Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
February 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
If any living species is to inherit the earth, it will not be man.
In 1971, a most unusual documentary was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public, one in which it was argued that one day mankind would be extinct, but the insects would remain. This documentary was called The Hellstrom Chronicle and it was produced and directed by Walon Green, who knew a little something about the survival instinct having contributed to the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (which opens with a scene of children pitting two scorpions against each other). Written by David Seltzer, the thrust of the film is presented by an expert named Dr. Nils Hellstrom, whose views occasionally come off as alarmist, but he does present some alarming facts, all of which are backed up by startling footage of insects doing what insects do best: eating, killing, mating and dying.
Winner of the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (beating out, among others, Marcel Ophüls's epic The Sorrow and the Pity), the film covers the life cycles of all kinds of insects, from termites to locusts, bees to mayflies, capping everything off with a chilling depiction of the destructive power of driver ants. Suffice it to say, Microcosmos it is not. In fact, it's probably more akin to Saul Bass's Phase IV, which came along just a few years later. That film is about a colony of desert ants that mounts an offensive against mankind, one that even a pair of scientists can't withstand. If Dr. Hellstrom is to believed, the insects won't have to put up much of an effort.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
You might say I'm a social worker. I've come to do what I can.
When Roger Corman's name comes up, the phrase "maker of hard-hitting social dramas" doesn't exactly spring to mind, but he did make one -- 1962's The Intruder, which starred William Shatner as a representative of the Patrick Henry Society who arrives in a small southern town to fight racial integration of the local high school. Following an unbroken string of financial successes, this was the first film Corman made that didn't immediately reap a profit, which is why he retreated to the exploitation films he was known for and didn't look back. The major studios could afford to make the occasional prestige film for the sake of posterity; Corman needed each film to make money so he could go on and make the next one.
Long before he became known for his hammy acting, Shatner put in a credible performance here as the anti-integrationist (who's also rabidly anti-commie and antisemitic to boot) who talks a good talk, but can't control the situation once he's stirred up the hornet's nest. He's ably assisted by Frank Maxwell as a newspaper editor who's against integration, but finds Shatner's methods even more distasteful, Beverly Lunsford as Maxwell's daughter, who goes to the high school that's being integrated, Robert Emhardt as a rich southern gentleman who gives Shatner crucial backing, Leo Gordon as a traveling salesman staying just down the hall from Shatner who unwisely leaves his wife Jeanne Cooper on her own, and Charles Barnes as one of the black students reluctantly going to the white school, much to the majority population's consternation. To illustrate this, Charles Beaumont's screenplay (based on his novel) is peppered with racial slurs (I counted 21 uses of the n-word alone), some of which were voiced by local nonprofessionals who were probably all too comfortable using them. While the film may lack subtlety, one can't deny its power.
I know a wonderful person who'll come and shake us all up.
Another film about a dark influence coming to small-town America is Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, often cited as his personal favorite. Released in 1943, while the world outside the U.S. was engulfed in war, it showed that things at home weren't necessarily all rosy, either. Hitchcock was still getting acquainted with his adoptive country at the time, so he engaged Thornton Wilder to help write the script and give its characters some authenticity. The end result is a crackerjack thriller about innocence lost and the way evil can appear in the most pleasant of guises.
At the start of the film, young Charlie (Teresa Wright) bemoans the fact that her picture-perfect family is stuck in a rut. Then her beloved Uncle Charlie (the incomparable Joseph Cotten) sends a telegram announcing his impending arrival in town. This puts a spring in everyone's step, but the reason for his visit isn't just to perk up the family. It seems he's the Merry Widow murderer and he's on the run from the law. The film also features Macdonald Carey as the detective on his trail, Frank Capra regular Henry Travers as the head of the family, a mystery buff who's always discussing the ins and outs of murder with soft-spoken neighbor Hume Cronyn, and Patricia Collinge as the mother who's quite overwhelmed by the return of her brother.
Hitchcock manages to wring a great deal of suspense out of the situation, especially once Wright starts to figure out that something is amiss, but even before then the visuals are able to convey the darkness that has descended upon the town. For example, Uncle Charlie arrives on a train which spews forth a great amount of black smoke as it pulls into the station. And in Hitchcock's cameo on the train, we see that he's playing cards and is holding a hand full of spades, which, of course, are used to bury people in the ground. That's the sort of macabre notion that wouldn't have been lost on him.
Monday, February 4, 2008
He'll eat our food, drink our water and double-cross us first chance he gets.
Alfred Hitchcock's last wartime film was 1944's Lifeboat, which was the first of his feature-length stunts. (The second was 1948's Rope, which also takes place in a single location, albeit one that's a bit more claustrophobic.) Based on a story by John Steinbeck, it starred Tallulah Bankhead as the only person on board at the start of the film, but she's quickly joined by other survivors from her freighter, which has been torpedoed by a German U-boat. They include rugged seaman John Hodiak, soft-spoken merchant marine Hume Cronyn, nurse Mary Anderson, a wounded William Bendix, rich industrialist Henry Hull, and black porter Canada Lee. Then they pick up German sailor Walter Slezak, which is when things get interesting.
Lifeboat was the only film Hitchcock ever made at 20th Century Fox, largely because studio head Darryl Zanuck couldn't help sticking his oar in where it didn't belong. At the time Hitchcock believed he was making an important picture, but he received a certain amount of criticism from those who took issue with the fact that the villainous German was the most capable character in the film, with the Allies made to look indecisive and ineffectual. This was similar to the way Powell & Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was received, but both films had an identical message: if you tried to play by the old rules, the Germans were going to beat you because the Germans didn't believe in rules, just orders.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Somebody's got to get left behind to get their bayonets wet.
Samuel Fuller's first major studio film was 1951's Fixed Bayonets!, which was his second Korean War film in less than a year after The Steel Helmet. Based on the John Brophy novel The Immortal Sergeant, which had previously been filmed in 1943, it takes place in the dead of winter, when a single platoon is ordered to carry out a rearguard action to cover their entire division's withdrawal. Richard Basehart -- favorite actor of MST3K's Gypsy -- plays a corporal who flunked out of officer school because he freezes up whenever he's given command. Early on we find out he also has a problem with firing at the enemy when they're at point blank range. It should come as no surprise that he's given the chance to work through both of those issues by the end of the film.
At the start of the action, though, Basehart has two sergeants above him. (There's also a lieutenant, but he takes a bullet in an early skirmish.) One of them is the aptly-named Sgt. Rock, played by Gene Evans (star of The Steel Helmet), and the other is played by Michael O'Shea. Anxious to ensure he doesn't have to take command, Basehart even attempts a white-knuckle walk across a minefield to retrieve O'Shea after he's been hit by enemy fire. It's the first of many heroic actions he takes on his way to becoming the kind of leader he's meant to be.
Incidentally, Fixed Bayonets! was shot on Fox's sound stages by expert director of photography Lucien Ballard, who went on to shoot many of Sam Peckinpah's best-known films in the '60s and '70s. This was the only time he worked with Fuller, though. Even while he was ensconced in the studio system, Fuller never did forge a bond with any one cinematographer for an extended period of time. This film also marked the screen debut of James Dean, who apparently plays one of the grunts, but I wasn't able to pick him out.
A spot of war would be quite exciting.
I realize this is virtually impossible, but pretend you know nothing about Paul Verhoeven. Forget that he's spent the past two decades racking up hits like Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct and misses like Showgirls and Hollow Man. Instead, simply think of him as a talented director from the Netherlands who makes exciting films in Dutch. That's the best way to approach Soldier of Orange, his 1977 epic about the Dutch Resistance during World War II (a subject he would return to 30 years later with Black Book, a film I still need to catch up with).
Spanning the years between Holland's entry into the war in 1940 (and subsequent surrender to the Nazis) and its liberation in 1945, the film follows the lives of six university students, focusing on law student Rutger Hauer and rich playboy Jeroen Krabbé, both of whom play at amateur espionage before being recruited to do the real thing. Part of that involves being smuggled into England, where the queen is ruling in exile and where they are debriefed by British colonel Edward Fox (who is credited as a "Special Guest Star"). There's also some business about a possible traitor in their ranks, which is not surprising. As Fox says at one point, in war there's no such thing as friends.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
You do what you can in these lousy times.
In the middle of a string of successful crime pictures, Jean-Pierre Melville took time out to make a more personal project, his 1969 French Resistance film Army of Shadows. Melville had more of an investment in the material than usual since he was in the Resistance during the war (or so he claimed), but the one thing he refused to do was romanticize the subject. Instead, he presented the story in the same stripped-down, straightforward manner as his previous film, 1967's Le Samouraï. That film wasn't released in the U.S. until 1972, but it took Army of Shadows even longer to get here. In fact, it wasn't seen in this country until 2006, when it received an extremely belated theatrical release. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was the best film I saw in theaters that year. It's quite a stunner.
Unlike Solider of Orange, which unfolds over the course of the entire war, Army of Shadows covers a scant four months, from October 1942 to February 1943. At the start of the film, electrical engineer and Resistance leader Lino Ventura is taken to a prison camp run by Vichy French. He isn't kept there long, though, and once he escapes from his captors he and three compatriots (Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet and Christian Barbier) find themselves with the unenviable task of having to take care of the traitor who betrayed him. This is carried out in a manner that would have pleased Alfred Hitchcock, who just a few years earlier in Torn Curtain had shown how hard it is to kill someone. Other key members of the Resistance include Paul Meurisse as the chief (who accompanies Ventura on a trip to England), Jean-Pierre Cassel as his brother, and Simone Signoret as the ever-resourceful Mathilde.
At the moment, the Criterion Collection is the only company in the business of putting out Melville's films on DVD and keeping them in print. (Anchor Bay put out his final film, 1972's Un Flic, but that has since been discontinued.) One can only hope that they have something like Le Doulos, Second Breath or Two Men in Manhattan (my preference) in the wings for 2008.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
A religion without mystery is no religion at all.
Luis Buñuel's 1969 film The Milky Way was hardly the first time he took a potshot at organized religion -- that tendency went all the way back to his second film, 1930's L'Age d'Or -- but it did represent his most concentrated attack on the Catholic Church, specifically. Written with his frequent late-period collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, the film follows two modern-day beggars (Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff) on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a journey fraught with digressions. For example, early on Buñuel cuts from a discussion about facial hair to a scene where Jesus (Bernard Verley) contemplates shaving his beard, but is talked out of it by his mother (Edith Scob). This raises the first of many questions about what kind of a man Jesus was, a subject much debated through the ages.
Of greatest interest to Buñuel and Carrière is the way the Catholic Church makes heretics out of those who deviate from accepted dogma. An argument about transubstantiation is followed by a scene of a heretical priest (Carrière) who preaches hedonism. A theological discussion at a restaurant (presided over by Julien Bertheau) leads to a scene where the Marquis de Sade (Michel Piccoli) rails against God. One of the beggars imagines a group of revolutionaries executing the Pope, after which they encounter an Angel of Death. A scene where a nun is crucified while her Mother Superior (Muni) looks on leads to the beggars being recruited as seconds for a duel -- and so on.
Buñuel seems to reserve his more pointed critiques for when they cross the border into his native Spain, where a bishop (Claudio Brook) oversees the exhumation of a long-dead religious leader whose views have posthumously been deemed heretical. There is also an extended sequence where a priest holds court at an inn, regaling his captive audience with some of the Virgin Mary's more amazing feats. Finally, just as they reach their destination, the beggars are waylaid by a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who offers them more immediate satisfaction, fulfilling the prophecy of a stranger they met at the beginning of their journey -- the one who instigated the facial hair discussion. As he neared the end of his career, Buñuel took a certain delight in making films that doubled back on themselves. It's an indulgence that would carry over to his subsequent films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. For a man who planned to retire after 1967's Belle de Jour, he turned out to have quite a few more tricks up his sleeve.
Friday, February 8, 2008
You talk different, sure, but you drive just like the rest.
One year after Laura, Otto Preminger returned to film noir with 1945's Fallen Angel, which reunited him with star Dana Andrews. At the start of the film, Andrews rolls into the small town of Walton, California. To be more precise, he's kicked off a bus because he can't afford the fare to San Francisco. Making the most of his unscheduled stop, Andrews gets acquainted with local sexpot Linda Darnell and talks his way into a job doing advance publicity for psychic John Carradine. When given the chance to go to San Francisco with Carradine, though, Andrews impulsively decides to stay in town to be close to Darnell.
In order to win Darnell, Andrews needs money, so he sets about wooing church organist Alice Faye, who, along with her overprotective sister Anne Revere, is heir to their late father's fortune. Revere is gun shy when it comes to men, having been bilked by a charlatan herself, but Faye goes ahead and marries Andrews anyway. Complications set in, however, when Darnell is murdered on their wedding night and special investigator Charles Bickford (who happens to be a former New York cop) makes Andrews his prime suspect. Until Andrews goes on the run from the law the film seems to be spinning its stylistic wheels, but eventually it gets traction. And yes, it also gets around to explaining who the "fallen angel" of the title is. Surprise surprise, it isn't Darnell.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Ma takes care of the boys. You gotta talk to Ma about the boys.
Toward the end of his run with AIP, Roger Corman tried his hand at a Bonnie and Clyde-style true-life gangster film with 1970's Bloody Mama. It was not his first crack at the genre, however, since he had done The St. Valentine's Day Massacre for Fox just three years earlier as well as a couple others in the late '50s. (One of them, 1958's Machine Gun Kelly, even gave Charles Bronson has first starring role in a movie.) Bloody Mama gave him one of his few films with a strong female lead, in this case Shelley Winters as Ma Barker, a domineering mother who loves her sons just a little too much.
At the start of the film her four sons are all grown up and they're already set in their larcenous ways. Eldest son Herman (Don Stroud) has his "bad moments," one of which lands him and youngest son Freddy (Robert Walden) in jail, Arthur (Clint Kimbrough) is smart, but sticks with his family regardless, and Lloyd (Robert De Niro) starts out as a glue sniffer until he graduates to being a full-blown dope addict. Also along for the ride are Diane Varsi as a whore who captures Herman's heart, Bruce Dern as Freddy's cellmate, who forges an intimate bond with him that extends beyond jail, and Pat Hingle as a rich cotton broker they hold for ransom much longer than they were expecting to.
In the end, it falls to caretaker Scatman Crothers to dime them out while they're laying low in Florida. This leads to the climactic shootout that closes the film -- and the one action sequence in the film that Corman doesn't completely botch. It's hard to mess up shots of people shooting at each other, I guess, but there are a couple chase scenes earlier on that are damned near incoherent. Corman may have believed he was a competent action director, but based on the evidence of this film it was clearly not his forte.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
I've done my share of things that shouldn't be talked about.
Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood has finally made it to my area, so I have finally caught up with it. As I'm at least a month behind the curve, I won't go into too much detail about it other than to say if I had seen it before the end of the year it would have made my Top Ten Films of 2007 list easily. As for Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of ruthless oilman Daniel Plainview, it is truly one for the ages. In many ways he's the ultimate misanthrope, rejecting anybody who even attempts to forge a kinship with him, from the man who claims to be his long-lost brother (Kevin J. O'Connor) to his adopted son (played as a boy by a completely unaffected Dillon Freasier) to a charismatic young preacher (Paul Dano) who would like to be his spiritual brother (or at the very least get a piece of his worldly gains). After spending two and a half hours with him, you won't think too highly of humanity yourself (although you may find yourself rushing out to get Jonny Greenwood's excellent score).
Monday, February 11, 2008
What I know about is Texas. And down here, you're on your own.
One of the most assured debuts in movie history, Ethan and Joel Coen's Blood Simple heralded the arrival of a potent creative team. A stripped-down neo-noir in the tradition of James M. Cain (an acknowledged inspiration), Blood Simple came out in 1984, a veritable dead zone for intelligent thrillers, but the Coens managed to surprise a lot of people with their tight script and creative (mis-)direction. There are a lot of things they tell the audience that they keep from their characters -- or rather, their characters keep from each other. One gets the feeling that if some of them had been a little more talkative, things would have turned out different in the end.
Not that it's likely anybody would have gotten off scot-free. In the world of Blood Simple there are no heroes or villains, and there's no such thing as an innocent party. For starters, you have adulterous couple John Getz and Frances McDormand, who initially hook up for just a one-night stand. Then there's McDormand's cuckolded husband Dan Hedaya, who hires private detective M. Emmet Walsh to follow them and, later on, kill them. Walsh doesn't take murder lightly, though, and neither do the Coens. To put it simply, they make sure the audience feels every moment of violence -- and there is more than enough blood to go around.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
You must renounce this sinister mission you've taken upon yourself.
Bernard Herrmann may have severed ties with Alfred Hitchcock over the rejection of his score for 1966's Torn Curtain, but he was more than accommodating when François Truffaut asked him to compose the music for his 1968 Hitchcockian thriller The Bride Wore Black. Based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich (written under the pen name William Irish), the film stars Jeanne Moreau as a woman distraught over the murder of her childhood sweetheart on their wedding day who decides to track down the men responsible. As she eliminates them one by one, we learn a little bit more about her motivation until we find out exactly what happened on that fateful day. Then it's a matter of whether she'll be able to carry out the rest of her plans before her conscience or the police catch up with her first.
Truffaut was inspired to tackle the suspense genre after the series of interviews he did with Hitchcock for the seminal Hitchcock/Truffaut book. After soaking up enough lessons from the Master, the pupil is always apt to want to try them out for themselves. Even if the overall film is not as successful as it could have been (it flags a little bit as it reaches the home stretch), that didn't deter Truffaut from bringing another Woolrich story to the screen the following year when he made Mississippi Mermaid with Catherine Deneuve. Perhaps he was a little more practiced by that time.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
You have now successfully ruined two of my marriages.
When Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding was released last fall I read some middling reviews of it, but resolved to see the film regardless. I had been greatly impressed by his last film, The Squid and the Whale, and admired his contribution to the script for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, so I made him one of my filmmakers to watch. I still haven't caught up with any of his '90s work, but there's no rush. It's not like the films are going anywhere.
The title character, played by Nicole Kidman, is a writer of confessional short stories (much like Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited) who is traveling by train to attend the wedding of her estranged sister, teacher Jennifer Jason Leigh, to unemployed artist (and frustrated musician) Jack Black. To say Kidman and Leigh have unresolved issues is putting it mildly, but as the wedding approaches it becomes clear that Kidman's main problem is her brutal honesty with everybody around her, and that includes her teenage son, played by Zane Pais. One gets the impression she wouldn't be able to keep her opinions to herself even if her life depended on it.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
She ought to marry. The men get worse the longer you wait.
Yasujiro Ozu's third and final remake was 1960's Late Autumn, which revisited the plot of 1949's Late Spring, swapping the gender of the parent to give Setsuko Hara the role of a widow eager to see her 24-year-old daughter happily married. Yôko Tsukasa plays the daughter, who's in no hurry to leave the nest, but that doesn't stop three of her father's old friends (Shin Saburi, Nobuo Nakamura and Ryuji Kita) from clumsily playing matchmaker. All three of them had crushes on Hara once upon a time as well, so when it becomes clear that Tsukasa won't leave her mother all alone, their solution is for the widower in their midst to propose marriage.
Others with a vested interest in seeing Tsukasa tie the knot include her friend from work (Mariko Okada), who takes the three older men to task for their meddling, a young man from one their firms (Keiji Sada) who is rejected sight unseen when they try to set it up, but has better luck when a meeting is arranged by a mutual friend, and her uncle (Chishu Ryu), who runs an inn in the country. The film moves along at Ozu's usual leisurely pace, slowly building to its foregone conclusion, with a few unexpected wrinkles along the way. It be wrong to call them plot twists, though. They're just the sorts of things that happen in life. As one of the matchmakers concedes after things fail to go completely as planned, "It's people who complicate life. Life is surprisingly simple."
This is a very strange love affair.
Easily the most romantic of Hitchcock's films, 1946's Notorious was his first post-war film, but its villains are still Nazis (in this case, ones who have relocated to South America). Armed with a flawless script by top screenwriter Ben Hecht and one of Hitchcock's best Maguffins (the uranium in the wine bottle), the film stars Cary Grant as an American agent who recruits Ingrid Bergman, the half-German daughter of a convicted traitor, to infiltrate a Nazi enclave in Rio de Janeiro. What neither of them counts on is that they'll fall in love before they find out her assignment is to seduce ringleader Claude Rains. That sort of thing would put a strain of any relationship.
Incidentally, this was Hitchcock's second film with Grant (who had starred in 1941's Suspicion) and Bergman (who had starred in the previous year's Spellbound, which had also been written by Hecht). Grant would, of course, return in To Catch and Thief and North by Northwest the following decade, but Bergman's swan song for the director was the ill-fated Under Capricorn, a film that even Hitchcock's admirers find hard to defend. Suffice it to say I will be skipping over that one when it comes up.
Friday, February 15, 2008
People only realize the value of money when they're broke.
The second film in Eclipse's Postwar Kurosawa set is 1947's One Wonderful Sunday, which is about a young engaged couple that only gets to see each other once a week. With just 35 yen between them, Yuzo (Isao Numasaki) and Masako (Chieko Nakakita) don't have a lot of options, but they're determined to enjoy each other's company as much as possible. Of the two of them, war veteran Yuzo is more pessimistic, but Masako still holds onto their prewar dream of opening a café together. It's a fanciful notion for a couple that can't even afford the deposit on a squalid apartment, let alone a brand-new model home.
I'm not in the habit of speculating about what films would be like with different casts, but I do have to wonder about this one a little. Kurosawa made it one year before Drunken Angel, which was his first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, and this is definitely a film that could have used an actor with Mifune's brooding intensity in the lead. Likewise, I can easily see Setsuko Hara (star of Kurosawa's previous film, No Regrets for Our Youth) in the role of his long-suffering fiancée. Of course, even with a cast like that the dreary midsection where the couple's day is washed out by a downpour and their attempt to get into a concert is foiled by scalpers would still be a slog. I realize the prospects for a lot of young people weren't too good in the years immediately following the war, but there's no reason to harp on that.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
To you, it may be deadly, but to us, it's really a gas.
Roger Corman's final film for AIP (and the last film in The Roger Corman Collection box set) was 1971's Gas-s-s-s, which also goes by the Dr. Strangelove-ian title Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. Having formed New World Pictures the year before, Corman only had a couple more films in him before he hung up his megaphone. (His very last film before vacating the director's chair was 1971's The Red Baron, although he did briefly come out of retirement two decades later to make Frankenstein Unbound.)
Written by future film director George Armitage, Gas! tells the story of a scientific experiment accidentally unleashed by the military that kills everybody over the age of 25, leading to the breakdown of law and order and the creation of mini societies (a football team that gears up for looting, a biker gang that inhabits a golf course, a hippie commune that advocates nonviolence) that our heroes must navigate. At first there's just the pair of them -- campus troublemaker Robert Corff and his girl Elaine Giftos -- but once they hit the road they hook up with a quartet of desperadoes made up of searcher Bud Cort, consummate consumer Talia Shire (here credited as Tally Coppola), revolutionary Ben Vereen and a pregnant Cindy Williams, who's crazy about music. (In fact, Corff and Giftos first meet them in a still-stocked record shop. I guess the looting was somewhat selective.)
Its depiction of a post-apocalyptic society that falls into all of the old traps recalls not only Dr. Strangelove ("We must not allow there to be a mineshaft gap!"), but also Richard Lester's 1969 film The Bed Sitting Room, which is overripe for rediscovery. And it prefigures Stephen King's The Stand by almost a decade. Given King's taste in popular culture, I would be mightily surprised if he didn't have this film percolating in the back of his mind while he conceived that epic.
Monday, February 18, 2008
I spent the afternoon trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
I first saw Steven Wright's Academy Award-winning short The Appointments of Dennis Jennings in 1992 as part of Two Mikes Don't Make a Wright, a shorts program that also included Michael Moore's Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (his follow-up to Roger & Me) and Mike Leigh's A Sense of History. Unfortunately none of them have ever been commercially released (the absence of Pets or Meat on the Roger & Me DVD was a particularly glaring omission), but Wright sells The Appointments of Dennis Jennings through his personal website, which is how I finally got hold of a copy a decade and a half later.
Directed by Dean Parisot (who went on to helm Galaxy Quest and the remake of Fun with Dick and Jane in between various television projects) and co-written by Steven Wright and Mike Armstrong, the film stars Wright as the hapless Dennis Jennings, a character not unlike his stand-up persona, who starts seeing an inattentive psychiatrist (played with a slight Germanic touch by Rowan Atkinson) who has "The Star Spangled Banner" playing on a loop in his waiting room. Unsurprisingly, Dennis is struggling with a number of quandaries -- an unrewarding job, unresolved father issues -- but he believes the one constant in his life is his girlfriend (Laurie Metcalf), who turns out to be a prime source of his paranoia. To reveal more about the story would be criminal, but I will note that the film also features Mike Starr as a surly doorman and David Hyde Pierce as a supercilious businessman. It's probably the most perfect distillation of Steven Wright's deadpan comic style and deserves to be more widely seen.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
He may have looked very relaxed, but he was really a nervous wreck.
A full decade after The Appointments of Dennis Jennings netted him an Oscar, Steven Wright turned his hand to the short form a second time, producing One Soldier, which premiered at the Comedy Arts Festival in 1999. In it, Wright plays a Civil War veteran who's obsessed with death -- not an uncommon preoccupation for a soldier, but Wright is far from a common soldier. For one thing, his sole job during the war appears to be playing the concertina. For another, after it's all over he leaves his uniform on, pointedly refusing to return to civilian life. It's telling that when his wife Becky (Sandi Carroll) tells him she's pregnant with his child, he can't even get up, let alone jump for joy.
Shot in stark black and white, the film has a visual sophistication that shows Wright is more than just another comedian who picked up a camera one day and decided he was a director. It also shows that Wright the screenwriter still knows how to pile on the absurdities while keeping his story grounded in what may best be described as a somber reverie. Early on his character says, "The way I see it, you can't talk about being alive without talking about being dead." That pretty much sums up the condition of man right there. Funny how one needs to look to a comedy short to find it voiced so succinctly.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
I don't keep souvenirs. It's the ring that matters.
After the critical and commercial success of The Bride Wore Black, Francois Truffaut returned to the well and came back with another Cornell Woolrich adaptation, 1969's Mississippi Mermaid. He had a bigger budget to work with this time, but the film saw diminishing returns despite extensive location shooting and the presence of stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. (Even the fleeting scenes of a topless Deneuve failed to bring in the crowds.)
Belmondo plays a plantation owner based on a small island off the coast of Madagascar who sets his heart on marrying Deneuve after only corresponding with her. Once she arrives it turns out neither of them was entirely honest with the other -- he downplayed his wealth and position and she sent him a bogus picture -- but they go ahead with the marriage anyway. Then one day an alarming letter arrives and Deneuve flies the coop with most of Belmondo's money. His pride wounded, Belmondo hires a private detective to find Deneuve, but then decides to track her down himself. Some things a man must do on his own.
There are numerous allusions to Hitchcock's oeuvre, with the most obvious antecedent being the similarly flawed Marnie, which also deals with a woman who meets rich men under false pretenses and takes them for everything she can. Curiously enough, the ending of the film echoes one of the rejected endings of Hitchcock's Suspicion, which Truffaut must have known about. One has to wonder, if it didn't pass muster for the Master of Suspense, why did he think it would work for him?
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Kohayagawa family is complicated indeed.
As he neared the end of his life and career, Yasujiro Ozu's films became increasingly concerned with death. Case in point: 1961's The End of Summer, his penultimate film and the last to star Setsuko Hara, who would retire from acting soon after his passing. The focus of this film, however, is Ganjiro Nakamura (the kabuki troupe leader from Floating Weeds) as the incorrigible patriarch of the Kohayagawa family. Not only does he have two daughters that he'd like to see married -- one of whom, played by Hara, has been a widow for six years -- but he's also started seeing an old flame whose daughter may or may not be his. (He thinks she is, but no one else seems to. This, of course, doesn't prevent her from trying to get a mink stole out of him.)
It's curious how fluid the casting can be in Ozu's films. In Late Autumn, Yoko Tsukasa was Hara's daughter, but in this film she plays her sister, and she's being pressured into marrying a man we never see when she'd rather be with a teacher's assistant who has been transferred to a distant province. The eldest daughter is played by Michiyo Aratama, who is most vocal about chastising Nakamura for his wandering ways while the family sake business flounders. Then the old man has a heart attack, which brings in even more relatives, including Nakamura's sister Haruko Sugimura, who tries her best to be jovial to put a brave face on things. And Ozu stand-in Chishu Ryu has a brief but memorable cameo at the end. If any actor is going to present Ozu's point of view in a film, it's going to be Ryu.
When a man's alone, living on his own, life is monotone.
The technology was still in its infancy when René Clair made his first sound film, 1930's Under the Roofs of Paris, so a great many of its sequences were shot silent -- with music added later, of course. It's the kind of story that would have been nigh-impossible to tell effectively just a year or two earlier since it concerns a young man (Albert Préjean) who sells sheet music by getting crowds of people on the street to sing the songs with him (to the accompaniment of an accordion). One day he spots a pickpocket stealing from the purse of a pretty girl (Pola Illéry) and, smitten, he confronts the thief and recovers her money, but earns the wrath of her beau, a cad named Fred (played by Gaston Modot, the Bruce Campbell of his time, who went on to star in Buñuel's L'Age d'or later that same year).
That night while they're out dancing Fred steals Pola's key and she is forced to stay at Albert's place -- a situation that starts out contentious, but predictably leads to her being smitten with him. When Albert is sent to jail on trumped-up charges, however, she winds up in the arms of his friend Louis (Edmond T. Gréville), which is the sort of thing that would strain any friendship. The sort of film that doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, Under the Roofs of Paris ends up being unsatisfying on both counts. Sure, Clair uses some impressive camera moves and captures some poetic imagery, but the end result lacks the verve of his musical comedies Le Million and À Nous la Liberté, which came along the following year. Chalk this one up to being very much a transitional film.
Friday, February 22, 2008
There are people who are silent while they are talking.
Akira Kurosawa didn't dwell on the atomic bomb too often in his films, but when he did -- as in 1991's Rhapsody in August -- it was with a sober thoughtfulness. His previous film on the subject, 1955's I Live in Fear, starred Toshiro Mifune as a patriarch whose plan to move his family to South America to be out of harm's way ruins them financially. Rhapsody in August, on the other hand, stars Sachiko Murase as an old woman whose husband died at Nagasaki, leaving her to raise their two children on her own. It's 45 years later, but she still remembers the events of that fateful August day vividly and recounts them for her four grandchildren, who are staying with her for the summer.
Their visit coincides with their parents' trip to Hawaii to meet a man who claims to be Murase's older brother, who turns out to be the wealthy owner of a pineapple plantation. With the anniversary of her husband's death looming, the ailing brother sends his Japanese-American son Clark (played by Richard Gere) to see her. There's a great deal of hand-wringing about what his visit really means, but in the end all he wishes to do is offer his condolences and learn what he can about the uncle he never knew. It's an eye-opening experience for everyone involved.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Nobody likes to lose like the negroes. They're born losers.
Larry Cohen's 1973 film Black Caesar was neither his first as a director, nor was it his first crack at a blaxploitation picture (both of those would be 1972's Bone). It was, however, his first film for AIP, which had recently gotten into the blaxploitation business with titles like Slaughter and Blacula, both of which were immediately sequelized (as Black Caesar would be). That was one way in which AIP definitely followed the lead of the majors. Black Caesar stands apart from the pack, though, thanks to the sharpness of Cohen's writing and his expert blend of action and social commentary.
When we first meet the title character he's a shoeshine boy running errands for the mafia in 1953. One such errand involves delivering a payoff -- which turns out to be $50 short -- to corrupt cop Art Lund, who shows the youth the meaning of police brutality. The next time we catch up with him it's 1965 and he's played by Fred Williamson, who offers his services as hitman to a mob boss, but what he really wants is to organize the rackets in Harlem with the help of childhood friends D'Urville Martin (whose church is a useful front for money laundering) and Philip Roye (the brains of the outfit) and his singer girlfriend Gloria Hendry. In order to get ahead, though, Williamson has to do business with Lund and neither of them are particularly willing to let bygones be bygones. Thus, the cycle of violence continues (a point driven home in the film's closing scene).
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Our past belongs to us. We can change it if we want.
In his review of Michel Gondry's new film Be Kind Rewind, Roger Ebert suggests that it may be too whimsical for its own good. While this view may or may not have some merit, I believe it misses the point to the extent that Gondry's films are largely about the extraordinary invention that goes into the making of them. On that count, Be Kind is an unqualified success. Besides, why would one expect realism from a film where Jack Black gets zapped by a power station during a misguided attempt at sabotage and, instead of being burned to a crisp, is merely magnetized?
His new magnetic personality has devastating effects, though, when it erases the entire stock of the Passaic, NJ, video store where Black's friend Mos Def works. Entrusted with the store by boss Danny Glover while he scopes out the competition (represented by West Coast Video, which was the first place I ever rented a video), Mos Def understandably freaks out -- especially when flaky regular Mia Farrow comes in and asks to see Ghostbusters -- but quickly hits on the idea of reenacting the film with Black's help. ("Okay, I'm Bill Murray. You be everyone else.") For their next opus -- a ham-handed version of Rush Hour 2 -- they enlist the help of neighborhood girl Melonie Diaz and things really start to take off.
Eventually it seems like the whole neighborhood is helping (or should that be enabling?) them until the studios get wind of what they're doing and send a representative (played by Sigourney Weaver, amusingly enough) to shut them down. There's nothing to stop them from making their own original film, though, a development that brings to mind the Talking Heads song "Found a Job," which is about a couple that gets fed up with the poor quality of television and does something about it. "Just look at Bob and Judy," David Byrne sings, "they're happy as can be; inventing situations, putting them on TV." There are certainly worse things that one can do with their time.
Monday, February 25, 2008
We agreed there was only one crime either of us could commit: the crime of making a mistake.
Over the course of half a century, three very different films based to varying degrees on the Leopold & Loeb murder case were made. The first was Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope, based on the successful Broadway play of the same name, but with different character names. In the opening moments we hear Brandon and Phillip (John Dall and Farley Granger) strangle a former classmate behind closed curtains just for the thrill of it. Once we cut inside we stay in their apartment for the duration of the film, during which they hide the body in a trunk and host a macabre dinner party to which they've invited the victim's parents, his girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend and Rupert, their housemaster from private school, whose theories about intellectually superior men and their ability to carry out murder as art Brandon has apparently taken to heart. That these views are jovially expressed by James Stewart makes them no less palatable, especially when one considers what they've led to.
Much is made about the technical challenges Hitchcock faced making an entire film in long takes -- challenges compounded by the fact that it was also his first in Technicolor -- but his cast also had to be constantly on their toes. Granger, in particular, gives a multifaceted performance as the more regretful (or as Brandon might say, the weaker) of the two, who barely seems to be able to contain his anxiety as the party wears on and his apprehension mounts. It's hardly surprising that Hitchcock would bring him back three years later in Strangers on a Train, his first unqualified masterpiece of the '50s. Rope may not rank among the Master's greatest achievements, but it's really only a step or two below them.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Never be the innocent bystander. That's the guy that always gets hurt.
In the decade following the runaway success of Laura, director Otto Preminger made numerous return trips to the land of film noir, culminating in 1952's Angel Face, which he made for RKO in 1952. The film stars Robert Mitchum as a Beverly Hills ambulance driver who is hired as a chauffeur for a family he once called on under unusual circumstances. (It seems the lady of the house had a close call with a gas leak.) Jean Simmons co-stars as the daughter who is devoted to her father, blocked novelist Herbert Marshall, and detests her stepmother Barbara O'Neil, who holds the purse strings in the family.
Simmons also has romantic designs on Mitchum, a former race car driver who dreams of someday opening his own garage. Simmons wants to help make that dream a reality, but O'Neil shoots it down. Sure enough, it isn't long before she's out of the picture and district attorney Jim Backus (who is actually quite effective) is prosecuting them for murder. Mitchum should have stuck with his first instinct when Simmons offered him the job. "I don't think I'm quite the type for that," he said, but he's just the type to have a murder pinned on him.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The day The Star reports facts, Judas Iscariot will be sainted.
Samuel Fuller had newsprint in his blood and he proved it by using $200,000 of his own money to write, produce and direct the film Park Row in 1952. Set in 1886, it stars Gene Evans as a crusading editor who founds upstart newspaper The Globe to challenge lumbering giant The Star, which is run by his professional rival Mary Welch (who is also somewhat improbably his romantic interest). At times it seems she has as much a stake in seeing his dream go up in smoke as he has in bringing fresh ideas to the newspaper business. (The number of innovations attributed to Evans and The Globe gets a little ridiculous, but one has to allow Fuller some dramatic license.) A tried-and-true independent in an industry that valued monetary gains over creative dividends, it isn't hard to tell where Fuller's sympathies lie.
Friday, February 29, 2008
There's always an audience for horror -- believable horror.
I'll be brief about this because I'm over at a friend's house on their computer, but we went to see George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead tonight and I have to say we both enjoyed it very much -- once it got going, that is. This is Romero's fifth zombie movie and his second in three years, so one might be tempted to think he's run out of things to say, but in giving his series a "reboot" in modern times he has shown that he is more than up to the task of competing with his undead progeny. The film stars a cast of unknowns, most of whom are playing film students in the process of making a cheesy mummy movie when the world goes all to hell. Reliable information is hard to come by in the early stages of the epidemic, so the group bands together in an effort to stay alive and find other survivors.
The central couple is Jason (Joshua Close), who is mostly an offscreen presence since he's the one shooting the majority of the footage that makes it into the film, and his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), who comes to resent the way he keeps shooting as things fall apart around them. He's not the only character who becomes fascinated with the images he captures, though, and his isn't the only camera in play. Romero cuts in footage from camcorders, a camera phone, surveillance cameras and webcams. Essentially, if you can shoot video with it, he found a place for it in the film.
In the original Night of the Living Dead, the survivors were isolated in a farmhouse and had no way of knowing what was going on in the outside world. In Diary of the Dead, the protagonists spend much of their time on the road and have access to more information than they can comfortably process. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how well-informed you are. In certain situations (like, say, a zombie invasion) you either survive by your wits or you don't. It's as simple as that. And yes, in Romero's world dead things still move slow (a rebuke to today's fast-moving zombies on the go).
Back to February 2008 -- Onward to March 2008
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