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.   

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, Rita Moreno, Cynthia O'Neal, Carol Kane. Screenplay: Jules Feiffer. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Sam O'Steen.

Carnal Knowledge begins as a light comedy of manners set in the late 1940s, when college students were supposedly less casual and more poorly informed about sex. Jonathan (Jack Nicholson), who claims to be more sexually experienced than his Amherst roommate, Sandy (Art Garfunkel), gives Sandy some advice on how to approach Smith College student Susan (Candice Bergen) at a mixer. The scene has some of the keen ear for awkward attempts at communication found in screenwriter Jules Feiffer's cartoons and in director Mike Nichols's comedy routines with Elaine May. Eventually, Sandy and Susan get together, with Jonathan still coaching Sandy on sex, until Jonathan himself makes his own moves -- unknown to Sandy -- on Susan. He succeeds, in an excruciating scene in which Susan's confusion about the loss of her virginity plays across her face, partly obscured by the grunting Jonathan on top of her. And from then the film becomes increasingly sour, as the years pass and the misogynistic Jonathan continues to meddle in Sandy's life but also makes a mess of his own relationships with women. He takes up with Bobbie, a model played by Ann-Margret, for what begins as a passionate fling and ends in misery. By the end of the film he is being serviced by Louise (Rita Moreno), a prostitute whom he hires to perform a routine -- and abuses when she deviates from it -- designed to give him an erection. It's a sad, rather hopeless film that despite fine performances from all the actors never quite convinces us that its characters are anything but puppets of the writer and director. Jonathan and Sandy seem incapable of change and growth. Something makes me think that Carnal Knowledge would have been a better film if it had been told from the women's point of view, that it would have made a more telling point about the male ego and about the great gulf between the sexes if we had seen Jonathan and Sandy through Susan and Bobbie's eyes. We get glimpses of that, but Susan disappears from the film after she marries Sandy and he, egged on by Jonathan, drifts into mid-life affairs. Bobbie's entrapment into Jonathan's world leads to a failed suicide attempt, after which she, too, vanishes from the story. Feiffer and Nichols never make it clear whether their film is a satire on sex in modern society or just a particularly bleak story about unhappy people.

Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)

Metzengerstein

Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead: Metzengerstein

Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein: Jane Fonda
Baron Wilhelm Berlifitzing: Peter Fonda
Contessa's Advisor: James Robertson Justice
Contessa's Friend: Françoise Prévost

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Pascal Cousin
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov
Music: Jean Prodromidès

William Wilson

Alain Delon in Spirits of the Dead: William Wilson

William Wilson: Alain Delon
Giuseppina: Brigitte Bardot
Priest: Renzo Palmer

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle, Clement Biddle Wood
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Production design: Ghislain Uhry
Film editing: Franco Arcalli, Suzanne Baron
Music: Diego Masson

Toby Dammit

Terence Stamp in Spirits of the Dead: Toby Dammit

Toby Dammit: Terence Stamp
Priest: Salvo Randone
TV Commentator: Annie Tonietti
The Devil: Marina Yaru

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Piero Tosi
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nino Rota

Of the three short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories collected here under the title Spirits of the Dead, only the third, Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, a freewheeling version of Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," really works. Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein is simply cheesy, with his then-wife Jane Fonda sashaying around in supposedly period costumes that are designed to reveal as much flesh as possible. The casting of her brother, Peter, as the man she loves, is obviously there to elicit a frisson of some sort, but it doesn't. Louis Malle's William Wilson stuffs a little too much of Poe's doppelgänger fable into its confines, and despite the presence of a cigar-puffing Brigitte Bardot, manages to pull whatever punches the story may have had, ending up rather dull. But Toby Dammit is a small gem, a concentration of Fellini's usual grotesques and decadents into a bright satire on celebrity: It's almost impossible to watch another awards show without recalling Fellini's acid-bathed take on it. Only the conclusion of the film really retains much of Poe, which suggests that Vadim and Malle might have been better off devising contemporary riffs on the material, as Fellini does.

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)

Renato Salvatori and Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco Parondi: Alain Delon
Simone Parondi: Renato Salvatori
Nadia: Annie Girardot
Rosaria Parondi: Katina Paxinou
Vincenzo Parondi: Spiros Focás
Ginetta: Claudia Cardinale
Ciro Parondi: Max Cartier
Luca Parondi: Rocco Vidolazzi
Morini: Roger Hanin

Director: Luchino Visconti
Story and screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli
Based on a novel by Giovanni Testori
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Garbuglia
Music: Nino Rota

When Rocco cries out, "Sangue! Sangue!" on finding Nadia's blood on his brother Simone's jacket, I almost expect to hear Puccini on the soundtrack instead of Nino Rota. It's one of those moments that cause Rocco and His Brothers (along with other films by Luchino Visconti) to be called "operatic." It's "realistic" but in a heightened way -- the word for it comes from the realm of opera: verismo. The moment is in the same key as the actual murder of Nadia, along with her earlier rape by Simone, and the numerous highly volatile scenes of the family life of the Parondis. It's what makes Rocco and His Brothers feel in many ways more contemporary than Michelangelo Antonioni's more cerebral L'Avventura, which was released in the same year. Movies have gone further in the direction of Rocco -- think of the films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola -- than they have in the direction of Antonioni's oeuvre. I have room in my canon for both the raw, melodramatic, and perhaps somewhat overacted Rocco and the enigmatically artful work of Antonioni, however.

Watched on Filmstruck

Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller, 1973)

Lina Wertmüller was a big deal 40 years ago, when I saw Swept Away (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975) in the theater. The latter earned her the distinction as the first woman ever nominated for the best director Oscar. (She lost to John G. Avildsen for Rocky, and the less said about that the better.) I remember thinking that her films were wound a little too tight, and seeing Love and Anarchy rather confirms my opinion. The performances are ratcheted up at times to near-hysteria, and things that could be said are shouted. But even when Wertmüller's cast is milking it for all it's worth, it's clear that she has a point of view and the means to express it, especially with the two actors on whom she frequently called during her directorial heyday. As Tunin, the "bumpkin" who has taken on the task of assassinating Mussolini, Giancarlo Giannini plays a complete dramatic arc, from the wide-eyed, almost comatose naïf who finds himself lodged in a Roman brothel and then goes through stages of passion, fear, disgust, commitment, and a final martyrdom. Mariangela Melato as the prostitute Salomè doesn't have such a grand arc to traverse, but somehow she manages to let traces of humanity show through the flamboyant façade she has adopted. Eros Pagni as the odious Fascist Spatoletti and Lia Polito as Tripolina, the winsome prostitute who wins Tunin's heart, are also good, though their roles verge a bit on caricature. The handsome cinematography is by Giuseppe Rotunno, who at one point expresses the divisions in Tunin's character by a tricky, brilliant shot that shows Giannini and his reflections in two different mirrors.

Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)

Titta: Bruno Zanin
Gradisca: Magali Noël
Miranda: Pupella Maggio
Aurelio: Armando Brancia
Grandfather: Giuseppe Ianigro
Lallo: Nando Orfei
Teo: Ciccio Ingrassia
Oliva: Stefano Proietti

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Danilo Donati
Music: Nino Rota

Nostalgia, Fellini-style, with lots of bawdiness, plenty of grotesques, much comedy, and a little pathos. It was a huge hit, earning the foreign-language film Oscar and nominations for Fellini as director and as co-author (with Tonino Guerra) of the screenplay. It's certainly lively and colorful, thanks to the cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno, the production and costume design of Danilo Donati, and of course the scoring by Nino Rota -- though it sounds like every other score he did for Fellini. What it lacks for me, though, is the grounding that a central figure like Marcello Mastroianni or Giulietta Masina typically gave Fellini's best films, among which I would name La Strada (1954), The Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8 1/2 (1963). The presumed center of Amarcord is the adolescent Titta, whose experiences over the course of a year in a village on Italy's east coast serve to link the various episodes together. But Titta is too slight a character to serve that function the way, for example, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) did as the Fellini surrogate in I Vitelloni (1953). There are some marvelous moments such as the sailing of the ocean liner SS Rex past the village, which goes out to greet it in a variety of fishing and pleasure boats. But too much of the film is taken up with the noisy squabbling of Titta's family, who soon wear out their welcome -- or at least mine.