Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, and Norihiko Hashida in Three Resurrected Drunkards

Beanpole: Kazuhiko Kato
The Small One: Osamu Kitayama
The Smallest One: Norihiko Hashida
I Chong-il: Kei Sato
Kim Fwa: Cha Dei-dang
The Middle-aged Man: Fumio Watanabe
The Young Woman: Mako Midori

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Nagisa Oshima's attempts to unsettle his audiences usually took the form of serious explorations of social dysfunction like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Boy (1969), and The Ceremony (1971) or sexually provocative films like In the Realm of the Senses (1976), but Three Resurrected Drunkards plays more like A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) than any of those often grim and brutal excursions into the dark side of contemporary Japanese life. It begins with three young men larking about at the beach, accompanied by a giddy Japanese pop song. When their clothes are stolen and replaced with others, the film goes off into  a series of mostly comic mishaps. But there's a dark side to their larking about from the beginning: One of their gags is an attempt to restage the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a South Vietnam general pointing a gun at the head of a grimacing Viet Cong prisoner. They take turns playing the general and the victim as the third critiques the grimace on the face of the one playing the victim. It turns out that the clothes thieves are South Koreans who are trying to sneak into Japan to avoid military service in Vietnam. The Koreans have a gun, with which they threaten the three young Japanese. Along the way, they also get involved with a young woman and an abusive older man who may or may not be her husband. At one point, the film simply stops and starts over at the beginning, but this time the characters know what happened in the first part and are able to change things around. It's all a fascinating blend of rock movie high jinks and serious social commentary: Oshima is satirizing the Japanese prejudice against Koreans, among other things. Some of the satire is lost on contemporary audiences, especially in the West, but Three Resurrected Drunkards is a fascinating glimpse into its director's imagination and political indignation.

Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Mrs. de Winter: Joan Fontaine
Maxim de Winter: Laurence Olivier
Mrs. Danvers: Judith Anderson
Jack Favell: George Sanders
Frank Crawley: Reginald Denny
Major Giles Lacy: Nigel Bruce
Colonel Julyan: C. Aubrey Smith
Beatrice Lacy: Gladys Cooper
Mrs. Van Hopper: Florence Bates
Coroner: Melville Cooper
Dr. Baker: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan
Based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, William Cameron Menzies
Music: Franz Waxman

Rebecca is a very good movie. Would it have been a better one if Alfred Hitchcock, directing his first American film, had been left alone by the producer, David O. Selznick, an incurable micromanager? That's the question that lingers, especially since Hitchcock later expressed some dissatisfaction with the film. It does lack the director's sense of humor, manifested for example in the scene in which the horrid Mrs. Van Hopper snuffs a cigarette in a jar of cold cream, a gag Hitchcock liked so much that he used it again 15 years later in To Catch a Thief, in which the substitute ashtray is a fried egg. The differences between Hitchcock and Selznick largely lay in the realm of editing, in which Selznick loved to dabble, insisting that scenes be shot from various camera angles to give him latitude in the editing room. Hitchcock was a famous storyboarder, working out scenes and planning camera setups well in advance of the actual shooting -- "editing in the camera," as it's usually called. The story would probably also have been very different in the Hitchcock version: According to one source, the original version suggested by Hitchcock began on shipboard, with various people being seasick. Selznick, however, liked to stick closely to the novels on which he based his films: The opening title, for example, refers to the movie as a "picturization" of Daphne Du Maurier's bestseller. (This was doubtless a comfort to Du Maurier, who hated Hitchcock's version of her novel Jamaica Inn (1939) -- but then so did Hitchcock, and both of them were right to do so.) The glory of Rebecca lies mostly in its performances. Although Laurence Olivier never makes Maxim de Winter a fully credible character -- I think he felt he was slumming, doing the film only to be near Vivien Leigh, and disgusted when Selznick didn't cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter -- he was always a watchable actor, even when he wasn't doing a great job of it. Joan Fontaine is almost perfect in her role, making credible the crucial character switch, when she stops being shy and stands up to Mrs. Danvers. And Hitchcock must have loved working with the gaggle of British character actors who had flocked to Hollywood and populate all the supporting roles.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)

Batisti: Luigi Ornagi
Batistina: Francesca Morigi
Minec: Omar Brignoli
The Widow Runk: Teresa Brescianini
Anselmo: Giuseppe Brignoli
Maddalena: Lucia Pezzoli
Stefano: Franco Pilenga
Finard: Battista Travaini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Ermanno Olmi
Production design: Enrico Tovaglieri
Costume design: Francesca Zucchelli

Watching almost any three-hour movie is going to be an immersive experience, but The Tree of Wooden Clogs is exceptionally so, given that it was written, directed, and beautifully photographed by Ermanno Olmi as a kind of tribute to the endurance of the people of the province of Bergamo in Northern Italy, the region Olmi came from. I compare filmmakers to Faulkner perhaps too often, but once again it seems to fit: Bergamo is Olmi's Jefferson, Mississippi -- a place where the past weighs heavy and the people have learned to endure. The film is set in Bergamo at the end of the 19th century, when a kind of feudalism still reigned: The people of The Tree of Wooden Clogs are tenant farmers, struggling to survive on a third of the produce and animals they raise, the rest of it going to the landowner who supplies them housing -- an old ramshackle building where four families live. In one apartment the bedroom, in which a woman gives birth during the film, is in a sort of attic reached only by a ladder. They are kept going by a deep piety, a constant invocation of the Holy Trinity and the saints. Political protest is something that takes place far away, and we glimpse it only when a newlywed couple makes a journey to Milan, where they spend their wedding night in an orphanage run by nuns and in the morning return to Bergamo with the year-old infant they have adopted, in part because the stipend that pays for his support will supplement the man's farm labor and the wife's work in a small mill. Their path to the orphanage is blocked briefly by troops battling with protesters. A Marxist orator also gives a speech at the local carnival, but he's mainly ignored by the people having fun. Critics attacked Olmi for not being political enough, but it's clear that one function of his film is to stir anger at human exploitation: The title comes from one of the episodes in the film, in which Minec, the young son of Batisti and Batistina, breaks the wooden clog that he wears on his daily eight-mile walk to and from school. Batisti, in desperation, chops down a tree and carves new clogs from the wood, but when the landlord finds out, the family is sent packing. Olmi's vision is steady and only occasionally slips into sentimentality, and his non-professional cast, made up of residents of Bergamo, is flawless.

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations. 

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in Shame

Eva Rosenberg: Liv Ullmann
Jan Rosenberg: Max von Sydow
Jacobi: Gunnar Björnstrand
Mrs. Jacobi: Brigitta Valberg
Filip: Sigge Fürst
Lobelius: Hans Alfredson

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editor: Ulla Ryghe

One of Ingmar Bergman's bleakest and best films, Shame is unencumbered by the theological agon that makes many of his films tiresome (not to say irrelevant) for some of us. It's a fable about a couple, Eva and Jan, two musicians seeking to escape from a devastating war by exiling themselves to an island. At the start of the film their life is almost idyllic: Their radio and telephone don't work, so they remain in blissful ignorance of the problems of the world outside. He's a bit scattered and idle; she's practical and businesslike. They quarrel a little over their temperamental differences, but they have developed a self-sustaining life, raising chickens and cultivating vegetables in their greenhouse. But needless to say, no couple is an island: The war comes to them. When they take the ferry into town, selling crates of berries and stopping to drink wine with a friend who has just been drafted, they begin to be aware that the larger conflict will not remain at a distance for long. There will be no retreat for them into the simple life. Under the pressure of war, their relationship changes: Eva becomes more careless, Jan loses his passivity. In the end, desperate to flee the despoiled island, they join a group on a fishing boat heading for the mainland only to wind up in a dead calm -- a literal one, for they are stuck in a sea filled with corpses, an image that, because so much of the film is straightforward in narrative and imagery, manages to avoid the heavy-handedness that often afflicts Bergman's films. There is also, for Bergman, a surprising lack of specificity about the war in the film: There are no direct allusions to particular wars, such as World War II, the one that raged in his childhood, or to the war of the day in Vietnam -- there are no images of burning monks as in Persona (1966). The war of the film is generic -- soldiers, planes, trucks, and tanks lack insignia and the names and nationalities of the two sides are never mentioned. It's as if war is an ongoing condition of the human race.

Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)

Turo Pajala in Ariel

Taisto Kasurinen: Turo Pajala
Irmeli Pihlaja: Susanna Haavisto
Mikkonen: Matti Pellonpää
Riku: Eetu Rikamo
Miner: Erkki Pajala
Mugger: Matti Jaaranen

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

As in Shadows in Paradise (1986), another of Aki Kaurismäki's impassive, expressionless couples sets sail at the end of Ariel, this time on the ship that gives the film its title. (If you know Kaurismäki's films, you surely weren't expecting any airy Shakespearean sprites from him?) When the mine at which Taisto and his father work shuts down, the father hands to keys to his Cadillac convertible to Taisto, then goes into the men's room and shoots himself. Taisto stoically gets in the car and drives to Helsinki to look for work, despite the fact that it's winter in Finland and he can't get the top to go up. (This problem persists throughout the film, leading Irmeli's small son to comment, "Nice wind," as they're speeding along the highway. It's resolved only toward the end of the film when Mikkonen asks, at a particularly inappropriate moment, "What's this button for?" and presto!) It's odd to use the word "charming" about a movie so grim in its setting and the plight of its characters, and that involves suicide, murder, various beatings, and prison time, but that's the nature of Kaurismäki's filmmaking: There are moments of dark delight scattered throughout, such as the fact that the fob on which the keys to the Cadillac are hung is the inner workings of a music box, and the tune it plays is the socialist anthem "The Internationale." Music is used wittily throughout the film, including various pop songs, and as the Ariel sails away to Mexico at the end, we hear "Over the Rainbow," sung in Finnish. There is something Faulknerian about Kaurismäki's determination to inject humor into even the grimmest of situations.

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.