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Charles Chaplin and Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux |
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Monday, April 3, 2017
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
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Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in Drunken Angel |
Matsunaga: Toshiro Mifune
Okada: Reizaburo Yamamoto
Nanae: Michiyo Kogure
Miyo: Chieko Nakakita
Gin: Noriko Sengoko
Singer: Shizuko Kasagi
Takahama: Eitaro Shindo
Oyabun: Masao Shimizu
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Keinosuke Uekasa, Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Akikazu Kono
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Drunken Angel has been called Akira Kurosawa's Stagecoach, because just as John Ford established a fruitful director-actor team with John Wayne in his 1939 Western, in this movie Kurosawa launched a brilliant collaboration with Toshiro Mifune that lasted for 16 films. But to my mind, just as important, Drunken Angel marked the first teaming of Mifune with the great character actor Takashi Shimura. Kurosawa immediately saw the potential of the team, in which Shimura's low-key steadfastness serves as a foil for Mifune's volatility. He reteamed them in 1949 for two films, The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog, but their most memorable work together would come in Seven Samurai (1954), in which Shimura's wise and wily Kambei Shimada plays off beautifully against Mifune's madly unpredictable Kikuchiyo. In Drunken Angel, Shimura has the title role: an alcoholic doctor laboring in the slums of a postwar Japanese city. His clinic fronts a festering lake of sewage and his clientele comes largely from the neighboring nightclubs and brothels. Mifune plays Matsunaga, a swaggering young gangster with tuberculosis, who comes to Dr. Sanada hoping for a cure that won't put a crimp in his lifestyle. The screenplay by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa makes both characters into complex figures: Sanada's bitterness about his poverty and lack of status feeds his alcoholism, but he persists in trying to help his patients, even when, like Matsunaga, they resist his efforts, sometimes violently. Still, there's a bond between the two men in a recognition that they are both caught in traps they didn't make. What makes Drunken Angel more than just a clever reworking of film noir tropes -- another instance of Kurosawa's fascination with American movies -- is that it's a veiled commentary on the wounded Japan, in which the militaristic violence has been turned inward. Yesterday's soldier has become today's yakuza, still carrying on about honor and saving face. Kurosawa's film delivers an incisive criticism of some of the root problems facing his country. Made during the American occupation, when censorship was at its strictest, especially in depicting violence, Kurosawa nevertheless stages some vivid and intense fight scenes, using Mifune's physicality to great effect. That much of it occurs against a background of Western-style pop music only heightens its boldness.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
It's not hard to see why Alfred Hitchcock would want to remake his 1934 film version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It has good bones: a murder, a kidnapping, a political assassination plot, attractive international locations, colorful villainy, mistaken identifications, and innocents put in jeopardy by sheer accident. But he kind of blew it the first time with pallid protagonists (Leslie Banks and Edna Best), tedious comic byplay involving a sinister dentist, a wacky sun-worshiping cult, and a confusingly staged climactic shootout. Today it's best remembered for Peter Lorre's delicious villainy in his first English-language role. For the remake, Hitchcock supposedly told screenwriter John Michael Hayes not to watch the original or to read its screenplay by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, but to follow his own retelling of the story. The result is a more supple narrative, and the stars, Doris Day and James Stewart, are a definite improvement over Best and Banks. Hayes has made them a rather edgy couple: She's an internationally known musical star who has gone into retirement to marry him, a Midwestern surgeon. He seems to be a bit resentful of her celebrity, and she seems to be a little disappointed at having to settle down in Indianapolis. He's given to outbursts of temper that she sometimes has to quell before he does something rash. Their marital tension never results in an out-and-out fight, but it makes for some uneasy moments. In some respects they verge on '50s stereotypes of male and female roles: He pulls out his medical expertise and administers a sedative to her before telling her that their son has been kidnapped, a rather extreme form of mansplaining. In the 1934 film, Best played an award-winning sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the villain, while Day is given a softer task: She helps locate their kidnapped son by singing (and singing and singing) "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," the film's Oscar-winning song. The remake is 45 minutes longer than the original, and it seems a little overextended. Still, the performances are good, and Robert Burks's Technicolor cinematography and the Marrakesh location of the first part of the film give the remake a definite edge, as does Bernard Herrmann's score. Herrmann makes his only on-camera appearance conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the "Storm Cloud Cantata" at the Royal Albert Hall, in the pivotal scene that was carried over from the 1934 version.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Where Is My Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
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Babek Ahmed Poor in Where Is My Friend's House? |
*The Persian title has been translated several different ways: IMDb, for example, calls it Where Is the Friend's Home? I prefer "my friend's house" as more colloquial, and because it avoids the real-estate-agent coziness that tries to pretend that every house is a home.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)
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Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini, and Alberto Sordi in I Vitelloni |
Alberto: Alberto Sordi
Fausto Moretti: Franco Fabrizi
Leopoldo Vannucci: Leopoldo Trieste
Riccardo: Riccardo Fellini
Sandra Rubini: Leonora Ruffo
Francesco Moretti: Jean Brochard
Sergio Natali: Achille Majeroni
Guido: Guido Martufi
Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasati
Production design: Mario Chiari
Film editing: Rolando Benedetti
Music: Nino Rota
The international success of I Vitelloni launched Federico Fellini's directing career after the comparative failures of Variety Lights (1951), which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, and The White Sheik (1952), his first solo directing effort. It also earned him an Oscar nomination for screenwriting, which he shared with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It's certainly one of his most endearing early films, made before his familiar mannerisms set in -- though there are glimpses of those in the tawdry theatrical sequence with the grotesque aging actor played by Achille Majeroni (a part that Fellini tried to persuade Vittorio De Sica to play). But somehow it has taken me several viewings over the years to fully appreciate it. I think that's because Fellini's greatest films have a strong central character -- usually played by Giulietta Masini or Marcello Mastroianni -- to hold the narrative together. I Vitelloni is by definition and title an ensemble picture, but it's also the first of Fellini's excursions into himself, concluding with the Fellini surrogate, Moraldo Rubini boarding a train that will take him away from the idlers of his provincial home town -- and presumably to Rome, where he will become the jaded Marcello Rubini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and the blocked director Guido Anselmi of 8 1/2 (1963). The problem is that the character of Moraldo isn't written strongly enough or given enough substance by the actor: Franco Interlenghi, who was discovered by Roberto Rossellini and cast in Shoeshine (1946), had a long career in films and TV in Italy, but the part in I Vitelloni demands someone with more charisma -- a young Mastroianni, in short. Moraldo is overshadowed by the womanizing Fausto and by the comic figures of Alberto and Leopoldo. The scenes that should develop Moraldo as a central figure don't quite work, particularly the early-morning encounters with Guido, a boy on his way to work at the railroad station -- a sharp counterpoint to the idling vitelloni. "Are you happy?" Moraldo asks the boy. "Why not?" he replies. The exchange seems designed to undercut the frenetic strivings and complaints of the vitelloni, who chafe against the boredom and provinciality of the town, but don't seem to be able to muster enough resolve to do something about it, instead continuing to pursue phantoms of creative or sexual success. The trouble with the Moraldo-Guido scenes is that they come out of nowhere narratively -- and even have oddly uncomfortable (and probably unintended) hints of pedophilia on Moraldo's part. Nor do they satisfactorily set up the film's ending: Moraldo departs and we see Guido walking along the train tracks, the former facing up to the uncertain future, the latter heading comfortably back into his routine. Still, it's a film held together by the score by Fellini's great collaborator Nino Rota, and filled with the boundless energy that often rescued Fellini from his worst impulses.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
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Kinuyo Tanaka in The Life of Oharu |
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
It's been some years since I last saw The Deer Hunter, and watching it again last night I found it had a different resonance for me. It was no longer a film about the Vietnam War, but instead a film about the destruction of the American industrial working class. Who is willing to bet that the steel mill in which Michael (Robert De Niro) and his buddies work is still open? And who can doubt that the group singing "God Bless America" at the film's end, and their progeny, all voted for Donald Trump, responding to his "Make America Great Again" call and helping him carry the state of Pennsylvania? The Deer Hunter didn't even start out to be a film about Vietnam: The germ of it was a screenplay by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn Redeker about people who bet on Russian roulette in Las Vegas. Michael Cimino was brought on to direct and to develop the script with Deric Washburn. Many drafts, arguments, and hurt feelings later, it had become a film about steelworker buddies who go off to Vietnam, and the Russian roulette had become first a torture method used by the Viet Cong and then a device to symbolize the destructive effect of the war on the American psyche. It remains the most controversial part of the film -- there are many who assert that Russian roulette was never used as torture or for gambling in the back streets of Saigon -- but there's no denying its dramatic potency or the larger symbolic role it plays. The great strength of the film lies not in its screenplay but in its performances, starting with De Niro, whose Michael is the embodiment of Hemingwayesque "grace under pressure." De Niro was also responsible for the casting of Meryl Streep as Linda, a small role in which she does what she can to offset the machismo in which the film is awash, and which earned her the first of her record-setting string of Oscar nominations. Along with Streep came her lover, John Cazale, whom the producers wanted to fire because he was dying of cancer and was hence uninsurable, but Streep refused to appear without him. Christopher Walken did win an Oscar as Nick, and there are memorable performances from John Savage and George Dzundza as well. It's the strength of this ensemble that keeps the film from flying out of control as Cimino's follow-up, Heaven's Gate (1980), so disastrously did. Certainly there are signs in The Deer Hunter of Cimino's fatal self-indulgence, particularly the overextended exuberance of the wedding reception scene, which anticipates the out-of-control Harvard commencement sequence in Heaven's Gate. Neither scene adds measurably to the narrative or the themes of its respective film, but Cimino bitterly fought all efforts to trim the wedding sequence in the editing process, and later claimed, after editor Peter Zinner won an Oscar, that he had edited the film himself. Because of its sloppiness and self-indulgence, I hesitate to call The Deer Hunter a great film, but it's certainly one in touch with the darkest strain of recent American history.
Monday, March 27, 2017
Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)
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Cinqué Lee and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in Mystery Train |
Mitsuko: Yuki Kodo
Night Clerk: Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Bell Boy: Cinqué Lee
Luisa: Nicoletta Braschi
Dee Dee: Elizabeth Bracco
Johnny: Joe Strummer
Will Robinson: Rick Aviles
Charlie the Barber: Steve Buscemi
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robbie Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop
Film editing: Melody London
Music: John Lurie
I was born 40 miles from Tupelo, 75 miles from Memphis, and five years and nine months after Elvis Presley, but I grew up preferring the jazz-pop standards of Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, and Porter, and singers like Jo Stafford and Mel Tormé. It took me a number of years before I finally caught up with what was supposedly my generation, but eventually I succumbed to the myth of the King -- just in time to witness its deconstruction. That's partly what's going on in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, a film that dragged me back to my own roots the moment I saw the City of New Orleans racing through a kudzu-shrouded railway cut. The myth is still so potent that it can draw young Japanese tourists from Yokohama to Memphis to visit Sun Records and Graceland, but also so porous that Jarmusch can peer through it -- like the ghost of Elvis that visits Luisa -- and glimpse some of the racial injustice that elevated Elvis to superstardom and left black musicians like Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Rufus Thomas (both of whom have roles in the film) struggling for recognition. If the film's three interlocking stories feel too much like a familiar contrivance, it's worth remembering that Mystery Train was made five years before Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and probably influenced it. The first segment, with the young tourists Jun and Mitsuko providing a decidedly original point of view on a country they view through the lens of rock 'n' roll, is the best. The middle one, in which the newly widowed Luisa drifts toward the same hotel where Jun and Mitsuko are staying and winds up sharing a room with the frenetic Dee Dee, is the weakest, particularly Luisa's ghost-sighting. The third section, with the wonderfully eccentric trio of Joe Strummer, Rick Aviles, and Steve Buscemi, ties everything together, but fortunately it doesn't do it so neatly that it feels phony. And the intermediary scenes with Hawkins as desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as bellhop keep everything in the skewed perspective that the film needs. Robby Müller's cinematography treats the characters in the film's three episodes as only transients through the city: He and Jarmusch often frame a scene, like the downtown buildings rising in the distance beyond vacant lots, and have the characters walk through the frame. The boarded-up storefronts and empty streets have an ironic permanence to them that the characters lack, so that the central character in Mystery Train is Memphis itself, seen here as bleak and grimy but still charged with some of the vital spark that gave rise to so much music. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay before he ever visited Memphis, but he found exactly what he anticipated there.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Foreign Correspondent was made by people walking on eggs as they worked their way through a minefield. It displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward, a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca.
*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.
*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
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Isao Shirasawa, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Kuniko Miyake, and Zen Murase in Early Summer |
Koichi Mamiya: Chishu Ryu
Aya Tamura: Chikage Awashima
Fumiko Mamiya: Kuniko Miyake
Shukichi Mamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Shige Mamiya: Chieko Higashiyama
Tami Yabe: Haruko Sugimura
Takako: Kuniko Igawa
Kenkichi Yabe: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Sotaro Satake: Shuji Sano
Nobo Tamura: Toyo Takahashi
Nishiwaki: Seiji Miyaguchi
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito
Early Summer is the second of the "seasonal" films made by Yasujiro Ozu in what is now recognized as his peak postwar period. The first was Late Spring (1949), and they were followed by Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I mention this chiefly because the English-language titles confuse even Ozu's hard-core admirers, among whom I count myself. "Was that Early Summer or The End of Summer?" we find ourselves asking when we're talking about Ozu's films. The confusion is further compounded by the fact that four of them starred the marvelous Setsuko Hara. It also doesn't help that the name of her character in Early Summer is Noriko, which was the name of her characters in Late Spring and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). So we have to remind ourselves that in Early Summer she is Noriko Mamiya, the unmarried 28-year-old daughter of Shukichi and Shige Mamiya. She lives with them as well as with her brother, Koichi, and sister-in-law, Fumiko, and their two bratty sons. She also has a well-paying clerical job and a group of old girlfriends from her schooldays. So why does everyone, even her boss, want her to get married? When her boss starts arranging things with an old business friend of his, her family encourages the connection, even though she's never met the man and he's in his early 40s. Noriko has a mind of her own, however, and eventually surprises everyone -- perhaps even herself -- with her decision. It's a comedy-drama in which nothing exciting happens -- even key events like the search for the bratty boys when they decide to run away from home take place mostly off-screen -- but Ozu holds everything in such delicate suspension, allowing us to meditate on the relationships at length, that we get caught up in the everyday lives of the film's huge cast. There are some wonderful scenes between Noriko and her girlfriends, who share the kind of in-jokes that old friends everywhere have. Some of these are lost in translation, but even that reminds us of real life, when we're left out of a group's established routines. And sometimes the subtitles wittily help us out, finding equivalents for the hick accents Noriko and her friend adopt when talking about the possibility of moving from Tokyo to the country. Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda bring the characters to life in their private moments, as when Shukichi and Shige talk wistfully about the son who remained MIA after the war, or when they see a balloon floating ahead and reflect on how sad the child who lost it must be. No filmmaker had a profounder sense of the inner lives of people in their ordinary routine.
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