A Story From Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

Kyoko Kagawa and Kazuo Hasegawa in A Story From Chikamatsu

Mohei: Kazuo Hasegawa
Osan: Kyoko Kagawa
Ishun: Eitaro Shindo
Sukeemon: Eitaro Ozawa
Otama: Yoko Minamida

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Hisakaza Tsuji

Kenji Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, which has also been released under the built-in-spoiler title The Crucified Lovers, is based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 18th-century play The Legend of the Grand Scroll-Maker. It's a romantic drama about doomed lovers that Mizoguchi and screenwriters Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda have expanded into a fable about greed, injustice, and the subjugation of women. The lovers don't even start out as lovers, but circumstances force them together. Mohei is a somewhat overworked apprentice scroll-maker who is thrown together with his master's wife, Osan, almost by accident. The master, Ishun, is a miser and a philanderer, and the circumstances that initially put Mohei and Osan together are almost the stuff of farce: Osan knows that Ishun has been harassing the pretty maid Otama, trying to persuade her to become his mistress, so Osan hides in the young woman's room one night to try to catch her husband in the act. Instead, Mohei goes to Otama's room and is discovered there with Osan. When Ishun finds out he accuses her of adultery, which as we've been shown earlier in the film is a crime punishable by crucifixion. In addition to this crime, Mohei has also been accused of forgery: Ishun had refused to give Osan's brother a loan, so Mohei agreed to help Osan by using Ishun's seal on a receipt, having been assured that the money would be repaid quickly. When confronted with the forgery, Otama intervenes on behalf of Mohei (whom she secretly loves) and says that she asked for the money. The upshot of all this complex of subterfuges, ultimately caused by Ishun's greed and lechery, is that both Osan and Mohei are forced to flee Ishun's household. They determine that suicide would be more honorable than crucifixion, but when they discover that they are in love with each other, they decide that life in hiding would be preferable to death. Things do not go well, of course, but in the end Ishun gets his comeuppance too. There is perhaps a little too much plot and the outcome is foreseeable, but Mizoguchi's mastery of atmosphere, aided by Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, lifts the film high above the melodrama. It's at times a strikingly claustrophobic film, whose boxlike interiors sometimes suggest the grids of Mondrian paintings, underscoring the entrapment not only of the lovers but also of those victims of their own avarice, indifference, or subservience who would punish them. When we're not inside, we're on crowded streets, and even when the lovers escape into the countryside, they're adrift on a fog-shrouded lake or framed by the stalks of a bamboo forest, hinting at prison bars. For some reason, perhaps the overcomplexity of the narrative, A Story From Chikamatsu doesn't hold the honored place in the Mizoguchi canon of Ugetsu (1953), The Life of Oharu (1952), or Sansho the Bailiff (1954), but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

Donatas Banionis in Solaris

Kris Kelvin: Donatas Banionis
Khari: Natalya Bondarchuk
Sartorius: Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Snaut: Jüri Järvet
Kelvin's Father: Nikolay Grinko
Kelvin's Mother: Olga Barnet
Anri Berton: Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy
Dr. Gribaryan: Sos Sargsyan

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, Andrei Tarkovsky
Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Production design: Mikhail Romadin
Music: Eduard Artemev

Andrei Tarkovsky called Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "lifeless," and viewing Tarkovsky's Solaris, made a few years later, it's apparent why. As I said in my comments on his Nostalghia (1983), Tarkovsky was a romantic for whom humankind's alienation from nature is a primary theme. Solaris begins with lush images of nature, of water, greenery, birds and dogs and horses, whereas Kubrick's film begins with (and seems to celebrate) the evolution of human beings into masters of technology, to the point that the most human character in the film is HAL, the computer. Technology in Tarkovsky's film has run amok, but not in the way HAL does in 2001: In contrast to the idyllic scene at the home of the protagonist's father that opens Solaris, the world of technology is endless ribbons of crisscrossing freeways, unreliable communications media, and the dilapidated space station that hovers over the ocean on the titular planet. In lesser hands than Tarkovsky's, portraying the disjunction between humanity and nature would lead to didacticism. But by immersing the viewer in the world of Solaris, by refusing to coach the viewer, Tarkovsky makes us work to assimilate his artistic vision. In that respect, he's not so far from Kubrick as his dismissal of 2001 might suggest.  Both films are immersive experiences, stretching the boundaries of conventional narrative to leave a viewer puzzled and provoked. And both end with visions of transformation and transcendence. It might also be said that Kubrick's fetal star-child, on its passage back to Earth, is a vision that allows for more hope than that of Kris Kelvin on an island of static and sterile illusions in the vast sea of Solaris. In any case, what a cast: especially Natalya Bondarchuk as an infinitely touching Hari, that frightened and frightening figment of Solaris's misinterpretation of Kelvin's past, and, walking the line near madness, Jüri Järvet as Snaut and Anatoliy Solonitsyn as Sartorius, the scientists damned to confinement on a space station manipulated by an uncomprehending but superior alien intelligence. I think the critic who likened Banionis to Glenn Ford, a handsome actor tending toward blandness, is on the mark, but Kelvin needs to be a little bland to serve as foil for the extraordinary things that occur around him.  

Othello (Orson Welles, 1951)

Orson Welles and Suzanne Cloutier in Othello

I watched Orson Welles's film version of Shakespeare's Othello twice last night. The first time was a recording on my DVR of the recent showing on Turner Classic Movies of the 1992 restoration supervised by Welles's daughter Beatrice. The images are crisp and beautiful but the soundtrack is muddy and sometimes unintelligible -- a grave fault when the speeches and dialogue are Shakespeare's. So I decided to check out Othello on Filmstruck's Criterion Channel. It appears to be based on the 1952 European release* that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Though the images are less sharp than those on the TCM restored version, the sound is superior, so I sat through the film again. I don't think it's the masterpiece that Welles's admirers call it, but it's certainly one of the few filmed versions of Shakespeare that succeed in turning what's essentially theater into cinema. The story of the three-year making of Welles's Othello has been often told: the long hiatuses when Welles ran out of money and had to take on acting work in other films to finance his own, the fight scenes that began filming in Morocco and ended in Italy, the striking improvisations like filming the attack on Cassio (Michael Laurence) and the murder of Roderigo (Robert Coote) by Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) in a Turkish bath because the costumes had been held up by the supplier after the bills for them weren't paid, and so on. It's true, too, that the film is full of distracting continuity gaffes: Welles's makeup darkens and lightens within a single scene; MacLiammóir's beard seems to wander about his face; in the scene in which Othello confronts Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) about the handkerchief, he sometimes holds her hand with his right hand, while in the reverse shot it's his left hand. And so on. Would Welles's Othello be greater if he had had all the money and support in the world? I'm not sure that the hunger of Welles's imagination could ever have been satisfied. Moreover, he seemed to relish the role of wounded genius, to enjoy showing off what he could do in the face of adversity. We could ask for a more skillful actress than Cloutier (dubbed by Gudrun Ure, who had played Desdemona opposite Welles on stage), for a film that paid as much attention to Shakespeare's verse as it does to the spectacular settings in Italy and Morocco, for subtler and more original interpretations of the characters. But what we have is Welles at his most creative, always looking for and finding the most expressive way to bring a scene to life, and perhaps that's precious enough. Welles's Othello is no more Shakespeare's Othello than Verdi's is, yet all are touched with some kind of genius.

*In the 1952 version, Welles spoke the credits in a voiceover, but the on-screen credits that were added at the request of American distributors are retained in the 1992 restoration.

Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991)

Jean-Marc Barr and Barbara Sukowa in Europa

We're accustomed to movies, usually blockbuster action films, in which the feats of filmmaking technology are more impressive than the narrative or characterization, but it's startling to find that kind of disjunction in a supposedly serious art-house film. That's what happens in Lars von Trier's Europa*, however. The film's visual tricks -- front and rear projection, double exposures, juxtapositions of black-and-white and color -- linger in the mind longer than any of the characters or the story. At base, Europa is a thriller, set in Germany in 1945, about an idealistic young American, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), whose German uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) gets him a job as an apprentice conductor on the Zentropa railway line. Leo is an idealist and a pacifist (the film is rather vague about what he did during the war) who wants to help Germany recover, but this only makes him putty in the hands of various opportunists, from the American military to the railway owners to an underground group of die-hard Nazis known as "werewolves." Things grow more complicated for Leo when he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), whose father, Max (Jørgen Reenberg), owns Zentropa and is undergoing scrutiny in the "denazification" efforts by the occupying Allied forces. This is standard, even promising, thriller material, and to a large extent von Trier and co-screenwriter Niels Vørsel deliver on its premises. There are moments of suspense and surprise -- especially the assassination of a newly appointed Jewish mayor by a young boy planted on the train by the werewolves -- that would do any thriller writer and director proud. And it has to be said that the general atmosphere of the film, a lingering sinister darkness and chill, is effectively produced. But the tarting up of the story with gimmicks takes me out of the narrative and into a concentration on the effects. For example, there's a scene in which Katharina, in monochrome, is standing behind Leo, who is in color, until she walks out of the frame and re-enters next to him, both now in color. Then Leo leaves the frame and re-enters, now in monochrome, behind her. I know how it's done -- rear projection and careful storyboarding -- but I remember the effect, and not anything that was said by the characters while the trick was taking place. Something of the same could be said about the frame in which von Trier sets his story: The film begins with a shot of railway tracks lighted by a moving train and the voice (Max von Sydow's calm baritone) of a man hypnotizing someone: "You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa...." The voice recurs throughout the film until it's clear that the "you" is Leo. As for the "Europa" into which Leo is being guided, von Trier has explained that he had Franz Kafka's satirical fantasy Amerika in mind while making the film. The framing, I think, freights the story with more significance than anything that actually appears in the film. Von Trier has said that Europa is something like "Hitchcock in a Tarkovsky setting," which is nothing if not overreaching.

*Europa was released in the United States in 1992 under the title Zentropa to avoid confusion with Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, which had been released in 1991 in America. Von Trier also named his production company Zentropa, which is the name of the railway company in his film.

They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)

Though usually remembered as a precursor of another, more celebrated lovers-on-the-lam movie, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), They Live by Night stands on its own, largely because of novice director Nicholas Ray's attention to characterization and detail. This is a film with texture, rising above its melodramatic core by constantly introducing peripheral detail. Instead of opening, as a conventional movie might have, with a dramatization of the prison break by Bowie (Farley Granger), Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva), and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen), it begins with an aerial shot of the stolen car speeding across the landscape -- a daring early use of what has become routine in filmmaking, namely, a helicopter shot. Ray continues to fill his frames with the unexpected: As Bowie hides behind a billboard, waiting for Chickamaw and T-Dub to return with another car, a small dog appears and hangs around the young fugitive. Later, when Bowie and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) begin their flight on a Greyhound bus, Bowie is seated beside a woman who is determined to ignore her crying, squirming baby, leaving Bowie to try to quiet the infant. Neither dog nor baby is essential to the scene, but by their very presence they lend a quality of innocence to the boyish fugitive. Bowie and Keechie decide on the spur of the moment to get married in a quickie ceremony conducted by an anything-for-a-buck justice of the peace (Ian Wolfe), who calls on his standby witnesses. After the perfunctory ceremony, the woman witness hugs Keechie, but the male witness declines because he has a cold. Again, the witness's cold is irrelevant to the plot, but it serves to add a subtle note of disorder to the scene, a hint that Bowie and Keechie will always be subject to forces as far beyond their control as the common cold. I don't know whether dog and baby and cold were present in the novel by Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us, on which the film is based, or if they were introduced in Charles Schnee's screenplay or in Ray's revisions of it, but the fact that they were either introduced or retained in the film speaks volumes on the kind of director Ray was: one attentive to the contingencies that bring a film to life. Granger and O'Donnell are incredibly touching in their performances, and the rest of the cast rise about the stereotypes they could easily have become. Anderson's novel was filmed again, under its original title, by Robert Altman in 1974, and I remember liking that movie. But unless another viewing of Altman's version changes my mind, I think They Live by Night is better.

Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)

Oleg Yankovskiy in Nostalghia

For the last film of his life, The Sacrifice (1986), Andrei Tarkovsky, self-exiled from the Soviet Union, would venture into Sweden with the help of Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, and he made his first film outside of Russia in Italy with the help of co-screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who had written screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Just as Bergman is a spiritual presence in The Sacrifice, so are Antonioni and Fellini in Nostalghia. But mostly it's Tarkovsky's deracination that shows in both films, especially in Nostalghia, in which he imports a damp Russian climate into the Mediterranean atmosphere of Italy. I find Nostalghia more accessible or more satisfying -- if such words could ever be adequate to one's experience of Tarkovsky -- than The Sacrifice because Tarkovsky doesn't take on anything so enormous as nuclear holocaust in Nostalghia. In its bare essence, Nostalghia is the story of a Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), in Italy to write the biography of an 18th-century Russian composer, who finds himself sinking deeper into depression until he encounters a madman named Domenico (Erland Josephson) who allows Andrei a moment of transcendence. Nostalghia is a film about fire and water. Domenico, who lives in a leaky ruin into which the rain continually drips, believes that he can save the world if he carries a lighted candle through the waters of the spa at Bagno Vignoni. The authorities, however, continually prevent him from even attempting the task. Eventually, Domenico becomes a mad prophet, preaching to a scattered audience of followers before he douses himself with gasoline and sets himself on fire. Andrei then sets out to complete Domenico's task, walking across the pool -- which has, however, been drained for a periodic cleaning -- with the candle and then collapsing. Tarkovsky films this scene in a single long take, during which the wind blows out Andrei's candle twice, forcing him to restart the task, before he finally accomplishes it. This is film as poetry, the product of a singular, remarkable sensibility, and it probably should be judged more by the standards we apply to poetry than by those we apply to narrative film. Tarkovsky was one of the last romantics, still willing to ascribe virtue to enthusiasm, to find wisdom in madness, to rail against our alienation from nature as profoundly as Wordsworth or Shelley or Blake ever did.

The Informer (John Ford, 1935)

Time has not been kind to The Informer, though it was celebrated as a masterpiece at the time, and won four Academy Awards: John Ford for director, Victor McLaglen for best actor, Dudley Nichols for best screenplay, and Max Steiner for score.* Today, The Informer looks a little stiff and stagy and McLaglen's performance vastly overdone. The film invites comparison to much better manhunt films like Fritz Lang's M (1931) and especially Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), which also takes the Irish revolution for its subject. Ford has a way of overstating things, such as the constant visions that Gypo Nolan (McLaglen) has of the "Wanted" poster that inspired him to inform against Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford). And the final scene in the church now feels impossibly mawkish: Frankie's mother (Una O'Connor), veiled and -- thanks to cinematographer Joseph H. August's lighting -- as beatific as a Raphael madonna, forgives Gypo, who then expires before a crucifix proclaiming, "Frankie! Your mother forgives me!" It has to be said, though, that The Informer is full of great energy, and some of the supporting performances, like J.M. Kerrigan's Terry, who sponges off of the newly flush Gypo, or May Boley as the madam of a Production Coded brothel, are vivid and colorful. McLaglen's performance lacks the kind of nuance that would help us see Gypo as more than just a drunken loudmouth with no moral compass, which would make the ending feel less unearned, but you can't take your eyes off of him even when you wish you could. Legend has it that Ford kept McLaglen liquored up throughout the film to get the performance he wanted, but there are many long takes and ensemble scenes that suggest to me that McLaglen was more in control of himself than the legend suggests.

*It also contributed to Oscar statistics: This was the first of Ford's record-setting Oscar wins as director. The others were for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). (None of Ford's wins were for the genre with which is is most associated, the Western.) And Nichols became the first person to decline an Oscar: As a member of the Screen Writers Guild, Nichols was suspicious of the Academy because it had been founded in part as an attempt by the film industry to reduce the influence of unions. After the Academy began to disassociate itself from union-busting efforts, Nichols quietly accepted the award.

The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)

I spent much of the day trying to think what to say about Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice that doesn't make me sound like an utter fool. The director is someone I admire, and his achievement in what was his last film, finished only months before his death, is in many ways extraordinary. But The Sacrifice leaves me cold and tempts me to sarcastic assessments like "art-house profundity," a rude and inadequate phrase that I might have used about the film if I didn't respect its maker so much. For The Sacrifice is unquestionably a visionary film, drawn from Tarkovsky's heart and soul. I just wish there were a little more brain holding heart and soul in check. Is it my habitual agnosticism that makes me bridle against the protagonist's quest for metaphysical certainty? The twentieth-century search for God produced masterworks like Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Tarkovsky's own Andrei Rublev (1966), and, most appropriate in this context, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957). The Bergman connection suggests itself because Tarkovsky made his film in Sweden, with Bergman's frequent leading man Erland Josephson and Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist, in a location, Gotland, that resembles the island of Fårö, the location of many of Bergman's own films. But The Sacrifice seems to me to take some of the worst aspects of some of Bergman's films -- the rather histrionic treatment of people's search for faith in Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963) -- and intensify it. Precipitating the crisis of The Sacrifice with the threat of nuclear holocaust warps the film away from psychological truth into didacticism. One of the reasons Andrei Rublev succeeds is that, like The Seventh Seal, it is set in an age of faith. Both films depict the essential downside to spiritual certainty -- bigotry and fanaticism and a loss of essential humanity -- while balancing it with a portrayal of the rewards of faith: kindness and creativity. As I said about The Seventh Seal,  "Commentators have sometimes likened the plague that threatens the world of The Seventh Seal to the threat of nuclear annihilation, but I think that misses the point: For the medieval world, the Plague was a test of faith; for the modern world, the Bomb is a test of humanity." The Sacrifice, I think, misses that point. Moreover, I think Tarkovsky's style -- enigmatic, elliptical, deliberately obscure -- becomes a stumbling block in attempts to respond both emotionally and intellectually to the film. It even betrays a sympathetic critic like David Thomson into a distracting error, when he refers to Alexander's (Josephson) son, known in the film as "Little Man," as his grandson. By failing to make relationships among the characters more explicit -- Is Marta (Filippa Franzén) Alexander's daughter? What is her connection to the doctor, Victor (Sven Wollter)? -- Tarkovsky forces us to spend a lot of our attention on matters of simple identification, distracting us from what should be the central focus of the film. And what, exactly, is that? 

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)

James Mason and Kathleen Ryan in Odd Man Out

Johnny McQueen: James Mason
Kathleen Sullivan: Kathleen Ryan
Lukey: Robert Newton
Pat: Cyril Cusack
Shell: F.J. McCormick
Fencie: William Hartnell
Rosie: Fay Compton
Inspector: Denis O'Dea
Father Tom: W.G. Fay
Theresa O'Brien: Maureen Delaney
Dennis: Robert Beatty
Nolan: Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: F.L. Green, R.C. Sheriff
Based on a novel by F.L. Green
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Film editing: Fergus McDonell
Music: William Alwyn

The collaboration of director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker on Odd Man Out is perhaps not as celebrated as the one on The Third Man (1949), but in some ways it's more impressive. The Third Man has a tighter screenplay and a location, postwar Vienna, that lent itself more readily to the kind of expressionistic atmosphere Krasker's images of it supply. Odd Man Out is a looser, more episodic story. As its title almost suggests, it's a kind of reworking of the Odyssey, the archetypal perilous-journey narrative. Reed made a decision at some point to treat the first part of the film, the planning and commission of the heist, in a conventionally realistic fashion and then gradually to shift into something more expressionistic, something that reveals the disintegrating state of the dying Johnny McQueen's mind. He needed an actor like James Mason, who could give Johnny the necessary charisma while still suggesting from the outset the character's damaged state of mind. But he also needed Krasker's ability to present actuality and then to transform it into something stranger than reality, to suggest the menace lurking in the mundane streets of Belfast and then to work with the baroquely sinister sets designed by Ralph W. Brinton that include the ornate Four Winds Saloon (based on an actual Belfast pub but created in the studio) and the decaying Victorian residence of Shell and the mad painter Lukey. We first begin to see the transition when Johnny experiences vertigo while riding through the streets of the city, but from the moment when the wounded Johnny takes cover in an abandoned air-raid shelter, where reality becomes indistinguishable from Johnny's fevered prison memories and other hallucinations, the film increasingly steps away from realism. Even the weather plays a role in subverting realism: The semi-conscious Johnny is left by Shell in an old bathtub in a lot filled with junk, including a statue of an angel whose nose seems to run after the rain starts to fall. Later, when rain has turned to snow, an icicle hangs from the drippy nose. The encounters with Belfast street kids are like meeting the children of Pandemonium. The cast, much of it recruited from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, is superb, including Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, Dan O'Herlihy, and Denis O'Dea. Robert Newton received pre-title second billing with Mason, which is certainly out of keeping with the size of his role, and there are those who find Newton's Lukey out of key with the less showy performances of the other actors: Pauline Kael calls it "a badly misconceived performance in a badly misconceived role." But for me it brings the ferment of the manhunt and the increasingly bizarre handing-about of Johnny to a kind of necessary climax before Johnny's reunion with Kathleen and the inevitable outcome.

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

It's tempting to make jokes about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film, Querelle, which does sometimes look like a staging of Billy Budd designed by Tom of Finland. But for all its often overheated, overstylized, absurd moments, there is a a deep sadness at the core of the film. It was made, after all, at the beginning of the age of AIDS, from which its star, Brad Davis, would die. And even though it misses the poetry of the novel by Jean Genet on which Fassbinder and Burkhard Driest based their screenplay, it contains the essential sympathy for transgressors and outcasts that marks the work of both Genet and Fassbinder. That it no longer has the power to shock -- you can see far more outrageous images and situations on pay TV channels almost any night of the week -- almost works to its benefit. It has become a period piece almost before its time, but to say that it's "dated" is to miss the point. Querelle reflects an age of repression: The central character of the film, I think, is Franco Nero's Lt. Seblon, dictating his lust for Querelle into his tape recorder, watching the less-inhibited society of Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), Nono (Günther Kaufmannn), and the others who circle around Querelle like moths, swooping in for satisfaction and sometimes getting their wings singed. Is it a good film? No. The performances -- especially Davis's, whose line readings are sometimes amateurish -- don't measure up. The interpolated religious symbolism feels trite. The narrative, especially when it involves Gil and his double, Robert (Hanno Pöschl), is confusingly handled. But is it worth being annoyed and disappointed by? Absolutely.

Les Maudits (René Clément, 1947)

René Clément's Les Maudits has sometimes been known as The Damned, but lately people have turned to using the French title, perhaps to avoid confusion with Luchino Visconti's 1969 film called The Damned. The confusion is understandable: Both films are about Nazis. In Clément's film, a group of Nazi officials and their hangers-on board a submarine in April 1945. Seeing the writing on the wall, they hope to make it to South America to establish an outpost of what's left of the Reich, but as they're passing through the English channel they're spotted by a destroyer that drops depth charges. The sub is unharmed, but Hilde Garosi (Florence Marly) is knocked unconscious. She's the wife of one of the passengers, an Italian industrialist (Fosco Giachetti), and the mistress of another, a Nazi general (Kurt Kronenfeld), so a contingent is sent ashore into liberated France to find a doctor. Henri Vidal plays Dr. Guilbert, who also serves as a narrator for the film. Having been shanghaied into service on the sub, Guilbert knows that once his usefulness in treating Hilde, who has a mild concussion, is over his days are numbered, so he diagnoses a crew member with a sore throat as having diphtheria, necessitating quarantine and continued treatment. The rest is a fairly suspenseful and engaging submarine movie, with some superb camerawork in the confines of the ship. The cinematographer is Henri Alekan, who pulls off a great tracking shot down the length of the sub, which must have been quite a tour de force in the days before Steadicams. The screenplay by Clément, Jacques Rémy, and Henri Jeanson skillfully gives the mostly unsavory characters complexity, although Marly is a little too much the icily glamorous blond stereotype and Jo Dest, as the SS leader Forster, couldn't be more hissable. Michel Auclair has some good moments as Willy Morus, Forster's aide (and, by implication, boy toy). Although Vidal is the film's ostensible hero, top billing went to the great character actor Marcel Dalio (billed, as often he was in France, by only his surname) in what amounts to a small cameo role as Larga, the South American contact for the Nazis.  

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.