Animal House (John Landis, 1978)

Tom Hulce in Animal House

John "Bluto" Blutarsky: John Belushi
Eric "Otter" Stratton: Tim Matheson
Donald "Boon" Schoenstein: Peter Riegert
Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger: Tom Hulce
Kent "Flounder" Dorfman: Stephen Furst
Daniel Simpson "D-Day" Day: Bruce McGill
Chip Diller: Kevin Bacon
Dean Vernon Wormer: John Vernon
Marion Wormer: Verna Bloom
Prof. Dave Jennings: Donald Sutherland
Katy: Karen Allen
Clorette DePasto: Sarah Holcomb
Mayor Carmine DePasto: Cesare Danova

Director: John Landis
Screenplay: Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, Chris Miller
Cinematography: Charles Correll
Art direction: John J. Lloyd
Film editing: George Folsey Jr.
Music: Elmer Bernstein

The granddaddy of gross-out comedies, Animal House has a certain innocence to it 40 years later. For one thing, it goes lightly on the gross-outs, the most famous one being Bluto's zit joke. We don't even get to see Flounder throw up on Dean Wormer. For another, without their familiar lined faces and grayed, thinning hair, such veteran actors as Peter Riegert, Tom Hulce, and Kevin Bacon look almost naked. The film has maintained its reputation, even being inducted into the National Film Registry in 2001. There are things in it, however, that wouldn't pass muster today, including the blatant objectification of the young women, especially in the scene in which Bluto spies on them undressing. And would any reputable filmmaker today dare to include the scene in which Pinto debates whether to rape the unconscious Clorette, abetted by a roguish devil and a prissy-voiced angel? There are touches of unchecked homophobia throughout.  John Landis's direction, too, sometimes seems a bit stiff-limbed, as if waiting for the audience to laugh before proceeding with the next line. There are flashes of wit in the screenplay, as when Bluto refers to the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, and Boon tells Otter, "Forget it, he's rolling." But many of the sight gags, such as the climactic assault on the homecoming parade, weren't worked out enough in advance, the exception being the marching band that gets led into a blind alley and then can't extricate itself. Still there's a fine energy to the performances, and even Dean Wormer gets to make a good point: "Fat, drunk, and stupid" really "is no way to go through life." But mostly the film is a strong reminder of what we lost with the early death of John Belushi -- and, more recently, of Stephen Furst.

Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)

Ivan Bondarev: Nikolay Burlyaev
Leonid Kholin: Valentin Zubkov
Galtsev: Evgeniy Zharikov
Katasonov: Stepan Krylov
Gryaznov: Nikolay Grinko
Old Man: Dmitri Milyutenko
Masha: Valentina Malyavina
Ivan's Mother: Irina Tarkovskaya
Soldier With Glasses: Andrey Konchalovskiy

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava
Based on a story by Vladimir Bogomolov
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Production design: Evgeniy Chernyaev
Film editing: Lyudmila Feyginova
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

There are scenes in Ivan's Childhood that wouldn't work in the hands of almost any other director than Andrei Tarkovsky. The famous scene in the birch forest, in which Kholin straddles a trench and kisses Masha while dangling her over it is completely extraneous to Ivan's story, as are almost all the scenes in which Masha, the physician's assistant, appears. And Tarkovsky never falls into the trap of sentimentality in the dream sequences, including the film's ending. In fact, I think it's a mistake to call them "dream sequences" -- they mostly avoid the conventions of movie dreams like odd angles or camera tricks or surreal elements. They're really memory pieces, explorations of the other side of Ivan's childhood, the innocent years of peace, poetically interpolated into the harshness of war. In fact, the "real" sequences are often more dreamlike than the memories: the dizzying ghostlike trunks of the birch trees, the flares falling silently like meteorites, the spiky war ruins that threaten to impale. It's a heartbreaking film because Tarkovsky refuses to pull out all the melodramatic stops but lets his images speak for themselves and because Nikolay Burlyaev performs with such conviction as Ivan, in one of the greatest performances by a child ever captured on film. It's probably the most poetic war film ever made because the war recedes into the background as a thing remembered.

Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

Gian Maria Volontè, Alain Delon, and Yves Montand in Le Cercle Rouge

Corey: Alain Delon
Inspector Mattei: Bourvil
Vogel: Gian Maria Volontè
Jansen: Yves Montand
Fence: Paul Crauchet
Chief of Internal Affairs: Paul Amiot
The Prison Guard: Pierre Collet
Rico: André Ekyan
Santi: François Périer

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Théobald Meurisse
Film editing: Marie-Sophie Dubus
Music: Éric Demarsan

Caper films are such a standard movie genre that it takes a skilled director to make it new. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge stands out from the herd of jewel heists and missions impossible because of its effortless-seeming cool. Of course, if you want effortless cool you cast Alain Delon and Yves Montand, whose pictures should accompany any dictionary definition of the word. Nobody ever wore a trenchcoat with such handsome finesse as Delon and nobody ever smoked a cigarette with such world-weary fatalism as Montand. The centerpiece of Melville's film is the extended sequence in which the trio of thieves light-finger the loot, a scene distinguished by its near-silence, so that you hear every bump and rustle (along with the gasps and chuckles of your fellow viewers) as it takes place. But Melville has given us more: A fable based on a quotation from the Buddha that Melville himself made up, to the effect that men who are fated to meet "will inevitably come together in the red circle." So Corey, released from prison, finds himself linked to Vogel, who has made a daring escape from Mattei, the cop who arrested him and is transporting him to prison, and eventually to Jansen, an alcoholic sharpshooter, in pulling off a spectacular jewelry theft. Their coming-together forms the plot, but what distinguishes the film is the quiet mastery with which Melville draws each of his characters, giving us details about them, like Corey's failed relationship with his former mistress or Mattei's devotion to his three cats, that bear no significance in terms of the plot. Mattei's slipup in letting Vogel escape puts him on the hot spot with internal affairs, a sinister figure (of course) who believes in the essential depravity of humankind: "All men are guilty," he growls. "They're born innocent, but it doesn't last." That's about as noir a sentiment as you can get, even in a film made in color.

Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)

Yuzo Kayama and Hideko Takamine in Yearning

Reiko Morita: Hideko Takamine
Koji Morita: Yuzo Kayama
Hisako Morizono: Mitsuko Kusabue
Takako Morita: Yumi Shirakawa
Ruriko: Mie Hama
Shizu Morita: Aiko Mimasu

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Mikio Naruse
Cinematography: Jun Yasumoto
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Yearning could almost have been a Douglas Sirk romantic melodrama, with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in the roles played by Hideko Takamine and Yuzo Kayama, except that Hollywood would never have allowed the Japanese film's bleak downer ending. (Sirk argued for an ending to the 1955 All That Heaven Allows in which Hudson's character died, but was overruled by producer Ross Hunter.) Like Sirk, Naruse takes the woman's side and uses the film for sharp commentary on the changing role of women. Reiko Morita's husband died in the war, after a brief marriage, but she stayed on to help the Morita family rebuild its business after the war ended, and in the subsequent years has run the family grocery and liquor store with great skill. But now a new threat has emerged to their business: the supermarket, which can afford to cut prices below what the Morita's store is able to charge. Reiko runs the store almost single-handedly, with no help from her brother-in-law, Koji, a college-educated layabout. And then her sister-in-law, Hisako, acting on a suggestion from her husband, proposes that the family convert the store into a supermarket because of its prime location. Koji, as the surviving male in the family, would become president -- if he can clean up his act. The problem with the plan is that there's no room in the scheme for Reiko, who is not actually a member of the family, even though she has kept it going for years. Meanwhile, Koji also discloses to Reiko that he's in love with her, which causes problems because she's his brother's widow as well as because she's 11 years older than he is -- the kinship and the age gap being huge challenges to tradition. When the situation reaches a crisis point, Reiko decides to go home to her own family, which lives far away. Koji follows her onto the train and in a long ride they try to work things out. Naruse and his lead actors give this concluding section a great poignancy, though it ends abruptly and painfully, leaving the audience to work out the consequences of the ending for themselves.

Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

Toshiro Mifune, Takako Irie, and Reiko Dan in Sanjuro

Sanjuro: Toshiro Mifune
Hanbei Muroto: Tatsuya Nakadai
The Spy: Keiju Kobayashi
Iori Izaka: Yuzo Kayama
Chidori: Reiko Dan
Kurofuji: Takashi Shimura
Takebayashi: Kamatari Fujiwara
Mutsuta's Wife: Takako Irie
Kikui: Masao Shimizu
Mutsuta: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto
Cinematography: Fukuzo Koizumi, Takao Saito
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Soto

Akira Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek Sanjuro is not so much a sendup of samurai films as it is an effort to carry a genre to its logical and sometimes absurd extremes, the way the James Bond movies took spy films to a point of exciting but improbable and often comic point of no return. It reaches its peak in the final combat between Sanjuro and Hanbei, with an explosion of gore (produced by a pressurized hose that nearly knocked actor Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet) that's surprising and shocking but also very funny once you put it in the context of the usual bloodless deaths of samurai films. But Kurosawa has made us aware of the just-a-movie unreality of Sanjuro's action throughout, with his careful arrangements of the nine samurai under the spell of the sloppy ronin who calls himself "Sanjuro Tsubaki," which means something like "30-year-old camellia," a name he makes up on the spot. The not-so-magnificent nine are always grouping themselves for the camera, either in little triple triads or in chains that fill the widescreen. Their arrangements come to annoy Sanjuro so much that once, when they're trying to sneak up on someone, he tells them not to move in single file behind him: "We look like a centipede!" In addition to Mifune's irresistible scene-stealing, there's a delightful comic performance by Takako Irie as Mutsuta's wife, dithery and concerned with propriety, but also with a fund of commonsense that Sanjuro wisely heeds. Tatsuya Nakadai is wasted as the villain who's the only plausible challenger to the hero -- a kind of Basil Rathbone to Mifune's Errol Flynn -- a role that otherwise doesn't give Nakadai much to do but glare at the fools he's allied with.

The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)

Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Geraldine Chaplin, and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer: Daniel Day-Lewis
Ellen Olenska: Michelle Pfeiffer
May Welland: Winona Ryder
Larry Lefferts: Richard E. Grant
Sillerton Jackson: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Welland: Geraldine Chaplin
Regina Beaufort: Mary Beth Hurt
Julius Beaufort: Stuart Wilson
Mrs. Mingott: Miriam Margolyes
Mrs. Archer: Siân Phillips
Henry van der Luyden: Michael Gough
Louisa van der Luyden: Alexis Smith
Mr. Letterblair: Norman Lloyd
Rivière: Jonathan Pryce
Ted Archer: Robert Sean Leonard
Narrator: Joanne Woodward

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese
Based on a novel by Edith Wharton
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Gabriella Pescucci
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Voiceover narrators in movies are usually to be avoided: They often serve as a crutch for screenwriters and directors who can't tell their stories through dialogue and action. But Joanne Woodward's cool, wry, witty narrator in The Age of Innocence is an essential element: She's really playing Edith Wharton, or more properly the "narrative voice," the storyteller who is there to comment on and clarify the characters and their motives and backstories. It's a device, and a performance, that brings us closer to the source of the movie. Whether that's a good thing or not is subject to debate: Many think that trying to squeeze one medium, literature, together with another, motion pictures, does a disservice to both art forms. Still, The Age of Innocence does it better than most literary movies, including much of the late flood of Jane Austen adaptations and even some of the Merchant Ivory oeuvre. The chief criticism of the film is that it's over-upholstered, that the attention devoted to period detail tends to overwhelm the story. But Martin Scorsese assembled a cast that could upstage all the fabric and cutlery and crockery, starting with Woodward, but of course including the three stars on screen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, and extending to one of the best supporting casts ever mustered. My criticism is that the film is overlong, coming in at 139 minutes. I don't begrudge the time spent watching that cast, but the film does Wharton's story a disservice by making it seem more portentous than it is. Epic length in movies is justified if the topic demands it, like the Russian stand against Napoleon in Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1966) or the struggle to unite Italy in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963), to name two of the more successful historical epics. But Wharton was working, like Austen on her "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory," in comparative miniature, with a thin slice of history in which manners and morals, not countries and continents, were undergoing revolutionary change. Fiction like Wharton's is meditative, film like Scorsese's is visceral, and while narration like Woodward's allows for some of the first, what lives with us after the film ends is likely to be the impact of Dante Ferretti's production design, Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar-winning costumes, Elmer Bernstein's score, and especially Michael Ballhaus's images, not to mention the pleasure of watching Day-Lewis, Pfeiffer, Ryder, et al. at peak performance. 

Youth in Fury (Masahiro Shinoda, 1960)

Shima Iwashita and Shin'ichiro Mikami in Youth in Fury

Takuya Shimojo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Yoko Katsura: Shima Iwashita
Setsuko Kitamura: Kayoko Honoo
Fumie Sono: Hizuro Takachiho
Seiichi Mizushima: Kazuya Kosaka
Michihiko Kihara: Junichiro Yamashita
Shizue: Yachiyo Otori
Oseto: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Shuji Terayama
Based on a story by Eiji Shinba
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Like the French New Wave directors, the Japanese also found themes and stories in the insurgent, rebellious post-World War II generation. But unlike such films as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and Bande à Part (1964) or François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), the Japanese equivalents never quite caught on internationally. Perhaps it's because the French found a new approach to the material, where the Japanese directors were more directly inspired by the tone and technique of American movies like The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), which had a more moralistic or didactic tone, blaming the eruption of youthful rebellion on societal neglect. Even so shrewd a director as Nagisa Oshima, in his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960), seems constrained to portray the departure of his young rebels from the old ways as shocking, whereas Godard and Truffaut relish their liberation from old moral norms. Youth in Fury (also known as Dry Lake) was also a second feature for Masahiro Shinoda, and it centers on young people caught up in the political revolt that culminated in student riots against the 1960 Japanese-American mutual security treaty. One of them is Takuya Shimojo, who is politically engaged but also confused -- he decorates his walls with pictures of political figures ranging from FDR to Hitler to Fidel Castro. Essentially he's a nihilist. He becomes involved with Yoko Katsura, whose father, a politician, has recently committed suicide, brought on by threats to expose his corruption. Her family is left penniless by his death, and with the consent of their mother, her older sister has agreed to sleep with a conservative politician who helps the family out with money. Eventually, Takuya's rejection of conventional morality will get him arrested: He hired a drunken boxer to beat up the man who had been engaged to Yoko's sister but jilted her after her father's suicide; instead the thug slashed the man's face with a razor. Yoko, the "nice girl," ends by being swept up in the crowds of students protesting the treaty. The problem with Youth in Fury is that it's overloaded with secondary characters, such as the rich young layabout who tries to rape Yoko, and Takuya's old girlfriend who resents his taking up with Yoko, as well as a group of politically engaged young idealists with whom Takuya first works but finally rejects. Shinoda has trouble sorting out and delineating these various characters, so that the film sometimes loses focus. But it's propelled by a good score by Toru Takemitsu -- like many films of its day, it relies more on jazz than on rock, which was just beginning to become the dominant musical idiom.

The Age of Innocence (Philip Moeller, 1934)

John Boles and Irene Dunne in The Age of Innocence

Countess Ellen Olenska: Irene Dunne
Newland Archer: John Boles
Julius Beaufort: Lionel Atwill
Granny Mingott: Helen Westley
Augusta Welland: Laura Hope Crews
May Welland: Julie Haydon
Howard Welland: Herbert Yost
Mrs. Archer: Theresa Maxwell Conover
Jane Archer: Edith Van Cleve
The Butler: Leonard Carey

Director: Philip Moeller
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Edith Wharton and a play adapted from it by Margaret Ayer Barnes
Cinematography: James Van Trees
Art direction: Alfred Herman, Van Nest Polglase
Music: Max Steiner

The fine ironic edges of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel have been filed down in this first sound version. (There had been a silent film based on the book, directed by Wesley Ruggles, in 1924.) Instead we get a rather soppy melodrama of forbidden love, which suggests that marital vows and family commitments are unbreakable -- an endorsement of old-fashioned values quite in line with the nascent Production Code, introduced in the year of the film's release. The movie opens with a montage of "modern times" replete with jazz and scandals, as if to drive home its message. It's further weakened by the casting of the ladylike Irene Dunne as the scandalous Ellen Olenska. The actress who turned the part down, Katharine Hepburn, might at least have brought a whiff of the unconventional to the role. Dunne tries to give Ellen a spark of life at the start, but after Newland Archer enters the picture and declares his love in spite of his engagement to May Welland, we are presented with Dunne's distant gazes and wistful looks. It doesn't help that John Boles is starchy and vapid as Newland, or that Julie Haydon's May Welland is a sugary ingenue, with no hint of the manipulative until the very end when she plays the pregnancy card. The only real life in the cast is supplied by the supporting players, particularly Laura Hope Crews, eschewing her usual fluttery mannerisms as as May's mother, and Helen Westley, providing some salt and vinegar as Granny Mingott. 

A Legend or Was It? (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1963)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Shima Iwashita in A Legend or Was It?

Kieko Sonobe: Shima Iwashita
Yuri Shimizu: Mariko Kaga
Hideyuki Sonobe: Go Kato
Shiziku Sonobe: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shintaro Shimizu: Yoshi Kato
Goichi Takamori: Bunta Sugawara
Norio Sonobe: Tsutomu Matsukawa
Narrator: Osamu Takizawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's A Legend or Was It? begins in an idyllic setting: a mountain valley in Hokkaido, gorgeously filmed in color, almost like a travelogue. But the narrator -- a rather obtrusive and unnecessary presence in the film -- tells us that it wasn't always inhabited by the kindly villagers we see going about their chores today. The setting remains the same as the film switches to black and white and we're told that it's now the summer of 1945. War is nowhere in evidence, but it's an inescapable presence. The villagers know that Japan is about to lose, and they're looking for ways to vent their frustration at having supported a losing cause. They find one in a family, the Sonobes, who have moved there after their home in Tokyo was bombed out. Suspicious and resentful of "city folk" on their turf, the villagers make the Sonobes a target after the daughter, Kieko, breaks off an engagement to Goichi Takamori, the son of the powerful mayor of the village, a wealthy landlord. Kieko's brother, on leave from fighting, has recognized Goichi, with whom he once served, as having killed and raped civilians, and urged Kieko not to marry him. In revenge, Goichi destroys the Sonobes' crops and begins spreading malicious rumors about them. A mob forms and a small-scale civil war breaks out. A Legend or Was It? is a highly kinetic film in its later parts, and the score by the director's brother, Chuji Kinoshita, helps create the kind of tension that needs to be released in action. Like Ennio Morricone, who punctuated Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy (1964, 1965, 1966), with pennywhistle tweets and percussion, Chuji Kinoshita's score relies heavily on simple, perhaps even primitive instruments, setting up a pounding repetitive sound to propel the action. It  has something of the hypnotic quality of Philip Glass's music, though without the variations that keep Glass's themes from complete monotony.  Critics commenting on A Legend or Was It? sometimes compare it to Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) for its portrait of vigilante mob justice. It's an unforgiving film, without Kinoshita's typical lapses into sentimentality, and an effective one.

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

William Munny: Clint Eastwood
Little Bill Daggett: Gene Hackman
Ned Logan: Morgan Freeman
English Bob: Richard Harris
The Schofield Kid: Jaimz Woolvett
W.W. Beauchamp: Saul Rubinek
Strawberry Alice: Frances Fisher
Delilah Fitzgerald: Anna Levine

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: David Webb Peoples
Cinematography: Jack N. Green
Production design: Henry Bumstead
Film editing: Joel Cox
Music: Lennie Niehaus

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is the one "real" Western to win a best picture Oscar. Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931) is more about a fractured marriage, politics and land development in the Oklahoma Territory than about gunfire; Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) is preoccupied with revising our views of the American Indian; and No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007), though it doesn't lack for gunfire, is set in our times, not in the days of gunslingers and dance-hall girls. Unforgiven also a very good movie, though not a classic on the order of Westerns the Academy mostly cold-shouldered, like Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) or The Wild Bunch (1969). It placed Eastwood among the pantheon of contemporary directors, though Eastwood had the grace to dedicate the film to John Ford and the less-celebrated directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel; the latter two had made him a star and taught him the trade. Eastwood is a good director by virtue of not overreaching: He reportedly stuck closely to David Webb Peoples's screenplay, which provided him with characters of considerable depth. Gene Hackman's Little Bill Daggett is a nasty villain, but Peoples gives him a human side with his obsessive work on his house and a porch he can sit on and watch the sunset. What Peoples doesn't give Eastwood is a wholly satisfactory ending: The movie builds to the concluding shootout, even after we have been led to think that there's more to Eastwood's William Munny than just an old gunfighter in retirement. Earlier, we have seen evidence that Munny has lost his shooting skills, but suddenly at the end he's able to gun down a roomful of armed men with complete ease. Others object to the rather inessential stuff like the episode involving English Bob, and Saul Rubinek's writer in search of a subject for pulp-magazine hagiography is an overworked caricature. Still, for most of the picture Eastwood skates over the clichés and conceals vague motives -- like the swiftness with which Munny decides to leave his two children to fend for themselves while he follows the young would-be gunfighter on a foolish mission -- so that we don't have time to be bothered by them too much.