Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/15/19

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, August 15, 2019

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)

Thelma Ritter and Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street

Cast: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, based on a story by Dwight Taylor. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Leigh Harline.

What better thing can you say about Pickup on South Street than that J. Edgar Hoover hated it? Even though the bad guy in the film is a commie spy, he's really not much less a sleaze than the good guys: The film's protagonist is a pickpocket, after all, who sneers at patriotism and flag-waving. Samuel Fuller's peculiar mastery of the pulp genre was never more effective than in this film, which is distinguished by its performers: Richard Widmark as the pickpocket, teetering between vice and a grudging kind of virtue; Jean Peters as a bad girl with a good streak that only gets her beat up; and best of all, Thelma Ritter as the aging snitch who only wants enough money to have a good funeral. Ritter got an Oscar nomination out of the film, too. One of the darkest, and one of the best, film noirs.

Violence at Noon (Nagisa Oshima, 1966)

Cast: Kei Sato, Saeda Kawaguchi, Akiko Koyama, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, based on a novel by Taijun Takeda. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Production design: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoda. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Violence at Noon is an edgy, jumpy film about a serial rapist and killer of women, played with his characteristic intensity by Kei Sato. It's a notable departure in technique by director Nagisa Oshima, usually given to long takes, in that it's constructed of thousands of individual shots. Akiko Koyama and Saeda Kawaguchi play the two women, both victims of the rapist, who try to piece together the truth about his life.