Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

John Garfield and Joan Crawford in Humoresque

Helen Wright: Joan Crawford
Paul Boray: John Garfield
Sid Jeffers: Oscar Levant
Rudy Boray: J. Carrol Naish
Esther Boray: Ruth Nelson
Gina: Joan Chandler
Phil Boray: Tom D'Andrea
Florence Boray: Peggy Knudsen
Monte Loeffler: Craig Stevens
Victor Wright: Paul Cavanagh
Frederick Bauer: Richard Gaines
Paul as a child: Robert Blake

Director: Jean Negulesco
Screenplay: Clifford Odets, Zachary Gold
Based on a story by Fannie Hurst
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Art direction: Hugh Reticker
Film editing: Rudi Fehr
Music: Franz Waxman

Jean Negulesco's Humoresque gets its title from the Fannie Hurst short story it's based on, but it also evokes the music played behind the opening title: the seventh of Antonín Dvořák's Humoresques, a group of short piano pieces that were later transcribed for orchestra. The music is best known today for the several facetious lyrics that have been attached to it, including "Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station" and "Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, get your elbows off the table."* Today, the movie also inspires similar irreverence, as an example of the melodramatic excesses of Joan Crawford's later career. How many drag queens have donned replicas of the Adrian gowns Crawford wears in the film, with shoulder pads so wide and sharp you fear that she could injure a bystander with a sudden turn? But there are far worse movies than Humoresque, and far less impressive performances than Crawford's in it. She doesn't appear until well into the film, after we've established the ruthless desire of Paul Boray to become a famous concert violinist. All he needs, it seems, is a rich patron, so when he meets Helen Wright, who has the money and nothing else to do with it but take lovers and drink, his fate is sealed. It's not like he doesn't have people to warn him off: There's his fellow musician, pianist Sid Jeffers, who can't supply much more than cynical wisecracks to keep Paul from doing the wrong thing. And there's his mother, who bought him his first violin but now wants him to settle down with fellow starving musician Gina and raise a family. But once Paul falls into Helen's clutches and becomes a hugely successful concert artist, all Mama and Gina can do is sit in the audience and glare up at Helen in her box -- though Gina sometimes bursts into tears and flees the auditorium. None of this would work if Garfield and Crawford didn't play their roles as well as they do. Garfield brings all the intensity and conviction to Paul that he does to his ambitious boxer in Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947). Although the violin playing is actually done by Isaac Stern, with some nice camera trickery that puts Garfield's face and Stern's fingers in the same frame, Garfield keeps up the illusion well, to the extent of busily working the fingers on his left hand, practicing the fingering even when he's not playing. He has some improbable lines to speak -- the screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold is freighted with them -- but he makes them work. As for Crawford, ambition was her nature and ruthlessness her forte in life as well as art, but she never just speaks her lines -- she inhabits them. There's no surprise in her performance, but that's not what we want from her. Negulesco's direction can be a little shapeless -- there's a gratuitous mid-film montage depicting a busy, hyped-up New York City -- but he handles the concluding sequence, set to a pastiche of themes from Tristan und Isolde, very well. Franz Waxman received an Oscar nomination for scoring, and there are excerpts from composers like Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Bizet, Mendelssohn, and Bach throughout: The film is a reminder that there was once a time when the audience for a Hollywood film would sit through extended passages of classical music.

*Or in my case, the discovery along with generations of other English lit grad students that the pouncing trochees of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" -- e.g., "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love" -- could be sung to Humoresque No. 7.

The Women (George Cukor, 1939)

Despite the sad novelty of its all-female cast, George Cukor's film flunks the Bechdel test completely: All the women in The Women talk about is men. They don't talk about their jobs because they don't have them: They circulate in a world of cocktail parties, kaffeeklatsches, spas, and venues for shopping. The one exception is Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford), who to my mind becomes the film's real heroine with her resigned "back to the perfume counter" final speech after she receives her comeuppance. Say what you will about Crystal, and the characters in The Women have plenty to say about her, she has a spine and a pretty solid view that the world is still there for her taking by any means necessary. Of course, the nominal heroine is poor Mary (Mrs. Stephen) Haines (Norma Shearer), who gets the final soft-focus scene as, dewy-eyed, she heads off to reconcile with her husband. I want to be a little more generous to Shearer than some have been: She has been given a thankless role -- generous, self-effacing, motherly to a fault -- and not only a formidable adversary but also a surrounding cast of colorful, wisecracking characters, from Rosalind Russell's bumptious, overdressed gossip to Paulette Goddard's wryly tough chorus girl on the make to Mary Boland's relentless serial divorcee. We are supposed to root for Mary, but why? This is where I think the gimmick, the all-female cast, does Shearer, a disservice. If we actually met Stephen Haines, we might have some clue as to why Mary takes so long to kick him out and then is so delighted to rush to his Crystal-stained arms at the film's end. Shearer is forced to play a role without a motive other than blindly enduring love. That she does it as well as she can gives her some default points, but for most of of the film she has to rely on Shearerisms: chin up, eyes moist, shoulders back. The character comes to life only at the end when Mary decides to fight back by marshaling all the dirty tricks she has been taught, and Shearer is fun to watch as she plays them. Still, her triumph over Crystal is only the product of a tired dramatic formula. It's Crawford who mops the floor with the rest of the cast with her performance and earns our respect for Crystal with her delivery of the famous exit line: "There a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society ... outside of a kennel. So long, ladies!" Everything else is anticlimax. Cukor gives the film great energy, though the adaptation by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin of the Clare Boothe Luce play (with uncredited help from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Ogden Stewart) is so full of would-be zingers that they begin to get a little tiresome. Sadly, the only respite from the non-stop bitchery is to introduce another weepy scene between Mary and her mother (Lucile Watson) or her daughter (Virginia Weidler). At two hours and 13 minutes, The Women seems at least 13 minutes overlong.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945)

I doubt that I would have recognized Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne as a film by Robert Bresson if I hadn't already known it was the second feature film of his career. Its milieu, the haute bourgeoisie, is far removed from the priests, peasants, pickpockets, and prison escapees of his great later films, which also relied on non-professional actors instead of the established professionals of this film. There is even a rather lush score by Jean-Jacques Grünewald, instead of the reliance on ambient sound characteristic of the more familiar period. Clearly, something happened to Bresson's aesthetic in the six years that separate Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne from Diary of a Country Priest (1951). And yet there's something in the restraint with which Bresson films this updating of a story by Denis Diderot and in the clarity of moral vision with which he imbues it that keeps it "Bressonian." Diderot's 18th-century story is of an age with Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses, which has been filmed half a dozen times, including versions updated to the 20th century by Roger Vadim (1959) and Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions, 1999). Diderot's and Laclos's stories both turn on the failure of the best-laid plans of vengeful lovers: Erotic obsession becomes a two-edged sword. With the help of Jean Cocteau's dialogue and well-judged performances by Maria Casares, Paul Bernard, and Elina Labourdette, Bresson maintains the tension of withheld revelations throughout the narrative in which Hélène (Casares) manipulates her former lover Jean (Bernard) into marrying Agnès (Labourdette), who is not the "impeccable" woman Hélène deceives Jean into believing her to be. The dénouement, in which Jean, having learned the truth, finds himself trapped inside his own automobile, is brilliantly staged. And even the bittersweet sort-of-happy ending feels right, if only because Bresson has revealed the inescapable cruelty of the milieu in which it takes place. I suspect that even if Bresson had gone on in this vein, rather than carving out for himself his unique place in film history, he would still be regarded as an important filmmaker.

Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf is unquestionably a "horror movie" -- i.e., one filled with incidents and images and narrative details aimed at shocking the viewer. It takes place on a remote island with a mysterious castle. Figures appear who may be either humans or demons. There's a scene in which a man walks up the wall and across the ceiling and one in which a woman peels off first her wig and then her face. The protagonist either murders or imagines that he has murdered a small boy. That protagonist is Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), an artist, who has come to the island with his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), to recover after an illness -- physical or mental, we're not told. Johan can't sleep, and Alma sits up with him at night while he tells her about the demons whose images he has sketched, so no wonder that her own mental state becomes fragile. One day, she meets an old woman who tells her that she should read Johan's diary, which he keeps under his bed. She does so, rather like Bluebeard's wife persisting in opening his castle's doors, uncovering some disturbing entries regarding his continued obsession with an old love, Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin). They're invited to a dinner party at the castle by the baron (Erland Josephson), where they meet a variety of unlovely sophisticates and are entertained by a rather bizarre puppet show excerpt from Mozart's The Magic Flute (an opera that Bergman would film, in a less bizarre manner, seven years later). But the climax of the evening comes when the baroness (Gertrud Fridh) takes the Borgs to her bedroom to show off her prized possession: Johan's portrait of Veronica Vogler. From then on, it's a deep descent into madness for Johan and a desperate attempt by Alma to save both of them from self-destruction. The "creep factor" in Bergman's movies is never entirely missing, but Hour of the Wolf cranks it up higher than ever. The problem is that the creepiness is sustained almost to the point of tedium, and with a concomitant loss of credibility. The remote island setting prevents the film from grounding itself in normality, so that the action plays out on one sustained note of oppressive isolation. Hour of the Wolf has many admirers, who rightly point out that Bergman, with the considerable help of his actors and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, has crafted a nightmare of erotic obsession with the utmost skill. But I like to compare Hour of the Wolf to another horror movie released the same year, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, a "commercial" product aimed at a general audience, which suggests evil things going on beneath the surface of a commonplace urban setting, and ask which is the more successful: the sustained psychological oppressiveness of the Bergman film or the sinister mixture of comedy and shock of the Polanski movie?  

Torment (Alf Sjöberg, 1944)

For all the menace emitted by "Caligula" (Stig Järrel), the sadistic teacher in Alf Sjöberg's Torment, for me the most chilling moment in the film comes when young Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin) returns home in the early hours of the morning after having slept with Bertha (Mai Zetterling), instead of staying home and studying for his upcoming exams. He slips into his darkened room and turns on the light only to find his father (Olav Riégo) sitting there. The father rises and leaves the room without a word, creating a miasma of guilt so thick you could hack chunks out of it. Torment is a deeply unsettling movie that foreshadows some of the ways its novice screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, could cloud over even the sunniest disposition with the films he would later direct. It also anticipates Bergman's occasional resort to overkill in his own films, piling misery upon misery. He wrote the screenplay to get even with his own education, to show how the very system of schooling thwarts creativity in the name of discipline. Jan-Erik is a dutiful student who really wants to spend time practicing the violin, but he's forced into the mold provided by the system, which includes a mind-numbing drill in Latin grammar that brings out the will to power in the teacher students call Caligula. It has been suggested that Caligula, who reads a Nazi newspaper in one scene, is also a veiled portrait of the Nazi presence in officially neutral Sweden, but that's only one element in the character's sinister villainy. He's mostly a despoiler of youth, including not only handsome Jan-Erik but also the tobacco shop clerk Bertha, whom he secretly terrorizes, and when Jan-Erik falls for Bertha, Caligula makes the most of it. Torment is a disjointed film, with Sjöberg and cinematographer Martin Bodin laying on the expressionist shadows and camera angles perhaps too heavily, and it never really comes across as an indictment of the education system -- there's a cheerily forgiving teacher and the headmaster really seems to be a well-meaning man -- so much as a somewhat truncated coming-of-age melodrama.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

El Hedi ben Salem and Brigitte Mira in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Emmi: Brigitte Mira
Ali: El Hedi ben Salem
Barbara: Barbara Valentin
Krista: Irm Hermann
Eugen: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges

When I say that Emmi is a plain, rather dumpy German woman in her 60s, and that Ali is a dark, well-built Moroccan man in his late 30s, I'm not just describing them, I'm "othering" them, depending on your own age, nationality, and other physical considerations. The fear that eats the soul in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's social problem drama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the fear of the other. And what draws Emmi and Ali into their odd coupling is their willingness to set aside the fear and accept each other. The film is not quite as formulaic as that sounds, of course: As writer and director, Fassbinder is willing to go beyond that and show that even acceptance can be a kind of exploitation. Emmi and Ali exploit each other for sex, for companionship on Emmi's side, for comfortable lodging on Ali's side. Inevitably, their relationship stirs outrage: The other residents of Emmi's apartment house are outraged at Ali's close presence in their snug German world; Emmi's family disowns her; her co-workers among the cleaning ladies at an office building snub her; the owner of the convenience store across the street refuses to serve Ali ostensibly because he doesn't speak proper German. And then things turn around when those who shun Emmi and Ali discover the potential for exploitation: The female residents realize that Ali can be useful to move things in the apartment house's basement storage area, and when Emmi invites them in, they circle Ali and admiringly feel his flexed biceps. The family accepts Emmi again when it turns out they need her babysitting services. The co-workers draw Emmi back in when they need her support in negotiating a raise and to exclude a new lower-paid woman recently immigrated from Yugoslavia. The shopowner welcomes them back as customers because a new supermarket is stealing his trade. And then there's another twist: Emmi and Ali become alienated from each other. He resents her displaying him like a trophy to the neighbors. She refuses to cook couscous for him because she doesn't like it. They split, and only come to a tentative reconciliation at the end when they allow each other their freedom. But fear doesn't just eat the soul, it also eats the stomach lining: Ali collapses from a stomach ulcer, which, a doctor explains to Emmi, is common among German "guest-workers" -- the immigrant laborers like Ali who helped bring about the Wirtschaftswunder of postwar German recovery. Ali will survive but the ulcer will recur. What saves Fassbinder's film from the didacticism of its problem-drama setup is first of all the credible performances of Mira and ben Salem, whose very ordinariness makes the situation feel real in ways that it might not have if the characters had been played by movie stars. But mostly it's the artfulness of Fassbinder's direction and his use of setting, framing the characters through doorways and in stairwells that create a world of confinement. Things never quite seem settled or easy for anyone. Even when Emmi's son angrily kicks in her TV set -- a detail Fassbinder borrowed from Douglas Sirk's 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows -- it takes him a frustratingly long time to succeed. In the post-9/11/2001 world, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul looks perhaps a little dated. There's an allusion to the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and someone groups Ali with "bombers," but anti-Muslim sentiment and fear of terrorism don't play the overt role in the prejudice against Ali the way they might today. The fear in the title is a more perennially abstract and pervasive one.

Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)

Humphrey Bogart called John Huston's Beat the Devil a "mess," which it is, but much of the messiness is due to Bogart's presence in the film. His tough-guy persona, for which Huston himself was largely responsible after casting Bogart in roles like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), puts him tonally out of sync with the rest of the cast of eccentrics in Beat the Devil. Bogart doesn't seem to know how to play Billy Dannreuther, an American trying to recoup his fortunes by playing along with some rather oddball crooks and grifters: the florid Peterson (Robert Morley), the German-Chilean who calls himself O'Hara (Peter Lorre), the lugubrious Italian Ravello (Marco Tulli), and the fascist Maj. Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), whose name almost suggests his character -- a humanoid Jack Russell terrier with a hair-trigger temper. Moreover, Dannreuther is rather improbably mated with the scheming Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) and equally improbably wooing the compulsive liar Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones). That Bogart has no chemistry with either actress, both of whom give delicious performances, further drags the film down. Jones made two films with Huston, this one and the little-seen We Were Strangers (1949), and they are two of the most interesting performances in her career, making me wish that Huston had been able to release Jones more frequently from the clutches of David O. Selznick. Everyone, including Edward Underdown as Gwendolen's husband, Harry, does delightful comic work except Bogart, who glumly and blankly delivers lines he doesn't seem to be trying to understand. That may be understandable, given that the screenplay was being written by Huston and Truman Capote -- and the uncredited Peter Viertel and Anthony Veiller -- pretty much on the fly while the film was being made. The result is a collection of very amusing moments pieced together with a lot of cobbled-together nonsense about uranium deposits in Africa -- in short, the stuff of which cult movies are made. I'm not a member of the cult, but I happily watch Beat the Devil every now and then, especially for the performances of Jones and Morley and Lorre, while wishing that Huston had cast someone more skilled than Bogart -- Grant? Stewart? Cooper? -- at working amid chaos and nonsense.

Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949)

Those of us of a certain age can remember when the phrase "foreign film" meant one thing: sex. Which was something the Production Code-ridden American film had long tried to persuade us didn't exist, or at least not outside of marriage. But when European filmmakers began to recover from the war, they were under no such constraints, so a certain whiff of the forbidden tended to accompany even the most artistically conceived French or Italian releases. Even the more austere Scandinavian films were the victims (some would say beneficiaries) of prurient distributors: Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika (1953) was snapped up by one who cut it by a third, while carefully retaining Harriet Andersson's nude scene, and marketed it as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. For a long time, what Americans associated with the phrase "French film" was not Renoir or Bresson, or even Godard or Truffaut, but Brigitte Bardot. And for many Americans, their introduction to Italian neorealism was not the documentary-like work of Roberto Rossellini in Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) or of Vittorio De Sica in Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), but Giuseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, with its posters and lobby cards emphasizing the voluptuous Silvana Mangano. The story has it that Bitter Rice began with a documentary inspiration: De Santis was riding on a train and noticed that it was full of working-class and peasant women. He learned that they were returning from their annual work in the rice fields of the Po Valley, where women were the primary workers because their smaller hands made them more efficient at planting and harvesting. De Santis was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and the more he investigated, the more the exploitation of the rice workers seemed to him the perfect subject for a film of social commentary. His first film, Tragic Hunt (1947), about the struggles of peasants to form a cooperative, had been well received, and he got the backing for Bitter Rice from Dino Di Laurentiis's new production company. Together with Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Puccini, he put together a story and began casting, signing up handsome newcomers Vittorio Gassman and Raf Vallone for the key male roles and the young American actress Doris Dowling, who had just made an impressive appearance as a call girl in Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend (1945), for the female lead. And then he discovered 19-year-old Silvana Mangano and the fine line between serious social-problem film and exploitation film was crossed. Mangano's innate sensuality threw the story off track, to the point that even today all anyone remembers about Bitter Rice is her vivid presence in it. Poor Doris Dowling becomes a secondary player, and the much worked-over screenplay shows the sometimes awkward efforts to integrate Mangano's character into the original plot, in which Dowling and Gassman play thieves on the run, with Dowling's Francesca hiding out among the rice-workers, while Gassman's Walter cooks up a scheme to hijack the entire rice crop. There is much ado about a stolen necklace that turns out to be fake, and a little bit of social commentary about the conflict between the unionized workers and the freelance "illegals." Traces of the original documentary inspiration remain in the movie, in between scenes of Mangano dancing and seducing Gassman and Vallone, and De Santis is a keenly observant director with a gift for staging impressive shots, deftly aided by cinematographer Otello Martelli. But the failure to assemble a coherent story undermines the whole project, so, naturally, De Santis and Lizzani were nominated for the best motion picture story Oscar.

A Story From Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

Kyoko Kagawa and Kazuo Hasegawa in A Story From Chikamatsu

Mohei: Kazuo Hasegawa
Osan: Kyoko Kagawa
Ishun: Eitaro Shindo
Sukeemon: Eitaro Ozawa
Otama: Yoko Minamida

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Hisakaza Tsuji

Kenji Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, which has also been released under the built-in-spoiler title The Crucified Lovers, is based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 18th-century play The Legend of the Grand Scroll-Maker. It's a romantic drama about doomed lovers that Mizoguchi and screenwriters Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda have expanded into a fable about greed, injustice, and the subjugation of women. The lovers don't even start out as lovers, but circumstances force them together. Mohei is a somewhat overworked apprentice scroll-maker who is thrown together with his master's wife, Osan, almost by accident. The master, Ishun, is a miser and a philanderer, and the circumstances that initially put Mohei and Osan together are almost the stuff of farce: Osan knows that Ishun has been harassing the pretty maid Otama, trying to persuade her to become his mistress, so Osan hides in the young woman's room one night to try to catch her husband in the act. Instead, Mohei goes to Otama's room and is discovered there with Osan. When Ishun finds out he accuses her of adultery, which as we've been shown earlier in the film is a crime punishable by crucifixion. In addition to this crime, Mohei has also been accused of forgery: Ishun had refused to give Osan's brother a loan, so Mohei agreed to help Osan by using Ishun's seal on a receipt, having been assured that the money would be repaid quickly. When confronted with the forgery, Otama intervenes on behalf of Mohei (whom she secretly loves) and says that she asked for the money. The upshot of all this complex of subterfuges, ultimately caused by Ishun's greed and lechery, is that both Osan and Mohei are forced to flee Ishun's household. They determine that suicide would be more honorable than crucifixion, but when they discover that they are in love with each other, they decide that life in hiding would be preferable to death. Things do not go well, of course, but in the end Ishun gets his comeuppance too. There is perhaps a little too much plot and the outcome is foreseeable, but Mizoguchi's mastery of atmosphere, aided by Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, lifts the film high above the melodrama. It's at times a strikingly claustrophobic film, whose boxlike interiors sometimes suggest the grids of Mondrian paintings, underscoring the entrapment not only of the lovers but also of those victims of their own avarice, indifference, or subservience who would punish them. When we're not inside, we're on crowded streets, and even when the lovers escape into the countryside, they're adrift on a fog-shrouded lake or framed by the stalks of a bamboo forest, hinting at prison bars. For some reason, perhaps the overcomplexity of the narrative, A Story From Chikamatsu doesn't hold the honored place in the Mizoguchi canon of Ugetsu (1953), The Life of Oharu (1952), or Sansho the Bailiff (1954), but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

Donatas Banionis in Solaris

Kris Kelvin: Donatas Banionis
Khari: Natalya Bondarchuk
Sartorius: Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Snaut: Jüri Järvet
Kelvin's Father: Nikolay Grinko
Kelvin's Mother: Olga Barnet
Anri Berton: Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy
Dr. Gribaryan: Sos Sargsyan

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, Andrei Tarkovsky
Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Production design: Mikhail Romadin
Music: Eduard Artemev

Andrei Tarkovsky called Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "lifeless," and viewing Tarkovsky's Solaris, made a few years later, it's apparent why. As I said in my comments on his Nostalghia (1983), Tarkovsky was a romantic for whom humankind's alienation from nature is a primary theme. Solaris begins with lush images of nature, of water, greenery, birds and dogs and horses, whereas Kubrick's film begins with (and seems to celebrate) the evolution of human beings into masters of technology, to the point that the most human character in the film is HAL, the computer. Technology in Tarkovsky's film has run amok, but not in the way HAL does in 2001: In contrast to the idyllic scene at the home of the protagonist's father that opens Solaris, the world of technology is endless ribbons of crisscrossing freeways, unreliable communications media, and the dilapidated space station that hovers over the ocean on the titular planet. In lesser hands than Tarkovsky's, portraying the disjunction between humanity and nature would lead to didacticism. But by immersing the viewer in the world of Solaris, by refusing to coach the viewer, Tarkovsky makes us work to assimilate his artistic vision. In that respect, he's not so far from Kubrick as his dismissal of 2001 might suggest.  Both films are immersive experiences, stretching the boundaries of conventional narrative to leave a viewer puzzled and provoked. And both end with visions of transformation and transcendence. It might also be said that Kubrick's fetal star-child, on its passage back to Earth, is a vision that allows for more hope than that of Kris Kelvin on an island of static and sterile illusions in the vast sea of Solaris. In any case, what a cast: especially Natalya Bondarchuk as an infinitely touching Hari, that frightened and frightening figment of Solaris's misinterpretation of Kelvin's past, and, walking the line near madness, Jüri Järvet as Snaut and Anatoliy Solonitsyn as Sartorius, the scientists damned to confinement on a space station manipulated by an uncomprehending but superior alien intelligence. I think the critic who likened Banionis to Glenn Ford, a handsome actor tending toward blandness, is on the mark, but Kelvin needs to be a little bland to serve as foil for the extraordinary things that occur around him.