No Blood Relation (Mikio Naruse, 1932)

Yoshiko Okada in No Blood Relation

Tamae Kiyooka: Yoshiko Okada
Masako Atsumi: Yukiko Tsukuba
Shigeko: Toshiko Kojima
Shunsaku Atsumi: Shin'yo Nara
Kishiyo Atsumi: Fumiko Katsuragi
Masaya Kusakabe: Joji Oka
Keiji Makino: Ichiro Yuki
Gen the Pelican: Shozaburo Abe
Neighbor Boy: Tomio Aoki

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Shunyo Yanagawa
Cinematography: Eijiro Fujita, Suketaro Inokai, Masao Saito

Before it settles down to become an intense domestic drama, No Blood Relation begins with a sequence of comic action: Gen, a goofy-looking purse-snatcher, is being chased through the streets until he collides with a man who holds him until the crowd catches up. Forced to strip, Gen reveals that he doesn't have the purse on him, and the cops send him away with his pants falling down around his ankles. But the man who caught him is actually an accomplice, Keiji, who hid the purse on himself when they collided. Keiji is the brother of a big Hollywood movie star, Tamae, who is returning that day to Japan for the first time in years, and Keiji and Gen see their chance for the big time as flunkies for Tamae. Her reason for returning home is to reclaim her daughter, Shigeko, whom she abandoned shortly after her birth. Her husband, Shunsaku, remarried, and his new wife, Masako, has proved to be a devoted mother to the little girl. Unfortunately, Shunsaku's business is about to go under, owing to his bad management and some shady deals that get him sent to prison. His mother, Kishiyo, is bitter about not only his business failure but also because this means they'll have to move out of their big house into a poor neighborhood. So when Tamae comes in search of her child, Kishiyo takes her side against Masako, leading to an intense battle between the birth mother and the one who is ... well, that's the point of the title. Masako fortunately has a defender, Masaya Kusakabe, whose relationship to the family is enigmatic: He's just returned from Manchuria, and since he's played by the handsome Joji Oka -- a sharp contrast to the plain and dour Shunsaku -- we begin to suspect that there's more to his relationship with Masako than meets the eye, though that part of the plot never pans out. No Blood Relation is a very effective tearjerker, with Naruse's characteristically hyperactive camera panning and dollying and zooming in to provide emphasis at key moments, and it shows Naruse's mastery of silent filmmaking, carrying the story without an overabundance of intertitles.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Tiger Shark (Howard Hawks, 1932)

Richard Arlen, Edward G. Robinson, and Zita Johann in Tiger Shark

Mike Mascarenhas: Edward G. Robinson
Pipes Boley: Richard Arlen
Quita Silva: Zita Johann
Tony: J. Carrol Naish
Fishbone: Vince Barnett
Manuel Silva: William Ricciardi
Muggsey: Leila Bennett

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Wells Root
Based on a story by Houston Branch
Cinematography: Tony Gaudio
Film editor: Thomas Pratt
Assistant director: Richard Rosson

Howard Hawks made a classic in 1932, but it wasn't Tiger Shark, it was Scarface. Which is not to say that Tiger Shark isn't a very good film. It has a hugely energetic performance from Edward G. Robinson and some terrific second-unit footage (supervised by Richard Rosson) of actual deep-sea tuna fishing, beautifully edited into the story. It also has Hawks's efficient zip-through-the-slow-parts direction. The slow parts are provided by the film's too-familiar love triangle plot: Quita marries Mike, the homely older man, out of a sense of duty, but falls in love with Mike's first mate, Pipes, with a predictable outcome. Hawks later admitted that he stole the plot from Sidney Howard's 1924 Broadway play, They Knew What They Wanted, which was filmed in 1940 by Garson Kanin and which Frank Loesser turned into the musical The Most Happy Fella in 1956. The film really belongs to Robinson, who seems to be having great fun upstaging everyone, which isn't very hard with a second-string supporting cast. Arlen is stolid, and although Johann has a sultry exotic presence, it was put to better use in her other 1932 film, Karl Freund's The Mummy, in which she plays the woman stalked by Boris Karloff's Imhotep because of her resemblance to his long-dead love.

Turner Classic Movies

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler in Kings of the Road

Bruno Winter: Rüdiger Vogler
Robert Lander: Hanns Zischler
Pauline: Lisa Kreutzer
Robert's Father: Rudolf Schündler
Man Whose Wife Killed Herself: Marquard Bohm
Paul: Hans Dieter Trayer
Theater Owner: Franziska Stömmer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Cinematography: Robby Müller, Martin Schäfer
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

Three hours is a considerable chunk of time to invest in a film whose plot and characters are going nowhere, but Wim Wenders somehow pulls it off in Kings of the Road -- a title that seems inevitable for a film that ends with Roger Miller's song, "King of the Road," but whose German title is a little more descriptive: Im Lauf der Zeit, "in the course of time." For time is what the central character, Bruno Winter, has plenty of. All he has to do is drive from one small German town to another, servicing the projectors in movie houses. These are towns set aside from the Wirtschaftswunder that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, satirizes in his films: They are in decline, and the sparseness of the population Winter encounters is striking. They are also along the border between West and East Germany, a split that's taking a psychic toll on their residents. Though he's very much a loner, indeed wallowing in his loneliness, Winter takes in a companion, Robert Lander, whom he encounters one day trying to kill himself by driving his speeding VW bug into the Elbe. The car refuses to sink until Lander finally climbs out through the sunroof and wades ashore with his suitcase. In the course of time, Winter and Lander become friends, and Kings of the Road becomes a very German version of the buddy movie. They're not Butch and Sundance, but simply two malcontents who find themselves cast together by circumstance. Much of Kings of the Road was improvised, with Wenders confessing that he would lose sleep at night worrying about what he might shoot the next day. It becomes a portrait of a generation, the one born at the end of World War II, in search of itself, as well as a portrait of a country trying to recover from that war's lingering traumas. Inevitably, both Winter and Lander confront the past: Lander in a visit to his father, from whom he has been estranged for several years, and Winter by a visit to the abandoned house on an island in the Rhine where he spent his childhood. Though its length and plotlessness inevitably result in some slackness, the film feels to me oddly more resonant than some of Wenders's more tightly constructed ones.

Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)

Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream

Sara Goldfarb: Ellen Burstyn
Harry Goldfarb: Jared Leto
Marion Silver: Jennifer Connelly
Tyrone C. Love: Marlon Wayans
Tappy Tibbons: Christopher McDonald
Ada: Louise Lasser

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Screenplay: Hubert Selby Jr., Darren Aronofsky
Based on a novel by Hubert Selby Jr.
Cinematography: Matthew Libatique
Production design: James Chinlund
Music: Clint Mansell
Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz

Our president recently addressed the opioid crisis by suggesting a familiar cure: Just tell children "Don't do drugs. Drugs are bad." But if that doesn't work, you might show them Requiem for a Dream, which should shock anybody straight. I have a feeling that Darren Aronofsky's film is not regarded quite so highly today as it was when it was released and critics used words like "compelling" and "visionary" about it and its director. Certainly it has a cast giving it their considerable all, and it scores some direct hits not only on the drug culture but also on the manic popular media embodied in the infomercial/game show Sara watches constantly. But before its notorious apocalyptic ending, in which all the major characters are raked through the mire, it often seems to be a vehicle for directorial self-indulgence. The split-screen effect early in the film, when Harry shuts Sara out of the room while he's "borrowing" her TV set, feels more like a show-off technical stunt than like an effective way to heighten the storytelling. And the laid-on effects throughout the film -- off-kilter camera angles, slow-motion and speeded-up scenes, busy montage, color tricks -- don't always advance the story or enhance our understanding of the characters. That said, Requiem for a Dream hasn't lost its power to grab viewers and rub their noses in the messes people make of their lives.

Watched on The Movie Channel

Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

Kyoko Kagawa in Mother

Masako Fukuhara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Toshiko Fukuhara: Kyoko Kagawa
Shinjiro: Eiji Okada
Ryousuke Fukuhara: Masao Mishima
Susumo Fukuhara: Akihiko Katayama
Hisako Fukuhara: Keiko Enami
Uncle Kimura: Daisuke Kato
Tetsuo: Takashi Ito
Aunt Noriko: Chieko Nakakita

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mutatis mutandis, Mikio Naruse's Mother could almost have been a 1950s Hollywood family drama starring Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy in the title role: a woman struggling to help her family survive difficult times. Of course, the necessary change would be that of setting: Mother is very much a portrait of lower middle class Japan in the immediate postwar years. Masako Fukuhara is not just trying to feed her family but also struggling with the effects of the war, including disease -- the death of her only son from tuberculosis -- and crippling loss -- she and her husband, Ryosuke, take in her sister Noriko's little boy, Tetsuo, after Noriko returns from Manchuria, where her husband was killed. Masako's struggle gets worse after Ryosuke works himself to death reestablishing the family's laundry business. Fortunately, there is Uncle Kimura, who had been a prisoner of war in Russia, to help out in the laundry, but Masako still has to raise her teenage daughter, Toshiko, as well as her younger daughter, Hisako, called Chako. What links Mother to the Hollywood films is some sentimental melodrama, a characteristic not usually ascribed to Naruse's work, and some rather conventional comic relief, such as the scene in which Toshiko's boyfriend, Shinjiro, sees her dressed as a bride and thinks she's marrying someone else, when in fact she's modeling for Noriko, who is trying to make it as a hair stylist. Fortunately, Naruse knows how to work against sentimentality and convention with some distancing tricks. In mid-film we are suddenly presented with a title card that says "The End" in Japanese -- a moment that actually made me reach for the remote control to see if the screening service had somehow skipped to the end. It turns out to be the end title for a movie that Toshiko and her friends have gone to see -- a weepie that has left them in the tears guaranteed by its advertising. It also helps that Mother has the extraordinary Kinuyo Tanaka and Kyoko Kagawa playing mother and daughter -- a relationship they would repeat in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It's also fun to see Eiji Okada as Shinjiro, one of his early performances, before he achieved international fame in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964).

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

Lisa Yang and Chen Chang in A Brighter Summer Day

Xiao Si'r: Chen Chang
Ming: Lisa Yang
Father: Kuo-Chu Chang
Mother: Elaine Jin
Eldest Sister: Chuan Wang
Older Brother (Lao Er): Han Chang
Middle Sister: Hsiu-Chiung Chiang
Youngest Sister: Stephanie Lai
Cat: Chi-tsan Wang
Honey: Hung-Ming Lin

Director: Edward Yang
Screenplay: Hung Hung, Mingtang Lai, Alex Yang, Edward Yang
Cinematography: Hui Kung Chang, Longyu Zhang
Production design: Wei-Yen Yu
Film editing: Po-Wen Chen

Any four-hour film is going to be immersive, but for me, A Brighter Summer Day was a bit like being taught to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool. There are so many characters and the political, social, and cultural milieu of Taiwan in 1960 is so foreign to me, that it took at least the first hour to get my bearings. I think it's no accident that Tolstoy's War and Peace, another vastly immersive experience, is referred to twice, the first time surprisingly by the fugitive gang leader known as Honey, who was attracted to its portrait of conflict and especially by Pierre's fixation on assassinating Napoleon. A Brighter Summer Day is perhaps the closest that a film can get to the complexity of a great novel -- which doesn't necessarily make it a great film, although I think it gets pretty close to that, too. It will take another viewing, which means another four-hour block of time, for me to make that decision -- and even for me to have something concise and coherent to say about it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies and on Filmstruck Criterion Channel (after my recording of the TCM showing fell short)

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in The American Friend

Tom Ripley: Dennis Hopper
Jonathan Zimmermann: Bruno Ganz
Marianne Zimmermann: Lisa Kreuzer
Raoul Minot: Gérard Blain
Derwatt: Nicholas Ray
The American: Samuel Fuller
Marcangelo: Peter Lilienthal
Ingraham: Daniel Schmidt
Rodolphe: Lou Castel

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Music: Jürgen Knieper
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

When I called Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) "stoner noir" yesterday, I thought I had pretty much exhausted the genre with the exception of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). But then I watched The American Friend and realized my error. Actually, the plot and milieu of The American Friend, loosely adapted from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, is material more for a thriller than for film noir's brooding exploration of the lower depths of criminality. Here we are in what might be called the upper depths: art fraud and murder for hire. But mostly The American Friend is an exercise in watching the phenomenon that was Dennis Hopper, who came to the set fresh from the horrors, the horrors of working on Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). It is, as most of Hopper's performances were, an exercise in self-destruction. And perfectly cast against him, in what was his first important film, is Bruno Ganz, struggling to keep his head. Ganz and Hopper eventually came to blows off-set, and then spent a night drinking their way into a fast friendship and an entertaining tandem performance. There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it character to the film's set-up exposition about why mild-mannered picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann gets caught up in the manipulations of Tom Ripley and Raul Minot, but it doesn't matter much. Zimmermann's first job for Minot is beautifully staged, with just enough eccentric touches -- Zimmermann colliding with a dumpster and a stranger (Jean Eustache, one of the director cronies Wenders cast in his film) offering him a Band-Aid -- to make it more than routine thriller stalking. And the sequence on the train is a classic of cutting between on-location and studio set filming, culminating in Zimmerman's exhilarated scream from the view port on the engine. To my taste, The American Friend is a little too loosey-goosey in exposition and a little too self-indulgent in its director cameos, making it catnip for cinéastes but maybe not solid enough for mainstream viewers. The thriller bones show through, making me want to see the material done a little more slickly and conventionally. But as personal filmmaking goes, it's fascinating.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel  

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank

Walker: Lee Marvin
Chris: Angie Dickinson
Mal Reese: John Vernon
Lynne: Sharon Acker
Yost: Keenan Wynn
Brewster: Carroll O'Connor
Frederick Carter: Lloyd Bochner
Stegman: Michael Strong
Hit Man: James Sikking

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse
Based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark)
Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop
Art direction: Albert Brenner, George W. Davis
Music: Johnny Mandel
Film editing: Henry Berman

Stoner noir. With its non-linear storytelling and audaciously post-realist tricks of style, Point Blank clearly shows the influence of the great French and Italian filmmakers of the 1960s, but even though its director was a Brit whose only previous non-documentary film was Having a Wild Weekend (1965), an attempt to do for the Dave Clark Five what A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1963) did for the Beatles, it's unquestionably an American movie. Its loner antihero, Walker, is straight out of American Westerns, and the two cities it shifts between, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are the American final frontier. That any studio, let alone MGM, would allow John Boorman and Lee Marvin to make Point Blank what it is -- an eccentric spin on a familiar genre -- shows how the Hollywood studio system had imploded. It's a film full of outrageous moments: Walker bursting into Lynne's apartment and emptying his revolver into an unoccupied bed. Walker fastening his seat belt -- in the days before shoulder belts and mandated buckling up -- and embarking on a one-car demolition derby with Stegman in the passenger seat. Walker dumping a naked Reese from a penthouse balcony. Chris pummeling an immovable Walker with her purse and her fists before collapsing in exhaustion. It has showoffy tricks: The pock pock pock pock of Walker's heels as he strides down an airport corridor, a sound that's carried over even after he's left the hallway. The often psychedelic color effects, like Chris's day-glo wardrobe or the closeup of the multicolored perfumes in the bottles that have shattered in the bathtub after Walker swept them from the shelves. Its plot stretches credibility to the breaking point: How did Walker survive being shot at, yes, point blank range and then get away from Alcatraz? This alone has served as the focus of countless attempts at interpretation: Is Walker a ghost? Or is what happens after he's shot the revenge fantasy of a dying man? In short, Point Blank is a glorious mess, made into an enduring work of fascination and puzzlement by wonderful performances, particularly by Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Is it a great film or just an enduring cult movie? I tend to the latter view, but it's bloody fun in either case.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

Haruko Sugimura in Late Chrysanthemums

Kin: Haruko Sugimura
Tomi: Yuko Mochizuki
Tamae: Chikako Hosokawa
Nobu: Sadako Sawamura
Kiyoshi: Hiroshi Koizuma
Sachkiko: Ineko Arima
Tabe: Ken Uehara
Seki: Bontaro Miake

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Toshiro Ide
Based on stories by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Music: Ichiro Saito

In 1993, writer-director Nora Ephron satirized a prevailing male attitude toward "women's pictures" in Sleepless in Seattle. When the character played by Rita Wilson tears up while recounting the plot of An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey 1957), Tom Hanks's character dismisses the film as "a chick's movie," and he and Victor Garber's character mock her by bursting into tears while recalling the thoroughly macho ending of The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1957). Although Ephron's film had the downside of reinvigorating the old put-down phrase "chick flick," it also sent video sales and rentals of An Affair to Remember through the roof. The male-female audience split, and the willingness of filmmakers to cash in on it, dates from the days when there were movie theaters within walking distance of almost every neighborhood, and women who worked at home could take a break to watch a movie while the kids were in school. So the "matinee weepie" became a standard product of Hollywood studios, usually focusing on the problems women had with their families and their husbands -- or their lack of families and husbands. In Japan, however, women's problems were compounded by history and rapid social change: The institutions women had learned to adapt to before and during the war were being revolutionized. The constitution drafted during the occupation of Japan in 1946 went perhaps even further to establish the political and social equality of women with men than was common in the United States. The Japanese version of a "woman's picture," Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums, demonstrates both how liberating and how traumatizing this newfound equality could be for older women by focusing on four former geisha, now in late middle age, past the time when the one skill they had been trained in, pleasing men, could support them. One of the women, Nobu, has found stability by running a small restaurant. Another, Kin, had socked away the money she had earned and, never married, now lends money and invests in real estate. But Tomi and Tamae, each of whom now has a grown child but no husband, have had harder times. They share a house, but Tomi is addicted to gambling and Tamae is in poor health, which keeps her from earning what she could as a housekeeper in a hotel. Tomi is also upset that her daughter, Sachiko, who dresses in modern Western clothes, is marrying an older man, while Tamae frets first about the fact that her son, Kiyoshi, has a mistress and later that he has decided to move to Hokkaido. There's no real plot to Late Chrysanthemums, but instead a concentrated focus on characters and their reactions to a changing world. Kin, for example, is drawn back into the wartime past by the return of two men: Seki, with whom she was once so in love that they attempted a double suicide, and Tabe, an ex-soldier who was her patron. She spurns Seki, now a derelict ex-con, but eagerly receives the handsome Tabe, only to be disillusioned when it turns out that he only wants to borrow money and gets sloppily drunk. Haruko Sugimura, who was usually cast in rather vinegary roles, like a Japanese Agnes Moorehead, gives a performance of depth and understanding as Kin, but all of the film's performances are richly accomplished.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)

Walter Matthau and Audrey Hepburn in Charade

Peter Joshua: Cary Grant
Regina Lampert: Audrey Hepburn
Hamilton Bartholomew: Walter Matthau
Tex Panthollow: James Coburn
Herman Scobie: George Kennedy
Leopold W. Gideon: Ned Glass
Sylvie Gaudet: Dominique Minot
Inspector Grandpierre; Jacques Marin

Director: Stanley Donen
Screenplay: Peter Stone, Marc Behm
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Jean d'Eaubonne
Music: Henry Mancini

Charade was dismissed in its day as a pleasant but derivative entertainment, with touches of Hitchcock and a bit of James Bond in the mix, a film that would be nothing without its star teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It would also inspire other star-teamed romantic adventures with one-word titles, like Warren Beatty and Susannah York in Kaleidoscope (Jack Smight, 1966) and Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine in Gambit (Ronald Neame, 1966), and Charade's director, Stanley Donen, would even repeat the formula with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Arabesque (1966). But Charade has survived today as a classic when the others have mostly been forgotten. The star teaming has a lot to do with it, of course: Who doesn't want to see the two most charming people in the world together? Owing to Grant's genetic gift for looking much younger than he was, even the 25-year age difference between Grant and Hepburn only slightly tests the limits of what one can accept in a romantic pairing.* But the film also makes sly references to the difference in their ages, and wisely makes Hepburn's character into the more active one in initiating a relationship. Charade also has an exceptionally witty screenplay, with Peter Stone largely responsible for the final script from the story he and Mark Behm had been unable to sell to the studios until they turned it into a novel that was serialized in Redbook magazine. And it has a near-perfect supporting cast, including three actors at turning points in their careers: Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. All of them would move out of television and into the movies after Charade, and all three would win Oscars for their work. And in Stanley Donen it had a director whose lightness of touch had been honed in MGM musicals, including the greatest of them all, Singin' in the Rain (1952).

Watched on Showtime

*Compare, for example, the similar age gap between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). After that film, Stewart gave up playing romantic leads. Grant made much the same choice: Charade was his antepenultimate film: Although he would make one more, Father Goose (Ralph Nelson, 1964), that paired him with a younger actress, Leslie Caron, in his final film, Walk, Don't Run (Charles Walters, 1966), he was the older man who serves as matchmaker to young lovers -- a role that was based on the part played by Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943).