movie lover

Amadeus

2009-08-16T10:31:00.001-07:00

Happy people are pleased by the happiness of others. The miserable are poisoned by envy. They vote with Gore Vidal and David Merrick, both credited with saying, "It is not enough that I succeed. Others must fail." Milos Forman's "Amadeus" is not about the genius of Mozart but about the envy of his rival Salieri, whose curse was to have the talent of a third-rate composer but the ear of a first-rate music lover, so that he knew how bad he was, and how good Mozart was.

The most moving scene in the movie takes place at Mozart's deathbed, where the great composer, only 35, dictates the final pages of his great "Requiem" to Salieri, sitting at the foot of the bed with quill and manuscript, dragging the notes from Mozart's fevered brain. This scene is moving not because Mozart is dying, but because Salieri, his lifelong rival, is striving to extract from the dying man yet another masterpiece that will illuminate how shabby Salieri's work is. Salieri hates Mozart but loves music more, and cannot live without yet one more work that he can resent for its perfection. True, Salieri plans to claim the work as his own--but for a man like him, that will be one more turn of the screw.

"Amadeus" (1984) swept the Academy Awards and had a considerable popular success. When you consider that 98 percent of the American public never listens to a classical music station, it is astonishing that Mozart became for a time a best-seller, and not only to women assured by talk-show gurus that his music boosted the IQs of embryos. The movie's success is partly explained, I think, by its strategy of portraying Mozart not as a paragon whose greatness is a burden to us all, but as a goofy proto-hippie with a high-pitched giggle, an overfondness for drink, and a buxom wife who liked to chase him on all fours.

This is not a vulgarization of Mozart, but a way of dramatizing that true geniuses rarely take their own work seriously, because it comes so easily for them. Great writers (Nabokov, Dickens, Wodehouse) make it look like play. Almost-great writers (Mann, Galsworthy, Wolfe) make it look like Herculean triumph. It is as true in every field; compare Shakespeare to Shaw, Jordan to Barkley, Picasso to Rothko, Kennedy to Nixon. Salieri could strain and moan and bring forth tinkling jingles; Mozart could compose so joyously that he seemed, Salieri complained, to be "taking dictation from God."

"Amadeus" was brought forth by the independent producer Saul Zaentz ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Unbearable Lightness of Being," "The English Patient"), who brought Peter Shaffer's play and assigned the playwright to adapt it with the director Milos Forman. Zaentz's pattern, as you can see, is to take literary successes that seem unfilmable--too ambitious, too specialized--and film them. Forman, a Czech filmmaker who turned his back on the Russians and came to work in America, but not exactly in Hollywood, had directed "Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), "Hair" (1981) and "Ragtime" (1984).

The key precursor is "Hair." He sees Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a spiritual brother of the hippies who thumbed their noses at convention, muddled their senses with intoxicants, and delighted in lecturing their elders. In a film where everybody wears wigs, Mozart's wigs (I noted in my original review) do not look like everybody else's. They have just the slightest suggestion of punk, just the smallest shading of pink. There is something about Mozart's Vienna apartment, especially toward the end, that reminds you of the pad of a newly-rich rock musician: The rent is sky-high, the furnishings are sparse and haphazard, work is scattered everywhere, housekeeping has been neglected, there are empty bottles in the corners, and the bed is the center of life.

The flower child Mozart tries to govern his life, unsuccessfully, by the lights of three older men. His father Leopold (Roy Dotrice) trained the child genius to amaze the courts of Europe, but now stands aside, disapproving, at the untidy mess Mozart has made of his adulthood. His patron, Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) passes strict rules (no ballet in operas!) but cannot enforce them because, God love him, he enjoys what he would forbid. Then there is Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), who poses as his friend while plotting against him, sabotaging productions, blocking appointments. The irony (not least to Salieri) is that Salieri is honored and admired while Mozart is so new and unfamiliar that no one knows how good he is, except Salieri. Even the emperor, who indulges him, is as amused by Mozart's insolence as by his art. Mozart's role in the court of Joseph II is as the fool, saying truth wrapped in giggles. Mozart's ally in his struggles with authority is his wife Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge), who seems a child, stays too late in bed, calls him "Wolfie," but yet has a good head for business and a sharp eye for treachery.

The film is told in flashback by Salieri at the end of his life, confined in a madhouse, confiding to a young priest. He thinks perhaps he killed Mozart. It is more likely Mozart killed himself, by some deadly cocktail of tuberculosis and cirrhosis, but Salieri seems to have killed Mozart's art, and for that he feels remorse. It is all there in Mozart's deathbed scene: The agony of the older rival who hates to lose, who would lie and betray, and yet cannot deny that the young man's music is sublime.

The movie was shot on location in Forman's native Prague, one of a handful of European cities still in large parts unchanged since the 18th century. The film is a visual feast of palaces, costumes, wigs, feasts, opening nights, champagne, and mountains of debt. Mozart never had enough money, or much cared; Salieri had money, but look at his face when people snicker behind his back while he plays one of his compositions, and you will see what small consolation it was.

"Director's cuts" are a mixed blessing in this age of the DVD. Many of them seem inspired entirely by the desire to sell another video. Forman says his new version of "Amadeus," which runs 20 minutes longer than the 1984 version, is in fact the original cut: Afraid that a historical biopic about Mozart would find tough sailing at the box office, Forman and Zaentz made trims for pragmatic reasons. The major addition to the film is a scene explaining more fully why Constanze has such contempt for Salieri. Salieri, the court composer, has in his gift a lucrative appointment that, he explains to the young bride, will be her husband's--if she will grant Salieri her favors. Since there is little indication that Salieri has any great interest in women (or in anything, other than Mozart) this favor seems motivated not by sexual desire but by the need to humiliate Mozart. Constanze, desperate to help her Wolfie, does indeed visit Salieri at his apartments, and bares her breasts before having second thoughts.

In a film of grand gestures, some of the finest moments are very subtle. Notice the way Jeffrey Jones, as the emperor, balances his duty to appear serious and his delight in Mozart's impudence. Watch Jones' face as he decides he may have been wrong to ban ballet from opera. And watch Abraham's face as he internalizes envy, resentment and rage. What a smile he puts on the face of his misery! Then watch his face again at Mozart's deathbed, as he takes the final dictation. He knows how good it is. And he knows at that moment there is only one thing he loves more than himself, and that is Mozart's music.

The Apu Trilogy

2009-08-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. The three films, which were made in India by Satyajit Ray between 1950 and 1959, swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India--whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances. Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture.

Ray (1921-1992) was a commercial artist in Calcutta with little money and no connections when he determined to adapt a famous serial novel about the birth and young manhood of Apu--born in a rural village, formed in the holy city of Benares, educated in Calcutta, then a wanderer. The legend of the first film is inspiring; how on the first day Ray had never directed a scene, his cameraman had never photographed one, his child actors had not even been tested for their roles--and how that early footage was so impressive it won the meager financing for the rest of the film. Even the music was by a novice, Ravi Shankar, later to be famous.

The trilogy begins with "Pather Panchali," filmed between 1950 and 1954. Here begins the story of Apu when he is a boy, living with his parents, older sister and ancient aunt in the ancestral village to which his father, a priest, has returned despite the misgivings of the practical mother. The second film, "Aparajito" (1956), follows the family to Benares, where the father makes a living from pilgrims who have come to bathe in the holy Ganges. The third film, "The World of Apu" (1959), finds Apu and his mother living with an uncle in the country; the boy does so well in school he wins a scholarship to Calcutta. He is married under extraordinary circumstances, is happy with his young bride, then crushed by the deaths of his mother and his wife. After a period of bitter drifting, he returns at last to take up the responsibility of his son.

This summary scarcely reflects the beauty and mystery of the films, which do not follow the punched-up methods of conventional biography but are told in the spirit of the English title of the first film, "The Song of the Road." The actors who play Apu at various ages from about 6 to 29 have in common a moody, dreamy quality; Apu is not sharp, hard or cynical, but a sincere, naive idealist, motivated more by vague yearnings than concrete plans. He reflects a society that does not place ambition above all, but is philosophical, accepting, optimistic.

He is his father's child, and in the first two films we see how his father is eternally hopeful that something will turn up--that new plans and ideas will bear fruit. It is the mother who frets about money owed the relatives, about food for the children, about the future. In her eyes, throughout all three films, we see realism and loneliness, as her husband and then her son cheerfully go away to the big city and leave her waiting and wondering.

The most extraordinary passage in the three films comes in the third, when Apu, now a college student, goes with his best friend, Pulu, to attend the wedding of Pulu's cousin. The day has been picked because it is astrologically perfect--but the groom, when he arrives, turns out to be stark mad. The bride's mother sends him away, but then there is an emergency, because Aparna, the bride, will be forever cursed if she does not marry on this day, and so Pulu, in desperation, turns to Apu--and Apu, having left Calcutta to attend a marriage, returns to the city as the husband of the bride.

Sharmila Tagore, who plays Aparna, was only 14 when she made the film. She projects exquisite shyness and tenderness, and we consider how odd it is to be suddenly married to a stranger. "Can you accept a life of poverty?" asks Apu, who lives in a single room and augments his scholarship with a few rupees earned in a print shop. "Yes," she says simply, not meeting his gaze. She cries when she first arrives in Calcutta, but soon sweetness and love shine out through her eyes. Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, shares her innocent delight, and when she dies in childbirth it is the end of his innocence and, for a long time, of his hope.

The three films were photographed by Subrata Mitra, a still photographer who Ray was convinced could do the job. Starting from scratch, at first with a borrowed 16mm camera, Mitra achieves effects of extraordinary beauty: Forest paths, river vistas, the gathering clouds of the monsoon, water bugs skimming lightly over the surface of a pond. There is a fearsome scene as the mother watches over her feverish daughter while the rain and winds buffet the house, and we feel her fear and urgency as the camera dollies again and again across the small, threatened space. And a moment after a death, when the film cuts shockingly to the sudden flight of birds.

I heard a distant echo of the earliest days of the filming, perhaps, when Subrata Mitra was honored at the Hawaii Film Festival in the early 1990s, and in accepting a career award he thanked, not Satyajit Ray, but--his camera, and his film. On those first days of shooting it must have been just that simple, the hope of these beginners that their work would bear fruit.

What we sense all through "The Apu Trilogy" is a different kind of life than we are used to. The film is set in Bengal in the 1920s, when in the rural areas life was traditional and hard. Relationships were formed with those who lived close by; there is much drama over the theft of some apples from an orchard. The sight of a train, roaring at the far end of a field, represents the promise of the city and the future, and trains connect or separate the characters throughout the film, even offering at one low point a means of possible suicide.

The actors in the films have all been cast from life, to type; Italian neorealism was in vogue in the early 1950s, and Ray would have heard and agreed with the theory that everyone can play one role--himself. The most extraordinary performer in the films is Chunibala Devi, who plays the old aunt, stooped double, deeply wrinkled. She was 80 when shooting began; she had been an actress decades ago, but when Ray sought her out, she was living in a brothel, and thought he had come looking for a girl. When Apu's mother angers at her and tells her to leave, notice the way she appears at the door of another relative, asking, "Can I stay?" She has no home, no possessions except for her clothes and a bowl, but she never seems desperate because she embodies complete acceptance.

The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood. The mother has gone to live with a relative, as little better than a servant ("they like my cooking"), and when Apu comes to visit during a school vacation, he sleeps or loses himself in his books, answering her with monosyllables. He seems in a hurry to leave, but has second thoughts at the train station, and returns for one more day. The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children.

I watched "The Apu Trilogy" recently over a period of three nights, and found my thoughts returning to it during the days. It is about a time, place and culture far removed from our own, and yet it connects directly and deeply with our human feelings. It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.

The 400 Blows

2009-08-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.Francois Truffaut

Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea.

Francois Truffaut and his on-screen alter ego, young Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel.

Antoine Doinel was played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, who has a kind of solemn detachment, as if his heart had suffered obscure wounds long before the film began. This was the first in a long collaboration between actor and director; they returned to the character in the short film "Antoine and Collette" (1962) and three more features: "Stolen Kisses" (1968), "Bed and Board" (1970) and "Love on the Run" (1979).

The later films have their own merits, and "Stolen Kisses" is one of Truffaut's best, but "The 400 Blows," with all its simplicity and feeling, is in a class by itself. It was Truffaut's first feature, and one of the founding films of the French New Wave. We sense that it was drawn directly out of Truffaut's heart. It is dedicated to Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic who took the fatherless Truffaut under his arm at a time when the young man seemed to stand between life as a filmmaker and life in trouble.

Little is done in the film for pure effect. Everything adds to the impact of the final shot. We meet Antoine when he is in his early teens, and living with his mother and stepfather in a crowded walkup where they always seem to be squeezing out of each other's way. The mother (Claire Maurier) is a blond who likes tight sweaters and is distracted by poverty, by her bothersome son, and by an affair with a man from work. The stepfather (Albert Remy) is a nice enough sort, easy-going, and treats the boy in a friendly fashion although he is not deeply attached to him. Both parents are away from home a lot, and neither has the patience to pay close attention to the boy: They judge him by appearances, and by the reports of others who misunderstand him.

At school, Antoine has been typecast by his teacher (Guy Decombie) as a troublemaker. His luck is not good. When a pinup calendar is being passed from hand to hand, his is the hand the teacher finds it in. Sent to stand in the corner, he makes faces for his classmates and writes a lament on the wall. The teacher orders him to decline his offending sentence, as punishment. His homework is interrupted. Rather than return to school without it, he skips. His excuse is that he was sick. After his next absence, he says his mother has died. When she turns up at his school, alive and furious, he is marked as a liar.

And yet we see him in the alcove that serves as his bedroom, deeply wrapped in the work of Balzac, whose chronicles of daily life helped to create France's idea of itself. He loves Balzac. He loves him so well, indeed, that when he's assigned to write an essay on an important event in his life, he describes "the death of my grandfather'' in a close paraphrase of Balzac, whose words have lodged in his memory. This is seen not as homage but as plagiarism, and leads to more trouble and eventually to a downward spiral: He and a friend steal a typewriter, he gets caught trying to return it and is sent to the juvenile detention home.

The film's most poignant moments show him set adrift by his parents and left to the mercy of social services. His parents discuss him sadly with authorities as a lost cause ("If he came home, he would only run away again''). And so he is booked in a police station, placed in a holding cell and put in a police wagon with prostitutes and thieves, to be driven through the dark streets of Paris, his face peering out through the bars like a young Dickensian hero. He has a similar expression at other times in the film, which is shot in black and white in Paris in a chill season; Antoine always has the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind.

Truffaut's film is not a dirge or entirely a tragedy. There are moments of fun and joy (the title is an idiom meaning "raising hell''). One priceless sequence, shot looking down from above the street, shows a physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris; two by two they peel off, until the teacher is at the head of a line of only two or three boys. The happiest moment in the film comes after one of Antoine's foolish mistakes. He lights a candle to Balzac, which sets the little cardboard shrine on fire. His parents put out the flames, but then for once their exasperation turns to forgiveness, and the whole family goes to the movies and laughs on the way home.

There is a lot of moviegoing in "The 400 Blows,'' with Antoine's solemn face turned up to the screen. We know that young Truffaut himself escaped to the movies whenever he could, and there is a shot here that he quotes later in his career. As Antoine and a friend emerge from a cinema, Antoine steals one of the lobby photos of a star. In "Day for Night'' (1973), which stars Truffaut himself as a film director, there is a flashback memory to the character, as a boy, stealing down a dark street to snatch a still of "Citizen Kane" from in front of a theater.

The cinema saved Francois Truffaut's life, he said again and again. It took a delinquent student and gave him something to love, and with the encouragement of Bazin he became a critic and then made this film by his 27th birthday. If the New Wave marks the dividing point between classic and modern cinema (and many think it does), then Truffaut is likely the most beloved of modern directors -- the one whose films resonated with the deepest, richest love of moviemaking. He liked to resurrect old effects (the iris shots in "The Wild Child," narration in many of his films) and pay tribute ("The Bride Wore Black" and "Mississippi Mermaid" owe much to his hero, Hitchcock).

Truffaut (1932-1984) died too young, of a brain tumor, at 52, but he left behind 21 films, not counting shorts and screenplays. His "Small Change" (1976) returns to the sharply remembered world of the classroom, to students younger than Doinel, and recalls the almost unbearable tension as the clock on the wall creeps toward the final bell. Even while directing a film a year, he found time to write about other films and directors, and did a classic book-length, film-by-film interview with Hitchcock.

One of his most curious, haunting films is "The Green Room" (1978), based on the Henry James story "The Altar of the Dead," about a man and a woman who share a passion for remembering their dead loved ones. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thinks "The Green Room" may be Truffaut's best film, told me he thinks of it as the director's homage to the auteur theory. That theory, created by Bazin and his disciples (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), declared that the director was the true author of a film -- not the studio, the screenwriter, the star, the genre. If the figures in the green room stand for the great directors of the past, perhaps there is a shrine there now to Truffaut. One likes to think of the ghost of Antoine Doinel lighting a candle before it.

Au Hasard Balthazar

2009-08-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a donkey from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself--a dumb beast, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. Balthazar is not one of those cartoon animals that can talk and sing and is a human with four legs. Balthazar is a donkey, and it is as simple as that.

We first see Balthazar as a newborn, taking its first unsteady steps, and there is a scene that provides a clue to the rest of the film; three children sprinkle water on its head and baptize it. What Bresson may be suggesting is that although the church teaches that only humans can enter into heaven, surely there is a place at God's side for all of his creatures.

Balthazar's early life is lived on a farm in the rural French district where all the action takes place; the donkey will be owned many of the locals, and return to some of them more than once. A few of them are good, but all of them are flawed, although there is a local drunk who is not cruel or thoughtless to the animal, despite his other crimes.

Balthazar's first owner is Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), who gives him his name. Her father is the local schoolmaster, and her playmate is Jacques (Walter Green), who agrees with her that they will marry someday. Jacques' mother dies, and his grief-stricken father leaves the district, entrusting his farm to Marie's father (Philippe Asselin), in whom he has perfect trust. Marie loves Balthazar, and delights in decorating his bridle with wild-flowers, but she does nothing to protect him when local boys torment the beast. The leader of this gang is Gerard (Francois Lafarge), and when Marie glances up to the church choir during Mass as Gerard sings, he brings an evil even to the holy words.

Marie's father is a victim of the sin of pride. Although he has managed the farm with perfect honesty, he refuses to produce records or receipts to prove himself, after rumors are spread by jealous neighbors that he is stealing from the owner. To the despair of Marie's mother (Nathalie Joyaut), he follows his stubborness straight into bankruptcy. Balthazar becomes the possession of the local baker, and is used by the baker's boy (none other than Gerard) to deliver bread. Gerard mistreats and abuses Balthazar, who eventually simply refuses to move. Gerard responds by tying a newspaper to its tail and setting it on fire. Eventually under Gerald's mistreatment thedonkey collapses and there is talk of putting it down.

But the town drunk, Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert), saves him and brings him back to life, and then there is Balthazar's brief moment of glory when he is hired out as a circus animal--the Mathematical Donkey, who can solve multiplication tables. This life is soon brought to an end, as Balthazar becomes the property of a recluse, and then finally wanders back on its own to the stable where it began its life, and where it finds Marie's father and even Marie.

But this is not a sentimental ending. Marie is a weak girl, who rejects the sincere Jacques when he returns as a young man, to say he still loves her. She prefers Gerard, who mistreats her but seems glamorous with his leather jacket and motor bike. What we see through Balthazar's eyes is a village filled with small, flawed, weak people, in a world where sweetness is uncommon and cruelty comes easily.

That is what we see -- but what does Balthazar see? The genius of Bresson's approach is that he never gives us a single moment that could be described as one of Balthazar's "reaction shots." Other movie animals may roll their eyes or stomp their hooves, but Balthazar simply walks or waits, regarding everything with the clarity of a donkey who knows it is a beast of burden, and that its life consists of either bearing or not bearing, of feeling pain or not feeling pain, or even feeling pleasure. All of these things are equally beyond its control.

There is however Balthazar's bray. It is not a beautiful sound, but it is the sound a donkey can make, and when Balthazar brays it might sound to some like a harsh complaint, but to me it sounds like a beast who has been given one noise to make in the world, and gains some satisfaction by making it. It is important to note that Balthazar never brays on cue to react to specific events; that would turn him into a cartoon animal.

Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn't prevent us from supplying them -- quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson's civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us. In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience.

Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy. It is worth noting that both Ozu and Bresson use severe stylistic limitations to avoid coaching our emotions. Ozu in his sound films almost never moves his camera; every shot is framed and held, and frequently it begins before the characters enter the scene and continues after they leave.

Bresson's most intriguing limitation is to forbid his actors to act. He was known to shoot the same shot 10, 20, even 50 times, until all "acting" was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: By simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.

Given this philosophy, a donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it comunicates its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered ith snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted. Returning home, it is relieved to find a familiar place. Although some humans are kind to it and others are cruel, the motives of humans are beyond its understanding, and it accepts what they do because it must.
Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.

The final scene of "Au Hasard Balthazar" makes that argument in a beautiful way. The donkey is old and near death, and wanders into a herd of sheep--as, indeed, it began its life in such a herd. The other animals come and go, sometimes nuzzling up against it, taking little notice, accepting this fellow animal, sharing the meadow and the sunshine. Balthazar lies down and eventually dies, as the sheep continue about their business. He has at last found a place where the other creatures think as he does

The Band Wagon

2009-08-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

The opening credits of Vincente Minnelli's "The Band Wagon" play over a top hat and cane, which would remind us of Fred Astaire even if he weren't the star of the movie. Then we join an auction of movie memorabilia. The top hat and cane don't sell, even when the auctioneer pleads, "50 cents, anyone?" They belonged to a has-been hoofer named Tony Hunter, and now we see him, played by Astaire, on a train to New York City. Maybe he can make a comeback on Broadway. From the way he sings "By Myself," he doesn't seem hopeful.

"The Band Wagon" (1953) came only a year after the same writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, wrote "Singin' in the Rain." Both are great backstage musicals, one about Hollywood, the other about Broadway, one starring Gene Kelly, the other Fred Astaire. "Singin' in the Rain" is a comedy, but "The Band Wagon" has a note of melancholy along with its smiles, a sadness always present among Broadway veterans, who have seen more failure than success, who know the show always closes and that the backstage family breaks up and returns to the limbo of auditions and out-of-town tryouts.

The movie takes a would-be musical through all the stages of writing, casting, production, choreography, rehearsals, failure on the road and eventual triumph on Broadway. It's so happily aware of its genre that we actually do hear mention of renting a barn and putting on a show. But it draws on experience with the actual working conditions of Broadway professionals, just as "Singin' in the Rain" knew a lot about how movies are made. "Singin' in the Rain" was the work of a fresh newcomer (Stanley Donen was 28 when he directed it). "The Band Wagon" is informed by a Minnelli who, at 50, had logged a long tour of duty in show biz, not least as the husband of the complicated Judy Garland.

When Astaire made "The Band Wagon," he was 54 years old but hardly washed up. In recent years, he had made "Easter Parade" and "Royal Wedding," and his future held "Funny Face" and "Silk Stockings." But in the movie as in life, he is insecure about his gifts; "Fred rehearsed until he drove you crazy," remembers co-star Nanette Fabray, and he was uneasy about co-starring with Cyd Charisse. "She's rather tall, isn't she?" he worries in the movie, and Fabray assures him, "It's a stage illusion."

It wasn't. Charisse was fully as tall as Astaire, taller with heels, and she had classical dance training; Astaire's Tony Hunter complains about "this little ballerina's snide insinuation that I'm only a hoofer." Real insecurities and rivalries were right beneath the surface of the fictional ones created by Comden and Green, and real personalities are not far offscreen; they even based the writers Lily and Lester Marton on themselves (Minnelli cast them as Oscar Levant, who looked like Green, and Fabray, who had Comden's spirit).

The Astaire and Charisse characters are brought together by Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), a director-producer-star with artistic pretensions, who thinks the lively little musical by the Martons should be reworked as a version of "Faust." The Cordova character is said to be inspired by Jose Ferrer, who at the time was starring in one Broadway show and producing three others, but in the ego and the big plans there's also an echo of Orson Welles.

Buchanan, an actor from Scotland who kids his own patrician stage presence, has fun with a character who lacks any practical knowledge about what a production can afford and what an audience will endure. (One of the movie's charms is the moment when he concedes he is wrong and Astaire is right, and they do a soft-shoe to "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan.")

Astaire and Charisse get into a furious fight the first time they meet, and then, in the scene where the movie's magic first begins to work, they make up wordlessly in the "Dancing in the Dark" sequence under a full moon in Central Park. (The critic Douglas Pratt recommends watching this scene with the audio turned off: "It is haunting.") Here and throughout the movie, Charisse is a sexy and capable partner for Astaire, who said somewhat enigmatically, “When you dance with her, you stay danced with.”

The overblown Faustian musical is a flop in New Haven; a stagehand observes, "You've got more scenery in this show than there is in Yellowstone National Park." As the depressed actors and dancers gather in a hotel suite, they cheer themselves with the "I Love Louisa" musical number, "but only for the time it takes them to sing and dance," writes the critic Joe McElhaney. "The moment the song is finished everyone goes into a depressed slump."

Levant in fact looks like he's depressed most of the time. A real-life hypochondriac whose character recites a list of complaints early in the movie, Levant was a friend and good-luck mascot for Arthur Freed, the key producer during MGM's golden age. That's how he got so many good supporting roles (as in "An American in Paris"), despite often looking grumpy and exhausted. "Oscar needed someone to yell at," Fabray remembers in an interview on the DVD. When he blew a line, he'd blame it on somebody -- usually picking on Fabray, who was appearing in her first movie. After she told him to go to hell, she says, he backed off.

All of the interviews with the surviving cast members suggest the film was an unhappy shoot, although they don't quite say why. Minnelli's offstage marriage problems with Garland may have been one reason, Astaire's ambivalence about Charisse might have been another, Levant's daily appearance represented what he liked to call "a pharmaceutical miracle," and Buchanan was undergoing painful dental surgery. Still, a great musical emerged from the shambles, just as it does in the story.

Despite the elegance of "Dancing in the Dark" and the long "Girl Hunt" ballet sequence toward the end (with Astaire as a private eye and Charisse a slinky dame in red), my favorite musical number is an early one, "Shine on Your Shoes." Liza Minnelli, then 7, followed her father around during the filming, and remembers him scouting Penn Station for ideas about the soundstage sets.

Minnelli saw Leroy Daniels, a real shoeshine man who sang and danced as he worked, and that not only inspired the number, but got Daniels a trip to Hollywood and a scene where he co-stars with Astaire. He's a gifted performer, his timing as precise as Astaire's, and perhaps because he's the real thing, we sense a freshness and joy. Note, too, Astaire's casual strength when he lifts himself on the arms of the chair so he can kick in mid-air.

Most of the scene's charm is because of Astaire and Daniels, but some, too, was contributed by Minnelli. McElhaney recommends watching the "Shine on Your Shoes" number, but not focusing on Astaire and Daniels: "Instead, only take note of the direction of the extras; watch it again, and only note the function of the decor and the camera movements; then watch it one final time putting all of these elements together." What that exercise would illustrate is that for Minnelli, the whole screen was always in play, not just the foreground and the stars.

Many of the movie’s songs, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Deitz, already existed; MGM in those days didn’t simply recycle Broadway hits but created new musicals from scratch, often using songs it already owned. That works here because, after dumping the Faustian musical, the performers decide to put on a revue. One song written new for the movie would become a touchstone: Deitz and Schwartz’s “That’s Entertainment,” which celebrates show business in a way as joyous but not as zany as Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘em Laugh” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” One of their older songs that makes an unconvincing reappearance is “Louisiana Hayride,” originally written in 1932; although in a revue anything, so to speak, goes, the hayride seems like a stretch.

Another musical sequence, the bizarre "Triplets," shows Astaire, Fabray and Buchanan all apparently midgets dressed as babies, sliding down from their high chairs and dancing. Since we see their feet hit the floor and special effects seem impossible, how did they do it? By balancing on artificial legs strapped to their knees, Fabray reports; they fell dozens of times before getting it right, and relied on pain-killers.

All of these backstage details seem like a distraction from the magic of "The Band Wagon," but part of the film's appeal comes from our sense that what we see is not far removed from the actual process of making the movie. It's entertainment, all right, but it's also hard work, and Astaire chain-smokes all the way through it. "I don't think a dancer should smoke," Charisse tells him early in the film, but by the end, she's bumming a cigarette.

In a Lonely Place

2009-08-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

The courtyard of the Hollywood building occupied by Humphrey Bogart in "In a Lonely Place" (1950) is one of the most evocative spaces I've seen in a movie. Small apartments are lined up around a Spanish-style courtyard with a fountain. Each flat is occupied by a single person. If you look across from your window, you can see into the life of your neighbor.

One apartment is occupied by Dixon Steele, an alcoholic screenwriter who has some success but is now in the midst of a long, dry spell. Across from him is Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a would-be actress and a smart cookie. Steele is a bitter, angry man. Drinking at noon in his usual hangout, he succeeds in insulting his agent, punching a man who is cruel to an aging has-been actor and then getting in a fistfight with the son of a studio chief.

This concise opening scene, set in a bar inspired by Bogart's own hangout, Romanoff's, establishes Dixon Steele's character and summarizes some of the things we sense about Bogart, that enigmatic man. They both drink too much. They're both idealists who sympathize with underdogs. They both have a temper. Steele has, and Bogart was always able to evoke self-pity; remember his Dobbs in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Bogart was at his best in conflicted roles, at his weakest in straightforward macho parts. Steele's qualities make him an ideal partner for Laurel Gray, who has been around, knows the ropes and is more likely to fall for a wounded pigeon than a regular guy.

"In a Lonely Place" has been described by the critic Kim Morgan as "one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever committed to film," and love is indeed what it's really about. It has the look, feel and trappings of a film noir, and a murder takes place in it, but it is really about the dark places in a man's soul and a woman who thinks she can heal them.

As carefully constructed by Bogart, who produced it, and directed by Nicholas Ray, from a great noir novel by Dorothy Hughes, it's at pains to make its man and women adults who know their way around. Neither is a victim, except of their own natures: Dixon Steele a drinker with rotten self-esteem, Laurel Gray a woman who should know better than to invest in him.

In the film, Steele is given the job of adapting a trashy best-seller. He needs the work, but he can't even bear to read the novel. A friendly hat-check girl named Mildred (Martha Stewart) tells him she loved it, and he hires her to come home with him and tell him the story. On their way through his courtyard, they pass Laurel Gray, and Gloria Grahame is perfect in how she conveys to him that she notices him. The storytelling session drags on, Mildred becomes a bore, and Steele sends her away. The next morning she's found murdered. Steele, seen to leave the bar with her and with a long rap sheet involving assaults and fights, is the logical suspect.

Did anyone see Mildred leave his apartment? Yes, as it turns out, Laurel says she did, and provides an alibi when she's brought to the police station. Something happens between Laurel and Dixon in the captain's office that is unmistakable -- and later that day they act upon it, no small talk, hungry with passion and hope.

Laurel gets Dixon off the sauce. He starts writing again. They're helplessly in love, a little giddy with happiness. But the possibility lingers that he did murder the girl, and that Laurel testified for him out of instinct more than certain knowledge. An idyllic interlude on the beach suddenly turns ugly and leads to worse. We, and Laurel, are presented with the possibility that her life is in danger, especially if he drinks again. Ambiguity about the true Dixon Steele provides the soul of the film. The fact that they truly love each other its poignancy.

This is a crisp black-and-white film with an almost ruthless efficiency of style. It taps into the psyches of the three principals: Bogart, who bought the story to produce with his company; Nicholas Ray, a lean iconoclast of films about wounded men (James Dean in "Rebel Without Cause"), and the legendary Gloria Grahame (1923-1981), whose life story inspired Peter Turner's extraordinary book Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool. Turner was the last of her many loves. She was married to Nicholas Ray but that ended during the making of this film, when Ray found her in bed with his 13-year-old son by an earlier marriage. (She and the boy, Tony, were married from 1960 to 1974.)

Life on the set was obviously fraught with emotional hazards. Ray had modeled the movie's apartment complex on an apartment he once occupied at Villa Primavera in West Hollywood. When he moved out on Grahame, I learn from critic J. Hoberman, Ray actually moved onto the set and started sleeping there. The relationship between Dixon and Laurel mirrored aspects of Bogart's own with the younger, strong-willed, nurturing Lauren Bacall. Yet perhaps they all sensed that they were doing the best work of their careers -- a film could be based on those three people and that experience.

"In a Lonely Place" is a superb example of the mature Hollywood studio system at the top of its form. Photographed with masterful economy by Burnett Guffey ("Knock on Any Door," "Bonnie and Clyde"), it understands space and uses the apartments across the courtyard to visualize the emotional relationship between Dixon and Laurel. Visible to each other, dependent on each other, they never officially move in together but remain enclosed, and no matter what they say, apart. Notice the way Guffey focuses light on Bogart's eyes during a frightening speech when he imagines how Mildred was murdered.

"You know, Miss Gray," he says, "you're one up on me. You can see into my apartment but I can't see into yours."

"I promise you, I won't take advantage of it."

"I would, if it were the other way around."

Bogart is so good at playing vulnerable men. It's strange he has an enduring image as a tough guy. It would be more accurate to say he was tempered by experience. A decade before this film, in "Casablanca," he was already the man drinking alone late at night, afraid of hearing an old song.

About Grahame's characters there was often a doomed quality. She and Lee Marvin had an iconic scene in "The Big Heat" (1953) when he threw a pot of boiling coffee in her face. In "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), she plays the grown-up Violet, who in the nightmare sequence, becomes a prostitute. She won an Oscar for "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952), playing an actress who hates the producer who betrayed her. And she gained the unfortunate nickname "the can't say no girl" after performing that song in "Oklahoma!" (1955).

If there is one key element of film noir, it is the flawed hero. That, usually joined with a distinctive visual style and tone, defines the genre. The hero is sympathetic but weak, often haunted by mistakes in the past or fatally tempted by greed or lust. He is likely to discover himself capable of evil he had never dreamed of, and is consumed by guilt and fear.

Bogart embodies this noir quality flawlessly in "In a Lonely Place." He plays a good man with a hot temper who can fly into a rage when he drinks. This gives Dixon a Jekyll and Hyde quality that Laurel awakens to, leading to later scenes of terror. The monster inhabiting him is an acting-out of self-loathing, which infects his success and dooms his happiness. He foresees his fate when he quotes to her a line just written in his new screenplay: "I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me."

The Bridge on the River Kwai

2009-08-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

The last words in David Lean's ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' are ``Madness! Madness ... madness!'' Although the film's two most important characters are both mad, the hero more than the villain, we're not quite certain what is intended by that final dialogue. Part of the puzzle is caused by the film's shifting points of view.

Seen through the eyes of Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), commanding officer of a battalion of British war prisoners, the war narrows to a single task, building a bridge across the Kwai. For Shears (William Holden), an American who escapes from the camp, madness would be returning to the jungle. For Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), the Japanese commandant of the camp, madness and suicide are never far away as the British build a better bridge than his own men could. And to Clipton (James Donald), the army doctor who says the final words, they could simply mean that the final violent confusion led to unnecessary death.

Most war movies are either for or against their wars. ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957) is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. Like Robert Graves' World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. By the end of ``Kwai'' we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave.

The film is set in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, along the route of a rail line the Japanese were building between Malaysia and Rangoon. Shears is already in the camp; we've seen him steal a cigarette lighter from a corpse to bribe his way into the sick bay. He watches as a column of British prisoners, led by Nicholson, marches into camp whistling ``The Colonel Bogey March.''

Nicholson and Saito, the commandant, are quickly involved in a faceoff. Saito wants all of the British to work on the bridge. Nicholson says the Geneva Convention states officers may not be forced to perform manual labor. He even produces a copy of the document, which Saito uses to whip him across the face, drawing blood. Nicholson is prepared to die rather than bend on principle, and eventually, in one of the film's best-known sequences, he's locked inside ``the Oven''--a corrugated iron hut that stands in the sun.

The film's central relationship is between Saito and Nicholson, a professional soldier approaching his 28th anniversary of army service (``I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time''). The Japanese colonel is not a military pro; he learned English while studying in London, he tells Nicholson, and likes corned beef and Scotch whisky. But he is a rigidly dutiful officer, and we see him weeping privately with humiliation because Nicholson is a better bridge builder; he prepares for hara-kiri if the bridge is not ready on time.

The scenes in the jungle are crisply told. We see the bridge being built, and we watch the standoff between the two colonels. Hayakawa and Guinness make a good match as they create two disciplined officers who never bend, but nevertheless quietly share the vision of completing the bridge.

Hayakawa was Hollywood's first important Asian star; he became famous with a brilliant silent performance in Cecil B. DeMille's ``The Cheat'' (1915). Although he worked onstage and in films in both Japan and the United States, he was unusual among Japanese actors of his generation in his low-key delivery; in ``Kwai'' he doesn't bluster, but is cool and understated--as clipped as Guinness. (Incredibly, he was 68 when he played the role.)

Alec Guinness, oddly enough, was not Lean's first choice for the role that won him an Oscar as best actor. Charles Laughton originally was cast as Col. Nicholson, but ``could not face the heat of the Ceylon location, the ants, and being cramped in a cage,'' his wife, Elsa Lanchester, wrote in her autobiography. The contrasts between Laughton and Guinness are so extreme that one wonders how Lean could see both men playing the same part. Surely Laughton would have been juicier and more demonstrative. Guinness, who says in his autobiography that Lean ``didn't particularly want me'' for the role, played Nicholson as dry, reserved, yet burning with an intense obsession.

That obsession is with building a better bridge, and finishing it on time. The story's great irony is that once Nicholson successfully stands up to Saito, he immediately devotes himself to Saito's project as if it is his own. He suggests a better site for the bridge, he offers blueprints and timetables, and he even enters Clipton's hospital hut in search of more workers, and marches out at the head of a column of the sick and the lame. On the night before the first train crossing, he hammers into place a plaque boasting that the bridge was ``designed and built by soldiers of the British army.''

It is Clipton who asks him, diffidently, if they might not be accused of aiding the enemy. Not at all, Guinness replies: War prisoners must work when ordered, and besides, they are setting an example of British efficiency. ``One day the war will be over, and I hope the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built, and who built it.'' A pleasant sentiment, but in the meantime the bridge will be used to advance the war against the Allies. Nicholson is so proud of the bridge that he essentially forgets about the war.

The story in the jungle moves ahead neatly, economically, powerfully. There is a parallel story involving Shears that is not as successful. Shears escapes, is taken to a hospital in British-occupied Ceylon, drinks martinis and frolics with a nurse, and then is asked by Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins) to return as part of a plan to blow up the bridge. ``Are you crazy?'' Shears cries, but is blackmailed by Warden's threat to tell the Americans he has been impersonating an officer. Holden's character, up until the time their guerrilla mission begins, seems fabricated; he's unconvincing playing a shirker, and his heroism at the end seems more plausible.

Lean handles the climax with precision and suspense. There's a nice use of the boots of a sentry on the bridge, sending hollow reverberations down to the men wiring the bridge with plastic explosives. Meanwhile, the British celebrate completion of the bridge with an improbable musical revue that doesn't reflect what is known about the brutal conditions of the POW camps.

The next morning brings an elaborate interplay of characters and motives, as the sound of the approaching train creates suspense, while Nicholson, incredibly, seems ready to expose the sabotage rather than see his beloved bridge go down. (The shot of the explosion and the train tumbling into the river uncannily mirrors a similar scene in Buster Keaton's silent classic ``The General,'' in which the train looks more convincing.)

Although David Lean (1908-1991) won his reputation and perhaps even his knighthood on the basis of the epic films he directed, starting with ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' in 1957, there's a contrarian argument that his best work was done before the Oscars started to pile up. After ``Kwai'' came ``Lawrence of Arabia,'' ``Dr. Zhivago,'' ``Ryan's Daughter'' and ``A Passage to India''; all but ``Ryan'' were nominated for best picture, and the first two won. Before ``Kwai'' he made smaller, more tightly wound films, including ``Brief Encounter,'' ``Oliver Twist'' and ``Great Expectations.'' There is a majesty in the later films (except for ``Ryan's Daughter'') that compensates for the loss of human detail, but in ``Kwai'' he still has an eye for the personal touch, as in Saito's private moments and Nicholson's smug inspection of the finished bridge. There is something almost Lear-like in his final flash of sanity: ``What have I done!''

Breathless

2009-08-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
--Michel to Patricia

Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in 1960. No debut film since "Citizen Kane" in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard's technique of "jump cuts" is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.

There is a direct line through "Breathless" to "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands" and the youth upheaval of the late 1960s. The movie was a crucial influence during Hollywood's 1967-1974 golden age. You cannot even begin to count the characters played by Pacino, Beatty, Nicholson, Penn, who are directly descended from Jean-Paul Belmondo's insouciant killer Michel.

"Breathless" remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years. What fascinates above all is the naivete and amorality of these two young characters: Michel, a car thief who idolizes Bogart and pretends to be tougher than he is, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American who peddles the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune while waiting to enroll at the Sorbonne. Do they know what they're doing? Both of the important killings in the movie occur because Michel accidentally comes into possession of someone else's gun; Patricia's involvement with him seems inspired in equal parts by affection, sex and fascination with his gangster persona.

Michel wants to be as tough as the stars in the movies he loves. He practices facial expressions in the mirror, wears a fedora, and is never, ever seen without a cigarette, removing one from his mouth only to insert another. So omnipresent is this cigarette that Godard is only kidding us a little when Michel's dying breath is smoky. But Belmondo at 26 still had a little of the adolescent in him, and the first time we see him, his hat and even his cigarette seem too big for his face. He was "hypnotically ugly," Bosley Crowther wrote in his agitated New York Times review, but that did not prevent him from becoming the biggest French star between Jean Gabin and Gerard Depardieu.

Seberg was restarting her career after its disastrous launch in America. Otto Preminger staged a famous talent search for the star of his "Saint Joan" (1957), and cast an inexperienced 18-year-old Marshalltown, Iowa, girl; Seberg received terrible reviews, not entirely deserved, and more bad notices for "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958), which Preminger made next to prove himself right. She fled to Europe, where she was only 21 when Godard cast her for "Breathless."

Her Patricia is the great enigma of the movie. Michel we can more or less read at sight: He postures as a gangster, maintains a cool facade, is frightened underneath. His persona is a performance that functions to conceal his desperation. But what about Patricia? Somehow it is never as important as it should be that she thinks she is pregnant, and that Michel is the father. She receives startling items of information about Michel (that he is a killer, that he is married, that he has more than one name) with such apparent detachment that we study that perfectly molded gamin face and wonder what she can possibly be thinking. Even her betrayal of him turns out to be not about Michel, and not about right and wrong, but only a test she sets for herself to determine if she loves him or not. It is remarkable that the reviews of this movie do not describe her as a monster--more evil, because she's less deluded, than Michel.

The filming of "Breathless" has gathered about it a body of legend. It was one of the key films of the French New Wave, which rejected the well-made traditional French cinema and embraced a rougher, more experimental personal style. Many of the New Wave directors began as critics for the anti-establishment magazine Cahiers du Cinema. The credits for "Breathless" are a New Wave roll call, including not only Godard's direction but an original story by Francois Truffaut (Godard famously wrote each day's shooting script in the morning). Claude Chabrol is production designer and technical adviser, the writer Pierre Boulanger plays the police inspector, and there are small roles for Truffaut and Godard himself (as the informer). Everyone was at the party; the assistant director was Pierre Rissient, who wears so many hats he is most simply described as knowing more people in the cinema than any other single person.

Jean-Pierre Melville, whose own crime movies in the 1950s pointed the way to the New Wave, plays the writer interviewed by Patricia at Orly, where he expounds on life and sex ("Two things are important in life. For men, women. For women, money"). Melville's "Bob Le Flambeur" (1955) is referenced when we meet the man who informed on Bob, or when Michel tells a friend, "Bob the gambler would have cashed my check."

One inside joke in the film is always mentioned, but is not really there. Michel's alias is "Laszlo Kovacs," and countless writers inform us this is a reference to the legendary Hungarian cinematographer. In fact, Godard had not met Kovacs at the time, and the reference is to the character Belmondo played in Chabrol's "A Double Tour" (1959). In a film with so many references to the past of the cinema, it is amusing to find a coincidental reference to its future.

Godard's key collaborator on the film was the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked with him many times, notably on "Weekend" (1967). It was only Coutard's fourth film, and his methods became legend: How when they could not afford tracks for a tracking shot, he held the camera and had himself pushed in a wheelchair. How he achieved a grainy look that influenced many other fiction films that wanted to seem realistic. How he scorned fancy lighting. How he used hand-held techniques even before lightweight cameras were available. How he timed one shot of Belmondo so that the streetlights on the Champs Elysses came on behind him. There is a lovely backlit shot of Belmondo in bed and Seberg sitting beside the bed, both smoking, the light from the window enveloping them in a cloud.

That's from a long scene that's alive with freshness and spontaneity. Patricia returns home to find Michel in her bed, and they talk, flirt, smoke, fight, finally make love. She quotes Faulkner: "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." Michel says he would choose nothing; "grief is a compromise." She poses in front of a Renoir poster of a young girl, and asks who is prettier. Michel sits below a Picasso poster of a man holding a mask. Throughout this long scene, perplexingly, they both throw their discarded cigarettes out the window.

In this scene and throughout the film, Godard uses jump cuts--cuts within continuous movement or dialogue, with no attempt made to make them match. The technique "was a little more accidental than political," writes the Australian critic Jonathan Dawson. The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and "rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring."

The technique adds charm to a scene where the two drive through Paris in a stolen convertible, and there is a series of closeup cuts over her shoulder as Michel describes her. When the two lovers, fleeing the police, sneak into a movie, it is a scene directly quoted in "Bonnie and Clyde"--which, we recall, both Godard and Truffaut were once to direct. In each case, the dialogue reflects the action; Bonnie and Clyde hear "we're in the money," and Michel and Patricia hear dialogue about a woman "covering up for a cheap parasite."

The movie had a sensational reception; it is safe to say the cinema was permanently changed. Young directors saw it and had abandoned their notions of the traditional studio film before they left the theater. Crowther of the Times, who was later to notoriously despise its descendant "Bonnie and Clyde," said of "Breathless" that "sordid is really a mild word for its pile-up of gross indecencies." The jump cuts to him were "pictorial cacophony."

Yet Crowther conceded, "It is no cliche," and the film's bold originality in style, characters and tone made a certain kind of genteel Hollywood movie quickly obsolete. Godard went on to become the most famous innovator of the 1960s, although he lost the way later, with increasingly mannered experiments. Here in one quick, sure move, knowing somehow just what he wanted and how to obtain it, he achieved a turning point in the cinema just as surely as Griffith did with "Birth of a Nation" and Welles with "Citizen Kane."

Beauty and the Beast

2009-08-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

Before Disney's 1991 film and long before the Beast started signing autographs in Orlando, Jean Cocteau filmed "Beauty and the Beast" in 1946, in France. It is one of the most magical of all films. Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup, here is a fantasy alive with trick shots and astonishing effects, giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal. Cocteau, a poet and surrealist, was not making a "children's film" but was adapting a classic French tale that he felt had a special message after the suffering of World War II: Anyone who has an unhappy childhood may grow up to be a Beast.

Those familiar with the 1991 cartoon will recognize some of the elements of the story, but certainly not the tone. Cocteau uses haunting images and bold Freudian symbols to suggest that emotions are at a boil in the subconscious of his characters. Consider the extraordinary shot where Belle waits at the dining table in the castle for the Beast's first entrance. He appears behind her and approaches silently. She senses his presence, and begins to react in a way that some viewers have described as fright, although it is clearly orgasmic. Before she has even seen him, she is aroused to her very depths, and a few seconds later, as she tells him she cannot marry--a Beast!--she toys with a knife that is more than a knife.

The Beast's dwelling is one of the strangest ever put on film--Xanadu crossed with Dali. Its entrance hall is lined with candelabra held by living human arms that extend from the walls. The statues are alive, and their eyes follow the progress of the characters (are they captives of the Beast, imprisoned by spells?). The gates and doors open themselves. As Belle first enters the Beast's domain, she seems to run dreamily a few feet above the floor. Later, her feet do not move at all, but she glides, as if drawn by a magnetic force. (This effect has been borrowed by Spike Lee.) She is disturbed to see smoke rising from the Beast's fingertips--a sign that he has killed. When he carries her into her bed chamber, she has common clothes on one side of the door and a queen's costume on the other.

Belle has come to the castle as a hostage. She lives at home with her father, two unkind sisters and a silly brother, whose handsome friend wants to marry her. But she cannot marry, for she must care for Poppa. His business is threatened, and he learns on a trip to a seaport that he has lost everything. On his way home, through a forest on a stormy night, he happens upon the Beast's castle, and is taken prisoner and told he must die. The Beast offers a deal: He can go home if he will return in three days, or he can send one of his daughters. The other sisters of course sniff and make excuses, and their father says he is old and nearly dead and will return himself. But Belle slips out and rides the Beast's white horse, which knows the way to the castle. And the Beast's first words tell her, "You are in no danger."

Indeed she is not. The Beast has perhaps intuited that a daughter who would take her father's place has a good heart. He tells her that every night at 7 he will ask her the same question: "Will you be my wife?" She shudders and says she will never marry him, but eventually her heart softens, and she pities him and sees that he is good. He gives her a magical glove that allows her to travel instantly between the castle and her home (emerging whole from the wall), and there is intrigue involving the key to the garden where his fortune is held. The sisters plot and scheme, but Belle of course prevails. Her father rises up from his deathbed, the Beast sinks into a final illness instead, and when she begs him to rally, his dying words are pathetic: "If I were a man, perhaps I could. But the poor beasts who want to prove their love can only grovel on the ground, and die."

Then there is another death, of the faithless family friend who wanted to marry her, and as his body turns into that of the Beast, the Beast comes back to life and turns into a prince who looks uncannily like--the dead friend. And no wonder, because all three--friend, Beast and prince--are played by Jean Marais. Odd, how appealing Marais is as the Beast, and how shallow and superficial he seems as the pompadoured prince. Even Belle doesn't leap cheerfully into his arms, but looks quizzically at her new catch and confesses she misses the Beast. So did Marlene Dietrich, who held Cocteau's hand during the suspenseful first screening of the film at a Paris studio. As the prince shimmered into sight and smilingly presented himself as Belle's new lover, she called to the screen, "Where is my beautiful Beast?"

Although he made many films, Cocteau (1889-1963) did not consider himself primarily a filmmaker but a poet; he also painted, sculpted, wrote novels and plays, and stirred the currents of the Paris art scene. His first film, the surrealistic "Blood of a Poet," was made in 1930, the same year as Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's notorious "L'Age d'Or." Both films were produced by the Viscount de Noailles, who delayed the release of Cocteau's after the other film inspired riots (Bunuel wrote of filling his pockets with rocks to throw at the audience if they charged the screen). Cocteau's film included images that became famous, as when a mirror turns into a pool of water, and when a mouth wiped off a painting affixes itself to his hand.

"Blood of a Poet" was an art film made by a poet. "Beauty and the Beast" was a poetic film made by an artist. He made it at the urging of Marais, his lover of many years, who was tall and imposing, with an extraordinary profile and matinee idol looks--a contrast to the skinny, chain-smoking Cocteau, whose months of shooting the film were made a misery because of a painful skin disease that required penicillin every three hours.

Because Cocteau was not sure he had the technical mastery for such an ambitious production, he recruited the director Rene Clement ("Purple Noon," "Diabolique") as his technical adviser; the gifted cameraman Henri Alekan to handle the tricky changes between outdoor realism and indoor fantasy, and the theatrical designer Christian Berard to design the makeup, sets and costumes (his ideas were based on the illustrations of Gustav Dore). The costumes were so elaborate they were said to be "as much as the actors could stand up in." All of Cocteau's thoughts on this process are preserved in his journal, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, which shows him persevering despite his health. His entry for Oct. 18, 1945: "Woke up with unbearable pain. As I can neither sleep nor walk up and down, I calm myself by picking up this notebook and trying to shout my pain to the unknown friends who will read these lines."

We exist. His film has made us the friends. Watching it again tonight, I felt an unusual excitement. Its devices penetrate the usual conventions of narrative, and appeal at a deeper psychic level. Cocteau wanted to make a poem, wanted to appeal through images rather than words, and although the story takes the form of the familiar fable, its surface seems to be masking deeper and more disturbing currents. It is not a "children's film." Is it even suitable for children? Some will be put off by the black and white photography and the subtitles (brief, however, and easy to read). Those who get beyond those hurdles will find a film that may involve them much more deeply than the Disney cartoon, because it is not just a jolly comic musical but deals, as all fairy tales do, with what we truly dread and desire. Brighter and more curious children will be able to enjoy it very much, I suspect, although if they return as adults they may be amazed by how much more is there.

Casablanca

2009-08-06T03:39:00.000-07:00

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making ``Casablanca'' thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an ``A list'' picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of ``Casablanca'' was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,'' convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In ``Casablanca,'' he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. ``What is your nationality?'' the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, ``I'm a drunkard.'' His personal code: ``I stick my neck out for nobody.''

Then ``of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, ``As Time Goes By.'' He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (``I thought I told you never to play that song!''). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (``Round up the usual suspects.'')

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as ``Havana,'' Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of ``Casablanca'' is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

Bride of Frankenstein

2009-08-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

So intones Dr. Praetorious to Dr. Henry Frankenstein, toasting their new friendship with a glass of gin ("my only weakness") before proposing a partnership. He unveils a series of miniature living humans, each in its own bell jar: Homunculi, he says, which point the way to full-scale experiments in the creation of life. "Alone," he tells Frankenstein, "you have created a man. Now, together, we will create his mate."

Their quest forms the inspiration for James Whale's "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), the best of the Frankenstein movies--a sly, subversive work that smuggled shocking material past the censors by disguising it in the trappings of horror. Some movies age; others ripen. Seen today, Whale's masterpiece is more surprising than when it was made because today's audiences are more alert to its buried hints of homosexuality, necrophilia and sacrilege. But you don't have to deconstruct it to enjoy it; it's satirical, exciting, funny, and an influential masterpiece of art direction.

Whale has long been valued by admirers of 1930s horror films, but in 1998, with the release of the biopic "Gods and Monsters," based on the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram, his life was credited with a new significance. In an era when Hollywood was filled with homosexuals who stayed adamantly in the closet, he was portrayed as openly gay--not only in his life, but in his work. This view may have involved wishful thinking; biographers such as Anthony Slide say Whale was "a very private man who kept his personal life to himself," but that doesn't fit the thesis of critics such as Gary Morris, who interpret "Bride" as a bold gay parable. Morris' reading is sometimes torturous (are the Monster and the blind hermit a model for a "blissful married couple"?), but he may be right to see Praetorious and Frankenstein as the Monster's same-sex parents ("Henry the father in giving it life, Praetorious a mother-figure who nurtures it"). Praetorious (played by Ernest Thesiger in high camp overdrive) indeed sometimes seems to relate to the Monster as rough trade. Parable or not, the movie is more fun when its insinuations are allowed to glide beneath the surface as an unspoken subtext.

The film works perfectly well on its own terms, as a sequel to Whale's "Frankenstein" (1931), recasting the Monster as an outcast yearning for friendship. The credits for "Frankenstein" said it was inspired by a novel by "Mrs. Percy B. Shelley." "Bride" improves the billing of the feminist heroine, calling her "Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley" and adding a prologue in which Mary; her husband, Percy, and their friend Lord Byron imagine a sequel to the first story: The Monster survives being burned in a mill and staggers forth, alive and misunderstood.

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Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley and also has the unbilled role of the Bride--where she provides one of the immortal images of the cinema with lightning-like streaks of silver in her weirdly towering hair. Whale based the film's look on the stark shadows and jagged tilt shots of German Expressionism (from such horror films came the look of film noir in the 1940s). His inspiration for the Bride was Maria, the artificial woman from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927)--where he also borrowed ideas for Praetorious' laboratory, with its platform that lifts the Bride up to the heavens to be penetrated by lightning bolts. (Mel Brooks' laboratory for Praetorious in the 1975 "Young Frankenstein" is not merely similar--it uses the same props, which he discovered in storage.)

The central figure of the film is, of course, the Monster (which is not named Frankenstein, despite the movie's title). He is played by Boris Karloff, who in "Frankenstein" got only this credit: Monster.....................? but in the sequel is billed in bold capitals above the title: KARLOFF. Despite the broadness of the character, Karloff finds room for subtlety and small gestures; although he opposed it, he benefits enormously from the decision to allow the Monster to speak. In "Frankenstein," he only bleats piteously, but in "Bride" he stumbles into the forest hut of a blind violinist, who teaches him words ("Wine ... wine!") that later evolve into his poignant statement to Praetorious: "I want friend like me."

The 1931 film was famous for a scene in which the Monster happens upon a little girl who is floating daisies upon a pond. The Monster joins her in throwing flowers into the water; when the flowers are gone he takes the next logical step and throws her in. She drowns. The sequel begins with the girl's parents searching the ruins of the burned mill, to be sure the Monster is dead; the father dies, and the mother clutches a hand in the wreckage, discovering it is not her husband's but the Monster's. Such cold-blooded scenes are in a way more shocking than the forthright violence in the films, but it is interesting how Whale allows his sympathy for the Monster to soften the second story. (This time the Monster saves a drowning girl, although his heroism is misinterpreted as an attack.)

The famous scene in which the Monster dines with the hermit (O.P. Heggie) is quiet and touching (the hermit thanks God for sending him a visitor to break his loneliness). That first meal is poignant, the second one farcical, as the Monster stumbles into a crypt where Praetorious has interrupted his search for spare parts to sit down to a candlelit dinner. Praetorious invites him to join in, and the Monster puffs contentedly on a cigar.

"Bride" belongs largely to Praetorious and the Monster, despite the subplot involving Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his fiancee (whose wedding date is postponed by the doctor's distractions in the laboratory). The climax comes in Praetorious' gothic tower, with the bizarre apparatus that uses lightning to animate the cobbled-together body parts of the Bride. The scene makes such an unforgettable impression that it's easy to forget how little of the movie the Bride actually appears in.

Whale and his screenwriter, William Hurlbut, add wry humor wherever it will fit. They have fun with the character of Minnie (Una O'Connor), Frankenstein's housekeeper, whose scream could break glass. And they enjoy moments like the one where the Monster saves the shepherdess who has fallen into the water, and muses, "Yes, a woman. Now that's real interesting."

One advantage of horror movies is that they permit extremes and flavors of behavior that would be out of tone in realistic material. From the silent vampire in "Nosferatu" (1922) to the cheerful excesses of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Hammer horror films of the 1960s, the genre has encouraged actors to crank it up with bizarre mannerisms and elaborate posturings. The characters often use speech patterns so arch that parody is impossible.

The genre also encourages visual experimentation. From "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1919) onward, horror has been a cue for unexpected camera angles, hallucinatory architecture and frankly artificial sets. As mainstream movies have grown steadily more unimaginative and realistic in their visuals, horror has provided a lifeline back to the greater design freedom of the silent era. To see sensational "real" things is not the same as seeing the bizarre, the grotesque, the distorted and the fanciful. There is more sheer shock in a clawed hand unexpectedly emerging from the shadows than in all the effects of "Armageddon," because "Armageddon" looks realistic and horror taunts us that reality is an illusion.

Many biographical details about James Whale (1889-1957) can be glimpsed in "Gods and Monsters," which mentions his early romance with a friend killed in battle, and his great Hollywood movies of the 1930s (not only "Frankenstein," but such titles as "The Old Dark House" and "The Invisible Man"). Whale stopped making films in 1941 and lived quietly and luxuriously, painting and socializing. In the film he is seen at the end of his life, portrayed by Ian McKellen as a civilized, still hopeful gay man who in his new gardener (Brendan Fraser) sees a last opportunity for seduction. Giving Fraser a flat-top haircut, however, is perhaps insisting too much on the parallel between directors as Gods, and the Monsters they create.

Bonnie and Clyde

2009-08-06T03:29:00.000-07:00

There is a moment in "Bonnie and Clyde'' when Bonnie, frightened and angry, runs away from Clyde through a field of wheat, and as he pursues her, a cloud sweeps across the field and shadows them. Seen in a high, wide-angle shot, it is one of those moments of serendipity given to few movies. Today the cloud could be generated by computers; on the day the scene was filmed in Texas, it was a perfectly timed accident of nature.

The cloud carries foreboding; Bonnie and Clyde are doomed, and uneasily realize it. Not long after that scene, Bonnie has a final reunion with her mother. By then Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) are famous outlaws, celebrated in the press as populist bank robbers in an America gripped by the Depression. Bonnie speaks wistfully of marrying Clyde and moving in next door to her mother. "You live within a mile of me, honey, and you'll be dead,'' her mother flatly pronounces.

They would indeed die, in a hail of bullets that permanently changed the way the movies depicted violence. But their lives provided a template that would be used time and again in later films; as the ads put it, "They're young ... they're in love ... and they kill people.'' From "Bonnie and Clyde'' descended "Badlands,'' "Days of Heaven,'' "Thelma & Louise,'' "Drugstore Cowboy,'' "Natural Born Killers'' and countless other movies in which ordinary people were transformed by sudden violence into legend.

"Bonnie and Clyde,'' made in 1967, was called "the first modern American film'' by critic Patrick Goldstein, in an essay on its 30th anniversary. Certainly it felt like that at the time. The movie opened like a slap in the face. American filmgoers had never seen anything like it. In tone and freedom it descended from the French new wave, particularly Francois Truffaut's own film about doomed lovers, "Jules and Jim.'' Indeed, it was Truffaut who first embraced the original screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton, and called it to the attention of Warren Beatty, who was determined to produce it.

The legend of the film's production has become almost as famous as its heroes. Stories are told about how Beatty knelt at the feet of studio boss Jack Warner, begging for the right to make the film. How Warner saw the original cut and hated it. How the movie premiered at the Montreal film festival, and was roasted by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. How Warner Bros. determined to dump it in a chain of Texas drive-ins, and how Beatty implored the studio to give it a chance.

How it opened and quickly closed in the autumn of 1967, panned by the critics, receiving only one ecstatic opening-day newspaper review. (Modesty be damned: It was my own, calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance'' and predicting "years from now it is quite possible that `Bonnie and Clyde' will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.'')

The movie closed, but would not go away. The soundtrack, bluegrass by Flatt and Scruggs, went to the top of the charts. Theodora Van Runkle's berets and maxiskirts for Dunaway started a global fashion craze. Newsweek critic Joseph Morgenstern famously wrote that his original negative review had been mistaken. The movie reopened, went on to become one of Warner Bros.' biggest hits and won 10 nominations (with Oscars for supporting actress Estelle Parsons and cinematographer Burnett Guffey).

But that is only the success story. More important was the impact the film had on the American movie industry. Beatty's willingness to play a violent character with sexual dysfunction was unusual for a traditional 1960s leading man. In a famous Esquire profile by Rex Reed, which appeared as the movie was opening, he was dismissed as a has-been pretty boy. "Bonnie and Clyde'' put him permanently on the Hollywood map.

Beatty and director Arthur Penn cast the movie mostly with unknown stage actors--so successfully that all the major players (Dunaway, Parsons, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Wilder) became stars on the basis of this film. Behind the camera, the movie launched the careers not only of Van Runkle, but also of editor Dede Allen (a New Yorker breaking into a closed shop) and production designer Dean Tavoularis, who went on to work on Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather'' and "Apocalypse Now.'' And the cinematography of Guffey launched a whole new wave of its own, of films shot and edited in the more impressionistic French style.

Arthur Penn came fresh to the project after a resounding failure ("Mickey One,'' a self-conscious but intriguing art film) also made with Beatty. His later credits included "Night Moves,'' "Alice's Restaurant'' and "Little Big Man.'' Co-writer Robert Benton became an important director ("Kramer vs. Kramer,'' "Places in the Heart''). It's as if that one film sent all those careers cascading down to the present day.

It was a film in which all of the unlikely pieces were assembled at the right time. And more than anything else, it was a masterpiece of tone, in which the actors and filmmakers were all in sync as they moved the material back and forth between comedy and tragedy.

The opening scenes are lighthearted, starting with Clyde's bravado after Bonnie catches him trying to steal her mother's car. She senses in him, instantly, the means of her escape from a boring west Texas town. What he essentially supplies--for her, for the hero-worshipping gang member C.W. Moss (Pollard) and for the hungry newspaper readers -- is the possibility of glamour in lives of drab poverty. "We're the Barrow Gang,'' Clyde says, introducing them at the beginning of a bank robbery so they'll be sure to get credit. And one of the movie's great moments comes as Clyde lends his gun to a dispossessed black sharecropper so he could shoot at a bank's foreclosure sign.

If Clyde offers glamour, Bonnie offers publicity. She writes "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde'' and sends it to a newspaper, and she poses for photos holding a machinegun and a cigar. Clyde's brother Buck (Hackman) is more level-headed, more concerned with bank jobs than newspaper headlines. He comes attached to Blanche (Parsons), whose whiny complaints get on Bonnie's nerves (when agents surround one of their hideouts, she runs screaming across the lawn, still holding the spatula she was using to cook supper).

Penn directs the film as a series of set-pieces, which remain in the memory, focused and clear. The Okie camp where homeless farmers, tractored off their lands by the banks, hunch over campfires. Bonnie's sad, overcast, foggy family reunion. The bank robbery that goes all wrong when C.W. stupidly parks the getaway car. The way laughter turns blindingly to violence, as when a stickup ends with a meat cleaver and a sack of flour, or when a getaway ends with a bullet in a bank man's face. The run-in with a state trooper (Denver Pyle) who is made to pose with Bonnie and Clyde, and then unwisely released. The scene where C.W., a gas station attendant, leaves his job and runs off with the gang that's just robbed him. The scene where C.W.'s father effortlessly browbeats his wimpy son for getting a tattoo. And then the slow-motion ballet of the final execution.

Today, the freshness of "Bonnie and Clyde'' has been absorbed in countless other films, and it's hard to see how fresh and original it felt in 1967 -- just as the impact of "Citizen Kane,'' in 1941, may not be obvious to those raised in the shadow of its influence.

When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible.

Gone With The Wind

2009-08-05T05:24:00.000-07:00

"Gone With the Wind'' presents a sentimental view of the Civil War, in which the ``Old South'' takes the place of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O'Hara her comeuppance. But we've known that for years; the tainted nostalgia comes with the territory. Yet as ``GWTW'' approaches its 60th anniversary, it is still a towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story, and tells it wonderfully well.

For the story it wanted to tell, it was the right film at the right time. Scarlett O'Hara is not a creature of the 1860s but of the 1930s: a free-spirited, willful modern woman. The way was prepared for her by the flappers of Fitzgerald's jazz age, by the bold movie actresses of the period, and by the economic reality of the Depression, which for the first time put lots of women to work outside their homes.

Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do with myths of delicate Southern flowers, and everything to do with the sex symbols of the movies that shaped her creator, Margaret Mitchell: actresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae West. She was a woman who wanted to control her own sexual adventures, and that is the key element in her appeal. She also sought to control her economic destiny in the years after the South collapsed, first by planting cotton and later by running a successful lumber business. She was the symbol the nation needed as it headed into World War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie the Riveter.

Of course, she could not quite be allowed to get away with marrying three times, coveting sweet Melanie's husband Ashley, shooting a plundering Yankee, and banning her third husband from the marital bed in order to protect her petite waistline from the toll of childbearing. It fascinated audiences (it fascinates us still) to see her high-wire defiance in a male chauvinist world, but eventually such behavior had to be punished, and that is what ``Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn'' is all about. If ``GWTW'' had ended with Scarlett's unquestioned triumph, it might not have been nearly as successful. Its original audiences (women, I suspect, even more than men) wanted to see her swatted down--even though, of course, tomorrow would be another day.

Rhett Butler was just the man to do it. As he tells Scarlett in a key early scene, ``You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.'' For ``kissed,'' substitute the word you're thinking of. Dialogue like that reaches something deep and fundamental in most people; it stirs their fantasies about being brought to sexual pleasure despite themselves. (``Know why women love the horse whisperer?'' I was asked by a woman friend not long ago. ``They figure, if that's what he can do with a horse, think what he could do with me.'') Scarlett's confusion is between her sentimental fixation on a tepid ``Southern gentleman'' (Ashley Wilkes) and her unladylike lust for a bold man (Rhett Butler). The most thrilling struggle in ``GWTW'' is not between North and South, but between Scarlett's lust and her vanity.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were well matched in the two most coveted movie roles of the era. Both were well-served by a studio system that pumped out idealized profiles and biographies, but we now know what outlaws they were: Gable, the hard-drinking playboy whose studio covered up his scandals; Leigh, the neurotic, drug-abusing beauty who was the despair of every man who loved her.

They brought experience, well-formed tastes and strong egos to their roles, and the camera, which cannot lie and often shows more than the story intends, caught the flash of an eye and the readiness of body language that suggested sexual challenge. Consider the early scene where they first lay eyes on one another during the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Rhett ``exchanges a cool, challenging stare with Scarlett,'' observes the critic Tim Dirks. ``She notices him undressing her with his eyes: `He looks as if--as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy.' ''

If the central drama of ``Gone With the Wind'' is the rise and fall of a sexual adventuress, the counterpoint is a slanted but passionate view of the Old South. Unlike most historical epics, ``GWTW'' has a genuine sweep, a convincing feel for the passage of time. It shows the South before, during and after the war, all seen through Scarlett's eyes. And Scarlett is a Southerner. So was Margaret Mitchell. The movie signals its values in the printed narration that opens the film, in language that seems astonishing in its bland, unquestioned assumptions:

``There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.''

Yes, with the capital letters and all. One does not have to ask if the Slaves saw it the same way. The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of slaves (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the crimes of slavery). But to its major African-American characters it does at least grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted person in the entire story (she won one of the film's eight Oscars), and although Butterfly McQueen, as Prissy, will always be associated with the line ``I don't know nothin' about birthin' babies,'' the character as a whole is engaging and subtly subversive.

Remember that when ``GWTW'' was made, segregation was still the law in the South and the reality in the North. That the Ku Klux Klan was written out of one scene for fear of giving offense to elected officials who belonged to it. The movie comes from a world with values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own--and yet, of course, so does all great classic fiction, starting with Homer and Shakespeare. A politically correct ``GWTW'' would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.

As an example of filmmaking craft, ``GWTW'' is still astonishing. Several directors worked on the film; George Cukor incurred Clark Gable's dislike and was replaced by Victor Fleming, who collapsed from nervous exhaustion and was relieved by Sam Wood and Cameron Menzies. The real auteur was the producer, David O. Selznick, the Steven Spielberg of his day, who understood that the key to mass appeal was the linking of melodrama with state-of-the-art production values. Some of the individual shots in ``GWTW'' still have the power to leave us breathless, including the burning of Atlanta, the flight to Tara and the ``street of dying men'' shot, as Scarlett wanders into the street and the camera pulls back until the whole Confederacy seems to lie broken and bleeding as far as the eye can see.

And there is a joyous flamboyance in the visual style that is appealing in these days when so many directors have trained on the blandness of television. Consider an early shot where Scarlett and her father look out over the land, and the camera pulls back, the two figures and a tree held in black silhouette with the landscape behind them. Or the way the flames of Atlanta are framed to backdrop Scarlett's flight in the carriage.

I've seen ``Gone With the Wind'' in four of its major theatrical revivals--1954, 1961, 1967 (the abortive ``widescreen'' version) and 1989, and now here is the 1998 restoration. It will be around for years to come, a superb example of Hollywood's art and a time capsule of weathering sentimentality for a Civilization gone with the wind, all right--gone, but not forgotten.

Annie Hall

2009-08-05T05:17:00.000-07:00

'Annie Hall"contains more intellectual wit and cultural references than any other movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture, and in winning the award in 1977 it edged out "Star Wars," an outcome unthinkable today. The victory marked the beginning of Woody Allen's career as an important filmmaker (his earlier work was funny but slight) and it signaled the end of the 1970s golden age of American movies. With "Star Wars," the age of the blockbuster was upon us, and movies this quirky and idiosyncratic would find themselves shouldered aside by Hollywood's greed for mega-hits. "Annie Hall" grossed about $40 million--less than any other modern best picture winner, and less than the budgets of many of them.

Watching it again, 25 years after its April 1977 premiere, I am astonished by how scene after scene has an instant familiarity. Some of its lines have seeped into the general consciousness; they're known by countless people who never saw the movie, like Jack Nicholson's chicken salad speech from "Five Easy Pieces." For years I've invariably described spiders as being "as big as a Buick," and this movie may be where most people first heard Groucho Marx's comment that he would not want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Alvy Singer, the gag writer and stand-up comic played by Allen in the movie, is the template for many of his other roles--neurotic, wisecracking, kvetching, a romantic who is not insecure about sex so much as dubious about all the trouble it takes. Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, sets the form for many of Allen's onscreen girlfriends: Pretty, smart, scatterbrained, younger, with affection gradually fading into exasperation. Women put up with a lot in Allen's movies, but at a certain point they draw the line.

Alvy Singer, like so many other Allen characters and Allen himself, accompanies every experience in life with a running commentary. He lives in order to talk about living. And his interior monologues provide not merely the analysis but the alternative. After making love with Annie for the first time, Alvy rolls over, exhausted and depleted, and observes, "As Balzac said, 'There goes another novel'."

Alvy is smarter than the ground rules of Hollywood currently allow. Watching even the more creative recent movies, one becomes aware of a subtle censorship being imposed, in which the characters cannot talk about anything the audience might not be familiar with. This generates characters driven by plot and emotion rather than by ideas; they use catch-phrases rather than witticisms. Consider the famous sequence where Annie and Alvy are standing in line for the movies and the blowhard behind them pontificates loudly about Fellini. When the pest switches over to McLuhan, Alvy loses patience, confronts him, and then triumphantly produces Marshall McLuhan himself from behind a movie poster to inform him, "You know nothing of my work!" This scene would be penciled out today on the presumption that no one in the audience would have heard of Fellini or McLuhan.

"Annie Hall" is built on such dialogue, and centers on conversation and monologue. Because it is just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie, because it won the Oscar, because it is a romantic comedy, few viewers probably notice how much of it consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie's free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be, climaxing with the memory of her narcoleptic Uncle George falling asleep and dying while waiting in line for a free turkey. It is all done in one take of brilliant brinksmanship, with Keaton (or Annie) right on the edge of losing it.

Because "Annie Hall" moves so quickly, is so fresh and alive, we may not notice how long some of Allen's takes are. He famously likes to shoot most scenes in master shots with all of the actors onscreen all of the time, instead of cutting on every line of dialogue. The critic David Bordwell has an illuminating article in the Spring 2002 issue of Film Quarterly that points out that Allen's average shot length (ASL) ranges high: 22 seconds for "Manhattan" and 35.5 seconds for "Mighty Aphrodite." Bordwell tells me "Annie Hall" has an ASL of 14.5 seconds (he says other 1977 films he clocked had an ASL of from 4 to 7 seconds). By comparison, the recent film "Armageddon" has an ASL of 2.3 seconds, a velocity that arguably makes intelligent dialogue impossible.

Alvy and Annie take a sly delight in their conversational skill; they're attracted to each other not by pheromones but by pacing. In the first conversation they have, after meeting as tennis partners, they fall naturally into verbal tennis:

Alvy: You want a lift?

Annie: Oh, why? Uh, you got a car?

Alvy: No, I was going to take a cab.

Annie: Oh, no. I have a car.

Alvy: You have a car? I don't understand. If you have a car, so then why did you say, 'Do you have a car?' like you wanted a lift?

Annie: I don't, I don't, geez, I don't know. I wasn't. ...I got this VW out there. (To herself) 'What a jerk, yeah. Would you like a lift?'

Alvy: Sure. Which way you goin'?

Annie: Me? Oh, downtown.

Alvy: Down ... I'm going uptown.

Annie: Oh well, you know I'm going uptown too.

Alvy: You just said you were going downtown.

Annie: Yeah, well, but I could ...

This is not merely dialogue, it is a double act in the process of discovering itself. The more we listen to Annie and Alvy talk, the more we doubt they meet many people who can keep up with them When Alvy expresses reluctance to let Annie move in with him, and she complains that her apartment is too small and has bad plumbing and bugs, who but Alvy could take "bugs" as his cue, and observe, "Entomology is a rapidly growing field." And only Annie could interpret this as, "You don't want me to live with you."

Alvy: I don't want you to live with me!? Whose idea was it?

Annie: Mine.

Alvy: Yeah, it was yours, actually, but I approved it immediately.

There are of course other women in Alvy's life, including the Rolling Stone correspondent (Shelley Duvall) who is a Rosicrucian (Alvy: "I can't get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics"). And the liberal Democrat (Carol Kane) who Alvy marries but later splits up with because of their disagreements about the second gun theory of the Kennedy assassination. That Annie Hall is the great love of his life is immediately clear, and the movie is a flashback from the opening monologue in which he sadly notes that a year earlier they were in love; the movie is his analysis of what went wrong, and his answer is, he found happiness, but couldn't accept it. Groucho's line "is the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women."

Lore about "Annie Hall" on imdb.com includes the revealing detail that Diane Keaton, who lived with Allen at the time, was born as Diane Hall, and her nickname was Annie. The movie originally contained a murder subplot, entirely dropped; a 140 minute rough cut became a 95 minute film in a process described in editor Ron Rosenblum's book When the Shooting Stops.

Viewing the final cut, I sensed not only how well the remains hold together but how miraculously, since the parts would seem to be an ungainly fit. Consider Allen's astonishing range of visual tactics, including split screens in which the characters on either side directly address one another; a bedroom scene where Annie's spirit gets up during sex to sit, bored, in a chair by the bed; autobiographical flashbacks; subtitles that reveal what characters are really thinking; children who address us as if they were adults ("I'm into leather"); an animated sequence pairing Alvy with Snow White's wicked witch; and the way Alvy speaks directly out of the screen to the audience.

This is a movie that establishes its tone by constantly switching between tones: The switches reflect the restless mind of the filmmaker, turning away from the apparent subject of a scene to find the angle that reveals the joke. "Annie Hall" is a movie about a man who is always looking for the loopholes in perfection. Who can turn everything into a joke, and wishes he couldn't.

John Tucker Must Die

2009-08-04T11:16:00.001-07:00

This is your embedded middle-aged male movie critic, reporting from somewhere near the unprotected border between pubescent girlhood and young womanhood. The breaking story: a teen comedy called "John Tucker Must Die."

Sometimes a movie critic just has to acknowledge that he does not fall within a particular film's target demographic. But it can be a fascinating and enlightening sociological expedition to see it with the very audience for whom it was intended. In this instance, that meant watching "John Tucker Must Die" from deep inside a preview screening of about 78 percent teenage girls, 21 percent teenage boys, and 0.4 percent movie critics. I do not know who those other 0.6 percent were, or what they were doing there.

The crowd didn't clap at the end or anything, but they laughed, and sighed a few times, and talked and text messaged each other unceasingly throughout, despite being warned by burly uniformed security dudes upon entering the auditorium that all cell phones were to be turned off before entering. Yeah, right. There were so many little screens flickering all over the theater that it looked like the projector beam was hitting a disco ball.

This is the way a significant minority of viewers will encounter "John Tucker Must Die," because we can already be pretty sure most of them will see it on DVD in an environment where their voice and text conversations will not be hindered by semi-darkness or adults who turn around and tell them to shut the hell up.

Not as mean as "Mean Girls," as raunchy as "American Pie," or as sappy as, say, the Shirley Temple version of "Heidi" (and I have seen them all), "John Tucker Must Die" isn't half bad. It's about two-fifths bad, mostly toward the incoherent ending, but that ratio is... well, not bad.

The title character is the most popular boy in school, John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe, Eva Longoria's boy-toy gardener on "Desperate Housewives"). He's gorgeous, in a Ken doll with eyebrows kind of way, a star athlete, the captain of the basketball team, and he's triple-timing three of the hottest girls in school, none of whom knows he's also dating the others. In other words, he's a typical teenage male sociopath, a slick, winning Ted Bundy who has not yet graduated to full-fledged serial killing.

But when the girls find out he's been cheating on them -- all of them -- they unite to wreak their revenge. There's Carrie (Arielle Kebbel), the blonde white girl who reports for the school TV station; Heather (Ashanti), the henna-haired black girl who's the head cheerleader in every sense of the word; and Beth (Sophia Bush), the brunette white girl who describes herself alternately as a teen vegan activist and a slut. (The language doesn't get any harsher than that -- this is PG-13.) Oh, and if the names "Carrie" and "Heather" don't mean anything to you, you might want to brush up on your high school girl movies.

Bringing them all together is Kate (Brittany Snow), the ugly duckling and socially "invisible" girl who, as is invariably the case in these movies, is so much prettier than the "pretty" popular girls that it's not even funny. In any high school in America, Kate's looks alone would make her Miss Popularity before you could say "First Period Algebra." But this is the movies. Kate's hot mom Lori (Jenny McCarthy) wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt and keeps entering into short-lived affairs with interchangeable jerks Kate has taken to calling by a single name: Skip. Because that's what they always do.

Kate has a negative view of heterosexual relationships, having never actually witnessed a functional one. She is taken in, and made over, by the other girls as part of a series of plots to humiliate and devastate John Tucker in front of the whole school. Meanwhile, Kate becomes lab partners with "The Other Tucker," John's "invisible" brother Scott (Penn Badgley, borrowing Heath Ledger's old hair for the role), with whom she feels a certain kinship. Possibly a kissing kinship. By the end of the movie he's wearing a t-shirt with the word "INTEGRITY" on it, in case you're left with any doubt that he's more her type than his brother John, who will surely grow up to head an overvalued off-shore corporation and eventually be indicted for fraud.

"John Tucker Must Die" is kind of "Carrie" in reverse. While Kate is tarted up to provide suitable nookie-bait for John Tucker, and must invoke iron will to resist his hunky, psycho-skeezy wiles, he is the one who will get the (figurative) bucket of pig's blood dumped on his head in the climactic party scene. That's also the part where, unfortunately, everything rapidly degenerates into a messy free-for-all -- and that's a description of what happens to the movie, not just what happens in it.

Still, for the most part director Betty Thomas, the Second City alumnus, former "Hill Street Blues" cast member and helmer of Howard Stern's "Private Parts" and "The Brady Bunch Movie," gets more out of this material, and her cast, than we had any reason to anticipate. The performances are loose, relaxed and -- dare I say it? -- almost improvisational. What was the last teen comedy in which any lines were underplayed or tossed off casually, instead of the actors practically yelling them into the camera so as to be heard over the banks of mobile phones in the audience? (That's a rhetorical question, please.)

This is Metcalfe's first starring role in a motion picture, and while Snow is the real star here, he displays a sense of humor about himself that's beyond anything required of him on "Desperate Housewives," which is tipped more toward soap opera acting than comedy -- with the fine exception of Felicity Huffman. The scene where he has a meltdown at a basketball game, brought on by slipping him estrogen pills, is played just right -- broad, but not smack-us-in-the-face-with-a-halibut broad.

My favorite moment was also the one in which my movie-critic cover was inadvertently blown. Scott tries to tell his BMOC brother that he probably isn't Kate's kind of guy. "She likes old school Elvis Costello, listens to obscure podcasts, and she reads Dave Eggers," he says. "She's deep." Baritone laughter erupted from... two adult males in the crowd. Other than that, stone silence. But that's a funny line. And I'm happy to say, from the way it's delivered, you can bet Betty Thomas knows it's funny, too.

Just Tell Me What You Want

2009-08-04T11:09:00.001-07:00

“Just Tell Me What You Want” occupies a world most of us have fantasies about, the world of an incredibly powerful, self-made business tycoon. It’s a world that’s not new in the movies, but not often is it seen as sharply as in this film, which, amazingly, leaves us feeling fairly affectionate about the people involved: This is a film that could have just been high-class, soft-core trash, but it sneaks in a couple of fascinating characters and makes them real.

They are Max Herschel (Alan King), investor, art collector, husband, lover, overgrown baby, and Bones Burton (Ali MacGraw), his mistress, who’s in television production. She’s also his prize creation; they met, we gather, 13 years ago when she was a teenager, and Max has educated her, stage-managed her career, doted on her ever since.

But now there’s a crisis: Max has purchased a near-bankrupt studio, and wants to plunder it for its film library and then sell the real estate to make a sports stadium. But Bones wants to try to turn the studio around.

He can’t quite see his protégé succeeding on her own. But they have other problems, too. Bones, who has just had another abortion and isn’t getting any younger, wants to get married. But Max is still married, and supports his deranged wife (Dina Merrill) in a series of expensive private institutions. He also cheats on both his wife and his mistress.

Bones grows rebellious, falls in love with a young playwright, and marries him one morning. Max, enraged, tries to strip her of everything he’s ever given her. Bones, livid, violently attacks Max with her handbag in Bergdoff Goodman’s, in one of the movie’s funniest scenes. And Max, wounded, goes undercover to try to destroy Bones’s husband.

All of the ins and outs of the plot (and they are many) are essentially just props for the director, Sidney Lumet, who is mostly concerned with the characters of Max and Bones. The movie’s especially successful with Max, who comes across as virile, childish, bright, vindictive and perversely likable.

The performance by King is surprisingly good, considering how little feature film acting experience King has; King really inhabits the role of the rich tyrant, instead of just strutting through the dialogue. MacGraw is good, too, as Bones, making the character sexy primarily because of her intelligence.

The movie has several good supporting performances, especially by Myrna Loy, as an executive secretary who sees right through all of Max’s many moods, and by Keenan Wynn, as an ancient real estate tycoon who is Max’s chief competition. The whole cast, indeed, is plausible as real people, and that’s what makes this movie somewhat unusual.

There’s a whole genre of movies about the sex lives of the rich and famous, and the actors in them usually seem a little smaller than the lives they’re playing. Not this time: “Just Tell Me What You Want” somehow succeeds in taking on a tacky genre, overcoming it, and giving us a couple of actually interesting characters.

Toy Story

2009-08-04T11:05:00.001-07:00

"Toy Story" creates a universe out of a couple of kid's bedrooms, a gas station, and a stretch of suburban highway. Its heroes are toys, which come to life when nobody is watching. Its conflict is between an old-fashioned cowboy who has always been a little boy's favorite toy, and the new space ranger who may replace him. The villain is the mean kid next door who takes toys apart and puts them back together again in macabre combinations. And the result is an visionary roller-coaster ride of a movie.

For the kids in the audience, a movie like this will work because it tells a fun story, contains a lot of humor, and is exciting to watch. Older viewers may be even more absorbed, because "Toy Story," the first feature made entirely by computer, achieves a three-dimensional reality and freedom of movement that is liberating and new. The more you know about how the movie was made, the more you respect it.

Imagine the spectacular animation of the ballroom sequence in "Beauty and the Beast" at feature length and you'll get the idea. The movie doesn't simply animate characters in front of painted backdrops; it fully animates the characters and the space they occupy, and allows its point of view to move freely around them. Computer animation has grown so skillful that sometimes you don't even notice it (the launching in "Apollo 13" took place largely within a computer). Here, you do notice it, because you're careening through space with a new sense of freedom.

Consider for example a scene where Buzz Lightyear, the new space toy, jumps off a bed, bounces off a ball, careens off of the ceiling, spins around on a hanging toy helicopter and zooms into a series of loop-the-loops on a model car race track. Watch Buzz, the background, and the perspective -- which stretches and contracts to manipulate the sense of speed. It's an amazing ride.

I learn from the current Wired magazine that the movie occupied the attention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest models around, which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this and other scenes -- at 2 to 15 hours per frame. Each frame required as much as 300 MBs of information, which means that on my one-gigabyte hard disk, I have room for about three frames, or an eighth of a second. Of course computers are as dumb as a box of bricks if they're not well-programmed, and director John Lasseter, a pioneer in computer animation, has used offbeat imagination and high energy to program his.

But enough of this propeller-head stuff. Let's talk about the movie. Lasseter and his team open the film in a kid's bedroom, where the toys come to life when their owner is absent. Undisputed king of the toys is Woody, a cowboy with a voice by Tom Hanks. His friends include Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles), Slinky Dog (Jim Varney), Hamm the Pig (John Ratzenberger) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts). The playroom ingeniously features famous toys from real life toys (which may be product placement, but who cares), including a spelling slate that does a running commentary on key developments (when Mr. Potato Head finally achieves his dream of Mrs. Potato Head, the message is "Hubba! Hubba!).

One day there's a big shakeup in this little world. The toy owner, named Andy, has a birthday. Woody dispatches all of the troops in a Bucket of Soldiers to spy on developments downstairs, and they use a Playskool walkie-talkie to broadcast developments. The most alarming: The arrival on the scene of Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a space ranger.

Buzz is the most endearing toy in the movie, because he's not in on the joke. He thinks he's a real space ranger, temporarily marooned during a crucial mission, and he goes desperately to work trying to repair his space ship -- the cardboard box he came in. There's real poignancy later in the film when he sees a TV commercial for himself, and realizes he's only a toy.

The plot heats up when the human family decides to move, and Woody and Buzz find themselves marooned in a gas station with no idea how to get home. (It puts a whole new spin on the situation when a toy itself says, "I'm a lost toy!") And later there's a terrifying interlude in the bedroom of Sid, the dreadful boy next door, who takes his toys apart and reassembles them like creatures from a nightmare. (His long suffering sister is forced to hold a tea party for headless dolls.)

Seeing "Toy Story," I felt some of the same exhilaration I felt during "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Both movies take apart the universe of cinematic visuals, and put it back together again, allowing us to see in a new way. "Toy Story" is not as inventive in its plotting or as clever in its wit as "Rabbit" or such Disney animated films as "Beauty and the Beast"; it's pretty much a buddy movie transplanted to new terrain. Its best pleasures are for the eyes. But what pleasures they are! Watching the film, I felt I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which draws on the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between, where space not only bends but snaps, crackles and pops.

The Bank Job

2009-08-04T11:01:00.001-07:00

A serviceable B-grade British heist movie, “The Bank Job” is no worse than its generic title. And no better. It front-loads the naughty sex and back-loads the plot twists (the titular crime takes place in the middle), but apart from the prominence of Princess Margaret in the subterfuge, it’s a pretty routine job, as the use of the hackneyed phrase “plot twists” earlier in this sentence should indicate.

“The Bank Job” begins with a quick time-shuffle of the sort to which modern audiences have become accustomed. It starts in 1970 in the Caribbean. Literally in it. Brief shots of sub-aquatic toplessness are followed by a quick-and-blurry tropical fornication montage and a little retro-voyeuristic shutterbugging. Next, it’s East London in 1971 and some hoods are making violent threats against a stubbly car shop dealer named Terry Leather (Jason Statham). Then it’s three weeks earlier and ...

You know the drill. At first you think Guy Ritchie might be rolling in his grave — only he’s not dead, just his career. That’s the kind of cheap shot you have plenty of time to think about as this movie grinds through its laboriously disjointed exposition.

It doesn’t stick to that approach for long, though. Once the picture gets its chronology sorted out (why did it employ flashbacks to begin with?), it eventually works up some downhill momentum near the end. But for a movie about royal scandals, spies, cops, villains (slang for crooks and thugs), prostitutes, pornographers, strip clubs, payoffs, radical-chic black-power celebrity gangsters, murder, torture, blackmail, double-crossings, extramarital temptations... you’d sure think “The Bank Job” would be more fun to watch. Instead, it seems a little distracted, continually glancing back over its shoulder at a few hundred other caper films and crime thrillers. Once it triggers memories of movies as diverse as "The Asphalt Jungle," “Rififi,” "Le Cercle Rouge," “The Italian Job,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Inside Man” — and how could it not? — you may realize that you’re not having quite as much fun watching this picture as you did watching those.

One semi-redeeming element is that the film was inspired by true events. The shocking 1971 Lloyds Bank robbery was a big story, until four days later when it suddenly wasn’t. The whole thing abruptly and mysteriously vanished from the papers, radio and television, reportedly due to a “D-Notice” issued by the highest authorities banning all press coverage.

But why? Did an opportunistic pseudo-radical black-power fascist who called himself Michael X really hide scandalous photographs of Princess Margaret in a London vault and then use the threat of exposure to blackmail the British government? Did Her Majesty’s Secret Service (“Spooks — MI5 or MI6, I can’t tell the difference,” a cop says) really engineer a bank robbery using small-time hoods to break into Pandora’s safety deposit box and retrieve the damning evidence before it escaped into the public domain?

Those are the premises of the script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (“Across the Universe,” “Flushed Away”). But how much is truth and how much is inspiration? Nobody quite knows. A recent article about the infamous “Walkie-Talkie Bank Job” on the Web site of the British tabloid The Daily Mail (Feb. 16, 2008) reports:

“Speculation quickly arose that compromising sexual photographs of the queen’s sister, the late Princess Margaret, had been uncovered in the bank vault.

"It was rumoured they had been stashed away by well-known underworld figure Michael X. A drug dealer and Black Power leader, he was convicted of murder and hanged in Trinidad in 1975. A government file on him will remain closed until 2054. The Mirror can for the first time reveal that Fleet Street editors of the day were approached directly by senior government officials and told to drop the story.”

And it’s such a good story. What a shame it isn’t more memorably told. The director is the bewilderingly uneven Roger Donaldson (“Smash Palace,” “No Way Out,” “Cadillac Man,” “Cocktail”). The cast are fine (as British grammar would have it).

The Apartment

2009-08-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. ''The Apartment'' is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree. On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, the lonely person feels robbed of something that was there in childhood and isn't there anymore.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a definitive lonely guy, in ''The Apartment,'' with the ironic twist that he is not even free to go home alone, because his apartment is usually loaned out to one of the executives at his company. He has become the landlord for a series of their illicit affairs; they string him along with hints about raises and promotions. His neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) hears the nightly sounds of passion through the wall and thinks Baxter is a tireless lover, when in fact Baxter is pacing the sidewalk out in front, looking up resentfully at his own lighted window.

When Billy Wilder made ''The Apartment'' in 1960, ''the organization man'' was still a current term. One of the opening shots in the movie shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point. This shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film ''The Crowd'' (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Cubicles would have come as revolutionary progress in this world.

Baxter has no girlfriend and, apparently, no family. Patted on the back and called ''buddy boy'' by the executives who use him, he dreams of a better job and an office of his own. One day he even gets up his nerve and asks out one of the elevator girls, Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but she stands him up at the last moment because of a crisis in her relationship with the big boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). She thought her affair with Sheldrake was over, but now apparently it's on again; he keeps talking about divorcing his wife, but never does.

The screenplay, executed as a precise balance between farce and sadness, has been constructed by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond to demonstrate that while Baxter and Miss Kubelik may indeed like each other--may feel genuine feelings of the sort that lead to true love--they are both slaves to the company's value system. He wants to be the boss' assistant, she wants to be the boss' wife, and both of them are so blinded by the concept of ''boss'' that they can't see Mr. Sheldrake for an untrustworthy rat.

The movie has been photographed in widescreen black and white. The b&w dampens down any jollity that might sweep in with the decorations at the Christmas parties, bars and restaurants where the holidays are in full swing. And the widescreen emphasizes space that separates the characters, or surrounds them with emptiness. The design of Baxter's apartment makes his bedroom door, in the background just to the left of center, a focal point; in there reside the secrets of his masters, the reasons for his resentments, the arena for his own lonely slumber, and eventually the stage on which Miss Kubelik will play out the crucial transition in her life.

Other shots track down Manhattan streets and peer in through club windows, and isolate Miss Kubelik and the phony-sincere Mr. Sheldrake in their booth at the Chinese restaurant, where he makes earnest protestations of his good intentions, and glances uneasily at his watch.

By the time he made ''The Apartment,'' Wilder had become a master at a kind of sardonic, satiric comedy that had sadness at its center. ''Double Indemnity'' (1944) was about a man (MacMurray again) who trusted that one simple crime would solve his romantic and financial troubles. ''Sunset Boulevard'' has William Holden as a paramour to a grotesque aging movie queen (Gloria Swanson), but there was pathos in the way her former husband (Erich von Stroheim) still worshiped at the shrine of her faded greatness.

Wilder was fresh off the enormous hit ''Some Like it Hot'' (1959), his first collaboration with Lemmon, and Lemmon was headed toward ''The Days of Wine and Roses'' (1962), which along with ''The Apartment'' showed that he could move from light comedian to tragic everyman. This movie was the summation of what Wilder had done to date, and the key transition in Lemmon's career.

It was also a key film for Shirley MacLaine, who had been around for five years in light comedies and had good scenes in ''Some Came Running'' (1958) but here emerged as a serious actress who would flower in the 1960s.

What is particularly good about her Miss Kubelik is the way she doesn't make her a ditzy dame who falls for a smooth talker, but suggests a young woman who has been lied to before, who has a good heart but finite patience, who is prepared to make the necessary compromises to be the next Mrs. Sheldrake. The underlying seriousness of MacLaine's performance helps anchor the picture--it raises the stakes, and steers it away from any tendency to become musical beds.

What's particularly perceptive is the way, after her suicide attempt, she hauls herself together and actually gives Sheldrake another chance. Like Baxter, she has not been forced into job prostitution, but chosen it. One of the ways this is an adult picture and not a sitcom is the way it takes Baxter and Miss Kubelik so long to make the romantic leap; they aren't deluded fools, but jaded realists who have given up on love and are more motivated by paychecks. There is a wonderful, wicked, delicacy in the way Wilder handles the final scene, and finds the right tender-tough note in the last lines of the screenplay. (''Shut up and deal'' would become almost as famous as ''nobody's perfect,'' the immortal closing lines of ''Some Like it Hot.'')

As it happened, I watched ''The Apartment'' not long after Jack Lemmon's death, and looked at Blake Edwards' ''The Days of Wine and Roses'' (1962) and James Foley's ''Glengarry Glen Ross'' (1992) at the same time. The side-by-side viewings were an insight into Lemmon's acting, and into changing styles in movies. ''The Days of Wine and Roses'' has dated, in my opinion; the famous greenhouse scene looks more like overacting than alcoholism. Wilder's ''The Lost Weekend'' (1945) was made 17 years earlier but feels more contemporary in his treatment of alcoholism. ''Glengarry Glen Ross'' contains probably Lemmon's best performance. His aging, desperate real estate salesman is deserving of comparison with anyone's performance of Willy Loman in ''Death of a Salesman,'' and it is interesting how Lemmon, who famously began with directors asking him to dial down and give ''a little less,'' was able here to hit the precise tones needed for the David Mamet dialogue, which is realism cloaked in mannerism.

In observing that ''The Lost Weekend'' hasn't dated, I could be making a comment about Wilder's work in general. Even a lightweight romantic comedy like ''Sabrina'' (1954) holds up better than its 1990s remake, and the great Wilder pictures don't play as period pieces but look us straight in the eye. ''Some Like It Hot'' is still funny, ''Sunset Boulevard'' is still a masterful gothic character comedy, and ''The Apartment'' is still tougher and more poignant than the material might have permitted. The valuable element in Wilder is his adult sensibility; his characters can't take flight with formula plots, because they are weighted down with the trials and responsibilities of working for a living. In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in ''The Apartment'' they have to be reminded that they have anything else.

Drag Me To Hell

2009-08-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

"Drag Me to Hell" is a sometimes funny and often startling horror movie. That is what it wants to be, and that is what it is. After scaling the heights with "A Simple Plan" (1998) and slugging a home run with the "Spider-Man" franchise, it's like Sam Raimi is taking some personal time and returning to his hobby.

He is greatly assisted by his star, Alison Lohman. Horror movies with nasty old men can be fun (see "Bride of Frankenstein"), but for the mainline product there's nothing like a sweet and vulnerable girl. Although in real life she's pushing 30, Lohman looks nowhere near old enough to be Christine, the bank loan officer. No wonder she has such a chaste sleep-apart relationship with her boyfriend, Clay Dalton (Justin Long). I suspect they practice abstinence.

If "Clay Dalton" rings a bell, those are surely two of the most common names in movies; there have been 761 Clays and 413 Daltons. That's the kind of elbow nudge Raimi likes to provide, especially since the character really requires no surname. The whole movie is nudges, especially scenes involving a cute kitten and Shock Reveals. Cute kitties of course are useful in the It's Only a Cat! false alarms, and Raimi deserves praise for not using this kitten in that way. Shock Reveals are of course the moments when a terrifying image explodes from the scene, scaring the split pea soup out of the heroine.

Shock Reveals should logically be silent, unless the Revealed is screaming. But in horror films they always come with discordant chords and loud bangs. This is as obligatory as the fact that blades always make a snicker-snack noise even when they are not scraping enough something.

It is essential that the heroine (for horror victims are conventionally women) be a good screamer, and man, can that Alison Lohman scream. Stanley Kubrick would have needed only a day with her on "The Shining," instead of the weeks he spent with Shelley Duvall. Christine has reason to scream. An old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails asks her for a third extension on her home loan, and if there's one thing I've learned in this life, it's that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.

In the struggle that follows, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), rips a button off Christine's coat, and that leads to no end of bad things, including the very real possibility that (spoiler) Christine will find herself Dragged to Hell. (unspoiler) Mrs. Ganush stalks and threatens her, Christine psyches out at work and with dinner with Clay Dalton's parents, and Clay Dalton recruits an Indian-American mystic named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) to fight on her side.

If you think "Rham Jas" is supposed to be an elbow nudge for the famous Ram Das, you may be on to something. I didn't find any occurrence of "Rham Jas," except those citing this movie, in the first 1,000 Google hits, which I considered to be due diligence.

For a Pasadena soothsayer who accepts American Express, Rham Jas is remarkably knowledgeable about the Rules of Hell, especially as they pertain to buttons and kittens. He struggles with Christine and Clay Dalton to appease Mrs. Ganush, especially after she dies and gains a powerful ally. Shock Reveals nevertheless occur with increasing frequency and ferocity.

Christine is badgered, beaten and hexed. Her body and soul are put through the wringer. Things get so bad Clay Dalton sleeps over one night. The other nights, he simply drops her off in front of her Arts & Crafts house (pre-crash value circa $2 million) and says, "You sure you'll be all right?" She always is, for some reason.

As Boss Gettys says of Citizen Kane, "He's going to need more than one lesson, and he's going to get more than one lesson." Christine learns these lessons: (a) Never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails; (2) Never dig a grave during the thunderstorm of the century; (3) If she calls Clay Dalton when she needs him, that will be too late. Little could the poor girl have anticipated that a time would come when the penalty for approving the old gypsy woman's home loan application would be her whole bank being dragged down to hell.

17 Again

2009-08-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

Mike O'Donnell's wife wants a divorce, his kids are remote, he didn't get the job promotion he expected, and everything else in his life has gone wrong since that magic year when he was 17, a basketball star, in love, and looked like Zac Efron instead of Matthew Perry. He's obviously a case for treatment by a Body Swap Movie.

Revisiting the trophy case at his old high school, Mike encounters a janitor who, from the way he smiles at the camera, knows things beyond this mortal coil. If only Mike could go back to 17 and not make all the same mistakes. In "17 Again," he can. He falls into a Twilight Zone vortex and emerges as Zac Efron. They say be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Mike should have been more specific. Instead of wishing to be 17 again, he should have wished to go back 20 years in time.

Yes, he becomes himself trapped inside his own 17-year-old body. Same wife, same kids, same problems. As Old Mike getting divorced, he'd moved in with his best friend, Ned (Thomas Lennon), and now he throws himself on Ned's mercy: Will Ned pose as his father, so Young Mike can be his son and help out his kids by enrolling in the same high school again? Ned, who is a software millionaire and middle-age fanboy, agrees, especially after he falls helplessly in love with the high school principal, Jane (Melora Hardin).

Young Mike becomes the new best friend of his insecure son, Alex (Sterling Knight). Then he meets Alex's mom, Scarlet (Leslie Mann), who, of course, before the vortex was his wife, and before that his high school bride (Allison Miller). She thinks it's strange that he looks exactly like the boy she married at 17. He explains he is the son of an uncle, who I guess would have to be Old Mike's brother, so it's curious Old Scarlet never met him, but if she doesn't ask that, why should I?

In high school, Young Mike again becomes a basketball star, befriends Alex, and attempts to defend his Gothish daughter, Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg), against the predations of her jerk boyfriend, who as a hot-rodding jock traveling with a posse is, of course, the last guy in school who would date, or be dated by, a moody girl who wears black.

I've seen Body Switches before (Tom Hanks in "Big"). The first act of this movie seemed all retread. Then it started to dig in. There are twin romances; as Shakespeare demonstrated, one must be serious and the other farcical. Young Mike is still seriously in love with his wife, Old Scarlet, and she is powerfully attracted to this boy who's a double for her first love. She thinks that's wrong. He knows it isn't but how can he explain?

Meanwhile, best buddy Ned courts Principal Masterson, who for the first time in his life has Taught Him What Love Means. Before her, ecstasy was owning Darth Vader's costume. I will not describe what happens the first time they go out to dinner, except to say that it's comic genius, perfectly played by Melora Hardin and Thomas Lennon.

I attended a screening held by a radio station, which attracted mainly teenage girls who left their boyfriends behind. When Zac Efron took off his T-shirt, the four in front of me squealed as if there were buzzers in their seats. Now that he's a little older, Efron has a Tom Cruiseish charm, and a lot of confidence. Why Matthew Perry was cast as his adult self is hard to figure; does your head change its shape in 20 years?

"17 Again" is pleasant, harmless PG-13 entertainment, with a plot a little more surprising and acting a little better than I expected. Mike is dispatched into that vortex by the bearded old janitor with a delighted smile. The janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray) is quite a convenience, supplying vortexes when needed. If his smile reminds you of anyone, he's played by Bill Murray's brother.

The Windmill

2009-08-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olch was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olch attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.

Olch is able to sync up some of Rogers’ material, much of it gorgeous color film footage inspired by his youth in the Hamptons, to audio recordings that Rogers also left behind. As we look at faded color 16mm images of green fields and and girls on bikes and girls on beaches and legs and smiles and girls and girls, Rogers’ voice explains that his formative sexual experiences happened on the beach, as a child amongst a gaggle of sunbathing wives left alone while their husbands worked in the city. “The summer is incredibly important. Incredibly important things happen in the summer,” he’s decided, and this will be the running thesis of his film. You believe him when he says that those summer hours aspent s the only male presence (and a purely voyeuristic one) in a female environment, the rest of his gender off securing the caste, were key to his “becoming a person.” As a man, he never lacked for sexual partners, but had much more trouble with his professional identity. Not only could he not finish the personal film, but his less-than-lucrative choice of filmmaking niche put him in general opposition to his monied family and the notion of masculinity, deeply tied to an ability to sustain a family’s lifestyle via professional contribution, that prevailed in his Hamptons spiritual home. More than once, Rogers laments not being able to add to the family fortune by being a banker, or at least “Steven Spielberg.” This is the strongest stuff in The Windmill Movie, the sections where Rogers’ non-existent self-portrait really seems to have been stitched into some kind of benevolent Frankenstein-like life.
Olch’s bolder creative moves are less successful, but still often compelling. In an attempt to be fair to Rogers’ own interest in the idea of recreation of reality as the path to truth, Olch chose to funnel the left-behind material into a documentary-fiction hybrid, with Wallace Shawn (ie: “Dick’s old friend Wally”, with whom Rogers went to prep school) performing Rogers in copies of scenes shot before his death. The material with Shawn is, surprisingly, the film’s weakest link; apparently a vestigial tail of an abandoned project in which Shawn would play Rogers and Cynthia Nixon would take the role of Susan Meiselas, there’s not enough of it left in the finished piece for what’s there to add up to anything, so when it is woven in, it’s a distraction. Olch also scripted a narration from Rogers’ perspective, based on conversations with the older filmmaker’s friends and family and the diaries he left behind, which Olch performs himself. This is a fascinatingly ballsy move (one wonders, did Olch come up with phrases like “my thwarted sperm,” or was that an actual Rogersism?), one which works as an analogue to the sequences edited to Rogers’ left-behind recordings, but never matches the synchronous power of the late filmmaker’s images matched to his voice.

Ultimately, one gets swept up in the first soapy, then tragic melodrama of the life matter that overwhelmed Rogers’ desire/compulsion/ability to make art — his youthful bohemian sexuality aged into an inability to choose between potential life partners, the endless Hamptons summer of sun-and-booze-soaking soured into melanoma, then brain cancer — while still longing for a discreet “Where I’m From” statement of equal precision and beauty to Rogers’ late-60s short Quarry (which will screen before Olch’s feature at Film Forum). That key question posed early on — “Is there anything to say?” — is answered by Rogers’ own material with a frustrated “yes”; Olch’s material plays up the tragedy that Rogers’ confidence in his own voice failed to metastasize quicker than cancer.

Aliens in the Attic Movie

2009-08-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened on the way to the theatre this morning–and before you stop me, no, this will NOT turn into a Zero Mostel reference. I guarantee it. Anyway, I was on my way to catch the very first showing of a movie so I could bring it back here to you.

I wanted The Collector.

I got Aliens in the Attic.

I know, I know–it’s all about managed disappointment, folks, and ironically, that’s also what Aliens in the Attic is about: managed disappointment.

Anyway, the plot. It’s your class-X standard family movie fare–youngest daughter is here for no other reason than to be cute, supersmart middle boy child feels alone and neglected and starts tanking his grades so he can fit in better because “no one likes a mathlete”, Dad’s trying his bumbling best to keep up, oldest daughter’s dating a guy roughly four years older than she is but no one actually knows until he actually starts telling people. Anyway, this Seventh Heaven episode gone ever so slightly off the rails packs up for a family vacation to Middle of Nowhere, Michigan. It’s actually something involving the word “creek” but I just didn’t care enough to pay that close attention and you won’t need to either. When they get to the rental home where the obnoxious other half of the family is also heading, they find a little surprise waiting for them.

Zirconian commandos.

Yep, seems the Zirconian Empire wants to annex Earth, and has thus sent a self-important halfwit, a psychotic weapons expert, a female martial artist who’s clearly overcompensating and a sensitive engineer who, in earth years, acts like he’s TWELVE to pave the way for the incoming invasion force by activating a device that’s been buried underground for decades. Oh, and did I mention that the Zirconians are only about one tenth the size of an average human?

Let me just say, up front, that unless you have kids this movie will be an utter waste of your time. Some children’s fare–especially the good stuff–is made accessible to adults by virtue of so-called “dual layer” writing, in which jokes that work for kids also work on adults on a totally different level, using things like clever double entendres and careful wordplay.

Aliens in the Attic, meanwhile, has all the wordplay of a brick.

This is a kiddie movie, plain and simple. Anyone under, oh, fourteen or so is going to absolutely fall in love with it. They’re going to love the thought of using mind control on Nana and having her execute Street Fighter moves (even I was impressed by watching Doris Roberts pulling off a Shoryuken), and the thought of hijacking their sister’s jerk of a boyfriend and making him slam into his own car and confess to his girlriend’s parents that he desperately needs a new set of adult diapers. But most grownups, meanwhile, are going to find the jokes lame and tedious, with not a whole lot of laughs available for them. The comedy here is weak if you’ve graduated high school any time recently.

Like I said, folks, it’s all about “managed disappointment”, which is just what Aliens in the Attic is. There’s some fun here, and some interesting moments, but there’s also a whole lot of kids-only stuff in between the interesting moments, a whole lot more than you’d want to personally hazard unless you’re taking the kids out to the movies.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale issues it a five out of ten for doing its job and doing it well, but not doing much more than the minimum. Some great moments for grownups here can’t distract from the fact that this is, first, foremost, and mostly, a kid’s movie.

Tropic Thunder (It's Zoolander all over again)

2009-08-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

Oh my God, SO bored. This is like day 14 with no work to do at work, and I'm at that point where I feel like I've seen everything on the internet that I would possibly want to see. And it's a gorgeous, cool, sunny day outside, making matters worse. How does this bring us to Tropic Thunder? Well, really just that it underlines for me how unexcited I am to write about this disappointing movie, but am turning to it as a way to fend off complete boredom.

My friend was super into seeing this from the ads, so I saved it for him. The movie opens with an ad for Booty Sweat, an energy drink from hip-hop star Alpa Chino, then has three fake trailers for movies by its stars. The first and least funny is the sixth sequel in which the earth becomes a steaming fireball, starring Stiller's character, Tug Speedman. The second is a parody of those Eddie Murphy comedies where he plays all the characters, with Jack Black's character, Jeff Portnoy. The last is a gay-monk movie, obviously based on Brokeback Mountain, called Satan's Alley. Surely you recognize that name as the title of the musical Travolta stars in at the end of Staying Alive. That one is starring Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Kirk Lazarus. We then have credits, and join our three actors in a Vietnam movie that is going badly. The director [Steve Coogan] is way over budget, and gets an angry call from Tom Cruise as Les Grossman, this big gross hairy blowhard studio head. Nick Nolte, playing the author of the book their movie is based on, suggests that the only way to really save this thing is to get the actors out there in the real jungle. This is exactly what they do, and one second later, the director is obliterated by a land mine, leaving them all out on their own.

Eventually it starts dawning on everyone—except Speedman—that they've really just been left in the jungle. They bicker. Portnoy, who is using heroin, has his stash taken away and essentially goes into withdrawal on the trip. Lazarus is a method actor and has had his skin surgically darkened to play a black man. He also keeps in this voice and persona he thinks a black man would have—and is often called on this by the real black guy on the mission. We periodically cut back to Hollywood for more of Speedman's agent, played by Matthew McConaughey, and Les Grossman, the best thing in the movie. Eventually the guys get into a real adventure and have to enact a rescue, that [sort of] satirically turns into the exact kind of adventure scenes reminiscent of their movies, and it ends.

So you're sitting there, laughing fitfully, thinking "This is not nearly as funny as I'd hoped it would be," and certainly isn't as satirical or movies or Hollywood or anything. Once it was over, my friend and I agreed that it was pretty much Zoolander, but in a different locale with a different idea. Only, Zoolander was better. A lot of the things I was looking forward to in this movie were, if not busts, then just seriously deflating. The Hollywood satire had no more bite than anything you might see on E! The whole thing of Downey playing a black guy had almost no content to it and pushed next to no buttons. Almost everything even commenting on this was in the trailer. The whole angle of mentally disabled people being mocked [there were protests outside my theater the night the movie opened] was a big nothing. Seriously, Tom Cruise was the best thing in the movie—at least he was really fun. It was all so middling and everyone so rote that my friend was inspired to say "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you actually look forward to when Tom Cruise comes on, because then you're seeing someone who knows how to act."

It wasn't awful—I was never bored and I laughed a few times. It's just that, given all of the ideas and all the stars and the whole concept, I had really hoped for a lot more. Stiller is fine as a director, but he still way overplays his fake acting, and everyone else doesn't make much of an impression. That is to say—here's a movie in which Robert Downey Jr. doesn't even really make AN IMPRESSION, and that's saying something. Hopefully Hamlet 2 will be good.

Pineapple Express

2009-08-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

This is one of those movies I started a review of but eventually deleted, having no real insight to offer on it, but then my friend told me that it's my duty to point out homo subtext in movies, and besides, reviews of movies in theaters draw more readers in than boring old movies on DVD. So, fine.

Seth Rogen, who stands a very good chance of luring me into a tempestuous affair before I run back to Aaron Eckhart, begging for forgiveness, plays Dale Denton, a process server who spends his days driving around, getting stoned, serving papers, and listening to talk radio. Can you imagine a comedy with a lead character who gets drunk and drives around? Anyway, Dale needs more bud and calls his dealer, Saul, who supplies him with the new brand, Pineapple Express, which is like "God's Vagina" and which only he has access to. Dale is about to split when Saul convinces him to stay for a bit, guilting him that no one wants to be friends with their dealer, they just do business and split. But after a while, split Dale does.

That night, Dale is parked outside a house where he sees a man get shot. Freaking, he throws his roach out the window, and takes off. The killer, Gary Cole as Ted, and his assistant, Rosie Perez as cop Carol, recognize the brand of weed—and you'll recall that only Saul has it. Dale runs to Saul's, they both panic, grab a huge bag of weed, and take off. They spend a funny panicked night in the woods, and wake sleeping in each other's arms. They then have to walk out of the woods, leading to the oft-noted scene of them playing leapfrog that is often mentioned in context of this film's [largely illusory] "indie sensibility." It's a bummer, because my notes were full of all the tiny homoerotic touches, like the way they sleep curled up together, but of course I threw those out when I decided not to finish the review.

Anyway, they arrive at the home of Red, played by suddenly-everywhere Danny McBride, who excels at playing obnoxiously ignorant putzes. Both my friend and I agreed that as lame as The Foot-Fist Way was, it clued us much more closely into McBride's brand of humor. Turns out Red is going to turn the duo in to the bumbling thugs that are after them, which results in a hilariously awkward fight all over the house. Blah, blah, the whole thing goes on with the guys constantly on the run in various locations and navigating several different situations.

Along the way they go over to the house of Dale's high school girlfriend [she's a safe 18], where the group has to take refuge as the thugs invade and instigate a shootout. I thought this whole scene with the disapproving parents, was hilarious and wouldn't have minded if the whole family was involved for much longer than they were. They realize that they have no money and sell drugs to young kids! Toward the end, Dale refuses to smoke any more and says "have you noticed we're not real productive when we're stoned?" which is the one "message" moment of this movie, and I definitely appreciate that they left it at that.

Throughout Dale and Saul have been in a blissful "romantic friendship" [as they say in Brideshead Revisited], very much along the lines of the adolescent homoerotic love of Superbad [written by the same people], but toward the end they have what is essence a lover's quarrel and split. During this time comes one of the movie's funniest moments, in which Dale and his girlfriend are crying as they reconcile on the phone, but her suggestion of marriage makes him cry with the heebies. The two friends reconcile when one comes to rescue the other, and this is enacted through a Blades of Glory-style physical comedy piece that looks as though they are having lusty anal sex. Once again, like in Superbad, the emotional climax of the movie is the character's declarations of love for one another. All of this is accompanied throughout by the oft-repeated line "Bros before hos," meaning that you should put your male friends before relationships with women, and I understand how that with into the whole homoerotic vibe here, but it was repeated to the point where I found it to become a little offensive. I obviously have no problem with romantic friendships between people of the same sex, but I find it unfortunate that it is so often accompanied by denigration of the opposite sex. Which is not to mention the fact that not all women are "hos." Once or twice is one thing, but it was repeated so often here it kind of becomes a theme of the movie, which is unfortunate. Regardless, I suppose it's good that straight guys are coming to a place where they can recognize a certain homoeroticism to their friendships without worrying that it automatically makes them gay. Anyway, there is a bombastic climax that parodies action movies, accompanied by overblown comedy gore, and eventually it's all over.

It was all quite funny, but once it's over it kind of fades away in one's mind and ultimately kind of ends up being a B+. Good, but unmemorable. This was directed by David Gordon Green, indie darling who rose to prominence with George Washington, released a few less well-received movies, and now jumps to the mainstream here. His name has led to much discussion of the "indie sensibility" he brings to this film, which to me is just so much hot air and wishful thinking. Everyone is good, Rogen we're familiar with, McBride is wonderful and hilarious, but the real shock is James Franco, returning to comedy. I never saw him on Freaks and Geeks, but he's wonderful here, charming, natural and funny—and really the only time he has seemed like an actual human being.

Anyway, it's cool, it's funny, it's got homo not-exactly-sub subtext, and it all fades away a few hours after it's over. To me, Superbad is the much better, sweeter, more focused and more affecting of the two, but this one'll kill a few hours in a pleasant fashion.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Sure, although if you haven't seen Superbad, give that one priority.

Paul Blart:Mall Cop

2009-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

I don’t watch TV, so I was kind of surprised by how totally cute the relatively svelte Kevin James was in Chuck and Larry. I kind of like the schlub type, to an extent. Then this movie promised James with a mustache and in a uniform, so when I was recovering from foot surgery and wanted to see something light n’ stupid, to this film I went. I was, however, unprepared for just how very light n’ stupid it was.

We begin with Blart doing pretty well on the test to join the New Jersey police force, which is his dream, but failing at the last moment as he is hypoglycemic, and suddenly falls asleep. He lives with his mother and daughter from his marriage to a Hispanic woman, who married him only to gain citizenship, and left him the second she got it. His mother and daughter encourage him to join an internet dating site, because his life is empty without romance. He is very excited about the pie his mom made for him, and slathers it in peanut butter before eating it. I suspect that some of this was intended to be humorous in some way.

At the mall he rides around on Segway and displays how very seriously he takes his job, portrayed throughout as absolutely pathetic, as he is disrespected by mall employees, customers, and his fellow guards. The humiliation he endures, for how seriously he takes his job and his weight, is unrelenting for the film’s first half hour—during which the plot is going NOWHERE—and kind of crosses the line into outright cruelty for me. Hey, why not have somebody piss on him? Why not have him slip, because he’s fat, and fall face first, mouth open, into a steaming pile of turds? That would be REALLY funny!

Meanwhile he’s smitten with this vacuous blonde, Amy, who works at a kiosk in the mall selling hair extensions. She is polite, but seems to have very little interest in him, but you know, fat people are pathetic and desperate for affection of any kind, so Paul is happy to suffer any indignity for the slightest bit of attention from this woman. She is, by the way, skinny as a rail, because as you know, it is NOT POSSIBLE for ANYONE, even an overweight man, to find an overweight woman attractive. Sorry, not possible! There is an overlong, totally unfunny, and flat-out dumb sequence where Paul gets drunk and makes a fool of himself at a karaoke bar. God, if only someone had puked on him, it would be comedy gold!

Finally the “plot” kicks in, where the security trainee Paul has been working with turns out to be the mastermind of a criminal operation to steal credit card numbers from the mall’s machines. Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have told you who the mastermind was, because it’s SUCH a surprise. Then the movie becomes a kind of Die Hard spoof as Blart inadvertently takes down the bad guys one by one and saves the mall.

This is where I expected Blart would redeem himself, and use his smarts to outwit the intruders, but sadly he remains as dunderheaded as ever, and most of his capturing of the villains is pure blundering that just happens to work out. The movie specifically goes out of its way to do this, in one scene having Blart momentarily disable an opponent by throwing something in his eyes, but then standing there like a fool, unable to take advantage of the situation. It’s kind of hard to get behind the redemption of this foolish schlub when he saves the day almost purely by accident, and is just as much a schulb by the end as he was at the beginning. And it starts to bring up questions such as “Why did I want to see this movie in the first place?”

One also ends the movie, in which [spoiler!] Blart ends up getting the girl at the end, wishing one could step on the screen and advise her to thank him politely, but decline any further contact. He even declines his dream job on the New Jersey police force to retain his job at the mall! Ladies, step away from the loser.

All of this is accompanied by phony uplift and an illusory sense that all is now right with the world, although nothing has really changed. Blart’s relationship with Amy is also a bit uncomfortable on all sides. Mostly for the aforementioned fact that the film positions Blart as a great guy that struggles with his weight, but is not nearly so generous to women. No, women must still be skinny and gorgeous, if they are to be attractive at all. And since Amy is such a pretty vacuum, the implication is that Blart likes mainly because she's beautiful and thin, which is apparently all you need in a woman. Maybe Amy really sees past Blart's weight to his true soul and loves him for who he really is, but the reality is far less likely, making it seem a little distastefully disingenuous to make it seem like she’s just delighted to run off with Blart at the end. Overweight people, the movie says, simply cannot find other overweight people attractive. This is of course on top of all the ribbing the movie has made on Blart’s weight. It’s the Shallow Hal of the new decade.

Anyway, not really worth expending this much effort on. The movie is admirably less violent than it could have been [perhaps helping to explain the large numbers of kids in the audience. Those kids will learn that fat people are intrinsically funny, and that overweight men can be attractive, but overweight women cannot. Not really that funny and leaving you with the feeling that you just paid $12 to watch a long sitcom, this one is best left to history.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

I wouldn’t, unless you have a lot of time to kill.

Bedazzled

2009-08-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

This is a British comedy from 1967 that was remade with Elizabeth Hurley and Brendon Frasier a few years back. I had an opportunity to watch that one on an airplane where I was stuck in my seat and had nothing else to do, and I still turned it off after just a few minutes. The original was just re-released on DVD, and received a rave review as being extremely clever and funny, so my friend who prefers to watch only movies that are worthwhile [snore] suggested we watch it for one of our movie nights.

It begins with a rather hip 60s credit sequence in which we find out that the music here was written by Dudley Moore, and the screenplay by Peter Cook, from a story thought up by the both of them. This was directed by Stanley Donen, director of the non-musical sequences of Singin’ in the Rain, as well as other things we'll talk about later.

So we see Dudley Moore as Stanley in church, asking God for just some small sign of his existence. Peter Cook as Satan sees him at this moment. Next we have a little establishing story of Stanley in this diner he works at, where Eleanor Bron is a waitress named Margaret. Stanley is desperately in love with Margaret, but is too shy to bust a move. He runs out after her when her shift is over to ask her out, but chickens out and sees her getting into some futuristic car with another guy.

So Stanley goes home to hang himself. He doesn’t succeed, and at that moment Satan shows up. He promises that Stanley can have anything he wants so long as he gives up “a tiny little thing you probably didn’t even know you had,” his soul. Satan, who is known in the world as Mr. Spiggott, is quite up front about being the devil, and here you start to get that droll British humor where every line is delivered in an absolutely flat everyday voice, and it’s only after a few seconds’ thinking that you realize what they’re saying is actually quite funny. For example, Spiggott hands Stanely the contract, and Stanley asks why he is referred to as “the damned.” “It’s formal words,” Spiggott says. “Legal jargon.” We see that Spiggott lives with personifications of the seven deadly sins. He promises Stanley seven wishes in exchange for his soul and Stanley signs.

All of his wishes revolve around getting Margaret. First he wishes to be intelligent and articulate. So he becomes this windy intellectual and Margaret is charmed, they repair to his house and listen to Brahms, and have an odd scene where they explore how lovely it is to touch things. But when Stanley moves to touch her [actually he pretty much grabs her and throws her down] she cries rape and his wish is over.

So he comes out of his wish, which he can do at any time by blowing a raspberry. Spiggott shows him what the real-life Margaret is doing right then, which is looking for his body in a pond [for in reality he is dead]. So then Stanley wishes that he could be married to Margaret and for her to be very lusty—and in his wish she is lusty, but for this hot boy toy she has, virtually ignoring her husband, Stanley. All his wishes go like this, with each of them playing different roles each time, and there always being some angle that Stanley didn’t think of that Spiggott exploits to ruin his wish.

So between all the sequences where Stanley gets his misguided wishes come scenes in which he hangs out with Spiggott, becoming friends with him and learning about his history. A lot of these scenes revolve around the regrets the devil has and how his dearest wish is to get back into heaven. One of my favorite scenes is where Spiggott is telling Stanley about what it’s like in heaven, how you just sit around doing nothing but worshipping God all day. Then he says [these are not direct quotes], “Okay, I’ll be God,” he hops up on a mailbox, “and you be an angel. Just dance around me and make up songs about how great I am.” Stanley dances around, saying “Oh God, you’re so great,” to which Spiggott-as-God matter-of-factly says “Thank you very much.” Stanley goes on until he finally says, “You know, this is getting really boring,” and Spiggott says “EXACTLY.” So Spiggott becomes more sympathetic and fleshed-out as the story goes on. One other area of constant amusement is how he’s always committing the most petty evil, like making parking meters go expired, switching phone connections, and my favorite, removing the “wet paint” sign from a fresh green park bench. At one point Stanley shows up just as Spiggott is smashing bananas ready for shipment to stores, and he asks “What are you doing?” to be told “Oh, routine mischief.”

While all this is going on, something of the homo is developing between them. At one point Spiggott lets Stanley sleep in his bed, and this is the first time Stanley mentions that “you’re the only one who’s ever taken an interest in me.” Spiggott then sends Lust in to his bed with Stanley—in the form of Raquel Welch, who, much as I love her, was not very good. During a later conversation, Spiggott mentions to Stanley how he sees God “nestling in your trousers.” Then, at the end, another mention that Spigott is “the only one I can talk to.” The tenderness that grows between them is quite sweet and, coupled with the reality that this relationship is much more secure and loving than the one Stanley shares with Margaret, is enough to make me list this movie in the “Homo Movies” section, even though it is not explicitly about gay people. Oh, which is not even to mention Barry Humphries, future Dame Edna, as the personification of Envy, here portrayed as a bitter queen who lies waiting in Spiggott’s bed. Oh yeah, and then that bit about the lesbian nuns.

When I told my friend that Donen directed the non-musical sequences of Singin’ in the Rain, he made a crack about “which no one remembers,” but I was surprised to see that there is a very advanced visual sense here, with most shots visually interesting and some of them amazingly beautiful. I’m sorry I couldn’t pull out any screen shots for you, but I had to return the movie before I could make it to my computer. One of my favorite shots has to do with a bunch of nuns in black-and-white habits spread out across a vivid green lawn, jumping up and down. But the visual sense is very intelligent and serves to tell the story, for example in a series of shots filmed through glass panels in a door; you’ll notice that Spiggott is in the upper left quadrant, and Stanley is in the lower right, visually suggesting Spiggott’s dominance and schematizing their relationship. When talk turns to sex there are shots along a pool cue as it shoots the white cue ball… lots of visual intelligence like that. Donen also directed On The Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Charade and… Saturn 3!

One last thing. In one wish Stanley wants to be lusted after by women, so Spiggott makes him into a pop star. He sings this song called “Love Me,” which is fine enough, but then Spiggott comes on after and sings the title song, this moody low-key number in which he drones “I don’t love you… you don’t move me… go away…” and more, which is okay in itself, but is notable for basically anticipating a great deal of the pop that came into vogue in the 80s. The whole thing about low-key emotion, songs of disaffection sung in a flat, monotone voice against a murmuring background, the singer in a suit, barely moving, became what groups such as Pet Shop Boys and New Order and Depeche Mode and any number of others were all about. Maybe there was a lot more music like this song in vogue in 1967 [I assume so, and that this song was parodying it], but if not, we have to credit this movie with foreseeing the music of an entire decade, a decade in advance. I haven’t been able to find out if that is included in the music Dudley Moore wrote for the film.

Okay, so now to the less positive. Both me and my friend found this movie, overall, to be simultaneously funny and not funny at all. It is very clever verbally, with certain lines very carefully written to provide little jokes right as a certain visual onscreen, or to supply little puns that are so subtle they are easy to miss. For example, during the wish where Stanley’s wife is horny—for someone else—Spiggott, playing croquet, hands his “blue balls” to the caddy. And there are a million little things like that sprinkled throughout the movie, as well as just the general deadpan British demeanor and droll way of putting things. So on that level it’s very funny, but there’s a whole layer of jokes on a more literal level that were just kind of, well, stupid. For example, during that same fantasy when Stanley’s wife lusts for someone else, he keeps bringing her gifts that she ignores—jewels, furs—until he finally brings her the Mona Lisa, and there’s a joke about how it’s the real one. I can’t remember more [I blocked them out], but suffice to say that there is this very sophisticated verbal and tonal humor going on at the same time as this very base and cringeworthy obvious and lowbrow humor.

And finally, the fatal blow; Stanley’s seven wishes just get really boring and routine. So Spiggott is going to find a loophole in every one, we get it, and we get it after four wishes [actually we get it after two, I’m trying to be generous], leaving three left to sit through. This movie is only 104 minutes, but seemed much longer. Similarly, even though Cook and Moore are essentially playing different roles in each wish, after a while they all sort of become the same, and the entire thing gains a sheen of tedium.

Overall, the good and clever and funny and interesting outweighs the bad, making it definitely worth the rental, but the thick vein of lowbrow humor and the overall tedium of the whole concept conspire to keep it from becoming the brilliant film it might have been.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Yes, although it doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

The Cat o' Nine Tails

2009-08-03T11:35:00.001-07:00

Dario Argento's second film, his follow-up to the internationally successful Bird with the Crystal Plumage, accentuates the mystery angle of the giallo rather than emphasize the violence. This might turn off fans who've come to know Argento's work from more celebrated — and sanguinary — works like Deep Red (1975), Suspiria ('77) and Tenebre ('82). To date, this is the "mildest" Argento film we've seen when it comes to blood 'n' guts. Aside from a 3-second shot of Catherine Spaak's bare breasts and a single "Oh, shit!", there's nothing in this movie that couldn't be shown uncut on network TV. The whodunit angle predominates here, buttressed by more character development than is customary for Argento flicks. The subtle dashes of humor may also seem unusual to those familiar only with the Italian director's later works.
A break-in at Rome's prestigious Terzi Institute for Genetic Research seems at first to be of little consequence. As nothing appears to have been stolen the incident is chalked up to a botched attempt at industrial espionage. But blind puzzle-maker Franco Arno (Malden), who lives just across the street from the scientific complex, is convinced otherwise. At the time of the break-in he overheard a strange conversation between two people in a car parked outside the gate — one of them mentioned blackmail. The next day a top scientist from the institute, Dr. Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero), is killed when he falls in front of a train. The police think it's an unrelated accident. Arno knows better: his 10-year old "seeing eye" niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis), identifies the dead man as one of those present in the parked car just before the break-in. A journalist prior to losing his sight, Arno takes his hunch to cynical but dedicated reporter Carlo Giordani (Franciscus). The newsman quickly comes around to Arno's theory of foul play when a photographer who happened to snap a picture of the train station "accident" is brutally murdered, his film stolen. A series of killings soon follows, each with ties in one way or another to the institute's personnel and/or the secretive research being done there. Dissatisfied with the progress being made by the police, Giordani and Arno team up to pursue their own investigation of the crimes. The murderer is on to them, however, and plans to eliminate these amateur sleuths before they get too close to the truth.
The Cat o' Nine Tails is a satisfying, if overly drawn out, Italian whodunit featuring perhaps the best lead performances in any Argento film. Veteran American actors Karl Malden (A Streetcar Named Desire, Patton) and James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of The Apes) play very well off one another, with each character bringing his own special attributes to the solving of the mystery. Malden is particularly good in his role as the blind puzzle designer. While restraining himself in the presentation of violence and gore this time out (the flick is less bloody than 1969's Bird), Argento nevertheless retains a few visual tricks up his sleeve — there are some nicely-helmed stalking scenes and subjective 'killer's view' camera shots here — on the job training, it would seem, for the director's tour de force thrillers to follow. The jazz-themed, often dissonant score by Ennio Morricone also lends gravitas to the proceedings.
If you're looking for stunning, vicious murders a la Deep Red, or the wall-coating arterial spray of Tenebre, then this early Argento work will likely disappoint. If you've the patience for a stylish and sometimes leisurely-paced mystery, Cat o' Nine Tails should fill the bill admirably.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

2009-08-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

Mercenaries hunt for the elusive Alfredo Garcia, intending to deliver his severed head as proof that he's been eliminated in order to collect a million dollar bounty...
Sam Peckinpah — often referred to as "Bloody Sam" by fans and detractors alike — was in a peculiarly precarious position when he made this deeply personal film. Having been nominated for an Academy Award for The Wild Bunch (curiously, only for the script; his direction went without a nod), he secured a top spot in the film industry as a major filmmaker, but his difficult personality and struggles with alcohol, drug addiction and paranoia started to become more noticeable. His next film, the U.K.-lensed thriller Straw Dogs (1971), created a huge stir upon its release, but quieter vehicles like Junior Bonner and The Ballad of Cable Hogue went more or less unnoticed; an increasingly cynical Peckinpah came to the conclusion that audiences just wanted slow motion violence from him, and he may even have been right. The commercial and critical failure of his heavily compromised Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (an epic recut and basically rendered incomprehensible by its studio) embittered Peckinpah to such a degree that he decided to work outside the studio system in an attempt to regain creative control. Alfredo Garcia allowed him such control, though the peculiar, bordering-on-surreal end product left audiences cold and critics of the time shaking their fists with righteous indignation.
As one might gather from the title, the film is as close to a horror film as Peckinpah ever created. Lurid moniker to one side, however, the film isn't anywhere near as vicious or graphically gory as some of his other films. Instead, it wallows in an atmosphere of such seediness and squalor that one is ready to take a shower after viewing it. The story works as something of a pastiche of film noir conventions, with its put-upon protagonist (a brilliant turn by Warren Oates) subjected to one indignation and calamity after another. Along the way, he meets with a variety of bizarre characters, ranging from a pair of gay hitmen (Robert Webber and Gig Young) to a pair of motorcycle-riding rapists (one of them played by Kris Kristofferson), and is ultimately reduced to holding rambling, confessional conversations with a severed head. While the early section of the film derives from fun in its depiction of Oates as a wannabe tough guy, the narrative ultimately forces him to be more decisive and single-minded in his purpose, ultimately carrying himself with the steely determination of, say, William Holden's Pike in The Wild Bunch. Oates, in a rare leading role, gives an Oscar caliber performance here — he covers an amazing range of emotions in the space of less than two hours, effectively retaining a human edge to the character throughout. He makes for one of the most endearing protagonists of any of Peckinpah's movies, making one regret that the late actor hadn't been given more such opportunities in his all-too-short career. The supporting cast is impressive. Isela Vega is seductive and sympathetic as Oates' love interest. There's a believability and realism to Vega's performance that helps to give the film a human core. Robert Webber and Gig Young, surprisingly cast as gay assassins, play their roles with great strength and presence, resisting the urge to transform the characters into camp stereotypes. Kris Kristofferson also does a nice job in his cameo, though his sequence feels like an unnecessary digression.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a deeply personal project for Peckinpah. Those close to the director have remarked that Oates is basically playing Peckinpah — he mimics the external characteristics (mustache, dark glasses, mannerisms) while embodying something of the director's mercenary, nihilistic attitude. The film reflects a bitter and melancholy disposition, something which was by all accounts very much a part of its maker's psyche at the time. It is also something of a last hurrah for Peckinpah — a brooding, darkly humorous, deeply felt portrait of obsession that stands in stark contrast with the mostly indifferent work that would follow it (with the exception of the World War II drama Cross of Iron starring James Coburn, Maximilian Schell and James Mason, his remaining films never really hit the mark).

Bride of Frankenstein

2009-08-03T11:32:00.001-07:00

James Whale's brilliant follow-up to his 1931 smash Frankenstein is that uncommon rarity in movies, a sequel that's superior to the original. A true treasure of Hollywood's "Golden Age", Bride is — almost 70 years on — rightly considered one of the greatest American films of all time.
Working with more control and a bigger budget than he enjoyed on the first film, Whale fashions a near perfect blend of horror, satire and absurd humor. Inspired by the German Expressionist design of Lang and Murnau, the huge gothic sets (interior and exterior) are absolutely marvelous. The performances of the players are equal to the milieu created for them. Colin Clive is thankfully more restrained here as Henry Frankenstein; Ernest Thesinger’s Dr. Pretorious — accentuating his relish for sacrilege with a devilish foppery — remains one of the most memorable mad scientists of the movies. Created by Frankenstein and Pretorius as a mate for the lonely Monster, Elsa Lanchester's surprisingly short screen time as the "bride" was nonetheless powerful enough to make an indelible impression on pop culture.
The amazing Boris Karloff (now portraying a creature with the power of speech) matches his brilliant performance in the first film... That he was passed over for an Oscar nomination is inexcusable. His interpretation of this iconic role will live forever.

Blood Freak

2009-08-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

Fashioned with a 'one take only' philosophy that makes Ed Wood look like Stanley Kubrick, Blood Freak is, in a word, in-freakin'-credible. I've seen my share of really bad movies but this one's a stunner. It's undeniably unique: an anti-drug gore film with a pro-Christian message, featuring a homicidal monster with the body of a man and the head of a turkey. He murders dope addicts to drink their blood, the only way he can satisfy his own chemical-induced addiction. Frankly, the flick left me completely stupefied when I wasn't cackling with uncontrolled mirth. Before experiencing this one-of-a kind horror I'd have normally refused to accept its very existence. After all... why in God's name would anyone make such a thing? What would possess them to? But seeing is believing.
A beefy nomadic biker dude with an Elvis 'do named Herschell (co-director Steve Hawkes) plays the Good Samaritan when he helps a pretty woman named Angel (Heather Hughes) with car trouble. He escorts her back to the house she shares with her foxy sister Ann (Dana Cullivan), where a pot party is in full swing. Though Angel is a scripture-quoting Christian, Ann is a party animal druggie with a brain the size of a walnut. She offers Herschell a little ganja but he seems more interested in Angel's views on God. Rebuffing Ann's advances, he accepts Angel's offer to let him crash at their house while he looks for a job. A friend of Angel's who runs a turkey farm offers Herschell a job starting the following week.
Which gives Ann more than enough time to work her wiles. She may be dumb as a box of rocks but she's a looker. Herschell doesn't really stand a chance. Soon Ann has him tokin' the Devil Weed and tumbling into bed with her. Trouble is, the pot she gave him is a particularly potent variety that has him hooked in no time. (Oh, say about 10 minutes.) Later, when Herschell reports for his first day at work, he finds out his new job is as a human guinea pig testing chemically altered turkey meat. The turkey farm scientists assure him it's perfectly safe to consume and offer to fix him up with some primo drugs to boot. Herschell tucks into his new job with gusto, eating most of a cooked bird without so much as a side dollop of mashed potatoes or even anything to drink. Afterwards he starts to feel sick, passing out in a field. When he wakes up, Herschell is a new man — one with a gigantic turkey head made out of papier-mâché and a thirst for blood. He kidnaps a couple of female heroin junkies, hangs them upside down from a ladder, then slices open their throats to (rather sloppily) drink the arterial spray... which, in the case of the 1st victim, actually jets out of her shirt rather than her neck. He also strangles an old man who witnesses one of the murders. Then he kills a relative of the old man, a fat, beer-bellied redneck, who attacks him in revenge. A regretful Ann, horrified by her boyfriend's condition, enlists a couple of hippy stoners to try to help poor Herschell by supplying him with drugs. He ends up undermining their efforts by cutting off the leg of a drug dealer with a buzz saw. All throughout these nonsensical proceedings a chain-smoking on-camera narrator (co-director Brad Grinter, reading from a script on his desk) occasionally chimes in, failing miserably at tying it all together. And would you believe it? — the thing actually has a happy ending!
Made for about ten dollars tops, Blood Freak is an incredibly stupid, completely inept piece of... er, filmmaking which by no sane law of the universe should even exist. But it does, and hardcore cheese lovers will want to seek it out for precisely that reason. It's just staggering how bad this movie is! It amusingly stumbles right out of the gate, repeating both the title and "Starring Steve Hawkes" twice within the span of a few minutes. The plot makes no sense, continuity is thrown to winds, and it looks to have been edited by Helen Keller. There's no point in critiquing the acting because there just isn't any to speak of. The attempt at a Christian message is apparently sincere, yet it throws in messy gore effects and even a brief shot of Ann's bare backside. The murder scenes are hysterical, especially the dismemberment of the drug dealer (apparently played by a guy with only one leg in real life)... Clutching the bleeding plastic stump, he screams at the top of his lungs for a full minute before expiring. The film's one attempt at an action sequence, the attack by the vengeful redneck, will leave you slack-jawed in utter astonishment. (For a fat guy he vaults that fence quite nimbly.) If you think you've seen the absolute dregs of American Z-grade schlock cinema (The Creeping Terror, Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Mighty Gorga, etc.) but haven't yet experienced Blood Freak, I'm confident that the world's only "Turkey-Monster-Anti-Drug-Pro-Jesus Gore film" should provide you with an entirely new perspective. Fans of 'So Bad They're Good' flicks will definitely want to gobble this 'un up — though it certainly helps if you're blitzed when you watch it.

Blood and Black Lace

2009-08-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, master visualist Mario Bava's shocking (for its time) '60s murder mystery is available in America in uncut form. This is the seminal film that drew the blueprint for the giallo — a particularly Italian genre of suspense/horror/mystery thriller with an emphasis on bizarre psychological aberrations and intense murder scenes.
With a diverse pallet of candy-colored hues and sinister shadows, Bava weaves a tale of savage multiple murders with the Christiana Haute Couture, a high-profile house of fashion, at its vortex. The models there are leading scandalous lives behind the scenes and the tell-all diary of one of the women, Isabella, chronicles all the sordid details. When Isabella turns up brutally murdered and the diary's existence becomes public knowledge, no one can feel safe. Will the price of learning its secrets be horrible death?
Accompanied by Carlo Rustichelli's swanky core, Bava's Blood and Black Lace establishes all the giallo formula's key ingredients. The faceless, black-gloved killer that came to stalk the cinematic landscape through the works of Dario Argento, Sergio Martino and others made his first dramatic appearance here. This had to be strong stuff for the mid-'60s. Not because of gore (which is actually mild), but for the grim sadism with which some of the victims are dispatched. It still packs a punch. Goosebumps are guaranteed.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

2009-08-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

The first of four follow-ups to the groundbreaking 1968 science fiction classic, Beneath the Planet of the Apes bears all the marks of a cheap, quickie sequel designed solely to cash in on the phenomenal success of the original. This wasn't entirely due to the edicts of penny-pinching studio execs, however. Charlton Heston, A-List star of the first film, loathed the idea of returning for a sequel. He was eventually cajoled into appearing in it by the suits at Fox, on the condition that he'd only be available for two weeks of shooting and that his character, Taylor, would not be the lead role. Heston also dictated the shockingly downbeat ending — shocking, that is, for kiddie-age fans like me at the time — which the actor believed would not just preclude his participation in any further sequels, but bury the notion of there being any additional Apes movies at all. Given such demands by the ostensible star of the then-potential franchise, it isn't so surprising that Fox hedged its bets and slashed the production budget in half.
At any rate, ol' Chuck was certainly right on the first count but very, very wrong on the second.
Beneath literally picks up where Planet of the Apes left off, using the famous final scenes of the original to pad its relatively short running time. Taylor, accompanied by his primitive mate Nova (the gorgeous Linda Harrison), rides off into the desolate Forbidden Zone to find his "destiny". Enter astronaut Brent (Valley of Gwangi's James Franciscus), sole survivor of a rescue mission launched on the same trajectory as Taylor's missing spacecraft. Beyond knowing that he's somehow been thrown forward in time to the year 3955 A.D., Brent has no idea what planet he's on or whether the same fate befell Taylor and crew. Luckily he encounters Nova, riding alone, when she approaches the wreckage of his crashed ship. Being mute she's unable to explain her history with Taylor — from the NASA dog tags she carries Brent knows that she's at least met him at some point — nor can she describe how he mysteriously vanished into thin air after experiencing weird phenomena in the Forbidden Zone. (Which we're made privy to via flashback.) Obeying Taylor's command to seek out sympathetic chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius should anything ever befall him, Nova leads Brent to Ape City. Here the astronaut clandestinely observes the apes from a vantage point in the woods. Brent is staggered by what he sees: a swaggering military leader, the gorilla general Ursus (James Gregory), giving a speech to assembled ape officials calling for a preemptive war of conquest against the unknown beings said to exist in the Forbidden Zone. Extolling the virtues of "naked, merciless force" and making plain that "the only good human is a dead human," Ursus' harangue leaves Brent with little doubt that whatever planet this might be, it's going to seriously suck being stranded here. There's no alternative but to continue the quest for Taylor while avoiding the apes as much as possible.
Given a map and provisions by Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (David Watson, subbing for Roddy McDowell), Brent and Nova try to sneak away from Ape City but are caught by a security patrol. This merely sets up a plot-padding set-piece in which they escape captivity — narrowly missing out being used for target practice by Ursus' troops — and are subsequently chased by gorilla cavalry. The humans shake their pursuers by ducking into a cave which they soon discover leads into the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system. Brent, faced with the same chilling truth as Taylor at the end of POTA, takes the demise of civilization in comparative stride — no "Goddamn you all to hell!" outbursts of rage from this guy. Besides, there are more pressing matters afoot... He and Nova are taken prisoner by human mutants possessing formidable mental powers (telepathy, mind control, image projection), who've created their own subterranean society beneath the ruins of old New York and worship a nuclear missile as a god. The mutants have no empathy for the 'lesser-developed' members of their own species, looking down on the newcomers with as much disdain as would the apes. Joy at finding Taylor alive — he, too, is held captive by the mutants — is stillborn with the revelation that their hosts don't intend to let them live. And the ape army, led by Ursus and Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), has found ingress to the mutant's underground lair...
When compared to its masterful progenitor, Beneath the Planet of the Apes looks pretty shoddy. The reduction in budget is principally reflected by lower quality special effects (some unconvincing matte paintings, dodgy front-projection) and the noticeably stiff pullover masks worn by many of the ape extras in lieu of more elaborate (i.e., expensive) makeup appliances. The episodic script plays as if hastily cobbled together from various drafts, as was apparently the case in order to meet Heston's conditions. Ted Post's direction is workmanlike and uninspired; it certainly lacks the artistry and visual force of Franklin Shaffner's original. Hunter and Evans, excellent performers returning from the first film, are pretty much wasted in their greatly reduced roles. As Cornelius, Watson does a surprisingly good job of imitating McDowell's voice and mannerisms, although you can still tell he isn't really the Cornelius. (If you're a fan of the '68 original it's actually a bit distracting.) Franciscus, a likable, athletic second-tier leading man, gives a fine physical performance but, as written, his character is so generic he could be called simply 'American Astronaut' instead of Brent. (Contrast this with the fascinating character arc undergone by Heston's Taylor in POTA.) The only performer to really make an impression is TV veteran Gregory, whose booming, gravelly baritone seems the perfect voice for the warmongering Ursus. Heston, of course, is Heston — Taylor may only have 20 minutes on the screen this time around but he's for damn sure going to have the final say on how things turn out.
Heavily flawed as it may be, the movie is still not without entertainment value. Beneath blows as the continuation of a landmark "SF" film but as pulp "sci-fi" it's actually not too bad — certainly as good if not better than any contemporary stuff made in that genre. Other than a disposable scene in which chimpanzee peaceniks vainly protest, Vietnam War style, against Ursus' military campaign, there are no stabs at social commentary or analysis. The film is purely content to show us what happened next after Taylor rode away from that statue on the beach, throwing in some action, adventure and bomb-worshipping mutants along the way.

Black Dragons

2009-08-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

Cheap, dull and poorly scripted, this wartime Monogram potboiler can be a real chore to sit through. Barely over an hour's running time feels more like two. Even the always watchable Bela Lugosi can't save it — though his presence is the only reason to bother.
Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor six members of Japan's nationalistic Black Dragon society are transformed by plastic surgery into exact doubles of prominent American industrialists. Switched for their counterparts, once the war is underway these 'deep cover' agents use their high positions to sabotage the U.S. war effort and gather vital information about new weapons projects, troop deployments and the like. The Black Dragon spy ring operates with apparent impunity until one by one its members start turning up murdered on the steps of the now-closed Japanese embassy in Washington D.C., a ceremonial dagger clutched in each victim's hand. U.S. intelligence agents are completely baffled by the case; they're still in the dark about the true identities of the murdered men. (Apparently any autopsies performed on the bodies failed to uncover signs of plastic surgery.) All they know is that each of the victims attended a dinner party held at the mansion of a wealthy D.C. physician, Dr. Saunders (George Pembroke), who has suddenly fallen ill and remains secluded in his room. The only people with access to Saunders are his faithful butler and a mysterious houseguest, one Monsieur Colomb (Lugosi), an "old friend" of the doctor's who showed up the night of the fateful party.
"Colomb" is in reality Dr. Melcher, a diehard Nazi scientist and the Third Reich's foremost plastic surgeon. His services were loaned to Japan by Hitler but he was double-crossed by the Japanese once he'd completed the transformation of the six Black Dragon agents. Imprisoned because he alone knows the identities of the spies (and the men they've replaced), Melcher somehow escaped from Japan and made his way to America under the alias 'Colomb'. Now he's exacting an insidious revenge by bumping them off one by one. I suppose the idea of simply leaking his knowledge of the spy ring to U.S. authorities never occurred to him...
Black Dragons is the kind of creaky potboiler that makes flicks like The Devil Bat look good in comparison. Despite the plot don't expect any 'spy smasher' serial-type action. It owes more to the 'Old Dark House' formula than anything else, with Lugosi creeping around Saunder's mansion, eavesdropping on conversations, slipping in and out undetected, hiding bodies, etc. He's kept on his toes when Saunders' pretty niece Alice (Joan Barclay) shows up for a visit and government agent Dick Martin (future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore) comes snooping around. But for the most part nothing really happens.
The ending is incredibly contrived, and the explanation of who Colomb really is and what motivates his revenge is tacked on via flashback in the last five minutes of the movie. About the only pleasure to be derived from Black Dragons — even for serious Lugosi fans — comes from a few passages of truly abominable dialog, the goofiest of which is recreated below:
Alice: I heard a strange noise, like a body falling.
Colomb: Why, I was stumbling. I was awkward.
Alice: Yes, but... there were gurgling sounds.
Colomb: Oh! I was humming. Is my voice as bad as that?
And that's about as good — or rather unintentionally humorous — as the film gets. Only rabid acolytes of Lugosi will want to waste their time.

Blacula

2009-08-03T09:48:00.001-07:00

With the "Blaxploitation" trend of the early to mid-1970s, a movie of this nature — an African-American Dracula on the prowl in modern day L.A. — was inevitable. Fortunately for the film and the audience, Blacula has in its leading man an actor of William Marshall's caliber and screen presence. The classically trained thespian comports himself with dignity and a panache above and beyond the call of the material and its meager budget.
Marshall, best known to the public as the mad Dr. Daystrom from the classic "Ultimate Computer" episode of original Star Trek (as well as the King of Cartoons on Pee-Wee's Playhouse), really throws himself into the role. With his regal bearing and rich baritone voice he's easily the American equivalent of Christopher Lee — only his performance as the cursed African prince Mamuwalde is substantially better than many of Lee's turns as Dracula. For one thing, he's given much more dialog and screen time.
In a pre-titles prologue set in the late 1700s we are introduced to Mamuwalde and his bride Luva (Vonetta McGee of The Great Silence), who are on an embassy to Europe on behalf of their nation. A Western-educated prince of the Niger River delta's Ibani tribe, Mamuwalde is touring the continent to enlist aid in ending the slave trade. Unfortunately for him and his wife, their travels bring them to the dinner table of a certain Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula (Charles McCauley). Not only does the Count insult him, he bites him on the neck as well. Locking Mamuwalde in a coffin, Dracula condemns him to an eternity of unrequited thirst — cursing him with his own name and dubbing him "Blacula". Luva is sealed up in the chamber to starve, doomed to hear her undead husband's cries of agony from within his prison.
Animated credits treat us to an upbeat funky soul groove that leaves the 18th Century far behind. Two gay interior decorators from California are in Europe on a business trip buying antiques. After signing a deal for the contents of Castle Dracula, everything — including a certain coffin — is shipped back to a warehouse in Los Angeles. While examining the shipment (at night, of course) they unknowingly free Mamuwalde from the coffin and are attacked. (Whenever Blacula is about to put the bite on a victim he suddenly sprouts extra facial hair a la Mr. Hyde, including extra-bushy eyebrows, muttonchops, and a widow's peak.) Replenished with fresh blood, the Prince is further delighted when he happens upon a stylish, nearly floor-length cape in the warehouse. Accentuating his wardrobe, Mamuwalde climbs back into his coffin for a few more Zs, laughing lustily.
Hip police forensics scientist Dr. Gordon Thomas (TV and Blaxploitation movie vet Thalmus Rasulala) is puzzled by the mysterious death of one of the designers, Bobby, a childhood friend of Gordon's fiancée Michelle (lovely Denise Nicholas of TV's Room 222). As more bodies begin turning up and people disappear, Dr. Thomas slowly comes to the realization that vampires could possibly exist. When a dead female cab driver rises from the slab and attacks a morgue attendant, Thomas's skeptical white friend, LAPD lieutenant Jack Peters (Colossus: The Forbin Project's Gordon Pinsent), is brought in on the hunt. In the meantime, Michelle's sister Tina — who happens to look exactly like the long-departed Luva (and is again played by McGee) — is being romanced by a tall mysterious stranger in a cape...
Politically incorrect by today's standards, Blacula manages to stereotype blacks, whites and gays all at the same time, a common denominator of low budget '70s exploitation fare. The kitschy, obligatory musical number during the initial nightclub scene will be a good time to raid the fridge. Yet it's a surprisingly entertaining B-movie that still elicits a scare or two in between the unintentional laughs, particularly the slow motion attack on Sam the morgue attendant (Elisha Cook Jr., sporting one of the phoniest-looking "hook hands" I've ever seen).
Rasulala fills the vampire hunter role nicely here. He's a likeable, action-oriented guy who's not afraid to take a flying leap at the undead, stake in hand, with all the vigor and determination of Peter Cushing's Van Helsing in Horror of Dracula. Marshall completely steals the show, though, as Mamuwalde — invoking both a hissable villain (though I suspect urban audiences at the time were expected to cheer Blacula's thrashing of white cops) and a sympathetic character who doesn't deserve his fate.

Blackenstein

2009-08-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

If you're expecting something enjoyable along the lines of Blacula then forget it. Blackenstein is a blaxploitation picture without a solitary trace of funk, an inept horror film whose dime store production values, pathetic acting and clumsy direction can't even manage to be unintentionally funny — it's just smelly-dog-crap-on-the-bottom-of-your-shoe awful. Given the inane story's potential for Velveeta-coated goodness I actually felt dissed by the flick when it was finally over.
A young African-American PhD, Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), arrives at the southern California mansion of her former university mentor, Dr. Stein (John Hart), to become his research assistant. The main reason she took the position was to be near her boyfriend, Eddie (Joe De Sue), who's just come home from the Vietnam War minus his arms and legs from a land mine explosion. Winifred hopes that Dr. Stein, winner of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for (ahem) Medicine, can help rehabilitate Eddie with some kind of experimental therapy — conveniently he's the world's leading authority on DNA research and limb transplantation. Stein accompanies Winifred to the veteran's hospital where Eddie is a patient and, after visiting with him, has the wounded man moved to the mansion to begin treatment.
With some injections of "DNA formula" and the attachment of spare pairs of limbs — it's never mentioned where Stein got 'em — Eddie makes remarkable progress. Before you know it he's able to embrace Winifred with his new arms as the couple plans their future together. This potentially happy ending isn't appreciated by Malcolm (Roosevelt Jackson), Stein's odd-voiced, stiffly formal servant. Malcolm, it seems, fell in love with the winsome Winifred the moment she arrived at the mansion. After she rejects his clumsy advances, the vengeful Malcolm decides to get even by switching Eddie's DNA formula with another solution. Winifred and Stein are puzzled about the sudden reversal of Eddie's progress, especially as his head begins taking on a pronounced square shape. Unknown to them, at night Eddie takes his new legs for a long and very slow stroll away from the mansion, somehow making it all the way to the veteran's hospital where he rips the arm off an orderly who cruelly tormented him during his stay there. Morphed by the wrong formula into a poor man's image of the Frankenstein Monster, Eddie continues his nocturnal killing spree by strangling and ripping the guts out of anyone he encounters. (The gore footage is so lame and phony-looking that I can't assign a 'Blood 'n' Guts' icon to this review.) The unlucky sap can't help it, of course; it's all Malcolm's fault. The conniving servant ultimately pays for his crime but Eddie, too, will have to be destroyed in the end.
Blackenstein is a real endurance test, one which I readily failed. I actually turned the movie off for a few hours and otherwise occupied myself before returning for the second half, something that is definitely not my policy to do. (After all, I made it through Mesa of Lost Women and Lust for Frankenstein in single sittings.) The movie should be funny, at the very least unintentionally so; instead it just lays there like Eddie before receiving his limb transplants. When the film finally becomes ambulatory it still creeps along like molasses in January... In one scene our titular monster takes one minute and fifteen seconds to simply cross a room, a cinematic moment that seems to last an eternity. (When your monster makes Kharis the Mummy look like the Roadrunner in comparison, you might as well hang it up.) Two-thirds the way through, the film decides to take a break by switching to a nightclub where we get two wretchedly unfunny jokes from a charisma-free M.C. ("A man walks into a bar with a dog...") and a blues number from a singer. Had Dolemite been performing there instead, the movie might at least have had five minutes of watchable footage.

Black Sabbath

2009-08-03T09:44:00.001-07:00

Boris Karloff serves as M.C. in this trilogy of ghoulish stories... The Telephone deals with a high class call girl (luscious Michele Mercier) who is being terrorized by phone calls from her ex-pimp; The Wurdalak tells the tale of an elderly farmer (Karloff) who returns home from a trip, having been turned into a vampire; and A Drop of Water is about a nurse (Jacqueline Soussard) who steals a dead woman's ring and soon comes to regret it.
One of the most distinctive and individualistic artists ever to work primarily in the horror genre, Mario Bava is beloved for his baroque style and mastery of varying genres. With his sly sense of humor and irony, an undeniable mastery of mood and atmosphere, and the ability to make high quality cinema with very little at his disposal, Bava forged a body of work that can rightly be called unique. This was a filmmaker who not only guided the actors through the motions and told the camera operator where to point the camera — he was a brilliant cinematographer and special effects artist who oversaw nearly every facet of production and stamped an unmistakable personality on every film he directed, be the end result good, bad or indifferent.
Black Sabbath (I Tre Volti Della Paura, "The Three Faces Of Fear") is one of his most beloved films and came during a period of ferocious creativity for the director. Sandwiched between the equally well regarded Whip and the Body (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), it also helped rekindle an interest in anthology-based horror films; the following year saw the production of Amicus Films' first omnibus Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. The film offers an insight into Bava's complete mastery of the genre as he serves up three tales that touch on the major subgenres. The first tale is an early example of the giallo, a variety of murder mystery Bava had helped to define, cinematically, in the previous year's Girl Who Knew Too Much. Originally altered by U.S. distributor American International Pictures (AIP) so as to remove the 'adult' content (prostitution, lesbianism, etc.) and replace it with a nonsensical supernatural theme, in its original form (preserved on this DVD) it plays as a compelling, somewhat sleazy and defiantly downbeat opening act that sets the stage for the director's later gialli.
Story number two is more traditional, being a period-set vampire tale that harkens back to Bava's debut success, Black Sunday (1960). In it, Karloff gives one of his best latter-day performances as the creepy but oddly sympathetic vampire doomed to drink the blood of those he loves the best. The stagebound atmospherics, colored gel lighting and keen use of sound make up for some lulls in the story.
Best of all is the last segment, set somewhere in between the modern first story and the "once upon a time" second act. Compact and legitimately scary, it reflects the director's interest in Russian literature in its tale of a woman who becomes a victim to her guilty conscience. Almost bereft of dialogue, it's a fantastic example of visual storytelling that builds to a finale that has haunted many viewers for forty years.
Clearly the work of a gifted artist at the peak of his powers, Black Sabbath is a classic of its kind and is sure to appeal to horror fans, whether they're into 'Euro-Cult' or not.

Beast from Haunted Cave

2009-08-03T09:41:00.001-07:00

This low budget cheapie, just one of the scores of flicks which rolled off the Roger Corman assembly line in the late '50s, actually took me by surprise. The mixture of gangsters and monsters, plus the snowbound setting, is certainly unusual for its day, especially with a script that for once isn't aimed strictly at the kiddies.
Crime boss Alex (Frank Wolff), his boozy girlfriend Gypsy (Sheila Carol) and henchmen Byron (Wally Campo) and Marty (Richard Sinatra) have come to a sleepy South Dakota ski resort posing as tourists. Their plan is to raid the administration office of a nearby gold mine, where Alex knows a small but valuable cache of gold bars is stored in an easily opened vault. Marty is to plant a bomb in the mine itself, which at the appointed time will serve as a handy diversion for the small resort town's citizens. Alex has already arranged for the local ski instructor, Gil Jackson (Michael Forest), to guide his party on a cross-country trip to an isolated cabin deep in the forest. A ski plane is scheduled to land near the cabin at a prearranged time to pick up the gang and spirit them to Canada. The unsuspecting Gil is to be eliminated.
Events, however, take a strange turn the night before the robbery. As a cover for his bomb planting, Marty takes the town slut, barmaid Natalie (Linné Ahlstrand), up to the mine for a little hanky panky. While setting the charge he finds the remains of a strange egg in one of the shafts. Then he and Natalie are attacked by a weird, moaning creature, a monstrous, spider-like thing covered in wispy filaments. A visibly shaken Marty returns to the ski lodge alone, telling Alex that Natalie is dead, killed by some kind of monster. Alex thinks Marty is off his rocker, that it was he who killed the girl. No matter; the heist is to go down as planned. And it does. The bomb detonates on time, drawing the townsfolk and any law officers to the site of the blast. Alex, Marty and Byron break into the mine office and fill their backpacks with gold bars. Then they hightail it to the lodge, where Gypsy and Gil await them to start the cross-country trek into the wilderness. But something is following them...
As alluded to in the opening paragraph, Beast from Haunted Cave is much better than it has any right to be. The script spends an unusual amount of time on characterization, particularly Alex's world-weary moll, Gypsy, believably played by Carol, and Gil, the "mountain man" who's anything but the slowwitted yokel the gang thinks he is. (Michael Forest, perhaps best known to EC readers as Apollo in the classic Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonis?", makes an appealing hero.) Most of the dialog is on a more adult level than one would expect, especially between these two characters. First-time director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Shatter) doesn't allow the low budget to hamstring him, giving the film a perceptible 'crime noir' edge even without the customary trappings and aesthetics of that genre, tossing in the occasional quirky moment to keep things interesting. Then there's the monster...
Beast's beast is pretty silly looking, moving so clumsily that the film has to be significantly speeded up during the climax to lend it an air of impending menace. It's the cheesiest aspect of the movie. Wisely it's kept mostly out of sight until the end. Nonetheless it apparently made quite an impression when the flick first appeared at drive-ins and later made the rounds on creature feature shows during the days of pre-cable TV. This is due more to the monster's method than appearance. A shambling, vampiric thing, it doesn't kill its victims right away. Instead it cocoons them to the walls of the cave, enveloping them in the same shimmery, web-like filament that covers its own body. The helpless victims are trussed for slaughter, still conscious, as the beast slowly sucks out their blood.
Like the one effective scene in the otherwise inferior Attack of the Giant Leeches (showing trapped humans being fed upon), these moments are genuinely creepy — and simply had to have inspired the production designers on Aliens. (Note: Beast from Haunted Cave shares something else with the Corman-produced Leeches besides similar 'monsters munching on humans' scenes... They also have the same music score.)

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

2009-08-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

This film marked stop-motion effects maestro Ray Harryhausen's first solo gig on a motion picture. It was the beginning of a career that would produce some of the most beloved science fiction and fantasy films in cinema history, responsible for inspiring generations of filmmakers and effects artists to come. With The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen created one of the classic 'giant monster on a rampage' sequences of all time, when his 50-ton "Rhedosaurus" goes for an afternoon stroll through the streets of Manhattan. Every second, every single frame of the effects work was crafted by hand, by Harryhausen himself. He wouldn't have it any other way.
In the arctic wastes near the North Pole, an atomic bomb test (what else?) accidentally frees a gigantic dinosaur from its millennia-long slumber trapped in the ice. A scientist on hand for the test, Prof. Tom Nesbitt (Swiss actor Paul Christian), catches a fleeting glimpse of the monster during a blizzard but is thought by everyone else to have been hallucinating. Sure of his faculties, Nesbitt hypothesizes that a prehistoric creature has been released from suspended animation and is now on the loose. The mysterious sinking of a fishing trawler in Baffin Bay spurs him to contact the world's foremost paleontologist, kindly Dr. Elson (Cecil Kellaway), who humors Nesbitt out of professional courtesy but ain't buying his theory. Elson's attractive female assistant (Paula Raymond) is more receptive, however, and when another ship is sunk off Nova Scotia she helps Nesbitt gather evidence that his idea isn't such an outlandish one. The lone survivor of the first sinking identifies the sea monster that wrecked his boat from a sketch — the same drawing Nesbitt picked out earlier as the prehistoric leviathan he saw in the arctic. Elson is now convinced and lends his prestige to an effort to alert the military of the danger. He believes that the beast, a dinosaur of the rare (and fictitious) "Rhedosaurus" species, is making its way to its ancestral breeding grounds in the submarine canyons off the coast of New York City...
Which ultimately leads to ol' Rhedo's aforementioned Manhattan stroll. It's a bravura sequence, a genuine touchstone of classic monster movie cinema — and one which makes us forget about the somewhat tedious (though well-acted and nicely photographed) build-up to this point. Until the Beast hits the streets he only appears in the film very briefly, when Nesbitt first observes him in the arctic, with the sinking of the first ship, and in the terrific lighthouse sequence (in which the creature is seen almost completely in silhouette, a simple yet highly effective technique). Even the Beast's famous rampage through New York isn't that long — just a few minutes of footage — but can anyone who ever saw this as a kid forget the World's Dumbest Cop... the foolhardy patrolman who tries to fend off the behemoth with his .38 police special? (And who miraculously shows up again in the very next scene, part of a squad of shotgun-armed cops, despite having been swallowed whole!) Working within the constraints of a very small budget, Harryhausen achieved a milestone of motion picture special affects. By making clever use of light sources, as when the Beast moves in and out of the "shadows" between buildings, he camouflaged the weaknesses of his stop-motion model; by injecting a sense of character into his creation, he gave it more life than most modern CG artists, with millions of dollars to play with, have yet to master.
Of course, a cool monster requires a cool customer to deal with it, and Beast gives us that Most Manly Military Monster Masher of 'em all, Kenneth Tobey (The Thing, It Came from Beneath the Sea), to take charge in the crisis. He plays Nesbitt's Army pal Colonel Evans, put in command of New York's defenses when the monster attacks. Nobody could say lines like "It'd take a 3-inch shell to penetrate that skull!" with more authenticity. And who's that playing the marksman on whose shoulders rests the ultimate fate of the city? A young Lee Van Cleef, the corporal who claims he "picks his teeth" with grenade rifles. Don't worry, though... if you can load it, he can fire it. (It'd take another future spaghetti western icon, Clint Eastwood, to kill the monster spider in the 1955 giant bug classic, Tarantula.)

Beast of Blood

2009-08-03T09:38:00.001-07:00

Beast of Blood (known as Beast of the Dead when it ran on U.S. TV in the late 1970s) is actually a direct follow-up to The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, an American-Filipino co-production from low budget independent company Hemisphere Pictures. Aspects of the first film are alluded to in this sequel without much explanation. This isn't really a problem, though, as the plot's pretty basic. Besides, there's not the remotest possibility anyone seeing this thing would give a damn.
Frankly, I expected more from this movie. On paper it sounds like a cheese lover's delight... On a remote tropical island a mad doctor conducts nightmarish experiments on humans, resulting in a goofy monster with slimy green skin and a severe tartar control problem. The good guys mount a jungle commando mission to end the villain's reign of terror. Sounds groovy to me! Unfortunately most of this potential is wasted with a sluggish, yawn-inducing narrative. Having a lead actor who's little more than a block of wood with Elvis sideburns certainly doesn't help matters.
The film does start out promisingly, however. A young American doctor, Bill Foster (Beach Blanket Bingo's John Ashley), is leaving Blood Island by boat after the events of the first movie — I have no idea what those were as I haven't seen it. Suddenly the monster appears onboard, killing all the crewmembers with an axe. Foster battles the creature but an accidental fire sets off an explosion which sinks the boat, leaving him floating in the ocean holding on to some wreckage. The monster — who's got huge yellow fangs and mucusy skin lathered in what looks like guacamole, hot dog relish and Vaseline — has also survived, washing ashore on Blood Island. He stumbles off into the jungle just before the animated opening credits, which were designed by the same folks who provided title sequences for Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Horror of the Blood Monsters. Unfortunately we don't see the Beast again until halfway through the film, and by that point he's had his head chopped off! More on that in a minute.
Immediately after the credits we see Foster boarding another boat, heading back to Blood Island. (Why he's doing this isn't explained until near the end of the film, in a throwaway line.) Onboard he meets a reporter for a Honolulu newspaper, Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall, who costarred with The King himself, Elvis, in Live a Little, Love a Little). She wants to do a story on the events of the previous film (whatever those were) but Foster is noncommittal. (In fact, Ashley's entire performance is noncommittal, as he walks through this picture with the same blank expression throughout, delivering his lines in a disinterested monotone.) Along with the boat's captain (co-writer Bev Miller), Foster and Myra land at Blood Island and visit with some natives the doctor knows from the first movie. They learn that villagers have been periodically kidnapped by "The Green Men", guys in loincloths and covered in green skin lesions. Then Myra is kidnapped, so Foster and a Filipino woman who's got the hots for him set off into the jungle to track her abductors. An attempt to help Myra escape fails, but Foster sees that Razak (Bruno Punzalan), the bald, monkey-eared henchman of his old nemesis Dr. Lorca, is the leader of the armed thugs holding her captive. Their trail is followed to a hidden mountain encampment. As help is summoned from the village, Myra becomes the unwilling guest of Lorca (Eddie Garcia), the film's Dr.No-like archvillain. (Aside from being evil he wears an eyepatch, has a bad limp, and is burned across part of his face.) He uses unwilling human guinea pigs in his immoral experiments, which somehow involve chlorophyl and which earlier produced the slimy monster we saw in the opening sequence. The titular Beast, by the way, has been recaptured by Lorca and is now held in his underground laboratory. To render it easier to control, Lorca has cut off the monster's head, keeping both the body and severed head alive by artificial means. Just what he's attempting to achieve by all this is never explained. (He does hold one-sided conversations with the head, however.) It all culminates with Foster, the Captain, and the village chief leading an armed assault on Lorca's compound to free Myra; the Beast's animated head gets final revenge on the mad doctor as the papier-mâché cavern crumbles around them.
Until its final 30 minutes Beast of Blood is just a monotonous drag. Things pick up considerably once Dr. Lorca comes on the scene, with some unintentionally funny dialog, amusingly inept action sequences, and the reappearance of the monster. There are a few fleeting moments of Grade-A cheese, as when the Beast's noggin (the mask-wearing actor's head stuck through a hole cut in a table) gets to speak. Judging by the opening mayhem, had the monster showed up now and then before this it'd have been a livelier picture. Instead we get a lot of 'jungle trek' scenes with pauses here and there for Ashley to drone a bit of dialog. The sound effects are pretty bad but not in an amusing sense; they're just irritating. (Regardless of where characters tread — be it indoors, the jungle, or in a cave — the foley sounds like people stepping on discarded peanut shells.) All the dialog was poorly looped afterwards and the terrible music score ranges from 'Get Smart in the Jungle' to 1920s silent movie accompaniment. Given the potential of the available exploitation elements, Beast of Blood fumbles the ball when it should've easily scored a few points. If the other Filipino-shot horror flicks in the so-called "Blood Island Trilogy" are this lame, I'll likely pass.

Baron Blood

2009-08-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

After the shockingly violent and sexual nature of his transgressive giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), Italian director Mario Bava returned to the kinder, gentler trappings of old-fashioned gothic horror with his next film, Baron Blood. Although set in modern times, its chief location — a medieval castle in Austria — gives the film the ambiance of a classic Universal or Hammer production. So does Bava's restraint in telling the story. Twitch featured a naked woman being hacked up with a machete (amongst many other things); the mayhem in Baron Blood is strictly PG-rated material.
Handsome college grad Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) travels from the U.S. to visit his ancestral home in rural Austria. With his uncle, Prof. Karl Hummel (Massimo Gerotti), he tours an ancient castle once owned by his forebears, now being renovated for sale at auction. 300 years ago it was the fortress of the notorious Otto von Kleist, an evil nobleman called "Baron Blood" by the local populace he terrorized in a reign of torture and murder. His crimes were such that the people finally revolted, storming the castle and subjecting the Baron to his own implements of pain before burning him alive.
Peter is obsessed with an occult angle to the legend of the Baron's death. Supposedly a witch whom von Kleist had condemned to the stake placed a curse on him before being consumed by the flames; a certain incantation will bring the Baron's corpse back to life so that he can be tortured anew in atonement. Peter has brought with him a centuries-old parchment containing the words of the spell and, enlisting a pretty architectural student (Elke Sommer) in a late-night visit to the dungeon, speaks the incantation. At first unbeknownst to them, the hideously disfigured Baron does rise from his grave, killing a number of people as he skulks about the castle grounds in a black cape and hat. Later the couple starts to believe that he's really come back and that their own lives are in danger. Meanwhile a strange elderly millionaire, Herr Becker (Joseph Cotton), shows up out of the blue to purchase the castle. He plans to restore Baron Blood's torture chamber to its original condition...
Except for perhaps Antonio Margheriti (The Virgin of Nuremberg), nobody knew their way around a castle, crypt, or night-shrouded cemetery like Mario Bava. A craftsman of profound visual acumen, Bava — whose wizardry at creating the illusion of opulence with but a pittance is legendary — makes excellent use of his locations, steeping the film in a rich gothic atmosphere. This is particularly evident in Baron Blood's two most effective set-pieces: when caretaker Fritz (Luciano Pigozzi) discovers a body hanging in the stairwell, only to get a rude pointer from the Baron personally; and the stalker-like pursuit of Sommer through the fogbound alleyways of the local village. Other than these standout scenes the film is well-mounted but mostly bland, even routine. Without injecting any sleaze or ultraviolence into the proceedings, there's really not much else Bava could do (given the rather basic plot) but make it look great and give it the proper ambiance. At 100 minutes it runs a tad long; 10 or even 15 minutes could've easily been shaved to quicken the pace without compromising the bare-boned scenario. Composer Stelvio Cipriani's score is especially undistinguished, actually hurting the film with its inappropriately bouncy (and kitschy) opening/closing theme, which sounds like it belongs in a sex comedy set on the sunny Riviera.
Though evidently game, the grandfatherly Cotton is much less effective here as the monstrous villain than he is in more sympathetic genre roles (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Lady Frankenstein). He just doesn't seem the type who'd derive sadistic thrills from torturing people. (And does a lousy job of 'air-slapping' one victim, missing by an obvious country mile. Vincent Price reportedly turned down the part; it's a given, I think, to suggest the film would've been considerably better for his presence, with Cotton more suited to the Uncle Karl role.) The best performance is by Rada Rassimov (The Cat o' Nine Tails) in a small but crucial supporting role as a medium who, at the behest of the protagonists, summons the spirit of the dead witch to learn a way of sending the Baron back to Hell. Buxom blonde Elke Sommer (Bava's Lisa and the Devil) is a real honey — and a decent actress, too, with a sexy German accent — but her hoarse, raspy screaming starts to grate after awhile... and she does a lot of screaming.
A must-see for Bava admirers, Baron Blood only barely achieves time-waster status for gothic horror fans in general. They've seen this type of story many, many times before. And without any serious gore or T&A to 'sex' things up it may prove a bit of a snoozer.

Barbarella

2009-08-03T09:34:00.001-07:00

Inspired by Troy's recent review of Danger: Diabolik, I decided to give that film's much better known contemporary, Barbarella, a shot. I'd watched it before, but that was almost 15 years ago via Pan & Scan cable broadcast — therefore I hadn't really seen it. In any aspect ratio it was just as silly as I remembered.
There ain't a whole lot of plot here. In the year 40,000 AD, the President of the Republic of Earth contacts star-trekkin' hottie Barbarella (Jane Fonda) — the galaxy's top-rated "astronavigatrix" — aboard her shag carpeted spaceship. He has an urgent mission for her. The brilliant scientist Duran Duran has disappeared in an unexplored region of space, taking with him the secret of an über-powerful weapon called the Positronic Ray. Barbarella is to find him and return him to Earth at all costs. A magnetic storm causes her ship to crash-land on the rocky planet Lythion, where she episodically encounters a number of strange humanoids both friendly and hostile. In her search for the missing scientist, a hunky blind angel named Pygar (Diabolik himself, John Phillip Law) helps her infiltrate Sogo, a city built atop a lake of liquefied negative energy that thrives on evil...
I have no idea whether or not Barbarella's extremely campy tone is in keeping with its source material, a racy French comic strip which I've never read. Either way, it's evident that director Roger Vadim (at the time Fonda's husband) didn't really have a clue as to how to direct such a movie. He seems inspired more by lava lamps than comic books. There's quite a contrast between his approach and that of Mario Bava in Danger: Diabolik. Bava was a director with the aesthetic acuity to see the comic book and the motion picture as similar, complementary constructs; Vadim seems content to just point his camera at weirdly garbed actors standing around on bizarre, trippy sets. The film is further undermined by spectacularly crappy special effects, about on par with something you'd see in a '60s episode of TV's Doctor Who. (A low budget cannot be cited as an excuse. Barbarella was reportedly made for $9,000,000 — at the time a considerable sum.) The only truly 'alien' creatures we're shown are a plastic-looking 'ice manta' and some blue-painted bunny rabbits. (???)
The film does have a couple of positive things going for it, however. The memorable pop/psychedelic score by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox is delightful and complements the visuals immensely — this is the kind of music that the term "groovy" was invented for. (Check out the MP3 link on the left-hand sidebar for a primo example.) As Dildano, the fumbling revolutionary who hopes to topple Sogo's evil queen with Barbarella's help, the late David Hemmings (Deep Red) is quite amusing in an atypically comedic role. Then there's Jane Fonda herself. Not only is her performance fully attuned to the film's kitschy/camp spirit, she makes for one fine babe-a-licious space vixen. About 30 when Barbarella was filmed, she's at the height of her beauty here. It's very easy to see why she's considered one of the sexiest actresses of the 1960s. (Although the DVD packaging lists the film's rating as PG, this is the uncut version that includes a few tantalizing glimpses of Fonda in the buff.)
While I personally find Barbarella a disappointment (I'm content to turn it off after Fonda's famous zero-gravity striptease during the opening credits), I'm fully cognizant of its secure status as a bona fide cult "classic". The film certainly has its devotees; although it bombed at the U.S. box-office it was popular in Europe, later gaining cult cachet in the States via midnight movie screenings attended by stoned college kids. Undeniably, its look and sound have influenced filmmakers — and pop culture — in the decades since. Were Austin Powers ever shot into space a la James Bond in Moonraker you could expect to see quite a few references to Barbarella. (Let's all hope and pray that Mike Myers never gets around to that...)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

2009-08-03T09:32:00.001-07:00

I've already waxed nostalgic about my childhood love of all things Nemo and Nautilus in my November 2002 review of Columbia's Mysterious Island DVD. Needless to say I was utterly thrilled to finally see Disney's greatest live-action film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, arrive on DVD in an absolutely superb two-disc set. It's pretty much everything I could've hoped for and more.
Jules Verne's famous story needs but a brief summary. Shortly after the American Civil War, ships are being rammed and sunk on the high seas by a huge underwater "monster". The warship U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is dispatched to investigate. The American government asks marine biologist Prof. Arronax, an eminent French scientist traveling in the United States, to join the expedition. Accompanied by his assistant Conseil, the professor takes ship aboard the Lincoln on a cruise through the South Pacific. Also onboard is merchant seaman Ned Land, hired for his skill as a master harpooner. The monster is eventually encountered; the Lincoln is attacked and disabled by the beast. Only the beast isn't an animal at all, but rather a fabulous submarine boat more than a century ahead of its time. This exciting discovery is made by Arronax, Conseil and Ned, who, after being thrown into the sea by the collision, find themselves 'guests' of the submarine's commander, the enigmatic Captain Nemo. Because he cannot allow them to return to civilization and reveal his secrets, Nemo takes the castaways on a cruise beneath the world's oceans in the Nautilus, a technological marvel sprung entirely from his own tortured genius. Nemo, for very personal reasons, hates the very concept of war. He uses the Nautilus as an engine of destruction, making war on war — sinking the warships of the world's navies and cargo vessels carrying munitions. Arronax temporarily puts aside questions of morality in order to learn all he can from the brilliant Nemo, but the professor's companions have a different agenda: escape.
While Verne's original novel is essentially an oceanography lesson partially disguised as a ripping yarn, the 1954 Disney film version focuses squarely on exactly what a sci-fi/fantasy adventure movie needs to: thrills and spectacle. (No dissertations on the mating habits of Mediterranean starfish here!) The special effects — absolute state-of-the-art in their time — still hold up wonderfully today, even the battle with the animatronic giant squid. (A sequence costing over $250,000 to shoot a half century ago, it'd run in the millions today.) The production design of unsung genius Harper Goff is superb; his steam-punk vision of Victorian futurism results in the coolest-looking submarine to ever sail across the silver screen. James Mason, as Captain Nemo, made Verne's conflicted anti-hero an enduring icon of fantasy cinema, while Paul Lukas (Prof. Arronax) and Peter Lorre (Conceil) lend solid support.
Then there's Kirk Douglas as Ned Land.
It's the most common criticism of the film... Many people tend to pooh-pooh the deliberate hamminess of Douglas' gregarious performance. Actually, I think it works rather well in contrast to the stern, stoic character of Nemo and the scientific reserve of Arronax. He brings needed energy and humor to the proceedings. Douglas is simply being Douglas here, not even allowing a trained seal to upstage him in the film's 'kiddie' moments.
Today's kids (those 12 and under) will likely be bored stiff by 20,000 Leagues. It'll prove too slow and too talky, with special effects that aren't 'special' enough. No CGI, no quick-cut, MTV style edits to satiate their ADD-addled brains. What a shame. As a youngster I saw the film at a Memphis theater during a revival run in the early 1970s. Enthralled, I was glued to my seat for every minute of the two hour-plus picture. It filled me with awe and wonder, sparking my fertile young imagination.
Over three decades later, for me — and for the 8-year old boy still inside me — 20,000 Leagues stands as one of the absolute pinnacles of fantasy entertainment.
First and foremost, the new DVD is the way to see this movie other than in an actual theater. After years of only being available on home video via fullframe, pan and scan VHS the film can finally be enjoyed in all its widescreen Cinemascope glory. Very widescreen in fact... A note to those with 27-inch TVs or smaller: Forget it. Either that, or sit really close. This is a film with a large canvas; director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings) utilizes the 2.55:1 aspect ratio to the full. In the old VHS edition the Nautilus would glide across the width of the screen and you couldn't see the entirety of the vessel in a single shot. Now we get to see it all. Beautiful! The same adjective will serve to describe the actual transfer. The film looks magnificent — it can't have looked this good since the first prints ran in theaters in 1954. There's practically no print damage to speak of and colors are astounding. (Some grain is occasionally noticeable; nothing unusual for a flick this old.) Sound quality, too, is absolutely first rate, with the audio track remastered to THX specifications. This is a 50-year old film with the A/V specs of a modern day blockbuster, or at least as close as one can get. Kudos to Disney on this glorious restoration.
More kudos are earned for the excellent, all-encompassing bonus features packed into the two-disc set. In addition to the main feature, Disc 1 offers a full-length audio commentary with Fleischer and film historian Rudy Behlmer. It's a congenial chat, loaded with anecdotes both technical and personal about the production, but is often rendered moot if you've seen the "Making Of" featurette included on the second disc (see below). Disc 1 also offers viewers the chance to see the original Donald Duck cartoon, Grand Canyonscope, that played with 20,000 Leagues on its initial theatrical run.
Disc 2 is crammed full of so much stuff I can only really catalogue it here given the limited space at hand. The crown jewel is the 90-minute documentary The Making of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. This fascinating, comprehensive featurette — packed with stills, film clips and behind-the-scenes footage — covers all major aspects of the film's production, and is constructed around interviews with Fleischer, Behlmer, Kirk Douglas, Roy Disney (brother of Walt and company vice chairman), the late Harper Goff (via archival footage), matte artist Peter Ellsenshaw, frogmen Bill Stropahl and Al Hansen (who participated in the underwater diving scenes), and others. Even memorabilia collector extraordinaire Bob Burns gets to weigh in, which is a nice touch.
Still want more? Well, here's what you get... Five additional featurettes: Jules Verne and Walt Disney: Explorers of the Imagination (16 min.), comparing how the two visionaries came to enthrall the public in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively; The Musical Legacy of Paul Smith (11 min.), a tribute to the film's composer and his work on other Disney projects; Monsters of the Deep (7 min.), a bit of promotional ballyhoo put together by Disney to tout the film prior to release; The Humbolt Squid: A Real Sea Monster (7 min.), featuring a marine biologist discussing and showing video clips of this particularly aggressive aquatic creature; and Movie Merchandise (9 min.), an inspection of 20,000 Leagues collectibles. Additional goodies: Touring the Nautilus, which uses computer animation, photos, and clips from the film to showcase the main compartments of Nemo's submarine; image galleries loaded with stills and promotional art; a split-screen storyboard-to-film comparison; animation clips that were created for the movie but never used; a script excerpt ("Nemo's Death"); some brief outtakes ("Trims"); talent bios; and a selection of audio-only extras (radio spots, Captain Nemo's organ music, and a recording of a post-production dialog looping session with Peter Lorre). Oh, and you get the original theatrical trailer, too.
But I'm still not finished! Of special interest is a 3-minute video clip entitled Lost Treasure: The Sunset Squid. For the first time the public is able to get a glimpse of the disastrous original staging of the famous giant squid sequence. Fortunately good sense intervened; money was raised to completely reshoot it after a major rewrite. Fans of the film should find this 'lost' footage fascinating.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

2009-08-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

There are some movies that, when mentioned, cause a spontaneous smile. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is certainly one of these beloved films, able to generate big smiles and warm remembrances. Many a rainy afternoon has been whiled away absorbing Sinbad's adventures of sailing the high seas, battling evil sorcerers and escaping from dreadful gigantic beasts bent on eating our brave hero. I'm sure everyone reading this has a childhood memory of being glued to the screen (big or small) and seeing the fantastic sights that it seemed only Ray Harryhausen could bring to life. In the course of 35 years and 16 movies Mr. Harryhausen made some of the best and most successful fantasy films in the history of cinema. Anyone who loves cinema fantastique has a favorite even if they don't love them all. In addition to the three Sinbad movies, there's 20 Million Miles To Earth, Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, First Men in the Moon, One Million Years B.C., The Valley of Gwangi, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans (1981), to name the most popular. Personally I love Harryhausen's movies with the joy of one who senses a kindred spirit. His films always delight me and leave me feeling good about the world and hopeful for the future. 7th Voyage of Sinbad wasn't the first of Harryhausen's movies I ever saw, but it is a good place for anyone to start.
Captain Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews - The Pirates of Blood River, Octaman) is sailing to Baghdad with his fiancée after a successful peace mission to the neighboring kingdom of Chandra. He and his betrothed, Parisa (Kathryn Grant), a royal princess of Chandra, are very much in love. Mysterious winds have blown the ship off course for a week when they finally make landfall on Colossa, a legendary island. When Sinbad and some of the crew disembark to gather provisions they encounter Sokurah, a magician, being chased by a 30-foot tall Cyclops! Sokurah (Torin Thatcher) has taken a magical lamp containing a genie from the treasure hoard of the Cyclops and is attempting to escape. Sinbad, Sokurah and the landing party get off the island unharmed but the monstrous one-eyed beast reclaims the lamp. The wizard begs Sinbad to return immediately to steal the lamp but he declines, sailing on to Baghdad. Once there, Sokurah petitions the Caliph to finance an expedition to Colossa to slay the Cyclops and obtain the lamp. When the Caliph refuses, Sokurah secretly casts a spell, shrinking Parisa down to doll size.
He then offers his 'help', claiming the only way to restore her to normal is by means of a magic potion — the main ingredient of which exists only on Colossa. With no alternative if he's to aid the woman he loves, Sinbad agrees to return to the island. For a such a dangerous voyage he must enlist a group of cutthroats, saved from the headsman's axe, to crew his vessel. When all is ready the ship sets sail. While Sinbad cares only for the restoration of the Princess, the evil Sokurah naturally has other plans...
I truly love this movie and my one fear on buying this DVD was that my memories of it would prove better than the film itself. Luckily my fears were groundless! More than 40 years after its original release, 7th Voyage is still able to excite and entertain like few films ever could. It's a lovingly crafted work of cinema magic that I can easily imagine thrilling audiences for decades to come. It takes itself (and its audience) seriously and knows that we want to see the monsters just as much as we want to see them defeated by the hero. Harryhausen never slights us in our desire for adventure and spectacle. He was making movies he wanted to see himself and that wide-eyed love for what he was doing is in every frame. If you can't enjoy this movie, I feel just a little sorry for you. It's not Harryhausen’s best film but it is very good.
Columbia's DVD release of 7th Voyage is quite a package. It was the first of a series called The Ray Harryhausen Signature Collection and contains enough to satisfy most fans. First, the transfer of the movie is very good with clarity missing from previous videotape transfers. I could wish for a slightly sharper picture but overall I'm happy with the way it looks. The picture is letterboxed at 1.85:1 — here is my only real complaint. I firmly believe that the movie was shot with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio in mind; this is born out by statements made by Harryhausen that his effects were photographed using the entire 1.33:1 frame. As soon as I saw that this DVD was 1.85:1, I panicked.
I just knew that heads were going to be lopped off and set design was going to be lost all in the name of over-matting the image to meet an artificial concept of "Original Aspect Ratio". But strangely enough I only found three shots in the movie that looked the least bit cramped and the worst of them was of a human actor, not a special effect. 99% of the movie looked correctly presented with the non-FX scenes looking perfectly framed. The audio track is presented in English, Spanish or Portuguese and retains the original Mono mix without the dubious addition of a 5.1 retrofit. Subtitles are available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean and Thai.
There are a number of extras on the disc. First up is a 12-minute short called Look Behind the Voyage that seems to be transferred from videotape. It's fairly interesting as a brief look at the making of the film and it does build excitement for the movie but to judge by the shirt that Ray is wearing it seems to have been made in the 1970s! Second is an 11-minute long piece in which Harryhausen is interviewed by director John Landis about Jason and the Argonauts. It's a little too brief, seeming to end just as it gets rolling, but it gives a good overview of Ray's techniques for creating special effects.
The biggest of these extras is a 50-minute documentary called The Ray Harryhausen Chronicles. Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, it covers the high spots of Ray's life and career and had the effect of making me wish for a really good biography of the man. For most fans the real draw of this extra will be the large amount of very rare footage from Harryhausen's aborted film projects and early experiments in stop animation that are just not easy to find elsewhere. They are fascinating and now we have them in digital form so we can replay them again and again. Also included are trailers for seven of Harryhausen's other movies, talent files and a look at the original poster art.
Altogether a satisfying disc and one I'm proud to own. If you're curious about old school special effects or just have fond memories of a fantastical adventure on the island of Colossa with Sinbad the sailor, this is a DVD you will enjoy.

4D Man

2009-08-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

This late '50s sci-fi/horror tale was financed by Jack H. Harris, producer of the original The Blob (1957) and Dinosaurus! (1960). It's a fun, surprisingly well-made film featuring commendable special effects, a punchy all-jazz score, and an excellent lead performance by the late Robert Lansing. 4D Man also has to be just about the most vibrantly colorful genre flick of the period I've ever seen.
The story opens with brash young scientist Tony Nelson (Congdon) performing an after-hours experiment at the research institute that employs him. He's obsessed with the idea of manipulating electromagnetic fields in order to pass any solid object "through" another. Somehow this involves the temporary co-mingling of atoms so that, essentially, two objects occupy the same space at one time without damaging one another. Tony's only success to date — passing an ordinary pencil through a block of solid steel — came by accident. His accident-prone tendencies continue as the current experiment fails, overheating the equipment and catching the lab on fire. Within moments the whole institute is ablaze. Not surprisingly, Tony soon finds himself out of a job.
The unemployed scientist shows up at the private physics lab where his older brother, Scott (Lansing), is a top researcher. Levelheaded and dedicated to his work, Scott views Tony as an irresponsible ne'er-do-well. There's been "bad blood" between the brothers in the past — Tony once ran off with Scott's then-fiancé — but Scott is willing to bury the hatchet and help Tony out. Since Tony's a top-notch scientist (despite his flighty behavior and often crackpot-sounding theories), Scott helps him secure a job at the lab, which is engaged in R & D for the Pentagon. But history begins to repeat itself as pretty research assistant Linda (Lee Meriwether), whom Scott carries a torch for, starts falling for Tony. Adding to Scott's woes, Dr. Carson (Edgar Stelhi), his employer, steals most of the personal credit for a potentially profitable new discovery made by the team Scott heads. He's also informed by the company physician that exposure to radiation on the job may somehow be affecting his brain. Downtrodden, Scott proposes marriage to Linda but is rebuffed. In a fit of pique Scott breaks into Tony's storage locker to take a look at little bro's "hobby" project. While tinkering about with Tony's "force field" apparatus, Scott accidentally makes a startling discovery — he's able to pass his hand through a solid steel block by simply willing it. He informs his brother, who's shocked to learn that Scott doesn't even need the machine to duplicate the process! Very quickly Scott masters this new power, able to pass his entire body through solid walls while in a self-generated "4th Dimensional" state. Much like The Invisible Man's Jack Griffin, Scott is morally corrupted by this almost god-like ability; that very night he uses it to rob a bank of $50,000 (for no other reason than he can). There's a high price to pay, of course. Every time he uses the power Scott loses decades off his life span, aging years within seconds. By means of another accident he discovers that his youth and energy can be restored — by draining the life force from other human beings. The touch of the 4D Man means death.
Lansing (Empire of the Ants) is very, very good as the scientist turned murdering monster. His nuanced performance, spanning the gamut of emotions, really sells the movie and its less than plausible concept. So do the "4D" special effects, achieved either through blue-screen process photography or simple camera tricks. (While dated by today's standards, they generally still hold up well enough to permit a suspension of disbelief; they must've looked quite cool to audiences at the time.) Actually, the film's best effects involve the rapid aging deaths of Scott's victims, whose agonized shriveling is realized with makeup and, in one scene, a combination of time-lapse photography and animation.
Perhaps the most commented upon facet of 4D Man is composer Ralph Carmichael's unusual jazz score. It's more akin to that of a Noir-style police procedural than a science fiction film. You won't hear a single note played on a theramin. Bold and brassy horn riffs frequently accentuate the onscreen action with aural punctuation marks; the cool bass/drum passages wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Twin Peaks. Occasionally inappropriate in scenes where no musical accompaniment at all would have served better (and in one case — the picnic in the park — getting downright silly), I think it's an asset to the film as a whole.

Image's edition of 4D Man is one of the company's earlier releases ('99), so the DVD unfortunately comes in the cardboard "snapper"-type packaging. It's also completely bereft of Extras — there isn't even a trailer. On the plus side, audio/visual quality is quite good considering the film's age and low budget heritage. Presented fullframe (don't worry, you're not missing anything), print damage is minimal while colors are astoundingly vibrant. The digital mono audio track is crisp and clear. Best of all, the disc is quite inexpensive.

The River (Le Fleuve) (1951)

2009-08-03T08:36:00.001-07:00

Jean Renoir's "The River" (1951) begins with a circle being drawn in rice paste on the floor of a courtyard, and the circular patterns continue. In an opening scene, the children of a British family in India peer through porch railings at a newcomer arriving next door. At the end, the same children, less one, peer through the same railing at a departure. The porch overlooks a river, "which has its own life," and as the river flows and the seasons wheel in their appointed order, the Hindu festivals punctuate the year and all flows from life to death to rebirth, as it must.

The film is one of the simplest and most beautiful by Jean Renoir (1894-1979), among the greatest of directors. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, who was born in India and lived there many years, it remembers her childhood seen through the eyes of a young girl named Harriet (Patricia Walters), who falls in love with the new neighbor. He is Capt. John (Thomas E. Breen), an American who lost a leg in the war and now has come to live with his cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields).

We meet Harriet's family: Her parents, her three sisters, her brother Bogey. We also meet Mr. John's daughter Melanie (Radha), whose Hindu mother has died, and Valerie (Adrienne Corri), whose father owns the jute factory that Harriett's father manages. There are others: The family's nanny, the young Indian man who courts Melanie, the Sikh gatekeeper, the young Indian boy who is Bogey's playmate.

Although the film covers one year, the impression is of an endless summer day during which the girls play and write in their journals, observe the flow of life outside their gates, and are fascinated by Capt. John. At the time of the Hindu festival of light, there is a little party at the family home with music from a wind-up phonograph, and each of the older girls asks Capt. John to dance before he finally settles in a corner with Valerie. It becomes clear to young Harriet, despite her crush on the captain, that he has eyes for the red-haired Valerie. What she does not notice is that he is also attracted to his half-Indian cousin Melanie, and she to him. One day both Melanie and Harriet follow Valerie and Capt. John out into a grove, where they kiss. "It was my first kiss," Harriet remembers, "but received by another." Melanie must have felt the same.

To some degree, the girls are in love with Capt. John because he is the only eligible man in their lives. No other characters appear or are discussed; that he is sad and detached they can overlook. Harriet impatiently wants to be old enough to be visible to Capt. John. "I want to be outstandingly beautiful," she tells her pregnant mother. Harriet's narration is spoken by an adult voice; we understand these events take place around 1946.

Capt. John has come to live in India, he tells the Anglo-Indian Melanie, because with one leg he feels like an outsider. "I'm a stranger wherever I go," he says, and she replies quietly, "Where will you find a country of one-legged men?" She is a stranger, too, because of her mixed race. "I don't know where you belong," her father tells her.

Certainly all of their lives stand apart from India; we never hear a conversation between Melanie and her Indian suitor, or between Bogey and his Indian playmate, and the nanny is limited to nannyisms; she is not even given the Indian title ayah by which all nannies were known. Scenes of the real India outside the compound are mostly in long-shot.

The film is not constructed around high melodrama, but its deepest feelings are expressed when the two outsiders, Melanie and Capt. John, speak with each other, almost in code. Melanie has an enchanted scene in which she tells a story about the meeting of Prince Krishna and his bride, named Radha. The actress Radha was a dancer, and her character's story leads into a dance scene that allows some of the color and mystery of Indian religion to enter the isolation of the British family's compound.

"The River" and Michael Powell's "The Red Shoes" are "the two most beautiful color films ever made," Martin Scorsese says in an interview on the new Criterion DVD of the restored print. I saw the movie for the first time when Scorsese's personal 35mm copy played at the Virginia Film Festival some years ago; when I mentioned it to him, he said, "I watch that film three times a year. Sometimes four."

On the DVD, he says it reaches him more powerfully than "Rules of the Game," considered Renoir's masterpiece. Some will agree, some will not. "The River" is like an Ozu film in the way it regards life without trying to wrest it into a plot. During the course of the year, the girls fall in love with the same unavailable man, there is a death and a birth, and the river continues to flow.

Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, directed his first film in 1924 and was considered a grand master when he fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood in 1941. There he worked with mixed success until, by the time he made "The River," he was almost unemployable. The film was financed by an outsider, Kenneth McEldowney, a Hollywood florist who loved Godden's novel.

Renoir insisted on filming it on location in India, which he did with his nephew Claude Renoir as cameraman (and young Satyajit Ray as an assistant director). It was the first Technicolor film made in India. The budget was small. There were no stars, and some of the players had never acted before. Much of the atmosphere flows from Renoir's documentary footage, showing a bazaar, life along the river, annual festivals, boatmen at their work, and Hindus descending flights of stairs both grand and humble to bathe and pray in the water.

The British family lives apart from this India, and knows it. Behind the walls of their garden is a separate world, protected by the stern Sikh gatekeeper; only Bogey's young playmate climbs the walls. Together, the boys sneak out to the bazaar and watch a snake-charmer, and Bogey finds another snake in the roots of the giant banyan tree right outside the garden -- a tree whose roots fall down from the branches to reach for the ground, and among which gods and spirits are said to live.

There are subdued issues here involving colonialism and racism. Does Capt. John shy away from romance with Melanie because she is not white? Is Harriet's father being paternalistic when he "loves" the sight of the laborers bearing their vast bundles of jute into the factory? The issues are there, but they are not called into focus, and the life Harriet shows us is the only one she knows.

The center of her world is a cubbyhole under the stairs, where she keeps her poetry and journals, and it is a betrayal when Valerie snatches away a notebook and reads Capt. John some of the younger girl's love poems. India itself is on the brink of independence and partition, but Harriet is on the brink of adolescence, and that is much more important to her, as perhaps is natural.

Films have grown so aggressive and jittery that it takes patience to calm down into one like "The River." Its most dramatic moment takes place offscreen. Renoir is not interested in emotional manipulation but in regarding lives as they are lived. Not everyone we like need be successful, and not everyone we dislike need fail. All will be sorted out in the end -- or perhaps not, which is also the way time passes and lives resolve themselves.

Nothing is really finished at the end of "The River." Despite Jane Austen's insistence that a man like Capt. John "must be in want of a wife," he is still in want as the film ends. Harriet has not yet grown up. Melanie has still not found a place for herself. Renoir's way of bringing his story to a conclusion is a form of understated poetry. All three girls receive letters from Capt. John. All three open them and begin to read them while sitting on the steps, and then from within the house comes a baby's cry. The nanny emerges to announce: "It's a girl!" And the three girls jump up and rush into the house, the letters fluttering forgotten to the ground behind them.

A new print of "The River" plays Feb. 24-March 3 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport. "The River" is available on DVD, as are these other titles in the Great Movies series: Renoir's "Rules of the Game" and "Grand Illusion," Powell's "The Red Shoes" and Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy" and "The Music Room."

The Red Shoes (1948)

2009-08-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

There is tension between two kinds of stories in "The Red Shoes," and that tension helps make it the most popular movie ever made about the ballet and one of the most enigmatic movies about anything. One story could be a Hollywood musical: A young ballerina falls in love with the composer of the ballet that makes her an overnight star. The other story is darker and more guarded. It involves the impresario who runs the ballet company, who demands loyalty and obedience, who is enraged when the young people get married. The motives of the ballerina and her lover are transparent. But the impresario defies analysis. In his dark eyes we read a fierce resentment. No, it is not jealousy, at least not romantic jealousy. Nothing as simple as that.

The film is voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don't watch it, you bathe in it. Yes, the ending is a shocker, but you see it coming and there's no way around it; the movie tells us a fairy tale and then repeats it as real life. It's the Hans Christian Andersen fable about a young girl who puts on a pair of red slippers that will not allow her to stop dancing; she must dance and dance, in a grotesque mockery of happiness, until she is dead. This is a dire subject for a ballet, you will agree; the movie surrounds it with the hard-boiled business of running a ballet company.

"The Red Shoes" was made in 1948 by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, British filmmakers as respected as Hitchcock, Reed or Lean. Powell was the director and Pressburger, a Hungarian immigrant, was the writer, but they always took a double credit as writer-directors, and were known as The Archers; their logo was an arrow hitting its target, announcing such masterpieces as "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "Black Narcissus," "Peeping Tom," "The Thief of Bagdad," and "A Matter of Life and Death," the David Niven classic that played in America as "Stairway to Heaven."

Pressburger had written a draft of a ballet film in the 1930s, and after the war, after their enormous success with "Black Narcissus" (1947), which made a star of Deborah Kerr and won Oscars for cinematography and art direction, they had another look at it. Powell had grown up on the French Riviera; his British father ran a hotel on Cap Ferrat, and he often saw the Russian impresario Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes wintered nearby in Monte Carlo. The Archers used Powell's notions about Diaghilev and the earlier script to create the story of a proud, cold, distant impresario who meets his match with a fiery ballerina. Pressburger may have been inspired by a famous scandal in 1913 when Diaghilev's great but tortured star, Vaslav Nijinsky, married the Hungarian ballerina Romola de Pulszky. He fired them both.

Casting is everything when the characters must move between realism and fantasy, and "The Red Shoes" might have failed without Moira Shearer and Anton Walbrook as the stars. Shearer and Walbrook have distinctive, even idiosyncratic personalities, and they bring an emotional realism to characters who are really, after all, only stereotypes. Walbrook plays Boris Walbrook, the imperious manager of the Ballet Lermontov, a company ruled by his iron will. He is arrogant, curt, unbending, able to charm, able to chill. Shearer plays the dancer Victoria Page, whose friend Julian Craster (Marius Goring) bursts into Lermontov's office to complain that his composition has been stolen by the company's conductor. Julian is hired by Lermontov, Vicky wins an audition, and when the company's leading dancer resigns to get married, they are told "we have three weeks to create a ballet -- out of nothing."

Moira Shearer, let it be said, is a great beauty: "Her cloud of red hair, as natural and beautiful as any animal's, flamed and glittered like an autumn bonfire," Powell wrote in his autobiography, the best ever written by a filmmaker. "She had a magnificent body. She wasn't slim, she just didn't have one ounce of superfluous flesh." Of Walbrook he wrote: "Anton conceals his humility and his warm heart behind perfect manners that shield him like suit of armor. He responds to clothing like the chameleon that changes shape and color out of sympathy with its surroundings."

Quite so. In "Colonel Blimp," Walbrook makes a German aristocrat sympathetic. In Max Ophuls' great "La Ronde" (1950), he is our urbane and charming guide to a decadent society. In "The Red Shoes," he creates a deliberate enigma, a man who does not want to be understood, who imposes his will but conceals his feelings.

Vicky Page is his opposite: Joyous and open to life. Shearer, who was 21 when she was cast, was at the time with the Sadlers' Wells Company, dancing in the shadow of the young Margot Fonteyn. She didn't take movies seriously, waited a year before agreeing to star in "The Red Shoes," went back to the ballet, and possibly never knew how good she was in the movie, how powerfully she related to the camera. "I never knew what a natural was before," Powell told the studio owner J. Arthur Rank. "But now I do. It's Moira Shearer."

The movie tells parallel stories leading up to its 17-minute ballet sequence. While Vicky and Julian are falling in love, Lermontov and his company are creating the new ballet. There is a key scene where Lermontov and all his colleagues meet in his villa to hear Julian play the new ballet for the first time. "I was determined to shoot it in one big master shot," Powell wrote, and it is a masterpiece of composition, of entrances, exits, approaches to the camera, background action, and the vibrating sense of a creative team at work. "There are lots of clever scenes in 'The Red Shoes'," he wrote, "but this is the heart of the picture."

The other key scenes are the ballet itself, and the sequence leading up to the ending. No film had ever interrupted its story for an extended ballet before "The Red Shoes," although its success made that a fashion, and "An American in Paris" and "Singin' in the Rain," among others, have extended fantasy ballet sequences. None ever looked as fantastical as the one in the "The Red Shoes," where the little shoemaker puts the fatal slippers on the girl. The physical stage is seamlessly transformed into a surreal space, where Shearer glides and flies, enters unreal landscapes and even does a pas de deux with a newspaper that takes the form of a dancer, turns into the dancer, and then into a newspaper again. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff wrote about how he manipulated camera speed to make the dancers seem to linger at the tops of their jumps; the art direction won an Oscar, mostly because of this scene (there was also an Oscar for the music, and nominations for best picture, editing and screenplay).

After Vicky and Julian are married and Lermontov fires them, he persuades her to dance "The Red Shoes" one more time. Julian walks out of the premiere of his new symphony in London to fly to Monte Carlo and accuse her of abandoning him. What will she choose? The dance, or her husband? She puts on the red slippers, and in a brilliant closeup the slippers force her to turn around, and seem to lead her as she runs from the theater and throws herself in front of a train. Discussing the script, Pressburger argued that Vicky couldn't be wearing the red shoes when she runs away, because the ballet had not yet started. Powell writes: "I was a director, a storyteller, and I knew that she must. I didn't try to explain it. I just did it."

That brings us back to the tension we began with. Why does Lermontov object so violently to the marriage of these two young people? Is it sexual jealousy? Does he desire Vicky, or, for that matter, Julian? Lermontov is a bachelor with the elegant wardrobe and mannered detachment that played as gay in the 1940s, but there is not a moment when he displays any sexual feelings. He would rather die than appear vulnerable. My notion is that Lermontov is Mephistopheles. He has made a bargain with Vicky: "I will make you the greatest dancer the world has ever known." But he warns her: "A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer -- never." Like the Satan of classical legend, he is enraged when he wins her soul only to lose it again. He demands obedience above all else.

That leaves us with Vicky's choice. She can return to London with Julian, or leave him and continue her career. Why does she abandon these choices at the height of her youth and beauty, and kill herself? The answer of course is that she is powerless, once she puts on the red shoes.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

2009-08-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

It has always been a question whether "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925) is a great film, or only a great spectacle. Carl Sandburg, one of the original reviewers, underwent a change of heart between his first Chicago Daily News review (he waited for the Phantom's unmasking "terribly fascinated, aching with suspense") and a reconsideration written a month later ("strictly among the novelties of the season"). It was not, he added on the level of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or "Greed," mentioning two of the greatest films of all time.

He was right about that, and could have added the greatest of all silent horror films, Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922), whose vampire may have influenced Lon Chaney's performance as the Phantom. But as an exercise in lurid sensationalism, straining against technical limitations in its eagerness to overwhelm, the first of the many Phantom films has a creepy, undeniable power.

The story is simply told -- too simply, perhaps, so that all of the adaptations, including the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, have been much ado about relatively little. In the cellars of the Paris Opera House lives a disfigured masked man who becomes obsessed with the young singer Christine. He commands the management to give her leading roles, and when they refuse, he exacts a terrible revenge, causing a great chandelier to crash down on the audience.

Christine's lover, a pallid nonentity, is little competition for her fascination with the Phantom, until she realizes with horror that the creature wants her to dwell in his mad subterranean world. She unmasks him, is repelled by his hideous disfigurement, flees to the surface and her lover, and is followed by a Phantom seeking violent revenge. There is no room for psychological subtlety here.

It is the idea of the Phantom, really, that fascinates us: the idea of a cruelly mistreated man going mad in self-imposed exile in the very cellars, dungeons and torture chambers where he was, apparently, disfigured in the first place. His obsession with Christine reflects his desire to win back some joy from a world that has mistreated him. Leroux and his adapters have placed this sad creature in a bizarre subterranean space that has inspired generations of set designers. There are five levels of cellars beneath the opera, one descending beneath another in an expressionist series of staircases, ramps, trapdoors, and a Styxian river that the Phantom crosses in a gondola. The Phantom has furnished his lair with grotesque fittings: He sleeps in a coffin and provides a bed for Christine in the shape of a whale boat. Remote controls give him warnings when anyone approaches and allow him to roast or drown his enemies.

To Christine, he offers wealth, luxury and opera stardom, and she is in no peril "as long as you do not touch the mask" -- oh, and she must love him, or at least allow him to possess her (although his precise sexual plans are left undefined). Perhaps warned by the fate of the hero in her current production of "Faust," she refuses this bargain, although for an engaged woman, she allows herself to be dangerously tempted.

After taking over the leading role from an ominously ill prima donna, she follows a mysterious voice, opens a secret door behind the mirror in her dressing room, descends through forbidding cellars, is taken semi-conscious by horseback and gondola deeper into the labyrinth and sees the coffin where he sleeps. At this point, her sudden cry of "You -- you are the Phantom!" inspired me to write in my notes: "Duh!"

Her lover, the Viscount Raoul de Chagny, is likewise not a swift study. After the Phantom has presumably claimed dozens of victims with the falling chandelier and threatened Christine with death if she sees him again, Raoul agrees to meet her at the Masked Ball. This is held in the Opera House on the very next night, with the chandelier miraculously repaired and no mourning period, apparently, for the dozens of crushed and maimed. Christine tells Raoul the Phantom will murder them if they are seen together, but then, when a gaunt and spectral figure in red stalks imperiously into the grand hall, Raoul unmasks himself, which is, if you ask me, asking for trouble.

Christine determines to sing her role one more time, after which Raoul will have a carriage waiting by the stage door to spirit them safely away to England. This plan is too optimistic, as the Phantom snatches Christine from her dressing room, and the two are pursued into the bowels of Paris by Raoul and Inspector Ledoux -- and, in a separate pursuit, by the vengeful stagehand Buquet (whose brother the Phantom murdered), leading a mob of torch-carrying rabble. The hapless Raoul and Ledoux are lured into a chamber where the Phantom can roast them to death, and when they escape through a trapdoor, it leads to a chamber where they can be drowned.

All of this is fairly ridiculous, and yet, and yet, the story exerts a certain macabre fascination. The characters of Christine and Raoul, played by Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, essentially function as puppets of the plot. But the Phantom is invested by the intense and inventive Lon Chaney with a horror and poignancy that is almost entirely created with body language. More of his face is covered than in modern versions (a little gauze curtain flutters in front of his mouth), but look at the way his hand moves as he gestures toward the coffin as the titles announce "That is where I sleep." It is a languorous movement that conveys great weary sadness.

The Phantom's unmasking was one of the most famous moments in silent film. He is seated at his organ. "Now, when he is intent on the music," Sandburg wrote, "she comes closer, closer, her fingers steal towards the ribbon that fastens the mask. Her fingers give one final twitch -- and there you are!" There you are, all right, as Chaney, "the Man of 1,000 Faces" and a master of makeup, unveils a defacement more grotesque than in any later version, his mouth a gaping cavern, his nose a void, his eyes widely staring: "Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!"

The other famous scene involves the falling chandelier, which became the centerpiece of the Webber musical and functions the same way in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film version. In the original film, it is curiously underplayed; it falls in impressive majesty, to be sure, but its results are hard to measure. Surely there are mangled bodies beneath it, but the movie stays its distance and then hurries on.

Much more impressive is the Masked Ball sequence and its sequel on the roof of the opera house. The filmmakers (director Rupert Julien, replaced by Edward Sedgwick and assisted by Chaney) use primitive color techniques to saturate the ball with brilliant scarlets and less obtrusive greens. Many scenes throughout the film are tinted, which was common enough in silent days, but the Masked Ball is a primitive form of Technicolor, in which the Phantom's great red cloak sweeps through the air like a carrion bird that enfolds him.

And on the roof, as Raoul and Christine plot, he hovers unseen above them on the side of a statue, the red garment billowing ominously. Chaney's movements in all of these scenes are filled with heedless bravado, and yet when he pauses, when he listens, when the reasons for his jealousy are confirmed, he conveys his suffering.

In a strange way, the very artificiality of the color adds to its effect. True, accurate and realistic color is simply ... color. But this form of color, which seems imposed on the material, functions as a passionate impasto, a blood-red overlay. We can sense the film straining to overwhelm us. The various scores (I listened to the music by the great composer for silent film Carl Davis) swoop and weep and shriek and fall into ominous prefigurings, and the whole enterprise embraces the spirit of grand guignol.

"The Phantom of the Opera" is not a great film if you are concerned with art and subtlety, depth and message; "Nosferatu" is a world beyond it. But in its fevered melodrama and images of cadaverous romance, it finds a kind of show-biz majesty. And it has two elements of genius: It creates beneath the opera one of the most grotesque places in the cinema, and Chaney's performance transforms an absurd character into a haunting one.

The new film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" opens nationally on Wednesday. See also the Great Movie reviews of "Nosferatu," "The Man Who Laughs," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Orpheus".

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

2009-08-03T08:08:00.001-07:00

Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter'' (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many ``great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but ``Night of the Hunter'' is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.

Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like "Kwaidan" (1964).

Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister "Reverend'' Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious Man'':

"On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love'' and on his left hand was the word "fear'' And in which hand he held his fate was never clear''

Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?'') And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.

But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter'' the recognition it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect "The Silence of the Lambs" to do many years from now.

The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the ``preacher.'' But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt.

Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.

"Chill...dren!"

The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.'' He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: ``Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.'' She quotes the film's producer, Paul Gregory: ``. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.''

Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.

Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, ``How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?'' And answer: ``Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.'' ``The Night of the Hunter,'' he observes, represents ``the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,'' by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher.

Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.

Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (``Not as a Stranger'') it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen "The Night of the Hunter'' has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . dren?''

The Music Room (1958)

2009-08-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (1958) has one of the most evocative opening scenes ever filmed. A middle-age man, his face set into deep weariness, sits on the wide, flat roof of his house in an upholstered chair that has been dragged outdoors for his convenience. He stares into space. His servant, his face betraying long alarm about his master, scurries toward him with a hookah, one of those ancient water pipes smoked by the Cheshire Cat in Alice and by the idle in Indian films. The man observes the preparations. "What month is it?" he finally asks.

This man is named Huzur Biswambhar Roy. He lives in a crumbling palace on the banks of a wide river, in the midst of an empty plain. It is the late 1920s. He is the last in a line of landlords who flourished in Bengal in the 19th century; the time for landlords has passed, and his money is running out. For years he has had little to do, and only one passion, listening to concerts in his music room.

He has been long jealous of his closest neighbor, the despised moneylender Mahim Ganguly. Mahim is low-caste and vulgar, but hardworking and ambitious. From time to time sounds carried on the air inform him of Mahim's doings: Far-off music, or the distant putt-putt of a generator revealing that he has even brought electricity into his home. He learns that Mahim has held a party. "Was I invited?" Huzur asks his servant. He was, he learns--and Mahim was much distressed that he did not attend. "Do I ever go anywhere?" "No."

After winning worldwide fame with the first two films of his Apu trilogy, which were the first Indian titles to aspire to, and reach, the status of art, Satyajit Ray paused before finishing his trilogy about abject poverty to make this film about genteel poverty. Newly available on video at last in a high-quality print, it is the story of a man who has been compared to King Lear because of his pride, stubbornness, and the way he loses everything that matters.

Almost every scene involves Huzur, played by Chhabi Biswas, an actor who was such a favorite of Ray's that when he died in 1962, Ray said he simply stopped writing important middle-age roles. In "The Music Room" Biswas plays a man so profoundly encased in his existence that few realities can interfere. With no income and a dwindling fortune, he is nevertheless called "lord" by the shifty Mahim, and although his enormous castle is neglected and only two servants remain, he carries on, oblivious.

His life centers on music. More precisely, on giving expensive concerts to show off his music room, or jalsaghar, with its shimmering chandelier, its ornamental carpet, and its portraits of Huzur and his ancestors. He lives to flaunt what remains of his wealth. After the opening sequence on the rooftop, much of the film is told in flashback to a time years earlier, and centers on two concerts given in the room.

The first is a coming-of-age "thread ceremony" in honor of his son Khoka. Only the best musicians will suffice, and Huzur reclines on pillows, flanked by his male neighbors and relatives, as the musicians and a celebrated woman singer perform. A slow camera pans the faces of the listeners, pausing at the vulgar Mahim, who is restless, does not enjoy Indian classical music, and reaches for a drink.

The evening is a triumph, even though Huzur's wife, waiting impatiently upstairs, berates him for mortgaging her jewels to pay for it. He is asleep before she finishes. Not long after, his wife and son leave for a river journey to the house of her father, and in a touching scene she bows to him as they leave, and then reveals a modern note: "Behave yourself!"

But the despised Mahim comes to see him with an invitation for a concert of his own. Ray structures the scene as a confrontation between privilege and new wealth: Huzur composes himself on a sofa and appears to be so deeply engrossed in his reading that he hardly notices Mahim. Then he counters that he, himself, is planning a concert for that very same evening! In the background, the servant, who knows the condition of their finances, looks stunned.

The second concert has disturbing undercurrents. Even the singer, a bearded man with a stricken face, seems aware of approaching doom. Huzur has sent word that his wife and son must return for the event, but they have not yet arrived, and as the chandelier sways in the wind and lightning streaks through the sky, Huzur looks down and sees an insect drowning in his glass. It is an omen of great loss.

The third concert comes at the end of the long period of withdrawal. We are back in the present. The last of the jewels will be pawned. Huzur will go out in style. He impetuously outbids Mahim for the services of a famous, even scandalous, woman singer and dancer. At the end, when Mahim commits the folly of attempting to tip the woman, the crook of Huzur's walking stick comes down firmly on his hand: It is for the lord to tip in his own house. Huzur hands the woman the last of his gold coins. The great closing sequence shows Huzur in the afterglow of this reckless grand gesture. Drunk, he toasts the portraits of his ancestors, until he sees a spider crawling up the leg of his own portrait. It is dawn. The loyal retainer pulls away the draperies to admit the cold light.

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) was an unusually tall man, handsome as a movie star, the grandson of a landlord such as Huzur's ancestors. In Calcutta in the late 1940s he was a commercial artist for an ad agency, and founded a cinema club that bought its own print of "Potemkin" and imported films from around the world. He rejected the mass-produced Bengali films of the time as so much sub-Hollywood tripe, and with "Pather Panchali" (1955), the first of his famous Apu trilogy, he won a top prize at Cannes and established himself as the preeminent Indian filmmaker in the eyes of the world.

At the New York Film Festival in 1970, he was asked why he was now moving his camera more than in the Apu trilogy. "Because I can afford the equipment," he smiled. In his book Our Films Their Films, he recalled that he had never shot a foot of film before the first day of filming "Pather Panchali." When his cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, visited the Hawaii film festival a few years ago, he told me, "We started together. I had never exposed a single foot of film before that day."

Ray made many fine films. The Apu trilogy and "The Music Room" rank highest, I think, but there are also "The Big City" (1963), about a woman who breaks with convention and goes to work when her husband is laid off; "Days and Nights in the Forest" (1970), about office workers who take a holiday of self-discovery; "Distant Thunder" (1973), about an Indian village hearing echoes of World War II; "The Chess Players" (1977), about British attempts to seize the land of a lord who can barely bring himself to notice them, and "The Home and the World" (1984), based on the Tagore novel about a landowner who prides himself on his modern ideas, until his wife falls in love with his friend.

"The Music Room" is his most evocative film, and he fills it with observant details. The insect in the glass, the bliss of an elephant being bathed in the river, the joy of the servants reopening the dusty music room, the way the chandelier reflects Huzur's states of mind, the way when the servant sprinkles the guests with scent he adds an extra contemptuous shake for Mahim.

Despite the faded luxury surrounding Huzur, the film is not ornate in any way. Perhaps as a reaction to the hundreds of overwrought Indian musical melodramas churned out annually, Ray made an austere character study--also with music. His hero deserves the comparison with King Lear, because like Lear he arouses our sympathy even while indulging his vanity and stubbornly doing all of the wrong things. Like Lear, he thinks himself a man more sinned against than sinning. Like Lear, he is wrong.

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)

2009-08-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

Unhappiness is an invented thing.

So the General tells his wife. He is convinced she wants to be unhappy. She places herself willfully in the way of sadness. It is her choice. There was a time when Louisa would have agreed with him, when their views on society matched perfectly. But now she is truly unhappy, and it is beyond her choice. The General will never understand that. Neither, probably, will her lover, the Baron. It is the gift these men have given her: The ability to mourn what she has lost or never found. It is the one gift they cannot take back. Without it, she would have been unable to understand happiness. Certainly the men cannot.

''The Earrings of Madame de...,'' directed in 1953 by Max Ophuls, is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed. It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it. The film is famous for its elaborate camera movements, its graceful style, its sets, its costumes and of course its jewelry. It stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica, who effortlessly embody elegance. It could have been a mannered trifle. We sit in admiration of Ophuls' visual display, so fluid and intricate. Then to our surprise we find ourselves caring.

The story takes place in Vienna a century or so ago. The General (Boyer) has married late, and well, to Louisa (Darrieux), a great beauty. He gives her expensive diamond earrings as a wedding present. As the film opens, Madame is desperately in debt, and rummaging among her possessions for something to sell. The camera follows her in an unbroken shot as she looks through dresses, furs, jewelry, and finally settles on the earrings, which she never liked anyway. ''What will you tell your husband?'' asks her servant. She will tell him that she lost them.

She trusts the discretion of Remy the jeweler. She should not. Remy, who originally sold the earrings to the General, tells him the whole story. The General buys back the earrings as a farewell present to his mistress, who is leaving him and going to Constantinople. Certainly the wife will never see them again, and there is poetic justice involved.

The mistress sells the earrings to finance her gambling. The Baron Donati (De Sica) buys them. In his travels he encounters the Countess Louisa, falls in love, courts her, and gives her the earrings. She is startled to see them, but intuits how they came into the Baron's hands. How to explain their reappearance to the General? In his presence, she goes through the motions of ''finding'' them. The General knows this is a falsehood, and the whole tissue of deceptions unravels, even though the jewels are bought and sold two more times. (There is always a laugh when the jeweler turns up in the General's office for ''our usual transaction'').

Standing back a little from the comings and goings of the earrings, which is the stuff of farce, the movie begins to look more closely at Louisa (whose husband's name is never given, so that she is always vaguely the ''Countess de...''). She and her husband live in a society where love affairs are more or less expected; ''your suitors get on my nerves,'' the General fusses as they leave a party. If they do not know specifically who their spouse is flirting with, they know generally. But there is a code in such affairs, and the code permits sex, but not love. The General confronts the Baron with his knowledge of the earrings. (''Constantinople?'' ''Yes.'') The General tells him, ''It is incompatible with your dignity, and mine, for my wife to accept a gift of such value from you.''

The General's instinct is sound. The Countess has indeed fallen in love. The Baron thought that he had, too. Their tragedy is that the intensity of her love carries her outside the rules, while the Baron remains safely in-bounds.

The scene where they fall in love shows Ophuls' mastery. He likes to show his characters surrounded by, even drowning in, their milieu. Interior spaces are crowded with possessions. Their bodies are adorned with gowns, uniforms, jewelry, decorations. Ophuls likes to shoot past foreground objects, or through windows, to show the characters contained by possessions. But in the key love scene, a montage involving several nights of dancing, the circling couple is gradually left all alone.

The Baron and the Countess are at a resort. On the dance floor, they observe it has been three weeks since they danced together--two days--one day--and then they are dancing still and no time has passed. The dialogue and costumes indicate the time transitions, but the music plays without interruption, as do their unbroken movements. They dance and dance, in love. An admiral's wife whispers: ''They're seen everywhere--because they can't meet anywhere.'' On the last night, one orchestra member after another packs up and goes home. A servant extinguishes the candles. Finally a black dropcloth is thrown over the harp, and the camera moves in until the screen is black and the dance is over. The economy of storytelling here--a courtship all told in a dance--resembles the famous montage in ''Citizen Kane'' where a marriage dissolves in a series of breakfasts.

The discovery of a possession in the wrong place at the wrong time is an ancient trick in fiction, from Desdemona's handkerchief to Henry James' Golden Bowl to the brooch that should not be around Judy's neck in ''Vertigo.'' What is interesting in ''Madame de...'' is the way the value of the earrings changes in relationship to their meaning. At the start Madame Louisa wants only to sell them. Then, when they are a gift from her lover, they become invaluable. The General wants to buy them back once, twice, but finally is reduced to telling the jeweler, ''Stay away from me with those infernal earrings!'' An expensive bauble, intended to symbolize love, becomes an annoyance and a danger when it finally does represent it.

For Louisa, the earrings teach a lesson. She is no more morally to blame than her husband or her lover, if only adultery is at stake. But if the General's honor is the question--if being gossiped about by the silly admiral's wife is the result--then she is to blame. Certainly the Baron understands this, and withdraws, his love suddenly upstaged by his regard for his own reputation. The final meeting between the two men is brought about, curiously, by the General's discovery that he does have real feelings for his wife.

Max Ophuls (1902-1957) was a German who made films in Germany, Hollywood and France. His career was used by the critic Andrew Sarris as a foundation-stone of his auteur theory. Sarris famously advised moviegoers to value the how of a movie more than the what. The story and message are not as important, he said, as the style and art. In Ophuls, he had a good test case, because Ophuls is seemingly the director most obsessed with surfaces, with the visual look, with elaborate camera movements. He was dismissed by many as nothing more than a fancy stylist, and it took Sarris (and the French auteurists) to show what a master he was.

His films are one of the great pleasures of the cinema. ''Madame de...'' is equaled by ''La Ronde'' (1950) and ''Lola Montes'' (1955) as movies whose surfaces are a voluptuous pleasure to watch, regardless of whether you choose to plunge into their depths. The long, impossibly complex opening shot of ''La Ronde,'' with the narrator introducing us to the story and even singing a little song, is one of the treasures of the movies. And who else has such romantic boldness that he will show Louisa writing her Baron day after day, with no letter back, and then have him tell her when they finally meet: ''I always answered your letters, my love--but I lacked the courage to mail them.'' And then to show his unmailed letters torn into bits and flung into the air to become snow.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

2009-08-03T07:17:00.000-07:00

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff," one of the best of all Japanese films, is curiously named after its villain, and not after any of the characters we identify with. The bristle-bearded slavemaster Sansho is at the center of two journeys, one toward him, one away, although the early travelers have no suspicion of their destination. He is as heartless a creature as I have seen on the screen.

The film opens on a forest hillside, where Tamaki, the wife of a kind district administrator, is discovered with her young son, Zushio, her younger daughter, Anju, and their servant, making their way down a difficult path. The dense underbrush here is reflected throughout the film, which is set in 11th-century feudal times, and reflects the director's feeling that humans and nature are the sides of a coin. The little group has had to flee for their lives after her husband drew the wrath of the cruel Sansho and was exiled. They hope to rejoin him.

In this shot, and throughout the film, Mizoguchi closely observes the compositional rules of classic cinema. Movement to left suggests backward in time, to the right, forward. Diagonals move in the direction of their sharpest angle. Upward movement is hopeful, downward ominous. By moving from upper left to lower right, they are descending into an unpromising future.

They stop for the night, build a rough shelter from tree limbs, and start a small fire. In the darkness, wolves howl. Their little domestic circle in the firelight is a moment of happiness, however uncertain, that they will not feel again. Then an old priestess finds them, and offers them shelter in her nearby home. In the morning, discovering their destination, she suggests that a boat journey will greatly diminish the distance. She knows some friendly boatman. As they leave her house, a furtive dark figure, almost unseen, darts behind them in the shrubbery.

The delivery to the boatmen is a betrayal. The woman and servant are captured by body merchants, the women to be sold into prostitution, the children into slavery under Sansho. He runs a barbaric prison camp of forced labor, and it here that the children will spend the next 10 years. Sansho is an unlovely man, a bully and sadist, who is surrounded by servile lackeys, all except for his son.

Flashbacks have shown us something of the captured children's early life under their father, a good man who gave his son an amulet representing the Goddess of Mercy, and taught him that all men are created equal. That same familiar concept is enshrined in the Japanese Constitution, imposed by the American occupation in 1947 and still in force, not a word changed, 60 years later. When Mizoguchi made his film in 1954 the words must have been alive in his mind, reflecting his obsession with the rights of women throughout his career, and serving to condemn Sansho's slave camp (which mirrors those the Japanese ran in the Second World War). The story, we're told in a prefatory note, took place in "an era when mankind had not yet awakened as human beings." By that Mizoguchi may be referring both to the story and to aspects of traditional Japanese totalitarian society, in which everyone's role was rigidly defined, and authority flowed from the top down.

As the plot unfurls, we see Zushio and Anju trying to escape, lured by an evocative song that is sung to them by a recent prisoner from their village, and echoed too in a bird cry: "Zushio, Anju, come back, I need you." It is their mother's ghostly voice. The film incorporates this mystical summons into images of startling cruelty under Sansho, who causes prisoners to be branded on their foreheads if they try to escape. One who does not agree with this practice is Sansho's son, Taro, and it is an irony of the film that while Taro embraces resistance, Zushio begins to identify with Sansho and becomes the tyrant's surrogate son. Then he has a conversion, in a scene of surpassing beauty and emotion, as the film moves toward its final journey.

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) is considered, with Ozu and Kurosawa, one of Japan's greatest directors; for this film, and also "Song of Oharu," (1952) and "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953), he won the Silver Lion, the grand prize, three years in a row at Venice, which was and remains unheard-of. He is known for the elegance of his compositions and the tact of his camera movement, and his theory "one scene, one shot," as in a famous scene in "Sansho" where the suicide by drowning of one of the characters is not shown, but merely indicated by ripples on the surface of a lake. Remarkably, since his characters always seem carefully composed within the frame, we learn that he never instructed the actors about where to move or stand, but simply indicated the desired result and let them move and place themselves. No doubt this leads to a subtly-sensed feeling of unstudied natural movement.

Ozu of course also adheres to "one scene, one shot," but his camera never moves, and framing and composition are everything. Mizoguchi's elegant camera movement almost creates the illusion that we are not only looking along with him, but sometimes looking away, choosing not to see. The camera does not move away from certain actions so much as decline to notice them, often because they are too painful or personal.

Mizoguchi made about 75 films, but of them all "Sansho" may contain the most autobiographical impulse. Living in poverty, Wikipedia reports, his family placed his older sister for adoption, and the adoptive family sold her as a geisha. His father treated the family brutally. Here are perhaps the reasons why the story of "Sansho," based on a 500-year-old folk tale, resonated so strongly in the director's mind.

Sometimes it is difficult to say exactly why a story strikes us with such power. In the case of "Sansho the Bailiff," it may be the unrelieved tragedy that strikes this good family for no good reason. They are not destroyed instantly, in a natural cataclysm, but separated for long years to know and experience their fates. That gives us time enough to know and believe the depth of Sansho's cruelty. Some humans are born without kindness or mercy, and do with pleasure what others could not do at all.

At dinner last night a man of around 60 recalled an event when he was 6. His beloved cat gave birth to a litter on his stomach during the night. On awakening, he saw the miracle of the tiny mewing specks of life, and wondered that his cat would so trust him as to give birth there, and not in a hidden corner, as is the nature of cats. The man's voice trembled as he told what happened then. His beast of a stepfather took the kittens and, in the boy's full view, smashed them with a hammer. I tell the story only to capture the sadism of Sansho, who takes pleasure in his work, and mirrors some of the stories Mizoguchi must have heard about wartime atrocities.

Does the story have a happy ending? No. But it has resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness (although not of Sansho). It has the conversion of Zushio, and the spectacular turn his fortune takes. After all of that more still happens, but for that you must see the film. At some point during the watching, "Sansho the Bailiff" stops being a fable or a narrative and starts being a lament, and by that time it is happening to us as few films do.

Anthony Lane, the film critic for The New Yorker, did a profile of Mizoguchi a few year ago in which he wrote these extraordinary words: "I have seen 'Sansho' only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal."

"Sansho" is available in an elaborate Criterion DVD edition with many extras, including a booklet with two versions of the original folk tale. Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari" is also included in my Great Movies collection on rogerebert.com. Jim Emerson, editor of the Web site, has written a deep and detailed essay on the film, especially strong on compositions and themes, here. The Anthony Lane profile is online at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/ 2006/09/11/060911crci_cinema.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

2009-08-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

Cabiria's eyebrows are straight, black horizontal lines, sketched above her eyes like a cartoon character's. Her shrug, her walk, her way of making a face, all suggest a performance. Of course a prostitute is always acting in one way or another, but Cabiria seems to have a character in mind--perhaps Chaplin's Little Tramp, with a touch of Lucille Ball, who must have been on Italian TV in the 1950s. It's as if Cabiria thinks she can waltz untouched through the horrors of her world, if she shields herself with a comic persona.

Or perhaps this actually is Cabiria and not a performance: Perhaps she is a waiflike innocent, a saint among the sinners. It is one of the pleasures of Giulietta Masina's performance that the guard never comes down. As artificial as Cabiria's behavior sometimes seems, it always seems her own, and this little woman carries herself proudly through the gutters of Rome.

``Nights of Cabiria,'' directed by Masina's husband, Federico Fellini, in 1957, won her the best actress award at Cannes, and the film won the Oscar for best foreign picture--his second in a row, after ``La Strada'' in 1956 (he also won for ``8 1/2'' in 1963 and ``Amarcord'' in 1974). Strange, then, that it is one of Fellini's least-known works--so unfamiliar that he was able to recycle a lot of the same underlying material in ``La Dolce Vita'' only three years later.

Now the movie has been re-released in a restored 35-mm. print, with retranslated, bolder subtitles giving a better idea of the dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini. There is also a 7 1/2-minute scene that was suppressed in earlier versions of the film.

Seeing it in its new glory, with a score by Fellini's beloved composer Nina Rota, ``Nights of Cabiria'' plays like a plucky collaboration on an adult theme between Fellini and Chaplin. Masina deliberately based her Cabiria on the Little Tramp, I think--most obviously with some business with an umbrella, and a struggle with the curtains in a nightclub. But while Chaplin's character inhabited a world of stock villains and happy endings, Cabiria survives at the low end of Rome's prostitution trade. When she's picked up by a famous actor and he asks her if she works the Via Veneto, the center of Rome's glitz, she replies matter-of-factly that, no, she prefers the Archeological Passage, because she can commute there on the subway.

Cabiria is a working girl. Not a sentimentalized one, as in ``Sweet Charity,'' the Broadway musical and movie based on this story, but a tough cookie who climbs into truck cabs, gets in fights and hides in the bushes during police raids. She's proud to own her own house--a tiny shack in an industrial wasteland--and she dreams of sooner or later finding true romance, but her taste in men is dangerous, it's so trusting; the movie opens with her current lover and pimp stealing her purse and shoving her into the river to drown.

By the nature of their work prostitutes can find themselves almost anywhere in a city, in almost any circle, on a given night. She's admitted to the nightclub, for example, under the sponsorship of the movie star (Alberto Lazzari). He picks her up after a fight with his fiancee, takes her to his palatial villa, and then hides her in the bathroom when the fiancee turns up unexpectedly (Cabiria spends the night with his dog). Later, seeking some kind of redemption, she joins another girl and a pimp on a visit to a reputed appearance by the Virgin Mary. And in the scene cut from the movie, she accompanies a good samaritan as he visits the homeless with food and gifts (she is shocked to see a once-beautiful hooker crawl from a hole in the ground).

All of these scenes are echoed in one way or another in ``La Dolce Vita,'' which sees some of the same terrain through the eyes of a gossip columnist (Marcello Mastroianni) instead of a prostitute. In both films, a hooker peeps through a door as a would-be client makes love with his mistress. Both have nightclub scenes opening with exotic ethnic dancers. Both have a bogus appearance by the Virgin. Both have a musical sequence set in an outdoor nightclub. And both have, as almost all Fellini movies have, a buxom slattern, a stone house by the sea, a procession and a scaffold seen outlined against the dawn. These must be personal touchstones of his imagination.

Fellini was a poet of words and music. He never recorded the dialogue at the time he shot his films. Like most Italian directors, he dubbed the words in later. On his sets, he played music during almost every scene, and you can sense in most Fellini movies a certain sway in the way the characters walk: Even the background extras seem to be hearing the same rhythm. Cabiria hears it, but often walks in counterpoint, as if to her own melody. She is a stubborn sentimentalist who cannot believe the man she loved--the man she would do anything for--would try to drown her for 40,000 lira. (``They'd do it for 5,000,'' her neighbor assures her.)

She is a woman seeking redemption, a woman who works as a sinner but seeks inner spirituality. One night she happens into a performance by a hypnotist, is called onstage, and in the film's most extraordinary sequence is placed in a trance (half vaudeville, half enchanted fantasy) in which she reveals her trust and sweetness. She also informs the rude audience that she has a house and a bank account.

A man named Oscar (Francois Perier) sees her on the stage and begins to court her with flowers and quiet sincerity. He is touched by her innocence and goodness, he says, and she believes him. At last she has found a man she can trust, to spend her whole life with. She is filled with joy, even as her friends (and we in the audience) despair of her naivete.

Fellini's roots as a filmmaker are in the postwar Italian Neorealist movement (he worked for Rossellini on ``Open City'' in 1945), and his early films have a grittiness that is gradually replaced by the dazzling phantasms of the later ones. ``Nights of Cabiria'' is transitional; it points toward the visual freedom of ``La Dolce Vita'' while still remaining attentive to the real world of postwar Rome. The scene involving the good samaritan provides a framework to show people living in city caves and under bridges, but even more touching is the scene where Cabiria turns over the keys of her house to the large and desperately poor family that has purchased it.

These scenes provide an anchor, an undertow, that lends a context to the lighter scenes, like the one where she is mocked by two Via Veneto prostitutes who are more elegant (and much taller) than she is. Or the scene where she drives away in the actor's big American car while flaunting her new client to her rival prostitutes (again, a scene Fellini would recycle in ``La Dolce Vita''). In all of those scenes she remains in defiant character, and then we sense a certain softening toward the end. As she allows herself to believe that her future lies with Oscar, her eyebrows subtly soften their bold horizontal slashes, and begin to curve above eyes and a face that seem more vulnerable. It's all in preparation for the film's unforgettable last shot, in which we see Cabiria's face in all its indomitable resolve.

Of all his characters, Fellini once said, Cabiria was the only one he was still worried about. In 1992, when Fellini was given an honorary career Oscar, he looked down from the podium to Masina sitting in the front row and told her not to cry. The camera cut to her face, showing her smiling bravely through her tears, and there was Cabiria.

Directed by Federico Fellini and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Edited by Leo Catozzo. Photographed by Aldo Tonti and Otello Martelli. Music by Nino Rota. Running time: 110 minutes. No MPAA rating (mature themes involving prostitution).

Broken Blossoms (1919)

2009-08-03T07:01:00.003-07:00

Lillian Gish told D.W. Griffith she was too old to play the girl in "Broken Blossoms," and perhaps she was. Born in 1896, she was 23 as Griffith prepared the production in 1919, and not as waiflike as audiences remembered her from "The Birth of a Nation," filmed five years earlier. But Griffith wanted a star, and Gish was that: Incredibly, in an age when silent actors never stopped working, this was her 64th film.

It is not as important as "Birth of a Nation," but neither is it as flawed; stung by criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in "Intolerance" (1916), which criticized prejudice. And in "Broken Blossoms" he told perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies--even though, to be sure, it's an idealized love with no touching.

Gish plays Lucy, the daughter of a brutal London prizefighter named Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp); the titles tell us she was "thrust into his hands by one of his girls." A drunken "gorilla," he lives in a hovel in Limehouse, and when his manager berates him for drinking and carousing, he takes it out on Lucy. Their story is intercut with the story of Cheng Haun (Richard Barthelmess), called "The Yellow Man" in the titles, a Buddhist who journeys from China to bring "a message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons." Instead, he turns to opium, and "Limehouse knows him only as the Chink storekeeper."

Griffith shot the movie almost entirely on sets, creating a foggy riverside atmosphere to suggest hidden lives. Cheng's room is a refuge upstairs over his shop. Lucy and Battling live in a room without windows, where he sits at a table, wolfing his meals and drinking, while she cowers in a corner. When he orders her to smile, she uses her fingers to push up the corners of her mouth. He gives Lucy money for groceries and goes out to drink more, and she timidly ventures out to do the shopping, clutching a precious hoard of tinfoil, which she hopes she can trade for a flower to brighten her grim existence. On the streets, weary housewives warn her against matrimony, and women of the night against prostitution; thus her only two possible escapes seem closed. Through the window of his shop, the Yellow Man sees her, and "the beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart."

That evening, Lucy spills hot food on Battling's hand, and he whips her almost to death before going out to drink. She stumbles into the Chinese man's store, and he gives her refuge, with "the first gentleness she has ever known." She is able to smile at him without using her fingers. When Battling Burrows finds out where she is, there's a violent showdown, including a striking shot where Lucy, locked in a room with Battling splintering the door with an ax, turns in a helpless circle, screaming.

Gish was one of the great vulnerable screamers of the silent era, although she also had a good line in pluck and independence. In a long career that ended with "The Whales of August" (1987), she played many strong women. Here she is essentially the passive object of male fantasy--of Battling, who sees her as servant and victim, and Cheng, who idealizes her as his "White Blossom." Griffith emphasizes both her angelic face and her weakness by often lighting and photographing her from above, and many years later, on the set of Robert Altman's "A Wedding" (1978), I heard her rebuke a photographer who was trying for a low-angle shot: "Get up from there! Get up! If God had wanted you to shoot me from that angle, he would have given you a camera in your belly button. Mr. Griffith always said, `Shoot from above for an angel; shoot from below for a devil.' "

If the attitudes about race in "Broken Blossoms" are more well-meaning and positive than in "Birth of a Nation," they are nevertheless painfully dated for today's eyes. But of course they are. Marriage between the races was a crime in 1919, and so we see Cheng's face in closeup, looming closer to Lucy as if he wishes to kiss her, and then pulling away as the subtitles assure us of his pure intentions. Battling, of course, thinks the Yellow Man has had his way, but the girl cries out, "T'ain't nothing wrong!" Griffith intrigues his audience with the possibility of exotic sex, and then cuts to moralizing titles.

The stereotyping of the Chinese character begins with the choice of a Caucasian to play him. There were many Asian actors in silent films, but only one, Sessue Hayakawa, played leading roles, and the most famous of the early Asian characters, like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, were played by whites. The character of Cheng is an anthology of stereotypes: He is a peaceful Buddhist, opium addict, shopkeeper. But Griffith's film was nevertheless open-minded and even liberal in the context of his time and audiences, and we sense the good intentions behind patronizing titles like this one describing the advice Cheng gets from a Buddhist priest before his journey: "word for word, such as a fond parent of our own land might give."

Although the best silent comedy remains timeless and many silent films remain undated, melodrama such as "Broken Blossoms" seems old-fashioned to many viewers. Watching it involves an act of cooperation with the film--even active sympathy. You have to imagine how exotic such stories once seemed, how the foggy streets of Limehouse and the broadly drawn characters once held audiences enthralled.

In trying to imagine the film's original impact, it might help to look at Fellini's "La Strada" (1954). Pauline Kael finds many of Fellini's inspirations in "Broken Blossoms," including Zampano the strongman (Anthony Quinn), whose costume even resembles Battling Burrows'. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), his much-abused companion, is obviously drawn from Lucy, and Richard Basehart's Matto, who gives her shelter from the brute, fills the same function as the Yellow Man.

Griffith in 1919 was the unchallenged king of serious American movies (only C.B. DeMille rivaled him in fame), and "Broken Blossoms" was seen as brave and controversial. What remains today is the artistry of the production, the ethereal quality of Lillian Gish, the broad appeal of the melodrama, and the atmosphere of the elaborate sets (the film's budget was actually larger than that of "Birth of a Nation").

And its social impact. Films like this, naive as they seem today, helped nudge a xenophobic nation toward racial tolerance.

There is all of that, and then there is Lillian Gish's face. Was she the greatest actress of silent films? Perhaps; her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men. When she was filming "The Whales of August" in 1987, her co-star was another legend, Bette Davis. The film's director, Lindsay Anderson, told me this story. One day after finishing a shot, he said, "Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!" "She should," Bette Davis observed dryly. "She invented them."

12 Angry Men (1957)

2009-08-03T06:57:00.001-07:00

In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.

The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge's perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only second-hand, as the jurors debate it. Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But "12 Angry Men" never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

The principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enlightened elements of our Constitution, although many Americans have had difficulty in accepting it. "It's an open and shut case," snaps Juror No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb) as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, 10 of his fellow jurors agree, and there is only one holdout--Juror No. 8 (Henry Fonda).

This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action; where the defendant has been glimpsed only in a single brief shot; where logic, emotion and prejudice struggle to control the field. It is a masterpiece of stylized realism--the style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content. Released in 1957, when Technicolor and lush production values were common, "12 Angry Men" was lean and mean. It got ecstatic reviews and a spread in Life magazine, but was a disappointment at the box office. Over the years it has found a constituency, however, and in a 2002 Internet Movie Database poll it was listed 23rd among the best films of all time.

The story is based on a television play by Reginald Rose, later made into a movie by Sidney Lumet, with Rose and Henry Fonda acting as co-producers and putting up their own money to finance it. It was Lumet's first feature, although he was much experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits ("On the Waterfront," "Long Day's Journey into Night") show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges.

The cast included only one bankable star, Fonda, but the other 11 actors were among the best then working in New York, including Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley and Robert Webber. They smoke, they sweat, they swear, they sprawl, they stalk, they get angry.

In a length of only 95 minutes (it sometimes feels as if the movie is shot in real time), the jurors are all defined in terms of their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices and emotional tilts. Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving L train.

We see the murder weapon, a switch-blade knife, and hear the jurors debate the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Fonda imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In its ingenuity, in the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory, "12 Angry Men" is as meticulous as the summation of an Agatha Christie thriller.

But it is not about solving the crime. It is about sending a young man to die. The movie is timely in view of recent revelations that many Death Row convictions are based on contaminated evidence. "We're talking about somebody's life here," the Fonda character says. "We can't decide in five minutes. Supposing we're wrong?"

The defendant, when we glimpse him, looks "ethnic" but of no specific group. He could be Italian, Turkish, Indian, Jewish, Arabic, Mexican. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, and he looks exhausted and frightened. In the jury room, some jurors make veiled references to "these people." Finally Juror No. 10 (Ed Begley) begins a racist rant ("You know how these people lie. It's born in them. They don't know what the truth is. And let me tell you, they don't need any real big reason to kill someone, either...") As he continues, one juror after another stands up from the jury table and walks away, turning his back. Even those who think the defendant is guilty can't sit and listen to Begley's prejudice. The scene is one of the most powerful in the movie.

The vote, which begins as 11-to-1, shifts gradually. Although the movie is clearly in favor of the Fonda position, not all of those voting "guilty" are portrayed negatively. One of the key characters is Juror No. 4 (E. G. Marshall), a stockbroker wearing rimless glasses, who depends on pure logic and tries to avoid emotion altogether. Another Juror No. 7 (Jack Warden), who has tickets to a baseball game, grows impatient and changes his vote just to hurry things along. Juror No. 11 (George Voskovec), an immigrant who speaks with an accent, criticizes him: "Who tells you that you have the right to play like this with a man's life?" Earlier, No. 11 was attacked as a foreigner: "They come over and in no time at all they're telling us how to run the show."

The visual strategy of the movie is discussed by Lumet in Making Movies, one of the most intelligent and informative books ever written about the cinema. In planning the movie, he says, a "lens plot" occurred to him: To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters.

"In addition," he writes, "I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, shot the second third at eye level and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie." In the film's last shot, he observes, he used a wide-angle lens "to let us finally breathe."

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood. By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate, a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered. By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion. Lumet uses closeups rarely, but effectively: One man in particular--Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney, the oldest man on the jury)--is often seen in full-frame, because he has a way of cutting to the crucial point and stating the obvious after it has eluded the others.

For Sidney Lumet, born in 1924, "12 Angry Men" was the beginning of a film career that has often sought controversial issues. Consider these titles from among his 43 films: "The Pawnbroker" (the Holocaust), "Fail-Safe" (accidental nuclear war), "Serpico" (police corruption), "Dog Day Afternoon" (homosexuality), "Network" (the decay of TV news), "The Verdict" (alcoholism and malpractice), "Daniel" (a son punished for the sins of his parents), "Running on Empty" (radical fugitives), and "Critical Care" (health care). There are also comedies and a musical ("The Wiz"). If Lumet is not among the most famous of American directors, that is only because he ranges so widely he cannot be categorized. Few filmmakers have been so consistently respectful of the audience's intelligence.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

2009-08-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

To begin with a story: Our grandson Taylor was deeply immersed in a video game on his laptop. I began to watch "The Thief of Bagdad" on DVD. At first he ignored it. Then I saw him glancing at the screen. Then he closed the laptop and watched full time. During the spider sequence, only his eyes were visible above the neck of his T-shirt. "That was a good movie!" he told me. "What did Taylor say when he found out it was almost 70 years old?" his mother, Sonia, asked me. "I didn't tell him," I said.

This 1940 movie is one of the great entertainments. It lifts up the heart. An early Technicolor movie, it employs colors gladly and with boldness, using costumes to introduce a rainbow. It has adventure, romance, song, a Miklos Rozsa score that one critic said is "a symphony accompanied by a movie." It had several directors; as producer, Alexander Korda leaped from one horse to another in midstream. But it maintains a consistent spirit, and that spirit is one of headlong joy in storytelling.

The story is loosely borrowed from Douglas Fairbanks Sr.'s "The Thief of Bagdad" (1924), itself a great film. Fairbanks Jr. told me it was his father's favorite. One major change is crucial: In the silent film, the thief and the romantic lead were one and the same, played by Fairbanks. In the 1940 film, they are made into two characters. The thief, Abu, is played by the Indian child star Sabu, then about 15. The king, Ahmad, is played by John Justin with a Fairbanksian mustache. This is an invaluable change, for both dramatic purposes and practical ones: The silent character needs no one to talk to. The 1940 characters become allies drawn from the top and bottom of society, making Sabu essentially the star of the film, although he doesn't receive top billing. The most compelling character, as he should be, is the villain Jaffar, played by the German emigre Conrad Veidt with hypnotic eyes and a cruel laugh. The beautiful, passive heroine, a princess desired by both men, is played by June Duprez.

The story in my mind moves from one spectacular special-effects sequence to another: the Sultan's mechanical toy collection. The flying horse. The storm at sea. The goddess with six arms. The towering genie released from a bottle. Abu's assault on the temple that contains the All-Seeing Eye. His climb up a mountainous statue. The battle with the gigantic spider. The flying carpet.

Half of the the shots in "Citizen Kane" used special effects, according to Robert Carringer, who wrote a book on the film. There is rarely a shot in "The Thief of Bagdad" without them. The film was a breakthrough in technique and vision, influential in shaping the entire genre. There are few effects in "Star Wars" (1977) that cannot be found in "Thief." Some of them, such as blue screen, were still being perfected. Other effects, such as matte paintings, had been in use for years.

The Criterion DVD offers interviews with three effects experts, including Ray Harryhausen, who discuss the film's techniques. It is especially eye-opening to see stills revealing the "hanging matte" technique, which creates a background or completes a composition by suspending a matte painting in front of the camera. The camera's 2-D eye is fooled by the painting into making us see foreground as background. Other techniques are simplicity itself: The genie is made to tower over Abu by using an optical printer to combine a shot of the genie (Rex Ingram) close to the camera, and Abu hundreds of feet away. Both are filmed from a static camera on the same beach.

The use of blue screen may seem primitive compared to today's computer-generated animation, but it has the advantage of using real-world subjects. The flying horse, for example, is a real horse, with a real actor mounted on it. The flying carpet is a real carpet, with Abu standing on it. Both the genie and the thief seem real in all of their shots, because they are.

The point here is that all of the effects, supervised by the wizard Lawrence W. Butler, are used to further and deepen the story. Consider the remarkable beauty of several scenes showing magnificent cities climbing hills in the background. The cities may be tinted peach or blue, which makes them all the more fantastical. They are all mattes.

Once on a visit to the Disney Studios, I met the famous matte artist Peter Ellenshaw, who was a young assistant artist on "Thief." He told me how his paintings used not only a forced perspective , but such devices as deliberate blurring to create the illusion of depth. When two lovers are standing in a balcony in front of a matte cityscape, it would be a mistake to make the painting in a photo-realistic style. Its indistinct qualities make it seem farther away.

Korda, a Hungarian emigre who had earlier run Britain's Denham Studios, was now an independent, powerful in the Mayer, Selznick or Goldwyn mode. He used his brother Vincent as his art director, his brother Zoltan as a director. The already legendary art director William Cameron Menzies also worked on the film, and is said to have directed some scenes. Together they made a film of breathtaking beauty. It is done so well that it does not date. Never mind that today similar vistas could be painted with CGI. These are so gorgeous that we cannot imagine them being improved.

Korda often employed others from overseas. Veidt (1893-1943) was a famous German silent actor who fled Hitler in 1933, became a British citizen, worked in Hollywood, was a major star. Sabu (1924-63) was born in Mysore, India, and as a boy was a servant for a maharajah. In 1937, he was cast by Robert Flaherty in the title role of the quasi-documentary "Elephant Boy," an international hit. He was signed by Korda, for whom he made "The Drum" (1938), "Thief" and the great success "Jungle Book" (1942). Rex Ingram (1895-1969), the genie, was a well-known African-American stage and screen actor who graduated from Northwestern University. He achieved fame in films like "Green Pastures" and "Cabin in the Sky."

The energy centers on the film are clearly supplied by Sabu and Veidt, as a boy bubbling with enthusiasm and innocent guile and a man steeped in bitterness and cruelty. Both performances are perfectly pitched to the needs of the screenplay. The romance between Duprez and Justin, as the princess and Ahmad, is rather bloodless, centering on abstract vows; their greatest passion is shown in the scene where they're bound to opposite walls, and under sentence of death. The same low-flame romance was mirrored in Disney's "Aladdin" (1992), greatly influenced by both versions of the "Thief," combining Abu and Ahmad as "Aladdin."

Although the film had so many directors (including Michael Powell, two Kordas and Menzies), it seems the work of one vision and that must have been Korda's. It remains one of the greatest of fantasy films, on a level with "The Wizard of Oz." To see either film is to see the cinema incorporating every technical art learned in the 1930s and employing them to create enchanting visions. Today, when dizzying CGI effects, the Queasy-Cam and a frantic editing pace seem to move films closer to video games, witness the beauty of "Thief of Bagdad" and mourn.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

2009-08-03T03:37:00.000-07:00

The first thing everyone notices and best remembers about "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) is the film's bizarre look. The actors inhabit a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives. These radical distortions immediately set the film apart from all earlier ones, which were based on the camera's innate tendency to record reality.

The stylized sets, obviously two-dimensional, must have been a lot less expensive than realistic sets and locations, but I doubt that's why the director, Robert Wiene, wanted them. He is making a film of delusions and deceptive appearances, about madmen and murder, and his characters exist at right angles to reality. None of them can quite be believed, nor can they believe one another.

The film opens in the German town of Holstenwall, seen in a drawing as houses like shrieks climbing a steep hill. After a prologue, a story is told: A sideshow operator named Caligari (Werner Krauss) arrives at the fair to exhibit the Somnambulist, a man he claims has been sleeping since his birth 23 years ago. This figure, named Cesare (Conrad Veidt), sleeps in a coffin and is hand-fed by the crazed-looking doctor, who claims he can answer any question.

The hero, Francis (Frederich Feher), visits the show with his friend Alan (Hans Heinz von Twardowski), who boldly asks, "When will I die?" The reply is chilling: "At first dawn!" At dawn Alan is dead. Suspicion falls on Cesare. Francis keeps watch all night through a window as Caligari sleeps next to the closed coffin. But the next morning, his fiancee, Jane (Lil Dagover), has been abducted. Does that clear the doctor and the Somnambulist from suspicion?

In itself, this is not a startling plot. The film's design transforms it into something very weird, especially as Cesare is seen carrying the unconscious Jane and is pursued by a mob. The chase carries them through streets of stark lights and shadows and up a zigzagging mountain trail. Caligari, meanwhile, is followed by Francis as he returns to where he apparently lives -- the insane asylum, where he is the ... director! Evidence is discovered by Francis and the local police that Caligari, influenced by an occult medieval manuscript, yearned to find a somnambulist and place him under a hypnotic spell, subjecting him to his will.

A case can be made that "Caligari" was the first true horror film. There had been earlier ghost stories and the eerie serial "Fantomas" made in 1913-14, but their characters were inhabiting a recognizable world. "Caligari" creates a mindscape, a subjective psychological fantasy. In this world, unspeakable horror becomes possible.

"Caligari" is said to be the first example in cinema of German Expressionism, a visual style in which not only the characters but the world itself is out of joint. I don't know of another film that used its extreme distortions and discordant angles, but its over-all attitude certainly cleared the way for "The Golem," "Nosferatu," "Metropolis" and "M." In one of the best-known books ever written about film, From Caligari to Hitler, the art historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that the rise of Nazism was foretold by the preceding years of German films, which reflected a world at wrong angles and lost values. In this reading, Caligari was Hitler and the German people were sleepwalkers under his spell.

I don't believe the films caused Nazism in Germany, and whether they predicted it depends a great deal on hindsight. What is certain is that the Expressionist horror films created the most durable and bulletproof of genres. No other genre has box-office appeal all by itself, although film noir, also deeply influenced by Expressionism, comes close. All a horror film need promise is horror -- the unspeakable, the terrifying, the merciless, the lurching monstrous figure of destruction. It needs no stars, only basic production values, just the ability to promise horror.

The 1920s were the decade that saw the rise of the Dada and Surrealist movements. The first rejected all pretense, all standards, all sincerity. It was a profound expression of hopelessness and alienation. It led to the rise of the related art movement Surrealism, which cut loose from order and propriety, rejected common values, scorned tradition and sought to overthrow society with anarchy. It's said such movements were a reaction to the horror of World War I, which upset decades of relative tranquility and order, threw the European nations into unstable new relationships and presented the inhuman spectacle of modern mechanized battle. After the brutality of trench warfare, it would be difficult to return to landscapes and still life.

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" as a viewing experience must have been unsettling to the audiences of 1920. The original Variety review, which cheerfully reveals the ending, tries in its stilted wording to express enthusiasm: "This has resulted in a series of actions so perfectly dovetailed as to carry the story through at a perfect tempo. Robert Wiene has made perfect use of settings designed by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Roehrig, settings that squeeze and turn and adjust the eye and through the eye the mentality."

Although the prose suggests chiropractic, I imagine some viewers indeed felt squeezed, turned and adjusted by the images. The film today still casts its spell. I viewed the version on a DVD from Kino, which (unusually with silent films of its vintage) includes all the original footage. The film has not been digitally restored to remove all flaws, but in a way those that remain --spots, blemishes -- add to the effect. You feel as if you're watching an old record of an old story, which includes within itself an even older one. The original film was tinted, so there are no purely black-and-white scenes, only those mostly in shades of reddish-brown and slate blue.

Wiene is fond of the iris shot, which opens or closes upon a scene like an eye. This makes the point that we are looking and are privileged to witness events closed to other people. He also sparingly uses a device of superimposing words on the image to show Alan feeling surrounded by voices. Wiene's closeups lean heavily on Caligari's fierce and sinister scowl, the dewy innocence of Jane, and the wide-eyed determination of Alan. The Somnambulist is not very expressive -- he certainly lacks the charisma of Frankenstein's monster, who in a way he inspired -- and is most often seen in long shot, as if the camera considers him an object, not a person.

The sets are presented, as they must be, in mostly longer shots, establishing their spiky and ragged points and edges. The visual environment plays like a wilderness of blades; the effect is to deny the characters any place of safety or rest. It isn't surprising that the "Caligari" set design inspired so few other films, although its camera angles, lighting and drama can clearly be seen throughout film noir, for example in the visual style of "The Third Man" (1949).

Robert Wiene (1873-1938) began his career in 1913 and directed 47 films, including "Raskolnikow," based on Crime and Punishment, and the famous "The Hands of Orlac" (1924). He fled the rise of Hitler and at the time of his death was working on "Ultimatum" (1938), with another refugee, Erich von Stroheim. Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), another refugee, made 119 films and was a major star of the time, whose credits included the great "The Man Who Laughs" (1928) and of course "Casablanca"(1942), where he played Major Strasser, who met an unexpected end at the airport. (All three titles are also in my Great Movies Collection.)

Note: "Caligari" is part of Kino's excellent German Expressionism set and is available separately.

Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

2009-08-03T03:02:00.000-07:00

In 1929, the year it was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2 seconds. "Man With a Movie Camera" had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of Michael Bay's "Armageddon" was -- also 2.3 seconds. Why would I begin a discussion of a silent classic by discussing such a mundane matter? It helps to understand the impact the film made at the time. Viewers had never seen anything like it, and Mordaunt Hall, the horrified author of the New York Times review, wrote: "The producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention." This reminds me of Harry Carey's advice in 1929 to John Wayne, as the talkies were coming in: "Stop halfway through every sentence. The audience can't listen that fast."

"Man With a Movie Camera" is fascinating for many better reasons than its ASL, but let's begin with the point Dziga Vertof was trying to make. He felt film was locked into the tradition of stage plays, and it was time to discover a new style that was specifically cinematic. Movies could move with the speed of our minds when we are free-associating, or with the speed of a passionate musical composition. They did not need any dialogue--and indeed, at the opening of the film he pointed out that it had no scenario, no intertitles, and no characters. It was a series of images, and his notes specified a fast-moving musical score.

There was an overall plan. He would show 24 hours in a single day of a Russian city. It took him four years to film this day, and he worked in three cities: Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. His wife Yelizaveta Svilova supervised the editing from about 1,775 separate shots -- all the more impressive because most of the shots consisted of separate set-ups. The cinematography was by his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who refused to ever work with him again. (Vertov was born Denis Kaufman, and worked under a name meaning "spinning top." Another brother, Boris Kaufman, immigrated to Hollywood and won an Oscar for filming "On the Waterfront.")

Born in 1896 and coming of age during the Russian Revolution, Vertov considered himself a radical artist in a decade where modernism and surrealism were gaining stature in all the arts. He began by editing official newsreels, which he assembled into montages that must have appeared rather surprising to some audiences, and then started making his own films. He would invent an entirely new style. Perhaps he did. "It stands as a stinging indictment of almost every film made between its release in 1929 and the appearance of Godard’s 'Breathless' 30 years later," the critic Neil Young wrote, "and Vertov’s dazzling picture seems, today, arguably the fresher of the two." Godard is said to have introduced the "jump cut," but Vertov's film is entirely jump cuts.

There is a temptation to review the simply by listing what you will see in it. Machinery, crowds, boats, buildings, production line workers, streets, beaches, crowds, hundreds of individual faces, planes, trains, automobiles, and so on. But these shots have an organizing pattern. "Man With a Movie Camera" opens with an empty cinema, its seats standing at attention. The seats swivel down (by themselves), and an audience hurries in and fills them. They begin to look at a film. This film. And this film is about--this film being made.

The only continuing figure -- not a "character" -- is the Man With the Movie Camera. He uses an early hand-cracked model, smaller than the one Buster Keaton uses in "The Cameraman" (1928), although even that one is light enough to be balanced on the shoulder with its tripod. This Man is seen photographing many of the shots in the movie. Then there are shots of how he does it--securing the tripod and himself to the top of an automobile or the bed of a speeding truck, stooping to walk through a coal mine, hanging in a basket over a waterfall. We see a hole being dug between two train tracks, and later a train racing straight towards the camera. We're reminded that when the earliest movie audiences saw such a shot, they were allegedly terrified, and ducked down in their seats.

Intercut with this are shots of this film being edited. The machinery. The editor. The physical film itself. Sometimes the action halts with a freeze frame, and we see that the editor has stopped work. But that's later--placing it right after the freeze frame would seem too much like continuity. If there is no continuity, there is a gathering rhythmic speed that reaches a crescendo nearer the end. The film has shot itself, edited itself, and now is conducting itself at an accelerating tempo.

Most movies strive for what John Ford called "invisible editing" -- edits that are at the service at the storytelling, and do not call attention to themselves. Even with a shock cut in a horror film, we are focused on the subject of the shot, not the shot itself. Considered as a visual object, "Man With a Movie Camera" deconstructs this process. It assembles itself in plain view. It is about itself, and folds into and out of itself like origami. It was in 1912 that Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world with his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase." It wasn't shocked by nudity--the painting was too abstract to show any. They were shocked that he depicted the descent in a series of steps taking place all at the same time. In a way, he had invented the freeze frame.

What Vertov did was elevate this avant-garde freedom to a level encompassing his entire film. That is why the film seems fresh today; 80 years later, it is fresh. There had been "city documentaries" earlier, showing a day in the life of a metropolis; one of the most famous was "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" (1927).

By filming in three cities and not naming any of them, Vertov had a wider focus: His film was about The City, and The Cinema, and The Man With a Movie Camera. It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. Godard once said "The cinema is life at 24 frames per second." Wrong. That's what life is. The Cinema only starts with the 24 frames -- and besides, in the silent era it was closer to 18 fps. It's what you do after you have your frames that makes it Cinema.

The experience of "Man With a Movie Camera" is unthinkable without the participation of music. Virtually every silent film was seen with music, if only from a single piano, accordion, or violin. The Mighty Wurlitzer, with its sound effects and different musical voices, was invented for movies.

The version available in the U.S. is from Kino, and features a score by composer Michael Nyman ("The Piano"). It was premiered performed by the Michael Nyman Band on May 17, 2002 at London's Royal Festival Hall. As the tempo mounts, it takes on a relentless momentum. Another score was created by the Cinematic Orchestra, and you can hear it while viewing nine minutes of the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvTF6B5XKxQ

A famous score was created by the Alloy Orchestra of Cambridge, Mass., which devotes itself to accompanying silent cinema. To mark the 80th anniversary of the film, the Alloy obtained and restored a print from the Moscow Film Archive, and performed their revised score in the city. They will tour with the print in 2010, and on their schedule is Ebertfest 2010.

The surrealist milestone "Un Chien Andalou" (1928), by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, is also in my Great Movies Collection.

Rio Bravo (1959)

2009-08-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

Howard Hawks didn’t direct a film for four years after the failure of his "Land of the Pharaohs" in 1955. He thought maybe he had lost it. When he came back to work on "Rio Bravo" in 1958, he was 62 years old, would be working on his 41st film and was so nervous on the first day of shooting that he stood behind a set and vomited. Then he walked out and directed a masterpiece.

To watch "Rio Bravo" is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water. It contains one of John Wayne’s best performances. It has surprisingly warm romantic chemistry between Wayne and Angie Dickinson. Dean Martin is touching. Ricky Nelson, then a rival of Elvis’ and with a pompadour that would have been laughed out of the Old West, improbably works in the role of a kid gunslinger. Old Walter Brennan, as the peg-legged deputy, provides comic support that never oversteps.

Wayne and the other men and the gambling lady inhabit a town that is populous and even crowded, but not a single citizen, except for an early victim, a friendly hotel owner and his wife and of course the villain, ever says a word to them. The shadows are filled with hired killers with $50 gold pieces in their pockets — "the price of a human life." All that buys Wayne and his deputies a stay of execution is the prisoner they precariously hold as a hostage. In a film with suspenseful standoffs and looming peril, even a scene where Wayne and Martin walk down Main Street after nightfall is frightening.

The story situation was fashioned by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, two veterans who wrote Hawks’ great film "The Big Sleep" in 1946. It centers on four men holed up inside a sheriff’s office: a seasoned lawman, a drunk, an old coot and a kid. This formula would prove so resilient that Hawks would remake it in "El Dorado" (1966), John Carpenter would remake it as "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976) and directors from Scorsese to Tarantino to Stone would directly reference it. It is a Western with all of the artifice of the genre, but the characters and their connections take on a curious reality; within this closed system, their relationships have a psychological plausibility.

Wayne, as Sheriff John T. Chance, plays what he himself called "the John Wayne role." He even wears the same hat, now battered and torn, that he had worn in Westerns ever since John Ford’s "Stagecoach" (1939). Yet here he calls upon the role and his own history to bring nuance and depth to the character. Grumpy old Ford, seeing Hawks' "Red River," said "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act."

Wayne is effective above all when he simply stands and regards people. "I don’t act, I react," he liked to say, and here you see what he meant. His Chance doesn’t feel it necessary to impose himself, apart from the formidable fact of his presence. He never sweet-talks Feathers (Dickinson), indeed tends to be gruff toward her, but his eyes and body language speak for him. There is a moment when he is angered that she didn’t get on the stage out of town, stalks upstairs to her hotel room, barges through the door and then — in the reverse shot — sees her and transforms his whole demeanor. Can you say a man "softens" simply by the way he holds himself? With the most subtle of body movements, he unwinds into the faintest beginning of a courtly bow. You don’t see it. You feel it.

Dickinson was 27, looked younger, when she made the film — her first significant feature role after bit parts and TV. Wayne was 51. No matter. They fit together. They liked each other. They make this palpable without throwing themselves at each other. If you will go to chapter 21 of the DVD, you will see a romantic scene so sweet and unexpected, it may make you hold your breath. Dickinson absolutely holds the screen against the big man. Her carriage and deep, rich voice project a sense of who she is — not a saloon floozy but a competent professional gambler accustomed to sparring with men.

She was the type of woman Hawks liked, and returned to time and again: Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, indeed the future studio executive Sherry Lansing. He loved to use again what had worked for him earlier; when Dickinson asks Wayne to kiss her a second time, because "it’s even better when two people do it," there’s an echo of Bacall in "To Have and Have Not," telling Bogart, "It’s even better when you help." Peter Bogdanovich notices this in a supplement on the DVD and praises the long opening sequence in "Rio Bravo," which runs, he says, five minutes without dialogue. And no wonder: Hawks used the business of a coin thrown into a spittoon in the silent film "Underworld" (1927), for which he wrote the scenario. And where might Hawks have found inspiration for the scene where Wayne lifts Dickinson in his arms and carries her upstairs?

Much of the strength of the Chance character comes from the way he holds himself in reserve, not feeling the need to comment on everything. His delicate relationship with Dean Martin’s alcoholic character Dude involves a minimum of lectures and a lot of simply waiting to see what Dude will do. When Dude and old Stumpy (Brennan) get in a loud argument, Hawks holds Chance in center background, observing, not interfering. Chance is always the unspoken source of authority, the audience the others hope to impress.

The score by Dimitri Tiomkin evokes a frontier spirit when it wants to but also helps deepen the film, which rarely for a Western marks the passage of days with sunsets and sunrises, and makes the town streets seem lonely and exposed. There is also the introduction of a theme known to the Mexicans as "The Cutthroat Song," which the villain Burdette (John Russell) orders the band to play. Chance reads it as a message: "No quarter taken." The song haunts the film.

There is another use of music that some will question. In a lull in the action, the men relax inside the barricaded sheriff’s office, and Martin, resting on his back with his hat shielding his eyes, begins to sing about a cowboy’s loneliness. Nelson picks up his guitar and accompanies him. Then Ricky sings an uptempo song of his own, with Martin and even Brennan in harmony. Does this scene feel airlifted in? Maybe, but I wouldn’t do without it. Martin and Nelson were two of the most popular singers of the time, and the interlude functions well as an affectionate reprise for the men before the final showdown. Needless to say, Sheriff Chance doesn’t sing along.

The brave sheriff takes a stand against the outlaws who threaten a town. It is a familiar Western situation, which may remind you of "High Noon" (1952). In 1972, I interviewed Wayne on the set of his "Cahill, U.S. Marshal" in Durango, Mexico. "High Noon" came up, as it will when Westerns are being discussed.

"What a piece of you-know-what that was," he told me. "I think it was popular because of the music. Think about it this way. Here’s a town full of people who have ridden in covered wagons all the way across the plains, fightin’ off Indians and drought and wild animals in order to settle down and make themselves a homestead. And then when three no-good bad guys walk into town and the marshal asks for a little help, everybody in town gets shy. If I’d been the marshal, I would have been so goddamned disgusted with those chicken-livered yellow sons of bitches that I would have just taken my wife and saddled up and rode out of there."

Also in my Great Movies Collection: Howard Hawks’ "The Big Sleep" (1946) and "Red River" (1948).

SOULS FOR SALE (1923)

2009-08-03T02:38:00.000-07:00

In the 1920s, the golden age of silent films, millions of Americans bought tickets every week to see movies like "Souls for Sale." It isn't on any list of great movies I've ever seen, possibly because hardly anyone had seen it for more than 75 years. When it has played over the last few years on Turner Classic Movies, it's possible more people saw it than in all the decades since it was released in 1923.

This is a prime example of the mid-range entertainment Hollywood was producing so skillfully at the time. Filled with actors who were then stars, fast-moving, entertaining, with a spectacular circus action sequence at the climax, it is drama, melodrama, romance and satire all at once -- wrapped up in a behind-the-scenes look at how a desperate young woman fell into the movie business by accident and became a star.

The story involves the memorably named Remember Steddon, played by Eleanor Boardman as a wide-eyed girl from a rural town who literally leaps off the train on her honeymoon to escape her new husband (Lew Cody). He swept her off her feet in a whirlwind courtship, we learn, but now he fills her with loathing; and no wonder, because he's a snaky operator with a skinny mustache and a history of marrying women and killing them for their insurance money.

Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, obviously not on a limited budget, it's also an exploitation of the national fascination with Hollywood and its transgressions. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921 would have been in audience minds as they saw the milk-fed maiden venturing into the den of iniquity. Remember's father is a preacher who lectures on the sins of the movies, and she believes what she hears.

But what is a girl to do? Stranded in the California desert after escaping from the train, she staggers under the burning sun and is close to death when she's rescued by a sheik on horseback. Is he a mirage? Not at all. He's an actor making a film. Poking fun at Valentino, a title card notes: "The usual sheik led the usual captive across the usual desert." The girl is nursed back to life by the filmmakers and taken to Los Angeles.

Already two of the movie men are in love with her: Richard Dix, as the film's director, and Frank Mayo, as the actor on the camel. But Remember is mindful of her father's warnings and stays clear of the movies until desperation drives her to seek a job. This sets in motion a fascinating backstage story in which we follow her as she gets past the studio gates, is rebuffed by a casting director, is befriended by the director and gets work as an extra.

Goldwyn must have called in a lot of favors, because there are cameo roles showing Charles Chaplin directing a scene while puffing furiously on a cigarette, Erich von Stroheim allegedly working on "Greed" and such other stars as Barbara La Marr, Jean Hersholt, Chester Conklin and Claire Windsor.

Remember is given a screen test, miserably fails, weeps when it is screened and is told by Dix: "If you could only cry that well on camera." Of course, she can. He also gives her some very modern advice: "Don't try to act funny. Just feel funny. The camera photographs exactly what you are thinking of." He then helpfully promises her: "I'll make an actress of you if I have to break your heart and every bone in your body."

Eleanor Boardman is a spirited screen presence, a big star in the decade, who married the important director King Vidor and starred in his masterpiece "The Crowd" (1928). Her female co-star in "Souls for Sale" is another silent legend, Mae Busch, who appeared in 131 roles between 1912 and 1947, most notably with Laurel and Hardy in "Sons of the Desert" (1933). Here her character's tragedy provides Boardman's big break: The newcomer takes over her starring role after a heavy overhead lamp falls on her: "She may not walk for a month -- if ever!"

The movie was written and directed by Rupert Hughes, who was the uncle Howard Hughes so fatefully decided to visit in Hollywood. He adapted it from his own novel, which was serialized in Redbook magazine, and judging by his title cards, he was well aware of how absurd his plot was. After the treacherous husband discovers his wife has disappeared from the train, he returns to his seat and -- goes to sleep. "Why didn't he tell the conductor and stop the train?" a title card asks, not unreasonably. Indeed, there are times when the titles seem to be doing the work of "MST 3000," providing a sardonic commentary on the action. One card observes: "That seasick camel is a regular osteopath."

"Souls for Sale" provides a pointed commentary on Hollywood's practice of putting the schedule above all other considerations. The climactic scene takes place during the filming of a circus scene. A violent storm is planned to threaten the Big Top, and a huge mounted propeller is brought in to generate wind. If the director warns people not to walk into that fan once, he does it three times. Then a real storm blows up, lightning strikes the crew's generator, the circus tent catches fire, Remember's evil husband turns up from his refuge in Egypt (she's afraid her lovers will discover she's already married, not knowing he was a bigamist), and the wind machine becomes a lethal weapon. But the animals in the menagerie are saved.

"Keep cranking until the flames grow too hot!" the director tells his camera crew. The Big Top goes up in a spectacular conflagration, there is a violent death (preceded by a heartfelt speech), and then, can you believe, with an ambulance hauling the deceased away, the heartless director asks Remember if she could possibly act in one more scene. She can. What a trouper. You can't tell me Rupert Hughes wasn't grinning when he wrote this.

He also seems to have had an open mind about camera possibilities. In a scene involving the setup for a studio scene, he hurries along with little jump cuts. His framing is fairly standard, but he doesn't overuse closeups, and the editing is brisk. The titles, when they come, are not used only for dialogue or information, but also sometimes seem to supply Hughes' own comments as he looks at his picture.

There's one little moment I'm curious about. Like so many silent films, "Souls for Sale" is not all in black and white, but uses a great deal of color tinting. Red for the desert, sepia for indoors, blue for night, a little yellow hand-painted in for the flames of the circus tent. When Remember and the wife killer are on the rear observation platform of the speeding train, the scene is tinted for night, but when he decides they should go inside, there's a quick shot of him, still outside, tinted sepia. Why's that there? Foreshadowing?

"Souls for Sale," popular on its release, was thought to be lost for many years. A few prints were discovered, and when the IMDb user "wmorrow59" saw one at the Museum of Modern Art, it was "badly tattered in places, with a confusing turn in the plot at one point, which suggested that a chunk of footage must be missing."

Since then the film has been restored; its first DVD version was released last month by Warner Bros. and Turner Classic Movies and looked remarkably good, considering its perilous survival. A new score has been added by Marcus Sjowall, part of TCM's Young Composers Competition, and the result is a lively and funny experience, enriched by the backstage rags-to-riches story; we see lots of sets, props, costumes, cameras, crew members and, of course, that one unfortunate overhead light.

Title cards near the end reflect the blessing of Sam Goldwyn, if not his penmanship, in praising the toilers of Hollywood for their dedication in bringing our dreams to the screen. And despite the town's reputation, Remember Steddon will be a virgin on her wedding day.

"Souls for Sale" on DVD is part of the Warner Bros. Archive Collection.