Saladin the Victorious (Youssef Chahine, 1963)

Ahmad Mazhar in Saladin the Victorious

Cast: Ahmad Mazhar, Salah Zulfikar, Nadia Lutfi, Hamdy Gheith, Layla Fawzi, Ibrahim Ehmarah, Zaki Tolemat, Mahmoud Al Meleji, Umar El-Hariri, Ahmed Louxor. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Abderrahman Charkawi, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef El Sebai, Mohamed Abdel Gawad. Cinematography: Wadid Sirry. Film editor: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. 

Youssef Chahine's Saladin the Victorious is not quite like any other historical epic about the Crusades that you've seen, and not just because it looks at its subject from the "other side" of the usual Hollywood versions. Oh, it has the usual cast-of-thousands battle scenes, the romantic subplot, the hissable villains,  the stirring soundtrack, the opulent sets and costumes. And it has the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms we've come to associate with the genre. There's no evidence, for example, that the Arabs used Greek fire against siege towers in defending Jerusalem. Handheld telescopes were not commonly used to spy on the enemy until 500 years later. And in a scene set at Christmas, the muezzin's call to prayer segues into Christians singing "Adeste Fideles" ("O Come All Ye Faithful"), the tune of which has been traced to the 18th century but no earlier. Chahine also departs at one point from the conventional documentary style of storytelling and shows simultaneous meetings of the opposing camps not with a split screen but by putting them side-by-side on an obvious soundstage set, using the lights to switch back and forth between the two groups. It's a neat trick, but a theatrical, not a cinematic one. Chahine obviously wants his movie to do more than to tell a rousing story, and he's helped by an attractive performance by Ahmad Mazhar in the title role. It's a film designed partly to promote Arab unity in the mid-1960s, when Egypt and the Middle Eastern countries were flexing their muscles and taking on the colonialist powers. Chahine ignores the fact that the historical Saladin was a Kurd, not an Arab, but even that serves his more humanistic aim, to persuade people to set aside religious and ethnic differences in favor of peace and human unity. Saladin's chief opponent, Richard I of England (played by Hamdy Gheith in an unfortunate red wig) loses his bigotry and hot-headedness in the face of Saladin's peace-making. Yes, it's a message movie, but a watchable one.   

Next of Kin (Tony Williams, 1982)

Jacki Kerin in Next of Kin

Cast: Jacki Kerin, John Jarratt, Alex Scott, Gerda Nicolson, Charles McCallum, Bernadette Gibson, Robert Ratti, Vince Delitito, Tommy Dysart, Debra Lawrence. Screenplay: Tony Williams, Michael Heath. Cinematography: Gary Hansen. Art direction: Richard Francis, Nick Hepworth. Film editing: Max Lemon. Music: Klaus Schulze. 

Next of Kin is an Australian creepy old house horror movie, with all the improbabilities, plot holes, and clichés of the genre, but if you stick with it you're rewarded with a literally smashing finale. When her mother dies, Linda (Jacki Kerin) inherits the big gloomy mansion her mother had converted into a nursing home in the rural small town where Linda grew up. She doesn't want the property, though it seems to be capably managed by a woman named Connie (Gerda Nicolson) with a physician, Dr. Barton (Alex Scott), seeing to the medical needs of the residents. After taking a look at the books maintained by her mother, which are something of a mess, Linda is inclined to sell the place and return to the city where she's been living. Even the presence of an old boyfriend, Barney (Alex Scott), doesn't really persuade her to stick around. And then a strange death of one of the residents occurs, and Linda's inspection of her mother's papers stirs her suspicions, particularly where the unexplained disappearance of her Aunt Rita is concerned. Of course, things get creepier, though the way writer-director Tony Williams sets them up is a little slow and clunky. The movie has its admirers, including Quentin Tarantino, who compared it favorably to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Only the payoff at the end, I think, really measures up to that standard. 

The Sixth Day (Youssef Chahine, 1986)

Dalida in The Sixth Day

Cast: Dalida, Mohsen Mohieddin, Shouweikar, Hamdy Ahmed, Sanaa Younes, Salah El-Saadany, Mohamed Mounir, Youssef Chahine, Abla Kamel, Hasan El-Adl, Maher Esam. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Hasan Al Geretly, based on a novel by Andrée Chedid. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Tarek Salaheddine. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Omar Khairat. 

The French-Italian pop star Dalida, who was born in Egypt, plays Saddika, a middle-aged woman living in a village during the cholera epidemic of 1947. She takes in washing to support her second husband, who is disabled, and her small grandson. Saddika catches the eye of Okka (Mohsen Mohieddine), who is 20 years younger. He's a street performer who works with a trained monkey, and he idolizes Gene Kelly -- to whom the film is dedicated. Okka doesn't have Kelly's talent as either a singer or a dancer, as a fanciful musical interlude demonstrates, but he is energetic in his wooing of Saddika. When her grandson is stricken with cholera, he helps her hide the child from the public health authorities. A bounty is awarded to anyone who reports a cholera victim, and the village is alive with people willing to snitch on their neighbors. Saddika may have good reason to conceal the boy's illness: The sick are taken to a site in the desert that is rumored to be nothing more than a death camp. The film's title comes from the belief that if you survive six days with the disease you're in the clear. Saddika and the boy end up on a river boat accompanied (reluctantly on her part) by Okka. The Sixth Day is mostly coherently narrated, and it has some fine moments of comedy and suspense, but it also contains some incidents that don't quite fit the main story. I'm not sure, for example, what's going on in a scene in which a drunken British soldier is hustled into a bright red car whose passengers are women. Dakka witnesses the incident, but it's not clear what it has to do with his story or Saddika's. I suspect that it's a scene in Andrée Chedid's novel that Youssef Chahine didn't quite integrate into his screenplay. 

La Prisonnière (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1968)

Laurent Terzieff in La Prisonnière

Cast: Laurent Terzieff, Elisabeth Wiener, Bernard Fresson, Dany Carrel, Dario Moreno, Claude Piéplu, Noëlle Adam, Michel Etcheverry. Screenplay: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Monique Lange, Marcel Moussy. Cinematography: Andréas Winding. Production design: Jacques Saulnier. Film editing: Noëlle Balenci.   

La Prisonnière (aka Woman in Chains) was Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film, but in many ways it feels more dated the ones he made a decade earlier, the classic The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). It's about a couple, Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) and Gilbert (Bernard Fresson) in an "open" relationship that actually seems to be open only on his side. He's an artist, working with visual effects and geometric sculpture, preparing for an exhibition of op art and kinetic art in a gallery owned by Stanislas Hassler (Laurent Terzieff). His preparation includes sleeping with a prominent woman art critic, which Josée tolerates grudgingly. Meanwhile, she becomes involved with Stanislas, which stirs Gilbert's jealousy. She visits Stanislas in his apartment over his gallery, where he puts on a slide show of some of the works in his collection, one of which is a photograph of a nude woman in chains. Josée's curiosity is aroused, in part because she's a film editor working on a documentary about abused women. The photographer is Stanislas himself, and she lets herself be persuaded to watch him photograph one of his models. Josée reacts with a mixture of revulsion and desire. Unfortunately Wiener is not up to the demands of the role: As she tries to portray a woman breaking free from conventional morality, she looks dithery and awkward. Stanislaus taunts Josée that she's a bourgeoise (which the subtitle inadequately translates as "housewife"), and his bullying begins to break down her resistance: She becomes an active participant in his shoots and falls completely in love with him, with disastrous results. One problem with the film is that the depiction of Stanislas's sadomasochism feels timid: We've seen much more disturbing images than these, of topless women in mildly tortured poses, "glamour porn" at worst. (Luis Buñuel gave us more convincing perversity a year earlier in Belle de Jour.) Clouzot seems to be trying to make both a fable about repression and liberation and a cutting satire of the art world of the 1960s, but he fails to make the two aims coalesce.   

The Other (Youssef Chahine, 1999)

Hanan Turk and Hani Salama in The Other

Cast: Hanan Turk, Hani Salama, Nabil Ebeid, Mahmoud Hebeida, Lebleba, Hassan Abdel Hamid, Ezzat Abu Ouf, Amr Saad, Ahmad Wafiq, Edward Said, Hamdine Sabahi, Tamer Samir. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Khaled Youssef. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Hamed Hemdan. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Yehia El Mougy. 

Youssef Chahine's The Other is a mess of a movie, but in a way the mess is its message. It begins with a symbol of unity: the United Nations building, where Adam (Hani Salama), a UCLA graduate student working on a thesis about religious terrorism, meets with a friend to prepare for their interview with Edward Said, the celebrated Palestinian-American literature professor at Columbia. During the interview, Said reiterates his concern about the way contemporary civilization is torn by disunity, by the tendency to treat one's opponents as "the other" instead of recognizing their common humanity. And so Chahine introduces his theme, which amounts to an exploration of such immense topics as global capitalism, cultural appropriation, and terrorism. Chahine tries to develop his theme through a love story: Adam falls in love at first sight of the pretty Hanane (Hanan Turk) waiting in an airport. She's a journalist out to interview a man who wants to build an interfaith retreat on his land in the Egyptian desert. Adam is on his way to visit his parents in Egypt, who just happen to be backing the project. So he facilitates the interview and wins Hanane's heart. Unfortunately, Adam's cynical and corrupt parents are only looking to make money off the project, acquiring the land and then selling it to a hotel company. Margaret, Adam's mother (Nabil Ebeid), is an American who married a wealthy Egyptian, Khalil (Mahmoud Hebeida), for his money. Her real -- and creepy -- love is for her handsome son, and naturally she is appalled when he marries Hanane, who comes from a lower class family. The complications ensuing from this familiar star-crossed lovers trope are perhaps enough for a romantic drama, but not to develop Chahine's larger theme, especially since he underscores the love story with a kind of "Ballad of Adam and Hanane" sung off-screen during key moments in their relationship. There's also an extended scene of dancing and singing at their wedding, partly to emphasize Margaret's distaste for the whole thing. And when Margaret causes a break between the couple, it stirs Adam, whom we have seen as smart and affectionate, to violence: He strikes Hanane and rapes her. The scene feels inconsistent with the characters, especially when Hanane, whom we have seen as tough and independent, forgives him. In short, The Other provides an object lesson on the danger of overreaching.   

The Public Eye (Howard Franklin, 1992)

Joe Pesci and Barbara Hershey in The Public Eye

Cast: Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, Jerry Adler, Dominic Chianese, Richard Riehle, Richard Schiff, Jared Harris. Screenplay: Howard Franklin. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Mark Isham. 

Before they were paparazzi, they were shutterbugs, and the most notorious of them was Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee. Fellig's ability to get to a crime scene first, often before the police, made him famous, but he also thought of himself as a serious documentary photographer. Howard Franklin based the protagonist of The Public Eye, Leon Bernstein, aka Bernzy (Joe Pesci), on Fellig/Weegee, including the character's willingness to cheat a little to make his pictures better. Bernzy, for example, coming upon a corpse before the cops arrive, rearranges the body a little to make the composition of the shot better. Once, he asks a bystander to toss the victim's hat into the frame: "People like to see the hat," he says. Weegee likewise knew how to pose and frame his pictures: One of his most famous documents the arrival of a pair of bejeweled and befurred dowagers at the Metropolitan Opera opening night in 1943, while a drab and frowzy woman gawps at them. It was published in Life magazine and in the following year was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, where the reaction to its comic juxtaposition gave the shutterbug a reputation as an artist. But it was not a candid photograph: Weegee and his friends had found a barfly, plied her with wine, and shoved her into the frame at just the right moment. Franklin gives Bernzy some of Weegee's duplicity, but he's more intent on making his shutterbug into a hero who uses his street smarts to foil a plot by the mob to muscle in on the distribution of gasoline rationing coupons -- the film takes place in 1942. He also falls in love with Kay Levitz (Barbara Hershey), a beautiful nightclub owner. In short, the movie is slick when it should be gritty. Pesci gives a restrained performance, almost as if he doesn't want to repeat himself, having just won an Oscar as the volatile Tommy DeVito ("What do you mean I'm funny?") in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). There are good performances by Hershey, Stanley Tucci as a young mobster, Jerry Adler as a newspaper columnist friend of Bernzy's, and Jared Harris as a doorman at Kay's nightclub. But the movie never builds the tension it needs for the story to have much payoff at the end. 

Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1967)

Yuzo Kayama and Yoko Tsukasa in Scattered Clouds

Cast: Yoko Tsukasa, Yuzo Kayama, Mitsuko Kusabue, Mitsuko Mori, Mie Hama, Daisuke Kato, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yu Fujiki, Tadao Nakamura. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada. Cinematography: Yuzuru Aizawa. Production design: Satoru Chuko. Film editing: Eiji Ooi. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

As Scattered Clouds opens, Yumiko Eda (Yoko Tsukasa) is as happy as a married woman can be: Her husband has just had a promotion that will take them from Tokyo to Washington, D.C., and she has just learned that she's pregnant. And then he's killed in an accident and she loses the child. It's a mark of Mikio Naruse's masterly control of tone that he chooses neither to show the accident happening or to make explicit how her pregnancy ended -- whether it was a miscarriage or an abortion. The cause is less important than the effect: Yumiko's utter devastation. And then we switch from her point of view to learn that the driver who killed her husband, Shiro Mishima (Yuzo Kayama), was devastated by the accident in his own way. Although he is exonerated -- he was in no way responsible for the death of Yumiko's husband, the result of a blown-out tire that caused him to lose control of the car -- he suffers at work: His company wants to avoid scandal and transfers him to a less-desirable location. He also suffers from guilt: Desperate to make amends, he arranges to send Yumiko a monthly stipend. She needs the money: Her husband's family coldly distances itself from her, and the insurance isn't enough to live on. But she proudly rejects Shiro's offer, regarding it as "blood money," until it's apparent that she needs it to survive. To that point, Scattered Clouds is a probing look at the nature of grief and guilt. And then melodrama sets in: Shiro's transfer coincidentally puts him in the neighborhood of the inn that Yumiko's sister-in-law runs, and Yumiko takes a job as hostess at the inn. As their plot-crossed paths intersect, Shiro and Yumiko overcome their initial antipathy and fall in love. But what matters in Scattered Clouds is not the familiarity of the tropes of melodrama but the skill with which Naruse, his actors, and his crew -- especially composer Toru Takemitsu -- handle them. It's an irresistible film, no matter how contrived its plot, and if you're not a little teary-eyed when it ends, I feel sorry for you.   

The Devil of the Desert (Youssef Chahine, 1954)

Omar Sharif and Maryam Fakhruddin in The Devil of the Desert 

Cast: Omar Sharif, Maryam Fakhruddin, Lola Sedki, Tawfik El Dekn, Hamdy Gheith, Abdelghani Kamar, Salah Nazmi. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Hussein El-Mohandess. Cinematography: Alevise Orfanelli, Bruno Salvi. Art direction: Maher Abdel Nour, Hussein Helmy, Abdel Mohem Shokry. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

In The Devil of the Desert (aka Devil of the Sahara or Shaytan Al-Sahra), Omar Sharif plays Essam, a masked avenger not unlike Zorro, except that instead of leaving the letter Z as his calling card, he leaves a twisted palm frond -- or as the subtitles call it, a "knitted frond," a phrase that elicited puzzled amusement every time I saw it. This frond is also a way of communicating his whereabouts to his followers, chief among them the "gypsy"* Shaden (Lola Sedki). But it's only one of many things that puzzled and amused me about Youssef Chahine's movie. Basically, it's a lively romp, an adventure movie that could have played in the Saturday matinees of my childhood. Essam even has a comic sidekick, and he swashbuckles his way through the plot twists while trying to decide between the sultry Shaden and the lovely Dalal (Maryam Fakhruddin). Unfortunately, it needed a better fight choreographer -- Sharif sometimes seems to buckle when he should swash. It also suffers from clumsy editing, a muddy soundtrack, and a few too many unnecessary scenes, including three musical numbers. So much is stuffed into its 110-minute run time that it's a surprise when it ends in a breathless rush. It left me feeling that Chahine was bored with the film and wanted to get on to something better.  

*Many Romani consider "gypsy" an ethnic slur. It was derived from the fact that their people were once thought to be descended from an exiled Egyptian tribe. I use it here because it's the way the subtitles to The Devil of the Desert translate it, and being ignorant of Arabic, I don't know what word is used in the film.   

Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973)

Carroll Baker and Isabella De Funès in Baba Yaga

Cast: Carroll Baker, Isabella De Funès, George Eastman, Ely Galleani, Daniela Balzaretti, Mario Mattia Giorgetti, Sergio Masieri, Angela Covello, Cesarina Amendola. Screenplay: Corrado Farina, Giulio Berruti, François de Lannurien, based on the graphic novels of Guido Crepax. Cinematography: Alace Parolin. Art direction: Giulia Mafai. Film editing: Giulio Berruti. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

If this silly attempt at an erotic horror thriller hadn't been botched in pre-production by changes in producer, production company, and cast, and if it hadn't been heavily cut in post-production without director Corrado Farina's involvement or even knowledge, it might have been more coherent and involving. But even that's doubtful. It was only Farina's second feature film as director, and he never made another. Moreover, it's based on a tiresome and offensive trope: the predatory lesbian. The title character, played by Carroll Baker,  has no resemblance to the hag of Slavic legend. She's a mysterious recluse living in a decaying mansion in Milan. One night, she runs into -- literally, in her car -- the fashion photographer Valentina (Isabella De Funès), whom she begins to cast a spell over, partly by hexing Valentina's Hasselblad. Weird stuff involving a doll in S&M garb that comes to life ensues, and Valentina has to be rescued from Baba Yaga's clutches by her boyfriend (George Eastman). People familiar with Guido Crepax's adult comics may appreciate the film more than those who aren't. I'm not, and I found it more tedious than titillating.   

Flowing (Mikio Naruse, 1956)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Isuzu Yamada in Flowing

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, Mariko Okada, Haruko Sugimura, Sumiko Kurishima, Chieko Nakakita, Natsuko Kahara, Seiji Miyaguchi, Daisuke Kato. Screenplay: Toshiro Ide, Aya Koda, Sumie Tanaka, based on a novel by Koda. Cinematography: Masao Tamai. Production design: Satoru Chuko. Film editing: Eiji Ooi. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Having been a college English teacher and a print journalist, I know something about what it's like to be in a dying profession. So I have some empathy with the women in the geisha house in Mikio Naruse's Flowing. Their story is told largely from the point of view of Rita Yamanaka (Kinuyo Tanaka), whose name the owner of the house, Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), finds too difficult to pronounce, so she calls her Oharu, a name that will have resonance for anyone who has seen Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 masterpiece, The Life of Oharu. But unlike Mizoguchi's heroine, this Oharu is a simple woman in a profession that will probably never vanish: a maid. Her quiet ubiquity in the house enables her to see and hear things that heighten her mistress's financial struggles and the household's eventual doom. Equally valuable is the role of Katsuya (Hideko Takamine), Otsuta's daughter, who was trained as a geisha but doesn't want to be one. She regards her mother's profession as a commodification of self. Unfortunately, Katsuya has no marketable skills and is struggling to find her way in a male-dominated world. Naruse's film is a poignant and searching commentary not only on the disappearing way of the geisha but also on the role of women in a society trying to redefine the relationship between the sexes. Tanaka, Yamada, and Takamine are three of the greatest Japanese actors; it's a treat to see them working together, and they're beautifully supported by the rest of the cast.   

The Emigrant (Youssef Chahine, 1994)

Khaled Nabawy and Youssra in The Emigrant

Cast: Khaled Nabawy, Youssra, Mahmoud Hemida, Michel Piccoli, Hanan Turk, Safia El Emari. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Rafiq El-Sabban, Khaled Youssef. Cinematography: Ramses Marzouk. Production design: Hamed Hemdan. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Mohamad Nouh. 

How refreshing to see a historical epic set in ancient Egypt that doesn't look like it was filmed at Cinecittà or on a Burbank back lot and that features actors who look like Egyptians and not A-listers in dark makeup. That's because Youssef Chahine's The Emigrant was filmed in Egypt with Egyptian actors -- with the exception of French actor Michel Piccoli, who does look a little out of place in his long white patriarchal beard. Piccoli plays Adam, the father of Ram (Khaled Nabawy) and his treacherous brothers. They're thinly disguised variations on Jacob, father to Joseph and his brethren, whose story is told in the book of Genesis and in the Quran. Chahine's movie ran into a little trouble with the censors because of where that story is told: A Muslim fundamentalist recognized the obvious parallel between film and scripture, and invoked the Islamic proscription against depicting figures mentioned in the holy book. And as if not to be outdone, a Christian fundamentalist protested that the story in the film was not close enough to the biblical account. Nevertheless, The Emigrant was a box office success in Egypt. There are other changes from the source: In the film, there's no coat of many colors, and Ram makes his way in Egypt not by exercising the gift of prophecy but by native smarts, charisma, and a thirst for knowledge. The captain of Pharaoh's guard to which Ram is sold in slavery is not called Potiphar but Amihar (Mahmoud Hemida), and his wife, who lusts after Ram, is a priestess called Simihit. She comes by her desire for Ram honestly, for not only is he good-looking but her husband is impotent -- he was one of the eunuchs who guarded his master's household. It's not one of Chahine's best films, but it's a thoroughly satisfying one, marred only by a little muddling in the narrative -- Chahine cuts back and forth in the story too often and too abruptly, especially confusing to anyone who doesn't know the story on which it's based. Nabawy's lively and appealing performance made him a star.      

Delirious (Tom DiCillo, 2006)

Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt in Delirious

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, Alison Lohman, Gina Gershon, Kevin Corrigan, Richard Short, Elvis Costello. Screenplay: Tom DiCillo. Cinematography: Frank G. DeMarco. Production design: Teresa Mastropierro. Film editing: Paul Zucker. Music: Anton Sanko. 

Celebrity is a broad target for satire, but writer-director Tom DiCillo finds the right weapon for hitting it: He makes his protagonist a paparazzo named Les Galantine, played by Steve Buscemi with his usual high-strung, terrier-like intensity and vulnerability. Trying one day to shove aside the other paparazzi and get the right picture of the latest pop music phenomenon, K'Harma (Alison Lohman), Les encounters a homeless kid named Toby (Michael Pitt), hanging around the fringes of the shoot. With his usual impulsive bark-is-worse-than-his-bite manner, Les at first abuses the kid, and then lets him crash in his apartment. Toby is sweet but a little dim: When Les explains that every paparazzo is in search of "the shot heard around the world," the photo that will make his reputation, Toby clearly doesn't know the origin of the phrase. Still, when he proves useful in capturing a shot of a celebrity who has just had surgery on his penis, Les empties a closet for Toby to use as a bedroom and makes him his unpaid assistant. But gradually the dynamic between the two shifts: K'Harma had noticed the good-looking Toby, who wants to be an actor, and so does a casting director (Gina Gershon) when he tags along with Les at a celebrity event. Before long, it's Toby whom the paparazzi are pursuing, much to Les's fury. DiCillo keeps the satire well within the confines of his story, and his actors never let it overwhelm the characterization of Les and Toby and K'Harma.   

Love Liza (Todd Louiso, 2002)

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Love Liza

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff, Stephen Tobolowsky. Screenplay: Gordy Hoffman. Cinematography: Lisa Renzler. Production design: Stephen Beatrice. Film editing: Katz, Anne Stein. Music: Jim O'Rourke. 

Love Liza is a screwball tragedy. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Wilson Joel, deep into grieving for his wife, who recently committed suicide. To ease his grief, he takes to huffing gasoline fumes. (It's implied that his wife asphyxiated herself in their garage.) Through a farcical sequence of misunderstandings brought about by his addiction to the fumes, he winds up making friends with Denny (Jack Kehler), an enthusiast for remote-controlled model boats. At this point, the film turns into a kind of road movie, and Wilson's spirits temporarily rise. But all the while he is carrying his wife's suicide note, which he discovered under a pillow on their bed. His mother-in-law (Kathy Bates) and others urge him to open the envelope and read the note, but Wilson fears that it will tell him things he doesn't want to know. It's a remarkably eccentric film that reminds me of Hal Hartley's movies in that you're never quite sure what direction the characters will go next. Hoffman's brother, Gordy, wrote the screenplay, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and actor Todd Louiso, in his debut as a feature director, handles the story's frequent and abrupt variations of tone well. The cast gives it their all, especially Hoffman, who provides the right fragility for his character, and Kehler, who makes us believe that Denny wouldn't have cut and run in his first encounter with the obviously disturbed Wilson. It took me a while to adjust to the film's departures from convention, including some background music and songs by Jim O'Rourke that sometimes feel like they're angling away from what's on screen. Inevitably, too, the story of Hoffman's death from an overdose of drugs colors our reactions to his character in the film. 

Ginza Cosmetics (Mikio Naruse, 1951)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Ginza Cosmetics

 Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Ranko Hanai, Yuji Hori, Kyoko Kagawa, Eijiro Yanagi, Eijiro Tono, Yoshihiro Nishikubo, Haruo Tanaka. Screenplay: Matsuo Kishi, based on a novel by Tomoichiro Inoue. Cinematography: Akira Mimura. Art direction: Takashi Kono. Film editing: Hidetoshi Kasama. Music: Seiichi Suzuki. 

I'm not entirely sure what the title, Ginza Cosmetics, means. But I think it has something to do with putting on a good face when things are troubled inside. That applies to the protagonist, Yukiko (the great Kinuyo Tanaka), a bar hostess struggling to raise her young son, Haruo (Yoshihiro Nishikubo), and at the same time trying to keep the bar she works in from going out of business. But it also applies to the Ginza itself, the bustling shopping and entertainment district of Tokyo. At one point, Yukiko is showing a young man from the country around the city, and points out how much of the area he finds oppressively noisy and crowded had been leveled during the war: The Ginza itself has put on a new face, hiding its scars. Mikio Naruse's film is an account of several days in Yukiko's life, a character study without melodrama. She has a few moments of crisis: Haruo, who is usually a quiet and studious child who looks after himself (with the aid of a few neighbors) while Yukiko goes to work, once wanders off for a few hours, to her distress. And she is almost raped by an old acquaintance whom she goes to in search of money to help the bar's owner from having to sell it. There's also some tension among the women who work in the bar when the marriageable young man from the country comes to visit one of them. At the end, life goes on without the usual narrative resolution, and if you're like me you feel you've had a privileged glimpse into another world and another life. 

The Blazing Sun (Youssef Chahine, 1954)

 

Omar Sharif in The Blazing Sun

Cast: Omar Sharif, Faten Hamamah, Zaki Rostom, Farid Shawqi, Abdulwareth Asar, Hamdy Gheith. Screenplay: Ali El Zorkani, Hilmi Halim. Cinematography: Ahmed Khorshed. Art direction: Maher Abdel Nour. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

With his big brown eyes and gleaming smile, Omar Sharif was a natural for the movies, and making his film debut, billed as Omar El Cherif, in Youssef Chahine's The Blazing Sun, he proved he could act too. Chahine's melodrama gets off to a bumpy start with some clunky exposition and a bit of scenery chewing from the villains in the piece, wealthy landowner Taher Pasha (Abdelwareth Asar) and his nephew Reyad (Farid Shawqi), but once Sharif appears on the scene and encounters his leading lady, Faten Hamamah, things begin to come together with enough plot twists, suspense, and romance to satisfy even a jaded movie-watcher like me. Sharif plays Ahmed, trained as an engineer, who returns to his village to help his father, Saher Abdel Salam (Abdulwareth Asar), and the peasants harvest a sugarcane crop. But Taher Pasha and Reyad are conniving to keep the peasants from making money and getting uppity. Reyad, whom we first see shooting a cat running across the lawn of his uncle's palatial estate, suggests dousing another poor cat in gasoline, setting it on fire, and letting it loose in the sugarcane. The Pasha is somewhat less sadistic: Just flood the fields, he says, and Reyad complies. Saher and the peasants are ruined. Meanwhile, the Pasha's beautiful young daughter, Amal (Hamamah), is returning home after an absence of many years. While Reyad is driving her from the station, Ahmed spots her and calls out her childhood nickname, "Potatoes." She's delighted to see her childhood boyfriend again, especially since he now looks like a 22-year-old Omar Sharif, much to Reyad's disgust. And so everything is set up for a fateful conflict, which involves a wrongful murder conviction, several other deaths, and a Western-like showdown in the ruins of the temple at Luxor. Handsomely photographed and well-acted, The Blazing Sun doesn't have as much social comment as other films by Chahine that I've seen, but it's thoroughly entertaining.

Street Without End (Mikio Naruse, 1934)

Setsuko Shinobu in Street Without End

Cast: Setsuko Shinobu, Akio Isono, Hikaru Yamanouchi, Nobuko Wakaba, Ayako Katsuragi, Shin'ichi Himori, Chiyoko Katori, Ichiro Yuki. Screenplay: Jitsuzo Ikeda, Komatsu Kitamura. Cinematography: Suketaro Inokai. Set designer: Jokichi Shu. 

The titular street of Street Without End is located in the bustling Ginza district of Tokyo, where Sugiko (Setsuko Shinobu) works as a waitress. One of the most fascinating elements of Mikio Naruse's film is its documentation of the Ginza, now famous as a teeming, neon-lighted network of streets, in the 1930s, images of which constitute both the beginning and the end of the film. In between these shots of the crowded streets, we follow Sugiko's story as she almost marries the man she loves, almost becomes a movie star, loses her first love and her chance at stardom when she's struck by a car, marries the wealthy driver of the car, and suffers from the class snobbery of her sister- and mother-in-law. By the end of the film, she's back working as a waitress. A classic "woman's picture" melodrama, it was made in service of Naruse's concern about the weight of tradition and history that burdens the lives of Japan's women. It was Naruse's last silent film, and you can see him striving toward sound, which was late coming to the Japanese film industry. It is, for example, almost too chopped up by intertitles, as if Naruse were longing for audible dialogue. But Naruse surrounds his heroine with a gallery of well-drawn characters, overcoming the limitations of silent melodrama by making the people in it believable.    

The Land (Youssef Chahine, 1970)

Mahmoud Al Meleji and Ezzat El Alaili in The Land

Cast: Mahmoud Al Meleji, Nagwa Ibrahim, Ezzat El Alaili, Hamdy Ahmed, Ali El Sherif, Yehia Chahine, Salaah El-Saadany, Tawfik El Deken. Screenplay: Hassan Fuad, based on a novel by Abderrahman Charkawi. Cinematography: Abdelhalim Nasr. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Ali Ismail.

I will only betray my ignorance of Egyptian history, literature, politics, and culture, not to mention the Arabic language, if I venture to say more than that I found Youssef Chahine's The Land both stirring and baffling. I may have been baffled occasionally because The Land is based on a novel, and Chahine chose to include some sections that may have worked better on the page, such as the opening sequence about a boy's infatuation with the pretty Wassifa (Nagwa Ibrahim). Chahine spends much time establishing a backstory for the boy, but he disappears from the rest of the film after his sequence ends. But narrative flaws like that one shouldn't deter anyone from watching the film, which is often quite beautiful and features some impressive performances, particularly that of Mahmoud Al Meleji as a farmer struggling with the intractable demands and corruption of government authorities, with the ambitions of his landlord, and with the apathy and ineptness of some of his fellow farmers. The action moves through incidents both comic and brutal, and ends with a masterly final scene that evokes the work of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. The rest of the film isn't on a par with its ending, but that's probably asking too much. 

Inferno (Roy Ward Baker, 1953)

Robert Ryan in Inferno

Cast: Robert Ryan, Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan, Larry Keating, Henry Hull, Carl Betz, Robert Burton. Screenplay: Francis M. Cockrell. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Robert L. Simpson. Music: Paul Sawtell. 

Inferno is a smartly written, capably acted, and crisply directed thriller that deserves to be better known. The reason it isn't, I think, is that it was made during the early 1950s fad for 3-D movies, but happened to appear just at the end of that era, and it loses something when it's shown in 2-D. The story begins almost in medias res: The first characters we meet are the villains, Geraldine Carson (Rhonda Fleming) and Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan), who have just left her husband, the millionaire Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan), in the desert with a broken leg. Will he survive, and will the cheating lovers be caught? You probably can guess the answer, but there's a nice little ironic twist at the end. The movie's 3-D origins show in the usual way, with things getting thrust or flung at the camera, but they're usually integral to the action. Where it fails in the 2-D version is in its use of the Mojave Desert setting: Carson has been left at the top of a ridge, and to save himself he has to descend a steep and rocky hillside with a painfully fractured leg he manages to immobilize with a makeshift splint. There are shots of the slope from the top of the hillside, but they lose their vertiginous steepness when the movie is shown flat. The other obvious legacy of its 3-D origins is an "Intermission" title card that appears in mid-film. Inferno runs only 83 minutes, so it hardly needs an intermission for the audience's sake, but one was provided there for the projectionists. The 3-D movies of the '50s used two projectors running in sync, but most movie houses had only two projectors, which usually ran in alternation, with one showing the film and the other queued up with the next reel. When both projectors were running simultaneously, as they did for 3-D movies, theaters needed a time-out to swap out the reels. Still, unlike a lot of the era's 3-D movies, Inferno holds up well today. 

The Story of O (Just Jaeckin, 1975)

Udo Kier and Corinne Cléry in The Story of O

Cast: Corinne Cléry, Udo Kier, Anthony Steel, Jean Gaven, Christiane Minazzoli, Martine Kelly, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Gabriel Cattand, Li Sellgren, Albane Navizet, Nadine Perles, Laure Moutoussamy. Screenplay: Sébastien Japrisot, based on a novel by Dominique Aubry as Pauline Réage. Cinematography: Robert Fraisse, Yves Rodallec. Art direction: Jean-Baptiste Poirot. Film editing: Francine Pierre. Music: Pierre Bachelet. 

The interiority of novels is what makes them so difficult to film. The characters and action of a novel exist only in the mind of the reader encountering them on the page. When we see those characters and that action on the screen, they usually have a very different effect, especially when the novel and the film deal with sex. When The Story of O, a novel written by a woman, was transferred to the screen by a director who's a man, the "male gaze" inevitably informed the movie, particularly because the story is about a woman submitting to sadomasochistic discipline. So the film, whose subject matter and abundant female nudity got it banned in Britain and labeled NC-17 in the States, was also subject to charges that it was antifeminist. There are those who assert that it's actually a feminist fable, since O (Corinne Cléry) is given frequent opportunities to escape from her submissive role and asserts her equality, if not dominance, at the film's end, but they seem to be in a minority. In any case, The Story of O is not a very good movie. It's drenched in soft-core porn clichés and its soft-focus photography gives it a candy-box ambiance. On the page, the novel could be intellectually and erotically provocative. But on the screen it's just tedious and repetitive.   

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

Cast: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benny Safdie, Skyler Gisondo, Maary Elizabeth Ellis, John Michael Higgins, Christine Ebersole, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ryan Heffington, Nate Mann, Joseph Cross. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography: Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Bauman. Production design: Florencia Martin. Film editing: Andy Jurgensen. Music: Jonny Greenwood.

Ever seen a movie that you liked but a couple of years later couldn't remember a thing about it? That's what Licorice Pizza was for me. Which is odd, because one of the things about Paul Thomas Anderson's movies is that they're so memorable, if only for certain moments, like the rain of frogs in Magnolia (1999) or Daniel Day-Lewis threatening to drink Paul Dano's milkshake in There Will Blood (2007). But there's something comparatively low-key about Licorice Pizza, at least for the first half of the film. It's basically a boy-meets-girl story, or rather a boy-meets-woman story: A more-than-usually assertive 15-year-old boy meets a slacker twenty-something woman. Teenager Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is an actor and an entrepreneur; Alana Kane (Alana Haim), who is either 25 or 28, depending on which you believe of the ages she gives at one point in the movie, lives at home with her parents and her sisters (played by Haim's real-life family). Gary and Alana meet when he's standing in line to have his high school yearbook photo taken; she's an assistant to the photographer, a job she dislikes. They begin a relationship that turns co-dependent and evolves into an off-beat (and possibly illegal) romance. And for a time that's all there is, until after the excursions of the two into the waterbed and pinball machine business put them in contact with some big name Hollywood types: Sean Penn plays a very thinly disguised version of William Holden, and Bradley Cooper a very broadly caricatured Jon Peters. These extended cameos throw the film out of whack for a while until the main story gets its balance back, though it ends with a sequence that's a cliché out of the romcom genre. I think one of the reasons Licorice Pizza is so unmemorable is that Anderson hasn't quite figured out how to turn the autobiographical elements of his story, drawn from growing up as an actor's son in the San Fernando Valley, into a narrative that connects with the audience. It had the same effect on me as Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022), another film that doesn't rise out of autobiography into common experience. Both movies were fun to watch but they didn't quite stick with me.  

The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco in The Savages

Cast: Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour, Tonye Patano, Guy Boyd, Debra Monk, Rosemary Murphy, Margo Martindale. Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins. Cinematography: W. Mott Hupfel III. Production design: Jane Ann Stewart. Film editing: Brian A. Kates. Music: Stephen Trask. 

The Savages are a dysfunctional family who live disjointed lives. The mother abandoned them at some point in their childhood, and Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), well into middle age, are both unmarried. Wendy is having an affair with a married man and Jon is in a relationship with a woman who is about to return to Poland because her visa has expired. Their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), lives in Sun City, Ariz., with a woman he hasn't married, and when she dies he has already begun to sink into dementia. He has also signed an agreement that he has no stake in the legacy of the woman he lives with.This means that Wendy and Jon, who live in New York -- she in New York City, he in Buffalo -- have to drop everything and go tend to a parent from whom they are estranged. (He is said to have been abusive, although we're given no specifics.) Wendy is just a bit flaky: She's an aspiring playwright who supports herself by working as an office temp. Jon is just a bit withdrawn: He's a professor of English whose specialty is drama, particularly Bertolt Brecht. When Wendy comes up with impractical ideas about how to deal with their father, Jon tends to retreat into his shell. As for Lenny, he's just lucid enough to be cantankerous, especially at inconvenient moments. Such a story needs skilled actors to bring it off, and it gets them. There's just enough comedy in Tamara Jenkins's screenplay to keep the film from being a downer, and Linney, Hoffman, and Bosco know precisely how to balance the elements of pain and humor in their stories. Even though the predicament faced by the Savages is heightened by distance and alienation, the basics of the narrative are familiar to almost everyone who has aging parents, which makes The Savages something of a fable for our times. 

Apart From You (Mikio Naruse, 1933)

Cast: Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Akio Isono, Sumiko Mizukubo, Reikichi Kawamura, Ryuko Fuji, Yoko Fujita, Tomio Aoki. Screenplay: Mikio Naruse. Cinematography: Suketaro Inokai. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. 

One of Mikio Naruse's earliest surviving silent films, Apart From You is a fable in support of filial devotion. An aging geisha, Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), is trying to raise a teenage son, Yoshio (Akio Isono), but he has become ashamed of his mother's profession. When she discovers that Yoshio has been cutting school and has joined a gang, her friend and fellow geisha, the pretty young Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), tries to help Kikue by showing Yoshio what her own dysfunctional family is like. The contrast with his own self-sacrificing parent inspires him to give up his adolescent rebellion. Though the film teeters on the edge of sentimentality, it's saved by the complexity of the characters, the performances of the actors, and the fluidity of the direction and camerawork.   

Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958)

Cast: Farid Shawqi, Hind Rustum, Youssef Chahine, Hassan el Baroudi, Abdulaziz Khalil, Naima Wasfy. Screenplay: Abdel Hai Adib, Mohamed Abdel Youssef. Cinematography: Alevise Orfanelli. Art direction: Gabriel Karraze. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

Movies usually treat train stations as venues for the passengers' romantic meetings and partings, but they rarely focus on the lives of people who work there. Youssef Chahine's absorbing Cairo Station is different. It swarms with indigenous life, that of the people who serve the passengers, loading their luggage or selling them newspapers and food and drink. It focuses in particular on a porter, Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), his girlfriend, Hanuma (Hind Rustum), who peddles soft drinks, and a crippled newspaper vendor, Qinawi (Chahine). Abu Siri is something of a bully, but his chief aim, besides courting (and sometimes abusing) Hanuma, is to organize a labor union for the other luggage handlers. Hanuma doesn't have a license to ply her trade, so she and her fellow drink vendors are always scurrying to hide from the police. Qinawi is the lowest of the lowly, living in a shed that he decorates with cutout pictures of women that remind him of the object of his desires, the voluptuous Hanuma. Eventually, Qinami's desire will turn into a sinister obsession, especially as he's goaded by other men at the station who mock him for not having a woman. But the darkness of the plot of Cairo Station is not what makes it an exceptional film, it's the vivid portrait of the station, as lives work themselves out amid the never-ending movement of people and trains.  

Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M. Newman, 1953)

Cast: Jeanne Crain, Michael Rennie, Carl Betz, Max Showalter, Mary Anderson, Marjorie Hoshelle, Willis Bouchey, Yvonne Peattie. Screenplay: Leo Townsend, based on a radio play by John Dickson Carr. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: William Reynolds. 

Someone disappears in a public setting -- a train, a hotel, a passenger ship -- and the person who saw them last discovers that no one else claims to have ever seen them. It's a nice trope for a thriller, like The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) or So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950), so who can blame 20th Century-Fox for taking it out of the mothballs for a low-budget picture like Dangerous Crossing? Ruth (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship for a honeymoon ocean voyage with her husband, John (Carl Betz), who takes her to their stateroom and then goes to make a deposit of some money with the purser. He'll meet her in the bar, he says, but he doesn't show up. When Ruth goes to the stateroom to look for him she finds it locked, and when an attendant opens it for her, their luggage is gone. Ruth has them find the maid (Mary Anderson) who was preparing the room when the couple entered and saw John carry her over its threshold, but she swears she didn't see them and that the room has always been vacant. As Ruth becomes more distraught, everyone begins to suspect she's lying or insane. Only the ship's doctor (Michael Rennie) is willing to put up with her frantic assertions that she really is married and that her husband must be somewhere on board. Naturally, since Rennie gets top billing with Crain, we know that some kind of relationship between Ruth and the doctor is going to develop. Unfortunately, the doctor is such a know-it-all male and Ruth such a basket case that it's a dull romance, not helped by a lack of chemistry between the actors. Crain does a nice job from the start at suggesting that there's something fragile and off-balance about Ruth, so even though we've seen her with John, we feel there's something she's not telling us. There is, but as the story unfolds, the movie gets routine and predictable.  

One Hour Photo (Mark Romanek, 2002)

Cast: Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Dylan Smith, Gary Cole, Evie Daniels, Paul Kim Jr., Eriq La Salle, Clark Gregg. Screenplay: Mark Romanek. Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth. Production design: Tom Foden. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford. Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek. 

Robin Williams gives a fine performance in One Hour Photo, but it remains just that: a performance, a tamping down of his familiar manic presence into the persona of the repressed, furtive Sy Parrish. He works in the photo processing department of SavMart, a vast and impersonal big box store. He lives alone, and his chief human contact is with his customers, who bring him their rolls of film to be developed. Their snapshots give him a glimpse into the lives of people who have families and children and celebrate events like weddings and birthdays. He also gets a glimpse of the secret lives of people, who bring in shots revealing their sexual proclivities, but he chooses to concentrate on the happy families, especially the Yorkins: the beautiful Nina (Connie Nielsen), her handsome husband, Will (Michael Vartan), and their cute 9-year-old son, Jakob (Dylan Smith). His admiration for the Yorkins grows into an obsession, and from that writer-director Mark Romanek spins the plot. One Hour Photo is supposed to be a thriller, in which we watch uneasily as Sy's obsession curdles into something malevolent. But by showing us Sy talking to the police at the start of the film, he deprives us of that surprise. There's a slackness in the narrative that works against the suspense, and Sy's breakdown and eruption into violence feels less like an integral part of the character than a plot device. Romanek also gets distracted into making a satiric point about the soullessness of the megacorporate entities embodied by SavMart, turning the store manager (Gary Cole) into the villain who pushes Sy over the edge. For many people, however, watching Williams perform is enough to overcome the movie's flaws. 

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

Cast: Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, Tony Siragusa. Screenplay: David Benioff, based on his novel. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: Barry Alexander Brown. Music: Terence Blanchard. 

Spike Lee's 25th Hour is a "day in the life" movie, and a very good one. The day is the last one of freedom for Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) before he goes to prison for seven years. He spends it with his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), his friends Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank (Barry Pepper), and his father (Brian Cox), and also makes a visit to the Russian mobsters who got him into the business of pushing drugs. It's also one of Lee's best films, less celebrated than Do the Right Thing (1982) or Malcolm X (1992), but worthy of being mentioned in their company. The only reservation I have about the movie is that Lee doesn't let his powerhouse cast bring their solidly written characters to life without indulging in a few distracting cinematic tricks. He and his longtime editor, Barry Alexander Brown, can't seem to resist techniques like freeze frames and moments in which the action is repeated from a different angle. There are showy montages and tour de force episodes, some of which work, like the "fuck you" episode in which the embittered Monty anathematizes almost every racial, social, and economic group in New York City. And the film ends with a beautifully realized sequence in which Monty's father proposes to help him escape and imagines the life he might live. But other episodes don't quite work, like the long take in which Jacob and Frank talk about their friendship with Monty, a scene that must have involved careful preparation on the part of Pepper and Hoffman, But it's staged in front of a window in Frank's apartment, which somewhat improbably overlooks Ground Zero, where crews are clearing away the rubble of the World Trade Center. I couldn't help being distracted by the scene outside the window instead of concentrating on their dialogue. Still, the movie, which was planned before the 9/11 attack and completed and released afterward, beautifully integrates that event into the theme and tone of the film. 

Brainstorm (William Conrad, 1965)

Cast: Jeffrey Hunter, Anne Francis, Dana Andrews, Viveca Lindfors, Stacy Harris, Kathie Browne, Philip Pine, Michael Pate, Robert McQueeney, Strother Martin. Screenplay: Mann Rubin, Lawrence B. Marcus. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Robert Emmet Smith. Film editing: William H. Ziegler. Music: George Duning.

The vertiginous Brainstorm starts off in one direction, with the sadistic industrialist Cort Benson (Dana Andrews) gaslighting his employee, Jim Grayam (Jeffrey Hunter), who is having an affair with Benson's wife, Lorrie (Anne Francis). But then it turns in another direction: Benson may be trying to make Grayam think he's going mad, but Grayam may actually be insane. He plots an intricate scheme to kill Benson and get away with it, and he almost does. It's a whipsaw premise for a thriller that in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock might have been a classic. Unfortunately, William Conrad was a better character actor than director, and he doesn't quite bring it off. Part of the problem is that Hunter is a little too handsome for the role and doesn't balance the attractiveness of Grayam with enough darkness: We ought to feel more ambivalent about the character from the start. The script has some distracting inconsistencies of plot and character that a more sure-footed director might have overcome, the way Hitchcock covers up the plot holes in Vertigo (1958). There are still some good performances, especially from Viveca Lindfors as a psychiatrist who plays her own ambivalent role in Grayam's case. I think it's the off-balance narrative that has allowed Brainstorm to develop into something of a cult film after its initial rejection from the critics.