OLDIES!

Older films seen in 2017, continued from the 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 editions. Most of these are really quick comments - typically scribbled down in 10-15 minutes without benefit of notes - and any resulting wit or insight should be viewed as an accidental by-product. Slightly more thoughtful capsules may be found on the now-defunct old reviews page.

All films, both from this year and the 14 previous ones, can be accessed alphabetically. Most can be viewed ranked by rating as well, though I'm still not sure what that's all about.

[Addendum, February 2009: I've now stopped doing reviews of new movies, but I'll continue to update this page; however, this is purely for my own benefit - since I can't always remember when I watched an oldie, so it's handy being able to find them here - and I won't be going any deeper or writing any more than I used to (probably the opposite). I am not reinventing this as a classic-movie site, nor do I set myself up as an expert on oldies. Or anything, really...]

ESSENE (64) (Frederick Wiseman, 1972): The opposite of the monks in INTO GREAT SILENCE: these monks never shut up - indeed, it's part of their mission to "discern the Spirit by listening to one another" - making them closer to early-70s hippies than traditional monks; their emphasis is on "healing" and also on the individual, talking about their interpersonal relationships as much as God. Easy to see why the subject appealed to Wiseman but in fact his subjects' self-absorption defeats him, constantly (and rather verbosely) seeking to illuminate themselves when the camera should be doing that for them. Still a few glorious moments - panning up from a prayer huddle to show three monks standing behind the group, all three gazing dreamily in different directions - and the scene with the deadpan, owlish monk who objects to being called by his first name is among the funniest things I've ever seen, Wiseman-wise or otherwise: "It has always been that way... When I was in the world, known as 'Edmund', I did not care to be known as 'Ed', or 'Eddie', or whatever else you want to call the thing. Except among my very close chums. Of which there were five."

CLIMBING HIGH (61) (Carol Reed, 1938): How do you contrive it for your star - hitherto best-known for musicals - to do a bit of singing in this non-musical comedy? Most films would give her a job in a nightclub or something - but this one takes her on a picnic, then arranges for the picnic to be crashed by an escaped mental patient who loves to sing opera and forces her into a rather nervous duet with him! The madman reappears in the climax, shifting the action from London to a Swiss Alp (to fit with the title?), one of many demented ingredients also including Alastair Sim as a work-shy Bolshevik, cartoon slapstick with a wind machine in an advertising agency, a Canadian lumberjack brother who's introduced in a prologue then forgotten till the very end, and a meet-cute wherein hero runs heroine over with his car, not once but twice ("It's a bit thick, picking on one pedestrian," observes a passing matron. "Like catching the same fish twice"). Standard, if pleasant, stuff in between the highlights - and Jessie Matthews isn't great, too wide-eyed and squirrelly to belong in this screwball world - but its choices are consistently startling, and we haven't even mentioned the extended gag where Jessie, based on rather meagre evidence ("comfy wumfy beds"), thinks she's applying for a job at a whorehouse. That's even loonier than the lunatic.

DECEMBER 1, 2017

EASY RIDER (77) (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

BROADWAY BABIES (66) (Mervyn LeRoy, 1929): A gentle decline, as in many of these pre-Code movies: the last 10 minutes are vaguely ridiculous, the first 15 minutes are magnificent - a scratchy recording of 'All By My Ownsome' over the credits, then a few quick shots of bustling NYC and cut to the boarding house where the three titular "babies" - chorus girls, not necessarily gold diggers - sleep till noon, bicker adorably ("you two nitwits", etc) and chat with other boarders including the guy Alice White is sweet on, his friend with the comical stammer (a significant prop in this very verbal milieu) and the has-been, older showgirl who laments that "I hate to see you marry outside the money". Infantilisation of women is right there in the title, but most of the patronising "little girl"s come from the avuncular gambler (and yes, sugar daddy) who falls in love with little Alice, hoping she can someday love him back; the girls are exploited - the guy's fellow gamblers hand him binoculars to spy on them rehearsing, and single out Alice because she's "one of the youngest kids on Broadway" - but they're also independent, the film ultimately fair to everyone, and LeRoy makes it incredibly brisk for 1929, compensating for bulky cameras with good coverage and fluent cutting. All that's missing - an enormous absence, admittedly - is Busby Berkeley.

WESTWARD THE WOMEN (70) (William A. Wellman, 1951): Two things might seem iffy nowadays, the comic-relief Japanese sidekick and the notion of women longing above all to be married (you overlooked "the will of a woman when there's a wedding ring in sight," jokes our hero) - but in fact the Japanese man is sympathetically treated, esp. a mere six years after WW2, turning into a fount of commonsense wisdom (albeit something of a wise child, still asexual even at the end), while the women soon become a force of Nature, the film's most salient (and secretly feminist) point being the way the moralistic notion of a "good" (i.e. virtuous) woman slowly gets transformed, through force of hardship and adventure, into a "good" (i.e. capable) woman. The hardships are real, the adventures grim (Leslie Halliwell's contention that the film is "apparently intended mainly to amuse" is more than usually off-base); it kills off a [spoiler] without batting an eye, pauses for a morbid roll-call of the dead after an Indian attack, and Robert Taylor's trail boss is jaw-droppingly unpleasant ("rugged", in the film's parlance), shooting men in cold blood and offering zero sympathy - more like a slap in the face - in times of trouble. The rhythm gets a definite whiff of one-damn-thing-after-another while on the trail, but the satisfyingly fleshed-out epilogue - positing femininity as its own weapon, insisting (once the women have proved they're as good as men) on their identity as women, placing them in charge of their destinies in the most generous and empowering way - feels like a well-earned reward. Surprisingly touching.

OCTOBER 1, 2017

SCANDAL SHEET (75) (Phil Karlson, 1952): Not a new sub-genre, the guilty man forced to oversee the investigation of his own crime (DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE BIG CLOCK both played variations), but the pungent world of the tabloid press - everything from axe murders to what look like real Bowery bums and alkies - adds a shot of sharp urban cynicism, the dialogue is breathless and consistently intelligent (wouldn't be surprised if much of it came verbatim from the novel by Sam Fuller, only one of the three credited writers - James Poe - having much of a reputation) and, best of all, the culprit doesn't behave in the usual panicky manner, being smart and pugnacious enough to know how to avoid suspicion (only we are privy to his anxious frowns and fidgets, when everyone else has gone). The ending seems a bit arbitrary, as noir endings often do, though it can't be easy wrapping this up in under 90 minutes with a touch of INDEMNITY's "Right across the desk from you"/"Closer than that" into the bargain; as enjoyable old-Hollywood entertainments go, it's among the most underrated. May be underrating it now, actually.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

VINCENT, FRANCOIS, PAUL AND THE OTHERS (58) (Claude Sautet, 1974): Actually it's mostly Vincent, who has money problems and other problems - and Yves Montand, with his crooked grin and practised charm, gives a very different (but equally effective) performance to e.g. Jack Lemmon in SAVE THE TIGER, another middle-aged businessman falling apart behind the facade, but the put-upon tone - and sadness at getting older - is comparable. That said, the main driver is the group relationship, which doesn't really work as it should; Francois has betrayed his youthful ideals and lives with a cheating wife, Paul is a blocked writer with a less-than-stellar war record, but the characters are little more than the sum of those traits - and there's also Gerard Depardieu as an aspiring boxer, whose big bout (played, surprisingly, as the film's extended climax) seems freighted with more symbolic weight than it actually carries. Sautet's camera moves well, but doesn't keep revealing unexpected detail the way e.g. Assayas does when covering a crowd scene or party; more parties - like the Sunday get-together that opens the film - might've helped, actually.

DETOUR (77) (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945): Never realised that DETOUR was ... this. Always imagined it as film noir, but it's not exactly film noir - and Ann Savage is no femme fatale, more a shrewish dark-comedy wife with a touch of Warholian freak, sucking hapless hero into a toxic co-dependent relationship. He's already quite unsympathetic, hilariously truculent and belligerent in the opening diner scene and a pretty sullen hitch-hiker to boot, a fatalistic loser who never has (or gives himself) a chance, cf. the usual tempted/fallen film-noir protagonist. Stunningly modern (because sordid and ignoble? probably) yet also dreamlike, narratively strange with a whole other plot that threatens to begin and never does, and Ulmer's resourcefulness in the face of a six-day shoot and a very low budget is obvious - one bit is especially odd, a one-sided phone conversation that's nonetheless punctuated by a shot of the girl listening at the receiver; did they happen to have that one shot from a later scene? - though the pivotal shot of [spoiler] should perhaps have been framed a little lower, or at least with a slight pan to the telephone wire. I assume it's clearer on the big screen.

1945 REVISITED, both second viewings after approx. 20 years:

• AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (80) (Rene Clair)
• A WALK IN THE SUN (64) (Lewis Milestone): I'd forgotten how weird this is: the production insists on realism but Conte and Tyne - an Italian and a Jew - speak the wise-guy patter of noir (or Jimmy Cagney, or the Dead End Kids), the rest of the dialogue is self-consciously poetic, with repeated catch-phrases and flights of fancy, and a mournful ballad also intrudes at intervals. Actually compelling, in its folksy/snappy way, till it sinks into conventional action in the final third; the dialogue is especially pungent and often hilarious, though the big dramatic scenes (like the sergeant "cracking") are predictably Hollywood-fake. A high-flown war movie that could only have been made (without being laughed off the screen) at the end of an actual war, and even then James Agee called it "embarrassing".

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (66) (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, 1961): The final 10 minutes, in which the film is shown to its subjects and comments are invited, helped a lot - if only in allowing me to admit what had been bothering me, viz. that much of it (like the self-indulgent Mary Lou, or even the wordless sequence of Angelo's day at the factory) simply doesn't seem very interesting. Rouch & Morin acknowledge that as a valid point of view, seeing their job as being to document and ask questions rather than supply any 'entertaining' through-line - and there's still enough to beguile, Marceline (*) at the table with the two black men and her borderline-racist comments ("I’d never marry a coloured man") trumped by the revelation of her own moral authority as a Holocaust survivor, or the early interviews asking people in the street if they're happy (possibly thrown in as misdirection, a sample of the shallow vox-pop impulse the film won't be dealing in, yet still vastly enjoyable, especially at this distance). A snapshot of changing times, old left-wing ideology seguing into the new multiculturalism, bohemians (like the painter and his wife) starting to make inroads in bourgeois society; Marker's LE JOLI MAI was livelier, as I recall - but this does have those admirable, self-interrogating last 10 minutes.

(*) I actually profiled Marceline Loridan Ivens in 2009, when she came to Cyprus. Here's the text.

Notes on two medium-length (50-60-minute) movies:

• FELLOW CITIZEN (72) (Abbas Kiarostami, 1983): A modernist drone-music piece where a single melody gets played - with subtle variations - over and over. A gatekeeper cop checks cars for permits, deciding in each case whether to allow the driver through; the excuses he hears are almost the same every time, but tiny things vary (incl. external factors, like what the previous driver happened to say) - and of course human beings vary, their sheer diversity turning out (in the film's final, exhilarating montage) to be Kiarostami's big theme. Also morally complex, in that the cop's behaviour ranges from capricious to compassionate, and of course some would say that the law should be equally applied without any haggling and no-one in authority should have that much discretionary power - but today that cop would probably be replaced by a machine with no discretion at all, and where's the humanity in that?
• NOT RECONCILED (61) (Jean-Marie Straub, 1965): Like Angelopoulos, Straub/Huillet are revealed to have started on the borders of melodrama before withdrawing into their brand of stylised formalism. Their debut isn't as rich as Angelopoulos' RECONSTRUCTION but it's still surprisingly angry and political, as well as made in a jagged style that retains ambiguity. There's a buried plot out of YOUNG TORLESS; conventionally tense scenes like a man trying to get past a hotel concierge, or a bad-tempered lunch between old enemies; stuff about demolition (of the past) and reconciliation (with old evils) that's explicitly linked to post-war Germany - but also very opaque bits, unexplained cuts, and an exchange about the world's salvation lying in sheep. Mostly stimulating.

LOVE AND FASHION (53) (Ljubomir Radicevic, 1960): It's freeing to watch an old movie that's not too over-determined and rigidly structured - but this literally seems to exist as a wafer-thin excuse to showcase three Yugoslav pop singers, two of whom aren't even part of the plot; they just appear (as themselves), with someone saying 'Look, it's [presumably well-known name in early-60s Yugoslavia]'. A bunch of crazy kids have a flying club, and put on a - surprisingly slick-looking - show to raise some cash so they can fly their gliders during the summer hols; the corporate drones and sycophants who'd be mocked in a Frank Tashlin comedy are instead promoted to loveable sidekicks, the reminder that this is a Balkan (as opposed to American) movie being the one who's only there because he's someone's cousin, gets through meetings in a drunken stupor and meets every crisis with a cheerful "Maybe something good will come of this!"; in between is a half-baked love story, even more half-baked since the 'boy' is about twice the age of the 'girl'. Fun, flimsy hybrid of two late-50s/early-60s styles, pop musical and corporate satire - as in Tashlin, or e.g. GIANTS AND TOYS - plus a topical reference to Laika the space dog: "Woof".

O.C. AND STIGGS (42) (Robert Altman, 1985): Always assumed this would be great - a subversive satirical teen comedy by Robert Altman, what's not to love? - but in fact it's heavy going, its satirical targets (Reagan-era, middle-class conformity and complacency) made cartoonishly obvious and hit without much finesse, Altman in the fuzzy distracted mode that didn't really work (for me) in POPEYE either. Basically the low-key, purposely-shapeless anarchy of MASH revisited, with our heroes now 10 years younger - but the cooler-than-thou young duo are actively obnoxious, trying on rebellious attitude like a pair of shades (Stiggs wants to be called Stiggs, rather than Mark, because "it sounds more ridiculous"), and the countervailing weight of blood and darkness (and war) that made MASH special is missing here. Liked a couple of the jokes - esp. Mr. Stiggs' serene response to whether there are cactus plants in Arkansas: "Arkansas is one of the United States. All America is the same" - and Altman does attempt (speaking of cactus) to evoke a sense of place, though Phoenix doesn't look very hot even when the radio talks of 115-degree temperatures, visual texture not being one of his strengths (the editing is also often butt-ugly, but I guess that's a stylistic choice). Also kind of liked that, despite its obvious liberalism, it's homophobic and maybe even racist by strict modern standards - though c'mon, the fact that the president of Gabon is called 'Mr. Bongo' has always been funny.

AUGUST 1, 2017

PANIQUE (64) (Julien Duvivier, 1946): More Pagnol than Simenon, full of scurrying humanity and comic figures like the pompous little taxman with the big moustache - and Duvivier seems more interested in making a mordant comedy in any case, its subject the everyday fascism of the mob mentality (doubtless with an eye to the previous few years). Michel Simon's Hire is a dignified figure, the film itself a strange mix of tones, literally going for a carnival atmosphere - a fortune teller is both absurd and prescient, warning the couple to "beware of gossip, and the month of October" - but also with a film-noir cynicism that's right on the edge of irreverence, literally so when a church choir plays over the petty thief (who's entirely unapologetic about having killed the old lady) and his masochistic moll, who only wishes she could've suffered more to show her love for him. Starts and finishes strong, wanders a bit in the middle.

THE BEGUILED (76) (Don Siegel, 1971)

SAN DEMETRIO LONDON (55) (Charles Frend, 1943): "Nice drop of gun, this." "All right to look at. But guns are like women. Can't tell till you're in action - and then it's too late!" The opening exchange between two salt-of-the-earth ship's gunners confirms this as the Ealing - i.e. slightly more twee - variation on IN WHICH WE SERVE, a propaganda-minded tribute to the Merchant Navy that's based on fact (hence some dated detail like the camera going in closer when a ship turns out to be the HMS Jervis Bay, a significant name at the time) but also contains some fictitious characters, almost certainly including the politically-necessary Yank - known to the rest of the crew as "Yank" - who starts out wild, and predictably gets tamed. It also contains the Ealing spirit of comfy goodwill, shading into complacency when our heroes abandon ship with no great sense of urgency even though their ship is on fire and their cargo is millions of tonnes of petrol (!) - and the various crises seem to be solved a bit too calmly and easily (the solutions are mostly improvised, the heroism of ordinary blokes being part of the point), but the second half works in a physical way and the general tone (by definition) is very agreeable. No surprise that it ends on a judge thanking everyone concerned for giving him the best working day of his life, going on to say how much he's enjoyed listening to "the very modest recital of some gallant gentlemen". Modest gallantry, indeed.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (74) (George A. Romero, 1978)

MORNING PATROL (73) (Nikos Nikolaidis, 1987): Fwiw, I developed a relationship with this movie (even beyond the fact that I profiled Michele Valley, who considers it her favourite of the films she made): the audio was distorted on my DVD player so I moved to the computer, then decided I couldn't watch such incredible images on such a small screen and went back to the player, then (after about half an hour) decided I was missing too much dialogue and moved again, then found a way to fix the audio and moved back yet again - each time re-watching the last few scenes and feeling the atmosphere seep more and more into my psyche (point is, I may be overrating slightly). One-note but intensely beautiful - my kind of beauty, no gaudy colours (mostly just blues and gunmetal-greys) but faded 80s texture and a low-budget netherworld of silhouettes and pools of light - plus a stately, melancholy score, growing increasingly romantic. The blend of dystopian sci-fi and existential angst - actual quote from the voice-over: "We'll both be tormented by the same questions forever: Where do I come from? Where am I going? And how long do I have left to live?" - could be dismissed as sub-Tarkovsky emo, though in fact the first 40 minutes are closer to WALL-E, a dialogue-free ramble through a broken world filled with shards of pop-culture memories (Sinatra in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, a snatch of 'I've Written a Letter to Daddy'); Nikolaidis isn't a (self-)important thinker like Tarkovsky but essentially an obsessive film buff - stay away from movie theatres, our heroine is warned, "they're a trap" - revelling in the power of light to create a particular world. Full of muted yearning, and just so beautiful.

JULY 1, 2017

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (68) (Seijun Suzuki, 1963): The material is tedious, but Suzuki attacks it with brio. Visual flourishes aim at disorientation - a b&w prologue explodes into manic laughing girls in glorious colour; yakuza gather at a nightclub in a soundproof room, the action in the club going on behind them (later, a movie gets projected on the wall in the villains' lair), then the lights go out mysteriously as our hero is led away and a fan-dancer in pink seems to rise up from the floor as the camera pans - but the real disorientation lies in his mixture of extreme intensity and deliberate distance, also encapsulated in the stylised languor of Jo Shishido. A junkie clutches at a chair with such frenzy that she rips the sawdust out of the seat, the colours scream arrestingly - a blood-red carpet, a dust storm filtered in sickly yellow - but the cutting is purposely careless, the rhythms detached in a jazzy way, and it's always clear that Suzuki's interest in the YOJIMBO-ish shenanigans is limited, except insofar as he can mine them for glimpses of obsession and sexual dysfunction. (Unlike Bava, a comrade in some ways - delirious visual style applied to genre - his antic sense of humour contains a certain impatience.) Design is everything, from a modish red-and-white telephone to the marshalling of people in the frame when the gang are in conference; a film buff's delight, but it does sag occasionally.

1990 REVISITED: Second viewings, mostly unseen in >20 years. Prompted by a re-viewing of SINGAPORE SLING, which ended up making my (highly unsatisfactory) 1990 list:

• SINGAPORE SLING (71) (Nikos Nikolaidis)
• A WORLD WITHOUT PITY (57) (Eric Rochant). Easy to see what appealed to me at the time - the free-spirited hero who demands nothing from others (incl. girlfriends) and gives no commitment in return. Looked at today, he seems very smug and sophomoric, the attempts to cast him as the Voice of a Generation ("What have they left us? A bright future? The European market? We've got nothing left but to fall in love, like fools") are thin, and I also notice details like the actor playing the brother who, called upon to play a teenager, gives a frantically tic-ridden performance. On the other hand, 2017 also makes me notice this, in the closing credits: "Collaboration au scenario: Arnaud Desplechin".
• DARKMAN (70) (Sam Raimi). I'd forgotten how bonkers this is - not a superhero movie but closer to a mad-scientist movie, turning on a dime (the structure lurches wildly) into stylish, unconvincing action movie. Not sure I approve, but it's so full of violent/comic energy and random weirdness (doctor Jenny Agutter's inappropriate glee after sticking a pin in her patient; a bizarre line-reading of "Would you like a martini"; "Yes... Thank you"), not to mention Raimi's freakshow operatics in EVIL DEAD mode. Also so much shorter and brisker than current MCU-type fantasies (96 minutes, yay). Colin Friels is the smooth corporate villain who turns out (wtf?) to enjoy balancing precariously on high-steel structures, Frances McDormand adds soul and a memorable kiss-off: "If you're not going to kill me, I have things to do."

THE DYING SWAN (53) (Yevgeni Bauer, 1917): Little more than an anecdote, with a morbid aspect that doesn't really do it any favours; the Poe-like figure of the artist who's obsessed with painting Death seems a bit strained and artificial after the naturalistic romance - and betrayal - of the early scenes. Also, the punchline could've worked (again, in a darkly humorous Poe way) if the focus were purely on the artist's unsuccessful attempts - meaning he has to go 'to the next level' - but making the heroine in love again is confusing, and just seems arbitrarily cruel. All that said, rhythm and compositions have a definite freshness and appeal (esp. compared to most of what I've seen of the 1910s), making me want to watch more Bauer. Tinted dream sequence with the grabbing hands ftw, obviously.

BUSTER AND BILLIE (62) (Daniel Petrie, 1974): Somewhere between coming-of-age TV drama and the rural-American Gothic that was popular in the mid-70s (see e.g. ALL THE KIND STRANGERS from the same year - and of course TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was also in the same year), an ambience also glimpsed in songs like 'Ode to Billy Joe'. Doubt this kind of rural America exists anymore, and maybe it didn't even at the time - this is actually horny-teen nostalgia in the vein of SUMMER OF '42, taking place in 1948 - but it feels authentic, both because the film doesn't editorialise (70s preoccupations like race are entirely absent) and because the characters are unusual: Buster a sympathetic jock, something of a bad boy but protective of his friends, good to his parents (who are still implicitly shell-shocked over losing a son in the war), at one point opining with some desperation that "You can't think about life, you just gotta live it", Billie looking like a backwoods Lena Dunham but withdrawn, soft, very close to being what the locals would call 'touched'. Obviously minor, rather loosely plotted, with a pivotal line-reading (you'll know it when you hear it) so bad it's more likely to elicit laughter - yet the modest ambitions are an asset nowadays (it's great, for instance, that neither set of parents is given an 'arc' per se), and there's still a simmering strain of rural weirdness which explodes in the final stretch. Also worth it for Freddy Krueger as the funny-looking friend, suggesting (without having to state) that Buster likes shielding weaklings and misfits - like Billie later - and joining him in a day-trip to the beach that's all the more memorable for being gratuitous.

RIDE A CROOKED TRAIL (67) (Jesse Hibbs, 1958): Way above average - almost a major discovery, in fact - except that the script rushes the second half, the better to wrap the whole thing up in 88 minutes. First half sets up surefire tension (an outlaw posing as a Marshal), adds a wry twist - the criminal's deception rhymed with the deception of the prostitute who poses as his wife, i.e. a 'respectable woman' - then fires the whole thing up through a wonderfully juicy Walter Matthau (already middle-aged, at 38) as an alcoholic Judge Roy Bean figure; when cadaverous Henry Silva also turns up as a smirking gangster, the stage seems set for a classic - but Matthau recedes later on, the plotting gets sketchy, and a rather generic kid character is forced to shoulder way too much dramatic ambivalence. Audie Murphy's (lack of) presence also a problem, though it's made to work; our hero's nebulous nickname - "Maybe" - is all too appropriate.

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (56) (Rowland V. Lee, 1934): Don't the guards get suspicious when they see Dantes sleeping in the same position every night, year after year? ("The guards must think the figure in the bed is you, asleep," explains the Abbe, the dummy in the bedsheets being presumably not yet a cliché in 1934.) Did the Abbe really draw those ridiculously elaborate paintings, maps, zodiac wheels, etc on the walls of his cell using only chunks of chalk? Shouldn't the sailors react more forcefully - e.g. take the loot for themselves - when Dantes comes back to the ship a millionaire? (I guess it's possible that, having found the treasure, he kept quiet about it and went back by himself later.) Mildly embarrassed to be worrying about all these dumb plausibility questions - then again that's the level on which this works, lacking both cinematic flair and the kind of psychological strangeness Charles Laughton brought to LES MISERABLES. Lee is a hack, of course, but it's surprising to see Philip Dunne's name among the writers, given the script's lack of creative solutions - esp. at the end, when both of the Count's dramatic dilemmas (whether to fight the duel with young Mondego, then whether to defend himself in court or protect his victim's daughter) are simply allowed to resolve themselves and/or collapse into bathos ("I'll write him a note..."). Still a gripping plot, esp. in the second half, but that's Dumas of course.

JUNE 1, 2017

MAY 1, 2017

THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (57) (Valerio Zurlini, 1976): The cast is starry (if mostly dubbed), the images hauntingly beautiful, but overall this is something of a disappointment. The rocky, unearthly locations recall the previous year's THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, and that spirit of old-fashioned adventure is there at first - though in fact it's a red herring and that's perfectly fine, in fact it may be even better, yet the film never quite achieves the existential-nightmare quality it's trying for. The fort is a place where waiting is initially a chore, then a Kafkaesque trap where escape keeps getting deferred, then finally a necessity - one thinks of Cavafy's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' - or maybe the waiting is Life itself and the Tartars are Death (the ending makes this clear), its approach endlessly obsessed-over but also denied, because waiting for it is endlessly preferable to confronting it (Death hangs heavy over the place; Drogo's first approach to the fort is through the cemetery). Could've been great but it needed to be more surreal/artificial, in the style of e.g. the elaborate scene where the officers introduce themselves one-by-one - an overly-mannered hothouse quality, a sense of Time standing still. Zurlini doesn't fully commit to the strangeness, trying to keep the all-star prestige drama going too - but the characters never really matter and the plotting is lumpy (I actually thought there was a reel missing, given how quickly our wide-eyed hero goes to his CO and asks for a transfer), so it falls between two stools. THE NINTH CONFIGURATION is a better variation on such material.

DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (63) (John Newland, 1973): Made for TV, and not today's Golden Age of Cable but 70s network TV when horror had to stay PG-ish, with obvious fades-to-black for commercial breaks which must've totally ruined the atmosphere. Newland's solution is perhaps counter-intuitive, viz. to avoid very much subtle build-up - the haunted-house spookiness is established straight away and the monsters are aggressive, shown in full by the half-hour mark and making no secret of their evil intentions - placing all his chips on the convention of the terrified woman whose loved ones (ambitious husband, in this case) don't believe her and in fact are angry at her. The result is intense psychological drama, admirable in the Val Lewton way of finding creative hacks to obvious limitations; also loveable for stray 70s detail like the floral hippy fashions on some briefly-glimpsed extras, plus the friend who - being a woman - is terrified of mice: "I don't care what Women's Lib tells me, the very mention of a mouse drives me crazy!".

APRIL 1, 2017

THE BRIDGE (60) (Bernhard Wicki, 1959): Hamstrung by real life, or at least I assume this is how the true story ended, with the boys defending the bridge - but the decision to end as a big action movie coarsens the ironies: we know from the start that the kids are doomed, one way or the other (the slightly weird atonal music in the early scenes shows that the film knows it too), so it adds nothing to see them turn into soldiers. Looks for a while like it'll be something much more poignant, a film where everyone in the army actually tries to protect the boys but their own misguided idealism ends up destroying them anyway - and that's definitely in there too, but Wicki is perhaps too much of a journeyman to make it poetic (or perhaps he had no choice, in that the story didn't resolve itself poetically in real life). Still well-crafted and of course historically important, the first real suggestion by a German director that, guilt notwithstanding, the German people were victims too; about three-quarters of the boys are memorable - incl. runty, jug-eared Sigi - which is not too bad really.

THE FALLS (73) (Peter Greenaway, 1980): Obvious echoes of Monty Python and Georges Perec ("Life: A User's Manual" had only come out in French at that point, but I bet Greenaway knew about it), one could even mention Tolkien in the world-building and ornate character names. Obviously 'too much' at this length, exhausting, boring even, but the entries that score - maybe due to some structuring element, like being played off close-ups of train timetables or a child's voice telling bird jokes - are even more memorable for being interspersed by a few entries that just sort of sit there, and (as e.g. in ZORN'S LEMMA) repetition ends up building - possibly spurious - links between random elements that keep cropping up (the word "clout", the Goldhawk Road). All of which doesn't remotely capture the fertility of Greenaway's imagination or the breadth of his inventiveness - even if 'breadth' seems an odd word for something so obsessive and single-minded. Verbal humour abounds, characters are described as "frugivorous" or "a collector of berets", their ailments include not just paralysis or bone-marrow disease but also "a preference for travel in spring and autumn", something is described as being named after "the collective noun for immature carrier pigeons" - yet the film is often visually beautiful too, and Michael Nyman's supersized closing credit speaks to the importance of his music. Who knew that Greenaway started out as an entertainer?

MY FATHER THE HERO (56) (Gerard Lauzier, 1991): Writing this two weeks later, I find I've forgotten most of the details - though in fact the same might've been true had I written it two hours later. Determinedly forgettable, maybe even deliberately so as a way of drawing the sting from its controversial premise, despite being made in a more relaxed time when that premise (even with the echoes of paedophilia) was considered risqué rather than tasteless. Plotting is very even-tempered, scenes simmer at the same general temperature whether Dad is reacting to his daughter's deception, trying to rescue her after she's pulled out to sea, or just having fun in Mauritius (the sub-plot with the lonely woman who fancies him is typically half-baked, ending in a kind of tepid friendship). Actually quite amiable, gently-escalating farce (except when it's slapstick), and Gerard Depardieu - in a light, understated performance - is a very cool dad.

1981 REVISITED: Doing maintenance work on my 1981 list, so I re-watched a few contenders (all second or third viewings, most of them unseen in >20 years):

• DIVA (73) (Jean-Jacques Beineix). "C'est pas banale ici," admits a cop, looking around our hero's apartment - and there's a strenuous effort to avoid the banal throughout this lovely bauble (when exposition absolutely must be ladled out, Beineix jazzes up the scene by having a mysterious bell repeatedly tolling somewhere offscreen). So much to treasure, from the diva's sweetly platonic love affair with her puppyish fan, to the loft decorated with wrecked cars, to Dominique Pinon - "I don't like Beethoven" - channelling the killer from THE KILLERS, but bottom line goes as follows: First half-hour absolutely magical, a sensuous near-wordless thriller to rival the best of De Palma, middle section less amazing but the car-and-subway chase is a thrilling action sequence, final act - specifically the two big set-pieces with the crooked cops - unfortunately sinks into banality, though even here there are nice touches: his immaculate white vintage car destroyed by a long-distance bomb, Richard Bohringer calmly opens a garage door to reveal an identical one.
• THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY (61) (Jamie Uys). Never really got the PC objections; yes, the Bushmen are idealised and arguably treated like children - "the little people of the Kalahari" - but if so they're very pure and very wise children, never less than admirable. There's a well-worked slapstick scene (the runaway car) amid the undercranked action and cute animals, and it's still rather charming, but on second viewing it becomes hard not to notice that the woman is just spoiled and useless, and the (Communist) rebels are just bumbling villains. Likeably second-rate apart from the Bushman, with his great Frodo moment at the very end.
• MEPHISTO (65) (Istvan Szabo). Should I sculpt your face in clay or in bronze? wonders a flirtatious sculptor - and the film seems to have the same confusion, clay being the obvious material since our hero (an ambitious actor) is happy to accommodate himself to those in power, but bronze also an option since the emphasis is often on his ruthlessness and calculating nature. It makes a difference since his psychology is the whole show, the film being a showcase for a charismatic turn - Klaus-Maria Brandauer's virtuosity is almost too exuberant - made in a rather stodgy style. Given the running-time, a more elaborate Message than 'Don't dance with the Devil' might've been expected; still, I wasn't bored.
• THREE BROTHERS (68) (Francesco Rosi). A grand experiment that really doesn't work, even Pauline Kael's rave review admitting as much: "With so much greatness in it, why is it that THREE BROTHERS doesn't quite take?". Rosi wants a fluid structure with flashbacks and dreams (or flash-forwards?), and a State of the Nation debate - the Red Brigades stuff is interesting, but feels too time-specific for the timeless themes surrounding it - and a family saga connecting the rest, all in under two hours; it's impossible, and what suffers most are the three brothers who are all under-explained (the teacher only gets a couple of scenes). Lumpy to watch, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; the idea of hopes and significant memories acting as secret indicators - life suddenly broken up by inner life - is ambitious and poetic, and Rosi also intercuts the drama with mysterious scenes like the little girl playing in the grain silo. I now recall that I was inspired to write a (never-filmed) short script after watching it the first time 20+ years ago, and it's easy to see why.
• SOUTHERN COMFORT (73) (Walter Hill). A close-quarters nightmare, the shots feeling too full and claustrophobic right from the start, then also a black comedy with the bickering men often the architects of their own misfortune (cf. DELIVERANCE, with its more quasi-mystical tone). Sags in the middle, but dialogue and performances are excellent - Keith Carradine remains a genius without honour, based on this and CHOOSE ME - and the ending is ingenious in allowing all possibilities to remain on the table (using music to add unreality) right to the final seconds. The plot suggests slasher movie - picked off one-by-one, etc - but this is way richer, even beyond the Vietnam allegory.
• SUPERMAN II (58) (Richard Lester). Lester's sense of comedy and jazzier visual style are welcome, but (probably due to well-known production troubles) this really falls apart in the second half, feeling very rushed and incoherent. Liked it more than the actual rating, and no-one watches superhero films for the plot, but still distractingly shoddy; kind of amazed it didn't bother me so much as a kid, actually (though I do recall being very confused by the business with the green crystal).

MARCH 1, 2017

ROPE (49) (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

GHOST IN THE SHELL (55) (Mamoru Oshii, 1995): I don't envy those who've been tasked with rejigging this for the live-action remake, because its strengths are very mid-90s - an impressively expansive look (for pre-CGI), and an excitable technophilia from the days when we all said things like 'information superhighway' ("The Net is limitless," is the final line, not meaning Internet but close enough). The plot has to do with machines becoming self-aware, cyber-brains in cyborg bodies waking up to "the consciousness I call 'me'" - a "ghost" is a soul, more or less - which seems a bit jejune nowadays. Contemplative moments are the best (as in THE SKY CRAWLERS, the other Oshii I've seen), frantic action of e.g. the first 10 minutes seems out of place; another reason to fear the remake.

TOKYO CHORUS (67) (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931): Slapstick Ozu and Student Comedy Ozu segue into Domestic Ozu - the most successful section, with the scene-stealing kid who got his own film a year later with I WAS BORN, BUT... - then it's social comment (Hoover's policies haven't made a difference to us yet, says one Depression-hit Tokyo resident to another, anticipating globalisation by almost a century) and a final section that seems a little bland compared to the family stuff. Very picaresque, 20-something Ozu still trying things out, there's a urinal joke and a brief commotion because "a bear broke out of its cage" (we never see the bear, nor is it relevant). Working-class solidarity is one kind of through-line, while the theme of personal will - and personal dignity - over regimentation is there from the very first reel, but one mostly recalls the graceful throwaway touches: the camera staying on a forgotten fish flopping on the ground at the end of a truncated fishing trip, or the two kids - quixotically trying to mend broken vinyl records with spit - passing quickly through the frame as a scene fades out, both of them working intently on their doomed vinyl project.

MR. THANK YOU (63) (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936): As in many early Talkies, the apparent sloppiness - like the jaunty music score that plays wall-to-wall in the background, not quite synched up to the action - is actually liberating, the impression of looseness and freedom made even stronger by Shimizu's own sloppiness (he seems quite bad at building narrative, based on the three films I've seen; plot just occurs without much set-up) and the sense of the rural bus as a surprisingly fluid world; people get on and off, move around, even abandon the bus and decide to walk to their destination if something upsets them. Not a conventionally 'good' film, but two things happen: first, the ramshackle quality allows simple humanity to shine through - the point of the film is compassion and courtesy; the titular driver is known by his politeness to pedestrians who make way for the bus, even though they probably shouldn't be in the middle of the road in the first place - and secondly, the film's relentlessly dark picture of Japan in crisis (jobless men, girls being sold into prostitution) clashes intriguingly with the stubbornly light tone. When Mr. Thank You says "Sometimes I think I'd be better off driving a hearse" or "These days, when a baby's born you don't know whether to offer congratulations", followed immediately by jaunty music - well, it may just be sloppy, but it's memorable.

LE TROU (78) (Jacques Becker, 1960): Surely there's a pun in the title (they dig a hole while 'in the hole') though I don't know if 'doing time' also works in French - yet time is essential to this movie, the time it takes for a hole to be dug in real time, the necessity of keeping track of time (e.g. with the improvised hourglass that's vital to the plot) and the emphasis on physical process in general. Physicality is also important, the physical proximity of five men in a cramped prison cell - and surely no American movie of the time would've shown the open toilet in the corner being used (albeit only for peeing), though it's also much gentler - more humane - than most American prison movies (or the same year's CONCRETE JUNGLE from Britain): the prisoners live in relative harmony, the warden is a humorous soul, the guards often turn a blind eye and e.g. deliver the thieving plumbers for punishment. A strong sense of functional ecosystems, one above ground and the other below, and a strong sense of community beyond class divisions, exploded in the ending which is even more potent for being abrupt when the rest of the film is so deliberate. One particular cut in the last 10 minutes is among the most shocking single cuts in all cinema. I can say no more.

THE WOMEN (65) (George Cukor, 1939): Given the theme, some infusion of 21st-century political correctness is probably inevitable - though the pre-feminism shouldn't be viewed as simplistic, envisaging more than one way for women to cope with their situation; Mother's old-school insistence that a wife should simply put up with a straying husband is a world away from the serial divorcees on the train to Reno, though oddly similar to Marjorie Main's battered bumpkin and the fashion model's rather pathetic philosophy ("What else have we got to give?"); and of course our "spoiled" society heroines are somewhere in between. The underlying point, however, is the powerlessness of women, emphasised by the gimmick (the fact that men are invisible even though the plot revolves around them makes them seem akin to gods, regulating the affairs of mortals from afar) and even the opening credits, which not only equate each heroine with an animal but also define most of them by their husbands' names - a social and dramatic presumption that's hard to overlook, even though Cukor is a very graceful director (he's forever finding unobtrusive ways to open up the drama, incl. camera moves and e.g. following a little dog from one space to another). Still a play, with an obvious three-act structure that hobbles it slightly imho - but the actresses are game, even staid Norma Shearer, there's a Hedda Hopper joke and a swastika joke, and it may be unfashionable when Mother opines that a man who cheats is essentially "tired of himself" (it's unfashionable even in the context of the movie), but it still made me wish that modern-day moralists would judge a little less, and try to understand a little more.

ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN (62) (Charles Barton, 1940): Peter Lorre is the whole show here, though there's a couple of good twists in the second half when our hero - an undercover agent who seems to have no plan except dumb resistance - becomes a bit more proactive. Lorre employs his arched eyebrow and velvety voice and adds something rather hilarious, the supervillain as nagging, fault-finding husband: "I had a very annoying afternoon... Please, Lorraine, put on something else, I don't like that". He's bored and heavy-lidded almost to the point of self-parody, but it's still delicious - also there are night shots where the leaves in the canopy of jungle reflect little pinpricks of light, like diamonds, and at least one appearance of the proto-noir effect of light streaming in through Venetian blinds, striping the heroine in shadow. Not bad, for 67 minutes.

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (59) (D.W. Griffith, 1919): "The Yellow Man watched Lucy often. The beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart". Easy to get hung up on nomenclature and miss the sensitivity and beauty of what "the Chink" stands for - not to mention, on a more prosaic level, the fact that the villain is explicitly tagged as a racist who "hates those not born in the same great country as himself" (more surprisingly, a Christian missionary on his way to China to convert "the heathen" is viewed with unnmistakable derision). Griffith's liberalism doesn't quite extend to miscegenation - the Chinaman's love for the white girl remains "a pure and holy thing" - though even that is successfully tagged as an indicator of spirituality rather than a cop-out; the central relationship is a sanctuary, an oasis, cross-cut with an otherwise-irrelevant boxing match to highlight its serenity (it's also a positive flipside to the equally languid opium den where the Yellow Man whiles away his hours). The connection is established physically, through body language (both soulmates favour an attitude of wistful repose), though in fact the film has little more to say once the two get together; dramatically speaking, the final act is a muddle - not to mention that the YM seems terribly quick with a gun, for such a gentle soul. Feel I'm underrating it but in fact the great stuff is mostly incidental, the dramatic core not very satisfying. Still would be worth preserving just for the unearthly expression on Lillian Gish's face - her big sloe eyes and squirrel features terrified yet faraway, as if lost in a dream - in the early scene where she comes home to confront her abuser.

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

GET CRAZY (77) (Allan Arkush, 1983): My only regret is that I watched this late at night, and was forced to keep it down so as not to disturb the neighbours; like THE TREE OF LIFE (actually much more than THE TREE OF LIFE), it demands to be played loud. Hard to pin down its exuberance, but it may be understood as disarmingly silly (but not stupid) comedy with Jay Ward-style cartoonish detail - the villain has two henchmen who follow him everywhere he goes, one on each flank, paraphrasing everything he says: "His time is past." "A has-been!" "History!"; "Exactly." "Precisely!" "To the letter!" - getting cross-bred with putting-on-a-show movie then launched into the stratosphere by exhilarating, unexpectedly tight blues/rock performances. Anarchy meets vaudeville meets 'Rolling Stone' magazine, rock'n roll gets restored to its prelapsarian state as a rowdy good time. Also: a talking penis.

ROCKY (72) (John G. Avildsen, 1976): Hadn't seen this before, for some reason, though I've seen the sequels - which is surely the best way to watch it, the better to marvel at its honesty and naturalism. Is this modest meathead chatting to his pet turtles really the same Rocky Balboa who fights (and wins) the Cold War in a boxing ring in ROCKY IV? Is this almost pathologically shy wallflower really Adrian, who shows little trace of pathology in the rest of the saga? The boxing is almost irrelevant, the first hour merely observing Rocky as he leads the humdrum life of an ageing small-timer, already something of a has-been at 30 - "There's nothin' special about you," snarls acerbic Mickey at the boxing gym - hanging out with (surprisingly troubled) Paulie at the meat freezer and trying to court Adrian by telling her a bad joke every morning. Even his big break comes out of nowhere, his training doesn't have any fancy Hollywood arcs or dramatic devices (he just learns to punch really hard, the rest being simple desire) and even his nickname - 'The Italian Stallion' - turns out to be unglamorous: "I invented that about eight years ago, when I was eating dinner". Mickey's an opportunist and not a nice man (he blows up at the young autograph hunters), the final fight turns into a brawl and a test of guts and stamina - not so much technique - and the sense of working-class community, nasty people generously excused as being "in a bad mood", is a flipside to working-class repression, soundly exploded by outbursts of hysterical rage. That doesn't appear in the sequels much, either.

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (66) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980): "That thing in each man which silently screams: 'I am not a machine'..." The repeated stylistic tic of slowing down the action to a series of individual frames does make people look a bit like machines malfunctioning, and of course industrial capitalism is ever-present - but the recurring theme is human contact, esp. physical contact, angrily rejected in the early scenes (the director - "Godard" - is propositioned by the hotel porter, who's apparently a big fan and expresses a desire to bugger him; later, "Godard" touches his wife's hair affectionately, and is pushed away) then turned into a sleazy transaction in the world of prostitutes, culminating in the corporate boss who turns it into (yes) a machine - posing three people in a sexual arrangement with instructions to make certain sounds when touched in a certain way. The dirtiest Godard I've seen (not a bad thing), with less of his wordplay and philosophical quotes, more of his provocateur's shock effects. Also fuel for those who accuse him of misogyny, and he does seem to get a kick out of female humiliation even while successfully getting it to mean something more; 26-year-old Isabelle Huppert trumps all attempts to degrade her through sheer nonchalance.

BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET (64) (Mario Monicelli, 1958): Second viewing, no change in rating but renewed appreciation for the little-man compassion amid the slapstick; the Italian title - 'I Soliti Ignoti', i.e. 'Persons Unknown' - is more appropriate, since these small-time crooks are indeed unknown (and fated to remain so). Vittorio Gassman may be too conventionally handsome for the maladroit, stammering leader, whose attempts to be cool always end in failure (if he throws a knife at the door, it bounces back harmlessly), but he makes it work. The jokes are patchy, but the punchline where the robbers break through the wall surely brings the house down - no pun intended! - when seen in a theatre, and the dialogue is sometimes delightful: "Hey kid, you know a guy called Mario who lives around here?" "There's a thousand Marios around here." "Yes, but this Mario's a thief!" "There's still a thousand."

JANUARY 1, 2017