The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, 2016)

Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in The Salesman

Rana Etesami: Taraneh Alidoosti
Emad Etesami: Shahab Hosseini
Babak: Babak Karimi
The man: Farid Sajadi Hosseini
Sanam: Mina Sadati
Sadra: Sam Valipour
Majid: Mojtaba Pirzadeh
Kati: Maral Bani Adam

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi
Cinematography: Hossein Jafarian
Music: Sattar Oraki

Protesting an American policy that refuses to distinguish between artists and terrorists, Asghar Farhadi didn't attend the Academy Awards ceremony that gave his film The Salesman an Oscar for best foreign language film. The irony here is that in many ways The Salesman is as critical of the Islamic Republic of Iran as its director's action was of the United States. On the surface, The Salesman is a well-made domestic drama about the stress put on the marriage of Rana and Emad after Rana is assaulted in their own home. It's also a bit of a whodunit, as Emad tries to uncover the identity of the attacker, as well as a problem drama about the nature of revenge. But context is everything, and the context here is a country that seems to be as unstable as the condemned apartment house that Rana and Emad have to flee at the beginning of the film. Throughout The Salesman, the niggling pressures of a state determined to police the private lives of its citizens keep revealing themselves: The production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which Emad and Rana play Willy and Linda Loman is subject to last-minute cuts demanded by the censors. The class Emad teaches is interrupted by a man telling him that the books he has selected have not been approved -- Emad wearily tells him to throw them in the trash. Worst of all, Rana refuses to trust the police to handle her case, knowing that she'd be subjected to interrogation and public exposure worse than the attack itself. We never learn the full details of what happened to her, whether she was sexually assaulted or just subjected to a terrifying visit from a voyeur -- although the latter, especially in a state that prescribes rigorous standards of modesty from women, is an equivalent violation. We get a hint of the tensions and mistrust between the sexes in Iran in a scene in which Emad shares a taxi with one of his male students and a woman, who first accuses him of what we'd call "manspreading," and then asks to change seats with the student. Afterward, when Emad proclaims his innocence, the student tells him that the woman had probably been molested by a man during a cab ride and is oversensitive to any contact. Official standards of behavior have eroded community standards: Although the apartment Rana and Emad have moved into was once occupied by a prostitute, a profession both strictly illegal and widespread in Iran, the neighbors only gossiped about her, never notifying the authorities. Emad's vigilantism when he discovers the identity of Rana's attacker is the product of a system of justice that has broken down. That Rana and Emad are actors is suggestive: In the film's vision of Iran, everyone is playing a part, concealing their real selves. The social and political subtext is what makes The Salesman a more fascinating and important film than its mere plot, well-handled as it is, would suggest.

Watched on Amazon Prime

Love Is Colder Than Death (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ulli Lommel in Love Is Colder Than Death

Franz: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Johanna: Hanna Schygulla
Bruno: Ulli Lommel
Woman on Train: Katrin Schaake

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Music: Holger Münzer, Peer Raben

I love Turner Classic Movies for its occasional programming surprises, but I have to wonder what its regular viewers thought if they stayed tuned to that channel after whatever Hollywood classic from MGM or Warner Bros. was over and started watching Love Is Colder Than Death. For the audience for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first feature film largely consists of (1) hard-core Fassbinder fans; (2) professional film scholars; and (3) compulsive film-bloggers. (Since I don't belong to either of the first two groups, I guess I have defined myself into the third.) The rest of the usual TCM viewers probably gave up on Love Is Colder Than Death after a few minutes of the minimally staged, flatly lighted, tonelessly acted opening scenes, which look like a documentary of a performance in an experimental theater. (Like, for example, the Antiteater in Munich that Fassbinder helped found.) If they lasted through these scenes, which are about the attempt of the mob to recruit Franz and his first meeting with Bruno, they may have bailed out during an enigmatic conversation between Bruno and a woman he meets on a train, or shortly afterward, during Bruno's search for Johanna, the girlfriend Franz pimps out, a long sequence that consists largely of views of the nighttime streets down which Bruno is driving. Eventually, however, Love Is Colder Than Death comes together into the story of the ménage à trois formed by Bruno, Franz, and Johanna, and an ill-fated attempt to rob a bank. At this point it becomes clear that Fassbinder is mimicking and perhaps parodying the French New Wave. The ménage is very much like the ones in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964) and François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), though entirely lacking the joie de vivre of either. In a somewhat shabbier way, Bruno emulates the gangster chic attempted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (Godard, 1960) and mastered by Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967). There's some of the larky post-adolescent lawlessness of Breathless and Masculin Féminin (Godard, 1966), as when the trio shoplifts sunglasses in a department store or Johanna and Bruno filch things in a supermarket, though Fassbinder's characters never seem to have much fun doing it. But there are touches throughout the film that might be called more Fassbinderish than Godardian. The supermarket scene is accompanied by several bars from a duet in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier that have been looped endlessly into a kind of insane Muzak, giving an eerie, almost feverish note to the scene. For much of the film, Fassbinder avoids pans and zooms and other camera tricks, but when he uses them it's noticeable, as in the scene in which Franz is being held by the police for interrogation: The camera glides regularly back and forth along a steady track, without holding for a second on the person speaking -- it's like moving your head back and forth during a tennis match without focusing on the ball. It can't just be the absence of a budget for blanks and blood squibs that makes the several scenes in which people are shot so lacking in conventional movie realism: In each case, we hear the sound of the shot without seeing either smoke or a muzzle flash from a gun, and the victim falls down dead, like a kid in a playground pretend gunfight. And even the ending, which fades to white instead of black, seems like Fassbinder making fun of movie conventions. I don't know of many other movies that manage to be so derivative and yet so original at the same time.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc in Weekend

Corinne Durand: Mireille Darc
Roland Durand: Jean Yanne
Head of the Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise: Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Saint-Just: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Tom Thumb: Yves Afonso
Emily Brontë: Blandine Jeanson
Joseph Balsamo: Daniel Pommereulle
Pianist: Paul Gégauff
African: Omar Diop
Arab: László Szabó

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on a story by Julio Cortázar
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Antoine Duhamel

"You say you want a revolution / Well, you know, / We all want to change the world." I'm old enough to remember when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were denounced as capitalist reactionaries for that song, especially for lines like "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." So watching Jean-Luc Godard's satire Weekend takes me back to the days of a revolutionary fervor that now seems naive, especially since the violent year of 1968 culminated in the election of Richard Nixon, and Mao has been relegated to the ranks of history's more odious tyrants. Still, there's nothing naive about Weekend, which although it now looks less like a great film than a self-indulgent one at least demonstrates the indulgence of a great self, i.e., Jean-Luc Godard's. Is Godard celebrating the revolutionary spirit or sending it up? Weekend ranges from fascinating to stupefying, from bravura filmmaking like the pan along the traffic jam and the repeated 360-degree pan around a farmyard where a pianist is playing a Mozart sonata, to the eye-glazing extended readings from the works of Stokely Carmichael and Frantz Fanon and the drum solo accompanied by a Whitmanesque poem by Lautréamont. Pauline Kael got it right when she called Weekend a "vision of Hell," but what seems most significant now is that it's a hell that lies just beneath us, covered by the veneer of civilization. In Weekend, civilization is showing cracks being widened by unbridled consumerism. And who's to say in the age of climate change denial, abrogation of human rights, and raging corporate globalization that those cracks haven't widened still further? This is a film made by a man who definitely doesn't "know that it's gonna be all right."

Watched on the Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956)

Lorne Greene and Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves

Millicent Wetherby: Joan Crawford
Burt Hanson: Cliff Robertson
Virginia Hanson: Vera Miles
Mr. Hanson: Lorne Greene
Liz Eckhart: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Malcolm Couzzens: Shepperd Strudwick

Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Jean Rouverol*, Hugo Butler*, Lewis Meltzer, Robert Blees
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Music: Hans J. Salter
Costume design: Jean Louis

Six years before What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich directed Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves. I mention this because the image many people now have of Aldrich comes from Alfred Molina's portrayal of him in the TV series Feud that this year concentrated on the shenanigans of Crawford and Bette Davis on the set of Baby Jane. Molina's Aldrich is a punching bag for Jessica Lange's Crawford and Susan Sarandon's Davis, and a studio hack under the thumb of Stanley Tucci's snaky Jack Warner. In fact, Aldrich was a gifted director with some strong credits, including the noir version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the action epic The Dirty Dozen (1967). Autumn Leaves shows off his strengths, especially in keeping a florid melodrama about Hollywood's idea of mental illness just this side of plausibility. He makes the most of the film's major set, Millicent Wetherby's bungalow, collaborating with cinematographer Charles Lang to keep an ordinary dwelling shadowy, confining, and off-kilter. Aldrich is particularly good at working with significant objects, and not only the typewriter that Burt Hanson so memorably hurls at Millicent. After a tense confrontation between Millicent and the increasingly unstable Burt, she goes from one room to another and there, front and center, Aldrich has placed precisely what we want to see: the telephone she should use to call for help. You sometimes sense that Aldrich is having a little fun with the film, too: He stages a beach makeout scene with Millicent and Burt kissing in the incoming tide that's an allusion to the celebrated scene with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Aldrich is surely aware that Crawford was offered Kerr's role but turned it down. Crawford had just turned 50 and her face was beginning to harden into the familiar mask of her later years, but she's still plausibly a good five to 10 years younger as the tense, wary, but near-fatally susceptible Millicent. Cliff Robertson, especially in his early scenes, keeps us wondering whether Burt is more than just a creep who likes to hit on older women. Unfortunately, the portrayal of mental illness is the usual Hollywood hackwork: Millicent is in denial about Burt's psychosis because she is starved for love, having sacrificed herself in her youth so she could tend to her father, an invalid. Burt's compulsive lying is the result of a trauma suffered when he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his father. And of course, a montage of medication and shock therapy is all that's needed to persuade us that Burt has been rehabbed and is ready to resume something like a normal relationship with a wife old enough to be his mother. If I were Millicent, I'd keep the typewriter locked up when not in use.

*Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler were blacklisted. The screen credit went to their "front," Jack Jevne.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)

Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in Happy Together

Lai Yiu-fai: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
Ho Po-wing: Leslie Cheung
Chang: Chen Chang

Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai
Cinematography: Christopher Doyle
Production design: William Chang
Music: Danny Chung

The title, of course, is ironic: Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing are anything but. In short, Happy Together is another of Wong Kar-Wai's studies of frustrated passion, though unlike the heterosexual couple in In the Mood for Love (2000), Lai and Ho have each other as a physical outlet for passion -- the frustration comes from their blocked desires to have their relationship transcend sex. Any happiness they might find together is prevented by incompatibility: Lai is steady and hard-working, Ho is unfettered hedonism. It's never made explicit why they have chosen to exile themselves in Argentina, other than that Buenos Aires might be presumed to offer a more tolerant environment for a gay couple than a Hong Kong threatened by the transfer to the People's Republic of China that took place in the year of the film's release. As it turns out, exile serves mainly as a catalyst for their breakup. This is, in short, a character study, and a fine one. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung give searing performances as the volatile lovers, and Wong Kar-Wai wisely concentrates the film on them, providing only one other witness to the intensely destructive entanglement of Lai and Ho: a young Taiwanese named Chang, out to see the world, who works in a kitchen with Lai. In fact, Chang sees only Lai's side of the relationship, although the fact that he is gifted with heightened powers of seeing and hearing suggests that he perceives more than he can interpret. Chang is presented as rather asexual -- perhaps gay, but not experienced enough to make any sort of move toward Lai -- and as such serves as the perfect foil for Wong's portrait of the erotic time-bomb that is the relationship of Lai and Ho. The film ends poignantly with Lai, having finally broken completely with Ho, returning to Hong Kong, but making a stopover in Taipei where he visits's Chang's family's food stall, but narrowly missing the chance of a reunion with Chang. It's another missed connection in a film filled with them.

Watched on Filmstruck

Camille (George Cukor, 1936)

Henry Daniell and Greta Garbo in Camille

Marguerite Gautier: Greta Garbo
Armand Duval: Robert Taylor
Baron de Varville: Henry Daniell
M. Duval: Lionel Barrymore
Prudence Duvernoy: Laura Hope Crews
Nanine: Jessie Ralph
Olympe: Lenore Ulric
Gaston: Rex O'Malley
Nichette: Elizabeth Allan

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James Hilton
Based on a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Karl Freund
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis
Music: Herbert Stothart
Costume design: Adrian

MGM was notoriously a producers' studio, a factory system in which the director was rarely allowed to stand out as the guiding influence on a movie. But somehow out of MGM's producer-driven concentration on high style in sets and costumes, and above all on the production of "more stars than there are in the heavens," George Cukor managed to emerge as one of the great directors. He did it in part by his ability to elicit definitive performances from actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford -- and later Judy Holliday and Judy Garland -- but most especially from Greta Garbo in Camille. Garbo's Marguerite Gautier is of course one of the great creations by an actress in the movies, but the remarkable thing about Camille is that Cukor is able to keep her performance from swamping the film. He remembers that there is an ensemble to work with that includes not only such formidable scene-stealers as Lionel Barrymore and Laura Hope Crews, but also a raw, untrained leading man, Robert Taylor. It's to Cukor's credit that Taylor holds up as well as he does against a luminous presence like Garbo, though it's perhaps to Garbo's credit that she makes us believe Marguerite is so profoundly infatuated with a man who has nothing but good looks to work with. Though Camille was always destined to be The Greta Garbo Show, Cukor makes her part of a very entertaining whole. He manages to modulate Lionel Barrymore's usual camera-hogging and turn him into a credible concerned paterfamilias -- in fact, Cukor directed two of the few Barrymore performances I really find myself enjoying, the other being Mr. Peggotty in David Copperfield (1935). He tames another performance that could have got out of hand in Henry Daniell's arrogant Baron de Varville, though he might have reined in Daniell's attempt to turn the French baron into an English upperclass ass: Daniell lays on the r-tapping (e.g., "veddy" for "very") a little heavily, and when he's asked if he wants to dine replies, "Ai'm not hungreh." Which brings us back to Garbo, who is glorious from her febrile first moment, clutching the camellias as if they were life itself slipping away, to her last, a death scene that has never been equaled. Garbo knew that the best performances are the most "actressy," the ones that transcend realism, that throw down a challenge to other actresses: Top this if you can. It's a knowledge demonstrated by many others, from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep. (Jennifer Lawrence shows signs of learning it, too.) Call it camp if you will, label them divas if you want, but the movies would be poorer without it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971)

Benoît Ferreux, Ave Ninchi, Lea Massari, and Daniel Gélin in Murmur of the Heart

Laurent Chevalier: Benoît Ferreux
Clara Chevalier: Lea Massari
Charles Chevalier: Daniel Gélin
Thomas Chevalier: Fabien Ferreux
Marc Chevalier: Marc Winocourt
Augusta: Ave Ninchi
Father Henri: Michael Lonsdale
Helene: Jacqueline Chauvaud
Daphne: Corinne Kersten
Freda: Gila von Weitershausen

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich
Production design: Jean-Jacques Caziot

There's a very dated play from 1953 called Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson that was made into an even more dated film by Vincente Minnelli in 1956 about a prep-school boy whose effeminacy makes him the target for gibes about homosexuality. To prove to the boy that he's a real man (i.e., not gay), the headmaster's wife offers herself sexually to the boy, telling him as she unbuttons her blouse and the curtain falls, "Years from now, when you speak of this, and you will, be kind." The film version, responding to Production Code strictures, adds a coda in which we learn that the boy is now married -- i.e., "cured." I thought of Tea and Sympathy as I watched Murmur of the Heart, whose very different problem -- adolescent horniness -- has a very different cure -- incest. Murmur of the Heart has always been something of a critical darling, from Pauline Kael's description of it as an "exhilarating high comedy" to Michael Sragow's essay for the Criterion Collection proclaiming that it "boasts the high spirits to match its high intelligence." And for the most part I concur: Lea Massari's joyously earthy performance as the mother is beautifully detailed, and Benoît Ferreux's endearing gawkiness brings the character of Laurent to full life. Louis Malle's script and direction keep things moving splendidly, never allowing things to bog down into "message moments" about priestly pedophilia -- years before that became the stuff of headlines -- or the parallels between the French involvement in Vietnam and that of the Americans, which was very much in the headlines when the film was made. And yet for me the ending of Murmur of the Heart seems as hollow as that of Tea and Sympathy. After having sex with his mother, the product of his attempt to console her for a breakup with her lover, he goes out to have sex with one of the girls he has met at the spa hotel where they're staying -- as if to prove that he's "straight," though in a different way from that of the Tea and Sympathy protagonist. There's an awkwardness in the setup -- the shocking taboo of incest -- for what turns into a feel-good ending gag: The whole family, including the mother, the cuckolded father, the bullying older brothers, and Laurent himself, join in uproarious laughter at the fact that Laurent has gotten laid. If what had gone before the incest scene had not been so splendidly wrought -- if, in fact, the incest scene itself hadn't been so tastefully handled -- would we really feel satisfied with this ending? For that matter, are we today really content with the film's ongoing sexism, including the scene with Laurent in the brothel and an uncommonly pretty prostitute? Would anyone ever dare to make a comedy that concluded with a girl whose quest to lose her virginity ends with her having sex with her father? Or is it that what makes Murmur of the Heart a successful film is that it raises all these questions without belaboring us with them? It's a virtual catalog of all of the social and sexual hangups that continue to make growing up such a trial. That it achieves this with, yes, "high spirits" and without preachiness may be its real virtue.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Johnny Depp in Dead Man

William Blake: Johnny Depp
Nobody: Gary Farmer
Cole Wilson: Lance Henriksen
Conway Twill: Michael Wincott
Johnny "The Kid" Pickett: Eugene Byrd
John Scholfield: John Hurt
John Dickinson: Robert Mitchum
Salvatore "Sally" Jenko: Iggy Pop
Benmont Tench: Jared Harris
Big George Drakoulios: Billy Bob Thornton
Thel Russell: Mili Avital
Charlie Dickinson: Gabriel Byrne
Train Fireman: Crispin Glover
Trading Post Missionary: Alfred Molina

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Production design: Bob Ziembicki
Music: Neil Young

It was probably inevitable that Jim Jarmusch and Johnny Depp, two of American film's best-known off-beat artists, would collaborate, and it seems appropriate that they should do it in that quintessentially off-beat American genre, the "stoner Western."* Unfortunately, for some viewers the film just feels stoned: slow, meandering, and fixated on images that refuse to yield up their significance. It is, I think, one of those films that are more involving to think about after watching them, which is why its reputation has grown since its initial release, when Roger Ebert, among other critics, dismissed it as "unrewarding." It opens with a long montage of young accountant William Blake's westward train journey from Cleveland to the end-of-the-line factory town called Machine, a name that suggests the real manifest destiny of the United States was the spread of industrial capitalism. Blake is on his way to a job with the Dickinson Metalworks in Machine, and is unaware that he shares a name with the poet and artist who was one of the great enemies of industrial capitalism. He dozes through spectacular scenery that has filled the great Westerns -- a reminder that before there were movies there were train windows. But when he arrives in Machine, no job is waiting for him, and his protests are futile when he demands to see Mr. Dickinson, who turns out to be the always-formidable Robert Mitchum in his last screen role. Moreover, that night he kills Dickinson's son in self-defense and, wounded himself, flees town on a stolen horse. Dickinson immediately hires a trio of gunmen to kill him. Blake is found half-dead from his wound by an Indian, who patches him up but also tells him that the bullet is lodged near his heart and he will die from it eventually. The Indian is called Nobody because he belongs to no tribe, having been abducted by white men as a child and taken to England to be exhibited. He was educated there and learned to love the art and poetry of William Blake, so naturally he proclaims the hapless accountant a reincarnation of the poet. And so Blake and Nobody begin an odyssey toward the Pacific, a picaresque in which Jarmusch manages to cross an adventure story with a satiric look at the failure of American ideals, using bits of Blake's prophetic verse as a running commentary. (Remarkably, quotations from Blake turn out to sound much like the kind of native wisdom usually ascribed to American Indians in the movies.) It's to Jarmusch's credit that this high-concept blend becomes as moving as it often is, especially, as I've suggested, in retrospect.

*Jarmusch referred to Dead Man as a "psychedelic Western," but aside from the scene in which Nobody, under the influence of peyote, sees the skull beneath William Blake's skin, it doesn't have the conventional distortions and hallucinations associated with movie psychedelia.

Watched on The Movie Channel

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

Marie Ault and Ivor Novello in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

The Lodger: Ivor Novello
Daisy: June Tripp
Mrs. Bunting: Marie Ault
Mr. Bunting: Arthur Chesney
Joe: Malcolm Keen

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Title writing: Ivor Montagu
Cinematography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Hal Young
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold, Bertram Evans
Title design: E. McKnight Kauffer
Film editing: Ivor Montagu

As Alfred Hitchcock's first major film, The Lodger has been strip-mined for anticipations of the themes and techniques that would recur throughout his career, from the fixation on blondes to the fear of cops, from Russian-inspired montage to German expressionistic lighting and camera angles. They're all there, of course, as is the "wrong man" motif that Hitchcock frequently exploited. It's often told that the film was almost shelved by the studio until producer Michael Balcon called in Ivor Montagu, film critic for the Observer, to critique it. The extent of Montagu's contributions will never really be known, although he has been credited with sharply reducing the number of title cards, and for suggesting that designer E. McKnight Kauffer be hired to give the ones that remained a distinct style. In any case, The Lodger is a film that really feels "Hitchcockian," especially when you compare it to Downhill, the melodrama Hitchcock made the same year, which also starred Ivor Novello. The difference is not just that The Lodger is a suspense movie and Downhill isn't, but that The Lodger has a rhythm to it that Downhill, with its rather sprawling account of the fortunes of its protagonist, lacks. You can sense Hitchcock developing a narrative pace here, especially in the central section in which the landlady begins to suspect that the lodger might actually be the serial killer and snoops in his room while he's out -- at the same time that the blonde-murdering Avenger claims another victim. Hitchcock would refine the rhythm over the years until it reaches its brilliant peak in the similar scene in Rear Window (1954) in which Lisa decides to snoop in Lars Thorwald's apartment. We probably don't have as much problem as contemporary audiences did with the idea that matinee-idol Novello could actually turn out to be the villain, although we can understand it if we remember that Hitchcock faced the same problem in 1941 with Cary Grant's casting as a potential murderer in Suspicion. In The Lodger, Hitchcock gave in and abandoned his original plan to leave the conclusion ambiguous, though he lays it on a bit too thick in the opposite direction by posing Novello cradled in June Tripp's arms like Christ in a Pietà. The Lodger has been beautifully restored, so that it remains a wonderful film to look at, with its elegantly designed title cards and its atmospherically tinted frames.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

Peter Breck and Hari Rhodes in Shock Corridor

Johnny Barrett: Peter Breck
Cathy: Constance Towers
Trent: Hari Rhodes
Stuart: James Best
Boden: Gene Evans
Pagliacci: Larry Tucker
"Swanee" Swanson: Bill Zuckert
Dr. Menkin: Paul Dubov
Dr. Cristo: John Matthews
Wilkes: Chuck Robertson
Dr. Fong: Philip Ahn

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor is the kind of raw, nightmarishly energetic film that cinéastes love but more classically oriented movie lovers often find ridiculous or repellent. And sure enough, there's plenty to ridicule, starting with the film's premise that schizophrenia is a contagious disease. (This is not a film for people who take mental illness and its treatment seriously.) Johnny Barrett is a hotshot reporter lusting after a Pulitzer Prize -- "Pulitzer fever" is, as anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows, a real and untreatable illness -- who pretends to be in love with his sister so he can get committed to a mental hospital where he plans to solve the recent murder of an inmate. He doesn't have a sister, however, so he persuades his girlfriend, Cathy, who works as a stripper, to play the part. Cathy doesn't much want to go along with the plan, worrying that he can't handle the stress of constant contact with the inmates and may go mad himself. But she somewhat abruptly decides to go along with the idea, which is endorsed by Johnny's editor. Once inside, Johnny befriends three inmates who actually witnessed the murder. The murder case, however, is just a MacGuffin -- a plot device that allows Fuller to make symbolic statements about the malaise of America in the 1960s, afflicted by the Cold War, racism, and the nuclear arms buildup. One of the witnesses, Stuart, is a Korean War vet who briefly turned communist and was imprisoned; he now thinks he is the Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. Another, Trent, is a young black man who was the first of his race to attend a Southern university; he was harassed into a breakdown and now thinks he's the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan -- he steals pillowcases off of beds to make hoods. And Boden is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb and is so laden with guilt that he has regressed to the mental age of 6. Johnny's friendship helps each of them break through to brief moments of sanity during which they provide clues that help solve the murder before reverting to their disturbed states. But Cathy's fears about what might happen to Johnny also come true, so at the end, as one of the doctors says, "An insane mute will win the Pulitzer Prize." This is grand exploitation B-movie stuff, treated with a mixture of low-budget quickie filmmaking and actual artistry, but it doesn't quite deserve to be taken as seriously as some of its admirers do. There are too many glaring continuity gaffes: In one scene, the closeups, lighted by the fine cinematographer Stanley Cortez, have a deep-shadowed expressionist look, but when the film cuts to an establishing shot the faces are conventionally lighted. There's a ridiculous scene in which Johnny wanders into the women's ward and is attacked by a group of what he calls, in voiceover, "Nymphos!" Six or eight women knock him down and swarm over him, but it's not entirely clear what they're up to. Later, we see Johnny with his face heavily bandaged as if they had bitten or scratched him, but after the bandages come off there are no visible bruises or scabs. The performances are mostly good, especially Hari Rhodes as Trent, but Constance Towers's part is a thankless one. She spends most of the film histrionically worrying about Johnny, but she also has to bring off a clunkily choreographed striptease scene that begins with her face completely muffled by a large feather boa, making her look in closeup like Big Bird's butt. In short, Shock Corridor is fascinating personal filmmaking, which is why it has an enormous cult following. But if you're of a conservative or conventional bent, you should know what you're getting into.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies