Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)

Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) is insane, and Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) love each other more than either of them loves Catherine. That's obviously a reductive way of looking at the movies' most famous ménage à trois, but it's my takeaway from the most recent viewing of Truffaut's masterpiece. Why is Catherine insane? one should ask. Because she's a free spirit trapped in a woman's body when freedom for women can be glimpsed but not fully achieved. Note how liberated she becomes when she dresses as a man, smoking a stogie (pace Dr. Freud, but sometimes a cigar is more than just a cigar) and providing a light for a strange man outside of a pissoir. And at no time do Jules and Jim find her more sexually desirable, I think. Naturally, she marries Jules, the more repressed of the two, and finds further liberation by cheating on him rather than falling into the socially respectable roles of wife and mother. As for the "bromance" of Jules and Jim, that too skirts societal disapproval: The narrator tells us that their friendship was much talked about. Even separated by a war that puts them on opposing sides, each worries that he may find himself killing the other. But they survive, only to find Catherine testing their friendship. That it survives the test until Catherine kills one of them is the film's deepest irony. And Catherine is never able to find the freedom she seeks, even after death: Her desire to have her ashes scattered to the winds is thwarted by "the regulations," as the narrator (Michel Subor) tells us. It is, of course, one of the great films, made so by Moreau's tremendous performance, by Georges Delerue's score, and by Raoul Coutard's cinematography, but most of all by Truffaut's direction and (with Jean Gruault) endlessly fascinating script. Even Jules and Catherine's daughter, Sabine, is perfectly presented: Sabine Haudepin is one of the least affected, least annoying child performers ever to appear on screen.

The Letter (Jean de Limur, 1929)

Her fascinating performance in this version of the Somerset Maugham melodrama might have won Jeanne Eagels an Oscar -- the second one ever given for best actress -- if the Academy hadn't been determined to give it to Mary Pickford, who had been one of its founders. Certainly Eagels outshone Pickford's ridiculously hammy Southern belle in Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929). Though there were no "official" nominations for the award this year, Academy records show that Eagels had been under consideration -- as well she should have been. Her Leslie Crosbie is edgy, nervous -- a sharp contrast to the grim, icy Leslie that Bette Davis created in the 1940 remake of the story. Only at the end of the film, in a blazing release of the tension she has stored up does Eagels demonstrate the full power of the character, with her celebrated pronouncement, "With all my heart, with all my soul, I still love the man I killed." In sharp contrast to the later film, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, which insisted that all criminals must receive their due punishment, this version ends with Leslie walking free, though she's hardly in an enviable emotional state. Eagels had been a sensation on Broadway in another Somerset Maugham vehicle, playing Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1922. Her stage career was troubled by her alcoholism and addiction to heroin, but the reception of her performance in The Letter suggested that she could have made a remarkable career in Hollywood. Six months after the film's release, however, she died suddenly; the toxicology report found alcohol, heroin, and chloral hydrate, which she took to help her sleep, in her system. Both versions of The Letter, incidentally, feature Herbert Marshall, though in this one he plays the man Leslie murders, whereas in the 1940 film he is Leslie's husband. But Eagels is pretty much the main reason for the survival of this version. As a very early talkie, it feels almost primitive: There's no music track, and throughout the film there's very little ambient sound. We see the streets of Singapore which, though they're thronged with people, are shown with no crowd noises, and even when we get to the Crosbies' plantation we see men playing on musical instruments from which no sound comes. This was Jean de Limur's first film as a director -- he had worked as an actor and writer in Hollywood. George J. Folsey, the film's cinematographer, later claimed that it had really been directed by the more experienced Monta Bell, the credited producer, who wanted to launch de Limur's directing career. After making one more film, Jealousy (1929), also starring Eagels, de Limur moved to his native France, where he continued his directing career into the 1940s.

Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940)

Mitchell Leisen directed two films from screenplays by Preston Sturges. The first, Easy Living (1937), is one of the great screwball comedies, in which fat cat Edward Arnold throws his wife's fur coat out of their penthouse window and it lands on penniless Jean Arthur, who is riding by on the top deck of a double-decker bus. Wackiness ensues. But Sturges was so unhappy with what Leisen did with the other script, for Remember the Night, that he decided to direct his own screenplays for then on, resulting in one of the greatest of writer-director careers. He was, however, so delighted with Barbara Stanwyck's performance in Remember the Night that he created one of his best movies, The Lady Eve (1941), for her. Stanwyck and her co-star, Fred MacMurray, are in fact the best thing about Remember the Night, on which Leisen could never find the right handle. It starts as screwball comedy, with Stanwyck playing Lee Leander, a compulsive shoplifter whose theft of a bracelet lands her in court being prosecuted by assistant district attorney John Sargent (MacMurray). It is just before Christmas, and when the judge rules for a continuance until after the holidays, Sargent good-heartedly arranges for Lee to be released on bail rather than spend the holidays in jail. When defendant and prosecutor find that they are both from Indiana, he decides to give her a lift home. Naturally, they fall in love, and not so naturally, the movie falls to pieces. It devolves into a sentimental nostalgia piece, with a few good lines and some nice performances, particularly by Beulah Bondi as Sargent's mother, Elizabeth Patterson as his maiden aunt, and Sterling Holloway as his simple-minded cousin. But the problem is that they have to return to New York and she has to face him as prosecutor, not as fiancé. The Indiana scenes are preposterous: Sargent's family lives on a farm near a small town that seems untouched by the 20th century, a place without electricity where the chief amusements are taffy pulls and barn dances. It's possible that Sturges could have resolved all of this better than Leisen does, but the material needs a consistent touch that the director is unable to provide.

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Oscar-bashing is an easy game to play, but sometimes it's a necessary one. Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards: best picture, best director (Billy Wilder), best actress (Barbara Stanwyck), best screenplay (Wilder and Raymond Chandler), best black-and-white cinematography (John F. Seitz), best scoring (Miklós Rózsa), and best sound recording. It won none of them. The most egregious losses were to the sugary Going My Way, which was named best picture; Leo McCarey won for direction, and Frank Butler and Frank Cavett won for a screenplay that seems impossibly pious and sentimental today. Almost no one watches Going My Way today, whereas Double Indemnity is on a lot of people's lists of favorite films. The reason often cited for Double Indemnity's losses is that it was produced by Paramount, which also produced Going My Way, and that the studio instructed its employees to vote for the latter film. But the Academy always felt uncomfortable with film noir, of which Double Indemnity, a film deeply cynical about human nature, is a prime example. Wilder and Chandler completely reworked James M. Cain's story in their screenplay, and while they were hardly cheerful co-workers (Wilder claimed that he based the alcoholic writer in his 1945 film The Lost Weekend on Chandler), the result was a fine blend of Wilder's bitter wit and Chandler's insight into the twisted nature of the protagonists, Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). And as long as we're on the subject of Oscars, there are the glaring absences of MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson from the nominations -- and not only for this year: Neither actor was ever nominated by the Academy. MacMurray's departure from his usual good-guy roles to play the sleazy, murderous Neff should have been the kind of career about-face the Academy often applauds. And Robinson's dogged, dyspeptic insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, is one of the great character performances in a career notable for them. (The supporting actor Oscar that he should have won went to Barry Fitzgerald's twinkly priest in Going My Way, a part for which Fitzgerald had been, owing to a glitch in the Academy's rules, nominated in both leading and supporting actor categories.)

Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

I don't see movies in theaters anymore: Before yesterday I think the last one I went to was The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) which was kind of a family outing. And I hadn't seen one in 3-D since the last time the process was in vogue, back in the 1950s. But I had to see this one not to be culturally retrograde, and I'm glad I did. To sidetrack to 3-D, I'm not sold on its necessity, partly because the process itself is distracting: I'm always conscious of the screen itself as a kind of frame that cuts things off as they are whizzing into and out of it. In regular old 2-D the frame works to contain the action so you can concentrate on it. I found myself distracted whenever anyone walked into the frame because I was momentarily unsure whether they were part of the film or just someone entering the theater after getting some more popcorn. I think that's why it's a process particularly suited for fast-paced action but not much else. But the movie gave me everything else I wanted, including the warm fuzzy feeling of being reunited with Han (Harrison Ford) and Leia (Carrie Fisher), whose grizzled maturity gave a gravitas to the film. It recaptured the feeling I had back in 1977 at the NorthPark theater in Dallas when John Williams's music struck up and the introductory crawl stretched away into space. Episode VII is essentially a remake of Episode IV, if we must call them that, with the young hero on a desert planet, the droid found in the junkyard, the gathering of a team to fight the black-clad villain, and the ultimate destruction of a giant weaponized space station. It's nice that the hero this time is a woman (Daisy Ridley) and that her cohort includes a black man (John Boyega), both of whom are great in their roles. Oscar Isaac shows once again that he's something of a shapeshifter as an actor: I knew he was in the movie, but I almost didn't recognize him at his first entrance, after having seen him recently as the thwarted Yonkers mayor on HBO's Show Me a Hero (Paul Haggis, 2015). He has the ability to play callow and boyish as well as bitter and brooding, as in Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2013). I look forward to seeing the movie again, but this time in the comfort of my home and on a smaller 2-D screen. I think it will play just as well there, thanks more to the smart screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, and to the well-directed actors, including Adam Driver's Kylo Ren, than to the technological whiz-bang.

Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

I recently commented here that I didn't respond particularly well to Gregory Peck because, unlike stars such as Cary Grant and Bette Davis, he never surprised me with a line reading or a facial expression. I think the same is true of Tom Cruise, whose range seems to be limited to intensity: He never seems to unclench. That becomes apparent in this fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible series when he shares the screen with a much more versatile star, Jeremy Renner, who can be both intense and casually self-deprecating. I'm not saying Cruise is a bad actor: I thought his performance in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) was superior to Dustin Hoffman's Oscar-winning one. All Hoffman had to do was find a shtick and stay with it; Cruise was the one who had to grow and change over the course of the movie. It's just that he built his career on muscular action and a captivating grin that grew into a rictus as his career thrived. This Mission film is, I think, superior to the first three because it doesn't take on more than it can handle. It turns its heroes -- Cruise, Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton -- into fallible beings who screw up but manage to get on the right course at the last minute. It's all familiar super-action stuff, of the kind we've seen and marveled at ever since James Bond hit the screen. Renner and Pegg especially are instrumental in saving the movie from tedium, especially in their interplay in the sequence when Renner is called on to reprise the famous drop to within an inch of danger that Cruise did in the first Mission film back in 1996. This time, Renner has to do it with no restraint, free-falling until a magnet repels his magnetized suit, and both Renner and Pegg play it for laughs, something that director Brad Bird is skilled at providing. The screenplay (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) tries to build some suspense around a secret that Renner's character, Brandt, is hiding from Cruise's Ethan Hunt, but that's just filler between action sequences.

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

Geoff Carter: Cary Grant
Bonnie Lee: Jean Arthur
Bat McPherson: Richard Barthelmess
Judy McPherson: Rita Hayworth
Kid Dabb: Thomas Mitchell
Lee Peters: Allyn Joslyn
Dutchy: Sig Ruman

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Viola Lawrence
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Thomas Mitchell had begun his acting career on stage, making his Broadway debut in 1916. It would be 20 years before he decided to leave the stage for Hollywood, and three years after settling there he found himself performing in no fewer than five of 1939's top movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle), Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra), Stagecoach (John Ford), and Only Angels Have Wings. He won an Oscar for Stagecoach, and four of the five films in which he appeared were nominated for the best picture Oscar. As it happens, the one film that didn't get nominated, Only Angels Have Wings, is my favorite of the bunch. That it wasn't nominated may have had something to do with its director, Howard Hawks, who refused to be tied down to any one of the major studios, feeling that he had been burned by a dispute with production head Irving Thalberg at MGM. For the rest of his career he made the rounds of the studios, producing and directing (and often writing without credit) some of the most enjoyable movies ever made. But he was nominated for the best director Oscar only once, for Sergeant York (1941), which has its Hawksian touches -- fast-paced dialogue and deft use of character players like Walter Brennan, Margaret Wycherly, Ward Bond, and Noah Beery Jr. -- but is more sentimental than typical Hawks films. In fact, Hawks must hold some kind of record for classic films that received no Oscar nominations at all, including the great gangster film Scarface (1930) and the dizziest of screwball comedies -- Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940) -- as well as the definitive Marilyn Monroe vehicle, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the films that stand as landmarks in the careers of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). He finally got an honorary Oscar in 1975, after having been discovered by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and American auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris. Only Angels is prime Hawks, with a sterling cast that includes not only Mitchell, as the aging pilot known as "Kid," but also Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. They bring a touch of the screwball comedy at which they excelled to what is essentially a serious story about the grace under pressure shown by fliers in a small South American port town who have to battle the weather to fly the mail across the Andes. Hawks and screenwriter Jules Furthman take the familiar "you can't send the kid up in a crate like that" premise and turn into something both funny and moving. The key is that that they refuse, like the pilots in their movie, to take anything really seriously, so the light touch keeps the peril and loss from bogging the film down. There is a startling moment near the end when we see tears in Grant's eyes, but the movie swiftly moves to a lighter-hearted conclusion. There is some corny artifice in the settings and flying sequences, and perhaps a little too much about the relationship between the characters played by Rita Hayworth (pushed on Hawks by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn) and Richard Barthelmess. Some see Only Angels as a kind of rough draft for To Have and Have Not, and Jean Arthur, who clashed with Hawks about her character, said she didn't understand what he wanted until he saw that later film. But Only Angels Have Wings stands on its own.

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."