Four Bags Full (Claude Autant-Lara, 1956)

Like most movie-lovers whose knowledge of film extends beyond "Hollywood," I was familiar with Jean Gabin, especially through his work for Jean Renoir in Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), and French Cancan (1955). But although I had encountered the name, I didn't know Bourvil, celebrated in France but not so much on this side of the Atlantic. Which made it difficult for me at first to capture the tone and humor of Four Bags Full, a film also known as La Traversée de Paris, The Trip Across Paris, and Pig Across Paris. Since the film begins with newsreel footage of German troops occupying Paris in 1942, it strikes a more serious tone than it eventually takes. Marcel Martin (Bourvil) is a black market smuggler tasked with carrying meat from a pig that's slaughtered at the beginning of the movie while he plays loud music on an accordion to cover its squeals. He's responsible for transporting two suitcases filled with pork across the city to Montmartre, but when the other smuggler fails to show up, he has to accept the aid of a stranger, Grandgil (Gabin), who agrees to carry the other two valises. Grandgil, however, wants the butcher, Jambier (Louis de Funès), to pay much more than the originally agreed-upon amount for his services, and blackmails him into accepting, to the consternation of Martin. The task is perilous, given the vigilance of the French police and the German occupying troops, so the film wavers between thriller and comedy -- the latter particularly when some stray dogs pick up the scent of what's in the suitcases. The film ends up being a fascinating tale of the odd-couple relationship between Grandgil and Martin, as well as a picture of what Parisians went through during the occupation. It was controversial when it was released because it takes a warts-and-all look at black-marketeers and the Résistance, downplaying the heroism without denying the genuine risks they took. Eventually, Grandgil and Martin are caught by the Germans, but Grandgil is released because the officer in charge recognizes him as a famous artist. Martin is sent to prison, but the two are reunited after the war when Grandgil recognizes him at a train station as the porter carrying his luggage -- a rather obvious, and somewhat sour, bit of irony.

Wild Rose (Sun Yu, 1932)

Wild Rose director Sun Yu

By 1932, sound was so established in American filmmaking that Charles Chaplin's decision a year earlier to release his City Lights with a score and synchronized sound effects but without dialogue was regarded as an anachronistic whim on the part of a cinematic genius. But elsewhere in the world, sound had not fully taken hold. Chinese filmmakers like Sun Yu were still making silent films: Wild Rose was the fourth in his career as a director, which began in 1928. Raised in China, Sun studied drama at the University of Wisconsin and film at the New York Institute of Photography and Columbia University before going home again in 1926. Wild Rose is a skillfully made tale of the romance of a country girl, Xiao Feng, which translates as "Little Phoenix," and a rich young city dweller, Jian Bo, who wants to be an artist. Wang Renmei, who made her film debut as the girl, became one of China's major stars during the 1930s, and eventually married her co-star, Jin Yan, who was known as "the Rudolph Valentino of Shanghai." Jian and Little Phoenix meet one day when he's sketching in her village. He's amused by her attempts to do a military drill with a group of kids and her exortations that they love China. When a fire destroys her home, he takes her to the city with him. After a quarrel with his father, caused by Little Phoenix's clumsy attempt to adjust to city manners and fashion, the young couple move into a slum, sharing quarters with two of his buddies, resulting in scenes that were obviously inspired by La Bohème. Unable to sell his art, Jian takes a job as a sign painter, working on billboards -- which are, interestingly, mostly in English. But he falls ill, and their increasing poverty causes Little Phoenix to steal a wallet from a drunk. When she's caught, Jian takes the rap, so she goes to his father and secretly makes a deal: If he'll bail Jian out, she'll leave him. Time passes, and when patriotic fervor is roused by the Japanese attempts to take over Manchuria, Jian finds her and and his old friends in the crowds recruiting troops for the war. Wang's performance is strikingly reminiscent of Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford at their spunkiest. The story is nicely handled, if a little disjointed toward the end, and the movie gives us some remarkable looks at China in a turbulent era. The scenes of slum life are nicely contrasted with the upperclass milieu of Jian's family, who live in an opulent mansion that's a blend of Chinese style and Art Deco.

Wang Renmei in Wild Rose

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort

Delphine Garnier: Catherine Deneuve
Solange Garnier: Françoise Dorléac
Yvonne Garnier: Danielle Darrieux
Andy Miller: Gene Kelly
Étienne: George Chakiris
Maxence: Jacques Perrin
Simon Dame: Michel Piccoli
Bill: Grover Dale
Josette: Geneviève Thénier
Subtil Dutroux: Henri Crémieux

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Jean Hamon
Music: Michel Legrand

I appreciate Jacques Demy's hommage to the Hollywood musical, but I think I would have to like Michel Legrand's songs more to really enjoy The Young Girls of Rochefort. Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) has been known to seriously divide and damage friendships, though when I last saw it I rather enjoyed its cheeky sentimentality and bright colors. Rochefort takes a similar approach to Cherbourg, setting a musical romance in a French town and filling it with wall-to-wall Legrand songs, but by doubling down on the concept -- giving us multiple romances, extending the time from Cherbourg's 91 minutes to Rochefort's more than two hours, and bringing in guest stars from American musicals -- it begins to try one's patience. Catherine Deneuve, who starred in Cherbourg, is joined by her sister, Françoise Dorléac, and the two of them have great charm, though Deneuve's delicately beautiful face is smothered under an enormous blond wig for much of the film. They are courted by Étienne and Bill, who often seem to be doing dance movements borrowed from Jerome Robbins's choreography for West Side Story (Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), in which the actor playing Étienne, George Chakiris, appeared. (Rochefort's choreographer is Norman Maen.) But Solange winds up with an American composer, Andy Miller, while Delphine keeps missing a connection with Maxence, an artist who has painted a picture of his ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Meanwhile, their mother, Yvonne, doesn't realize that her old flame (and the father of her young son), Simon Dame, has recently moved to Rochefort. (She had turned him down because she didn't want to be known as Madame Dame. No, I'm not kidding.) And so it goes. The movie is given a jolt of life by Gene Kelly's extended cameo: At 55, he's as buoyant as ever, though somewhat implausible as the 25-year-old Dorléac's love interest. He would have been better paired with Darrieux. It's a candy-box movie, but for my taste it's like someone got there first and ate the best pieces, leaving me the ones with coconut centers.

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Power corrupts, as we knew long before John Dalberg-Acton so nicely formulated it for us. It's the truth underlying so many myths, from the Garden of Eden to the Nibelungenlied to the Faust legend. Goethe's Faust is a philosophical poem, a closet drama not designed for stage or film, but that hasn't prevented playwrights, opera librettists, or screenwriters from making the attempt. F.W. Murnau's version is probably the most distinguished cinematic attempt, but not because of its fidelity to the source. Murnau's version works because it concentrates on the power struggle, initially between Good, as represented by the archangel (Werner Fuetterer), and Evil, as represented by Mephisto (Emil Jannings), and later by the attempt of Faust (Gösta Ekman) to obtain mastery over Time. It begins with a wager, borrowed from the book of Job, between the archangel and Mephisto, over whom Faust's soul will belong to. Then it eventually devolves into what is the core of most dramatic treatments of Goethe's story, the seduction of Gretchen (Camilla Horn), with the aid of Mephisto. In the end, both Gretchen and Faust are redeemed by his willingness to sacrifice himself, an abnegation of power. But that too-familiar story is distinguished by Murnau's staging of it, with the significant help of Carl Hoffmann's cinematography and the art direction of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig. This is one of the most beautiful of silent films because of the interplay between light and dark, a superb evocation of the paintings of Rembrandt in the way scenes are composed and lighted. The tone of the film is set near the beginning by the spectacular image (above) of a gigantic Mephisto looming over a German town, which clearly influenced the similar scene in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Jannings manages to be both sinister and gross as Mephisto -- the latter mode most in evidence in his scenes with Gretchen's lustful Aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert). (If Guilbert looks familiar it's because, as a Parisian cabaret singer during the Belle Époque, she was the subject of numerous portraits by Toulouse-Lautrec.) This was the last of Murnau's films in Germany: The following year he moved to Hollywood, where he made probably his greatest film, Sunrise. He was soon followed to America by the actor who played Gretchen's brother, Valentin, William Dieterle, who became a prominent Hollywood director.

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

As Bram Stoker first described him, Count Dracula was by no means hideous. Creepy, yes, but with his long white mustache, his aquiline nose, and his "extraordinary pallor," he must have been at least striking to see. Most of the incarnations of Count Dracula on screen have been more or less attractive men: Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Frank Langella, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, among many others. And lately, since Anne Rice's novels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters), the tendency has been to portray vampires as hot young dudes like the ones seen on the CW's The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Vampires, it seems, have been getting more human. But not the very first version of Dracula portrayed on screen: With his steady glare, his beaky nose, his batlike ears, his long taloned fingers, his implacable stiff-legged gait, and his posture suggestive of someone who has been crammed for a long time into a coffin, Max Schreck's Count Orlok (the name has been changed to protect the studio, which it didn't) is decidedly non-human. He's a mutant, perhaps, or an alien. He is also not sexy, which is something of a paradox because vampirism, with its night prowling and exchange of fluids, is all about sex -- or the fear of it. And yet this is probably the greatest film version of Dracula, even allowing for the fact that it's a ripoff, designed to allow the producers Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau to avoid having to pay the Stoker estate for the rights. They were sued, and according to the terms of the settlement all prints of the film were supposed to be destroyed. The studio went out of business, but Nosferatu was undead -- enough copies survived that it could be pieced together for posterity. Undead, but not undated: Some of the opening scenes involving Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), the novel's Harker, are a bit laughable given the actor's puppyish grin, and the character of Knock (Alexander Granach), the novel's Renfield, is wildly over-the-top. But Murnau knew how to create atmosphere, and he keeps the action grounded in plausibility by using real locations and natural settings. The scene in which a long procession of coffins filled with plague victims moves down a street (actually in Lübeck) is haunting. But most of all, it's Schreck's uncanny performance that makes Nosferatu still able to stalk through dreams after more than 90 years.

Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952)

Egotism is accounted a sin, or at best a character flaw, but what would art, at least since the Renaissance, be without it? Imagine the history of motion pictures without the egotism of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Orson Welles, not to mention countless movie stars. So it comes as a bit of a shock to find David Thomson, in his essay on Singin' in the Rain in Have You Seen ...?, making reference to "[Gene] Kelly's rather frantic ego." I do know what he means: I've always found the "Broadway Melody/Broadway Rhythm" number overlong and overdone, suggesting Kelly's attempt at being regarded as "serious" dancer, especially in the pas de quatre with Cyd Charisse, her train, and a wind machine. And its ending, with the zoom-in-close of Kelly's face, does seem a bit de trop. Thomson also hints that producer Arthur Freed may have been indulging his ego by loading the film with his and Nacio Herb Brown's catalog of songs, instead of those of better songwriters. Freed, as the head of the legendary "Freed Unit" at MGM, had won a best picture Oscar for another Gene Kelly musical based on a songwriter's catalog, An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), which was wall-to-wall George Gershwin. And even though Singin' in the Rain is a better movie, it might have been nicer if it had songs by Harold Arlen or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. Porter at least gets plagiarized in Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number, the tune for which is virtually identical to that of "Be a Clown," which Porter wrote for the Freed-produced The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948). That said, the Freed-Brown songs are entirely appropriate to the era depicted: They date from such 1929 MGM musicals as The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont) and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner), exactly the ones parodied in Singin' in the Rain's montage of early movie musicals. My point is that egos are not enough to spoil the wonder that is Singin' in the Rain, widely regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals, and in my opinion just plain one of the great movies. Much credit goes to the expert comedy writing of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and to Harold Rosson's cinematography. Kelly and Stanley Donen wisely did what directors of movie musicals so often fail to do: rely on long takes and full-body shots during dance numbers. As for the performers, no one in the film, and that includes Kelly and O'Connor, ever reached this peak again. Debbie Reynolds was too often betrayed into perkiness, but she is human and appealing here. Jean Hagen stole scenes from everyone and received one of the movie's two Oscar nominations -- the other was to Lennie Hayton for scoring -- but her movie career stalled and she wound up doing TV guest appearances. As for egotism, it pains me to remember that Singin' in the Rain was not nominated for the best picture Oscar winner for 1952. The winner was The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by one of the great egotists, Cecil B. DeMille. Some egotists are geniuses; others are hacks.

Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947)

Body and Soul is a well-made boxing picture, but it has a historical significance as the nexus of some major careers damaged by the anti-communist hysteria that gripped the United States in the years that followed its release. After its director, Robert Rossen, pleaded the fifth amendment at his hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, he was blacklisted in Hollywood. The same fate befell screenwriter Abraham Polonsky after his refusal to testify before HUAC. The star, John Garfield, testified that he knew nothing about communist activity in Hollywood, but studios refused to hire him; he made his last film in 1951 and died of a heart attack the following year, only 39. Cast members Anne Revere, Lloyd Gough, Canada Lee, and Art Smith were also victims of the blacklist. The film stands as an example of the folly of HUAC witch-hunting: With all the reds and pinkos involved in its production, you might expect it to be pure propaganda, but the only leftist message it communicates is about the danger of greed. Today the only viewers who may find Body and Soul subversively anti-capitalist are those who subscribe to the "greed is good" credo enunciated by Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987). Garfield plays an ambitious young boxer named Charley* Davis who falls prey to racketeers who manipulate his career, despite the warnings of his mother (Revere), his best friend, Shorty (Joseph Pevney), and his girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer). The fight sequences, shot by James Wong Howe and edited by Francis Lyon and Robert Parrish, were groundbreaking in their realistic violence, winning Oscars for Lyon and Parrish. Howe, who is said to have worn rollerskates and used a hand-held camera to film the fights, was curiously unnominated, but nominations also went to Garfield and Polonsky. Palmer, unable to conceal her German accent or to eliminate traces of the sophisticated roles she usually played, is miscast as Charley's artist girlfriend. The script makes a half-hearted attempt to explain away the accent but mostly ignores it. One thing of note: The black boxer played by Lee calls Garfield's character by his first name, Charley, in their scenes together. The usual racial protocol was for African-American characters to call white ones "Mr." -- "Mr. Charley" or "Mr. Davis" -- the way Dooley Wilson's Sam always refers to Bogart's character as "Mr. Rick" in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943). It's the earliest example of an assumed equality that I can recall in a Hollywood movie.

*A nitpicky note: The filmmakers never decided whether it was spelled "Charley" or "Charlie." It appears both ways on the posters advertising his fights, but it's "Charlie" in the inscription on a gift he gives Peg and in her letter addressed to him. I'm going with the way IMDb lists it.

Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)

This was the fourth and last of the films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, but the movie was stolen by Claire Trevor, who won a supporting actress Oscar, and by Bogart's old partner in Warner Bros. gangster movies, Edward G. Robinson. It's a little too talky and stagy, partly because it was based on a 1939 Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, a once-admired playwright whose specialty was blank-verse dramas. Huston and co-screenwriter Richard Brooks took great liberties with the play, changing the characters and the ending, and updating the action to the postwar era, but occasionally you can hear a bit of Anderson's iambic pentameter in the dialogue. Bogart's Frank McCloud was originally called King McCloud and was a deserter from the Spanish Civil War; in the movie he's a World War II veteran, something of a hero, who comes to Key Largo to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and the widow (Bacall) of an army buddy who was killed in Italy. He finds them being held in the hotel they own by a group of gangsters, headed by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a Prohibition-era mobster who is trying to sneak back into the States after being deported. As so often -- cf. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944) -- the Bogart character is called on to make a choice between taking the kind of action he has renounced and remaining neutral. Bacall's role is somewhat underwritten, and what few sparks she and Bogart strike seem to be the residue of their previous films together, especially To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946). Having to play opposite that scene-stealing old ham Barrymore doesn't help much, either. But Trevor fully deserved her award as Rocco's moll, an alcoholic club singer known as Gaye Dawn. She has a big moment when she's forced by Rocco to sing "Moanin' Low" on the promise that he'll let her have a drink -- which he then sadistically refuses her. As usual, Robinson is terrific, and also as usual, he failed to receive the Oscar nomination he deserved and was never granted. Karl Freund's cinematography helps overcome the studio's decision not to film on location.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

I haven't read the Thomas Pynchon novel on which Anderson's film is based, but I've read enough Pynchon to know that his work is founded on a kind of literary playfulness for which there's no cinematic equivalent or even substitute. What Anderson gives us is a kind of loosey-goosey spoof of the private eye genre that works as well as it does because of brilliant casting. Joaquin Phoenix is perfect as Doc Sportello, the perpetually stoned P.I. who is trying to figure out what's going on with his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) while butting heads with a police detective, "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). The time is the 1970s, with Nixon as president and Reagan as California governor, and Anderson milks the period paranoia about drugs and law and order for all it's worth. The plot is as murky as a Raymond Chandler novel, which links the movie with two distinguished predecessors, The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) and The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), which really were based on Chandler novels. Inherent Vice isn't as good as either of those films: It's a little too long and a little too caught up in the cleverness of its spoofery. But there's always something or someone -- the cast includes Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Martin Short, among others -- to watch. Brolin is a hoot as Bigfoot: With his crew cut and perpetually clenched jaw he looks for all the world like Dick Tracy -- or maybe Al Capp's parody of Dick Tracy, Fearless Fosdick.

Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967)

Peppermint Frappé sounds like it should be a teen beach party movie, at least until you see that it's directed by Carlos Saura and dedicated to Luis Buñuel. Then you know it's going to be a somewhat kinky story with darkly comic overtones. It opens with a middle-aged man cutting pictures of fashion models out of magazines. He's Julián (José Luis López Vázquez), a physician who runs a radiology clinic with the help of his nurse, Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), who is as quiet and conservative as he is. Then he's reunited with a boyhood friend, Pablo (Alfredo Mayo), whose life is virtually the antithesis of Julián's: Pablo has been living an adventurous life in Africa, he drives a Corvette, and he has just married the smashingly pretty and vivacious Elena, who is also played by Chaplin in a tour de force performance. Eventually, Julián's jealousy of Pablo and desire for Elena will take an increasingly predictable course, as his obsession leads to an attempt to remake Ana into Elena. Not that Saura's film is ever really predictable: As a director he has too many tricks up his sleeve, so that things always stay a little off-balance, especially when Julián invites Pablo and Elena to his weekend retreat in the country, which is next to an abandoned spa where Pablo and Julián used to play as children. Saura's use of setting is masterly in this sequence. The title refers to Pablo's favorite cocktail, a crème de menthe-based concoction served over crushed ice; it's a particularly venomous shade of green not found in nature. And yes, it plays a part in the denouement. López Vázquez and especially Chaplin give terrific performances, but the movie doesn't add up to much more than a showcase for them and Saura's skewed way of telling a story.