Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)

Imagine Gertrud as a Hollywood "women's picture" of the 1940s or '50s, with Olivia de Havilland, perhaps, as Gertrud, and Claude Rains as her husband, Montgomery Clift as her young lover, and Walter Pidgeon as the old flame who comes back into her life. It's not hard to do, given that the play by Hjalmar Söderberg on which Carl Theodor Dreyer based his film has all the elements of the genre: a woman trapped in a sterile marriage; an ardent young lover who appeals to the artist trapped in her; another man who represents the road not taken that might have led her to fulfillment if she hadn't discovered that he was more committed to his work than to her. And it ends the way the Hollywood film might have: After Gertrud has rejected those three lovers and gone off to Paris with yet another man -- George Brent, perhaps -- who seemed to give her the opportunity to find herself, we see them reunite 30 or 40 years later, when she has settled into a sadly contented solitary life. There would have been a Max Steiner or Alfred Newman score to draw tears at the crisis moments -- as when, for example, Gertrud discovers that her young lover has boasted of his affair with her at a party also attended by the old flame. But this is a "women's picture" of ideas, largely about the nature of love and the way we can be deceived in the pursuit of it. And there are no melodramatic moments, merely extended conversations in which the participants rarely, if ever, make eye contact. As Gertrud, Nina Pens Rode maintains a gaze into the middle distance, rarely even blinking, whether she's telling her husband (Bendt Rothe) that she's leaving him, declaring her love for the young musician (Baard Owe) who later boasts of his conquest, or reminiscing about their past together with her old flame (Ebbe Rode). But the faint flicker of thought and emotion always plays over her face, as Henning Bendtsen's camera gazes steadily at her. It is, for those raised on the Hollywood version, something of a trying and even boring film, but for those who understand what Dreyer is doing -- grabbing the viewer's eye and keeping it trained on the characters, through long, long takes and subtle camera moments -- it creates a psychological tension that is unnerving. Dreyer makes more conventional directors' work seem frantic and frivolous.

Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)

As a non-believer, I find the story told by Ordet objectively preposterous, but it raises all the right questions about the nature of religious belief.  Ordet, the kind of film you find yourself thinking about long after it's over, is about the varieties of religious faith, from the lack of it, embodied by Mikkel Borgen (Emil Hass Christensen), to the mad belief of Mikkel's brother Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) that he is in fact Jesus Christ. Although Mikkel is a non-believer, his pregnant wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), maintains a simple belief in the goodness of God and humankind. The head of the Borgen family, Morten (Henrik Malberg), regularly attends church, but it's a relatively liberal modern congregation, headed by a pastor (Ove Rud), who tries to be forward-thinking: He denies the possibility of miracles in a world in which God has established physical laws, although he doesn't have a ready answer when he's asked about the miracles in the Bible. When Morten's youngest son, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), falls in love with a young woman, her father, Peter (Ejner Federspiel), who belongs to a very conservative sect, forbids her to marry Anders. Then everyone's faith or lack of it is put to test when Inger goes into labor. The doctor (Henry Skjaer) thinks he has saved her life by aborting the fetus -- we are told that it has to be cut into four pieces to deliver it -- but after he leaves, Inger dies. As she is lying in her coffin, Peter arrives to tell Morten that her death has made him realize his lack of charity and that Anders can marry his daughter. And as if this doesn't sound conventionally sentimental enough, the film ends with Inger, who has died in childbirth, being restored to life with the help of Johannes and the simple faith of her young daughter. Embracing Inger, Mikkel now proclaims that he is a believer. The conundrum of faith and evidence runs through the film.  For example, if the only thing that can restore one's faith is a miracle, can we really call that faith? What makes Ordet work -- in fact, what makes it a great film -- is that it poses such questions without attempting answers. It subverts all our expectations about what a serious-minded film about religion -- not the phony piety of Hollywood biblical epics -- should be. Dreyer and cinematographer Henning Bendtsen keep everything deceptively simple: Although the film takes place in only a few sparely decorated settings, the reliance on very long single takes and a slowly traveling camera has a documentary-like effect that engages a kind of conviction on the part of the audience that makes the shock of Inger's resurrection more unsettling. We don't usually expect to find our expectations about the way things are -- or the way movies should treat them -- so rudely and so provocatively exploded.

The Red Mill (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1927)

The Red Mill is a surprisingly well-preserved silent film, with crisp images -- the cinematography is by Hendrik Sartov, a Danish director of photography who also shot La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926) and The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöstrom, 1926). It's also a fairly forgettable romantic farce, about Tina (Marion Davies), a Dutch scullery maid, who falls in love with Dennis (Owen Moore), an Irishman visiting Holland, and gets involved with a plot to save Gretchen (Louise Fazenda) from having to marry someone other than her boyfriend Jacop (Karl Dane). The whole thing is very loosely based on a creaky old Victor Herbert operetta. The chief distinction of the film is that it was directed by Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle, who had to take the pseudonym William Goodrich because he had been blacklisted after the scandal over the death of Virginia Rappe -- even though Arbuckle was acquitted. Given that the film is a fitfully amusing comedy, whose chief virtue is that is shows off the great comic gifts of Davies, it might be surprising to find it in such pristine condition when so many other (and better) silent films are available only in patched-together restorations or have been lost altogether. The reason is probably that it was produced by William Randolph Hearst's company, Cosmopolitan Productions, which existed largely to showcase Davies, Hearst's mistress. So MGM, which released the film, took special care not to offend Hearst in its handling of The Red Mill. Davies is, as so frequently, a delight, playing physical comedy without sacrificing her beauty and femininity. She does a wonderful slapstick bit in which she tries to solve the problem of assembling a folding ironing board -- a twist on the familiar struggles of comedians with folding beach chairs. But Arbuckle, who directed dozens of short films, doesn't give this movie the pace needed to sustain itself at feature length. Frances Marion did the screenplay and the cornball captions -- sample: "A summer on Holland's canals leaves an impression, but a fall on its ice leaves a scar" -- are by Joseph Farnham.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Leonardo DiCaprio has replaced Robert De Niro as Martin Scorsese's go-to leading man, but he has yet to make his Raging Bull (1980) or Taxi Driver (1976), which many people -- including me -- think of as the peak achievements of both Scorsese and De Niro. The Wolf of Wall Street comes close to being DiCaprio's GoodFellas (1990). Both movies are based on true stories that illuminate the dark side of American experience: In the case of GoodFellas, the mob, and for Wolf, the unholy pursuit of wealth in the stock market. Both are in large part black comedies, full of sex and drugs, and both end in an inevitable downfall. And both have been criticized for excessively glamorizing the lifestyles of their protagonists. Terence Winter's adaptation of the memoir of Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) spares no excess in depicting a life corrupted by unchecked greed, and yet neither Winter nor Scorsese seems able to put the course of Belfort's corruption into plausible shape, the way Scorsese and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi made Henry Hill's rise and fall plausible in GoodFellas. It's a flamboyant film, with entertaining and sometimes frightening performances by DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Bernthal, and Jean Dujardin, but the film often seems to be carried away with its own determination to get away with as much outrageous behavior and language as possible. I would have welcomed a little less Jordan Belfort and a little more Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who was based on Gregory Coleman, the FBI agent who finally managed to bring Belfort down. But as in GoodFellas, the emphasis is less on the law than on the disorder.

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

Andy Weir's best-selling science fiction novel was one of the few that manage to emphasize science almost as much as fiction. The film version, being aimed at a somewhat less cerebral audience, doesn't quite keep that balance, but Drew Goddard's screenplay is an admirable effort to keep up with protagonist Mark Watney's (Matt Damon) determination to "science the shit out of" the problem of surviving after he has been marooned on Mars. And in an age when science has fallen afoul of politics, The Martian nobly attempts to bring some luster to this essential human endeavor. There is also a political undercurrent in the film, namely the hurdles that NASA administrator Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) has to leap in order to achieve the rescue of his stranded astronaut. It's gratifying, too, to see so many actors of color -- Michael Peña, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Donald Glover, among others -- given key roles in the effort to rescue Watney, all of them given parts emphasizing their skill and intelligence. On the other hand, there were protests that the ethnicity of some of the characters in the film had been changed. In the novel, for example, the mission director is called Venkat Kapoor, and he is a Hindu. His first name is changed in the film to Vincent, and he's played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor whose parents were born in Nigeria -- the change is signaled by an explanation that his father was Hindu and his mother was a Baptist. One reason for such protests is that director Scott's previous film was Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), in which all of the Egyptian and Middle Eastern characters were played by white actors like Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton, a continuation of an old Hollywood tradition that increasingly seems wrong-headed. Fortunately, in The Martian Scott kept the novel's prominent female roles, including mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) and astronaut Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara).

No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007)

No Country is not my favorite Coen brothers film; Fargo (1996), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Miller's Crossing (1990), and maybe O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998) would have to rank higher. But that only shows what an extraordinary contribution the brothers have made to motion picture history. There are those who task the Coens with too much cleverness, too much awareness of breaking or bending conventions, such as, in this film, dispatching both the protagonist and the antagonist off-screen, depriving us of the catharsis usual in such a thriller. There is, some critics argue, something chilly about the Coens, never letting us get too involved in their characters as potentially real human beings. I'd argue that engaging sympathetic identification with characters is not a sine qua non in art, and that the tendency of writers and directors to do that has led to a lot of sentimental and falsified endings. And anyway, who doesn't feel a sympathetic identification with Marge Gunderson in Fargo, or the Dude in The Big Lebowski, to name two of their greatest characters? (They also happen to be original creations of the Coens, not borrowed from a novel, as the characters in No Country are.) I haven't read the Cormac McCarthy novel, but the film strikes me as a moral fable akin to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, with the implacable Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) as the Death figure stalking Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), whose avarice -- though modified by a few virtues, such as bringing a jug of water, albeit too late, to the man he finds dying in the desert -- finally proves his undoing, despite his clever attempts to avoid his fate. We root for Moss because of our common humanity, a trait lacking in the psychotic Chigurh, but it's telling that the story is framed by the point of view of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who can only see the story as a manifestation of what is lacking in human beings. Ed Tom thinks it has something to do with the changing times, which is why there seem to be no countries for old men anymore, but I would suggest that the medieval fable analogy overrides Ed Tom's theory: Human beings have always been like this. That said, the Coens seem to be assembling a kind of American collage. One thing that No Country shares with all of the Coens' best movies is a strong sense of time and place, whether it's the frigid Minnesota of Fargo, the Greenwich Village in the '60s of Inside Llewyn Davis, the unspecified Prohibition-era city of Miller's Crossing, the Depression-era Mississippi of O Brother, or the '90s L.A. of The Big Lebowski. In this case, it's West Texas in 1980, and every note struck about place and period has a resemblance to truth, without being literal about it. As usual, the Coens' collaborators -- especially cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell -- play a major role, especially Burwell's almost subliminal score.

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

Laura is a clever spin on Pygmalion, with a Henry Higgins called Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) whose protégée is an Eliza Doolittle called Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). It's also a spin on the classical myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue of Galatea he had sculpted, bringing her to life. This Pygmalion is a detective, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), who falls in love with the portrait of Laura, who he thinks has been murdered, and is startled when she walks through the door, very much alive. Maybe this classical underpinning explains why Laura has become such an enduring classic, but probably it really has to do with a story so well-scripted, by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Elizabeth Reinhardt from a novel by Vera Caspary, well-acted by Webb, Tierney, and Andrews, along with Vincent Price as the decadent Shelby Carpenter and Judith Anderson as the predatory Ann Treadwell, and most of all, directed with the right attention to its slyly nasty tone by Otto Preminger, one of the most underrated of Hollywood directors of the 1940s and '50s. Like such acerbic films as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Laura is full of characters one would be well advised to steer clear of in real life, but who make for tremendous entertainment when viewed on a screen from a safe distance. It makes a feint at a conventional happily romantic ending, with Laura supposedly going off with McPherson, but do we really believe it? Laura Hunt has shown dubious taste in men -- whom McPherson characterizes as "a remarkable collection of dopes"-- including the desiccated fop Waldo and the smarmy kept man Shelby. So it's hard to believe the social butterfly Lydecker has created is going to settle down happily with a man who, as Waldo says once, fell in love with her when she was a corpse and apparently has never had a relationship with a woman other than the "doll in Washington Heights who once got a fox fur outta" him. Laura is notable, too, for its deft evasions of the Production Code, including Laura's hinted-at out-of-wedlock liaisons, which are at the same time undercut by the suggestions that Waldo and Shelby are gay -- another Code taboo. (Shelby, for example, has an exceptional interest in women's hats, including one of Laura's and the one of Ann's that he calls "completely wonderful.") This shouldn't surprise us, as Preminger went on to be one of the most aggressive Code-breakers, challenging its sexual taboos in The Moon Is Blue (1953) and its strictures on the depiction of drug use in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), and giving the enforcers fits with Anatomy of a Murder (1959). In addition to the contributions to Laura's classic status already mentioned, there is also the familiar score by David Raksin. (Johnny Mercer added lyrics to its main theme after the film was released, creating the song  "Laura.") And Joseph LaShelle won an Oscar for the film's cinematography.

Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

It's a measure of how little Hollywood understood what kind of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was that Warner Bros. insisted he make Dial M for Murder in 3-D. The process was nearing the end of its '50s heyday, one of the several attempts by the troubled studios to draw patrons away from their TV sets and into the theaters. The 3-D films of the '50s, like the blockbusters released in the process today, were mostly filled with things being flung, poked, thrust, or shot at the audience. As Hitchcock had a reputation as a "master of suspense," perhaps the studio assumed that he'd use the process to scare people. But he never needed tricks like 3-D for that, being perfectly skilled at pacing and cutting to build tension in the audience. Dial M ended up being shown mostly in 2-D anyway, and only some very peculiar blocking and framing in its images today show the efforts Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks did to accommodate the moribund process: Scenes are often filmed with table lamps prominent in the foreground, for no other reason than to emphasize the action taking place beyond them. The scene in which Swann (Anthony Dawson) attempts to murder Margot (Grace Kelly) is the only bit of action that would have benefited from the process, with Margot's hand desperately reaching toward the audience for the scissors behind her. Dial M is essentially a filmed play -- Frederick Knott adapted his own theatrical hit for the movies -- and as such relies far more on dialogue and spoken exposition for its narrative coherence. It was the first of three movies -- the other two are Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955) -- that Hitchcock made with Kelly, and the one that gives her least to do in the way of characterization: Mostly she just has to be a pawn moved about by her husband (Ray Milland), her lover (Robert Cummings), and the police inspector (John Williams). But she clearly defined Hitchcock's "type," already partly established in his films with Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman: the so-called "cool blond." Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Janet Leigh would attempt to fill the role afterward, but never with quite the charisma that Kelly, a limited actress but a definite "presence," achieved for him. Milland is very good as the murderous husband, and Williams is a delight as the inspector who has to puzzle out what's going on with all those door keys. The rather goofy-looking Cummings has never made sense to me as a leading man -- he almost wrecks Saboteur (1942), an otherwise well-made Hitchcock film that might be regarded as one of his best if someone other than Cummings and the bland Priscilla Lane had been cast in the leads. It's not surprising that after his performance in Dial M he went straight into television and his own sitcom.

Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

Rebel Without a Cause seems to me a better movie than either of the other two James Dean made: East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) and Giant (George Stevens, 1956). It's less pretentious than the adaptation of John Steinbeck's attempt to retell the story of Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley, and less bloated than the blockbuster version of Edna Ferber's novel about Texas. And Ray, a director with many personal hangups of his own, was far more in tune with Dean than either Kazan or Stevens, who were shocked by their star's eccentricities. Granted, Rebel is full of hack psychology and sociology, attributing the problems of Jim Stark (Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood), and John "Plato" Crawford (Sal Mineo) to parental inadequacy: Jim's weak father (Jim Backus) and domineering mother (Ann Doran) and paternal grandmother (Virginia Brissac), Judy's distant father (William Hopper) and mother (Rochelle Hudson), and Plato's absentee parents who have left him in care of the maid (Marietta Canty). In fact, Jim and his friends really are rebels without a cause, there being neither an efficient cause -- one that makes them do stupidly self-destructive things -- nor a final cause -- a clear purpose behind their madness. Fortunately, Ray is not as interested in explaining his characters as he is in bringing them to life. Unlike Kazan or Stevens, Ray gives his actors ample room to explore the parts they're playing. There's a loose, improvisatory quality to the scenes Dean, Wood, and Mineo play together, more suggestive of the French New Wave filmmakers than of Hollywood's tightly controlled directors. It's no surprise that both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were admirers of Ray's work. At the same time, though, Rebel is very much a Hollywood product, with vivid color cinematography by Ernest Haller, who had won an Oscar for his work on Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), and a fine score by Leonard Rosenman. Most of all, though, it has Dean, Wood, and Mineo, performers with an obvious rapport. At one point, for example, Dean puts a cigarette in his mouth backward -- filter on the outside -- and Wood reaches out and turns it around, a bit establishing their intimacy that feels so real that you wonder if it was improvised or developed in performance. (In fact, I noticed the gesture because I had just seen Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, made ten years earlier, in which Jane Wyman performs the same turning-the-cigarette-around action for Ray Milland several times. Cigarettes are nasty things but they make wonderful props.)

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)

If such a thing as conscience could be ascribed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it might be said that giving The Lost Weekend and director Billy Wilder the best picture and best director Oscars was an attempt to atone for its failure to honor Wilder's Double Indemnity with those awards the previous year. (The awards went to Leo McCarey and his saccharine Going My Way.) The Lost Weekend is not quite as enduring a film as Double Indemnity: It pulls its punches with a "hopeful" ending, though it should be clear to any intelligent viewer that Ray Milland's Don Birnam is not going to be so easily cured of his alcoholism as he and his girlfriend, Helen St. James (Jane Wyman), seem to think. But the film also lands quite a few of its punches, thanks to Milland's Oscar-winning performance and the intelligent (and also Oscar-winning) adaptation of Charles R. Jackson's novel by Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett. For its day, still under the watchful eyes of the Paramount front office and the Production Code, The Lost Weekend seems almost unnervingly frank about the ravages of alcoholism, then usually treated more as a subject for comedy than for semi-realistic drama. The Code prevented the film from ascribing Birnam's drinking to an attempt to cope with his homosexuality, but in some respects this can be seen today as a good change made for the wrong reason, since the roots of addiction to alcohol are far more complicated than any simplistic explanation such as self-loathing. The Code was also powerless to prevent Wilder and Brackett from finessing the suggestion that the friendly "bar girl" Gloria (Doris Dowling) is anything but an on-call prostitute. Increasingly, post-World War II films would treat audiences like the adults the Code administration wanted to prevent them from being. Wyman's Helen is a bit too noble in her persistent support of Birnam's behavior -- she moves from ignorance to denial to enabling to self-sacrifice far too swiftly and easily. But in general, the supporting cast -- Phillip Terry as Birnam's brother, Howard Da Silva as the bartender, Frank Faylen as the seen-it-all-too-often nurse in the drunk ward -- are excellent. The fine cinematography is by John F. Seitz. The score, which is laid on a bit too heavily, especially in the use of the theremin to suggest Birnam's aching need for a drink, is by Miklós Rózsa.