Elegy for the Aged Gangster: "Choice of Arms" (1981)

Alain Corneau’s Choice of Arms (1981) is a solid crime drama with an outstanding cast: Yves Montand, Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Montand is Noel Durieux, an aged, reformed mobster who now breeds thoroughbred horses with his wife Nicole (Deneuve). Noel is thrust back into the crime world when two escaped criminals show up at their door seeking refuge: Serge Olivier (Pierre Forget), Noel’s old partner-in-crime, and Mickey (Depardieu), a sociopathic, low-level gangster. Mickey becomes problematic when he threatens to expose Noel to the police for aiding and abetting them. When the police track the criminals to Noel’s house, Mickey flees. Noel must then keep the police off his back and at the same time track down Mickey to ensure his mouth stays shut.

The story’s foundation is secure, but on the whole the writing seems uneven: some characters and scenes feel extraneous, and the first half of the film doesn’t flow too well. Partly, this might be because the American cut is only 114 minutes long, 21 minutes shorter than the European cut. But while the first half of the film seems awkwardly assembled, with characters and situations lacking the necessary exposition, the second half is tight and gives new depths to the characters, Noel Durieux in particular.

Knowing that the cut I saw wasn’t complete, I want to believe that all of Choice of Arms’ faults would somehow be fixed if the 21 minutes were reinserted, but the most I can do is speculate. As it stands now, the biggest flaw is with Nicole Durieux. Catherine Deneuve has proven herself as one of the world’s strongest actors in such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Repulsion (1965), and Belle de Jour (1967), but here she isn’t given a chance to lend her talent: hers is only a peripheral role. It seems that whenever Mickey shows his face around the house, Noel is forever telling Nicole to deal with the horses. Thus, all the important scenes take place between Montand and Depardieu—Deneuve is never given a chance to develop any rapport with them.

Depardieu, however, gives a magnificent performance as Mickey. He delivers his dialogue with such immediacy that pre-meditation seems impossible. It is this unpredictable quality that makes his scenes so rife with anxiety. One of the highlights of the film is a scene where Mickey gets into a scrape with a female gas station attendant. When he pulls his gun on her, she keeps right on at him, screaming and provoking him still further. In a way, her cheeky impudence is rather humorous, but after having witnessed him kill before, we can’t help but think she’s asking for it. Instead, Mickey gets back in his car and backs into the front window of the store.

Contrary to Depardieu’s wired performance, Yves Montand plays his character as stoic and aloof. There’s an unnerving calmness about Noel, even when Mickey is running around the room firing off his pistol: it is as though Noel has seen this before, and knows exactly how to handle the situation. Noel inspires in us a murderous confidence, knowing well that if he has to, he will go to the farthest measures to assure he and his wife’s safety. Which is not to imply that Noel is a trigger-happy retiree: like Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III (1990), Noel is happy to be out of the game and not at all anxious to get back in it, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten how to play if need be.

As effective a story as Choice of Arms is, it still follows the gangster movie code in many ways. Aged gangsters are always calm, cool and collected—Noel in this film, Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) in Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), Jean Gabin’s Max in Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954), and Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972) amongst many others in the genre. The young gangsters are always too hotheaded, as well—Depardieu in this film, Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and the list continues. These archetypes, clichés though they have become, are almost essential to the genre: an inherent way to communicate generational conflict, nostalgia for the past and uncertainty for the future. There is always something elegiac about these stories, the we watch the old generation, so staid, unable to pass on quietly; it is as though the world is so unstable in the hands of the young that the old cannot leave well enough alone. This is really the core emotional conflict of Choice of Arms, with Mickey being a threat to the security that Noel has established. Such a timeless theme that permeates multiple genres and such disparate films such as La Dolce Vita (1960) and Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Choice of Arms may not be the most original movie ever, but Yves Montand and Gerard Depardieu really make the film worthwhile.

The Visual Artistry of Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus craft a dense image that combines cinematic techniques with theatrical traditions and elements from painting and portraiture. The intersection of all three is a film of rare visual splendor: rare, because hardly ever does a filmmaker savor the basic kinetics of motion, the texture of fabrics and the collision of fashions from disparate time periods like Fassbinder does. The story concerns fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) who invites Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla) to move in with her in order to play a dual role as both model and lover. Marlene (Irm Hermann) is Petra’s secretary, who bears witness as Petra and Karin’s relationship disintegrates under their struggle for power and domination over one another takes precedence in their relationship.

Fassbinder stages his characters in a tableau-style manner, often choosing to have them recite their lines while standing still, as though they are portraits speaking the lines. Sometimes the camera stays still, respecting the characters’ poise, while other times it navigates the set, highlighting the complex layers of visuals constantly at play: always choosing the long take, the camera racks focus to shift from Petra speaking to Karin listening, then it pans across the room, passing by statuesque mannequins on its way to Marlene who, in the corner, has stopped typing to stare at the two lovers philosophize about the politics of relationships.

Confined to only Petra’s apartment, the film’s theatrical origins are apparent (Fassbinder originally wrote The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a stage play). At the same time, the film feels organically cinematic: the intimacy of the shots often reveals details that would not be noticeable from the audience’s perspective in a theatrical setting. So much is conveyed through the actors’ subtlety—Margi Carstensen and Irm Hermann’s facial nuances are particularly revealing. Likewise, Fassbinder and Ballhaus’ compositions are equally telling, be it through the positioning of mannequins in the background that mimic the characters or the use of mirrors and windows to symbolically represent deception and disconnection.

Poussin’s painting of “Midas and Bacchus” covers an entire wall in the bedroom. As Petra and Karin sit on the bed in front of it, they begin to take on iconic statures like the characters depicted in the painting. The irony is that, if Petra, Karin and Marlene are to be idealized like the nudes in the painting, they are anything but perfect: they are constantly donning eccentric costumes (jeweled brassieres and long flowing robes) and covering their faces thickly with make-up in comparison with the bare skin in the painting—this, perhaps, reflecting the layers of deception and costumes worn by the characters. Too, the presence of the painting forges a bond between disparate time periods, commenting that the conflict between Petra and Karin is timeless, and has been performed throughout history. The parallel between Midas and Petra is not so obvious. Both are stories of ironic comeuppance: Midas received “the golden touch” as a reward, only to discover that it made life impossible for him to live. Petra’s comeuppance is less straightforward, and thankfully less moralistic: after recognizing Marlene’s loyalty, Petra decides to love her as a human being and not a servant. Hearing this, Marlene packs her bags and walks out the door, all the while “The Great Pretender” plays on the stereo. The song says it all: “Oh yes, I’m the great pretender / Pretending I’m doing well / My need is such I pretend too much / I’m lonely but no one can tell.” Petra’s “pretending” is her undoing: she doesn’t care for Marlene, and is only reaching out for a replacement for Karin, who has left her. Marlene, well aware of Petra’s motivations, prefers true insensitivity to false affection. As Petra says, “It’s easy to pity…but so much harder to understand. If you understand someone, don’t pity them—change them. Only pity what you can’t understand.”

The Stunted Growth of "Superman Returns" (2006)

Superman Returns (2006) is effrontery to everything quality cinema stands for. It satisfies all of Hollywood’s blockbuster criteria to a T, and it had the audience in my screening cheering. But my honest, gut reaction was boredom: I engaged in none of their thrills, none of their excitement and shared none of their enthusiasm. I am speaking against the crowd not as a curmudgeon-before-his-time, but as an audience member who has seen almost all of what Superman Returns has to offer before, and pessimistically wishes never to see it again.

Picking up somewhere in the middle of the Superman series, the movie opens with Superman (Brandon Routh) returning to Earth after several years of absence. Old flame Lois Lane (Kate Boswoth) is now in love with Richard White (James Marsen) and has a child, Jason White (Tristan Lake Leabu). Lex Luther (Kevin Spacey) has a plan to form a new continent out of crystals, drown North America, and defeat Superman. The outcome—he’s not called Superman for nothing.

Plot-wise, Superman Returns is a variation on a classic theme: guy wants girl, but a bunch of other guys keep getting in the way. The faults lie not in the basic structure, but in the details specific to the film. Most importantly, the film’s logic does not hold up to scrutiny. For example, if Kryptonite cripples Superman’s powers, then why doesn’t he drown after several minutes of being underwater? Too, if Lex Luther’s island is made of Kryptonite, then why is Superman able to carry it into space—shouldn’t he be powerless? These are only two of many questions that weren’t answered sufficiently during the film’s 154 minutes.

The script, written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, is simply excessive (a facet that is, after all, inherent to all areas of multi-million dollar, superhero blockbusters). In terms of dialogue, it is both unnatural and unnecessary. For example: the scene in which Superman is drowning in the ocean and is saved by Lois Lane, David and Jason, needs no words. The dialogue is merely eventful, with phrases like “He’s over there!” and “I see him” as the trio flies their seaplane over the drowning hero. All of this: not needed. It could easily be accomplished with a cut from Lois and David looking out the window to Superman in the water; or—there are many ways, none of which require dialogue. At the moment, such pointless words serve only as vessels of bad acting. Instances such as this abound in Superman Returns, and the title of an article by the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, written at the end of the era of silent films, comes to mind: “The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles.” Transposed to modern times, it would read, “The Ideal Pictures Needs No Dialogue.” Or—at least “less” dialogue.

The film’s look—the cinematography, the directing, and the special effects—is so stunning that it has stunted its growth. Its beauty—which would otherwise be in quotes except that the movie does possess a glossy, artificial allure akin to Botox, facelifts and such—is sterile and cold. There is not a grain of physicality in the landscape: the buildings, even when on the verge of collapse during an earthquake, are not frightening. Partly the reason they are not so imposing is that we know Superman will be by to save the day. Largely, however, the reason is that the terrain lacks any intimacy: the danger is too aestheticized to feel real. What Superman Returns lacks is the simplicity of something like Vittorio De Seta’s Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), a film whose cinematic look resounds in physical imposition and destitution. De Seta (who also photographed the film) illustrates an intimacy with Sicily’s mountainous terrain that cannot be faked, and its authenticity cannot be completely explained in words (in which case it could be easily copied). Physicality is the key, and realism plays a big role, as well: when the shepherds carry injured sheep on their backs across the mountains, the weight on their shoulders and the rocks jutting through their soles is communicated to the audience, but I still have no physical empathy with the pedestrians of Superman Returns, nor with Superman himself. Superman Returns is a fantasy, whereas Bandits of Orgosolo embraces documentary realism—but perhaps the genres are not so disparate, after all, Superman Returns director Bryan Singer could learn a lot from Vittorio De Seta.

I began this review by acknowledging that I am disagreeing with the majority audience I saw the film with. I’m perturbed by the existing dichotomy between critics and audiences, as though they are somehow separate. Critics are audience members, and the audience is a pool of critics. The separation is none. A critic may not speak for an entire audience, but neither does the critic speak for all critics. As regards Superman Returns, I was bored and unexcited. It was obvious what to expect: you could see it coming from a mile away and, after all, it is a Superman movie—of course he is going to save the day. Is there any other outcome that could be expected? Superman has too many strengths and not enough weaknesses for me to hold my breath for long enough to swallow any of it.

Recent Watching: Wassup Rockers (2005)

Larry Clark’s latest film, Wassup Rockers (2005), opens with a promising split-screen sequence: two shots of Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez), a Hispanic teenager, taken from different angels, as he introduces himself. The left screen, like an attentive listener, is focused on his face while Jonathan talks directly to the camera. The right screen is taken from an askew angle, and the camera does not make eye contact with Jonathan. This shot is taken from a little further back than its counterpart, and his teenage torso is the focal point. There is a voyeuristic quality to the shot, and it idealizes the teenager’s young sexuality. This tension between accurately depicting youth culture (the left screen) and idealizing it (the right screen) is a great way the start off the movie. Sadly, the conflict ends halfway through the movie when idealization and fantasy overrule reality, and the storyline waxes ridiculous one too many times for Wassup Rockers to be believable.

The story focuses on Jonathan and his friends, all of them from the same neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles and who love to skateboard. The first half of the movie is rather whimsical, a series of vignettes about their daily lives: waking up, lifting weights, band practice, girlfriends, and plenty of skateboarding. These are actions without consequences, and the lack of heavy-handed drama is a welcome relief. At the same time, there is an element of grit that separates Wassup Rockers from the majority of teen fluff that circulates movie theaters: these skaters fall down when attempting tricks, they don’t blow their lid wondering if a girl likes them or not, and they don’t complain about their parents pressuring them into college. Freddie Prinz, Jr. is absolutely nowhere in sight.

When the group heads off to Beverly Hills for some skating, the film’s idyllic quality turns juvenile. Their adventures turn into a series of “crash moments” with different white people (who are really just variations on the same theme): cops (both un-hip and racist), girls (who think Hispanic boys are just so cute) and guys young and old (who want to beat/shoot the skaters on sight). These racial conflicts are of the shallowest variety, and the clichés aren’t handled with enough irony for them to be funny. Too, the situations begin to lose their veracity and often degenerate into absurdity—the epitome of which involves a drunk, rich white woman who, after Kiko (Francisco Pedrasa) flees from her bubbly bathtub, falls into the bathtub herself. The sequence ends with her reaching up to grab onto the chandelier to hoist her up, only the chandelier falls into the tub and she gets electrocuted. The joke is juvenile, and rather pointless. Her death carries no significance and only clouds the narrative: so is Kiko going to be wanted for murder? This narrative strand is never followed through, and it remains only one of several such divergences that are never cleared up.

The visual element of Wassup Rockers is an improvement over its narrative. Director Larry Clark is at times intimate (such a close-up of a girl’s goosepimpled arm), while often he exercises his skill through extended skating sequences. In one such sequence the boys perform tricks on a staircase. While a couple kids land safely, most of them fall and injure themselves. The spectacle is nothing so new or innovative—you can see bad skaters on any street corner—but it is precisely this unimpressive quality that is so attractive. Whereas most skating sequences seek to impress with flashy moves and slick camera movement, Clark opts for unembellished, minimal camera movement that more closely resembles something the boys would shoot themselves.

With Wassup Rockers, Clark is attempting to re-envision Hispanic youth and skater culture from its current cinematic state. A similar (and more successful) undertaking was Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), which undertook the teenage Asian-American stereotype. Where Lin’s film succeeds is in it’s writing: the ensemble cast features distinctive characters and situations, whereas Clark’s characters are largely anonymous types. This is the ultimate irony of Wassup Rockers, that instead of realistically representing his characters, Clark has really only succeeded in not portraying them like everyone else.

Revolutionary Tapastry: Fassbinder and Fengler's The Niklashausen Journey (1970)

The Niklashausen Journey (1970), co-directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, is a dense political allegory that combines contemporary protests with the true story of Hans Bohm (Michael Konig), a shepherd who in the 15th century began a religious movement after claiming to have been visited by the Virgin Mary. Bohm’s movement picks up followers amongst the peasants, but ultimately it is suppressed by governing powers and Bohm is killed. Past and present collide in a way that is never reconciled: Hans Boehm and Johanna (Hanna Schygulla), his Virgin Mary, appear in full period costume while Fassbinder (playing the Black Monk who advises Bohm’s movement) wanders the landscape with his signature leather jacket and cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips; the police carry machine guns during the raid, and Gunther Kaufmann (playing the peasant leader) makes allusions to Fred Hampton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was murdered by Chicago police. The intersection of such distant times is draw parallels between counter-cultural movements: as Fassbinder says in the opening scene, he wishes to find success by understanding past failures.

A tapestry of cultural allusions, The Niklashausen Journey can be seen as part of a movement of politically-oriented cinema along with Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) and La Chinoise (1967), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Partner (1968) and Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and I Am Curious (Blue) (1968). These films funnel the anxieties in late-1960’s European youth through a variety of lenses: Bertolucci’s film uses Dostoyevsky’s The Double as its source, while Sjoman takes documentary approach to understand the sexual morays in Sweden, though it is with Godard that Fassbinder and Fengler share the most affinities. In Weekend, Godard channels society into a series of car crashes and other surreal disasters that occur on a couple’s weekend getaway, while in La Chinoise a group of students discuss Mao and plan a violent uprising. In both of these films, as in The Niklashausen Journey, violence is handled in a blunt, matter-of-fact manner that reflects a cultural desensitization and resignation. The battle between peasants and police in The Niklashausen Journey shares more in common with television news footage of Vietnam than with the dominant strain of war films that feature an orderly, staged battle sequence.

Co-directors Fassbinder and Fengler stage the film in a theatrical manner: the characters don’t move much, and often the scenes are long dialogues taking place in a single location. Dietrich Lohmann, however, Niklashausen’s cinematographer, navigates these scenes with the utmost mobility. His camera languidly pans back and forth across a field, as characters on opposite sides hold separate conversations; while tracking through a house, the camera zooms in and out, tilting up and down, taking in the full ambiance of the rich décor; or, more simply, the camera performs a long, slow zoom up a long, stone staircase while characters at the top carry on conversation. Rarely is camera movement savored so delectably, yet there is such energy in the delicate kinetics of Lohmann’s photography that the film does not feel slow or ill paced. Like Raoul Coutard’s photography for Godard’s La Chinoise, it is Lohmann’s artistry that makes the political content of the film accessible for audiences: when didacticism and idealism seem more than one can handle, it is this artistry that keeps us attune to the movie.

"Murderers Are Among Us" (1946), the German Neorealist Masterpiece

Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Are Among Us (1946) is most famous for two qualities: it is the first film to be made in Germany after World War II, and it was shot on location in the remnants and rubble of Berlin. Neither of these facts is merely trivia: the landscape plays an important role in the film (both as setting and as a metaphor for the near-capitulation of humanity during the war), and its authenticity is unmistakable; as for being the first film after the war, that it chose to deal with the present condition of everyday people is remarkable—rarely are such issues dealt with in cinema in such a timely manner. (An interesting parallel is with Roberto Rossellini, who was shooting his Neorealist masterpiece Rome, Open City (1946) at the same time under similar circumstances in Italy. Both filmmakers were grappling with not only the issue of how to represent contemporary conditions in narrative, but also the issue of how to capture the natural landscape visually.)

Staudte's story (co-written with his father Fritz Staudte) concerns what awaits those who return home after the war, a problem faced by both civilians and soldiers. Murderers Are Among Us focuses on Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef), who is returning home to Berlin after spending several years in a concentration camp. Her apartment building is still standing, but all around her the city is in collapse. She discovers that in her absence another tenant has moved in: Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert). Stricken with severe trauma from his days as a military doctor, Hans is unable to work. Susanne insists that they share the apartment together, and the two of them forge a bond and start to rebuild their lives together. Hans’ trauma is set off when he reunites with Ferdinand Brueckner (Arno Paulsen), his old commander from the war who has returned to his former prosperity and avoided the destitution felt by the rest of the country. As Hans thinks of how to seek retribution on Brueckner for ordering him to murder hundreds of innocent civilians one Christmas, Hans’ own murderous desires begin to surface, and the question arises of whether or not justice is possible for all the horrors that war wrought on society.

Stylistically, Murderers Are Among Us combines the chiaroscuro of 1920s expressionism with a more heightened sense of realism. The collaboration between director Staudte and cinematographers Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann is reminiscent of the pairing of director Orson Welles with cinematographer Gregg Toland for Citizen Kane (1941), resulting in images that are not only visually arresting, but also impact our understanding of the narrative. Staudte uses extreme low-angle shots to draw parallels between the dilapidated buildings and Hans, emphasizing their vertiginous anxieties. Both the buildings and Hans seem to be on the verge of collapse—one building does, in fact, collapse on camera. A title-card at the start of the film describes Berlin as a city that has already capitulated: the buildings that have yet to crumble suffer from the anxiety of still standing, knowing well that capitulation is eminent. What is the fate of a building half blown away by bombs except collapse? These same anxieties also permeate the low-angle shots of Hans who, drunk or sober, reels as though on the verge of falling onto the camera.

Though much of the movie is steeped in pessimism, the film ultimately is one of hope and optimism. Retribution is not achieved by the last shot, it is only dreamt of. A concluding montage foreshadows a just and lawful Germany, and an end to the toil of everyday living. Didactic, but well meaning, the film’s earnestness is balanced out by its frank detailing of post-war depravity.

Flashing Lights are Classic... The Big Clock

The Big Clock (1948), an adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s hardboiled gem directed by John Farrow, stars Ray Milland as George Stroud, an editor of a crime magazine that specializes in finding and exposing criminals that have eluded the police. Through a series of events as fantastic as they are entertaining, Stroud recognizes the “missing” murderer he is looking for is actually himself—and the new question is, Who is framing him, and why? As the clues pour in, and Earl Janoth (Stroud’s boss played by Charles Laughton) and his associate Steve Hagen (George Macready) keep pushing Stroud to finger the criminal, Stroud begins to suspect that their motivations aren’t entirely editorial. The plot is indicative of the Golden Age of mystery yarns: plots so rigorously convoluted they are admirable. The Big Sleep (1946) is famous for featuring a murder that even the author of its original novel, Raymond Chandler, could not figure out. But The Big Clock (as far as I can figure) makes sense—that said, there’s always someone’s mother, such as my own, who can find holes in any plot with such ease that it’s almost their sixth sense.

The trio of Milland, Laughton and Macready are remarkable together, and they are able to sustain an almost intolerable amount of tension, in large part due to the amount of restraint they bring to their roles. Instead of blowing gaskets and waxing hysteric, all three actors exert an unsettling sense of calm. Their anxiety does not emanate from sweaty brows, blundered speech and hasty decisions, but rather from their decisiveness in situations that would typically breed anything but. Elsa Lanchester, famous for playing The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), plays a painter who gives a fair amount of comic relief to the film (a staple of the hardboiled genre). Finally, Margaret O’Sullivan plays Milland’s wife, Georgette Stroud, a character that is somewhat under-utilized, but is important in highlighting the less-flattering characteristics of Milland.

“The Big Clock” that the title refers to is a large tower in the middle of Stroud’s building:an Orwellian object that represents time, order, and logicality, it shows the exact time of every country in the world. It is the prized monolith of Earl Janoth, a man who likewise sees himself as a purveyor of dominion over his employees. Metaphorically, it belongs in the series of cinematic images of “Big Brother” and other panoptic structures. But culturally it belongs among the great, antiquated cinematic images of modernity along with Metropolis (1927). Inside the clock, a spiral staircase leads to a platform with revolving cylinders and walls filled with rows and columns of flashing lights. While neither of which seem to have any mechanic function, they seem to be indicative (especially the blinking lights) of the movies’ preoccupation with futuristic technology. Nothing about the story suggests that it is to take place in the future, yet at the core of the story is this structure that is absolutely foreign to the present. The structure’s unfamiliarity is unrelenting, and it is the impossibility of familiarity that makes it so sinister. When Ray Milland is at the top of the clock, crouched behind a console as Henry Morgan (more familiarly credited as Harry Morgan of “Dragnet”) slowly ascends the stairs with his gun drawn, the clock’s design lends an atmosphere of desolation and hopelessness. Its disconnection from the offices that we work in is a source of anxiety that we draw on, and it feeds our connection with Ray Milland’s character. It is this attention to detail, along with impeccable acting, writing (by both Fearing and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer) and directing by Farrow that makes The Big Clock such a strong film, one that stands alongside Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942) as an example of the hardboiled film that does not degenerate over time into satire and caricature.

Concentric Ambiguities: Walter Ungerer's The Animal (1976)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep in Walter Ungerer’s The Animal (1976), a mystery story about a couple that inhabits an isolated cabin in the Vermont wilderness during winter. Ungerer uses nature’s ambiance to full advantage, portraying it as beautiful and scenic, but also as an elusive labyrinth: this tension been attraction and repulsion lends a subtle, unsettling quality to the film. The story is minimal, shifting between the daily activities of the couple, and two mysteries that preoccupy them. The first is a set of animal tracks that lead away from the house and to the woods, and the second is a pair of children who never speak and approach only the wife when she is alone. These children seem reminiscent of the twin sisters that reappear throughout Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), made four years later, but Ungerer doesn’t divulge whether they are real or just apparitions in the wife’s mind. Before either mystery is solved, the woman disappears while cross-country skiing. Search parties go out, days pass, but in an echo of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), the woman never reappears. The Animal can be seen as a series of concentric ambiguities: mysteries that begin but are never answered. Ungerer heads in the opposite path of the conventional mystery film, which posits a problem that is solved within ninety minutes; providing answers is part these films’ pleasures, and an even greater pleasure is figuring out the mystery on one’s own before the end of the movie. The Animal functions on an entirely different plane: we are left thinking about the mysteries, wondering how much they had to do with the story in the first place. Is the woman’s disappearance related to the animal tracks that so preoccupied the man, or was it merely a red herring that distracted us from detecting a deeper rift in their relationship? Ungerer demands that we not only question the nature of these mysteries and their importance to the story, but also their importance to the characters because it is the secrets that they keep—those not revealed—that continue to ruminate long after the movie has ended.

The Crimson Kimono

Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959) is a lesser- known film during the filmmaker’s most active period, and one that can hold its own alongside the best of his output such as Pickup on South Street (1953), Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). The film centers around two detectives, Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) and Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) investigating the murder of stripping sensation Sugar Torch. Historically speaking, it is most famous for being filmed on location in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo—a rarity for its time—and the footage’s journalistic grit still emanates strongly. It is this attention to detail that most concerns Fuller, whose attitude towards the plot can only be described as ambivalent: often it seems as though the director is saying (while chomping on a cigar), “We all know the story, so let’s just get on with it.” This fast-paced, elliptical style of filmmaking was clearly an influence on the French New Wave films such as Breathless (1960) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960), films that echo Fuller’s fondness for eschewing logicality and patience for tabloid-like sensationalism. The Crimson Kimono pulses like a hot item coming over the wire, straight to the press with no time wasted on any after thoughts.

Recent Watching: Hard Candy (2005)

The issue at hand in Hard Candy (2005)--a 32-year-old man who meets a 14-year-old girl online and takes her back to his house--is a serious one worth consideration but twenty minutes in, when the girl exchanges girl scouts for a more vengeful Mike Hammer-ish attitude, any sense of topicality vanishes. Hard Candy plays like a 17th century puritan witch-hunt but on kiddy porno: the movie revels, as did the puritans, in sadistically torturing others. It is a haughty stance, at once unsympathetic and uninsightful. The movie is not so much interested in socio-politics as it is in abusing it as a jump-off for an hour long torture sequence, as lacking in any moral standpoint as the characters are.

Since the film jettisons any serious social discourse, I’m not going to dwell on it. Cinematically, the film still belies its exploitive core with its compositions, carefully framed to keep the most disgusting moments off screen (such as the much hyped castration sequence). If on-screen the action is somewhat restrained, the soundtrack picks up the slack and delights in squishy, cringe-inducing sounds like someone hiding a whoopee cushion under their own seat during a family dinner.

What’s most enraging about Hard Candy is that its filmmakers are playing the audience for a patsy. Writer Brian Nelson and Director David Slade mask this amoral, one-note torture story with a topic that elicits extreme emotions from the audience: it tries to justify its own sadism through society’s intolerance for pedophilia. The movie waxes extremist like a moral equivalent to fascism: the demonization of the villain is aroused so easily the filmmakers hardly have to do any work. The girl,then, at once playing the hero and the psychopath, gets off the hook. This duality is not so much a contradiction as it is a necessity in the script: the movie needs a mechanism to fulfill society’s collective intolerance. Such a movie is so emotionally exploitive of the audience that we, the viewers, aren’t sure what to think: not wanting to condone the villain, and at the same time not wanting to let him get away with murder (among other crimes equally deplorable), the filmmaker has maneuvered the audience into a crossroad where personal feelings get in the way of both an aesthetic judgement of the film, as well as a more objective appraisal of how it handles social issues.

Recent Watching: Brick (2005)

A roguish, nerdy looking adolescent, spectacled and unkempt, trots across the parking lot to a gang of kids camped around a convertible. Their focus is on the letterman trumpeting about his football skills, the coach who refuses to acknowledge them, and the team that he could whoop single-handedly. As the rogue, Brendan Frye (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), sits on the edge of the convertible, the car sinks slightly, and all eyes turn on him. He stands up to the letterman the only way a nerd could: after hearing the letterman say, "Yeah," a half dozen times repeatedly, Brendan tells him to look it up in the thesaurus: "It’s under 'Y'," Brendan reminds him. Challenged to a fistfight, the roguish nerd trumps the letterman again, leaving him bruised on the pavement. Walking away, a late spectator asks him, "Was there a fight?" Brendan coolly replies, "Yeah, there was."

If this scenario seems like the fantasies of a marginalized high-schooler with a fondness for all things hardboiled, then you’re dead on: Rian Johnson's Brick (2005) assumes the semi-important mindset of adolescence and runs with it. The film is deliberate--for better or for worse--about everything in it. It's a series of winks at the audience and nods to Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, and a thousand-and-one black and white gems that make up the film noir canon.

In the first moments of the movie, we are privy to a hidden moment that stays that way until well into the movie. Brendan discovers a blonde dead in the gutter--a secret grotto in front of a darkened cave. Rian Johnson, the film's writer and director, takes us back two days earlier to a phone call Brendan received from the blonde in the opening scene. She's scared out of her mind, too much so to tell him why, but she wants his help. The remainder of Brick centers around the who, what, when, where, why and how of all this: the movie is about answering questions.

What unfolds is a veritable checklist of noir must-haves: femme fatales, tough guys and lingo that exists purely for the reason of fulfilling some hardboiled desires that were aroused in the public consciousness sometime in the late 1920s and have yet to be fulfilled. Much like Mike Hammer in Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, Brendan uncovers a seedy drug ring among the elite--this time high school rich kids rather the Mafia big-shots--with a missing bundle of dope at the center of it all.

In midst of this fantasy, classes, teachers and parents seem to be almost lost. They appear only occasionally: a mother who serves Brendan apple juice after being beaten by her son in the basement; a principal who tries to tap Brendan for information; and, in the dialogue, references to homeroom and parent-teacher conferences. Humorous asides out-of-place within the genre, they are supposed to signal self-awareness within the film, reminding us that movie is taking itself in stride, and we should take it likewise.

Only I can't. Its derivations and allusions make the film trite, not intelligent. Brick is not so much a part of any foundation for new cinema as it is another piece on the top of a firmly established pile. It doesn't so much explore a genre as much as transplant it, the way a spoof or satire would. In fact, Brick functions in the gray area between Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) and your friend's gangster movie you acted in during high school.

Where Brick runs astray is when it eschews the organic for the contrived, when it opts to do what has been done before even when it is not in the story's capacity to do so. Brendan's motivation, for instance, remains unconvincing: does he seek out the woman's killers because he loves her, or because it is neccesary for the story to unfold? (Just as it unnecessarily for the protagonist to have a brainy know-it-all, ironically named Brain, and for every woman to be sex-crazed...) The characters that make up the drug-ring seem to be in such a spiral that Brendan's presence hardly has an impact: it is as though the shoot-out climax would have happened regardless of Brendan's involvement (only without him, the camera would not have been there).

What a film like David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005) offers that Brick does not is a complex mystery that works above the level of referential hee-haw that the latter is content with. There is a moment of revelation in Cronenberg's film that completely changes the main character; a similar revelation in Johnson's film is nowhere near as enlightening: when the darker side is revealed, it may be unexpected, but it certainly doesn't change much, expecting a few more issues that remain aggrivatingly unexplored.

Ultimately what was so unsatisfying about Brick is that its high-school, middle-class setting, which the film calls attention to so often, isn't dealt with in any insightful manner. Excepting for a few minor jokes (the funniest being an unknowing mother serving milk to a group of thugs crowding her living room in the middle of the night) it remains painfully in the background. The story, and especially the characters, are low-relief in the worst way: they're shallow because of flaw, not because of circumstance. And this is one facet that, regardless of intention, is inexcusable.

Rigid Individualism or Rigid Masculinity: The Fountainhead

King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949), adapted by Ayn Rand from her own novel, feels more like dialogue from a pamphlet than a movie script. It's easier to take as overt allegory, too, because little of narrative is well written enough to swallow as straight drama. Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) is a non-conformist architect that wades in obscurity until given the chance to make art on his terms: a contract to design a gas station. It's enough to get him started, and he makes a name for himself. This portion of the story--the architect's struggle--is a pleasant enough allegory for any artist to relate to (for any individual in any field, as a matter of fact): down with the critics who pander to the masses and never recognize "real art." (What is it that Estragon says to Vladimir in Waiting for Godot that is so insulting? "Crritic!" But critics are artists, too, no?)

The end of the film is pleasant enough, too, when Roark dynamites his own building after the contractors have their own way with his original idea. The ensuing trial isn't as much about his destroying property as it is about whether an artist has a right to his own ideas, or he has to work for the greater good of the community. Anti-communist rhetoric is clearly at work here (HUAC is doing to Hollywood what the critics were doing to Roark), and Rand is all for the individualist. Vidor and his actors, however, seem to be on a different track. They don't seem to care much for Rand's politics: they're more interested in the relationship between Cooper and Patricia Neal. All the references to jack-hammers and structures seem more sexual symbols than political ideals.

I liked Gary Cooper's performance quite a bit, partly because he's an odd casting choice. He emanates a soft-spoken conservatism, whereas Roark seems to be a radical liberal in many ways. Roark chooses aesthetics over functionality, high-brow over low-brow; he drafts plans for an apartment complex for another architect without taking any credit or payment because he's all about personal gratification rather than public, and he'd rather be proud than rich. Perhaps, though, Cooper is perfect for the fundamentally anti-Communist tone that Rand wanted to lend her story, because he bleeds a lot of the radicalism out of the role. (Dynamiting public property still seems pretty radical to me, even after seeing the movie.) Ultimately, Cooper's understatment helps keep the film from stepping too far from the Mason-Dixon line that separates politics and entertainment. Rigid individualism or rigid masculinity? The Fountainhead plays both hands like a Siamese twin playing against itself.

Ask the Dust: The Wrong Fit

Ask the Dust (2006) fits like a glove on the wrong hand. In many ways, it still performs the function is supposed to, but the cloth is taut where it shouldn't, and it's immobility infringes on its usefulness. Yet it's still better than no glove at all, and a mediocre movie of John Fante's novel is better than no movie at all. Writer/Director Robert Towne tries to play Fante's game by Hollywood's rules, using dialogue that is sharp only in that points in one direction. The story of Arturo Bandini doesn't fit the Hollywood mould, and the movie feels like a struggle between apathetic whim and strained predictability. But that even a strain of whim works its way into the film makes it worthwhile. Bandini (played by Colin Farrell) is a young writer from small-town Colorado recently relocated to the Bunker Hill region of L.A., an area full of "old ladies and weak men" as one woman describes it. The woman is Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek), a Mexican waitress at a nearby diner. Days after I've seen the movie, I still can't pin-point their relationship: one moment he's busy playing (badly, at that) the cool, detatched, semi-belligerant writer (and she does her part to instigate it), and the next they're in a beach-front shack while he teaches her how to read English. But neither extreme is out of Bandini's capacity, nor out of Camilla's, which marks Ask the Dust several steps above the typical Hollwood romances.

Transience Prolonged: Woman is the Future of Man

Hong Sang-Soo doesn’t confuse reverie with nostalgia. The two never come close to colliding in Woman is the Future of Man (2004), and the result is a thankfully unsentimental romantic semi-comedy. Having graduated from an American film school, Hunjoon (Kim Tae-Woo) returns to Korea for the first time in many years. He reunites with MunhoYu Ji-Tae), an old friend currently teaching art at a local university. The two share lunch, and then go off in search of Hunjoon’s old girlfriend, Sunhwa (Seong Hyeon-A).

The ensuing search and reunion occupies the second half of Woman, which is just less than 90 minutes total. The film’s conclusion is as inauspicious as its beginning, as Munho and Hunjoon stand on the sidewalk under falling snow, unable to find any rhyme or rhythm in conversation. The ending finds them separate and alone, not so aware of any great change, but with a few memories that won’t be leaving them anytime soon.

Memory is key to Woman is the Future of Man. Ironically, these men can’t see into the future: their vision is blurred by inextricable memories of humiliation and regret. A passing woman wearing a purple scarf sends both of them into their pasts, as they remember how horribly they treated Sunhwa. Their trip to see her isn’t so much about finding a lost friend as it is about wiping out these old memories, finding some moment of reconciliation. Given the chance, they screw it up once again.

As a storyteller, Hong is more in tune with chance and coincidence than genre and plot. A scene’s importance may not seem readily apparent, and it may never shake its shroud of seeming insignificance, but to Hong such moments are things of beauty. The science of transience is Hong’s specialty, and he knows how to film a movie like writing between the lines.

Trapped by Sound: Pabst's Threepenny Opera

Sound is to Pabst what a tack is to a bicycle tire: it still runs, but the ride is bumpy and it takes too long to get there. G.W. Pabst's The Threepenny Opera was filmed in 1931 when sound recording techniques still had much to be desired, and much of the film's failing has to do with just that. Lacking the freedom that camera's were allowed in the silent era (when microphones were not an issue), Pabst reverts to tableaux shots and long takes: the scenes are static, and the actors hardly move. This isn't the usual Pabst who constructs his stories in lurid, penetrating close-ups. What he is able to carry over from his silent films are his love of decor and stylized sets. The acting, however, is uninspired, and it's as though the actors are reading the lines to themselves before they go to sleep. Just as their movements are static, there is nothing kinetic about their voices. As many early sound pictures proved, movies may have learned to talk, but they had still to learn how to move once again.

King of Hearts (1966)

If ignorance is bliss, then what is insanity?

Phillipe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966) finds the Germans retreating from a small French village at the end of the first World War. Before they do, however, they trigger the town to blow-up when the clock strikes midngight. Logically scared for their lives, the townspeople evacuate, leaving the local asylum unguarded. When Scottish officer Alan Bates arrives in town, he finds the town overrun by the innamtes, and he is soon crowned the King of Hearts. But the Scots and Germans haven't gone for good, and when they show up back in town, it's hard to tell who's the whacko.

And that's the point--that the soldiers, and the world at large, is crazier than anything inside the gated asylum. The loonies are much happier amongst themselves, remaining oblivious to anything so "overly dramatic" as fighting (as one of the inmates describes an impromtu battle between the two armies).

De Broca directs with such a subtle grace that many of the scenes seem to be set to an imaginary music that only the characters can hear. I'm thinking particularly of the three Scottish soldiers, stepping in unison, swaying right and then left, peering around corners to see if the Germans have gone. And the sequence when the inmates let loose in the abandoned town exhibits an understated sense of humor: the accustomed ease with which they pick up lipstick and clothes betrays the excitement that one would expect.

One of the most pleasant things about King of Hearts is its comedic pacing: it never goes for the quick guffaw, instead the movie feels rather understated, as though its humor can only heigthen with familiarity.

Deceitul, Murderous Delight: The Two Mrs. Carrolls

Barabara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart aren't their usual selves in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947). She is not the femme fatale, and he isn't the hardboiled private eye. Lovers after a chance encounter, Bogart and Stanwyck wed shortly after Bogart's first wife passes away. This second Mrs. Carroll begins to bore Bogart, however, as she fails to inspire his paintings as she once did. However, a new muse has entered his life, played by Alexis Smith. Soon, Mrs. Carroll falls ill, with symptoms much like the first Mrs. Carroll's before she passed away...

Director Peter Godfrey, while delivering a solid noir-melodrama, reuses much of the imagery and tension that Alfred Hitchcock used in his film Suspicion (1941): the shot of Bogart holding the poisoned glass of milk is a straight copy of Cary Grant in the earlier film. Both films, however, distinguish themselves in different ways. Hitchcock's film is a family-sized red herring served on a silver platter; Godfrey, on the other hand, consummates the tale of deceit and delivers a murderer at the end of the film. Thomas Job's script (from the play by Martin Vale) is excellently written, with smart dialogue and a handful of wry stock characters (the grumpy maid, the elderly fisherman) that, as often is the case, are the most memorable parts of the film.

Vamp-Camp: A Fool There Was

"A Fool There Was" (1915), the film that made a star out of star Theda Bara, is a poorly dramatized piece of vamp-camp that lingers over Bara's exotic sexuality. This is what the attraction of the film was in 1915, and that is still the main reason to see it today: Bara's sinful ways are as exaggerated as Mary Pickford's innocence, and its extremity is what makes it exciting. Her eating a grape out of her lover's mouth still carries erotic appeal; and her lifting the hem of her dress off the floor to show her ankles--this should also be cherished as a sign of the times, and as an early lifting of the sexuality's veil. (And those hems seem to have been getting higher ever since.)

Though coming fifteen years before Josef Von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" (1930), "A Fool There Was" tells a similar story of a successful, respected man turned wayward and ruined by his lust. The object of his obsession is Theda Bara, known only as "The Vampire," a woman whose sole preoccupation is with bringing men to ruin: poverty, death, and suicide meet all of her former lovers. Called to England as an ambassador, John Schuyler (Edward Jose) books passage alone on a boat. On board, he becomes the next victim of "the Vampire," and off they go to Italy. Away from his family, Schuyler misses them terribly, but cannot live without his new mistress. Returning home (with Bara in tow), Schuyler fails to balance both his familial responsibilities and his desire for Bara and ends his life in utter ruin.

Director Frank Powell uses flowers as a symbol of female sexuality in the manner of Georgia O'Keefe. At one point Bara even thwarts a jealous lover's pistol with her long stemmed flower. But in other aspects of the film, Powell's direction isn't so successful. The introduction of the family is confused, with too many persons introduced too quickly with little to distinguish them. He doesn't exhibit the same flair for composition or editing that Thomas Ince or D.W. Griffith concurrently used in their own films: Powell's seem flat and unassured compared to them. The story, too, feels undeveloped beyond the bare bones of the plot. It is Bara's image that receives all the attention of the filmmaker, and her expressionistic glamour must have been a shock to audiences used to the Pickford curls. Bara's rampant seduction is domineering compared to the submissive roles played by Lillian Gish. This is not to sleight either Pickford nor Gish, nor to place Bara on a higher platform than either of them, but merely as context with which to compare Bara's character, for hers was the original vamp, the first femme fatale--but if that is all she represents, then "A Fool There Was" would not be worth much. Bara's value comes in her character, complete in vision and in action, which allows her to rise above a mundane script, and separate her from all its mediocrity.

Communal Poetics: Maureen Gosling's Blossoms of Fire

Maureen Gosling’s documentary, Blossoms of Fire (2000), goes behind the mythic “Juchitan matriarchy,” a Mexican town that is supposedly run all by women. The myth is only half wrong: women run most of the local businesses, but it is a gender balance based on a mutual work ethic that has evolved over centuries. From here, Gosling’s story spirals outward, expanding until it encompasses all members of the villages, all aspects of their history and culture—and it’s amazingly fascinating. She approaches Juchitán in the tradition of Robert Flaherty, with expert attention to the customary poetics in their cooking, their clothes, their crafts. Local musicians color the film on-screen and on the soundtrack; one memorable scene involves a man singing and playing harmonica while playing a bass improvised out of a stick, a string, and a bucket. Where Gosling deviates from Flaherty is in the town’s present and future: Flaherty was obsessed with tradition and ritual in a pre-industrial state; Gosling is fascinated with Juchitán’s resistance to globalization and the influx of corporate influence—which the town has thwarted so far successfully through vibrant protests. And this is the key thread of the film: a town that has held on to its roots, and continues to preserve them. The school still teaches the local dialect; Juchitán also elected the first liberal, local government during the reign of the one-party system; after Elle Magazine slandered local women in an issue, the town brought libel charges against the French magazine. What Gosling has found in this small town is a community that stands up for itself and wants to preserve its own unique image and history—it doesn’t want to be like everywhere else. It resists all aspects of modernization: human-made craftsmanship over mass production, homegrown over laboratory foods, the local marketplace over the supermarket. Gosling, with her detail-oriented camera, observes the intimate kinesis of a community at work and translates it on to film fluidly.

The Maltese Falcon: Two Adaptations

Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel "The Maltese Falcon" was turned into three films in one decade: Roy Del Ruth's 1931 The Maltese Falcon (later retitled Dangerous Woman), William Dieterle's 1936 Satan Met a Lady and John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon.

****

The 1931 version plays much like Roy Del Ruth's other pre-Code gems, such as 1930's Lady Killer with James Cagney: the sensation of comedy and cruelty, with an unmistakable affection for the sleazy and the lurid. An abridged version of the novel, private dick Sam Spade is still the protagonist (though Del Ruth really emphasizes the "public" over the "private"). After his partner is killed on a case, Spade is drawn into a free-for-all over a mystery jeweled falcon--femme fatales, young gunmen, exotic foreigners, fat old men and the coppers--the film is everything film noir would come to be, but The Maltese Falcon is not quite there yet. It is not as dark or cynical as 1940s harboiled films would be; instead, there is a certain lightness about this Maltese Falcon--perhaps its the way that Spade (played by Ricardo Cortez) always has this conniving grin on his face, and can't say anything straight. Duplicity does not expose the darker side of humanity, but the funnier side of things: with no one telling the truth, any absurdity can pass through someone's mouth. It's almost the aesthetic of a Marx Brothers film, but without the slapstick action.

***

Satan Met a Lady, too, feels like a Marx Brothers film--but not in a good way. It feels like the "straight" scenes, the little bits of plot that try and form a cohesive action, but utterly fail dramatically. Satan, however, has none of the comic relief of a Groucho, nor the sarcasm of Roy Del Ruth's 1931 adaptation. The plot retains the core of the story, but with some excess baggage, such as Spade being an exiled detective, run out of every town by various "public morality groups." The story, however, is so streamlined (to make room for new additions), that in its 76 minutes it hardly finds time to cohere. Duplicity is never so much an issue as unbelievablity: the acting is not convincing of anything but a poor script.

I Married a Witch: The Wrong Aisle For Some Viewers

Rene Clair’s I Married a Witch (1942) is stupefyingly schlocky. Veronica Lake plays a 290-year-old witch that was burned by the puritans and buried under an oak tree that is to contain her spirit for eternity. A lightning bolt strikes the tree in the 1940s, however, releasing Lake’s ghost. Vengeful, she singles out Frederic March, whose ancestor was the one to burn Lake centuries earlier. She foils his marriage, clinches his election for governor, and then takes him down the aisle for herself. It should be ridiculous, but handled at Clair’s breakneck pace it finishes as fittingly absurd. Still, his earlier works such as À Nous La Liberté (1931) and Paris Qui Dort (1925) need less justification for their comedy to work. With I Married a Witch, you have to keep telling yourself, “Veronica Lake doesn’t look half bad for someone George Washington’s age.”

You Can’t Teach an Oldboy New Tricks

Oldboy (2003) would be a whodunit, only the “who” is revealed before the film’s halfway point. So—it’s more of a whydunit, with a highly unsatisfying “why.” The story concerns a man who is mysteriously imprisoned for fifteen years, and then released. Hunting down his captor, the prisoner rediscovers the youthful guilt that so inspired his captor’s revenge, Neither party can live with the guilt; one commits suicide, and the other undergoes hypnosis. Vengeance is whine.

The Racket: Robbed of all Potential

The Racket (1951) is one of those movies that should have been a lot better than it was. It has a great cast (Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott), but because of flaccid directing and dialogue copped from even worse pictures, this cops and crooks story is robbed of all potential. There is one great line, though: says Ryan to Scott, “You cheap, clip joint canary.” Typecast as the brutal criminal, Ryan was unable to make the better of his role in this picture. He plays the head of a racket that is paying off cops and politicians. Mitchum, playing the honest cop, is out to get Ryan first on the stand, then convicted, and finally behind bars. As the plot runs its course, the gangsters shoot all their cronies before they can confess, and the cops shoot all the gangsters before they can, too. So—in the end, it’s not like anything’s changed.

Flight of Fancy Crashes in Latest Kong Remake

You can’t have your chorus girl and eat her, too. Kong made his choice. Peter Jackson apparently hasn’t.

King Kong (2005) director Peter Jackson thinks big. He does big, too. Everything about his vision is big, and because of this he often overlooks the smaller, more important details of his movie. His rendition of the classic tale of filmmakers shooting on a mysterious island who discover a larger-than-life ape whom they bring back to NY only for it to escape and go on a rampage—all for the love a girl (Naomi Watts)—is even less believable than the original.

With a three-hour-plus running time, there should be ample room for even the slightest bit of character development, yet this is exactly what is missing from the film. Naomi Watts, as the actress, and Adrien Brody, as the writer, seemingly hate each other at first sight. At second, however, they are immediately in love. Brody, however, is no match for the ape, and Watts quickly chooses brawn over brains. These typical clichés clutter the movie more than its excessive action sequences.

On the other hand, with so little attention paid to the characters, it would seem as though it would be easy enough to achieve consistency. Here, too, Kong fails. Cheesiness and hokieness abound, it is difficult to tell whether the movie is supposed to be a spoof or a classic adventure picture. So much of the dialogue and so many of the scenes appear to mock 1930s cinema, the era in which the original King Kong (1933) appeared. Jackson seems to have watched the wrong 1930s movies, because his script has none of the wit or sharp commentary of an Anita Loos.

Perhaps most disappointing of all is how un-original Jackson’s re-vision is. Not that is takes so much from the original King Kong, but from movies like Tremors, Star Wars, Predator, Starship Troopers and his own Lord of the Rings trilogy. The choreography of the action scenes will make you scratch your head in wonder: where have I seen this before? The dinosaur stampede, with all those Tyrannosaurus Rexes, is decidedly reminiscent of Jurassic Park.

And the nameless, fat man with glasses still dies.

One could congratulate Jackson on the enormity of his picture, on its monstrous special effects and on its technological breakthroughs—they must be there, I just don’t know what they are—but this is what I’d like to know: what is the point of making the fantastic more realistic if, in the process, the story becomes even less so? The pathos for Kong is forced, and there are more last minute rescues than in a D.W. Griffith movie.

Jack Black, however, is very funny as the villainous director with the “heart of darkness.” (Yes, there is a character reading Conrad’s novel on-board the ship). But overtones such as these—turning flights of fancy into philosophical levitations—mar the comedy with a contrived seriousness.

Caché: Suspense Unfettered by Closure or Cell-Phones

It’s been a while since I heard an audience scream like that.

Not like the thrill-shriekers that love horror films like they love roller coasters, but like an audience watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955)—exactly like that—and you either have seen the movie and know exactly what I mean, or it would be disastrous for me to spell it out.

Watching Michael Haneke’s latest Caché (Hidden) (2005) is very much like watching a Clouzot picture, but Haneke differs in one crucial way: there is no resolution to the story, no villain to pin it on, no explanation to the mystery. If you are one who needs this type of closure, then Cache is not for you. Haneke provokes us through his unconventional storytelling and demands that we appreciate the vibe of mystery for its own sake. “It’s the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition-derby world,” writes Stephen King in the afterward to his novel The Colorado Kid.

King’s words ring ironic throughout Caché, because the films characters are unable to live with the mystery, and their wits are whittled away by the invisible hand of a blackmailer. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) begin receiving videotapes of them entering and leaving their house accompanied by child-like drawing of bloody faces. The threat is there, but not explicitly. Neither husband nor wife can figure out what the blackmailer wants from them, nor what he is blackmailing them about.

Is it even blackmail? Another videotape shows Georges’s childhood home; still another a hotel room. Georges tracks down the hotel room and discovers a childhood memory long forgotten: Majid, the son of two servants that worked for his family. Georges surmises that Majid and his son are behind these videotapes, but where is the proof, and where is the motive—and what are they after?

The suspense genre has been constantly evolving over the past fifty years. Think back to Diabolique: the mystery is resolved. Virtually all mystery/suspense pictures before the 1960s had a large degree of closure. Beginning in the 1960s, the genre began to show signs of dissent. Blow-Up (1969) leaves us wondering if he really photographed a murder, or whether it was David Hemmings’s imagination. Haneke continues the evolution by making the threat real, but by leaving the characters so far out in the cold that there’s little chance they’ll ever find the right path. The right path, in fact, never appears in the movie: all trails are as futile to Haneke.

The way the film develops, then, is through Georges’s psychological reaction to the tapes. Unsure of their intended meaning, his mind goes rampant through his subconscious, digging up all the guilt and shame that he had hidden for so long. The footage of him walking in and out of his house is meaningless, harmless, really, save for the fact that someone is nearby with a camera. Much like in Rear Window (1954) when Scottie’s gaze is returned by Thorwald, Georges’s subconscious becomes his outer-shell. His and Anne’s need for a reason, for a motive—needs much like the audience’s—surfaces their own lack of trust in one another.

The reason why Haneke is successful with Caché is that he hits at such a mundane vulnerability in us: there is nothing spectacular or fantastic about the terror; in fact, it seems to be created as much by Georges as it is by the mysterious cameraman. The mere sight of himself on film sets off a whole globe of paranoia.

Stephen King continues musing on the nature of mystery in his afterward: “Wanting might be better than knowing.” With cinematic villainy becoming increasingly more deranged and pathological, too, the stakes for the victims is changing as well. The innocent girl played by Ida Lupino in Out of the Fog (1943) that is being harassed by John Garfield is no longer the case: innocence no longer exists, except in the minds of others. Georges proves that he finds himself guilty; his struggle for exoneration is as much about proving his innocence to his wife as it is proving himself guilty to himself.

Haneke’s direction is fitting. He utilizes static shots that leave the audience wondering, “Is this going to be a videotape or not?” Flashbacks, too, are subtly intertwined as to avoid easy pinpointing. With the villain a filmmaker himself, Haneke has fun toying with the audience as to who is filming which shot.

It is impossible for people, when talking about Caché, not to mention the end of the film. And it’s no wonder—Hakeke is prevocational up until the last shot. People in the audience began shouting, “What? Is that it?” It’s been a long time since audience reaction after a movie could drown out a cell-phone. Speaking of which, not one went off during the entire movie. It’s been a while since that has happened.

The Best of Youth (2003)

Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth (2003) begins in 1966 with two brothers, Matteo and Nicola, at the end of another semester. After their final exams, they are to meet up with two of their buddies for a long road trip. Matteo, however, arrives with Giorgia, a girl whom he helped escape from the mental hospital where Matteo works. Giorgia has been abused while in custody, given severe doses of electroshock therapy that Matteo deplores. Postponing their trip for two days, Matteo and Nicola try to bring Giorgia to safety.

They fail, however, and she is taken into custody by the police. Too, the brothers fail to go on their adventure: they never meet up with their friends, Matteo runs to join the military, and Nicola heads out on his own to Norway.

From the start, The Best of Youth structures its story on interruption, allowing for a whimsical feel that, for the most part, eludes feeling contrived and structured. That’s a hefty feet for such an epic film—it runs just over six hours—but a quality necessary for the film to succeed.

Much of its success it due to the writing by Sandro Petraglia and Sefano Rulli, who balance the audience’s want for drama, but also their plot-weary mentality. Brought up on movies, audiences can spot impossibilities like liver spots, and but for a few moments, the writing is sincere enough that even the best plot guessers won’t mind if they’re right, once in a while. The few moments I speak of are at the beginning of the second half, when the characters’ political alliances begin to clash: Matteo is with the police and Nicola’s wife is a member of the radical group the Red Brigades. However, this conflict doesn’t become the main focus of the film.

Instead, the film smartly focuses on family, playing close attention to every character and not allowing any of them to fall to the wayside. In many ways, The Best of Youth is similar to that other familial Italian epic The Tree of Wooden Clogs. That film, written and directed by Ermanno Olmi in 1978, tells the story a family of Italian peasants, working hard to make a living at the end start of the 20th century. Both films share a concentration to everyday survival, and the role that chance plays in determining our paths.

Too, the film develops thematically, not relying on only one to permeate the film. Hours into the film, new themes continually re-assert themselves, harkening back to moments from early on in the film. Photography is a key element to the film. Matteo speaks of his own ideas about photographing people, and how one should look for the mystery in gestures, markings that might escape our eyes. Early on in the film, it is Matteo’s eye that noticed scars just above Giorgia’s ears, and it is his photographs of them that first engage Nicola’s sympathies for the girl.

Director Giordana clearly shares this philosophy. Like Fellini, Giordana has a fondness for faces, and while they may not be as exaggerated as Fellini’s are, each character is given an individualistic look which helps distinguish them in such a long movie with so many different people.

Mental illness and politics all share time on screen, but the movie never falls back on didacticism for effect. They may surface throughout the film, but neither is the main point that The Best of Youth seems to be making. In fact, the point of the film is somewhat of a mystery that takes the whole film to fully evolve on screen. Ultimately, there are a lot of lessons that would sound hokey if I spelled them out to be found in The Best of Youth, but a pervasive capriciousness and pathos make them seem sincere—so that’s all right.

In the end, we get the feeling that we have actually seen the characters in The Best of Youth live, and thinking back to the beginning of the film, forty years or six hours earlier (depending on how you judge time) seems a lifetime ago--which is the way its supposed to be.

Hitchcock Double Feature: Strangers on a Train and I Confess

I feel a certain futileness when describing "Strangers on a Train": my words are deficient in describing its excellence. Too, I am having great difficulty calling attention to a detail here, or a detail there, when so much of the picture was handled with great care. A pervasive humor seems to reach out from behind the screen and pinch us, reminding us (as Alfred Hitchcock oft said), "It's only a movie." For one thing, the writing balances within the story both drama and comedy, morbid jokes and adventure: the potentially ridiculous story of Guy Haines and his stalker Bruno Anthony could have more easily been moribund than lively. Guy, played by Farley Granger, is a stuffy sort of hero, stuck with the guilt of a murder he had nothing to do with. Bruno, a wickedly charming Robert Walker, is the real murderer: he strangled Guy's wife and is ready to pin it on him if Guy doesn't scratch Bruno's back (for a favor Guy never asked for): what Bruno wants is a murder in return.

Alfred Hitchcock's symbolic directing feels very much at home in "Strangers on a Train." He uses the camera to create parallels between characters and emphasize notions of guilt and anxiety. The casting is also full of animated faces, character actors like Leo G. Carroll and Hitch's own daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. She seems to be the omnipotent presence of director Hitchcock himself, pointing out all the morose details and giggling all the while.


"I Confess," on the other hand, suffers from being too heavy with not enough comic relief (the light touch that Hitchcock normally exudes). Hitchcock here falls prey to the severity of his subject, a priest (Montgomery Clift) who overhears a murderer's confession in the church is himself accused of the murder, only vows keep the priest from revealing what was said in the privacy of the confessional. The picture circles around this conflict very closely, rarely steering away from it, but with little to distract the audience from the story, they have ample time to find all its contrivances and plot holes. Much of the picture is wasted because of this: the writers spent too much time amassing superficial evidence as to why Clift looks guilty, and then how he ironically can't confess the truth because of his vows. In many ways, the film is as stiff as a corpse.

The film isn't entirely bad--its mainly the writing--and there is plenty to admire and entertain. The opening sequence of the film is inspired, however, by Hitchcock's deft handling of shadows and intrigue: the murderer, in priests clothing, hurries down the alley in true film noir fashion, with the garment's hem hovering just above the cobblestone street. Clift, as well, is the right actor for the role, and he executes the tension between guilt, shame and loyalty fittingly. Karl Malden, too, is wonderful as the smug cop, his squashed nose and pinched eyes working to their full advantage. Melodrama, as much Hitchcock's forte as mystery, suspense or comedy, proves overpowering in "I Confess" With little comedy or adventure to filter out the melodramatic pungency, the film ultimately lacks many of Hitchcock's usual touches. It seems as though his mind was someplace else during this movie.

This Week's Highlights

Even on the fifth viewing, Fassbinder's Whity (1970) gives me a sense of total dislocation. It's so hard to define its time and place--it avoids any attempt at pinning it down. Fassbinder works his magic in and out of the Western genre, mixing English slang with German dialogue, 19th century period costumes and 1970s glamour, and a soundtrack that references Morricone, Brecht and late '60s West Coast rock.

***

James Cagney plays a small-time, big-city gambler that hits it big: falling for Mae Clarke's scam and losing fifty bucks at a "nice, friendly game of cards," Cagney offers his services to her entourage, and together they make a killing off the city. All goes well until the killing becomes real and Cagney has to flee to California. Picking up the pieces as a Hollywood extra, he works his way to the top of the studios, only to be felled when his gang shows up wanting a piece of the action.

There's something a little raw about the humor of Roy Del Ruth's 1933 Lady Killer. Consider when Cagney returns home to his Hollywood mansion to find Clarke waiting in bed for him: in a single shot, he grabs her by the hair, and drags her across the room and into the hallway. Before the production code of 1934 (which upped the morals while lowering the morale), movies could get away with such brutality. Too, the bad guys could win. Such is how Cagney is implicated in murder, stealing, assault, theft, gambling and booze (the prohibition was on), and in the last frame still be on his way to Cuba to get married with his lover (guilty of the same crimes).

***

Anna Magnani carries Amore (1948) all on her own. The film, directed by Roberto Rossellini and scripted with the help of Federico Fellini, among others, comprises two short films. In the first, "A Human Voice," Magnani is the only actor on screen, save for a dog that is in no more than a few shots. Magnani is on the phone with her lover, far away and recently departed. This, it seems, is to be their last conversation. The second film, "The Miracle," was banned in the US and taken to the Supreme Court. Magnani plays a poor woman who meets a man in the woods one day who she takes to be Saint Joseph. He gets her drunk and, once unconscious, rapes her. Convinced that he was Saint Joseph, Magnani informs the town that her pregnancy was an immaculate conception. Ridiculed and run out of town, Magnani flees to the hills to bear her child alone.

The common theme seems to be one of faith, both secular and religious. In the first film, Magnani is dealing with her obsession for her lover, whom she shall never see again. Through the course of the conversation, she realizes that he has been lying to her: that he is not "at home" alone, and that he is cushioning the truth in order to make the separation easier. The facade breaks and her delusions fall away. Faith has to do with trust and fidelity, as well as our own projection of others, what they think and how they feel. In "The Miracle," the townsfolk and church do not buy into Magnani's tale, and they reject her own religious experiences. To them, she is a sinner, a liar, a whore, a hyprocrite, and a lunatic.

Communication, too, seems to be of concern. In "A Human Voice," the telephone is the only means of connection between the lovers, and the line keeps going dead--or does he hang-up? With the partner absent (literally, in the film, for even his voice is absent), so much is left to the imagination. And in the second--no one believes her. Her faith is ridiculed and since it doesn't conform to the mass's conception, then it is not accepted.


***

There is something cruel about Nicholas Ray's films, this inward hate that infests his characters. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, punching the desk, hoping that any expression of violence will curb its tendencies for the time being. Or Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar, the gunslinger who traded his pistols for the guitar, only to find his hand still goes for the nearest gun when trouble resounds. Too, in the same movie, Joan Crawford refuses to leave town, even though she knows the puritanical lynch-mob (headed by Mercedes McCambridge) is out to get her; when a young man accused of robbery is found hiding in her saloon by the mob, Crawford encourages the young man to lie and implicate her in the robbery if it would save him from the gallows. Self-destruction and circularity permeate Ray's films, with no easy exits provided.

Grand Central Murder: Half Hardboiled, Half Hyperbole

S. Sylvan Simon's Grand Central Murder (1942) is a yarn so good you might consider knitting a sweater out of it. It would make a great hand-me-down if it was anything like the movie--which I'd feel more comfortable recommending than a lot of better movies, such as Antonioni's noir-influenced Story of a Love Affair. Grand Central Murder is a comedy about a money-crazed actress found dead in her private train car. Sam Levene plays the detective assigned to the case. He rounds up the usuals--the understudy, the fiancé, the ex-husband, and the maid--as well as Private Dick Van Heflin, seen snooping around the crime scene around the time of the murder. The whole crew gets together and, in between accusations and heart attacks, recalls the downed diva's past life and a thousand reasons why she should be murdered. The conclusion to the tale is wonderfully anti-climactic: it is a quick "in and out" comic touch that differentiates from dramatic spectacle. Many such touches grace the film, including the liquor-starved Levene who is stuck with a dozen bottles of soda (and drinking straws, of course), and the cigar-smoking Swedish masseuse who was the deceased's maid. And then there's Van Heflin, the smart-ass P.I., who with great skill carefully balances hardboiled and hyperbole.

On Nykvist's Cinematography in Bergman's Winter Light

The first time I saw Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light* (1963) it was during the peak of the summer in New York City. I had just moved into my apartment, and there were no shades in the window: the sun dusted by face like so many brooms. I would awake dazed, my head baked from the glaring sun. The title remained a mystery, and the photography little more than ‘beautiful.’

When I revisited the film, however, it was during a Maine winter, and certain things about Sven Nykvist's photography became clearer. There is a tendency—especially when it snows—for time to seemingly stop. Morning and afternoon all share the same, gray light: muted, but blinding. 6AM and 4PM do not seem so different. The shift to night is sudden and equally enigmatic. There is a larger sense of stasis in winter than in summer because it is more difficult to distinguish the hours from one another.

It is this stasis, a dislocation with life and time, that affects the characters in Winter Light: they are trapped and cannot any exit, and solution to their problems. A pastor, Tomas (Gunnar Bjonstrand), confronts his waning congregation and loss of faith, both in fellow people and in religion. Jonas (Max Von Sydow) approaches the pastor with his own loss of faith, and his increasing distress over nuclear proliferation. He seeks comfort, but the pastor is too caught up in his own problems to provide sufficient guidance. Parallel to Tomas’s spiritual rejection of Jonas is his physical rejection of Marta (Ingrid Thulin), the atheistic schoolteacher in love with him.

Dispersed throughout the film are long, still shots of nature: trees, frozen ponds, snowy fields: nature under the heavy weight of snow. Bergman’s direction, then, calls particular attention to the relationship between the photographic elements of the film and the story. Contrary to Peter Cowie, who described Bergman as, “eschewing the mechanics—the magic—of the cinema,” with Winter Light, I feel Bergman is achieving something intrinsically cinematic: elements of time, movement (or lack thereof) and photography combine to create an environment filled with meaning (118). These characters are at once in a barren, open landscape, but one that is seemingly endless with no exit. With their loss of faith, the physical world is their only life, yet for them it is a trap they are unable to escape.

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*According to http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/winter_light.htm, the original title Nattvardsgästerna means "The Communicants". The relationship of cinematography to the story does not change, however. The English title of the film served as a lens for examining the film, not as the metaphor itself.

Cowie, Peter. Antonioni/Bergman/Resnais: Three Monographs. Holland: International Film Guide, 1963.

-Cullen Gallagher