Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)

Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi

Luke Skywalker: Mark Hamill
Leia Organa: Carrie Fisher
Kylo Ren: Adam Driver
Rey: Daisy Ridley
Finn: John Boyega
Poe Dameron: Oscar Isaac
Snoke: Andy Serkis
Maz Kanata (voice): Lupita Nyong'o
General Hux: Domhnall Gleeson
C-3PO: Anthony Daniels
Captain Phasma: Gwendoline Christie
Rose Tico: Kelly Marie Tran
Vice Admiral Holdo: Laura Dern
DJ: Benicio Del Toro

Director: Rian Johnson
Screenplay: Rian Johnson
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Production design: Rick Heinrichs
Film editing: Bob Ducsay
Music: John Williams

Fun but just a little bit frustrating. As I said in my comments on Episode VII: The Force Awakens, we need more backstory -- about Ren's fall to the dark side, about Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rey. We get snippets of Ren's story, including Luke's threat to kill Ren when he sees him going bad, and of Rey's, including a revelation that her parents were no one in particular -- which may be unreliable information on both counts. Poe and Finn go their separate ways in The Last Jedi, essentially into subplots that add texture but not substance to their stories. Instead of establishing Poe, Finn, and Rey as the heroic triad comparable to Luke, Leia, and Han, which is what The Force Awakens might have led us to expect, The Last Jedi makes them seem relatively ineffectual. I think the episode suffers a bit from "middle film" syndrome, the need to continue a story without providing the resolution that presumably will arrive in Episode IX.

The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003)

The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001

The Two Towers, 2002

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood in The Two Towers

The Return of the King, 2003

Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and Ian McKellen in The Return of the King

Frodo: Elijah Wood
Gandalf: Ian McKellen
Aragorn: Viggo Mortensen
Sam: Sean Astin
Pippin: Billy Boyd
Merry: Dominic Monaghan
Legolas: Orlando Bloom
Gimli/Treebeard (voice): John Rhys-Davies
Arwyn: Liv Tyler
Elrond: Hugo Weaving
Gollum (voice and motion capture)/Smeagol: Andy Serkis
Bilbo: Ian Holm
Saruman: Christopher Lee
Galadriel: Cate Blanchett
Boromir: Sean Bean
Eowyn: Miranda Otto
Theoden: Bernard Hill
Denethor: John Noble
Eomer: Karl Urban
Faramir: David Wenham
Haldir: Craig Parker
Wormtongue: Brad Dourif

Director: Peter Jackson
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair
Based on a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cinematography: Andrew Lesnie
Production design: Grant Major
Film editing: John Gilbert (The Fellowship of the Ring), Michael Horton (The Two Towers), Jamie Selkirk (The Return of the King)
Music: Howard Shore

There is a clarity of narrative and action in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings that seems to me to be lacking in the blockbusters that have followed in its sizable wake, even those that have been scaled down for serialization on television, like Game of Thrones. (And even, I might add, in Jackson's own attempt to expand J.R.R. Tolkien's much more modest novel The Hobbit into a similarly epic film trilogy.) Some of this clarity lies in the source, in Tolkien's vividly characterized and shrewdly plotted novel. But Jackson and his team also display an ability to stage action sequences like the Helm's Deep scenes in The Two Towers and the assault on Minas Tirith in The Return of the King while both keeping things exciting and making sure we know where the characters we most care about are in the thick of things. Too often, especially in recent superhero films, the big battles of action movies seem to be either taking place in the dark or are simply a blur of quick cuts, with the revelation of who's up and who's down taking place after the dust clears. In The Lord of the Rings, there's a logic to what's taking place, and an awareness of peril and triumph that threads through the action. This is the more to the good because Jackson makes us care about Tolkien's characters, even the ones who seem less vulnerable or lovable than the small beings who bear the burden of the Ring. I think the special effects have begun to show their age: The group shot of the fellowship, for example, in the first film in the trilogy, feels awkwardly tricksy, with the hobbits and the dwarf obviously "pasted in" along with the human-sized characters. But the great vast project of bringing Tolkien's book to the screen remains a landmark and a stunning success.

Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997)

Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy

Holden McNeil: Ben Affleck
Alyssa Jones: Joey Lauren Adams
Banky Edwards: Jason Lee
Jay: Jason Mewes
Silent Bob: Kevin Smith
Hooper X: Dwight Ewell

Director: Kevin Smith
Screenplay: Kevin Smith
Cinematography: David Klein
Production design: Robert Holtzman
Film editing: Scott Mosier, Kevin Smith
Music: David Pirner

The treatment of sexual identity in movies and on TV becomes a more sensitive topic every year, so it's nice to see that Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy hasn't dated as much in the past 20 years as it could have. Just hearing that the plot involves a love affair between a straight guy and a lesbian sets off all sorts of alarms about misconceptions of sexual orientation, including the old canard that the "right guy" (or woman) could "convert" someone to heterosexuality. Actually, even in 1997 that idea would have been derided and protested off the screen, but there is sometimes a sense in Chasing Amy that Smith is walking on eggshells. What we have instead is a thoughtful portrait of the complexities of youthful sexual experimentation along with a scathingly satiric one of the ways in which men misunderstand women, gay or straight. The penultimate scene in which Holden (a deliciously Salingerian choice of name) attempts to prove his bona fides to Alyssa is brilliantly, cringingly, painfully funny. 

Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev, 1974)

Anna Prucnal in Sweet Movie

Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada: Carole Laure
Potemkin Sailor: Pierre Clémenti
Capt. Anna Planeta: Anna Prucnal
El Macho: Sami Frey
Mrs. Abplanalpe: Jane Mallett
Jeremiah Muscle: Roy Callender
Mr. Kapital: John Vernon
Mama Communa: Marpessa Dawn

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: France Gallagher, Dusan Makavejev, Martin Malina
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Production design: Jocelyn Joly
Film editing: Yann Dedet
Music: Manos Hatzidakis

In the 1933 decision that lifted the ban in the United States on James Joyce's Ulysses, Judge John M. Woolsey dismissed the charges of obscenity, though he found that "in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic." I've never found anything to be "emetic" in Ulysses, certainly not on the level of some of the more queasy moments in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie, which exploits every orifice known to be possessed by human beings, especially in the orgiastic scenes featuring Otto Muehl's commune. As for obscenity, that lies in the eye of the beholder. To my mind, Sweet Movie dallies on the brink of it in the scene in which Anna Prucnal's Captain Anna, scantily clad to say the least, makes what appear to be sexual come-ons to a group of boys aboard her boat called Survival. At moments like this I snap out of the trance of make-believe into which art lures us, and into a realization that the boys in the scene are pre-pubescent actors. There's a layer of child sexual abuse in staging such a scene that I can't quite rise above. Beyond that, however, Sweet Movie does precisely what Makavejev wants it to: It surprises, startles, shocks, overturning most of our expectations of what a movie can and/or should show us. It's valuable for that reason alone. Whether it illuminates or provokes thought in its even-handed assault on both capitalism and communism is another question. It has begun to feel dated, as many avant-garde satires tend to do. But it's also done with a great deal of verve and chutzpah, which never really grow old.     

Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)

Metzengerstein

Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead: Metzengerstein

Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein: Jane Fonda
Baron Wilhelm Berlifitzing: Peter Fonda
Contessa's Advisor: James Robertson Justice
Contessa's Friend: Françoise Prévost

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Pascal Cousin
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov
Music: Jean Prodromidès

William Wilson

Alain Delon in Spirits of the Dead: William Wilson

William Wilson: Alain Delon
Giuseppina: Brigitte Bardot
Priest: Renzo Palmer

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle, Clement Biddle Wood
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Production design: Ghislain Uhry
Film editing: Franco Arcalli, Suzanne Baron
Music: Diego Masson

Toby Dammit

Terence Stamp in Spirits of the Dead: Toby Dammit

Toby Dammit: Terence Stamp
Priest: Salvo Randone
TV Commentator: Annie Tonietti
The Devil: Marina Yaru

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Piero Tosi
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nino Rota

Of the three short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories collected here under the title Spirits of the Dead, only the third, Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, a freewheeling version of Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," really works. Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein is simply cheesy, with his then-wife Jane Fonda sashaying around in supposedly period costumes that are designed to reveal as much flesh as possible. The casting of her brother, Peter, as the man she loves, is obviously there to elicit a frisson of some sort, but it doesn't. Louis Malle's William Wilson stuffs a little too much of Poe's doppelgänger fable into its confines, and despite the presence of a cigar-puffing Brigitte Bardot, manages to pull whatever punches the story may have had, ending up rather dull. But Toby Dammit is a small gem, a concentration of Fellini's usual grotesques and decadents into a bright satire on celebrity: It's almost impossible to watch another awards show without recalling Fellini's acid-bathed take on it. Only the conclusion of the film really retains much of Poe, which suggests that Vadim and Malle might have been better off devising contemporary riffs on the material, as Fellini does.

Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Ineko Arima in Black River

Shizuko: Ineko Arima
Nishida: Fumio Watanabe
Killer Joe: Tatsuya Nakadai
Landlady: Isuzu Yamada
Okada: Tomo'o Nagai
Okada's Wife: Keiko Awaji
Kurihara: Eijiro Tono
Kin: Seiji Miyaguchi
Sakazaki: Asao Sano

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Takeo Tomishima
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Ninjin Kurabu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It's a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida, in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko, who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe, who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don't include its tenants. She's played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957). Here she's outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Tatsuya Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Torohiko Hamada in The Thick-Walled Room

Yokota: Ko Mishima
Yamashita: Torohiko Hamada
Yoshiko: Keiko Kishi
Yamashita's Sister: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kawanishi: Kinzo Shin
Kimura: Tsutomu Shimomoto

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Shizuo Oosawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The resonant phrase "just following orders" hovers silently throughout Masaki Kobayashi's scathing The Thick-Walled Room. It's a portrait of postwar Japan more critical of all concerned, from the militarists who caused the war to the forces that occupied the country after it, than most of the films made by Kobayashi's contemporaries, which is why it was held from release for three years after it was made in 1953. The film focuses on the class-B and -C war criminals held prisoners by the occupying Americans -- and then by the Japanese -- for crimes they were ordered by their superior officers to commit. Meanwhile, many of those superior officers have been released and have returned to civilian life and even to important positions in business and government. The prisoners are both haunted by the things they were ordered to do and resentful of the injustice of their situation. They also remain ignorant of the way the outside world has changed. Yokota, for example, dreams of his girlfriend, Yoshiko, unaware that she has become a prostitute. The screenplay by novelist Kobo Abe is psychologically rich, and Kobayashi's direction makes the most of its subtleties.

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Karl Scheydt in The American Soldier

Ricky: Karl Scheydt
Rosa von Praunheim: Elga Sorbas
Jan: Jan George
Doc: Hark Bohm
Cop: Marius Aicher
Chambermaid: Margarethe von Trotta
Gypsy: Ulli Lommel
Magdalena Fuller: Katrin Schaake
Singer: Ingrid Caven
Ricky's Mother: Eva Ingeborg Scholz
Ricky's Brother: Kurt Raab
Prostitute: Irm Hermann
Police Chief: Gustl Datz
Franz Walsch: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Film editing: Thea Eymèsz
Music: Peer Raben

Is The American Soldier an hommage to American film noir or is it a satiric glance at the ongoing European fascination with that genre? I like to think that it's the latter, Fassbinder's snarky take on the movies' hard-drinking anti-heroes who, like Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) for one example, affect trenchcoats and fedoras as they go about their murderous business. Surely Ricky's sharply angled hat and his omnipresent bottle of Ballantine's are tongue-in-cheek allusions to those cinematic predecessors. The American Soldier isn't up to much else. Fassbinder is playing around with his usual company as well as giving himself another opportunity to play a character named Franz Walsch, which he did in Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) before handing over the role to Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague (1970). The film's real highlight is its loopy, nonsensical ending, in which Ricky's brother wrestles with the dying Ricky as their mother looks on impassively. Otherwise, it's really for Fassbinder completists.

The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama

Orin: Kinuyo Tanaka
Tatsuhei: Teiji Takahashi
Tama: Yuko Mochizuki
Kesakichi: Danko Ichikawa
Matsu: Keiko Ogasawara
Mata: Seiji Miyaguchi
Mata's Son: Yunosuke Ito
Teru: Ken Mitsuda

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Matsunosuke Nozawa

Keisuke Kinoshita was so prolific a filmmaker, so freewheeling in his choice of subject, so willing to try something different with each film, that it's tempting to dismiss him as a kind of dilettante. And too often, his attempts at pathos come off as sentimental, even banal. But if he has a masterwork in his oeuvre, it's The Ballad of Narayama, a highly stylized account of life in a medieval Japanese village in which old people, when they reach the age of 70, are taken up the mountain and left there to die. I know nothing of kabuki, but the style of the film is often likened to that traditional Japanese theater. What I do know is that Kinoshita is one of the few directors who have managed to make film feel theatrical, to give us the intimacy of theater with the flexibility of film. The Ballad of Narayama is carefully, deliberately staged, using sets that are obviously on soundstages with trees and plants that emulate nature but are clearly artificial. I kept being reminded, oddly, of the MGM musical Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954), which was originally planned to be filmed in Scotland, and later on the Monterey Peninsula in California, but was moved into a Culver City soundstage thanks to budget cuts. Kinoshita, who had often made spectacular use of actual Japanese locations, wasn't forced by the budget to give his film such an artificial look but rather chose it. And it works: There's a formal quality to the film that suits its story, a distancing that makes the harshness of its fable so effective. The film also benefits from the performance of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, whose dignified acceptance of her fate becomes heartbreaking. Her own grandson, Kesakichi, scorns her as just another mouth to feed, and mocks her with a song about a woman with demon teeth, whereupon Orin takes a rock and smashes her own teeth to demonstrate her good intentions. Tanaka makes this horrifying scene plausible, as she does the final submission to the abandonment at Narayama. She's well supported by Teiji Takahashi as her grieving, dutiful son.

The Rose on His Arm (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Yoshiko Kuga in The Rose on His Arm

Kiyoshi Akiyama: Katsuo Nakamura
Keiko Hase: Yoshiko Kuga
Kiyoshi's Mother: Sadako Sawamura
Masahiro Hase: Akira Ishihama
Kaoro Akiyama: Noriko Arita
Yoko: Hiroko Sugita
Choshichi Tsuji: Shinji Tanaka
Masahiro's Mother: Kuniyo Miyake
Masahiro's Father: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita '
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The only real distinction accruing to The Rose on His Arm is that it was cited as one of the best foreign films by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in its Golden Globe Awards for 1956. Otherwise, it's a rather plodding entry in the "troubled youth" genre, very much outshone even in the year of its release by Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, which exploited with greater finesse the audience's fascination with the postwar generation. Kiyoshi is a sullen, rather spoiled young man who resists his mother's attempts to find him gainful employment in a factory, and instead falls into the clutches of would-be yakuza Masahiro, not to mention the arms of Masahiro's pretty sister, Keiko. Keisuke Kinoshita and his usual behind-the-camera collaborators never quite lift this one out of predictability.

The Big City (Satyajit Ray, 1963)

Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee in The Big City

Arati Mazumdar: Madhabi Mukherjee
Subrata Mazumdar: Anil Chatterjee
Himangshu Mukherjee: Haradhan Bannerjee
Edith Simmons: Vicky Redwood
Priyogopal, Subrata's Father: Haren Chatterjee
Sarojini, Subrata's Mother: Sefalika Devi
Bani, Subrata's Sister: Jaya Bhaduri
Pintu: Prasenjit Sarkar

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Based on stories by Narendranath Mitra
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Art direction: Bansi Chandragupta
Film editing: Dulal Dutta
Music: Satyajit Ray

For a long time, cities got a bad rap in the movies: Think of Fritz Lang's soul-devouring futuristic city in Metropolis (1027), the hedonistic town that sends out tendrils like the sinister Woman From the City to ensnare country folk like The Man and The Wife in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), or the weblike New York City that blights the lives of John and Mary in The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928). But these are surviving remnants of the Romanticism that proclaimed "God made the country and man made the town." By the mid-20th century, even our poets, or at least our songwriters, had turned the great big city into a wondrous toy, just made for a girl and boy, and a place where if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere -- a heroic challenge. In The Big City, Satyajit Ray's Kolkata retains some of the old sinister qualities, but it also represents opportunity, especially for women emerging from the shadows of male domination. Ray's domestic drama doesn't set up a contrast between town and country so much as a contrast between the dark, cramped home that Subrata and Arati Mazumdar share with his mother and father and sister and their young son, and the expanse of the city, which offers up tempting alternatives to the tight nuclear household. And those alternatives are something that the older members of that household view with disgust and horror: Arati's going out to work and to supplement the small income of the traditional breadwinner, Subrata. A world opens up for Arati, though it's also a world that can easily crumble around her. Madhabi Mukherjee's wonderful performance as Arati, tremulous and naive at first but gradually gaining fire and courage, animates the film. Obstacles present themselves: Subrata loses his job as a bank clerk, and Arati eventually loses hers by standing up for the Anglo-Indian Edith. But at the end, husband and wife, who have found their marriage tested by her employment, summon up reserves of courage to face the job market. The ending has been criticized as sentimental, but Ray has so carefully shown the growth of both Arati and Subrata that I find it hopeful.

Farewell to Dream (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Noriko Kikuoki, Shinji Tanaka, and Yoshiko Kuga in Farewell to Dream

Yoichi Akimoto: Shinji Tanaka
Oshin, Yoichi's Mother: Yuko Mochizuki
Toyoko, Yoichi's Older Sister: Yoshiko Kuga
Genkichi, Yoichi's Father: Eijiro Tono
Kazue, Yoichi's Younger Sister: Noriko Kikuoki
Sudo: Takahiro Tamura
Seiji Harada: Ryohei Ono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The English title, Farewell to Dream, seems to be grammatically or idiomatically off: We would expect Farewell to a Dream or ... Dreams instead. (The Japanese title is Yûyake-gumo, which Google Translate renders as "Sunset Cloud.") But then there's something a little off about this entire short film -- only 78 minutes long. Its young narrator, Yoichi, tells us his story about how circumstances made him bid farewell to his dreams, except that he doesn't seem to have had any substantial dream other than not following in his father's footsteps as a fishmonger, a job he hates because it makes him smell of fish, causing other boys to taunt him. We can't really blame him, but the film never suggests that Yoichi had a clear plan of escape from that life. He spends a good deal of his time looking out over the rooftops of Tokyo through his binoculars, sighting a pretty young woman whom he dreams of meeting. Eventually, he and his friend Seiji make their way across the city to where they think the young woman lives, only to arrive in her neighborhood as she's getting into an automobile with the man she's engaged to marry. Yoichi's story is also mixed with that of his sisters: The elder one, Toyoko, is pretty and vain, and has a handsome boyfriend, Sudo. But when Sudo's family goes broke, she marries an older man -- and then carries on an affair with Sudo. When his father falls ill, Yoichi's parents allow a rich uncle to adopt his younger sister, Kazue, in exchange for some financial support, and we see Yoichi bid a sad farewell to the girl. I think we're meant to sympathize with Yoichi in the collapse of his family, but the irony is that after his father dies, Yoichi turns out to be a very good fishmonger, building a thriving business from his own talent as a cook by developing a sideline as a caterer and seller of prepared meals. Like it or not, Yoichi has become what many families would see as a blessing: the son who successfully keeps the family business alive. The effect is that Yoichi's lament for his lost future feels like self-pity rather than legitimate dismay at unfulfilled potential.

The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)

Hans Scholten: Folker Bohnet
Albert Mutz: Fritz Wepper
Walter Forst: Michael Hinz
Jurgen Borchert: Frank Glaubrecht
Karl Horber: Karl Michael Balzer
Klaus Hager: Volker Lechtenbrink
Sigi Bernhard: Günther Hoffmann
Franziska: Cordula Trantow
Stern: Wolfgang Stumpf
Unteroffizier Heilmann: Günter Pfitzmann
Hauptmann Fröhlich: Heinz Spitzner
Oberstleutnant Bütov: Siegfried Schürenberg
Sigi's Mother: Edith Schultze-Westrum
Albert's Mother: Ruth Hausmeister
Jürgen's Mother: Eva Waiti
Walter's Father: Hans Elwenspoek
Walter's Mother: Trude Breitschopf
Karl's Father: Hans Hellmold
Barbara: Edeltraut Elsner
Sigrun: Inge Benz

Director: Bernhard Wicki
Screenplay: Michael Mansfeld, Karl-Wilhelm Vivier, Bernhard Wicki
Based on a novel by Manfred Gregor
Cinematography: Gerd von Bonin
Production design: Heinrich Graf Brühl, Peter Scharff
Film editing: Carl Otto Bartning
Music: Hans-Martin Majewski

Something of a landmark in the revival of German filmmaking before the burst of creativity wrought by Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others in the 1960s and '70s, The Bridge is an appropriate title in that it not only looks back to what Germany was during the war, but also suggests some of the trauma that lingered into the increasingly affluent present. The decimation and psychic mutilation of the generation that came of age during the war is the film's central subject. It focuses on seven young men, still in their teens, in the final days of the Third Reich, inspired by the dream of military glory but undermined by the incompetence of the remnants of the Wehrmacht, facing a defeat it cannot admit is coming. The boys have grown up together in the same town, and they all receive their draft notices on the same day. But a well-meaning officer decides not to send these raw draftees into the heat of battle but to give them a nonsensical task: defending the bridge across the river near their town -- even though the bridge is slated to be blown up as a deterrent to the advancing Allies. It will keep them out of harm's way, the officer thinks. But communications wires get crossed and the boys on the bridge never get the message to retreat. Instead, they die "heroically," doing all the right things -- including blowing up an Allied tank -- as they make their futile stand. The story, from the novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, under his pseudonym Manfred Gregor, is based on a real event told to Dorfmeister by one of the survivors. The film is full of well-staged action and an effective re-creation of the real setting which had been completely transformed in the years since the war ended. The interaction between the boys and their families is touching without slopping over into mawkishness.

The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

Hiroki Iwase and Ken Ogata in The Demon

Sokichi Takeshita: Ken Ogata
Oume: Shima Iwashita
Riichi: Hiroki Iwase
Kikuyo: Mayumi Ogawa
Yoshiko: Miyuki Yoshizawa

Director: Yoshitaro Nomura
Screenplay: Masato Ide
Based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Art direction: Kyohei Morita
Film editing: Kazuo Ota
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

The title suggests a horror film, which in its profoundly disturbing way The Demon is. Except there are no supernatural demons to be exorcised in Yoshitaro Nomura's film. There are only horribly flawed human beings who do things that we encounter frequently in the news media: They abuse children. Nomura is so unsparing in his treatment of the subject that for many the film will be impossible to watch, and only the distancing inherent in the medium of film made it possible for me to work through its more disturbing moments. I had to remind myself of what a tremendous acting job Ken Ogata brings off as he plays Sokichi, whose mistress one day dumps their three small children -- an infant, a 4-year-old girl, and a 6-year old boy -- on him and his wife, Oume, who until this point hasn't known of their existence. I steeled myself by admiring the camerawork and editing when Sokichi, pressured by Oume, sneaks away from the little girl and abandons her amid a throng of tourists, only to have their eyes meet as the elevator door taking him away closes. He has already allowed Oume to "accidentally" bring about the death of the infant, and there is worse to come when they plot to rid themselves of the boy. In the end, however, I'm not certain that The Demon entirely justifies telling us of the horrors inflicted on the children. There is an ironic ending that suggests justice will be done, although whether that justice is in measure to the pain that has been inflicted is doubtful. The result is a kind of nihilistic acceptance that things like this occur and will continue to occur, despite our disgust at them, and there's not much we can do about them.

Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)

Yosuke Irie and Aiko Mimasu in Street of Shame

Mickey: Machiko Kyo
Yasumi: Ayako Wakao
Hanae: Michiyo Kogure
Yumiko: Aiko Mimasu
Yorie: Hiroko Machida
Eiko: Kenji Sugawara
Otane: Kumeko Urabe
Kawadaki: Yosuke Irie
Tatsuko Taya: Sadako Sawamura
Kurazo Taya: Eitaro Shindo
Shizuko: Yasuko Kawakami

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Masahige Narusawa
Based on a novel by Yoshiko Shibaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Hisao Ichikawa, Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Kanji Suganuma
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

In his last film, Kenji Mizoguchi returned to one of his most frequent settings, the world of prostitutes. The English-language title, Street of Shame, is slightly more exploitative than the Japanese, Akasen Chitai, which means "red-light district," although even that one is inevitably freighted with sensationalism. But Mizoguchi is hardly shaming his prostitutes -- whom we would call today, in a not entirely successful attempt at neutralizing the stigma, "sex workers." He wants us to understand who they are and why they pursue their occupation. He focuses on five women in the brothel known as "Dreamland," each of whom has dreams of her own, even if the most fundamental dream is that of survival in a world of exploitation and corruption. In the end, some of them triumph, some are crushed, and some stoically continue in a routine they can't rise above. Mizoguchi punctuates their stories with news of the ongoing debate in the Japanese parliament over the abolition of prostitution, which actually took effect after the film was released. At the film's end, we see a new young woman, fresh from the country, timidly taking her place in Dreamland, calling out in a weak and nervous voice for the clients who prowl the street. It's a heartbreaking moment, particularly since she has been given the job as a replacement for one of the women who suffered a nervous breakdown after being rejected by her son, ashamed of his mother's work. But Mizoguchi is no sentimentalist, and Street of Shame is not a conventional "message movie." Instead, it's a richly ironic and keen-eyed look at a fact of life: Sexual desire is universal, and as long as it exists, there will be those who take advantage of it.

The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963)

Nino Manfredi (second from left) in The Executioner

José Luis Rodríguez: Nino Manfredi
Carmen: Emma Penella
Amadeo: José Isbert
Antonio Rodríguez: José Luis López Vázquez
Álvarez: Ángel Álvarez
Director of the prison: Guido Alberti

Director: Luis García Berlanga
Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Art direction: Luis Argüello
Film editing: Alfonso Santacana
Music: Miguel Asins Arbó

The scene shown above comes near the end of The Executioner; it takes place in the antechamber to the room in which a prisoner will be strangled to death by the machinery of the garrote. But the man struggling against his fate is not the prisoner, he's the executioner. The prisoner is in the small group at the upper right of the frame, moving resignedly toward his death. Although it's a scene to inspire horror, beautifully staged by director Luis García Berlanga and shot by cinematographer Tonino Delle Colle, it's the deliciously ironic climax to a very funny film. Tone is everything, and García Berlanga deftly maintains a kind of buoyancy in his treatment of the predicament of José Luis Rodríguez, the film's extremely reluctant executioner, who has managed to maintain his composure up to this point by denial. How he got into this situation is the bulk of the film, and how his denial has brought him to this point is also the setup to the kicker at the film's ending: Having performed his grisly duty, José Luis vows never to do it again. Whereupon his father-in-law, the former executioner whose job José Luis has been forced to assume, tells him that's what he said the first time he had to do it. How can we laugh at this? We do because García Berlanga has cozened us into accepting the unacceptable, just as the state cozens us into accepting capital punishment. It's a tour de force of a film, a comedy that dares us to laugh and keeps making us do it.

Crazed Fruit (Ko Nakahira, 1956)

Yujiro Ishihara, Mie Kitahara, and Masahiko Tsugawa in Crazed Fruit 

Natsuhisa: Yujiro Ishihara
Haruji: Masahiko Tsugawa
Eri: Mie Kitahara
Frank: Masumi Okada
Eri's Husband: Harold Conway

Director: Ko Nakahira
Screenplay: Shintaro Ishihara
Based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Masanori Tsuji
Music: Masaru Sato, Toru Takemitsu

The eternal triangle, this time involving two brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji, and a young woman, Eri. Crazed Fruit is somewhat of a landmark movie in Japanese film history, part of a genre known as taiyozoku or "Sun Tribe" movies, featuring the idle, affluent postwar Japanese youth. Every culture had its rebels without a cause in the 1950s, and the Japanese older generation was as scandalized (and titillated) by them as the rest. Crazed Fruit was singled out as more scandalous than most, partly because it seems to relish the erotic energy of the young without condemning it. The focal point of the film is the younger brother, Haruji, who becomes infatuated with a pretty young woman he sees in a train station, and becomes involved with her after he meets her again while out in a motorboat -- she has swum much farther out from shore than is usual, and he gives her a ride back. Her name is Eri, and she mysteriously keeps him away from the place she lives, agreeing to meet him elsewhere. She is taken with Haruji's innocence and shyness -- for a long time they stop short of having sex -- in part because he reminds her of her own lost innocence. She is married to a wealthy middle-aged American businessman, a fact she keeps from him, but which the older brother, Natsuhisa, learns and uses to blackmail her into having an affair with him. Haruji's learning the truth leads to a cataclysmic ending, of course. The material is handled with a good deal of sophistication that somewhat mitigates its exploitative qualities. The film made its young leads into big stars: After outgrowing his rebellious youth persona, Masahiko Tsugawa became a leading man and then a familiar character actor, while Yujiro Ishihara (the screenwriter's young brother) and Mie Kitahara married and became frequent costars -- the TCM commentary on the film calls them "the Bogart and Bacall of Japan."

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

Leticia: Silvia Pinal
Edmundo Nobile: Enrique Rambal
Steward: Claudio Brook
Leandro Gomez: José Baviera
Doctor: Augusto Benedico
Sergio Russell: Antonio Bravo
Alicia de Roc: Jacqueline Andere
Colonel: César de Campo
Silvia: Rosa Elena Durgel
Lucia de Nobile: Lucy Gallardo
Alberto Roc: Enrique García Álvarez
Juana Avila: Ofelia Guilmáin
Ana Maynar: Nadia Haro Oliva
Raúl: Tito Junco
Francisco Avila: Xavier Loyà
Eduardo: Xavier Massé
Beatriz: Ofelia Montesco
Cristián Ugalde: Luis Beristáin
Rita Ugalde: Patricia Morán
Blanca: Patricia de Morelos
Leonora: Bertha Moss

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Production design: Jesús Bracho
Film editing: Carlos Savage
Music: Raúl Lavista

The Exterminating Angel teeters occasionally on the brink of heavy-handed satire -- the sheep entering the now-blocked church at the film's end, for example -- but somehow Luis Buñuel always recovers his balance. I think it's because he knows that surrealism -- the movement which gave him birth -- must always be underpinned by a dutiful semi-documentary realism, that we must never be entirely sure whether the improbable characters we're encountering and the unlikely events we're witnessing are external to us or are products of our own unstable minds. Take the déjà vu effect near the beginning of the film, when we witness the guests arriving at the mansion of the Nobiles and ascending the staircase only to watch the same scene repeated almost immediately from a somewhat different angle. For a moment we wonder if the projectionist has put on the wrong reel or the film editor has forgotten to excise the repeated scene. Or perhaps we wonder if we dozed off for a second and missed something that would explain the repetition. But no, the director must be playing with us, we conclude. That, or we're trapped in his own world, just as he is to trap the guests inside a room later, never bothering to provide an explanation of the force that keeps them there. It's one of those tricks that can only work in the movies, where we, like the house guests, have gathered and found themselves unable to escape. We can choose to escape from the experience The Exterminating Angel presents to us -- nothing prevents us from leaving the theater or turning off the video -- but we don't. So there's much to be said for the observation that the house guests are us, that Buñuel's point is not just that the Spanish bourgeoisie of the Franco years were seething in their own corruption and inertia, but also that we are all trapped by something in our psyches and/or societies that limits and lames us.

Danger Stalks Near (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1957)

Hideko Takamine in Danger Stalks Near

Yuriko Sato: Hideko Takamine
Kaneshige Sato: Keiji Sada
Tetsu Sato: Akiko Tamura
Bunichi Akama: Koji Nanbara
Sakura: Toshiko Kobayashi
Miyoko: Hiroko Ito
Ayame: Masako Arisawa
Shintaro: Ryo Ono
Kazuo: Kotohisa Saotome
Mr. Suzuki: Yoshihide Sato
Mr. Kitamura: Koji Satomi
Tatami repairman: Saburo Sato
First thief: Akira Oze
Second thief: Shoji Sayama
Kohei: Shinji Tanaka

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

A rather pleasant surprise. Nothing about the English title suggests that you're going to get the comedy of errors that Danger Stalks Near turns out to be, or that its star, Hideko Takamine, usually seen in serious, often glamorous roles, will play a mousy, bespectacled housewife under the domination of her tyrannical mother-in-law. The film starts out with two young thugs bullying Kohei, a man from the country who needs money to return home, into robbing a suburban house. But as they case the joint from a nearby hillside, things constantly happen to keep them from their goal. The house is the property of Tetsu Sato, a war widow, who lets her son, Kaneshige, and his wife, Yuriko, and their son, Kazuo, live there. She also rents a room to Miyoko, a flighty young woman who starts the day's madness off by burning a hole in the tatami mat in her room. Tetsu immediately evicts her. Things snowball from there, with the tatami repairman coming and going, movers arriving, Yuriko's sisters showing up with various problems of their own, Yuriko returning with her boyfriend to demand the remaining day she had paid for in rent, an old friend of Kaneshige's arriving and revealing his own larcenous aims, and various other unexpected incidents. The three would-be thieves watch in dismay as their opportunity to bust in and steal what they -- and others -- believe to be a considerable amount of money belonging to Tetsu disappears. Kinoshita piles on the complications, and in the process unveils some of the hidden motives and simmering resentments of the members of the household. For once, Kinoshita lets his cynical side dominate, diluting some of the syrup that often makes his films a little sticky.

The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

Katamari Fujiwara, Minoru Chiaki, Misa Uehara, and Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress

Gen. Rokurota Makabe: Toshiro Mifune
Tahei: Minoru Chiaki
Matashichi: Katamari Fujiwara
Princess Yuki: Misa Uehara
Gen. Hyoe Tadokoro: Susumu Fujita
Gen. Izumi Nagakura: Takashi Shimura
Lady in Waiting: Eiko Miyoshi
Farmer's daughter: Toshiko Higuchi

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
Cinematography: Kazuo Yamazaki
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Masaru Sato

There's a kind of boyish glee in even the title, The Hidden Fortress, promising secrets and surprises. This rousing, entertaining, and, yes, occasionally silly adventure story is remembered most today for inspiring George Lucas on the first Star Wars film, which is now clunkily known as Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (1977). From Akira Kurosawa's film Lucas borrowed the spunky rebel princess and the fretful, quarreling sidekicks, and renamed them Leia, C3PO, and R2D2, but more importantly he borrowed the insouciance, the delight in cinematic action. For once, Toshiro Mifune's bravado doesn't steal as many scenes as it usually does, thanks largely to Kurosawa's employment of the disgruntled foot-soldiers Tahei and Mataschichi, whose cynicism, venality, and outright greed serve as foils for the heroics of Mifune's Gen. Rokurota. Like the first Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress never rises to the level of serious thought -- in fact, it's more straightforward fun than the Lucas oeuvre: There's no mysterious Force to suggest spiritual overtones and to weigh down the adventure with mythmaking.

Endless Desire (Shohei Imamura, 1958)

Hiroyuki Nagato and Misako Watanabe in Endless Desire

Satoru: Hiroyuki Nagato
Shima Hashimoto: Misako Watanabe
Onuma: Taiji Tonoyama
Ryochi: Shoichi Ozawa
Ryuko: Hitome Nozoe
Yakuza: Takeshi Kato

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Hisashi Yamanouchi
Based on a novel by Shinji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Production design: Kazu Otsuka
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

Commenting on lesser-known films, even though they've been made available on Filmstruck by the Criterion Collection, can be a problem. The IMDb listing for Endless Desire is curiously incomplete, lacking some cast names and identification of which roles some actors are playing, and there's little commentary available online to help refresh my memory of some plot details and to provide background information on the film. Which is a pity, because Endless Desire is an involving black comedy, that a few commentators have likened to Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). It's less genially whimsical than the former and less explicitly bloody than the latter, but it holds its own in their company. The setup is this: Ten years after the surrender of Japan, a small group of former soldiers gather as planned to try to relocate a barrel full of morphine that was buried when the war ended. They expect to meet their former lieutenant, but discover that he's dead and that a woman, Shima Hashimoto, who says she is his sister, plans to help them recover the stash. In the meantime, however, a shopping district has grown up over the site, so the group leases an empty shop planning to tunnel over to the presumed location. And so it goes, as the greedy tunnelers squabble toward their goal, with Shima directing their moves and fending off such amorous advances as she may not wish to entertain. Somehow caught up in all of this is young Satoru, whom the landlord insists the treasure-hunters must hire in their phony real-estate office, and the pretty Ryuko, whom Satoru loves but who keeps him at an arm's length. The whole thing builds to a cataclysm, of course, in which the plans are complicated by the municipal authorities' decision to raze the shopping district over the tunnelers' heads, and the general greed leads to their killing one another off. This is early Imamura, and a film that he was pressed by the studio into doing, but it has much of his characteristic sardonic humor and jaundiced view of human beings.