WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

Milena Dravic in WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Milena: Milena Dravic
Vladimir Ilyich: Ivica Vidovic
Jagoda: Jagoda Kaloper
Soldier: Tuli Kupferberg
Radmilovic: Zoran Radmilovic
With Jim Buckley, Jackie Curtis, Betty Dodson, Nancy Godfrey as themselves

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: Dusan Makavejev
Cinematography: Aleksandar Petkovic, Predrag Popovic
Music: Bojana Marijan
Film editing: Ivanka Vukasovic

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is an evocative movie for anyone who lived through the strange and eventually futile revolutionary ferment of the late 1960s and early '70s. It seemed then as if everything about sex and politics -- and sexual politics -- was being overhauled. It didn't turn out that way in the long run, but Dusan Makavejev's film is more than just a nostalgia piece or an outdated propaganda film. It does indeed explore mysteries, even if it sees them through a warped lens.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

James Mason and Christopher Olsen in Bigger Than Life

Ed Avery: James Mason
Lou Avery: Barbara Rush
Richie Avery: Christopher Olsen
Wally Gibbs: Walter Matthau
Dr. Norton: Robert F. Simon
Dr. Ruric: Roland Winters
Bob LaPorte: Rusty Lane

Director: Nicholas Ray
Screenplay: Cyril Hume, Richard Maibaum
Based on a magazine article by Berton Roueche
Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald
Music: David Raksin

Making a domestic drama like Bigger Than Life in CinemaScope is a bit like sending a love letter in a business envelope: The carrier feels wrong for the message. And yet, Nicholas Ray makes it work, partly by acknowledging the irony and playing with it. CinemaScope's outlandish dimensions were designed to put up a fight against the tiny TV screens of the day, which were rapidly becoming the venue for domestic dramas and situation comedies focusing on everyday family life. So Ray makes Bigger Than Life into a kind of companion piece for his Rebel Without a Cause (1955): Both films are antithetical to the portraits of 1950s families on shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver.* Ray also uses CinemaScope for shock value. The wide screen was designed to provide almost more information than the viewer could process. It's hard to hide things from a viewer if the screen is testing the limits of peripheral vision, but Ray and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald manage it beautifully in the scene in which young Richie Avery frantically hunts through his father's things for the medicine that is causing his father's psychotic behavior. Finally he locates the pills, hidden behind the drawer underneath a mirror on top of a dresser, but as he shoves the drawer back in, the mirror changes angles to reveal his father's face behind him. Although the scene would have worked in a standard format, the wide screen heightens the surprise by almost lulling us into thinking that we could see everything in the room. Bigger Than Life was a flop in its day, despite its ripped-from-the-headlines premise -- Miracle Drug May Be Driving You Crazy -- and one of James Mason's best performances. It may have failed because audiences weren't ready for a portrait of the dark side of American family life that wasn't based, like Rebel Without a Cause, on "juvenile delinquency" or, like Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957), on sex. Bigger Than Life suggested that we shouldn't trust those we were most inclined to trust: doctors and pharmacology. The physicians in the film are cold, gray men with no bedside manner, stonewalling questions from the patient's wife and imperiously clinging to their expertise. The film also gives us a rather chilling portrayal of conventional attitudes toward mental illness, a stigma far worse than any physical disorder. Ed's wife, Lou, resists the idea that her husband might be psychotic simply because it might endanger his job. Barbara Rush gives a capable performance, most effectively when she snaps under the constant pressure and smashes a bathroom mirror, but the role really needed an actress of more consistent depth and range, someone like Jean Simmons for example, so that Lou doesn't just stand around prettily fretting so much. There are also some nice touches in the otherwise conventional pretty suburban decor of the Averys' house, such as the corroded old water heater in the kitchen, a persistent symbol of the precariousness of the family finances, and the rather dark travel posters of Rome and Bologna that hint at a desire to escape. The "hopeful" ending is also nicely ambiguous.  

*The Beaver himself, Jerry Mathers, has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it walk-on bit as one of the schoolkids in Bigger Than Life.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies 

La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Louis XVI: Pierre Renoir
La Rochefoucauld: William Aguet
Marie Antoinette: Lise Delamare
Roederer: Louis Jouvet
Bomier: Edmond Ardisson
Arnaud: Andrex
Javel: Paul Dullac
Louison: Nadia Sibirskaïa

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, N. Martel-Dreyfus
Cinematography: Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Bourgoin, Alain Douarinou, Jean Louis, Jean-Marie Maillols
Production design: Léon Barsacq, Georges Wakhévitch
Music: Joseph Kosma, Henry Sauveplane

Just the film for Bastille Day. If ever a movie deserved the oxymoronic label of "intimate epic," it would have to be Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise, a story of the French Revolution from the fall of the Bastille to the victory over the Prussians at Valmy. It's not the part of the revolution we're used to seeing, as it ends before the Reign of Terror, with its tumbrils and guillotines. Instead, it's a collection of vignettes high and low, from the king and queen blithely expecting the trouble to blow over to the foot soldiers who marched from Marseille to Paris to depose them. The director's brother, Pierre, is a wonderful Louis XVI, not quite the caricature that Robert Morley made him in Hollywood's Marie Antoinette (W.S. Van Dyke), which was made the same year, but nevertheless more than a little out of touch: As the Tuileries is being stormed, Pierre Renoir's Louis is perturbed that he can't finish his dinner and that his wig is slightly askew. Lise Delamare's Marie Antoinette is somewhat more clued in, but her frosty hauteur suggests that she is fully capable of uttering the apocryphal "Let them eat cake." Much of the film, however, focuses on the soldiers who, after capturing the forts at Marseille, march toward Paris, and especially on Bomier, a mason who joins the regiment after putting things in order for his mother (whose tears are a familiar cinematic clue to Bomier's fate). Bomier tells his companions Arnaud and Javel that the marching song that gives the film its title is no good and will soon be forgotten, but by the time they reach Paris, he is joining in the chorus. Renoir made La Marseillaise between two greater films, Grand Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938), partly as a leftist political statement at a time when the forces of the right were triumphing on every side of France. He got his financial backing for the project from trade unions, but the film was a disaster at the box office and disappeared for a long time. It feels a little more formulaic in its characterization than Renoir's best films are and, given our knowledge of what's to come, the ending could never be quite as upbeat as Renoir seems to want it to be, but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method

Carl Jung: Michael Fassbender
Sigmund Freud: Viggo Mortensen
Sabina Spielrein: Keira Knightley
Otto Gross: Vincent Cassel
Emma Jung: Sarah Gadon

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton based on a book by John Kerr
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Production design: James McAteer
Music: Howard Shore

Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Viggo Mortensen, playing the man himself, demonstrates, a cigar is a prop that can help you win an acting contest. Because too often a costume drama based on a play becomes just that: a contest among actors to show who can come out on top, especially when the cast consists of actors like Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Vincent Cassel -- none of them exactly shy of showing what they can do before a camera. When I heard of it, I thought Mortensen was a decidedly off-beat choice to play the father of psychoanalysis, and he was in fact the second actor to be cast in the role, after Christoph Waltz, an almost inevitable choice, found he had a scheduling conflict. Mortensen had worked with director David Cronenberg twice before, but playing men of violent action in Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), not a pre-World War I middle-European Jewish intellectual. And yet Mortensen gives a delicious performance as Freud: puckish, proud, intellectually combative. And the cigar helps, whether brandished elegantly or plugged defiantly in the middle of his face. By contrast, everyone else seems a little over the top. Fassbender (who was second choice after Christian Bale) is his usual handsome presence, but he frets a little too visibly and never quite establishes Jung as the challenger to Freud's authority that Freud seems to have thought him to be. Keira Knightley acts the electrons off the screen as Sabina, almost popping out an eye and dislocating her jaw in her mad scenes, but recovers nicely in her later moments in the film. And Vincent Cassel, as the mad Otto Gross, takes his role to the extreme as the man who carries Freud's theories about repression to their logical extreme: Don't repress anything. Ever. The film's battle of ideas gets a little bit lost in all the emoting, and as so often happens in filmed costume dramas, the scenery and the sets capture the eye when the words should be capturing the mind. But Howard Shore's evocation of the melancholy side of Wagner's music is perfect for the era in which the film is set, the transition from 19th-century Weltschmerz into 20th-century bloodshed, a time when, as Joyce punned, we were Jung and easily Freudened. Jung's prophetic dream of a bloody tide sweeping over Europe is cited in the film, as a warning that all of this intellectual (and sexual) ferment was about to be inundated by war.  

Watched on Starz Encore

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Paterson

Paterson: Adam Driver
Laura: Golshifteh Farahani
Doc: Barry Shabaka Henley
Donny: Rizwan Manji
Everett: William Jackson Harper
Marie: Chasten Harmon
Young Poet: Sterling Jerens
Method Man: Method Man
Japanese Poet: Masatoshi Nagase

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Poems by Ron Padgett
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Production design: Mark Friedberg

There have been lots of movies about poets. Some of them, like Jane Campion's 2009 film about John Keats, Bright Star, are even good. But when have we ever seen a movie about poetry, let alone one as good as Jim Jarmusch's Paterson? It's an homage of sorts to William Carlos Williams, who is perhaps the greatest claim to fame for the city of Paterson, N.J., and especially to his minimalist meditations on the quotidian: celebrations of things like refrigerated plums and white chickens beside a rain-glazed wheelbarrow. The protagonist of Paterson (which is also the title of Williams's not-so-minimalist long poem) is Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson.  He, too, writes poems about ordinary things such as Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes. His wife, Laura (who, as we are reminded, shares a name with the subject of Petrarch's sonnets), designs textiles with black-and-white patterns and longs to be a country-music singer and to start a cupcake business. They have a funny-clever-mischievous bulldog named Marvin. If all this sounds terribly cutesy, it doesn't feel that way while you're watching it. (No, I shouldn't speak for everyone. Let's just say it didn't feel that way for me.) It's kept grounded by Jarmusch's treatment of his characters, by a tinge of melancholy perhaps, or a sense that we're living in one of Jarmusch's urban constructs -- a Paterson of the imagination, like the Memphis or New Orleans or Cleveland Jarmusch imagined in his earlier films, places that look like the real thing but aren't. There are moments when Paterson gets sentimental, but it never gets mushy -- it gets Jarmuschy. It celebrates the poetic imagination that can find an emotional world in a familiar detail, as when Paterson, on one of his nighttime visits to the neighborhood bar, passes a laundromat where Method Man is composing a rap (or however you say it -- this is not my scene) to a beat provided by the slosh of a washing machine. The film would be nothing without surefooted direction, but it also benefits immeasurably from Driver's sensitive, funny performance and from the delicacy of the interplay between him and Golshifteh Farahani as Laura. Watch, for example, the way Paterson struggles not to offend Laura after she serves him a brussels-sprout-and-cheddar-cheese pie for dinner and tries to beguile him into a compliment on her creation. Nothing really terrible happens in Paterson: A gun is pulled in a bar by a frustrated lover, but it turns out to be a toy; some guys in a passing car warn Paterson, who is walking Marvin, that bulldogs are prime targets for dognapping, but it seems to be just a warning and not a threat; Paterson's bus breaks down, causing him an anxious moment because he feels responsible for his passengers, but help arrives. The big calamity of the film occurs near the end: Laura has constantly urged Paterson to make photocopies of the poems he keeps in manuscript in his notebook, but before he can do this, Marvin, who seems to be jealous of anything not centered on him (he growls whenever Paterson and Laura kiss), chews up the notebook. Paterson is dejected by the loss of the poems, but an encounter with a Japanese professor* who is visiting the city to pay homage to Williams reminds him that the poetic imagination is universal and indestructible. (It also helps that the professor gives Paterson a fresh notebook.)

*Played by Masatoshi Nagase, who was the young Japanese tourist in Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989).

Watched on Amazon Prime

The Trouble With Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Jerry Mathers in The Trouble With Harry

Sam Marlowe: John Forsythe
Jennifer Rogers: Shirley MacLaine
Capt. Albert Wiles: Edmund Gwenn
Miss Ivy Gravely: Mildred Natwick
Mrs. Wiggs: Mildred Dunnock
Arnie Rogers: Jerry Mathers
Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs: Royal Dano
The Millionaire: Parker Fennelly
Dr. Greenbow: Dwight Marfield
The Tramp: Barry Macollum
Harry Worp: Philip Truex

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: John Michael Hayes
Based on a novel by Jack Trevor Story
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Music: Bernard Herrmann

The Trouble With Harry, which many people remember as "the one in which Beaver Cleaver finds a corpse," needs to be thought of in connection with Alfred Hitchcock's other films about small towns, such as Santa Rosa in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Bodega Bay in The Birds (1963). Like the Vermont village of The Trouble With Harry, these are places where anomalous events, like the return of a native son turned serial killer or a disruption in the natural order or just a mysterious dead body, can be viewed through a privileged, if somewhat cracked, lens. Cities can take serial killers, birds behaving badly, and the occasional unidentified corpse in stride, but they're a big deal in small towns. For an urbanite like Hitchcock, the small town settings are themselves anomalous, which is why he treats them to varying degrees with condescending whimsy. Of those films, The Trouble With Harry is the most whimsical, which may have something to do with its source novel, which was set in one of those cozy English villages so beloved of mystery readers. There are some who think Hitchcock should have left it in that setting, but I don't think much harm was done by the change. For one thing, it gives us a chance to look at New England fall foliage unblocked by tour buses full of leaf-peepers. Even though it was hindered by an unexpected storm that caused many of the leaves to fall prematurely, Robert Burks's achingly lovely cinematography combines well with Bernard Herrmann's score -- his first for Hitchcock -- to meld whimsy with an autumnal wistfulness. It helps, too, that we have actors skilled at sprinkling a little salt and vinegar on the whimsy, particularly Edmund Gwenn and the two great Mildreds, Natwick and Dunnock. Shirley MacLaine's debut film went a long way toward establishing her as a specialist in quirky, but it would take a more charismatic actor than John Forsythe to bring off his role: With his disregard for convention and monetary reward, Sam Marlowe seems to have wandered in from a Frank Capra film like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which needed Gary Cooper -- though James Stewart could have handled it equally well -- to pull it off. I think in the end, your reaction to The Trouble With Harry mostly depends on your tolerance for twee, and if it's low you may not want to stay much past the opening credits designed by Saul Steinberg.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

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