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day: "Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.")

Aside from some dated Cold War rhetoric, it's not necessary to gloss over any deficiencies in The Steel Helmet—filmed in ten days mostly in L.A.'s Griffith Park and in the studio with stock footage interpolated, on a budget reported to be only $100,000—to appreciate the feeling and the visual imagination Fuller put into the movie. And the resemblances to The Big Red One show how meaningful and how formative Fuller's own war experiences were to him and to the view of life he expressed in his films.
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1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

2009-11-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fact vs. Legend in the Old West

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to universal education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy elements of the philosophy of his opposite.

In the next installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962.

Ghost Images: Ten Classic Movies of the Supernatural

2009-11-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

With Halloween last week and the Day of the Dead this week, movie blogs have been buzzing with posts on films about the occult. The IMDb Hit List recently featured a post about the top ten ghost movies. While the selections were thoughtfully chosen, the emphasis was on movies of the last thirty years or so, and none of the pictures on it were the kind of classic films that most appeal to me. So in this post I'd like to offer ten ghost movies from 1937-1962 that I think would appeal to lovers of classic film like me—admittedly not all of them masterpieces, but still entertaining and in some cases unusual examples of the genre from that era. One film that normally would be on the list is Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), but I'm forgoing that one because I've already written an entire post on it. So here they are, in chronological order:

• Topper (1937). Ordinarily you expect a ghost story, or a movie about ghosts, to be scary. But Topper is a rarity—a comedy about ghosts, one of three I'm including in this post. The fast-living, hard-drinking socialite couple George and Marion Kerby (a rather manic Cary Grant and Constance Bennett) are killed in a car crash returning home from a night club. Fortunately, their car, a custom-built fin-tailed 1936 Buick, survives the crash intact and is bought by a staid banker, Cosmo Topper (Roland Young). But along with the car come the Kerbys as ghosts, and under their influence he defies his repressive wife (Billie Burke) and breaks out of his conservative shell. Of course, only Topper can see and hear the Kerbys, and this leads to many humorous complications and misunderstandings. The movie was produced by Hal Roach, who was responsible for the early Harold Lloyd shorts, the Our Gang comedies, and many of the Laurel and Hardy movies, so it's no surprise that Topper is full of hyperkinetic physical comedy. The director, Norman Z. McLeod was no stranger to broad comedy either, directing movies with the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope. Topper was followed by two sequels (without Grant, who in the meantime had gone on to greater things). One of them, Topper Returns (1941), is a fun comic ghost story/mystery without the Kerbys that stars the always delightful Joan Blondell as a ghost who enlists Topper to help her solve her own murder.

• Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). After saxophone-playing prizefighter Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) crashes his airplane, an overzealous heavenly messenger (Edward Everett Horton) snatches his soul to Heaven, not realizing Pendleton was supposed to have survived the crash. When Joe's manager (James Gleason) has his body cremated, the heavenly Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) is forced to rehouse Joe temporarily in a recently deceased body until he can sort out the situation. The body is that of a crooked millionaire investment banker named Farnsworth, who has just been murdered by his scheming wife and her lover. The movie is not only a seriocomic ghost story, but has elements of both the body-switch movie (we see Robert Montgomery but everyone else sees the real Farnsworth) and the Capra social conscience movie as Joe tries to rectify Farnsworth's financial swindles, especially to one of his victims, Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), with whom he has fallen in love. The movie is full of clever and imaginative twists, unexpectedly comic in its approach to death and reincarnation, and thoroughly entertaining. Montgomery gives one of his best performances as an honest working-class man trying uncomfortably, and with often humorous results, to impersonate an upper-class crook, and character stalwarts Rains, Horton, and Gleason form a dream supporting cast.

• The Curse of the Cat People (1944). This was one of three movies Robert Wise directed for famed producer Val Lewton. (Actually, he replaced Gunther von Fritsch and the two get co-directing credit for this film.) The movie carries over the three main characters from the first horror film Lewton produced for RKO, The Cat People (1942), but otherwise has little connection to its predecessor. In this film, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) has married his colleague Alice (Jane Randolph) after the death of his first wife Irena (Simone Simon), the strange young woman who believed herself the victim of an ancient curse in The Cat People. The couple now have a troubled young daughter, and the ghost of Irena (pictured above) appears to her. This ghost, though, is no menace, but rather a protector and guide to the unhappy girl, a sort of spectral equivalent of the imaginary friend. The movie is not frightening, but instead dreamy—closer to a supernatural fantasy than a classic ghost story—and quite unlike the other Lewton thrillers or the typical movie about the supernatural.

• The Uninvited (1944). A wonderfully atmospheric ghost movie that deserves to be better known. A brother and sister from London, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), visiting the south coast of England, discover a picturesque unoccupied seaside house called Windward House and determine to live there. The owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), at first refuses to sell the house but eventually relents after warning them of the house's evil reputation and the reports of strange occurrences there. It turns out that his daughter died in a fall from the cliff outside the house, which in part explains his overprotective attitude toward his granddaughter Stella (Gail Russell)—who has charmed the Fitzgerald's, particularly Roderick—and the fact that he refuses to let her visit them at Windward House. The new owners soon begin to experience events that convince them that an evil presence does indeed haunt the house and that it is not only connected to the ethereal Stella but poses a real threat to her. The movie includes ghostly apparitions, an exorcism of the house, and a very memorable séance (pictured above), walking a fine line between explicit and suggested ghostly manifestations. It also features the beautiful Victor Young melody "Stella by Starlight."

• Blithe Spirit (1945). The third comic ghost story on my list is based on a play by Noel Coward, a perennial favorite of amateur theater groups. Writer Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison), a skeptic about the occult in search of material for a new book, invites the local medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford, above), to conduct a séance at his home. The séance has unfortunate consequences when Madame Arcati accidentally summons up the headstrong ghost of Charles's first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond, in appropriately weird green make-up and shroud-like gown). Complications ensue in the form of conflict with his second wife (Constance Cummings) and Madame Arcati's ineffectual but hilarious attempts to rid the Condomines of Elvira's ghostly presence and the supernatural ménage à trois it has created. The plot—especially its resolution—is reminiscent of Topper, but with director David Lean at the helm, the humor is drier and more subtle, emphasizing verbal wit over physical shenanigans. The acting is more subtle too, but Rutherford goes all out in her characterization of the wacky medium and easily manages to steal the movie in the process, in a comic performance that is a genuine classic.

• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). One of the most romantic of all ghost movies, this is the story of a love affair between a living woman and a ghost. The young widow Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney, at her loveliest) and her daughter leave London to live in a small house called Gull Cottage on the English coast. The superstitious locals believe the house to be haunted by its former inhabitant, a sea captain named Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison again), who is thought to have committed suicide there. On her very first night at Gull Cottage, Lucy finds the tale of haunting to be true when the irascible Capt. Gregg appears to her. The two soon make a truce, though, and over the years develop a close friendship. When Lucy finds her income gone, the captain even devises a clever scheme that permits Lucy to remain the tenant of Gull Cottage and stay close to him. The movie is quite poignant in its depiction of the decades-long devotion of Lucy and the captain to each other. A very touching tale directed with uncharacteristic tenderness by the usually acerbic Joseph L. Maknkiewicz.

• Portrait of Jennie (1948). On a snowy winter day in New York City, artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) meets a teenaged girl named Jennie (Jennifer Jones) in Central Park and strikes up a friendship. But Jennie disappears from the park suddenly before he can find out more about her. Eben keeps returning to the park hoping to meet her again but is unsuccessful. A few weeks later he runs into her again, and she seems a few years older. Time and again this pattern is repeated: Jennie disappears suddenly, only to reappear later, each time a bit older. Eben, who is having a hard time finding inspiration and establishing himself as an artist, soon begins a portrait of her, working on it intermittently when he can get her to sit for him. As he investigates Jennie's past, the mystery surrounding her deepens as he is told things that don't seem possible. Jennifer Jones is quite good as the beautiful, gentle Jenny who becomes Eben's ghostly muse, and the cast is rounded out by veteran character actors Ethel Barrymore, Cecil Kellaway, and Lillian Gish. Debussy's "Clair de Lune" is used most effectively as a recurring musical theme to suggest Jennie's otherworldly nature. In a way the movie is a bit silly and at times a trifle overly earnest in its treatment of its slight story. But Luis Buñuel named it one of the ten best movies of all time in a Sight and Sound survey, so there must be something to it, mustn't there?

• Scrooge (1951). Hands down the best version ever of Dickens's A Christmas Carol and one of the very best adaptations of a work by Dickens ever filmed for the big screen. Is there anyone unfamiliar with this irresistible tale of greed and redemption, with its trio of Christmas ghosts who show Ebenezer Scrooge the error of his ways just in time? The production design, the cast (including in a small role a young Patrick MacNee, John Steed of TV's The Avengers), the photography, the direction—everything about the movie is first-rate. But as good as those things are, it is Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge who dominates the picture. This was the role of a lifetime, and even if he had never made another movie, this performance would have secured his place in cinema history.

• The Innocents (1961). In Victorian England Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is hired by their uncle as governess to his two young wards, Miles and Flora, who live at a remote country estate. She soon begins to suspect that something is not right in the house when she keeps seeing two strangers furtively prowling the grounds. The housekeeper says her description of them sounds like the children's former governess and her lover, the estate manager, both now dead, and hints at some unspeakable scandal they were involved in. Miss Giddens, convinced that the two have somehow corrupted the children and have returned from the dead with evil designs on them, gradually becomes obsessed with protecting the children from the ghosts and with finding out exactly what hold the ghosts have over them. The Innocents is based on the short novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and reproduces both the ambiguity of the book about the existence of the ghosts and the book's suggestions that there is something implicitly sexual in Miss Giddens's preoccupation with the "corruption" of the children by the ghosts. Are the ghosts figments of her imagination, or are they real? Are the children really in danger, or is her concern for their safety and purity an idée fixe born of repressed sexual hysteria? Is Miss Giddens the children's protector, or is she a delusional neurotic projecting her own phobias about sex onto the children? The movie provides no answers, giving us evidence that could support either view. But it does provide atmosphere galore, and the governess's belief in the evil hanging over the children, whether real or imaginary, is genuinely unsettling. Of all the movies covered in this post, The Innocents, brilliantly directed by Jack Clayton and photographed by Freddie Francis, is the most successful as a work of cinema art, and it contains what in my view is the great Deborah Kerr's finest performance.

• Carnival of Souls (1962). A car with three young women in it plunges off a bridge and into a turbid river. As rescuers search for the submerged car and pull it from the river, the lone survivor, a young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligloss), staggers from the river dazed and covered in mud. Trying to put the trauma of the crash behind her, Mary moves to another state and gets a job as a church organist. But strange things keep happening to her. The most unnerving of these are recurrent encounters with a ghoulish-looking stranger and Mary's fascination with a derelict carnival pavilion on the edge of a remote lake, to which she inexplicably feels drawn. The movie climaxes in a late-night danse macabre at the pavilion, in which bizarre-looking couples who could have come from a zombie movie directed by Fellini move stiffly around the dance floor and Mary herself dances with the ghoul. Shot in two weeks by a crew of five, the movie was filmed in 16mm and blown up to 35mm for release to drive-in theaters. The director was Herk Harvey, a Kansas-based filmmaker who directed over 400 short educational and industrial films with titles like Your Junior High Days and Why Study Industrial Arts? but no other feature films. The movie's twist ending will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the Twilight Zone episode with Inger Stevens about the mysterious hitchhiker, but it still packs a satisfying punch. Carnival of Souls is a bona fide proto-indie/cult/sleeper film that despite its budgetary limitations is in its way as chilling a ghost tale as any movie on this list.
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Movie Houses: Memorable Homes from Ten Classic Films

2009-10-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since Aristotle wrote his Poetics breaking down narrative literature into its constituent parts, setting—where and when a story takes place—has been considered one of the fundamental elements of narration. In narrative film, which is essentially a visual art, where the action occurs is if anything even more important than in literature. In the past I've written about the importance of setting in Mon Oncle, The Haunting, and The Magnificent Ambersons, specifically the houses where those movies take place. In this post I'd like to discuss ten more movies where the setting not only is visually striking and vividly atmospheric, but also plays an important part in the narrative. Here they are, then, in no particular order:

• Citizen Kane (1941). "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That Charles Foster Kane named his mansion Xanadu is a good indication of the character's megalomania. The house depicted in Citizen Kane certainly seems to be the residence of a man with delusions of grandeur. And its position high on a hilltop—part fortress, part prison—underscores the isolation of Kane in his later years. Xanadu is the first thing we see in the movie, a light in one window, the window of the room where Kane lies dying and utters that enigmatic last word "Rosebud" as the snow globe slips out of his hand and rolls across the floor. It's also the last thing we see, in complete darkness now with smoke rising from the chimney. What a frisson when we realize exactly what is burning in that massive fireplace in front of which the second Mrs. Kane whiled away the hours with her jigsaw puzzles.

• Lost Horizon (1937). Shangri-La has become synonymous with paradise, and practically everyone, not just moviegoers, recognizes the name. When Frank Capra filmed James Hilton's novel, his set designers came up with an unforgettable vision of that exotic Himalayan home of ageless monks and their Utopian community. The design details could only be called eclectic, an eccentric fusion of modernist, Babylonian, Moorish, and Asian elements, both inside and out, that mirrors the vague East/West mysticism of the monks. The grounds are complete with reflecting pools, wandering ornamental wildfowl, architectonic conifers, and weeping Chinese trees. Dominating it all are the radiant blue skies and brilliant sunlight of Southern California.

• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This house could have come right out of a Currier & Ives print, so closely does it conform to the archetype of the upper middle-class American home circa 1900. The movie, all about the tribulations of the Smith family when they learn they must leave St. Louis after the father of the family takes a job in New York City, follows what will be the last few months in their familiar home as the family faces the approaching move with mounting apprehension. This house should be an idyllic place, a place of security, stability, and happiness. And everything about it does indeed convey exactly those feelings of wholesome normalcy. Who could bear to leave a place of such idealized Midwestern homeyness for the uncertainty of life in the big city?

• The Beauty and the Beast (1946). Cocteau's vision of the Beast's home is ravishingly beautiful, strange, and magical. This is a living house, where everything—from the caryatids supporting the fireplace mantelshelf to the candelabra held by human arms that swivel to light Belle's passage down the dark hallway to her room—is alive. The imaginative detail that went into this setting—indeed, into everything about the movie, including its props, costumes, and makeup—is astounding and, once seen, impossible to forget. There has never been anything quite like it in any other live-action movie: a fairy tale vision that easily does justice to the fantastic story it's such a big part of.

• Rebel Without a Cause (1955). One of the first, and probably the definitive, teen alienation movies, with James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo as the alienated teens. Near the end of the movie the three meet at an abandoned mansion and in a poignant sequence role-play the ideal family they long for in their real lives. This is a place of escape and fantasy, and its dereliction suggests the impossibility of their dream world. The actual location used was the Getty Mansion in Hollywood, where those scenes were shot over the course of several nights. This is, coincidentally, the same location used as Norma Desmond's mansion in Sunset Boulevard, and the empty swimming pool with Dean, Wood, and Mineo in it pictured above is the same one in which the body of Joe Gillis floats as he narrates that movie in flashback. This and other filming locations for Rebel are described in a fascinating post at the blogsite Dear Old Hollywood, which is where I located the screenshot above.

• Rebecca (1940). "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Nobody who has seen this movie will forget that line. Nor will they forget the spooky seaside mansion where Maxim de Winter takes his shy, unassertive second wife and where so many memorable scenes take place. At Manderley the second Mrs. de Winter's isolation is not only physical but also social. A former paid companion, she is intimidated by the responsibility of being in charge of such a large house and staff (especially the resentful, domineering Mrs. Danvers) and by trying desperately to fit in with the idle rich with whom her new husband socializes. Alfred Hitchcock, himself the son of a greengrocer, makes Manderley a representation of the profoundly ingrained class system of pre-World War II Britain and makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the class insecurity of the timid young bride unaccustomed to the privilege and wealth of her new social position.

• Gone with the Wind (1939). So essential is Scarlett O'Hara's plantation Tara to the movie that composer Max Steiner actually gave it its own musical theme. Tara represents an idealized vision of the antebellum South. Its destruction in the Civil War devastates Scarlett, and her obsession with restoring it to its previous glory becomes the driving motivation of her life. To achieve this she marries two men she doesn't love for their money and even kills. At the end of the movie, after she has lost everything else, she returns to Tara and vows to make it the Edenic place it once was. In its way, Tara is nearly as essential to the plot of the movie as any of the main characters. In a movie of lavish expenditure, clearly not a dollar was spared by David O. Selznick on making Tara the image of everything it stands for in Scarlett's memory.

• Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Shot at several palaces in Bavaria, this movie would be inconceivable without its locations. Remove those and what would remain? Little but enigmatic characters and an impenetrable fugue of a plot. It's the look of this movie that makes it an unforgettable one of a kind: those people encountering one another in baroque salons encrusted with elaborate ornamentation or in mind-bending halls of mirrors, or standing about like statues in those absolutely symmetrical, geometric French-style gardens. Forget the people, forget trying to make sense of the plot or the dialogue. Just lose yourself in those timeless, hallucinatory images. Location, location, location—that's what this film is all about.

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). While most of the other homes I've written about are rather grand places, the setting of this film is just the opposite. Located in a run-down building ironically named Elysian Fields, the home of Stanley and Stella Kowalski is a shabby, cramped apartment. The set designers (who won an Oscar for their work) actually turn the movie's stage origin to its advantage by creating a claustrophobic vision of poverty that looks all the more stark in the film's black-and-white cinematography by Harry Stradling, better known for opulent movies like The Picture of Dorian Gray or Technicolor extravaganzas like The Pirate and My Fair Lady. Here he perfectly captures the bleakness of the Kowalskis' apartment, with its sparse furnishings, overstuffed appearance, harsh lighting, and hanging electric cords snaking across the top of the frame. Stanley Kowalski, in his sweaty T-shirt, looks right at home here, but his fantasist sister-in-law Blanche du Bois, in her frilly, virginal Southern belle frocks, seems completely out of place in this absolutely realistic vision of limited resources and frustrated hopes.

• Psycho (1960). How else could I end this post but with what is probably the most identifiable movie house in all cinema? Old-fashioned, a bit dilapidated, and in need of a fresh coat of paint it may be, but once you've seen what goes on inside, that ordinary-looking old house looming eerily on an isolated hilltop will be burned into your memory, the ultimate image of creepiness, menace, and perversion hiding behind an innocuous facade—just like its inhabitant, Norman Bates. Who but Alfred Hitchcock could have taken such a hackneyed idea and made it so thoroughly convincing and so thoroughly entertaining?

I've limited myself to ten memorable movie homes drawn from my favorite era in cinema, some of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. If anyone would like to add favorites of your own, please do leave a comment.
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The Best Movies of the 1980s

2009-10-19T00:00:00.001-07:00

Another decade poll, this one on the 25 best movies of the 1980s, has concluded at Wonders in the Dark, and the results have been announced. This was for me the most difficult of the four decade polls I've taken part in. In previous decade polls—I didn't begin participating until the poll on the 1950s—my greatest problem was narrowing down a list of 40-50 possibilities—all taken from my list of **** movies, my highest personal rating—to 25 finalists. This time the problem was the opposite: I didn't have 25 to begin with, so I had to expand my preliminary list to come up with 25 finalists. This meant that for the first time a few of the titles on my final list, while very good films, didn't quite make my highest rating. One of the reasons for this was that for these lists I include only one movie per director. This practice originally began because I didn't want my lists dominated by a handful of individuals who are my own favorites at the expense of other directors. Even though this time such a limitation wasn't strictly necessary, I decided for the sake of consistency to continue observing it.

Because the WitD poll now permits television productions to be included in the poll, I could have filled out the list with the best TV mini-series of the decade. (See my list at the end.) For me the 1980s were the zenith of the TV mini-series, particularly in the UK. But as with the 1970s poll, I balked at including television productions because I don't really consider them the same thing as theatrical movies. I watch them differently, and I have different expectations of them. I expect theatrical movies to be more concentrated. I also expect to be able to watch them in one sitting, and for me that means a running time of at most around three hours, give or take a little.

One of the most interesting things I did in preparing for the poll was to watch the TV version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. The theatrical film runs a little over three hours, and the TV version about five hours. I watched the TV version's four episodes over four nights, as it was intended, and then compared the two versions. The TV version contains several sequences, some brief and a couple fairly long, that do not appear in the theatrical version. Some of these add to the story, but some of them seem like digressions that aren't absolutely necessary and in some cases actually sidetrack the main narrative.

One short sequence that isn't in the theatrical version occurs when Alexander is locked in the attic for making up a story that his stepfather murdered his first wife and their two daughters. The two daughters appear to Alexander as ghosts and tell him what really happened—that they were victims of a tragic accident in the river that runs outside their house. This fairly brief sequence seems to hearken back to the dreaminess of Bergman's earlier films, a style he had largely abandoned by the time of Fanny and Alexander. Curiously, in a way it actually de-emphasizes Alexander's eidetic imagination, making the movie more a literalized ghost story than a portrait of the artist as a young man haunted by his own metaphorical ghosts rooted in his childhood experiences (the loss of this father and abuse by his stepfather).

A long sequence that also weakens the longer version occurs when their grandmother's friend Isak tells Fanny and Alexander a complicated and rather tedious story that is a parable of the human search for the locus of pure imagination and a lost state of grace. It elaborates on a point that is already obvious and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about either Isak or Alexander. The whole extended sequence seems to exist only for a brief, although admittedly vivid, glimpse at Alexander's visualization of one event in the story. A similar sequence that appears only in the long version occurs after the Christmas feast when Alexander's father calms the restive children in the nursery by telling them a lengthy tale about a Chinese princess and her magic chair. The story is in itself not very interesting, a digression that slows the film down without contributing anything significant.

On the other hand, some things included in the longer version strengthen the movie. A couple of scenes that last only a few seconds are inexplicably missing in the short version. At the very beginning, Alexander imagines he sees a statue come to life. In the long version he also has a brief glimpse of Death as the Grim Reaper, and these few moments of counterpoint between beauty and death, with their echoes of The Seventh Seal, are so potent that I am surprised they were eliminated in the short version. Likewise, in the long version after the christening banquet, there is a brief shot of the guests all assembled, which then transmutes into a black-and-white photo, which becomes one of a pile of photos Alexander's grandmother is trying to sort out and paste into a scrapbook. This is one of the most haunting images in the movie, and again I am surprised that, lasting at most a few seconds and intensifying the movie's preoccupation with memory and time, it was eliminated in the shortened version.

A longer sequence with Alexander's uncles trying to get the two children away from their stepfather, who is holding them prisoner after their mother has left him, struck me as pertinent to the story despite its length, helping to flesh out the uncles and the way they differ in personality. This sequence was eliminated altogether from the theatrical version. And in the TV version the farewell of Alexander's mother to the actors when she announces she is closing the theater is, I feel, more poignant than the abbreviated sequence in the short version.

However, one example of trimming the movie improves the theatrical version considerably. This is the very first long sequence of the Christmas festivities at the theater and at the Ekdahls' house. The shorter version, which I described at length in a previous post, is wonderfully concentrated. I wrote that "Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal." But in the TV version, this sequence, running nearly twice as long, is bogged down in unnecessary exposition and digression, its power considerably diluted. After comparing the two versions, I decided that the ideal would probably have been something between the two, running about four hours.

Why am I writing in such detail about this one movie? One reason is that this decade poll and the previous one highlighted the proliferation of alternate versions of films under consideration—TV versions, restorations, reconstructions, director's cuts. Another reason is that I chose Fanny and Alexander as the #1 movie of the decade, as did the participants in the 1980s poll at WitD. This is the fourth decade in a row that I placed a film by Bergman at or near the top of the movies of the decade: Wild Strawberries at #2 for the 1950s, Persona at #1 for the 1960s, Cries and Whispers at #3 for the 1970s, and now Fanny and Alexander at #1 for the 1980s.

With the usual caveat, that this a personal list limited by my own viewing experiences and cinematic preferences—and acknowledging that on reflection it strikes me as a fairly conservative list, heavy on period movies and movies about children—here are my top films of the 1980s:

THE BEST MOVIES OF THE 1980s

Fanny and Alexander, Bergman (1983)
Blue Velvet, Lynch (1986)
The Night of the Shooting Stars, Taviani & Taviani (1982)
A Sunday in the Country, Tavernier (1984)
The Dead, Huston (1987)
Kagemusha, Kurosawa (1980)
Tootsie, Pollack (1982)
Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen (1986)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar (1988)
The Last Emperor (Director's Cut), Bertolucci (1987)
Au Revoir, les Enfants, Malle (1987)
Hope and Glory, Boorman (1987)
Pixote, Babenco (1981)
Pelle the Conqueror, August (1988)
Babette's Feast, Axel (1987)
A Room with a View, Ivory (1986)
Dangerous Liaisons, Frears (1988)
Raging Bull, Scorsese (1980)
Brazil, Gilliam (1985)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg (1982)
Terms of Endearment, Brooks (1983)
La Traviata, Zeffirelli (1982)
Jean de Florette, Berri (1986)
Paris, Texas, Wenders (1984)
The Home and the World, Ray (1984)

HONORABLE MENTION: The Elephant Man, Ran, The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Manon of the Springs, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors

BEST TV PRODUCTIONS: The Singing Detective, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Paradise Postponed

If I were to single out one film director for especially good work during the 1980s, it would be Woody Allen, for the films I mentioned plus Zelig (for the boldness of its concept and its meticulous execution).

This will likely be the last decade poll I'll be participating in. The 1980s lie at the outside edge of my knowledge of cinema, and my interest in movies produced after this decade begins to wane seriously. I find fewer and fewer movies of the last 20 years that appeal to me enough to go out of my way to seek them out, and when I do, I too often find they don't live up to my hopes. I'll continue to follow Allan Fish's concise and knowledgeable reviews at Wonders in the Dark, and the stimulating comments and discussions that his sometimes surprising choices evoke. And I'll be trawling the site for titles to add to my watch-list to help update my film knowledge. It's been a pleasure discovering and rediscovering the best movies of the 1950s-1980s, and I thank Allan and Sam Juliano of WitD for inspiring those of us who regularly visit the site to do this.