Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

Alex R. Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight

Adult Chiron Harris: Trevante Rhodes
Teenage Chiron Harris: Ashton Sanders
Child Chiron Harris: Alex R. Hibbert
Adult Kevin Jones: André Holland
Teenage Kevin Jones: Jharrel Jerome
Child Kevin Jones: Jaden Piner
Paula: Naomie Harris
Teresa: Janell Monáe
Juan: Mahershala Ali
Terrel: Patrick Decile

Director: Barry Jenkins
Screenplay: Barry Jenkins
Based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Cinematography: James Laxton
Production design: Hannah Beachler
Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders
Music: Nicholas Britell

Coming-of-age films are the cinematic equivalent of the Bildungsroman, the usually semi-autographical "novel of education" that tracks the formative childhood and adolescent experiences of the protagonist. Dickens, for example, wrote not one but two Bildungsromane: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. In the movies, the classic coming-of-age films include Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, 1955; Aparajito, 1956; The World of Apu, 1959) and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows* (1959). Lately, Richard Linklater has added a distinguished entry to the genre, Boyhood (2014). And now Barry Jenkins adds to the genre with Moonlight, a fine film about growing up black and gay, while deftly avoiding the double pitfall of making his film about being black or gay. There have been plenty of films about growing up black and about growing up gay -- I watched a good film just last night about the latter, André Téchiné's Wild Reeds (1994) --  and much commentary about possessing the dual stigma in a straight and/or white society. But what sets Jenkins's film apart is its avoidance of pop psychology and trite sociology: Moonlight is about being human. You don't need to have grown up in India or France to understand and sympathize with Apu or Antoine, and you don't need to have grown up in the Miami housing projects to sense why Chiron (rhymes with "Tyrone," but with a spelling that suggests the mythical centaur) is so blocked, so stubborn, so silent. Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play Jenkins adapted for the film, step carefully around the clichés of the genre, especially when it comes to ascribing blame. Juan, the drug runner who finds the young Chiron hiding from bullies in an abandoned crack house and shows him kindness, isn't entirely the heroic figure he might be. Juan becomes the fatherless Chiron's first adult male role model, but he's a poor one even though he's generous and understanding, since Chiron grows up to follow Juan's profession and even imitate some of his showy mannerisms. Paula is a terrible mother, but she doesn't want to be: It's the drugs that Juan sells her that send her skidding off the track she desperately wants to be on. Kevin, Chiron's first (and apparently only) sort-of boyfriend, isn't strong enough to stand up to the taunts of the bully Terrel, so he betrays the teenage Chiron, provoking him to violence. So the film ends on an ambivalent note with the reunion of the adult Chiron and Kevin. Are they strong enough now to provide support to each other, or are their lives going to be haunted by the damaged child that was Chiron, seen in the film's final shot? There is something a little too formulaic about that ending, I think. I'm not entirely convinced, for example, that the handsome, bulked-up, successful drug runner that is the adult Chiron would have remained celibate for so long. But Jenkins has risked much and mostly succeeded -- after all, there's that Oscar -- in crafting a film that doesn't play the blame game or rely on pat explanations and outcomes.

*I'm not including the other four Antoine Doinel films by Truffaut because, like many others, I don't sense a real continuity of character between the Antoine of The 400 Blows and the Antoine of the sequels.

Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

Cary Grant, Edward Everett Horton, and Jean Dixon in Holiday

Linda Seton: Katharine Hepburn
Johnny Case: Cary Grant
Julia Seton: Doris Nolan
Ned Seton: Lew Ayres
Nick Potter: Edward Everett Horton
Susan Potter: Jean Dixon
Edward Seton: Henry Kolker
Seton Cram: Henry Daniell
Laura Cram: Binnie Barnes

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman
Based on a play by Philip Barry
Cinematography: Franz Planer
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Al Clark, Otto Meyer
Music: Sidney Cutner

Of the four films Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made together, I think George Cukor's Holiday may be my favorite. Their first, Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor, 1935), is just, well, weird. The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940) has maybe a touch too much MGM gloss for my tastes, and James Stewart has a better role than Grant does. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) is a greater movie than Holiday and one of the funniest films ever made, but as a showcase for the talents and the chemistry of Grant and Hepburn it falls short because they're mostly called on for one note: zaniness. But Holiday allows them to show off almost everything they could do. It allows Grant to be suave and ardent and acrobatic and sexy. It lets Hepburn be intense and vulnerable and glamorous and noble. And it gives them one of the best supporting casts ever assembled to play off of. As films like his David Copperfield (1935) and The Women (1939) show, Cukor was a master at directing ensembles of colorful players. Here he directs the usually bland Lew Ayres in a heartbreaking performance as Ned Seton, the trapped, alcoholic younger brother of Linda and Julia. He makes Doris Nolan's Julia first a credible match for Grant's Johnny Case and then eases her transition into a chip off the old ice block: the die-hard capitalist tycoon paterfamilias played by Henry Kolker. Johnny's background is illuminated by his friendship with the witty, professorial Potters as that of the Setons is by the snide, snobbish Crams. Of course, all of these relationships are built into the film by its source, a play by Philip Barry adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, but it's Cukor's skill at keeping them in balance that allows the film to stay away from sentimentality or getting bogged down in satire of the rich. There's a bit of the latter -- and of the leftist views that would later get Stewart blacklisted -- when Seton calls Johnny's desire to take time off from making money "un-American," to which Linda replies, "Well, then, he is, and he won't go to heaven when he dies, because apparently he can't believe that a life devoted to piling up money is all it's cracked up to be." Holiday has a little more satiric bite than the other Barry-Stewart-Cukor-Grant-Hepburn collaboration, The Philadelphia Story, but this is Depression-era political commentary with a light touch. Best of all, Holiday is one of the greatest members of a much-abused genre, the romantic comedy.

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

Patricia Collinge, Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Henry Travers, Charles Bates, Edna May Wonacott in Shadow of a Doubt

Charlie Newton: Teresa Wright
Charlie Oakley: Joseph Cotten
Jack Graham: Macdonald Carey
Joseph Newton: Henry Travers
Emma Newton: Patricia Collinge
Herbie Hawkins: Hume Cronyn
Louise Finch: Janet Shaw

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Gordon McDonell
Cinematography: Joseph A. Valentine
Art direction: John B. Goodman
Film editing: Milton Carruth
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

In high school I appeared in a production of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, playing three roles: In the first act I was Professor Willard, who comes on stage to bore the audience with facts about the town of Grover's Corners, which, he says, "lies on the old Pleistocene granite of the Appalachian range" and is largely populated by "English brachiocephalic blue-eyed stock." I have no doubt that, as the class nerd, I was chosen for my ability to pronounce "Pleistocene" and "brachiocephalic," but I also played a newsboy tossing imaginary newspapers on imaginary front porches in the second act, and in the third I was the Second Dead Man, who sits in the cemetery waiting to speak his one line: "A star's mighty good company." Our Town has always been a good choice for amateur theatrics because it's inexpensive, designed to be performed with no scenery other than some chairs, a couple of trellises, and a stepladder, but it was especially good for high schools in the 1950s because it was clean. No sexual innuendo, no profanity. Our straitlaced principal, Dr. Brubaker, acted as censor on all of the school plays, and the only thing he found an objection to was the alcoholic choirmaster Simon Stimson, so the director, our English and dramatics teacher Mr. Wilson, had to threaten our Simon, Billy Cavanaugh, every now and then when he started to play drunk. I mention all of this because Wilder's Our Town looms large over Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Wilder wrote the first draft of the screenplay, based on a story idea by Gordon McDonell. The screenplay was revised and completed by Sally Benson (author of the New Yorker stories that were the basis for Vincente Minnelli's 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis) and Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville, after Wilder left for service in World War II, but it's his benign vision of small town life that informs the Santa Rosa of Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock even paid tribute to Wilder with a separate on-screen credit in the film's opening. The premise of Shadow of a Doubt is essentially: What if a serial killer showed up in Grover's Corners? What better place to hide out from the cops than in the bosom of one's own "average American family," as the Newtons of Santa Rosa are said to be? Instead of Hitchcock's frequent "wrong man" plot device, what we have here is the wrong place, the tension being developed from Uncle Charlie's threat to small town tranquility. Hitchcock is often quoted as saying Shadow of a Doubt was one of his favorite films, and there's much to admire in it, especially the performances. As Uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotten, with his quick turns from joviality to menace, is splendid, and Teresa Wright as his namesake niece makes the most of their odd emotional connection: If Uncle Charlie is psychotic, Young Charlie is at least neurotic, especially in her often frantic and edgy attempts to launch her own investigation, either to prove or disprove her uncle's guilt. Patricia Collinge is also superb as the mother who has to be protected from the truth about her brother, lest the whole family structure that depends on her hard work and common sense collapse. Henry Travers as the father and Hume Cronyn as his mama's-boy friend provide the necessary macabre comedy in their schemes to bump each other off. But I think the film is undermined by the unnecessary introduction of a love story between Charlie and the detective Jack Graham. It's inserted into the film too abruptly, almost in a cut between scenes: All of a sudden Charlie has not only figured out that Graham is a detective but she has also fallen for him. A more interesting actor than Macdonald Carey might have made it plausible, but his affable Graham doesn't feel like an appropriate match for the intensity that is Charlie. Grover's Corners was no paradise, as the third act of Our Town demonstrates, and Uncle Charlie is perhaps not the only serpent in Santa Rosa: The scene in which the two Charlies go to a smoky dive and encounter the waitress Louise, a schoolmate of Young Charlie's who has fallen on hard times and looks longingly at the ill-gotten emerald ring her friend is wearing, is an effective counterpoint to the folksiness and bonhomie on the small town surface. I think the film could have benefited from a bit more of the dark underside of Santa Rosa and a bit less of its superficial geniality.

Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)

Charles Blavette and Celia Montalván in Toni

Antonio "Toni"  Canova: Charles Blavette
Josefa: Celia Montalván
Fernand: Édouard Delmont
Albert: Max Dalban
Marie: Jenny Hélia
Sebastian: Michael Kovachevitch
Andrex: Gabi

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Jacques Levert
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Leon Bourrely
Film editing: Suzanne de Troeye, Marguerite Renoir
Music: Paul Bozzi

Authenticity in movies is like sincerity in politics: If you can fake it, you've got it made. Jean Renoir's Toni is a venture into realism, the quest for the kind of authenticity produced by using non-professional actors and shooting on location without resort to studio-built sets. Like the films of the Italian neorealist directors who admired and imitated Toni, it focuses on the struggles of the working class, in this case the immigrant workers from Spain, Italy, and North Africa who come to the South of France seeking jobs on the farms and, in the case of the Italian Antonio "Toni" Canova, the quarries. The film begins with Toni's arrival on a train; as the workers spread out on their search, we follow Toni as he knocks on the door of a boarding house run by Marie. Then there's an abrupt cut in which time has passed and we see that Toni is now sharing Marie's bed. It's a time jump that Renoir will use several times over the course of the film. While still with Marie, Toni falls in love with Josefa, a Spanish woman, but she agrees to marry the brutish Albert, who is Toni's boss at the quarry. Toni proposes that he and Marie join them in a double wedding ceremony. After another time jump, Josefa has had a baby and named Toni as the godfather, a role that doesn't please Marie at all. As the marriage of Toni and Marie disintegrates, he moves out of the house and she attempts suicide. Eventually, the relationship of Toni and Josefa ends in calamity, and as the film ends we have a reprise of the opening scene: Another train arrives, with yet another group of laborers. Toni is, as we should expect from Renoir, a work of great cinematic sophistication used to create a sense of simple immediacy, of witnessing real lives unfold. The story, while often melodramatic, maintains its documentary quality by relying on ambient sound and the deglamorization of its players. The polyglot cast is utterly convincing, and for once the viewer reliant on subtitles may be at something of an advantage over those just listening to the dialogue: Even if you know only a little French you can tell that the accents are thick and varied. But the film is also often visually quite beautiful: It was the first collaboration of Renoir with his nephew, Claude, as cinematographer, who achieves some quite striking nighttime scenes without resorting to the filtered or underexposed daylight shooting known as "day for night" or, in France, la nuit américaine.

No Post Today

Feeling a bit under the weather (or maybe just lazy). For the record, here are the films I've seen lately, some of which I hope to write up soon:

Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be

Maria Tura: Carole Lombard
Joseph Tura: Jack Benny
Lt. Stanislav Sobinski: Robert Stack
Col. Ehrhardt: Sig Ruman
Greenberg: Felix Bressart
Rawitch: Lionel Atwill
Prof. Siletsky: Stanley Ridges

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Production design: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Dorothy Spencer
Music: Werner R. Heymann

Topical humor and satire has always been a risky business, as Kathy Griffin learned recently with her gag involving a severed Trump head. When a joke about current events offends rather than amuses an audience, producing stunned silence or at best nervous laughter, comedians usually try to defuse the situation by asking, "Too soon?" For Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, it was "too soon" for a very long time. Begun before Pearl Harbor and completed after the United States had declared war on Nazi Germany, To Be or Not to Be had the further misfortune to be released shortly after the death of its star, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash while on a tour selling war bonds. The unavoidable bad timing resulted in a critical and commercial failure, with many critics echoing the reaction of the New York Times's Bosley Crowther, admittedly a man not known for his lively sense of humor, that To Be or Not to Be was a "callous and macabre" treatment of "a subject which is far from the realm of fun." Even the father of the film's star, Jack Benny, walked out of the picture when he saw his son wearing a Nazi uniform. (He was later persuaded to sit through the movie and liked it.) Critical nervousness about To Be or Not to Be lingered for a very long time, especially among the generation that fought in or grew up during the war. Andrew Sarris, who placed Lubitsch in his "Pantheon" of great directors in his 1968 book The American Cinema, took notice of the film's reputation as "an inappropriately farcical treatment of Nazi terror," and rather oddly commented, "For Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable." As late as 1982, in her collection of short reviews, 5001 Night at the Movies, Pauline Kael said that "the burlesque of the Nazis ... is so crudely gleeful that we don't find it funny." That last is, incidentally, a prime example of the Kaelian "we," her tendency to include the reader in her own experience of films. As Sam Goldwyn reportedly said, "Include me out." I'll admit that the first time I saw To Be or Not to Be, I was a little shocked by its tone, and especially its portrayal of the Gestapo as a gaggle of brainless schnooks, epitomized by Sig Ruman's easily duped Col. Ehrhardt. Yes, the Gestapo was a formidable instrument of terror, to the point that they remain emblematic of the utmost viciousness of Nazism, especially when countless movies made after the entrance into the war freed Hollywood filmmakers from their obligation to remain neutral. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition was an equally formidable instrument of terror, and is anyone really offended when they turn up as a gag line -- "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" -- in Monty Python sketches? Time allows us to distance ourselves from horror, so today most people acknowledge and admire the skill and wit of Lubitsch's satiric farce, which is also a pretty good spy thriller, with genuinely suspenseful moments. Lombard is at her most poised and glamorous, as well as a surprisingly effective foil for Benny, who as the "great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura" for once in his rather undistinguished career in movies -- which never showcased him as well as radio or TV did -- has a chance to display his perfect comic timing. Tura's reaction -- an indignant slow burn -- when the start of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy cues Lt. Sobinski to leave his seat for an assignation with Mrs. Tura is Benny at his best. But the film is also laced with moments of real awareness of the horrors beneath, an awareness that is not really compromised by being made part of a comedy. The most famous line of the film is probably Ehrhardt's observation, in response to the disguised Tura's request for an evaluation of his work on the stage, "What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." How this double entendre made it past the Production Code censors, I don't know, but it's evidence that Lubitsch was certainly aware of the reality and not just being "inappropriately farcical."

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1963)

Chishu Ryu in An Autumn Afternoon

Shuhei Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Michiko Hirayama: Shima Iwashita
Koichi: Keiji Sada
Akiko: Mariko Okada
Yutaka Miura: Teruo Yushida
Fusako Tagachi: Noriko Maki
Kazuo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Shuzo Kawai: Nobuo Nakamura
Nobuko Kawai: Kuniko Miyake
Sakuma ("The Gourd"): Eijiro Tono
Tomoko Sakuma: Haruko Sugimura
Bar Owner: Kyoko Kishida
Yoshitaro Sakamoto: Daisuke Kato

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Minoru Kanekatsu

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then what is a wise consistency? Because Yasujiro Ozu was nothing if not consistent, especially in the films of his greatest period: From Late Spring (1949) through An Autumn Afternoon, his final film, we get the same milieu -- middle class Japanese family life -- with the same problems -- aging parents, marriageable daughters, unruly children -- and the same style -- low-angle shots, stationary camera, boxlike interiors, exterior shots of buildings and landscape used to punctuate the narrative. Ozu's style would be called "mannered" except that the word suggests an obtrusive inflection of style for style's sake, whereas Ozu's style is unobtrusive, dedicated to the service of storytelling. There are, I suppose, some who are turned off by such consistency, who don't "get" Ozu. All I can say is that it's their loss, because it's a wise consistency, dedicated to trying to understand the way people work, why, for example, they conceal and obfuscate and manipulate to get what they really want. And why, sometimes, they don't even know what they really want. An Autumn Afternoon could almost be mistaken for a remake of Late Spring because of its central problem: a young woman at risk of sacrificing herself for an aging, widowed father. It stars the same actor, Chishu Ryu, as the father, Shuhei, and it ends in a strikingly similar way: The daughter, Michiko, gets married, but we never see the bridegroom, just as we never see the man Noriko marries in Late Spring. But where Late Spring centered itself on a kind of moral dilemma, the white lie the father tells to resolve the problem, An Autumn Afternoon illuminates the relationship of father and daughter through the experiences of secondary characters. If Michiko marries, will her marriage be like that of her brother and sister-in-law, strained by constant arguments about money? If Shuhei doesn't encourage her to marry, will she end up like the daughter of his old teacher, embittered because she gave up the prospect of marriage to serve him? There's yet another possibility for Shuhei: His close friend, a widower, remarried, but now his much younger wife has him on a tight leash, putting limits on him that Shuhei doesn't have, such as the ability to stop off in bars and to drink with his old war buddies. (Even Michiko tries to rein in her father where this is concerned, pointedly commenting when Shuhei comes home a little late and tipsy.) The screenplay by Ozu and his usual collaborator, Kogo Noda, deftly integrates all of these stories and more, but the shining center of the film is the performance of Ryu, constantly letting us see the conflict that is churning beneath Shuhei's calm demeanor. And it's entirely fitting that the final shot of Ozu's last film -- Shuhei, saying softly to himself, "Alone, eh?" -- features Ryu, the actor who appeared in so many of his films that he seemed to be Ozu's alter ego.

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.