Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
March 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
What do we know about making movies? That's what I'm trying to tell you.
Had a double feature of off-the-radar independent films today, one of which I provided and one that my host, Joe Blevins, was eager to show me. First up was The Executioner, a 1978 Godfather knock-off written, produced and directed by erstwhile Dean Martin knock-off Duke Mitchell, who also stars under his real name Dominico Miceli. It tells the story of Mimi Miceli, son of an exiled mafia don, who returns to Los Angeles to shake down some pimps and bookmakers and settle some old scores. One such score involves recruiting old associate Jolly Rizzo (Vic Caesar) to help him kidnap the current mob boss. To show they mean business, they send one of his fingers to the man's son, who immediately calls a meeting of the heads of the syndicate. "That's his finger all right," says one of them after they've passed it around. "I've seen it on him a million times."
That's just one of the many downright ludicrous lines in the film. Others include such gems as "You're in or you're in the way" and "Tonight we eat, tomorrow we shoot," both of which are spoken several times, like they accumulated extra meaning with repetition. I guess Mitchell thought he was some kind of a writer. He also thought he was some kind of a singer since he includes three whole songs that he recorded back in his '50s heyday (when he briefly teamed up with Jerry Lewis knock-off Sammy Petrillo to make the execrable Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla).
I could go on about the amateurishness of the whole affair, but what's most shocking is the abundant gore and the casual racism that infects the entire film, which reaches its zenith when a black pimp named Super Spook is nailed to a cross on Easter Sunday. For these and many other reasons, The Executioner took three years to see the light of day and when it did it was released under a number of titles, including Murder Mafia Style and Like Father, Like Son. During that time Mitchell shot a follow-up, entitled Gone with the Pope, but he died before he was able to finish editing it. Judging by the trailer that can be seen on YouTube (I won't link to it, but it's easy enough to search for), maybe it's a good thing that he didn't.
Our second was a little-known and very bizarre Canadian film from the mid-'80s called Crime Wave (which had to be changed to The Big Crime Wave to avoid confusion with the Sam Raimi film of the same name that came out around the same time). The film was written and directed by Winnipeg auteur John Paizs, who also stars as aspiring filmmaker Steven Penny, who can write the beginnings and endings of movies, but not the middles. He's living over the garage of an unassuming suburban family, whose daughter Eva Kovacs acts as our narrator and is in the habit of rescuing his discarded drafts, which she imagines being acted out. (In addition to the abortive beginnings and endings -- all of which involve somebody trying to break into some kind of "racket" -- we also see bits and pieces of random scenes that seem to have little to no relation to anything else.)
Penny's goal is to write the ultimate Colour Crime Movie, and he works exclusively by streetlight. Dissatisfied by his lack of progress, however, he contemplates giving up his dream until Kovacs convinces him to see experienced writer Dr. Jolly (Neal Lawrie), who may have been a reputable script doctor at one time, but has since become a serial killer. Curiously enough, a character by the name of Jolly isn't the only connection between Crime Wave and The Executioner. Both films also share an affinity for bloody shootings, feature characters toiling on the outskirts of the entertainment industry (at one point Mitchell and Caesar go into the porno business) and were obviously labors of love for their makers. The main difference, though, is that Paizs the actor wisely lets his film speak for itself, while Mitchell's self-aggrandizing need to give himself a number of big speeches underlies his hypocrisy. Once you've decided to stake your reputation on a racist, misogynistic, ultraviolent mafia saga, it's disingenuous to take Hollywood to task for portraying Sicilians in an unflattering light.
Monday, March 3, 2008
This crime is the most fiendish, cold-blooded, inexcusable case the world has ever known.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it curious that Orson Welles is top-billed in 1959's Compulsion when he doesn't appear at all in the first hour of the film. Such are the vagaries of star billing, I guess. The second Hollywood film based on the Leopold & Loeb murder case, Compulsion was based on the novel by Meyer Levin, who also went to the trouble of changing the names of the killers. Of the two of them, Dean Stockwell's Judd is the more soft-spoken one, an intellectually superior grad student who's big on Nietzsche and ornithology and who idolizes Bradford Dillman's Arthur, who rather perversely is more than happy to help the police with their investigations once their crime is discovered (shades of Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window).
It isn't until after state's attorney E.G. Marshall catches them in a lie and obtains signed confessions from both of them that their families retain Welles, a high-priced lawyer known for his crusade against the death penalty. It's when they get into the courtroom, I suppose, that Welles earns his top billing because he delivers one of the longest monologues committed to film up to that time. No wonder he shared the Best Actor award at Cannes with Stockwell and Dillman. This film was not to be the final word on Leopold & Loeb, though. It took an independent film made three decades in the future to explicate the things that could only be hinted at in Rope and Compulsion.
It's hard to tell if this is a comedy or a tragedy... but it's a masterpiece.
I don't know why it's taken me so long to catch up with so many of Jean-Luc Godard's films from the '60s, but tonight I watched A Woman is a Woman, which he made in 1961. An anti-musical of sorts, this is the film where Godard plays with the soundtrack relentlessly. There's lots of music (by Michel Legrand) and sound effects, but they frequently cut out for no apparent reason, except for one number where the music drops out whenever anybody opens their mouth to sing. The style is disconcerting at the start, but one soon grows accustomed to it the way one gets used to the jump cuts in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry. Godard was doing it three decades earlier, though, something which film students know but the general public is largely unaware of.
Godard's first film in widescreen format and color, it stars Anna Karina as a striptease artist living with cyclist Jean-Claude Brialy. She wants to have a baby, but he's not so eager while he's in training, so friend Jean-Paul Belmondo is called upon to impregnate her. In one of many in-jokes in the film, Belmondo talks about not wanting to miss Breathless (which he starred in) on television. Later on he bumps into Jeanne Moreau in a bar and asks her how Jules and Jim is progressing, and there is also an overt reference to Shoot the Piano Player, which Truffaut had made the year before. Godard even has his actors occasionally address the camera, reminding the viewer that they're watching a film. It's a device that can be off-putting or stimulating for audiences. Thankfully, early on in his career Godard's films generally fell into the latter category.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
I'll do business with a Red, but I don't have to believe one.
Criterion has always done well by Samuel Fuller. They were the first company to put his films out on DVD (Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss were among the first films to be added to the Collection in 1998) and while most studios continued to sit on their catalog titles well into the '00s, Criterion continued the good work with a handsome edition of his 1953 film noir Pickup on South Street. It's the story of a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) who picks the purse of a woman on the subway and unknowingly lifts some microfilm containing government secrets that were being delivered to a Communist traitor. The thing is the woman (Jean Peters) didn't know her boyfriend (the uber-slimy Richard Kiley) was a Commie when she agreed to deliver the package for him, and she doesn't find out until well-paid stoolie Thelma Ritter puts her on Widmark's trail. (This is, of course, after she's already given the same information to the police, who are just as eager to track down the microfilm and find out who it was to be delivered to.)
Ritter delivers the performance of the film, hawking her information along with her cheap ties -- that is when she isn't talking about the fancy funeral plot she's saving up for. (Her biggest fear is being buried in Potter's Field. "If I was to be buried in Potter's Field," she says, "it would just about kill me.") Most of the other characters are either hard-boiled or, in the case of Peters, hopelessly naive (and rather quick to fall for a guy who socked her in the jaw), but Ritter really makes you feel every ache and pain in her body as her time winds up. Fuller may not have been a subtle filmmaker, but he could write amazing dialogue and occasionally he got an actor like Ritter or Widmark who could knock it out of the park.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
It's best to let her marry the one she loves. She'll be happier that way.
It's quite fitting that Yasujiro Ozu's final film would bring his favorite star and frequent surrogate Chishu Ryu center stage one last time. In 1962's An Autumn Afternoon, Ryu plays a widower with three children who feels pressured into marrying off his 24-year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita). He's not eager to let her go, however, until he sees the example of an old teacher nicknamed "The Gourd" (Eijiro Tono) whose daughter never married to care for him. Not only is Tono miserable and given to drinking too much, but he feels bad for his daughter (Ozu regular Haruko Sugimura) who passed up numerous proposals and grew to be a bitter old maid.
Meanwhile, it seems Ryu's elder son Koichi (Keiji Sada) is far from blissfully married, with a hen-pecking wife (Mariko Okada) who won't let him buy the set of golf clubs he wants. And younger son Kazuo (Shinichirô Mikami) is such a layabout, Ryu worries that he won't be able to take care of himself once his sister is gone. All this would weigh more heavily on him if he didn't have old friends Nobuo Nakamura and Ryuji Kita to rely on. For his part, Nakamura seems most intent on finding a match for Michiko, while Kita eagerly sings the praises of remarrying young (which gives rise to numerous jokes about his need to take pep pills to keep up with his wife). At the end of the day, though, no matter what he does, Ryu knows he'll end up alone. It's just the way of things.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
I have a suspicion. Something odd is about to happen.
When I worked at Tower Records, I struck up a friendship with video manager Jeff Goodhartz, with whom I shared a passion for Mystery Science Theater 3000, but whose knowledge of offbeat cinema far exceeded my own. Occasionally he would share one of his gems with me, as when he introduced me to A*P*E (South Korea's answer to the 1976 remake of King Kong), The Dragon Lives Again (perhaps the most inexplicable Hong Kong film that followed in the wake of the Bruce Lee's death), The Giant Claw (in which Jeff Morrow does battle with one of the silliest flying monsters ever put on film), and The Executioner (which I introduced Joe Blevins to last week). A couple months back he sent me a package containing more cinematic wonders, each one promising to be more bizarre than the last.
First out of the box is Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell, a Japanese film from 1968 that Turner Classic Movies actually showed some months back, but I missed the first hour of thanks to the end of Daylight Savings Time. Directed by Hajime Sato (who also made 1966's The Terror from Beneath the Sea, in which journalist Sonny Chiba tries to expose a plot to convert men into fish), Goke tells the story of an Air Japan flight that crash lands on a supposedly deserted island after an attempted hijacking. In short order the hijacker is taken over by an alien being (in a shot that must have stretched the effects budget) and begins stalking the other survivors, including the co-pilot, a stewardess, an important politician, a weapons manufacturer and his wife, a psychiatrist, a space researcher and a mad bomber. As if that wasn't enough of a motley crew, there's also an American war widow on her way to pick up the body of her dead husband, who was killed in Vietnam. Without food or water, the survivors quickly turn against each other, especially once they realize one of their number is a bloodsucker with a gaping head wound (which you'd think would make the enemy easy to identify, but people seldom act rationally in situations like these). Turns out this is all according to plan since the aliens have decided to pass judgment on us for our warlike ways (cue shots of carnage culminating in the atomic bomb). Way to be such a downer, Japan.
Anyone unafraid of darkness has a vital defect as a human being.
For his final film, Akira Kurosawa chose Madadayo, the story of a professor who retires after 30 years of service and whose students gather every year on his birthday to wish him well. Written, directed and edited by Kurosawa -- with uncredited help from fellow filmmaking legend Ishirô Honda in all three departments -- the film stars Tatsuo Matsumura as the beloved professor, with Kyôko Kagawa as his steadfast wife and Hisashi Igawa as the former pupil who heads up the committee that plans his annual celebration (and attends to other needs as they come up). The first -- to mark his 60th birthday -- is rather small and subdued since it takes place during the rationing of World War II, but the following year's gathering (the first in the postwar era) fills up a beer hall and is a most raucous affair.
We also get some flavor of the professor's life between birthdays. First his students move him into a modest house in Tokyo, but after it's burnt down in an air raid they find him and his wife in a tiny shack. Returning the generosity of spirit he showed them during their school days, they build him a new house after the war, which also becomes the home of a stray cat the professor becomes attached to. When the cat goes missing the professor is despondent and the students spring into action to try to find it. Finally, the film jumps forward to the professor's 77th birthday, a gathering attended not just by his students, but their wives and children and even some grandchildren. As is their custom, they ask, "Are you ready?" to which he boldly replies, "Madadayo!" (or "Not yet!"). Maybe someday, but not yet.
Monday, March 10, 2008
You've just enjoyed the treat of shaking hands with a murderer.
In many ways the most comprehensive depiction of the Leopold & Loeb case, Tom Kalin's 1992 film Swoon is also the most stylized. Shot entirely in black and white, it freely incorporates newsreel footage as a way of evoking the period without straining its meager budget, and it deliberately introduces anachronisms like touch-tone phones and other modern devices. And, most notably, it's the first film to use their actual names and overtly acknowledge their homosexuality (and their Jewishness).
Where Rope only covered the brief time from the carrying out of the deed to its discovery and Compulsion started with the planning of the crime, but skipped over its commission on its way to the trial, Swoon takes in all facets of the story. It starts with the pact that Nathan Leopold (Craig Chester) and Richard Loeb (Daniel Schlachet) enter into, using their own diary entries to chart their progress as they plan the perfect murder. We then watch them carry it out and attempt to cover it up in grisly detail, followed by the police investigation and sensational trial, and their subsequent incarceration. That's something else the earlier films skipped over. Of course, Kalin had the benefit of knowing how things turned out.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The sword is the soul. Study the soul to know the sword.
It is without fear of overstatement that I can say Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is one of the most devastating samurai films ever made. Released in 1966, but as fresh today as it ever was, The Sword of Doom also has one of the highest body counts I've ever seen in a samurai film. (I wasn't keeping track, but the bodies sure do stack up.) The film stars Tatsuya Nakadai (who also starred in Okatomo's Kill! two years later) as an amoral swordsman with a "silent style" who likes to kill for the sake of killing. To establish this beyond a shadow of a doubt, his first act in the film is to slay a helpless old man on a pilgrimage with his granddaughter. Next he despoils the wife of his opponent in an upcoming fencing match and, after he kills the man with a single stroke, calmly dispatches a dozen swordsmen who come after him looking for revenge. Clearly he is not a man to be trifled with, but even he recognizes when he meets someone of superior skill.
The film takes place over the course of three years, starting with "the Sakurada Gate Incident" in the spring of 1860 and culminating with an apocalyptic battle at a house of prostitution. In between, Nakadai takes up with the wife of his vanquished foe (Michiyo Aratama) and finds that he is being sought by the man's brother (Yuzo Kayama), who is training under a formidable master (the incomparable Toshirô Mifune). In fact, he has no reason to doubt his own skills until he sees Mifune in action during an ambush one snowy night. One might say Nakadai has a talent for killing, but Mifune raises it to an art form. Unfortunately, the film ends rather abruptly before the two of them can cross swords, the result of it being the first part of a planned trilogy that was never completed. No matter, The Sword of Doom is enough of a masterpiece on its own.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Wanna hear one of my ideas for a perfect murder?
A few weeks back I read Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train in anticipation of re-watching Hitchcock's film version, which came out the following year. Both have the same basic premise -- two men meet on a train and one flippantly suggests that they swap murders, but only one of them intends to follow through on "their" plan. The key difference between them is in Highsmith's novel the other man is ultimately driven to carry out the second murder, making it more of a psychological suspense story. It wouldn't do for a Hitchcock hero to actually be guilty of murder, though, which is why Farley Granger's Guy Haines is squeaky clean through and through. His profession has also been changed from architect to amateur tennis player, and his fiancée Ann (Ruth Roman) is the daughter of a prominent senator (Leo G. Carroll), whose other daughter Barbara is played by Patricia Hitchcock (in her second of three supporting roles in her father's films).
The one character who moved from the novel to the film virtually unchanged is ingratiating sociopath Bruno Anthony, masterfully played by Robert Walker, another Hitchcock villain with an unhealthy relationship with his mother (Marion Lorne). Watching him, one can see how he thinks he's doing Guy a favor by strangling his wayward spouse (Laura Elliott), who refuses to grant him a divorce. Of course, once Guy makes it plain that he won't be murdering Bruno's father in exchange, Bruno sets out to frame him for his wife's murder. After all, Guy's the one with the motive, right?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but I don't want to be a part of it.
Michael Haneke is one of those filmmakers that I've known about for several years, reading reviews of his films as they were released in theaters and on DVD, but until today I had never actually seen any of them. And yet, I remember seeing a trailer several months back and, long before it showed the title, thinking, "Wait, did somebody remake Funny Games?" Soon enough my suspicion was confirmed and it was quickly followed by the revelation, "Ah, I see. Michael Haneke has remade Funny Games." In the months that followed I toyed with the notion of seeing the 1997 original first, but decided to view the remake on its own terms. In retrospect, this was probably the best course of action.
Funny Games is one of Haneke's more notorious films, dealing as it does with two unfailingly polite young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet in this version) who show up at the vacation home of a nice, upper middle class family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart) and proceed to terrorize the living shit out of them. It's difficult to say any more without giving the "game" away, but the whole thing starts with a simple request for eggs and, before it's over, they're not the only things that end up getting broken. Pitt and Corbet make for very creepy home invaders and the games they come up with are designed for maximum discomfort, both for the "players" and for the audience. In fact, Haneke has some rather pointed things to say about the kind of person who would "enjoy" the violence in a film like Funny Games (which is why it is kept, for the most part, offscreen). I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I can definitely say that I admire Haneke's chutzpah in putting a film like this out there, twice -- and I would take it over a hundred Saws or Hostels.
One final note: Best use of John Zorn's "Bonehead" and "Hellraiser" ever (not that I've ever heard them used anywhere else, but still).
Friday, March 21, 2008
You never heard such silence.
Harold Pinter is about as far from an American playwright as you can get in the English language, but that didn't stop the American Film Theatre from producing a film version of his 1965 play The Homecoming. Made in 1973, it was directed by noted British stage director Peter Hall and photographed by David Watkin, who is best known for his work with Richard Lester and Tony Richardson (and who died just over a month ago; he would have been 83 on Sunday). And it featured a top-notch cast of British actors, with Paul Rogers as the belligerent family patriarch (and retired butcher) constantly railing against his two sons (thuggish pimp Ian Holm and dim boxer-in-training Terence Rigby) and his effete chauffeur brother Cyril Cusack. Then his eldest son Michael Jayston, a doctor of philosophy who has been away for some time lecturing at an American university, arrives on the doorstep late one night with Vivien Merchant, his wife of nine years and the mother of his own three sons, in tow. The result is akin to an uneasy comedy of toxic manners, one which finds Pinter (who also wrote the screenplay) operating at the height of his powers. Highly recommended.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
I figured one day I'd just wake up and find out what the hell yesterday was all about.
I'm not terribly surprised that I didn't get to see David Lynch's epic three-hour mindfuck Inland Empire in theaters, but I still wish I'd had that immersive experience. At home there are so many distractions -- and that's where the tyrannical pause button holds sway. (We can't all stop and rewind films in the theater like Michael Pitt in Funny Games.) Written and directed by Lynch, who was also director of photography, sound designer and editor on the film (which was actually shot on DV, but we'll put that distinction aside for now), Inland Empire stars Laura Dern as an actress in need of a comeback role who thinks she finds it in a film about a woman who enters into an ill-advised affair with a married man. Then Dern enters into an ill-advised affair with her leading man (Justin Theroux, who played the put-upon director in Lynch's Mulholland Dr.) and reality and fiction start to get confused.
It takes a while for the film to get to that point, though. A few random scenes and odd interludes (like the puzzling rabbit-com, which comes complete with a laugh track) aside, it appears to be rather straightforward (for a Lynch film). Then, an hour in, Dern tumbles down the rabbit hole and Lynch leaves objective reality behind. Well before that happens, though, she receives a visit from new neighbor Grace Zabriskie, who makes some startling predictions about the part she's about to get. Jeremy Irons plays the director of On High a Blue Tomorrow (the film within the film) and it's so good to see him sink his teeth into a decent part for a change. (Irons has done a lot of crap movies in recent years, so when he shows up in something good or interesting, it tends to come as a relief.) His assistant is played by Harry Dean Stanton, who is perpetually hard up for money and hits up everybody in the cast and crew, and who also uncovers some disturbing information about the film they're making. Seems it's a remake of a Polish film that was never completed for mysterious reasons.
There are other familiar faces scattered about the sidelines of the story, like Diane Ladd as an impertinent talk show host, William H. Macy as her announcer (a part so small you wonder what he's doing in it), and Julia Ormond as Theroux's wife, who's first seen in a police interrogation room, quite literally spilling her guts. And the voices of Jane, Jack and Suzie Rabbit are provided by Laura Harring, Scott Coffey and Naomi Watts, all of whom starred in Mulholland Dr. Like that film, Inland Empire features many seemingly disconnected events that never quite cohere into a followable plot, but (with a few exceptions) Lynch's films have never been for people who need to have things spelled out for them. For example, why does he has a group of women spontaneously jump up and dance to "The Loco-Motion"? I have no idea -- and I'm fairly sure Lynch doesn't, either. It probably just seemed like a good idea at the time. If you can hang with that, Inland Empire might be for you.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Good news for Mouse. He's hired. What's the job?
Over the course of its existence, Adult Swim has produced some of the strangest shows ever to grace the boob tube, but by far the most "out there" has probably been 12 Oz. Mouse, the kind of show that words like "convoluted" and "indescribable" and phrases like "non sequitur-ridden" and "crazy-ass-being" were invented for. Created by Matt Maiellaro, half of the team behind Aqua Teen Hunger Force and one of the many writers who shepherded Space Ghost Coast to Coast through its ten years of existence, 12 Oz. Mouse ran for 20 episodes from 2005-2006, but when Adult Swim put it out on DVD last month (on Leap Year Day, no less), they were edited together into one long "movie," which clocks in at just under three and a half hours. That's a lot of Mouse to take in, but it's the kind of show that definitely comes more into focus the more of it you watch. In a row. One after another. Sequentially. On a TV screen. With your eyes. But writing about it afterward? Forming coherent thoughts? Trying to convince somebody who's never seen it to give it a shot? That's a whole other ballgame.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The realm of possibility is a terrible country.
Following his run of films with Harold Pinter, director Joseph Losey turned to playwright Tom Stoppard to draft the screenplay for his 1975 film The Romantic Englishwoman, based on the novel by Thomas Wiseman (who also had a hand in the script). The film stars Glenda Jackson as an Englishwoman (who may or may not be romantically-inclined) who travels to Baden-Baden, Germany, for the water cure, leaving her novelist husband (Michael Caine) and their young son behind. There she meets a handsome young poet (Helmut Berger), who's also a handsome young drug smuggler and gigolo, but nothing happens between them. That doesn't prevent Caine from imagining the worst, though, dreaming up all kinds of infidelities which he channels into a screenplay that he's writing in lieu of his latest novel.
Even after Jackson comes home, jealousy eats away at Caine until he winds up inviting Berger (who has come to England to escape the consequences of a botched delivery) to stay with them. Caine claims it's for research purposes, so he can write Berger into the script, but he pushes the situation to the point where it almost seems like he wants to be proven right. (Along the way we get to see Jackson and Berger act out scenes as he's writing them, which shows that he's incapable of keeping his life and his work separate.) Stoppard would delve further into the collision of fantasy and reality in his script for Terry Gilliam's Brazil and return to the theme of a writer incorporating things from his life into his work for Shakespeare in Love, but this was where his screenwriting career started. Not a bad beginning.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
There was a time when I painted in all the lines. Now I merely deepen what is already there.
1983's The Dresser stars Albert Finney (in his third of four performances nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards) as a tyrannical actor-manager struggling with the onset of dementia while headlining a company performing Shakespeare in the provinces during the World War II. Tom Courtenay co-stars as his ever-faithful (and unapologetically gay) dresser struggling to keep Finney from cracking up long enough to get him onstage to give his 227th performance as King Lear -- and his first during an air raid. Directed by Peter Yates from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, it's the kind of backstage drama that the Brits positively excel at, with the supporting roles ably filled out by the likes of Edward Fox (as a vain pretender to the throne), Eileen Atkins (as a long-suffering stage manager) and Michael Gough (as a journeyman actor who knows without having to be told not to upstage Finney). I also spotted Sheila Reid (who made a distinct impression two years later as the suddenly widowed Mrs. Buttle in Brazil) as an actress in the company.
In addition to Finney's, the film garnered four other Oscar nominations, including Courtenay for Best Actor (they both lost to Robert Duvall for Tender Mercies), Harwood for Best Adapted Screenplay and Yates for Best Director (both of whom lost to James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment) and Best Picture (which went to, you guessed it, Terms of Endearment). The film was nominated for even more awards at the BAFTAs the following year, but it was similarly shut out there as that was the year of The Killing Fields. Even so, one can still appreciate the film for what it is -- an opportunity for Finney to fully inhabit a role that fits his expansive (and occasionally outsized) acting style.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
You speak so many bloody languages and you never want to talk.
I wasn't the only one taken aback when director Anthony Minghella died earlier this month at the age of 54. He had only directed six feature films, including The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, but he made his biggest splash with 1996's The English Patient, which garnered nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (and had three other nominations besides). Adapted by Minghella from the novel by Michael Ondaatje, the film stars Ralph Fiennes as a Hungarian count and explorer whose plane is shot down in the North African desert during World War II and who is burned beyond recognition. Jumping forward to the end of the war, we find him in Italy, suffering from amnesia and being cared for by nurse Juliette Binoche. She believes she's cursed because everyone she loves or gets close to dies, but this is no problem with Fiennes since he's close to death anyway.
Wishing to spare Fiennes the pain of being moved, Binoche sets him up at an abandoned monastery, which also becomes home to Willem Dafoe, a morphine addict who claims to be working for the Allies rooting out traitors, and base camp for Naveen Andrews, a Sikh bomb expert that Binoche finds herself drawn to despite her misgivings about getting involved with anyone. As for Fiennes's murky past, Minghella slowly reveals that it has to do with an affair he had with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose husband Colin Firth was a pilot working for the British government in the lead-up to war. Unsurprisingly, Firth was less than pleased to discover his wife's infidelity, which ultimately leads to tragedy for all three of them (four if you count Dafoe, whose life was also affected by Fiennes's actions). It's the kind of film Academy voters go gaga for, but I would have much preferred seeing Best Picture go to Fargo that year.
Whenever you got men in prison, they're gonna want to get out.
Jules Dassin's first film with a noirish tinge was 1947's gritty prison drama Brute Force. Written by Richard Brooks, the film stars Burt Lancaster, fresh from his debut in The Killers, as a tough convict determined to break out of prison -- and who can blame him? Conditions are terrible, there are six men to each overcrowded cell, the head guard is corrupt and power-hungry, and men are routinely assigned the worst job in the prison -- working the drain pipe, which is as good as a death sentence for some. Hume Cronyn turns in a subtly creepy performance as the guard who's more of a menace than the men he's guarding, and Charles Bickford shines as the go-to guy for his fellow prisoners and the ineffectual warden alike.
Throughout the film we get glimpses of the world outside the prison in flashback form, but for most of the inmates the prison is their whole world. All of the flashbacks come from Lancaster and his cell mates, who either have a woman waiting for them or one they're glad to be away from. The most tragic story is probably the one recalled by bookish Whit Bissell, who embezzled money to buy his wife a mink coat and can't even get a single letter out of her. Then again, it's possible Cronyn has merely been overzealous with censoring the mail, always searching for a psychological advantage over his charges. And when that isn't enough, he's not afraid to use a little force. The film's conclusion may be far from subtle, but along the way it makes some trenchant observations about the iniquities of the prison system.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Should we who are trying to free Cuba become murderers, too?
In 1948, John Huston made the all-time classics The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart. In 1950, he made the textbook heist film The Asphalt Jungle with Sterling Hayden and Marilyn Monroe. In between, he made the significantly less-heralded We Were Strangers, which starred Jennifer Jones and John Garfield as Cuban revolutionaries fighting for the liberation of their people between the wars, when the country was under the rule of a oppressive regime. Jones joins the cause after her younger brother is shot down in the street for distributing some critical leaflets. She's eager to kill the slimy head of the secret police (Pedro Armendáriz), who pulled the trigger, but Garfield sells her and the organization on a plan to take out not only him, but many high-ranking government officials in one fell swoop. Coincidentally enough, his plan involves digging a tunnel, a job that weighs heavily on those who volunteer for it. What they didn't count on was that Armendáriz would take a sudden interest in Jones... and who can blame him?
Huston had a long and distinguished career in motion pictures spanning six decades, five of which he spent in the director's chair. In that time he directed 37 features (38 if you count Casino Royale) and, while some of them were duds, there's almost always something of value to be found in each of them. That is why, as of this writing, I have seen 25 of them (26 if you count Casino Royale, although I must confess I'm inclined not to). We Were Strangers certainly doesn't rank with Huston's best work and there have been better films made about political turmoil in Cuba (The Godfather, Part II and Richard Lester's Cuba both come to mind), but I can always hope there are one or two undiscovered gems in the dozen or so that I haven't gotten to yet. For example, I have high hopes for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which was in my Netflix Queue until I discovered that they have it at my local library. I'll have to check that out -- literally.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Your job is to determine what's stopping us from reaching Mars.
In 1967, Shochiku Studios (best known as the home of Ozu and producer of some of Kurosawa'a early films) got into the kaiju game with The X from Outer Space. It's about an expedition to Mars that is thwarted by a malevolent UFO, but they still manage to return to Earth with a space spore (collected by the ship's space biologist, the token blond in the crew). This is no ordinary spore, though, for it contains an extraterrestrial that quickly escapes from the lab and grows to be 200 feet tall and 150,000 tons in a matter of hours. Oh, yes. And it's a giant radioactive chicken/lizard thing which the scientists dub Space Monster Guilala because they have nothing better to do than stand around naming alien creatures that are stomping the countryside flat.
The X from Outer Space was co-written and directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, whose only other credit is 1968's War of the Insects. I got to see it courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, which showed it earlier this month as one of its TCM Imports, and I must say Robert Osborne seemed a little sheepish about presenting it during his introduction. I guess you can't blame him. The film wears its low budget on its sleeve and its depiction of space travel is a far cry from what would be presented in 2001 just a year later. (One scene of a floating clipboard is not enough to suggest weightlessness.) And in case you needed to be reminded of when it was made, at one point the ship is diverted to a moon base to refuel, whereupon one of the crew members exclaims, "This is groovy. I can't believe we're on the moon." That's funny, neither can I.
Toward the end of the film things really start to get silly. During one scene the director tries artificially creating suspense by adding a ticking sound to a clock that has no second hand. Then there's something akin to a dry run for Jurassic Park's T-Rex chase (the one where Ian Malcolm says, "Must go faster") that shows how much worse that would have been if it had been done using cheap models, poor process suits and a sweaty Japanese guy running around in a rubber monster suit. If The X from Outer Space has one claim to fame, though, it is that it features the first monster that is defeated by being doused with shaving cream. I only wish I were making that up.
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