The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

It's not hard to see why Alfred Hitchcock would want to remake his 1934 film version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It has good bones: a murder, a kidnapping, a political assassination plot, attractive international locations, colorful villainy, mistaken identifications, and innocents put in jeopardy by sheer accident. But he kind of blew it the first time with pallid protagonists (Leslie Banks and Edna Best), tedious comic byplay involving a sinister dentist, a wacky sun-worshiping cult, and a confusingly staged climactic shootout. Today it's best remembered for Peter Lorre's delicious villainy in his first English-language role. For the remake, Hitchcock supposedly told screenwriter John Michael Hayes not to watch the original or to read its screenplay by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, but to follow his own retelling of the story. The result is a more supple narrative, and the stars, Doris Day and James Stewart, are a definite improvement over Best and Banks. Hayes has made them a rather edgy couple: She's an internationally known musical star who has gone into retirement to marry him, a Midwestern surgeon. He seems to be a bit resentful of her celebrity, and she seems to be a little disappointed at having to settle down in Indianapolis. He's given to outbursts of temper that she sometimes has to quell before he does something rash. Their marital tension never results in an out-and-out fight, but it makes for some uneasy moments. In some respects they verge on '50s stereotypes of male and female roles: He pulls out his medical expertise and administers a sedative to her before telling her that their son has been kidnapped, a rather extreme form of mansplaining. In the 1934 film, Best played an award-winning sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the villain, while Day is given a softer task: She helps locate their kidnapped son by singing (and singing and singing) "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," the film's Oscar-winning song. The remake is 45 minutes longer than the original, and it seems a little overextended. Still, the performances are good, and Robert Burks's Technicolor cinematography and the Marrakesh location of the first part of the film give the remake a definite edge, as does Bernard Herrmann's score. Herrmann makes his only on-camera appearance conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the "Storm Cloud Cantata" at the Royal Albert Hall, in the pivotal scene that was carried over from the 1934 version.

Where Is My Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

Babek Ahmed Poor in Where Is My Friend's House?

I think Dickens would have liked Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is My Friend's House?* It deals with one of Dickens's great subjects: the anomalous place of children in an adult world that often doesn't even hear or see them or recognize them as human beings with their own problems and concerns. It's the story of 8-year-old Ahmed (Babek Ahmed Poor), who goes to school in the village of Koker. One day the teacher berates the boy who sits next to Ahmed, Mohamed Reda (Ahmed Ahmed Poor), because he has done his homework on a piece of paper and not in the prescribed notebook. It's the third time Mohamed Reda has done this, the teacher scolds, and the next time he'll be expelled. We can see Ahmed wincing at the treatment of Mohamed Reda, and after school he helps the boy when he stumbles and drops his schoolbooks. When he gets home, Ahmed discovers that he has accidentally picked up Mohamed Reda's notebook and is horrified that this means the boy will be expelled. He tells his mother that he needs to take the notebook to his friend, but she's preoccupied with doing the wash and tending to the baby, so she tells him to do his homework first and then to pick up the bread for dinner. Perplexed, Ahmed tries to do his homework but his mother keeps interrupting him to help with the baby or to carry the washbasin, constantly dismissing his insistence that it's important that he deliver the notebook. Finally, he seizes the opportunity to leave, but he knows only that Mohamed Reda lives in the neighboring village of Poshteh, which is over the hill from Koker. So he races up the zigzag trail that takes him over the steep hill and down through the olive grove that lies outside the village. He knows Mohamed Reda's family name is Nematzadeh, but there are lots of Nematzadehs in Poshteh, and he doesn't know which branch of the family is his friend's. Finally, he gets a lead and is told that Mr. Nematzadeh and his son have just set off for Koker. So he races back over the hill, only to be delayed in his search by his own grandfather (Rafia Difai), who sends Ahmed off to fetch his cigarettes. While Ahmed is running this errand, the grandfather expounds his theories of child-rearing to a friend: His own father, the grandfather says, would give him some money and a beating every other week, whether he deserved it or not. Sometimes, he admits, his father would forget the money, but he always remembered the beating. This, the grandfather proclaims, taught him the discipline and obedience that children today like Ahmed don't learn. Meanwhile, Ahmed, who is struggling to fulfill what he sees as his duty to his friend and his family, has learned that the boy who accompanied Mr. Nematzadeh was not Mohamed Reda, and that the man has just started back for Poshteh, riding on a donkey. So Ahmed makes another trip over the hill, keeping Nematzadeh in sight and following him into the labyrinthine streets and alleys of Poshteh, only to discover that he has the wrong branch of the family after all. Eventually, after another misadventure, a despondent Ahmed returns home, finishes his own homework, and copies it into Mohamed Reda's notebook, which results in a well-earned happy ending. It's an excellent movie for children, but beside that, Kiarostami's screenplay, direction, and editing, and his empathy with the people and landscape of Northern Iran bring everything together into a fable about miscommunication and the difficulties of growing up. It's not as ambitious or complex as some of Kiarostami's later films, but it has their depth of feeling and brilliance of execution.

*The Persian title has been translated several different ways: IMDb, for example, calls it Where Is the Friend's Home? I prefer "my friend's house" as more colloquial, and because it avoids the real-estate-agent coziness that tries to pretend that every house is a home.

I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)

Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini, and Alberto Sordi in I Vitelloni

Moraldo Rubini: Franco Interlenghi
Alberto: Alberto Sordi
Fausto Moretti: Franco Fabrizi
Leopoldo Vannucci: Leopoldo Trieste
Riccardo: Riccardo Fellini
Sandra Rubini: Leonora Ruffo
Francesco Moretti: Jean Brochard
Sergio Natali: Achille Majeroni
Guido: Guido Martufi

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasati
Production design: Mario Chiari
Film editing: Rolando Benedetti
Music: Nino Rota

The international success of I Vitelloni launched Federico Fellini's directing career after the comparative failures of Variety Lights (1951), which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, and The White Sheik (1952), his first solo directing effort. It also earned him an Oscar nomination for screenwriting, which he shared with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It's certainly one of his most endearing early films, made before his familiar mannerisms set in -- though there are glimpses of those in the tawdry theatrical sequence with the grotesque aging actor played by Achille Majeroni (a part that Fellini tried to persuade Vittorio De Sica to play). But somehow it has taken me several viewings over the years to fully appreciate it. I think that's because Fellini's greatest films have a strong central character -- usually played by Giulietta Masini or Marcello Mastroianni -- to hold the narrative together. I Vitelloni is by definition and title an ensemble picture, but it's also the first of Fellini's excursions into himself, concluding with the Fellini surrogate, Moraldo Rubini boarding a train that will take him away from the idlers of his provincial home town -- and presumably to Rome, where he will become the jaded Marcello Rubini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and the blocked director Guido Anselmi of 8 1/2 (1963). The problem is that the character of Moraldo isn't written strongly enough or given enough substance by the actor: Franco Interlenghi, who was discovered by Roberto Rossellini and cast in Shoeshine (1946), had a long career in films and TV in Italy, but the part in I Vitelloni demands someone with more charisma -- a young Mastroianni, in short. Moraldo is overshadowed by the womanizing Fausto and by the comic figures of Alberto and Leopoldo. The scenes that should develop Moraldo as a central figure don't quite work, particularly the early-morning encounters with Guido, a boy on his way to work at the railroad station -- a sharp counterpoint to the idling vitelloni. "Are you happy?" Moraldo asks the boy. "Why not?" he replies. The exchange seems designed to undercut the frenetic strivings and complaints of the vitelloni, who chafe against the boredom and provinciality of the town, but don't seem to be able to muster enough resolve to do something about it, instead continuing to pursue phantoms of creative or sexual success. The trouble with the Moraldo-Guido scenes is that they come out of nowhere narratively -- and even have oddly uncomfortable (and probably unintended) hints of pedophilia on Moraldo's part. Nor do they satisfactorily set up the film's ending: Moraldo departs and we see Guido walking along the train tracks, the former facing up to the uncertain future, the latter heading comfortably back into his routine. Still, it's a film held together by the score by Fellini's great collaborator Nino Rota, and filled with the boundless energy that often rescued Fellini from his worst impulses.

The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Life of Oharu

Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is by turns a lover, a concubine, a courtesan, a servant, a wife, a prostitute, and a nun, which in the 17th-century Japan of Kenji Mizoguchi's film is almost everything a woman could possibly be. But Tanaka's great performance individualizes Ohara, keeping her from just being a representative figure, a stand-in for Woman. Over the course of the film, Oharu suffers almost every indignity that could be inflicted on her: At the court in Kyoto where she is a lady in waiting, she falls in love with a page, Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune), but when their affair is discovered, she and her parents are expelled and he is beheaded. One day a courtier for a powerful feudal lord comes to the village where they are exiled: The lord is in need of an heir, and his wife is barren. Oharu fits his rather exacting specifications to the letter, so she is brought to his palace where she bears him a son, but she's not allowed to nurse the child and is expelled from the household by his jealous wife. She goes to work as a courtesan to pay off the debts incurred by her greedy father (Ichiro Sugai), takes a job as maid to a woman who suspects her of sleeping with her husband, marries a man who is killed by robbers, and becomes a Buddhist nun but is expelled from the temple for supposedly seducing a man who was actually trying to rape her. Years pass and she loses her beauty and now walks the streets to earn money to survive, but she is subjected to scorn and mockery as a "goblin cat" by a man leading a group of young pilgrims. Hope dawns when she is summoned to meet her son, who has succeeded his father as lord, but it turns out that the officials in the court really want to cover up the fact that their lord's mother has been a prostitute, so she runs away after only a brief and distant glimpse of him. At the end she wanders the streets as an itinerant nun receiving alms in exchange for prayers -- her prostitution is now spiritual rather than physical. It's easy to take a synopsis like this and dismiss the story as "lachrymose as a soap opera," and "a reverse Horatio Alger adventure," as a particularly obtuse New York Times review did when The Life of Oharu was first released in the United States in 1964. It is neither of those things, of course. Even the Times reviewer was struck by Tanaka's performance, Mizoguchi's direction, and Yoshimi Hirano's cinematography, without understanding how or why these elevate the story into art. The story comes from a 17th-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman, a work far more erotic and picaresque than the melancholy screenplay Mizoguchi and co-screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda derived from it. The Life of Oharu is unremittingly grim -- it put me in mind of the novels of Thomas Hardy, whose characters suffer more than seems absolutely necessary for the author to make his point about the workings of fate. But the film is not about suffering; it's about strength, and women's strength in particular.  

The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)

It's been some years since I last saw The Deer Hunter, and watching it again last night I found it had a different resonance for me. It was no longer a film about the Vietnam War, but instead a film about the destruction of the American industrial working class. Who is willing to bet that the steel mill in which Michael (Robert De Niro) and his buddies work is still open? And who can doubt that the group singing "God Bless America" at the film's end, and their progeny, all voted for Donald Trump, responding to his "Make America Great Again" call and helping him carry the state of Pennsylvania? The Deer Hunter didn't even start out to be a film about Vietnam: The germ of it was a screenplay by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn Redeker about people who bet on Russian roulette in Las Vegas. Michael Cimino was brought on to direct and to develop the script with Deric Washburn. Many drafts, arguments, and hurt feelings later, it had become a film about steelworker buddies who go off to Vietnam, and the Russian roulette had become first a torture method used by the Viet Cong and then a device to symbolize the destructive effect of the war on the American psyche. It remains the most controversial part of the film -- there are many who assert that Russian roulette was never used as torture or for gambling in the back streets of Saigon -- but there's no denying its dramatic potency or the larger symbolic role it plays. The great strength of the film lies not in its screenplay but in its performances, starting with De Niro, whose Michael is the embodiment of Hemingwayesque "grace under pressure." De Niro was also responsible for the casting of Meryl Streep as Linda, a small role in which she does what she can to offset the machismo in which the film is awash, and which earned her the first of her record-setting string of Oscar nominations. Along with Streep came her lover, John Cazale, whom the producers wanted to fire because he was dying of cancer and was hence uninsurable, but Streep refused to appear without him. Christopher Walken did win an Oscar as Nick, and there are memorable performances from John Savage and George Dzundza as well. It's the strength of this ensemble that keeps the film from flying out of control as Cimino's follow-up, Heaven's Gate (1980), so disastrously did. Certainly there are signs in The Deer Hunter of Cimino's fatal self-indulgence, particularly the overextended exuberance of the wedding reception scene, which anticipates the out-of-control Harvard commencement sequence in Heaven's Gate. Neither scene adds measurably to the narrative or the themes of its respective film, but Cimino bitterly fought all efforts to trim the wedding sequence in the editing process, and later claimed, after editor Peter Zinner won an Oscar, that he had edited the film himself. Because of its sloppiness and self-indulgence, I hesitate to call The Deer Hunter a great film, but it's certainly one in touch with the darkest strain of recent American history.

Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

Cinqué Lee and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in Mystery Train

Jun: Masatoshi Nagase
Mitsuko: Yuki Kodo
Night Clerk: Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Bell Boy: Cinqué Lee
Luisa: Nicoletta Braschi
Dee Dee: Elizabeth Bracco
Johnny: Joe Strummer
Will Robinson: Rick Aviles
Charlie the Barber: Steve Buscemi

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robbie Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop
Film editing: Melody London
Music: John Lurie

I was born 40 miles from Tupelo, 75 miles from Memphis, and five years and nine months after Elvis Presley, but I grew up preferring the jazz-pop standards of Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, and Porter, and singers like Jo Stafford and Mel Tormé. It took me a number of years before I finally caught up with what was supposedly my generation, but eventually I succumbed to the myth of the King -- just in time to witness its deconstruction. That's partly what's going on in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, a film that dragged me back to my own roots the moment I saw the City of New Orleans racing through a kudzu-shrouded railway cut. The myth is still so potent that it can draw young Japanese tourists from Yokohama to Memphis to visit Sun Records and Graceland, but also so porous that Jarmusch can peer through it -- like the ghost of Elvis that visits Luisa -- and glimpse some of the racial injustice that elevated Elvis to superstardom and left black musicians like Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Rufus Thomas (both of whom have roles in the film) struggling for recognition. If the film's three interlocking stories feel too much like a familiar contrivance, it's worth remembering that Mystery Train was made five years before Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and probably influenced it. The first segment, with the young tourists Jun and Mitsuko providing a decidedly original point of view on a country they view through the lens of rock 'n' roll, is the best. The middle one, in which the newly widowed Luisa drifts toward the same hotel where Jun and Mitsuko are staying and winds up sharing a room with the frenetic Dee Dee, is the weakest, particularly Luisa's ghost-sighting. The third section, with the wonderfully eccentric trio of Joe Strummer, Rick Aviles, and Steve Buscemi, ties everything together, but fortunately it doesn't do it so neatly that it feels phony. And the intermediary scenes with Hawkins as desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as bellhop keep everything in the skewed perspective that the film needs. Robby Müller's cinematography treats the characters in the film's three episodes as only transients through the city: He and Jarmusch often frame a scene, like the downtown buildings rising in the distance beyond vacant lots, and have the characters walk through the frame. The boarded-up storefronts and empty streets have an ironic permanence to them that the characters lack, so that the central character in Mystery Train is Memphis itself, seen here as bleak and grimy but still charged with some of the vital spark that gave rise to so much music. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay before he ever visited Memphis, but he found exactly what he anticipated there.

Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Foreign Correspondent was made by people walking on eggs as they worked their way through a minefield. It displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward,  a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca.

*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

Isao Shirasawa, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Kuniko Miyake, and Zen Murase in Early Summer

Noriko Mamiya: Setsuko Hara
Koichi Mamiya: Chishu Ryu
Aya Tamura: Chikage Awashima
Fumiko Mamiya: Kuniko Miyake
Shukichi Mamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Shige Mamiya: Chieko Higashiyama
Tami Yabe: Haruko Sugimura
Takako: Kuniko Igawa
Kenkichi Yabe: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Sotaro Satake: Shuji Sano
Nobo Tamura: Toyo Takahashi
Nishiwaki: Seiji Miyaguchi

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

Early Summer is the second of the "seasonal" films made by Yasujiro Ozu in what is now recognized as his peak postwar period. The first was Late Spring (1949), and they were followed by Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I mention this chiefly because the English-language titles confuse even Ozu's hard-core admirers, among whom I count myself. "Was that Early Summer or The End of Summer?" we find ourselves asking when we're talking about Ozu's films. The confusion is further compounded by the fact that four of them starred the marvelous Setsuko Hara. It also doesn't help that the name of her character in Early Summer is Noriko, which was the name of her characters in Late Spring and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). So we have to remind ourselves that in Early Summer she is Noriko Mamiya, the unmarried 28-year-old daughter of Shukichi and Shige Mamiya. She lives with them as well as with her brother, Koichi, and sister-in-law, Fumiko, and their two bratty sons. She also has a well-paying clerical job and a group of old girlfriends from her schooldays. So why does everyone, even her boss, want her to get married? When her boss starts arranging things with an old business friend of his, her family encourages the connection, even though she's never met the man and he's in his early 40s. Noriko has a mind of her own, however, and eventually surprises everyone -- perhaps even herself -- with her decision. It's a comedy-drama in which nothing exciting happens -- even key events like the search for the bratty boys when they decide to run away from home take place mostly off-screen -- but Ozu holds everything in such delicate suspension, allowing us to meditate on the relationships at length, that we get caught up in the everyday lives of the film's huge cast. There are some wonderful scenes between Noriko and her girlfriends, who share the kind of in-jokes that old friends everywhere have. Some of these are lost in translation, but even that reminds us of real life, when we're left out of a group's established routines. And sometimes the subtitles wittily help us out, finding equivalents for the hick accents Noriko and her friend adopt when talking about the possibility of moving from Tokyo to the country. Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda bring the characters to life in their private moments, as when Shukichi and Shige talk wistfully about the son who remained MIA after the war, or when they see a balloon floating ahead and reflect on how sad the child who lost it must be. No filmmaker had a profounder sense of the inner lives of people in their ordinary routine.

The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin in The Big Sky

Jim Deakins: Kirk Douglas
Boone Caudill: Dewey Martin
Teal Eye: Elizabeth Threatt
Zeb Calloway: Arthur Hunnicutt
Romaine: Buddy Baer
"Frenchy" Jourdonnais: Steven Geray
La Badie: Henri Letondal
Poordevil: Hank Worden
Streak: Jim Davis

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Ray Buffum, DeVallon Scott
Based on a novel by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Perry Ferguson
Film editing: Christian Nyby
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

The Big Sky is a good Henry Hathaway or Budd Boetticher movie, except that it was made by Howard Hawks, from whom we have come to expect more. Hawks had just passed through one of the peak periods of his long career, with the sterling achievement of To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Red River (1948), and he was to return to form in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959). But The Big Sky looks like a routine Western adventure in that company, even though it has some old Hawksian hands on board in screenwriter Dudley Nichols, cinematographer Russell Harlan, and composer Dimitri Tiomkin. It has the director's characteristic touches in places: overlapping dialogue and the usual male-bonding moments. Some of the latter, especially between Kirk Douglas's Jim Deakins and Dewey Martin's Boone Caudill, verge on the homoerotic, since Boone is given to wearing tight leather pants and both go around with their shirts flared open, making one scene look like it's taking place in a West Hollywood bar and not a St. Louis saloon. The absence of the usual "Hawksian woman," able to return wisecrack for wisecrack, is particularly noticeable. The only woman in the large cast is Elizabeth Threatt, playing an Indian woman named Teal Eye, who doesn't speak English. This was the only film appearance for Threatt, a model Hawks had spotted in a photograph. Her chief function in the film is to provide sexual tension among the members of a crew of fur traders making their way up the Missouri River and to spark a bit of rivalry between Jim and Boone. Teal Eye has been brought along on the expedition by Zeb Calloway to act as a go-between with the Blackfoot tribe, to which she belongs. Also along for the journey is a somewhat addled Blackfoot known as Poordevil, played by Hank Worden, a regular member of John Ford's stock company who sometimes moonlighted for Hawks. The journey is interrupted by Indian attacks, river rapids, and the threats from a rival trading company, in scenes that are staged and shot well but never provide more than the routine excitement of the genre. Hunnicutt and Harlan received Oscar nominations for their work.

An Enemy of the People (Satyajit Ray, 1989)

Dhritiman Chatterjee and Soumitra Chatterjee in An Enemy of the People

Dr. Ashok Gupta: Soumitra Chatterjee
Nishith Gupta: Dhritiman Chatterjee
Haridas Bagchi: Dipankar Dey
Maya Gupta: Rama Guha Thakurta
Idrani Gupta: Mamata Shankar
Birish Guha: Subendu Chatterjee
Adhir: Manoj Mitra

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Based on a play by Henrik Ibsen
Cinematography: Barun Raha
Music: Satyajit Ray

The phrase "enemy of the people" regained currency recently when the current president of the United States applied it to the news media. It's also the title of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 play about the persecution of a truth-teller, so let the irony fall where it may. Writer-director Satyajit Ray's adaptation of Ibsen's play is one of his last films, made three years before his death. His health had been severely weakened by a heart attack in 1983, and his consequent lack of vigor shows in the film's static character: limited camera movements and a restriction to only a few sets, mostly interiors. It's very much a filmed play -- even in the final scene we hear but don't see the crowds outside proclaiming their support of Dr. Gupta. Ray's screenplay follows Ibsen in general outline, while shifting the scene from a Norwegian town to an Indian one. The title character, Dr. Ashok Gupta, is concerned about a sharp increase in diseases that are typically water-borne, such as hepatitis and cholera, so he sends a sample of the town's water, including that from the newly built Hindu temple, for analysis, and his suspicions are confirmed. He writes an article for the local newspaper explaining his findings and suggesting that the temple be closed until necessary water treatment measures are taken. But he is opposed in this by his own brother, Nishith, the equivalent of the town's mayor, who fears that closing the temple will hurt the economy, especially with a festival approaching that is likely to attract religious pilgrims. Nishith enlists a priest from the temple to proclaim the water safe and pressures the newspaper's publisher into killing his brother's article. Dr. Gupta calls a town meeting, but it is taken over by Nishith, who even goes so far as to call his brother's faith into question. Religious fundamentalists attack the Guptas' home and the landlord asks the doctor to move; the doctor's daughter loses her job as a teacher, and his privileges in the local hospital are revoked. Ibsen's play ends with his Dr. Stockmann standing firm, with only his family's support, but Ray softens his film's ending with the off-camera sound of the rallying supporters of Dr. Gupta. It's not really a cop-out ending, however. Ray has shifted the focus of his film from Ibsen's attack on bureaucracy and capitalist privilege to one he believed more relevant to his country: the clash of science and religious fundamentalism. What saves Ray's An Enemy of the People from preachiness and its lack of cinematic finesse is the director's usual involvement in his characters and the deep conviction of his actors, particularly Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his film debut in The World of Apu (1959) and worked with Ray on more than a dozen films over the next three decades.