The Lower Depths (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet in The Lower Depths

Pépel: Jean Gabin
The Baron: Louis Jouvet
Vassilissa: Suzy Prim
Natasha: Junie Astor
Kostylev: Vladimir Sokoloff
Louka: René Génin
Nastia: Jany Holt
The Actor: Robert Le Vigan
The Police Inspector: André Gabriello
Felix: Léon Larive
Anna: Nathalie Alexeeff

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Yevgeni Zamyatin, Jacques Companéez, Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak
Based on the play by Maxim Gorky
Cinematography: Fédote Bourgasoff

Jean Renoir's encompassing humanism might have seemed the right sensibility to apply to Maxim Gorky's play about society's castoffs, who live in a crowded flophouse. But Renoir can't avoid "opening up" the play, which takes place entirely in the dingy living quarters and presents the continual conflicts and squabbles among the inhabitants and their greedy landlord. He chooses to begin with the backstory of one of the inhabitants, a baron so addicted to gambling that he has lost his entire fortune. Pépel, a thief who pays his rent at the flophouse by letting the landlord serve as fence for the stolen goods, one night decides to rob the baron's house, unaware that the baron is bankrupt and the authorities are in the process of repossessing everything he owns. When the baron discovers Pépel robbing him, he just laughs and invites Pépel to sit down to supper. The two make friends over the misery of their lives, and the baron moves into the flophouse too. It's a scene of sophisticated comedy that starts the film far away from the madness of the play. Renoir also provides a kind of happy ending, in which Pépel, after serving time in prison for killing the landlord, hits the road with Natasha, the late landlord's sister-in-law -- a sharp contrast to the play's ending, an ironic moment in which news of the death of one of the inhabitants interrupts a raucous song. Renoir maintained that Gorky had approved of the screenplay, but the film was not released until December 1936 and Gorky died in June of that year, so his opinion of the completed film can't be known. The film is really a reinterpretation of the play in the light of the political turmoil of the mid-1930s in France and the struggle of the Popular Front against the fascists. If it's more Renoir than Gorky, it's still satisfying in large part because of the performances of Louis Jouvet as the baron and Jean Gabin as Pépel, an odd couple whose scenes together are the heart of the film. The ensemble is mostly terrific except for Junie Astor, whose limited range of expressions never brings Natasha to life, and whose pencil-line eyebrows seem out of place on the face of a character who has been bullied into being a scrubwoman in a flophouse. Inevitably, Renoir's The Lower Depths has been compared to Akira Kurosawa's 1957 version, which sticks much more closely to the play. Renoir himself thought Kurosawa's film "more important" than his, and I find it hard to argue otherwise, but it's nice to have two versions by two master filmmakers.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Collection 

Conflagration (Kon Ichikawa, 1958)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Raizo Ichikawa in Conflagration 

Goichi Mizoguchi: Raizo Ichikawa
Tokari: Tatsuya Nakadai
Tayama Dosen: Ganjiro Nakamura
Tsurukawa: Yoichi Funaki
Goichi's Mother: Tanie Kitabayashi
Goichi's Father: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Yukio Mishima
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

I haven't read the Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, on which Conflagration is based, but the film has the earmarks of an adaptation from a novel, including incidents, such as Goichi's vandalizing the sword of a naval cadet who mocked him, and such secondary characters as Tsurukawa, the fellow acolyte who befriends him, whose treatment feels truncated, as if their narrative and symbolic weight was greater in the book than Kon Ichikawa was able to give them in the film. But the fine performances of Raizo Ichikawa, Ganjiro Nakamura, and Tatsuya Nakadai help Conflagration succeed on its own. Ichikawa plays a young Buddhist acolyte, Goichi, whose stammer has made him an outcast, and whose troubled childhood only worsens his sense of alienation. Nakamura plays the head priest at a temple, who studied with Goichi's father and takes the young man in out of a sense of duty, eventually paying his way to the university. There, Goichi meets another outcast, Tokari, whose deformed leg has caused him to become bitter and cynical. Although Goichi retains his shyness and naïveté, the two bond as outcasts, with Tokari's darkly rebellious philosophy eventually infecting the young acolyte, provoking him to the destructive act that gives the film its title. Nakadai's intensity in the role gives the sometimes plodding narrative, with its flashbacks within flashbacks, a needed jolt.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Camera Buff (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1979)

Malgorzata Zabkowska and Jerzy Stuhr in Camera Buff

Filip Mosz: Jerzy Stuhr
Irka Mosz: Malgorzata Zabkowska
Anna Wlodarczyk: Ewa Pokas
The Director: Stefan Czyzewski
Osuch: Jerzy Nowak
Witek: Tadeusz Bradecki
Piotr: Marek Litewka
Warwzyniec: Tadeusz Rzepka

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jerzy Stuhr
Cinematography: Jacek Petrycki
Music: Krzysztof Knittel

Film, said Jean-Luc Godard, is "truth 24 times a second." But as Oscar Wilde put it, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple," which is the problem amateur filmmaker Filip Mosz runs into when he begins to devote his life to making movies. Filip, a purchasing agent for a state-run factory in the Polish town of Wielice, buys a Russian-made 8mm camera when his first child is born. His wife, Irka, is not entirely thrilled by the purchase, which cost him two months' salary, and she grows even more disenchanted when he devotes more and more time to his new hobby. Filming his new daughter takes up less and less of his time after the director of the factory says he will buy film for Filip if he will make a documentary about an anniversary celebration of the factory's founding, at which numerous Communist Party higher-ups will be present. Filip throws himself whole-heartedly into the project, going to movies more often and reading film books to pick up tips about filmmaking technique. When the director sees the film he makes some suggestions for cuts: Don't show the bigwigs slipping out of the meeting to go to the bathroom, for example, and what's with all the insert shots of pigeons? And then Anna, a pretty representative of the state film commission, shows up to suggest that Filip enter his movie in a festival celebrating industrial filmmaking. This only adds fuel to Irka's jealousy of Filip's avocation. Filip takes third prize at the festival -- after a judge proclaims that none of the films entered deserved a first prize -- and attracts the notice of a TV station in Krakow, which is interested in news footage from Wielice. As Filip's filmmaking career snowballs, however, so do his troubles: The neglected Irka leaves him, and the director informs him that the footage he has sent to the TV station, revealing that renovation funds for the town have been misused, has caused some projects, like a nursery school, to be canceled, and that he has had to fire some of Filip's fellow workers. Camera Buff is clearly a fable, about the compulsiveness that drives and sometimes destroys artists, as well as a rather oblique satire on the dreariness of Polish life under communist rule. At the end of the film, Filip is reduced to filming perhaps the only thing he can be sure of: himself.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Odd Obsession (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai in Odd Obsession 

Ikuko Kenmochi: Machiko Kyo
Kenji Kenmochi: Ganjiro Nakamura
Toshiko Kenmochi: Junko Kano
Kimura: Tatsuya Nakadai
Hana: Tanie Kitabayashi
Masseur: Ichiro Sugai
Dr. Kodama: Mantaro Ushio
Dr. Soma: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

As with so many foreign-language films, the English title Odd Obsession seems to miss the mark a little, but the Japanese title, Kagi, which means "The Key," also seems a little off-target, even though it was taken from the novel on which the film was based. If I were retitling it, I'd call the film something like "The Jealousy Cure," which is not only in keeping with the plot but is also supported by the way the film opens, as if presenting a case study: We see a man in a physician's white coat standing before an anatomy chart, speaking directly at the camera. He describes the various effects of aging on the body before turning away to enter the action of the scene. We learn that he is Kimura, an intern in the clinic of Dr. Soma, who is treating a post-middle-aged man, Kenji Kenmochi, for sexual dysfunction. The doctor advises Kenji that the injections he has been giving him are probably ineffective, and that he should try to find other ways of dealing with the problem. Kimura has also been dating Kenji's daughter, Toshiko, and he has let slip to her that her father is seeing Dr. Soma. She passes the information along to her mother, Ikuko, whom we then see visiting Dr. Soma to find out if there is something she can do for her husband. It's an awkward encounter: Ikuko is rather embarrassed by the subject of their sex life, but she resolves to do what she can to help. Kenji then discovers that his libido is stirred by the thought of anyone having sex with his much younger wife, and when Kimura comes to dinner, Kenji begins to plot ways of bringing his wife and the young and handsome intern together. As Kimura and Ikuko begin an affair -- the key from the Japanese title is the one she gives Kimura to the back gate -- Kenji's sex drive reawakens, with the added consequence of dangerously elevating his blood pressure. Odd Obsession is not so much a case study, however, as an ironic dark comedy, one in which the follies of the various characters lead to what might be a tragic conclusion if viewed from another angle than the one Ichikawa chooses. It's also a showcase for the versatility of Tatsuya Nakadai and Michiko Kyo, who reteamed seven years later for the more serious The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966). I think Ichikawa is a little too interested in "trying things out," such as the opening segue from breaking the fourth wall into starting the action of the film, or the freeze frames that interrupt the action in the opening section, tricks that don't feel consistent with the rest of Odd Obsession.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936)

René Lefèvre in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

Amédée Lange: René Lefèvre
Valentine: Florelle
Batala: Jules Berry
The Concierge: Marcel Lévesque
The Concierge's Wife: Odette Talazac
Meunier's Son: Henri Guisol
Charles: Maurice Baquet
Edith: Sylvia Bataille
Estelle: Nadia Sibirskaia

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Castanier, Jacques Prévert, Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Jean Bachelet

M. Lange's crime is murder, and he gets away with it. This droll dark comedy is a vehicle for Jean Renoir's anti-fascist politics, and to enjoy it to the fullest you probably have to have been there -- "there" being Europe in 1936. But it still resonates 80-plus years later with its story of a little guy exploited by a venal fat cat. Lange, who writes adventure stories about "Arizona Jim" in the wild West, works for a greedy, corrupt publisher named Batala, who not only stiffs him on a contract to publish the stories, but also inserts advertising plugs into the story itself, making Arizona Jim pause to pop one of the sponsor's pills before launching into action. Batala is also a shameless womanizer who impregnates Estelle, the girlfriend of Charles, the bicycle messenger who works for him. (In a rather cold-hearted twist you probably won't see in movies today, everyone rejoices when the baby dies.) Fleeing from his creditors, Batala reportedly dies in a train wreck, and to salvage their jobs, his employees, encouraged by Meunier, the son of Batala's chief creditor, form a cooperative to run the publishing company. It's a huge success, with Lange's stories becoming incredibly popular -- so much so that a film company wants to buy the rights to make an Arizona Jim movie. Unfortunately, Lange doesn't own the rights, as Batala reveals when he turns up very much alive, disguised as a priest who happened to be standing by him during the crash. When Batala begins demonstrating his old ways, including making a play for all the available women in the company as well as asserting his rights to Arizona Jim and the profits it has made, Lange shoots him, then flees with his girlfriend Valentine. Aided by Meunier, they reach an inn near the border -- which one isn't specified -- where, while Lange rests up, Valentine tells his story and leaves it up to the people at the inn whether they will turn him in. There's some famously show-offy camerawork from cinematographer Jean Bachelet, but the real energy of the film comes from Renoir's company of vivid, talkative characters, whose chatter and whose relationships unfold so rapidly that you may want to see the film twice to appreciate them. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is second-tier Renoir but, with its genuine affection for human beings, it's better than most directors' top-tier work.

Watched on Filmstruck

Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet

Romeo: Leonardo DiCaprio
Juliet: Claire Danes
Tybalt: John Leguizamo
Mercutio: Harold Perrineau
Father Laurence: Pete Postlethwaite
Fulgencio Capulet: Paul Sorvino
Ted Montague: Brian Dennehy
Dave Paris: Paul Rudd
Capt. Prince: Vondie Curtis-Hall
The Nurse: Miriam Margolyes
Apothecary: M. Emmet Walsh
Gloria Capulet: Diane Venora
Caroline Montague: Christina Pickles

Director: Baz Luhrmann
Screenplay: Craig Pearce, Baz Luhrmann
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Donald McAlpine
Production design: Catherine Martin
Costume design: Kym Barrett

Roger Ebert hated it: "I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that this new punk version of Romeo & Juliet makes of Shakespeare's tragedy." But I kind of love it, and something tells me that Shakespeare would. After all, he wrote for a very mixed audience, ranging from people who admired lyric poetry to people who just wanted a little action, a little bawdry, and perhaps a good cry. Baz Luhrmann's version is Shakespeare for the multiplex. But Ebert makes a good point when he says "the movie lacks the nerve to cut entirely adrift from its literary roots." The problem with Romeo + Juliet (no, I don't know why the plus sign rather than "and" or ampersand) is Shakespeare: The text and the theatricality keep getting in the way of Luhrmann's cinematic impulses. He constantly has to work around the demands of Shakespeare's dialogue. Sometimes the workarounds are witty: I like the replacement of the prologue with a TV newscast, the change of the peacekeeping Prince Escalus to a cop called Capt. Prince, even the placement of Paris on the cover of Time as "Bachelor of the Year" -- though why wasn't he on People's cover as the "Sexiest Man Alive"? Even the change in weaponry is nicely handled: Obviously, contemporary gangbangers have to carry guns, and not the weapons specified in Shakespeare's dialogue, so instead of Colt and Glock, their guns have brand names like Sword, Dagger, and Rapier. There is also some wit in the performances: I particularly like the reimagining of Juliet's mother, whom Diane Venora plays as an aging trophy wife, not above doing a little flirting with Paris, her intended son-in-law. Harold Perrineau's portrayal of Mercutio as a drag queen also makes a good deal of sense, given the flamboyance of the character in the play. On the other hand, I don't know why we first see Father (not Friar) Laurence shirtless, delivering a botany lecture to some choir boys. Priestly pederasty was beginning to make headlines when the film was made, but a hint at Father Laurence's predilections doesn't seem relevant to his function in the story. On the whole, the film is best when it's full of action, drawing on the kind of energy that Luhrmann is known for, and it tends to sag in the love scenes. So maybe Romeo + Juliet is a mess, but it's an entertaining one -- and haven't we seen enough productions of the play that weren't?

Watched on Starz Encore Classics

Lola (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981)

Barbara Sukowa in Lola

Lola: Barbara Sukowa
Von Bohm: Armin Mueller-Stahl
Schuckert: Mario Adorf
Esslin: Matthias Fuchs
Fräulein Hettich: Helga Feddersen
Lola's Mother: Karin Baal
Frau Schuckert: Rosel Zech

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Pea Fröhlich, Peter Märtesheimer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Xaver Schwarzenberger
Production design: Raúl Gimenez, Rolf Zehetbauer
Costume design: Barbara Baum, Egon Strasser

A key part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's trilogy of films satirizing the manners, morals, and excesses of the Wirtschaftswunder, Lola is a conscious updating of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 classic The Blue Angel, in which a cabaret singer (read: prostitute) leads a schoolteacher into self-destruction. But in this case, Lola leads a conscientious public official, the new building commissioner in a West German town, into compromising his principles, its own kind of self-destruction. Filmed in retina-traumatizing color, with sets and costumes that plunge into the very heart of kitsch, Lola almost makes the Sirkian melodrama of The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and the camp excesses of Veronika Voss (1982), the other films in the trilogy, look tame. It is, perhaps, too obviously a political and social fable about corrupt times -- the late 1950s, anything-goes period in the German economy -- to the extent that neither of its supposed principals, Lola and Von Bohm, seem fully realized characters: Their motives shift with the exigencies of the plot. The one really well-drawn character in the film is the scheming, amoral Schuckert, who exploits everyone, especially Lola, for his own advantage. But to ask for anything so inhibiting as consistency from Fassbinder is to diminish his unmatched ability to amaze.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

The Lovers (Louis Malle, 1958)

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory in The Lovers

Jeanne Tournier: Jeanne Moreau
Bernard Dubois-Lambert: Jean-Marc Bory
Henri Tournier: Alain Cuny
Maggy Thiebaud-Leroy: Judith Magre
Raoul Florès: José Luis de Villalonga
Coudray: Gaston Modot

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louise de Vilmorin
Based on a novel by Dominique Vivant
Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Anna Karenina without the train. That's one way of looking at Louis Malle's once-scandalous but now somewhat tepid The Lovers. That seems to be the way the German censors saw it: a story about a woman who abandons not only her husband but also her child, and seemingly gets away with it. In the German release, the scenes involving Jeanne Tournier's daughter were cut, as if the idea of a mother leaving so adorable a child was too horrible for audiences to contemplate. In the United States, of course, it was the depiction of sex -- not "cutting away to the window" as Malle once described the traditional approach to sex scenes -- that caused the censors to draw their knives. The result was the Supreme Court decision that The Lovers didn't fit Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." He didn't, and it isn't: What we see in the scene are a briefly flashed nipple and the look on Jeanne's face as Bernard brings her to orgasm. Even the fact that she is being pleasured orally by him is only implied by his absence in the frame. The Lovers is more satiric than erotic, its targets the stale marriages and pro forma affairs of an haute bourgeoisie obsessed with hairstyles and polo games. Malle attempts to contrast the sterile dalliances of the idle rich with the more spontaneous relationship between Jeanne and Bernard, a casually dressed archaeologist who drives a clunky tin-can Citroën, but the film gets a little too formulaic, especially in the lushly romantic moonlight stroll and boat ride that serves as foreplay to the consummation of their affair. He switches back to irony at the end: Jeanne and Bernard escape together under the astonished gaze of her husband and her other lover, but we sense their uncertainty about whether it will work, anticipating the way Mike Nichols tempered romance with reality by holding the camera just a little bit too long on Benjamin and Elaine after they escape from the church in The Graduate (1967). Maybe we don't see the train but we hear it approaching.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies 

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead

Howard Roark: Gary Cooper
Dominique Francon: Patricia Neal
Gail Wynand: Raymond Massey
Ellsworth M. Toohey: Robert Douglas
Peter Keating: Kent Smith
Henry Cameron: Henry Hull
Roger Enright: Ray Collins

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Ayn Rand
Based on a novel by Ayn Rand
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Edward Carrere
Music: Max Steiner

Ayn Rand, proponent of a "philosophy" beloved of 20-year-old frat-boy business majors, is still very much with us, as the would-be Randian Übermensch currently inhabiting the White House too well demonstrates. So it's probably worth brushing up on the ideas that seem to captivate perpetual adolescents and sociopaths. Fortunately, you don't have to slog through her doorstop novels to get the gist: All you have to do is watch The Fountainhead, for which she wrote the screenplay. Its sociopath hero, Howard Roark, would be intolerable if he weren't played by Gary Cooper, taking on a role that is a curious inversion of the "common man" he played for Frank Capra in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) or the pawn of the Establishment in Meet John Doe (1941). Cooper's occasional eye twinkles or wry smiles help keep us from believing that he's really the kind of arrogant shit who says things like "I don't give or ask for help" or "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." As Dominique Francon, Patricia Neal does a lot of seething and surging about; it's not a good performance by a long shot, but it's watchable. But Raymond Massey manages to give an almost good performance, even when forced to deliver lines like: "What I want to find in our marriage will remain my own concern. I exact no promises and impose no obligations. Incidentally, since it is of no importance to you, I love you." Was ever woman in this humor wooed? The real saving grace of The Fountainhead, however, is its director, King Vidor, whose career began and flourished in the silent era, with classics like The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928), which honed his visual sense before he had to work with dialogue. If The Fountainhead had been a silent movie, not cluttered with Rand's dialogue and sermonizing, it might have been a classic itself, especially since it had a first-rate cinematographer in Robert Burks and a clever set designer in Edward Carrere. Max Steiner's overbearing score also helps distract us from the clanking and clattering of Rand's screenplay. The Fountainhead, in short, is a hoot, but a perversely fascinating one.

Watched on Filmstruck

The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet in The Fire Within

Alain Leroy: Maurice Ronet
Lydia: Léna Skerla
Dubourg: Bernard Noël
Eva: Jeanne Moreau
Solange: Alexandra Stewart

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Based on a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Suzanne Baron

The Fire Within seems an ironic title for a film about a man whose internal fire has become so low that he plans to, well, snuff it. The French title is Le Feu Follet, which means "will o' the wisp," proverbially "something just out of reach." The thing out of reach for Alain Leroy, a recovering alcoholic whose stay in a clinic has been so effective that his doctor thinks he should go home, is any reason to go on living. Estranged from his wife, who now lives in the United States, he searches for the elusive raison d'être in sex, work, family life, drugs, politics, society, and a return to alcohol, but the quest ends in failure. It's the midlife crisis writ large, but what saves Louis Malle's film from slumping into yet another ennuyant portrait of ennui is the keenly internalized performance of Maurice Ronet as Alain as well as the perverse vitality of the world he is seeking to leave: i.e., Paris in the early 1960s. Malle's vision, in tandem with Ghislain Cloquet's rich black-and-white cinematography, gives us a milieu that presents almost too many reasons to stay alive, so that the problem -- Camus's familiar "one really serious philosophical problem" of suicide -- remains centered in Alain himself. The film crackles with the tension between the world as Alain sees it and the world we see through Malle's eyes.