Sawdust and Tinsel (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

When this movie was first released in the United States it was called The Naked Night, probably by exhibitors who wanted to cash in on the reputation Swedes had gained for being sexy, but especially because the film's star, Harriet Andersson, had just appeared in the nude in Summer With Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953), which had been passed off in some markets as a skin flick. By the time I first saw it, sometime in the 1960s, it had been renamed Sawdust and Tinsel. (The Swedish title, Gycklarnas Afton, can be translated as something like "Evening of a Clown.") Frankly, the first time I saw it, I found it tedious and heavy-handedly sordid, with its shabby, bankrupt circus and its frustrated, destructive relationships. Having grown older and perhaps somewhat wiser, I don't hate it anymore, but I can't see it as the masterpiece some do. It seems to me to lean too heavily on the familiar trope of the circus as a microcosm of the world, and on emphasizing the grunge (sawdust) and fake glamour (tinsel) of its currently prevalent title. What it has going for it is the awesome cinematography by Sven Nykvist: It was his first film for Bergman; they didn't work together again until 1960 and The Virgin Spring, but it became one of the great partnerships in filmmaking. The opening sequence of the tawdry little circus caravan trundling across the landscape is superbly filmed, and I can't help wondering if Bergman and Gunnar Fischer, the cinematographer of The Seventh Seal (1957), didn't have it in mind when they created the iconic shot of Death and his victims silhouetted against the sky in that later film. The performances, too, are excellent: Åke Grönberg as Albert, the worn-out circus owner; Andersson as his restless mistress, Anne; Hasse Ekman as Frans, the actor who rapes her; Anders Ek as the half-mad clown, Frost; and Annika Tretow as Albert's wife, who has gone on to be a success in business after he left her. But the story is heavily formula-driven: There is, for example, a rather clichéd sequence in which Albert toys with suicide, which too obviously echoes an earlier moment when Frans hammily rehearses a scene in which he kills himself while Anne watches offstage. In the end, the movie is rather like a version of Pagliacci without the benefit of Leoncavallo's music. After a disastrous performance of the circus, someone actually says, "The show's over," which is pretty much a steal from the final line of Pagliacci: "La commedia è finita!"  

Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952)

If Moulin Rouge had a screenplay worthy of its visuals, it would be a classic. As it is, it's still worth seeing, thanks to a stellar effort to bring to life Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and sketches of Parisian nightlife in the 1890s. The screenplay, by Anthony Veiller and director Huston, is based on a novel by Pierre Le Mure, the rights to which José Ferrer had purchased with a view to playing Lautrec. He does so capably, subjecting himself to some real physical pain: Ferrer was 5-foot-10 and Lautrec was at least a foot shorter, owing to a childhood accident that shattered both his legs, so Ferrer performed many scenes on his knees, sometimes with an apparatus that concealed his lower legs from the camera. But that is one of the least interesting things about the movie, as is the rather conventional story of the struggles of a self-hating, alcoholic artist. What distinguishes the film is the extraordinary production design and art direction of Marcel Vertès and Paul Sheriff, and the dazzling Technicolor cinematography of Oswald Morris. Vertès and Sheriff won Oscars for their work, but Morris shockingly went unnominated. The most plausible theory for that oversight is that Sheriff clashed with the Technicolor consultants over his desire for a palette that reproduced the colors of Lautrec's art: The Technicolor corporation was notoriously persnickety about maintaining control over the way its process was used. It's possible that the cinematography branch wanted to avoid future hassles with Technicolor by denying Morris the nomination. (Ironically, one of the more interesting incidents from Lautrec's life depicted in the film involves his clashes with the lithographer over the colors used in posters made from his work.) The extraordinary beauty of the film and some lively dance sequences that bring to life performers such as La Goulue (Katherine Kath) and Chocolat (Rupert John) make it memorable. There are also good performances from Colette Marchand as Marie Charlet and Suzanne Flon as Myriamme Hayam. And less impressive work from Zsa Zsa Gabor, playing herself more than Jane Avril, and lipsynching poorly to Muriel Smith's voice in two songs by Georges Auric.

A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman, 1954)

Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand in A Lesson in Love

Marianne Erneman: Eva Dahlbeck
David Erneman: Gunnar Björnstrand
Susanne Verin: Yvonne Lombard
Nix Erneman: Harriet Andersson
Carl-Adam: Åke Grönberg
Prof. Henrik Erneman: Olof Winnerstrand
Svea Erneman: Renée Björling
Pelle: Göran Lundquist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Martin Bodin

In A Lesson in Love, Ingmar Bergman seems to be trying to turn Eva Dahlbeck into Carole Lombard. She certainly has Lombard's blond glamour, and she makes a surprising go at knockabout comedy. But where Lombard had the light touch of a Howard Hawks or an Ernst Lubitsch to guide her in her best work, Dahlbeck is in the hands of Bergman, whose touch no one has ever called light. A year later, the Bergman-Dahlbeck collaboration would make a better impression with Smiles of a Summer Night, but A Lesson in Love sometimes verges on smirkiness in its treatment of the marriage of Marianne and David Erneman. They are on the verge of divorce and she is about to marry her old flame Carl-Adam, a sculptor for whom she once posed. David is a gynecologist who has had a series of flings with other women, including Susanne, with whom he is trying to break up. But Marianne has not exactly been faithful to their vows either. Meanwhile, we also get to know their children, Nix and her bratty little brother, Pelle, and David's parents, who in sharp contrast to Marianne and David are celebrating 50 years of marriage. While Bergman sharply delineates all of these characters -- especially 15-year-old Nix, who hates being a girl so much that she asks her father if he can perform sex-change operations -- the semi-farcical situation he puts them has a kind of aimless quality to it. I appreciated Harriet performance as Nix the more for having seen her as the dying Agnes in Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972) the night before, but in this film her role makes no clear thematic sense. 

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

Cries and Whispers is both of a time and timeless. It is very much a product of the last great moviegoing age, when people would see a challenging film and go back to their homes or coffee shops or dorm rooms and debate what it meant. Today, if a movie provokes discussion it's usually on social media, where seriousness gets short shrift. Moreover, the discussion is likely to get interrupted by someone who has just seen the latest installment of some hot TV series and wants to try out their theories. Moreover, the combination of visual beauty and emotional rawness in Bergman's film is something rarely encountered today. We are, I think, wary of emotion, too eager to lapse into ironic distancing from the depiction of disease, suffering, death, cruelty, passion, spite, and grief that permeates Cries and Whispers. No director I know of is trying to do what Bergman does in so unembarrassed a fashion in this movie. And that, in turn, is what makes it timeless: The emotions on view in the film are universal, and Bergman's treatment of them without melodrama or sentiment is unequaled. Personal filmmaking is becoming a lost art: There are a few prominent adherents to it today, such as Paul Thomas Anderson or Terrence Malick, and their films are usually greeted with a sharp division of opinion between critics who find them pretentiously self-indulgent and those who find them audaciously original. But we seldom see performances as daring as Harriet Andersson's death scene, Kari Sylwan's attempts to comfort her, Ingrid Thulin's self-mutilation, and Liv Ullmann's confrontations with the others. And we seldom see them in a narrative that teeters between realism and nightmare as effectively as Bergman's screenplay, in a setting so evocative as production designer Marik Vos-Lundh's, or via such sensitive camerawork as Sven Nykvist's. The film has often been compared to Chekhov, and for once it's a film that merits the comparison.

Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014)

It's a great idea for a movie: the downfall of a hugely successful artist who took the credit for the work done by someone else. It allows a filmmaker to explore such topics as fraud, the difference between capital-A Art and works that are just popular, the nature of value when it comes to works of the imagination, and in this case, the relationship between men and women. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) persuaded his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams), to let him pass off her work -- paintings of large-eyed waifs -- as his own. The trouble with the movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to say about any of the important issues it raises, other than that Margaret Keane was a victim of the male-dominated society of the 1950s and '60s. It doesn't even settle on the issue of whether Margaret's paintings were mawkish kitsch or actual works of Art, though I think it rather smugly assumes that viewers will be smart enough to have decided on the former. But it complicates this position by starting with a quote from Andy Warhol proclaiming that the Keane art is "terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." And it turns the critics of Keane into pretentious snobs, represented by the gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman) who resents the fact that the Keane paintings outsell his rather arid, minimalist abstractions, and by John Canaday (Terence Stamp), the New York Times critic who prevents a Keane from being exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. So what we are left with is Margaret Keane, the victim who finally has the courage to turn against her monstrously manipulative husband and become a hero. That she is a hero in the cause of women's rights is presumably fine. But is it also fine that she becomes a hero by asserting her right to profit from making bad art? I don't think either screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski or director Tim Burton have decided for themselves. So we are left only with Adams's terrific performance as Margaret, which could have been bolstered by a fuller backstory, and Waltz's somewhat overdone performance as Walter. What Burton does best in his movies is milieu, especially when he can caricature it, which he does here, with a little more restraint than usual, in his portraits of the business of art in the 1960s. And he gets us into the head of Margaret Keane: When she is grinding out big-eyed paintings for Walter she goes to a supermarket and hallucinates the clerks and customers as big-eyed grotesques. But the movie probably should have gone more in one direction or another: Either into a realistic portrayal of the relationship of the Keanes or into a more vivid and surreal lampoon of the art world. Trying to do a bit of both undermines the film.

The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)

William Faulkner claimed that he wrote the novel Sanctuary for the money, which may have some truth in it -- it was one of his few best-selling novels. But if it's not on a par with The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying or Go Down, Moses, it's a well-wrought book with a good deal more art than its sensational plot suggests: Temple Drake is a hedonistic Ole Miss coed who winds up at a bootlegger's hangout after an automobile accident and is abducted by a thug called Popeye who rapes her with a corncob (he's impotent) and forces her into prostitution. Naturally, Hollywood jumped at the chance to capitalize on the book's reputation, and equally naturally found itself unable to do anything but bowdlerize the story. Temple (Miriam Hopkins) is still a "bad girl," but gone are Popeye's impotence and the corncob, along with his name (presumably to avoid a lawsuit from the holders of the copyright on the cartoon character). In the movie he's called Trigger (Jack La Rue), and although the rape takes place (after a fadeout) in a corncrib, there's no hint of his incapacity. And in the end, Temple gets a chance to redeem herself in court at the trial of a man accused of the murder that Trigger actually committed -- a complete reversal of what happens in the book. Nevertheless, the film became one of the most notorious of the Pre-Code films that led to Hollywood's rigorous system of self-censorship. The problem is that it's a rather muddled movie. Roberts was a second-string director, and he fails to impose shape or coherence on the story, which was adapted by Oliver H.P. Garrett. Hopkins, in her 30s, is miscast as the flighty young Temple, and William Gargan, who plays the lawyer Stephen Benbow, alternately chews the scenery and fades into the background. La Rue, on the other hand, had a long career as a heavy and brings real menace to the part of Trigger, almost evoking Faulkner's description of Popeye's "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." The best performance, though, is probably Florence Eldridge's as the downtrodden Ruby, who grudgingly tries to protect Temple from Trigger and the other men at the bootlegger's hangout. There is some Paramount gloss on the film: When she isn't in her underwear, Hopkins wears gowns by Travis Banton, and the cinematography by Karl Struss gives the movie a more sophisticated look than it really deserves. But the general feeling one gets is that Faulkner has once again been badly served by the movies.

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Would there have been a Quentin Tarantino if there hadn't been a David Lynch? Blue Velvet represents an opening up of mainstream moviemaking to the perverse underside of American experience. It had been approached before, in 1940s film noir, for example, but only by suggestion. In the era of the nascent Cold War, unusual sexual behavior was typically presented as the product of decadent cities like New York and Los Angeles. But in Lynch's film, made at the height of the Reagan era, it underlies the wholesome atmosphere of a small town where the fireman smiles and waves as he passes by. The film noir detective was disgusted by what he saw, not fascinated and drawn in the way Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is. Jeffrey, barely out of adolescence, teams up to explore the mystery of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with a teenage girl, Sandy (Laura Dern), who is both disgusted and fascinated by what she learns. The use of songs like Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" suggests the way American pop culture, aimed at the young, floats atop a sea of darkness that it only thinly hides. In the end, of course, everything is cleaned up: the vicious Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) gets what's coming to him and Dorothy is reunited with her child. Even Jeffrey's father, incapacitated by a stroke while watering his lawn at the beginning of the film, is restored to health.  Sandy has earlier told us about her nightmare in which the horrors will only disappear when the robins fly down and bring a "blinding light of love." So in the end a robin appears on the windowsill, with one of the disgusting insects we saw at the film's beginning under the grass of the Beaumonts' lawn in its mouth. But Lynch mocks the happy ending by clearly showing us that it's a fake, an animated stuffed robin.

A Room With a View (James Ivory, 1985)

Rosemary Leach, Daniel Day-Lewis, Simon Callow, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves in A Room With a View

Lucy Honeychurch: Helena Bonham Carter
Charlotte Bartlett: Maggie Smith
George Emerson: Julian Sands
Mr. Emerson: Denholm Elliott
The Rev. Mr. Beebe: Simon Callow
Eleanor Lavish: Judi Dench
Cecil Vyse: Daniel Day-Lewis
Mrs. Honeychurch: Rosemary Leach
Freddy Honeychurch: Rupert Graves

Director: James Ivory
Screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Based on a novel by E.M. Forster
Cinematography: Tony Pierce-Roberts
Production design: Brian Ackland Snow, Gianni Quaranta
Music: Richard Robbins
Costume design: Jenny Beavan, John Bright

James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant had a collaboration that began with the formation of Merchant Ivory Productions in 1961 and lasted until Merchant's death in 2005. It usually included the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio developed a reputation for literary adaptations that were beautifully filmed with opulent sets and costumes and a gallery of celebrated stars -- most of them British. But the trouble with developing a distinctive style is that you can become a cliché: "Merchant Ivory" eventually became a label for a film that was tastefully middlebrow -- well-done and entertaining but just a tad safe. It's a pity, because their best films -- Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993), and this one -- set a high standard, despite their "safeness." Few films have a better sense of place and time than A Room With a View, in its depiction of Florence at the start of the 20th century. Granted, it leans a bit too heavily on the cliché about stuffy Brits losing their cool in the warmer climate of Tuscany, but that's the fault of E.M. Forster's novel -- not one of his major works -- and not of Jhabvala's Oscar-winning screenplay. Oscars also went to the art direction team and to costumers Jenny Beavan and John Bright, and it was nominated for best picture, for the supporting performances of Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith, for Ivory's direction, and for Tony Pierce-Roberts's cinematography. The cast includes Helena Bonham Carter (in her "corset-roles" period) and Julian Sands, along with a then little-known Daniel Day-Lewis. Proof that Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors of all time is no longer needed, but it's worth contemplating that he created the character of the prissy Cecil Vyse in this film within a year of appearing as the gay street punk Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears), and that he would follow with the sexy Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, 1988), the paralyzed Christy Brown in My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989), and the dashing Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992). Day-Lewis's Cecil Vyse verges on a caricature of the sexually repressed Brit, but he has an affecting moment near the end when, after Lucy (Bonham Carter) breaks off their engagement, he emerges as a vulnerable, three-dimensional character. Richard Robbins's fine score is memorably supplemented by Kiri Te Kanawa's recordings of two Puccini arias: "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi and "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" from La Rondine.

Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015)

Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria -- There's no greater sorrow than remembering happy times in misery. What was true of Paolo and Francesca, Dante's lovers in hell, is also true of 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) in Inside Out. This extraordinarily clever Pixar animated movie, written by Docter, Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley, takes an ancient premise and does wonderful things with it. Though it purports to be a whimsical treatment of modern psychological theories about the role of emotions in the formation of personality, it's a kind of moral allegory, not unlike the moral fables of all eras, including John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Riley and her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) have moved to San Francisco from Minnesota. The shock of adjusting to a new home and a new school plunges Riley into misery, made worse by her remembrances of the happy times when she felt secure, had friends, and was a star on her hockey team. Her emotions -- Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) -- lose control of her personality, and things begin to fall apart. It's an astute and original (despite its ancient precedents) look at the way we learn to face life, brilliantly animated and skillfully voiced by a great cast.

Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)

Day for Night has a certain notoriety as the film that caused a rift between the New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. As the story goes, Godard walked out of a screening of Day for Night and charged that Truffaut had a fraudulent, sentimental view of the traditional movie-making that had been their targets in their first features, The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) and Breathless (Godard, 1960). Godard, the purist, had maintained his radical political leftism from the beginning; Truffaut, who was an unabashed fan of movies no matter what their politics, had not maintained, in Godard's view, a strict enough awareness of his social responsibility as a filmmaker as his career advanced. Godard is, on his own terms, accurate about this aspect of Truffaut's work, so it all boils down to which filmmaker you prefer. As I happen to love them both, I won't take sides. Godard shows me things in movies that I haven't seen anywhere else, while Truffaut's humanity wins me over almost every time. Day for Night was, as it happens, a fair target for Godard's kind of criticism: It was warmly embraced by the establishment that Godard scorned, namely the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave it the best foreign language film Oscar for 1973 and, because of eligibility rules, led a year later to nominations for Truffaut as best director and (with Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman) for best original screenplay, as well as a best supporting actress nomination for Valentina Cortese. (She lost to Ingrid Bergman in Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express, leading to a famous moment in which Bergman blurted out in her acceptance speech that she thought Cortese would win -- and then later expressed her embarrassment that she had slighted the other three nominees in the category.) Day for Night is still one of Truffaut's most enjoyable movies, an account of the difficulties encountered by a director (played by Truffaut himself) in completing a studio-produced melodrama called Meet Pamela. He has to contend with an aging alcoholic actress (Cortese) who can't remember her lines so they have to be posted around the set, and who repeatedly opens the wrong door and walks into a closet during one of her big scenes. There is also a fragile leading lady (Jacqueline Bisset) who is returning to work after a nervous breakdown, an unexpectedly pregnant actress (Alexandra Stewart) in a key supporting role, an aging matinee idol star (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud) whose life is complicated by his romantic notions about women. Moreover, one of these performers will die before filming ends, making things even more difficult. That the film also bristles with insights into the filmmaking process only makes it a more durable addition to Truffaut's canon. For once, the English title, which refers to the technique of underexposing or filtering the images so that daytime shots appear to be taking place at night, is more suggestive than the French one (La Nuit Américaine is the French phrase for the same process) in evoking the illusion/reality paradox involved in making movies. One additional plus: Georges Delerue's wonderful score.