Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

Turner Classic Movies

*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Brigitte Mira and Gottfried John in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

Emma Küsters: Brigitte Mira
Corinna: Ingrid Caven
Thälmann: Karlheinz Böhm
Frau Thälmann: Margit Carstensen
Helene: Irm Hermann
Niemeyer: Gottfried John
Ernst: Armin Meyer
Knab: Matthias Fuchs
Nightclub Owner: Peter Kern
Bar Owner: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Raab
Based on a story by Heinrich Zille
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

It's a too-familiar story in the United States: A disgruntled employee attacks his place of work and then kills himself. It may have had a more ripped-from-the-headlines feeling in West Germany during the recessionary times of the 1970s, which is my way of saying that Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven feels a little more stuck in time and place than Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films usually do. The setup is familiar: A man goes berserk at his workplace and commits suicide, leaving his family to face the aftermath. The follow-through is predictable: People -- tabloid reporters and politicians -- flock to milk what they can from the family's pain. But Fassbinder being the satirist that he was couldn't simply play the story for conventional domestic drama. He treats the family from the outset with a sardonic tone: The soon-to-be widow does piecework, assembling electric sockets on her kitchen table, as her son and his wife squabble over their coming vacation. Helene, Emma Küsters's pregnant daughter-in-law, is given to putting on airs about healthy living, preparing salads for dinner when Emma's husband and son want meat. Ernst, the son, works as a butcher, but he is so under his wife's thumb that he submits to her every wish, including a vacation in Finland when he would really prefer to go somewhere warmer. When news comes of the crime committed by Herr Küsters, we meet the daughter, Corinna, who fancies herself a singer, but really is just sleeping with the owner of the bar where she works. When the whole family gathers, the reporters flock to get the dirt, which is immediately swept up by Niemeyer, a writer and photographer, who starts sleeping with Corinna. In the background, their initial presence never quite explained, are a well-dressed couple, the Thälmanns, who turn out to be members of the Communist Party, eager to find a recruit in Frau Küsters, who becomes "Mother Küsters" for them. And so the unsavory game of exploitation begins. The problem comes when it has to end: Fassbinder provided two endings, in both of which Mother Küsters becomes a pawn in a game between the Communists, who are really just bourgeois radical-chic types, more interested in election victories than revolution, and the anarchists, who want headline-grabbing action. But one ending, the one shown in Germany and Europe, culminates in the death of Mother Küsters -- though the bloodshed isn't acted out, but just narrated in end titles. In the other ending, shown only in the United States, the action, a sit-in in the offices of the newsmagazine for which Niemeyer works, fizzles out because nobody really cares that much. Mother Küsters goes home with a janitor who has to close up the place and invites her to join him in a dinner of "Himmel und Erde" -- apples and potatoes with blood sausage. Both endings make the point, the first by refusing to dramatize the outcome of the protest, the second more directly: There's no real political conviction anymore. I rather like that both endings are available together now, not only because they reinforce one nicely, but also because there is nothing definitive to be said about the plight of Mother Küsters in a post-ideological context. Fassbinder, that great admirer of Douglas Sirk, seems to be saying that life itself has been reduced to melodrama, and the choice of a bloody ending or a happy one is completely arbitrary. 

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Mel Ferrer and Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious

Vern Haskell: Arthur Kennedy
Altar Keane: Marlene Dietrich
Frenchy Fairmont: Mel Ferrer
Beth Forbes: Gloria Henry
Baldy Gunder: William Frawley
Maxine: Lisa Ferraday
Mort Geary: Jack Elam
Wilson: George Reeves
Preacher: Frank Ferguson
Harbin: Francis McDonald
Comanche Paul: Dan Seymour
Kinch: Lloyd Gough

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Daniel Taradash
Based on a story by Silvia Richards
Cinematography: Hal Mohr
Music: Emil Newman

Arthur Kennedy was one of those reliably good Hollywood actors who never made it to the first rank of stardom though he received five Oscar nominations during his 50-year career on screen. He gives what is perhaps the most convincing performance in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious as the Wyoming cowboy who obsessively tracks down the man who raped and murdered his fiancée, but convincing acting perhaps isn't to the point when you're up against Marlene Dietrich, one of those larger-than-life movie stars who can upend a scene just by tossing back her shoulders, unleashing her familiar hooded gaze, and letting a famous leg slip from the slit in her skirt. The part of Vern Haskell needs a Gary Cooper or John Wayne just for balance. Nor does Mel Ferrer, his reliable blandness offset by frosted highlights in his hair, fare particularly well as Frenchy Fairmont, the current lover of Dietrich's equally absurdly named Altar Keane. But Lang keeps Rancho Notorious from steering too far into the direction of camp, offsetting its Western clichés with some well-staged action scenes and a steady pace that briskly ties up the plot in just under 90 minutes. Unfortunately, Rancho Notorious, which was originally titled Chuck-a-Luck, was tricked out with a narrative ballad accompaniment, "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" by Ken Darby, with the unsingable refrain, "Hate, murder, and revenge," that pops up every time you think you can keep a straight face. Still, the film is as watchable as it is incredible.

Turner Classic Movies

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975)

Peter Kern, Hanna Schygulla, Rüdiger Vogler, Nastassja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech in Wrong Move

Wilhelm: Rüdiger Vogler
Laertes: Hans Christian Blech
Therese Farner: Hanna Schygulla
Mignon: Nastassja Kinski
Bernhard Landau: Peter Kern
The Industrialist: Ivan Desny
Wilhelm's Mother: Marianne Hoppe
Janine: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Peter Handke
Based on a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editor: Peter Przygodda

With his presence in Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road (1976) Rüdiger Vogler became as essential to Wim Wenders's films of the mid-1970s as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese's work in the late 1970s and the 1980s. His homely everyman face is perfect for the self-centered loners of the first and the third films in Wenders's "road trilogy," men who find themselves having to come to terms with a world -- or at least a Germany -- they can't fully accept. But Vogler feels miscast in the middle film -- too old to be playing the young writer out to discover himself, a character drawn by screenwriter Peter Handke from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and thrust into modern post-Nazi, post-Wirtschaftswunder Germany. There is no naïveté left in Vogler's face, there are no illusions to be lost. Yet Wenders sends his 30-year-old Wilhelm on the voyage from northern to southern Germany, from Glückstadt to the Zugspitze, and into encounters with the world of art and politics that might have disillusioned a 20-year-old. Which is not to say that Wrong Move is a failure. It remains a film that tantalizes with its non-realistic narrative, its sense of of a world grown alien to people who think and feel, and of a country haunted by its desperation to escape from a terrible history. No surprise that a good part of its dialogue consists of people telling one another of their dreams, for the film itself has a liminal dreamlike quality. Would a fully awake and aware Wilhelm really pay the train fare for the con artist Laertes and his mute traveling companion Mignon? Do people really fall in love when their eyes meet between trains traveling on different tracks, and then somehow manage to get together after all? Do strangers really decide to travel together and wind up by mistake in the mansion of a suicidal industrialist? Or does all of that happen only in dreams? Wenders's film is touched by the mysterious angst that afflicts the characters in Antonioni's films -- the scene in the concrete caverns of Frankfurt evokes the bleak modern Rome of a film like L'Eclisse (1962), for example. In the context of a film so beautifully shot, so eccentrically put together as Wrong Move, even the miscasting of Vogler feels like not so much a mistake as a provocation.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in Youth

Fred Ballinger: Michael Caine
Mick Boyle: Harvey Keitel
Lena Ballinger: Rachel Weisz
Jimmy Tree: Paul Dano
Brenda Morel: Jane Fonda
Queen's Emissary: Alex McQueen
Julian: Ed Stoppard
Paloma Faith: Herself
Miss Universe: Madalina Diana Ghenea
Masseuse: Luna Zimic Mijovic
Sumi Jo: Herself

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Music: David Lang

Woody Allen

Is it just accidental that in Youth, wearing a slouchy hat and dark-rimmed glasses, Michael Caine often looks like Woody Allen? Or is Paolo Sorrentino suggesting some kind of connection between Caine's character, a reclusive composer-conductor trying to drift into retirement, and the prolific but scandal-plagued writer-director? The resemblance might have been more on point if Caine had played Harvey Keitel's part, a writer-director trying to put together what turns out to be his last film, meanwhile obsessing on the lost past and approaching death. But then nothing quite fits together right in Youth, a somewhat scattered and occasionally enervated film. Caine's Fred Ballinger and Keitel's Mick Boyle are old friends -- there is even a suggestion, not followed up, that they may once have been lovers. They are also tied by the fact that Fred's daughter, Lena, is married to Mick's son, Julian. Fred and Mick have come together at a spa in Switzerland, Fred to undergo medical examinations, Mick to work with an entourage of screenwriters to put together the final touches on a script that's meant to star one of his longtime collaborators, the actress Brenda Morel. Also on hand, as a kind of confidant for both Fred and Mick, is a young actor, Jimmy Tree, preparing for a film in which he would play Adolf Hitler, an attempt to counter his popular image as the star of a sci-fi movie in which he played a robot. Sorrentino tries hard to bring together all the threads of each character's plot, including the breakup of Lena and Julian's marriage, Fred's resistance to a command performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and Mick's difficulties in coming up with a final scene for his film. But the pacing of Youth is too slow, and the manipulation of the themes of youth and age, past and present, too superficial. Caine and Keitel are two of the most dynamic actors ever, and Rachel Weisz and Paul Dano are certainly worthy of their company, but Sorrentino tamps down their energies. The only time Youth ever comes to life is when Jane Fonda finally makes her appearance as the aging, rather blowsy Brenda, in a performance that reminds us how good she has always been. She delivers the worst news Mick could imagine: that she has decided not to appear in his film but to do a TV series. But Sorrentino follows up her scene with one that feels ripped off from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), in which Mick, like Fellini's Guido long blocked from completing his film, finds himself surrounded in an Alpine meadow by the women from his earlier movies. It's not so much shamelessly derivative as it is pointless. Sorrentino is a formidably imaginative writer-director, as demonstrated by his dazzlingly off-beat TV series The Young Pope and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) -- also indebted to Fellini but with a more inventive twist. Youth has touches of inspiration, but too often gets snarled in its own plots.

Cinemax     

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe: Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade: Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade: Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine: Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer: Henry Gibson
Harry: David Arkin
Terry Lennox: Jim Bouton
Jo Ann Eggenweiler: Jo Ann Brody

Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's loopy take on the myth of the hardboiled private eye, holds up well today, thanks to Elliott Gould's performance as Philip Marlowe. A long way from the world-weary, cynical Marlowes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, Gould's version of the character is a guy who will go out in the middle of the night to buy food for his cat and will stop dead in the middle of the street for a dog that refuses to get out of the way of his car. Not that he's a softy, exactly. He's not above meting out his own brand of punishment -- a bullet to the gut -- for someone who's eluded the law. It's just that he sees the world as a messed-up place and feels sympathy for its innocents: mainly, cats and dogs. Otherwise, there are few innocents in the circles Marlowe finds himself caught up in. He smokes incessantly, even though no one else around him does, thinking nothing of lighting up -- often from the butt of a previous cigarette -- before he enters someone else's space. He smokes so much that it's surprising he has the wind to chase Eileen Wade's car on foot for several blocks. The plot, as so often in adaptations of Raymond Chandler, doesn't matter so much as the attitudes on display, Marlowe's as well as the various people who are trying to prevent him from uncovering their secrets. Altman indulges himself in his usual overlapping, improvised dialogue, especially in group scenes like the one at the L.A. police station or the ones at which Marlowe is surrounded by gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen. (One of whom is played by the unbilled and mute but indomitably there Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There are some great set pieces, such as the horrifying scene in which Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face, or the attempt of Marlowe and Eileen to rescue Roger from the crashing surf -- with the nice touch that the Wades' Weimaraner fetches Roger's cane from the waves. There's some entertaining filigree around the narrative edges, like the gaggle of nubile starlets who live next door to Marlowe. And there's some offbeat casting that, for once, works: Nina van Pallandt, whose chief claim to fame is that she was hoaxer Clifford Irving's mistress and ratted on him about his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and Jim Bouton, the ballplayer whose behind-the-scenes book Ball Four tattled on the misbehavior of idols like Mickey Mantle. Leigh Brackett, who collaborated on the screenplay for Bogart's The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), is the credited screenwriter, and apparently did shape the plot for Altman, but the dialogue has that off-the-cuff, on-the-set character of most of the director's films. John Williams's title theme, sometimes with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, is wittily deployed throughout the movie, as doorbell chimes or supermarket Muzak, and in various arrangements, including one for the municipal band of the Mexican town of Tepotzlan.

Filmstruck

Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Tsuyoshi Kinoshita and Tetsuo Abe in Boy

Toshio Omura: Tetsuo Abe
Takeo Omura: Fumio Watanabe
Takeko Taniguchi: Akiko Koyama
Peewee: Tsuyoshi Kinoshita

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura
Cinematography: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

We meet the 10-year-old title character of Nagisa Oshima's Boy when he's playing hide-and-seek with imaginary friends -- the only kind he'll make in the course of the film -- around a war memorial. We don't even learn his name, Toshio, until the end of the film: His family simply refers to him as "the boy." They are on the down and out in increasingly prosperous Japan: The father, Takeo, is a disabled veteran who has married for a second time and fathered a child, known as "Peewee," with Toshio's stepmother, Takeko. They have cut off ties with their extended family, and when Toshio mentions his grandparents he's told they don't want to see them. They make a living by fraud: Takeko runs into the street to fake being hit by cars, and Takeo bullies the motorists into paying him off instead of calling the police. At a certain point, the parents realize that drivers would be even more willing to pay up if they think they've hit a child, and Toshio agrees to become the pretend victim. They travel around Japan to avoid detection -- too many incidents in one location would cause the police to get wise -- and Oshima's film takes us on this unsentimental journey, going as far as the northernmost point of the country in Hokkaido. The parents squabble constantly, especially when Takeko gets pregnant and decides not to have an abortion, all of which begins to take its toll on Toshio. He runs away several times, always to return: His stepmother gives him cash, to his father's annoyance, so once he tries to buy a ticket to where his grandparents live, but finding himself short of cash he goes only partway, then play-acts a meeting with them before returning to his family. Oshima directs this story, drawn from an actual case of an accident-faking family, with as much detachment as he can muster, but the pathos is inherent to the story, especially since the point of view is that of Toshio. A young non-professional, recruited for the film from an orphanage, Tetsuo Abe gives a remarkable performance, maintaining a precocious stoicism through the worst experiences, but also revealing that there is still a child behind that persona.

Turner Classic Movies

Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends

Franz Biberkopf: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Eugen Thiess: Peter Chatel
Max: Karlheinz Böhm
Philip: Harry Baer
Hedwig: Christiane Maybach
Wolf Thiess: Adrian Hoven
Eugen's Mother: Ulla Jacobsson

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Hohoff
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

I have a feeling that Fox and His Friends seems much less exotic or sensational to viewers today than it did in the mid-1970s, given the steady movement of depictions of gay men into mainstream entertainment culture. At the time it created outrage, not just from defenders of the heterosexual norm but also from the gay community, which found much of it distorted and unflattering. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story is not about being gay, it's about being exploited, about mistaking predation for love. Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf, known as "Fox" from his gig as "Fox the Talking Head" in a sleazy carnival act, is a classic naïf who is taken for all he's worth -- which is the 500,000 Deutschmarks (a bit under $125,000 in the day) he won in the lottery. Fassbinder the director doesn't make it clear that the well-dressed guys Franz meets after one of them, Max, picks him up outside a public lavatory, are intentionally trying to fleece him, until Eugen, whose father's printing business is in financial trouble, sees a way to persuade Franz to rescue the company with a sizable investment and promises of part ownership of the firm. It could be, of course, that Eugen just gets a kick out of sleeping with the working class Franz. But he throws over his current lover, Philip, and takes the rough-hewn, slightly homely Franz into his home and bed. Is Eugen telling the truth when he tells Franz that he's being kicked out of his apartment for being gay? It would be entirely plausible in the day and time. Or is it a lie that gives Eugen an opportunity to persuade Franz to buy a posh new apartment, and to furnish it with opulent antiques from Max's shop. And to go along with Franz's new image as a haute bourgeois businessman, he of course needs new clothes from Philip's fashionable shop. None of this exploitation feels premeditated except in hindsight, as Franz becomes Eliza Doolittle to Eugen's Henry Higgins -- though with less overt success. The resulting film is a superb tragicomedy, one of Fassbinder's best films, I think. Fassbinder turns out to be as good an actor as he is a writer and director, giving Franz just the right blend of naïveté and street smarts. I think the ending of the film is a shade heavy-handed, but the rest of it is full of extraordinary satiric moments: The horrifying scene in which Eugen brings Franz to dinner with his parents. The vacation in Morocco, where the man* Eugen and Franz pick up on the streets is refused entrance to the Holiday Inn Marrakech -- though wouldn't a pretentious bourgeois like Eugen have chosen a tonier hotel? -- because it doesn't admit Arabs. (The employee refusing the entrance, himself an Arab, suggests that if they want boys, he could provide some from the hotel staff.) And the moment of truth in which Franz realizes he's been conned is shattering. Michael Ballhaus's vivid color cinematography is complemented by Kurt Raab's production design, especially in the garishly overdressed apartment which includes a chandelier hanging so low that guests have to walk around it, that Eugen puts together with the most expensive pieces from Max's antique shop. Only after Eugen and Franz break up does Eugen reveal that he hates the place: He has clearly condescended to what he thinks an uncouth working class guy would think is the height of fashion.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

*Played by El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), who had been deported to Morocco after a bar fight in Germany. Brigitte Mira, ben Salem's co-star in that film, also has a cameo as the shopkeeper who originally denies Franz admittance to her store to validate his lottery ticket until the suave Max flatters her into it.

Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Cruel Story of Youth

Makoto: Miyuki Kuwano
Kiyoshi: Yusuke Kawazu
Yuki: Yoshiko Kuga
Dr. Akimoto: Fumio Watanabe
Horio: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Music: Riichiro Manabe

In addition to the shamelessly exploitative title Naked Youth, Cruel Story of Youth has also been released as A Story of the Cruelties of Youth. So is it the story that's cruel or the youth in it? Those who know Japanese can probably tell me which is closer to the original title, Seishun Zankoku Monogotari, but I suspect the ambiguity is intentional. It's a cruel story about cruel young people, with the usual implication that society -- postwar, consumerist, America-influenced Japan -- is to blame for the cruelties inflicted upon and by them. With its hot pops of color and unsparing widescreen closeups, the film puts us uncomfortably close to its young protagonists, Makoto and Kiyoshi. Makoto is just barely out of adolescence -- Miyuki Kuwano was 18 when the film was made -- but carelessly determined to grow up fast. She hangs out in bars and cadges rides with middle-aged salarymen until the night when one of them decides to take her to a hotel instead of her home. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. But a young passerby intervenes and beats the man, threatening to take him to the police until the man hands over a walletful of money. The next day, Makoto and her rescuer, Kiyoshi, meet up to spend the money together. He's just a bit older -- Yusuke Kawazu was 25, three years younger than the film's director, Nagisa Oshima -- and over the course of their day together on a river he slaps her around, pushes her into the water and taunts her when she can't swim, and seduces her with his mockery of her inquisitiveness about sex. When he doesn't call her again, she seeks him out and they become lovers. They also become criminals: She goes back to her game of hooking rides with salarymen and he follows them, choosing a moment when the men start to get handsy with Makoto -- sometimes she provokes them to do so -- to beat and rob them. Naturally, things don't get better from here on out, especially after Makoto gets pregnant. We can object to the film's sentimental attempt to redeem Kiyoshi, who starts out as an abusive young thug but is transformed by love, and there's some awkward coincidence plotting, like an abortionist who turns out to be Makoto's sister's old boyfriend. But Oshima's portrait of a lost generation has some of the power of the American films that inspired it, Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), as well as the French New Wave films about the anomie of the young by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. It was only Oshima's second feature, but it signaled the start of a major career.

Turner Classic Movies