The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Lillian Gish in The Wind

Letty: Lillian Gish
Lige: Lars Hanson
Roddy: Montagu Love
Cora: Dorothy Cumming
Beverly: Edward Earle
Sourdough: William Orlamond

Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Based on a novel by Dorothy Scarborough
Cinematography: John Arnold
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Edward Withers
Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig

In the introduction to the 1983 video release of The Wind, produced by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow, Lillian Gish says that she and director Victor Sjöström (credited as "Seastrom" in his Hollywood years) argued for a downer ending to the film in which Letty, driven mad by the wind after she shoots Roddy, who has raped her, walks out into the whirling sandstorm to die. But Irving Thalberg, MGM's production head, insisted on the extant "happy ending," worried that their ending would hurt the film at the box office, with audiences already rejecting silent movies after the arrival of sound. It makes a good story, a fable about art vs. commerce. But as a friend of mine discovered when he interviewed Gish extensively about her work with D.W. Griffith, she was not always a terribly reliable source, given to telling stories long on color but short on accuracy. And I have to think that Thalberg was right about the ending of The Wind, not just because of its commercial value, but also because the concluding reconciliation of Letty and Lige feels consistent with the melodramatic story. As I've said before, drama should make you think, melodrama should make you feel. And in the absence of any real ideas to think about in The Wind, feeling bummed about the bleakness of the ending Gish and Sjöström proposed hardly makes for a satisfactory melodrama. The Wind has been hailed as a masterpiece, which I think it falls just short of being, largely because it becomes a one-woman show for Gish. She is superb, of course, but she's virtually the only character in the film with any dimensions: Roddy is a mustached rotter; Lige is a rural goof with a cornpone sidekick named Sourdough; Cora is a shrew and Beverly is a wimp. So we spend the film's 79 minutes watching Gish suffer brilliantly, responding in wholly affecting ways to the hopelessness of her life with a man she doesn't love, the bleakness of the landscape, and the constant torment of the wind. It's Gish as a grownup version of the waif she so often played for Griffith. But the film needs another substantial character: Lars Hanson is good so far as his role goes, but the screenplay stints on giving Lige a convincing character arc, from goof to spurned husband and finally to romantic hero. It's Letty who does all the heroic stuff, including shooting Roddy and trying to bury his corpse, so the reconciliation at the end, with both of them facing the wind, feels awfully one-sided. We may celebrate this as a tribute to the strong woman, but on the other hand it also feels like the wife submitting to duty to her husband.

Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)

Al Pacino in Scarface

Tony Montana: Al Pacino
Manny Ribera: Steven Bauer
Elvira Hancock: Michelle Pfeiffer
Gina Montana: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Frank Lopez: Robert Loggia
Mama Montana: Miriam Colon
Omar Suarez: F. Murray Abraham
Alejandro Sosa: Paul Shenar
Mel Bernstein: Harris Yulin

Director: Brian De Palma
Screenplay: Oliver Stone
Based on a screenplay by Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett adapted from a novel by Armitage Trail
Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
Art direction: Edward Richardson
Film editing: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray
Music: Giorgio Moroder

Brian De Palma's Scarface ends with a dedication of the film to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, the director of and the author of the story for the 1932 Scarface. As well it might, for De Palma's film and Oliver Stone's screenplay follow the outlined action and many of the characters of the earlier film far more closely than many remakes do. Most of the major characters have counterparts in the 1932 film: the Italian Tony Camonte becomes the Cuban Tony Montana; the first Tony's best friend, Guino Rinaldo, becomes Manny Ribera; Tony's sister, Cesca, becomes Gina; his boss Johnny Lovo's mistress, Poppy, becomes Tony Montana's boss Frank Lopez's mistress, Elvira. Both Mama Camonte and Mama Montana are sternly disapproving presences, and the appropriate characters are bumped off in more or less the same sequence and circumstances as in the earlier film. Because of the relaxation of censorship, there's a little heightening of some subtext from the first film: Gina taunts Tony Montana with having incestuous feelings for her more explicitly than Cesca ever dares with Tony Camonte. And although the earlier film was thought to be excessively violent, the remake goes boldly where it didn't dare, starting with a chainsaw murder and ending with a veritable orgy of gunfire, including that of Tony's "little friend," a grenade launcher. The violence of De Palma's film first earned it an X rating, which was bargained down to an R after some suggested cuts -- although De Palma has claimed that he actually released the film without the cuts, and no one noticed. The remake's violence also turned off many of the critics, although it received a strong thumbs up from Roger Ebert. Since then, of course, the movie has become a cult classic, and more people have seen the remake than have ever seen the original. Which is a shame, because the original, despite some occasional slack pacing and the inevitable antique feeling that lingers in even pre-Production Code movies, is a genuine classic, while De Palma's version feels like a rather studied attempt to go over the top. Screenwriter Stone was never noted for subtlety, and while Al Pacino is one of the great movie actors, De Palma lets him venture into self-caricature, especially with what might be called his Cubanoid accent. On the other hand, Steven Bauer -- who was born in Cuba and sounds nothing like Pacino's Tony -- is a more appealing sidekick than George Raft was, and Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of her first major film roles, makes a good deal more of Elvira than Karen Morley did of Poppy, even though Pfeiffer is asked to do little more than look beautifully sullen and bored throughout the film. Scarface is at best a trash classic, a movie whose impact is stronger than one wants it to be. 

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

Hugo Cabret: Asa Butterfield
Georges Méliès: Ben Kingsley
Isabelle: Chloë Grace Moretz
Station Inspector: Sacha Baron Cohen
Mama Jeanne: Helen McCrory
Rene Tabard: Michael Stuhlbarg
Uncle Claude: Ray Winstone
Lisette: Emily Mortimer
Monsieur Labisse: Christopher Lee
Madame Emilie: Frances de la Tour
Monsieur Frick: Richard Griffiths
Hugo's Father: Jude Law

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: John Logan
Based on a novel by Brian Selznick
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Sandy Powell
Music: Howard Shore

Martin Scorsese's fantastical tribute to pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès begins with a spectacular traveling shot, a combination of CGI and live action, sweeping across Paris and into the Gare Montparnasse until it finishes on a shot of young Hugo Cabret in the clock tower. Normally, I feel that too much CGI robs a movie of its grounding in reality, drawing attention to itself at the expense of characters and story. But on the other hand, who can really doubt that if computer graphics had been available to Georges Méliès, he wouldn't have done something similarly amazing with them, the way he relied on papier-mâché, cardboard, flash powder, and whatever camera tricks he could muster? One of the great delights of Hugo is its re-creations of parts of Méliès's movies, particularly from the behind-the-scenes angle. It's a charming film, perhaps a little overloaded with effects, but Scorsese has a light touch with the story and he has a cast equal to the task of standing up to the computer trickery. A few critics demurred, finding the special effects oppressive, especially in the 3-D version, but on the whole the reviews were raves. It also won Oscars not only for the effects but also for cinematography, art direction, and sound mixing and editing, and was nominated for best picture, director, screenplay, film editing, costumes, and musical score. It seems to me a much better film than the year's best picture winner, The Artist (Michel Haznavicius), coincidentally a movie set in a significant moment in film history. Yet it was a major box-office flop, which may have shadowed its chances at the awards.

The Annotated Pauline Kael¹: Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy

Annie Laurie Starr: Peggy Cummins
Barton Tare: John Dall
Packett: Berry Kroeger
Judge Willoughby: Morris Carnovsky
Ruby Tare Flagler: Anabel Shaw
Clyde Boston: Harry Lewis
Dave Allister: Nedrick Young
Bart Tare (age 14): Russ Tamblyn
Bluey-Bluey: Stanley Prager
Miss Wynn: Virginia Farmer
Miss Augustine Sifert: Anne O'Neal

Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Screenplay: MacKinlay Kantor, Dalton Trumbo (credited to Millard Kaufman)
Based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Production design: Gordon Wiles
Film editing: Harry W. Gerstad
Music: Victor Young

Gun Crazy   Originally called Deadly Is the Female. (1949)² -- Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a tawdry³ version of the Bonnie and Clyde⁴ story. Cummins is a really mean broad,⁵ whose partner is her desperately eager victim.⁶ In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.⁷ With Morris Carnovsky, Berry Kroeger, Annabelle Shaw, and Don Beddoe.⁸ Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, from a screenplay based on MacKinlay Kantor's SatEvePost story, and credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time, later revealed that he wrote the script and persuaded Kaufman to let his name be used. Produced by Frank and Maurice King; released by United Artists. b & w 

-- from 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1982

¹From time to time, maybe, I thought it might be fun to break format and reprint some of Pauline Kael's reviews as a basis for my own reactions to specific movies I've just watched. Why Kael? Because she's still synonymous with film criticism from her heyday as the New Yorker's chief film critic in the 1970s and '80s. Some of her critiques no longer seem on point -- I don't value Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) or Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) nearly as highly as she does, and I think more highly of "art-house" directors like Michelangelo Antonioni than she does -- but they are always provocative even when dated.

²It was made in the spring of 1949 but not released until January 1950.

³I wouldn't call Gun Crazy "tawdry" in any sense of the word. Its production values are solid: Russell Harlan was a first-rate cinematographer, with six Oscar nominations (though no wins); film editor Harry W. Gerstad won his first Oscar in 1950 for Champion (Mark Robson, 1949) and another for High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952); and composer Victor Young was nominated 19 times and won (posthumously) for Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956). Even when it ventures into sleazy locations like the carnival where Bart meets Laurie, the sleaze is kept to a minimum.

⁴An obvious comparison after the 1967 Arthur Penn film, though there's not much evidence that anyone connected with that movie had seen Gun Crazy, which fell into obscurity until auteurist critics discovered it.

⁵Granted, she's a killer, which Bart isn't, but as "mean broads" go, Laurie is really something of a softie: She stands by her man even after their initial decision to go their separate ways after the meat-packing plant robbery, and she could have ditched Bart at any time.

⁶Yes, this description of Bart works, even though I don't think John Dall and the screenwriters put together a wholly convincing character. Would any guy who had gone through reform school and the army really be so naïve as to fall so hard for a carnival dame, no matter if she looks like Peggy Cummins? The problem lies mainly in the simplistic psychology of Bart's gun craziness: He loves them but doesn't realize what they're really for other than shooting at bottles and tin cans. You'd think he'd be smart enough to realize that armed robbery is going to to lead to someone's getting hurt.

⁷Kael was never impressed with film technique as such, which is what so many of us find fascinating about Gun Crazy. It makes brilliant use of locations like the Armour meat-packing plant (actually in Los Angeles, not Albuquerque), and the long take, shot from the back seat of the car, in which Laurie distracts a cop while Bart commits a robbery, is breathtaking. It's also notable for the actual driving scenes -- most B-pictures would resort to process screens to show what's outside the car. There's nothing "crummy" about these sequences. I think the B-picture label occurs to Kael mainly because the producers, the King brothers, specialized in cheapies, and this is the only film by director Joseph H. Lewis that still gets much respect from anyone other than hardcore cinéastes. Still, it was tapped for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1998 on the strength of its later reputation.

⁸Don Beddoe? A familiar character actor but he just has an uncredited bit as "Man from Chicago" in the film. More interesting is the appearance of Russ Tamblyn as the young Bart Tare. Tamblyn is one of the few child stars who survived adolescence for a later career: He's best known for his athletic dancing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954) and West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961) and later for playing Dr. Lawrence Jacoby in David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series. The problem is that because we know the grownup Tamblyn, it's clear that the kid couldn't grow up to look like John Dall. But nobody knew that at the time, just as nobody knew that Mickey Rooney wouldn't grow up to look like Clark Gable when he played the younger version of Blackie Gallagher in Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934).

Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

Vince Barnett, Paul Muni, and Karen Morley in Scarface

Tony Camonte: Paul Muni
Cesca Camonte: Ann Dvorak
Poppy: Karen Morley
Guino Rinaldo: George Raft
Angelo: Vince Barnett
Johnny Lovo: Osgood Perkins
Tom Gaffney: Boris Karloff
Inspector Guarino: C. Henry Gordon
Mama Camonte: Inez Palange

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett
Based on a novel by Armitage Trail
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, L. William O'Connell
Set designer: Harry Oliver
Film editing: Edward Curtiss

Like so many early talkies, Scarface feels a little off in its pacing at times, especially in scenes with dialogue, as if the director was uncertain how much of the exposition was getting across to the audience. Which is surprising, considering the director is Howard Hawks, the master of fast-paced repartee. But the real Hawks shows up eventually, especially in the action scenes, and in some brilliant bits, such as the murder of Boris Karloff's Tom Gaffney in the bowling alley. We see Gaffney start to fall after the shot, but the camera follows the track of the ball he has just bowled: It's a strike, but one pin wobbles uncertainly for a second before toppling. François Truffaut commented on the scene, "This isn't literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema." For many, Hawks's Scarface has been overshadowed by Brian De Palma's 1983 version, and its rough contemporaries Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), the gangster films that set Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney on their road to fame, shadowed the Hawks film at the time, delaying its release as Hawks and producer Howard Hughes wrangled with the Hays Office censors, who were edgy about the plethora of gangster films. In response to their objections, the film has no fewer than three screens full of text before the movie actually starts, proclaiming that it's "an indictment of gang rule in America and the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace," and exhorting the audience to demand that the government do something about it. Later there are clearly interpolated scenes that suggest some of the things the government can do include gun control and immigration reform or even the imposition of martial law. The film was even released with a subtitle, Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. This heavy-handedness suggests that Hughes had less clout with the Hays Office than did Warner Bros., which didn't jump through quite so many hoops in releasing Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. Nevertheless, Scarface was a box office success, largely because it's a hugely entertaining film, showcasing what may be Paul Muni's best screen performance -- the only other contender would be I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Muni has a leering, gleeful quality as Tony Camonte; he's almost sexy, which is something that would never be said of the actor after he began to take himself seriously in William Dieterle's stodgy biopic celebrations of Great Men like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Because Scarface was made before the Production Code clampdown on sex, it's pretty clear what's going on between Tony and Karen Morley's Poppy, but also that Tony's relationship with his sister, Cesca, has a touch of the perverse about it. The film is full of delicious asides, too, like a minor character, a reporter known as "MacArthur from the Journal," a tip of the hat to screenwriter Ben Hecht's former colleague in Chicago journalism, Charles MacArthur, who was also his co-writer on the play The Front Page. The character is played by Hecht and MacArthur's friend John Lee Mahin, one of the screenwriters on Scarface. 

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Norton in Fight Club

The Narrator: Edward Norton
Tyler Durden: Brad Pitt
Marla Singer: Helena Bonham Carter
Bob Paulson: Meat Loaf
Richard Chesler: Zach Grenier
The Mechanic: Holt McCallany
Angel Face: Jared Leto

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Jim Uhls
Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth
Production design: Alex McDowell
Film editing: James Haygood
Music: Dust Brothers

What if Dr. Jekyll didn't know he was turning into Mr. Hyde? Fight Club is essentially an exploration of that premise, turning Robert Louis Stevenson's sci-fi into psy-fi, a fiction based on a fantastical psychological premise. But Chuck Palahniuk's novel, and the adaptation of it by screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher, is more than that: It's also a satire on corporate commercialism and the grip it has on the soul -- particularly the male soul. The Narrator is a nebbishy corporate everyman, stuck in a job he hates, doing work that morally revolts him -- he calculates whether an auto manufacturer can get away with dangerously defective parts, whether a recall will be more expensive than paying off accident victims. He's insomniac, and finds that he can sleep only when he goes to support groups for people worse off than he is, sufferers from serious illnesses. At one session he meets Marla Singer, beautiful and frazzled, who also goes to these support groups because she wants to feel something that she can't find in her own routine life. Then on a business trip, during which the venality of his job becomes particularly clear to him, he meets a devil-may-care type named Tyler Durden, handsome, clever, and completely amoral. Returning from the trip he arrives to find that his apartment, the only thing he feels some pride in, has been blown up in what seems to be an accidental explosion. He has no place to go, so when he finds Durden's card, he moves in with him in a dreadful rundown old house on the edge of nowhere, and becomes drawn into Durden's life, including the formation of the titular club, in which men of various professions gather to beat one another silly. It's the ultimate catharsis for meaningless corporate drudgery. He also introduces Durden to Marla, and lies in his bed listening to the two of them having raucously noisy sex. Eventually, the sex and violence escalate, and when they reach the pinnacle of rebelliousness against establishment values, the Narrator has a revelation: He's Tyler Durden. Fincher beautifully finesses any literal-minded explanations, relying instead on Edward Norton's ordinariness and Brad Pitt's good looks, as well as some careful staging and cutting, to keep from turning this into a tale about dissociative identity disorder. Instead, it's a fable about the ordinary male's repressed desire to become a Brad Pitt, or as Durden puts it, "All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not." The first viewers of Fight Club were often distracted by the violence and failed to respond to the ideas the film is working with. Since then, it has grown in esteem, perhaps because its violence has become more routine in movies, but also because its apocalyptic ending irrupted into real life on Sept. 11, 2001. The film's power to provoke, to appall, and to stimulate argument makes it some kind of minor classic.

Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)

Charles Dance and Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dillon: Charles S. Dutton
Clemens: Charles Dance
Andrews: Brian Glover
Golic: Paul McGann
Aaron: Ralph Brown
Morse: Danny Webb
Bishop/Bishop II: Lance Henriksen
Junior: Hoyt McCallany
David: Pete Postlethwaite

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Vincent Ward, David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Cinematography: Alex Thomson
Production design: Norman Reynolds
Film editing: Terry Rawlings
Music: Elliot Goldenthal

Alien 3 may be the sourest sequel ever made, completely negating in its opening scenes what made Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) so exciting: Ripley's heroic efforts to save the lives of Newt and Hicks (as well as retrieve what remained of Bishop). When Alien 3 begins, Newt and Hicks have died, making Ripley's efforts meaningless. And as if to rub salt in her wounds, she is forced to watch an autopsy of the little girl, just to make sure the alien isn't incubating in her. Not that what follows is much more enjoyable. As I said in my comments on Aliens, what made that film and its predecessor, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), so entertaining was the interplay among its well-drawn characters. But there are hardly any characters besides Ripley in Alien 3. Charles S. Dutton and Charles Dance are fine actors, but Dance feels miscast as the brief potential romantic interest for Ripley, and Dutton is given little to do but deliver a homily at the cremation of Newt and Hicks and afterward to run and shout a lot as everyone fights the alien. Dutton's character, Dillon, is supposed to be the spiritual leader of a group of YY-chromosome inmates on the prison planet Ripley's escape pod crashes onto. The religious subplot feels superfluous -- it's apparently left over from an earlier version of the screenplay in which the prison was instead a monastery -- since the prisoners don't seem particularly devout; they mostly growl and leer at Ripley, the only woman on the planet, and a group of them try to rape her. This was the debut feature for David Fincher, who has since proved himself to be one of the more skilled and distinctive American directors, but making it was not a pleasant experience for him -- there were too many misfired attempts to get a workable screenplay, and the director who preceded him, Vincent Ward, was fired. It's mostly held together by Sigourney Weaver's performance and a few exciting action scenes -- though even these are marred by some confusing editing, especially the extended chase sequence through the corridors of the prison at the end. And Ripley's sacrifice -- which should have put an end to the series but didn't -- only adds to the general depression that permeates the movie.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

Hideko Takamine and Daisuke Kato in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Keiko Yashiro: Hideko Takamine 
Kenichi Komatsu: Tatsuya Nakadai 
Junko Inchihashi: Reiko Dan 
Nobuhiko Fujisaki: Masayuki Mori 
Matsukichi Sekine: Daisuke Kato 
Yuri: Keiko Awaji 
Goda: Ganjiro Nakamura 
Minobe: Eitaro Ozawa 
Tomoko: Chieko Nakakita 

Director: Mikio Naruse 
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima 
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko 
Film editing: Eiji Ooi 
Music : Toshiro Mayuzumi 

If I ran a revival house like the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto or the Castro in San Francisco, I'd like to program a series of double features of American and Japanese "women's pictures." It would give us a chance to compare not only directors like Douglas Sirk and Mikio Naruse but also the actresses most associated with the genre: Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, and Lana Turner on the one hand; Kyoko Kagawa, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine on the other. Takamine is the woman who ascends the stairs in Naruse's film, only to hit something like a glass ceiling. She plays Keiko (at first a little confusingly, at least to Western audiences, called "Mama"), a Ginza bar hostess whose job it is to bring in paying customers, especially rich ones,who will while away their after-office hours flirting with her and the fleet of bar girls. She doesn't sleep with the customers -- even the younger women aren't expected to, but sometimes do -- and though she drinks with them, she doesn't particularly like alcohol. But Keiko is on the brink of turning 30, and when the bar starts losing customers to a younger hostess named Yuri, who has left Keiko's establishment to start her own, she begins to see what a dead-end she faces. She doesn't own the bar where she works, and the woman who does is beginning to blame her for losing customers and for not wearing flashier kimonos. She supports her mother and somewhat feckless brother, who has a son who needs an operation to correct a defect left by polio.She begins to hate climbing the stairs to the bar every night and the stress brings on a peptic ulcer, but she can see only three options for her life: Marry, become the mistress of a wealthy patron, or buy her own bar. Each of these opportunities presents itself during the course of the film, only to end in disappointment, and at the end she is climbing the stairs again. Takamine is marvelous, so expressive that we hardly need her voiceover narration to know what she's feeling and thinking, and she's well-supported by Reiko Dan as the younger, more carefree bar girl; Tatsuya Nakadai as the bar's handsome young business manager, who's in love with Keiko; Daisuke Kato as the chubby customer who proposes a marriage to Keiko that she accepts before learning that he's already married and a constant philanderer;and Masayuki Mori as the potential wealthy patron with whom, in a moment of drunken abandonment, she sleeps, only to learn the next morning that he's moving to Osaka.When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a beautifully made account of problems specific to a time, a place, and a gender, yet universal in its depiction of the frustrations of the working life.    

Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)

Hisashi Igawa in Pitfall

The Miner/Otsuka: Hisashi Igawa
The Shopkeeper: Sumie Sasaki
The Miner's Son: Kazuo Miyahara
The Man in the White Suit: Kunie Tanaka
Toyama: Sen Yano
Reporter: Kei Sato

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Based on a teleplay by Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Segawa
Production design: Kiyoshi Awazu
Film editing: Fusako Shuzui
Music: Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu

Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature film, and the first in his trilogy of collaborations with writer Kobo Abe that also includes Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966), is a fascinating blend of documentary realism and fantasy, a murder mystery and a ghost story. Set in the coal-mining region of Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands, it follows a miner who travels around looking for work, accompanied by his young son. He is surprised one day to be offered a job by a company he had never worked for before, hired on the basis of a photograph he didn't know had been taken of him. When he reports to the location he finds only a deserted village, whose sole resident appears to be a woman who runs a candy shop. She explains that the mine shut down after a cave-in, and that she's owed some money and is waiting there for word from a man she knows. When he sets out to look for whoever summoned him there, he is followed by a man wearing a white suit and carrying a briefcase. Unnerved by this silent follower, he begins to run, but the man at first keeps pace with him and then draws a knife from his briefcase and stabs the miner to death, then tosses the knife into the nearby marshes. Returning to the village, the man gives the shopkeeper a large amount of money and gives her detailed instructions on what to tell the police when they arrive, including a precise description of the murderer. And then the fantasy begins: The miner's ghost arises from his corpse and discovers he can't communicate with the living. Moreover, when the police and reporters arrive to the crime scene, they identify the victim as Otsuka, the head of a miners' union working nearby. Otsuka is a doppelgänger for the murdered miner. And so the complications mount, as we learn that Otsuka's union is at odds with a rival union headed by Toyama. More deaths take place and other ghosts appear, some, like the miner, filled with frustration that they can't help reveal the truth about their murders. Finally, the only living person who knows what really took place is the miner's young son, who has witnessed the various murders. But the film ends with the orphaned boy setting out on a road that extends off to the horizon, carrying his secrets into an unknown future. Hiroshi Segawa's eloquent black-and-white cinematography and the minimalist, percussive score composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, and Toru Takemitsu -- the last-named, a frequent collaborator with Teshigahara, is credited as "sound director" -- give the film its fine, nervous edge.

Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)

Brenda Blethyn and Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet: Keira Knightley
Mr. Darcy: Matthew Macfadyen
Mrs. Bennet: Brenda Blethyn
Mr. Bennet: Donald Sutherland
Jane Bennet: Rosamund Pike
Charles Bingley: Simon Woods
Lydia Bennet: Jena Malone
Mr. Wickham: Rupert Friend
Mr. Collins: Tom Hollander
Kitty Bennet: Carey Mulligan
Lady Catherine de Bourgh: Judi Dench
Caroline Bingley: Kelly Reilly
Mary Bennet: Talulah Riley
Charlotte Lucas: Claudie Blakley
Georgiana Darcy: Tamzin Merchant
Mr. Gardiner: Peter Wight
Mrs. Gardiner: Penelope Wilton

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Deborah Moggach
Based on a novel by Jane Austen
Cinematography: Roman Osin
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Film editing: Paul Tothill
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran
Music: Dario Marianelli

Joe Wright's lush, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the ampersand belongs to the film) irked many Janeites. But people who love Austen's books are fated to be irked: There is no easy way to translate to film the narrative ironies that readers seize on with delight. Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach (with uncredited help from Emma Thompson) have crafted a Pride & Prejudice that takes place in a universe parallel to Austen's. They push back the time of the novel from the early 19th century to the late 18th. Tinkering with time is not unique to films of the novel: The 1940 version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and directed by Robert Z. Leonard moved the action up to the Victorian period, maybe to take advantage of MGM's wardrobe full of crinolines and hoop skirts. Wright's earlier time period allows  for a looser, more earthy setting, more Henry Fielding than Jane Austen. There are clotheslines and farm animals to be seen, and the first of the two balls that take place in the film is rougher, sweatier, more countrified than the elegant formal dances usually seen in period films. Elizabeth Bennet arrives at Netherfield with her hair about her ears, not neatly pinned under her bonnet. Later, she spins barefoot on a rope swing hung at the entrance to the barnyard, and at one point an enormously ungelded hog walks through the action. Even the formal dress is different: With her upswept hairdo, Judi Dench's Lady Catherine looks like she has just stepped out of a Joshua Reynolds portrait. The real strength of Wright's version is not in its fidelity to the novel, but in its creation of a satisfyingly consistent world in which it might have taken place, mutatis mutandis. There is some elegant staging: Visiting Pemberley, Elizabeth finds herself in a sculpture hall, where the nude statuary adds a frisson to her awakening attraction to Darcy. The ballroom scenes are beautifully filmed with long traveling takes among the various characters. And Dario Marianelli's score, with its suggestions of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, isn't overstated. Keira Knightley's fetching underbite  suggests Elizabeth's stubbornness and pride, and she's well-matched with Matthew Macfadyen, who has the thankless task of following in the footsteps of Olivier and Colin Firth, who became a sex symbol with his Darcy in the 1995 television series. Macfadyen is not conventionally handsome -- he's a little potato-nosed -- but that serves the character well: Darcy should not be an instant heartthrob like, for example, Mr. Wickham. There will never be a perfect film version of the novel -- for that matter, of any novel -- but Wright's Pride & Prejudice satisfies for what it is, a lesser work derived from a great source.