0 Brief Reviews: The Son (2002) / Yi Yi (2000)

THE SON (2002) ***
In my continuing efforts to update my knowledge of the foreign language films of the last twenty years, I recently watched my first work by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, from Belgium. It's the thirteenth film of fifteen they've co-directed, most of them also written and produced by the Dardennes. It's also one of their most highly lauded, having received a special jury prize at Cannes and been nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The main character is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, above, who is excellent and deservedly received the best actor award at Cannes), a carpentry instructor at a school for troubled teenagers, and the film opens with the director of the school proposing to enroll a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), in Olivier's program. But when Olivier sees the student's dossier, he has a strong reaction and tells the director his class is full. Olivier eventually relents but seems obsessed with the boy—stalking him, stealing his keys from his locker and sneaking into his apartment, and behaving bizarrely whenever around him.

Olivier seems to have no life outside his work, although we do get a glimpse of his austere apartment, where we witness an uncomfortable encounter with his ex-wife. He also seems to have no emotions aside from the extreme agitation he expresses when alone or around Francis. Francis, on the other hand, grows more attached to Olivier despite his cold treatment by the older man and at one point even asks Olivier to become his legal guardian.

For nearly the first half of the film, we are given no context for the relationship between the two or for Olivier's strange attitude toward the young man. So reticent is the film on this point that it almost seems Olivier might be a pedophile trying to resist his impulses toward Francis. He's not, but the exact nature of the relationship is only hinted at in a couple of places before being revealed midway through. For the first half of the film we are given little but Olivier's unrelenting anxiety around Francis and the mystery of its cause. This rather contrived approach strikes me as less ambiguity than coyness on the part of the directors, and I think it is a misstep that weakens the movie by forgoing any attempt at engaging the viewer's emotions in favor of piquing our curiosity and testing our patience by withholding information, a strategy I found more tedious than suspenseful.

The look of the film is certainly startling, though, and along with Gourmet's intense performance is one of the movie's great strengths. The directors shoot almost everything in tight close-up, following the actors with a hand-held camera. This might sound gimmicky but doesn't come off that way, instead lending the movie a sense of immediacy and authenticity and keeping the focus firmly on characters rather than on events or pictorial composition. It also emphasizes the emotional repression of Olivier.

I did observe that the movie was co-financed by Belgian television (which might partly account for the talking heads style) and also read that it was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The version I watched was in widescreen (with a 1 : 1.66 aspect ratio), and I couldn't help noticing that the tops of the characters' heads were often out of the frame. I'm wondering if the movie was originally filmed in an aspect ratio of 1 : 1.33 and later cropped for theatrical distribution. This would tend to emphasize even further the closeness of the camera to the actors and could account for the awkwardness in framing that was frequently noticeable.

The acting and direction of The Son are unquestionably impressive. The script, however, has weaknesses that are impossible to overlook. That the movie becomes so much more compelling in its second half makes the first half seem all the more obscure and padded. On the whole, I would say this is a good movie whose potential greatness is undermined by some of the artistic decisions of the Dardennes in their capacity as screenwriters.

YI YI (2000) ***
If The Son gives us too little information, this movie, a multiple-prize winner from Taiwan, goes in the opposite direction and gives us too much. I knew I was having problems with this narrative overload when halfway through the nearly 3-hour long film I began fidgeting and checking to see how much longer it was going to run. The movie opens with a wedding that introduces us to the main characters, an upper middle class Taipei family, each of whom is confronting his or her own problems.

The father is coping with strains not uncommon to middle-aged professionals everywhere: a marriage that has grown stale, ethical problems at his work (an IT firm), doubts about the life decisions he has made, and the nagging feeling that his life is going nowhere. The wife, a lawyer, is dealing with both her seriously ill mother and severe depression. The teenaged daughter experiences a disappointing first love, while the young son is being bullied by schoolmates and family alike.

The problem is that with all this potent material to work with, the director, Edward Yang, simply doesn't know when to stop. For one thing, he tends to overindulge a fondness for slow, lingering shots. (Perhaps it's understandable that Antonioni was reportedly one of Yang's favorite directors.) These can be quite effective when used sparingly—for example, when a character who has just had a moving experience simply sits for a while and absorbs it—and as one who generally abhors aggressively kinetic music video-style editing, I feel guilty complaining about this.

But Yang uses the dilatory approach even when there is no good reason. For instance, someone opens the door to the apartment and walks in: First we have a shot of the empty hallway lasting several seconds. Then we hear a door off the hallway open and close, and a few seconds later someone walks into the hallway, turns, and walks toward the camera for several more seconds. Now we cut to the same person walking into the living room, who then walks away from the camera for several seconds before putting down his things, wandering around the room for a few seconds, and slowly sitting down on the sofa. None of this is in aid of any discernible thematic or even dramatic purpose: these people have problems, but ennui doesn't appear to be one of them. What should have taken a few seconds has lasted 30-60 seconds. Calling Jean-Luc Godard!

Even more distracting is the overdevelopment of subplots that eventually become full-blown digressions that divert attention from where it should be—on the father re-evaluating his life. In particular, far too much time is devoted to rambling subplots about the flaky brother-in-law and the young son (after all, the movie isn't The 400 Blows). Not content to show us the touching story of the daughter's unhappy first romance, in a startling shift of tone Yang embellishes it with a gratuitous and sensationalistic conclusion that involves sexual abuse of a student by a teacher and a triple murder. These and other divagations at times turn into soapish melodrama that undercuts the film's otherwise mature and thoughtful tone.

The strong parts of Yi Yi are very good indeed, and it is well worth watching just for these. But at points the film seems in danger of foundering under the weight of its accretion of superfluous detail. There is no denying that Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, was a director of great talent. But Yi Yi, his eighth and last film, is kept from greatness by its overly ambitious desire to include everything and leave out nothing.

0 Brief Reviews: Two by Samuel Fuller

SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) **½
"The picture that breaks the shock barrier!" proclaims the trailer to this movie directed by Samuel Fuller. The real shock here is that the man who directed Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One could have made such a preposterous movie as this one, evidently in perfect seriousness. In the film Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an investigative newspaper reporter of overpowering ambition, is convinced he will win a Pulitzer Prize by impersonating a madman, having himself admitted to a mental hospital, and solving the murder of a patient that took place there a year before. He plans to do this by pretending to have an incestuous sexual obsession with his sister, who is actually his girl friend, Cathy (Constance Towers).

This plot allows Fuller to portray mental illness in the most outrageous ways, his concept of mental illness consisting of a pastiche of a little bit of knowledge and a large helping of myth, imagination, and misinformation. The patients at the hospital show the most clichéd symptoms of psychosis, shuffling around like zombies, lounging about in catatonic stupors, or indulging in compulsive repetitive behaviors. In their "mad" scenes, the entire cast tends to overact without restraint. Fuller also throws in gratuitously lurid details (Cathy is a stripper in a sleazy nightclub) and dialogue: "My love for you goes up and down like a thermometer," Johnny says to an imaginary Cathy his first night in the hospital. "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me," a friendly orderly confides to Johnny. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Johnny gets trapped in the "nympho ward," where a pack of wild-eyed females surround him, throw him to the floor, and maul him.

Eventually Johnny gets around to interviewing the three witnesses to the murder, lunatics who fortunately snap into lucidity just long enough to reveal important evidence about the crime. These characters allow Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, to inject into the plot heavy-handed commentary on some of the big political issues of the time—political defectors, segregation, and the Cold War. They also allow him to depict some of the more dramatic psychotic disorders—delusions of grandeur, dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder, and regression to an infantile state. By the end of the movie, Johnny has solved the murder but been so traumatized by his experiences in the hospital that he develops a bad case of "catatonic schizophrenia."

Is there a reason to watch this movie? Well, yes, especially for fans of Fuller. Despite its sensationalistic excesses (and frequent unintentional hilarity), it is so flamboyantly directed, so imaginative in its visualizations (especially considering that it was shot in ten days on one set), and so unexpectedly and consistently over-the-top that it never fails to entertain.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951) ***½
In an excerpt from an interview I saw recently on Turner Classic Movies, Samuel Fuller spoke of the transition from being a journalist and novelist to becoming a movie director. He said he realized that as a film director he didn't need to use words to tell the story, that he could do this with the camera and the images. If Shock Corridor—with its long-winded speechifying and constant voice-over internal monologue narration by the main character—belies this observation, The Steel Helmet, in contrast, clearly illustrates it.

The movie takes place during the Korean War and was filmed during the early days of that conflict. Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, excellent in the first of six films he made with Fuller), the lone survivor of a massacre by North Korean troops, tries to find his way back to his unit, along the way picking up a young Korean orphan and joining another group of soldiers who have become separated from their unit. After groping their way through a dense fog, the group eventually stumble on a deserted, pagoda-like Buddhist temple and hole up there, unaware that a North Korean sniper is hiding on the upper level of the building.

Visually, Fuller makes the most of the sequence in the fog and especially the temple, where much of the movie takes place. His camera glides around the interior of the temple and moves fluidly from level to level. Interspersed as a sort of unifying image are recurrent cuts to the giant statue of the Buddha dominating the interior of the temple, with its serene facial expression that forms such a contrast to the tension between the soldiers and to the danger they face from both the sniper inside the temple and the enemy troops closing in from outside.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it seems a trial version of Fuller's nearly three-hour long WW II epic The Big Red One (1980), with many elements from The Steel Helmet worked into that later masterwork and more fully developed. The Steel Helmet opens with a shot of Sgt. Zack lying in a field of dead soldiers with a bullet hole in his helmet, prefiguring the scene on the beach during the Normandy invasion in The Big Red One when The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) shoots a bullet through the helmet of a fallen soldier as a warning of what will happen to any soldiers who might pretend to be hit. The gruff Sgt. Zack, with his half-smoked cigar permanently stuck in his mouth, resembles both Fuller himself and Fuller's alter ego in The Big Red One, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine). The Korean orphan brings to mind the dying boy Marvin rescues from the concentration camp. At one point in The Steel Helmet Sgt. Zack tells of an enlisted man he served with in WW II who kept a detailed diary of his experiences, just like Pvt. Zab in The Big Red One. And he also reminisces about his sergeant in that war and quotes him as saying on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, "There are two kinds of men here: those who are dead and those who are about to die." This is, in fact, the most familiar line of dialogue from the later film, repeated verbatim by Marvin as he directs his soldiers when they land on the beach at Normandy. (Interestingly, Robert Mitchum has a very similar line in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day: "Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.")

Aside from some dated Cold War rhetoric, it's not necessary to gloss over any deficiencies in The Steel Helmet—filmed in ten days mostly in L.A.'s Griffith Park and in the studio with stock footage interpolated, on a budget reported to be only $100,000—to appreciate the feeling and the visual imagination Fuller put into the movie. And the resemblances to The Big Red One show how meaningful and how formative Fuller's own war experiences were to him and to the view of life he expressed in his films.

0 Brief Reviews

THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931) ***½
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."

Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.

Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.

Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.

Florence and John in the lions' cage

Capra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.

Kaspar appears on a street in Nuremberg

Exhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.

Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.

Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.

I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.

The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.

The invasion of the locusts

Visual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.

The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.

0 Brief Reviews

THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1941) **½
As regular visitors to The Movie Projector know, I have a special fondness for the films of Ernst Lubitsch. This one, though, is an inconsistent work that doesn't measure up to his usual standard. The film is about a chic Park Avenue couple, Jill and Larry Baker (Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas), who have been married six years and whose relationship has begun to grow stale and predictable. Each is just a little bored with the other. When Jill begins getting hiccups at moments of stress or agitation, she consults a psychiatrist. At his office, she meets a neurotic pianist, Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a self-proclaimed "individualist" who always speaks his mind and dislikes humanity. But he likes Jill, and the two soon develop a curious friendship that becomes a desultory affair that causes the Bakers to separate and plan divorce.

The movie is not without its delights. Lubitsch handles the comedy with his characteristic light and whimsical touch, and it is at a few points laugh-out-loud funny. A couple of long sequences are equal to Lubitsch's best. One is the first meeting of Jill and Sebastian followed by their visit to a modern art gallery. The other is a very funny dinner party at which the Bakers entertain a group of Hungarians who are potential clients of Larry's insurance firm and which Alexander, invited by Jill without her husband's knowledge, proceeds to disrupt in a delightfully comic way. The best thing about the movie is Burgess Meredith as the solemn and self-centered pianist. He makes an essentially humorless character quite funny.

But the movie also has some obvious flaws. Midway through, I realized that the basic plot isn't that different from The Awful Truth, a movie I have praised as the definitive screwball comedy: a couple breaks up over trivial differences, eventually they realize that they were happier together, and in the end they reunite. So why doesn't That Uncertain Feeling work better? For one thing, the pacing of the script is uneven: entertaining stretches alternate with sections of relative tedium. Then some awkwardly jumpy edits indicate an inattention to detail not typical of Lubitsch; perhaps the filming was rushed or he grew tired of the project. But the biggest problem is the two leads. Douglas is a subdued leading romantic man, but he can be very effective, as he showed in Lubitsch's Ninotchka. But to come across, he really needs a dynamic leading woman like Irene Dunne or Greta Garbo to play off of, and the lovely but bland Oberon is almost wholly lacking in dynamism. Douglas actually gets better as the movie goes along, but Oberon remains rather enervated and dull throughout.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that with even the great directors, sometimes the elements simply fail to gel. That Uncertain Feeling, a decent enough movie, is not quite a disaster. It just isn't of the quality we expect of the great Lubitsch.

THE MALE ANIMAL (1942) ***½
Having seen the banal musical remake of The Male Animal—She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo—many years ago, I was in no hurry to watch this. It's too bad I waited so long, because the original is so unlike the remake and so much better. I had always wondered what would attract Henry Fonda, who made so few comedies and preferred roles of thematic heft, to such a project, and the movie provided a clear answer.

Fonda plays Prof. Tommy Turner, a mild-mannered academic who teaches English at Midwestern University. On the eve of the big homecoming football game, he finds himself unwillingly enmeshed in a controversy over academic free speech. He is threatened with dismissal by Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette), the despotic, obsessively Red-hunting head of the board of trustees, over his plan to read to his class the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist arrested, framed, convicted as a scapegoat, and executed in Massachusetts in 1927. (Vanzetti and the man convicted with him, Nicola Sacco, were pardoned in 1977 by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.) Keller would even like to censor student writing by suppressing the student literary magazine that announced the upcoming lecture in a story, but it has already gone to press. At the same time, Turner must defend his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), from the advances of her ex-boy friend, the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who has returned for the big game. Ellen wants Tommy to give in and not read the letter, using Joe's revived romantic interest in her and Tommy's insecurity at being so unathletic to attempt to coerce him into forgoing his principles to save their comfortable way of life.

Based on a play by James Thurber and director Elliott Nugent, the movie has intelligent, witty dialogue and a deftly constructed plot. It even contains a memorable drunk sequence with Tommy and his star pupil that ends in a shambolic fistfight between Tommy and Joe. The cast is uniformly good (although deHavilland sometimes seems a bit too intelligent for her role, and comedy wasn't really her forte) and even includes Hattie McDaniel as the wisecracking housekeeper, Cleota.

Even among such great performers Fonda, predictably, is remarkable. He is especially outstanding in the climactic scene when Prof. Turner defies Ellen and the board and reads the brief but eloquent letter to a packed classroom that includes Keller, Ellen, Joe, students, reporters, and the just plain curious. Fonda reads the letter with quiet, underplayed conviction (much the same way he reads the final letter of the lynched Dana Andrews in The Ox-Bow Incident, released the following year) and wins over even his antagonists. The happy outcome seems a bit pat, but who wouldn't sympathize with Fonda's risking his marriage and career to defend academic freedom? If only such disputes always turned out so felicitously in real life.

SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955) ***
This movie would make a super second feature on a double bill with Pickup on South Street (1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It has the same basic plot setup of good guys battling Communist spies after government secrets during the Cold War of the 1950s. The movie opens with a cheesy close-up of Kotty (Terry Moore) sunning on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit. Up creeps Slob (Lee Marvin), who pounces on her and attempts to molest her before she can fend off his advances. Both Kotty and Slob work at the shack of the title, a Southern California beachfront greasy spoon run by Keenan Wynn that appears to be located near Malibu before it became developed—she as the waitress, he as the cook. The beach and the cafe are the only two locations in this clearly very low-budget movie.

Kotty is being romanced by Prof. Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a research scientist working at a top-secret government research facility just up the coast. The professor is encouraging the pretty, lively, but slightly dim Kotty to improve herself by studying for the civil service exam to be a stenographer. Moore doesn't look much like Marilyn Monroe, but she sure sounds exactly like her, and every male in the cast treats her as though she is just as desirable as MM. Unfortunately, one evening Kotty inadvertently overhears the professor passing secrets to an enemy agent, and realizing he is a Communist spy, breaks off with him. Without a protector, she is now at the mercy of the lecherous Slob.

The plot and characters are dealt with in an entirely functional way that lacks the artistic vision or cinematic personality of a Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich. The two big revelations at the end—the truth about the professor and the identity of the mastermind behind the operation, the mysterious Mr. Gregory—are wholly predictable, as is the means of Kotty being saved from rape and murder by Slob. But the dialogue—especially the repartee between Kotty and her male pursuers, which at times borders on the camp—is uniformly snappy. And the plot is presented with economy and great forward momentum.

But the movie really belongs to Lee Marvin as Slob. He is by turns sadistic, pathetic, comical, dumb, shrewd—simultaneously a feckless joker and a menacing villain. His chameleonic performance only highlights the two-dimensional characters who otherwise populate the film. The scene of him and Keenan Wynn working out with barbells and weights in the diner is the comic highlight of the movie. Of the performances nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar that year, his is equaled only by Jack Lemmon's winning turn in Mister Roberts, and Marvin wasn't even nominated. Shack Out on 101 is by any measure strictly a B-movie, but it does present an amusing time capsule of the insecurities of the era, and it is consistently entertaining. It may not be a masterpiece, but a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) ****
In the 1930s, Leo McCarey made three comic masterpieces, starting with the best movie the Marx Brothers ever made, Duck Soup (1933), and ending with what I have called the definitive screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937). In 1935 he made this film, which in style falls somewhere between the manic anarchy of Duck Soup and the restrained sophistication of The Awful Truth. The title character, Ruggles (Charles Laughton), is the British manservant to the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). Red Gap is the name of the frontier town in Washington state where Ruggles finds himself after the Earl loses him in a poker game in Paris to Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles), a nouveau riche hick making the grand tour around the turn of the 20th century.

Floud doesn't know what to make of the British class system, finding it incomprehensible that people would voluntarily submit to such institutionalized indignity. He is determined to treat Ruggles as a social equal and to loosen his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, but his wife Effie (a hilarious Mary Boland), a dedicated social climber, has other plans for Ruggles. She wants to flaunt him to the locals as proof of her newfound social status and to use his knowledge to transform her gauche husband into her image of an English-style upper-class gentleman. When the henpecked but crafty Egbert introduces Ruggles as Colonel Ruggles to his hometown cronies, he sets up a dual identity for Ruggles that results in many comic ramifications.

The movie's comic situations are of course, given McCarey's experience working with many of the comedy greats of American movies of the early 1930s, inventively devised and highly entertaining. To me the movie is most reminiscent of McCarey's work with early Laurel and Hardy, with its carefully paced set-ups building slowly to controlled comic explosions, and its opposition of rambunctious characters and repressed ones, But the comedy here is given extra resonance by the social and character details that underpin it: the absurd social pretensions of Effie and her relatives, the tension between the belief in social equality of Egbert and the adherence of Ruggles to the tradition of a prescribed social hierarchy, and the dawning realization by Ruggles that the American way of life and the misunderstandings about him deliberately fostered by Egbert present him with the opportunity to reinvent himself.

Even with all these great character actors (including fluttery, nasal-voiced Zasu Pitts as a potential love interest for Ruggles), it is Charles Laughton who elevates this movie beyond expectations. It might seem inconceivable that the notoriously hammy Laughton could so effectively play a buttoned-up comical character. But he is a marvel as he proceeds through the various phases of the psychological transformation of Ruggles from a Jeeves-like automaton to a new man, one freed from the stifling belief in a life predetermined by social class and presented instead with the ability to create his own identity. Ruggles is like a prisoner inching his way to freedom. When that freedom comes, it is a liberation that, although achieved through comic means, is deeply moving.

Ruggles of Red Gap is a sort of social fairy tale powered by American optimism, the belief in the entitlement of every person to self-definition and an open-ended future. In an age when practically anyone could use a few good laughs and a reminder that people once genuinely believed in such ideals, watching Ruggles is like getting a glimpse into an Edenic past, a less complicated and more innocent time.

0 Brief Reviews: Film Noir, Américain et Français

THE DARK CORNER (1946) ***
If you've ever yearned to see Lucille Ball in a film noir, this movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, will give you the chance. Lucy plays Kathleen Stewart, secretary to a P.I. who has just opened an office in New York City, Brad Galt (Mark Stevens). In no time at all Galt tangles with a crew of weird, menacing characters. One is his former partner, Anthony Jardine, who had Galt framed in San Francisco and sent to prison. Jardine is now a lawyer and one of his clients is Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), the owner of a ritzy art gallery, whose much younger wife is having an affair with Jardine. We know this because in their first scene together the radio in the background is playing "The More I See You (the More I Want You)." In fact, the movie is filled with ambient sound—music from orchestras or juke boxes heard through open doorways of night clubs and bars or on radios and phonographs in rooms, and street noise of all kinds, including traffic and the rumble of subway trains, heard even through open windows when the action moves indoors. In a moment of bizarre contrast, a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" plays while a brutal murder is taking place.

Galt is framed for the murder of his former partner, and Lucy, who has fallen in love with Galt, must help him find the real killer before the police find him. I love Lucy, but she doesn't seem ideally cast here. She handles with aplomb the wisecracking banter with Galt as she deflects his sexual advances at the beginning of the movie, but after that her character becomes a bit bland and she doesn't really get the chance to shine. Stevens doesn't have enough heft as an actor to put across his cynical lines, which sound like they come directly from a Raymond Chandler novel. They really need somebody more forceful, like Humphrey Bogart. Webb is delightful, spouting arch witticisms like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral" (actually a variation on a quip by Robert Benchley).

But the whole movie has an air of familiarity, from the predictable plot to the well-worn characters, including Webb, channeling his Waldo Lydecker from Laura, and William Bendix, playing a thuggish P.I., who seems to be reprising his role in The Glass Key. One element, though, dominates the movie: Joe MacDonald's astonishing cinematography, a perfect exemplar of the film noir look. I've seldom seen a movie shot with such high-contrast lighting. This is a black-and-white film in the most literal sense, a film with virtually no tonal gradation: the blacks and shadows are as dark, and the whites as bright, as imaginable, with few shades of gray in between. This extreme lighting, along with the use of mirrors and windows as recurring visual motifs, gives the film great visual appeal. One final note: the set decorators should be commended for their audacity in furnishing the Cathcart Gallery. It is as full of art treasures as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre, filled with Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs, even Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

BORN TO KILL (1947) ***½
A few months ago, in his blog Maximum Strength Mick, San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle asked his readers what they would present as guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies. I chose four undervalued genre pictures from the studio era, and for my film noir I chose this movie. Directed by Robert Wise in a less genre-influenced style than his later near-classic The Set-Up (which I previously reviewed at The Movie Projector), it nonetheless has several effectively atmospheric sequences, especially one that takes place on a foggy night in a remote area of the dunes at the beach. Despite Wise's restrained direction, the movie's plot and characters unmistakably make it a noir.

It opens in Reno, where Helen Trent (Claire Trevor, in an atypically posh role) is just completing her divorce. On her last night in town, at a casino she encounters a man, Sam Wild (!) (Lawrence Tierney), whose good looks and sexual charisma spark her interest. Little does she know he is a paranoid psychopath dating another resident (Isabel Jewell) of the boarding house where she has been staying and that later that night he will savagely murder both Jewell and the man she has been two-timing him with. When Helen discovers the bodies in the kitchen of the boarding house, she calmly walks around to the front door, enters the house, and calls the train depot to reserve a seat on tomorrow's train to San Francisco, where she lives. Later she explains that she didn't call the police because "it's a lot of bother." Within ten minutes the tone of the movie has been established by the gory double murder, and the corrupt nature of its two main characters clearly revealed by their roles in it. When Wild boldly picks up Helen at the train station the next day and follows her back to San Francisco, we can see where the plot is heading: it is inevitable that these two forces—he all uncontrolled impulse and she all cold calculation—will collide like matter and anti-matter, creating an explosive reaction that after minor detonations along the way will end in mutual annihilation.

Along for the ride is a great supporting cast. Esther Howard, who had small roles in seven films directed by Preston Sturges, plays the blowsy, beer-guzzling landlady of the boarding house in Reno. Walter Slezak plays the sly P.I. she hires to track down the killer. Best of all, Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Wild's best friend, Marty, for five years his roommate and protector. After finding out about the double murder in Reno, he patiently tells Wild, "You can't just go around killin' people when the notion strikes you. It's not feasible" and explains exactly what must be done to avoid getting caught. To say that there is an implicitly homoerotic element to the relationship between these two would be an understatement.

We can predict how the movie will end but not the twists and turns it will take on its way there, and watching the scenario play out to its inevitable end—witnessing the thrust-and-parry relationship between Trevor and Tierney as she attempts to control an essentially anarchic force—provides an hour and a half of immensely satisfying entertainment, especially for lovers of the genre.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955) ****
Although nearly unknown in the U.S. until recently, the French director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) has long been recognized in Europe as a precursor of, and major influence on, the French New Wave. Traces of his style and sensibility are easily recognized in early works by Godard and Truffaut, especially Breathless (which incorporates references to the plot of Bob le Flambeur and even features a cameo by Melville) and Shoot the Piano Player. In fact, a convincing case could be made the Bob le Flambeur is actually the first movie of the New Wave.

This is a heist movie—a type of film considered by many a sub-genre of film noir—in the vein of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but I would say that as good as those movies are, Bob le Flambeur is even better. Even though it is a heist movie—the object is the casino at Deauville—the plan for the heist isn't hatched until well into the movie, and the (naturally) unsuccessful heist never actually happens. The movie clearly occupies film noir territory with its almost exclusively nocturnal action; its cast of petty crooks, hustlers, gamblers, and gendarmes who keep tabs on them; and its settings in bars, night clubs, card rooms, race tracks, and casinos both legal and illegal. The whole movie has an aura of life lived on the edge, outside of conventional society and in an atmosphere of risk and unpredictability. Over all hangs an air of fatalism, of men and women driven by internal forces to behave in ways that will inevitably lead to their doom.

Movies of this type invariably have an ensemble cast of colorful characters, but here it is the main character, Bob Montagné, the flambeur or compulsive gambler of the title (he even keeps a one-armed bandit in a small closet in his living room just to amuse himself with), who lifts the story into the stratosphere. As portrayed by Roger Duchesne, Bob is a slick, sophisticated man, a middle-aged ex-con who enjoys the good things in life—a quality wardrobe, a snazzy American Plymouth convertible, and a cool bachelor pad with a loft and picture-window view of the Sacré-Coeur—and maintains his comfortable lifestyle through the tireless pursuit of all sorts of gambling coupled with an unshakable belief in his own good luck. For the first part of the movie, his good fortune always seems to hold. But around midway through, his luck turns and, broke, he is forced to devise the scheme to rob the casino. His plan, so complex and so intricately engineered down to the least detail, clearly indicates a formidable intelligence and organizational ability that channeled into legitimate pursuits would probably have made Bob a very rich businessman.

Melville directs with the flair and personal authority that would later come to be considered hallmarks of the New Wave directors. As well as the conventional flat cuts, dissolves, and fade-out/fade-ins, he revives transitional devices such as iris-ins, iris-outs, horizontal wipes, and at one point even a vertical wipe—just the kind of retro flourishes later used by Truffaut and Godard in their early films. He and his cinematographer, the great Henri Decaë, film the deserted early-morning streets of Paris and the dives frequented by his characters in a near-documentary way that makes the viewer feel like an observer of reality. Melville, who also co-wrote the movie, gives Bob a concisely revealed backstory and places him in situations—such as his avuncular interactions with both Paulo, his young protégé and the son of his former partner-in-crime and Anne, a foolish, uninhibited, but charming teenager living on the streets—that succinctly limn a fully developed, fascinating, and sympathetic character.

In typical noir fashion, the movie ends in irony: waiting for several hours in the casino for the robbery to begin, Bob whiles away the time gambling and manages to win a fortune. He doesn't really need the money any more and feels his self-confidence restored, yet he still carries through with the robbery even though he knows it is destined for failure. I can think of no other movie that so obviously acts as a transition between the American films noirs of the 1940's and early 50's and their offspring, the French New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 60's.

BREATHLESS (1959) ***
After watching this movie—one of the seminal films of the French New Wave—with friends the other night, I asked one (not a cinephile, just an ordinary movie watcher) what he thought of it. His answer: "Merde." I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I must say that afterward I felt a distinct sense of letdown, a sort of cinematic petite mort. I have to confess that I have never been that fond of Jean-Luc Godard, the film's director. Although I had never seen Breathless before, I have seen several of the movies that immediately followed it. In each of those movies I found some things to like, but with the exception of Weekend (1967) and possibly Contempt (1963), they never struck me as unified works of art or even film narrative. And I always felt that they were keeping me at arm's distance, almost as though Godard was daring the viewer to tolerate his idiosyncrasies.

In Breathless, Godard has an annoying way of taking a stylistic quirk and repeating it ad nauseam. A couple of examples: 1) Those vaunted jump cuts. Exactly what was their purpose? Just to show that he could defy the conventions of film storytelling if he wanted to, as if he could by the power of his ego turn a flaw into a virtue and exhibit his individualism by a refusal to stick to the rules, even when there is a perfectly good reason for the rules? I could understand the cuts that covered major ellipses in the narrative to speed things along, but I found all the small jump cuts (or maybe jumpy cuts would be more accurate), when just a second or so of action was missing, to be distracting. 2) Belmondo's tic of rubbing his lips. Those are magnificent lips—in a way they are the real star of the movie. Is Godard trying to show what a narcissist Michel (the character Belmondo plays) is? The time he did this in front of Patricia's (Jean Seberg) dressing table mirror, I actually thought he was putting on some of her lipstick. These examples beg the question: At what point does novelty become tedium, cleverness become self-indulgence, hommage become pretension? The answer provided by this movie is, around the tenth repetition. But don't worry, you'll get the chance to see this answer confirmed by another ten or so repetitions.

So why watch Breathless? I can offer three reasons (hence the *** rating): 1) The film is historically important. Breathless is—along with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour—one of the three earliest full-blown examples of the French New Wave, a movement that had tremendous impact on the history of film. 2) Several dazzling extended tracking shots by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, including a 360-degree shot of Seberg circling the room that is repeated a second time, then repeated again with Belmondo circling in the opposite direction. 3) Jean-Paul Belmondo. His performance is as revolutionary as Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire—unique, charismatic, and completely riveting. From little more than a sketchy case study of a self-absorbed young man with severe personality disorder, he creates a compelling character. If you can stay with this movie—considered by many Godard's most accessible work—to the end, you might want to seek out more of his films. But as Breathless attests, be prepared to accept the inevitable annoyances and excesses of Godard to enjoy his moments of inspiration.

0 Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.

Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.

The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.

The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.

The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.

Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.

One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.

Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.

As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.

0 Brief Reviews

THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934) ***½
The director Josef von Sternberg was hardly a modest man. In the 1967 BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg, included on the Criterion DVD of The Scarlet Empress, he claimed total creative authorship of his movies—not only writing and direction, but also production, lighting and photography, and editing, whether he was credited with these in the completed film or not. It's little wonder then that the American auteurist Andrew Sarris named von Sternberg one of his "pantheon directors," praising his mastery of visual technique and describing him as "a lyricist of light and shadow." The Scarlet Empress is a mind-bogglingly baroque surfeit of visual detail, by turns ravishingly beautiful, lushly decorative, and hauntingly bizarre. Many scenes contain as much visual embellishment—in set decoration, props, costumes, and human spectacle—as I've ever seen in one movie. And still von Sternberg manages to arrange all these objects (including the actors, whom he refers to in the documentary as "marionettes") in these elaborate settings with clarity and purpose. Of the great directors, perhaps only Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and Orson Welles were as skillful as von Sternberg at organizing objects within the frame to create mood and emphasis.

In The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, who made seven movies with von Sternberg, plays the lead role, Catherine the Great of Russia. She is required to transform from a young innocent—engaged through an arranged marriage to the future Tsar Peter III (Sam Jaffe), a childish madman—into a mature woman who uses sexual favors to engineer his assassination and seize the throne. (The historical accuracy of this is debatable.) She is quite convincing as she proceeds from naiveté to a kind of survivalist acceptance of her situation and finally, after a binge of sexual libertinism, to the decision to take control of events. Is she a cunning schemer, or does she truly want to rescue the Russian people from the insane tyranny of her husband? Von Sternberg keeps the answer ambiguous.

Jaffe, with his goofy buck-toothed grin and wide-eyed leer, is appropriately demented. And Louise Dresser turns in a broad semi-comic performance as Peter's dissolute and manipulative aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Still, the strong impression these performers make pales beside the one von Sternberg makes as the absolute, perfectionist master of his startling cinematic vision.

H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941) ***½
King Vidor directed all or part of 67 pictures between 1913 and 1980, more than half of them silent. Along with some bona fide classics, he also directed two of the worst movies I've ever seen, Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949), so I approached this movie with some trepidation. The story of a privileged member of a rich Boston society family from birth to middle age, the movie opens with a striking, nearly silent sequence showing Pulham's (Robert Young) morning routine—from waking up to arriving at his law office at exactly 9:00 a.m.—that within just a few minutes plainly establishes the regimented sterility of his life. The rest of the movie is structured as an alternately serious and whimsical stream-of-consciousness narrative that moves between scenes of the present and the past as Pulham recalls his entire life from birth to the present.

As I watched, I was amazed at the fluidity of the direction and at how natural Vidor made the rather literary structure of the movie seem. Young, with his subdued and rather bland screen presence, was ideally cast in the title role. The most interesting parts of the movie are those that deal with Pulham's life in New York City immediately after World War I working as a copywriter in an ad agency. In doing this, he is defying his father (Charles Coburn), who wants him to come home and join the family law firm. For a while it appears that Pulham will escape the stultifyingly conformist future that awaits him in Boston, especially after he begins a romance with a fellow copywriter, Marvin Myles Ransome (Hedy Lamarr), an independent-minded woman who encourages him to break away from the stifling traditions of his class and heritage. Lamarr's freethinking character is one of the best things in the movie. She seems surprisingly modern, wanting a career and her own life over marriage and a family, and Lamarr gives an excellent performance. But it is precisely her (for the time) unconventional values, combined with circumstances which force Pulham to return to Boston and his family, that ultimately separate them.

The ending is a bit pat—and with its message that you can't escape your background, a bit disturbing in its complacency—but the rest of the movie is delightful, a felicitous mixture of excellent acting, writing, photography (by Ray June) and editing, with Vidor's assured direction holding it all together.

DOWNSTAIRS (1932) ***½
I must confess to having a fairly low tolerance for movies of the early 1930's. Even the most highly touted of them often disappoint me. Downstairs, though, proved to be a pleasing exception. It stars John Gilbert, who wrote the story himself, and the whole movie is built around his character.

The movie opens at the Mitteleuropean estate of a baron whose head butler Albert (Paul Lukas) is being married to Anna (Virginia Bruce), the personal maid of the baroness. Into the festivities walks Gilbert as Karl Schneider, the new chauffeur. Karl is an unrepentant cad who immediately proceeds to charm, lie, blackmail, and seduce his way into a position of power and influence both upstairs and downstairs, managing to outwit and outmaneuver everyone who tries to expose him. In particular he sets his sights on the luscious but innocent Anna. After the stuffy Albert discovers that Karl has indeed seduced her, Anna looses an astonishingly frank tirade that not only makes clear that Karl's power over women lies in his sexual prowess, but also strongly asserts the desire of women to enjoy sex as much as men do and be treated by men as equal sexual beings.

Besides its surprisingly modern sexual attitudes, Downstairs has several other things going for it: an amusing take on amorality among the rich, its satirical mockery of the class system, and very entertaining supporting performances by Reginald Owen as the "silly ass" baron and Olga Baclanova (Freaks) as the conniving baroness. Monta Bell, who did such a great job on the Norma Shearer silent Lady of the Night (1925), directs with great seriocomic flair and provides some nice auteurish visual touches, including those in the scene where Karl seduces Anna, and later when he dissolves from the sleeping Anna to the next scene with Karl so slowly that for a few moments Karl seems to be a hazy dream image hovering over her bed. This movie and Queen Christina, which Gilbert made the next year with Garbo, should put to rest in any viewer's mind the notion that Gilbert's career ended because he was unsuited to sound films.

TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH (1949) ****
I'm not a big fan of war movies. Nor am I a big fan of Gregory Peck, whose performances often strike me as wooden and unengaging. Yet I found both this movie and Peck's performance in the lead role outstanding. In Twelve O'Clock High the emphasis is not on combat, but on psychology and characterization. In England in 1942, the first American Army Air Force crews have arrived and are starting the first daytime bombing raids over Europe. (The British RAF flew only nighttime raids.) The number of squadrons is small and support is minimal. Although the war planners are convinced that in time this strategy will prove the decisive factor in winning the war in Europe, at the moment the missions are having little real effect. Losses of aircraft and crews are high, understandably leading to great stress and low morale among both men and officers. One bomber squadron, based at Archbury, in particular is experiencing problems, and General Savage (Peck) is assigned to replace his good friend Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) as commanding officer of the squadron.

In early scenes Savage has been established as a nice guy but a shrewd analyst who believes that the problem with Davenport is that he has grown too close to his men and lost his objectivity. So when Savage arrives at Archbury and immediately begins behaving like a cold martinet, we know that this is a role he is playing, a psychological ploy devised to instill the spirit of selflessness and teamwork among his fliers. "Consider yourselves already dead and you won't have to be afraid of it happening," he tells them at his first briefing. The initial response is not good, especially after his unsympathetic treatment of a popular navigator results in his suicide. But Savage finds one man, the deskbound Maj. Stovall (Dean Jagger, in an Oscar-winning performance), who understands his tactics and is willing to help him. Slowly his efforts pay off and the squadron comes into shape. It is only towards the end of the movie that we actually go on a bombing mission, with Gen. Savage leading the formation, in an exciting and deeply affecting sequence.

The treatment of the characters and situations by director Henry King is refreshingly unsentimental and unjingoistic. One can easily imagine the heavy-handed treatment such a plot would have received in the hands of a less subtle director. Peck too is uncharacteristically subtle. His rather stiff acting style makes his "performance" as a by-the-rules martinet believable, while he also manages to suggest the true, more sensitive feelings of the character that lie beneath the surface. The movie runs a little over 2 hours 15 minutes yet doesn't seem that long. And by not fawning for the viewer's admiration, it earns our sincere respect. Few movies about World War II made so soon after the event have aged as gracefully as Twelve O'Clock High.

0 Brief Reviews

GUN CRAZY (1949) ***½
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible.

Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless.

The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.

DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) **
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful.

Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion.

So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).

CROUPIER (1999) ***½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling.

The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees.

The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.

ADAPTATION (2002) **½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity.

The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns.

Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.

0 Brief Reviews

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) ***½
I've read or heard more than once that this movie, the Oscar winner as Best Picture of 1969, is one that hasn't dated. I cannot, however, totally agree. The first 40 minutes or so—with their fussy, stream-of-consciousness direction and editing—strike me as dated indeed. The story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a naive, Candide-like Texan who travels to New York with dreams of striking it rich as a gigolo, the movie is remembered by those who have seen it for the graceless Joe's episodic encounters with a series of satirically exaggerated New Yorkers, his friendship with the pathetic Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), and its sad ending. These parts of the movie are very good indeed.

But Joe Buck is not a particularly deep or complex character, and except for his connection with Ratso and his becoming a bit more realistic in his expectations, he doesn't really change much during the course of the movie. So the first part of the movie, with its complicated flashback-and-dream structure that tells the backstory of Joe, seems unnecessarily detailed, just so much showy padding. It only delays the arrival of the genuinely interesting parts of the movie and tells us far more than we really need to know about Joe to appreciate his experiences in New York. Ratso's background is dealt with far more briefly and directly, without resorting to cinematic gimmicks, and yet tells us enough about Ratso to understand him.

Fortunately, the last two-thirds of the movie is very entertaining, and the performances are uniformly excellent (Brenda Vaccaro is especially good in a supporting role), although Hoffman's interpretation of Ratso is at times perhaps just a bit too colorful. Both he and Voight received Oscar nominations for Best Actor. If the first part of Midnight Cowboy were as compelling as the rest of the movie and better integrated in terms of style with what follows, this film might well deserve a full **** rating.

BLUE VELVET (1986) ****
This is one movie that for me hasn't dated a bit. It's still just as unique and thrilling an experience as it was when it was first released more than twenty years ago. From the beginning it is clear that sinister things lurk beneath the placid surface of the small lumber town where the film takes place, just as in the opening sequence predatory insects lurk beneath the picture-perfect lawn of Jeffrey Beaumont's (Kyle MacLachlan) home. The movie's beginning is deceptively innocuous, almost like a Hardy Boys story, as Jeffrey and his girl friend Sandy (Laura Dern) set out to solve the mystery of the severed ear. Things soon get pretty strange, and every time you think the movie couldn't possibly get any more bizarre, director David Lynch throws another bomb at the audience.

The cast couldn't be better. Besides wholesome MacLachlan and Dern, it includes exotic Isabella Rossellini as a troubled night club singer known professionally as The Blue Lady, a heavily made-up Dean Stockwell as spaced-out Ben the Sandman, dreamily lip-syncing to Roy Orbison, and, most memorable of all, Dennis Hopper as the demented villain Frank Booth, a morass of volatile psychosexual obsessions. The movie also contains astonishingly hallucinatory images, haunting music, and a 20-minute long slam-bang roller coaster ride of a finale.

Lynch keeps his propensity for over-egging the pudding with too much weirdness successfully controlled, and the movie lands squarely in the middle between the surrealism of Eraserhead and the more conventional narrative style of The Elephant Man, without sacrificing the visual genius of those earlier films. Lynch delivers a gloriously mind-boggling, eye-popping, candy-colored thrill ride of a movie that keeps the viewer guessing and on the edge of the seat the whole time. When normalcy is finally restored at the end, it's like waking up from a particularly vivid nightmare.

THE PAINTED VEIL (2006) ***
Rather lost in the Christmas deluge of movies released in 2006, this film got very good reviews, but my reaction to it is mixed. Based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, it is the story of an inhibited bacteriologist, Walter Fane (Edward Norton), who rashly falls in love with a young London socialite, Kitty Garstin (Naomi Watts). She marries him largely to spite her domineering mother and returns with him to his post in colonial Shanghai. There she has a passionate fling with the local Lothario, and when Walter finds out about it, he relocates them to a remote inland area where a cholera epidemic is raging.

In a recent interview on Turner Classic Movies, Norton, along with Watts one of the film's producers, spoke of how much he admires Out of Africa, and in many ways The Painted Veil is reminiscent both of that movie and of the later films of David Lean, its scenery so gorgeously picturesque that it overwhelms the human element of the story. And the human element of The Painted Vail is none too compelling to begin with. As Walter, Norton, an excellent actor, seems petulant, cruel, and emotionally aloof. Watts fares a bit better with her vapid and self-centered Kitty, but Kitty's shallowness keeps her from being more interesting, and her transformation at the end seems awfully abrupt. No doubt these characterizations were intended, but that doesn't make these people any less remote and unappealing.

The British actors Diana Rigg and Toby Jones make stronger impressions in more sympathetic and nuanced supporting roles. Besides those performances, the film benefits from its stunning landscapes, its depiction of the hardships of the villagers, and its portrait of the political turmoil and resentment of colonialism in 1920's China. The Painted Veil is worth seeing for its glossy surface virtues, but the inability of its lead characters to fully engage the emotions is a definite hindrance to complete enjoyment.

THE YOUNG IN HEART (1938) ***½
This Selznick production is a charming comedy about the Carletons, a family of con artists exiled from the Riviera after their professional deceptions are discovered by the authorities. On the train to London they are befriended by a gullible and lonely rich old lady named Miss Fortune (!) who has no living relatives, and they quickly concoct a plan to fleece her. She essentially adopts this family of scoundrels, who then set to work subtly persuading her to leave them her money in her will.

To make themselves more credible to her, they temporarily assume the appearance of conventionality and even get jobs. The more fond they grow of Miss Fortune, the more they unexpectedly find their new lives of respectability growing on them, and she becomes a sort of moral fairy godmother, granting the family not riches but ethics. Under her influence they find themselves in the end transformed into honest citizens. The movie, released the same year as You Can't Take It with You, is in a sense a Capra comedy turned on its head, with a family of eccentrics finding happiness by forgoing their nonconformist ways and becoming conventional.

The Carletons are expertly played by Roland Young (Topper) as the father, a blustering former actor who pretends to be a British colonel retired from colonial India and is called Sahib by his family; Billie Burke (the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz) as the dithering, scatter-brained mother; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., for once quite good, as the son, Richard; and winsome Janet Gaynor as the sweet-natured and intelligent daughter, George-Anne. The stage actress Minnie Dupree plays the childlike Miss Fortune, and lovely Paulette Goddard plays Richard's love interest. The movie also includes an incredible-looking automobile called a Flying Wombat that at several points plays an important part in the proceedings. The typically high Selznick production values (including an elaborately staged train wreck), appealing cast, and plot that balances the roguery of the Carletons with the guilelessness of Miss Fortune, and humor with sentiment, results in one of the more unusual comedies of the 1930's and a very entertaining viewing experience.