War and Peace (Sergey Bondarchuk, 1966)

Pierre Bezukhov: Sergey Bondarchuk
Natasha Rostova: Lyudmila Saveleva
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky: Vyacheslav Tikhonov
Field Marshal Kutuzov: Boris Zakhava
Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky: Anatoli Ktorov
Princess Maria Bolkonsky: Antonina Shuranova
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov: Viktor Stanitsyn
Countess Natalya Rostova: Kira Golovko
Nikolai Rostov: Oleg Tabakov
Petya Rostov: Sergei Yermilov
Hélène Kuragin: Irina Skobtseva
Anatol Kuragin: Vasili Lanovoy
Napoleon Bonaparte: Vladislav Strzhelchik

Director: Sergey Bondarchuk
Screenplay: Sergey Bondarchuk, Vasiliy Solovyov
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Yu-Lan Chen, Anatoliy Petritskiy, Alexsandr Shelenkov
Production design: Mikhail Bogdanov, Aleksandr Dikhtyar, Said Menyalshchikov, Gennady Myasnikov
Film editing: Tatyana Likachyova
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

No film adaptation of a great novel is going to satisfy admirers of that novel. The best we can hope for is a work that stands on its own, that supplies cinematic equivalents for some of the achievements of the prose work. But War and Peace, with its epic battles and accounts of the social lives and romantic entanglements of 19th-century Russians, cries out for filming on the grand and glamorous scale. And few films have assumed a grander scale than Sergey Bondarchuk's seven-hour-long version of Tolstoy's novel. I saw it in a theater in Dallas, where it was shown in four installments, sometime in the early 1970s and have never quite forgotten it, particularly those moments when the camera soared away from the heat of the battle into what seemed like the high heavens, or when it sailed above the dancers at Natasha's first ball. But I've read the novel several times, the latest reading a couple of months ago, and the best I can say, watching Bondarchuk's film again, is that his version is a magnificent failure. We get great gulps of the source material, sometimes in voiceover narration, and the performers are apt embodiments of the characters I see in my mind's eye as I read the book. But no film can capture the interiority of the novel, the psychological insights that make Prince Andrei, Natasha, and especially Pierre into people we feel like we know. Bondarchuk tries to supply some of this with voiceovers in which the characters speak their inner thoughts, but only succeeds in blurring the focus: The voiceovers are distractions from the drama that should be unfolding through action and dialogue. That said, watching the film over four successive nights is a unique experience.

Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

The longest of the four parts of War and Peace, Andrei Bolkonsky is the expository vehicle, introducing the three major characters, though it gives the lion's share of exposition to the two men, Andrei and Pierre. Natasha, still a little girl, virtually bursts into the film when she flings open a door in a brilliant flash of light, but the narrative concentration is on the youthful indecision of Pierre and on Andrei's unhappy marriage. Why he's so unhappy with the pretty, pregnant Lise is never made clear in the film -- and not much clearer in the book, other than that he's a man who hasn't found a direction in his life. Neither has Pierre, to be sure. He's still spending his time with boisterous companions. Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Bondarchuk are too old to be playing these characters -- Tikhonov was in his late 30s and Bondarchuk in his mid-40s -- but the war and the death of Andrei's wife allow Tikhonov to assume maturity swiftly, whereas Bondarchuk is stuck playing the naïf, railroaded into marriage with Hélène and later into a foolish duel with Dolokhov.

Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva and Vyacheslav Tikhonov in War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva is an exquisite Natasha, but I think Bondarchuk does the character a disservice by not allowing her more time to fall into the clutches of Kuragin. Tolstoy's novel delineates the gradual stages of Kuragin's seduction and Natasha's yielding to him. It also makes more clear that Kuragin really does fall in love with her -- as who wouldn't? The ball is the spectacular set piece of the installment, and the camera dances along with the people. Andrei's father is of course the real villain of the story, and I wish we had more of the torture he inflicts on his daughter, Maria, and on her retreat into religion to bolster the depiction of the old man's cruelty. But as Bondarchuk has chosen to eliminate the very interesting (but not essential) story of Nikolai Rostov's throwing over his cousin Sonya for Maria, there doesn't really need to be much development of the character. Too bad, because Antonina Shuranova does a fine job with what's left of Maria in the film -- like Tolstoy's Maria, she really does have beautiful eyes, but unlike her, she could never be considered "ugly." Bondarchuk has also cut, perhaps wisely, Pierre's involvement with the Freemasons, which takes up many of the less interesting pages of Tolstoy's book.

Part III: The Year 1812

Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

There are no more spectacular battle scenes than the ones in this film, and probably never will be, even now that we have CGI to supplant the thousands of extras and borrowed Soviet soldiers that Bondarchuk employed for the film. I think the thunder and carnage of war is made more impressive by the presence of Pierre, immaculately garbed, with a white top hat, absurdly stumbling around as the soldiers go about their terrible business. As the narrator puts it, "On June 12, the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontiers of Russia and war began. In other words, an event took place that was contrary to all human reason and human nature." Bondarchuk pulls out all stops in proclaiming the love of Mother Russia that animates the soldiers, but when the icon of the Holy Mother of Smolensk is brought out for mass adoration, I was ironically reminded of the scene in Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929) in which a procession of Orthodox clergy comes out to pray for rain and is mocked by cuts to images of bleating sheep. Clearly, much had changed in the treatment of religion in the Soviet Union by the time Bondarchuk made War and Peace. This part does end on a rather heavy-handed patriotic sermon, which I suspect may have been inserted to placate the censors.

Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

There is something rushed and jumbled about the concluding part of Bondarchuk's epic, which is forced to wind up the stories of Andrei and Natasha as well as concentrate on the burning of Moscow, the retreat of the French, and Pierre's imprisonment and release. This leaves little time for Tolstoy's epilogue, in which Pierre and Natasha wed and start a family, as do the mostly absent Nikolai and Maria. The coincidence of Pierre's rescue and Petya's death feels particularly rushed: I wonder if anyone who hasn't read the book recently will even be able to follow the action. But we are also spared much of the interaction of Pierre and Platon Karataev (Mikhail Khrabrov), one of Tolstoy's founts of peasant wisdom, which even on the page tends toward mawkish sentimentality. There are still some enormously effective scenes. The burning of Moscow puts the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) to shame -- which may have been Bondarchuk's intent. The execution of prisoners by the French is movingly staged, as is the fate of the retreating French soldiers, summed up on one last spectacular overhead shot as the ragged and freezing French stream toward a huge circle around the fire.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945-46)

Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Nikolay Cherkasov in the color sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part II

Czar Ivan IV: Nikolay Cherkasov
Czarina Anastasia Romanovna: Lyudmila Tselikovskaya
Boyarina Ephrosinia Staritskaya: Serafima Birman
Prince Andrei Kurbsky: Mikhail Nazvanov
Czar's Guard Malyuta Skiratov: Mikhail Zharov
Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov: Amvrosi Buchma
Fyodor Basmanov: Mikhail Kuznetsov
Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky: Pavel Kadochnikov
Boyar Fyodor Kolychev/Archbishop Philip: Andrei Abrikasov
Nikolay the Fanatic: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pyotr Volynets: Vladimir Balashov
Archbishop Pimen: Aleksandr Mgebrov
Sigismond, King of Poland: Pavel Massalsky

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein
Cinematography: Andrei Moskvin, Eduard Tisse
Production design: Iosif Shpinel, Sergei Eisenstein
Costume design: Leonid Naumov, M. Safonova
Music: Sergei Prokofiev

David Thomson has made a suggestion that a better film epic could be made of the life of Sergei Eisenstein than the one that was made about the life of John Reed -- i.e., Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). In fact, Eisenstein's life was so crowded with artistic and political drama that it would probably have to be an HBO miniseries like Game of Thrones (which is not a bad subtitle for Ivan the Terrible, come to think of it). The drama surrounding Ivan the Terrible alone would be enough for a whole season's episode, with Eisenstein struggling to bring his proposed three-installment film about Stalin's favorite czar to the screen while at the same time dealing with the lethal whims of the dictator himself. After Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released to great acclaim in 1945, including a Stalin Prize from the hands of the man himself, Stalin soured on the project: The mad frenzy of Ivan in Part II cut too close to the bone and it was not released until 1958 -- five years after Stalin's death and ten years after Eisenstein's. Part III had begun filming but was canceled, and what existed of it, except for some stills and scraps, was destroyed. After all this Sturm und Drang, it would be nice to conclude, as some critics have done, that Ivan the Terrible is one of the masterpieces of world cinema. But I can't go that far. It seems to me a great directorial folly, akin to Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) in its directorial excesses, its indulgence in style for style's sake. That the style is immensely entertaining in its artistic wrong-headedness pushes Ivan the Terrible in the direction of camp, a world's fair exhibition of stained-glass attitudes, early silent film poses, great garish sets, costumes that make even the hairiest 16th-century Russians look like drag queens, and in Part II there's a sequence in the most lurid color this side of some of the ballet sequences in MGM musicals of the 1950s. The first time we see Sigismond, the king of Poland, in Part II, he's sprawled across the throne in a position that almost screams for a sign proclaiming "Careless Decadence,"  and really looks extremely uncomfortable. Ivan's enemy, Archbishop Philip, swans about in a billowing cloak that has no known sartorial or clerical necessity, and which allows Ivan to forestall his exit by simply placing a foot on it. When Philip does manage to leave, the cloak raises a cloud of dust that suggests Ivan needs to liquidate the housekeeping staff. The collection of poses in Ivan the Terrible is balletic and operatic in the worst senses of the words, but the film is also watchable for all those reasons. There are some redeeming values, of course. It's a window into the mind of the Stalinist Soviet Union, both in what it approved and what it banned. It has a distinguished score by Prokofiev, though unfortunately muddied by poor sound reproduction -- in restoring the film, it's too bad that as much attention wasn't paid to providing a new music soundtrack as to cleaning up the images. Visually, it's fascinating, even when the visuals are absurd.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Vera Miles, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quayle in The Wrong Man

Manny Balestrero: Henry Fonda
Rose Balestrero: Vera Miles
Frank D. O'Connor: Anthony Quayle
Det. Lt. Bowers: Harold J. Stone
Det. Matthews: Charles Cooper
Tomasini: John Heldabrand
Mama Balestrero: Esther Minciotti

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Paul Sylbert
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock's docudrama The Wrong Man is not so anomalous in his career as his rather portentous backlit introduction suggests: It may be based on an incident about a real Manny Balestrero, but there are lots of wrongly accused men in his movies, and this time he simply landed on one who happened to be an actual person. And Hitchcock's gravitation to the theme of undeserved punishment and consequent mental anguish (in this case Rose Balestrero's) was something we could expect from him if we knew of the trauma caused by the notorious childhood incident in which his domineering father had the local constabulary lock young Alfred in a jail cell for five minutes. The lesson learned was less "be a good boy" than "fear the cops," who loom large in many of his films. But the real novelty of The Wrong Man is its tone: There's virtually no leavening of gloom in the film by the usual Hitchcockian humor. Only at the very ending, when we are assured that Manny and Rose and the kids moved to Florida and lived happily ever after, is there any attempt to mitigate the rather oppressive quality of the black-and-white, location-shot tale of the struggling Balestreros. And anyone who knows much about the difficulty of "curing" depression, which Rose suffers from, is likely to feel a little skeptical about that. That said, it's a very good film, making especially fine use of Henry Fonda -- his only appearance for Hitchcock -- whose naturally haunted look is a perfect fit for the victimized Balestrero. Vera Miles, whom Hitchcock was grooming as a replacement for Grace Kelly after her recent elevation to Princess of Monaco, gives a convincing performance as Rose, managing to suggest that her depression was in the cards even before Manny's arrest. The realism of the Balestreros' financial struggle is also well-handled, as is the climactic revelation of the "right" man, accomplished by a double exposure in which he walks into and fills the image of Balestrero in closeup. For me, the other only false note besides the oversimplified happy ending is the invocation of religion as a cure to Manny's dilemma: Mama Balestrero's urging him to pray for strength and his gaze at a rather kitsch picture of Jesus is too swiftly followed by his deliverance. It turns a serious emotional and spiritual struggle into a cliché as old as the movies. The Wrong Man has been favorably compared to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), a distinction I don't think it quite merits, but then what film does?

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging

R.: Do-yun Yu
Warden: Kei Sato
Education Officer: Fumio Watanabe
District Attorney: Hosei Kamatsu
Doctor: Rokko Toura
Chaplain: Ishiro Ishida
Chief of Guards: Masao Adachi
Sister: Akiko Koyama
Narrator: Nagisa Oshima

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

It's becoming clearer to me that Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Ozu often know little about him. Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque." 

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)

Han Ying-jie (center) in A Touch of Zen

Yang Hui-zhen: Hsu Feng
Gu Sheng-tsai: Shih Chun
General Shi Wen-qiao: Bai Ying
General Lu Ding-an: Xue Han
Abbot Hui-yuan: Roy Chiao
Ouyang Nian: Tien Peng
Sheng-tsai's mother: Zhang Bing-yu
Men Da: Wang Rui
Chief Commander Xu Xian-chun: Han Ying-jie

Director: King Hu
Screenplay: King Hu
Based on a story by Songling Pu
Cinematography: Hua Hui-ying

I'm not an expert on or even a devotee of Asian martial arts films (wuxia), so I come to A Touch of Zen with more than a touch of naïveté. It's a celebrated film for its elevation of the genre into the realm of art, and that part of it I can appreciate, even as it often baffled and sometimes irritated me: Why did the battle with the "ghosts" have to be shot in the dark? Its sometimes oblique narrative puzzled me: The first two characters we meet are the scholar-artist Gu and his mysterious customer, Ouyang Nian, and I felt a bit lost when Ouyang turned out to be a bad guy and Gu's reticent neighbor Yang Hui-zhen became the protagonist, as well as Gu's lover (after declining the marriage proposal Gu's mother insists on). But we're clearly working with a director-screenwriter who wants to keep us off-balance, and succeeds. Best, I realized, not to attempt to unravel the plot but to pay attention to the gorgeous and often exciting images that King Hu gives us -- the more than three-hour length of his epic flies by if you do that. The mixture of martial arts and religious philosophy is something the skeptic in me can only gaze at disinterestedly, so the ending, with the dying abbot bleeding gold, eludes any attempt I might make to find coherence with the political struggles that inform most of the film's action. But perhaps if I educate myself better in wuxia, I'll come to a fuller appreciation of why A Touch of Zen is so widely and enthusiastically admired. 

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, and Benoît Magimel in The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut: Isabelle Huppert
Mother: Annie Girardot
Walter Klemmer: Benoît Magimel
Anna Schober: Anna Sigalevitch
Mrs. Schober: Susanne Lothar
George Blonskij: Udo Samel
Gerda Blonskij: Cornelia Köndgen

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke '
Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Cinematography: Christian Berger

Michael Haneke's cinema of cruelty reaches its apex (some would say nadir) in The Piano Teacher, which becomes an almost definitive vehicle for Isabelle Huppert's ability to create terrifying women. In that regard her performance surpasses even the murderously manipulative Jeanne in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995). The Piano Teacher's Erika Kohut calls to mind the masochistic Michèle Leblanc in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), which earned Huppert the Oscar nomination that should have gone to her for those earlier films. The Piano Teacher resembles Elle in that both Erika and Michèle are masochists, the product of horribly dysfunctional families: Michèle's father was a mass murderer, Erika's died in a mental institution. But Erika is the more intricately fascinating character because she is devoted to the beauty of her art, releasing her pent-up sexuality in private acts of self-mutilation, watching pornography, and voyeurism -- there are drive-in movie theaters in Vienna? who knew? -- whereas Michèle has channeled hers into creating video games full of violent images. It's the disconnect between the beauty of Schubert and Schumann and Bach that fills the film's soundtrack and the ugliness of Erika's desire for self-degradation that gives Haneke's film its essential tension. To be sure, she takes out her frustrations on her students, cruelly mocking them in her attempts to make them live up to her musical ideals, but it's only when she finds a man who can challenge her own desire to dominate that she approaches fulfillment. Walter Klemmer is younger than she; he's handsome and athletic and smart, and he has the kind of musical talent that potentially matches her own. The masochist thinks she has met her potentially equal sadist. It's in her attempts to convert Walter's otherwise conventional sexuality into something as dark and damaged as her own that she encounters her limits, becoming the failure that her horrendous harpy of a mother has continually called her. None of this is a lot of fun: The Piano Teacher is one of the least erotic films about sex ever made. Haneke has jettisoned the backstories of Erika and her mother that were apparently supplied in Elfriede Jelinek's novel (which I haven't read), leaving us to speculate on how mother and daught wound up in a relationship in which they are slapping and yelling at each other one moment, then cuddling in a shared bed the next. But Haneke is not an explainer; he's content to show, not tell. And that often gives his films a visceral quality that makes them as fascinating and provocative of thought as they are unpleasant.  

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

John Vernon and Karin Dor in Topaz

Andre Devereaux: Frederick Stafford
Michael Nordstrom: John Forsythe
Nicole Devereaux: Dany Robin
Rico Parra: John Vernon
Juanita de Cordoba: Karin Dor
Jacques Granville: Michel Piccoli
Henri Jarré: Philippe Noiret
Michele Picard: Claude Jade
François Picard: Michel Subor
Boris Kusenov: Per-Axel Arosenius
Philippe Dubois: Roscoe Lee Browne

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samuel A. Taylor
Based on the novel by Leon Uris
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Music: Maurice Jarre

There's one Hitchcockian touch, almost the only one, in Topaz, that's become known as "the purple dress scene": As a woman, shot at close range, collapses to the floor, the skirts of her dress spread out around her like blood. It's a striking effect, but also a distractingly showoffy one in a film that is remarkably free of other such irruptions of style. Topaz may not be the worst film Alfred Hitchcock made -- there are some strong contenders in his early silents as well as in some of his other late films -- but it's certainly one of the dullest. There are four sections that cry out for some of the Hitchcock wit to make them more tense and entertaining: In the opening sequence, we watch as a highly placed official in the KGB defects to the West, along with his wife and daughter; then the French agent Andre Devereaux is tasked with retrieving a crucial document from a Cuban officer residing in a Harlem hotel during the opening of the United Nations; next, Devereaux goes to Havana to obtain further information about Russian missiles in Cuba (the film is set in October 1962); and finally, Devereaux is charged with unmasking the high-ranking French intelligent agents, whose code name is Topaz, who are selling secrets to the Soviets. Staging all of these sequences should have been child's play to the director whose mastery of the spy thriller was well-established in such films as Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959), but each of them somehow fizzles into overextended business without real suspense. Part of the problem seems to be that Hitchcock was working without a finished script: After Leon Uris's attempt to adapt his novel was rejected, Hitchcock turned at the last minute to Samuel A. Taylor, who had written the screenplay for Vertigo (1958). Whatever you may think of Vertigo, the strengths of that film are not in its screenplay, and Taylor, working under intense deadline pressure, was unable to come up with a script that successfully ties together the four big sequences of Topaz. The frustration and ennui that Hitchcock felt with the situation is palpable. The ending was reshot several times, the first time after a preview audience rejected the notion of a duel between Devereaux and the Topaz agent Henri Jarré that took place in a soccer stadium, the second after audiences were confused by a scene in which Jarré manages to escape to the Soviet Union. The final version, in which Jarré commits suicide off-screen, lands with a thud, partly because Philippe Noiret, who played Jarré, was unavailable for the filming, so that we see only the exterior of his house and hear the sound of a gunshot. More interesting stars than Frederick Stafford and John Forsythe would have helped the film, but most of the blame for the dullness of Topaz has to be given to Hitchcock.

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

Kichiemon Nakamura and Kiwako Taichi in Kuroneko

Gintoki: Kichiemon Nakamura
Yone: Nobuko Otowa
Shige: Kiwako Taichi
Raiko: Kei Sato

Director: Kaneto Shindo
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Cinematography: Norimichi Igawa, Kiyomi Kuroda
Art direction: Takashi Marumo
Film editing: Hisao Enoki
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Sometimes mood is everything, especially in a ghost story. The film that starts creepy and stays creepy tests our tolerance for creepiness. Kaneto Shindo seems to know this. He starts Kuroneko with a peaceful pastoral scene: a hut with a small brook running past its door, and in the distance fields backed by the wall of a forest. He lingers on this scene just long enough for it to register on us before ragged samurai begin to emerge from the forest, approach the brook in front of the hut, and drink thirstily from it. Then he cuts to the inside, where two terrified woman are watching the approach of the samurai, who enter the hut, pillage it, rape and murder the women, and set fire to the hut. Then we cut to the opening frame as the samurai return to the forest and smoke begins to billow from the hut. It blazes up, and Shindo cuts to the aftermath: the ruins of the hut and the bodies of the women, strangely unconsumed by the fire. A black cat enters and sniffs around the women, then begins to lick their wounds. Then it's nighttime, and the scene changes to the Rajomon (or Rashomon) Gate in Kyoto, where the supernatural story begins: The women are now ghosts, their former rags replaced by fine garments, who lure the samurai who violated and killed them to their handsome dwelling in a bamboo grove, where they bite out their throats and drink their blood. Shindo's mastery at setting up a plausibly real opening and slowly transitioning to the eerie vengeance of the dead women, who seem to float and sometimes move with, well, catlike grace. News of the deaths of the samurai reaches the emperor, who orders the chief samurai, Raiko, to deal with the problem. We then cut to a fight between a young soldier and a huge man armed with an iron-studded club. The soldier vanquishes the big man, cuts off his head, and rides home to bring the news that he's the only survivor of a battle. Raiko rewards the soldier by making him a samurai and giving him the name Gintoki. The interpolation of the fight scene and Gintoki's ride again break the mood, providing a welcome contrast with the ghost scenes. Proudly, Gintoki goes to see his wife and his mother, only to find the ruins of their hut -- they were, of course, the victims of the marauding samurai. And Raiko then orders Gintoki to prove his valor by finding and killing the "monster" that has been slaughtering his samurai. Eventually, of course, Gintoki will discover that the killers are the ghosts of his wife, Shige, and his mother, Yone, setting up an impossible moral dilemma. It's a tense, beautifully photographed, often surprisingly erotic, and subtly terrifying film that even I, usually immune to the shocks of horror movies, can appreciate.

The Paradine Case (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947)

Ann Todd and Charles Laughton in The Paradine Case

Anthony Keane: Gregory Peck
Gay Keane: Ann Todd
Lord Thomas Horfield: Charles Laughton
Simon Flaquer: Charles Coburn
Lady Sophie Horfield: Ethel Barrymore
Andre Latour: Louis Jourdan
Maddalena Anna Paradine: Alida Valli
Sir Joseph: Leo G. Carroll
Judy Flaquer: Joan Tetzel

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Alma Reville, James Bridie
Based on a novel by Robert Hichens
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson

Alfred Hitchcock was at the end of his seven-year servitude to David O. Selznick when he was roped into The Paradine Case, a project Selznick had been nursing since 1933, when he bought the rights at MGM hoping to star Greta Garbo as the "fascinating" Mrs. Paradine. Garbo declined then and later, saying she didn't want to play a murderer. Hitchcock's involvement in the belated project was grudging, given that the other two features, Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945), on which he had been forced to work directly with Selznick had been difficult experiences, producer and director having decidedly different views on almost everything about filmmaking. But he went ahead with crafting a screenplay, enlisting his wife, Alma Reville, playwright James Bridie, and Ben Hecht. In the end, however, Selznick rewrote the screenplay, sometimes after individual scenes had been shot, and claimed credit, relegating Reville to "adaptation" and Bridie to "treatment in consultation with," and leaving Hecht off the credits entirely. Moreover, Hitchcock's initial cut was three hours, which Selznick then scissored down to 132 minutes and after premieres to the extant 114 minutes. It's hard to say what was lost in the process, except that Anthony Keane's supposed erotic fascination with Mrs. Paradine barely registers in the current version, making Gay Keane's jealous moping almost nonsensical. It also robs the climax of the film of any real emotional impact. But miscasting also may be responsible for those failures: Gregory Peck, never a very interesting actor, becomes even duller in his attempts to play a distinguished British barrister. Peck was 31, and the gray streaks in his hair do little to convince us that he's a man with a long career at the bar. Moreover, his attempts at a British accent are fitful: You can almost see him tense up every time he has to pronounce "can't" as "cahn't." Alida Valli, in the key role, is more sullen than mysterious, and Ann Todd as Peck's wife, is pallid. What life exists in the film comes from Charles Coburn as the solicitor in the case and from Charles Laughton, deliciously haughty as the judge, with a reputation for enjoying hanging women as well as clear evidence of his sexually predatory nature when he makes his moves on Mrs. Keane. Ethel Barrymore for some reason was nominated for an Oscar for her small role as the judge's wife, who sweetly admonishes her husband for his ways, but otherwise has little to do. There is not much Hitchcock could do stylistically in the film with Selznick hanging around: He attempts some impressive long takes, many of which Selznick chopped up in the editing room, and an experiment in collaboration with cinematographer Lee Garmes in lighting changes during Keane's interrogation of Mrs. Paradine. He also introduces Louis Jourdan's character by keeping him in shadows and half darkness, to heighten our suspicion of the character's nature, but such occasional tricks only stand out from the general flatness of the drama.