Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)

Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

Longfellow Deeds: Gary Cooper
Babe Bennett: Jean Arthur
MacWade: George Bancroft
Cornelius Cobb: Lionel Stander
John Cedar: Douglass Dumbrille
Walter: Raymond Walburn
Judge May: H.B. Warner
Mabel Dawson: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Emile Von Hallor: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Morrow: Walter Catlett
Farmer: John Wray
Mrs. Meredith: Emma Dunn

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick
Music: Howard Jackson

Frank Capra's perennially popular Mr. Deeds Goes to Town currently has an 8.0 score on IMDb and an 89% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So let me cavil a little bit about its psychological dishonesty, namely the scene in which Deeds, engagingly played by Gary Cooper, is subjected to a sanity hearing because of his attempt to give away to distressed farmers the $20 million he has inherited -- a scheme that economically speaking doesn't bear much close scrutiny. Capra (and Robert Riskin, who as writer must bear his share of blame) brings on an "expert," a caricature Viennese psychiatrist, who explains that Deeds suffers from "manic depression," the now-discarded term for bipolar disorder, and exhibits a peaks-and-valleys chart of Deeds's mood swings. It's pretty clear that Capra and Riskin want us to regard this testimony as quackery. But anyone who has dealt with bipolarity, either first-hand or with family or friends, can see the element of truth in the diagnosis. We don't know enough about Deeds's daily life in Mandrake Falls, Vt., where, as the Faulkner sisters testify, everyone is "pixilated" but them, to give a confident diagnosis that Deeds is in fact bipolar, and the attempt to use the diagnosis as a smear is reprehensible. But Deeds's decision to refuse legal council at the hearing is the act of someone who really is depressed, and while we are supposed to dismiss as chicanery the attempt to classify his eccentricities -- playing the tuba, sliding down banisters, chasing firetrucks, feeding doughnuts to a horse, and above all wanting to give away his money -- as manic behavior, there's a grain of truth there. Moreover, Deeds does in fact exhibit violent tendencies: witness his punching out the poets who mock his greeting-card verses -- who beats up poets? -- and his assaulting the lawyers at the trial. Capra intends his film as a valorization of small-town virtues against city cynicism, but even that doesn't bear much close scrutiny, especially in the age of more critical looks at small town life as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It has always struck me that Capra was the most empty-headed of the great American directors, making films that annihilate thought, or at least anesthetize it. I like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town more than most Capra films: At its best it's lively and funny, but its worst is pretty annoying and even pernicious stuff.

Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

Sanshiro Sugata (Akira Kurosawa, 1943)

Ryunosuke Tsukigata and Susumu Fujita in Sanshiro Sugata

Sanshiro Sugata: Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano: Denjiro Okochi
Sayo Murai: Yukiko Todoroki
Gennosuke Higaki: Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Hansuke Murai: Takashi Shimura
Osumi Kodana: Ranko Hanai
Tsunetami Iinuma: Sugisaki Aoyama
Police Chief Mishima: Ichiro Sugai
Saburo Monma: Yoshio Kusugi
Buddhist Priest: Kokuten Kodo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita
Cinematography: Akira Mimura
Art direction: Masao Tozuka
Film editing: Toshio Goto, Akira Kurosawa
Music: Seiichi Suzuki

You know the plot: A talented, cocky young newcomer takes on the old pros and gets his ass kicked, but he learns self-discipline and becomes a winner. You've seen it played out with young doctors, lawyers, musicians -- it's even the plot of Wagner's Die Meistersinger -- and others challenging the established traditions. But mostly it's the plot for what seems to be about half of the sports movies ever made, including Akira Kurosawa's first feature, Sanshiro Sugata. It's also a film about the conflict between rival martial arts disciplines, jujitsu and judo, but fortunately you don't need to know much about the nature of the conflict to follow the film. From what I gather from reading the Wikipedia entry on judo, the founder of that discipline, Jigoro Kano, wanted to give jujitsu a philosophical underpinning that would put an emphasis on self-improvement for the betterment of society, and he called it judo because "do," like the Chinese "tao," means road or path. Kano's renaming was meant to shift the emphasis from physical skill to spiritual purpose. In Kurosawa's film, young Sanshiro comes to town wanting to find someone to teach him jujitsu, and signs up with a teacher who accepts a challenge from the judo master Shogoro Yano. (The name is an obvious twist on "Jigoro Kano.") Sanshiro watches as not only the teacher but all of the other members of his dojo are defeated -- in fact, tossed into the river -- by Yano. Whereupon Sanshiro becomes a follower of Yano's, but has to undergo some defeats and a cold night spent in a muddy pond before he gets the idea of what judo is all about. The film was not a big hit with the wartime Japanese censors, who wanted more aggression and less philosophy in their movies, so 17 minutes were cut from it, never to be seen again. In the currently available print, the missing material is summarized on title cards, but what's left is more than enough to show that Kurosawa arrived on the scene as a full-blown master director. His camera direction is superb, and he knows how to tell a story visually. For example, when Sanshiro joins up with Yano, he kicks off his geta, his wooden clogs, so he can pull Yano's rickshaw more efficiently. Kurosawa cuts to a passage-of-time montage in which we see one of the abandoned geta lying in the road, then in a mud puddle, covered with snow, then tossed aside as spring comes. The film's crucial scene is a showdown between Sanshiro and his jujitsu rival, Higaki, in a field of tall grasses, swept by wind with rushing clouds overhead; it's a spectacular effect, even if the battle turns out to be a bit anticlimactic. However much the censors may have disliked it, audiences were enthusiastic enough that Kurosawa made a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata Part II in 1942.

Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Tomoko Hamakawa and Tamio Kawaji in Tokyo Drifter

Tetsuya (Tetsu the Phoenix) Hondo: Tetsuya Watari
Chiharu: Chieko Matsubara
Tatsuzo the Viper: Tamio Kawaji
Kurata: Ryuji Kita
Kenji Aizawa: Hideaki Nitani
Tanaka: Eiji Go
Mutsuko: Tomoko Hamakawa
Keiichi: Tsuyoshi Yoshida
Umetani: Isao Tamagawa
Otsuka: Eimei Esumi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Yasunori Kawauchi
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Shinya Inoue
Music: Hajime Kaburagi

Imagine if The Godfather had been made in the mid-1960s with someone like Frankie Avalon as Michael Corleone, interpolated pop songs ("An Offer He Can't Refuse," perhaps?), and sets in comic book colors that look like they were designed for a Freed Unit musical at MGM in the 1950s. Then you have something like Tokyo Drifter, a jaw-dropping Japanese gangster movie directed by the irrepressible Seijun Suzuki. There's no summarizing a plot that has so many wild excursions, but it basically follows the attempts of a young hitman who has his yakuza boss's approval to go straight -- or so he thinks, until the boss changes his mind. None of this suggests where the movie's going to go, including the shootout between Tetsuya and his almost Doppelgänger nemesis Tatsuzo on the railroad tracks with an approaching train in a snowstorm. Or the free-for-all fistfight in a bar designed to look like a saloon set for an American Western, during which the bar is almost completely demolished. For most of the film, including the train track shootout, Tetsuya wears a robin's egg blue suit with white shoes, though he later changes into other pastels. Those who find Tokyo Drifter a bit much (as the studio that employed Suzuki did) dismiss it as style over substance, but it's undeniably fascinating.

Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Miller's Crossing (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1990)

Watched 10/8/2018

Gabriel Byrne and John Turturro in Miller's Crossing

Tom Reagan: Gabriel Byrne
Verna: Marcia Gay Harden
Leo O'Bannon: Albert Finney
Bernie Bernbaum: John Turturro
Johnny Caspar: Jon Polito
Eddie Dane: J.E. Freeman
Frankie: Mike Starr
Tic-Tac: Al Mancini
Mink Larouie: Steve Buscemi
Mayor Dale Levander: Richard Woods
Mayor's Secretary: Frances McDormand

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Barry Sonnenfeld
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Michael R. Miller
Music: Carter Burwell

Miller's Crossing is the wit and cruelty of hard-boiled fiction like Dashiell Hammett's filtered through Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s, further filtered through film noir of the 1940s and served up by the postmodern sensibilities of Joel and Ethan Coen. It was a box office flop, but it has a cadre of admirers, many of whom, like David Thomson, ordinarily look askance at the smart-aleckiness of the Coens. There is much to admire, starting with pitch-perfect performances by the underused Gabriel Byrne, the always brilliant Albert Finney, and the shrewdly enticing Marcia Gay Harden, along with a gallery of character actors that rival those of the peak years of the Hollywood studios. Carter Burwell's score is, as always, essential. And there are some delicious moments, such as the discovery of the body of "Rug" Daniels by a small boy and his dog, who cocks his head quizzically as the boy filches the corpse's toupee, thereby providing something of a red herring for those who want to figure out who killed Rug. But on the whole, the film leaves me a little cold. It feels like a period piece for the sake of being a period piece and not because it has anything of substance to say about the chosen period.

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Ken'ichi Enomoto and Denjiro Okochi in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

Benkei: Denjiro Okochi
Togashi: Susumu Fujita
Porter: Ken'ichi Enomoto
Kamei: Masayuki Mori
Kataoka: Takashi Shimura
Ise: Akitake Kono
Suruga: Yoshio Kosugi
Yoshitsune: Hanshiro Iwai
Hidachibo: Dekao Yokoo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on plays by Nobomitsu Kanze and Gohei Namiki
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's fourth film and first venture into the samurai movie genre is only an hour long, but it displays both the attention to character delineation and the infusion of humor into a sometimes earnest genre that would be present when Kurosawa began working on an epic scale almost a decade later in Seven Samurai (1954). But he ran into trouble with the censors both before and after the war ended, first with the militarists of the Japanese government who wanted propaganda, not subtlety, and then with the American occupying forces, which banned all films that seemed to glorify the warlike past. It was held from release until 1952. As a film, it's little more than an anecdote about how the samurai serving Lord Yoshitsune managed to elude a roadblock and escape into hiding. Kurosawa added a comic figure to the retinue, a porter played by the big-mouth comedian Ken'ichi Enomoto, a kind of Japanese Joe E. Brown. Enomoto's mugging gets a bit annoying at times, but he also keeps the film from turning into a historical pageant as the leader of the samurai, Benkei, tricks the garrison commander at the roadblock, Togashi, into thinking that they're actually a group of monks raising funds for the restoration of a temple. When his bluff is called and he's asked to read the paper that sets for the appeal for funds, Benkei unfurls a blank scroll and improvises -- to the astonishment of the porter, who is looking over his shoulder. Yoshitsune is disguised as a second porter, and in order to deter Togashi's suspicion, Benkei is forced to beat the disguised lord for laziness -- an unthinkable act of lèse-majesté under normal circumstances. Slight as it is, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail gives off a sense of the greatness to come in Kurosawa's career, including the presence of several actors, such as Takashi Shimura, who would become prominent in the director's later films. 

L'Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Anna Magnani in the "Una Voce Umana" segment of L'Amore

Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani in the "Il Miracolo" segment of L'Amore

Una Voce Umana
The Woman on the Telephone: Anna Magnani

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Anna Benevuti
Based on a play by Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Robert Juillard, Otello Martelli
Production design: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Il Miracolo
Nannina: Anna Magnani
The Vagabond: Federico Fellini
The Monk: Peparuolo
The Teacher: Amelia Robert

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini
Based on a novel by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Cinematography: Aldo Tonti
Art direction: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's L'Amore, designed as a tribute to Anna Magnani, comprises two short films, Una Voce Umana and Il Miracolo. The first is based on Jean Cocteau's monodrama La Voix Humaine and its cast consists entirely of Magnani as a woman whose lover is not only breaking up with her but also going off to marry another woman. In a long telephone call she pleads with and rages at him. Unfortunately, in the print shown by the FilmStruck Criterion Collection, the dialogue goes seriously out of sync with what's on screen for a long period -- a flaw also to be found for a shorter span in the other film, Il Miracolo. The English subtitles keep pace with the on-screen action, but those of us who have a little familiarity with Italian find the disjunction of sight and sound distracting. In Il Miracolo, Magnani is Nannina, a simple-minded woman who, while herding goats in the hills above her village, encounters a hiker whom she takes to be St. Joseph. He gets her drunk and leaves her pregnant. (The hiker is played by 28-year-old Federico Fellini, who doesn't speak a word in one of his few on-screen appearances.) When Nannina learns that she's having a child she takes it to be a miracle from God, but the townspeople, who already treat her as the village idiot, torment her so much that she flees into the hills, where she gives birth in what seems to be an abandoned monastery. In one of the landmark moments in the decline of film censorship, the Catholic National Legion of Decency charged Il Miracolo with sacrilege and persuaded the New York state film censors to pull it from release. The lawsuit brought by the American distributor, Joseph Burstyn, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1952 ruled that the ban was an unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech. Magnani's performance is fuller and more varied in Il Miracolo than in Una Voce Umana, in which she gives a lacerating performance that feels more theatrical than cinematic -- her torment becomes monotonous. But both films accomplish what Rossellini set out to do: showcase Magnani's intense commitment to her art.

A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)

Watched 10/7/2018

Groucho Marx and Kitty Carlisle in A Night at the Opera

Otis B. Driftwood: Groucho Marx
Fiorello: Chico Marx
Tomasso: Harpo Marx
Rosa Castaldi: Kitty Carlisle
Ricardo Barone: Allan Jones
Herman Gottlieb: Sig Ruman
Mrs. Claypool: Margaret Dumont
Rudolfo Lassparri: Walter Woolf King

Director: Sam Wood
Screenplay: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, James Kevin McGuinness
Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: William LeVanway
Music: Herbert Stothart

Verdi's Il Trovatore is one of my favorite operas, but it only works if it's performed by a cast willing to give it their all. To see what I mean, try to find the live recording from the 1962 Salzburg Festival conducted by Herbert von Karajan and starring Leontyne Price, Franco Corelli, Ettore Bastianini, and Giulietta Simionato. Thrill to Price and Corelli in a duel of high notes, Corelli and Bastianini trying to out-ham each other, and Simonato camping the hell out of Azucena. That's what opera is all about and why it's such a natural target for the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera is not my favorite of their films, however. It was made after they left Paramount for MGM, where Irving G. Thalberg seemed determined to file down the team's rough edges, Louis B. Mayer didn't get their jokes, and the direction was assigned to Sam Wood, who earned his surname honestly. So we get an insipid romance between the opera singers played by Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones, who are allowed to do the "Miserere" scene straight-faced, and one of those gooey musical interludes in which Chico and Harpo are allowed to charm a bunch of kids with their piano and harp playing. For many, the comic highlight of the film is the stateroom scene, in which much of the cast is crammed into a tiny space, but I'm afraid too many viewings have left me cold to it. But I will never grow cold to Groucho, who rises above all inanities. Any moment he's on screen cracking wise is golden. The rest ranges from silver to Wooden.

Les Portes de la Nuit (Marcel Carné, 1945)

Nathalie Nattier, Yves Montand, and Jean Vilar in Les Portes de la Nuit

Jean Diego: Yves Montand
Malou: Nathalie Nattier
Georges: Pierre Brasseur
The Homeless Man: Jean Vilar
Guy Sénéchal: Serge Reggiani
M. Sénéchal: Saturnin Fabre
Raymond Lécuyer: Raymond Bussières
Claire Lécuyer: Sylvia Bataille
Cricri Lécuyer: Christian Simon
M. Quinquina: Julien Carette
Étiennette: Dany Robin
Étiennette's Boyfriend: Jean Maxime

Director: Marcel Carné
Screenplay: Jacques Prévert
Cinematography: Philippe Agostini
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Jean Feyte, Marthe Gottié
Music: Joseph Kosma

Marcel Carné's Les Portes de la Nuit was a flop in postwar France, and its poetically vague title may indicate some of the reasons why. The film attempts to walk a line between whimsy and tragedy, its vision of life in postwar Paris a little too suffused with romantic melancholy for audiences grappling with the day-to-day uncertainties of existence. The setting is February 1945, after the liberation of Paris but before the end of the war, a period that feels like a kind of limbo. A homeless man with the gift of foreseeing other people's fates walks through the streets, first encountering our protagonist, Jean Diego, a former member of the Resistance, on the Métro, Jean is going to see the wife of Raymond Lécuyer, a fellow Resistance fighter, to tell her that her husband is dead. But when he breaks the news, she bursts out laughing, whereupon the door opens to reveal a very much alive Lécuyer, who wants to know what's so funny. Jean, it turns out, had been captured along with Lécuyer and had overheard the orders sending him to the firing squad, but the execution didn't take place. Eventually, the plot will reveal who ratted on Lécuyer, and the homeless man will predict the rat's fate. But this story of the clash of Resistance and collaboration takes a secondary place in the film to the romance that develops between Jean and the beautiful Malou, the wife of Georges, who made his fortune in armaments during the war, as the film turns into a muddle of coincidences. Carné was a great director, and even this weakling among his films gives us something to watch, including a performance by the 25-year-old Yves Montand. He's a bit too young for the role, given that Jean was supposed to be a soldier of fortune before the war, but he was Carné's second choice after Jean Gabin, whom the director wanted to co-star with Marlene Dietrich as Malou. After starting to work with Carné, Gabin and Dietrich bowed out and went on to make Martin Roumagnac with Georges Lacombe instead -- not the most felicitous of choices. The other major distinction of Les Portes de la Nuit is the score by Joseph Kosma, which introduced his song "Les Feuilles Mortes," better known in the States as "Autumn Leaves," with lyrics by Johnny Mercer replacing the original ones by Jacques Prévert.

Martin Roumagnac (Georges Lacombe, 1946)

Watched 10/6/2018

Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin in Martin Roumagnac

Blanche Ferrand: Marlene Dietrich
Martin Roumagnac: Jean Gabin
Blanche's Uncle: Jean d'Yd
The Schoolteacher: Daniel Gélin
The Defense Attorney: Jean Darcante
Jeanne Roumagnac: Margo Lion
Laubry: Marcel Herrand

Director: Georges Lacombe
Screenplay: Pierre Véry, Georges Lacombe
Based on a novel by Pierre-René Wolf
Cinematography: Roger Hubert
Production design: Georges Wakhévitch
Film editing: Germaine Artus
Music: Marcel Mirouze

This overheated and forgettable melodrama should have been better, given that Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin were lovers and were both making their postwar returns to European filmmaking. It's watchable but mainly for Dietrich, who was trying to overcome her old image as a Hollywood diva and allows herself to be filmed in natural light for once, and for a mad courtroom scene featuring a defense lawyer who behaves like a Daumier caricature. Gabin grumps about in a role that would have been better if he and Dietrich had the kind of on-screen chemistry that they supposedly had off-screen.

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)

Watched 10/5/2018

Phoebe Frost: Jean Arthur
Erika von Schluetow: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. John Pringle: John Lund
Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Millard Mitchell
Hans Otto Birgel: Peter von Zerneck
Mike: Stanley Prager
Joe: William Murphy

Director: Billy Wilder
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Richard L. Breen, Robert Harari
Based on a story by David Shaw
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Walter H. Tyler
Film editing: Doane Harrison
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to watch Roberto Rossellini's neorealistic drama Germany Year Zero (1948) back-to-back with Billy Wilder's satiric romantic comedy A Foreign Affair, if only to illuminate the respective visions of the two directors. Both are set in the ruins of postwar, pre-wall Berlin, using the ruins of the city as a correlative for the evil of Nazism. But for Rossellini, that evil is persistent, a lurking danger. For Wilder it's something that may persist but also something that can be overcome by good will and humor. A Foreign Affair is sometimes accused of a nasty cynicism about politics, and certainly its embodiment of American democracy, the congressional fact-finding delegation, is seen as rather clueless and superficial. But for Wilder, a good joke is our best defense against even such evils as Nazism, just as it was for Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be (1942) -- and later for Mel Brooks in his 1983 remake of the Lubitsch film and his own The Producers (1967).

Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Phoenix

Sayoko Aihara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shinichi Yasaka: Keiji Sada
Naoya Yasaka: Isamu Kosugi
Moto Yasaka: Toyo Takahashi
Yuji Yasaka: Akira Yamanouchi
Hiroshi Aihara: Tamotsu Kawasaki
Housekeeper: Eiko Takamatsu

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Yoshiro Kawazu
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Phoenix probably had much more resonance for the Japanese audiences who saw it in 1947 than it does for us today, when it can easily be dismissed as a tearjerking love story. For those first audiences, the heroine, Sayoko, a war widow with a three-year-old child, could easily be seen as emblematic of the hopes of the Japanese people -- hence the film's title. We see much of Sayoko's story in flashback: her first encounter with Shinichi, the man with whom she falls in love; her rejection by his stern, conservative father; her own family's attempt to force her into an arranged marriage that would cement a business deal with a weapons manufacturer; her lonely life with her brother, who is dying of tuberculosis; the capitulation of Shinichi's father, who agrees to let them be married during Shinichi's brief furlough before he returns to the war in which he's killed. After all this, Sayoko lives with her late husband's family, essentially a factotum, tasked with keeping the large Yasaka family on point and occasionally getting scolded by her father-in-law. But she tells her brother-in-law that she's happy, pinning her hopes on her small child and on her plans one day to open a shop as a seamstress. Kinoshita is often a shameless sentimentalist, but here he has first-rate actors, Kinuyo Tanaka and Keiji Sada, as the ill-fated couple. They have real chemistry together, even though Tanaka was 16 years older than Sada.

Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948)

Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

John Forbes: Dick Powell
Mona Stevens: Lizabeth Scott
Sue Forbes: Jane Wyatt
J.B. MacDonald: Raymond Burr
Bill Smiley: Byron Barr
District Attorney: John Litel
Tommy Forbes: Jimmy Hunt
Ed Brawley: Selmer Jackson

Director: André De Toth
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Based on a novel by Jay Dratler
Cinematography: Harry J. Wild
Art direction: Arthur Lonergan
Film editing: Walter Thompson
Music: Louis Forbes

André De Toth's Pitfall is a noir-tinged cautionary fable about midlife ennui. Married to his childhood sweetheart, Sue, John Forbes is bored with his job at an insurance company and with his suburban life in general. But then he gets a case involving the recovery of the assets of Bill Smiley, who is doing time for embezzlement. The sleazy private eye Forbes has hired, J.B. MacDonald, has tracked down some of the loot to Smiley's mistress, Mona Stevens. Forbes decides to pay her a visit, but not before MacDonald, with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, urges him to put in a good word with Mona about him. Forbes's visit to Mona will turn into an affair that earns the enmity of not only MacDonald, who is obsessed with her, but also Smiley, whose jail term is almost up. The whole thing ends with a couple of corpses and a badly damaged marriage. De Toth handles it with a minimum of sugarcoating on the life of the Forbeses, even though they have a cute little boy named Tommy, and with a great deal of suspense as the hulking MacDonald, well-played by Raymond Burr in his heaviest heavy mode, gets Forbes more deeply involved in his relationship with Mona -- despite the best efforts of both Forbes and Mona to put an end to it.

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)

Houseley Stevenson and Tom D'Andrea in Dark Passage

Vincent Parry: Humphrey Bogart
Irene Jansen: Lauren Bacall
Madge Rapf: Agnes Moorehead
Bob: Bruce Bennett
Sam: Tom D'Andrea
Dr. Walter Coley: Houseley Stevenson
Baker: Clifton Young
George Fellsinger: Rory Mallinson

Director: Delmer Daves
Screenplay: Delmer Daves
Based on a novel by David Goodis
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Charles H. Clarke
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Franz Waxman

Time doesn't just heal wounds, it also makes bad movies into interesting ones. Dark Passage is, on the face of it, a bad movie, a silly thriller whose plot depends on a series of absurd coincidences. But it has survived and achieved almost cult status because of several things: the eternal chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and its wonderful views of San Francisco in the late 1940s among them. And, I think, because writer-director Delmer Daves knew enough to take its absurdities with a straight face, keeping his tongue only slightly in his cheek as he unspools the story of convicted wife-murderer Vincent Parry, who manages to escape from San Quentin in an open barrel precariously perched on the back of a truck, to survive a barrel roll from the truck on Highway 1, to be picked up first by a guy we later learn is an ex-con who had done time in San Quentin and then by Irene Jansen, who is convinced that Parry is innocent. She takes him to her handsome apartment -- an Art Deco building at 1360 Montgomery St. that still attracts movie-loving tourists -- and gives him shelter, even though she's also friends with Madge Rapf, who testified against Parry at the trial. Leaving the safety of Irene's apartment, he hails a cabbie named Sam, who recognizes him but believes he's innocent, and who takes him to a back-alley plastic surgeon who -- for $200! -- gives him a new face. And so on. Much of the first part of the film is done with a subjective camera, giving us Parry's view of things, including the film's best -- that is, funniest -- scene: the doctor explaining the procedure as Sam kibitzes over his shoulder. His face bandaged, Parry returns to Irene, who nurses him until the bandages come off and we see Bogart's face for the first time -- though even with bandages on, he's identifiably Bogart. And so on as Parry gathers evidence that proves the real murderer was Madge, who inconveniently takes a header through a plate-glass window, robbing him of his proof. Pauline Kael was representative of the earlier response to the movie, calling it "miserably plotted" and "an almost total drag," but if you have an easily willing suspension of disbelief, a taste for old-style star chemistry, and an interest in seeing the Golden Gate Bridge without bumper-to-bumper traffic, Dark Passage can be a lot of fun.

Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, 1938)

Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard in Pygmalion

Henry Higgins: Leslie Howard
Eliza Doolittle: Wendy Hiller
Alfred Doolittle: Wilfrid Lawson
Mrs. Higgins: Marie Lohr
Col. Pickering: Scott Sunderland
Mrs. Pearce: Jean Cadell
Freddy Eynsford Hill: David Tree

Director: Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis
Based on a play by George Bernard Shaw
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Art direction: John Bryan
Film editing: David Lean
Music: Arthur Honegger

The perfect antidote for those who think Rex Harrison is the only Henry Higgins, as well as for those, like me, who usually find Leslie Howard a bland and uninteresting actor. He's wonderful in this film, and he's beautifully matched by Wendy Hiller as Eliza. Unlike other Elizas one has seen, Hiller does the flower girl Eliza without coyness or the sense that she has been coached to speak cockney as thoroughly as Eliza is coached by Higgins to speak "proper." It does seem to me that the cockney dialect in the film has been smoothed out a bit more than necessary -- even more than in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) -- for the sake of American audiences. I'm also struck by the fact that the word "damn" remains so prominent in Pygmalion when it caused such a flap with the censors only a year later in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), and that the reference to the fact that Alfred Doolittle never married Eliza's mother wasn't removed. Did the Production Code administration not have to approve this import?

On hiatus...

...but still watching movies:
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) 10/9/2019
A Woman's Face (Gustaf Molander, 1938) 10/10/2018
Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950) 10/11/2018
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Meryn LeRoy, 1933) 10/12/2018
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) 10/13/2018
Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962) 10/14/2018
Conflict (Curtis Bernhardt, 1945) 10/15/2018
Up to His Ears (Philippe de Broca, 1965) 10/16/2018

The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man

Nick Charles: William Powell
Nora Charles: Myrna Loy
Dorothy Wynant: Maureen O'Sullivan
Guild: Nat Pendleton
Mimi Wynant Jorgenson: Minna Gombell
MacCaulay: Porter Hall
Tommy: Henry Wadsworth
Gilbert Wynant: William Henry
Nunheim: Harold Huber
Chris Jorgenson: Cesar Romero
Julia Woolf: Natalie Moorhead
Morelli: Edward Brophy
Claude Wynant: Edward Ellis
Tanner: Cyril Thornton

Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich
Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Robert Kern
Music: William Axt

I have seen W.S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man several times before, and I recently read Dashiell Hammett's novel, but I still couldn't remember whodunit. Even now, I'm not sure why and how the killer did things the way they were done. Which is, I think, because it doesn't really matter: The mystery is secondary to the banter of Nick and Nora and the eccentricity of the characters they encounter as her world of privilege marries with his world of cops and lowlifes. Most of the best mysteries, by which I mean those of Hammett and Raymond Chandler, are about atmosphere rather than crime: Those who want to try to solve the mystery along with the detective should read other writers who are more involved with planting clues and red herrings. The Thin Man may have benefited from MGM's lack of interest in the project, which could have been swamped with the kind of second-guessing from the front office that often stifled the studio's films. Instead, it was treated as a routine programmer whose stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy, were second-tier and whose director, known as "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke, was known for getting things done quick and dirty -- filming took only 16 days. But Powell and Loy became first-tier stars, and the movie earned four Oscar nominations (picture, actor, director, and screenplay) and was followed by five sequels. Powell has often struck me as a surprising star, with his big nose and his dubious chin, and I used to have trouble distinguishing him from Melvyn Douglas. Even now, if you asked me to say without hesitating whether it was Powell or Douglas in My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), or Douglas or Powell in Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939), I might stumble a bit. But he had undeniable chemistry with Loy, so much so that they got re-teamed in movies outside the Thin Man series like The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936), and others. The Thin Man also has a little more zip and zest than some of the films made after the Production Code clamped down, though Nick and Nora, like other married couples, were forced into twin beds. They still drink to an unholy excess, of course.

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, and Eleanor Wesselhoeft in Street Scene

Rose Maurrant: Sylvia Sidney
Sam Kaplan: William Collier Jr.
Anna Maurrant: Estelle Taylor
Emma Jones: Beulah Bondi
Frank Maurrant: David Landau
Vincent Jones: Frank McHugh
Steve Sankey: Russell Hopton
Mae Jones: Greta Granstedt
Greta Fiorentino: Eleanor Wesselhoeft
Bert Easter: Walter Miller
Abe Kaplan: Max Montor
Shirley Kaplan: Ann Kostant
Dick McGann: Allen Fox
Karl Olsen: John Qualen
Willie Maurrant: Lambert Rogers
Filippo Fiorentino: George Humbert
Laura Hildebrand: Helen Lovett
Alice Simpson: Nora Cecil

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Elmer Rice
Based on a play by Elmer Rice
Cinematography: George Barnes
Production design: Richard Day
Film editing: Hugh Bennett
Music: Alfred Newman

Eighty-seven years later, King Vidor's Street Scene remains one of the best translations ever made of a stage play into a movie. I think it's largely because Vidor and screenwriter Elmer Rice, adapting his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, avoided the temptation to "open out" the play. The focus of both play and film has to be the façade of the tenement house in which the characters live. Director and writer resist the temptation to go inside, even to show the double murder that forms the climax of the drama. Vidor does give the setting a little more context, with shots of the street and the city rooftops, and there's a scene inside a taxicab arriving at the brownstone, as well as a swish-pan montage of faces popping into windows along the street as people hear the gunshots. But virtually all of the action takes place where it should: on the front steps and in the flanking and upper-story windows of the tenement. What keeps Street Scene from bogging down as one-set films tend to do is the constant mobility of the camera, seeking out a variety of angles on the characters as they come and go. Several of the actors, including Beulah Bondi, John Qualen, Eleanor Wesselhoeft, George Humbert, and Ann Kostant, had performed their roles on Broadway, so they were already keyed into the kind of ensemble playing that Street Scene demands. This was Bondi's film debut, and she's a standout in the key role of the malicious gossip Emma Jones, a hypocrite whose son is a bully and whose daughter behaves like what Emma would call a tramp if she were someone else's daughter. The newcomers to the play also handle themselves admirably, especially Sylvia Sidney and Estelle Taylor as Rose Maurrant and her mother, Anna. The weak link in the cast is William Collier Jr. as Sam Kaplan, who comes across as something of a wuss, unable to defend himself against the bullying Vincent Jones, and a sap in his love scenes with Sidney's Rose, making us wonder what she sees in him. Street Scene also trades a little heavily in stereotypes: the Italians who love music, the Irishman who's a drunk, the Jews who are somewhat isolated from the rest of the tenants, and even the Swede with a comic accent -- one of John Qualen's specialties. Like most of the films produced by Sam Goldwyn, Street Scene has high production values, particularly Richard Day's set, which was modeled on Jo Mielziner's Broadway set; the cinematography by George Barnes with some uncredited assistance from Gregg Toland; and Alfred Newman's score, which features a bluesy Gershwinesque theme that he would re-use in half a dozen other movies even after he left Goldwyn for 20th Century Fox.

I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Anna Canzi and Carlo Cabrini in I Fidanzati

Liliana: Anna Canzi
Giovanni: Carlo Cabrini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Art direction: Ettore Lombardi
Film editing: Carla Colombo
Music: Gianni Ferrio

Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati begins with an empty room, a kind of stage if you will, on which the first act of his small romantic drama will be played out. It's a large room, apparently some kind of meeting hall, in which the chairs and tables have been pushed to the sides. People begin to enter, including two men who scatter wax on what will become a dance floor. A pianist and an accordionist take their places on a small stage in a corner, and the tables and chairs along the walls begin to be occupied by people, some couples, some single. They are ordinary looking people, plain and paunchy and many of them middle-aged, but Olmi manages to direct our attention to a younger couple who are somewhat better-looking than most of the others in the room: She's pretty in a fresh, unmade-up way; he's craggily handsome. They are Liliana and Giovanni, the engaged couple of the film's title, but they're also oddly tense with each other, as if they've just had a quarrel. When the musicians strike up a banal foxtrot, people slowly, self-consciously take the floor, starting with a pair of elderly women. Liliana and Giovanni watch the dancers silently until he stands up and invites her to dance with him. She indicates her lack of interest, so he crosses the room and finds another woman to dance with. Liliana and Giovanni have been engaged for a long time, never having quite saved enough money from their jobs to get married and find a place of their own. They are at odds tonight because he has just been offered a job by his company that includes advancement and better pay, but the job is in Sicily, hundreds of miles to the south, and she can't go with him. I Fidanzati, in short, is about the incompatibility of love and work. It's also set in a crucial moment in Italian history, when the postwar industrial and economic boom has begun to transform people's lives. Olmi's film, then, might be compared to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films set in the era of the German Wirtschaftswunder, when prosperity upended people's lives. Nothing so drastic happens to Giovanni as happens to Fassbinder's Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), of course, but when he takes the job in Sicily Giovanni finds himself in much the same position as Ali: a stranger in a strange land, uprooted from all that's familiar, especially his long-term relationship with his fiancée. Fortunately, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in separation Giovanni and Liliana find their relationship undergoing some kind of renewal. Olmi is not a sentimental sap, however, and he chooses to conclude his film with a thunderstorm that interrupts a telephone call between the fidanzati, which some interpret as a symbol of their ongoing differences. But sometimes a thunderstorm is just a thunderstorm, and what really matters in Olmi's film is the skill with which he establishes the two characters, the deep authenticity of the two hitherto unknown actors who play them, the artful use of flashbacks and narrative disjunctions to create a mood and tone, and a camera that seeks out the beauty amid banality.

One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita in One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo: Isao Numasaki
Masako: Chieko Nakakita
Yamamoto: Atsushi Watanabe
Dessert Shop Owner: Zeko Nakamura
Yamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Dance Hall Manager: Masao Shimizu
Waif: Shiro Mizutani
Sono: Midori Ariyama
Apartment Superintendent: Toshi Mori

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Keinosuke Uekusa
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday brings to mind two near-contemporary films: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In its own odd way, Kurosawa's film blends a bit of the fantasy of the Capra film with the neorealism of the De Sica, though it doesn't quite succeed in the attempt. All three are products of the postwar world. The Americans, having won the war, naturally put the stress on optimism; the Italians and the Japanese, having lost, and having been sunk in the economic crisis caused by losing, naturally put the stress on endurance, on clinging to shreds of hope. Kurosawa's protagonists are a young couple, Yuzo and Masako, who can't afford to get married, but pool their resources, a meager 35 yen, to try to enjoy a Sunday together. Yuzo's depression shadows the outing, but Masako is determined to cheer him up. She's a little bit bossy, however -- when they first get together at the train station, he has just picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the pavement, hoping to smoke it later, but she strikes it out of his hand. Then she drags him into a model home in a new housing development, even though it's well beyond their means and is, he notes, shoddily built. Their housing plight -- he lives with a friend, she with her sister's family -- is emphasized when they visit a place that has a room to rent, only to discover that it's only minimally livable and that they can't afford even that. But Yuzo manages to climb out of his depression when he finds a bunch of kids playing baseball in the street and joins their game. And so it goes through the day as they oscillate between depression and hope. A visit to what remains of the city's zoo confronts them with some sad-looking animals. A large, fat pig slumbers in a cage that used to belong to a lion, causing Yuzo to remark, "The world is run by pigs." And then it starts to rain. Yuzo suggests that they go to his place -- his roommate will be out until late, he says -- but Masako resists, angering him. Then she notices a poster for a concert featuring Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. They can afford the 10-yen tickets, so they run through the rain to the concert hall. But scalpers have bought up all the 10-yen tickets and are selling them for 15 yen, and when Yuzo protests, they beat him up. When they go to Yuzo's room after all, where Masako treats his wounds, he tries to persuade her to sleep with him and she leaves. More depressed than ever -- even the roof is leaking -- Yuzo broods until Masako returns, contrite, but her sobs make any further sexual moves impossible, so they decide to spend the last of their money in a coffee shop. Even there, they are stymied: The coffee shop bills them for café au lait, instead of the regular coffee they thought they ordered, so Yuzo leaves his overcoat, saying he'll return the next day to make good on the bill. Now penniless, they begin to live in their dreams. They pretend that the ruins of a house are the coffee shop they want to open some day and, discovering an old band shell, try to pretend that Yuzo is conducting the performance of Schubert's Unfinished that they missed. At this point, Kurosawa departs from neorealism and has Masako address the movie audience directly: If they'll applaud for all the sad, impoverished lovers in the world, then she and Yuzo will be able to hear the music he's pretending to conduct. It works, and they hear the music. They part as the film ends, promising each other to meet again next Sunday. In fact, Kurosawa's borrowing from Peter Pan and asking for the audience's applause didn't work in Japan, where audiences were simply puzzled, though when the film was shown in France years later, French audiences responded enthusiastically. The sentimentality of One Wonderful Sunday is hardly characteristic of Kurosawa, but it's tempered by some masterly use of locations -- blended with more stylized studio sets -- and good performances by the leads: Isao Numasaki, in fact, does manage to evoke both James Stewart in Capra's film and Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica's, even though he couldn't have seen the latter and probably didn't see the former. There are moments when Kurosawa prolongs the depression of Yuzo and Masako a bit too much, and the film seems a little overextended for the slightness of its narrative, but it's clearly a formative work for a master director, as well as a heartfelt depiction of the plight of his country.