Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930)

Remembered today chiefly because it was the film that won Marie Dressler the best actress Oscar (for what was by no means her best screen performance), Min and Bill is a good example of the struggle Hollywood movie-makers went through in adapting to sound. Dressler and co-star Wallace Beery had both been stars in silent films, and screenwriter Frances Marion was one of the most successful writers of that era. Unfortunately, Marion and co-screenwriter Marion Jackson don't seem to have mastered writing the dialogue a sound film needs for exposition and continuity, so it often sounds as if  Dressler and Beery are ad-libbing just to keep the soundtrack alive. And director George W. Hill, a former cinematographer who had turned director before sound came in, doesn't quite know how to keep the pace from sagging. The result is a rather choppy movie with a few good scenes, most notably a knock-down, drag-out brawl between Dressler's Min and Beery's Bill.  At the beginning of the film, Min seems to be destined to be one of Dressler's slapstick comic creations: There's an extended chase sequence in which Min and Nancy are at the controls of a runaway speedboat that culminates with Min being thrown overboard and hauled out of the water with repeated dunkings. But the main plot is sentimental drivel: Min runs a waterfront speakeasy/barbershop and has raised a girl, Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), left her as an infant by the now-aging prostitute Bella (Marjorie Rambeau). Now that Nancy is of marriageable age and is being wooed by the wealthy Dick Cameron (Don Dillaway), Bella has shown up again to try to claim the maternal privileges that she fears Min is going to assert. The trouble with this twist to the plot is that we never see Min being particularly loving and maternal toward Nancy, so that the denouement, in which Min tries to keep the girl out of Bella's clutches, doesn't make a lot of emotional sense. Still, the public loved it, and Dressler was for a time MGM's biggest star.

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2

Guido Anselmi: Marcello Mastroianni
Claudia: Claudia Cardinale
Louisa Anselmi: Anouk Aimée
Carla: Sandra Milo
Rossella: Rossella Falk
Gloria Morin: Barbara Steele
Madeleine: Madeleine Lebeau
La Saraghina: Eddra Gale
Pace, a Producer: Guido Alberti
Carini Daumier, a Film Critic: Jean Rouguel

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Music: Nino Rota

At one point in 8 1/2 an actress playing a film critic turns to the camera and brays (in English), "He has nothing to say!", referring to Guido Anselmi, the director Marcello Mastroianni plays and, by extension, to Fellini himself. And that's quite true: Fellini has nothing to say because reducing 8 1/2 to a message would miss the film's point. Guido finds himself creatively blocked because he's trying to say something, except he doesn't know what it is. He has even enlisted a film critic to aid him in clarifying his ideas, but the critic only muddles things by his constant monologue about Guido's failure. Add to this the fact that after a breakdown Guido has retreated to a spa to try to relax and focus, only to be pursued there by a gaggle of producers and crew members and actors, not to mention his mistress and his wife. Guido's consciousness becomes a welter of dreams and memories and fantasies, overlapping with the quotidian demands of making a movie and tending to a failed marriage. He is also pursued by a vision of purity that he embodies in the actress Claudia Cardinale, but when they finally meet he realizes how impossible it is to integrate this vision with the mess of his life. Only at the end, when he abandons the project and confronts the fact that he really does have nothing to say, can he realize that the mess is the message, that his art has to be a way of establishing a pattern out of his own life, embodied by those who have populated it dancing in a circle to Nino Rota's music in the ruins of the colossal set of his abandoned movie. The first time I saw this film it was dubbed into German, which I could understand only if it was spoken slowly and patiently, which it wasn't. Even so, I had no trouble following the story (such as it is) because Fellini is primarily a visual artist. Besides, the movie starred Mastroianni, who would have made a great silent film star, communicating as he did with face and body as much as with voice. It is, I think, one of the great performances of a great career. 8 1/2 is also one of the most beautiful black-and-white movies ever made, thanks to the superb cinematography of Gianni Di Venanzo and the brilliant production design and costumes of Piero Gherardi.

My Life As a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985)

The American success of Hallström's off-beat but lightweight film netted him two Oscar nominations: best director and -- with co-screenwriters Reidar Jönsson, Brasse Brännström, and Per Berglund -- best adapted screenplay. (The film was based on the middle volume of a trio of novels by Jönnson.) It also brought him to Hollywood, where he has directed more off-beat but lightweight films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Chocolat (2000), and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011). His most successful film after coming to the States has probably been The Cider House Rules (1999), for which he received another Oscar nomination for directing; it was the perfect teaming with a similarly off-beat and lightweight novelist, John Irving. Mind you, I have nothing against either the off-beat or the lightweight: My Life As a Dog is a perfectly charming and often touching movie that showcases a wonderful performance by young Anton Glanzelius as Ingemar, who gets tossed around from relative to relative as they try to cope with the boy. There are also excellent performances by Anki Lidén as Ingemar's mother, Tomas van Brömmsen as Uncle Gunnar, and Melinda Kinnaman (half-sister of the actor Joel Kinnaman) as the pubescent Sagar, who is distressed that her emerging femininity means an end to playing soccer and boxing with the boys. Jörgen Persson's cinematography is another plus. The trouble comes only when one tries to take My Life As a Dog too seriously as a coming-of-age tale, a genre much worked-over by the movies. The lightweightness of My Life as a Dog shows in comparisons with such classics of the genre as Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1956), François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), and even so recent an entry as Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014), all of which more successfully integrate the coming-of-age tale with a specific time and place. By contrast, Ingemar's life seems to be taking place in a kind of whimsical neverland that just happens to look like rural Sweden. It's an often heartfelt and certainly entertaining movie that could have been much more.

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

L'Atalante is one of those near-universally acclaimed film masterpieces that failed theatrically on their first release and were rediscovered and re-evaluated more than a decade later. But it's also one of those films that young contemporary movie lovers may not "get" on first viewing today. I remember my own reaction to films like The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) and L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), movies that didn't fit what I expected from being raised on energetic, plot-driven, star-centered American movies. Melancholy and irony are not widely praised American values, although lord knows we have plenty of it in the best American literature. They surfaced for a time in the best American films of the 1970s, but have been driven back into the underground by the blockbuster mentality. There was a time, even after the great cinematic awakening of the '70s when I found myself resenting film critics for their inability to appreciate popular movies I enjoyed: "Critics see too many movies to enjoy them," I sniffed. But the truth is, the more movies you see, the more you're able to appreciate those that don't walk the line, that don't instantly gratify the hunger for plot resolution, for spectacle, for something that sends you out of the theater blissfully untroubled by thought. L'Atalante confused and bored its contemporary viewers, but today those of us who love it do so because it seems to us alternately tender and brutal, simultaneously comic and touching, and, taken as a whole, one of the few movies that successfully transport us to a time and place and a company of human beings we have never found ourselves in the middle of before. It is also, despite years of mishandling and cutting and botched attempts at restoration, one of the most technically dazzling films ever made. The performances -- by Michel Simon as the rather gross Père Jules, Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté as the young couple trying to start married life on a cramped river barge, and Gilles Margaritis as the madcap peddler who almost wrecks their marriage -- are extraordinary. Cinematographer Boris Kaufman overcame the severe limitations of filming scenes in the cramped quarters below-decks as well as open-air scenes for which the weather refused to cooperate. Vigo and Kaufman stage visual compositions that have a freshness that never seems arty. And who can ever forget Simon's Père Jules clambering aboard the barge with a kitten on his shoulders? Every corner of L'Atalante is filled with life.

Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Masahiko Shimazu and Koji Shitara in Good Morning

Good Morning is, maybe, lesser Ozu, but that's because the director himself set the standard so high -- and perhaps because in some ways it's a reworking of I Was Born, But... (1932) without the depth and clarity of the silent film's themes. We are deep into postwar Japan here, with modernization and the youth culture threatening some of the values and traditions of the country. The families in Good Morning live in a new suburb, but are struggling with problems that still afflict the middle class: unemployment, saving for retirement, keeping up with the Joneses, and so on. The two young sons of Keitaro (Chishu Ryu) and Tamiko Hayashi (Kuniko Miyake), Minoru (Koji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu) have been sneaking out to watch TV at their neighbors, an unconventional young couple who are scorned by others in the community because "they wear pajamas in the middle of the day" and the woman is said to be a singer in a nightclub. When the parents forbid them from going there, the boys demand that Keitaro buy them a TV set, and throw a tantrum when he refuses. He tells them they talk too much, and Minoru, the older son, retorts that it's adults who talk too much, wasting their breath on meaningless exchanges like "good morning" and "good night" and on small talk. Banished to their room Minoru and Isamu take a vow that they won't speak to adults anymore -- even to their parents and teachers. The vow backfires on them when they're unable to relay the message that they're supposed to bring their lunch money to school, but it also causes trouble when the boys' failure to exchange greetings like "good morning" is interpreted as a reflection of their parents' attitude toward the neighbors. Ozu and co-scenarist Kogo Noda develop this premise into what is essentially a situation comedy, but one that illuminates both the essentials of small talk as a social lubricant and its limitations when it comes to deeper relationships: A shy young man and woman are obviously drawn to each other, but they can't find a way to verbalize their mutual attraction, and at the film's end are shown standing on the platform waiting for a train, both unable to get past talking about the weather. That Ozu manages to introduce layers of meaning into a comedy full of juvenile fart jokes is a tribute to his genius.

I Was Born, But.... (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)

Hideo Sugawara, Seiichi Kato, and Tomio Aoki in I Was Born, But....

The family was source and inspiration for many of Ozu's greatest films, but he often focused on the problems caused by the elders in a family, as in Tokyo Story (1953) and The End of Summer (1961). The family is supposedly the basic element in society, but Ozu's films often show how society itself strains familial relationships: In those films and others by Ozu, elders who have outgrown their usefulness can become obstacles to a family's ongoing concerns about fitting into and making a way in the larger society. I Was Born, But.... turns things around by focusing on children, whose self-centeredness can be as troublesome to the family dynamic as that of the very old. Ozu's films are about expectations that can never be quite fulfilled, and in no part of life are expectations more important than childhood. That makes the film sound more grimly serious than it is, for on the surface I Was Born looks an awful lot like American-style comic films about kids -- the Our Gang and Little Rascals comedies, for example. It focuses on Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara) and his younger brother, Keiji (Tomio Aoki), who have just moved to the suburbs with their father, Yoshi (Tatsuo Saito), and mother, Haha (Mitsuko Yoshikawa). The boys are unhappy with the move, partly because the local kids bully them as newcomers, but also because Ryoichi in particular resents Yoshi's expectations that he'll get high marks in school. Eventually, after playing hooky and being scolded, they begin to adjust, and Ozu's picture of boyhood becomes lighter and more amusing. We see them adapting to their new corner of society: They overcome the bullies and make friends with Taro (Seiichi Kato), who just happens to be the son of Yoshi's boss. But then Taro lets them come over to his house on an evening when his father is showing home movies to Yoshi and some other employees, and Ryoichi and Keiji are embarrassed when some of the films show their father making funny faces and clowning for the boss and co-workers. It's an eye-opener for Ryoichi especially, who becomes aware of his father's place in the corporate hierarchy. Back home, he demands to know why his father isn't a corporate executive instead of a middle manager, and Yoshi is hard-pressed to explain this particular fact of life. The boys pitch a tantrum -- Keiji always following his older brother's lead -- and Yoshi spanks Ryoichi, only making matters worse. By the film's end, the boys and their parents have reconciled, but one senses that everyone has learned one of those lessons that only life can teach. I Was Born, But.... is one of Ozu's late silent films, and it's masterly in provoking serious thought about a near-universal experience while being engagingly entertaining. It's also very much of its pre-World War II time. Perhaps only in hindsight do audiences notice the hints of Japanese militarism in the story: the military-style drills that the small boys undergo at school, and the fact that when Yoshi asks his sons what they want to do when they grow up, they want to be generals. The performances of the young actors are extraordinary, as is the cinematography of Hideo Shigehara.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)

Given the sexism and vulgarity that underlies the teaming of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell -- two women best known at the time for their bodies, not for their talents as actresses or singers -- it's gratifying that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes turned out to be a landmark film in both their careers. Some of it has to do with the director, Howard Hawks, who despite his reputation for womanizing created some of the most memorable roles for such actresses as Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Lauren Bacall, and many others. Certainly neither Russell nor Monroe ever showed more wit and liveliness than they do here, even though Monroe is playing the gold-digging ditz part that she came to resent, especially after having to play it again the same year in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco), and Russell is stuck with the wise-cracking sidekick role. Both stars are paired with lackluster leading men, Elliott Reid and Tommy Noonan, but while it might have been fun to see someone like Cary Grant in Reid's part, that kind of casting would probably have thrown the film off-balance. Better that we have Charles Coburn's bedazzled old lech, young George Winslow's precocious appreciation of Monroe's "animal magnetism," and Marcel Dalio's judge overwhelmed by Russell's hilarious impersonation of Monroe's Lorelei Lee. The production numbers, choreographed by Jack Cole, costumed by Travilla, and filmed by Harry J. Wild in a candy-store Technicolor that we'll not see the like of again, are exceptional showcases for Russell and Monroe: The former's baritonish growl blends perfectly with the latter's sweet and wispy soprano (though some of Monroe's high notes were provided by Marni Nixon).

The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

Cary Grant was a great listener, which is what made him a great movie actor. Just watch how alert he is when someone else is talking (which is almost all the time in The Philadelphia Story), registering his responses with a slight smile, a tilt of the head, a lifted eyebrow. This was the mark of his career for more than 30 years, working with some of the greatest directors in Hollywood history, from Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) to Stanley Donen in Charade (1963), taking in multiple turns with Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock along the way. Is there an actor with a better filmography? And yet, he was nominated for the best actor Oscar only twice, for the weepies Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944), movies that only a Cary Grant fanatic need bother checking out. He wasn't nominated for The Philadelphia Story, either, even though his C.K. Dexter Haven is one of his deftest performances. The Oscar went to his co-star James Stewart, for playing Macaulay Connor in the same movie, an award that even Stewart thought was a consolation prize for not winning the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra). The great virtue of The Philadelphia Story is the way director George Cukor keeps a large and skillful cast buoyantly aloft, giving Katharine Hepburn her comeback role as Tracy Lord after being labeled "box-office poison" for a series of flops in the 1930s. Hepburn was nominated, too, but lost, rather absurdly, to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle (Sam Wood). The other acting nominee was Ruth Hussey for her delightfully sly Liz Imbrie, a role that should have boosted her career but for some reason didn't. The other Oscar for the film went to Donald Ogden Stewart for his adaptation of the Philip Barry play. Stewart got uncredited help from writer Waldo Salt, which leads to a bitter irony: Both men were blacklisted for their leftist views in the 1950s, even though The Philadelphia Story seems to demonstrate that the very rich sometimes have better values than the working-class Macaulay Connor and Tracy's fiancé, the former coal-miner George Kittredge (John Howard). There isn't a weak link in the cast, which includes the peerless Roland Young as droll and lecherous Uncle Willy, and Virginia Weidler, one of the few child actors one doesn't want to stifle, as Tracy's kid sister, Dinah.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)

I love Turner Classic Movies -- obviously, because it's where I see so many of the films I comment on here. But I don't always love the introductory segments they do for some of their films. It can be a real irritant when they bring on a celebrity as a "guest programmer." Some of them are excellent: Sally Field displays real knowledge and insight about the films she introduces. But The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was introduced by Candice Bergen, who is normally a witty and charming person, but seemed to have no idea about the movie she was showcasing. She admitted to interviewer Robert Osborne that she hadn't seen it for 35 years, and that she recalled it as this "little" movie that she surmised had been filmed on a small budget in locations maybe 20 minutes from the studio. To Osborne's discredit, he made no attempt to correct her: Warner Bros. gave it what was a generous budget for the time of $3 million, and it was mostly filmed on location -- a rarity for the time -- in the state of Durango and the town of Tampico, Mexico. (Some scenes had to be shot in the studio, of course, and it's easy to spot the artificial lighting and hear the sound stage echoes in these, which don't match up to the ones Ted McCord filmed on location.) It's hardly a "little" movie, either: It has a generosity of characterization in both the screenplay by Huston from B. Traven's novel and in the performances of Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt. It's always shocking to realize that Bogart failed to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the bitter, paranoid Fred C. Dobbs. I mean, who today remembers some of the performances that were nominated instead: Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco)? Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles at Me (Walter Lang)? Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty (Lang)? To the Academy's credit, Huston won as both director and screenwriter, and his father, Walter, won the supporting actor Oscar -- the first instance of someone directing his own father to an Academy Award for acting, which Walter Huston's smartly delineated old coot certainly deserved. But let's also put in a word for Tim Holt, who had one of the odder careers of a potential Hollywood star: He gave good performances in some of the best movies to come out of the studios in the 1940s, including The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) and My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), and was a handsome and capable presence in them. But even after working for Welles, Ford, and Huston, after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre he went back to performing in B-movie Westerns, which had been the stock in trade of his father, Jack Holt (who has a small part as a flophouse bum in this film). His heart seemed not to be in the movie business, and he retired to his ranch, making only a few appearances after 1952.

Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)

Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda in Daisy Kenyon

Daisy Kenyon: Joan Crawford
Dan O'Mara: Dana Andrews
Peter Lapham: Henry Fonda
Lucille O'Mara: Ruth Warrick
Mary Angelus: Martha Stewart
Rosamund O'Mara: Peggy Ann Garner
Marie O'Mara: Connie Marshall
Coverly: Nicholas Joy
Lucille's Attorney: Art Baker

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: David Hertz
Based on a novel by Elizabeth Janeway
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy
Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler
Music: David Raksin

Daisy Kenyon is an underrated romantic drama from an often underrated director. Otto Preminger gives us an unexpectedly sophisticated look -- given the Production Code's strictures about adultery -- at the relationship of an unmarried woman, Daisy, to two men, one of whom, Dan O'Mara, is married, the other a widowed veteran, Peter Lapham, who is suffering from PTSD -- not only from his wartime experience but also from the death of his wife. It's a "woman's picture" par excellence, but without the melodrama and directorial condescension that the label suggests: Each of the three principals is made into a credible, complex character, not only by the script and director but also by the performances of the stars. Crawford is on the cusp of her transformation into the hard-faced harridan of her later career: She had just won her Oscar for Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), and was beginning to show her age, which was 42, a time when Hollywood glamour becomes hard to maintain. But her Daisy Kenyon has moments of softness and humor that restore some of the glamour even when the edges start to show. Andrews, never a star of the magnitude of either Crawford or Fonda, skillfully plays the charming lawyer O'Mara, trapped into a marriage to a woman who takes her marital frustrations out on their two daughters. Although he is something of a soulless egoist, he finds a conscience when he takes on an unpopular civil rights case involving a Japanese-American -- and loses. Set beside his two best-known performances, in Preminger's Laura (1944) and in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), his work here demonstrates that he was an actor of considerable range and charisma. Fonda is today probably the most admired of the three stars, but he had always had a distant relationship with Hollywood: He suspended his career for three years to enlist in the Navy during World War II, and after making Daisy Kenyon to work out the remainder of his contract with 20th Century-Fox  he made a handful of films before turning his attention to Broadway, where he stayed for eight years, until he was called on to re-create the title role in the film version of Mister Roberts (John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy, 1955). Of the three performances in Daisy Kenyon, Fonda's seems the least committed, but his instincts as an actor kept him on track.