Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)

Pleasure, as the poets never tire of telling us, is inextricable from pain.  Le Plaisir is an anthology film dramatizing three stories by Guy de Maupassant that center on what has been called the pleasure-pain perplex. An elderly man nearly dances himself to death in an attempt to recapture his youth. The patrons of a brothel quarrel and even come to blows when they discover that it is closed. An artist marries his mistress to atone for his cruelty to her. Max Ophuls brings all of his elegant technique to the stories, including his characteristic restless camera, which prowls around the wonderful sets by Jean d'Eaubonne, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for art direction. It's also, like Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), an all-star production -- if your stars are French. Claude Dauphin plays the doctor who treats the youth-seeking dancer; Madeleine Renaud is the madame of the brothel, Danielle Darrieux is one of her "girls," and Jean Gabin plays the madame's brother, who invites her to bring the girls to the country for his daughter's first communion, hence the temporary closure of the brothel; Daniel Gélin is the artist, Simone Simon his model/mistress, and Jean Servais his friend who also narrates the final section. Of the three segments of the film, the middle one is the longest and I think the most successful, moving from the raucous opening scene in which the men of the small Normandy town discover the brothel closed into a comic train ride to the country, which is as fetchingly pastoral a setting as you could wish. The sequence climaxes with the filles de joie dissolving in tears at the first communion -- the little church in which it takes place is one of d'Eaubonne's most inspired sets -- then returning to town and a joyous welcome. Intriguingly, Ophuls never lets us inside the brothel: We see it only as voyeurs, through the windows. Nothing of this segment is "realistic" in the least, making the melancholy first and last segments more important in establishing the film's theme and tone. The first segment does its part to set up the course of the film as a whole, beginning with a riotous opening as tout Paris flocks to the opening of a dance hall, a pleasure palace, followed by scenes of lively dancing, then the collapse of the elderly patron, who is wearing a frozen and rather creepy mask of youth, and concluding with the bleakness of his normal existence, tended by his aging wife, who is fittingly played by Gaby Morlay, once a silent film gamine. The final segment is the bleakest of all, as the film concludes with the artist pushing his wheelchair-bound wife along the seashore, penance for having provoked her suicide attempt. The film leaves me with something like the feeling I get from the song "Plaisir D'Amour."

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment. 
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie. 

The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

I had forgotten how important the sexual tension between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) is to the texture and motivation of the film. It's obvious from the moment when she watches him, shirtless and glistening with sweat, help her rather dull (and fully clad) husband, Joe (Van Helflin), uproot a tree stump, and it plays like a low bass note throughout the film, until it becomes the main reason why Shane feels he has to move on at the end. After all, he has just humiliated Joe by knocking him unconscious and taking on the role Joe assumes is his rightful duty, thereby reducing him in the eyes of his wife and son, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). It also doesn't escape the notice of the bad guys, one of whom taunts Shane with the fact that Joe has a pretty wife. (The filters used on some of Arthur's closeups are a giveaway: She was 50 when she made Shane, her last film, but she's plausible as a character 10 or 15 years younger.) It's to George Stevens's credit that he plays all of this as low-key as he does. It would have been much too easy to move the eternal triangle to the center of the film's structure. Shane is an intelligent film, though to my mind it gets a little heavy-handed with the introduction of the black-hatted Wilson (Jack Palance) as the potential nemesis to the knight errant Shane. As fine as Palance's performance is, I wish his character had been given a more complex backstory than just "hired gun out of Cheyenne." Otherwise, the screenplay by A.B. Guthrie Jr. does a fair job of not making its villains too deep-dyed: The chief tormenter of the sodbusters, the cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), is given a speech justifying himself as having gotten there first and settled the land -- we haven't yet reached the point in historical consciousness where the claims of the Native Americans are taken seriously. And Shane's first opponent, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), eventually has a change of heart -- not an entirely convincing one to my mind, considering Calloway's behavior in his first encounter with Shane -- and warns Shane that Joe's appointment with Ryker is a trap. Stevens uses Jackson Hole, Wyoming, almost as effectively as John Ford used Monument Valley, and Loyal Griggs won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, even if Paramount's decision to trim the original images at top and bottom to make the film appear to have been shot in a widescreen process resulted in some oddly cropped compositions. Shane is undeniably a classic, but I think it takes itself a little too seriously: The great Western directors, like Ford and Howard Hawks, knew the value of a little comic relief, but in Shane even Edgar Buchanan plays it straight.

Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)

Rachel McAdams and Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls

I admit that I am quite a few years beyond the target audience for this film, and yes, this is something of a change of pace from Accattone and Touki Bouki, but this blog is nothing if not eclectic. Anyway, I have to indulge my crush on Tina Fey with something other than binge-watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I also realize I'm 12 years late to the party on this film, which is probably what it was called at the time: the best teen comedy since Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995). That film had Jane Austen as an underpinning, where all Mean Girls has is Fey's wry take on that crucible of growing up, high school. Fey's screenplay is the chief distinction of Mean Girls, which follows the usual trajectory of teen comedies: innocence, fall from grace, suffering, redemption, reward. (The reward is, of course, the girl getting the boy she thought was lost to her forever.) What Fey does is to load the conventional plot with lovely non sequiturs: For example, in the "redemption" scene in which students get up to confess their mean acts, Fey sends in a ringer, a girl who proclaims, "I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy." Whereupon she's unmasked as not even a student at the school -- "I just have a lot of feelings," she whimpers -- and dismissed. With touches like that, Fey manages to parody the teen comedy genre without losing its essential feel-good effect. Mean Girls also features some exceptional young actresses whose careers went in opposite directions: Lindsay Lohan, who descended into tabloid notoriety, and Rachel McAdams, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for her performance in Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015). I also relished Lizzy Caplan's turn as the arty girl named Janis Ian. (The real Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" is heard on the soundtrack.)

Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)

Djibril Diop Mambéty once reinterpreted the old cliché about the relationship between movies and dreams by saying, "Cinema is magic in the service of dreams." Touki Bouki is certainly dreamlike, with its jump cuts and flashbacks, its almost hallucinatory saturated colors -- the recently restored version makes the most of Georges Bracher's cinematography -- and its scenes that challenge us to decide whether they represent reality or the characters' fantasies. It was made "the way I dream," Mambéty said. It begins with a nightmare shock: We see a herd of long-horned cattle, filmed with a long lens, approaching us, being guided by a young boy -- a literally bucolic moment. But suddenly the film cuts to a scene of a cow being forced to enter a slaughterhouse, and soon we are inside the abattoir, watching as cattle are being killed, our eyes assaulted by the vivid red of the spurting blood and the filthy, blood-soaked killing floor. It's a horrifying moment, but a real one, and the film, I think, never quite recovers from it. Then we meet the protagonist, a young man called Mory (Magaye Niang). who rides a motorbike with a cow's skull affixed to its handlebars. Mory and his girlfriend, Anta (Mareme Niang), have dreams of escaping their life in the slums on the fringes of Dakar, Senegal, and starting a new one in Paris. On the soundtrack we hear Josephine Baker's song "Paris, Paris, Paris," which becomes a motif in the film, just as later the French soprano Mado Robin's recording of a song about lost love, "Plaisir d'Amour," also recurs. The film then follows Mory and Anta as they explore various ways of getting the money for their trip, some of which are more fantastic than others. When they finally board the ship, however, Mory has a change of heart and runs away, leaving Anta to make the journey on her own. The basic narrative, then, is about the postcolonial dissonance of cultures, and the film is loaded with symbolic motifs like the slaughtered cattle and the skull on Mory's motorbike -- he finds the skull shattered and the bike ruined at the end. But Mambéty's use of the dreamlike elements of montage and camerawork lifts the film above any simplistic symbolic or allegorical treatment of the theme. There are moments in the film that defy literal-minded interpretation: The movie becomes a dream about dreamers.

Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)

Franco Citti in Accattone

Vittorio "Accattone" Cataldi: Franco Citti
Stella: Franca Pasut
Maddalena: Silvana Corsini
Ascenza: Paola Guidi
Amore: Adriana Asti

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Film editing: Nino Baragli

There are times in Pasolini's first feature when he seems to be trying out things that he will accomplish with greater finesse in his later films. For example, there are several walk-and-talk tracking shots in which Accattone and another person walk down a street toward a receding camera. This technique was used with greater force and wit in Pasolini's next film, Mamma Roma (1962), in which Anna Magnani strides down a nighttime street, talking about her life, as various people emerge from the darkness to deliver comments on what she is telling us. We've seen this sort of thing done many times since the development of the Steadicam -- it has become a kind of cliché in films and TV shows written by Aaron Sorkin -- but even though the shadow of the retreating camera rig occasionally creeps into the frame in Accattone, Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli execute it with considerable skill. Skill is not always in evidence in Accattone, which has its rough, raw edges. It's not always easy to follow Pasolini's screenplay, drawn in part from his early novels, when it comes to the relationships between the various characters: I'm not clear, for example, who the young woman with several small children is who shares a room with Maddalena and later Stella. Pasolini had worked with Federico Fellini on Nights of Cabiria (1957) and it's instructive to compare the two films: Fellini's has greater technical finish, but it's also less harsh and more sentimental, which may be why Fellini, who originally planned to produce Pasolini's film, withdrew his support. But the rawness of Accattone is entirely appropriate for a film that evokes the spontaneity and actuality of early Italian Neo-Realism with its non-professional actors and ungroomed settings. And it has at its center a charismatic performance by Citti, an untrained actor who went on to a long career on-screen that included an appearance as Calo, one of Michael Corleone's Sicilian bodyguards in The Godfather (Frances Ford Coppola, 1972).  "Accattone" is a nickname that means "beggar" or "ne'er-do-well" or "layabout" -- the character's given name is Vittorio Cataldi -- and is entirely appropriate for a character who begins as a pimp and, after hitting the skids and even trying work (at which he shudders), winds up as a thief -- a dead thief. Citti's voice was dubbed in the film, but most of the work is done by his extraordinarily expressive face and by a physical commitment to the role. There is, for example, a terrific fight scene between Accattone and the men of his ex-wife's family, which ends with Accattone and his opponent locked together in a struggle in the dirt, neither willing to relinquish hold. Pasolini also emphasizes the dissonance between a world that produces an Accattone and the religious background from which it springs by using excerpts from Bach's St. Matthew Passion on the soundtrack.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick told us that the world would end not with a whimper but a "Yeehaaa!" And given the bullying and posturing jingoism currently on display in the American presidential campaign, he may have been right. A lot of Dr. Strangelove has dated: There is no Soviet Union anymore, and the arms race has gone underground (where it may be more dangerous than ever). Some of the gags in the script by Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern have gone stale, such as the jokey character names: Jack D. Ripper, "Bat" Guano, Merkin Muffley. (Although to fault Dr. Strangelove for that is as pointless as faulting Ben Jonson for naming characters in The Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon and Doll Common. Satire loves its labels.) Where Dr. Strangelove has not dated, however, is in its attitude toward power and those who love and seek it to the point where it becomes an end in itself. Those in Kubrick's film who are capable of seeing the larger picture are ineffectual, like President Muffley (Peter Sellers) and Group Capt. Mandrake (Sellers). They are invariably steamrollered by those in pursuit of the immediate goal, like Gen. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) defending his precious bodily fluids, or Gen. Turgidson (George C. Scott) devoting himself to getting the upper hand on the Russkies, even to the extent of getting our hair mussed a little, or Dr. Strangelove (Sellers) himself, enraptured by the wonders of military technology. But the film really works by Kubrick's mastery of his medium: We find ourselves, against our better judgment, rooting for the bomber crew to reach its target, thanks to the way Kubrick, with the help of film editor Anthony Harvey, manipulates our love of war movie clichés. The film is full of classic over-the-top performances, especially from Hayden and Scott, and of course Sellers's Strangelove is a touchstone mad scientist character, anticipating Edward Teller's selling Ronald Reagan on "star wars" by a couple of decades. In fact, if the film seems to us have dated, it may be that reality has outstripped satire. Who could have invented Donald Trump?

Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

Les Enfants Terribles was released in the United States as The Strange Ones, which has the effect of reducing monstrosity to mere nonconformity. For the siblings Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Édouard Dermithe) are monsters, even if they are perhaps more destructive to each other than they are to other people. Not that Jean Cocteau, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, had anything against monsters: He created the most memorable non-animated version of Beauty and the Beast (1946), after all. Les Enfants Terribles was an uneasy collaboration between Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville; being no slouch as a director himself, Cocteau was capable of imposing his ideas on Melville, who was almost 30 years younger. But somehow they prevailed and produced a film that is either a "masterpiece," as David Thomson calls it, or "pretentious poppycock," as Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic, called it. I trust Thomson's judgments far more than those of Crowther, a notorious fuddy-duddy, but I prefer to think of the film as not "either/or" but instead "both/and." It's certainly not poppycock in any case, especially in its depiction of adolescence as a kind of fever dream, and the way incest flickers around the relationship of Paul and Elisabeth like heat lightning. But there is certainly a whiff of pretentiousness in the voiceover narration (by Cocteau himself) that hammers home the folie à deux of the siblings, which is apparent without any comment. If it's a masterpiece, which I'm not entirely confident in calling it, it becomes one from Melville's staging, in collaboration with production designer Emile Mathys, Henri Decaë's cinematography, and especially the performance of Stéphane, whose invocation of Lady Macbeth in one scene makes me wish she had played the part on film. Melville didn't want to cast Dermithe, Cocteau's lover, in the role of Paul, and I think he was right. At 25, Dermithe was too old and too sturdy to play the neurasthenic 16-year-old who is felled by a snowball. But Renée Cosima is impressive in the dual role of Dargelos, the schoolboy who throws the snowball, and Agathe, who falls into Elisabeth's clutches as a weapon with which to torment her brother.

The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937)

The identical cousin is a genetic anomaly known only to Anthony Hope and the creators of The Patty Duke Show, but both got a great deal of mileage out it. Hope's novel about a man who finds himself posing as a Ruritanian king to fend off a threat to the throne was such a hit that it was immediately adapted for the stage, turned into a film in 1913, and even became a Sigmund Romberg operetta. But leave it to David O. Selznick to produce perhaps the best of all adaptations. It was once said of Selznick -- I forget by whom, but it sounds a lot like something Ben Hecht would say -- that to judge from his movies, he had read nothing past the age of 12. Among the novels he made into movies are David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935), A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935), Little Lord Fauntleroy (John Cromwell, 1936), and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Norman Taurog, 1938). But it has to be said that each of these adaptations remains probably the best screen version of its source. The 1937 Prisoner of Zenda is so good that when MGM decided to remake it in Technicolor in 1952, producer Pandro S. Berman and director Richard Thorpe not only used the 1937 screenplay by John Balderston and Noel Langley, with Donald Ogden Stewart's punched-up dialogue, but also the score by Alfred Newman, following the earlier version almost shot for shot. The chief virtue of Selznick's production lies in its casting: Ronald Colman is suave and dashing as Rudolf Rassendyll and his royal double, Madeleine Carroll makes a radiant Princess Flavia, and Raymond Massey is a saturnine Black Michael. Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, and David Niven steal scenes right and left. Best of all, though, is Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Rupert von Hentzau, a grinning scamp of a villain. Fairbanks is so good in the role that we cheer when he escapes at the end. How Selznick got this one past the Production Code, which usually insisted on punishing wrongdoers. is a bit of a mystery, but he may have told the censors that he was planning to film Hope's sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, in which Rupert gets what's coming to him. He never got around to the sequel, of course, being distracted by Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939).

Diplomacy (Volker Schlöndorff, 2014)

The enormity of some crimes against humanity so swamps the imagination that it's often more effective to try to comprehend their analogs: crimes against art. The viciousness of ISIS, for example, made itself manifest in the threat to the archaeological treasures of Palmyra. The Taliban received perhaps as much international condemnation for its destruction of the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan as for any of its murderous repression of human beings. And Hitler's threat to destroy the city of Paris rather than let it fall into the hands of the liberating Allies stands as a kind of symbol of the deep-rooted evil that manifested itself in the Holocaust. It inspired the 1966 film Is Paris Burning? (René Clement), which had an all-star international cast, but Volker Schlöndorff's Diplomacy tells the same story more compactly and effectively. It also does it without relying on star-power: Few Americans will be familiar with the work of the two French actors, André Dussollier and Niels Arestrup, who face off in the film. Arestrup plays General von Choltitz, the commander of German troops in Paris who was tasked with carrying out Hitler's orders to obliterate such monuments as Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower, and to blow up the bridges on the Seine, damming the river and flooding the crowded low-lying areas of the city. The film opens with Choltitz and his officers reviewing the plans for the city's destruction in his suite at the Hotel Meurice. After the officers leave, there is a blackout caused by the shelling of the power plants by the approaching Allies, and when the lights come up again, Choltitz discovers that he is not alone: The Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling (Dussollier) has somehow appeared in his room. Nordling, it turns out, has used a secret passage into the hotel that was built for Napoleon III to make clandestine visits to his mistress. He has also witnessed the plans for the obliteration of a city he loves, and has come to persuade Choltitz to defy the Führer. The touch of melodrama in this "theatrical" entrance betrays Diplomacy's origins in a play by Cyril Gely, who collaborated with Schlöndorff on the screenplay. What ensues is a dialogue-heavy debate, somewhat "opened up" with scenes of German soldiers preparing the explosives and battling with the French resistance. The end is, of course, a foregone conclusion: We know Paris survives. But Schlöndorff and his two lead actors manage to create suspense through the give-and-take of their debate, during which we learn that Choltitz's family is under threat of death if he refuses Hitler's orders. Diplomacy suffers only a little from its touches of staginess, thanks to intelligent dialogue and performances.

Rio Lobo (Howard Hawks, 1970)

Not much of the opening sequence of Rio Lobo, an exciting and ingenious train robbery, was probably directed by Howard Hawks. He was injured during the filming, and much of it was accomplished by his second-unit directors, Yakima Canutt and Mike Moder, who are generously given screen credits -- just as Hawks gave a co-director credit to Arthur Rosson for the cattle drive scenes in Red River (1948). The sequence is also the best thing in the film. What follows feels for the most part tired, derivative, and poorly cast, which is a shame, since it was Hawks's last film. We'd all like our favorite directors to go out on a high note, but it seldom happens: There aren't many who regard Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976), Billy Wilder's Buddy Buddy (1981), or John Ford's 7 Women (1966) as sufficiently valedictory achievements, either. Still, Rio Lobo has its moments, most of them supplied by old pros like John Wayne and Jack Elam. It has cinematography by the masterly William H. Clothier and a score by Jerry Goldsmith. What it doesn't have is a competent supporting cast, particularly in the key roles played by Jorge Ribero and Jennifer O'Neill. Ribero's success in Mexican films, combined with his good looks, led Hollywood to give him a try, but he's out of his depth as a foil for Wayne and is obviously uncomfortable in his second language. O'Neill, a former model, is the last in the line of "Hawksian women" whose ability to stand up to men gave a certain bright tension to his films, and who were previously embodied by the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, and Lauren Bacall. But when O'Neill flubs an attempt to match Wayne at Hawks's characteristic overlapping repartee, it's clear that the game is over. O'Neill's character virtually disappears from the later part of the film, and  the climactic scene is given to another character played by Sherry Lansing, who at least recognized her limitations as an actress and gave it up to become a film studio executive. Rio Lobo, a more or less acknowledged semi-remake of Rio Bravo (1959) and its remake, El Dorado (1966), is not without its rewards for those who relish old-style Westerns, but coming from an era when Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah were reinventing the genre it feels like a sad anachronism.