Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Nikolay Burlyaev in Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev: Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Daniil Chyornyi: Nikolay Grinko
Theophanes the Greek: Nikolay Sergeyev
Boriska: Nikolay Burlyaev
Kirill: Ivan Lapikov
Durochka: Irma Raush
Prince Yuri/Prince Vasiliy: Yuriy Nazarov
Patrikei: Yuriy Nikilin
The Jester: Rolan Bykov
Foma: Mikhail Kononov

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Andrey Konchalovskiy, Andrei Tarkovsky
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Production design: Evgeniy Chernyaev
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Has any filmmaker ever made more eloquent use of the widescreen format than Andrei Tarkovsky does in Andrei Rublev? It was a process developed by Hollywood to help win its war with television -- bigger naturally assumed to be better. In Hollywood, it usually went hand-in-hand with color, and although the various widescreen processes -- Cinerama, Cinemascope, VistaVision, etc. -- were used in black-and-white films, they often feel out of place today. A case in point: The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959), which won an Oscar for the cinematography of William C. Mellor, but which seems to cry out for a format less expansive than CinemaScope, in which the Frank family's attic seems far too spacious. Andrei Rublev was filmed in a process called Sovscope, which like CinemaScope used anamorphic lenses to produce a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov artfully work with the expanse of the screen, not shying away from closeups but also doing extraordinary movement with the camera. One of the earliest scenes takes place in the barn in which Rublev and his fellow artist-monks take shelter from the rain. We are given an astonishing 360-degree pan inside the barn, circling from the monks to the other denizens of the shelter and back to the monks, a study in faces that establishes one of the film's major subjects: the nature of Russian humanity, which also becomes an abiding concern of Rublev's. (I think there's a witty acknowledgment of the nature of widescreen in that the peep-hole cut into the wall of the bar seems to have the same aspect ratio as the film.) And in the concluding sequence, there is a magnificent pan from the gates of the walled city of Vladimir below and the emerging procession up to the structure that holds the newly cast bell, where Boriska waits anxiously. Andrei Rublev is one of those films I can't help rewatching; even though (or perhaps because) it's slow and challenging, it more than repays frequent viewings. Tarkovsky is not a director to be taken lightly, and the moment you begin to be lulled by the magnificence of Yusov's cinematography or Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov's score, the director is likely to shock you with images of cruelty and brutality but also of beauty that make you sit upright. A "trigger warning" might be especially needed for lovers of animals, given the harshness with which they are occasionally treated: There is a scene with a cow on fire that will likely haunt me for a long time. But all the unpleasantness in the film is in service of a story about the persistence of the Russian people and the transcendence of art. Anatoliy Solonitsyn, who plays Rublev, looks a bit like Viggo Mortensen, and recalls for me the tormented masculinity you find in some of Mortensen's performances. Another standout performance is given by Tarkovsky's wife, billed as Irma Raush, as the "holy fool" Durochka, whom Rublev saves from a massacre by the Tatars by killing the assailant -- leading Rublev to atone by giving up his painting and taking a vow of silence. The last section of the film is given over to young Boriska, played by Nikolay Burlyaev, the astonishing Ivan in Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962), who takes on the task of casting a church bell despite the suggestion that he will be murdered by the tyrannical Grand Prince if he fails. Although the film is in black-and-white, it concludes with a breathtaking color sequence in which Rublev's paintings are shown in close-up. (To my mind, this  final ecstatic survey of Rublev's work is the only section in which Tarkovsky is thwarted by the widescreen process: Rublev's paintings had an aspiring verticality that is at odds with the dimensions of the screen.)

Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929)

Is Mary Pickford's performance in Coquette the worst ever to win a best actress Oscar? It's certainly a bad performance, full of cute mannerisms and telegraphed emotions, along with a terrible attempt at a Southern accent. At 37, Pickford was about 20 years too old to play the flirtatious young Norma Besant, a fact that becomes especially clear when she sits on the lap of Louise Beavers, who plays her "mammy," the black servant who raised her -- Beavers was ten years younger than Pickford. But this was Pickford's first talkie after 20 years in silent films in which she become the movies' first superstar, and unlike some silent stars, she demonstrates a perfectly fine speaking voice. Still, after three more features that did only passable box office, she took the hint and retired. The main problem with Coquette is not Pickford but the creakiness of the vehicle, which had been a stage hit for Helen Hayes. The melodrama, about a flirtatious girl whose carelessness brings about disaster for both the man she loves (Johnny Mack Brown) and her father (John St. Polis) who objects to their love, is stagebound, largely because of the limitations of early sound technology, but also because screenwriter-director Sam Taylor had not made a sound film before. Pickford appears game throughout, and she's certainly a better actor than Brown or St. Polis, not to mention the callow William Janney, who plays Pickford's younger brother. In one scene Janney wears one of the most eye-offending outfits ever seen on-screen: a plaid sweater tucked into deep-pleated striped pants. My retinas have yet to recover. It's very possible that Pickford's performance stood out against the others that are in Academy records as under consideration (there were no official nominations that year): Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (Lionel Barrymore), Betty Compson in The Barker (George Fitzmaurice), Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (Jean de Limur), Corinne Griffith in The Divine Lady (Frank Lloyd), and Bessie Love in The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont). I've been unable to see the performances by Chatterton and Compson, but my pick so far would be Eagels.

No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1985)

I probably should have brushed up on the political situation -- the suppression of Solidarity, the imposition of martial law -- in Poland in 1982, the time depicted in Kieslowski's film. It would have made the narrative a little easier to follow, and would have more readily explained the melancholy, despairing tone that pervades the entire film. On the other hand, Kieslowski and his co-screenwriter, Krzysztov Piesiewicz, make things emotionally lucid for at least this uninformed viewer. After all, I don't expect a film to rest entirely on a knowledge of outside context to succeed: All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) is still an acclaimed movie, even though most people who watch it today didn't sit glued to their TV sets, as I did, during the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon. What makes Kieslowski's film work is placing its politics in the context of personal loss, the death of the lawyer Antek Zyro (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and its effect on his wife, Urszula (Grazyna Szapolowska), and child (Krzysztof Krzeminski). Having the dead Antek address the camera at the film's beginning is a bold move, one that threatens to turn the film into a sentimental fable about a love that persists after death. But as we see, the relationship of husband and wife was not an ideal one, and the feeling of guilt that she experiences after his death is potently developed. (I'm not sure it entirely justifies the film's ending, however.) The point here is that a premature death like Antek's inevitably results in unfinished business, not only in the life of his family but also in the legal case, that of the incarcerated political prisoner Darek Stach (Artur Barcis) he left undefended. The defense of Stach devolves upon Mieczyslaw Labrador (Aleksander Bardini), the aging lawyer who would not have been Antek's choice for the role. Labrador saves Stach from a longer prison term by engineering a compromise with the judge, a move opposed by Labrador's own assistant (Michal Bajor), who still clings to some of the ideals of the suppressed Solidarity movement. The decision makes no one really happy, because Stach, like everyone else in Poland, isn't really free. The interweaving of the Stach case and Urszula's attempts to resume a normal life despite grief and guilt is sensitively handled, with the great help of Krystyna Rutkowska's editing and Zbigniew Preisner's score.

Two With Roscoe Arbuckle

The Round-Up (George Melford, 1920)
"Nobody loves a fat man," the kicker line for Arbuckle's 1920 feature, was meant to be wistfully ironic, since at the time, everybody loved "Fatty" Arbuckle (a nickname he hated). The irony went from wistful to bitter in a couple of years, when the scandal surrounding the death of Virginia Rappe turned Arbuckle into one of the country's most despised men, bringing his career to a halt. But when The Round-Up was made, Arbuckle was so popular that he received the featured billing for a film in which he was a supporting player, the comic relief in a somewhat routine Western. Arbuckle plays the sheriff in a small Arizona town, where he's much admired because he uses his dexterity, rather than his fists or guns, to disarm the bad guys. But he's painfully shy around women, which is why he loses the girl he loves (Jean Acker) to someone else. The main story revolves around a prospector (Irving Cummings) who is thought to be dead, so his girlfriend (Mabel Julienne Scott) marries someone else. Meanwhile, a lot of trouble gets stirred up by the "half-breed" Buck McKee (Wallace Beery). Things get sorted out eventually after a lot of chases and gunfights. Arbuckle and Beery are the best things in the movie, along with some location scenery handsomely photographed by Paul P. Perry.

The Life of the Party (Joseph Henabery, 1920)
As a knockabout comedy more in the Arbuckle mainstream, The Life of the Party seems designed largely to provide him with an opportunity to dress up in children's party clothes. The plot has to deal with a women's group who are out to bust up a trust that fixes the price of milk. Arbuckle plays Algernon Leary, an unscrupulous lawyer who is at first willing to go along with the trust, but is converted to their side by a pretty young member of the group (Viora Daniel). She also happens to be engaged to a judge (Frank Campeau) who, unknown to her, is in the pockets of the milk trust. This leads to much farcical running around, especially after the women's group decides to throw a fundraising party to which everyone is expected to come dressed as babies. It all goes on too long. The cast includes Roscoe Karns, an actor who didn't really come into his own until sound arrived, giving him the chance to reel off snappy patter for Howard Hawks in Twentieth Century (1934) and His Girl Friday (1940).

In Life of the Party, Arbuckle attends a party in which the guests dress as babies.

Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Berthelet, 1916)

It's easy to see why William Gillette was such a success on stage as Sherlock Holmes: He has the calm centeredness that the best Sherlocks possess. I'm thinking of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett here; even though I like Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in their versions, the contemporary setting makes them more active and volatile, not to say eccentric, than the traditional Victorian Holmeses. But Conan Doyle's character was not, I think, a good fit for silent film: I missed the detective's ingenious deductions that provide so much of the wit in Conan Doyle's tales and don't fit neatly onto title cards. The plot, cobbled together from several stories, is also both needlessly complex and tiresomely chopped up into discrete "acts." Apparently the surviving version of the film is a conversion of the American original into a French four-part serial. Gillette and Edward Fielding as Dr. Watson (here limited for the most part to the fourth segment) seem to have an awareness that less is more when it comes to film acting, but most of the company is made up of scenery-chewers, particularly Mario Majeroni and Grace Reals as the villainous Larrabees. Ernest Maupain isn't a terribly convincing Emperor of Crime as Moriarty, considering that his chief function is to bluster about bumping off Holmes, in which he is repeatedly thwarted, and his henchmen (one of whom is reportedly the later-to-be-famous character actor Edward Arnold) do a lot of ludicrous skulking and crouching. Still, it's a valuable record of Gillette's famous role and really not an unwatchable movie.

The Grim Game (Irvin Willat, 1919)

Harry Houdini escapes from all sorts of things in this film: handcuffs, shackles, a straitjacket, a bear trap, and even a plane crash. But the one thing he can't escape from is the movie's incredibly snarled plot. Houdini plays Harvey Hanford (apt alliteration's artful aid), a reporter for a newspaper that's on the verge of going out of business unless its owner (Augustus Phillips) can get the money he needs from a skinflint backer (Thomas Jefferson). So Hanford cooks up a plot to have the old miser, who just happens to have a lovely ward (Ann Forrest) with whom Hanford is smitten, taken off to a retreat by a showgirl (Mae Busch) posing as a nurse. Then Hanford will plant traces suggesting that the old man has been murdered for his money -- traces that incriminate Hanford. The reason for all this is a little screwy: Hanford has been working on a story about people unjustly convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, though what that has to do with getting the backer to pony up isn't clear. What Hanford doesn't reckon with is the fact that the newspaper owner and his cronies, a lawyer (Tully Marshall) and a doctor (Arthur Hoyt), have their own reasons for wanting the old man dead, so when he's found murdered, Hanford becomes the prime suspect. Got that? The whole thing is an excuse to show off Houdini's stunts, but he was not a very interesting film actor. Whatever charisma he had on stage was lost in close-ups, revealing him as a balding middle-aged man with an overbite that reminds me of a Simpsons character. The film was long thought to be lost, but it had been carefully preserved by a collector, and the restored version, in remarkably good shape, was shown publicly for the first time in 96 years this past March. The movie's highlight, other than seeing the actual Houdini at work, is some remarkable aerial photography and stunt work that resulted in an accidental mid-air plane collision being caught on film. The planes managed to land safely: The crash shown in the movie is staged.

Still Alice (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

After four previous nominations, Julianne Moore was overdue for an Oscar. I just wish she had won for a more challenging film than Still Alice, a middlebrow, middle-of-the-road movie that unfortunately suggests a slicked-up power-cast version of a Lifetime problem drama. It goes without saying that, with her luminous natural style, Moore can act the hell out of anything she's given: When she played Sarah Palin in Game Change (Jay Roach, 2012) on HBO, she even made me forget Tina Fey's great caricature of that eminently caricaturable politician, and did it without resorting to caricature. What bothers me most about Still Alice is its choice of an affluent white professional, a linguistics professor with a physician husband (Alec Baldwin) and an attractive family, to carry the burden of what the movie has to say about Alzheimer's. Why couldn't the film have been about the effect of early-onset Alzheimer's on a black or Latino family, or someone faced with meeting the bills -- a waitress or a secretary or a factory worker, perhaps? The screenplay (by directors Glatzer and Westmoreland, from Lisa Genova's novel) even shamefully asserts at one point that the disease is particularly difficult for "educated" people. The movie has its good points, of course. Kristen Stewart, as Alice's younger daughter, is a revelation. I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies, but I gather that even those who have were startled by the skill and maturity of Stewart's performance. And the scene in which Alice discovers the suicide instructions left by herself before the disease had progressed is deftly handled, as the disease itself prevents Alice from remembering and following through on the instructions. The film also has some poignancy in the fact that director-screenwriter Glatzer, who was Westmoreland's husband, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and died from the disease in 2015. But I think the use in Still Alice of excerpts from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, suggesting a parallel between Alzheimer's and AIDS, is unfortunate.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange

Alex: Malcolm McDowell
Dim: Warren Clarke
Georgie: James Marcus
Pete: Michael Tarn
Mr. Alexander: Patrick Magee
Mrs. Alexander: Adrienne Corri
Deltoid: Aubrey Morris
Catlady: Miriam Karlin
Minister: Anthony Sharp

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick
Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess
Cinematography: John Alcott
Production design: John Barry
Costume design: Milena Canonero
Film editing: Bill Butler

Any movie that was panned by Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert can't be all bad, can it? A Clockwork Orange remains one of Stanley Kubrick's most popular films, with an 8.4 rating on IMDb and a 90% fresh rating (93% audience score) on Rotten Tomatoes.  I think it's a tribute to Kubrick that the movie can elicit such widely divergent responses. I can see what Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are complaining about while at the same time admitting that the film is undeniably entertaining in a "horrorshow" way: that being both novelist Anthony Burgess's Nadsat coinage from the Russian word "khorosho," meaning "good," and the English literal sense. For it is a kind of horror movie, with Alex as the monster spawned by modern society -- implacable, controlled only by the most drastic and abhorrent means, in this case a kind of behavioral conditioning. Watching it this time I was struck by how much the aversion therapy to which Alex is subjected reminds me of the attempts to convert gay people to heterosexuality. Which is not to say that Kubrick's film isn't exploitative in the extreme, relying on images of violence and sexuality that almost justify Kael's suggestion that Kubrick is a kind of failed pornographer. It is not the kind of movie that should go without what today are called "trigger warnings." What's good about A Clockwork Orange is certainly Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex, one of the few really complex human beings in Kubrick's caricature-infested films. Some of his most memorable scenes in the movie were partly improvised, as when he sings "Singin' in the Rain" during his attack on the Alexanders, and when he opens his mouth like a bird when the minister of the interior is feeding him. Kubrick received three Oscar nominations, as producer, director, and screenwriter, and film editor Bill Butler was also nominated, but the movie won none, losing in all four categories to The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). It deserved nominations not only for McDowell, but also for John Alcott's cinematography and John Barry's production design.

The White Sister (Henry King, 1923)

Watching Lillian Gish in a film directed by Henry King after seeing her as directed by D.W. Griffith, Victor Sjöstrom, and King Vidor is, to say the least, instructive. All four of these movies are romantic melodramas (though The Scarlet Letter is lightly touched by the greatness of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel), but Griffith, Sjöstrom, and Vidor each possessed a degree of genius, whereas King will never be regarded as anything more than a director of solid competence. Despite his long career, which ranged from 1915 to 1962, amassing credits on IMDb for directing 116 films, his movies are not particularly memorable. Who, today, seeks out The Song of Bernadette (1943) or Wilson (1944), two of the "prestige" films he directed for 20th Century-Fox? In his great auteurist survey The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, the best Andrew Sarris has to say about these and other movies directed by King is that they display a "plodding intensity." King was, in Sarris's words, "turgid and rhetorical in his narrative style," and that certainly holds true for The White Sister. Griffith, Sjöstrom, and Vidor all made use of Gish's rapport with the camera, her ability to suggest an entire range of emotions with her eyes alone -- hence the many close-ups she is given in their films. But King, filming on location in Italy and Algeria, is more interested in the settings than in the people inhabiting them. (Roy Overbaugh's cinematography is one of the film's virtues.) Nor does he seem interested in moving the story along, dragging it out to a wearisome 143 minutes. When Prince Chiaromonte (Charles Lane), the father of Angela (Gish) and her wicked half-sister, the Marchesa di Mola (Gail Kane), goes out fox-hunting, we're pretty sure that disaster is about to happen. But King stretches out the hunt so long that when Chiaromonte is killed the accident has no great emotional impact. And when Angela takes her vows as a nun, effectively preventing her from marrying Captain Severini (Ronald Colman), the man she loves but thinks is dead, King gives us every moment of the ceremony, trying to generate suspense by occasional cuts to Severini's ship steaming homeward. There's also an erupting volcano at the picture's end, but King fails to stage or cut it for real suspense. Gish is perfectly fine, though she's not called on to do much but look pious and to go cataleptic when Angela receives the news of Severini's supposed death. Colman is handsome but not much else, and Kane's villainy seems to be signaled by her talking out of the side of her mouth, as if channeling Dick Cheney many years in advance.

Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920)

If Griffith's sententious title cards (e.g.,"Not by laws -- our Statutes are now overburdened by ignored laws -- but within the heart of man, the truth must bloom that his greatest happiness lies in his purity and constancy") don't have some viewers reaching for the remote, then the cornpone comic antics of his stereotypical rustics, such as the toothless constable (George Neville) and the hayseed Hi Holler (Edgar Nelson), certainly will. But stick with it to witness one of the great action sequences on film, Anna (Lillian Gish) adrift on the ice floe, as well as one of Gish's greatest moments as an actress, when she baptizes her dying baby. Yes, it's all hokum -- what do you expect from a melodrama almost a century old? But it's magnificent, enduring hokum, done brilliantly by a director who now seems more than just a pioneer but an artist of stature. And yes, that stature is tarnished by the man's racism in The Birth of a Nation (1915), just as Wagner's operas are tarnished by the anti-Semitism that many see lurking beneath their surface. But we don't have to endorse our artists to appreciate them, and the great efficiency with which Griffith tells a story and keeps us on the edge of our seats -- even when we know that his sentimentality is antique and outworn -- is something to be appreciated. Credit, too, must go to Billy Bitzer and the other cinematographers (Paul H. Allen, Charles Downs, and Hendrik Sartov) who gave us images that seem well beyond the years in which they were filmed. I do admit to some surprise that there are so many scenes in Way Down East that Griffith is content to film as if they were happening on a proscenium stage when one of his great contributions to the art of cinema is providing a fluidity and intimacy that are unavailable in the theater. Perhaps he was trying to do justice to his set designers, Clifford Pember and Charles O. Seessel, whose work is quite spectacular. But nothing before or since has quite equaled the ice floe sequence.