The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges, 1947)

The sad finale of two great Hollywood careers: Harold Lloyd's and Preston Sturges's. One of the great silent comedians, Lloyd had been making movies since 1913, but like so many stars of silent films he failed to make an impression in talkies and retired from movies in 1938. Sturges, who was starting up a new studio, California Pictures, with Howard Hughes, persuaded Lloyd to come out of retirement as a producer and director for the studio, but as so often happened when Hughes had a hand in things, nothing worked out right for either Sturges or Lloyd. Sturges had had a run as writer-director of seven comedies, from The Great McGinty in 1940 through Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944, that are some of the greatest ever made in Hollywood, but his attempt at a serious movie, The Great Moment (1944), was a major flop that led to his departure from Paramount and into his partnership with Hughes. Unfortunately, tensions with both Hughes and Lloyd over The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which Lloyd had been led to believe he would direct, contributed to the poor marketing and release of the movie. Its failure at the box office caused Hughes to pull it and to re-edit it into a shorter film renamed Mad Wednesday, which also failed. Lloyd never acted in another movie, and although Sturges wrote and directed three more, only Unfaithfully Yours (1948) has the comic finesse of his great 1940-44 films. It, too, was a box office flop, though it is now regarded by many as a late masterpiece. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, unfortunately, is no masterpiece, though it has some good moments. Many of Sturges's great company of character players are in the film, including Jimmy Conlin, Raymond Walburn, Rudy Vallee, Franklin Pangborn, and Robert Dudley, and the scenes in which they appear are invariably the best. It's perhaps unfortunate that Sturges chose to open the film with an excerpt from Lloyd's silent classic, The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925), because the slapstick sequences that follow in Sturges's part of the film pale in comparison. The central knockabout comedy scene in the film involves Lloyd, Conlin, and a lion stuck precariously on the ledge of a building; it recalls the classic skyscraper sequence in Lloyd's Safety Last! (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923), but the gag becomes overextended and glaringly improbable in this version.

Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Let us now praise Joel McCrea, who never became an icon like Cooper or Gable or Grant or Stewart, but could always be relied on for a fine performance when the others weren't available. He starred in two of Sturges's best, the other one being The Palm Beach Story (1942), and gave solid and sometimes memorable performances for William Wyler (Dead End, 1937), Cecil B. DeMille (Union Pacific, 1939), Alfred Hitchcock (Foreign Correspondent, 1940), and George Stevens (The More the Merrier, 1943) before becoming a durable fixture in Westerns. His performance in the title role of Sullivan's Travels is just what the movie needed: an actor who could do slapstick comedy but turn serious when necessary, a task that among major stars of the era perhaps only Cary Grant and Henry Fonda -- the Fonda of Sturges's own The Lady Eve (1941) -- were also really good at. The genius of Sullivan's Travels is that its serious parts jibe so well with its goofy ones. As Sturges has characters warn Sullivan at the beginning of his scheme to pose as a hobo to get material for his turn as a "serious" director, poor people don't like to be condescended to. The pivotal scene of the film is the one in which the convicts go to a black church to watch a movie. It could have been an embarrassing display of the era's racial stereotypes, but Sturges handles it with tact and sensitivity, so that it becomes emotionally effective and brings home the dual points about charity and the need for humor without excessive sentimentality and preachiness. Sturges's usual gang of brilliant character players -- including William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Eric Blore, and Jimmy Conlin -- are on hand. Sturges and McCrea found working with Veronica Lake a pain, but fortunately it doesn't show.

The End of Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

I would call Ozu the most "Chekhovian" of filmmakers because his movies really do remind me of Chekhov's plays. But the adjective has been so overused to the point that all it seems to mean is "a melancholy character study with a little humor, no action, and not much plot." That is, of course, true of The End of Summer, but it doesn't come close to capturing the effect of the film, the sense of having spent privileged moments with people as they go through the universal experiences of living: love, disappointment, death, reconciliation, coping with the past, and so on. It's about the Kohayagawa family, who run a small sake brewery that's in financial difficulties, partly because the patriarch, Manbei (Ganjiro Nakamura), has lost interest in the company. In his old age, he has rediscovered a former mistress, Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa), whose 21-year-old daughter, Yuriko (Reiko Dan), may be his own child. She's a flighty young thing who has a couple of American boyfriends and really hopes only to get a mink stole out of Manbei. Meanwhile, his own family struggles to figure out what to do with the business and how to keep track of Manbei, sometimes sending out employees to follow him on his excursions to see Sasaki. Manbei has two daughters, Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) and Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), as well as a daughter-in-law, Akiko (Setsuko Hara), his son's widow. Fumiko is married, and Manbei wants to get Noriko and Akiko married off before he dies, so he asks his brother-in-law, Kitagawa (Daisuke Kato), to find husbands for them. Neither woman is particularly interested in Kitagawa's picks, but they go through the motions to please Manbei. Like I said, not much plot, but Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda make the most of the characters, particularly Manbei himself, whom Nakamura turns into an endearing scamp. As often in Ozu's films, there are peripheral characters who serve as a kind of chorus: In this case, it's a couple of farmers (Chishu Ryu, who appeared in almost all of Ozu's films, and Yuko Mochizuki) who watch the funeral procession at the film's end and provide the appropriate comment about the "cycle of life."  

Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958)

Equinox Flower is Ozu's first color film. Once again he lagged behind film industry trends -- the first color film in Japan was made in 1951 -- and managed to anger the Japanese film industry by using the German-made Agfa color process instead of Fuji film because he thought the reds in Agfa film were truer. American viewers may be struck by how the movie often seems to be a Japanese translation of the American family comedy: think Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950). It centers on Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi), who finds his wife and daughters scheming against him when he insists on arranging the marriage of his elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima). When a young man he has never met before, Masahiko Taniguchi (Keiji Sada), comes to his office one day to ask for Setsuko's hand, Hirayama is furious, and not only forbids the marriage but also insists that Setsuko, who has met Taniguchi at the place where she works, be confined to home. Eventually, things work out for the young couple, but not before Hirayama has learned a lesson about the way the roles of the sexes have changed in Japan. In fact, when we first see Hirayama, he is giving a speech at a wedding, indicating his preference for parental approval and noting that even though their own marriage had been arranged, he and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is sitting silently beside him, made a go of it. We will soon learn that Kiyoko is not quite so submissive as she seems. The bite that underlies this quite charming comedy lies in its portrayal of the post-war Japanese male, the warrior turned salaryman, most effectively seen in an episode in which Hirayama, after reluctantly attending the wedding of Setsuko and Taniguchi, goes to a reunion of his old classmates, who sing songs about the glory of the Japanese warrior though their own lives consist of office work and golf. The screenplay by Ozu and Kogo Noda was based on a novel by Ton Satomi. The cinematographer was Yuharu Atsuta.

A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934)

Tomio Aoki in A Story of Floating Weeds

Kihachi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Otsune: Choko Iida
Shinkichi: Koji Mitsui
Otaka: Rieko Yagumo
Otoki: Yoshiko Tsubouchi
Tomi-boh: Tomio Aoki
Tomibo's Father: Reiko Tani

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada

This is the first, silent version of a film that Ozu remade with sound and in color in 1959, when it was released as Floating Weeds. Yes, 1934 is late to be making silent films, but Ozu was following the lead of the Japanese film industry, which didn't switch to sound until 1931 -- and Ozu waited till 1936 to make a talkie. It's the story (written by Tadao Ikeda and Ozu himself under his pseudonym James Maki) of Kihachi Ichikawa, the head of a troupe of traveling players who find themselves in a village where Kihachi has a former mistress, Otsune, with whom he had a son, Shinkichi. The now almost-grown son has always known Kihachi as "Uncle," because Kihachi has kept his parentage secret, not wanting him to follow in his footsteps as an actor. But when Otaka, an actress in the troupe and Kihachi's most recent mistress, discovers the secret, she decides to take revenge by asking a younger actress, Otoki, to seduce Shinkichi. The revenge backfires when Otoki falls in love with the young man. As usual, Ozu's sympathetic view of human relationships carries the film, giving depth to the somewhat slight story. And the glimpses of the world of the traveling players is both fascinating and funny. The lovely cinematography is by Hideo Shigehara, who filmed and sometimes edited many of Ozu's pre-war movies.

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

If only all action movies could be directed by George Miller and edited by Margaret Sixel. Then we might have fewer scenes shot in the dark with shakycam and patched together out of snippets of film so you can't really tell who's fighting whom. Or much less gratuitous use of CGI in scenes where actual hardware provides greater immediacy than software can ever do. Miller and Sixel are one of the movies' great husband-and-wife teams, and it's gratifying that they've both been nominated for Oscars for Mad Max: Fury Road. I've never been much of a fan of the Mad Max series, but this one, the fourth, seems to me to be the best and most coherent. It has the kind of visual storytelling that takes you back to the silent roots of the movies. It also features, in Charlize Theron's Furiosa, the best female action hero since Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). I don't expect the movie to win the best picture Oscar: It's not the kind of film the Academy admires, preferring action movies that are wrapped in history, like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), or sanctified by religiosity, like Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959). Fury Road is sheer enjoyable nonsense, with an abundance of grotesque villains and some heroes who, with the exception of Tom Hardy's Max and Nicholas Hoult's Nux, happen to be women. But I hope it takes home Oscars for John Seale's cinematography, Jenny Beavan's costumes, and for production design and visual effects. And I wouldn't mind if Miller and Sixel won, too.

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Calling a film a landmark, as Bonnie and Clyde so often has been called, does it a disservice in that it prioritizes historical significance over the aesthetic ones. It makes it difficult to appreciate or criticize the movie without recalling what it was like to see and to talk about the first time you saw it -- if, like me, you saw it in a theater when it was first released. It's a landmark because its success showed the Hollywood studios, which were mere surviving remnants of the old movie factories of the '30s and '40s, that there was an audience for something other than the big musicals and epics that had dominated American movies during the 1960s. There was a young audience out there that had grown up with the French New Wave and the great Italian and Japanese films of that decade, and was resistant to piety and platitudes. Along with The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), Bonnie and Clyde gave this audience something they were looking for, and fed the revolution in filmmaking that made the 1970s one of the most adventurous decades in film history. It's no surprise that the screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, were so familiar with the New Wave that they wanted François Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard to direct their movie. And even today Warren Beatty, in the opening scenes of Bonnie and Clyde, is bound to remind one of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (Godard, 1960). It was a movie that launched the careers of Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman, not to mention giving Beatty a boost into superstardom. It also put an end to some careers, most notably that of Bosley Crowther, who had been the New York Times's film critic since 1940 but was undone by his vitriolic attack on  Bonnie and Clyde, which he denounced not only in his initial review but also, after protests from the movie's admirers, in two subsequent articles. Crowther was replaced as the Times critic in 1968. On the other hand, Newsweek's critic, Joe Morgenstern, initially panned the film but, after being urged by readers to reconsider, recanted his original critique. So the question persists: Historical significance aside, is Bonnie and Clyde really any good? I'd have to say, after seeing it again for the first time in many years, that it holds up as entertainment. The acting is superb, and Burnett Guffey's cinematography, Dean Tavoularis's art direction, and Theadora van Runkle's costuming all provide a fine 1960s interpretation of 1930s style. Where it falls down for me is in substance: The screenplay, which was worked over by Robert Towne, is too preoccupied with Bonnie and Clyde as lovers with (especially Clyde) some psychosexual hangups. It only feints at demonstrating why the pair became cult figures in the Great Depression, most notably in a scene when Clyde refuses to take the money of a farmer who is in the bank they're robbing, and in a scene in which the wounded couple and C.W. Moss (endearingly played by Michael J. Pollard) stop for help at a bleak migrant camp. Only in scenes like these do we get a sense of the deep background of Depression-era misery, a fuller treatment of which might have elevated the film into greatness, the way Francis Ford Coppola's first two Godfather films  (1972, 1974) turned Mario Puzo's popular novel into an American myth. Otherwise, the criticism that it glamorizes the outlaws by turning them into fashion-model beauties still has some merit.

Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962)

When I watched Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of this movie, I commented that I hadn't seen Lee Thompson's 1962 version and didn't know why Scorsese would want to remake it. And now that I've seen it, I still don't know. This earlier version, with a screenplay by James R. Webb from the same John D. MacDonald novel, The Executioners, is a tense, well-cast movie with the same Bernard Herrmann soundtrack that Scorsese had Elmer Bernstein adapt for his version. What Scorsese's screenwriter, Wesley Strick, did was to add more complications to the characters in the later film. Gregory Peck's Sam Bowden is a straight arrow compared to Nick Nolte's, and both Jessica Lange and Juliette Lange bring greater depth to Bowden's wife and daughter than Polly Bergen and Lori Martin do in the earlier version. But given that the movie in both cases is essentially a suspense thriller, I'm not sure that this is necessarily an improvement: The earlier film's emphasis on the innocence of the Bowdens makes the threat posed by Robert Mitchum's Max Cady more intense than that posed by Robert De Niro to the more morally compromised Bowdens of the Scorsese film. So in short, I have to say I prefer the earlier version. No one is saying that Lee Thompson was a better director, or that the screenwriter and actors in his version are superior to Scorsese and company. But if the intent of the film is to shock and to have the audience on the edge of their seats, then the earlier version does the job better. I have never been a fan of Gregory Peck, who is an actor who never surprises me with a line delivery or facial expression, as Nolte has been known to do, and Bergen and Martin are decidedly inferior to Lange and Lewis as actors, but they make better victims, which is all that the movie asks of them. The one performance that seems to me superior is Mitchum's, perhaps because there is a brutishness in his very persona that is lacking in De Niro, who has many film personae. I think De Niro overacts feverishly to make his Cady menacing, at the expense of becoming ludicrous. Mitchum, on the other hand, has only to narrow his sleepy eyes to suggest the deep psychosis of his character, and his menacing of Bergen, in which Mitchum apparently improvised the device of breaking an egg and smearing her with it, is truly chilling. Although Lee Thompson's final sequence, in which Cady sneaks up on the Bowdens' houseboat, is somewhat botched -- we're never quite sure where Cady, Bowden, and the detective assigned to guard them are at any given moment -- I still think it's preferable to the special-effects-laden storm that destroys the houseboat in Scorsese's film. Lee Thompson, whose only other really memorable film was The Guns of Navarone (1961), was never the filmmaker that Scorsese is, but here I think he does a better job of keeping the audience on edge.

Swamp Water (Jean Renoir, 1941)

Swamp Water has a few things working against it other than its title. For one, having a cast of familiar Hollywood stars pretending to be farmers, hunters, and trappers living on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp, and saying things like "I brung her" and "He got losted," makes for a certain lack of authenticity. And at 32, its leading man, Dana Andrews is about a decade too old to be playing the callow youth he's supposed to be in the movie. Add to that the director, Jean Renoir, is a wartime exile from France, making his first film in Hollywood, and you might expect the worst. Fortunately, it has a screenplay by a master, Dudley Nichols, and an eminently watchable cast that includes Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette, who while they may never quite convince us that they're Georgia swamp-folk, do their professional best. It turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining movie that, while it doesn't add any luster to Renoir's career, doesn't detract from it either. This was Andrews's second year in movies, and he gives the kind of energetic performance that mostly overcomes miscasting. Born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, he also seems to know the character he's called on to play, perhaps a little better than the city-bred Baxter, whose efforts at being the village outcast are a bit forced. Brennan as usual plays an old coot, but without overdoing the mannerisms -- it's a slyly engaging performance. Much of the footage was shot by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and the uncredited Lucien Ballard in the actual swamp and environs near Waycross, Georgia. There is some obvious failure to match the location footage with that shot back in the 20th Century-Fox studio, but it's not terribly distracting.

Sadie Thompson (Raoul Walsh, 1928)

It's sad that most people know Gloria Swanson only as the gorgon Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1957). Or that Swanson's deft parody of silent movie acting in that film constitutes many people's impression of what it was like. The survival of Sadie Thompson, even though it's missing its last reel, which the restorers piece out with old stills and title cards, shows what a formidable force Swanson could be on screen, generating enough heat that it's surprising she didn't ignite the nitrate film stock. The story is the familiar one of the San Francisco prostitute who comes to Pago Pago, where she clashes with a bluenose reformer who threatens to return her to San Francisco and the hands of the police. The reformer is Alfred Davidson (Lionel Barrymore in full ham), who was a clergyman in Somerset Maugham's short story, "Miss Thompson," and the play, Rain, that was based on it, but becomes a layman here to please the Hays Office. Fortunately, Sadie has the support of a sturdy young Marine sergeant, Timothy O'Hara, played by director Raoul Walsh, who before turning director full-time had been an actor in the early days of silents; he played John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915). This brief return to acting was a one-shot: Walsh was planning to direct himself again in In Old Arizona (Irving Cummings, 1928), but lost his right eye in a freak auto accident while on location preparing to shoot the film; Warner Baxter took over the role and won an Oscar for it. Swanson was nominated for an Oscar for Sadie Thompson, as was cinematographer George Barnes, whose nomination included his work on two other films: The Devil Dancer (Fred Niblo, 1927) and The Magic Flame (Henry King, 1927). In fact, Barnes did only a week's worth of filming on Sadie Thompson before Samuel Goldwyn insisted he fulfill a contractual obligation to him; he was replaced by Robert Kurrle and Oliver T. Marsh.