The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Three Colors : Blue (Krysztof Kieślowski)
2. Three Colors : White (Krysztof Kieślowski)
3. Three Colors : Red (Krysztof Kieślowski)
4. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. La Haine (Mathieu Kassowitz)
6. 3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
7. Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
8. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe)
9. King of the Hill (Steven Soderbergh)
10. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)

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1- What a joy to watch the entire Three Colors trilogy again! I even revised my original assessment to be even more enthusiastic, especially about White. See my original review with additional comments here.

2- Marnie. Yikes. See my thoughts here.

3- La Haine had been on my radar for a while. 25 years to be precise. I finally caught up with it, and I wonder if time hasn’t dealt unkindly with it. It has a very restless 90s camera style that indicates grittiness but now looks a bit dated.  The story is quite aimless, but I am sure that was intentional to underline the aimlessness of these unemployed young men living in a banlieue just outside of Paris. The choice of having a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian as the friends/protagonists seems very 2020, but must have been unusual in 1995.  The gang members are as intimidating as The Sharks and The Jets. Who would have thought that the cutie-pie who starred in Amelie would have turned out such a gritty film for his directorial debut?

4- One of the joys of the Criterion Channel is that I have been able to get to know the works of the great Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. For someone like me who loves to analyze structure and who appreciates a good metafictional turn, these films have been fantastic. 3 Faces is one of the many films Panahi has made since he was officially silenced by the Iranian government and given a ban of 20 years before he could start filming again.  Not sure how he does it, but this ‘illegal’ film was shown at Cannes.  Maybe it is just a feint on the part of the Iranian government, or maybe Panahi has just too great a stature on the international film circuit, that it would be counterproductive for the government to do anything more to enforce the ban. Thank god they don’t because this film as well as This Is Not A Film, both made under the ban, are two of the most satisfying films I have seen all year.

5- Beau Travail. Well, it is a riff on Billy Budd with the homoerotic element brought to the fore, or maybe not.  I had seen it when it came out and didn’t care for it very much, despite the male pulchritude on display.  It is more of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad in the desert than anything else.   It seems to be brave about the male on male gaze, but to what point? I don’t know.  I found it hard to sit through a second time.

6- I saw Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom  when it premiered on Broadway in the 80s and it had no effect on me.  Since then, August Wilson has become a sacred cow, so I need to tread carefully when I say that I think that the play is pretty poorly constructed.  The linking, random, jokey conversations that the musicians have to pass the time are really enjoyable but when the big arias about “RACE” come up, they jarringly intrude on the proceedings. Everyone is saying that this film version is just a filmed play to which I say a) “It isn’t and b) “Why is that a negative?”  This is Chadwick Boseman’s last performance and I found it over the top. I fear that he will be lionized the way James Dean was lionized, both dying beautiful and young.

7- Steven Soderbergh is one of those directors who I feel is making movies just for me. They hit me exactly in the right way.  I ‘get’ them perfectly.  I loved Contagion and Side Effects and I really loved King of the Hill.   I had seen it when it came out and loved it.  It holds up beautifully.  Jesse Bradford gives one of the best child actor performances I know of.  The period evocation is wonderful. It feels as if you have a window into that time and not that you are watching a studio reconstruction of 1933 St. Louis.  Please watch this. It is a beautiful, beautiful movie.  The closest thing I can compare it to is To Kill A Mockingbird, although King of the Hill is less epic.

8- In deference to the great Fern, I voluntarily watched It’s A Wonderful Life again this Christmas Eve. It was on network TV complete with a million commercial interruptions.  This was the way I first saw it in 1979 and the only alternative was to watch it on Amazon Prime in a colorized version. Anathema.

When I first saw this movie it was before it was elevated to its current unshakeable status as ‘The Greatest Christmas Movie of All Times.”  It was just another movie from the 40s and I was enchanted by it.  On second and third viewing I became aware that the film profoundly depressed me.  There is a weird dichotomy at the end of the movie.  In a rush of overwhelming love and friendship, the good citizens of Bedford Falls perform a Christmas miracle of sorts and collect the $8,000 dollars which will prevent our hero from going bust and to jail, and worse, being in thrall to the ludicrously evil Mr. Potter.

I know that this is supposed to be the quintessential ‘happy end’ but at that point in the movie, I still have an awful taste in my mouth from the fantasy scene that preceded it. In essence, the town of Bedford Falls would have become a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah if George Bailey had never lived.  And yet…. and yet… when he lives it only is saved from that fate by having every single one of George’s dreams crushed and everyone else he knows, go on to wonderful things.

I think that people love it because of what they think it is saying, but if you actually look at what it says, YIKES.

 

Marnie….Oy vey iz mir

!!! WARNING: ATYPICAL INVECTIVE TO FOLLOW !!!

I have always felt that The Birds was the last masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock. From that point on, the quality of his work decreased and the tedium increased. However, I was discussing Marnie recently and the conversation made me think that I was too harsh in my assessment, even though I had seen it several times and never came away amazed by anything in it.

I had the opportunity to watch it again and now I can say with perfect confidence that it is a bad, bad film.  Perhaps future viewings will change my mind, but I doubt it.  In fact, I doubt there will be future viewings.

What is wrong with it?

Where do I start?

1- Technical Problems:

a- The set gimmicks of Hitchcock always stand out as poorly executed and distracting from the rest of the movie.  I am thinking of the ‘vertiginous’ zoom in/out of the stair case in Vertigo, for example.  In Marnie, the red filter that tells us that Marnie is having one of her sexual hysteria panic attacks triggered by that color are laughable and laid on with a sledgehammer.  I know that Hitchcock is lauded, and rightly so, for his use of ‘pure cinema’, i.e., emotion and information transmitted by purely visual means, but this is so clumsy. And I don’t think it is just a matter of less sophisticated special effects in 1964.

b- The process shots are extremely hokey.  Is this be because they don’t work as well in color as in black & white?  Maybe. The process shots of the riders during the hunt are phony looking and I do not think it is because we are now used to CGI ‘realism’ in special effects.  It is hard to imagine why a perfectionist like Hitchcock okayed them. ‘Tippi’ Hedren looks like she is on a carousel and not on a fox hunt. The action is out of sync with the process shot background and ruins the illusion of horseback riding rather than creating it.  This b&w shot looks somewhat better than the color image in the film, but you can see what I mean.

c- So many scenes end awkwardly.  Often a character finishes speaking, but instead of a fade out, the camera just hangs on the character, and you think, “Nu? Is there more to this scene?”, and then the fade comes and the next scene begins.  I don’t get it.  What was the editor thinking? What is supposed to be the effect? Or is it, as I fear, more sloppiness and proof positive that Hitchcock lost interest in the project midway through and was not concerned any longer with turning out a typically perfect product?

 

2- Acting

a- Perhaps the greatest liability in the film is ‘Tippi’ Hedren.  She already seemed out of her league in The Birds. I am sure we could think of any number of actresses of the time who would have been a better Melanie Daniels, especially when she is in confrontation with the juggernaut of Jessica Tandy as Mitch Brenner’s needy mom. But somehow, in The Birds her weaknesses are not detrimental to the whole enterprise.  Her iciness and model-like behavior seems in keeping with a the portrayal of a troubled rich girl.

In Marnie, her inexperience sinks the whole enterprise.  An actor’s greatest asset, even more than his or her physical presence,  is a powerful and communicative voice. This is what can rivet an audience and what can direct them to feel the way he or she feels.
Hedren just does not have that voice.  Hers is highly pitched and when she forces it into dramatic expression, it sounds like Minnie Mouse.  I blame Hitchcock. She should never have been cast in a role that needs so much dramatic nuance. Diane Baker, who plays the devious Lil in the film, would have been so much more effective in the role. It is like watching Guys and Dolls listening to Brando sing Luck be a Lady, knowing all too well that Sinatra is on the set NOT singing Luck be a Lady.

Sean Connery also brings his share of problems to the film.  Yes, he is gorgeous.  I heard that Hedren complained to Hitchcock that it would be hard to play frigid opposite such a hunk.   But for all that, there is very little chemistry between them.  This time around I was really distracted by Connery’s Scottish accent.  The way he goes in and out of the accent is another indication of lack of supervision at the top.

 

3- Psychology

At the end of Psycho, the psychologist, played by Simon Oakland, gives a tidy explanation of what happened in poor, murderous Norman Bates’ mind to give rise to so many horrors.  While the explanation is plausible, I always felt that it was filmed and played with a laugh up its sleeve.  I can’t put my finger on it, but I always find the end of Psycho kind of humorous.  The comic relief, icky though it is, that we needed after such unrelieved tension.

The amateur analyzing of Marnie by Sean Connery’s character is even ickier.  He claims to have had an interest in zoology and the way he traps and experiments on Marnie seem very zoological and not very medicinal. It certainly goes way beyond the medical dictum of ‘Do No Harm’.

Much psychologizing in films of the 60s and earlier seem to imply that if we could just find the one thing that made this character go nuts, we could cure him or her.  Once the memory of having to kiss her dead grandmother at the wake in The Three Faces of Eve is recovered, all the multiple personalities magically disappear. When Gregory Peck in Spellbound finally recalls how he accidentally caused his little brother’s death, he is cured.

And so in Marnie, a visit to her awful mom’s dockside house revives once and for all a nightmarish memory that turned the young Marnie into a frigid, thieving, duplicitous woman, we assume that she is cured.  It’s just too neat.

The bottom line here is  that if you think you would like to watch Marnie, do yourself a favor and watch The Birds again.

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. High Hopes (Mike Leigh)
2. The Short and Curlies (Mike Leigh)
3. The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda)
4. Merrily We Go To Hell (Dorothy Arzner)
5. Lured (Douglas Sirk)
6. Newsfront (Phillip Noyce)
7. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
8. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
9. High Heels (Pedro Almodóvar)
10. Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola)

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1-  Mike Leigh’s films seems to be some combination of life-affirming, bleak, cynical and joyous, sometimes in equal measure. But all are works of genius. High Hopes tends toward life-affirming with generous dashes of bleak. The marvelous Ruth Sheen is on hand to provide yet another one of the indomitable figures that are sprinkled across Leigh’s works.

2- I don’t think that I had watched an entire Agnes Varda film before I watched The Gleaners and I.  It is a lovely, odd documentary of people in France who would better be described as scavengers. Although seldom on screen, the personality of Varda permeates the film.  It is a personality that I look forward to spending more time with.

3- Merrily We Go To Hell was shown on TCM as a complement to the Mark Cousins’ multi-part documentary Women Make Film. The documentary is really a film class explaining all aspects of creating a film (framing, script, track shots, characterization, etc.)  After each of the weekly episodes, films that were used as examples are shown in their entirety.  This film was by Dorothy Arzner, the only active woman director besides Ida Lupino in Hollywood.   I had hoped that  it would be pretty raw, since that this was a pre-code film about a society women who marries as seriously alcoholic newspaperman. It is mostly raw, but their is an unfortunate ‘happy end’ tacked on.  I guess even in pre-code days this was to be expected.

4- It was lovely to see Newsfront again. I saw it back in the late 70s as the Australian New Wave was hitting the US. I didn’t remember a thing about it except that it was about newsreel makers in the days just before television.  It is a great combination of fiction and archival footage, with a nicely affecting story to boot.

5- I always had fun watching Rear Window, but this time around I realized that it might very well be greater than Vertigo.  More on this in a later post.

6- Sometimes too much knowledge is too much.  I always knew that The Magnificent Ambersons was a mangled masterpiece, but I thought the mutilation by RKO was on the end of the film, which always seems abrupt and sloppy. I watched it again on the Criterion Collection with the full-length commentary. It seems that the mutilation was far more extensive, hitting about every part of the film. Apparently something like 50 minutes were cut and are now lost.  With the commentary it became apparent that the film is a mess, with moments of brilliance (Fanny’s breakdown, the last party at the Amberson’s mansion).   What was unfortunate about watching with the commentary is that it planted the seed in my mind that even with the deleted holy-grail scenes, it might still be a mess.

7- Pedro Almodóvar has gone from being a campy director of loco shock comedies to one of the great humanists working in film today. High Heels dates from his epater le bourgeois period, so a little of it, for me at least, goes a long way.  There is no denying that the film is stunning-looking.  He was a master of the art form even then, but he hadn’t yet found the great themes that his technical genius was begging for.   He has found them now. Watch Pain and Glory to see way I mean.  It is overwhelming in every sense, but first and foremost, it is overwhelming because you are watching a genius who is at the top of his game.

8- I hadn’t seen Peggy Sue Got Married since it was first realeased.  I remembered being disappointed with it at the time, and it still is disappointing.  It has great ideas, but it is too timid to do anything with them.  It’s fun to see a 12-year-old Sofia Coppola as an annoying younger sister, though.

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. One Hour With You (Ernst Lubitsch)
2. Night Nurse (William Wellman)
3. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. Emma (Autumn de Wilde)
5. The Cabin in the Woods (Joss Wheedon)
6. It’s Love Again (Victor Saville)
7. The Big City (Satyajit Ray)
8. Tel Aviv on Fire (Sameh Zoabi)
9. Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi)
10. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

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1- I always found the winky, smarm-filled sex comedies of Mitteleuropa very off-putting. Sex is legal, even adultery, despite the biblical injunction, is legal.  Why the winkiness? For me it is the same as when people make nudge-nudge wink-wink noise about needing a cocktail after a trying incident. Have a cocktail. Prohibition has been over for ninety years. Shut up.

But the sex farces really leave me baffled and somewhat disgusted.  All these people having adulterous or not-adulterous affairs, and talking about it incessantly, telling us about why it is OK because we are all sophisticated adults…well.. I just don’t understand it.  I think of things like Die Fledermaus or Feydeau farces.  You want to have sex, go ahead. Why talk about it like you think it is bad, but you are going to do it anyway. I find it tiresome. As marvelous as Lubitsch can be, I find One Hour With You, a sound remake of his influential The Marriage Circle, to invoke the same kind of tedium. Now, I think the sex-farce aspects of Trouble In Paradise are just fine because they are coupled with a mercenary cynicism that makes the smarm tolerable.

2- I had seen Suspicion decades ago and all I remembered about it was Cary Grant mounting the stairs ominously, with a possibly poisoned glass of milk. I guess I know this so well because it is always shown in compilations of Hitchcock’s greatest hits.  The film  seems like a rush job. The resolution is very unsatisfying and suddenly the film is over.  Was it an attempt to duplicate his wild success with Rebecca? Maybe.  Joan Fontaine is on hand to do her distressed heroine thing and Cary Grant doing his poor man’s Laurence Olivier.

3- I was really pleased with the latest incarnation of Emma. I feel that of all the film versions so far, it really got the book down.  And how great to see Miranda Hart as the ridiculous and tragic Miss Bates.

4- Buffy The Vampire Killer was a surprising delight for me when I binge watched it a few years ago.  I loved Wheedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.  I had looked forward to The Cabin in the Woods because I had heard much about a surprising and satisfying plot twist. Well, not so much. It was fun to watch. Lots of pretty people in classic horror film tropes. In fact, I was hoping that it would be telling us that these horror tropes keep the world spinning, which is what it seemed to be heading for. But, about three quarters of the way through it kind of falls apart, into fun, Buffy-like sci-fi supernatural high-jinks.  I was entertained but not satisfied.

5- It’s Love Again demonstrates why TCM is essential for lovers of film and the performing arts.  This is not a great movie by any means. It is kind of a filmed play with lots of musical numbers. What is invaluable is it gives us a chance to see Jessie Matthews in action.  She was the singing and dancing sweetheart of the West End in the 1930s.  Is she wonderful? Hard to tell.  Her dancing is coltish, her singing is warbly, but still it is wonderful and instructive to see a beloved performer from a distant time.

6- I know when I watch a film by Satyajit Ray I know that I will be deeply satisfied and profoundly moved. The Big City did not disappoint. I need to see everything this genius did, twice!

7- Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance is an example of manga-inspired action films that the Japanese adore.  A genre that is just not for me.  It all seems so silly without being entertaining.

8- Tel Aviv on Fire gives a view of everyday Palestinian life through the eyes of people creating the eponymous soap opera for Palestinian television.  It was so refreshing to see day-to-day Palestinian life. People going to work, going to restaurants, etc. In fact, except for the fact that everyone speaks Arabic, one could imagine that one were watching a film about Israelis.  Yes, the ‘troubles’ are present in the dialogue.  Yes, there are difficult interactions with Israeli authorities but it is presented in a non-sensation, non-polemic way. And it is funny.

9- I love and I hate the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  At his best he is a master creating fascinating characters who seem to grow out of the Germany of his time. At his worst, the films are sloppy and very much like a kid trying to provoke adults by being shocking, but who winds up just being annoying. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant was dazzling to me. It is slow, claustrophobic and very stylized. It was German Kabuki.

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. The Last Wave (Peter Weir)
3. Rio Grande (John Ford)
4. Manchester-by-the-Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
5. The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes)
6. The Lost Squadron (George Archainbaud)
7. Boy Erased (Joel Edgerton)
8. Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti)
9. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)
10. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

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1- The Birds is one of the films I have seen the most times in my life.  Others include Citizen Kane, Wild Strawberries, All About Eve, Nashville, The Shop Around the Corner and Celine and Julie Go Boating.  They are like little vacations for me to resort towns that I know so well.  Some of these resort towns are creepier than others. All are familiar as home.

2- I remember when the films of the ‘Australian New Wave’ hit New York City in the late 70s/early 80s.  They had the effect on me that the appearance of the French New Wave must have had on my cinephile forebears in the late 60s/early 70s.  Films like Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Walkabout, Gallipoli and The Last Wave were young, exciting and sometimes perplexing.  Out of all of these, Picnic at Hanging Rock remains the most meaningful to me.

I hadn’t seen The Last Wave since my first viewing, and always considered it a companion piece to Picnic at Hanging Rock, mostly because they were shown on double bills throughout the 80s.  Seeing The Last Wave again made me realize that it is a lesser film for exactly the reason why Picnic at Hanging Rock is a superior film: ambiguity.  The mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock is never really solved, but you realize that that is not the point of the film.  The point seems to be the effect of disaster on the world.  You would think that the same would be true of The Last Wave. I love the foreboding atmospherics and the tantalizing aboriginal hoodoo, but ultimately it is too much about a mystery that never is cleared up and it doesn’t satisfy the way the other film does. Still, it is a great watch.

3- I need to write a piece on John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy. The Trilogy consists of Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande, in descending order of greatness and complexity. They are all masterpieces. Stay tuned.

4- Manchester-by-the-Sea. The only word for it is ‘magnificent’.  The complex relationships are handled so masterfully and the story is revealed so artfully. I am not a big believer in a movie needing to be ‘realistic’ to be great. Most of the time when filmmakers are reaching for realism, the results are embarrassing. Here, though, I felt that I was spending time with people I knew and understood. Not necessarily liked, mind you. The cumulative effect is devastating.  The buzz before I saw it was that it was incredibly depressing.  Obviously, the people who said this have had no life experience.  Magnificent.

5- I knew that pre-code films were pretty loose with morals and conventions but imagine my surprise when I saw this in The Lost Squadron:

 

6- Regarding Boy Erased and Love, Simon I refer you to my post on movies targeted to a specific audience.  I would be selling both of these short if I were to imply that they don’t appeal to a wider audience than Gay people. But Love, Simon is incredibly sweet and mostly just a Gay rom-com (not that there is anything wrong with that!) and Boy Erased is greater in its ambitions. The portrayal of the characters is nuanced, and transcends stereotypes. Thrillingly so.  Lucas Hedges is amazing, just like he was in Manchester By The Sea.

7- The Shape of Water. Best Picture of the Year? Really? I have long ago given up on the idea of Oscars as the arbiters of anything, but this award really baffles me. Except for The Devil’s Backbone, every Guillermo Del Toro films I have seen collapses under the weight of its own diffuseness and studied weirdness. This is no exception. Please feel free to tell my why I am wrong here.

8- I went crazy for both Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love when they both came out. I also really liked Boogie Nights a lot.  Since then I have felt a huge disconnect with the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.  I hate it because I see the attention, intelligence and style that are lavished on these movies, as well as the incredible performances he gets out of his stars. But once again, Phantom Thread left me cold and confused. Not as cold and confused as The Master.  Seeking your opinion here also as to what I might have missed.

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Million Dollar Legs (Edward Cline)
2. The Ring (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Rebels on Pointe (Bobbi Jo Hart)
4. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
5. The Primrose Path (Gregory La Cava)
6. Mudbound (Dee Rees)
7. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa)
8. Bluebeard’s Eight Wife (Ernst Lubitsch)
9. Giant (George Stevens)
10. Johnny Belinda (Jean Negolescu)

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1- I LOVE movies and books that portray an insane world by presenting it as normal to its own inhabitants.  Alice In Wonderland and Through The Lookingglass are my favorite books. This is the reason that I adore The Palm Beach Story, too.  For sheer insanity but not on the epic scale of Alice or the denizens of Palm Beach, I heartily recommend Million Dollar Legs. It is so nuts and it features W.C. Fields.  What else do you need.

2- Recently re-watched High and Low.  What a masterpiece this is.  The sustained tension is masterfully handled and the moral dilemmas that the characters are put through present real ethical quandaries for the audience. The first half is complete room-bound, almost as claustrophobic as the room in Rope. What makes this part of the film so dazzling is that even though it is all played in a very restricted space, it is shot in widescreen which creates a dizzying feeling.   The Olympian home in the first section, gives way to the Hades of the Japanese underworld. Brueghel at his best.  Mifune is masterful and the final confrontation between him and the villain, showing Mifune’s fruitless attempts to understand why the villain did what he did, are dazzling.

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Rocco and his Brothers (Luchino Visconti)
3. Consolation Marriage (Paul Sloane)
4. The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. All The President’s Men (Alan Pakula)
6. Arrowsmith (John Ford)
7. Hell or High Water (David McKenzie)
8. Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock)
9. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
10. La Jetée (Chris Marker)

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1- Early Hitchcock can be very interesting.  Looking for the hallmarks of his later great period is not really recommended.  Instead it is fascinating to see how much the works of the Twenties and the early Thirties are influences by German Expressionism.  Also, Hitchcock made much of the notion of ‘pure cinema’. Watching these early films, I realize that this term really just refers to the aesthetic of the silent film: the image is everything. Everything is communicated by what you see. Sound is unnecessary.  Think of the great set pieces of later Hitchcock like the shower scene in Psycho or any of the rhapsodically delirious sequences of longing in Vertigo or the great bird attacks in The Birds. They are all totally reliant on montage for the emotion.  The only difference between the early and later works, in the regard, is the masterful use of music to enhance the emotion.  But this, too, seems to be feature of silent film making at its best. Out of all the above early Hitchocks, I think Downhill was the most satisfying.  Plus you get a rare opportunity to see Ivor Novello.  He was the most enormous star of his time and is all but forgotten today.

2- Rocco and his Brothers comes closer to an opera than any other film I can think of, and that includes The Godfather. I don’t know how much I enjoyed it, it is way too long, but I did get the feel of a juicy verismo potboiler. Alain Delon is lovely as the Alyosha Karamazov-type brother.

3- Aguirre, The Wrath of God dates from that wonderful last gasp of ‘art house’ film from the late 70s/ early 80s.  I was nuts for this movie when it first came out and saw it half a million times.  I hadn’t seen it in more that 30 years and I thrilled to say that is it just as magical and quirky and satisfying as I found it originally.

4- For some reason I can’t handle stories that deal with time travel. That said, I think I would watch La Jetee any time.  Its audacious story, packed into a brief 30-minute running time, and its unusual story-telling technique of using still photographs almost exclusively, lead to a thoroughly satisfying and, for me, quite creepy experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. All This and Heaven, Too (Anton Litvak)
2. Joy (David O. Russell)
3. The Wedding March (Erich Von Stroheim)
4. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler/Paul Strand)
5. Grass (Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack)
6. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)
7. Chang (Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack)
8. 3:10 To Yuma (Delmer Daves)
9. The Golem (Carl Boese/Paul Wegener)
10. My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong)

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1- All This and Heaven, Too is the perfect example of what was known as a ‘woman’s picture’.  Nothing pejorative meant by that. It was a particular genre that was extraordinarily popular at the time. Star-crossed romances, attractive tragic protagonists, luscious scores by Max Steiner. I guess things like the Twilight series are the diminished descendents of these films.  Since this starred the great Bette Davis, I was expecting a plot with a little more meat and a tougher heroine.  Still, it was fun enough.  I don’t get why Charles Boyer was such a sex symbol, but he was. Must have been the French accent.

2- I think that David O. Russell makes movies just for me. I absorb them effortlessly and with great satisfaction.  The quirkiness of the plots and characters is never condescending.  His stable of actors is immensely appealing. Silver Lining Playbook and American Hustle were absolute delights.  Joy is also a joy.  He might be becoming formulaic, but it is such a tasty formula!

3- Each time I watch a Von Stroheim film, I am amazed that he succeeded in getting it made. The elaborateness of the productions, the penetrating psychology of the characters, the epic scope make you wonder how the studio heads ever agreed to his projects, especially since they were hugely expensive and perhaps not box-office smashes. I hadn’t seen The Wedding March in a long, long time, but it really holds up as an exemplar of what makes a Von Stroheim film so masterful. It is tragic that the second part of the film, The Honeymoon, was lost in a fire in Paris in the Fifties, but there are enough stills and information for us to piece together what the end of this melancholy story would have looked like.  The recent discovery of the complete Metropolis makes me take heart that The Honeymoon might be found in some European basement someday.  It is not like the missing reels of Greed which were deliberately destroyed by the studio, apparently.  This just seems to be a case of neglect. Keeping my fingers crossed.  Take a look at my survey of Von Stroheim if you have not already.

4- Bless TCM for their monthly perspectives.  This month, they are focusing on documentaries.  This gave me the chance to see three short films that I had always heard about but never had the opportunity to see. Manhatta is an astounding 11-minute silent film showing views of New York from highly artistic and interesting camera set-ups.  Grass and Chang are the products of Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, the boys who brought us King Kong. Granted, these are not documentaries in the strictest sense as many of the sequences seem staged, but just to imagine the difficulty that this kind of location filming presented in the 1920s makes these films even more amazing. Someone described Chang, set in the jungles of Thailand, as a ‘wild animal snuff film’. Cute, and somewhat accurate. But the anthropological details of the life of these people is so interesting. Grass is absolutely thrilling. It depicts the epic journey of the Bakhtiari people from central Turkey to somewhere in present-day Iran. They are fleeing the dried out fields of Anatolia for the lush grassland of Iran to feed their flocks.  Grass equals life here.  I was dazzled by the camera work and could not imagine how these epic set-ups were co-ordinated.  CGI has truly killed the thrill of this kind of cinema!

5- 3:10 To Yuma should be as regarded and as well known as High Noon.  When westerns are great, they are sublime, like The Searchers and Once Upon A Time In The West. When they are very good, they are very, very good, like 3:10 To Yuma. I am talking about the original here, with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Don’t know anything about the remake.  Like most remakes, I question the wisdom of the whole enterprise. (Probably only John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon was the only necessary and transcendent remake!).   When critics talk about the greatness of later westerns, they usually focus on the psychological depictions of the characters.  Here, the cat-and-mouse between Ford and Heflin keeps the whole thing taut and involving.  And that last shot in the rain is gorgeous.

6- I was glad finally to catch up with The Golem.  It was one of the major German Expressionist films that I had not seen. I watched it since it was one of the films covered in the new podcast The Chosen Films created by two friends of mine, Aaron Midler and Rabbi Shoshana Conover.  They discuss films from a Jewish perspective and their selections are eclectic.  I don’t think this film is as majestic as others of this time (The Cabinet of Dr. Calegari, Metropolis or Faust, but it is fascinating for the weird but not demonizing portrayal of those medieval Jews.  See it.

 

7- The late 70s/early 80s were a heady time for ‘art house’ cinema.  Bergman, Fellini and Hitchcock were still active, and we were discovering new corners of the cinematic universe.  Most impressive was what was called The Australian New Wave.  Fascinating, accomplished films like Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Last Wave  and Gallipoli burst Athena-like, fully-formed and glorious.  My Brilliant Career was a film that I saw at the time and liked a lot, but had completely forgotten about.  I was glad to catch up with it again and see that it was even more satisfying than I remembered. And Sam Neill is gorgeous.

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith)
3. Room and a Half (Andrei Khrzhanovsky)
4. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
5. I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock)
6. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
7. The Navigator (Donald Crisp/Buster Keaton)
8. It’s a Wonderful World (W.S. Van Dyke)
9. Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer)
10. Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey)

1 – I am often more interested in cinematic technique, i.e., how the filmmaker conveys the plot than in the plot per se.  I know Hitchcock felt the same way – see his concept of ‘MacGuffin’.  But, with certain filmmakers you just can’t ignore content.  The French critics considered Hitchcock the most personal of the personal auteurs. His fetishes and private fears appear all through his oeuvre.  One of his great themes, and probably one of his great personal concerns, is the concept of guilt and sin. No one makes the audience feel more complicit in the actions of characters than Hitchcock.  We assume their guilt.  Remember the scene when Norman Bates is trying to sink the car containing the murdered Janet Leigh in a pond? It stops sinking midway and we all think ‘Oh no! Norman and his mother will be caught now!’  Then the car resumes its downward descent and disappears underwater and we are relieved. Then to our horror we realize ‘We were just rooting for a man abetting a murder committed by his mother!’ Later on, we find out there is much more to be horrified by.  Sabotage is a film reeking with the notion of complicity and guilt and, perhaps, original sin.  What is it that causes Sylvia Sidney to do what she does at the end? She achieves a makeshift absolution by the mechanics of the plot, but does she really?  A terribly unsettling film in so many ways, and in many ways the first ‘Hitchcock film’.

2- I wonder why Room and a Half  is not better known.  Based on works of the poet Joseph Brodsky, this is a wonderfully inventive fantasy memoir about events that never happened.  Apparently, Brodsky never went back to Russia, so this depiction of his reunion with his (possibly dead) parents is all the stuff of imagination.  The combination of animation, raucous humor and the depiction of what it must have been like to be an intellectual in the latter days of the Soviet Union are entrancing.  There are moments of great lyricism mixed in with great humor.  I wish I knew more of his work, since I would probably understand more of the poetic tropes in the film For instance, his dead parents live on in two crows that come to the adult Brodsky. Is this part of his body of work?

This would have been a hit if we still lived in the days of the Art House movie theater.

3- All I can say is that I will be happy to watch Wild Strawberries every few months for the rest of my life.

4- I Confess is widely considered lesser Hitchcock.  I had seen it decades ago and didn’t remember much about it.  But having just watched Sabotage and The Lodger, I hoped that it would prove to be a pleasant surprise. It didn’t.  I think the big flaw is having Montgomery Clift in the lead.  He just seems to be in a different movie the whole time.  I think that he was probably doing his Method actor thing, but Hitchcock’s plan did not catch what he was doing. Hence, he looks like he is just stumbling around Quebec.  Anne Baxter seems very miscast as well.  The plot has all the trapping of a classic Hitchcock film, but it never really gets off the ground. I think Hitchcock himself is dismissive of it and seems to blame Clift, too.

5- I am so glad that I finally made time to sit down and watch the complete, three-hour version of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret.  I always loved his You Can Count On Me, and was amazed to see that Margaret was only his second feature.  It was plagued by creative and legal woes and never really had a theatrical run.  It is pretty much forgotted but it is a work of profound genius and creativity.  More to come on this one.

6- It’s hard to believe that I can actually say, ‘I haven’t seen that movie in over 35 years’, but such is the case with Seven Days In May.  It really holds up as an exemplar of cold-war paranoia.  It was directed by the master of screen paranoia, John Frankenheimer, who gave us such other delicious, cinematic nightmares as The Manchurian Canditate (yikes!) and Seconds, which has the most terrifying film of any film I have ever seen. OK, the Dutch version of The Vanishing has a worse ending, but Seconds is a very close second.

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen)
2. It’s Love I’m After (Archie Mayo)
3. Black Moon (Roy William Neill)
4. The Life Of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
5. Hitler’s Children (Edward Dmytryk)
6. Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones)
7. The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson)
8. The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)
9. Written On The Wind (Douglas Sirk)
10. The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock)

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1- I guess there are only so many things you can do with the classic ‘white woman drawn to the wicked world of Caribbean Voodoo’, but I must say that I was really struck by how much Black Moon looked and felt like my beloved I Walked With A Zombie.  A side-by-side viewing of the two would really show what makes a film of genius as opposed to a solid Hollywood B-film.  Of course, I Walked With A Zombie does have that Jane Eyre thing going for it, but it also has pacing, a great script, terrific acting and atmosphere you could cut with a knife.  Black Moon has more the feel of the second part of a Saturday afternoon double-bill from the Thirties. Fun, creepy, a little depressing, but not much more.

2- Can a man be a feminist director? I don’t know what else to call Kenji Mizoguchi.  Every one of his films that I have seen depict the plight of women, especially at the hands of self-interested men.  The Life Of Ohara is an especially bleak example of this. It is gorgeous, and the performance of Kinuyo Tanaka is amazing, but man, is it depressing.

3- Thank you Criterion for having another 50% off sale and allowing me to own the endlessly insane Written On The Wind. I would love to know what the reaction was when it first appeared in theaters.  Nymphomania, sexual performance anxiety and Lauren Bacall all wrapped up in an absolutely over the top Dallas-like story.  The image of Dorothy Malone dancing in sexual frenzy in her bedroom in her underwear, while right outside her door her father dies of a heart attack, is something I don’t think I will soon forget – nor would I want to.  This film is nowhere near the level of genius of All The Heaven Allows, but it is almost as formally dazzling. Color, costuming, mise-en-scene are all plotted out within an inch of their lives. Sirk seems to invert the famous Chekhov dictum by saying, ‘If a gun goes off in the first five minutes of a movie, you better see that gun for the rest of the film’. Malone won the Best Supporting Actress award for this frenzied portrayal, beating out another iconic performance of late 50s nuttiness: Patty McCormack as the terrifying Rhoda in The Bad Seed.  I guess the Academy didn’t dare give it to any one else for fear that Malone would come and shimmy them all to death.  And do I even need to mention her fondling of her father’s ‘oil well’ at the end of the film?

 

4- Thank you, Betsy Rubin, for your gift of a collection of more obscure Hitchcock films.  Because of this I was finally able to watch his silent gem The Lodger.  I feared that it would be more ‘homework’ than ‘pleasure’ but I was wrong.  It was a wonderful watch. You certainly can tell that Hitchcock spent time in Germany and watching German films – this looks like it could have been directed by UFA-period Fritz Lang.  The expressionist shadow and paranoia have obvious roots in Babelsberg, but so much of it is full of stuff we will see over and over again in later Hitchcock: the ‘wrong man’ plot, the underwear fetish, Catholic iconography (there is a really blatant re-enactment of the deposition from the cross). The interesting thing about this ‘wrong man’ plot is that Hitchcock doesn’t fill the audience in on the details until almost the end, so we don’t have the sympathy for Ivor Norvello that we do for Cary Grant in North By Northwest.

On to The Parradine Case!