Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945-46)

Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Nikolay Cherkasov in the color sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part II

Czar Ivan IV: Nikolay Cherkasov
Czarina Anastasia Romanovna: Lyudmila Tselikovskaya
Boyarina Ephrosinia Staritskaya: Serafima Birman
Prince Andrei Kurbsky: Mikhail Nazvanov
Czar's Guard Malyuta Skiratov: Mikhail Zharov
Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov: Amvrosi Buchma
Fyodor Basmanov: Mikhail Kuznetsov
Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky: Pavel Kadochnikov
Boyar Fyodor Kolychev/Archbishop Philip: Andrei Abrikasov
Nikolay the Fanatic: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pyotr Volynets: Vladimir Balashov
Archbishop Pimen: Aleksandr Mgebrov
Sigismond, King of Poland: Pavel Massalsky

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein
Cinematography: Andrei Moskvin, Eduard Tisse
Production design: Iosif Shpinel, Sergei Eisenstein
Costume design: Leonid Naumov, M. Safonova
Music: Sergei Prokofiev

David Thomson has made a suggestion that a better film epic could be made of the life of Sergei Eisenstein than the one that was made about the life of John Reed -- i.e., Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). In fact, Eisenstein's life was so crowded with artistic and political drama that it would probably have to be an HBO miniseries like Game of Thrones (which is not a bad subtitle for Ivan the Terrible, come to think of it). The drama surrounding Ivan the Terrible alone would be enough for a whole season's episode, with Eisenstein struggling to bring his proposed three-installment film about Stalin's favorite czar to the screen while at the same time dealing with the lethal whims of the dictator himself. After Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released to great acclaim in 1945, including a Stalin Prize from the hands of the man himself, Stalin soured on the project: The mad frenzy of Ivan in Part II cut too close to the bone and it was not released until 1958 -- five years after Stalin's death and ten years after Eisenstein's. Part III had begun filming but was canceled, and what existed of it, except for some stills and scraps, was destroyed. After all this Sturm und Drang, it would be nice to conclude, as some critics have done, that Ivan the Terrible is one of the masterpieces of world cinema. But I can't go that far. It seems to me a great directorial folly, akin to Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) in its directorial excesses, its indulgence in style for style's sake. That the style is immensely entertaining in its artistic wrong-headedness pushes Ivan the Terrible in the direction of camp, a world's fair exhibition of stained-glass attitudes, early silent film poses, great garish sets, costumes that make even the hairiest 16th-century Russians look like drag queens, and in Part II there's a sequence in the most lurid color this side of some of the ballet sequences in MGM musicals of the 1950s. The first time we see Sigismond, the king of Poland, in Part II, he's sprawled across the throne in a position that almost screams for a sign proclaiming "Careless Decadence,"  and really looks extremely uncomfortable. Ivan's enemy, Archbishop Philip, swans about in a billowing cloak that has no known sartorial or clerical necessity, and which allows Ivan to forestall his exit by simply placing a foot on it. When Philip does manage to leave, the cloak raises a cloud of dust that suggests Ivan needs to liquidate the housekeeping staff. The collection of poses in Ivan the Terrible is balletic and operatic in the worst senses of the words, but the film is also watchable for all those reasons. There are some redeeming values, of course. It's a window into the mind of the Stalinist Soviet Union, both in what it approved and what it banned. It has a distinguished score by Prokofiev, though unfortunately muddied by poor sound reproduction -- in restoring the film, it's too bad that as much attention wasn't paid to providing a new music soundtrack as to cleaning up the images. Visually, it's fascinating, even when the visuals are absurd.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Vera Miles, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quayle in The Wrong Man

Manny Balestrero: Henry Fonda
Rose Balestrero: Vera Miles
Frank D. O'Connor: Anthony Quayle
Det. Lt. Bowers: Harold J. Stone
Det. Matthews: Charles Cooper
Tomasini: John Heldabrand
Mama Balestrero: Esther Minciotti

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Paul Sylbert
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock's docudrama The Wrong Man is not so anomalous in his career as his rather portentous backlit introduction suggests: It may be based on an incident about a real Manny Balestrero, but there are lots of wrongly accused men in his movies, and this time he simply landed on one who happened to be an actual person. And Hitchcock's gravitation to the theme of undeserved punishment and consequent mental anguish (in this case Rose Balestrero's) was something we could expect from him if we knew of the trauma caused by the notorious childhood incident in which his domineering father had the local constabulary lock young Alfred in a jail cell for five minutes. The lesson learned was less "be a good boy" than "fear the cops," who loom large in many of his films. But the real novelty of The Wrong Man is its tone: There's virtually no leavening of gloom in the film by the usual Hitchcockian humor. Only at the very ending, when we are assured that Manny and Rose and the kids moved to Florida and lived happily ever after, is there any attempt to mitigate the rather oppressive quality of the black-and-white, location-shot tale of the struggling Balestreros. And anyone who knows much about the difficulty of "curing" depression, which Rose suffers from, is likely to feel a little skeptical about that. That said, it's a very good film, making especially fine use of Henry Fonda -- his only appearance for Hitchcock -- whose naturally haunted look is a perfect fit for the victimized Balestrero. Vera Miles, whom Hitchcock was grooming as a replacement for Grace Kelly after her recent elevation to Princess of Monaco, gives a convincing performance as Rose, managing to suggest that her depression was in the cards even before Manny's arrest. The realism of the Balestreros' financial struggle is also well-handled, as is the climactic revelation of the "right" man, accomplished by a double exposure in which he walks into and fills the image of Balestrero in closeup. For me, the other only false note besides the oversimplified happy ending is the invocation of religion as a cure to Manny's dilemma: Mama Balestrero's urging him to pray for strength and his gaze at a rather kitsch picture of Jesus is too swiftly followed by his deliverance. It turns a serious emotional and spiritual struggle into a cliché as old as the movies. The Wrong Man has been favorably compared to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), a distinction I don't think it quite merits, but then what film does?

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging

R.: Do-yun Yu
Warden: Kei Sato
Education Officer: Fumio Watanabe
District Attorney: Hosei Kamatsu
Doctor: Rokko Toura
Chaplain: Ishiro Ishida
Chief of Guards: Masao Adachi
Sister: Akiko Koyama
Narrator: Nagisa Oshima

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

It's becoming clearer to me that Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Ozu often know little about him. Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque." 

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)

Han Ying-jie (center) in A Touch of Zen

Yang Hui-zhen: Hsu Feng
Gu Sheng-tsai: Shih Chun
General Shi Wen-qiao: Bai Ying
General Lu Ding-an: Xue Han
Abbot Hui-yuan: Roy Chiao
Ouyang Nian: Tien Peng
Sheng-tsai's mother: Zhang Bing-yu
Men Da: Wang Rui
Chief Commander Xu Xian-chun: Han Ying-jie

Director: King Hu
Screenplay: King Hu
Based on a story by Songling Pu
Cinematography: Hua Hui-ying

I'm not an expert on or even a devotee of Asian martial arts films (wuxia), so I come to A Touch of Zen with more than a touch of naïveté. It's a celebrated film for its elevation of the genre into the realm of art, and that part of it I can appreciate, even as it often baffled and sometimes irritated me: Why did the battle with the "ghosts" have to be shot in the dark? Its sometimes oblique narrative puzzled me: The first two characters we meet are the scholar-artist Gu and his mysterious customer, Ouyang Nian, and I felt a bit lost when Ouyang turned out to be a bad guy and Gu's reticent neighbor Yang Hui-zhen became the protagonist, as well as Gu's lover (after declining the marriage proposal Gu's mother insists on). But we're clearly working with a director-screenwriter who wants to keep us off-balance, and succeeds. Best, I realized, not to attempt to unravel the plot but to pay attention to the gorgeous and often exciting images that King Hu gives us -- the more than three-hour length of his epic flies by if you do that. The mixture of martial arts and religious philosophy is something the skeptic in me can only gaze at disinterestedly, so the ending, with the dying abbot bleeding gold, eludes any attempt I might make to find coherence with the political struggles that inform most of the film's action. But perhaps if I educate myself better in wuxia, I'll come to a fuller appreciation of why A Touch of Zen is so widely and enthusiastically admired. 

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, and Benoît Magimel in The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut: Isabelle Huppert
Mother: Annie Girardot
Walter Klemmer: Benoît Magimel
Anna Schober: Anna Sigalevitch
Mrs. Schober: Susanne Lothar
George Blonskij: Udo Samel
Gerda Blonskij: Cornelia Köndgen

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke '
Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Cinematography: Christian Berger

Michael Haneke's cinema of cruelty reaches its apex (some would say nadir) in The Piano Teacher, which becomes an almost definitive vehicle for Isabelle Huppert's ability to create terrifying women. In that regard her performance surpasses even the murderously manipulative Jeanne in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995). The Piano Teacher's Erika Kohut calls to mind the masochistic Michèle Leblanc in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), which earned Huppert the Oscar nomination that should have gone to her for those earlier films. The Piano Teacher resembles Elle in that both Erika and Michèle are masochists, the product of horribly dysfunctional families: Michèle's father was a mass murderer, Erika's died in a mental institution. But Erika is the more intricately fascinating character because she is devoted to the beauty of her art, releasing her pent-up sexuality in private acts of self-mutilation, watching pornography, and voyeurism -- there are drive-in movie theaters in Vienna? who knew? -- whereas Michèle has channeled hers into creating video games full of violent images. It's the disconnect between the beauty of Schubert and Schumann and Bach that fills the film's soundtrack and the ugliness of Erika's desire for self-degradation that gives Haneke's film its essential tension. To be sure, she takes out her frustrations on her students, cruelly mocking them in her attempts to make them live up to her musical ideals, but it's only when she finds a man who can challenge her own desire to dominate that she approaches fulfillment. Walter Klemmer is younger than she; he's handsome and athletic and smart, and he has the kind of musical talent that potentially matches her own. The masochist thinks she has met her potentially equal sadist. It's in her attempts to convert Walter's otherwise conventional sexuality into something as dark and damaged as her own that she encounters her limits, becoming the failure that her horrendous harpy of a mother has continually called her. None of this is a lot of fun: The Piano Teacher is one of the least erotic films about sex ever made. Haneke has jettisoned the backstories of Erika and her mother that were apparently supplied in Elfriede Jelinek's novel (which I haven't read), leaving us to speculate on how mother and daught wound up in a relationship in which they are slapping and yelling at each other one moment, then cuddling in a shared bed the next. But Haneke is not an explainer; he's content to show, not tell. And that often gives his films a visceral quality that makes them as fascinating and provocative of thought as they are unpleasant.  

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

John Vernon and Karin Dor in Topaz

Andre Devereaux: Frederick Stafford
Michael Nordstrom: John Forsythe
Nicole Devereaux: Dany Robin
Rico Parra: John Vernon
Juanita de Cordoba: Karin Dor
Jacques Granville: Michel Piccoli
Henri Jarré: Philippe Noiret
Michele Picard: Claude Jade
François Picard: Michel Subor
Boris Kusenov: Per-Axel Arosenius
Philippe Dubois: Roscoe Lee Browne

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samuel A. Taylor
Based on the novel by Leon Uris
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Music: Maurice Jarre

There's one Hitchcockian touch, almost the only one, in Topaz, that's become known as "the purple dress scene": As a woman, shot at close range, collapses to the floor, the skirts of her dress spread out around her like blood. It's a striking effect, but also a distractingly showoffy one in a film that is remarkably free of other such irruptions of style. Topaz may not be the worst film Alfred Hitchcock made -- there are some strong contenders in his early silents as well as in some of his other late films -- but it's certainly one of the dullest. There are four sections that cry out for some of the Hitchcock wit to make them more tense and entertaining: In the opening sequence, we watch as a highly placed official in the KGB defects to the West, along with his wife and daughter; then the French agent Andre Devereaux is tasked with retrieving a crucial document from a Cuban officer residing in a Harlem hotel during the opening of the United Nations; next, Devereaux goes to Havana to obtain further information about Russian missiles in Cuba (the film is set in October 1962); and finally, Devereaux is charged with unmasking the high-ranking French intelligent agents, whose code name is Topaz, who are selling secrets to the Soviets. Staging all of these sequences should have been child's play to the director whose mastery of the spy thriller was well-established in such films as Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959), but each of them somehow fizzles into overextended business without real suspense. Part of the problem seems to be that Hitchcock was working without a finished script: After Leon Uris's attempt to adapt his novel was rejected, Hitchcock turned at the last minute to Samuel A. Taylor, who had written the screenplay for Vertigo (1958). Whatever you may think of Vertigo, the strengths of that film are not in its screenplay, and Taylor, working under intense deadline pressure, was unable to come up with a script that successfully ties together the four big sequences of Topaz. The frustration and ennui that Hitchcock felt with the situation is palpable. The ending was reshot several times, the first time after a preview audience rejected the notion of a duel between Devereaux and the Topaz agent Henri Jarré that took place in a soccer stadium, the second after audiences were confused by a scene in which Jarré manages to escape to the Soviet Union. The final version, in which Jarré commits suicide off-screen, lands with a thud, partly because Philippe Noiret, who played Jarré, was unavailable for the filming, so that we see only the exterior of his house and hear the sound of a gunshot. More interesting stars than Frederick Stafford and John Forsythe would have helped the film, but most of the blame for the dullness of Topaz has to be given to Hitchcock.

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

Kichiemon Nakamura and Kiwako Taichi in Kuroneko

Gintoki: Kichiemon Nakamura
Yone: Nobuko Otowa
Shige: Kiwako Taichi
Raiko: Kei Sato

Director: Kaneto Shindo
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Cinematography: Norimichi Igawa, Kiyomi Kuroda
Art direction: Takashi Marumo
Film editing: Hisao Enoki
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Sometimes mood is everything, especially in a ghost story. The film that starts creepy and stays creepy tests our tolerance for creepiness. Kaneto Shindo seems to know this. He starts Kuroneko with a peaceful pastoral scene: a hut with a small brook running past its door, and in the distance fields backed by the wall of a forest. He lingers on this scene just long enough for it to register on us before ragged samurai begin to emerge from the forest, approach the brook in front of the hut, and drink thirstily from it. Then he cuts to the inside, where two terrified woman are watching the approach of the samurai, who enter the hut, pillage it, rape and murder the women, and set fire to the hut. Then we cut to the opening frame as the samurai return to the forest and smoke begins to billow from the hut. It blazes up, and Shindo cuts to the aftermath: the ruins of the hut and the bodies of the women, strangely unconsumed by the fire. A black cat enters and sniffs around the women, then begins to lick their wounds. Then it's nighttime, and the scene changes to the Rajomon (or Rashomon) Gate in Kyoto, where the supernatural story begins: The women are now ghosts, their former rags replaced by fine garments, who lure the samurai who violated and killed them to their handsome dwelling in a bamboo grove, where they bite out their throats and drink their blood. Shindo's mastery at setting up a plausibly real opening and slowly transitioning to the eerie vengeance of the dead women, who seem to float and sometimes move with, well, catlike grace. News of the deaths of the samurai reaches the emperor, who orders the chief samurai, Raiko, to deal with the problem. We then cut to a fight between a young soldier and a huge man armed with an iron-studded club. The soldier vanquishes the big man, cuts off his head, and rides home to bring the news that he's the only survivor of a battle. Raiko rewards the soldier by making him a samurai and giving him the name Gintoki. The interpolation of the fight scene and Gintoki's ride again break the mood, providing a welcome contrast with the ghost scenes. Proudly, Gintoki goes to see his wife and his mother, only to find the ruins of their hut -- they were, of course, the victims of the marauding samurai. And Raiko then orders Gintoki to prove his valor by finding and killing the "monster" that has been slaughtering his samurai. Eventually, of course, Gintoki will discover that the killers are the ghosts of his wife, Shige, and his mother, Yone, setting up an impossible moral dilemma. It's a tense, beautifully photographed, often surprisingly erotic, and subtly terrifying film that even I, usually immune to the shocks of horror movies, can appreciate.

The Paradine Case (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947)

Ann Todd and Charles Laughton in The Paradine Case

Anthony Keane: Gregory Peck
Gay Keane: Ann Todd
Lord Thomas Horfield: Charles Laughton
Simon Flaquer: Charles Coburn
Lady Sophie Horfield: Ethel Barrymore
Andre Latour: Louis Jourdan
Maddalena Anna Paradine: Alida Valli
Sir Joseph: Leo G. Carroll
Judy Flaquer: Joan Tetzel

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Alma Reville, James Bridie
Based on a novel by Robert Hichens
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson

Alfred Hitchcock was at the end of his seven-year servitude to David O. Selznick when he was roped into The Paradine Case, a project Selznick had been nursing since 1933, when he bought the rights at MGM hoping to star Greta Garbo as the "fascinating" Mrs. Paradine. Garbo declined then and later, saying she didn't want to play a murderer. Hitchcock's involvement in the belated project was grudging, given that the other two features, Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945), on which he had been forced to work directly with Selznick had been difficult experiences, producer and director having decidedly different views on almost everything about filmmaking. But he went ahead with crafting a screenplay, enlisting his wife, Alma Reville, playwright James Bridie, and Ben Hecht. In the end, however, Selznick rewrote the screenplay, sometimes after individual scenes had been shot, and claimed credit, relegating Reville to "adaptation" and Bridie to "treatment in consultation with," and leaving Hecht off the credits entirely. Moreover, Hitchcock's initial cut was three hours, which Selznick then scissored down to 132 minutes and after premieres to the extant 114 minutes. It's hard to say what was lost in the process, except that Anthony Keane's supposed erotic fascination with Mrs. Paradine barely registers in the current version, making Gay Keane's jealous moping almost nonsensical. It also robs the climax of the film of any real emotional impact. But miscasting also may be responsible for those failures: Gregory Peck, never a very interesting actor, becomes even duller in his attempts to play a distinguished British barrister. Peck was 31, and the gray streaks in his hair do little to convince us that he's a man with a long career at the bar. Moreover, his attempts at a British accent are fitful: You can almost see him tense up every time he has to pronounce "can't" as "cahn't." Alida Valli, in the key role, is more sullen than mysterious, and Ann Todd as Peck's wife, is pallid. What life exists in the film comes from Charles Coburn as the solicitor in the case and from Charles Laughton, deliciously haughty as the judge, with a reputation for enjoying hanging women as well as clear evidence of his sexually predatory nature when he makes his moves on Mrs. Keane. Ethel Barrymore for some reason was nominated for an Oscar for her small role as the judge's wife, who sweetly admonishes her husband for his ways, but otherwise has little to do. There is not much Hitchcock could do stylistically in the film with Selznick hanging around: He attempts some impressive long takes, many of which Selznick chopped up in the editing room, and an experiment in collaboration with cinematographer Lee Garmes in lighting changes during Keane's interrogation of Mrs. Paradine. He also introduces Louis Jourdan's character by keeping him in shadows and half darkness, to heighten our suspicion of the character's nature, but such occasional tricks only stand out from the general flatness of the drama.

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Ulrich Mühe in The Castle

K.: Ulrich Mühe
Frieda: Susanne Lothar
Artur: Frank Giering
Jeremias: Felix Eitner
Barnabas: André Eisermann
Olga: Dörte Lyssewski
Amalia: Inga Busch
Erlanger: Hans Diehl
Pepi: Birgit Linauer
Narrator: Udo Samel

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Based on a novel by Franz Kafka
Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
Production design: Christoph Kanter

There's an odd resonance between Ulrich Mühe's frustrated K. in The Castle and the role for which he's best known in America, the anonymously gray Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Both are trapped in systems not of their making and are given tedious tasks that ultimately prove meaningless: K. to serve as a land surveyor in a village that doesn't want one and is so covered with blowing snow that there's hardly any land to survey, Wiesler to listen in on and try to trap a playwright whose crimes against the state are, if they exist, minimal. Both try to make the best of impossible situations, K. by doggedly persisting in his attempts to communicate with the unseen and unapproachable Castle, Wiesler by doing his job dutifully until its absurdity becomes intolerable. Absurdity is, to be sure, what Franz Kafka's unfinished novel is all about: People in it behave absurdly -- even the protagonist who, in a particularly dreamlike moment, finds himself hiding under a counter with the mistress of the man he wants to meet and having sex with her. Even the people who might help him, like his goofy assistants Artur and Jeremias or the eager emissary from the Castle, Barnabas, only lead him into further frustrations. Michael Haneke has followed the novel's plot faithfully, even to the extent of leaving off in mid-sentence at the point where the dying Kafka abandoned the manuscript. The result is a film both provocative and tedious: There's a scene near the end in which K. is struggling to stay awake, and I found myself fighting slumber, too. But the commitment with which Haneke and his cast throw themselves into a project that itself is a bit supererogatory -- does Kafka's unfinished story really need to be an unfinished film? -- is impressive.

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

"Alex, will you come in, please. I wish to talk to you." Reinhold Schünzel, Ivan Triesault, and Claude Rains in the final scene of Notorious

T.R. Devlin: Cary Grant
Alicia Huberman: Ingrid Bergman
Alexander Sebastian: Claude Rains
Mme. Sebastian: Leopoldine Konstantin
Paul Prescott: Louis Calhern
Dr. Anderson: Reinhold Schünzel
Eric Mathis: Ivan Triesault
Joseph: Alexis Minotis
Walter Beardsley: Moroni Olsen
Emil Hupka: E.A. Krumschmidt

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb

The critics have canonized Vertigo (1958) as the greatest film of all time, but I don't think it's even Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film. That would have to be Notorious, with Rear Window (1954) close behind, and North by Northwest (1959) and maybe Psycho (1960) edging up in the pack. I have a theory that Hitchcock threw himself so whole-heartedly into Notorious because it was begun under the infernal meddling of David O. Selznick, who was forced to sell the project to RKO in order to devote himself full-time to the impossible task of making Duel in the Sun (1946). Hitchcock had just suffered through making Spellbound (1945), with Selznick and Selznick's shrink, May Romm, breathing down his neck throughout the filming, and he must have felt such a great relief at being freed from Selznick's control that he was determined to make Notorious as good as it could be. He succeeded: It's a tight, witty, suspenseful showcase of everything that Hitchcock could do well. It has two or three of his most impressive directorial touches, specifically the two minute, 40 second single-take kissing scene that follows Devlin and Alicia from room to balcony and back again, and the great crane shot that begins on the balcony of Sebastian's entrance hall and swoops down to the key clutched in Alicia's hand. But technical mastery is only part of the glory of Notorious. It begins, after the sentencing of Alicia's father, with a film noir moment: "bad girl" Alicia entertaining her rather dubious friends as Devlin, whom we see only from behind, watches. And it ends, not with a lovers' clinch, but with the villain being summoned to a doom we know will be very unpleasant. Hitchcock trusts the audience to feel a little bit sorry for Alex Sebastian at that moment when the door shuts him inside with his mother and some very angry Nazis. But the whole film is full of masterly touches, including the characteristic concentration on objects like wine bottles and coffee cups and keys, which play almost as important role in the narrative as the actors. Not that the actors are ignored: Hitchcock was one of the few directors* who saw and exploited the dark side of Cary Grant, who effectively lets his mouth grow tense and his eyes grow cold in his first scenes with bad-girl Ingrid Bergman, so that he can loosen up as they fall in love and then resume the icy tension when Devlin is forced into virtually prostituting Alicia to Sebastian. Hitchcock also invents great business for Leopoldine Konstantin as the sinister Mme. Sebastian, such as the wonderful moment when, awakened by her son with the bad news that Alicia is a spy, she sits up in bed and calmly lights a cigarette before getting down to business. I also love that when Devlin comes to confer with his boss, Prescott, over Alicia's plight, Hitchcock has the usually debonair Louis Calhern stretched out in bed insouciantly eating cheese and crackers. In short, Notorious is a showcase for everything Hitchcock had learned in his first 20 years of moviemaking, as well as a demonstration of the great things to come. When Alicia overhears the argument between Sebastian and his mother, it's a foreshadowing of Marion Crane's hearing the argument between Norman and Mrs. Bates.

*The others would be Howard Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and George Cukor, who was the first to glimpse Grant's darkness in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), but I think Hitchcock exploited it best.

The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

Vincent Gauthier and Marie Rivière in The Green Ray

Delphine: Marie Rivière
Manuella: María Luisa García
Beatrice: Béatrice Romand
Françoise: Rosette
Edouard: Eric Hamm
Lena: Carita
Joel: Joël Comarlot
Jacques: Vincent Gauthier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Marie Rivière, Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Sophie Maintigneux
Film editor: María Luisa García
Music: Jean-Louis Valéro

Delphine is shy, self-conscious, self-doubting, and frankly somewhat of a pain. At the beginning of Éric Rohmer's film, which is part of his series "Comedies and Proverbs," a successor to his more celebrated "Six Moral Tales," she has been ditched by a friend with whom she was planning to go on vacation. It's July, which in France means you're obligated to go on a vacation, especially if you live in Paris, which will be abandoned to the tourists and the pigeons in August. Her long-distance boyfriend, whom we never meet, has his own plans, so she spends much of the film searching for someone to accompany her. Ireland, where her family plans to vacation, is too cold and wet for her. Finally, a friend invites her to stay with her and her family in Cherbourg, but Delphine finds all the fuss and noise of a large group depressing, since she has no one she can call her own. Moreover, she's a vegetarian amid a hearty group of carnivores, and finds herself spending a lot of time (and talk -- this is a Rohmer film, after all) defending her dietary choice: It makes her feel "airy," she claims. She returns to Paris, then makes a mad one-day dash to an Alpine resort where she walks up an Alp and back down to take a return bus to Paris, where she finds herself being followed by a creep on the street. Finally, another friend takes pity on the increasingly depressed Delphine and offers her her brother-in-law's apartment in Biarritz. Things aren't much better there, though she strikes up an acquaintance with a holidaying Swedish girl, Lena, who is as gregarious and sexually adventurous as Delphine is solitary and touchy. They go out on the town together, but Lena's vulgarity offends her and she flees from the advances of one of the men Lena helps pick up. But in Biarritz she has also overheard the conversation of a group of older people about Jules Verne's novel The Green Ray, which centers on the atmospheric phenomenon sometimes called "the green flash," which occurs when the sun is setting. In the novel, observers of the green ray supposedly gain a magical insight into themselves and the people they're with. At the film's end, Delphine has somehow overcome her shyness and struck up an acquaintance with Jacques, a handsome young man she meets in the station as she's waiting for her train back to Paris. And, yes, they observe the green flash together. End of film. There's a great deal of charm to Rohmer's fable, which was crafted with the assistance of Marie Rivière, the actress who plays Delphine. Much of the dialogue was improvised by the cast, and the film was shot on 16 mm to keep the actors as spontaneous as possible. Occasionally, you can see a member of the cast, especially the children in the Cherbourg sequence, look straight at the camera as if uncertain about their performance, but it only helps maintain a kind of documentary feeling to the film. This is a wisp of a film, but it's heartfelt.

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Opening title cards for Spellbound

Constance Petersen: Ingrid Bergman
John Ballantyne: Gregory Peck
Alexander Brulov: Michael Chekhov
Murchison: Leo G. Carroll
Mary Carmichael: Rhonda Fleming
Fleurot: John Emery
Garmes: Norman Lloyd
House Detective: Bill Goodwin

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Angus McPhail
Based on a novel by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: James Basevi, Salvador Dalí
Music: Miklós Rózsa

Although David O. Selznick held Alfred Hitchcock under contract, Hitchcock made only three films directly under his niggling presence: Rebecca (1940), Spellbound, and The Paradine Case (1947). The best of his work during this period -- Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and Notorious (1946) -- was done on loanout to other producers and studios. It was clear from the tensions between director and producer during the work on Rebecca that things would never go smoothly in their relationship. So I have a strong suspicion that Spellbound represents a sly Hitchcockian subversion of Selznick, an attempt to undermine the producer's obsessiveness by playing off Selznick's own quirks, in this case his preoccupation with psychoanalysis. Selznick notoriously gave his own analyst, May E. Romm, a screen credit as "psychiatric advisor" on the film, leading to some criticisms of her by the psychoanalytic community. Though Romm isn't credited as a writer on the film, it's thought that the title cards "explaining" psychoanalysis in the opening of Spellbound are her work. Romm and Hitchcock clashed during the filming, he studiously ignoring her suggestions and once dismissing her criticism with a characteristic "It's only a movie" retort. The result is one of Hitchcock's wackier, more improbable films, one that probably sent many in the audience away convinced that analysis was movie hokum, and not a real-life solution to mental problems. From the outset, for example, it's clear that the doctors in Green Manors, the fancy mental hospital in the film, are at least as nutty as the patients, with Dr. Fleurot constantly horndogging his beautiful colleague, Dr. Petersen, and the rest of the staff showing off their own ineptness. When the supposed Dr. Edwardes, the replacement for the retiring Dr. Murchison, arrives, he turns out to be a twitchy young man, given to fainting spells and other bits of odd behavior, but he succeeds in winning over the icy Dr. Petersen in an instant. And so on, through various bits of Hitchcockian obsession, mistaken identities, and unlikely revelations. There's the famous Dalí-designed dream sequence and Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning score, one of the first to use the eerie-sounding theremin in key passages, but it's never terribly convincing. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck are gorgeous, of course, and for once Peck doesn't seem like he was whittled out of wood -- perhaps because he and Bergman had an affair during the filming. The rest of the cast hams it up nicely, though the fact that the hammiest of them all, Michael Chekhov, got an Oscar nomination for his stereotypical shrink is lamentable. This is one of those movies that are more fun if you know all the backstories about the production.

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, and Norihiko Hashida in Three Resurrected Drunkards

Beanpole: Kazuhiko Kato
The Small One: Osamu Kitayama
The Smallest One: Norihiko Hashida
I Chong-il: Kei Sato
Kim Fwa: Cha Dei-dang
The Middle-aged Man: Fumio Watanabe
The Young Woman: Mako Midori

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Nagisa Oshima's attempts to unsettle his audiences usually took the form of serious explorations of social dysfunction like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Boy (1969), and The Ceremony (1971) or sexually provocative films like In the Realm of the Senses (1976), but Three Resurrected Drunkards plays more like A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) than any of those often grim and brutal excursions into the dark side of contemporary Japanese life. It begins with three young men larking about at the beach, accompanied by a giddy Japanese pop song. When their clothes are stolen and replaced with others, the film goes off into  a series of mostly comic mishaps. But there's a dark side to their larking about from the beginning: One of their gags is an attempt to restage the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a South Vietnam general pointing a gun at the head of a grimacing Viet Cong prisoner. They take turns playing the general and the victim as the third critiques the grimace on the face of the one playing the victim. It turns out that the clothes thieves are South Koreans who are trying to sneak into Japan to avoid military service in Vietnam. The Koreans have a gun, with which they threaten the three young Japanese. Along the way, they also get involved with a young woman and an abusive older man who may or may not be her husband. At one point, the film simply stops and starts over at the beginning, but this time the characters know what happened in the first part and are able to change things around. It's all a fascinating blend of rock movie high jinks and serious social commentary: Oshima is satirizing the Japanese prejudice against Koreans, among other things. Some of the satire is lost on contemporary audiences, especially in the West, but Three Resurrected Drunkards is a fascinating glimpse into its director's imagination and political indignation.

Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Mrs. de Winter: Joan Fontaine
Maxim de Winter: Laurence Olivier
Mrs. Danvers: Judith Anderson
Jack Favell: George Sanders
Frank Crawley: Reginald Denny
Major Giles Lacy: Nigel Bruce
Colonel Julyan: C. Aubrey Smith
Beatrice Lacy: Gladys Cooper
Mrs. Van Hopper: Florence Bates
Coroner: Melville Cooper
Dr. Baker: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan
Based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, William Cameron Menzies
Music: Franz Waxman

Rebecca is a very good movie. Would it have been a better one if Alfred Hitchcock, directing his first American film, had been left alone by the producer, David O. Selznick, an incurable micromanager? That's the question that lingers, especially since Hitchcock later expressed some dissatisfaction with the film. It does lack the director's sense of humor, manifested for example in the scene in which the horrid Mrs. Van Hopper snuffs a cigarette in a jar of cold cream, a gag Hitchcock liked so much that he used it again 15 years later in To Catch a Thief, in which the substitute ashtray is a fried egg. The differences between Hitchcock and Selznick largely lay in the realm of editing, in which Selznick loved to dabble, insisting that scenes be shot from various camera angles to give him latitude in the editing room. Hitchcock was a famous storyboarder, working out scenes and planning camera setups well in advance of the actual shooting -- "editing in the camera," as it's usually called. The story would probably also have been very different in the Hitchcock version: According to one source, the original version suggested by Hitchcock began on shipboard, with various people being seasick. Selznick, however, liked to stick closely to the novels on which he based his films: The opening title, for example, refers to the movie as a "picturization" of Daphne Du Maurier's bestseller. (This was doubtless a comfort to Du Maurier, who hated Hitchcock's version of her novel Jamaica Inn (1939) -- but then so did Hitchcock, and both of them were right to do so.) The glory of Rebecca lies mostly in its performances. Although Laurence Olivier never makes Maxim de Winter a fully credible character -- I think he felt he was slumming, doing the film only to be near Vivien Leigh, and disgusted when Selznick didn't cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter -- he was always a watchable actor, even when he wasn't doing a great job of it. Joan Fontaine is almost perfect in her role, making credible the crucial character switch, when she stops being shy and stands up to Mrs. Danvers. And Hitchcock must have loved working with the gaggle of British character actors who had flocked to Hollywood and populate all the supporting roles.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)

Batisti: Luigi Ornagi
Batistina: Francesca Morigi
Minec: Omar Brignoli
The Widow Runk: Teresa Brescianini
Anselmo: Giuseppe Brignoli
Maddalena: Lucia Pezzoli
Stefano: Franco Pilenga
Finard: Battista Travaini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Ermanno Olmi
Production design: Enrico Tovaglieri
Costume design: Francesca Zucchelli

Watching almost any three-hour movie is going to be an immersive experience, but The Tree of Wooden Clogs is exceptionally so, given that it was written, directed, and beautifully photographed by Ermanno Olmi as a kind of tribute to the endurance of the people of the province of Bergamo in Northern Italy, the region Olmi came from. I compare filmmakers to Faulkner perhaps too often, but once again it seems to fit: Bergamo is Olmi's Jefferson, Mississippi -- a place where the past weighs heavy and the people have learned to endure. The film is set in Bergamo at the end of the 19th century, when a kind of feudalism still reigned: The people of The Tree of Wooden Clogs are tenant farmers, struggling to survive on a third of the produce and animals they raise, the rest of it going to the landowner who supplies them housing -- an old ramshackle building where four families live. In one apartment the bedroom, in which a woman gives birth during the film, is in a sort of attic reached only by a ladder. They are kept going by a deep piety, a constant invocation of the Holy Trinity and the saints. Political protest is something that takes place far away, and we glimpse it only when a newlywed couple makes a journey to Milan, where they spend their wedding night in an orphanage run by nuns and in the morning return to Bergamo with the year-old infant they have adopted, in part because the stipend that pays for his support will supplement the man's farm labor and the wife's work in a small mill. Their path to the orphanage is blocked briefly by troops battling with protesters. A Marxist orator also gives a speech at the local carnival, but he's mainly ignored by the people having fun. Critics attacked Olmi for not being political enough, but it's clear that one function of his film is to stir anger at human exploitation: The title comes from one of the episodes in the film, in which Minec, the young son of Batisti and Batistina, breaks the wooden clog that he wears on his daily eight-mile walk to and from school. Batisti, in desperation, chops down a tree and carves new clogs from the wood, but when the landlord finds out, the family is sent packing. Olmi's vision is steady and only occasionally slips into sentimentality, and his non-professional cast, made up of residents of Bergamo, is flawless.

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations. 

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in Shame

Eva Rosenberg: Liv Ullmann
Jan Rosenberg: Max von Sydow
Jacobi: Gunnar Björnstrand
Mrs. Jacobi: Brigitta Valberg
Filip: Sigge Fürst
Lobelius: Hans Alfredson

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editor: Ulla Ryghe

One of Ingmar Bergman's bleakest and best films, Shame is unencumbered by the theological agon that makes many of his films tiresome (not to say irrelevant) for some of us. It's a fable about a couple, Eva and Jan, two musicians seeking to escape from a devastating war by exiling themselves to an island. At the start of the film their life is almost idyllic: Their radio and telephone don't work, so they remain in blissful ignorance of the problems of the world outside. He's a bit scattered and idle; she's practical and businesslike. They quarrel a little over their temperamental differences, but they have developed a self-sustaining life, raising chickens and cultivating vegetables in their greenhouse. But needless to say, no couple is an island: The war comes to them. When they take the ferry into town, selling crates of berries and stopping to drink wine with a friend who has just been drafted, they begin to be aware that the larger conflict will not remain at a distance for long. There will be no retreat for them into the simple life. Under the pressure of war, their relationship changes: Eva becomes more careless, Jan loses his passivity. In the end, desperate to flee the despoiled island, they join a group on a fishing boat heading for the mainland only to wind up in a dead calm -- a literal one, for they are stuck in a sea filled with corpses, an image that, because so much of the film is straightforward in narrative and imagery, manages to avoid the heavy-handedness that often afflicts Bergman's films. There is also, for Bergman, a surprising lack of specificity about the war in the film: There are no direct allusions to particular wars, such as World War II, the one that raged in his childhood, or to the war of the day in Vietnam -- there are no images of burning monks as in Persona (1966). The war of the film is generic -- soldiers, planes, trucks, and tanks lack insignia and the names and nationalities of the two sides are never mentioned. It's as if war is an ongoing condition of the human race.

Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)

Turo Pajala in Ariel

Taisto Kasurinen: Turo Pajala
Irmeli Pihlaja: Susanna Haavisto
Mikkonen: Matti Pellonpää
Riku: Eetu Rikamo
Miner: Erkki Pajala
Mugger: Matti Jaaranen

Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography: Timo Salminen

As in Shadows in Paradise (1986), another of Aki Kaurismäki's impassive, expressionless couples sets sail at the end of Ariel, this time on the ship that gives the film its title. (If you know Kaurismäki's films, you surely weren't expecting any airy Shakespearean sprites from him?) When the mine at which Taisto and his father work shuts down, the father hands to keys to his Cadillac convertible to Taisto, then goes into the men's room and shoots himself. Taisto stoically gets in the car and drives to Helsinki to look for work, despite the fact that it's winter in Finland and he can't get the top to go up. (This problem persists throughout the film, leading Irmeli's small son to comment, "Nice wind," as they're speeding along the highway. It's resolved only toward the end of the film when Mikkonen asks, at a particularly inappropriate moment, "What's this button for?" and presto!) It's odd to use the word "charming" about a movie so grim in its setting and the plight of its characters, and that involves suicide, murder, various beatings, and prison time, but that's the nature of Kaurismäki's filmmaking: There are moments of dark delight scattered throughout, such as the fact that the fob on which the keys to the Cadillac are hung is the inner workings of a music box, and the tune it plays is the socialist anthem "The Internationale." Music is used wittily throughout the film, including various pop songs, and as the Ariel sails away to Mexico at the end, we hear "Over the Rainbow," sung in Finnish. There is something Faulknerian about Kaurismäki's determination to inject humor into even the grimmest of situations.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes

Boris Lermontov: Anton Walbrook
Vicky Page: Moira Shearer
Julian Craster: Marius Goring
Boleslawsky: Robert Helpmann
Ljubov: Léonide Massine
Boronskaja: Ludmilla Tchérina
Livy: Esmond Knight
Ratov: Albert Bassermann
Prof. Palmer: Austin Trevor
Lady Neston: Irene Browne

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Screenplay: Emeric Pressburger, Keith Winter, Michael Powell
Based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen
Cinematography: Jack Cardiff
Production design: Hein Heckroth
Film editing: Reginald Mills
Music: Brian Easdale
Costume design: Hein Heckroth

In its digital restoration, The Red Shoes almost certainly looks better than it ever did even in the most optimal theatrical showing, its colors brighter and sharper, its darks deeper and more detailed. But is that necessarily a good thing? I'm not like one of those audiophiles who insist that old vinyl LPs sound better than CDs or any digital audio process -- I like being able to hear things without surface pops and skips. But I do think that in the case of a film like The Red Shoes, where suspension of disbelief is essential, something has been lost. The great red snood of Moira Shearer's hair is revealed to be a thing of individual strands that might have benefited from a quick brushing before her closeups. The special-effects moments, like Vicky's leap into the red shoes or Boleslawsky's transformation into the newspaper man, are more glaringly just rudimentary jump cuts. There's a loss of glamour and magic that hasn't been compensated for, even though we can now see Jack Cardiff's photography of Hein Heckroth's designs with greater clarity. I will also admit that I have never been in the front ranks of the fans of The Red Shoes. While I admire the storytelling ability of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, I have to question the moral of the story, which seems to be that a woman can't have both a great career and a successful private life, or in a larger sense, that art is impossible without a loss of self. Granted, the story comes from the realm of fairytale, which is never without an element of cruelty, but is Vicky's suicide a necessary follow-through, or just a submission on the part of the screenwriters to the demands of some kind of closure, given that they've never made the character more than a stereotype: the woman torn between the demands of two men? Ravishing to the eye, The Red Shoes doesn't satisfy the mind or the heart.

Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986)

Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää in Shadows in Paradise

Nikander: Matti Pellonpää
Ilona Rajmäki: Kati Outinen
Melartin: Sakari Kousmanen
Co-worker: Esko Nikkari
Ilona's Girlfriend: Kylli Köngäs
Shop Steward: Pekka Laiho

Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography: Timo Salminen

Glumly smoking their lungs out, a garbage collector and a supermarket clerk embark on a ploddingly passionless relationship -- their first date, to her disgust, is at a bingo parlor -- in Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise. Don't look too hard for paradise: It's no more in evidence in Kaurismäki's film than in his friend Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), unless Talinn, the Estonian capital toward which the couple set sail on a Soviet liner at the end of the film, is their idea of heaven. It's hard to think of a film as both authentic and ironic, but Kaurismäki and his actors manage to make their characters both convincing and, in a very low-key way, funny. It took me a while, to be sure, to catch on to the tone of the film: I had never seen one of Kaurismäki's before, and coming cold to its gray Helsinki cityscape and its entirely unprepossessing leads -- Outinen and Pellonpää are by far the homeliest performers in the film -- I wasn't sure whether the twinges of mirth I felt at their solemn, dogged worldview was appropriate. For that matter, I'm still not sure --- which is one of the reasons I find the film so interesting.

Gods of the Plague (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague

Franz Walsch: Harry Baer
Joanna Reiher: Hanna Schygulla
Margarethe: Margarethe von Trotta
Günther: Günther Kaufmann
Carla Aulaulu: Carla Egerer
Magdalena Fuller: Ingrid Caven
Policeman: Jan George
Mother: Lilo Pempeit
Marian Walsch: Marian Seidowsky
Joe: Micha Cochina
Inspector: Yaak Karsunke
Supermarket Manager: Hannes Gromball

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production designer: Kurt Raab
Film editor: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Music: Peer Raben

The Rainer Werner Fassbinder stock company is one of the wonders of film, mixing up their roles throughout his movies in often amusing ways. This is the second film to feature Franz Walsch, a name Fassbinder took as his own sometimes -- including in the credits for Gods of the Plague, which list "Franz Walsch" as the film editor. In the first Franz Walsch feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), the character, a young hood, was played by the decidedly homely Fassbinder, but in this one he becomes the considerably more handsome Harry Baer, preening his luxuriant mustache. Franz is released from prison at the film's start, and he soon becomes involved with two women, Joanna (played once again by Hanna Schygulla) and Margarethe (Margarethe von Trotta, who would soon come into her own right as a director as well as actress). Like the earlier film, Gods of the Plague takes place in the rather inept underworld of Munich, in which Franz teams up with Günther, aka Gorilla, to pull off a supermarket robbery that's doomed to deadly failure. Also like Fassbinder's other early films, it's played with a deadpan, emotionless affect by all concerned, so that you sometimes have to laugh at the disconnect of situations, events, and relationships that would be shocking or horrifying in the real world but are treated as no big deal by the characters in the film. It was obviously inspired by the attempts at coolness essayed by the characters in the French New Wave, but even Godard's delinquents seemed to be having more fun than Fassbinder's do. A difference between being French and being German perhaps? The cast also features other members of the stock company such as Irm Hermann and Kurt Raab (who doubles as production designer) as well as Fassbinder in very small roles.

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in The Lady Vanishes

Iris Henderson: Margaret Lockwood
Gilbert: Michael Redgrave
Dr. Hartz: Paul Lukas
Miss Froy: May Whitty
Mr. Todhunter: Cecil Parker
"Mrs." Todhunter: Linden Travers
Caldicott: Naunton Wayne
Charters: Basil Radford
Baroness: Mary Clare
Hotel Manager: Emile Boreo
Blanche: Googie Withers
Julie: Sally Stewart
Signor Doppo: Philip Leaver
Signora Doppo: Selma Vaz Dias
The Nun: Catherine Lacy
Madame Kummer: Josephine Wilson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

There are those who think that Alfred Hitchcock never surpassed The Lady Vanishes when it comes to the romantic comedy thriller. From the opening sequence of an obviously miniature Eastern European village to the concluding scene in which Miss Froy delightedly reunites with Iris and Gilbert, it's an utterly engaging movie. If I happen to prefer North by Northwest (1959), it may be only because Cary Grant is a greater movie star than Michael Redgrave and James Mason a more suavely subtle villain than Paul Lukas, and of course the thrills -- the crop-dusting scene, the Mount Rushmore chase -- are done more deftly (not to say expensively) and with greater sophistication. Because virtually everything in The Lady Vanishes works: There's real chemistry between Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood; May Whitty is a delight as the geriatric spy; the notion of a song being the MacGuffin is witty; Caldicott and Charters are the perfect ambiguously gay duo; and there's a nun in high heels who pauses to fix her makeup. It also has a genuinely serious subtext: 1938 was a year fraught with tension, and when Caldicott and Charters are preoccupied with getting the news from England, our first thought is that it has to do something with the threat of war and not with a cricket test match. The satiric glances at the insular Brits are also underscored by the relationship of Todhunter and his mistress, escaping to a place where nobody knows them to conduct their affair, and even by Gilbert's blithe preoccupation with collecting information about the native folk dances of the Bandrikans, who might indeed be next after the Czechs to be swallowed up by the Third Reich. 

Yotsuya Kaidan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Ken Uehara and Kinuyo Tanaka in Yotsuya Kaidan

Oiwa/Osode: Kinuyo Tanaka
Iemon Tamiya: Ken Uehara
Naosuke: Osamu Takizawa
Kohei: Keiji Sada
Oume: Hisako Yamane
Yomoshichi: Jukichi Uno
Takuetsu: Aizo Tamashima
Kohei's Mother: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a play by Nanboku Tsuruya
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Yotsuya Kaidan is one of the most famous Japanese ghost stories, put in classic form in the kabuki drama written by Nanboku Tsuruya in 1825. But in adapting the tale of a ronin, a masterless samurai, pursued by the vengeful phantom of the wife he murdered, Keisuke Kinoshita and his screenwriters, Eijiro Hisaita and the uncredited Masaki Kobayashi, jettisoned the supernatural elements to turn it into a psychological drama with overtones of Shakespeare tragedy: the ambition of Macbeth and the jealousy of Othello, abetted by an Iago-like villain. The ronin of Kinoshita's film, Iemon Tamiya, was dismissed by his former master for failing to guard the storehouse from a thief; he now ekes out a living with his wife, Oiwa, making and selling umbrellas. But while drowning his sorrows in sake one evening, he is approached by Naosuke, who plants in him the idea of wooing the wealthy Oume, whose father has the connections that would enable him to find a master and restore his status as a samurai. Naosuke also plots with Kohei, with whom he served some jail time, to woo Oiwa, with whom Kohei has been infatuated since the days when she worked in a teahouse. Kohei's attentions to Oiwa arouse Iemon's jealousy, which Naosuke plays upon. As the prospect of marrying Oume becomes more likely, Iemon is given a poison to use on Oiwa, but he's initially reluctant to go that far. When Oiwa accidentally scalds her face, producing a horrible disfigurement, Naosuke provides an "ointment" that puts her in terrible pain and Iemon administers the poison. In the turmoil that follows Oiwa's death, Naosuke also kills Kohei. Freed to marry Oume, Iemon finds himself tormented by a guilty conscience, and when he learns that Naosuke was the one who robbed the storehouse that led to Iemon's dismissal by his former master, he turns on the conspirator. A fiery conclusion results. Kinoshita released the film in two parts, the first running for 85 minutes, the second for 73 minutes. Part I is more tightly controlled, efficiently introducing its characters -- there are lots of secondary ones, including Oiwa's sister, Osode (also played by Kinuyo Tanaka), and her husband, Yomoshichi, who provide a kind of grounding in normal life. Kinoshita is not as successful at marshaling all of the secondary plots in Part II, and I tend to blame the director's tendency to sentimentalize, including the search of Kohei's mother for her son, for the weaknesses in the later parts of the film. But he gives his characters depth -- there is more sympathy for Iemon in the film than in more traditional versions of the story, which has been filmed many times: Turner Classic Movies has Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 film version on its schedule later this month.

Number Seventeen (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)

Ann Casson and John Stuart in Number Seventeen

Barton: John Stuart
Ben: Leon M. Lion 

Nora Brant: Anne Grey 

Brant: Donald Calthrop 

Henry Doyle: Barry Jones 

Rose Ackroyd: Ann Casson

Mr. Ackroyd: Henry Caine 

Sheldrake: Garry Marsh 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock 

Screenplay: Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Ackland 

Based on a play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Bryan Langley 

For the first part of the film, a bunch of people stumble around a derelict house, and for the rest of it most of them get on a speeding train and scramble around in pursuit of a presumably valuable necklace. There's a woman who's supposed to be a deaf-mute but turns out not to be and a corpse that's supposed to be dead but isn't, along with a giddy ingenue who falls through the ceiling and a cockney derelict who is supposed to supply comic relief from the gun-waving and running about. He doesn't, but the actor who played him, Leon M. Lion, not only got top billing but also a credit as producer. In short, Number Seventeen is a total mess. That it's atmospherically staged and photographed and the runaway train sequence is exciting in a mindless way are the positive elements we can ascribe to Hitchcock, who really didn't want to do this film version of a popular play, but agreed to anyway, then tried to turn a play he thought filled with clichés into a comedy thriller. He later called it "a disaster," and he was right.