Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/25/18

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

Thursday, October 25, 2018

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.