The Blackbird (Tod Browning, 1926)

The Blackbird begins with an atmospheric re-creation of Victorian Limehouse, with set designs by Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie impressively lighted and shot by cinematographer Percy Hilburn. But it turns into a routine melodrama showcase for Lon Chaney, who plays both the title character, a thief, and his alter ego, the Bishop, who pretends to be a missionary in the district. No one seems to suspect that the Blackbird and the Bishop are the same person, because in the latter persona Chaney contorts himself, holding one shoulder higher than the other and twisting one leg into an impossible position. Eventually, this masquerade will prove the truth of your mother's adage that if you keep contorting your face or body like that, it'll freeze that way. But in the meantime, the Blackbird falls for a music hall performer, Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée), who is also being pursued by a society toff (Owen Moore) known as West End Bertie. He's a thief, too, but in his case love for Fifi proves stronger than larceny. Browning, who also wrote the story (with Waldemar Young), handles this nonsense well. Adorée is charming, and her slightly risqué puppet show is fun, but the only real reason to see this movie is to admire Chaney's unfailing commitment to his considerable art.

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Rick Deckard: Harrison Ford
Roy Batty: Rutger Hauer
Rachael: Sean Young
Gaff: Edward James Olmos
Bryant: M. Emmet Walsh
Pris: Daryl Hannah
J.F. Sebastian: William Sanderson
Zhora: Joanna Cassidy

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples
Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick
Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth
Production design: Laurence G. Paull
Film editing: Marsha Nakashima, Terry Rawlings
Music: Vangelis

I had forgotten that Blade Runner, with its flying cars, ads for Atari and Pan Am, and rainy Los Angeles, was set in the year 2019, which unless things change radically in the next four years puts it on a par with 1984 (Michael Anderson, 1956) and 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) for missed prognostications. Yet despite this, and even more despite the great advances in special effects technology, this 33-year-old movie hardly feels dated. That's because it isn't over-infatuated with the technological whiz-bang of so many sci-fi films, especially since the advances in CGI. Its effects, supervised by the great Douglas Trumbull, have the solidity and tactility so often missing in CGI work, because they're very much  in service of the vision of production designer Laurence G. Paull, art director David L. Snyder, and especially "visual futurist" Syd Mead. But more especially because they're in service of the humanity whose very questionable nature is the point of Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It also helps that the film has a terrific cast. Harrison Ford can't help bringing a bit of Han Solo and Indiana Jones to every movie, but it's entirely appropriate here -- one time when a star image doesn't fight the script. Rutger Hauer makes Roy Batty's death scene memorable, and even Sean Young, a problematic actress at best, comes off well. (I think it's because when we first see her, she's dressed and coiffed like a drag-queen Joan Crawford, so that when she literally lets her hair down she takes on a softness we're not accustomed to from her.) And then there's Edward James Olmos as the enigmatic origamist Gaff, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, and especially Joanna Cassidy, who manages to achieve poignancy even wearing a transparent plastic raincoat. I only wish that HBO would scrap its print of the "voice-over" version of the film, with Ford's sporadic narrative and the happy ending demanded by Warner Bros., and show director Scott's 2007 "Final Cut" version instead.

Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979)

If Norma Rae were made today (which it wouldn't be), it would have to end with the owners closing the textile mill after the pro-union vote and shipping the jobs to Sri Lanka. Only two years after the movie was released, Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers, giving impetus to the anti-union movement that persists to this day. Which is not just to say that Norma Rae is dated -- it was a bit that way at the time -- but that it persists in the memory largely because of Sally Field's breakthrough performance. It won her her first Oscar, and a well-deserved one: She carries the movie as few actresses have done before or since, freeing her from the trap that the TV series Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70) had caught her in. She had proved herself with the 1976 TV miniseries Sybil, for which she won an Emmy, but nothing demonstrated her ability to hold an audience in her grasp like Norma Rae. The screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. also earned an Oscar nomination, but it's scattered and sketchy, only touching lightly on the many elements of union organizing in the South -- racism, political chicanery, violence -- which are probably more important to understand than what the film focuses on: the grit and determination of one young textile worker and one stereotypically lefty Jewish organizer (Ron Leibman). Field has spoken of the difficulty faced by an actress even after she has won two Oscars -- her second was for Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984) -- in finding challenging roles, and the career of Hilary Swank is a solid confirmation of that.

Once (John Carney, 2006)

Once is an entirely likable little movie with some good music, pleasant performances by unknowns, and a setting (contemporary Dublin) that hasn't been overworked into familiarity. It's also a film with a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which means that out of 154 reviews surveyed by the site, 149 of them were favorable. That gives it a higher rating on the Tomatometer than No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007) which won the best picture Oscar the same year that Once just took home the Oscar for best original song ("Falling Slowly"). It's also a better ranking than last year's critical hit and Oscar winner Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu), and is right on par with the current critical favorite, Spotlight (Tom McCarthy). On IMDb, Once currently has a 7.9 ranking (on a scale of 10), and is the 1,651st most popular film of all time.  I mention all this because we seem to have gone a little crazy with critical ranking systems. Sometimes films come along that capture critics' hearts because they are simpler and don't mount an assault on the senses that the effects-laden blockbusters the critics are obligated to watch do, which is why Once succeeds for them. But is Once a great picture just because it asks less of a viewer? Criticism today is part consumer guide and part serious analysis. So as a consumer guide, I would have no hesitation recommending Once to anyone who asked if I'd seen anything good lately, but it's a nice little movie that does nothing challenging to its viewers, which is why I will probably have forgotten it by the time someone gets around to asking me that question. On the other hand, I would hesitate to recommend to just anyone some of the movies I've watched lately that will stick with me for a long time  -- I mean films like A Man Escaped, Andrei Rublev, Fists in the Pocket, Jeanne Dielman, Leviathan, or Mamma Roma.

Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Imagine Bernie without Jack Black, but with, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. Hoffman would have played the hell out of the part, which is one of the reasons he is so sorely missed, but the tone of the film would have been very different. What Black brings to the role is a very familiar image, that of a scamp, a mocking presence in almost all of his previous movies. But here he's cast against type, as a sweet-natured possibly gay man who manages to capture the hearts of a small East Texas town, and more particularly the shriveled heart and deep needs of a wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine). It's the tension between the manic imp of his earlier films and the good-hearted (if naively lethal) Bernie that gives this movie its acerbic tone. I had forgotten that Richard Linklater also directed School of Rock (2003), Black's first big hit in a starring role after stealing High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000) out from under the nose of John Cusack. It's to Linklater's credit that he sees more in the actors he works with than others do. Small town East Texas is an easy target for satire, and I understand the critics who liken Bernie to Fargo (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1996), which did similar things with the easily caricatured accents and mannerisms of the deep plains states. Having grown up in the South and lived in Dallas, on the fringe of East Texas, I have known a few Bernies: somewhat effeminate men who don't fit the good-ol'-boy stereotype of the region, but are tolerated by the good-ol'-boys and especially doted upon by their wives and mothers. Black captures the Bernies to perfection, perhaps because Texan Linklater and his co-scriptwriter Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote about Bernie Tiede first for Texas Monthly, know them well, and know how (as the Coens likewise did in Fargo) to transcend the merely satiric for something more humane and interesting.

Two Norma Shearer Silent Films

Norma Shearer meets Norma Shearer in Lady of the Night

Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, 1925)
Molly Helmer/Florence Banning: Norma Shearer
David Page: Malcolm McGregor
Miss Carr: Dale Fuller
"Chunky" Dunn: George K. Arthur
Judge Banning: Fred Esmelton
Chris Helmer: Lew Harvey

Director: Monta Bell
Screenplay: Alice D.G. Miller
Based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns
Cinematography: André Barlatier

Norma Shearer and Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance

A Lady of Chance (Robert Z. Leonard, 1928)
Dolly Morgan: Norma Shearer
Steve Crandall: Johnny Mack Brown
Bradley: Lowell Sherman
Gwen: Gwen Lee
Mrs. Crandall: Eugenie Besserer

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Screenplay: Edmund Goulding, Andrew Percival Younger, Ralph Spence
Based on a story by Leroy Scott
Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley, William H. Daniels

I confessed in an earlier post that I really like the young Norma Shearer, especially in her silent films. But I can see from these two movies what led her astray in her later films: She loves the camera too much -- more than she does her leading men. Granted that neither Malcolm McGregor (Lady of the Night) nor Johnny Mack Brown (A Lady of Chance) is much more than a handsome presence on the screen -- not quite enough to act with when you've got Shearer's talent -- she still seems to hog these pictures, especially when she's playing tough girl. In Night she has a double role: the hard-bitten Molly Helmer and the sweet rich girl Florence Banning. She's surprisingly good as Molly -- and totally unbelievable as Florence, who decides to sacrifice her chance at marriage with inventor David Page (McGregor) because Molly had him first. But the incredible part is built into the story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, who churned out this sort of stuff for movies on a regular basis. In A Lady of Chance, Shearer has a role that would later be perfected by Barbara Stanwyck: the tough grifter with a soft heart. The story is nonsense again: She falls for her mark, a Southerner she thinks is a rich man, even after he takes her home to Alabama and she learns that she has jumped to the wrong conclusion. Stanwyck does it better in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) and The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), but Stanwyck also had better directors than the prolific but undistinguished Robert Z. Leonard. He allows, or perhaps encourages, Shearer to mug and pose endlessly; at first she's delightful, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way. A Lady of Chance also contains an embarrassing heap of period racism, when Shearer and Brown are being wheeled along the Atlantic City boardwalk by a singing black man, and Brown remarks that it reminds him of "the darkies singing on the plantation back home."

Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio, 1965)

In other hands than Bellocchio's, Fists in the Pocket could have been a horror movie, or perhaps a black comedy. (Push Momma From the Cliff?) Instead, it's a bit of both, but much more. Alessandro  (Lou Castel) is a psychopath, but his family isn't much better: Only his mild-mannered retarded brother, Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), seems to be blameless. Like Alessandro, Leone has a neurological disorder that causes seizures. Both keep them under control with medication, but Leone needs constant attention to make sure he stays on his meds, whereas Alessandro sometimes goes off of them just for the hell of it. Their sister, Giulia (Paola Pitagora), is just unstable, while their older brother, Augusto (Marino Masé), approaches normality, but with a weary cynicism that makes him ineffective. All of them are in service to their blind mother (Liliana Gerace), with whom they live in a shabby-genteel villa in Northern Italy. We get an efficiently presented glimpse of the family's various modes of dysfunction in a dinner table scene near the beginning of the film. Bellocchio uses this family as a vehicle for satire on the pieties surrounding the family, including reverence for ancestors and for the church. It's one of the most effective attacks on sentimental portraits of family life this side of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, which in many ways it resembles.

The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)

The Crowd begins with the birth of John Sims (James Murray) and the prophecy that he will be somebody, a belief that he clings to 12 years later, on the day his father dies suddenly. And then there's a jump to 21-year-old John arriving in New York City, still fired with ambition. The jump leaves an odd hole in the narrative: We expect his father's death to have made an impact on his expectations -- to have shown him, for example, the threat of the unexpected or the value of hard work. But 21-year-old John is a bit feckless, a dreamer who can't quite get in gear to succeed. He falls in love too easily, and is soon married to a woman named Mary (Eleanor Boardman), because the John-and-Mary trope is a little too hard for Vidor and his co-scenarists John V.A. Weaver and Harry Behn to resist. This is a 20th-century Everyman story. If the hole in John's backstory is obvious, however, Vidor makes the father's death a visual motif by an expressionistic shot of young John in the stairwell of his house when he learns of the death, a remarkable image of entrapment that Vidor echoes throughout the film: The skyscrapers of New York, for example, loom in the same funnel-like way as the stairwell. But most celebrated image of entrapment in The Crowd is the web-like rows of desks in the insurance office where John finds work but not fulfillment -- an image frequently imitated, most notably by Billy Wilder in The Apartment (1960). (It's worth noting the work of cinematographer Henry Sharp here, as well as the set designers Cedric Gibbons -- who may or may not have done actual work on the sets, since as head of MGM's design department, Gibbons had his name put on every film -- and A. Arnold Gillespie.) As a parable about modern work, The Crowd is an enduring film. John gets what little satisfaction he has from creativity -- in his case, entering contests to write advertising slogans -- and not from what he has to do to earn a living. Murray turned out to be a case of life imitating art: He was an alcoholic who, like John Sims, had trouble staying employed, but while the movie ends on an optimistic note for the character, the actor died at age 35, in a drowning that was possibly a suicide.

John Sims, age 12 (Johnny Downs), learns of his father's death.

A skyscraper echoes the stairwell scene in The Crowd.

The insurance office in The Crowd.

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)

Inevitably, because both films deal with Alzheimer's, I want to compare Away From Her to Still Alice. Both contain extraordinary female performances: Julianne Moore won an Oscar for the latter and Julie Christie was nominated for the former -- she lost to Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan). Of the two films, I think Away From Her is superior, in large part because its screenplay (by Polley, who was also nominated for writing it) has a strong source: Alice Munro's story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." It also has a remarkable supporting cast: Much of the movie is carried by Gordon Pinsent, a Canadian actor not well known enough in the States, as Grant Anderson, whose wife of 40-plus years, Fiona (Christie), insists on being institutionalized when the symptoms of the disease become too pronounced. But he is not allowed to see her for 30 days after she enters the nursing home: It's explained to him that the patients need time to adjust to their new surroundings, but a sympathetic nurse (Deanna Dezmari) suggests that this policy is more for the convenience of the staff than for the patients. I don't know if it's an actual policy in nursing homes for Alzheimer's patients, but it proves disastrous for Grant because by the time he is able to see Fiona again, she has formed an attachment, perhaps as more caregiver than lover, to a fellow patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), and treats Grant as if he's an acquaintance she can't quite place. It's an interesting if somewhat contrived situation, especially when Grant seeks out Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), who not only resents the relationship of Aubrey and Fiona but also removes him from the nursing home to care for him herself, partly because she is unable to cover the expenses. Dukakis gives a fine, astringent performance as the initially hostile Marian. ("What a jerk!" she says after Grant visits her.) It helps to undercut the drift toward sentimentality that could so easily swamp such a movie. Christie is, as always, impossibly beautiful, and her careful delineation of Fiona's initial distress and disorientation, and her eventual decline, is easily as good as Moore's in Still Alice. I have the same reservations about Away From Her that I did about that film: that Alzheimer's is portrayed as a problem particularly hard on affluent, educated white people, though this movie does touch on the financial difficulties that apparently even Canadians face because of it.

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame: Kerry Fox
Janet as a child: Karen Fergusson
Janet as a teenager: Alexia Keogh
Mother: Iris Churn
Father: Kevin J. Wilson
Myrtle: Melina Bernecker
Isabel: Glynis Angell
Leslie: Natasha Gray
Miss Botting: Brenda Kendall
Frank Sargeson: Martyn Sanderson

Director: Jane Campion
Screenplay: Laura Jones
Based on books by Janet Frame
Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh
Production design: Grant Major
Costume design: Glenys Jackson
Music: Don McGlashan

Three years before The Piano (1993) earned her critical acclaim and an Oscar for screenwriting as well as a nomination for directing, Campion made this film, originally as a TV miniseries. It's an account of the life of New Zealand author Janet Frame, told in three segments. Writers' biopics are difficult to bring off, in large part because writers' lives are usually less interesting than the things they write. Their chief function is typically to give us insight into the personal experiences that shaped their art, which in Frame's case included growing up in a working-class family in rural New Zealand, having a mental breakdown while she was at teachers' college, and being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and institutionalized for eight years at an antiquated mental asylum where she was treated with electroshock therapy. But during her stay at the hospital she wrote a series of short stories that were collected and published, receiving acclaim that eventually resulted in her release. Campion's film is based on three volumes of autobiography by Frame. I have to admit that I've not read any of Frame's books or stories, so I'm not qualified to judge whether the film adds substance to either the autobiography or the fiction, but the screenplay by Laura Jones and the performance by Kerry Fox as the adult Janet Frame (she is played by Alexia Keogh as a teenager and Karen Fergusson as a child) are compelling enough in themselves. I also admit that I had trouble understanding the New Zealand accents, so I lost out on some of the dialogue.