Les liaisons dangereuses (Roger Vadim, 1959)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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!