A Royal Scandal (Otto Preminger, 1946)

Charles Coburn, William Eythe, and Tallulah Bankhead in A Royal Scandal

Catherine the Great: Tallulah Bankhead
Chancellor Nicolai Ilyitch: Charles Coburn
Lt. Alexei Chernoff: William Eythe
Countess Anna Jaschikoff: Anne Baxter
Marquis de Fleury: Vincent Price
Capt. Sukov: Mischa Auer
Gen. Ronsky: Sig Ruman

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Bruno Frank
Based on a play by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller
Costume design: René Hubert

Sometimes it's better not to know too much about a movie, for example the fact that A Royal Scandal was to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo almost made one of her many rumored comebacks as Catherine the Great. Might have been tends to distract us from what was: a more-than-passable comedy about the goings-on in the court of the Empress of all the Russias. It was a notorious flop, however, and essentially ended any hopes Tallulah Bankhead might have had for screen stardom after her much-praised performance in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944). The film was savaged by the often unreliable but enormously influential Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: He called it "oddly dull and generally witless," though he faulted the script rather than Bankhead and the cast. I still think that if you go into A Royal Scandal with diminished expectations, you can find some fun in it. True, the script drags a little, and the central palace intrigue -- a plot to overthrow the empress -- is rather muddled in the setup. But it has some clever lines, and it has Bankhead and Charles Coburn to deliver them. William Eythe, a kind of second-string Tyrone Power, handles well his role as the naive soldier captivated by the empress, showing some shrewd comic timing, and Anne Baxter, as his fiancee and Catherine's lady-in-waiting, represses her tendency to overact. The faults in the film are generally more due to the director than the script. In Lubitsch's hands the romance might have been wittier and the comic-opera complications of the plot more effervescent. Otto Preminger, who took over after Lubitsch suffered a heart attack, was not the man for the job. As he showed with his first big hit, Laura (1944), Preminger was greatly gifted at handling scheming nasties and noirish perversities, but he was never one for costume-drama frivolities. What success he has with A Royal Scandal comes from giving a capable cast the reins.

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Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)

Monsieur Hulot: Jacques Tati
Martine: Natalie Pascaud
The Aunt: Micheline Rolla
Englishwoman: Valentine Camax
Hotel Proprietor: Lucien Frégis
Waiter: Raymond Carl

Director: Jacques Tati
Screenplay: Pierre Aubert, Jacques Lagrange, Henri Marquet, Jacques Tati
Cinematography: Jacques Mercanton, Jean Mousselle
Music: Alain Romans

One of the delights of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is that Hulot himself is part of an ensemble. It's not just a showcase for Jacques Tati's gifts as a physical comedian. While Hulot is the presumed focus of the movie, with his stiff-legged bouncing gait and his pipe-forward ambling, the world around him is as sweetly eccentric as he is. From the opening scenes with the holiday-bound crowds rushing from one railway platform to the other, confused by the comically garbled announcements, to the sardine-packed bus whose driver discovers a small boy thrusting his head up between the spokes of the steering wheel, Tati the director swiftly establishes the satiric thrust of the film: the bourgeoisie determined to have fun even if it kills them. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is not gut-bustingly funny. Instead it's an assemblage of drolleries: slapstick moments like Hulot getting shut up in a folding canoe and being mistaken for a shark, mixed with smile-inducing bits like the strolling couple, she cheerfully leading him on excursions he clearly doesn't enjoy, as when she delightedly picks up shells, cooing over their beauty, which he tosses away once her back is turned. All of it is sweetened by a skillfully crafted soundtrack, from Hulot's wheezing and rattling auto to the irruptions of radio broadcasts in the hotel to the poink of the swinging door at the entrance to the dining room. I happen to think that the restored 114-minute version, assembled by Tati before his death, may be a bit too long, but there are many who can't get too much Hulot.

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Coup de Grâce (Volker Schlöndorff, 1976)

Margarethe von Trotta in Coup de Grâce

Erich von Lhomond:  Matthias Habich
Sophie de Reval: Margarethe von Trotta
Conrad de Reval: Rüdiger Kirschstein
Aunt Praskovia: Valeska Gert
Dr. Paul Rugen: Marc Eyraud
Michel: Hannes Kaetner
Grigori Loew: Franz Morak
Franz von Aland: Frederik von Zischy
Volkmar: Mathieu Carrière

Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Screenplay: Geneviève Dormann, Margarethe von Trotta, Jutta Brückner
Based on a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Music: Stanley Myers
Film editing: Jane Seitz

Coup de Grâce is a film as chilly as its setting: a castle in Latvia in the bleak winter of 1919-1920, as the Bolsheviks begin to overwhelm their opponents in the Baltic states, many of whom are Germans determined to defeat the communists. The castle belongs to Conrad de Reval, who has gathered there some of the remnants of his forces, including his friend Erich von Lhomond. It becomes apparent very early, especially from the glances between Conrad and Erich, that they may be more than just friends. It's not so apparent to Conrad's sister, Sophie, who is still living in the castle along with her aged aunt. Sophie makes a play for Conrad, but it's only partially successful. To spite and to tantalize him, she begins to have affairs with some of the other men staying at the castle. Meanwhile, the castle comes under attack from the Bolsheviks, some of whom are also Sophie's friends. Margarethe von Trotta gives a complex portrayal of Sophie, but is somewhat undermined by the intricacies of the relationships among the various characters and the difficulty of sorting out their several backstories. We don't know enough about her, or Erich or Conrad, to get a full sense of why any of them behave as they do, other than the moral fatigue of having fought the war for so long. In the end, the film becomes most memorable for the performance of Valeska Gert, whose grotesque and macabre Aunt Praskovia steals every scene in which she appears. In the 1920s, Gert had been a silent film actress and a cabaret performer -- she would have fit right in with the "divine decadence" of the Kit Kat Kub in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972). Although Coup de Grâce has a strong final scene, the slackness of the narrative thread in the film deprives it of some of its impact. Still, good performances, an effective recreation of the historical period,  and the impressive black and white cinematography by Igor Luther make it worth seeing.

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Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis in Solaris

Chris Kelvin: George Clooney
Rheya: Natascha McElhone
Gordon: Viola Davis
Snow: Jeremy Davies
Gibarian: Ulrich Tukur

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Steven Soderberg (as Peter Andrews)
Production design: Philip Messina
Music: Cliff Martinez
Film editing: Steven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard)

The self -- or the soul, if you will -- is made of memories. Which is why disorders of memory, like Alzheimer's, terrify us so: Who are we if we don't have our memories? Relationships, too, are made by memories -- or marred by the absence of shared ones, as Andrew Haigh demonstrated recently in 45 Years (2015). But what are you if you are made of someone else's memories? That's the provocative premise explored in this version of Stanslaw Lem's novel Solaris, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Steven Soderbergh. When it was released, it was widely regarded by some prestigious critics as too slow, as "ponderous and dreadful," as "opaque, self-indulgent, and just plain goofy." I don't know if the critical reaction has shifted over the past 15 years, but I think Soderbergh's Solaris is a worthy companion to the more critically lauded Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). They attempt different things: Soderbergh a meditation on love, loss, and identity framed in the conventions of the sci-fi film, Tarkovsky a personal exploration of humankind's alienation from nature. If, as I tend to do, you prefer deeply personal filmmaking to Hollywood glossiness, you may prefer Tarkovsky, but I honor what Soderbergh -- a personal filmmaker working with Hollywood stars and conventions -- has achieved. The presence of George Clooney does tend to skew the film a bit, partly because Clooney, like all movie stars, has a fixed persona, and when he works against his type -- the handsome, wisecracking, invincible leading man -- people tend to feel their expectations have been frustrated and become dismissive. Would Soderbergh's Solaris have been critically better received if he had been able to cast his original choice for the role, the chameleonic Daniel Day-Lewis? Perhaps, but Clooney gives the role of Kelvin his considerable all, and I think it's one of his best performances. He's well supported by Natascha McElhone as Rheya, whose increasing horror at discovering she's not human but instead a being crafted out of Kelvin's memories of his dead wife is touchingly presented, and by Viola Davis as Gordon, who masks her terrors with a facade of toughness. We've seen Jeremy Davies do twitchy perhaps once too often, but it works here against the more controlled personae presented by Clooney and Davis's characters. Soderbergh also wisely keeps the identification of what (or who) Solaris is -- a planet or some kind of galactic sentient entity? -- one of the film's unsolved mysteries. To go too far into explanations would have sent the film into routine science-fiction territory. Cliff Martinez's musical score neatly supports the otherworldliness of the film.

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Les Misérables (Raymond Bernard, 1934)

Harry Baur in Les Misérables

Jean Valjean/Champmathieu: Harry Baur
Javert: Charles Vanel
Fantine: Florelle
Cosette: Josseline Gaël
Cosette as a child: Gaby Triquet
Marius: Jean Servais
Éponine: Orane Demazis
Éponine as a child: Gilberte Savary
Thénardier: Charles Dullin
Mme. Thénardier: Marguerite Moreno
Gavroche: Émile Genevois
Enjolras: Robert Vidalin
Grantaire: Paul Azaïs
M. Gillenormand: Max Dearly
Monseigneur Myriel: Henry Krauss

Director: Raymond Bernard
Screenplay: Raymond Bernard, André Lang
Based on a novel by Victor Hugo
Cinematography: Jules Kruger
Production design: Lucien Carré, Jean Perrier
Music: Arthur Honegger

Harry Baur gives one of the great film performances in Les Misérables, beginning with a tour de force in the first installment, subtitled Tempest in a Skull, in which he plays not only the brutish convict Jean Valjean and his first assumed identity, the benevolent mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, M. Madeleine, but also the addle-brained Champmathieu, wrongly fingered as the fugitive Valjean. Baur's Valjean is not the dashing, younger heroic figure embodied by Fredric March in Richard Boleslawski's 1935 Hollywood version or Hugh Jackman in Tom Hooper's 2012 film of the musical. March and Jackman had to work hard to suggest Valjean's hardened convict past, but Baur looks the part. He cleans up nicely, though. Raymond Bernard's version is closer to the epic Victor Hugo novel than the later adaptations, which necessitates its miniseries length: a 281-minute total run time, divided into three films. Trilogies typically sag in the middle: In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, for example, The Two Towers (2002) is weaker than The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003). But Bernard manages to give each part fairly equal heft, concentrating on Valjean's transformation in Tempest in a Skull, on the thwarted manipulations of the titular couple in The Thénardiers, and on the fight on the barricades in Freedom, Dear Freedom. This is not to say that there isn't some slackness within each installment: Bernard, like many directors who mastered their skills making silent films, doesn't seem fully at home with sound even yet; there are scenes in which the actors seem to be holding a pose a beat or two longer than necessary. And despite Arthur Honegger's distinguished score, Bernard allows some scenes that could use the "sweetening" of background music to go without it. In The Thénardiers, for example, the plot to ensnare Valjean and the ensuing fight scene could have used some tension-and-release music, but the score only begins, rather abruptly, when the lovers, Marius and Cosette, meet. But as a totality, Les Misérables is a triumph, and apparently a little-known one, to judge by the fact that it doesn't come up as one of the top results in an IMDb search. Jules Kruger's cinematography gives an expressionist tilt to some of its scenes, and the production design, from the slummy haunts of the Thénardiers to the opulence of Gillenormand's mansion, is superb. But most of all it has Baur and a tremendous supporting cast, particularly Florelle* as a very touching Fantine, and Émile Genevois as a memorable Gavroche. Charles Vanel's Javert is not humanized sufficiently in the script, I think, so that his suicide comes as something of an anticlimax, but he gives it all the implacable menace the role allows him. But it's Baur who carries the film as impressively as he carries Jean Servais's Marius through the sewers in the climax.

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*Her full name was Odette Elisa Joséphine Marguerite Rousseau, and she was occasionally billed as Odette Florelle. It's too bad that today her screen name sounds like that of an air freshener.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett: James Coburn
Billy the Kid: Kris Kristofferson
Alias: Bob Dylan
Sheriff Kip McKinney: Richard Jaeckel
Sheriff Baker: Slim Pickens
Mrs. Baker: Katy Jurado
Lemuel: Chill Wills
Chisum: Barry Sullivan
Gov. Lew Wallace: Jason Robards
Ollinger: R.G. Armstrong
Eno: Luke Askew
Poe: John Beck
Alamosa Bill: Jack Elam
Maria: Rita Coolidge
Bowdre: Charles Martin Smith
Luke: Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Screenplay: Rudy Wurlitzer
Cinematography: John Coquillon
Music: Bob Dylan

With its laid-back pace punctuated by moments of violence, not to mention its soundtrack by Bob Dylan, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid may be the ultimate stoner Western. After being mutilated by MGM -- the credits list six film editors -- it was savaged by critics on its first release, but the release on video of Sam Peckinpah's original preview version in 1988 caused a reevaluation of the film, with some now calling it a masterpiece. I wouldn't go that far: To my mind the narrative is still too elliptical and the inspiration -- rewriting a myth -- too commonplace. But it has moments of brilliance that transcend its flaws, such as the beautiful sequence of the death of Sheriff Baker, with its fine use of the iconic performers Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado and the underscoring with Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." James Coburn, always an underrated actor in his prime, is wonderful as Pat Garrett, and while Kris Kristofferson was never much of an actor, he and Coburn play well against each other. Dylan was no actor, either, but he's used well here as the enigmatic figure who lets himself be known as "Alias," and the scene in which Garrett forces him to read the labels of canned goods while he toys with other members of Billy's gang is nicely done. The gallery of character actors both old (Chill Wills, Jack Elam) and new (Charles Martin Smith, Harry Dean Stanton) is welcome. Its post-censorship era's exploitation of women -- there are an awful lot of bared breasts, though we also get a fleeting butt-shot of Kristofferson -- is overdone, and it certainly wouldn't earn any seal of approval from the American Humane Society after the scene in which live chickens are used for target practice.

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The Scar (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1976)

Franciszek Pieczka in The Scar

Stefan Bednarz: Franciszek Pieczka
The Chairman: Mariusz Dmochowski
Bednarz's Assistant: Jerzy Stuhr
TV Editor: Michal Tarkowski
Minister: Stanislaw Igar
Eva: Joanna Orzeszkowska
Bednarz's Wife: Halina Winiarska
Bednarz's Secretary: Agnieszka Holland

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Romuald Karas
Based on a novel by Romuald Karas
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak

The Scar was Krzysztof Kieslowski's first non-documentary theatrical feature -- he had previously made a fiction film for television -- and it's a quite accomplished one. He draws heavily on his work as a documentary maker to tell the story of the frustrating experiences of Stefan Bednarz, a member of the Polish Communist Party, who is picked to build and run a factory making chemical fertilizer in Olechów, a town where he and his wife had previously lived. His wife, however, has no interest in returning to Olechów -- she has unpleasant memories of the place and its people, some of whom Bednarz will be forced to work with -- so she stays behind in Warsaw, as does their grown daughter, Eva, whose liberated lifestyle vexes Bednarz. From the outset, Bednarz is faced with conflict from the residents of the town, who resent having the forest felled and some of the older houses torn down to make way for the construction. Throughout his stay in Olechów, Bednarz will struggle with townspeople, old resentments, management bureaucracy, government bureaucracy, discontented workers, and the media. Seen today, The Scar resonates with both Polish history and worldwide environmental concerns -- there's a heartbreaking scene of a deer, displaced from the forest, begging food from humans, who feed it cigarettes -- but even then it was a striking demonstration of Kieslowski's ability to work with actors, including many non-professionals, and to craft a narrative.

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45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

Kate Mercer: Charlotte Rampling
Geoff Mercer: Tom Courtenay
Lena: Geraldine James
Sally: Dolly Wells
George: David Sibley

Director: Andrew Haigh
Screenplay: Andrew Haigh
Based on a story by David Constantine
Cinematography: Lol Crawley

Even in the longest marriages, couples still have something they can never share: those years before they met. Old failures, old loves, old sorrows are locked in the minds of each partner. This is the stuff of which stories are made, perhaps most brilliantly in James Joyce's story "The Dead." Fiction has ways of dealing with the emotional tension imposed on the present by a past that movies can't quite evoke except, conventionally, by flashbacks. Fortunately, Andrew Haigh doesn't do anything so conventional in 45 Years, his adaptation of the story "In Another Country" by David Constantine. Instead, he trusts his actors to carry the burden, revealing in the cinematic present the effects of the unshown past. Kate and Geoff are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with a big party they had originally planned, we learn, for their 40th anniversary. It had to be postponed when Geoff went in the hospital for a coronary bypass. As they sit at the kitchen table a few days before the party, discussing the music they want played -- Geoff thinks it would be "kind of naff," i.e., corny, to play the Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which they danced to at their wedding -- he opens a letter he has received from Switzerland. The body of a woman he traveled with, more than 50 years ago, has been found preserved in glacial ice. He's intrigued and disturbed by the discovery, including the fact that she would still look the way she did in her 20s, whereas he is old and gray. Geoff has never told Kate much about Katya and her death, so as the days go by and he continues to be obsessed by the news, she begins to pry information out of him and eventually makes her own discovery: that when she fell to her death Katya was pregnant. Haigh's determined restraint as a storyteller shines here. We never hear the truth spoken by any of the characters -- Kate doesn't confront Geoff with what she learns -- but only witness Kate as, looking through Geoff's things in the attic, she finds a cache of old slides. As she projects them on a sheet, we see what she sees: Katya with a contented look as she places her hand on her protruding belly. Because we know that Kate and Geoff are childless, this revelation has an even greater emotional impact. The tension between husband and wife grows, born of Kate's inquisitiveness and Geoff's reluctance to open himself up, but voices are scarcely raised. Fortunately, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are more than equal to the task of showing how this half-century-old secret affects their lives. That we remember the catlike young Rampling, with her ice-blue eyes and wide sensuous mouth, and the weedy, angry young man that Courtenay often played also helps us contemplate the passage of time as we project those images onto the aging actors on the screen. Haigh ends on a masterstroke: Although Kate and Geoff have seemingly come to terms with the past, and he gives a speech at the party proclaiming his love for her, she has overruled his criticism and chosen "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" for their lead-off dance. And as the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach song ends, we realize along with Kate, left alone on the dance floor, that she has chosen a song about lost love to celebrate their anniversary.

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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.

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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.

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