10 to 11 (Pelin Esmer, 2009)

Mithat Esmer in 10 to 11

Cast: Nejat Isler, Mithat Esmer, Laçin Ceylan, Tayanç Ayaydin, Savas Akova. Screenplay: Pelin Esmer. Cinematography: Özgür Eken. Art direction: Naz Erayda. Film editing: Ayhan Ergürsel, Pelin Esmer, Cem Yildirim. 

Pelin Esmer's 10 to 11 gets its title from one of the items in Mithat's collection: a clock that he has carefully watched to determine precisely how much behind the time it runs. When he calculates that figure, he writes it on a label and attaches it to the clock, which is only one of the numerous clocks he has collected. We would call Mithat a hoarder: He lives in an Istanbul apartment with stacks and stacks of newspapers, which are only part of the various things he collects. Unfortunately, the building in which he lives is in the process of being condemned, and the elderly Mithat is the only holdout among the tenants willing to sign the building over to the authorities and relocate to a new building. He stubbornly resists the pleas of the head of the tenants association to do so, and finally is the only remaining resident, along with the caretaker, Ali. As the film ends even Ali has forsaken him, though he leaves behind an item that Mithat has long sought for his collection. Mithat's story is more droll and exasperating than melancholy, partly because Mithat is played by writer-director Esmer's uncle, Mithat Esmer, himself a real-life collector. The interplay between Mithat and Ali (Nejat Isler) becomes a delicately handled character study, with the naïve, provincial Ali gradually being educated in the ways of the big city by Mithat's cranky, precise demands. At one point, Mithat is visited by a nephew who, seeing a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on a shelf, opens it to pour a drink, only to be scolded by Mithat because the unopened bottle was part of his collection. Even recapping the bottle isn't sufficient to restore it to the pristine state Mithat demands for that part of his collection. The story becomes a resonant commentary on the nature of time and memory, with Mithat determinedly attempting to hold onto the past in tangible form, as the changing city tries to sweep the past away. 

The Children of the Century (Diane Kurys, 1999)

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in The Children of the Century

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Stefano Dionisi, Robin Renucci, Karin Viard, Isabelle Carré, Patrick Chesnais, Arnaud Giovaninetti, Denis Podalydès, Olivier Foubert, Marie-France Mignal, Michel Robin, Ludivine Sagnier. Screenplay: Murray Head, Diane Kurys, François-Olivier Rousseau. Cinematography: Vilko Filac. Production design: Bernard Vézat. Film editing: Joëlle Van Effenterre. Music: Luis Bacalov. 

Handsomely mounted and splendidly acted, Diane Kurys's The Children of the Century ultimately goes the way of all biopic costume dramas: history and fact bumping up against dramatic and narrative imperatives, and opulence overwhelming story. It's fun to watch Juliette Binoche throw herself into the role of George Sand, but it's more fun to watch her in films in which she has to create a character from scratch rather than from what books have already us about the character. Benoît Magimel goes grandly over the top in giving us the mood-swinging Alfred de Musset, but at the cost of making us wonder why Sand would have put up with his excesses as much as she did. Still, there's magnificent chemistry between the actors in the best scenes and even if the film doesn't do much to illuminate the works of Sand and de Musset, it's easy on the eyes.  

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey in Carmen Jones

Cast: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams, Brock Peters, Roy Glenn, Nick Stewart, Diahann Carroll. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a book for a musical by Oscar Hammerstein II, an opera by Georges Bizet, Henri Meilhac, and Ludovic Halévy, and a novella by Prosper Mérimée. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Georges Bizet. 

Turning Georges Bizet's opera Carmen into a stage musical with an all-Black cast set in the American South was not the coolest idea to start with, especially when it resulted in such silliness as turning the bullfighter Escamillo into the prizefighter Husky Miller and the tavern run by Lillas Pastia into a roadhouse run by Billy Pastor. Still, Otto Preminger's film version of Carmen Jones has a lot to recommend it, particularly Dorothy Dandridge's Carmen, a fiery, committed performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress -- the first ever for a Black performer of either sex in a leading role. The theatrical version that premiered in 1943 was designed to be sung by musical theater performers, not opera singers, but when Otto Preminger agreed to direct the film version, he insisted on operatic voices, meaning that even though Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, the film's Joe, were well-known as singers, their roles and others had to be dubbed in the musical numbers. Marilyn Horne, then only 20, hadn't yet developed the vocal depth and flexibility that would make her an operatic superstar, but her voice matched well with Dandridge's speaking voice, so the illusion works. LeVerne Hutcherson was less successful in dubbing for Belafonte, whose own singing voice was so familiar that the disparity with Hutcherson's becomes obvious. But the best vocal performance in the film is probably that of Pearl Bailey, who belts out the Gypsy Song, "Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum," in her own voice and provides one of the movie's high points. The lyrics provided by Oscar Hammerstein II are sometimes banal -- the Toreador Song turns into "Stand Up and Fight Until You Hear the Bell" -- but usually serviceable. Unfortunately, the film falls apart at the end, with a clumsy staging of the final tragic confrontation of Carmen and Joe.   

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013)

Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kuei-Mei, Lu Yi-Ching, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lee Yi Cheng, Lee Yi Chieh, Wu Jin-kai. Screenplay: Song Peng Fei, Tsai Ming-liang, Tung Cheng-Yu. Cinematography: Liao Pen-Jung, Lu Ching-Hsin, Shong Woon-Chong. Art direction: Liu Masa, Tsai Ming-liang. Film editing: Lei Chen-Ching. 

To go from yesterday's post on Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break to today's on Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs is to go from one cinematic polarity, the hyperkinetic, to the opposite, the almost intolerably static. We mostly expect some version of the former from movies: Motion pictures are by definition supposed to move. But Tsai stubbornly resists that impulse, even to the point of almost eliminating what makes cinema its own distinct art form: montage. Instead we have long, long takes, beginning at the start of the film with a woman lethargically brushing her hair while she sits on the edge of a bed where two children are sleeping. One of the key sequences of Stray Dogs is a shot of two men in plastic raincoats standing on a traffic island while holding up advertising placards; the sequence lasts so long that we welcome the moments when the traffic light apparently changes and the eye is relieved by the movement of cross-traffic. And the film concludes with a man and a woman standing absolutely still, looking at something (the mural in the picture above) off-screen. Minutes pass in which nothing happens except for the tear that rolls down the woman's face. This kind of stasis can be enormously effective when there's a narrative direction to it, as in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the fixed camera makes us watch as the banality of Jeanne's daily chores is established with long takes of her washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and so on, only to be disturbed when things go slightly wrong with those chores on a second visit to her apartment, giving Jeanne's story a forward movement. Stray Dogs accumulates such moments in the lives of the man with the advertising sign and his two children, along with three women -- including the one brushing her hair and the woman looking at the mural -- who interact with them. But in this film we seem to be looking for looking's sake. We may react to the social context of their lives -- the man and the children are homeless, and one of the women lives in a crumbling, water-streaked dwelling -- as the import of the film, but Tsai seems to feel no urgency about letting us know more about them than he shows us. There are moments of enigmatic drama unlike any we've seen in a film before, as when the man finds a cabbage in the bed he shares with the children. They have drawn a face on it, and the man first tries to smother it with a pillow, then attacks it with his teeth and nails and devours much of it. Any significance we may impose on this scene comes from us -- is he, for example, attacking the hopelessness of his existence, taking it out on the cabbage doll? -- but Tsai isn't going to tip his hand in that or any other direction. The film won numerous awards, and had several critics hauling out the word "masterpiece," but it also earned a dismissal from the New York Times critic Stephen Holden as a "glum, humorless exercise in Asian miserablism." I can't dismiss it that glibly, but I also can't endorse it with great enthusiasm. It's not a movie I would urge on anyone who isn't prepared to undergo a good deal of ennui -- my own finger hovered over the fast forward button several times -- in order to reflect the nature of the cinematic experience.  

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham. 

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.   

 

History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Leo Carrillo, Charles Boyer, and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night

Cast: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff, George Meeker, Lucien Prival, George Davis. Screenplay: Gene Towne, C. Graham Baker, Vincent Lawrence, David Hertz. Cinematography: David Abel. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Margaret Clancey. Music: Alfred Newman.

It starts as a domestic drama about a failing marriage, then becomes a suspense thriller, then a romance, then a rom-com with screwball touches, and winds up as a disaster movie. Objectively viewed, History Is Made at Night is a mess. But somehow it holds together, partly because of the chemistry of its leads, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, as well as some good comic acting by Leo Carrillo and the creepiness of Colin Clive, outdoing even his Dr. Frankenstein. And most of all, I think, by the direction of Frank Borzage, an under-recognized helmsman who seems willing to take anything the screenwriters and producer Walter Wanger throw at him. I've always been a fan of Arthur, and I think she's at her best here. She's not the sort of leading lady that makes you think men readily fall deeply in love with her, but here her character, Irene Vail, causes both the sinister steamship magnate Bruce Vail (Clive) and the suave Parisian headwaiter Paul Dumond (Boyer) to become obsessed with her, to the point that Dumond pursues her from France to America and Vail is willing not only to murder his chauffeur but even to sink an ocean liner with 3,000 passengers for her sake. Somehow, Arthur imbues the character with a quirky charm that makes all this credible. No, it's not a great movie by anyone's standards, but as a sample of Hollywood hokum it's at least great fun.  

À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Sandrine Bonnaire and Maurice Pialat in À Nos Amours

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Bresnehard, Cyril Collard, Cyr Boitard, Jacques Fischi, Valérie Schlumberger, Evelyne Ker, Pierre Novion, Tsilka Theodoru. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Jacques Loiseleux. Production design: Jean-Paul Camail, Arlette Langmann. Film editing: Valérie Condroyer, Sophie Coussin, Yann Dedet. 

Maurice Pialat is one of those directors who don't make it easy for viewers. He likes jump cuts from time to place that keep you slightly off-balance, and he seems to be obsessed with dysfunction. Not that À Nos Amours is hard to follow or hard to watch. It's graced with a skillful performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, making her screen debut in the key role of Suzanne, the teenage daughter in a family so volatile that it sometimes erupts into blows. Pialat himself plays the father, who finally gets so fed up with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and his dilettantish son (Dominique Bresnehard) that he abandons them -- not before knocking them around a few times. In response to this family craziness, Suzanne turns promiscuous, ignoring the attentions of Luc (Cyr Boitard), who loves her, and sleeping around until she finally decides to marry Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), though at the end of the film she has left him and is off to America. There's a raw immediacy to the film, created in part by Pialat's indifference to conventional exposition and transitions, so that we often feel as if we've been thrust into rooms to which we haven't been invited. 

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

Jessica Lange and Roy Scheider in All That Jazz

Cast: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen, Erzsebet Foldi, Michael Tolan, Max Wright, William LeMessena, Irene Kane, Deborah Geffner, John Lithgow, Sandahl Bergman. Screenplay: Robert Alan Aurthur, Bob Fosse. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Philip Rosenberg, Tony Walton. Film editing: Alan Heim. Music: Ralph Burns. 

Bob Fosse's All That Jazz has a valedictory feeling to it, and not just because it's about a man foreseeing his own death, which strikingly foreshadows that of Fosse himself. It also feels like one of the last films of the 1970s, a decade associated with young hotshot American filmmakers who were determined to go their own way and to craft movies filled with personal vision that didn't sugarcoat the material or pander and talk down to the audience. After them, the myth goes, came the deluge of movies made with a view to spawning sequels and franchises. That summary is oversimple, of course, but perhaps it does illuminate why a film like All That Jazz continues to fascinate viewers, despite its inherent messiness and occasional excessive self-indulgence. It's held together by Fosse's abundant mad energy and by a cunning, committed performance by Roy Scheider as the driven, workaholic, self-destructive Joe Gideon, whom only the most obtuse would deny is a warts-and-all self-portrait by Fosse. All That Jazz is usually classified as a musical, because of its elaborate production numbers, but it fits the genre only loosely. It's a bit like 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) in that it's a "backstage musical" with a serious undercurrent, although the undercurrent becomes a torrent in All That Jazz, and the music becomes an ironic counterpoint to the sardonic drama of the life and death of Joe Gideon.   

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor. 

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters. 

Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)

Dorothea Wieck and Hertha Thiele in Mädchen in Uniform

Cast: Hertha Theile, Dorothea Wieck, Emilia Unda, Hedy Krila, Ellen Schwanneke, Erika Mann, Else Ehser, Gertrud de Lalsky, Lene Berdolt, Margory Bodker, Charlotte Witthauer, Ethel Reschke, Doris Thalmer. Screenplay: Christa Winsloe, Friedrich Dammann, based on a play by Winsloe. Cinematography: Reimar Kuntze, Franz Weihmayr. Art direction: Fritz Maurischat, Friedrich Winckler-Tannenberg. Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter. Music: Hanson Milde-Meissner. 

An aura of naughtiness still clings to the title of Mädchen in Uniform, which is unfortunate, as if this drama set in a German girls' school were some sort of exploitation flick. What we have instead is a sensible, sensitive account of the emotional confusion of adolescence, done with a finesse in acting and camerawork that mostly seemed to escape Hollywood filmmakers in 1931. The premise is this: Manuela (Hertha Theile) is the new girl at a school run by a grim-faced martinet (Emilia Unda) who believes that education should be a matter of Prussian discipline. Naturally, the students rebel as much as they can, as do some of the teachers, especially Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), who believes in kindness and love as a way to inspire the girls. Naturally, all of the girls love Fräulein von Bernburg, who is quite good-looking, but Manuela, whose mother died when she was a baby, is especially drawn to her -- so much so that she freezes with embarrassment whenever the teacher calls on her in class. Eventually, this leads to a declaration of love before the whole school, and a consequent scandal that pits the head of the school against not only Manuela but also Fräulein von Bernburg. Director Leontine Sagan effectively stages both the boisterous scenes with the girls and the quiet ones between the principal characters. The film serves as an indictment of the harshness of the school system, which may have been as much a reason for its being banned when the Nazis came to power as its understanding and approving of the schoolgirl infatuation, which led to its being banned and heavily cut in the United States. It's often called a "lesbian classic," which it may well be, but it tells a universal story irrespective of sexual orientation. 

Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse

Cast: Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Anderson, Jeremy Burnham, Eveline Eyfel. Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on a novel by Françoise Sagan. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: Georges Auric. 

Only a couple of years after Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse was released to critical and box office indifference, filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni would make their international reputations with films about moneyed Europeans fighting vainly the old ennui. In fact, Bonjour Tristesse is not so very much different in content from movies like Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, both of which rocketed to success in 1960. They're all about what today we might call "Eurotrash" -- people with too much money and not enough to occupy their souls. Preminger's film was hindered a bit by the censors, who forbade any explicit descriptions of what was going on between Raymond (David Niven) and his several mistresses, much less any extrapolation about his exceptionally close relationship with his daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg). And the casting of the British Niven and Deborah Kerr and the American Jean Seberg as characters meant to be très French, feels more than a little off-base. There's also some heavy-handed telegraphing of the film's message, summed up in a title song by composer Georges Auric with lyrics by screenwriter Arthur Laurents that's sung by Juliette Gréco in a Paris boîte. But Bonjour Tristesse has gained in favor over the years, no longer dismissed as a complete misfire. Mylène Demongeot adds some much needed comic relief in the form of Elsa, Raymond's sunburned mistress, a necessary counterpoint to Cecile's existential angst. Auric's score provides a continental flavor to the film, and Georges Périnal's cinematography makes the most of locations, especially the Paris that's viewed in monochrome as contrasted with the Technicolor vividness of the Riviera. Since the film is told from the point of view of Seberg's Cecile, the place where she feels depressed and regretful is necessarily more drab than the place where she had a brief encounter with something like freedom and power. It's Paris as Kansas and the Riviera as Oz, but without the "no place like home" nostalgia. 

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torrès, Rodolphe Pauly, Mariane Plasteig, Diabolo, Denis Evrard, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Baptiste Glaymann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. 

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) together again, nine years later. They meet in a Parisian bookstore where Jesse, now a successful novelist, is signing copies of his book, whose story is based on their brief encounter in Vienna nine years earlier. It might have remained that, just a brief encounter with echoes of the great 1945 David Lean film of that name, except that Céline's curiosity tinged with guilt brings her to the book signing, where she hovers on the fringes until she catches Jesse's eye. Like Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise, Jesse's novel ends on an uncertain note: He doesn't say whether the characters he has based on himself and Céline made their appointed rendezvous in Vienna. The people at the book signing urge him to express an opinion on whether they did, but Jesse hedges. And so it remains for Céline herself, who invites him to join her for coffee after the signing, to elicit the truth. She knows she didn't make the planned reunion: Her grandmother, she tells him, died and she was at the funeral when they were supposed to meet. But did he show up? He says no at first, but then confesses the truth: He was there, but with no way for either to contact the other, he only had to assume that she decided it was over. He has married and has a son; she has remained single. And so begins the delicate verbal dance that Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have scripted for them to perform. They start almost as they did in Before Sunrise: he the brash, open American with the nervous laugh; she the reserved but intrigued Frenchwoman, only faintly condescending to his cultural and linguistic disorientation in a foreign land. And as in the first film, they walk and talk and prod each other into more and more revelations. Like the first film, Before Sunset also has a terminus ad quem that gives their encounter a sense of urgency: He has a plane to catch and a driver to get him to the airport on time. And like the first film, this one ends on an ambiguity: They have gone to her room, where they exchange a bit of dialogue before the credits roll. "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says. "I know," he says. And so we have another sequel to wait for. I know of no other English-language film that so deftly uses dialogue and the chemistry of two actors (who also wrote much of the dialogue) to accomplish its romantic aims while at the same time scoring so many points about the passage of time, the limits of communication, and the significance of sex.  

Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981)

Jorge Julião and Fernando Ramos da Silva in Pixote

Cast: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Julião, Marilia Pêra, Gilberto Moura, Edilson Lino, Zenildo Oliveira Santos, Claudio Bernardo, Israel Feres David, Jose Nilson Martin Dos Santos, Elke Maravilha, Tony Tornado, Jardel Filho, Rubens de Falco. Screenplay: Hector Babenco, Jorge Durán, based on a novel by José Louzeiro. Cinematography: Rodolfo Sánchez. Art direction: Clovis Bueno. Film editing: Luiz Elias. Music: John Neschling. 

At the risk of sounding flippant, I have to call Hector Babenco's Pixote an almost perfect feel-bad movie. Not only is what appears on screen unrelentingly harrowing and sordid, but the fate of the young non-professional actor who plays the title character -- he was shot dead by police at the age of 19 -- carries its own burden of sorrow. Yet as a work of art Pixote has a kind of tragic nobility, an unflinching look at the life of the wretched of the Earth, accomplished with the kind of realism that only film can provide. I can't help feeling that Dostoevsky and Zola would have envied Babenco the availability of the camera to show the world what they could only display in words. Pixote (Fernando Ramos da Silva) is a street kid, rounded up and sent to a brutal reformatory, from which he escapes with a group of friends, who hustle their way into the underworld of Brazil's cities, involving themselves in everything from purse-snatching to drug-running to prostitution to murder. It works because of a stunning ensemble of performances with a few standouts, especially Jorge Julão as the transgender Lilica and Marilia Pêra as the ailing prostitute Sueli. If Pixote has a major failing, it's that its tragic vision results in no catharsis, only a numb feeling of hopelessness as Pixote and his kind face an unaccommodating society. But it's also a work of well-shaped art, of subtly shifting tones, that needs to be judged chiefly for its clarity and honesty. 

The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Fernando Velázquez. 

In Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro takes all the elements of the Gothic romance and turns them up to 11, which is the best thing he could have done with such familiar, not to say cheesy, material. There's the dewy heroine who makes a dubious marriage, the sinister rival female, the doughty but dull spurned suitor, and of course the Old Dark House. This one makes Thornfield Hall, Manderley, and even the Castle of Otranto look like a suburban tract house: It's a great malevolent beetle of a mansion, squatting on a bleak landscape, decaying steadily and grossly while sinking into the mine above which it sits. It's inhabited by the cash-poor aristocrats Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), along with a sizable contingent of ghosts. To it, Thomas brings his bride, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), whose father has recently died (rather violently, as we have seen), leaving her the family fortune. Edith is spunky and imaginative, an aspiring writer of ghost fiction, having had her own encounters with ghosts who warned her to "beware Crimson Peak." What she doesn't know, of course, is that the place to which her husband has brought her is called Crimson Peak, for its blood-red clay, by the locals. Anyway, the truth will out, and in a variety of gruesome ways. What makes the movie work is that del Toro is willing to go over the top entertainingly, stretching credibility to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point, without smirking about it and camping it up. So we have, for example, a duel between Edith and Lucille, with both wearing flimsy, flowing nightwear. (Kate Hawley's costume designs are splendidly excessive.) We have apparitions in various states of decay and a plethora of insect life. The ghost of Edith's mother appears in a form that looks something like a cross between a tarantula and a woman with dreadlocks. There are vats of disgusting red murk in the cellar in which things are submerged. It's all a bit much, but the actors know how to take it in their stride. Having played Loki in the Marvel movies and the vampire Adam in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Hiddleston in particular knows how to make a character both attractive and disquieting at the same time. Del Toro isn't up to anything of great moment in this movie, but it's good to see the material handled with a distinct sensibility and an avoidance of the tried and true. 

Snow Trail (Senkichi Taniguchi, 1947)

Setsuko Wakayama and Toshiro Mifune in Snow Trail

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Akitake Kono, Yoshio Kosugi, Setsuko Wakayama, Kokuten Kodo. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa. Cinematography: Junichi Segawa. Art direction: Taizo Kawashima. Film editing: Senkichi Taniguchi. Music: Akira Ifukube. 

Snow Trail is the start of a famous collaboration, that of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. It was Mifune's first film, and he goes headlong into his handsome, brooding mode, playing a tough, ruthless bank robber on the run in the Japanese Alps. Kurosawa didn't direct the film, but wrote the screenplay and had a strong hand in working with director Senkichi Taniguchi. Though Mifune gets top billing and has probably the showiest role, the best performance in the film comes, as it often did, from Takashi Shimura, who would collaborate with Mifune and Kurosawa often over the next couple of decades. They would reunite almost immediately for Drunken Angel the next year. Mifune and Shimura have joined with a third robber, played by Yoshio Kusugi, in their flight into the mountains, which hasn't gone unnoticed by the police. After a brief stay at a popular spa, the trio head deeper into the snowy wilderness, where their plight becomes more desperate after Kusugi's character is killed by an avalanche. But they come across a small lodge run by an elderly man (Kokuten Kodo) and his granddaughter, Haruko (Setsuko Wakayama) for the benefit of mountain climbers. Only one climber, Honda (Akitake Kono), is currently staying there. It's the perfect hideout: The only contact with the outside world is by carrier pigeon (which Mifune's character swiftly kills). But when the barking of dogs alerts the robbers that their pursuers are drawing nearer, they decide to move on with the aid of Honda, the experienced climber, whom Mifune's character forces to be their guide by threatening to kill Haruko. The robber played by Shimura is beginning to have regrets, but he goes along with the plan until calamity puts the climbers in peril. It's a solid action drama, with some fine cinematography in the mountain wilderness. It gets a little sentimental in the scenes with Haruko and her grandfather -- there's a heavy-handed use of a record of, no kidding, "My Old Kentucky Home" -- but good performances keep it going. 

Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950)

Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, and Leon Ames in Crisis

Cast: Cary Grant, José Ferrer, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, Leon Ames. Screenplay: Richard Brooks, George Tabori. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

In Crisis, Cary Grant plays a brain surgeon, which led one critic to snark that he looked like he should be holding a martini glass instead of a scalpel. That only points up the problem of movie star image: We expect Grant to be suave and wisecracking and not hung up on the dilemma of whether to perform an operation on a cruel dictator (José Ferrer) who is trying to fend off a revolution. Naturally, Grant's Dr. Ferguson sticks by the Hippocratic Oath and goes through with the operation. Meantime, unbeknownst to Dr. Ferguson, his wife (Paula Raymond) has been kidnapped and the revolutionaries are threatening to kill her if the dictator lives. Ferguson is unaware of this because the dictator's wife (Signe Hasso) has intercepted the message from the revolutionaries and destroyed it. It's a pretty good thriller premise, but writer-director Richard Brooks doesn't know how to build the suspense it needs. This was Brooks's first feature film as director, so we may want to cut him some slack. After all, he does a few things well, including a demonstration of brain surgery techniques that adds a little documentary realism to the film. To my eyes, Grant's performance is perfectly fine, and Ferrer and Hasso know how to play villains. Raymond is a little bland as the wife, but there are solid supporting performances from Ramon Novarro as a colonel backing up the dictator, Gilbert Roland as a leader of the revolutionaries, and Leon Ames as an oil company executive trying to remain neutral in the political conflict in this unnamed Latin American country so he can build a pipeline. It's the film's own neutrality -- dictators are bad, but revolutionaries can be, too -- that saps a good deal out of the drama. 

Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)

Cast: Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Allan Kolman, Susan Petrie, Barbara Steele, Ronald Mlodzik, Barry Baldaro, Camil Ducharme, Hanna Poznanska. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Robert Saad. Art direction: Erla Gliserman. Film editing: Patrick Dodd. 

Shivers is a kind of zombie movie, except that the zombies aren't out for brains, they're out to get laid. And they aren't really dead, but just under the influence of a parasite that unleashes their libidos and eliminates their inhibitions. It takes place in a high-rise apartment building on an island near Montreal, where a doctor has been experimenting with parasitic organisms that could potentially eliminate the need for transplants: Instead of having, say, a kidney transplant, why not remove the diseased kidney and replace it with a parasite that, in exchange for a small amount of the patient's blood, would perform all the functions of a kidney? But the parasite he's working with has the unfortunate effect of producing the symptoms described above -- which is fine with the doctor, because he thinks human beings are too sexually repressed. It's a clever premise for a horror movie, and totally in keeping with writer-director David Cronenberg's exploration in his films of the unfettered id. Unfortunately, it was made a few years before its time, so Cronenberg has to be more discreet in his depiction of the orgies of the victims of the parasite than he might have been a few years later, and the budget for the film was obviously scanty. It's shot in a rather muddy but garish color, and the lighting is flat and harsh. There are a few familiar faces -- of the "where have I seen him/her before?" order -- among the actors, but mostly it's a cast of hard-working unknowns. One of Cronenberg's first features, it's a good sample of the better-made horrors yet to come.  

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Andrea Eckert, Hanno Pöschl, Karl Bruckschwaiger, Tex Rubinowitz, Erni Mangold, Dominik Castell, Haymon Maria Buttinger. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Florian Reichmann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Fred Frith. 

If there were any justice, Before Sunrise would have transformed the genre of romantic comedy by showing them all how it should be done. Granted, the film neatly transcends the genre, even though it starts with the hoariest of all its formulas: the meet-cute. But by the film's end, we have gotten to know Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline as we never get to know the characters in the conventional romcom. And then the film does something those conventional ones never do: It stops. There's no rush through the streets by lovers who've decided to reconcile. There are no hilarious exchanges of marriage vows. The movie doesn't tell us if Jesse and Céline ever meet again after he takes his plane to the States and she takes her train to Paris. Granted, the sequels do this, but think how tonic this first film in the trilogy was when it was first released. (And even the sequels don't behave like sequels, but that's another post entirely.) It's hard to undervalue how revelatory Before Sunrise was at the time. For one thing, it established Hawke as one of the best and smartest young actors of his day, taking him out of the "pretty boy" category into which he started to fall after his first big hit, Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989). It also established Richard Linklater as a director of intelligence, with an interest in the effects of time on personality that culminated in his masterpiece, Boyhood (2014). That the film didn't do as much for Delpy's career is probably more evidence that women don't have the same influence in movies as men. (She also revealed later that she wasn't paid as much as Hawke until the third film in the trilogy, Before Midnight, in 2013.) Delpy and Hawke also rewrote a good deal of the screenplay without credit. 

The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

Junio Valverde and Fernando Tielve in The Devil's Backbone

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés, Irene Visedo, José Manuel Lorenzo, Francisco Maestre, Junio Valverde, Berta Ojea, Adrián Lamana, Daniel Esparza, Javier Bódalo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: César Macarrón. Film editing: Luis de la Madrid. Music: Javier Navarrete. 

It's October, which means that all the purveyors of classic movies like TCM and the Criterion Channel are rolling out their horror films and ghost stories. Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone falls more into the latter category than the former, for although it has moments of high tension and bloodshed, its focus is largely on the haunting of an isolated Spanish orphanage by a young boy who wants to get revenge on his murderer. It's set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, which gives the film an underpinning of historical reality, and it adds some realism in the portrayal of the relationships that develop among the boys who have been sent there after the deaths of their parents in the conflict. It's as much high melodrama as horror movie, with a handsome villain, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who murdered the boy Santi (Junio Valverde) to conceal his attempts to break into the safe where the operators of the orphanage, Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), are hiding gold that is meant to support the loyalist cause. Murder will out, largely with the help of young Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the latest arrival to the orphanage, who learns to communicate with the ghost of Santi. On this simple framework, del Toro layers a good deal of Gothic oddities, including some fetuses preserved in rum, an unexploded bomb in the orphanage courtyard, a murky cistern, and Carmen's artificial leg. Atmosphere is everything in a movie of this genre, and del Toro is a master at creating it, using the contrast of the sunny Spanish landscape and the shadowy interior of the orphanage to great effect. The film is not so unrelenting a creepshow as some of del Toro's other films, like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which are more highly regarded but which I actually like less than The Devil's Backbone.

The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (Preston Sturges, 1949)

Rudy Vallee and Betty Grable in The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend

Cast: Betty Grable, Cesar Romero, Rudy Vallee, Olga San Juan, Porter Hall, Hugh Herbert, Al Bridge, El Brendel, Sterling Holloway, Danny Jackson, Emory Parnell, Margaret Hamilton, Marie Windsor. Screenplay: Preston Sturges, Earl Felton. Cinematography: Harry Jackson. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Robert Fritch. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

There's not much reason for anyone other than hardcore Preston Sturges fans to see The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, even though it was his last American film (he made one more, Les Carnets du Major Thompson, in France in 1955) and the only one in Technicolor. It has all the slapstick anarchy of his later films, like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), but none of the wit of his best, among which I'd name The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942). In those great comedies, he worked with stars like Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, and Claudette Colbert, letting them unbend in surprising and hilarious ways. In the later comedies, he stuck to purely comic actors like Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, and there's a bumptiousness about those films that can be a little wearying, though there's still some wit in their setups, like Hutton's mysterious pregnancy in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Bracken's mistaken heroism in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). The Beautiful Blonde is all bumptiousness, getting most of its laughs from character clowns like Hugh Herbert, El Brendel, and Sterling Holloway, and from some tired gags like Porter Hall's character getting repeatedly shot in the ass. It's a Western movie spoof, with Betty Grable as the title character, a dance hall girl who's a wicked hand with a pistol and who gets mistaken for the new schoolmarm when she flees to another town after shooting the judge (Hall). Cesar Romero is the nominal romantic lead, but Sturges isn't interested in romance in this movie; all he wants to do is stage outrageous gunfights and pull off slightly risqué jokes that had the censors on edge. It was, deservedly, a flop, but also undeservedly made Sturges persona non grata in Hollywood, after the failure of the more entertaining Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which had more of the old wit and less of the late bumptiousness. 

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor, Walter Ladengast, Dan van Husen, Jan Groth, Carsten Bodinus, Martje Grohmann. Screenplay: Werner Herzog, based on a novel by Bram Stoker and a film by F.W. Murnau. Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. Production design: Henning von Gierke. Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. Music: Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh. 

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu gets a little choppy in its efforts to blend both Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. The latter was an "unofficial" version of the novel, which the producers neglected to obtain the rights to film, and it was almost suppressed. But the potency of Max Schreck's embodiment of Dracula (called "Count Orlok" in the Murnau film) remained, and it informs Klaus Kinski's makeup and manner in Herzog's version. Herzog did a lot of tinkering with the Stoker version -- Jonathan Harker's wife is Lucy, not Mina as in the novel, and Dr. Von Helsing is not the vampirologist of the book but rather an elderly scientific skeptic -- but he stayed generally faithful to it almost to the end, when he switched to the denouement of the Murnau film and then added his own shocker twist. The homage to Murnau is apparent not only in Kinski's imitation of Schreck, but also in Isabelle Adjani's performance as Lucy, which is built on silent-movie mannerisms, including effective use of her great haunted eyes. Even though it's full of images designed to shock and disgust, including a plethora of rats, Herzog's film is often quite beautiful, especially in the scenes set in the Carpathian Mountains (actually filmed in Slovakia and the Bavarian Alps) and the views of the quaint town called Wismar in the film, but actually shot in the town of Delft and several other villages in the Netherlands. The performances are all that they should be, including Bruno Ganz's determined Harker, whose character twist at the film's end seems organic to the performance, and Roland Topor's giggly Renfield, which often seems to parody Peter Lorre. Dracula is so familiar and fertile a source for movies that it probably will never receive a definitive version, but Herzog's makes a good bid for it.  

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi, and Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen, Stephen Merchant, Archie Yates. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, based on a novel by Christine Leunens. Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr. Production design: Ra Vincent. Film editing: Tom Eagles. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

Taika Waititi's brilliant, queasy comedy Jojo Rabbit might be seen as a parody of the feel-good movie -- the ability to tack a happy ending on even a story about Nazism. Not that the end of Jojo Rabbit is, objectively regarded, happy. We're left with Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) as street orphans in a defeated Germany. But they're dancing, which is what Elsa wanted to do when the war ended, and that kind of makes everything right. Fortunately, our awareness that the film is a fantasia on dark themes, belonging in that category of movies like Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) that fuse fairy tale elements and a childlike vision with real world horrors, is set early on, when we discover that Jojo has an imaginary friend, none other than Adolf Hitler (Waititi). And that the brutality of Nazis is being caricatured by actors like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson. Jojo is a naïf in a hard and horrible world, which we see through his innocent eyes, just as we see Wonderland (a place of lunacy and cruelty) through the innocent eyes of Alice. It takes nothing away from the fine performances of young Davis and McKenzie, or from the darkly hilarious ones of Waititi, Rockwell, and Wilson, to say that the heart of the film, giving a performance that took my breath away, was Scarlett Johansson, who made beautiful sense of a role that shouldn't have worked at all: Jojo's mother, the secret resistance worker who tolerates her son's adulation of the Nazis while at the same time hiding a young Jewish girl in the walls of their house. We see her through three distinct points of view: Jojo's, Elsa's, and another that gradually becomes our own, and the outcome of her story, when these points of view finally merge, is heartbreaking even in the midst of the caricature of the real world that the film presents. The audacity of Waititi's movie has been likened to that of Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1999), a movie I hated, so I can understand the critics who thought Jojo Rabbit went too far, that it didn't cohere, but I can't entirely agree.