American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)

Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, and Ron Howard in American Graffiti

Curt: Richard Dreyfuss
Steve: Ron Howard
John: Paul Le Mat
Terry: Charles Martin Smith
Laurie: Cindy Williams
Debbie: Candy Clark
Carol: Mackenzie Phillips
Disc Jockey: Wolfman Jack
Joe: Bo Hopkins
Carlos: Manuel Padilla Jr.
Ants: Beau Gentry
Bob Falfa: Harrison Ford

Director: George Lucas
Screenplay: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Cinematography: Jan D'Alquen, Ron Eveslage; Haskell Wexler, visual consultant
Art direction: Dennis Lynton Clark
Film editing: Verna Fields, Marcia Lucas, George Lucas

American moviegoers, like Victorian novel-readers, love closure. They want movies to end with all the plot threads tied, with the good rewarded and the bad punished, and with a sense that nothing more needs to be told -- unless you're talking about movies that are obviously designed to springboard into sequels. George Lucas obviously felt the need for closure on American Graffiti, which is why he provided two endings. In the first, John wins his race with Bob Falfa, Terry and Debbie decide to meet again, Steve and Laurie are reconciled, and Curt goes off to college with a symbolic resolution of his pursuit of the Blonde in the T-Bird provided by a glimpse of the car from an airplane window. But because American Graffiti is set in 1962, and an awful lot happened to the generation portrayed in the film, Lucas also felt obliged to provide a second ending: a screen card that tells us John was killed by a drunk driver, Terry went missing in action in Vietnam, Steve sells insurance in Modesto, and Curt is "a writer in Canada." Critics have made some serious comments about this second ending's failure to tell us what happened to the female characters in the film: Laurie, Debbie, and Carol. And they're right, of course. But I think Lucas would have been better advised to stop with the first ending: His characters, with the possible exception of Curt, are not so well-drawn that they need to be dragged into the real world; the second ending feels more like a need to make a statement about the Vietnam War than a necessary coda to his story. American Graffiti is often compared to Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), another film about young men aimlessly lingering on the brink of maturity, and Lucas's Curt is an echo of Fellini's Moraldo, who at the end of the film leaves their small town for an uncertain future. But Fellini was content just to put Moraldo on the train and end his film, whereas the demand for closure pushes Lucas further. Fellini was pushed further, too, of course: We can see the characters played by Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) as possible versions of what Moraldo might have become. I somehow regret that Lucas didn't find that way of taking Curt into the future; instead he got sidetracked into a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. American Graffiti remains a landmark film, not only because it made Lucas very rich and able to indulge his bent toward space opera, but also because it established the teen-movie genre, sometimes for better -- e.g., Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) -- but more often for worse -- e.g., the Bob Clark Porky's movies (1981, 1983) and even the dud sequel More American Graffiti (Bill Norton, 1979).

Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)

Luca Chikovani and Adriano Tardiolo in Happy as Lazzaro

Lazzaro: Adriano Tardiolo
Antonio as a girl: Agnese Graziani
Tancredi as a boy: Luca Chikovani
Antonia as an adult: Alba Rohrwacher
Ultimo: Sergi López
Nicola: Natalino Basso
Tancredi as an adult: Tommaso Ragno
Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna: Nicoletta Braschi

Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Screenplay: Alice Rohrwacher
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Production design: Emita Frigato
Film editing: Nelly Quettier

The title character of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro is the perfect embodiment of the Holy Fool archetype, the naïf whose steady detachment from what "normal" people call reality provides a corrective influence on an increasingly haywire and self-obsessed society. Lazzaro begins as a worker on a hellish tobacco plantation somewhere in the heart of Italy, run by a marchesa whose sharecroppers are little more than slaves, kept in poverty and ignorance. But Lazzaro is happy, doing his part to help out everyone without complaint. And his happiness infects the surly son of the marchesa, Tancredi, who is bored and alienated, so that he enlists Lazzaro's help to fake his own kidnapping, while hiding out on a remote corner of the estate that Lazzaro shows him. Tancredi's ruse leads the police to investigate and to uncover the marchesa's illegal operation, shutting down the plantation and rescuing the workers from their enslavement. But in the midst of this upheaval, Lazzaro's part in the story takes a sharp and magical turn, as time passes and the scene shifts from rural exploitation to urban anomie. I'm not one for avoiding "spoilers," but the richness of discovery is part of this film's remarkable essence. Things happen that couldn't really happen, but even within the context of a brutal portrait of the real world they feel exactly right. Rohrwacher deftly avoids a descent into romantic primitivism while bringing to light some harsh truths about the world we have made for ourselves. In the end, we are led to contemplate the nature of happiness itself.

First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

Toller: Ethan Hawke
Mary: Amanda Seyfried
Jeffers: Cedric the Entertainer
Esther: Victoria Hill
Michael: Philip Ettinger
Balq: Michael Gaston

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Grace Yun
Film editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music: Brian Williams

"Derivative" is a much-overused word in film criticism: Everything comes from something else, and even the film praised as "original" is eventually going to reveal its sources. So it's not a knock on Paul Schrader's First Reformed that it feels so strongly influenced by the directors Schrader wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. What directors haven't been influenced by them, or at least had to acknowledge that the intensity and commitment of their work suffers in comparison? The resemblance to Ozu's work is purely stylistic in First Reformed: a spareness and stillness of image, sometimes even a sense of claustrophobia in Schrader's determined use of the so-called "Academy ratio," the 1:37:1 frame familiar to us from movies made before widescreen technique became common to moviemaking. A more direct borrowing comes from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) whose title character has intestinal torments that are reflected in those of Schrader's upstate New York priest, Toller. And the spectrum of religious faith, from non-belief to obsession, exhibited by Schrader's characters is found among the characters of Dreyer's Ordet (1955). But the film that seems to have most directly influenced Schrader is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), whose ailing, doubt-ridden pastor finds himself unable to prevent a troubled member of his congregation from committing suicide. There are times when Schrader's cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, even seems to be copying the setups of Bergman's, Sven Nykvist: Both, for example, give us views of the preachers facing out upon chilly, nearly empty sanctuaries, backed up by the emblems of the faith they barely cling to. If anything, Schrader's film is a kind of updated version of Winter Light; in First Reformed the existential dread of the times is no longer annihilation by nuclear warfare but instead the uncertainly looming cataclysm of climate change. Schrader of course goes beyond mere time-shifting: Ethan Hawke's Toller is not just a latter-day version of Gunnar Björnstrand's Tomas Ericsson, but a contemporary man with contemporary problems like dealing with the clammy hold that corporate capitalism has on his church, in the form of Michael Gaston's Balq and the toadying Jeffers, the preacher for a "prosperity Gospel"-style megachurch, surprisingly played by Cedric the Entertainer. And Toller finds ways to console the widow of the man who commits suicide that might have shocked Ericsson. This is the point at which derivativeness becomes a virtue in Schrader's film, when we can superimpose Bergman's vision of faith onto our own, more than half a century later. There are moments when Schrader's film seems to miss the mark and slip over into mere thriller-movie melodrama, particularly the introduction of ecoterrorism in the form of a suicide vest, so that we miss the maturity with which filmmakers like Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer resolved their characters' spiritual crises. But Hawke, in a performance that is more assured and sensitive than any I've seen him give, holds the film together admirably. 

Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949)

Juano Hernandez and David Brian in Intruder in the Dust

Gavin Stevens: David Brian
Chick Mallison: Claude Jarman Jr.
Lucas Beauchamp: Juano Hernandez
Nub Gowrie; Porter Hall
Miss Eunice Habersham: Elizabeth Patterson
Crawford Gowrie: Charles Kemper
Sheriff Hampton: Will Geer
Vinson Gowrie: David Clarke
Aleck: Elzie Emanuel

Director: Clarence Brown
Screenplay: Ben Maddow
Based on a novel by William Faulkner
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Art direction: Randall Duell
Film editing: Robert Kern
Music: Adolph Deutsch

Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust is the film that awakened me to a lifelong obsession with movies and how they're made. I was not yet 9 years old when the MGM film crew came to Oxford, Mississippi, where I was born and grew up, but I hung around the making of it as much as school and my parents would allow. The filming was an unprecedented event in the town, which had more or less taken for granted that one of its residents was a well-known author but also something of an eccentric. The call went out for extras, and my grandfather signed up. I can still spot him in the opening scenes in which the sheriff's car bringing Lucas Beauchamp to jail enters the town square and passes the Confederate monument in front of the county courthouse. He's one of the men standing there who turn and watch the car go by, a small man with a hat and pipe, wearing khaki trousers. The film also had its world premiere in Oxford in October 1949, at the Lyric Theater, one of the town's two movie houses, an event almost as memorable as the actual filming, partly because the shabby old theater, a converted livery stable, had been dolled up with fresh paint and glittery posters, and an actual spotlight scanned the sky in front of the theater. I must have seen the film there a few days later -- my parents were regular moviegoers and usually took me with them -- but it wasn't until it turned up on television many years later that I was able to assess it as a film, and to realize with pleasure that it's a very fine one indeed. Actually, I think it's better than the William Faulkner novel on which it's based. Critics have complained about the prolix self-righteousness of Gavin Stevens's speeches, but they're mercifully kept to a minimum in the film whereas they go on for pages in the book. The chief flaw of both film and book may be that neither Faulkner nor screenwriter Ben Maddow could decide whether they wanted a whodunit wrapped in a fable about racism, or a story about racism that incidentally contains a murder mystery. I think the film is partly rescued from this problem by Robert Surtees's mastery of black-and-white cinematography, which brings a film noir quality to the movie, especially in the scenes shot in the old Lafayette County Jail, where a single bare light bulb often apparently lights the shabby surroundings. And while the midnight digging up of Vinson Gowrie's grave by two teenagers and an elderly woman is one of the more improbable twists of the plot, Surtees's camera and lighting give at least an illusion of plausibility while also evoking horror movie chills. (One thing I particularly like about this scene is that Aleck, the black teenager played by Elzie Emanuel, isn't put through the usual degrading movie jokes about blacks afraid of graveyards. He goes along with the plan gamely, but also gets a good laugh line later when the sheriff asks Chick and Aleck what they would have done if there had been a body in the grave. "I hadn't thought about it," Chick says, probably lying to brave it out. "Uh, I did," Aleck says, quite sensibly.) The film works, too, because it's a movie without stars, therefore without the baggage of familiar personae that established movie actors bring to roles. David Brian is the nominal lead, but this was his first year in movies, so his relative unfamiliarity prevents him from overshadowing the film's real star, Juano Hernandez as the stubborn, proud Lucas Beauchamp, a brilliant performance that deserved one of the several Oscar nominations that the film failed to get. Claude Jarman Jr. had made his debut at the age of 12 as Jody in Brown's The Yearling (1946), for which he won the special Oscar once designated for juvenile actors, but like Brian, he never became a big star. The film is really carried by two stellar character players, Porter Hall as Nub Gowrie and Elizabeth Patterson as Miss Habersham, and, I think, by the citizens of Oxford and Lafayette County rounded up for the crowd scenes and a few incidental small roles. It's a film of control and texture that deserves to be better known than it seems to be.

Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016)

Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic

Ben: Viggo Mortensen
Bodevan: George MacKay
Kielyr: Samanta Isler
Vespyr: Annalise Basso
Rellian: Nicholas Hamilton
Zaja: Shree Crooks
Nai: Charlie Shotwell
Harper: Kathryn Hahn
Dave: Steve Zahn
Jack: Frank Langella
Abigail: Ann Dowd
Leslie: Trin Miller

Director: Matt Ross
Screenplay: Matt Ross
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Russell Barnes
Film editing: Joseph Krings
Music: Alex Somers

From Woodstock to Mar-a-Lago, the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the Baby Boom generation. Or, as Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic would have it, from an off-the-grid cabin in the mountains to an opulent mansion beside a golf course. That, anyway, is how the film symbolizes the spiritual schism of the late 20th and early 21st century. It's a schism that manifests itself in the bipolar disorder of Leslie Cash, whom we see only in the visions of her husband, Ben, and in her casket. Anchored by yet another fine performance by Viggo Mortensen as Ben, the film risks becoming over-formulaic, especially in the big confrontation scene in which Ben pits his world view against that of Leslie's father at her funeral. The father is played by Frank Langella, who is an actor skilled at taking potentially one-note roles and adding the appoggiaturas they need to become interesting, so that even when world views collide in Captain Fantastic, we're not left to pick mere feel-good leftism out of the rubble. Ben and Leslie have tried to raise their six children uncontaminated by corporate capitalism, but the effort seems to have been too much for her -- after a breakdown, she is hospitalized and Ben carries on without her until her suicide forces him to take the precocious, home-schooled kids out into the world they never made. Ben can't resist showing them off, of course. At his sister's house he queries his teenage nephews about the Bill of Rights: The younger one thinks it has to do with what people are asked to pay for stuff, and the older knows vaguely that it has something to do with the government. So Ben marches out 8-year-old Zaja, who first starts by quoting it and is then prompted to articulate its significance, which she does superbly. But such encounters only emphasize how unprepared the kids are for anything but their own closed society. They may know the mechanics of sexuality, for example, but as the oldest son, Bodevan, discovers when he encounters a hot-to-trot teenage girl in a trailer park, they're unprepared for the real-world applications. There is, of course, no easy resolution for this culture clash, and Ross is forced into an ending that feels forced and compromised. Still, the performances of Mortensen, Langella, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Ann Dowd, and especially the young actors playing the Cash family, make Captain Fantastic work as well as it could have.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

Lock Martin, Michael Rennie, and Patricia Neal in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Klaatu: Michael Rennie
Helen Benson: Patricia Neal
Tom Stevens: Hugh Marlowe
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt: Sam Jaffe
Bobby Benson: Billy Gray
Mrs. Barley: Frances Bavier
Gort: Lock Martin

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Edmund H. North
Based on a story by Harry Bates
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William Reynolds
Music: Bernard Herrmann

It's a truism that the science-fiction movies of the 1950s are really about the Bomb, the nascent Cold War, communism, McCarthyism, and other social and political crises of the era. All of that is apparent in perhaps the most celebrated film of the genre -- though I prefer The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) -- Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It has the virtue of being a straightforward fable: A being from another world comes to Earth to warn us that our bellicosity threatens the existence of the planet itself. And naturally, the reaction to his arrival is one of hysteria. But what the film really seems to me to be about is the disappearance of religious faith, something it rather clumsily suggests by having the messenger take on Christlike attributes: i.e., he performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. The movie seems to suggest that we need a community of belief to survive, and not the fractured dialectic that has taken the place of a universal creed. The denizens of the other planets who have sent Klaatu to warn Earth have decided that true peace depends on a community guarded by robot policemen, of which Gort is the film's representative. For those of us now contemplating the warnings that artificial intelligence could produce sentient machines capable of developing a simulacrum of life, self-maintenance and reproduction, and hence of evolving into beings that might dominate humanity, this vision of submission to squads of robocops is rather chilling. Still, though The Day the Earth Stood Still is rather naive in its trust in technology, it's a well-made and provocative film that shaped the consciousness of my own generation, even if all we took away from it was a magical phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.

And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956)

Marie Glory, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Christian Marquand, and Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman

Juliette Hardy: Brigitte Bardot
Eric Carradine: Curd Jürgens
Michel Tardieu: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Antoine Tardieu: Christian Marquand
Mme. Morin: Jane Marken
M. Vigier-Lefranc: Jean Tissier
Mme. Vigier-Lefranc: Jacqueline Ventura
Lucienne: Isabelle Cory
Mme. Tardieu: Marie Glory
Christian Tardieu: Georges Poujouly

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Raoul Lévy
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Victoria Mercanton
Music: Paul Misraki

For an exploitation film, which is what Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman surely must be called, the director and his co-screenwriter, Raoul Lévy, certainly devote a lot of attention to crafting something of a plot and a smattering of characterization. But what the movie is really about is Brigitte Bardot's body, which upstages everything else, including a determined performance by the young Jean-Louis Trintignant, on the brink of a distinguished career. Trintignant struggles to make sense of the infatuated Michel, but there's not much written into the character beyond his status as the middle of three brothers, caught in a hormonal web. Bardot's Juliette is so obviously meant to mate with the virile oldest brother, Antoine, that the film seems to be marking time before the consummation of the obvious. And when that happens, there's little else for the story to do but either erupt in a violent fraternal conflict or trail off into unhappy uncertainty. It does a feint at the former before fizzing out into the latter, substituting an extended scene of Juliette flaunting her stuff for some musicians as the real climax. Bardot had genuine acting talent, as her work in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) would reveal, but it was usually hidden beneath the other gifts that nature gave her, and Vadim did his worst to keep it hidden. Cinematographer Armand Thirard seems constrained by the aspect ratio of CinemaScope, frequently grouping his characters on one side of the screen while filling the rest with inessentials, like the staircase on the right side of the scene shown above, although he occasionally pulls off some interesting deep-focus compositions with this approach. Still his work on the film is probably most famous for a screen-wide shot of the nude Bardot that American censors slashed at ruthlessly.

West Point (Edward Sedgwick, 1928)

William Haines and Joan Crawford in West Point

Brice Wayne: William Haines
Betty Channing: Joan Crawford
"Tex" McNeil: William Bakewell
Bob Sperry: Neil Neely
Bob Chase: Ralph Emerson
Football Captain Munson: Leon Kellar
Coach Towers: Raymond G. Moses

Director: Edward Sedgwick
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock, story; Joseph Farnham, titles
Cinematography: Ira H. Morgan
Film editing: Frank Sullivan

For a silent film, Edward Sedgwick's West Point is awfully talky, by which I mean that it's heavily laden with intertitles. That's because it's partly a romantic sitcom and partly a patriotic tribute to the values of the United States Military Academy, and it needs the titles to carry the gags and repartee as well as the flag-waving endorsements of honor and probity. William Haines plays Brice Wayne, an entitled but charming jerk, and the opening scenes in which he establishes both the arrogance and the charm of the character are chopped up by titles feeding us his jokes. A sample: Meeting a fellow cadet with a Jewish name, Wayne quips, "Oh, an Eskimo!" Fortunately, Haines is a fine comic player and overcomes both the title interruptions and the lame dialogue, especially when Wayne meets the female lead, Haines's frequent co-star Joan Crawford, who has matching comic skills. Crawford lets us know from the outset that Betty Channing sees through Wayne's jerkiness to the attractively vulnerable guy beneath. If West Point stuck more to the interplay between Wayne and Betty, it might have been a more enduring classic comedy, but when it ventures into the area of esprit de corps, after Wayne becomes a star on the Army football team and stumbles over his own arrogance and entitlement, the movie becomes a predictable Moral Lesson. Fortunately, the vintage footage shot at West Point is interesting enough to keep us going through the dull parts. William Bakewell is good as Wayne's friend Tex McNeil, a naïf who worships Wayne to a point that's suggestively homoerotic, given what we now know about Haines's sexual orientation.