The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock's first great film, contains an object lesson in how to end a movie, a topic I raised in passing when I blogged about Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2016) a week or so ago. Rather than tie everything up in a neat package with a flowery bow as Spielberg tries to do in his film, Hitchcock simply ends after the confession and death of Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) -- shot with beautiful irony against a background of high-kicking chorus girls -- in a closeup of Hannay (Robert Donat) and Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) holding hands, the handcuffs still dangling from Hannay's wrist. Nothing more needs to be said or shown, although a scene was apparently shot in which it's made more explicit that Hannay and Pamela are now a couple. Who needs it? The 39 Steps established Hitchcock as the master of the romantic thriller. There are those who regret that he never moved very far out of that genre, and who wish that he could have devoted himself to more highly serious material than John Buchan, who wrote the novel on which the film is based -- Dostoevsky, perhaps. But that's the kind of aesthetic puritanism that leads directors astray into high-minded dullness. We should be grateful that Hitchcock never succumbed to it, and that he continued to devote himself to an almost unique economy of narrative and to developing his skill at creating ways to distract the viewer from noticing a story's holes. How, exactly, does Hannay get from the Forth Bridge to the Scottish Highlands? By the same sleight-of-hand that gets Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) from New York to Chicago to Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959), of course. And again, who cares? It's also the first of his films to rely on star power, the charisma and charm of the young Donat and the first of the director's "icy blonds," Carroll, who was never more appealing than in this film. At the same time, he also acknowledges the necessity of supporting players who can give the film texture and depth. I'm speaking here particularly of such narrative filigree as the crofter (John Laurie) and his wife (Peggy Ashcroft), the milkman (Frederick Piper) who lends Hannay his white coat and cap, the traveling salesmen (Gus McNaughton and Jerry Verno) on the train, and the professor's wife (Helen Haye) who is so unperturbed at seeing her husband (Godfrey Tearle) pointing a gun at Hannay. These are mostly the creations of Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Charles Bennett, and not John Buchan. Who reads Buchan anymore? Who doesn't want to watch Hitchcock's film again?

Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947)

I am not a camera. If you ever want to see what movies could be like if no one had discovered montage, crosscutting, expressive camera angles, and other techniques that make them so involving, just watch Robert Montgomery's debut* as a director, Lady in the Lake. The gimmick (and it's little more than that) of this film based on a novel by Raymond Chandler is that the audience sees everything that happens through the eyes of Philip Marlowe, thereby becoming the detective. Montgomery plays Marlowe, but except for occasional reflections in mirrors, he's on screen only in set-up segments that clue the audience into the gimmick. Naturally, the film has to cheat, as when there's a cut when Marlowe travels between one location and another, but the major problem is that what the camera mostly sees is people standing there talking to it, a point of view that soon gets tiresome. Some of the cast rise to the demand of the long takes and extended dialogue without the usual shot/reverse shot cuts. Tom Tully, for example, makes his police captain threatening and then undercuts the threat when Marlowe witnesses him on the telephone with his young daughter, promising to come home early on Christmas Eve and play "Santy Claus." (The choice to set the film at Christmas -- it isn't in the book -- is perhaps meant to create a kind of ironic dissonance. If so, it doesn't work.) Jayne Meadows is fun as the apparently scatterbrained landlady who later turns out to be a somewhat more menacing figure. But the female lead, Audrey Totter, as the Chandlerian femme fatale, is an inexpressive actress, resorting to a lot of eye-popping to express emotion. She looks like her face has been shot full of Botox, years before it was invented. Montgomery, who is heard more than he's seen, is miscast as Marlowe, his patrician handsomeness much at odds with the hard-boiled Marlowe made familiar to us by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, and others. There are some good moments, such as an effective sequence in which the camera is behind the wheel in the car Marlowe is driving, but too often the gimmick makes us pay attention to itself rather than to the story being told.

*Official debut, that is. Montgomery had done some uncredited work behind the camera for John Ford on They Were Expendable (1945).

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)

Watching Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! a day or two after Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? reminded me that one of the essential characteristics of a great director is a compassionate interest in human beings. It's not that they are both comedies about college students: They are also both "coming-of-age" films, although Linklater lets us extrapolate the course of his characters' potential maturity (or lack of it), while Ozu lets his characters mature before our eyes. Ozu and Linklater have been called "sociological" filmmakers because their movies tend to be about what happens to their characters in a given cultural context: in the case of Linklater's film a group of young jocks at a Texas college in 1980; in Ozu's, Japanese college students in the early years of the Great Depression. Linklater has acknowledged that Everybody Wants Some!! is a kind of coda to Dazed and Confused (1993), the action of which takes place four years earlier on the last day of high school. The newer film is more narrowly focused than the earlier one, which had a sampling of all types of high schoolers, male and female, from brains to jocks, from bullies to victims. Everybody is centered on a group of horny young men, highly competitive college baseball players, all of whom have dreams of making it as pros. But it's still an ensemble work, with a gallery of good young actors, mostly familiar from TV: Blake Jenner from Glee, Tyler Hoechlin from Teen Wolf, Ryan Guzman from Pretty Little Liars, among others. Linklater forces us to see through the jock stereotypes and find the brains and hearts intentionally hidden behind the bravado and braggadocio of hormones and muscles. He's interested primarily in his characters' intense competitiveness and in their swiftly fading innocence. As in Dazed and Confused, in which the older stoner Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) exhibited the Peter Pan syndrome, unwilling to leave adolescence behind, in Everybody we meet Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a 30-year-old who masquerades as a transfer student from San Luis Obispo, trying to prolong the blissful innocence of a life spent smoking dope and playing ball. The adult world rarely intrudes on the film's characters: The coach's prohibition of alcohol and women in the residence houses is quickly ignored. But Linklater neither preaches responsibility nor sentimentalizes immaturity. In the last scene, the freshmen Jake (Jenner) and Plummer (Temple Baker) finally get to their first college class after a weekend of partying and promptly put their heads down to sleep through the history professor's lecture. They're young and have no history, or as Willoughby puts it, they're there "for a good time, not for a long time." As good as it is, Everybody "underperformed" at the box office, perhaps because it looks too much like a routine teen sex comedy for discerning audiences and didn't have enough gross-out humor or marketable stars for the usual audience for that genre.

Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

Because it's based on a Raymond Chandler novel, Murder, My Sweet is inevitably subject to comparisons with another Chandler-based film noir, The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Which is unfortunate, because Edward Dmytryk was no Hawks, and Dick Powell and Anne Shirley were certainly not Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But then who is? Murder, My Sweet is good stuff anyway: a steady-moving, entertainingly complicated film noir. And though Dick Powell, the first actor to play Philip Marlowe on screen, doesn't eclipse Bogart's version, he holds his own well alongside other Marlowe incarnations like James Garner, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum. Powell had just turned 40 when Murder, My Sweet was released, and had lost the baby face that made him a star in Busby Berkeley musicals and in comedies like Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940). (It's said that RKO changed the title of the film from that of Chandler's novel, Farewell, My Lovely, because it was afraid that people would think it was a musical.) Powell looks a little slight to take as many sappings as he does in the film -- usually accompanied by the voiceover, "A black pool opened at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom." But he handles the tough-guy lines in John Paxton's screenplay well, and there are plenty of good ones like "She was a gal who would take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle." Or: "My throat felt sore, but the fingers feeling it didn't feel anything. They were just a bunch of bananas that looked like fingers." As usual, we don't know who's good or who's bad for a while, but they're almost all pretty bad, especially Claire Trevor as Helen Grayle, whose former identity as Velma Valento, whom Marlowe is initially hired to locate by Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki), is what ties together all the various plots and subplots about jade necklaces and the like. This was the last film for Anne Shirley, who married the producer of Murder, My Sweet, Adrian Scott, and retired. Scott later became one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Dmytryk was also one of the Ten, but after his initial refusal to testify, he changed his mind, and gave the unverifiable testimony that Scott and the others had put pressure on him to insert communist propaganda into his films.

Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Ureo Egawa in Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?

Like his I Flunked, But.... (1930), Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? is a silent comedy about college boys and their life after graduating (or not graduating), featuring some of the same cast members and some of the same opportunities for comedy: a pep squad training, elaborate attempts to cheat on exams, and so on. This time there's a group of four students, centering on the richest one: Tetsuo (Ureo Egawa), whose father is president of an import-export company. Tetsuo and his buddies are all in love with the pretty Shigeko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who works for a local bakery and delivers bread and cakes to the campus. During an exam, in which all four are industriously trying to cheat, Tetsuo receives word that his father has fallen ill. When his father dies, Tetsuo leaves college to assume the presidency of the company -- which is in fact run by its vice-president, Tetsuo's uncle, who keeps trying to find a wife for Tetsuo, none of whom matches up to Shigeko in Tetsuo's opinion. Meanwhile, Tetsuo's buddies have flunked out, and they come to him looking for employment. They have to pass a company exam, but Tetsuo slips them the answers to the questions. Then one day, out in his chauffeured limousine with his uncle's latest choice for his wife, Tetsuo spots Shigeko with a cart with all her belongings: The bakery has closed, and she is moving to a new apartment. He sends the potential bride away in a huff, gives Shigeko a lift, and offers her a job at the company. He tells his buddies that he is going to marry Shigeko, not knowing that she has already promised to marry one of them, Saiki (Tatsuo Saito). When Tetsuo announces this, however, Saiki, who is the sole support of his mother, says nothing because he's afraid he'll lose his job, and even congratulates Tetsuo. When he learns the truth, from no less than Saiki's mother, Tetsuo angrily attacks Saiki, but he also recognizes that the real problem is social inequality, and the film ends with the Tetsuo and the remaining buddies, Kumada (Kenji Oyama) and Shimazaki (Chishu Ryu), waving goodbye to Saiki and Shigeko as they set off on their honeymoon. It's a warm-hearted movie that makes a smooth transition from slapstick to sentiment, while also scoring some points against tradition and the class system. The screenplay is by Ozu's usual collaborator, Kogo Noda, and the cinematography by Hideo Shigehara.

Wings (Larisa Shepitko, 1966)

Wings was the first feature by Larisa Shepitko, who made only four of them before dying in an automobile accident in 1979, only 41. I've now seen two of her films, the other being her last completed one, The Ascent (1977), and it's clear to me how great a loss her death was. That last film was an extraordinary, harrowing adventure with a brilliant documentary realism but also a profound symbolic resonance. Her first is almost a polar opposite: a low-key character study of a woman whose adventures -- she was a decorated pilot during World War II -- are long behind her. Nadezhda Petrukhina (Mayya Bulgakova) now leads a quiet existence as headmistress of a school that prepares students for work in the construction industry. She is admired by her colleagues and students but unfulfilled by her work. She has an adopted daughter, Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova), but they have grown apart: Nadezhda hasn't even met Tanya's new husband, and when she goes to a party where he's present she mistakenly greets the wrong man as her son-in-law. In addition to supervising repairs at the school and coaching the participants in the school's entry in a theatrical contest, she also has to discipline a rebellious young male student -- with whom, we see, she has a kind of sympathy that is stifled by her official duties. She occasionally sees a man, the director of the local museum where her picture as a war hero is on display -- on a visit to the museum she overhears a girl ask if she's still alive. And occasionally she visits the local airfield to watch cadets being trained. We get a flashback to wartime, when she had a lover, Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov), a fellow pilot whose death in combat she witnessed. Flight, that eternal symbol of freedom, is a strong force even in the earthbound life she leads, and we glimpse her fantasies of soaring through the clouds. So at the film's end, having quit her job, she takes a daring move to achieve that freedom once again. Spare but poetic, with a stunning performance by Bulgakova, Wings was written by Valentin Ezhov and Natalya Ryazantseva and filmed by Igor Slabnevich.

Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)

Ewa Krzyzewska and Zbigniew Cybulski in Ashes and Diamonds

Maciek Chelmicki: Zbigniew Cybulski
Krystyna: Ewa Krzyzewska
Szczuka: Waclaw Zaztrzezynski
Andrzej: Adam Pawlikowski
Drewnowski: Bogumil Kobiela
Portier: Jan Ciecierski

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda
Based on a novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski
Cinematography: Jerzy Wójcik
Production design: Roman Mann

The plot of Ashes and Diamonds is simple: A group of men carry out an ambush on a road in the countryside only to discover that their intended target was not among the men they killed. So they return to town to plot another way of assassinating the man. The youngest, most volatile member of the group discovers that the man has taken the room next door in the hotel, but while waiting for his opportunity, his flirtation with a pretty young woman turns serious -- they begin to fall in love. Still, renouncing that chance at happiness, he follows through with his mission: He kills the man, but before he can make his escape from the town he is gunned down. It could have been -- probably has been -- the plot of a Western, a gangster film, a spy thriller, or a war movie. But because it's a film made in Poland during the Cold War, and the story it tells is set on the very day in 1945 when the Germans surrendered, it's an intensely political film, not just in what's on the screen but also in what went on while it was being made and released. I mention this because while I want to think about movies in purely aesthetic terms -- i.e., assessing the quality of acting, writing, direction, camerawork, etc. -- it's  almost impossible to approach a film like Ashes and Diamonds without taking so-called "external" factors like politics and history into consideration. If you try to watch it without knowing anything about the political situation in Poland in 1945, with the Germans retreating, the Soviets advancing, you'll miss half of the motivation of the characters and most of the intensity of the conflict. And if you disregard the fact that Poland in 1958 was a communist country, you can't understand why the plot to kill a communist leader was such a touchy subject for Andrzej Wajda to handle in a film -- and why the way he handled it was so audacious. It's a film that asks you to do your homework. On as pure an aesthetic level as I can get in thinking about the film, it's visually fascinating, with some splendid deep-focus cinematography by Jerzy Wójcik that pays homage to Gregg Toland's work on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Wajda was quite open about the influence of Welles on his filmmaking -- like Welles, Wajda wanted sets to have ceilings -- but he also expressed a love of American gangster movies and film noir, citing Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) and The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) among his inspirations for Ashes and Diamonds. The American influence is probably most felt by viewers today in the performance of Zbigniew Cybulski in the role of Maciek, the young assassin. It's a showy, jittery, almost over-the-top performance that validates Cybulski's reputation as "the Polish James Dean." Wajda initially resisted casting Cybulski, wanting a more traditional actor for the role, but once Jerzy Andrzejewski, his co-screenwriter and author of the novel on which the film was based, persuaded him to hire Cybulski, Wajda realized that the handsome young star would attract the younger audience the film not only needed to succeed, but also to educate this audience about their country's past. He even gave in to Cybulski's demand that he be allowed to supply his own wardrobe -- not at all the kind of clothes that a young Polish partisan would have worn in 1945 -- including his signature sunglasses. (A line was inserted to explain that Maciek wore them because he had damaged his eyesight by spending too much time in the sewers of Warsaw during the uprising of 1944.) But Wajda added some idiosyncratic touches of his own to the film, including the bullets setting fire to the jacket of one of the unintended victims of the ambush, and some ventures into symbolism like the upside-down crucifix that looms over Maciek and Krystyna when they visit a ruined church and the white horse that wanders the streets of the town near the film's end. Maciek is shot in a field where white sheets are drying on clotheslines, and when he clutches one of the sheets to himself, his blood shows through -- even though the film is in black and white, this is a reminder that the colors of the Polish flag, like the one the hotel keeper takes out to wave at the film's end, are white and red. Wajda also delighted in the ambiguity of Maciek's death scene, one of Cybulski's most extravagant moments, which takes place on a garbage heap. For the communist censors, he observed, this could be interpreted as the fate of rebels against their rule, while young would-be rebels could see it as the state treating them as garbage.

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

Oscar Isaac is one of my favorite actors. I loved his work in Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013), A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014), Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), and on the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero (2015). He even managed to stand out in all the whiz-bang and nostalgia of the latest Star Wars installment. But I sat through the entirety of X-Men: Apocalypse without realizing, until his name appeared in the credits, that he was the one beneath all the makeup and prosthetics as En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse. Which makes me wonder: Why bother? Casting an actor of such skill and versatility in a role that could have been played by anyone willing to sit through hours of applying and removing body paint, silicone, and foam latex seems to me a waste of valuable resources. But I guess the same thing could be said about the entire film if you ignore the return the producers got on their estimated $178 million investment. When a film this size feels routine, something has gone awry, and X-Men: Apocalypse is nothing if not routine. There are things I enjoyed about it, like the special effects when Quicksilver (Evan Peters) rescues almost everyone from the explosion that destroys the institute. The trick of seeing everything as Quicksilver sees it -- i.e., as time standing still while he moves at superspeed, dashing from room to room to haul occupants to safety -- is nicely done. And there are good performances from Peters, from James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler. I enjoyed seeing Sophie Turner (as the latest iteration of Jean Grey) in something other than Game of Thrones and Hugh Jackman in an unbilled (and extremely violent) cameo as Logan/Wolverine. But there's a kind of heartlessness and thoughtlessness about it, too often characteristic of the superhero blockbuster movie genre, that my experience amounted to a kind of déjà vu. I just hope Isaac got paid well.  

L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

When does style become mannerism? And why is it that style is generally thought of as a good thing, and mannerism is often a pejorative? I found myself pondering these questions while watching Robert Bresson's last film, L'Argent. Bresson is one of the directors I most admire, so my first impulse is to admire L'Argent as a superb example of Bresson's austere style: his willingness to let the audience decide what's going on within the characters by restraining his actors' displays of emotion, the simplicity of his mise-en-scène, his use of ambient sound to do the job that other directors rely on musical scores to accomplish. He has a fascinating premise to explore in L'Argent, which he adapted from a story by Tolstoy: the horrible repercussions of the passing of a counterfeit bill by some schoolboys. They spend the bill in a photography shop, buying a picture frame mainly to get some real money in change. When the fake bill is discovered, the shop owner passes it off in payment to Yvon (Christian Patey), the young driver of a heating-oil delivery truck. When Yvon is arrested for passing counterfeit money, he identifies the clerk at the photography shop, Lucien (Vincent Risterucci), who gave him the money. But Lucien perjures himself, saying he had never seen Yvon before, so Yvon is convicted. Though he's given a suspended sentence, he loses the job that he needs to support his wife and small daughter. Unable to find work, he agrees to act as the getaway driver for an acquaintance who's robbing a bank, but is caught and thrown into prison. Life in prison does him no good, especially after he learns that his daughter has died of diphtheria and his wife has decided to start a new life. When he lashes out at a fellow inmate he is thrown into solitary. He attempts suicide, but survives and returns to prison where he finds that Lucien is also an inmate, having robbed the photography store and become rich through various forms of larceny. Embittered, Yvon serves out his term and is released, but he continues his descent into criminality, murdering the keepers of a small hotel and robbing them, and finally finding shelter with an elderly woman (Sylvie Van den Elsen), whom he also murders, along with her entire household. At the end, he confesses and is returned to prison. Bresson's dry, understated telling of this story gives it a kind of dreamlike matter-of-factness that a more florid and violent version couldn't achieve. But there are also moments when you become aware of the way Bresson is telling the story, moments in which, I think, style becomes mannerism, especially if you've seen enough Bresson films to recognize his particular way of dramatizing events. For example, there is one scene in which the camera focuses on a passageway in the Paris Métro: What we see for a long time (perhaps only seconds, but it feels longer given our natural impatience to want things to happen in a movie) are the foot of a stairway, the concrete floor and tiled walls, and the beginning of a passageway to the trains. Bresson holds on this empty space as we hear the train arrive and the doors open and people make their way toward the space, through it, and up the stairs past us. He stays on the space until people -- they are Lucien and two of his friends -- come down the stairs past us and enter the passage. We hear the train doors close and the train depart, and only then does Bresson cut to the platform and the train entering the tunnel. It's a moment of no real narrative importance, but Bresson's holding us there as it happens crafts a kind of suspense, a kind of anxiety of the quotidian that informs the entire film. The only problem I have with the scene is the way it sticks in my memory as an inflection of style. And remembering this moment at the expense of others more important to the theme and narrative of L'Argent makes me think of it as mannered. While it's still a fascinating and challenging film, Bresson's deadpan actors and his focus on emptiness lend themselves easily to caricature and parody, and I think he carries them too far in L'Argent, never finding the balance that make his masterworks -- Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- such essential films.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

It goes without saying that Steven Spielberg is one of the great directors, with a seldom-equaled skill at visual storytelling and at building tension and suspense. But Spielberg tries too hard to make a statement in Bridge of Spies -- something about defending the Constitution -- when it could have been simply an engaging film about Cold War tensions. It also suffers from the wrong kind of star power: Tom Hanks has devolved from a terrific actor, skilled at both comedy and drama, into the movies' iconic Good Guy. Casting him as the lawyer James Donovan, forced to defend a Soviet spy, deprives the film of any ambiguity about Donovan's defense of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Hanks's Donovan can simply wrap himself in the Constitution and we're with him all the way, even as public opinion of the time turns against him. As a film actor Hanks has lost his dark side, so we know that whoever he plays will triumph. Imagine Bridge of Spies with Donovan played by George Clooney or Bradley Cooper, stars with just a touch of shadow in their personae, and you can see what I mean. Fortunately, the film is otherwise well-cast, including Rylance's Oscar-winning turn as Abel, as well as Scott Shepherd's impatient CIA man and Sebastian Koch's duplicitous East German lawyer, and the screenplay by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen manages a good deal of suspense. (Sometimes at the expense of historical accuracy: Donovan was never shot at in his home, as the film has it.) The Coen brothers were brought in to work on the first draft of Charman's screenplay, specifically on the section in which Donovan finds himself negotiating separately with the Soviets and the East Germans to engineer an exchange of Abel for imprisoned U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who has been accidentally arrested in East Berlin. It's the best part of the movie, as Donovan wrangles not only with the conflicting egos and bureaucracies of the Soviet and East German officials but also with the CIA's insistence that only Powers need be included in the deal. Unfortunately, Spielberg doesn't know when his movie is over. Bridge of Spies should end with the exchange of spies at the bridge, but Spielberg keeps it running as Donovan boards the plane for home, returns to the arms of his family just as the news of his successful negotiation is breaking, gives his wife (Amy Ryan) the jar of marmalade he promised to bring her from London, witnesses her realization that he wasn't in London after all, and soon afterward rides to work on the bus where a woman who had previously frowned at him as a traitor now smiles at him as a hero after seeing his picture in the newspaper. All the while, Thomas Newman's score is telling us what we're supposed to feel. It's sheer sentimental anticlimax, of the sort that many critics decry in what are usually regarded as Spielberg's greatest films, Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Schindler's List (1993). (I happen to agree that the frame story of the aging Ryan's visit to the cemetery in Normandy is unnecessary, though I think the Yad Vashem sequence at the end of the latter film can be justified by the enormity of its subject matter.)  Bridge of Spies is by no means a bad movie, but it would have been a lot better if Spielberg hadn't given in to his instinct for overemphasis.