OLDIES!

Older films seen in 2008, continued from the 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 editions. Most of these are really quick comments - typically scribbled down in 10-15 minutes without benefit of notes - and any resulting wit or insight should be viewed as an accidental by-product. Slightly more thoughtful capsules may be found on the now-pretty-much-defunct old reviews page.

All films, both from this year and the five previous ones, can be accessed alphabetically. Most can be viewed ranked by rating as well, though I'm still not sure what that's all about.

BORDELLA (70) (Pupi Avati, 1976): Politics meets porn - the United States government launches a global chain of male brothels for its client-states, known as the American Love Company (motto: "Come one, come all") - done in the approximate style of Mel Brooks; erotic skits are variable (and could've been sexier), but non-stop inventive zaniness pretty much makes up for it. We open on Henry Kissinger answering a question from a reporter ("Gunga Din of the Wisconsin Tribune") as to whether it's true that US policy is set by Mary Pickford, who appears to the President in his dreams while riding a white horse - Kissinger regretfully replies that yes, that is indeed true - followed by a steady stream of musical numbers, Old Hollywood references (Mr. Chips, Francis the Talking Mule and other specimens of US imperialism) and wacky non sequiturs: a bartender shampoos his hair (using a plastic basin behind the bar) in between serving customers, an elevator-boy likes to trade punches with the passengers he ferries up and down, and one scene is played with our hero throwing knives at his assistant for no reason at all. Then it's back to Kissinger, who can't believe that Nixon is angling for a job as head of the brothel business; that guy's such a jerk, agrees Mr. Chips (Vincent Gardenia), you know what he did, we went to the movies together and he tried to sneak in with his old Presidential discount card, made us both look bad. Whatever happened to this mad, hilarious Avati?  

THE STRANGLERS OF BOMBAY (66) (Terence Fisher, 1959): Awesome genre fun - not quite horror, despite the Hammer brand, more like GUNGA DIN with a remarkable appetite for bloodthirsty detail: limbs hacked off, eyes burned out, a vein slit open on a prisoner's leg to entice a nearby cobra with the smell of blood, an entire caravan of people strangled in their sleep. Only brought down by the usual old-movie collapse in the final stretch, creepy tension giving way to fisticuffs and banal heroics; before that, the talk is good, plotting brisk, characters surprisingly nuanced - even the cult's High Priest is differentiated from his fellow killers, being apparently a True Believer who doesn't have the stomach for sadism, and is scorned by his subordinates because of it - and the local colour surprisingly interesting. Some may blanch at the portrait of Indians as devious and duplicitous, but in fact I'm happier with the natives shown as dangerous sneaks secretly conspiring against the Raj - the rather bitter view of a chastened, post-colonial Britain - than the more condescending portrait in pre-1947 British movies like THE DRUM, where they're just noisy fuzzy-wuzzies waiting to be put down by courageous Builders of Empire.

THE WITCHES / LE STREGHE (73) (Luchino Visconti, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi & Vittorio de Sica, 1967): An expensive flop, a semi-guilty pleasure and certainly a grand folly, Dino De Laurentiis' mash-note to his wife, the rather inexpressive Silvana Mangano, with five different roles in five different stories (even the cartoon opening credits are a super-production). The two shorter 'joke' segments don't really work - the jokes are good, but not really explained; we have to assume Witch 2 needed an excuse to speed through the city (it's not like anyone stops her) and Witch 4 secretly wanted to dispose of all her male kinfolk - but the three longer stories complement each other nicely, the colours and design elements are a pleasure throughout (it's a good idea having only one DP and designer for all five parts), and the whole thing emerges as a kind of encyclopaedia of 60s Italian cinema: Antonioni-like alienation by way of Visconti's opener about an unhappy film star - adding his own imprimatur in the bitchy upper-class milieu - De Sica doing domestic comedy with more than a touch of Fellini in the housewife's fantasy scenes, Pasolini riffing on HAWKS AND SPARROWS with Day-Glo colours and even more absurdity (the Moral of the Story is especially fine), with the shorter segments adding Alberto Sordi in iconic Everyman mode and the Sicilian black farces of Pietro Germi. You never really know what's coming next, swinging from chilly pretension to demotic knockabout to surreal fantasy; Ms. Mangano isn't embarrassing in her one big scene - the tearful phone call in Segment 1 - and her relative blankness at least means you can put her anywhere. Also: Clint Eastwood as downtrodden Italian office drone? Who'd have thunk?

THE BELLES OF ST. TRINIAN'S (52) (Frank Launder, 1954): From a time when "good manners and good taste have been replaced by black-market values" - and admittedly the indignant matron speaking that line is a man in drag (and rowdy schoolkids were a British-comedy staple even pre-War, see e.g. Will Hay) but you still wonder how much the anarchic, proto-punk St. Trinian's girls reflect a post-war consensus that times had changed, and the new generation would be sharper, more streetwise, more cynical and even more scientific (one girl is unfazed when a teacher threatens her with 100 lines: "Lines! I've got a machine to do that!") than the war-weary older one. Also of course reflecting a desire to break out - from grey, rationed, conformist post-war Britain - that became Angry Young Man cinema (then the Beatles, Monty Python, Sid Vicious) just a few years later, making the film one of those blockbusters that also act as inadvertent time-capsules. Just wish it was funnier, but in fact the laughs are mild; shenanigans involving cockney spivs, Arab princes and prize racehorses seem closer to Norman Wisdom (as indeed they were) than the upcoming British explosion.

MOVIE MOVIE (76) (Stanley Donen, 1978): Second viewing, first since I was a kid - when I didn't really know what it was spoofing (films of the 30s) but liked it anyway. The first 'movie' (a boxing drama à la KID GALAHAD) is the better spoof, the second (a musical, à la 42ND STREET) not as sharp in pointing out clichés - but they're both very funny, zany yet affectionate, and Donen gets the shape of the compositions exactly right. Maybe GRINDHOUSE too should've led with an introduction by the 70s equivalent of George Burns (David Carradine?), explaining we're about to watch a double-feature "like in the old days" - though the stupid Greek-TV station I taped it from still seemed Unclear on the Concept, snipping all the fake trailers I recall from my first viewing so we go straight from Movie 1 to Movie 2. It's really not that difficult guys.

FINGERS (73) (James Toback, 1978): Romain Duris makes a more convincing pianist - Harvey Keitel is a little stubby-looking - and BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED had some good ideas of its own, but it looks pretty crude next to this version - which doesn't operate a gangster/artist dichotomy but makes it all part of the same character (he plays music constantly, even taking a tape-deck along when he goes out on gangster business, the music-rights being presumably what's keeping this off DVD) and creates a startling portrait of repression, a man caught between competing compulsions. He wants to please everyone - he's a noble guy, tending to practise the "heroic fuck" and stopping to cheer up a down-at-heel bag-lady - even though his insides are literally twisted with the tension of keeping it all in, the music and gangster machismo both depicted as forms of insanity (BEAT missed a trick by keeping the music 'legitimate'): on the one hand is his bug-eyed, presumably institutionalized Mom, on the other his braggart belligerent Dad and various tough-guy lowlifes, from the dandified thug whose 'au revoir' to his girl is "Be good or I'll break your face" to Jim Brown as the orgy-minded club-owner who treats women like shit; in the end - inevitably - our boy explodes, then crouches naked and bewildered in his small apartment like a feral beast (or the Bad Lieutenant). Toback is adept at flamboyant conversations - like the first meeting with Dad - but also subtle, or subtler than he later became, allowing Keitel's inner life to unfold unspoken. His music is the prime victim, something he can do for himself but freezes when he has to do it in public, implicitly because it feels wrong and unmanly; the audition-gone-wrong was a cringe-inducing fiasco in BEAT, but here emerges - for all its pain and confusion - as a kind of epiphany (at least he starts to realise something's wrong with him). A hunted, poisoned movie, scrappy but haunting.      

MAY 1, 2008

REMEMBER MY NAME (63) (Alan Rudolph, 1978): Don't often gripe about miscasting, but it's near-impossible to accept Anthony Perkins as a construction worker, and even quite difficult to accept him as a loving, settled blue-collar husband - he's just so angular and weird-looking. It makes a difference, because - even though his onscreen wife is his real-life wife - he seems from the start to belong more with fellow freak Geraldine Chaplin (he's most relaxed when they finally get together and recall old times while drinking their way through a restaurant drinks-menu, eyed by a disapproving waiter), which throws the film's balance slightly off, given that Chaplin is supposed to be a threat in the early scenes. It's a delicate balance, and Chaplin is memorably ambivalent, clearly unstable - there's a great moment when she produces a knife with a Grand Guignol flourish - almost autistic in some of her mannerisms (e.g. her detached, artificial way of speaking) yet sympathetic. The 'full' ending apparently makes her more sympathetic, casting the film as a wronged-woman's-revenge drama, which I think would also have thrown it off balance; the ending I saw was abrupt and near-incomprehensible (leaving open the possibility that Chaplin's just plain nuts), and all the better for it. Also: rather overbearing blues soundtrack, Alfre Woodard at 26, Jeff Goldblum also 26 - looking fully-formed and freakishly tall and thin, respectively.

COOGAN'S BLUFF (63) (Don Siegel, 1968): Clearly a dry run for DIRTY HARRY, with Clint - now explicitly a cowboy - ranged against bureaucrats, city folk and of course Kids Today, with their long hair and LSD and wild trippy happenings where stag-movies are projected on the wall and women kiss each other in public! Also ranged against a variety of truculent New Yorkers - cabbies, hotel clerks - which is hugely entertaining, ditto Clint's scorn for correct procedure (best bit: "I'm making a citizen's arrest!"), but it must be said that Coogan isn't as quixotic as Harry, whose battles had a Last Good Man touch of doomy nobility, and in fact is something of a selfish prick rather than a badass (even his "bluff" is kind of unnecessary); he treats the girl shabbily, and the film treats her even more shabbily, brushing aside her career-talk to stick her in front of the kitchen stove like a good little woman. Final motorcycle chase suffers by comparison with the next 40 years of action movies, though a chase climax was clearly the Big New Thing in '68; BULLITT came out two weeks later. 

TARGETS (76) (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968): Glib subject, terrific movie - and fascinating, because it's so clearly 'on the cusp' (like its changing times, like Bogdanovich himself with his Old Hollywood fetish and New Hollywood chops). The two stories - elderly horror-film star and young gun-nut gone psycho - don't just run in parallel, don't just stand for Movies vs. Reality, but also belong to two different eras: Boris Karloff's scenes feature convivial drunkenness and dated references to his "Chinese" secretary ("The Chinese have a saying about that", etc), like some cosy 50s artefact, the serial-killer scenes are chillingly modern, the violence unadorned and shockingly sudden, the settings suburban homes and arid freeways lined with used-car lots ("What an ugly city this has turned into!" muses Karloff, doubtless recalling the orange-groves and heady pioneer days of the 30s). Exemplary treatment of the young psycho, no explanation offered for why he turns his gun-mania from tin-cans to people - but various explanations implicitly offered: because shooting guns is the one thing he does well, and because the people around him (working jobs, watching TV) are barely human anyway - and it's funny how some things recall David Lynch: juxtaposition of movie-biz haggling and dreamlike horror (the initial murders are so abrupt they feel like a fantasy), rooms done up in lurid pinks and peaches, above all Bogdanovich's most radical gambit, using a lot of indistinct shots that become almost abstract (the back of Karloff's head in a dark screening-room; a smudge of blue sky in the near-darkness before nightfall; lingering on a film-within-the-film being shown at a drive-in, even though the sound from the screen is almost inaudible), though it's unclear whether that's avant-garde pretensions or just a low budget.     

GIANTS AND TOYS (68) (Yasuzo Masumura, 1958): Looks at first like it might be the Japanese WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? but it turns out to be the Japanese A FACE IN THE CROWD - not a satire of advertising but a bleak, despairing state-of-the-nation rant, its aggressive rhythm turning just a little bit strident, its Message hammered home just a little bit too forcefully. "Japan is America", consumer capitalism slowly rotting the country's codes of honour and friendship - creating a society based on giving people "no time to think" through the constant distractions of movies, TV and media (like FACE IN THE CROWD, it feels like it could've been made 30 years later). Masumura's frames teem with life, full of angular compositions and visual delirium - at one point we're gliding alongside a conference-table, with one worried salaryman giving way to another and various electronic toys set in motion on the table, scuttling in different directions at angles to the horizontal camera; the eye barely knows where to alight first - but the plot grows sombre after the brightly comic early scenes, finally toppling over into hectoring (stuff like the chief's bad marriage is a welcome touch of darkness when merely implied, but it gets a bit much when he's coughing blood and shouting hysterically); most poignant strand is perhaps fearless Youth vs. cynical 'maturity', the System chewing up naive enthusiastic young people and turning them into husks. Dazzling, but a little exhausting.  

CARMEN COMES HOME (70) (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951): The first Japanese film in colour, though the colour tends to be smeary, like a Republic B-Western - at least till Carmen turns up in her striking red dress, standing out amid the brown hills and houses. She's an "artiste" (read: stripper) coming back for a visit to her small rural hometown, and the film's treatment of the culture-clash is quietly miraculous, avoiding all possible pitfalls: Carmen's an airhead, and pointedly part of the 'new' Japan - she sings in English, unlike the town's blind musician (blinded in the war) who composes a song called "My Homeland" - but Carmen also says she'd die for Art, and doesn't end up being seduced by the town's rustic charms; the villagers make fun of her but also come to watch, spellbound, when she does a show in the village hall, and even her father - who's ashamed of his prodigal daughter - nonetheless admits in a moment of weakness that he loves "that idiot" more than anything. In the end, neither party is convinced by the other - but Carmen gives the money from the show to Dad in a gesture of love, and he passes it on to the village school, and meanwhile our heroine's charms convince the unpleasant local merchant not to take away the blind musician's beloved harmonium, so it all turns out all right. Thin on plot, but the delicacy of feeling - on a subject that usually ends up either cloyingly pastoral (in the Ealing style) or righteously 'progressive' (in the Miramax/CHOCOLAT style) - is deeply moving; it's the only film that's ever reduced me to tears despite being viewed with French subtitles (meaning I didn't get much of the nuance). Two movies in, I'm ready to call Kinoshita a favourite filmmaker.   

LOS OLVIDADOS (73) (Luis Bunuel, 1950): Quite a bit of Dickens, esp. "Oliver Twist" - the shot in the fog with the older urchin leading off the younger, Artful Dodger-style; the kindly rescuer sending our hero on an errand to show that he trusts him, finding his trust (apparently) misplaced - also a touch of the Dead End Kids though the film is tough, remarkably so, the work of a middle-aged underachiever with nothing to lose. Some of it may be posturing, e.g. when it pointedly shows the kids fighting dirty - biting ears, gouging eyes - in their climactic dust-up, but the absence of sentimentality carries through to a very dark ending, kindness mostly turns out to be resentful weakness in disguise, and (e.g.) a boy's pain at his mother's coldness is shown a lot more unsparingly than (e.g.) in THE 400 BLOWS - making the so-called "mother-meat dream" even more potent, especially since it comes out of nowhere. Any social-realist indictment can leaven proceedings with an interlude of magic or fantasy; it takes a peculiarly grim one to feature magic that's even more disturbing than the realism.

NAZARIN (65) (Luis Bunuel, 1958): Second viewing, first in about 20 years - when I liked it more, maybe because I saw it (on the big screen) sitting behind two yuppie-stockbroker types who fidgeted and sighed with boredom throughout (I think they were expecting something 'surreal', like a woman's eye getting sliced with a razor). Actually quite naturalistic, its main achievement being to work on two different layers at the same time - simultaneously sympathetic to its hero, a quixotic (or Quixotic) figure who practises a form of 'pure' Christianity, and viewing him as a misguided fool who fatally lacks the common touch (the first sounds we hear are the cries of street-vendors - but Nazarin himself stays away from the street, reading a book in his bedroom). The point is perhaps that religion fails because it tries to adapt intellectual concerns to human needs, inevitably degrading into superstition - Bunuel doesn't deny the possibility of visions, but they have to be based on raw emotion (as with the girl's tremulous epiphany), not the teachings of some long-ago philosopher; it's when God gets reduced to a God that'll personally intervene to heal your sick and cure your lame that things get ridiculous (cf. FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, where the monks' Christianity is also 'pure' but populist rather than cerebral). Lots of discussion-points, though more on the film's concepts than our hero's adventures - which aren't very memorable (final pineapple excepted) and occasionally hurt by the low budget; when a woman beats a child, his wails are all-too-obviously those of an adult dubber.        

SHE HAD TO SAY YES (56) (George Amy & Busby Berkeley, 1933): She had to say yes, because her job depended on it (she's a secretary asked to moonlight as a "customer-girl"), then later because it's the only way to help the man she loves. Seems there's no way a girl can avoid doing that sort of thing - though Loretta Young somehow manages to avoid it, her slightly tiresome virtue nicely offset by the fact that everyone assumes she does it anyway. Plotting falters in the final stretch, mostly because it can't decide if it wants the hero to be sympathetic or a little bit scary (still don't know why he takes her to that house in the middle of nowhere), but the standard happy-ish ending can't conceal the fact that Loretta's heart has been broken, and she'll never trust a man again; the sense of the constant dodging and weaving required to be a young girl in the city is all-pervasive. Possible MVP: Hugh Herbert, stealing scenes with his usual hooting laugh but also finding unexpected pathos in the moment when it suddenly sinks in that Loretta's been stringing him along. 

APRIL 1, 2008

FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE (55) (George Seaton, 1950): Things this has in common with MIRACLE ON 34th STREET: Seaton, Edmund Gwenn, supernatural whimsy (angels, in this case) and an amusingly incongruous taste for government machinery getting involved in the shenanigans - the legal system in MIRACLE, the IRS here. Device of the unborn children hanging around as disembodied souls, waiting for their prospective parents to give birth to them, is splendidly cute and punctuated with clever asides (those who grow old waiting finally get born as precocious child prodigies) - though also marked by dated sexual politics: a bad marriage should be saved no matter what, having children is a woman's greatest joy, etc. Much of it consists of prim Clifton Webb pretending to be a cowboy, and it takes more than heavenly intervention to make that seem funny; love to see some quirky programmer double-bill it with WINGS OF DESIRE, though. 

THE ASPHYX (39) (Peter Newbrook, 1973): British sci-fi horror with a Victorian setting, taking place mostly in sepulchral half-light (which is surely deliberate; Newbrook made his name as a DP), hopelessly stilted verging on comical (which is surely not; Newbrook never directed again). Restrained, formal style is initially welcome and appropriate - lots of talk, lots of long takes - the macabre premise reminiscent of Poe or H.G. Wells (scientist finds he can photograph the spirit of Death as it approaches a dying person, and can subsequently trap it in his apparatus meaning the person will never die), but restrained becomes sub-par then increasingly amateurish, despite some decent effects (the screaming Asphyx, primarily); rhythm is off, scenes don't build, dialogue is daft ("But why pursue Immortality?" asks the reluctant sidekick) and plotting is shaky, first in little niggly details - hero could never have filmed that close-up of his son crashing into the tree-branch - then obvious inconsistency, e.g. when Daughter alternately doesn't believe he can trap the Asphyx and does believe it but thinks it's morally wrong, all in the same scene; also the guillotine scene is giggle-inducing - mostly because it's so obvious how things could go wrong with a guillotine (*) - also Robert Stephens hams it up terribly as the scientist, clearly deprived of direction. Watched the 83-minute version (as opposed to 99 mins.) which presumably explains the butler's ailing sister, pointedly mentioned twice for no reason whatsoever. 

(*) Also - though this won't make sense unless you've seen the movie - the retardedness of thinking you can trick the spirit of Death into approaching just by pretending you're about to guillotine someone, without any intention of doing so. You might as well just point a gun at them. Safer, too.     

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (83) (Preston Sturges, 1948): Stanley Cavell coined a good one with "comedies of remarriage" but it takes a Sturges to come up with films "that question the necessity of marriage for eight reels before concluding that it's essential in the ninth". That line's a total throwaway, hinting at the level of verbal wit on display, and the film is indeed one of those nine-reel movies but also something more - an expression of a certain sensibility, Sturges the aggressive go-getter and professional inventor who'd previously sublimated his aggression in satire and screwball (the presence of Rudy Vallee recalls THE PALM BEACH STORY) but now, with career in decline - no-one to check him, nothing to lose - brings a more manic, not to say psychotic edge to romantic comedy. His hero is clearly insane - not just his violent fantasies; his love is excessive, from his furious rage at the notion of spying on his wife to his fulsome expressions of devotion at the end - and slapstick, more than ever (even more than in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS) acts as a lightning-rod for Sturges, a kind of safe harbour: his cynical view is that all human enterprise ends in slapstick - hence the final section, implicitly contrasting movies and real life - but it's just as well because, if people weren't so pathetic, they'd probably end up killing themselves and each other (one wonders if he subconsciously sabotaged his own career, ending up in drunken self-destructive slapstick as a way of warding off his demons). In itself, qualified only by a slightly creaky first half-hour; otherwise the manic meld of clever malice, hysterical farce and pitch-black comedy - plus Rossini, Wagner and Tchaikovsky - easily outdoes even KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. It's also surprisingly romantic. 

PRIVATE LIVES (45) (Sidney Franklin, 1931): Wonder what Noel Coward himself had to say about this MGM-ization of his stage success; hopefully something wittily sniffy, like e.g. 'There are few things more irreparably common than the assumption of sophistication by those patently unsuited to it'. Norma Shearer is too regal for an impulsive spitfire who at one point suggests getting "roaring, screaming drunk" - she sounds like a snob when delivering the famous line "It's extraordinary how potent cheap music is" (a line that ideally contains notes of ironic resignation and awed wonder at cheap music's potency) - and Robert Montgomery doesn't even modulate for the laugh-line ("Cleanness beyond belief!") when recalling the couple's long-ago vacation in some luxurious place. Perks up in Act 3, but Franklin is no Lubitsch, shooting mostly in indifferent master-shots - plus one atrociously mismatched insert (the old man's reaction to the bickering couple) where indifference shades into incompetence.  

INTOLERANCE (75) (D.W. Griffith, 1916): Seen for the express purpose of leaving no film unwatched on the All-Time Top 50 (still five to go for the Top 100), hence without any real expectations; rating vacillated, but the film's cumulative power finally trumps its sillier moments ("Help me to be a square-jawed jane!"), stodgier bits, or the fact that its purported four stories are really two-and-a-quarter. Arbitrary shuffling from one to another remains startling the first few times, which is partly a function of the film's age (like the inescapable knowledge, even stronger in a film with such a cast of thousands, that every single person onscreen is now dead, adding to the feel of feelbad epic about Time and mortality) - startling that stories could be treated with such (post-)modern abandon 92 years ago, just like it's startling how a girl's come-hither look is still nakedly carnal after 92 years, and a matron's realisation that she's "no longer part of the younger world" is still poignant after 92 years, and Constance Talmadge is so delightful after 92 years, etc etc - but also a function of the film's exuberance, its eclectic faith in a new medium, going from battle scenes and special effects (plastic dummies gleefully decapitated) to stark social comment, leaving two French girls asleep on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Massacre so it can stage a hilarious Babylonian "love dance". The climax, when the stories finally run free and intermingle with minimal intertitles, feels like an act of creation, as though Griffith's spent two-and-a-half hours carefully crafting a flying machine then lets go of the strings, and the thing soars up into the heavens; the film as a whole suggests a Filmgoer's Progress from straight narrative to bifurcated narrative to pure avant-garde (unsurprisingly, audiences didn't go the distance). Griffith often painted as a stuffy Victorian but the politics here are downright libertarian, Intolerance not just limited to tyrants and warmongers but also including the "meddlers" and do-gooders, those self-righteous folk - smoking-nazis? pushy NGOs? - who think they know what's best for others (and still do, 92 years later). Like I said, startling.    

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (48) (William Dieterle, 1948): Art, Beauty, Truth, spirituality, all that aesthetic ethereal guff. "Have you found what you were looking for?" the painter is asked - his Art being a way to get "closer to the Truth of things" - and later, when he listens to a choir singing hymns in a convent, feels "as if pretty soon I would understand", or perhaps Understand. Grist to the mill of hopeless romantics (like me), but the dialogue is sludge, the Portrait itself pretty kitschy and apple-cheeked Jennifer Jones makes a poor fit for ghostly melancholy, that "gentle kind of sadness that always troubled me" in Jennie. The final shot, plunging into Technicolor to illustrate how the portrait has become "real" to our hero, typifies the overall tackiness.

MARCH 1, 2008

PUNISHMENT PARK (50) (Peter Watkins, 1971): A shrill cry of rage, and the reason why many of us treasure BAMAKO. Style is exciting (if finally repetitive), subject-matter obviously relevant to the age of Guantanamo, but it only works if approached with the cynical conviction that the System is evil, America inherently "psychotic" and capitalist life synonymous with "war and oppression"; most counter-culture movies at least capture the fun of the movement, the euphoria of being young in 1971, but this one - inevitably, given the plot - just becomes whiny and self-righteous. One aspect alone is clever, the state painting P. Park as a "choice" (and going on about the kids having made the "choice" to be radicals), perfect terminology for a consumerist democracy, when of course it's nothing of the sort - hence the MOST DANGEROUS GAME-ish plot - just as Western democracy allows no meaningful choices; the rest will seem annoying unless one extends that cynicism to the whole enterprise, seeing e.g. the trial as a total sham even though it seems semi-acceptable (certainly better than a Stalinist show-trial), giving the defendants a chance to expound their philosophy on live TV - at least if they didn't simply yell at their accusers, throw around big words like "genocide" and babble streams of slogans, ranging from fair-if-utopian (help the poor, feed the hungry) to frankly loopy (release all prisoners back into the world). Maybe it's just dated, but I suspect it was always preaching to the converted. Significant detail: the judges include not just Big Business types but also a Professor of Sociology - a reminder that academics haven't always been on the right (i.e. left) side of the barricades.

WAGONMASTER (74) (John Ford, 1950): A Western, a musical, a small-scale project - no stars, no real plot, made in the interstices of the Cavalry Trilogy - that brings out the best in Ford, the feel for Western vistas (lines of men and horses among the curves of hills, hazy veil of dust thrown up by the wagon-wheels) and balance of respect for authority/tradition and nonconformism (the same balance that defined his raucous - but conservative - Irish sergeants): the heroes are all outsiders - "Mormons, show-folk and horse traders!" says a disgusted townsperson - but they all have their codes, whether in their faith, the songs and dances that mark their culture, or just the "professor" in the hoochie-coochie show refusing to go a day without shaving. Whole thing is casual-picaresque, even the ending capering in out of nowhere, its tone consistently mercurial and prone to change - the Indian dance interrupted by the terrified girl, who seems at first to be part of the dance - yet it works like a piece of music, instruments chiming in round a fragile melody, the thin but effective plot - outlaws hiding out among the wagon train, waiting to strike - adding its own note of tension. Charles Kemper, a portly middle-aged devil with silvery diction and sideburns, added to my personal collection of Unknown Actors Capable of Greatness; alas, he died a month later.

BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE (64) (Paul Mazursky, 1969): Second viewing, though I barely remembered it. Fun (and instructive) to watch in conjunction with TAKING OFF [see below], because Forman views middle-aged folks learning to "open up" sardonically whereas Mazursky's take is closer to a big wet kiss; a case of Central European vs. Jewish-American, or a case of the peace-and-love movement blighted by cynicism in the two years between the movies? Opening scene at the mountain retreat is like something out of "The Serial", making it quite affecting when you realise the film is naive (or generous) enough to take this stuff semi-seriously, taking satirical jabs at the contortions required to be "honest" and "beautiful" rather than mocking it outright - and it's also quite wise at the end, getting B&C&T&A in bed together only to remind them that being Honest isn't necessarily the same as being transgressive. One major problem (besides no longer being very funny): I can think of no known universe where smooth, tanned, imperturbably confident Bob and Carol would be best friends with antsy, angst-ridden, guilt-ridden Ted and Alice.    

TAKING OFF (61) (Milos Forman, 1971): Starts off strong, full of Forman's joy in human quirkiness and diversity, esp. the manifold glimpses of auditioning hopefuls; when he cuts abruptly from the hypnotist telling Buck Henry "If the thought of living is still exciting -" to a few gratuitous frames of a young lady bobbing gratuitously in mid-song, the "thought of living" merges imperceptibly with the thought of life for its own sake, and it is indeed exciting. Later goes wrong, partly because it sets itself an impossible task - how do you show the repressed, no-sex-life squares getting hip to the counter-culture without appearing condescending? - though the parents-trying-pot scene veers a shade too close to caricature by any standards, and the coda just seems muddled: hippy musician turns out to be a capitalist, capitalist parents try hard to be musical (in their square way), yet the way it's shot, the two camps seem as far apart as ever (Forman ends on "An angel like you" over the held-long shot of the daughter, which can only be implying how little their idealised conception comes close to understanding her). Also quite dated, naturally, though it's interesting that Pauline Kael (writing when the film came out) reckoned the suburbanites "seem to be living in the thirties" - which of course is as far removed from 1971 as 1971 is from now.

THE STEPFORD WIVES (53) (Bryan Forbes, 1975): Hopelessly torn between satire and thriller - or maybe this material only works on the printed page, where a writer can direct our attention to inner thoughts and meaningful details; onscreen it's hard to tell what's 'wrong' with the Wives unless you go the full dead-eyed-zombie route, which would topple over into horror movie (Forbes is trapped, because getting to know the women would expose the Big Twist but showing them briefly isn't enough; placid and hausfrau-ish doesn't = creepy). Strangely pointless and insubstantial for much of its length - Stepford itself is more of an abstraction than a plausibly working community, mostly defined through our heroine's feminist outrage and by not being New York City - till the money-scene where the robot malfunctions and the film finally shows its cards, seguing into thunder-and-lightning climax. Message ends up weirdly conservative, or maybe just cynical - in a world where everyone's unhappy (even heroine's college sweetheart, whose role is otherwise meaningless), why not just submit and forego one's individualism for a life of conformist (but happy) drone-hood? No wonder the 70s turned into the 80s.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (74) (Jim McBride, 1968): "Broadcast Yourself": YouTube culture skewered 40 years before the fact, and long before Mr. Holzman ends up talking to his beloved camera about masturbation (!), the wanky solipsistic nature of his project is apparent (made more apparent by news from Vietnam - the wide world beyond - on the soundtrack). David is wrong on just about everything - the hidden truths ("the mystery of things") he hopes to elicit, the effect of voyeurism on his girlfriend's desire to remain his girlfriend, the name of the beautiful neighbour across the street (not in fact "Sandra") - but the film gives him one (accidental) redemption in that much of the footage he shoots is rather beautiful, snippets of strangers glimpsed through lighted windows or the condensed bits-of-stories reflected in the people he meets on the street. Loveliness culminates in the film's standout scene - where McBride seems to take over from David temporarily - a tracking-shot down a line of senior citizens sitting on benches, 'scored' to the sound of a vote at the UN, all the countries of the world being called out one-by-one (it helps that the shot sways slightly, lending a magical air); personal and political briefly reconcile - one might say each of the old people is a country, with his/her lifetime of unique experiences - maybe looking forward to what David Holzman could make, if he ever gets his head out of his ass. Potent and packed with discussion-points even beyond banal what-is-reality? post-modernism, a veiled rebuke to Godard and Dziga Vertov (David knows his Eclair just as intimately as THE MAN knew his MOVIE CAMERA), also featuring one of the great nostalgia moments: a rundown, in fuzzy Flicker-Vision, of all the TV shows screened over a single night in July 1967. 

THE BIG CLOCK (65) (John Farrow, 1948): Half an hour of spectacular suspense legerdemain, built on sometimes-wobbly foundations: hero doesn't seem as hopelessly entangled as he should be for the desperation to work (he might still wriggle out of it, if it came to a frame-up; it's his word against the murderer's), and the mystery woman earlier on isn't sufficiently established to justify his lapse - basically he becomes besotted with her because that's what hapless heroes do with femmes fatales. Final half-hour is magnificent though, and Farrow also brings some offbeat subtext, the Charles Laughton tycoon-publisher being the titular Clock (all other clocks around him run according to his time) tying in with the hero's comment that there's "too much time in the world" (he, meanwhile, only wants some time to himself) - a metaphor of sorts for capitalist tyranny, the hidden oppressions of the System. When the dorky assistant makes a fool of himself, not many films would include Laughton saying "Fire him!" (it curdles the joke, for one thing), and even fewer would stretch out the scene to include the middle-manager being reluctant to do the deed, and the boss's henchman having to do it himself. Of such details is auteurist personality made. 

THE SEARCH (78) (Fred Zinnemann, 1948): Am I just a sap? Was I 'feeling fragile'? Was it due to having watched THE TRUE GLORY just a few days before? Hard to say, but second viewing of a (yes) sentimental middlebrow drama - which I fully expected to dismiss from my 1948 Top Ten - blew me away. As in GERMANY YEAR ZERO, the ruins of Berlin are as much a character as the wary, shell-shocked kids - and watching European kids three years after WW2, self-evidently carrying the trauma they've just witnessed, makes the film overpoweringly moving in a way SCHINDLER'S LIST and Co. can never match, their haunted presence sanctifying its manipulations. Turns very ordinary in the second half (the boy's command of English beggars belief, and it's hard not to cringe when he asks "Vott iss a mother?"), but it's saved by Zinnemann's trademark understatement and (especially) Montgomery Clift's unforced, humorous performance as the friendly GI; beautifully done, though it's possible 60 years of history are making its sweetness more palatable. Quoth the ever-quotable James Agee, back in '48: "At one point, while starving children grab for bread, a lady commentator informs one that they are hungry, and that the bread is bread."  

THREE ON A MATCH (70) (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932): Not conventionally 'good', but full of wild energy and jagged emotional angles. There's no reason to present this simple melodrama as a decades-spanning epic, except the frequent year-shifts allow for (still-entertaining) montages of gratuitous news headlines, and there's no reason to have three heroines when one barely features at all, esp. when she's introduced (as a child) as the smartest girl in the school's history; indeed that whole school prologue is a little off, breaking the rules of economical exposition by dwelling on a character (the Jewish boy) who isn't even in the film as an adult, and serving no real purpose except the ironic twist of the "worst girl in school" turning into a heroine while the rich popular girl ends badly (her mind turned by romantic novels at her ritzy boarding school, apparently). Then again, Ann Dvorak is wicked sexy in the latter role, morphing awesomely into a pathetic coke fiend - the film makes this explicit! - surrounded by the meanest-looking passel of thugs in a filthy tenement, and peripheral detail is generally splendid, from the passing pleb who fills us in on the plot (his friend would rather talk about his wife's cousin who went to Niagara Falls) to Edward Arnold introduced with a pair of tweezers up his nostril, to the glimpses of 30s life - diners, schoolyards, unfurnished rooms, beauty parlours - and harsh 30s look and skimpy clothes on the ladies. Moments and ambience: seems they can fill in for plot occasionally.

LOVE ME TONIGHT (72) (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932): Thought I'd like this more (as in much, much more), but it turns out dazzling technique isn't the best way to capture the blithe, casual quality that makes 30s musicals so magical; the whole elegance of the Lubitsch Touch was based on finesse and omission, on appearing effortless - i.e. not doing stuff - whereas Mamoulian is forever doing stuff, from the opening city-symphony (precursor of e.g. That Scene in DELICATESSEN) to the final Soviet-montage-like race between horse and train, and his virtuosity threatens to snuff out the romance. Best bits are the simplest, e.g. the recitative duet between Jeanette MacDonald and the doctor ("At night?" "Quite right. At night.") or C. Aubrey Smith trying to say "impertinent jackanapes", though of course one appreciates the constant flow of imaginative set-pieces, even when it doesn't really work (camera pulling back through heroine's bedroom window and dissolving to a wide-shot of the house is a great moment, even when the house is obviously a scale model). Domestics scuttling across a chessboard floor - seen from above, so they fan out like a human flower - is hugely more ambitious than anything in MONTE CARLO, but I think I'd trade most of this dazzle for 10 silly seconds of "Trimmin' the Women".

THE TRUE GLORY (60) (Carol Reed & Garson Kanin, 1945): Second viewing, first in ages - and maybe it's just that WW2 has been so over-exposed in the years since I last watched it. Approaches greatness with the liberation of Belsen and the final, measured effort to take away some lesson from the carnage, and it's obviously instructive (and admirable) that the Nazis aren't demonised, even in an official government documentary made with the war in Asia still raging. James Agee is right that it includes "several hundred" magnificent shots, though its "vernacular narration" no longer seems "free of falseness", being obviously scripted (at least the blank verse V.O. is honestly high-flown); masterfully-done for what it is, but we've seen it all before to be honest.

THE LATE GEORGE APLEY (59) (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947): A failure of nerve in the final act, which may have been Mankiewicz' fatal flaw - see also: THE QUIET AMERICAN - though I guess this failure could've been in the original (a play, based on a novel): turns into LIFE WITH FATHER when it looks like it's going to be THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, a tale of passion subjugated to social hypocrisy (Mr. Apley's motto? "putting emotion in its place and keeping it there"). What's amazing is the way it plays both sides, showing Apley as a failure - obsolete, as per the title; he can't even stop the electric sign reading "Grape Nuts" being erected on the edge of the park - yet giving him a worldview, an attention to the "little things" that keep a life going and make a marriage happy, even when it's loveless (of course they only become important once you repress the big things; still, it's a philosophy): "I'm not sure how much one can expect from Life," muses Mr. Apley (Ronald Colman is magnificent, giving the foolish old duffer a kind of bruised dignity); "It has a strange way of escaping you. Before you know it, it's slipped out of your hands" - and you have to wonder when Hollywood entertainments lost the ability to be wise and philosophical about failure; is it because it generally comes with middle age? Doesn't follow through, ending in the worst possible way - half one outcome and half the other, as if to please everyone - but there are beautiful moments (I was 70+ for a long time); add Percy Waram to the list of forgotten actors capable of Skandie-worthy performances.

HANNIE CAULDER (66) (Burt Kennedy, 1971): Light-hearted, offbeat revenge Western, with Raquel Welch as the avenging heroine - taking a bath in her new pair of pants to break them in, so they cling to her bottom - and the no-good trio of varmints played by uber-varmints Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin, wreaking bloody mayhem even as they trade knockabout routines reminiscent of the Three Stooges ("I can't find mah horse!" "Why not?" "Because you're sitting on him, you sonofabitch!"); it's perverse to the point of being awesome when they kill Raquel's husband and unceremoniously rape her in between comic bickering, then burn her house down with a careless drunken en passant lurch of a lighted match. She visits a gunsmith in Mexico (Christopher Lee?!) to get a special gun made, like the Bride in KILL BILL - and the film sags in the home stretch, possibly explaining its lack of a cult reputation, or maybe it's Kennedy's rather lame stylistic flourishes (a shoot-out in super-slow-motion) that explain why he's never been much-esteemed as a director; his writing prowess is another matter, and there's more than enough sharp lines amid the sub-spaghetti-Western goings-on to invoke the hand that wrote most of Boetticher's Ranown Westerns. "Did you have to cut him in half?" asks a sheriff sullenly after Raquel delivers the first of the varmints. "The halves match, don't they?" she replies coolly. "I wouldn't like to be you when the other two Clemens boys find out about this." "I wouldn't like to be you anytime." You go, girl! 

THE GIRLS (49) (Mai Zetterling, 1968): Strange seeing much of Bergman's stock company in a film with such a different sensibility - muddled, flashy and more of a fantasia, with a brief strange dream sequence (?) in the woods and a scene where a rant against men ("They're all a load of shit!") morphs into footage of Khruschev, Eisenhower, Moshe Dayan, etc, which is then being projected in a theatre for an audience of women to start throwing eggs and custard pies at the screen. "Feminist cinema", I assume, but in fact it's hard to say if Zetterling is being scathing on her heroines' half-baked rebellion, or if things were so bad 40 years ago (certainly the men are absurdly boorish) that said rebellion counts as empowerment - probably the former, given the cross-cuts to a performance of "Lysistrata" (women who dared live without men), but it's not like the Girls don't try to break through, notably the Bibi Andersson character, an actress in "Lysistrata" who's determined to connect with her audience of provincial burghers and begs the uncomprehending hicks to talk about their feelings. The film makes her look like a fool, and when e.g. a militant femme tells her audience: "Nothing to complain about? That shouldn't stop us complaining!" it could either be a call to eternal vigilance or a comment on spoiled wannabe-feminists in Sweden's welfare paradise. (Moot point: Can "feminist cinema" co-exist with a scene where a wife gets non-consensually spanked, and apparently enjoys it?) Ambivalence shades into confusion, and eventually tedium, though the snowscapes look nice in bleached b&w. 

FEBRUARY 1, 2008

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (77) (Howard Hawks, 1953): Second complete viewing, first in ages, rating upgraded; guess I never realised it was so exuberant before. All the things people talk about are here - a genuine friendship between women (analogous to those between men in e.g. RIO BRAVO), a riotous sense of colour, an easy blend of the artificial (i.e. musical numbers) and naturalistically casual (throwaway banter), a quasi-feminist insistence on surviving (and thriving) in a world of men - but mostly it's just tremendous fun, esp. the farcical hour on board ship. Note the constant theme of disguise, looking like one thing but being another - thus e.g. the python-goat misunderstanding, the passenger-list millionaire who turns out to be a kid, Marilyn Monroe wrapping a blanket around herself to disguise the fact that she's climbing out of a port-hole, Jane Russell later dressing up as Monroe, and of course MM herself, the dumb blonde who's actually not dumb at all (men just prefer her that way). Special mention for the great Charles Coburn as 'Piggy' Beekman, a flustered aristocrat out of P.G. Wodehouse.   

A JAPANESE TRAGEDY (72) (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953): Wtf happened here? Starts off explicitly political, with documentary footage of riots and newspaper headlines framing the central story, as if to make it emblematic of the nation at large; the style is remarkable, almost New Wave - flashbacks to the war (source of the Japanese Tragedy) dropped in totally without warning (and without sound, giving the feel of home-movie footage), shuffling between different time-lines, adding surreal touches like a baby's cries over some of the found footage (Japan's newborn democracy?). Then it all disappears in the second half, which simply works as family melodrama - a mother becoming estranged from her two grown-up children, a scenario out of Ozu or Naruse; watching it soon after a Naruse retro actually helped, because it shares with e.g. LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS the theme of post-war kids being vaguely embarrassed by their parents (tainted as they are by the past) and e.g. the sentimental cliché of the long-suffering mother recalls Naruse's MOTHER - except this is tougher because it turns out the only person who's sentimental about mother-love is the mother herself (even the little coda adds a cynical nail in the coffin). It's actually superb as family melodrama - the English teacher's wife a memorable shrew, though the daughter herself (a.k.a. the English teacher's mistress) turns out to be more complicated than she appears, her childhood secret surprisingly lurid by contemporary Hollywood standards; implications of sex are strong throughout, a reminder of US timidity in the 50s. Both halves are great, just very different; rating may go up on second viewing (hopefully on a Criterion with better subtitles), once I figure out if the halfway change - and near-total abandonment of state-of-the-nation effects - is deliberate or just a mistake.

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (65) (Akira Kurosawa, 1958): Hey, it's the wipes from STAR WARS! In other news I'm now lower than the general consensus on all three of Kurosawa's best-loved actioners (this, SAMURAI, YOJIMBO), and I suspect it has much to do with their lurching rhythm - they don't seem to build, lurching from one event to another, and e.g. the duel with spears seems a needless interruption to the main narrative (even if it later turns out to be important). Best appreciated as a film of grandiose spaces, the sweeping high-angle crowd shots prefacing the duel, the early encounters on fog-shrouded mountain slopes, and esp. the vertiginous spaces of the Hidden Fortress itself - also reflecting the class division underlying the movie, buffoonish peasants at one end of the chasm, complex aristocrats at the other. Fun but portentous, from Mifune's heavy strutting to the ending, which could (and should) have been quick and cynical but instead gets drawn-out, tying up loose ends and teaching the peasants a Lesson.

JANUARY 1, 2008