Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Where the Sidewalk Ends

Cast: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully, Karl Malden, Ruth Donnelly, Craig Stevens, Neville Brand, Grayce Mills, Robert F. Simon, Harry von Zell. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Victor Trivas, Frank P. Rosenberg, Robert E. Kent, based on a novel by William L. Stuart. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a tough cop who's just a little too eager to rough up the suspects, and he starts the film by getting demoted for it That barely fazes him, however: When he's called on to interview Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), a suspect in a murder that's just been committed, Paine fights back and Dixon punches him out. Unfortunately, Paine had a severe head injury in the war, and he dies. Dixon's attempts to cover up only make things worse, leading to a snarl of consequences that form the plot of this darkly entertaining crime drama. What elevates Where the Sidewalk Ends into more than routine is mostly Ben Hecht's richly slangy, cynical dialogue and Otto Preminger's smooth direction. It helps, too, that Preminger is working with people who made his Laura (1944) one of the classics of Hollywood film: Andrews, of course, who even shares the name Mark with his cop counterpart in Laura, Gene Tierney as another leading lady with a lousy taste in men, and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who won an Oscar for the earlier movie. Laura was, however, almost baroque in contrast with the tight, spare Where the Sidewalk Ends, which depends on Hecht's skill at crafting tough talk to overcome some of the story's reliance on pop psychology: Dixon, it seems, developed his sadistic approach to police work because he hated his father, who was a hoodlum gunned down by the cops. The film ends on a nicely unresolved note after Dixon admits to killing Paine and trying to cover it up at the same time that he's being honored for bringing mobster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) to justice. 

Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939)

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak, Joan Perry, Melville Cooper, Rose Stradner, John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Marc Lawrence, Stanley Brown, Scotty Beckett, Milburn Stone, Marie Blake. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort, Albert Duffy, based on a play by James Warwick. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: George Parrish. 

Blind Alley has a familiar setup: a killer on the run from the cops takes a family hostage in their own home. Chester Morris plays the killer, Hal Wilson, who moves in on the Shelby household, whose head is a college professor and psychiatrist played by Ralph Bellamy. Wilson, it turns out, is a psychopath, plagued by a recurrent dream, and Dr. Shelby sees the opportunity to disarm him by using the tools of psychotherapy. It works, sort of, in a rather too simplistic fashion, as the shrink decodes the symbolism of Wilson's dream as a traumatic event from his childhood that the killer has been repressing. The movie is a little stagy, as any adaptation of a play to screen is likely to be, but it's tidy enough in its storytelling that I didn't mind the obvious curtain lines and creaky attempts to "open out" the action -- for example, by visualizing the contents of Wilson's nightmare. It's nice to see Bellamy playing something other than a stooge for Cary Grant, as he did so memorably in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941). Morris is given to chewing the scenery but Ann Dvorak is good as his moll, Mary, who knows how to handle him well enough that Shelby can work his cure. The movie is sometimes cited as one of the first films noir, which only shows how flexible any definition of that genre has to be. 

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Richard Courcet, Nicolas Devauchelle, Adiatou Massudi, Mickael Ravovski, Dan Herzberg, Giuseppe Molino, Gianfranco Poddighe, Marc Veh, Thong Duy Nguyen, Jean-Yves Vivet, Bernardo Montet, Dimitri Tsiapkinis, Djanel Zemali, Abdelkader Bouti. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on a novella by Herman Melville. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Charles-Henri de Pierrefeu, Eran Zur. 

Claire Denis's Beau Travail doesn't really have much in common with Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991). Bigelow's film is pure pulp movie action thriller material, whereas Denis's is thoughtfully derived from a literary classic, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. But both films are directed by women with a keenly objective eye toward male display, the acting-out of testosterone-driven urges, a vision that gives these movies a special erotic charge. It might be worth bringing in a third film for consideration here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), a film made by a gay man that, like Denis's, also contains overtones of Billy Budd. But where Fassbinder's movie feels overheated, even campy, Denis's film, for all its intensity, has a coolness to it. I think that sometimes Denis, for all the scenes of barechested Legionnaires working out intensely, even intimately in the desert sun, is more restrained than she might be. The central conflict of her film, between Galoup (Denis Lavant), the movie's Claggart equivalent, and Sentain (Grégoire Colin), the Billy Budd of the movie, is fragmented in Denis's telling. All of the film's Legionnaires are handsome, so that Sentain doesn't stand out immediately from the group the way Melville's Billy does. The development of Galoup's jealous antipathy is subtly handled, mostly by casting the story as a flashback by Galoup after being court-martialed and expelled from the Legion -- this Claggart doesn't die. Neither, for that matter, does this Billy Budd, although he comes closer to it. But Beau Travail is still something like a great movie, maybe because Denis's avoidance of melodramatic excess and narrative hand-holding leaves it up to the viewer to draw inferences about motives and behavior. The film gets a great boost from Agnès Godard's hungry cinematography, a score that includes excerpts from another version of Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten's opera, and most especially from the Legionnaires' training routines, choreographed by Bernardo Montet.    

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan, Charlotte Mitchell, Lynsey Baxter, Peter Vaughan, Colin Jeavons, Liz Smith, Patience Collier, Leo McKern. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by John Fowles. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Carl Davis. 

When I used to teach a course on Victorian literature, I would assign, in addition to Dickens and George Eliot and the Brontës, John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman because, more than any other critical work I know of, it illuminated what those 19th-century novelists were up to: what they were telling us that their contemporary readers knew firsthand about the manners and morals and sexuality of their times. And about the intellectual controversies, such as Darwinism and societal change, that raged in the times. And crucially, about the conventions and evasions of fiction itself. Not much of this is readily translatable into cinematic terms, so when Karel Reisz came to film the novel and Harold Pinter to write the screenplay for it, much of that, especially the metafictional aspect of Fowles's book, had to be jettisoned. Instead, Reisz and Pinter chose to tell the main story of the novel -- the love affair of Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) and Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) -- within the framework of a story about the actors, Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons), also having a affair while performing in a movie about Sarah and Charles. The result, for anyone who relished the novel, was bound to be disappointing, even with actors as skilled as the film's stars. The movie is splendidly mounted and photographed, the music score is ravishing, and the performances are subtle and witty. But the frame seems gratuitous. Fowles's novel famously had alternate endings for its story about Sarah and Charles: one conventionally tidy in the manner of Victorian fiction, the other enigmatic in the manner of modern novels. The film instead assigns the Victorian ending to Sarah and Charles, the modern one to Anna and Mike, which only approximates the point Fowles was trying to make about fictional conventions. Streep got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and it's her usual carefully detailed work. To some it's a little too detailed and self conscious, and it doesn't quite match with Irons's performance: He admitted that, as a stage-trained actor making his first major film, he was puzzled by what Streep was doing until he realized that she knew much more about acting for the camera than he did. It's possible that if you haven't read the book, you're at an advantage, but as one who admires the original, I find this version pretty but flat. 

Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)

Joan Crawford and Anita Page in Our Modern Maidens

Cast: Joan Crawford, Rod La Rocque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Anita Page, Edward J. Nugent, Josephine Dunn, Albert Gran. Screenplay: Josephine Lovett, titles by Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist. Music: Arthur Lange. 

Cedric Gibbons got a lot of credit for designs he didn't do: His name was listed as art director on almost all of MGM's movies from 1925, when he joined the studio, through 1956, when he retired, but largely because he was head of the art department; the actual hands-on design work on any given film was probably that of the person listed along with Gibbons, usually as assistant art director. That said, I think it's almost a sure thing that the set designs for Our Modern Maidens were done by Gibbons himself: The giveaway is that they're a splendidly, almost over-the-top art deco, a style associated with Gibbons, which influenced even his most famous design: the Oscar statuette. The décor of B. Bickering Brown's mansion is a fabulous assemblage of deco staircases, columns, cornices, and whatnots, an almost cubist setting for Billie Brown (Joan Crawford) to sashay about in, wearing designs by Adrian. The truth is, the movie needs the boost it gets from the design, given that the story is a fairly banal account of modern maidens Billie and Kentucky (Anita Page) in dangerous liaisons designed to point the moral: Don't get too modern when it comes to sex. Billie, who has her fling at several wild parties, gets secretly engaged to Gil (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who has a little thing going with Kentucky, but when Billie meets Glenn Abbott (Rod La Rocque), things get complicated. She flirts with Abbott, who has connections in the state department, to get Gil posted to the embassy in Paris, but breaks off with Abbott when he gets a little too hot and bothered. Then, on her wedding day, she learns that Kentucky is pregnant with Gil's child, and she realizes that she really loves Abbott. Not to worry, he'll forgive her. This was Crawford's last silent film, and it's not entirely silent: Leo roars over the MGM logo, there's a music soundtrack, some sound effects and crowd noises, and once we hear a public announcement over a loudspeaker. It's not quite as entertaining as the movie to which it's a sequel, Harry Beaumont's 1928 Our Dancing Daughters, which also starred Crawford and Page, but it holds the eye if not the mind. 

Pressure Point (Hubert Cornfield, 1962)

Bobby Darin and Sidney Poitier in Pressure Point

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Bobby Darin, Peter Falk, Carl Benton Reid, Mary Munday, Howard Caine, Gilbert Green, Barry Gordon, Richard Bakalayan, Lynn Loring, Anne Barton. Screenplay: Hubert Cornfield, S. Lee Pogostin, based on a story by Robert M. Lindner. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Ernest Gold. 

Stanley Kramer was a producer best known for "message movies," films aimed at the soft heart of the liberal consensus. Though in his heyday, Kramer's movies were often labeled "controversial," their point of view was rarely more than demonstrations that tolerance was good, prejudice bad. He also directed some of his most famous films, like The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). And although he handed over the task of directing Pressure Point to a little-known second-stringer, Hubert Cornfield, it's widely assumed that Kramer also directed much of the film. It was not a box office success. Seen today, it feels more like a TV drama of the era, despite excellent cinematography by Ernest Haller, a nervous score by Ernest Gold, a commanding performance by Sidney Poitier and an incisive one by Bobby Darin. But it also feels like it's taking place in a world that never was: one in which, in 1942, a Black man could be a prison psychiatrist, treating a patient who was arrested on a charge of sedition, for being a member of the pro-Nazi organization the German-American Bund. Poitier's character, known only as "Doctor," is trying to help Darin's "Patient" with the problems he has sleeping. Naturally, this leads to the Nazi Patient taunting the Doctor with his racist beliefs. But when he cures the Patient of insomnia by having him face up to childhood trauma involving his abusive father and clinging mother, the Doctor wants to go further: to treat the Patient's racism as a mental disease. Even Sidney Poitier, at the peak of his "Magical Negro" persona, can't make that turn credible. Still, Pressure Point almost overcomes the artificiality of its story, the simplistic look at psychoanalysis, and the falsification of race relations in the 1940s, thanks to some intense acting. There's a completely gratuitous frame story set in the period when the movie was made, in which the older Doctor (Poitier with artfully grayed hair) counsels a young psychiatrist played by Peter Falk not to give up on his treatment of an especially frustrating patient by telling the story of his experience with the Nazi Patient. Unnecessary at it is, the frame -- like the rest of the movie -- is made watchable by the rapport of the actors.  

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Manjinder Virk in The Arbor

Cast: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin, Parvani Lingiah, Danny Webb, Kate Rutter, Jimi Mistry, Robert Emms, Kathryn Pogson, George Costigan, Monica Dolan, Neil Dudgeon, Matthew McNulty, Lizzie Roper. Screenplay: Clio Barnard. Cinematography: Ole Bratt Birkeland. Production design: Matthew Button. Film editing: Nick Fenton, Daniel Goddard. Music: Harry Escott, Molly Nyman. 

The Arbor is a heartfelt, scathing docudrama about promise without fulfillment, centered on the playwright Andrea Dunbar and her children, particularly the eldest, Lorraine, who is played on screen by the actress Manjinder Virk, lip-synching the actual Lorraine's voice from recorded interviews. Director Clio Barnard uses this technique throughout the film, with the voices of Lorraine's siblings, her foster parents, and other members of the Dunbar family dubbed in place of the voices of the on-screen actors. It's an arresting device that runs the risk of having a film full of monologues, which Barnard avoids by staging the scenes in the actual locations, particularly the drab, run-down council estate (i.e. "public housing"), where the Dunbars lived. She also includes scenes from Dunbar's plays, and the film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Alan Clarke, 1987), that was made from one of them. The Arbor culminates in the story of Lorraine's descent into drug addiction and the consequent death of her small son. It's not a film designed to lift your spirits, but the effectiveness of Barnard's way of telling the story makes it well worth seeing. 

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Maria Aitken, Tom Georgeson, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer, Cynthia Cleese. Screenplay: John Cleese, Charles Crichton. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: John Jympson. Music: John Du Prez. 

By all rights, A Fish Called Wanda shouldn't have worked: It's a blend of comic acting styles, from Monty Python to Hollywood to Broadway, under the direction of a septuagenarian best known for his work on that comparatively restrained classic of British postwar comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It's vulgar and silly and hardly sensitive to social concerns -- it was denounced by disability rights advocates for the laughs derived from the Michael Palin character's stutter. And yet it remains one of the most successful screen comedies in history. It won Kevin Kline an Oscar for his performance as the dopey Übermensch Otto, and covered John Cleese, Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis with glory -- especially Cleese, who not only wrote the screenplay (from a story he concocted with director Charles Crichton) but also reportedly did much of the directing for which Crichton got the Oscar nomination. The secret to its success is that it takes nothing seriously, especially the British and American national identity, but is so light-hearted in its offenses that they amuse rather than offend. It's full of little in-jokes, like calling the character played by Tom Georgeson "George Thomason," and naming Cleese's character Archie Leach without nodding to the fact that it was Cary Grant's real name. (That one may even be a double in-joke, since Grant himself ad-libbed a line about Archie Leach in Howard Hawks's 1941 screwball classic His Girl Friday.) Maybe it falls a little flat at the end, with the frantic business at Heathrow, but it would be hard to top what has gone before. 

In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

Volker Spengler in In a Year With 13 Moons

Cast: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes, Günther Kaufmann, Lilo Pempeit, Isolde Barth, Karl Scheydt, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kollek, Bob Dorsay, Gerhard Zwerenz. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Production design: Franz Vacek. Film editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. 

You might need to be better versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than I am to give a full account of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons, but two things are immediately apparent: It's a fable about identity and desire, and it's a very personal film for its maker. Fassbinder wrote, directed, photographed, and edited the movie as a response to the death of his lover Armin Meier. The story gradually tells us about the life of Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman who began as Erwin Weisshaupt, married and fathered a daughter, but after falling in love with a man decided to undergo surgery and become Elvira. Some ambivalence about her transition seems to remain: At the beginning of the film, she has dressed as a man in order to solicit sex from male prostitutes, but that ends with her being severely beaten. When she returns to the apartment she shares with her lover, Christoph (Karl Scheydt), he angrily packs a suitcase and storms out. Over the next few days, with the help of a prostitute named Zora (Ingrid Caven), Elvira seeks out a nun (Lilo Pempeit), whom she knew from her childhood in an orphanage and who tells her the truth about her parentage. She also visits with her ex-wife and her daughter, and makes her way in to see the man who inspired her transition, the powerful Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), a reunion that cannot end well. Despite the tragic drift of Elvira's story, there are ludicrous moments, as when she joins with the employees in Saitz's office in recreating a routine from a movie starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that is playing on the office television. There's also a gruesome sequence in a slaughterhouse as well as a brief interlude in which Elvira watches a man commit suicide after expounding his Schopenhaueresque philosophy of the will. This is Fassbinder at both his most enigmatic and his most heartfelt.