A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, September 30, 2018

La Truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

Isabelle Huppert in La Truite
Frédérique: Isabelle Huppert
Rambert: Jean-Pierre Cassel
Lou Rambert: Jeanne Moreau
Saint-Genis: Daniel Olbrychski
Galuchat: Jacques Spiesser
Daigo Hamada: Isao Yamagata
Verjon: Jean-Paul Roussillon
The Count: Roland Bertin
Mariline: Lisette Malidor
Carter: Craig Stevens
Party Guest: Ruggero Raimondi
Gloria: Alexis Smith

Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Monique Lange, Joseph Losey
Based on a novel by Roger Vailland
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Marie Castro
Music: Richard Hartley

I wish I had known beforehand that Joseph Losey's La Truite is supposedly a comedy or a "French sex farce" as the description on Rotten Tomatoes puts it. I wouldn't have worried so much that I had lost my sense of humor -- or concluded that Losey didn't know how to tell a joke. Or perhaps I would have laughed more at the scenes that seem to be meant to be funny, like Frédérique's bowling-alley hustle or the one in which she tosses out of the window the taxidermied fish belonging to the man who molested her in adolescence. Or even at the absurdity of seeing such luminaries of French cinema as Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in a bowling alley. There was one scene that amused me: Alexis Smith's very funny cameo appearance as the worldly wise Gloria, whom Frédérique, encumbered with an armload of gift-wrapped packages, encounters in a Japanese hotel. But there's really not much humor to be found in stale marriages, suicide attempts, sexual harassment, and an apparent murder, anyway. Mostly La Truite is a slog, with Losey unable to set the proper prevailing tone -- or really any tone -- for his story about a young woman's rise to power and influence. We spend so much time puzzling out who these characters are and what their relationships to one another may be, that there's not much time left to appreciate the story, especially since it's chopped up with flashbacks. We know where we are in time mostly by the length of Frédérique's hair, which starts out in her childhood in the trout hatchery as a waist-length red mane, has become a pageboy bob by the time she meets the Ramberts and Saint-Genis, and is chopped off becomingly when the latter takes her with him to Japan. La Truite is visually interesting, thanks to the work of two veterans of French film: cinematographer Henri Alekan and production designer Alexandre Trauner. But Losey's work as both director and screenwriter lets them, and his cast, down.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)

Ava Gardner and James Mason in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
Hendrik van der Zee: James Mason
Pandora Reynolds: Ava Gardner
Stephen Cameron: Nigel Patrick
Janet: Sheila Sim
Geoffrey Fielding: Harold Warrender
Juan Montalvo: Mario Cabré
Reggie Demarest: Marius Goring
Angus: John Laurie
Jenny: Pamela Mason
Peggy: Patricia Raine
Señora Montalvo: Margarita D'Alvarez

Director: Albert Lewin
Screenplay: Albert Lewin
Cinematography: Jack Cardiff
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Ralph Kemplen
Costume design: Beatrice Dawson
Music: Alan Rawsthorne

James Mason was a handsome man and a very fine actor but he seems a little miscast as the doomed and dashing Flying Dutchman, especially opposite the earthy Ava Gardner as the embodiment of the Dutchman's lost love. It's a role that calls less for Mason's cerebral, inward qualities than for a swashbuckling ladykiller of the Errol Flynn mode. That said, Mason's presence in the film is one of the things that have kept Albert Lewin's romantic fantasy Pandora and the Flying Dutchman on view for so long, even giving it minor cult status. There's a gravitas to his Dutchman that makes it possible for him to quote Victorian poetry -- Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- without looking foolish. There's also Jack Cardiff's Technicolor cinematography and John Bryan's handsome sets to the film's credit. Lewin's screenplay, unfortunately, tends to the portentous and the pretentious, including maxims like "To understand one human soul is like trying to empty the sea with a cup" and "The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it," not to mention purple passages like the Dutchman's "My mind was a hive of swarming gadflies, whose stings were my remorseless thoughts." But above all there's Gardner's scorching beauty, which transcends the absurdities of the role -- and her rather limited acting resources -- to make it credible that Reggie should take poison, Geoffrey should send his racing car over a cliff, and Juan should die in the bullring, all for her sake.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931)

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari
Mata Hari: Greta Garbo
Lt. Alexis Rosanoff: Ramon Novarro
Gen. Serge Shubin: Lionel Barrymore
Andriani: Lewis Stone
Dubois: C. Henry Gordon
Carlotta: Karen Morley
Caron: Alec B. Francis
Sister Angelica: Blanche Friderici
Warden: Edmund Breese
Sister Genevieve: Helen Jerome Eddy

Director: George Fitzmaurice
Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, Leo Birinsky
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Costume design: Adrian
Music: William Axt

Garbo ... dances? Well, only if you call the posing, prancing, and strutting she does before a statue of Shiva in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari dancing. It unaccountably brings on a storm of applause, though that may be because in the version shown on Turner Classic Movies we don't see the finale of the dance that audiences saw in the original pre-Code version of Mata Hari: an apparently nude Garbo. The movie was such a big hit for Garbo that it was re-released after the Production Code went into effect three years later, at which time the censors swooped in with their scissors, cutting not only the nude scene -- which in any case featured Garbo's body double with only a suggestion of nudity -- but also some scenes showing Mata Hari and Lt. Rosanoff in bed together. The film is mostly proof that Garbo in her prime could sell almost anything, even this piece of MGM claptrap. Here she vamps a very pretty Ramon Novarro, playing a Russian aviator with a Mexican accent, and connives with the Russian general overplayed by Lionel Barrymore and the sinister spymaster played by the almost as hammy Lewis Stone. Swanning about in some preposterous outfits by Adrian, Garbo's Mata Hari is the typical wicked lady -- she even persuades Rosanoff to snuff the candle he has promised his mother to keep burning before the icon of Our Lady of Kazan -- redeemed by falling in love. Rosanoff atones for his weakness by being blinded in a plane crash, and Mata Hari conceals from him the fact that she's been sentenced to the firing squad and goes off bravely to face her doom. They don't make them like this anymore, and there's a reason: We have no Garbos to pull them off. 

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936)

Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, John Halliday in Desire
Madeleine de Beaupre: Marlene Dietrich
Tom Bradley: Gary Cooper
Carlos Margoli: John Halliday
Mr. Gibson: William Frawley
Aristide Duvalle: Ernest Cossart
Avilia: Akim Tamiroff
Dr. Maurice Pauquet: Alan Mowbray
Aunt Olga: Zeffie Tilbury

Director: Frank Borzage
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein
Based on a play by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Frank Borzage's Desire was one of the first films Marlene Dietrich made after she and Josef von Sternberg went their separate ways. Though she's still very much in the Sternberg mode in her makeup, her consciousness of the way she's being lighted, and the couture by Travis Banton, she's also softer, funnier, and more human. She also benefits from being re-teamed with Gary Cooper, her co-star in Sternberg's Morocco (1930), and the only leading man with whom she had any real chemistry in the Sternberg films. Desire is still glamorous nonsense, a romantic comedy in which Dietrich plays a jewel thief and Cooper a seemingly naïve American automotive engineer. They meet on the road to Spain, where Cooper's Tom Bradley plans to spend his vacation and Dietrich's Madeleine de Beaupre is meeting up with her accomplice, Carlos Margoli -- a part planned for John Gilbert that went to John Halliday after Gilbert suffered a heart attack. Cooper is delightful as the infatuated American, whose native shrewdness manifests itself eventually. A subtext about the unsettled situation in Europe runs through the film, though there's no direct reference to the civil war brewing in Spain. Tom Bradley is not one to be outwitted by Europeans like Carlos, who, in a conversation about whether the United States would get involved if war breaks out in Europe, observes, "America's a very large country." Tom replies, "Six feet three." Like most good romantic comedies, Desire gets the best out of its supporting players, including Ernest Cossart as the jeweler and Alan Mowbray as the neurologist whom Madeleine plays off against each other to get her hands on the loot, Akim Tamiroff as a police officer, and Zeffie Tilbury as the larcenous, tippling Aunt Olga. Ernst Lubitsch, who produced, also directed some scenes while Borzage was finishing up another film, and his celebrated touch gives Desire some of its vivacity.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman
Concha Perez: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Don Pasqual "Pasqualito" Costelar: Lionel Atwill
Antonio Galvan: Cesar Romero
Gov. Don Paquito "Paquitito": Edward Everett Horton
Señora Perez: Alison Skipworth
Morenito: Don Alvarado
Tuerta: Tempe Pigott
Alphonso: Francisco Moreno

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, David Hertz, Oran Schee
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Josef von Sternberg
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: John Leipold, Hans Roemheld

Josef von Sternberg wanted to give The Devil Is a Woman the title of the music by Rimsky-Korsakov on which the film's score is based, Capriccio Espagnol, but studio head Ernst Lubitsch overruled him. The decision probably helped the movie a little at the box office -- though it was a flop that ended Sternberg's career at Paramount as well as helping Dietrich get stigmatized as "box office poison" in an infamous complaint by a distributor. But The Devil Is a Woman really is a "Spanish caprice," a film that has about as much to do with its ostensible setting, Spain, as the earlier Sternberg-Dietrich films Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Scarlet Empress (1934) had to do with North Africa, China, and Russia. They are products of Steinberg's fevered imagination, with baroque settings designed by Hans Dreier in which Marlene Dietrich could wear impossible gowns by Travis Banton. The 1930s moviegoing public may have tired of Sternberg's idiosyncratic melodramas, but they have stood the test of time as consummate expressions of what the Hollywood studio system could do if it gave free rein to one man's tastes and obsessions. Like Sternberg's first film starring Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), The Devil Is a Woman is about masochism, though the same could be said about all of the other films he made with her. In this one, she's Concha Perez, who leads a Spanish officer she calls Pasqualito on a merry-go-round of erotic entanglements, snaring him and deserting him repeatedly. And though Don Pasqual seems to have come to his senses enough to tell his story as a warning to a young political fugitive, Antonio Galvan, who has fallen for her, Concha returns to play with them again. None of this is remotely credible in any realistic context, which is why the Sternberg-Dreier-Banton concoction of a fantastic Spain is essential. The film thus becomes both silly and sublime and, with Sternberg in charge of everything but its title, one of the purest expressions of a director's sensibility available.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, and Marlene Dietrich in Angel
Lady Maria Barker: Marlene Dietrich
Sir Frederick Barker: Herbert Marshall 
Anthony Halton: Melvyn Douglas 
Graham: Edward Everett Horton 
Wilton: Ernest Cossart 
Grand Duchess Anna Dimitrievna: Laura Hope Crews 
Mr. Greenwood: Herbert Mundin 
Emma: Dennie Moore 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch 
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Guy Bolton, Russell G. Medcraft 
Based on a play by Melchior Lengyel 
Cinematography: Charles Lang 
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher 
Film editing: William Shea 
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

In Ernst Lubitsch's Angel, you can almost feel the Production Code censors breathing hotly down the director's neck, driving some of the oxygen out of the room. What's meant to be a light and airy sophisticated comedy, like for example Lubitsch's pre-Code masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), often feels starchy and coy. The emigrée grand duchess played by Laura Hope Crews is clearly a high-class procuress and her "salon" a very upscale brothel that enables a "fling" by Lady Maria Barker with a curiously naïve Anthony Halton. Their affair never seems to get consummated, although there are the usual narrative jumps when the relationship seems to come to the boiling point. And of course the Code's aversion to divorce and abhorrence of any sign that adulterers might get away with it unpunished means that the film must end with Lady Maria and Sir Frederick happily reconciled. We're used to such evasions in Hollywood movies of the 1930s through the 1950s, but it's a little depressing to see them stifle Lubitsch's usually sublime naughtiness. Sometimes it feels as if Marlene Dietrich is to blame: She never really strikes sparks with either Melvyn Douglas or Herbert Marshall -- certainly not the way Greta Garbo does with Douglas in Ninotchka (1939) or Miriam Hopkins with Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. But lovers of Lubitsch have plenty to enjoy in Angel, chiefly the way the director subverts expectations. When Sir Frederick invites Halton, an old war buddy, to dine with him and his wife, who neither man knows is the "Angel" Halton met in Paris and has been rhapsodizing about ever since, we expect a big explosion, especially when the husband points out his wife's picture to her lover. But just as Halton is about to look at the photograph, Lubitsch cuts. We don't see the awkward encounter between wife and lover we expect when she comes downstairs to meet the guest. Instead, we pick up with them later and realize that both have exerted exceptional self-control at the meeting. And we don't see the three of them at the dinner table; instead, Lubitsch takes us into the kitchen, where the servants are wondering why neither Lady Maria nor Mr. Halton has touched their food. Lubitsch leaves to our imagination scenes that other directors would have milked shamelessly. In another example, at their first encounter Maria and Halton are in a Parisian park at night, and after he proclaims his love for her he spots an old woman selling violets. He goes to buy the flowers, but Lubitsch holds the camera on the old woman, whose expressions tell us what's going on: Maria has chosen the moment to disappear and we hear Halton calling out "Angel!" in his pursuit of her. The flower seller sighs and picks up the dropped bouquet, dusts it off, and puts it back with the other flowers, then turns and walks away. Similarly, Lubitsch doesn't linger on the reconciliation scene between Maria and Frederick: They simply walk out the door, headed for Vienna and what we hope is a revived marriage. In the end, these "Lubitsch touches" aren't quite enough to lift Angel out of the middle tier of the director's films, but they constitute its saving grace notes.  

Monday, September 24, 2018

Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy
Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

Lino Ventura in Le Deuxième Souffle
Gustave "Gu" Minda: Lino Ventura
Commissioner Blot: Paul Meurisse 
Paul Ricci: Raymond Pellegrin
Manouche : Christine Fabréga 
Jo Ricci: Marcel Bozzuffi 
Inspector Fardiano: Paul Frankeur 
Antoine Ripa: Denis Manuel 
Alban: Michel Constantin 
Orloff: Pierre Zimmer 
Pascal: Pierre Grasset 

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: José Giovanni, Jean-Pierre Melville 
Based on a novel by José Giovanni
Cinematography: Marcel Combes 
Production design: Jean-Jacques Fabre 
Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Michele Boëhm 
Music: Bernard Gérard

I have to admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the plot of Jean-Pierre Melville's  Le Deuxième Souffle, other than to sort out the major relationships among the characters. And I think I'm right about that, just as I think it's foolish to try to unravel the plot of, say, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Because the point is not what story Melville (or Hawks) is telling us, but how he's telling it. It's a film full of ironic twists, starting with the jailbreak scene that frees our protagonist, Gu. He and one of his accomplices make a leap from a roof to a facing wall and land just short enough to find themselves clinging to that wall. But the third accomplice leaps well across the gap. We think he's the one who made it to the other roof with room to spare, except that there's no "other roof" -- it's a sheer wall, as we discover when Gu and the other man rappel down the far side and find the third man fallen to his death. And so the film goes, with Melville undermining our expectations at every turn. When Commissioner Blot arrives at a crime scene where a man has been murdered, we expect the standard interrogation of witnesses. Instead, Blot, jaded by too many such crime scenes, tells each of the witnesses what lies they are about to tell him and lets them go. Even the big set piece, the elaborately planned platinum heist, undermines our expectations because nothing goes especially wrong. There is one innocent guy who arrives on the scene, but he's neatly dealt with. Usually, in big thriller heists, there's a major screwup that causes the thieves to come up with a Plan B, but not here. The big screwups come when the crooks have to deal with sharing the loot. There's also a witty setup for the confrontation of one of the conspirators with several others, in which we see him case the joint and plant a gun on top of an armoire. Then we see another conspirator find and remove the gun. We expect the guy who planted the gun to get shot when he goes for the hidden gun, but it turns out that he's anticipated this move and has the element of surprise on his side after all. So it goes throughout Melville's film, which is sometimes seen as a story of "destiny, death, and bleak existential choice," full of "elemental concerns."  It may well be that, but it's also a kind of very dark comedy. There are also scenes that I cherish for their slight absurdity. After being badly beaten by the cops under the direction of Inspector Fardiano, Gu is confined to a hospital bed under guard. When a pretty nurse comes in to check on Gu, the guard follows her out into the hallway, giving Gu a chance to rip out his IV and get the jump on the distracted guard. Standard thriller stuff, but I was amused to notice that the nurse was wearing high heels. I doubt if French hospital nurses have ever made their rounds in Louboutins, so it's possible to think of this as a kind of gaffe on Melville's part, but I rather suspect that he wanted the nurse to look as sexy as possible and couldn't care less about verisimilitude. In short, he loved movies more than he loved realism. For all its existential subtext, Le Deuxième Souffle is a movie movie. 

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017)

Jacob Batalon and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming
Peter Parker / Spider-Man: Tom Holland
Adrian Toomes / Vulture: Michael Keaton
Tony Stark / Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr.
May Parker: Marisa Tomei
Happy Hogan: Jon Favreau
Ned: Jacob Batalon
Liz: Laura Harrier
Michelle: Zendaya
Pepper Potts: Gwyneth Paltrow
Aaron Davis: Donald Glover
Flash: Tony Revolori
Herman Schultz / Shocker #2: Bokeem Woodbine
Anne Marie Hoag: Tyne Daly
Abe: Abraham Attah
Coach Wilson: Hannibal Buress
Principal Morita: Kenneth Choi
Mr. Harrington: Martin Starr
Mrs. Toomes: Garcelle Beauvais
Mac Gargan: Michael Mando
Jackson Brice / Shocker #1: Logan Marshall-Green
Karen, the Suit Lady (voice): Jennifer Connelly

Director: Jon Watts
Screenplay: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino
Production design: Oliver Scholl
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Dan Lebental
Music: Michael Giacchino

Although he looks closer to 21 (his real age) than to 15 (his character's age), Tom Holland makes Peter Parker into a charmingly geeky and impulsive adolescent in Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest iteration of the comic book hero, and I think the best. It benefits greatly from a good and refreshingly multiethnic cast, and most of all from Michael Keaton's participation as Adrian Toomes, whose work clearing up the rubble from the Battle of New York, which we saw in The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), allows him to salvage some alien technology and turn himself into a supervillain called Vulture. So far, this is standard superhero movie stuff. What makes it fresh is that Toomes is also the father of Liz, a girl on whom Peter has a crush, leading to the best scene in the movie: the moment that Toomes realizes that the boy who is taking his daughter to the homecoming dance is actually Spider-Man, with whom Vulture has already tangled. It elevates the familiar teen-movie awkwardness of meeting a girlfriend's father into something deliciously awful. Both Keaton and Holland make this mutual recognition scene a small classic, more memorable than the big chopped-up, noisy, CGI-flattened action sequences. (Although even there, I admired the wit of the scene in which Spider-Man tries to use his webbing to glue the halves of a bifurcated Staten Island Ferry back together.) The set-up for the film is that Peter, after being mentored by Tony Stark in the conflict at the center of Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2016), has his head full of glory and plans to join the Avengers. But Stark wants him to grow up, and insists that he stay in school -- a STEM-focused high school in Queens for budding geniuses. He can become "the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in his down time, handling bicycle thieves and purse-snatchers, but nothing more than that. He does have a fancy new suit, but its powers are limited by a "training-wheels protocol." Naturally, Peter and his best friend, Ned, who discovers Peter's secret identity by accident, manage to hack into the suit's wiring and disable the protocol, launching the naïvely ambitious superhero into a world of trouble. I enjoyed Spider-Man: Homecoming more than the usual comic-book movie because its hero's dilemmas are familiar real-world ones, unlike those of gods like Thor and Wonder Woman, visiting aliens like Superman, rich dilettantes like Iron Man and Batman, or time-shifted science projects like Captain America.

Friday, September 21, 2018

Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926)

Estelle Taylor and John Barrymore in Don Juan
Don Jose de Marana/Don Juan de Marana: John Barrymore
Adriana della Varnese: Mary Astor
Lucrezia Borgia: Estelle Taylor
Cesare Borgia: Warner Oland
Count Giano Donati: Montagu Love
Pedrillo: Willard Louis
Mai: Myrna Loy
Marchesia Rinaldo: Hedda Hopper
Marchese Rinaldo: Nigel De Brulier
Donna Isobel: Jane Winton
Leandro: John Roche
Neri: Gustav von Seyffertitz

Director: Alan Crosland
Screenplay: Bess Meredyth; Titles: Walter Anthony, Maude Fulton
Cinematography: Byron Haskin
Art direction: Ben Carré
Film editing: Harold McCord
Music: William Axt, David Mendoza

Alan Crosland's silly action movie Don Juan has two things in its favor. One of them is historical: It was the first film with a synchronized sound track, though it's all music and no dialogue, which would have to wait a year for Crosland's The Jazz Singer. The score is played by no less than the New York Philharmonic. The other is the cast, starting with John Barrymore, first hamming it up in a death scene as Don Juan's father, and then doing some Douglas Fairbanks-style leaping about and sword-fighting as the great seducer. But the female cast is even more interesting, with Mary Astor teamed again with her Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924) co-star and former lover Barrymore, as well as some actresses who went on to different sorts of fame. Before she became Hollywood's favorite wife and/or mother, Myrna Loy was often cast as a vamp or a sinister type; here she slinks around as Lucrezia Borgia's lady-in-waiting, spying and tattling and stealing scenes from Estelle Taylor's Lucrezia. And before she became one of Hollywood's two most feared purveyors of gossip -- the other being Louella Parsons -- Hedda Hopper had a long career as a supporting actress; here she's the Marchesia Rinaldo, who kills herself when her husband discovers her affair with Don Juan. As for the rest of the movie, it's predictably junky, "explaining" Don Juan's treatment of women as a product of witnessing as a child his father being murdered by a cast-off lover. This psychological trauma is, I guess, supposed to make us believe that Juan has been cured of his hypersexuality by the love of a pure woman, Astor's Adriana della Varnese, with whom he literally rides off into the sunset at the end of the film.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas
Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)

Pîtâ in Funeral Parade of Roses
Eddie: Pîtâ
Leda: Osamu Ogasawara
Gonda: Yoshio Tsuchiya
Guevara: Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Tony: Don Madrid
Eddie's Mother: Emiko Azuma
Jimi: Yoshimi Jo
Juju: Koichi Nakamura
Greco: Flamenco Umeji
Mari: Saako Oota
Nora: Taro Manji
Philosopher: Mikio Shibayama
Sabu: Wataru Hikonagi
Piro: Fuchisumi Gomi
Okei: Chieko Kobayashi
Radon: Yo Sato
Humpback: Keiichi Takanaga

Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Screenplay: Toshio Matsumoto
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Setsu Asakura
Film editing: Toshie Iwasa
Music: Joji Yuasa

Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses both participates in and parodies the late-1960s avant-garde "underground" film movement, with its reliance on eccentric cuts and random inserts. There's a scene in which the filmmakers are shooting a badly tuned television set, and keep fiddling with the set to get the kind of distorted image they want. And at one point someone quotes the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas -- and then gets his name wrong, calling him "Menas Jokas." Matsumoto's film keeps the viewer off-balance at all times, moving in and out of what we take to be "reality" to expose that it's all moviemaking. There is, for example, a scene in which the cross-dressing protagonist, Eddie, and a black man, Tony, seem to be having sex, with lots of pornographic gasping and facial contortions. But then the camera angle shifts and we see that there's a camera crew surrounding the bed where Tony is propped up by himself on the headboard while the camera is focused on the face of Eddie, simulating ecstasy. Even the main story of the film gets its distancing when we cut to the actor who plays Eddie, Pîtâ (or Peter, as the English language screen credits have it), being interviewed about the role he's playing. It's much like his own life, he says, except for the incest part. At this point in the film, we don't know about the incest part, which precipitates the crisis in Eddie's life. Suffice it to say that Matsumoto based a large part of the film on Oedipus Rex. The central story deals with the rivalry between Eddie and Leda, the "Madame" of a club that caters to salarymen who want to sleep with gei boi, for the affections of Gonda, a man who turns out to have more significance in Eddie's life than is at first apparent. There are some longueurs in Matsumoto's film, mostly having to do with the avant-garde sequences but also with a too-long drugged-out orgy scene. (Other people's orgies are invariably boring.) But there are some genuine shocks and some real emotion in the film, and the performance by Pîtâ -- best known as the androgynous Kyoami, the analogue to the Fool in Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of King Lear -- is outstanding.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Woman (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Mitsuko Mito and Eitaro Ozawa in Woman
Toshiko: Mitsuko Mito
Tadashi: Eitaro Ozawa

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

Keisuke Kinoshita can often be accused of trying too much or of not trying enough. Both faults are on display in his Woman, a noirish story of a thief and his mistress. Kinoshita's love for trying out effects that don't quite work is on display in the artily tilted camerawork that adds an expressionist note to scenes that don't really demand it. It's the sort of thing that a film student might attempt for a class, not something you expect from a director who had been working for five years and already had eight features to his credit, including the well-received Morning for the Osone Family (1946). Still, the scenes are shot well by Kinoshita's regular cinematographer, Hiroshi Kusuda. Where Kinoshita gets sloppy is more troubling: The dialogue is badly post-synched, especially noticeable in the extreme closeups that dominate the film toward the end. And once again, Kinoshita lets his brother Chuji's score meander around behind scenes where it feels awkwardly matched to the mood. But Woman is also one of Kinoshita's better films, overcoming its weaknesses with a fine economy of story. It's only a little over an hour long, but it packs a lot of intensity of feeling into that run time. Eitaro Ozawa plays Tadashi, a crook who has just made a big score with a home invasion and persuades his mistress, Toshiko, played by Mitsuko Mito, to go on the run with him to a seaside resort where he will meet up with his accomplices and settle up the proceeds of the theft. She has a steady gig as a dancer in the chorus of a musical revue that she's reluctant to ditch, but he's persuasive in his own brutally infatuated way. The bulk of the film deals with their on-again, off-again relationship: Will she stay or will she go? Ozawa is the more expressive of the two actors, which is fine because he has the more volatile role, switching in an instant from anger at her reluctance to pleading for her submission to menacing her with a knife. Mito's face can be inexpressive at key moments, making Toshiko a rather enigmatic character, but she manages to suggest the deep conflict at work within: Having risen from bar hostess (a step up from prostitution) to chorus girl, she seems to think her life has taken an upward turn that staying with Tadashi might reverse, even though he promises her a life of riches. The denouement comes when Tadashi asks her to sell a piece of the stolen goods for him. She refuses, but just at that moment there's a shout of "Fire!" and people start running to see the burning building. The keeper of the shop where Tadashi plans to sell the loot steps out to join the rubberneckers, pulling the door shut behind him but not locking it, and to Toshiko's horror, Tadashi takes the opportunity to slip into the store and filch some more goodies. She decides enough is enough and tries to run away, with Tadashi in pursuit through a gathering crowd. Kinoshita stages the fire and the melee around it very well, giving some needed action to what has been a rather talky film. In the end, Tadashi is caught and Toshiko returns to the chorus line, a somewhat flat and anticlimactic ending to a film that has generated some real tension.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Les Visiteurs du Soir (Marcel Carné, 1942)

Marie Déa and Alain Cuny in Les Visiteurs du Soir
Dominique: Arletty
Gilles: Alain Cuny 
Anne: Marie Déa 
Baron Hugues: Fernand Ledoux 
Renaud: Marcel Herrand 
The Devil: Jules Berry

Director: Marcel Carné 
Screenplay: Jacques Prévert, Pierre Laroche 
Cinematography: Roger Hubert
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Henri Rust
Music: Joseph Kosma, Maurice Thiriet

Alexandre Trauner's sets and costumes for Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du Soir were based on the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, although I was more reminded of the work of early 20th century illustrators like Walter Crane, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish, who were also influenced by that celebrated 15th-century illuminated manuscript. Trauner was not credited for his work on the film however. He was a Jew in occupied France, and the credit went to a "front," Georges Wakhévitch, just as, little more than a decade later, blacklisted Americans working in Hollywood were forced to hide behind their own fronts. The story of the making of Les Visiteurs du Soir is almost as interesting as the film itself.Not only was some of the behind-the-scenes work done sub rosa, to fool the Nazis and their collaborators, even the film's attempts to display luxury were thwarted by real-life conditions. Although the film was given a generous budget, the costuming was hindered by a shortage of suitable fabric, and in the banquet scenes the food had to be treated with an unpleasant substance to keep the extras and the crew from gobbling it down between takes. Even so, because the film deals with the manipulations of emissaries from the devil to the court of a French nobleman, it was taken to be a kind of allegory of the German invasion of France, and the devil played by Jules Berry to be a satirical representation of Adolf Hitler. The director and the screenwriters denied that was their intent.The film was a big critical and commercial hit in a France starved for movies -- films made in America and Britain were banned -- and while it's not on a par with Carné's 1945 masterpiece Children of Paradise, it remains a classic. Arletty is superbly seductive as Dominique, although it's doubtful that anyone would ever mistake her for the boy she pretends to be for part of the film. Trouser roles are always a problematic convention, but Arletty's "boy" looks to be in his 40s, which she was. As her fellow emissary, Alain Cuny is suitably dashing, and while Marie Déa is not quite the peerless beauty the screenplay wants her to be, the doomed love affair of Anne and Gilles gives an otherwise rather chilly film some warmth. But the film is stolen by Jules Berry as the devil, camping it up amusingly, at one point literally playing with fire. As a fantasy film, Les Visiteurs du Soir doesn't have the consummate style of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), to which it is sometimes compared, but its moods are darker and its story may be deeper. 

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus 
Helen Faraday: Marlene Dietrich
Ned Faraday: Herbert Marshall
Nick Townsend: Cary Grant
Johnny Faraday: Dickie Moore
Ben Smith: Gene Morgan
Taxi Belle Hooper: Rita La Roy
Dan O'Connor: Robert Emmett O'Connor
Detective Wilson: Sidney Toler
Dr. Pierce: Morgan Wallace
Joe, a Hiker: Sterling Holloway
Cora: Hattie McDaniel

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman, S.K. Lauren, Josef von Sternberg
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Paul Marquardt, Oscar Potoker

At once fascinating and perfectly ridiculous, Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus is a domestic melodrama with music and a bit of road movie thrown in. For most viewers it's chiefly of interest as an opportunity to see Cary Grant before the familiar "Cary Grant" persona had fully developed. He's a little rough around the edges still, slipping from an attempt at a fully American accent back into whatever his particular blend of British and American accent is, and his gift for looking faintly amused at absurd or difficult situations -- with which he's often confronted in Blond Venus -- hasn't quite emerged yet. At this stage of his career, he was little more than a useful leading man -- or second lead, in this film -- on the order of a John Lodge or a John Boles, there to show off the real star of the film, like Mae West in I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) or Loretta Young in Born to Be Bad (Lowell Sherman, 1934) or Jean Harlow in Suzy (George Fitzmaurice, 1936). Or, of course, Marlene Dietrich, who is the reason Blonde Venus was made at all. Sternberg's obsession with Dietrich is on full display here as he crafts another story about a man willing to sacrifice his own love to make a woman in love with another man happy -- the role played by Adolphe Menjou in Morocco (1930) and here played by Grant, whose Nick Townsend, a rich playboy (he's identified as a "politician" in the screenplay, but we never see him either run for office or perform the duties of one), who gives up Dietrich's Helen Faraday twice: both times to let her return to her husband, played a little stodgily by Herbert Marshall. Of course, the real man in Helen's life is her son, Johnny, played by the terminally cute Dickie Moore. I like the way Sternberg both exploits and undercuts Moore's cuteness, as in the scene in which Johnny wears a hideous Halloween mask on the side of his head that's usually facing the camera. But then the whole film is full of Sternbergian tricks, such as the two amazing narrative jump cuts. The film opens with the meeting of Helen and Ned as he and some other hikers come upon her as she's swimming nude in a pond with her fellow chorus girls. She sends him away, though he discovers where she's performing before he goes. Cut from the girls splashing in the pond to Johnny splashing in a tub as Helen bathes him. Sternberg and his screenwriters omit what might have been a movie in itself: the second encounter of Helen and Ned, their courtship and marriage. Similarly, after much ado has reduced Helen to poverty and implied prostitution, there's a scene in which she gives a fellow derelict the $1500 Ned has paid her off with and goes off to, we assume, commit suicide -- or "make a hole in the water," as she has put it. Cut to a shot of an expanse of water, but then to a montage which tells us that Helen has resumed her career as a cabaret performer and has become the toast of Paris. Again, stuff that might have been almost an entire movie on its own has been (fortunately) elided. If Sternberg's tricks had been applied to a story that made more sense to start with, Blonde Venus might have been something of a classic. Instead, it's an extraordinary but often entertaining mess.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco
Tom Brown: Gary Cooper
Amy Jolly: Marlene Dietrich
La Bessiere: Adolphe Menjou
Caesar: Ullrich Haupt
Mme. Caesar: Eve Southern
Sgt. Tatoche: Francis McDonald
Lo Tinto: Paul Porcasi

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a play by Benno Vigny
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Karl Hajos

At one point in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco, Tom Brown literally sweeps Amy Jolly off her feet and then tries to guess her weight. She scoffs at his estimate of 120 pounds and says his low estimate must be because he's so strong. In fact, Marlene Dietrich had slimmed down noticeably since she made The Blue Angel for Sternberg only a few months earlier in Germany, though she's still not quite as svelte as she would become after his transformation of her into a Hollywood icon was complete. The pounds are gone in her first American film, as are the realistically tawdry cabaret costumes Lola Lola wears in the German film, replaced by a wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. She is also filmed lovingly by Lee Garmes, who helped her locate the key light whenever the camera is on, a lesson she never forgot long after Sternberg's star-making was over. Morocco was a sensation, earning Dietrich her only Oscar nomination, though it's hardly her best performance or even a very good film. Sternberg still maintains the slightly halting pace of a director making a transition from silent films to talkies, chopping up Jules Furthman's dialogue by pausing too long between lines, losing the snap that would be present when Sternberg and Furthman worked together two years later on Shanghai Express. What action there is in the story, such as the attack by thugs outside Amy's apartment or the taking out of the machine gun nest, is tossed off casually, all in service of romance. And even the celebrated ending, with Amy kicking off her shoes to join the camp-followers into the desert, is more likely to elicit laughs today. As handsome as Gary Cooper's legionnaire is, it doesn't seem likely that a tough cookie like Amy, once capable of tearing up La Bessiere's card into small pieces while he's watching, would be such a careless lovesick sap. Still, Morocco is worth sitting through for its legendary moments, including the celebrated appearance of Dietrich's Amy in men's evening wear, taking a flower from a woman whom she kisses on the mouth and then tossing it to Cooper's wryly amused Tom, who tucks it behind his ear. It's an entertaining flirtation with what the Production Code would, in just a few years, and for several dreary decades, egregiously label "sex perversion."

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel
Prof. Immanuel Rath: Emil Jannings
Lola Lola: Marlene Dietrich
Kiepert, the Magician: Kurt Gerron
Guste Kiepert: Rosa Valetti
Mazeppa, the Strongman: Hans Albers
The Clown: Reinhold Bernt
Director of the School: Eduard von Winterstein
School Caretaker: Hans Roth
Angst, a Student: Rolf Müller
Lohmann, a Student: Roland Varno
Erztum, a Student: Carl Balhaus
Goldstaub, a Student: Robert Klein-Lörk
Innkeeper: Károly Huszár
Rath's Maid: Ilse Fürstenberg

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann
Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann
Cinematography: Günther Rittau
Art direction: Otto Hunte
Film editing: Sam Winston
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel still has some of the earmarks of a film made during the transition from silence to synchronized sound, namely the tendency to hold a shot a beat or two longer than is actually necessary, so the narrative doesn't always move along at the speed we anticipate. But Sternberg is clearly ready for sound, as the final scene shows. The camera tracks back from the dead professor, clutching his old desk so tightly that the caretaker who found his body has been unable to loosen his grip. Meanwhile, we hear the clock striking midnight, with the twelfth stroke barely audible as the screen fades to black. It's a touching moment, made possible by the several shots and sounds of the clock* that occur through the film as a kind of indicator of Rath's decline from precise and punctual to dissipated and tardy. Otherwise the sound on the film is sometimes a little harsh to the ear, which makes Sternberg's relatively sparing use of it welcome. Many scenes are staged in near-silence, letting the action rather than the dialogue carry the story.  Marlene Dietrich's baritone recorded well, which is one reason her career took off when sound was introduced, but early in the film she's allowed to sing in an upper key which is more than a little off-putting. Fortunately, by the time we get to Lola Lola's big number, Friedrich Hollaender's "Ich bin von Kopf zu Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" (the subtitles use the English language version, "Falling in Love Again" instead of a literal translation), Dietrich is back in the correct register. The Blue Angel thrives on Dietrich's performance, which eclipses Emil Jannings's overacting, though he does provide some genuine pathos toward the end of the film. I don't quite believe the ease with which the professor falls from grace, but I'm not sure whether the fault lies entirely with Jannings or with the screenplay.

*I don't think there's ever an establishing shot of the tower where this clock resides, only closeups of its face and the procession of figures below as the hour strikes. Is it perhaps on the town hall, the Rathaus, in which case there's a kind of submerged pun at work?

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

Sigourney Weaver in Avatar
Jake Sully: Sam Worthington
Neytiri: Zoe Saldana
Dr. Grace Augustine: Sigourney Weaver
Col. Miles Quaritch: Stephen Lang
Trudy Chacón: Michelle Rodriguez
Parker Selfridge: Giovanni Ribisi
Norm Spellman: Joel David Moore
Moat: CCH Pounder
Eytukan: Wes Studi
Dr. Max Patel: Dileep Rao

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron
Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Production design: Rick Carter, Martin Stromberg
Film editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner

When it first appeared, James Cameron's Avatar was as much an event as a movie. People flocked to see its groundbreaking 3D and motion-capture CGI effects and to marvel at its colorful creation of a distant world. Even most of the critics raved, caught off-guard yet again by Cameron's expensive audacity, as they had been with Titanic in 1997. But as with Titanic, the passing of time has taken some of the glamour off of the film. Cameron had certainly excelled his contemporaries as a technological innovator, but 3D is beginning to become passé (as it did in its first insurgence in the 1950s) and motion-capture has become a standard technique. So it's possible to concentrate on Avatar as movie, and thus to find it wanting. For one thing, it's shamelessly derivative. The central plot, of a soldier "going native," is that of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990). The Na'vi belief in the mystical unity of all things is identical to the Force from the Star Wars movies. And the gung-ho Marines and villainous representatives of the military-industrial complex are borrowed by Cameron from his own Aliens (1986). Even the Na'vi, with their elongated torsos, big eyes, flat noses, and long round tails, remind me oddly of the Pink Panther. Except blue. The characters are stock: Sigourney Weaver is again playing the tough, adversary whom the exploitative bad guys underestimate. Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is the white man savior of the native peoples. And Stephen Lang's bull-headed Col. Quaritch is the hissable villain with no apparent redeeming qualities. Cameron even calls the material being sought by the earthlings in the movie "unobtanium," a variant spelling of the impossible substance that has been called "unobtainium" by engineers since the 1950s. The Marvel Studios screenwriters at least have the wit to call their minerals "adamantium"  and "vibranium." But maybe that's quibbling: Avatar remains an influential and extremely watchable movie, even if it's predictable and overlong -- cuts of the film range from 162 to 178 minutes.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

A Colt Is My Passport (Takashi Nomura, 1967)

Joe Shishido in A Colt Is My Passport
Shuji Kamimura: Joe Shishido
Shun Shiozaki: Jerry Fujio
Mina: Chitose Kobayashi
Shimazu's Successor: Ryotaro Suji
Shimazu: Kanjuro Arashi
Funaki: Shoki Fukae
Senzaki: Eimei Esumi
Kaneko: Jun Hongo
Miyoshi: Akio Miyabe
Otatsu: Toyoko Takechi
Otawara: Takamaru Sasaki
Tsugawa: Asao Uchida
Apartment Receptionist: Zeko Nakamura
Hit Man: Kojiro Kusanagi
Barge Captain: Zenji Yamada

Director: Takashi Nomura
Screenplay: Hideichi Nagahara, Nobuo Yamada
Based on a novel by Shenji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Production design: Toshiyuki Matsui
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Harumi Ibe

I didn't see any Colts in A Colt Is My Passport, but there are several rifles, pistols, and shotguns, some dynamite, and the protagonist carries a Beretta, so I suspect the title is a bit of poetic license designed to make the Japanese gangster into the equivalent of the gunfighter of the American Wild West. Harumi Ibe's music score, with its guitar, harmonica, and whistler evoking Ennio Morricone's scores for Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, seems designed for the same effect. But why court comparisons? The Japanese gangster movie is its own well-defined genre, and Joe Shishido is its superstar. In A Colt Is My Passport he's Shuji, a hit man hired to off a crooked businessman, which he does with cool efficiency. Unfortunately, the guys who hired him immediately turn against Shuji, so he's soon on the run, along with his sidekick, Shun, played by the Anglo-Japanese actor and singer Jerry Fujio. (Fujio even gets to croon a ballad at one point in the movie, slowing down the otherwise non-stop action.) The movie is filled with James Bond-like gadgets and car chases: At one point, Shuji and Sun find themselves kidnapped and thrown into the back seat of a car that they have had rigged with an extra braking system, apparently just in case they find themselves in such a predicament. Engaging the brake causes the car to skid, throwing the bad guys into the windshield and knocking them out. And so it goes until Shun is captured and beaten to a pulp, whereupon Shuji bargains with the bad guys, giving himself up to them so Shun and the pretty motel waitress Mina, who has helped them, can escape. Apparently the bad guys trust Shuji enough that he has time to work on a way of defeating them: He rigs up some booby traps for the showdown they have arranged on a landfill, and the movie ends with Shuji staggering away from the carnage. It's all great fun in that peculiarly heartless and mindless way that such thrillers have.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)

Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther
Black Panther T'Challa / Black Panther: Chadwick Boseman
Erik Killmonger: Michael B. Jordan
Nakia: Lupita Nyong'o
Okoye: Danai Gurira   
Everett K. Ross: Martin Freeman
W'Kabi:  Daniel Kaluuya 
Shuri: Letitia Wright
M'Baku: Winston Duke
N'Jobu: Sterling K. Brown
Ramonda: Angela Bassett
Zuri: Forest Whittaker
Ulysses Klaue: Andy Serkis
Ayo: Florence Kasumba 
T'Chaka: John Kani 

Director: Ryan Coogler
Screenplay: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
Based on comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Cinematography: Rachel Morrison
Production design: Hannah Beachler
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Michael P. Shawver
Music : Ludwig Göransson

This past week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put on hold its proposed introduction of a new category: best popular film. The idea provoked a barrage of criticism and mockery. Did this mean the Academy was admitting that its recent best picture winners had not been popular? What criteria would be used to determine popularity? The box office take, for example, or would that be a tacit admission that the Oscars have always been in it for the money? It was also noted that the idea was not a new one: At the very first Oscars in 1929, two "best picture" awards had been presented, one for "outstanding production," which went to William A. Wellman's Wings, and the other for "unique and artistic picture," which went to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.* The Academy apparently found the distinction unworkable way back then, because it was discontinued the following year. Critics also noted that some of the most popular films of all time, such as Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and Titanic  (James Cameron, 1997) had won best picture Oscars, so what was the problem? The problem, if there was one, seemed to lie in the fact that the Oscars had lost clout. By the time the Academy's awards are presented, there have been so many other awards shows, from the Golden Globes to the BAFTAs to the Screen Actors Guild awards, that there's hardly any suspense left about who will win. And ratings for the Oscars on TV had steadily declined -- the show was overlong and featured too many categories that viewers don't care about. The Academy has apparently stuck to its plans to give out some of the less-glamorous awards, like the ones for sound effects editing and for short films, during the commercial breaks in the TV show, but caved to ridicule of the popular film award.So what does this have to do with Black Panther, ostensibly the topic of this entry? One of the criticisms of the proposal suggested that the popular film category was only a way of pulling in fans of blockbuster hits like the Marvel superhero movies, of which Black Panther was the most recent example. Of course, there's nothing to prevent Black Panther from being nominated for the old best picture category -- though to date no Marvel film has been so honored. It currently has a 97% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which indicates not only that it's popular but also that even the critics think it's good. So do I: It has an interesting story to tell, a unique perspective on race and history, and it's sharply directed and superbly cast. Its appearance, in the midst of the political and cultural uproar caused by the election of Donald Trump, is more than timely. And it has even provoked intellectual debate over whether it is a fresh and clever valorizing of the black experience or, as Canadian journalist James Wilt put it,  "a fundamentally reactionary understanding of black liberation that blatantly advocates bourgeois respectability over revolution, sterilizes the history of real-life anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere, and allows white folks such as myself to feel extremely comfortable watching it." For my part, I never felt "extremely comfortable" watching Black Panther, though I did feel entertained and more than a little provoked to think about the issues raised by it, which is more than I can say about any other recent superhero blockbusters.

*Both films were released in 1927. The first Academy Awards for for films released between August 1, 1927 and August 1, 1928. The split-year eligibility continued until the awards presented in 1935, which were for films released in the calendar year 1934.