The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes

Boris Lermontov: Anton Walbrook
Vicky Page: Moira Shearer
Julian Craster: Marius Goring
Boleslawsky: Robert Helpmann
Ljubov: Léonide Massine
Boronskaja: Ludmilla Tchérina
Livy: Esmond Knight
Ratov: Albert Bassermann
Prof. Palmer: Austin Trevor
Lady Neston: Irene Browne

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Screenplay: Emeric Pressburger, Keith Winter, Michael Powell
Based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen
Cinematography: Jack Cardiff
Production design: Hein Heckroth
Film editing: Reginald Mills
Music: Brian Easdale
Costume design: Hein Heckroth

In its digital restoration, The Red Shoes almost certainly looks better than it ever did even in the most optimal theatrical showing, its colors brighter and sharper, its darks deeper and more detailed. But is that necessarily a good thing? I'm not like one of those audiophiles who insist that old vinyl LPs sound better than CDs or any digital audio process -- I like being able to hear things without surface pops and skips. But I do think that in the case of a film like The Red Shoes, where suspension of disbelief is essential, something has been lost. The great red snood of Moira Shearer's hair is revealed to be a thing of individual strands that might have benefited from a quick brushing before her closeups. The special-effects moments, like Vicky's leap into the red shoes or Boleslawsky's transformation into the newspaper man, are more glaringly just rudimentary jump cuts. There's a loss of glamour and magic that hasn't been compensated for, even though we can now see Jack Cardiff's photography of Hein Heckroth's designs with greater clarity. I will also admit that I have never been in the front ranks of the fans of The Red Shoes. While I admire the storytelling ability of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, I have to question the moral of the story, which seems to be that a woman can't have both a great career and a successful private life, or in a larger sense, that art is impossible without a loss of self. Granted, the story comes from the realm of fairytale, which is never without an element of cruelty, but is Vicky's suicide a necessary follow-through, or just a submission on the part of the screenwriters to the demands of some kind of closure, given that they've never made the character more than a stereotype: the woman torn between the demands of two men? Ravishing to the eye, The Red Shoes doesn't satisfy the mind or the heart.

Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986)

Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää in Shadows in Paradise

Nikander: Matti Pellonpää
Ilona Rajmäki: Kati Outinen
Melartin: Sakari Kousmanen
Co-worker: Esko Nikkari
Ilona's Girlfriend: Kylli Köngäs
Shop Steward: Pekka Laiho

Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography: Timo Salminen

Glumly smoking their lungs out, a garbage collector and a supermarket clerk embark on a ploddingly passionless relationship -- their first date, to her disgust, is at a bingo parlor -- in Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise. Don't look too hard for paradise: It's no more in evidence in Kaurismäki's film than in his friend Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), unless Talinn, the Estonian capital toward which the couple set sail on a Soviet liner at the end of the film, is their idea of heaven. It's hard to think of a film as both authentic and ironic, but Kaurismäki and his actors manage to make their characters both convincing and, in a very low-key way, funny. It took me a while, to be sure, to catch on to the tone of the film: I had never seen one of Kaurismäki's before, and coming cold to its gray Helsinki cityscape and its entirely unprepossessing leads -- Outinen and Pellonpää are by far the homeliest performers in the film -- I wasn't sure whether the twinges of mirth I felt at their solemn, dogged worldview was appropriate. For that matter, I'm still not sure --- which is one of the reasons I find the film so interesting.

Gods of the Plague (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague

Franz Walsch: Harry Baer
Joanna Reiher: Hanna Schygulla
Margarethe: Margarethe von Trotta
Günther: Günther Kaufmann
Carla Aulaulu: Carla Egerer
Magdalena Fuller: Ingrid Caven
Policeman: Jan George
Mother: Lilo Pempeit
Marian Walsch: Marian Seidowsky
Joe: Micha Cochina
Inspector: Yaak Karsunke
Supermarket Manager: Hannes Gromball

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production designer: Kurt Raab
Film editor: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Music: Peer Raben

The Rainer Werner Fassbinder stock company is one of the wonders of film, mixing up their roles throughout his movies in often amusing ways. This is the second film to feature Franz Walsch, a name Fassbinder took as his own sometimes -- including in the credits for Gods of the Plague, which list "Franz Walsch" as the film editor. In the first Franz Walsch feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), the character, a young hood, was played by the decidedly homely Fassbinder, but in this one he becomes the considerably more handsome Harry Baer, preening his luxuriant mustache. Franz is released from prison at the film's start, and he soon becomes involved with two women, Joanna (played once again by Hanna Schygulla) and Margarethe (Margarethe von Trotta, who would soon come into her own right as a director as well as actress). Like the earlier film, Gods of the Plague takes place in the rather inept underworld of Munich, in which Franz teams up with Günther, aka Gorilla, to pull off a supermarket robbery that's doomed to deadly failure. Also like Fassbinder's other early films, it's played with a deadpan, emotionless affect by all concerned, so that you sometimes have to laugh at the disconnect of situations, events, and relationships that would be shocking or horrifying in the real world but are treated as no big deal by the characters in the film. It was obviously inspired by the attempts at coolness essayed by the characters in the French New Wave, but even Godard's delinquents seemed to be having more fun than Fassbinder's do. A difference between being French and being German perhaps? The cast also features other members of the stock company such as Irm Hermann and Kurt Raab (who doubles as production designer) as well as Fassbinder in very small roles.

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in The Lady Vanishes

Iris Henderson: Margaret Lockwood
Gilbert: Michael Redgrave
Dr. Hartz: Paul Lukas
Miss Froy: May Whitty
Mr. Todhunter: Cecil Parker
"Mrs." Todhunter: Linden Travers
Caldicott: Naunton Wayne
Charters: Basil Radford
Baroness: Mary Clare
Hotel Manager: Emile Boreo
Blanche: Googie Withers
Julie: Sally Stewart
Signor Doppo: Philip Leaver
Signora Doppo: Selma Vaz Dias
The Nun: Catherine Lacy
Madame Kummer: Josephine Wilson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

There are those who think that Alfred Hitchcock never surpassed The Lady Vanishes when it comes to the romantic comedy thriller. From the opening sequence of an obviously miniature Eastern European village to the concluding scene in which Miss Froy delightedly reunites with Iris and Gilbert, it's an utterly engaging movie. If I happen to prefer North by Northwest (1959), it may be only because Cary Grant is a greater movie star than Michael Redgrave and James Mason a more suavely subtle villain than Paul Lukas, and of course the thrills -- the crop-dusting scene, the Mount Rushmore chase -- are done more deftly (not to say expensively) and with greater sophistication. Because virtually everything in The Lady Vanishes works: There's real chemistry between Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood; May Whitty is a delight as the geriatric spy; the notion of a song being the MacGuffin is witty; Caldicott and Charters are the perfect ambiguously gay duo; and there's a nun in high heels who pauses to fix her makeup. It also has a genuinely serious subtext: 1938 was a year fraught with tension, and when Caldicott and Charters are preoccupied with getting the news from England, our first thought is that it has to do something with the threat of war and not with a cricket test match. The satiric glances at the insular Brits are also underscored by the relationship of Todhunter and his mistress, escaping to a place where nobody knows them to conduct their affair, and even by Gilbert's blithe preoccupation with collecting information about the native folk dances of the Bandrikans, who might indeed be next after the Czechs to be swallowed up by the Third Reich. 

Yotsuya Kaidan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Ken Uehara and Kinuyo Tanaka in Yotsuya Kaidan

Oiwa/Osode: Kinuyo Tanaka
Iemon Tamiya: Ken Uehara
Naosuke: Osamu Takizawa
Kohei: Keiji Sada
Oume: Hisako Yamane
Yomoshichi: Jukichi Uno
Takuetsu: Aizo Tamashima
Kohei's Mother: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a play by Nanboku Tsuruya
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Yotsuya Kaidan is one of the most famous Japanese ghost stories, put in classic form in the kabuki drama written by Nanboku Tsuruya in 1825. But in adapting the tale of a ronin, a masterless samurai, pursued by the vengeful phantom of the wife he murdered, Keisuke Kinoshita and his screenwriters, Eijiro Hisaita and the uncredited Masaki Kobayashi, jettisoned the supernatural elements to turn it into a psychological drama with overtones of Shakespeare tragedy: the ambition of Macbeth and the jealousy of Othello, abetted by an Iago-like villain. The ronin of Kinoshita's film, Iemon Tamiya, was dismissed by his former master for failing to guard the storehouse from a thief; he now ekes out a living with his wife, Oiwa, making and selling umbrellas. But while drowning his sorrows in sake one evening, he is approached by Naosuke, who plants in him the idea of wooing the wealthy Oume, whose father has the connections that would enable him to find a master and restore his status as a samurai. Naosuke also plots with Kohei, with whom he served some jail time, to woo Oiwa, with whom Kohei has been infatuated since the days when she worked in a teahouse. Kohei's attentions to Oiwa arouse Iemon's jealousy, which Naosuke plays upon. As the prospect of marrying Oume becomes more likely, Iemon is given a poison to use on Oiwa, but he's initially reluctant to go that far. When Oiwa accidentally scalds her face, producing a horrible disfigurement, Naosuke provides an "ointment" that puts her in terrible pain and Iemon administers the poison. In the turmoil that follows Oiwa's death, Naosuke also kills Kohei. Freed to marry Oume, Iemon finds himself tormented by a guilty conscience, and when he learns that Naosuke was the one who robbed the storehouse that led to Iemon's dismissal by his former master, he turns on the conspirator. A fiery conclusion results. Kinoshita released the film in two parts, the first running for 85 minutes, the second for 73 minutes. Part I is more tightly controlled, efficiently introducing its characters -- there are lots of secondary ones, including Oiwa's sister, Osode (also played by Kinuyo Tanaka), and her husband, Yomoshichi, who provide a kind of grounding in normal life. Kinoshita is not as successful at marshaling all of the secondary plots in Part II, and I tend to blame the director's tendency to sentimentalize, including the search of Kohei's mother for her son, for the weaknesses in the later parts of the film. But he gives his characters depth -- there is more sympathy for Iemon in the film than in more traditional versions of the story, which has been filmed many times: Turner Classic Movies has Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 film version on its schedule later this month.

Number Seventeen (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)

Ann Casson and John Stuart in Number Seventeen

Barton: John Stuart
Ben: Leon M. Lion 

Nora Brant: Anne Grey 

Brant: Donald Calthrop 

Henry Doyle: Barry Jones 

Rose Ackroyd: Ann Casson

Mr. Ackroyd: Henry Caine 

Sheldrake: Garry Marsh 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock 

Screenplay: Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Ackland 

Based on a play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Bryan Langley 

For the first part of the film, a bunch of people stumble around a derelict house, and for the rest of it most of them get on a speeding train and scramble around in pursuit of a presumably valuable necklace. There's a woman who's supposed to be a deaf-mute but turns out not to be and a corpse that's supposed to be dead but isn't, along with a giddy ingenue who falls through the ceiling and a cockney derelict who is supposed to supply comic relief from the gun-waving and running about. He doesn't, but the actor who played him, Leon M. Lion, not only got top billing but also a credit as producer. In short, Number Seventeen is a total mess. That it's atmospherically staged and photographed and the runaway train sequence is exciting in a mindless way are the positive elements we can ascribe to Hitchcock, who really didn't want to do this film version of a popular play, but agreed to anyway, then tried to turn a play he thought filled with clichés into a comedy thriller. He later called it "a disaster," and he was right.  

The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)

Masuo Sakurada: Kenzo Kawaraski
Ritsuko Sakurada: Atsuko Kaku
Terumichi Tachibana: Atsuo Nakamura
Tadashi Sakurada: Kiyoshi Tsuchiya
Grandfather: Kei Sato
Setsuko Sakurada: Akiko Koyama
Shizu Sakurada: Nobuko Otowa

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima
Production design: Shigenori Shimoishizaka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

In his comments on The Ceremony in Have You Seen...? David Thomson makes an admission that perhaps I myself don't keep enough in mind: "I have seen enough Japanese films to know that, much as I admire that national cinema, it is based on precepts that are strange to me." But Thomson also makes an important point when he likens the family in The Ceremony to those in "Faulkner or Greek tragedy." We are distanced from the tortured family narrative in the film not only by cultural differences, but also by the larger-than-life mythic quality of the personalities and events. The transgressive sexuality -- the pervasive incest in the Sakurada family -- and the rigid adherence to tradition, which reaches its most absurd point when an elaborate wedding is conducted with the bride in absentia, are on one level satiric indictments of Japanese culture, but on another level are statements about human obsessions that transcend national boundaries. Sometimes Oshima's attempt at this kind of transcendent mythmaking bogs The Ceremony down a bit, and the performers don't always rise to the demands of the material, losing their grip on the humanity of their characters and bringing in a whiff of pretentiousness to the enterprise. But it's a fascinating film to watch -- and often to listen to, when Toru Takemitsu's spiky score appears.

Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Henry Kendall and Joan Barry in Rich and Strange

Fred Hill: Henry Kendall
Emily Hill: Joan Barry
Commander Gordon: Percy Marmont
The Princess: Betty Amann
The Old Maid: Elsie Randolph

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Val Valentine
Based on a novel by Dale Collins
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Charles Martin
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold
Music: Adolph Hallis

One of Alfred Hitchcock's early talkie flops, Rich and Strange begins well, with an opening shot of Fred Hill at work in an expressionist-style depersonalized office set, followed by a montage showing his attempt to make it home on the Underground, dealing with elbowing crowds and a recalcitrant umbrella. There's a nicely synched bit in which umbrellas open to musical flourishes before Fred's fizzles. Then it's home to a drab and chaotic existence before the Hills receive their wished-for deliverance from the daily muddle: A rich uncle tells Fred that he can have an advance on his inheritance so he and his wife, Emily, can live a little. They set off to see the world. This early part of the film is perhaps the best because it mostly picks up on the skills Hitchcock learned through his work in silent movies. In fact, it is shot through with droll title cards and very little dialogue of consequence. The Hills are overwhelmed by Paris and shocked at the Folies Bergère, then board ship -- not a promising moment for Fred, who succumbed to seasickness on the Channel crossing -- for a cruise on the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal toward Asia. (The American title was East of Shanghai.) And then the talk takes over, as both Fred and Emily have shipboard romances, she with a somewhat dashing bachelor on his way to Ceylon, he with a German "princess" who cons him out of his money. Rich and Strange is a curious mess, with Henry Kendall, a once-well-known music hall comedian, awkward in the romantic part of Fred's story. Joan Barry steps out in front of the camera behind which she was lurking to speak the lines for Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's  Blackmail (1929), but she's not much more than pretty.  Hitchcock liked the film, but nobody else did very much, and opinion doesn't seem to have changed with time.

The Young Rebels (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1980)

Tomisaburo Wakayama in The Young Rebels 

Journalist: Go Kato
Asakawa Senjo: Tomisaburo Wakayama
Takiko: Junko Mihara
Yukio: Tatsuya Okamoto
Orie: Tomoko Saito

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's polemical pseudo-documentary, The Young Rebels, sounds like that of a Hollywood film from the 1950s, the era of naive, sensational, and didactic dramas about "juvenile delinquency." Which is exactly what The Young Rebels turns out to be: an exploitation film about why kids go wrong. The answer is a simple one: their parents. The kids, Kinoshita is saying, are not all right: They ride around on motorcycles, they cut school, they shoplift, and they have sex. This was not exactly news in 1980: Nagisa Oshima, for example, was onto these facts in 1960, when he made Cruel Story of Youth, and he blamed it on dysfunctional parenting in 1969's Boy. But Oshima's films are about people more than they are about problems. Kinoshita has lost sight of the people in his obsession with the problem, and the result is a scattershot film designed to ferret out examples of parental irresponsibility both high -- affluent parents who are so obsessed with climbing the corporate or social ladders that they either ignore their children or spoil them -- and low -- parents who are so mired in poverty and its attendant ills like alcoholism and crime that they abuse their children. The narrative framework of the film is as simplistic as its point of view: a journalist goes in search of answers and interviews children and parents. Kinoshita is enough of an artist that he knows how to tell the several stories uncovered by the journalist, which gives The Young Rebels enough dramatic substance to keep the polemic at bay during the storytelling, but the piling on of miseries turns into overkill. Eventually, the journalist visits a kind of reform school in Hokkaido, the north of Japan, where wayward boys are nurtured back into society -- but there's even some recidivism there. At the end, the point seems to be that every kid needs a loving mother and father -- the Japanese title translates as a cry for help: "Father! Mother!" It has been pointed out that people raised children for millennia until, sometime in the mid-20th century, they became self-conscious about it and turned it into a problem. Kinoshita's humorless and even hopeless polemic does little to solve the problem, especially when the film often seems bogged down in fogeyism: A scene of joyriding motorcycle gangs, for example, is treated as a vision from hell.

The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Phyllis Konstam and Edward Chapman in The Skin Game

Mr. Hillcrist: C.V. France
Mrs. Hillcrist: Helen Haye
Jill Hillcrist: Jill Esmond
Mr. Hornblower: Edmund Gwenn
Charles Hornblower: John Longden
Chloe Hornblower: Phyllis Konstam
Rolf Hornblower: Frank Lawton
Dawker: Edward Chapman
Mr. Jackman: Herbert Ross
Mrs. Jackman: Dora Gregory
Auctioneer: Ronald Frankau

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville
Based on a play by John Galsworthy
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

Despite winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, John Galsworthy is one of those authors nobody reads much anymore, partly because his reputation was eclipsed by the great modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whom the Nobel committee overlooked. His series of novels that constitutes The Forsyte Saga came back in vogue for a while in 1967 and again in 2002 when they were adapted for British television, playing on that nostalgia for the good old days of the British class system that more recently made a hit of Downton Abbey. Class, especially the conflict of the landed aristocracy and the new-monied bourgeoisie, was his big theme, and he explored it not only in his novels but also in plays like The Skin Game, which was first performed in 1920 and immediately snapped up for a silent film adaptation. Hitchcock apparently saw the play and liked the idea of turning it into a talkie, wrote the screenplay with his wife, Alma, and even cast Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye in the roles they had played in the silent film. The problem is that Galsworthy forbade any deviation from the original plot and dialogue, leaving Hitchcock for the most part stagebound. There's occasionally some interesting camerawork, especially in the auction scene in which swish pans are used to build suspense during the competitive bidding over the property that the old-money Hillcrist wants to keep out of the hands of the self-made industrialist Hornblower. But too often Hitchcock reverts to stage tableaus -- some of them badly blocked -- that show off the melodramatic hamming of some of the actors, as well as some stilted dialogue carried over from the play. There's a long take in which Chloe Hornblower confronts Hillcrist's scheming agent, Dawker, that particularly exposes Phyllis Konstam's mannered acting. The plot hinges on Chloe's dark secret, which seems much ado about nothing today: that she once worked as a professional co-respondent in divorce cases before marrying Hornblower's son, Charles. But Hitchcock retains Galsworthy's ambivalence about his characters, making neither Hillcrist not Hornblower purely admirable or villainous. We dislike Hornblower for his callous treatment of some old tenants of Hillcrist's after he buys property from the squire and for his willingness to despoil the land with his factories, but we also have to condemn Hillcrist's snobbery and his readiness to drag Chloe Hornblower's name through the mud. As he often did, Galsworthy put his faith in the younger generation, Hornblower's son Rolf and Hillcrist's daughter, Jill, who seem fated to bring both houses together, but Hitchcock doesn't quite give these characters room enough in the film version to make that point. He later told François Truffaut that he "didn't make [The Skin Game] by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it," but as so often, Hitchcock was fiddling with the truth. It's not one of his better films, hindered as he was by Galsworthy's restrictions, but there's some meat on it.