Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)

Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons

Cast: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, Uma Thurman, Peter Capaldi. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on his play and a novel by Choderlos de Laclos. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Stuart Craig. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: George Fenton. 

"Wicked" is a word that has lost a good deal of its pejorative quality, and not just in Boston where it became slang meaning "excellent." There's an attractive quality to wickedness that's lacking in words like "evil." Which is not to say that the wicked pair of the Marquise de Marteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) aren't reprehensible, but that they fascinate us with their sly wit and determined pursuit of their aims. Close in particular makes the marquise so delicious that there's a considerable shock when she self-destructs upon the failure of her plans, and perhaps the audience even has a glimmer of pity for her final comeuppance. The choice of Malkovich to play Valmont was controversial: He's an actor known for eccentric roles, not the type for a suave seducer. And yet he gives Valmont a snake-like fascination -- so snaky that at one point he even hisses at Swoosie Kurtz's Madame de Volanges -- that makes his conquests of Uma Thurman's Cécile and Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel plausible. He also brings out the vulnerable side of Valmont, so that we find it credible that this implacably rakish figure could find himself undone by this conquest of Madame de Tourvel. But then again, who wouldn't find themselves undone by Michelle Pfeiffer, then at the early peak of her career? In casting Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears followed the lead of Milos Forman, who cast Amadeus (1984) with American actors instead of the British ones usually called on for costume dramas set in Europe, a move that shocked some critics -- especially the British. (The exception in Dangerous Liaisons is Peter Capaldi as Valmont's henchman Azolan, and his Scottish accent stands out oddly.) The irony here is that Forman was at work on his own version of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, called Valmont (1989), which was doomed by being released a year after Frears's film. Dangerous Liaisons won Oscars for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Stuart Craig's art direction and Gérard James's set decoration, and for James Acheson's costumes. Close and Pfeiffer were nominees, as was George Fenton for a score that blended nicely with excerpts from Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Gluck.

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr., Tom Bateman, Penélope Cruz, Josh Gad, Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Willem Dafoe. Screenplay: Michael Green, based on a novel by Agatha Christie. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Production design: Jim Clay. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Patrick Doyle.

Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)

Al Pacino in Scarface

Tony Montana: Al Pacino
Manny Ribera: Steven Bauer
Elvira Hancock: Michelle Pfeiffer
Gina Montana: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Frank Lopez: Robert Loggia
Mama Montana: Miriam Colon
Omar Suarez: F. Murray Abraham
Alejandro Sosa: Paul Shenar
Mel Bernstein: Harris Yulin

Director: Brian De Palma
Screenplay: Oliver Stone
Based on a screenplay by Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett adapted from a novel by Armitage Trail
Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
Art direction: Edward Richardson
Film editing: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray
Music: Giorgio Moroder

Brian De Palma's Scarface ends with a dedication of the film to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, the director of and the author of the story for the 1932 Scarface. As well it might, for De Palma's film and Oliver Stone's screenplay follow the outlined action and many of the characters of the earlier film far more closely than many remakes do. Most of the major characters have counterparts in the 1932 film: the Italian Tony Camonte becomes the Cuban Tony Montana; the first Tony's best friend, Guino Rinaldo, becomes Manny Ribera; Tony's sister, Cesca, becomes Gina; his boss Johnny Lovo's mistress, Poppy, becomes Tony Montana's boss Frank Lopez's mistress, Elvira. Both Mama Camonte and Mama Montana are sternly disapproving presences, and the appropriate characters are bumped off in more or less the same sequence and circumstances as in the earlier film. Because of the relaxation of censorship, there's a little heightening of some subtext from the first film: Gina taunts Tony Montana with having incestuous feelings for her more explicitly than Cesca ever dares with Tony Camonte. And although the earlier film was thought to be excessively violent, the remake goes boldly where it didn't dare, starting with a chainsaw murder and ending with a veritable orgy of gunfire, including that of Tony's "little friend," a grenade launcher. The violence of De Palma's film first earned it an X rating, which was bargained down to an R after some suggested cuts -- although De Palma has claimed that he actually released the film without the cuts, and no one noticed. The remake's violence also turned off many of the critics, although it received a strong thumbs up from Roger Ebert. Since then, of course, the movie has become a cult classic, and more people have seen the remake than have ever seen the original. Which is a shame, because the original, despite some occasional slack pacing and the inevitable antique feeling that lingers in even pre-Production Code movies, is a genuine classic, while De Palma's version feels like a rather studied attempt to go over the top. Screenwriter Stone was never noted for subtlety, and while Al Pacino is one of the great movie actors, De Palma lets him venture into self-caricature, especially with what might be called his Cubanoid accent. On the other hand, Steven Bauer -- who was born in Cuba and sounds nothing like Pacino's Tony -- is a more appealing sidekick than George Raft was, and Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of her first major film roles, makes a good deal more of Elvira than Karen Morley did of Poppy, even though Pfeiffer is asked to do little more than look beautifully sullen and bored throughout the film. Scarface is at best a trash classic, a movie whose impact is stronger than one wants it to be. 

The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)

Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Geraldine Chaplin, and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer: Daniel Day-Lewis
Ellen Olenska: Michelle Pfeiffer
May Welland: Winona Ryder
Larry Lefferts: Richard E. Grant
Sillerton Jackson: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Welland: Geraldine Chaplin
Regina Beaufort: Mary Beth Hurt
Julius Beaufort: Stuart Wilson
Mrs. Mingott: Miriam Margolyes
Mrs. Archer: Siân Phillips
Henry van der Luyden: Michael Gough
Louisa van der Luyden: Alexis Smith
Mr. Letterblair: Norman Lloyd
Rivière: Jonathan Pryce
Ted Archer: Robert Sean Leonard
Narrator: Joanne Woodward

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese
Based on a novel by Edith Wharton
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Gabriella Pescucci
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Voiceover narrators in movies are usually to be avoided: They often serve as a crutch for screenwriters and directors who can't tell their stories through dialogue and action. But Joanne Woodward's cool, wry, witty narrator in The Age of Innocence is an essential element: She's really playing Edith Wharton, or more properly the "narrative voice," the storyteller who is there to comment on and clarify the characters and their motives and backstories. It's a device, and a performance, that brings us closer to the source of the movie. Whether that's a good thing or not is subject to debate: Many think that trying to squeeze one medium, literature, together with another, motion pictures, does a disservice to both art forms. Still, The Age of Innocence does it better than most literary movies, including much of the late flood of Jane Austen adaptations and even some of the Merchant Ivory oeuvre. The chief criticism of the film is that it's over-upholstered, that the attention devoted to period detail tends to overwhelm the story. But Martin Scorsese assembled a cast that could upstage all the fabric and cutlery and crockery, starting with Woodward, but of course including the three stars on screen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, and extending to one of the best supporting casts ever mustered. My criticism is that the film is overlong, coming in at 139 minutes. I don't begrudge the time spent watching that cast, but the film does Wharton's story a disservice by making it seem more portentous than it is. Epic length in movies is justified if the topic demands it, like the Russian stand against Napoleon in Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1966) or the struggle to unite Italy in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963), to name two of the more successful historical epics. But Wharton was working, like Austen on her "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory," in comparative miniature, with a thin slice of history in which manners and morals, not countries and continents, were undergoing revolutionary change. Fiction like Wharton's is meditative, film like Scorsese's is visceral, and while narration like Woodward's allows for some of the first, what lives with us after the film ends is likely to be the impact of Dante Ferretti's production design, Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar-winning costumes, Elmer Bernstein's score, and especially Michael Ballhaus's images, not to mention the pleasure of watching Day-Lewis, Pfeiffer, Ryder, et al. at peak performance.