Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Alain Delon in Purple Noon

Tom Ripley: Alain Delon
Philippe Greenleaf: Maurice Ronet
Marge Duval: Marie Laforêt
Riccordi: Erno Crisa
O'Brien: Frank Latimore
Freddy Miles: Billy Kearns

Director: René Clément
Screenplay: René Clément, Paul Gégauff
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Paul Bertrand
Film editing: Françoise Javet
Music: Nino Rota

The original title of René Clément's Purple Noon, Plein Soleil, which means "full sun," with its implications of something done out in the open, by the light of day, seems to me a better indication of what this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is all about. And not just because the first part of the film, including Ripley's first murder, takes place under the bright sun of the Mediterranean. Ripley is the perfect embodiment of Hamlet's discovery "that one may smile and smile and be a villain," that someone can be as beautiful as Alain Delon and get away with murder. Henri Decaë's gorgeous color cinematography and the film's handsome settings are sometimes thought to be at odds with the darkness of the story. Even Ripley's shabby room at the Hotel Paradiso has a kind of glamour to it -- though that may just be the nostalgia of someone who recalls staying in places like that during his first visit to the Continent, a copy of (it is to laugh) Europe on $5 a Day in hand. But that kind of dissonance is very much to the point:  Ripley is almost an antihero, or antivillain, if you will. His victims are the abusive Philippe Greenleaf and the snotty Freddy Miles, both of whom scorn Ripley for his lowly origins. Highsmith disliked the film's ending which, although it doesn't quite show Ripley brought to justice at least implies that he's about to be caught. Her novel ends with Ripley in triumph, though edgy and paranoid, and able to con and kill again through four sequels. 

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat

Cody Jarrett: James Cagney
Verna Jarrett: Virginia Mayo
Hank Fallon aka Vic Pardo: Edmond O'Brien
Ma Jarrett: Margaret Wycherly
Big Ed Somers: Steve Cochran
Philip Evans: John Archer
Cotton Valletti: Wally Cassell
Trader Winston: Fred Clark

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts
Based on a story by Virginia Kellogg
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Film Editing: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner

It still baffles me that Raoul Walsh's terrific crime thriller White Heat received only one Oscar nomination, and that one for the scenario devised by Virginia Kellogg, which was notoriously revised not only by Kellogg but also by the credited screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts with much uncredited help from James Cagney and his friends Humphrey Bogart and Frank McHugh. Where were the nominations for Walsh's no-nonsense direction, Cagney's superbly over-the-top performance (especially the scene in which Cody Jarrett goes berserk on learning of his dear old mother's death), Margaret Wycherly's tiger mom, or even Virginia Mayo's tough broad? Mayo was one of the more underrated blond bombshells of the era. She could have been a rival to Dorothy Malone and Gloria Grahame for tough-girl roles, but under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, she got stuck in forgettable musicals and comedies in which she played the foil to fellow Goldwyn contract player Danny Kaye. The good reviews she got for playing Dana Andrews's cheating wife in William Wyler's 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives showed that she had more acting talent than Goldwyn had revealed, but with a few exceptions -- White Heat being the most notable -- she got stuck in movies that played off her beauty more than her acting ability. Edmond O'Brien also shines in the part of the undercover detective who buddies up to Cody, and a good deal of the suspense of the film hinges on his hair-breadth avoidance of having his cover blown. It's to the credit of Walsh, the supporting players, and the fleet of screenwriters that although Cagney's performance fires the film, it never completely burns it up -- there's always someone or something else to watch.

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Tomas Ericsson: Gunnar Björnstrand
Märta Lundberg: Ingrid Thulin
Karin Persson: Gunnel Lindblom
Jonas Persson: Max von Sydow
Algot Frövik: Allan Edwall
Fredrik Blom: Olof Thunberg

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

I have to admit that I was seduced into nostalgia by the opening of Winter Light, as the liturgy and communion service brought back memories of my Methodist childhood. But the mood vanished swiftly as the chill reality of the film took hold: The church is cold and nearly empty, most of its congregants brought there by necessity or duty. The pastor is a hypocrite with a head cold, unable to muster enough enthusiasm for his faith to keep a man who comes to him for counseling from blowing his head off with a shotgun or even to console his widow. His former mistress, the local schoolteacher, is as comfortable in her atheism as he is uneasy in his attempts to believe. It's Bergman at his bleakest, though paradoxically filled with a kind of existential affirmation. The message boils down to: Don't sweat the big stuff. That is, don't let theology get in the way of going on with your life. You can respond to this kind of message in three ways: With stubborn denial, with an exhilarated sense of liberation, or with a painful feeling of loss. Winter Light is a talky film, one that sometimes seems more fit for the stage than for the movies, but its characters are alive and complex, its performances uniformly superb, and its images -- supplied by the great Sven Nykvist -- sometimes even more articulate than its dialogue.

The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

Victor Sjöström and Tore Svennberg in The Phantom Carriage

David Holm: Victor Sjöström
Anna Holm: Hilda Borgström
Georges: Tore Svennberg
Edit: Astrid Holm
Edit's Mother: Concordia Selander
Maria: Lisa Lundholm
Gustafsson: Tor Weijden
David's Brother: Einar Axelsson

Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström
Based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Cinematography: Julius Jaenzon
Art direction: Alexander Bako, Axel Esbensen

In commenting on Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) recently, I observed that its ending, in which Arthur and Doreen plan a wedding and dream of a home of their own, almost took on the character of a parody of a movie "happy ending," given their previous behavior and the blighted milieu in which they live. It's almost certainly what Reisz and Alan Sillitoe, adapting his own novel, intended. They were making a drama, which depends on belief, in this case an ironic credibility in which the viewer knows the story of Arthur and Doreen hasn't really ended. If drama depends on belief, then melodrama depends on feeling: a willingness to suspend credulity in favor of a kind of emotional certainty, a feeling that the way the story ends is emotionally, if not intellectually, right. That's why I can't quarrel with the ending of The Phantom Carriage, even though I know that the supposed reformation and redemption of David Holm is scarcely credible in terms of real-world alcoholism and abusiveness. It feels right in the context of a ghost story. Victor Sjöström's movie is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of silent film, notable for its lasting influence, not only on Sjöström's compatriot Ingmar Bergman, but even on a filmmaker as recent as Stanley Kubrick, who copied the harrowing scene in which David takes an ax to the door between him and his terrified wife when he filmed the "Here's Johnny!" sequence in The Shining (1980). This is also one of the few films by an actor-director in which the actor is as successful as the director. Granted, we may quibble about a few things, such as the fact that 50-year-old Hilda Borgström was a bit too old to play the mother of two small children (who never seem to age during the film). Or that the ghost story gets jettisoned in favor of the morality tale: If David wasn't really dead, then who gets to relieve Georges of his duty of driving the carriage? But this is melodrama and it's enough to say that it feels right.

Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

Katsuko Wakasugi in Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan

Iemon Tamiya: Shigeru Amachi
Oiwa: Katsuko Wakasugi
Naosuke: Shuntaro Emi
Yomoshichi: Ryuzaburo Nakamura
Osode: Noriko Kitazawa
Ume Ito: Junko Ikeuchi
Maki: Kikuko Hanaoka
Kihe Ito: Hiroshi Hayashi
Takuetsu: Jun Otomo
Samo: Shinjuro Asano

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Screenplay: Masayoshi Onuki, Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Based on a play by Nanboku Tsuruya
Cinematography: Tadashi Nishimoto
Production design: Harayasu Kurosawa
Film editing: Shin Nagata
Music: Michiaki Watanabe

Keisuke Kinoshita's 1949 version of the much-adapted ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan, jettisoned the supernatural in favor of the psychological, turning the protagonist, Iemon, into a somewhat more sympathetic, even tragic figure. But ten years later, Nobuo Nakagawa went straight for the horror: a bloodthirsty, ambitious Iemon, who doesn't even need Naosuke's Iago-like promptings to descend straight into murder. In fact, if you try to apply psychology to Nakagawa's Iemon, you'll run up against some blank walls: It's hard to understand why Iemon in this version even bothers to settle down to a life of umbrella-making after his slaughter of Oiwa's father and his complicity in Naosuke's dispatch of Yomoshichi, his rival for Osode's hand. By this time, Iemon is steeped in blood so far that "returning were as tedious as go o'er," to put it in Macbeth's terms. In this version, the ghosts of Oiwa and Takuetsu are particularly real and vengeful, not just phantoms of Iemon's imagination, as in Kinoshita's version. They lead Iemon into slaughtering Ume and her father and finally to his own doom. Nakagawa's film lacks the subtlety of Kinoshita's, but in the end I think that's for the good: What you want from a ghost story is catharsis, not irony.

Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Shigeru Amachi in Jigoku

Shiro Shimizu: Shigeru Amachi
Yukiko/Sacihko: Utako Mitsuya
Tamura: Yoichi Numata
Gozo Shimizu: Hiroshi Hayashi
Ensai Taniguchi: Jun Otomo
Kinuko: Akiko Yamashita
Kyoichi's Mother: Kiyoko Tsuji
Mrs. Yajima: Fumiko Miyata
Prof. Yajima: Akira Nakamura
Ito Shimizu: Kimie Tokudaiji
Yoko: Akiko Ono
Kyoichi "Tiger" Shiga: Hiroshi Izumida

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Screenplay: Nobuo Nakagawa, Ichiro Miyagawa
Cinematography: Mamoru Morita
Production design: Shosuke Sasane, Haruyasu Kurosawa
Film editing: Toshio Goto
Music: Michiaki Watanabe

I know what hell is: I just spent two days without internet access. (Hence the absence of recent posts.) A good chunk of those two days passed waiting for the repairman, who was supposed to arrive between 1 and 4 p.m., but of course showed up just before 6 p.m., so my idea of hell is an infinite waiting room. Which is not the idea that director Nobuo Nakagawa and co-screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa present. It's pretty much the traditional one of fire and torture. Jigoku is a cult film, as many of the better (or at least more arty) horror films become, and while I'm not a member of the cult I can appreciate the skill with which Nakagawa presents his vision. It's a movie that ranges from deeply somber to extraordinarily lurid. The protagonist, Shiro, is a student who, after celebrating his engagement to Yukiko, gets into a car driven by his sardonic friend Tamura. On a dark road, Tamura runs down and kills a gangster, Kyoichi, whose mother witnesses the accident. Shiro wants to stop, but Tamura keeps driving. Since her son was a gangster, she doesn't report the hit-and-run to the police but, along with Kyoichi's girlfriend, Yoko, vows to hunt down Tamura and Shiro and kill them. After pleading with Tamura, Shiro decides to go to the police himself, but on the way the taxi driver -- whom Shiro briefly hallucinates as Tamura -- runs into a tree and Yukiko, who has reluctantly accompanied Shiro, is killed. Shiro's road to hell is certainly paved with good intentions, and after his death he winds up there. He has received a telegram that his mother is critically ill, so he goes to see her at the home for the elderly that his father runs in the country. She's not as ill as he feared -- the telegram was actually sent by Kyoichi's mother and girlfriend to lure him into their trap. He discovers that the old folks' home his father owns is actually run on the cheap, with a doctor who skimps on medicine and food. He also encounters Sachiko, a young woman who looks exactly like his fiancée, Yukiko, down to the pink parasol she carries. She turns out to be the sister Shiro didn't know he had, but by this time revelations are coming hard and fast: Tamura -- who appears more and more demonic -- turns up too, as do the potential assassins, and in an elaborate concoction of circumstances, everybody dies, including Shiro. And everybody goes to hell, which is a fantasia crafted out of depictions from old Buddhist paintings and traditional cinematic imaginings of the underworld. Shiro learns there that the taxi accident killed not only Yukiko but also their unborn child, and he spends much of his time trying to rescue the infant from the torments of the afterlife. The film ends, after much exploration of the more gruesome torments of hell, with Shiro's vision of the twinned Yukiko and Sachiko, both with pink parasols, but although it suggests Faust being redeemed by Gretchen, there's nothing to indicate that this is any kind of redemption for Shiro. In short, Jigoku is complicated, contrived, confusing, sometimes a little cheesy and more than a little morally questionable -- does Shiro really deserve to go through all this? -- but also thoroughly fascinating.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)

Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Arthur: Albert Finney
Doreen: Shirley Anne Field
Brenda: Rachel Roberts
Aunt Ada: Hylda Baker
Bert: Norman Rossington
Jack: Bryan Pringle
Robboe: Robert Cawdron
Mrs. Bull: Edna Morris
Mrs. Seaton: Elsie Wagstaff
Mr. Seaton: Frank Pettit
Blousy Woman: Avis Bunnage
Loudmouth: Colin Blakely
Doreen's Mother: Irene Richmond

Director: Karel Reisz
Screenplay: Alan Sillitoe
Based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Edward Marshall
Music: John Dankworth

The 24-year-old Albert Finney was spot-on casting for the antihero of Alan Sillitoe's adaptation of his novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. With his slicked-up coif, predatory grin, and omnipresent cigarette, Finney's Arthur Seaton exudes the kind of sexual attractiveness that allows one to ignore his rough edges. Always on the prowl, Arthur is the quintessential working-class yobbo, drinking too much and sleeping around too carelessly. He gets his comeuppance when Brenda, married to the stodgy Jack, becomes pregnant -- Jack's sexual neglect makes her sure the child is Arthur's -- and Jack's brother and another soldier work Arthur over in a vacant lot. Meanwhile, he has fallen for Doreen, and the film ends with Arthur and Doreen on a hillside overlooking their factory town, planning a wedding and dreaming of a home of their own. But from what we've seen of Arthur, this is almost a parody of a happy ending. Doreen's a tough cookie, too, and we can only foresee a kind of grim muddling-through future, a recapitulation of the lives of their parents and neighbors. It's to the credit of Finney and a superb supporting cast that the film is not a dreary slog through blighted lives, but a kind of tribute to the persistent energy of the working class. It helps that the movie is filmed by the great Freddie Francis, who finds a rich palette of grays in the surroundings, and provides a needed burst of action in the fairgrounds sequence. But above all, it's Finney's show, launching one of the great movie careers, from rakish young leading man to invaluable character actor.

High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra

Roy Earle: Humphrey Bogart
Marie: Ida Lupino
Red: Arthur Kennedy
Babe: Alan Curtis
Velma: Joan Leslie
Pa: Henry Travers
Louis Mendoza: Cornel Wilde
Big Mac: Donald MacBride
"Doc" Banton: Henry Hull
Algernon: Willie Best
Jake Kranmer: Barton MacLane
Healy: Jerome Cowan

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: John Huston, W.R. Burnett
Based on a novel by W.R. Burnett
Cinematography: Tony Gaudio
Film editing: Jack Killifer
Music: Adolph Deutsch

Ida Lupino gets first billing in High Sierra, an indication of where Humphrey Bogart's career stood at the time. He had labored for Warner Bros. for more than a decade as a supporting actor, usually in gangster films and occasionally miscast in roles like the Irish stablemaster in Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939). High Sierra would be a breakthrough into leading man roles, establishing his persona as a tough guy with a soft heart, as in films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944). He owes his role in High Sierra in large part to its screenwriter, John Huston, who as a director would emphasize the tough Bogart over the softie: the brutal Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the vicious Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). In High Sierra, however, although Roy Earle has just been released from prison and is off to pull another caper, he's full of nostalgia for his childhood as a farmboy and along the road adopts a family heading west, where Pa hopes to get a job and help his granddaughter, Velma, get surgery for her clubfoot. Roy gets soft on Velma and pays for the operation, but his proposal is turned down. Just as Roy has a soft side, Velma is at heart a party girl and wants to go back east and hook up with her ne'er-do-well boyfriend. High Sierra is full of reversals like that. Lupino, for example, plays a party girl who goes soft on Roy and turns into a stand-by-your-man accomplice. And there's even a cute little dog who turns out to be a jinx and rats on Roy at a crucial moment. There's a good deal of silliness in the plotting of High Sierra, as well as some lamentable racist shtick forced on the fine comic actor Willie Best, who is usually caught napping and awakens with his eyes crossed. But at its best, especially in the climactic chase scene along winding dirt roads in the Sierra, the film is a good vehicle for Bogart's leap into superstardom.

The Horror, The Horror

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye in Dracula

Count Dracula: Bela Lugosi
Mina: Helen Chandler
John Harker: David Manners
Renfield: Dwight Frye
Van Helsing: Edward Van Sloan
Dr. Seward: Herbert Bunston
Lucy: Frances Dade

Director: Tod Browning
Screenplay: Garrett Fort
Based on a play by Hamilton Dean and John L. Balderston adapted from a novel by Bram Stoker
Cinematography: Karl Freund
Production design: John Hoffman, Herman Rosse
Film editing: Milton Carruth

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

Dwight Frye, Colin Clive, and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein

Henry Frankenstein: Colin Clive
Elizabeth: Mae Clarke
Victor Moritz: John Boles
The Monster: Boris Karloff
Baron Frankenstein: Frederick Kerr
Fritz: Dwight Frye
Dr. Waldman: Edward Van Sloan
The Burgomaster: Lionel Belmore
Little Maria: Marilyn Harris

Director: James Whale
Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Francis Edward Faragoh
Based on a story treatment by John L. Balderston of a play by Peggy Webling adapted from a novel by Mary Shelley
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Charles D. Hall
Film editing: Clarence Kolster
Music: Bernhard Kaun

Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein have a lot in common. Both were based on stage plays adapted from celebrated novels; together they established the Universal studios as specialists in horror movies, the way gangster movies seemed to characterize Warner Bros. and musicals became identified as an MGM specialty; both launched the careers of actors known almost exclusively for their roles as monsters -- a millstone around the neck of the very talented Boris Karloff, an alternate identity for the less-gifted Bela Lugosi. There are some other incidental similarities: Both feature performances by Dwight Frye, a rather ordinary looking character actor who became a specialist in creep roles. In Dracula he's the vampire's stooge, Renfield, marked by a wheezing laugh that sounds like a cat trying to heave up a hairball. In Frankenstein he's the hunchbacked Fritz, stooge to the titular scientist. Both feature Edward Van Sloan as professorial types: the vampire expert Van Helsing and the ill-fated Dr. Waldman. Both have ingenues preyed upon by the monsters and handsome juveniles who try to be their stalwart defenders but mostly just get in the way. But Frankenstein is by far the better film than Dracula. It may be that James Whale was a more gifted director than Tod Browning, although Browning had a long career in silent films. including some standout Lon Chaney features, before Whale made his mark in Hollywood. Or it may just be that Dracula was made first, so that everyone working on Frankenstein could learn from its mistakes. Browning, I think, hadn't quite gotten used to making talkies, so that the pacing of Dracula is off: Scenes and speeches seem to halt a little longer than they need to. Dracula also betrays its origins on the stage more than Frankenstein. Apart from the spectacle of the storm at sea, there's little in Dracula that couldn't have been put on stage, whereas Frankenstein is loaded with spectacle: the opening funeral and grave-robbing scene; the sparking and flashing laboratory equipment and the thunderstorm; the murder of Little Maria; the torch-bearing villagers and the burning of the old mill. One thing they don't have much of is actual scary stuff, especially as compared to today's blood-and-gore horror movies. To contemporary audiences, Dracula and Frankenstein seem bloodless and gutless, and Dracula in particular has been deprived of its shock value by Lugosi's lack of sex appeal -- vampirism is a sexual threat, given its preoccupation with the exchange of bodily fluids, which is why vampires have gotten hotter over the years. The monster in Frankenstein on the other hand elicits sympathy: It's alone in a world it never made, which is why some think Whale, a gay man, betrays an identification with the character.