- Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
- Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné)
- Experience (Abbas Kiarostami)
- Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola)
- Zelig (Woody Allen)
- Babbitt (William Keighly)
- We Who Are About Die (Christy Cabanne)
- Red, White and Royal Blue (Matthew López)
- In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)0
- The Americanization of Emily (Arthur Hiller)
.
1- It’s probably more sensible not to consider the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder individually. Sure, some are much better than others and they deal with different themes, but for me they are just an amazing explosion of creativity over a very short period of time. He moved quickly from project to project. Sometimes the haste is evident, sometimes you see a creative genius at the height of his powers. Martha is a good example of his genius mode. A cruel story of the subjugation of a simple woman and a terrifyingly manipulative husband played by Karlheinz Boehm, who was a terrifying film maker in the notorious Peeping Tom. What ties this film to many of his others is the hommage to Douglas Sirk. The melodramatic flourishes he took from Sirk he makes his own in this film.
2- I find it hard to believe that I have not commented yet on The Children of Paradise. Commenting on it is a daunting task. For me it is not a film, it is a monument…it is enormous…it is an entire world. I feel guilty when I put the DVD back on the shelf because it deserves always to be playing. It is the great epic of misdirected love. The performance of Jean-Louis Barrault as the mime Baptiste is astonishing. The grace and fluidity he shows as he passes through the theatrical and the ‘real’ world are breathtaking. I never was impressed with Arletty as the inscrutable Garance. However, this time around I found the character completely scrutable and as nuanced and fluid as Barrault’s Baptiste. The final sequence, played against the madness of Carnival, builds to an incredible tension which is never released. Baptiste will always be running after Garance’s carriage for eternity.
3- I have watched all the feature films of Kiarostami, and thanks to the Criterion Collection, I have been catching up on his short films. They were made before and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution and they were mostly made for and/or about children. They range from very short instructional films about things like learning colors and learning how to resolve problems without fighting, to powerful character studies of troubled kids. Some of them foreshadow his later masterpieces with their penetrating portraits of children. Experience is under an hour long and it portrays the life of a lonely orphan who lives and works in a photo shop. The solitude is crushing. He does attempt to better his situation, but to no avail. This would actually be an excellent introduction to Kiarostami. I hope to post something about the short films soon
4- Poor Coppola. The Godfather is the same kind of albatross that Citizen Kane was for Orson Welles: after a single burst of perfection, what ever can you do later? Youth Without Youth is his return to filmmaking after a decade. He certainly seems to have more resources that Welles ever had. The film is beautiful to look at, but it is a mess. The narrative flow in The Godfather is so controlled but here it refuses to be tamed. The story makes sense….kind of….the performances are excellent but it was hard to conclude what the point was.
5- I read the Sinclair Lewis novel about a year ago, so I was intrigued to see what a somewhat-contemporary film version of Babbitt would be like. The bones of the plot are there but the scathing critique of pre-Depression America is missing. The artistry of the novel is that as you read it you realize that the affable George Babbitt is completely amoral, but does not have the capacity to acknowledge it or, perhaps better said, he has all kinds of self-deceptive ways of not acknowledging it. Since it was made in 1934 just before the Production Code really took hold, I was expecting more adult treatments of his infidelities and unethical business dealings. Instead we get a kind of screwball plot that gets Babbitt into a little hot water which he gets out by the end of the film, with everyone’s admiration and love for him still intact. But I guess I should have expected that since they cast Guy Kibbee in the lead. He always seems to play a loveable but philandering middle-aged blowhard. The great character of the novel was cut down to fit this persona.
6- We Who Are About to Die is something else entirely. From 1937, it is a tight 80 minute film about a sweet young man with a sweet young girlfriend who is framed for murder but some not-sweet gangsters. He is sentenced to death by hanging. This being Hollywood, you never really fear that he will swing, but it gets pretty tense for a while. It also seems to be a thinly veiled plea against the death penalty. A happily discovered gem courtesy of TCM.
7- I keep dipping my toe into the pool of Gay rom-coms and am usually disappointed by how boneheaded they are. Red, White and Royal Blue was better than most, mostly because it makes use of 1930s-style romance tropes like meeting cute, then hating each other, then loving each other, etc. There is real chemistry between the two very handsome leads and the first sex between them is much more explicit than what you would expect from this type of thing. All the critics hated Uma Thurman as the Texas-born President of the US and mother of one of the romantic leads. I thought she was wonderful. Like most rom-coms, believability is not its strong suit, but it was a very pleasant two hours and far more believable than Brokeback Mountain (*shudder*)
8- If you have ready this blog at all, you will know that I have no great love for Film Noir. As I have written before, it always seems to be style over substance, posturing over feelings. I was happy to watch In A Lonely Place, and to find a true emotional masterpiece. Bogart is astounding and nuanced playing a troubled screenwriter who has a chance for happiness and sanity when he falls in love with and is loved by his gorgeous neighbor played by Gloria Grahame. It is Film Noir, so it isn’t too much of a spoiler to tell you that things don’t work out. But it is how they don’t work out that makes this film remarkable. The film has the most tragic ending of any film I have seen, where no one dies at the end.
9- The late 50s and early 60s were a great period for powerful, adult comedy-dramas. Think of The Apartment as the classic example of this. Adult and nuanced in its storytelling, featuring adult and nuanced characters that you can really care about. The Americanization of Emily is another great example. I fear it is quite forgotten now and the fact that it stars Julie Andrews in her next film after Mary Poppins might work against it. I am hear to say that Andrews creates a fully fleshed out, multifaceted and appealingly flawed character. The screenplay is by Paddy Chayefsky so you know it is going to be scathing about something, and here the something is the stupidity of war. Seems like an easy mark, but it is handled beautifully and brutally. This is a film that deserves to be better remembered. One of the last great comedy-dramas before the studios turned their attention to kids.