Spoilers: Notes on a life at the movies

Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002)

2009-12-14T22:11:00.006-05:00

An extravagant, gigantic-budgeted Bollywood epic, with every possible richness of décor and costume. Indeed, the palatial homes of the two neigbouring families, the rich Mukherjis—their son is Devdas (Sharukh Khan)—and the now-wealthy but once theatrical next-door neigbours—their daughter is Parvati (Aishwarya Rai). Their homes are vast, opulent in a vulgar manner, westernized with neoclassical columns and painted ironwork and stained-glass and fountains and chandeliers and patterned marble floors. Everything is just a little too much. But the vulgar excess of material fantasy doesn’t ruin the film. It’s a three-hour romantic tragedy, the two childhood sweethearts separated by the Mukherji’s snobbery—and by Dev’s weakness, for he doesn’t simply take Paro and leave.

The story unwinds in a slow, inexorable decline. Cast out by his family and failing in his attempt to forget Paro as he’s told her he’s already done, Dev wanders aimlessly until a jovial friend brings him to the famous courtesan Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit). There he watches her dance, learns to drink, and treats her with contempt. Still, she loves him, and watches his slide into alcoholism helplessly. Meanwhile Paro is married to a very wealthy widower, a man devoted to the memory of his late wife, and he will not consummate the marriage. And a scheming sister-in-law alienates Dev’s family from him, and he is doubly cast out. He comes home to die at her gate—and Paro’s husband locks the gate so they are separated even as he dies.

It would be less surprising if all this did not work. But it does, somehow. The story is buoyed up by spectacle, especially the wonderful songs and the dancing scenes, and by the ability to show joy and long-lasting grief shared by Rai and Khan, and by Dixit as well. Enriching the plot, which is more than a little analogous to the premise of Romeo and Juliet, is a strong thematic undercurrent referring to the love of Krishna and Radha. This theme is reinforced by several of the songs, which tell of the ecstasy of their union and of the loneliness and longing of Radha in Krishna’s absence. There is an implicit gulf between the absolute demand of love (as figured in the Radha-Krishna story) and the cruel vanity of the parents in daily practice. The same gulf appears in the enactment of a Durga Puja, when the arrogance of the wealthy family Paro has married into runs against the implicit meaning of the ritual. And so it is deeply and grievously ironic that Paro, Dev, and Chandramukhi suffer such agonies because they love, when all around them friends, family, and strangers all celebrate the love of Radha and Krishna. Devdas—his name means “servant of the gods,” dies for love. It wasn’t the gods who killed him—it was human intolerance. The music, again, is wonderful, and the three main actors always worth watching. But it's sad, very sad.

Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)

2009-10-24T18:02:00.009-04:00

Sometimes after watching a movie—or even while watching—it's hard to resist the temptation to admit the truth of the cliché that there are only a few plots. Here again it’s the intensely smart, independent, brassy woman exploiting the simple, good, tall man.

This time it’s Barbara Stanwyck who’s leading Gary Cooper on; she’s a newspaper-woman (yes, again) with a great headline grabbing story. She's dreamed up a populist Everyman to give voice to her ideas—and her father’s ideas—about simple decency in hard times--it's a Great Depression story. Her character, Ann Mitchell, is losing her job because she's too mild-mannered, so she fires off a piece of fiery writing, supposedly a letter from an anonymous man out of work, out of luck, and without any hope or confidence in society or big business. Her invented "John Doe" announces he's going to jump off the tallest building in town on Christmas Eve. The piece provokes an uproar, saving Ann's job, but now the people want to know more--so she hires a likely prospect to pay the part. Uh-oh!

As it happens, Long John Willoughby (Cooper), an out-of-work minor-league pitcher chosen to play the part, really is a decent guy at least as sympathetic and, well, noble, as the one Ann invented. Inevitably she falls in love with him at the same time as her position gets more and more compromised, so that in the end she can only operate on emotion, not intellect. It's as if Capra imagined some sort of universal power that operates on smart women to reign them in, requiring them to become less voluble and peppery and daring , and then to become more “womanly.” Perhaps this is unfair, since falling in love transforms Long John, too, first making him act against his conscience and then making him risk everything to do the right thing.

Stanwyck is most compelling when she’s talking, and talking fast, with strong traces of Brooklyn still uncontrolled in her vowels. She’s not quite as pretty as some other comedic heroines, but she is very engaging in the speed of her talk, and the crispness of her movements, and her eyes are smart. I found this quotation somewhere online: “Eyes are the greatest tool in film. Mr Capra taught me that. Sure it’s nice to say very good dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting – watch the eyes!” Cooper, too, has good eyes, and a remarkably expressive face, which Capra uses to good effect with close-ups: dignified, sad, bleak, amused, desperate. He’s tall and rangy and surrounded.

The story of Meet John Doe is a populist confection for wartime—the newspaper story becomes a campaign against the ills of contemporary society (graft, corrupt government, callous big business, the tendency to dislike one’s neighbours), in short, a vague nod in the direction of treating people decently. Capra cuts between scenes with the principals and short scenes in which ordinary people in the street react to the John Doe story. Even though some of them are cynical and others panicky, they have an innate sense of right and wrong--so that even if they are misled by demagoguery, they can make it back safely to their real values.

The film opens with a workman using a jackhammer to remove the stone inscription about freedom of the press from the front of a newspaper building, replacing it with a big new ownership sign, and then everybody inside gets fired. The new owner, D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold), is a large, calm tycoon with a rich, attractive voice—the contrast between his assured calm and Stanwyck’s rapid-fire delivery is cleverly handled. Norton, however, is a fascist, and exploits the John Doe movement, then tries to destroy it when Long John refuses to help him become the next (right-wing) president. The people, though they’re temporarily swayed by Norton’s attack on Doe, come back to his values, and fascism is stopped.

There are some great character actors, most notably Walter Brennan as John’s hobo sidekick, the Colonel, Irving Bacon as the innocent clumsy gofer, and Warren Hymer as Angelface, the eternal wiseacre gangster-bodyguard. And there are wonderfully dotty sequences, especially the pretend baseball game in the hotel room, in which everybody is totally engaged. By mixing in screwball routines with a more serious story, Capra manages to keep the brush with disaster compelling and the return to ordinary life uplifting and sweet. With Capra, it's just when he seems not to be taking things seriously that the true serious heart of his work emerges.

Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

2009-10-23T22:12:00.006-04:00

How do we make and then remake our heroes? That’s a topic for another discussion, but the many versions of Abraham Lincoln devised by historians, novelists, poets, painters, and film-makers are fascinating in their diversity. Each one is constructed to address something in what has come to be called the “American character,” and Lincoln, apparently, serves as the sort of culture hero who embodies the best of what we would like to be true about our potential. In this case, John Ford fixes on Lincoln’s formative years, but of course he meant to project what Lincoln became by showing his qualities already strong at an early aged. Somehow Henry Fonda manages to pull off a decent impersonation of Lincoln as a young man, shy and tall and shambling and given to feats of strength and wit and storytelling.

Most of the plot is given over to what is supposed to be one of Lincoln’s first trials as a lawyer. He pulls off a coup, freeing two innocent young men and pinning the crime on an obnoxious sheriff’s deputy. Along the way there are some proleptic bits, like Lincoln twanging “Dixie” on his mouth-harp, and a walk to the top of a hill as thunder booms nearby, suggesting battlefields of the future. Mary Todd shows up, too, as does Stephen Douglass, but their part in the story is not taken up. There’s a lot of the old-timey music, some good, and some (refurbished and diluted with lame 1930s style orchestral scoring) not so much.

Ford is interested in American epic; here he represents Lincoln as a force of nature, a man made for his time, all wrapped up in a gangling, long-legged, craggy, folkloric, back-country lawyer with a strong attraction to justice. Meanwhile, Fonda looks Lincolnesque partly because of the lofty haircut, some nose adjustment, a mole, and something that makes his eyebrows prominent, cheeks hollow, and to this he adds a drawl and a bit of sprawlingly lazy movement. His best lines sound casual and off-hand, fitting the notion of the man of the people anti-sophisticate. All in all, it’s a pleasant exercise, more iconic than profound.

Baabul (Ravi Chopra, 2006)

2009-10-22T23:21:00.008-04:00

Another Bollywood contemporary fantasy, beautifully filmed and featuring some excellent music and some interesting ideas. But at first in some ways the movie seems overlarge, with palatial homes, ultramodern offices, and the pageantry of the materially successful. It is hard to be sure what the significance may be of such expansive wealth, obviously meant to be significant in some way. Several possible answers occur to me. First, the assumption may be that there is nothing wrong with wealth itself, especially wealth earned by ingenuity and hard work. Second, the display of entrepreneurial success—the Kapoors run an internationally prosperous jewelry firm—may be seen as an upbeat affirmation of the possibility of thriving in India. Third, Bollywood long ago took a hint from Hollywood, recognizing that in hard times glamour is especially attractive—witness the spate of movies made about wealthy, glamorous people during the depression. And fourth, Bollywood may well be furnishing their audiences with the comforting notion that the wealthy have personal troubles just like the rest of us ordinary mortals.

In Baabul there are several plots, and the merry love story of the first half nearly obscures them, though key themes are signalled carefully from time to time. The primary plot is simple enough: young Avinash Kapoor (Salman Khan) returns to India after seven years in America. His parents, Balraj and Shobhna Kapoor (Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini) meet him at the airport. Young Avi is exceedingly handsome and high-spirited, brisk and headstrong and playful in the “American” way. He and his father call each other “Buddy.” This is supposed to indicate good-natured teasing intimacy, and for the most part it works, though largely because Bachchan holds back a little to let Khan run with the part. Right outside the airport the games begin: the father gives the son a fast car, suggests a race, and wins with the help of an amusing bit of cheating. Jokes abound, in the luxurious office, at home, and on the golf course. There Balraj’s ball hits the canvas of a young painter, Malvika, known as “Mini” (Rani Mukherji). Balraj is thickheadedly insulting, but Avi is drawn to the pretty girl. He follows her, pretends he is not wealthy—for she has an aversion to arrogant, selfish rich folk. Their courtship blooms, and is only momentarily set back when she discovers Avi was lying. Balraj follows Mini as she leaves in tears and negotiates a settlement, and they are married with much pageantry. A young man who grew up with Mini, the singer Rajat (John Abraham) gives her away. His rueful smile declares he’s in love with Mini, too. The wedding meets with the approval of the head of the Kapoor family, the dictatorial Balwant (Om Puri), except for one thing. Balraj insists that Pushpa, a widow living with Balwant’s family, should attend the wedding. This goes against tradition and is inauspicious, and Balwant is angry.

Years pass, a cute boy with overlarge glasses is born, and Avi and Mini live happily in the Kapoor household, though work keeps him away a little too much. Hurrying home to the son’s birthday party, Avi jumps out of his taxi and threads his way through traffic, and a taxi hurtles into view, killing him at his doorstep. The entire tone of the movie shifts, and sadness overtakes it. Here Mukherjee comes into her own as an actor. In the early scenes of the movie she wears western clothes and acts sparky and self-willed, matching Khan’s westernized playfulness. But as sorrow overtakes her she begins to glow with a tragic light, and she is much more convincing and much more beautiful. For a long time Balraj, her late husband’s father, watches her with sad eyes. It turns out that Avi’s parents have really accepted Mini as their daughter, and Balraj especially is worried that she is wasting away. She weeps out in the rain, and she appears to get more and more fragile. So Balraj travels to the west to find her friend Rajat, begging him to come home for Mini needs him. He does, and she is happy to see him, but she is hurt by the way Balraj, whom she loves as a father, has thrown them together as if he wanted to be rid of her. Her reproach is very sad indeed.

Though the obstacles are great, after some time Mini is moved to accept Rajat, and wedding preparations begin. But the older brother arrives and forbids the wedding, shouting about the dishonor to the family of allowing a widowed daughter to marry again. He and his sons threaten Balraj and his family, and Mini offers to retreat upstairs so the wedding can be called off. But then Balraj steps forward and quietly defies the commands of his elder brother. There is a brief exchange of arguments, and then Balraj speaks with quiet intensity about the cruelty of this tradition. Mini is his daughter, and for a father to deprive a beloved daughter of a chance at happiness is unthinkable. The old custom of confining widows in the prison of the family is pointlessly cruel, for their lives do not end with the death of their husbands. Indeed, he insists, though the custom of burning widows on their husbands’ pyre is no longer acceptable, the imprisonment of widows is just another kind of suttee. He apologizes to Pushpa for saying nothing all the years when she was deprived of a chance at happiness. Everyone is struck with admiration and everyone weeps and the head of the family praises his younger brother’s good heart and his wisdom. The wedding goes forward, and the movie ends with a quiet close-up of Bachchan, serious and kind and alone. His acting is quietly impressive. He is still capable of monkey business (see his comic turn in an early dance scene) and he still has the impish smile, but in the serious parts of the movie he holds still, and keeps his expression under control. This reserve pays off in the scene when he speaks up for what he knows is right, with a soft-spoken but passionate eloquence.

A cynical view of Baabul might suggest it has everything: riches, pretty people, music, dancing, comic figures, jokes, tragedy, a cute kid, and a socially conscious message to lend it some gravitas. I don’t care. I like the omnium-gatherum way it is put together.

Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006)

2009-05-09T20:25:00.005-04:00

This movie is beautiful and full of surprises. Another example of the outstanding animation of Japanese studios, this one has a very current plotline: some people have created computer equipment that monitors dreams, and it’s being used experimentally for psychiatric purposes. But there are unintended consequences: the borderline between the dream world and reality is severely weakened. The cast is small: there’s Detective Kogawa, undergoing dream analysis with the sparky, red-haired Paprika; the research team of Chiba Atsuko, the fat genius inventor Tokita, the tiny balding supervisor, the vanished associate Himuro, the handsome young associate jealous of Tokita and infatuated with Chiba, and the gaunt, wheelchair-bound boss. Something is going wrong in the dream-level—somebody is taking over, and it’s not clear who.

The disturbance is manifested by a circus-like parade marching out of the dreamworld. The parade seems to merge into the dreams of random others, and the victims in the real world smilingly speaking amusingly absurd gibberish. All through these dreams, and investigations by Dr. Chiba, a little red-clothed doll recurs, sometimes with a face morphing into Himuro's face. Misdirections abound, but at last the villain of the piece is identified, and he is stopped just in time. But the leakage of the dream world has grown exponentially and the villain is in the process of destroying everything—one of the best effects in the movie is the way dreamscape locations start to shake and wobble and slip downward into a black-hole vortex. At the climax the entire real-world city is dissolving and sliding into the darkness surrounding the villain.

The dream-mad circus parade, full of colour and blue butterflies and frogs and confetti in the air and crowds of toys and surrealistic hybrids of refrigerators and humans and animals, people morphing into televisions, and ominously cheerful music—this is brilliantly conceived and executed.

Detective Kogawa has a recurring dream about a film noir memory, in which he arrives at a crime scene too late to save a murder victim. Sometimes he’s in a circus that starts out happy and then drifts into menace. His dream analysis takes place in a nightclub accessible through the internet, where Paprika comes to talk, and where two neat bartenders preside--and they later enter the world like elemental spirits to help defeat the villain.

Paprika is a virtual being, apparently projection of the beautiful Dr. Chiba in the virtual reality within the dream computers. We see her in reflections, sometimes talking to Chiba out of the mirror, but she has an existence beyond this function, and as the dream world and the real world start to merge, we see Paprika and Chiba together in the same scene.
A brilliant aspect of the movie is the slippage between media images, reflections, real-world, dream-world, imaginings, and explanations. In the opening scene, Paprika runs through the city, appearing on the crowded street, in billboards, reflections in shop windows and rain puddles, on a picture silkscreened on a t-shirt, on television monitors, and so forth. She’s intrepid and fast and ingenious and kindly and serious about helping people understand their dreams, and then later about healing the broken dream world. Science without compassion almost destroys the world; science with love saves it. The soundtrack is also great, especially the strange and cheerfully spooky parade music.

W.R. - Misterije organizma - Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

2009-05-07T13:48:00.005-04:00

Not for the faint of heart, this polemical documentary approaches its subject—the relation of sociopolitical structures to human sexuality and psychology—from every possible direction, often randomly and sometimes with absurdist discontinuity. The director prefaces the film with these words (in the English language version): “This film is, in part, a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957).” The first section of the movie alternates between documentary footage and interviews about Reich, his theories, and the state suppression in the U.S. of his books and ideas. Basically, he argued that the orgasm involved a transfer of energy that was not only pleasurable but necessary for psychological as well as physical health, and he taught that the involvement of society at large or government in regulation of sexuality results in totalitarianism and widespread unhappiness. Reich’s larger theories were soundly repudiated by the majority of psychologists and federal agencies, principally because they involved untested physiological notions and questionable therapeutic practices—the film seems to recognize this at the same time that it portrays the closing down of the Organon movement as a witch-hunt. Later the film shows other physical-psychological regimens—primal scream therapy—that seem pretty much on the same level as the Reichian exercises.

Then the movie begins to add more and more ingredients, including material from the sexual freedom movement of the late 1960s—a ruby-tinted prismatic scene of a bearded young man and a long-haired young woman making love outdoors, interviews with masturbation advocate Betty Dodson, a visit to the office of Screw Magazine, interviews with a glitter-bedecked young transexual, a practical demonstration of the methodology of the Plastercasters, who take molds of erect penises, and so forth. This is mixed with the absurdist political theatre of the period, notably, Tuli Kupferberg prowling around New York wearing a fake military outfit while the Fugs sing “Kill for Peace” in the background.

And all this is connected, somehow, to an exaggerated dramatization of the political-sexual struggle in communist Yugoslavia, where two attractive young women, room-mates, address the stirring question—what is revolution without joy?—each in their own way, the brunette by making love with men, the blonde by lecturing her fellow-workers on the counter-revolutionary nature of sexual repression. She is attracted to a Russian figure skater, a Hero Artist, and tries to join with him in an ideal revolutionary act of making love. He's self-absorbed and creepy, and afterwards he kills her, but she doesn’t seem to mind, singing along with him and smiling from the autopsy table where her severed head has been placed. All through these episodes contrasting fragments of film are intercut, including official Soviet footage and reverential depictions of Stalin, exemplifying the propaganda of totalitarian rule, and then shots of Soviet shock treatments while the glowing words of revolution go on in the soundtrack, to random snippets of western materials. The film ends with a mournful song sung by the hero-murderer, and somehow the tone of the movie has shifted from its earlier stages—curiosity, defiance, joy, anger—to an elegiac mood.

It’s sad that we’ve still learned so little. It strikes me that this movie needs footnotes more than most. It’s dated, firmly stuck in 60s anti-establishment culture. This is both its strength and, because so much happens that depends on allusion and time-bound references, modern audiences just won’t get it.

Dubarry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

2009-05-05T22:31:00.008-04:00

No ifs, ands, or buts. This is a bad movie, and it was probably a bad Broadway show in 1939 before it became a bad movie. You may ask, how could it be bad with the cast found wandering through the movie? After all, there’s Gene Kelly, and Lucille Ball, and Red Skelton, and Virginia O’Brien, and Donald Meek, and Rags Ragland, and even Zero Mostel. Well, I’ll tell you. The storyline, such as it is, serves merely as a string on which some song and dance numbers are threaded. At the outset, the movie doesn’t give much warning of impending mediocrity—a handsome woman in satin descends the sort of huge glittery staircase found only in the sort of imaginary nightclubs found in movies made from musical shows. She’s followed by a symmetrical gang of leggy women also in satin, and they are all singing and dancing to the inane title song. They outnumber the audience in the club by a factor of three to one; it’s a very exclusive nightclub.

The satiny chanteuse is May Daly (Lucille Ball). She is courted by a talented but impecunious singer/dancer/composer, Alec Howe (Gene Kelly), but she’s too brittle to marry him for love when what she really wants is to marry money. The hat-check guy Louis Blore (Red Skelton) worships her from afar and fails to notice the lovelorn but wisecracking Ginny (Virginia O’Brien) who is entirely, and inexplicably, smitten by him—she also has a pretty good musical number of her own.

There are a few other ringers brought in to upgrade the funniness, viz., Zero Mostel as “Rami the Swami,” Rags Ragland as Charlie, a cheerful lunatic with a foreign accent from no country in particular. Music by Tommy Dorsey. Add a bevy of calendar girls. If you blink you will miss tiny uncredited cameo appearances by Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.

When Louis wins a fortune in the Irish Sweepstakes, he buys a car and plans to marry May; she assents, strictly on business terms. A plan to put Louis’ rival Alec to sleep backfires, and Louis drifts into unconscious, where he becomes Louis XV, le roi de France, Ball is translated into Dubarry, and Kelly is the “Black Arrow.” Even the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra wears 18th-century costumes, and they look better that way. Mr. Dorsey himself sports his usual hornrimmed glasses under the powdered wig, also a satin suit with short trousers, hose, and high-heeled shoes with a silver buckle. And there were some bizarre moments—Buddy Rich at the drumset in full ancien regime regalia. Still, good drumming, some good trumpet work by Ziggy Elman, musical impersonations by the Oxford Boys, and some nice vocal moments with the Pied Pied Pipers (including Jo Stafford). Okay.

Well, Gene Kelly played the same part in a great many films, and he could have done this one in his sleep. No, he didn’t; he seems just as alert as always. Still, he has an open, enthusiastic, boyish face, and he certainly can dance. Red Skelton was a mugger, a rubber-faced clown, but here he seems relative subdued; in his later career on television he always went over the top—a master of crude, broad comedy. Hyuck hyuck, as it were. And though there are a good many people who might think Lucille Ball could have saved this, well, no, she couldn’t, for two reasons. First, in 1943 she was too busy being beautiful to waste time being funny. Here she is just as nearly blonde as red-headed, statuesque, with star glamour and frocks by “Irene,” and all that. It’s the sort of part many women of her day could play, and did, just as well or better. It’s a cookie-cutter role. Second, I may well be in the minority here, but quite frankly I have never been very much inclined to think she’s funny when she’s trying to be a comedian. Perhaps it’s because I grew up without a television and was not exposed during formative years and failed to form an addiction, or develop a tolerance, or whatever it is that one must go through to achieve the infeebled state of those who think Lucy is the funniest thing since somebody fell down and went boom. I admit my disbelief is not strictly relevant, since she’s not funny in this movie either—but I must acknowledge that she wasn’t supposed to be. So, regretfully, I do not recommend this movie, unless you are one of those viewers who like to watch the character actors and the uncredited musicians. Otherwise, steer clear.

Les liaisons dangereuses (Roger Vadim, 1959)

2009-05-04T21:56:00.006-04:00

One of the best films about heartlessness ever made, largely because of the fine work of Jeanne Moreau as Juliette and Gérard Philipe as Valmont. The story is taken a long way from the 18th-century roman of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, but the dynamics are surprisingly faithful.. Setting most of the action at a ski resort is especially brilliant, because it’s at once full of glamour and quite enclosed. For a while the film seems to be a sort of sex comedy, especially with the seduction of the young cousin Cecile (Jeanne Valérie), who is in love with fellow student Danceny (Jean-Louis Trintignant) but engaged to an exceedingly dull fellow chosen by her family. Cecile is very comely, and the post-seduction scene when she lies nude on her stomach doing her geometry homework and Valmont rests the textbook on her bum—it’s sweet and amusing.

Inevitably, the whole thing turns sour when Juliette steals Danceny and forces Valmont to abandon the virtuous Marianne (Annette Vadim) with whom he’s actually fallen in love. Moreau is strong and beautiful and twisted, a tour-de-force acting job. At last, an angry Danceny strikes despairing but still glamorous Valmont, who falls and hits his head on an andiron and dies. Juliette accidentally sets her clothing on fire trying to burn their awful letters. Marianne goes mad when she learns of Valmont’s death, and with a trance-like smile talks softly about the imaginary home they might have had together. "Rose, rose..." she murmurs.

The photography is really fine, and the best additional thing is the wonderful music by Thelonius Monk and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. It’s even better than I’d remembered it from many years ago. Watching this makes the American versions--Dangerous Liaisons and Cruel Intentions seem all the more flat and bland and listless.

Veer-Zaara (Vash Chopra, 2004)

2009-05-03T10:20:00.003-04:00

An epic romance, some three hours of singing, scenery, love, loss, despair, hope, and reconciliation. Beautiful Pakistani human rights lawyer Saamiya Siddiqi (Rani Mukherjee) visits an unidentified Indian prisoner who has been silent in his prison for 22 years. After calls him by his real name, he tells his story. A beautiful Pakistani girl, Zaara (Preity Zinta) left Lahore a little over twenty years ago, to bring her Aya’s ashes to the Sikh temple in India--an act of personal integrity and devotion, honouring the old woman's beliefs even though her Muslim family forbade it. But on the way her bus crashes and she is the last passenger to be rescued by handsome Indian policeman Veer Pratap Singh (Sharukh Khan). Veer helps her honour her aya and takes her to his village to meet his family. The inevitable happens. Veer and Zaara fall in love. However (of course) she’s already engaged, promised to the son of her father’s potential political ally back in Pakistan. They part, but Zaara's affianced groom, to avenge what he considers a slight to his honour, arranges to have Veer thrown in prison. There he remains for years and years. He will not tell his story because he has sworn never to speak Zaara’s name, to protect her honour.

The movie is deeply romantic, filled with yearning for homeland and joy. And it affirms generosity and openness. And because the story is framed with the dogged persistence of the lawyer who insists on opening Veer's case, equally moved by the injustice of his incarceration and by the romantic pathos of his suffering, and because the whole rotten plot against Veer and Zaara was made possible by the patriarchal orders of her family, the film has a strongly feminist slant. Moreover, the story constantly undermines communalism with appeals to common humanity--a romance between a Sikh and a Muslim, a Pakistani human rights lawyer consumed by indignation against mistreatment of an Indian prisoner. The good people, especially Saamiya, Zaara’s mother, and Veer’s family, all embody an amazing warmth and understanding. Granted, the plot may be predictable, but it is still very moving, filled with deep sadness and joy, the music and dancing very good, the photography excellent, and the colour brilliant.

Behind the Green Door (Artie & Jim Mitchell, 1972)

2009-05-02T20:02:00.010-04:00

It has been said that this is the movie in which pornography entered the mainstream market, and others have said it’s the first porn movie made as a serious film. Probably neither statement is really very accurate. Though there is no doubt that the film created a buzz in places that would never have discussed such things—highbrow magazines, film criticism, pop culture—Behind the Green Door was never taken seriously, except by those who marked its ambition as a piece of explicit erotica made as if it had been taken seriously by its directors. Perhaps that’s true enough, for there are signs that the Mitchell brothers were aiming for some of the effects associated with seriousness. There’s a narrative framework which sets out to place the erotic fairy tale inside the walls of anecdote. Three men—a middle-aged coffee-drinker and a middle-aged cook and a young truck-driver—meet in a diner, and the cook asks to hear the story they’ve been promising him. Then there’s a fade to some sort of resort and a long episode of meaningless babble as the coffee-drinker tells a tedious story to the young truck-driver at an outdoor table. A young woman is seated at a distant table. She watches.

A bit later the story begins: the young woman is abducted and taken forcibly in a limousine to a secret club, where she is subjected to a series of sexual activities for the viewing pleasure of a select membership. The woman is played by Marilyn Chambers, a model who around the same time had a contract with Ivory Soap, for whom she portrayed a wholesome, sweet-faced home-maker. This is the quality she brings to the film, too. Gloria has no dialogue, no character—she only responds. The plot, such as it is, allows Gloria the (imaginary) luxury of complete passive enjoyment. Because she has no choice, she cannot be morally responsible, and so she is ostensibly in the ideal situation, well removed from the repressive mores of society, the enemy of enjoyment and fulfullment. In the seedy short-story this movie was based on, passed around in mimeograph copies half a century ago, Gloria was not only captured but drugged, given some sort of aphrodisiacal elixir to boosted her sexual appetite to epic proportions. But here Gloria is peaceful, neither sex-crazed nor hopped up in any way. On her arrival backstage, the “matron” soothes her with the rituals of pre-meditation relaxation. There follow three acts: in Act 1 half a dozen hooded women remove Gloria’s clothes as she stands on a carpeted stage, surrounded by a small, poorly-lit night-club audience, all masked. The women caress her and perform oral sex, and she responds by closing her eyes and moving sinuously. Act 2 begins with the arrival of the “African Stud” (Johnny Keys), a very fit black porn star sporting face-paint, a tooth or claw necklace, and white tights cut out at the groin, highlighting his erection. The women move away and there is a scene of intercourse during which Gloria becomes increasingly excited and ostensibly attains orgasm. The stud withdraws. Act 3 is the house specialty. A special trapeze set-up is lowered into place, with seats for three men, all wearing the same sort of white tights as the A.S., and they are adjusted to the right height so Gloria has an organ in her mouth and one in each hand, as well as sitting on another. This goes on for some time, during which the members of the audience move from admiration to leisurely masturbation to full orgy mode. Paradoxically, they are no longer able to watch the performance on stage. Act 3 ends with a series of ejaculations filmed artfully, first in high-definition and slow motion, then in increasingly abstract versions done in bright colours and with cinematic effects like prismatic lenses and so forth. Then the show is over and somebody carries the sated Gloria off stage. There is a long coda, in which the young truck-driver heads down the highway at night as the roadlights give way to a scene in which he and Gloria are alone, having glad mutually pleasing, voluntary sex—but it’s clearly a fantasy, since the ongoing shot of the highway continues under the bedroom scene. And then with the truck-driver's orgasm the dream is over.

So what’s it all about? Several related and yet contradictory things. One element of the “serious” purpose of making a “good” erotic movie--the novelist Terry Southern wrote the satire Blue Movie about people supposedly so motivated--is the unspoken assumption that society’s repression of human carnal appetite produces great malaise and psychic disturbance. Thus free expression of sexuality is somehow liberating, even revolutionary. Dollar-store D.H. Lawrence, perhaps, but there it is, one of the great cliches of the 1960s. Wrap this up with a notion of esoteric rituals and it takes on a kind of haltingly, ponderous significance. Here, too, the Mitchells emulate “serious” film, attempting a Fellini-esque ambience by populating the night-club with solid citizens, pretty women, and grotesques, including a hugely obese woman and several people wearing what look like Venetian carnival masks or make-up. And a mime, no less. Old and young, handsome and unlovely. Another contradiction is easily discernible in the implicit violence of the kidnapping and the supposedly liberating ritual of excess—this is, after all, only a plot structure founded on the objectification of the female. But what makes this different from pornography unsurrounded with artistic notions or pretensions? Though it isn’t entirely successful, the film does try to do more than serving up a series of bare encounters. Part of what it tries to do is to splice together the sources of enjoyment common to “cinema” and to “porn.” Commercially-made North-American erotica generally caters to a male audience who want to see a woman involved with uninhibited sexual activity, at least pretending to enjoy it, and at least pretending to enjoy the pleasure of the other participant(s). The mechanism of the watcher, the voyeur, depends on a fantasy crossing of borders: the woman who is the object (recipient, receptacle) of sexual activity is enacting what in “normal” life is only imaginary. The key to the watcher's enjoyment is the illusion of her imaginary willingness, figured in both expression, her simulated orgasms, and most of all—that she is doing it. That is a real vagina, that is a real penis, that is real semen. Is there willing suspension of disbelief in watching? Perhaps, but in Behind the Green Door willing suspension of disbelief doesn’t come from narrative structure or character, as in novels or more well-thought-out movies. It comes only from physical evidence. Act 2 is unusual because it concludes with female orgasm—albeit such things are never verifiable—rather than the trite fountains of male ejaculation that are adduced as if to certify that the package contains real sex (as well as to maximize the masculine monopoly on enjoyment). That is, the A.S. leaves the stage after her orgasm, not his, which evidently doesn't happen. The multiple, artsily-photographed fountaining at the end of Act III goes far to make up for this momentary aberration, but the Mitchell Brothers were on to something here. In the midst of the sexual multiplication, the trapeze-mounted orgasms and the writhing, groping, smiling, moaning audience-participants, Gloria disappears. Remember, the audience becomes too occupied with their own gropings and wheezings. At first Gloria is a map of orgasmic possibility, then an accessory, then a backdrop, then a misty ideal of complete feminine satiation by means of plenty. Sated and completely relaxed in the arms of the stagehand who takes her back behind the green door, Gloria is completed, and completely gone. That she reappears in the truck-driver’s dream only proves her phantom existence.

It might not have worked this way with another actress. The presence of Chambers at the center of the story is strangely tranquil, even when she is in the throes of supposedly transformational delight. Of course, it doesn't really work at all, not by the standards of "real" movies, and yet when the movie came out in 1972, there was a real buzz among people who previously would never have discussed a porn film in public, articles in mainstream magazines and so forth. Did it change the history of erotic film? Perhaps so--its wide distribition probably made $25 million, and the extras (vestigial plot, dialogue, artsy camerawork) may have influenced others to make erotica with a story component. Marilyn Chambers wanted to be an actor, but it seems she wasn't as successful in that endeavour, so she became a kind of impresaria of porn, the Masterpiece-Theatre persona of pornography. She died in her 50s in April, 2009.

Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)

2009-05-01T12:13:00.003-04:00

Gary Cooper was a boyish 41 when he played the part of the young Tennessee prodigy Alvin York, first a great tear-away drunk, then a lightning-struck Christian guided by the densely-eyebrowed Pastor Rosier Pile (Walter Brennan), then a love-struck suitor of Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie), and finally a soldier of great courage and initiative, both a sharpshooter and a natural strategist on the battlefield. But first, for the sake of the story, he had some growing up to do, which happens when he falls for Gracie and decides to buy some bottomland, selling a mule and some furs and a clock and other stuff, and working very hard for a lot of people. In the two months he’s got to raise the rest of the money, he works desperately hard and with a sort of glow of dedication. But at the end of the time he’s just a little short, asks for a few more days, and the geezer with the land for sale reluctantly consents. So Alvin goes to a shooting match and naturally enough wins it all—but the geezer shows up to say he’s sold the land to Alvin’s rival. Alvin looks thunderous, Gracie tells him it doesn’t matter, he answers that it does to him, and strides off.

When war with Germany breaks out and a draft is mandated, Alvin is set against registering because his understanding of the Bible is that God declared that killing is wrong. The Pastor helps him apply for conscientious objector status, which the government denies because the Pastor’s church is not one with a tradition of opposing war. So he goes off to the army. Somehow they learn that he tried to get a deferment and keep their eye on him—but when he behaves politely and when he shoots multiple bullseyes on the target range their opinion of him changes. He rejects an offer of promotion, but a sympathetic officer discusses biblical passages and offers him a book on American history and a furlough to read it. Alvin reads and thinks up on a mountain, and the wind opens his Bible to the passage about rendering unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God those things which are God’s. That does it for him, and he returns, accepts the promotion to corporal, and they’re off to France.

Just as a big battle is about to happen, there’s an interlude in the trenches, during which a plucky Cockney teaches the Yanks how to ignore the incoming artillery shells that are going to miss them—and then he’s killed (a nice touch, plucky Britain and Britons, in 1941). The battle begins without the promised screening barrage, and many of Alvin’s company are killed or wounded, including his sergeant, who tells him he’s in charge. So Alvin decides that the machine guns need to be taken out and does it himself, using folksy hunting techniques. He captures 152 German soldiers (with only 8 Americans) and becomes a hero, decorated by the French, British, and American generals. Later, the sympathetic officer asks him how many Germans he killed, and Alvin answers that he doesn’t know. The way he looked at it, they were killing his men and he had to stop it, that’s all—he only killed the enemy to save lives.

A tickertape parade in New York is nice, but offers of corporate money to advertise products revolts him. He doesn’t mean to profit from what he did. So he goes home, tells Gracie they will have to wait a few years until he can save up enough to buy their place, and she leads him to the spot where the grateful state of Tennessee has paid for the land and a house and everything. The story ends with the happy couple walking hand-in-hand towards the house.

Some other points are worth mentioning. The movie struggles between the earnest desire to portray the hillbilly folk as simple, good people and the irresistible temptation to caricature them. The way the mountain folk speak is mannered and absurd, but Cooper pulls it off, matching the quaint diction with a look of innocent gravity (his specialty). The gravity of Mother York (Margaret Wycherly) is particularly well-done; she has small, almost beady, intense eyes and a well of reserve. And there is a nice bit of character balance bringing in a Bronx subway trainman nicknamed Pusher (George Tobias) to impart a bit of urban naivete, Pusher uses his experience with trains as a metaphor for understanding the world (when he's mortally wounded his last words are something about catching the last car), just as Alvin uses hunting and mountain culture metaphors.

Finally, while the issue of Alvin’s convictions is handled cleverly, I can’t help thinking the arguments that sway him are sophistical. There is no doubt that the character is selflessly heroic in action, and it is true that the movie acknowledges he is a reluctant soldier, but the argument of patriotism is a little weak in the delivery, and especially suspect because of the swelling upsurge of sentimental-patriotic music as Alvin reads the book about American history. But of course there is a polemical thrust to WW I movies made in the early 1940s—it’s meant to show Americans going to the aid of an embattled Europe, and it’s purpose is morale-boosting, resisting isolationism, and inspiring American youth to a patriotic fervor.

The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, 1925)

2009-04-15T11:05:00.004-04:00

This surprisingly good silent film combines the carnival and criminal worlds. In the beginning, Echo the Ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) is working a sideshow, along with Hercules the Strong Man (Victor McLaglen) and baby-faced small man Tweedledee, aka Little Willie (Harry Earles), and Rosie O’Grady (Mae Busch) works the crowd as a pickpocket. Echo closes his act by saying “That’s all there is to life, friends…a little laughter….a little tear...” Eager to get out of this life, the three concoct a plan to burgle houses they scope out by selling parrots to the owners. Chaney is a convincing cross-dressed Granny O’Grady, and things go well until Rosie falls in love with the straight shop assistant Hector. Hercules and Little Willie go out to do a robbery without Echo and wind up killing the owner of the house they are robbing. They plant evidence on Hector and hide, but Rosie prevails on Echo to save him. Eventually he does, quite dramatically in the courtroom, and when Rosie arrives at the sideshow to make good her promise to stay with him if he saves Hector, Echo says he was just kidding and lets her go, his heart breaking but a smile on his face, and the movie ending with his motto repeated. Busch is remarkable for being able to play the moll with a sneer and mocking laughter and a demi-ingenue in love, and she’s lovely in both modes. McLaglen is big, and Earles is little. And Chaney’s repertoire of facial expressions is nothing short of amazing—his posture and gestures make his Granny convincing, though if you watch carefully you can see the other layer of character, Echo, just inside. It’s a tour-de-force performance, almost enough to make one forget about the absurdity of hingeing the plot of a silent movie on ventriloquism…

Marmoulak / The Lizard (Kamal Tabrizi, 2004)

2009-04-14T23:18:00.003-04:00

A surprisingly gentle, funny, humane, and yet devout movie from Iran. The hero is Reza Marmalouk, Reza the Lizard (Parviz Parastui), a burglar specializing in climbing. As he enters prison, he encounters a chilly warden who says it’s his job to help the prisoners, a task carried out by sending them to solitary. When Reza accidentally cuts himself he is transferred to the hospital, where he shares a room with a holy man, a mullah, who instead of judging him as a thief speaks very kindly. Reza steals his clothes and escapes, but wanders into a village that has been eagerly awaiting a clergyman. From then on his attempts to escape backfire—not badly, but well, for the villagers interpret his visits to the criminal quarter (where he’s searching for a forged passport) as acts of charity in disguise. His preaching is earthy and inclusive—“There is no one in this world who doesn’t have a path to reach God.” This seems to be the movie’s theme, and somehow he manages to help people discern their paths, and gradually becomes the mullah he’s pretending to be. He still keeps some of his criminal lingo; in a sermon delivered in a jail, he says, “God is the heaviest dude in gentleness, the heaviest dude in kindness, the heaviest dude in friendship, and the heaviest dude in forgiving.” The steely warden tracks him down, and the director Tabrizi leaves the ending open. Reza hands his mullah outfit to a boy, saying that clothing tames people, and people need to be tamed, and he goes off with the warden, who tells his associate handcuffs won’t be necessary. Or does Reza go? The film ends with a beautiful song, with the refrain “I am waiting,” and the police car disappears down the street and the men in the mosque turn as if greeting him—then a freeze-frame with his voice speaking the lines about many paths, and then the credits roll, and several other voice-over lines pop up. Did the warden relent and find his own path? A very funny and moving film, extraordinarily well-acted by Parastui

The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920)

2009-03-03T20:42:00.004-05:00

A vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks to leap about and fight oppression and win the hand of the lovely Lolita Pulido (Marguerite de la Motte), who not surprisingly despises the pallid Don Diego and loves the intrepid Zorro. Fairbanks keeps his shirt on, very unusual for him, but even so he moves with considerable nimbleness. He leaps straight from the ground to the back of a galloping horse. The Bad Guy is tall Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim), something of a wannabe swashbuckler himself, but a bully and craven and a shameless kidnapper of reluctant maidens. Also bad is the judge who condemns the saintly Franciscan friar Fray Felipe (Walt Whitman—no, really, not the poet) to fifteen lashes. The colonial governor sent by oppressive Spain way off in Old Europe is Bad too; not only is he a tyrant but he appears to be habitually poorly groomed. The Old California sets and landscapes are nice, familiar from countless California western locations, but somehow quite refreshingly old--still older than the cowboy settings. The “natives” are actually real indigenous people, apparently, and they retain some dignity, not easy to do under oppression. For that matter, not easy under all the well-meaning Zorrovian interventions, either.

Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Gray (Carl Dreyer, 1932)

2009-02-28T23:17:00.006-05:00

This film seems to occupy a zone at the borders of a lot of different genres. Of course it is a vampire movie, complete with an ancient creature, Marguerite Chopin, with dark powers, corrupted minions, pale and suffering female victims, and an earnest young man appalled but also fascinated. In this instance the well dressed young man Allan Gray (Julian West)—he’s always wearing a tie—arrives as things are falling apart. Fueled by a sense of dread, as the intertitles inform us, Allan wanders all over the manor on the bright moonlit nights. He sees the shadows of people digging, arguing, and dancing, he sees disturbing glimpses of ominous things, and even the ordinary things about the place take on a tone of ominousness. At one point he becomes insubstantial, his transparent hand opening a door. He sees himself in a coffin with a little window, and then we see as he would see from inside, the peg-legged soldier screwing down the lid, the vampire peering in, a candle burning and melting. There are scenes of chasing, of rowing a boat in the fog, of Allan staring incredulously at the dying father, the anemic daughter, the manifold strangenesses—all this suggests the work of Man Ray and people like that, rather than than a traditional vampire narrative. After reading the book the father has left behind for Allan, the elderly handyman goes off to the churchyard to drive a stake through the monster's heart, and Allan helps. The body in the coffin turns to bones, the peg-legged soldier falls downstairs, the wicked doctor is suffocated with flour in the mill, the anemic woman is revived, and her young, wide-eyed sister and Allan go running through the woods toward the light –the emblematic happy ending. A good deal of the film is beautifully shot, using experimental techniques. Another odd thing is that the film has a sound track, with scary music and sounds, but there’s not a lot of talking and a lot of scenes involve lengthy close-ups of faces changing expression, and so it feels a lot like a silent film. And because so much of the film is mediated through Allan, whose dream it is, there’s not really so much scariness.

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)

2009-02-25T14:23:00.002-05:00

A thirteen-minute experimental film made in Los Angeles by Maya Deren (née Eleanora Derenkowsky) and Alexander Hammid. The film is an unusual hybrid of surrealism, Freudian symbol, and art photography—as if Martha Graham and Luis Bunuel had collaborated on a project with an accomplished photographer who’d just been given her first movie camera. Actually, Deren had really just purchased a 16mm Bolex camera, and she and Hammid shot the film together. There is no plot, naturally, for the images and sequences recur, sometimes with variations, as do the symbolic set-pieces. The woman sees a tall, hooded figure with a mirror instead of a face and she follows it out of her house and along a summer street. She enters a room, sees the figure carry a large flower up some stairs and drop it on the bed. Or she is at home asleep in a chair. The figure is walking away as she watches it—and herself following—from the window. She takes a key from her mouth. She finds a butcher knife and carries it around. She is asleep. She is running. She enters a room where she sees two more doubles of herself sitting at a table. In turn each one picks up the key and it disappears and reappears back on the table, until one of the duplicate woman turns her hand over to reveal a darkened hand (blood?) holding the key, which turns into the knife. The man arrives carrying the big flower and they go to the bedroom where he strokes her, and she breaks the mirror of his face. Mirror fragments on the beach. Waves. The man is coming up the street, enters, and sees the woman dead in her chair. The whole piece has a muted, anxious lyricism; Deren is dressed in the stylish garb of an early-1940s bohemian and has piles of curly hair and an intelligent and sensual face. Hammid looks like a handsome revolutionary sailor from an Eisenstein movie. “Serious” droning music was added some years later, composed by Deren’s next husband, Teiji Ito. There’s no way of explaining the film—like most surrealist pieces it gets its life from the tension between images, rather than from any explicable narrative or coherent pattern of symbolic meaning.

Caccia al Volpe / After the Fox (Vittorio de Sica, 1966)

2009-02-23T09:50:00.003-05:00

Two things—a Peter Sellers comedy, which is good enough in itself. Here he plays Aldo Vanucci, an Italian master criminal, with full Italian cinema shtick, first as a gangster, and then as an over-the-top director Federico Fabrizi (the parodic snipe at Fellini is right out front). Vanucci conceives a scheme to smuggle gold stolen in Egypt by the befezzed Egyptian Okra (Akim Tamiroff, ready to play any sort of exotic foreigner), under the cover of making a movie. To do so, he steals the production equipment from Vittorio de Sica, playing himself in a brilliant satiric setpiece: as Moses walks into the desert, the director, riding on a crane, cries out, “More sand! More sand in the desert!” The giant fans blow and dust envelops everything. When it clears, de Sica is sitting on the ground and every bit of equipment is gone. And then the production, in a tiny coastal village, is a breathtaking parody of neorealism, with all the villagers clamoring to play parts, the vagueness and phony existentialism of the director’s posturing, and the cheekbones of the starstruck police chief (Lando Buzzanca). "Fabrizi" lures a has-been romantic lead Tony Powell (Victor Mature) and casts his girlfriend "Gina Romantica" (Britt Ekland) to play the ingenue. So much of the film industry and film culture is satirized it's hard to keep up a list--the international crime caper (think Pink Panther, Topkapi, etc), the epic film, the greed of producers, the affected mannerisms of directors, the overblown egos of actors, the unthinking adulation of the public, the barely submerged longing in everyday people for admission to the world of movies, and more.

At the trial—because of course everything goes wrong and everybody is arrested—the prosecutor shows the film the gang shot while carrying out their scam. It's a grotesque jumble of random black & white footage, but a film critic in the courtroom leaps to his feet applauding, and is carried out of the courtroom crying out that it is a work of primitive genius. The story is by Neil Simon, the star turn is by Peter Sellers, but the parody is pure de Sica. And the movie's satirical richness startled me; I had no idea!

The Young Mr. Pitt (Carol Reed, 1942)

2009-02-16T20:25:00.002-05:00

Robert Donat plays Pitt as a patriotic man of principle, hating war but recognizing the need to resist the French attempt to conquer the world, doing battle with the know-nothing anti-war opposition led by Charles James Fox (Robert Morley), and aided by loyal, good men of various sorts. Pitt gives up his private life and his health for the country. From the peril of the English people to the reluctance of government to face danger to the treacherous and greedy fulminations of a tyrant (Napoleon, played well but briefly by Herbert Lom)—this is really all a fable of the second world war. It’s an impressive work, fiction as much as history.

Frankenstein movies...

2009-02-13T17:32:00.019-05:00

I. Frankenstein (James Whale,1932). Images from this movie are current in popular culture three-quarters of a century later. Whale manages to create shadowy black and white scenes of compelling, almost expressionist sharpness. Boris Karloff as the monster is hulking and impressive, and wholly creaturely—not a shred of humanity here, unlike the creation of the author here billed as “Mrs. Percy Shelley.” True, there is a little playfulness, and he likes children—though he throws little Maria into the lake after they run out of flower petals to throw. Colin Clive is the nervous doctor, whose impression of genius borders on the neurasthenic. He is only animated when he cries out, “It’s alive!” The monster dies in the fire that consumes the windmill where he takes refuge from the angry visitors.

II. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935): This sequel begins with a truly horrifying little skit: an overdressed trio of actors impersonating Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron chat in an overdecorated drawing room while thunder rages outside the window. Byron (Gavin Gordon) limps slightly and rolls his Rs and waggles his eyebrows at Mary (Elsa Lanchester) flirtatiously. Mary allows that she has more stories to tell, and then this one starts right up. Henry Frankenstein is pursued by the ominous Dr. Pretorius (Ernst Thesiger) who has plans to make a female creature, and so he does. It’s Miss Lanchester, she of the electrical hair—but in fact she's really only in the movie for five minutes or so. A few tidbits from the original book occur here (the blind violinist). A comic role, Minnie the noisy maid, is added for Una O’Connor. The monster dies in the explosion in the tower.

III. Son of Frankenstein (Rowland Lee, 1939): The monster (Karloff) is joined by Ygor (Bela Lugosi), who has befriended and taken over him, using him to kill the village jurors who previously had sentenced him (Ygor) to hang. They hide out in a stone dome laboratory, partly ruined. Lionel Atwil makes a good Inspector, complete with a prosthetic arm that locks in place and is almost as hard to control as Dr. Strangelove’s hand. Oh, and he stores his darts in the wooden arm. Eventually the monster dies in a pit of boiling sulphur.

IV. The Ghost of Frankenstein (Earl C. Kenton, 1942): The fourth of the early series, this time straying farther and farther afield--this could be one of the first major B-movie franchises, and Karloff was not invited to the party. It turns out that Dr. Heinrich Frankenstein had a brother, Ludwig (Cedric Hardwicke), who is an eminent psychiatrist with tired-looking eyes, a frustrated assistant, and a pretty daughter. Ygor, the assistant (Bela Lugosi) digs up the monster (Lon Chaney) out of the sulphur pit and goes to the hospital, where he plans to have his own brain transplanted into the monster's skull. Then it's alive. I forget how the monster dies this time.

V. Frankenstein meets the Wolfman (Roy William Neill, 1943): What a great idea! Let the stars of two spooky franchise work together, sort of like a scary Hope and Crosby on the Road to Transylvania. Poor Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), brokenhearted lycanthrope, chips the monster (Bela Lugosi) out of a giant block of ice. Perhaps to justify Lugosi's exotic accent, the location has shifted mysteriously to a small central European country of Vasalia, home of Castle Frankenstein, where the Countess Frankestein (Ilona Massey). Some of the cast from the Wolfman have strayed onto the set, notably the old gypsy fortuneteller Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya). The monster dies again in the end, of course.

VI. House of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1944). It's a party and everybody's invited! The wolfman returns, played by Lon Chaney as a sad, cursed soul longing for the release promised by the evil Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carroll Naish), in love with the gypsy girl Ilonka (Elena Verdugo), also the object of Daniel’s fruitless passion. Escaping from an asylum after a terrific thunderstorm, Niemann and Daniel take over a travelling show of horrors after killing the proprietor, and reawaken Dracula (John Carradine), who moves about menacingly, opens his eyes wide, and becomes a badly-animated bat, but then he disappears from the plot fairly early. Some of the same minor players from earlier movies appear, notably Leonard Atwill and Sig Ruman, but the movie is noteworthy for its complete embodiment of the generic horror story with a cast of, well, dozens. It’s fascinating to see two ex-monsters in human guise; the monster is played by an extra and has very little to do except die in the last minutes of the movie, this time in quicksand.

Tarzan the Ape Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1932)

2009-02-12T21:02:00.003-05:00

This would be a very interesting movie to study as a case of synthesis in film-making. A number of sets were made on the back lots and on location in California—some of the trees are recognizably California trees, perhaps the Eucalyptus imported from the Antipodes long ago. And then they use lots of stock footage shot in Africa, and perhaps a bit shot in zoos as well, mixed up with footage of trained (circus) animals. In the early part of the movie the actors perform in front of location shots, back-projected film of Africans in traditional costume, gathering and drumming and dancing. The actors walk around the corner of a bamboo house and stand in front of the people supposedly gathered for trading. In other scenes there is often intelligent intercutting between animal footage and live action—real alligators hurry toward the water and swim amongst real hippos, and then the editor cuts to a safe pond where mechanical crocodile backs churn across the surface in perfect coordination, like water ballet, as Johnny Weismuller swims steadily away from them his championship crawl. The mixture of actual apes (chimpanzees) and people in ape costume is perhaps the least convincing blend. The story is rather dim and missing key elements of continuity, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much, since the main point of the film is to bring Tarzan and Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) together. There’s a crusty father (C. Aubrey Smith) determined to find the elephants’ graveyard, and a stalwart colonial hero, Henry Holt (Neil Hamilton) who begins well but goes downhill as the trek through the jungle shows him to be a brute, and there are perhaps a dozen expendable black porters, killed along the way by falls from cliffs, arrows of hostile tribes, crocodile teeth, and some sort of captive gorilla-god. There aren’t any left at the end of the trip, though all the white people survive. This isn’t good. Weirdest of all is the appearance of the hostile tribe—they’re not pygmies, they’re dwarfs, as the father explains in matter-of-fact tones. Sure enough, it’s the entire stock of Hollywood small people in blackface make-up. Tarzan and the friendly elephants take care of them. What is decidedly not pleasant here is the explicit racism, the profiteering and imperialist motives, and the callousness toward African human and animal life. Even Tarzan is guilty, for he dispatches several of the porters himself after Holt has shot one of his ape-friends. Jane tries to prevent Holt from shooting Tarzan by crying out, “He’s White!” Not so much, according to the father, who deems Tarzan little more than an animal, and Holt sneers and glowers. And well he might, because he’d imagined Jane was his property. There’s the other fascinating thing about this movie: the attraction between the nearly-mute, beautiful ape-man and the nearly-always-speaking, beautiful “civilized” girl. It can’t be anything but animal magnetism, or, rather, pure sex. Weismuller spends the whole film nearly naked, and looking pretty good, and O’Sullivan indicates her potential sexiness when she changes clothes early in the film, pausing in her silky undergarments to laugh at her father’s discomfiture. By the time her clothes get torn and she goes swimming with Tarzan, her curves and general loveliness become an integral part of the story. Tarzan and Jane are fascinated by each other, and can’t stop staring. Tarzan is curious and innocent and hypnotized, and Jane passes through the obligatory stage of being frightened into an appreciation of Tarzan’s character, beauty, and sense of identity in and with the jungle, and at last into a happy ease in her own sensuality. This last development allows her to stay in Africa as Holt retreats on the back of a borrowed elephant. This is a ridiculous and offensive movie, and it is also rather wonderful. The best moment, other than O’Sullivan and Weismuller at play in the water and all wet on shore, is when Jane is bandaging the wounded Tarzan’s head and the young chimpanzee puts his arm familiarly around her shoulders.

Belle of the Nineties (Leo McCarey, 1934

2008-10-07T14:04:00.003-04:00

Mae West's fourth spectacular movie. So far nearly all of her films I’ve seen are metashows—that is, their plots mostly involve West as a performer, surrounded by a romantic plot that allows her to be cynical and romantic at the same time. West wrote her own screenplays just as she did her own reviews, and why not play up what works best? This story's no different—she’s Ruby Carter, a St. Louis music hall queen with a boxer-boyfriend, the Tiger Kid (Roger Pryor). Antagonistic rivals plot to make him think Ruby’s two-timing him and he dumps her, so she goes off to New Orleans to work at the Sensation House, a club run by slick Ace LaMont (John Miljan). The best thing about this gig is the pit band—it’s Duke Ellington and co. The music Ruby sings consists mostly of blues and jazz standards, usually with updated lyrics, no doubt by West herself.

Ruby discovers another plot against her—Ace has conned Tiger into stealing her jewels (he doesn’t know it was Ruby he was robbing), so she sets out to punish them both by fixing the boxing match that Tiger would have won had she not slipped him a mickey finn. Ace is ruined, and then when Tiger figures the whole con out he socks Ace and he falls over, hits his head, and dies. Tiger doesn't run--he stays to argue his innocence in court, succeeds, and the movie ends with a marriage.

The movie features a lot of great costumes for West, and dozens of men also costumed in 90s styles and hairdos. They all flock around her, of course. There are a few great vaudeville routines, too. Only a few of the great Mae West zingers, but she manages to raise her eyebrows, roll her eyes, slink, flounce, and sidle into rooms as only she can. The New Orleans setting means there’s an obligatory massed-choir contrapuntal black camp meeting outside her window, and she sings a lonely song atop it. Anyway, it’s still fun.

Zemlya / Earth (Aleksandr Dovshenko, 1930)

2008-10-06T10:45:00.005-04:00

In revolutionary Ukraine, the kulaks, or rich farmers, hold out stubbornly against progress, brought to the collective farm in the form of a new tractor, driven by Vassili. One of the kulaks murders Vassili at night, and the people hold a new sort of people's funeral celebration with new songs about the new life, instead of inviting the church to manage their grief. "There is no god," Vassili's father cries, and so the furious priest goes back to the church to curse the people. The murderer goes mad, crying out that he won't give up his land, spinning in circles, pressing his face into the plowed earth.

Because Soviet agricultural collectivism did not work, it is perhaps too easy to forget the condition of the common people before the revolution. They were landless serfs, bound to the landowners and living in the worst sort of poverty. Here, working the land together, their labour ennobles them and provides a promise of a better, more equitable future. The film is shot with lyrical human optimism, stunning photography of peasant faces, old faces with years and character, young smiling faces with strength and courage. The land, too, is lyrically portrayed, the film opening and closing with images of rain in the orchards, apples and melons, pears, leaves...

Some of the characters are photographed standing in grain fields, the low camera angle taking in the rippling wheat and the great white summer clouds. Vassili's bereaved fiancee hurls herself naked across her bedroom, tearing at the walls and calling his name. The people crowd the dusty lane marching and singing to lay Vassili to rest.

Zemlya is a beautiful movie; sometimes the narrative is a bit murky and hard to follow, and sometimes the photography (or the print) is dark, but the imagery carries the story as well as it does in any silent film.

The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1926)

2008-10-02T10:10:00.001-04:00

There isn’t much to this early Ruritanian musical, adapted from some sort of stage play to feature the singing of Maurice Chevalier, the rakish count Alfred Renard, and Jeanette MacDonald as Queen Louise of Sylvania. In the early sections the count is a cheerfully cynical Don Juan, and in the end Petruchio. That is, he is a libertine in Paris and gets sent home, where he marries the queen, but soon tires of being second and uses coolness and distance to teach her a lesson. The refeminization of the dominant woman—that is, stripping her of her power to leave her simpering—is rather unpleasant. MacDonald is earnest but unconvincing as a queen, largely because of her relaxed posture and her accent, though she sings like a good stage monarch. She and Chevalier do have the good grace to be self-parodic—he’s at his best explaining, with a charming grin, why he is the only one in the movie with a French accent. There’s a charming second couple, the count’s valet (Lupino Lane) and the maid Lulu (Lillian Roth), who parallel the queen’s courtship of the count with their own rather cruder antics. Also nice is to hear the rumbling voice of the great character actor Eugene Pallette, who plays a lamentably small part, but plays it well.

White Zombie (Victor Halpern, 1932)

2008-09-28T15:09:00.004-04:00

Bela Lugosi was very busy in the early 1930s. Here, in 1932, the year after his masterfully arch Dracula, he plays “Murder” Legendre, master of zombies in the creepy plantations of

Haiti

. The film's depiction of

Haiti

is troubling—all drums and cringing, frightened black men. In fact, practically the only black actor is the terrified coach-driver, and his friendly advisor-witch doctor is a white actor in blackface.

Anyway, Legendre has drawn the members of his troupe of zombies from his old enemies, including a witch doctor whose magical secrets he has stolen. Lugosi is wonderfully arch, with a fine sardonic look—everything ordinary people do amuses him—and a fine now-I-will-
control-your-brain look, magnetically focusing way up close on scary eyes.

The plot is creaky and utterly predictable: there is a triangle consisting of a clean-cut handsome man and his pretty bride-to-be and a desperate best-man-to-be in love with the girl. He contracts with Legendre to transform the girl to keep her from marrying, and she seems to die. Soon she’s whisked away from her tomb to—get this—a huge semi-ruined stone castle beetling over an immense precipice above the angry sea. In Haiti--go figure. Inside, the castle is not so much ruined as peculiar. There seems to be water flowing in the upper stories, since people cross a sort of indoor torrent and then walk down a grand staircase into the great room of the castle, a room maybe 80 feet high, with pillars and tall stained-glass windows and all the best gothic decor money can buy. There Legendre and the bad young man wear evening clothes and the girl plays Chopin on the piano, without any expression on her kewpie-doll face. Somebody has to stop this!

And the handsome groom-to- be appears just in time, assisted by a jovial preacher who appears on the scene from somewhere. But evil is very strong here. Utter ruin is about to consume every one of them, until at last the bad friend has a change of heart and saves his handsome friend and his bride-to-be. Of course he must purge himself of the wickedness of plotting against them, so he dies in the attempt, thereby redeeming himself.

Not a pretty picture, all told. It should have remained among the dead.

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

2008-09-23T20:27:00.012-04:00

Some films linger at the edge of one’s con sciousness, important somehow even if we haven’t actually gotten around to seeing them. La Dolce Vita’s spectral reputation in the 60s was as a shocking, sexy, glamorous film; in fact it is not very sexy at all. Rather, it is a very beautiful, very sad film about witnessing glamour, a prescient look at the cult of celebrity, and an acute insight into the sense of wanting something just out of reach. Marcello Mastroianni, who is of course very handsome and is looking out at the world as we look at him, seems to be still even when he’s moving. What we see in him is the ache of watching, and this creates an oddly affecting loop. We don’t want to be him, even as he’s engaged in not wanting to be him as well.

The film starts with a tour-de-force set of shots, two helicopters passing over a new housing development, one hauling a statue of Christ dangling on a long cable, its arms outstretched as if by pure coincidence circumstances accidentally came together and an arbitrary symbol passes through the world. People below run after the phenomenal sight, and its shadow whisks up the side of a building, at the top of which is a roof garden where several pretty young women are sunbathing, and one of the helicopters circles around so Marcello and his friend Paparazzo can flirt with them. The movie swarms with journalists occupying a spookily unreal zone of more or less staged occasions. Perhaps the most impressive is the great scene of televised religious frenzy, in which two children fake seeing the Virgin. Or they may or may not be faking. Surrounding them are huge crowds of would-be believers and hordes of television crews and paparazzi, and scenes are directed for television, and when the rain and the children’s proclamation set the crowd in motion, for a just a moment real need, sorrow, and faith can be seen in the midst of the big con.

Marcello seems always to be really near contact with things, and what is more, he appears to be really there, which makes him a great social reporter, but he senses he should be something more, a serious writer perhaps, as his brilliant-seeming bohemian friend suggests. But he isn’t even close to real feeling about his suicidal girlfriend. He is momentarily enchanted by the visiting American actress, the voluptuous Anita Ekberg, who is spontaneous and lustily primal but somehow not wicked, and he is attracted to the self-destructive Maddalena (Anouk Aimeé) who, in a poignant hall-of-whispers scene, begs him at a distance to marry her, then declares that she wants to love him and she wants to stay the same, a whore, and as she says this a man begins to make love to her and Marcello cannot find her in the maze of the old castle. The friend he so admired cracks and kills his children and himself—Marcello speculates he was afraid. Of somebody threatening him, a detective asks? No, of himself. He was right to be afraid; the event bears out the fear.

There is a scene with a distanced father, and a break-up scene, and a long decadent party, slightly silly and slightly brutal, and the last scene on the beach where the partygoers see a huge monster fish dragged in. A beautiful young girl, the innocent one, waves at Marcello. He’d met her at a café where he was trying to write and she was working. She beckons and calls, he says he can’t hear her, she signals again, he is called by the other partygoers, he shrugs eloquently and waves goodbye to her, as does she, still smiling. A farewell to beginnings.

There are lots of other things in the movie, too much to detail here. Afterwards, I was filled with a great sadness; the movie so eloquently expresses proximity without closeness, anomie, and despair, covered over with glamour and a hectic pace.

Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

2008-09-12T14:25:00.003-04:00

From a Damon Runyon story—that’s where the snappy under- world dialogue comes from. Apple Annie (May Robson) has been writing to her daughter for years using borrowed hotel stationery, letting the girl think she’s a society dame. Meanwhile, she sells apples on the street, where Dave the Dude (Warren William), an investor and gang boss, thinks his luck depends on buying an apple from her when something’s developing. Annie’s daughter writes that she’s arriving with her fiancé and his father, a Spanish count, and the Dude swings into action, borrowing a huge, luxurious apartment and inviting nightclub owner Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell) to superintend Annie's makeover, and gentleman pool hustler Judge Blake (Guy Kibbee) agrees to play the part of her husband. Of course things get terribly complicated and almost go wrong, but when the Dude tells his “fairy tale” to the mayor, the governor, etc., they all flock around to support the scene, and all ends well. Though William gets top billing, he’s not really the most interesting figure. Both Robson and Kibbee are delightful—the Judge handles the problem of coming up with a dowry by betting double or nothing with the Count at billiards, and he doesn’t even stay in the room to watch as his near-impossible shot drops into the pocket. The big cast is filled with guys and dolls of various stripes, including the ever-faithful Nat Pendleton as the genial, muscleheaded sidekick Shakespeare, and especially Ned Sparks as Happy McGuire, the Dude’s manager. Sparks has cornered the market on the sharp-featured raised-eyebrow and startled look, the purely facial double-take, and he gets nearly all the great snappy lines. Even when he’s not talking, he’s great to watch—as things get more and more unlikely, he takes to whistling snatches of “The Prisoner’s Song” to let the Dude know his plan is not as simple as he’d thought it would be, so he's likely to wind up with jail time. Sentimental and populist (the street people and gangsters and politicians with hearts of gold) and very funny.

Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)

2008-09-11T14:49:00.002-04:00

Noir, of the caper-gone-wrong variety. Even the double-crosses fail, people with less nerve than required die, and so do people with nerve. Dix (Sterling Hayden) is a gambler and hooligan, waiting for one big win that will allow him to go back to Kentucky to be with the horses. He has friends, the hunchback Gus (James Whitmore) and the dancer Doll (Jean Hagen) loves him. Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), fresh from seven years “behind the walls,” has a good plan for a heist, and brings in bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence), and then lawyer Lon Emmerich (Louis Calhern) as investors. Emmerich—who has a bedridden wife and a cute girlfriend (Marilyn Monroe)—tries and fails to cheat the crew. During the heist things go wrong, the safecracker, a family man, gets shot by a richochet bullet from a dropped pistol, the nitro sets off burglar alarms next door, and Dix gets shot a little later by Emmerich’s sidekick who’d attempted another cross. Cobby talks, Gus is arrested, Doc is arrested while taking a break in a cab ride to Cleveland as he watches a pretty teenaged girl dance, and Dix and Doll manage to get away and they drive to Kentucky—but he’s lost too much blood, and dies under the cloudy sky in a pasture, surrounded by horses. Most of the film is shot in classic noir style, largely at night, and it’s populated by grotesques and character studies. The writers inject a speech by the police commissioner to reporters, to the effect that without police on the job, even though some may be corrupt, the world would be nothing more than a jungle. Dix—played by Hayden mostly with a straight-up, calm power, a direct gaze, and one or two flickers of feeling—is really damaged, carrying the long hurt of losing his father, his home, and his world, and though he is tough and unafraid, he’s not mean, not brutal. He does what is needful and no more. But even that is too much.

Maladolescenza (Pier Giuseppe Murgia, 1977)

2008-09-09T12:45:00.006-04:00

When Europeans make films about summer holidays, they often view the time and place as unknown zones. Away from home, people are sometimes on some kind of unknown time: the first or last happy time, the beginning of maturity, explorations of love, rites of passage. This film is like that. There are only three characters, Laura (Lara Wendel), Fabrizio (Martin Loeb), and Silvia (Eva Ionesco), and the story takes place in the forest near the young people’s summer homes. Laura and Fabrizio explore the forest and discover high in the wooded hills a ruined “magic” town. Laura is eager to see him after a year apart, and she notes he has changed: he’s sullen and withdrawn and increasingly given to teasing and tormenting her. The sexual tension between them is complicated by Laura’s desperate wish to please him and his pleasure in denying her any sort of satisfaction, even conversation or a modest kiss. They find a cave underneath the castle, and lost down there Fabrizio undresses her and they make love. Just that once. And then he’s back to his mean ways of frightening her or tantalizing her. This gets still worse when he discovers Sylvia, in some ways Laura’s opposite, confident, blonde, mean, and fearless. She and Fabrizio torment Laura some more, in increasingly cruel ways, threatening to banish her, frightening her, shooting arrows at her, pretending to throw her from a cliff, making her serve them, and forcing her to watch them have sex. Fabrizio seems to get steadily worse, obsessed with living in the forest, imploring Sylvia to stay with him. As the summer is about to end and she’s set to leave, he takes them into the cave again and tells Sylvia they’re lost—and she panics, weeping and saying she’ll go crazy and screaming. She can’t hear Fabrizio pleading to let their idyll continue. Laura, who feels confused by Sylvia’s vulnerability and by her own diffidence (because she knows the way out), comforts the other girl. And Fabrizio kills her, just as he’s killed helpless birds already. What starts as an idyllic season succumbs to a corrosive pattern of conflating sex and power, so experimental cruelty is inevitable, and then the pastoral turns gothic. Sort of. The movie looks wonderful, with gorgeous photography of woods and meadows and ruins, and the three young actors are very nice to look at. Wendel is soft-looking, anxious, expectant, longing—she’s the best actor among them. Loeb is not a petulant adolescent, but he seems dissatisfied with things any boy his age would celebrate forever. Ionesco is an odd mixture of radiance and plainness, her golden hair all cloudlike and her skin fine, but her face is also rather ordinary looking from certain angles, and there’s something almost unformed and childlike about it, though her ease before the camera makes it difficult to spot (she was the favourite model for her mother, a famous photographer). Wendel appears more attractive because she’s more delicate, more hesitant, and more sympathetic. Finally, it would be nice to see a film about young people discovering sex and love and joy without this sour undercurrent of punishment.

The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)

2008-09-08T10:19:00.003-04:00

Back when Bagdad was a locus of wonder to the casually dreamy western imagination... Douglas Fairbanks is Ahmet, the swashbuckling Thief, who falls in love with the beautiful Princess (Julanne Johnston) and wins her hand through a set of great adventures. The story is a silly orientalist fairy tale filled with stereotyped villains, especially the scheming Mongol Prince (Sojin), aided by the furtively lovely Mongol slave in the Princess’s bedchamber (Anna May Wong), and fat beturbaned guards, and giant black gong-strikers, and easily befuddled soldiers. Fairbanks plays most of the movie with a bare torso, satin headband, luminous grin, and vaudeville-balletic arm gestures, and if he were not so absolutely convinced by—and convincing in—his own high-powered charm, he would be ridiculous, and indeed he almost is, but mostly it works. There are some nice special effects, including a magic rope he climbs up, a flying horse, and a magical army, but the real tour-de-force of the movie is the set design that offers an exceedingly tall city full of walls and towers and high windows and rounded corners and planes and twisty little stairs. Some of the shots are wonderful visualizations of Arabian tales, with tall-hatted men in robes moving about in halls over a hundred feet high. The movie is long—two hours—but delightful.

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)

2008-09-07T12:42:00.002-04:00

A political thriller based on an actual assassination of a Greek doctor in 1963. It’s briskly paced and well-written, and it suggests the staying power of a strong military status quo—though the language, the idiom, the actors, and the setting is all French, it’s nonetheless obviously the Greece of the colonels. There is an element of inevitability as the police prevent the peace rally from proceeding peacefully by having them kicked out of one sizeable venue and letting them meet somewhere obviously too small, so that people left outside are easy targets for right-wind counter-demonstrators and police. Things degenerate quickly, with savage beatings, and then cover-ups and suborning witnesses. Gradually the young judge entrusted with investigating the death of the peace movement leader discovers links between the police and the “accident,” and with the help of a young photographer and stubborn witnesses, he indicts the entire police/army leadership, right up to the general in charge. Most of the wrongdoers are either reprimanded or given brief jail sentences; most of the witnesses against them end up dead. However, only a few years later, captions at the end relate, there was a spontaneous movement that resulted in the collapse of the military regime and the resoration of democracy. As the wife and then the widow of the martyred doctor, Irene Papas has very little to say. She reacts tragically, humanizes the terrible events through flashback montage, and looks Greek.

Asphalt (Joe May, 1929)

2008-09-02T16:42:00.003-04:00

Produced by Murnau, and brilliantly directed by May, this silent drama is a masterpiece of cinematography. From the opening montages, with workmen tamping down hot asphalt and the steamrollers behind them and the rain-wet streets shining in the street lights, to the traffic slanting across the street while the young policeman directs traffic, to the change in the lighting at his home after he feels he has fallen—he stands in shadow while down the hall in a halo of light his mother is busy in the kitchen, as if he were observing another world—to the expressionist shadows on the staircases toward the end — it’s magnificently conceived and photographed. The lighting effects are astonishing. The story is not profound, involving an upright young traffic policeman falling under the spell of a diamond-thieving courtesan (Bette Amman), and when they are surprised in her bedroom by her regular lover, an older diplomat, who hurls the woman to the ground, the young man defends her, and himself, with the result that the other man dies. He goes home and tells his parents he has killed a man, and the father, also a policeman, stands up, puts on his dress helmet, and they go silently downtown. But the woman intervenes, calmly incriminating herself to save the young man. She is taken away to prison, but the young man says he will wait for her, and she looks at him with eyes brimming with tears, and a smile. Amman has impossibly big dark eyes and a helmet of bobbed, curly hair. Her cloche hats give her head a sculptural look, and she also moves sometimes with astonishing sensual power, as when she throws herself on the young policeman, winding her arms around his neck, her toes clinging to his boot-tops, her huge luminous eyes inches from his. In the early part of the film she is hard and manipulative, but at the end she has been shaken by real feeling and humanized. Okay, it’s an old story, riddled with cliche, but in this treatment it works, largely because the film is so beautifully shot.

À ma soeur! – Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

2008-08-31T15:16:00.005-04:00

Not what it first appears to be, no, neither a sweet or a difficult coming of age story. Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) is a plump 12- or 13-year-old girl with a beautiful sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), just 15, with whom she alternately quarrels and gets along. Throughout the movie they talk about being dissimilar sisters, about how angry they get with each other and how close they are, about boys, about wanting and not wanting sex. They’re vacationing somewhere, and Elena picks up an Italian student, Fernando (Libero Do Rienzo), and the relationship soon heats up. Elena arranges for him to come to the bedroom she shares with her sister, whom she instructs to sleep and say nothing. Fernando spends the night trying to convince Elena to have sex with him, and though she feels desire, she’s timid. He keeps telling her intercourse is a great gift of love, and she asks him to give her time. He counters by telling her of the urgency of his need and telling her it would be too bad for him to have to go with a girl he didn’t care for because she turned him away. At last he convinces her to let him penetrate her anally—that way she can still say she’s a virgin; all the girls do it.

Meanwhile Anaïs, who has up to now been indicating her loneliness by singing odd little songs and playing out a fantasy romance monologue in the swimming pool, kissing the ladder and the jealous diving board, listens to the talk and the lovemaking and is confused, weeping, angry, defiant. The next day Elena and Fernando make love on the beach, with Anaïs nearby, singing to herself again—Elena can only go out in her sister’s company. Fernando gives Elena an opal ring—this brings trouble, for it’s a valuable ring belonging to his mother, who comes to complain. The girls’ father has flown home; he can’t stand to be away from his business. Their mother cuts the vacation short and drives them home. Anaïs and Elena talk—Anaïs says she’s tired of being a virgin. Weary with driving, the mother stops at a rest stop to sleep, as a big truck goes by slowly in the lot. More quiet talking, and the Elena too goes to sleep. Suddenly a man smashes the windshield with an axe and kills Elena with one swipe, and strangles the mother. Anaïs gets out of the car and just looks at him. In the woods, as he is raping her, she reaches her arms up and embraces him. In the morning, as the police examine the bodies and walk Anaïs out of the woods, she says calmly, he didn’t rape me.

A very disturbing movie, especially the last seven or eight minutes, but there’s also something really distressing about Fernando’s exploitation of Elena, an innocent girl, who thinks in terms of love, and in his complete disregard for her feelings or for her pleasure. Sex is for him only. All this allies him with the crazed killer, and makes the movie terribly bitter and sad.

Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947)

2008-08-12T10:46:00.006-04:00

A weightily well- intentioned movie that is sometimes quite effective. Laura Z. Hobson wrote the novel and Moss Hart the screen play, and the topic is antisemitism. The focus is not on horrid examples or recent world history, but on the pervasiveness of prejudice in ordinary American life. This is how the set-up goes: a very wealthy, successful, liberal magazine editor John Minify (Albert Dekker) gets the bright idea of commissioning a series of articles exposing American antisemitism, and calls star journalist Philip Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck) do it. Green is a serious man with a serious, creative career, and he accepts the assignment after admitting disgruntlement to his wise mother Mrs. Green (Anne Revere), but he hasn’t got an angle, and this makes him nervous and dissatisfied. But he has a good friend, Dave Goldman (John Garfield) who is a Jew, and thinking about his friend’s experience gives him his angle: he will be a Jew for Eight Weeks, to see how hateful antisemitism is, from the inside.

Everybody is bowled over by the brilliance of the idea, and he goes ahead. The first problem arises when he mentions to his new girlfriend Kathy (Dorothy McGuire) that he’s writing from within, as a Jew himself. Kathy gives a start: she’s very liberal, disgusted by prejudice, and in fact she was the one who persuaded her uncle Minify to take on antisemitism. But in her character we see one of the basic problems: people are inclined toward opposing prejudice, but they haven't gone farther than that. Kathy has all the right intentions, but accepts unthinkingly all the daily mechanics that enforce prejudice: resorts with an “exclusive” policy, managing guests at a Connecticut party, and so forth. When Green’s son Tommy (Dean Stockwell) suffers from name-calling and beating, she comforts him by telling him it’s not true, he’s not a Jew—as if his membership in the dominant Christian community were inherently better, a belief she reveals even more when in the break-up argument she says she’s glad she’s a Christian and not Jewish, just as she’s glad she’s pretty and not plain, wealthy and not poor, healthy and not ill.

Daily abuses abound: the custodian of the apartment building where Green lives asks him not to write “Greenberg” on the mail-box label “because it ain’t allowed.” The doctor who treats Mrs. Green recommends only gentile heart specialists, and the secretary Minify hires to help Green, Elaine Wales (June Havoc) is a prime example of the internalized antisemitism of those passing for gentile (though Green is a little too hard on her). Through her Green discovers the personnel manager at the magazine doesn’t hire Jews, and Minify, embarrassed, reverses the policy.

There are only two other Jewish voices here. The first is Green’s friend Dave, an army officer and engineer just leaving the service to take up a job in New York, though he can’t find a place for his family to live. Dave’s attitude is reserved, guarded, but not without compassion: as Green reels from the impact of hatred, Dave tells him he’s getting in two weeks what a real Jew would have a lifetime to absorb—and it’s hard enough that way. He also tells Green one story, and one story only, about the death on the battlefield of a heroic Jewish soldier. Somebody said something about moving “this Sheeny,” and those were the last words he ever heard. The other voice is that of a brilliant physicist, Professor Lieberman (Sam Jaffee), who launches into a wonderfully merry, sardonic riff on how to solve the problem of antisemitism. Green himself is caught in a moral bind, because he is too principled to retreat from the ugliness of confrontations by playing the gentile card, which is also Lieberman’s point when he says that as a completely secular man of science he is not a Jew—no religion, no race. But he will never deny being a Jew because to do so would be to proclaim Jewish inferiority. Green can only leave his disguise of being Jewish by denouncing every manifestation of antisemitism, even among “good people.”

Meanwhile, there’s another wrinkle in the plot. Kathy is pretty and bright and speaks with a breathily soft voice, but she’s really not very interesting except as part of a matched set of handsome people. On the other hand, fashion editor Anne Dettrey (Celeste Holme) is bright, determined, very good looking in a polished way, and extremely witty. In fact, she gets all the snappy lines, and a scene showing her deeper, sweeter side. But then the good-hearted Dave has to go and spoil things by effecting a last-minute reconciliation between Kathy and Green—it’s not enough for her to feel disgust at prejudice, she has to take action, he tells her. Otherwise she’s part of it. So she allows the Goldmans to live in her cottage in exclusive Connecticut and commits herself to staying with her sister and fighting prejudice. It is a great disappointment, this reconciliation, for Anne Dettrey is a decent person all through the story, and somebody of real substance, not just a pretty face with social status, much better suited for Green than the somewhat vacuous Kathy. The weakest part of the story is the romance plot. And while Gregory Peck is very good to look at, Kazan seems to have directed him in a way that limits him for much of the film to expressions of righteous indignation, so that he appears stern, angry, and tightly wound nearly all the time. The best acting and the best lines are delivered by the secondary characters, especially Revere and Garfield—and Garfield most of all, who delivers a surprisingly nuanced, quiet, convincing performance.

The conceit of the story—reporting on the conditions experienced by an oppressed minority, is not unique. John Howard Griffin wrote of becoming black in the 1960s exposé Black Like Me, and there must be other instances. I’m not sure whether we ought to be troubled by the notion that the story can be written better by an outsider, but that’s an argument for another day.

Xiao Wanyi (Yo Sun, 1933)

2008-08-10T22:07:00.004-04:00

A silent epic, starting with traditional China in the 1920s, where a gifted woman, Ye (Lingyu Ruan) invents and makes toys. She has a circle of people in her village, her pudgy, slow husband who sells the toys, as does the scarecrow sidekick Mantis. In the opening scene her husband, daughter, and infant son tiptoe, and even the little dog wears felt booties, so she can sleep. Clearly Sister Ye is treasured—and she’s also admired by a rich, handsome man, Yuan Pu (Congmei Yuan), but she sends him away to learn how to manufacture things so China won’t keep buying imports. Over the years, things degenerate even though Sister Ye keeps making brilliant toys. Her husband falls down and dies in the market, and in the stir that ensues, somebody steals her young son and sells him to a woman in Shanghai. War comes and Sister Ye’s circle leave the village. They settle in Shanghai and continue to make toys, but their standard of living keeps falling. Sister Ye’s daughter Pearl (Li Li-li) grows up to be another toy-making genius, as well as an inspiring leader of children’s calisthenics. Yuan returns but can’t find Sister Ye; he builds the toy factory he’d promised her, and meets the woman who adopted Ye’s son—though nobody ever knows the connection. War gets far worse—the Japanese invade Manchuria, and there is much brutal destruction. Japanese planes bomb the hospital where Sister Ye and Pearl are helping, and Pearl dies in her mother’s arms. Finally Sister Ye is reduced to rags, selling a pole of toys outside a fancy night-club. Out of a limousine comes her son, dressed in the uniform of a boy scout, and she refuses to take money from him because he says he intends to grow up to save his country. Sister Ye smiles with tears in her eyes—and then the fireworks start going off and she cracks with the strain, running about screaming that war has come again. Yuan finds her and calms her a little, and she gradually works around to a profoundly patriotic speech, calling on everybody to serve, pointing at them, and pointing at the camera at the very end. The war-time propaganda starts about half-way through the movie, and escalates through Pearl’s cheerfully rousing patriotism to this final speech—from which (in the print I saw) both the Chinese intertitles and the English subtitles were missing, though plentiful earlier. I seem to have become a big fan of Lingyu Ruan, whose face I admire prodigiously—she’s really very beautiful, with a dazzling smile that transforms her face and her eyes into something very fine to behold. And she’s a very good actor as well, especially expressive. The movie harnesses tragedy to serve national interests: propaganda, perhaps, but still a warm human story.

All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)

2008-08-08T10:02:00.017-04:00

Perhaps one could call this the anti-epic, the tale of an ordinary German boy who joined the army in the first heat of idealism, only to watch his friends die, one after the other, for nothing. The professor who preaches honour and glory is a jingoistic fool, and the people at home want the army, underfed and undersupplied with every sort of necessity, to march on to Paris. Through more than two hours of the story—long, but not overlong—the film-makers, faithful to the original novel by Erich Marie Remarque, stress the effort to hold onto whatever it is that makes us human. This is not easy in the midst of a steady rain of death that renders all pre-war notions of sense meaningless and absurd. Disillusionment is epidemic, and in the face of a necessity that makes no sense—the war goes on—something else emerges. Cameraderie is paramount, the link that binds soldiers together in the face of death. Also the simple things, food, drink, dry clothing, sleep, and the dreamed-of things, home, love, and a coherent world—but in the grotesque absurdity of trench warfare, such dreams are hopelessly remote, and the war is near. The film is brilliantly acted by a very big cast. The central figure, Paul Bäumer, grows from a sensitive, romantic youth to a seasoned, disillusioned soldier; still, he retains a bit of his core of integrity—Lew Ayres is wonderful in this part. Over all, the movie produces a sense of painful recognition of waste, just like the great national cemeteries with their miles of crosses and gravestones. The final shot is a montage showing one of these graveyards seen from above, perhaps from the crest of a hill, and superimposed over this is a scene from early in the movie when the young recruits marched off to war in their clean,.new uniforms. As they pass, some of them—the main characters of the story, look back briefly over their shoulders directly into the camera, turn back, and march on toward death. Their faces are young and sober. It is one of the single most affecting shots I have ever seen, and perfectly holds this true masterpiece together.

A Fool There Was (Frank Powell, 1915)

2008-08-07T08:30:00.012-04:00

A melodrama featuring a Fool, wealthy diplomat John Schuyler (Edward José) who falls under the spell of a “woman of the vampire species” (Theda Bara), abandons his wife and yellow-ringleted daughter, sojourns dissolutely in Italy, stumbles back to New York, and dies a mere husk of a man. It is never clear just how the Vampire attracts and holds men—it must be sex and drink and perhaps some other unspecified unauthorized pleasures, because her victims seem both drunk and hypnotized and, in the end, suffering from something like alcoholic dementia.

Theda Bara is not especially glamorous here, at least not by our standards 90 years later, but the signals are right: she assumes the generally accepted body language of a harlot: hipshot, head thrust forward, and she moves aggressively on some occasions and sinuously at others. In the opening scene she stands draped in silk in a dark room, shredding a bouquet of roses and laughing. Moreover, throughout the film her costume is always powerfully different from the dress worn by other women. In an early scene she appears at a summer resort, where all the other women wear seasonally appropriate white or light-coloured clothing, loose-fitting, with soft lines. She wears a black and white vertically striped satin sheath skirt and a fitted black jacket, and a dark hat with a big feather, and her eyes are heavily shadowed. Schuyler’s wife “cuts” her, standing right next to her but not acknowledging her existence, and the Vampire swears revenge. Obviously her costume represents darkness contrasting with innocence, but the contrast hasn’t aged well, so she appears overdressed rather than exotic.

The concept of the movie comes from a Kipling poem, “The Vampire,” which appears in fragments in the intertitles. She is first and foremost the woman “who does not care,” and who attracts fools, uses them up, and discards them, laughing. Things do not end any better for Mr. Schuyler then they did for her previous victims.

Warm Water under a red bridge / Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu (Shohei Imamura, 2001)

2008-08-06T12:57:00.009-04:00

Without a job when his firm goes bankrupt, a man in his 40s looks unsuccessfully for work, talks on his mobile phone to his distant wife who’s moved away, and hangs out with a derelict, a homeless philosopher in a blue tent, who counsels him to live in such a way that he will not have regrets—and when the old man dies the man decides to go seek the treasure the old man used to tell him about, in an old house covered with trumpet vines, by a red bridge. The man goes there and sees a beautiful young woman. Shortly afterwards he sees her shoplifting cheese in a store; she is standing in a pool of water. He goes to the house, and the granny gives him a paper with a prophecy of good fortune written on it.

The girl tells him somehow water builds up inside her and she has to do something wicked to vent it. And when they make love she becomes an ecstatic fountain. So the man takes a job on a fishing boat, and he hurries back to her whenever she signals him from the shore with a mirror. After a while, though, the constancy of the relationship starts to “cure” her, and the water diminishes. The man is not happy, and he becomes unreasonable and jealous. The poor woman is miserably unhappy, too, because whenever she has taken a lover they have all have been that way when the water subsides. The fountain seems to be just exotic sex to them, while the water seems like a curse to her.

When the man confesses he’d initially come for the treasure, she laughs bitterly—the treasure was in her grandmother’s “pot.” At last, the man realizes the old philosopher had tricked him into discovering this wonder, and that he himself had been the man the grandmother had always waited for. The girl retreats sadly, accepting defeat and preparing herself for his departure. But he tells her he’s staying, and the she she tells him she loves him—and out of the seashore grotto where they are making love, a fountain of water emerges, and a rainbow.

It’s a fable about desire, isn’t it? But there’s more than just a succession of ebbing and endings. There's the promise of renewal and constancy. Sweetly optimistic magic realism.

Breathless / À Bout de souffle (Jean Luc Godard, 1960)

2008-08-05T09:27:00.011-04:00

Jean-Paul Belmondo as an attractive criminal, Michel, with a fondness for Bogart. He drifts into crime rather casually, as when he casually shoots a policeman pursuing the car Michel has stolen—Michel just happens to find a gun in the glove compartment. He has a vague romantic attachment to the American girl Patricia (Jean Seberg), who is even vaguer still. She’s brisk and pretty in her close-cropped fair hair and sailor-striped shirt and her American-accented French. The famous “honesty” of this film must stem from the fact that both lovers speak a good deal about how uncertain they are about whether they love each other, though they do.

This is not at all a conventional crime drama, because there’s very little dash and bravado–just free-floating charm. And this charm is peculiar because it’s so ambivalent. In the end, Patricia turns Michel in to the police. Why? Apparently it is supposed a means of discovering if she really loves him. It’s complicated, but it works something like this: how can she know whether she really does love Michel? If she betrays him, the act of betrayal would be especially méchant, and if she feels sufficiently terrible she will know she loves him, and if not, well then. This means of testing love is complicated and sophisticated and poetic and more than any of these qualities, stupid. Michel disdains escape. He’s tired, he says, and wants to sleep, though perhaps not to die, and yet he does die. The police on the scene misrepresent his last words to Patricia, who looks frozen at the camera and turns away.

The movie is deceptively good to look at, which conceals the waywardness of its concept. And more puzzling still, I wish I knew what some critics (and the blurb on the dvd-box blurb) mean when they use the word “existentialist” about this film.

Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

2008-08-04T09:41:00.011-04:00

This very early Hitchcock silent film is fascinating. Just before the crash of ’29, we have a moral fable about giddy youth in the jazz age. The movie opens with a most unusual shot—a young couple dancing vigorously (though blurrily) in the centre of a circle, and when the camera pulls back, it turns out we’ve been looking through the bottom of a champagne glass. The madcap flapper heiress Betty (Betty Balfour) — all curly blonde hair and big eyes and twinkly smiling — is taken on board a Cunard steamer after she's ditched her small airplane in the sea. She’s done it on purpose, to elope with a handsome fellow known only as “The Boy” (Jean Bradin), but he offends her by saying he wishes she didn’t have so much money, and she spurns him. At the same time a rather ominous looking fellow, “The Man” (Theo von Alten) moves in. He keeps looking at her with heavy-lidded eyes and a slightly svengalian gaze. In Paris Betty buys gowns and acts giddily until her father (Gordon Harker) shows up and tells her their fortune has disappeared. So they move into a little apartment and Betty tries to cook and tries to sell her jewelry and gets a scandalous job as a cigarette girl. Of course the whole thing was a set—up, to test her and to build character. The father wanted to teach the girl what was truly valuable, and The Man was in on the plot; she forgives them and as the movie winds to an end she’s about to marry “The Boy.” Balfour has a bright, softly triangular face, and she acts giddiness, resolve, wounded pride, and joy quite well. The movie is not really a mystery like so much of Hitchcock’s later work, though it does have some of the misdirection Hitchcock later perfected. The most interesting thing, for me, is the camerawork — cinematography by Jack E. Cox — because of the champagne-glass shot, repeated at the end, and because there are seven or eight quite remarkable shots when the actor walks straight into the camera from middle distance to extreme close-up, looking straight at us, until the cut to whoever it is he or she’s looking at, a sort of reverse point-of-view technique.

Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)

2008-08-04T09:14:00.013-04:00

What passes for style in this “auteur” independent film is little more than randomness, varieties of the grotesque, casual cruelty, and a patina of calm in the midst of clutter and senselessness. Korine frames the story with video footage of tornadoes, and an almost inaudible child’s voice tells of wreckage and carnage in Xenia, Ohio. Apparently this provides the context for inventing a cohort nihilistic characters and megadoses of rather grim absurdity. The the rest of the movie alternates between the dull adventures of Solomon aka Gummo (Jacob Reynolds) and his friend Tummler (Nick Sutton), gluesniffing boys who ride BMX bikes through town killing cats to sell by the pound, and two young tow-headed sisters (Chloe Sevigny and Carisa Glucksman), who drift about aimlessly and experimentally. Also featured is the Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who appears mournful and fragile and arbitrary. And a host of small-town people in various stages of dementia, obesity, undress, inebriation, exhibitionism, and so forth. Every interior is crowded with junk, so there’s barely space for the characters to walk into a room. Only the retarded people have neat bedrooms. Tummler has a young, tired face. Gummo has strong features in the upper half of his face, and a receding chin, and his hair is swept up like a woodpecker’s crest. There is some striking imagery and a few interesting lines in the script, but the whole piece seems contrived and self-indulgent, and aimed at three effects that probably are at war with each other: 1) the film-maker’s undisputed ability to generate striking images in support of (or extraneous to) a narrative; 2) a desire to shock the bourgeois audience; 3) a curiosity about people at the fringes of society or at the edges of a world that has stopped making sense. Ultimately, the movie operates by what I would call a geek aesthetic. That is, it means to attract by selling the audience a promise of the grotesque, and it sort of delivers on this promise.

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Lotte Reineger, 1926)

2008-08-03T18:36:00.008-04:00

A truly beautiful movie made by animating silhouettes or shadow puppets. Reineger cut out each puppet with scissors, attaching moving parts with thread. The astonishing detail—the lacy clothing and the flight dress of the Peri, for instance, and the fantastic palaces and costumes—are all incredibly fine and precise, and as beautiful as any Indonesian shadow puppet I’ve seen.

The story centres around magical compulsion and getting hopelessly lost. A wicked African sorceror tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a flying horse, at first exhilirating and charming, but before long the enchanted horse has gotten Achmed thoroughly him lost. He lands on an island where he chances sees three Peris land beside a lake and take off their bird identity/costume to bathe. Peris are winged creatures halfway between angels and humans. Prince Achmed pursues and captures the princess Peri Banu. She’s terrified and shy, but he slowly wins her over, but the sorceror returns to steal the horse and leave the Prince all alone. He meets Aladdin, who has also been tricked by the sorceror, and together with the Hexe, apparently a fire-witch, they defeat the sorceror and all the divs and demons of the island where Peri Banu has been taken prisoner, and they return home to Aladdin’s palace, Prince Achmed with Peri Banu, and Aladdin with Princess Dinarba.

I'm not aware of other animations done wholly with shadow puppets, so perhaps Reineger's masterpiece is unique.