Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Ronny Cox, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance

Ed: Jon Voight
Lewis: Burt Reynolds
Bobby: Ned Beatty
Drew: Ronny Cox
Old Man: Ed Ramey
Lonnie: Billy Redden
First Griner: Seamon Glass
Second Griner: Randall Deal
Mountain Man: Bill McKinney
Toothless Man: Herbert "Cowboy" Coward
Sheriff Bullard: James Dickey

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: James Dickey
Based on a novel by James Dickey
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Art direction: Fred Harpman
Film editing: Tom Priestley

I haven't read James Dickey's novel Deliverance, but I think I can see why Dickey grew so angry at director John Boorman's revisions on his screenplay version of the book. The film never quite decides what it wants to be: an adventure story, an environmental fable, or a story about a clash between cultures. It works best as an adventure story, which is in the nature of film, and somewhat as a clash of cultures. The four suburban hotshots who arrive in the backwoods of northern George for a weekend adventure are from the outset rude and condescending to the people who live there year-round, and of course they get their comeuppance in extreme ways. The irony is that the one man in their company who sympathizes with the locals is the one who fails to survive: Drew brought along a guitar, not the bows and arrows that Ed and Lewis bring with them, and he interacts musically with one of the supposedly "inbred hillbillies" in the celebrated "Dueling Banjos" sequence. Drew is also the only one who tries to hold out for facing justice after Lewis kills one of the mountain men who attack them. Lewis argues that if they stood trial for killing the man, they'd face a jury of the man's peers; Bobby doesn't want the story of his being raped to get out, and Ed passively goes along with them. Better backgrounding on the four adventurers might have given more substance to their characters and their ideas, and the villainous mountain men are monsters out of nightmares rather than actual human beings, so the debate over justice seems a little out of focus. But it's mostly the environmental issue that falls by the way: There's little sympathy shown for the people who face seeing their homes flooded -- one of them even says it's the "best thing that ever happened to this town" -- an almost no feeling for the wilderness that will be sunk beneath the man-made lake. Boorman would later make The Emerald Forest (1985), a more environmentally conscious film also about the construction of a dam, set in the Brazilian rain forest.

The River Fuefuki (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1960)

Okei: Hideko Takamine
Sadahei: Takahiro Tamura
Sozo: Koshiro Matsumoto
Ume: Shima Iwashita
Heikichi: Shinji Tanaka
Yasuzo: Kichiemon Nakamura

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Kisaku Ito
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

In The River Fuefuki Hideko Takamine gives a remarkable performance as Okei, a woman who marries into a peasant family on the banks of the titular river. As generations pass in the small house that lies at one end of the bridge across the river, the family's sons are drawn, despite warnings from their elders, into service of the feudal lord in battle after battle. Keisuke Kinoshita has apparently designed the film as an antiwar fable, sometimes giving the monochrome images a storybook quality with overlaid washes and streaks of color, often highlighting just a candle or the fire in a small hearth with a spot of red. It takes the heroism of the samurai film and debunks it, reducing the combat to mere slashing and hacking. Okei endures and ages through the film, becoming the true hero of the story.

The Man With the Recalcitrant Hat

Million Dollar Legs (Edward F. Cline, 1932)

Susan Fleming, Jack Oakie, and W.C. Fields in Million Dollar Legs

Migg Tweeny: Jack Oakie
The President: W.C. Fields
The Major-Domo: Andy Clyde
Mata Machree: Lyda Roberti
Angela: Susan Fleming
Mysterious Man: Ben Turpin
Secretary of the Treasury: Hugh Herbert
Mr. Baldwin: George Barbier
Willie: Dickie Moore

Director: Edward F. Cline
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry Myers
Cinematography: Arthur L. Todd

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward F. Cline, 1941)

W.C. Fields and Margaret Dumont in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break 

The Great Man: W.C. Fields
Gloria: Gloria Jean
The Producer: Franklin Pangborn
Mrs. Hemogloben: Margaret Dumont
Ouilotta Hemogloben: Susan Miller
The Rival: Leon Errol
The Waitress: Jody Gilbert
The Soda Jerk: Irving Bacon
The Producer's Wife: Mona Barrie
Butch: Billy Lenhart
Buddy: Kenneth Brown
The Cleaning Lady: Minerva Urecal

Director: Edward F. Cline
Screenplay: John T. Neville, Prescott Chaplin, W.C. Fields (as Otis Criblecoblis)
Cinematography: Charles Van Enger
Art direction: Jack Otterson
Film editing: Arthur Hilton
Music: Frank Skinner, Charles Previn

Was ever man so troubled by his hats? Million Dollar Legs and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break bracket W.C. Fields's career as a movie star (discounting his appearances in short subjects and in supporting roles in silent films and early talkies), and both begin with him struggling to manage a hat. It's a top hat in the earlier film, and it insists on having its own way, culminating in a familiar Fieldsian bit in which it rides behind him on the tip of his walking stick. In the later film, it's a straw boater whose lid comes to grief. Fields had crafted these hat tricks in vaudeville, and they remain one of the most endearing aspects of a potentially unlovable personality. Fields always managed to triumph over his own persona: Although Sucker finds him repellent in aspect, the broken veins of his nose and face unconcealable by any makeup artist, you can't help understanding why Gloria Jean, in an odd curtain line, proclaims her love for him. Both films are the apotheoses of the kind of sublime lunacy that emerged from his imagination, the former a surreal take on the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the latter an assault on the movie studios that tried (and usually failed) to stifle that imagination. Although Fields was surrounded in both films with superb comic talent -- Jack Oakie, Andy Clyde, Ben Turpin, Hugh Herbert, Franklin Pangborn, Margaret Dumont, Leon Errol -- they are dominated by him, braving it out through all reversals of fortune that may come his way. The greatest film comedians -- Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, the Marxes -- were similarly indomitable. The climax of Sucker is a spectacular car and firetruck chase that owes more to the direction of Edward F. Cline, veteran of the golden age of silent slapstick comedy, than to Fields, but we shall never see his like again.

Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Macha Méril and Sandrine Bonnaire in Vagabond

Mona Bergeron: Sandrine Bonnaire
Mme. Landier: Macha Méril
Yolande: Yolande Moreau
Jean-Pierre: Stéphane Freiss
Assoun: Yahiaoui Assouna
David: Patrick Lepcynski
The goatherd: Sylvain
The goatherd's wife: Sabine
Aunt Lydie: Marthe Jarnias

Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Patrick Blossier
Film editing: Patricia Mazuy, Agnès Varda
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

We Americans tend to regard homelessness as a socio-economic problem, a consequence of a lack of economic opportunity (i.e., jobs) and affordable housing. But leave it to the French, or more specifically to Agnès Varda, to see it as an existential problem, a challenge to our notions of freedom. Mona Bergeron, found frozen to death at the start of Vagabond, couldn't have cared less about economic opportunity if she could find just enough to buy some bread that wasn't too stale and hard to eat, and she carried her housing, a tent, with her. Nor does she care that the stench from her unwashed clothes and body is repellent to some that she encounters as she hitchhikes her way around the Languedoc. Hers is a life, as the French title, Sans Toit ni Loi, says, "without roof or rules." She's not your typical off-the-grid dropout: Those are embodied in the film by the goatherd with a degree in philosophy who scorns Mona for her unwillingness to work, to which she responds that she may stink but she's free; he works all the time and stinks anyway. Varda has crafted an extraordinary docudrama, featuring both professional actors and people who actually met the real Mona Bergeron, played beautifully by Sandrine Bonnaire. Varda has a way of summing up things in simple images, such as the one above with the manicured hands of Mme. Landier, the scientist who picks up the hitchhiking young woman, and the grimy fingers of Mona, meeting but not touching across a cafe table. In simple strokes, Varda examines not only Mona's life but also those of people who encounter her: Mme. Landier, her colleague Jean-Pierre, the goatherd and his wife, and Yolande, a young woman who nominally takes care of the elderly Aunt Lydie, with whom Mona easily strikes up a more effective rapport. It's a bleak, sometimes funny, sometimes profound film that never succumbs to sentimentality or falseness.

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)

Yoko Tsukasa, Setsuko Hara, Ryuji Kita, Shin Saburi, and Nobuo Nakamura in Late Autumn

Akiko Miwa: Setsuko Hara
Ayako Miwa: Yoko Tsukasa
Yuriko Sasaki: Mariko Okada
Soichi Mamiya: Shin Saburi
Shuzo Taguchi: Nobuo Nakamura
Seiichiro Hirayama: Ryuji Kita
Shotaru Goto: Keiji Sada
Shukichi Miwa: Chishu Ryu

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Ton Satomi
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Tomiji Shimizu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Takanobu Saito

It's possible to think of 1960 as a kind of watershed year in Japanese film, with the appearance of two such radically different films as Nagisa Oshima's The Sun's Burial and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. The contrast between the lurid chaos of Oshima's underworld and the strict geometry (of both style and morals) of Ozu's middle classes couldn't be sharper. I imagine some alien intelligence on a distant planet intercepting transmissions of both films and wondering that they could possibly come from the same world, let alone the same country (and even the same film studio, Shochiku). Ozu was of course an established master, whereas Oshima was beginning a career -- with a bang, it should be said, making three feature films that year. The razzle-dazzle of The Sun's Burial was long behind Ozu, if it was ever really in his cinematic vocabulary. But both films speak to the restless undercurrents in Japanese postwar society, Oshima's by confronting the disorder and corruption, Ozu's by slyly examining the breakup of stifling traditions in the Japanese family. Both end with solitary women, the gangster-prostitute Hanako in The Sun's Burial and the empty-nest mother Akiko in Late Autumn, confronting loneliness. But if Hanako has a counterpart in Ozu's film, it's really the feisty Yuriko, the representative of the younger generation who sorts out all the tangled threads that the meddling older generation has gotten snared in. At this point I feel the comparisons getting strained, but it's always fun to let differing films sort themselves out.

Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979)

Mayumi Ogawa and Ken Ogata in Vengeance Is Mine

Iwao Enokizu: Ken Ogata
Shizuo Enokizu: Rentaro Mikuni
Kazuko Enokizu: Mitsuko Baisho
Haru Asano: Mayumi Ogawa
Hisano Asano: Nijiko Kiyokawa
Kayo Enokizu: Chocho Miyako
Tanejiro Shibata: Taiji Tonoyama
Daihachi Baba: Goro Tarumi
Kawashima: Yoshi Kato
Prostitute: Toshie Negishi

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Masaru Baba
Based on a novel by Ryuzo Saki
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Production design: Akiyoshi Satani
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Shinichiro Ikebe

It might have been called Vengeance Without a Cause for all Shohei Imamura's film tells us about what drove Iwao Enokizu, a character based on the real-life con man and serial killer Akira Nishiguchi, to his criminal excesses. We are left to see them as the product of societal decay in postwar Japan, or perhaps as something in the air -- as the strikingly fantastic end of the film seems to suggest. It's a film with all the repellent fascination of a rattlesnake, and Imamura is intent on holding the viewer's gaze on the crimes. Nothing escapes Imamura's scathing treatment: not motherhood, not the police, not religion, and certainly not Japan's prewar history, which is touched on in a scene that a lesser filmmaker might have used as a source for Enokizu's disorder: His father is forced to submit to an imperial soldier as the boy Iwao looks on in disgust. Ken Ogata is attractively repellent as the adult Enokizu, and Rentaro Mikuni portrays the father as a man who hides his moral cowardice behind a façade of devout Catholicism. There are daring performances by Mitsuko Baisho as Iwao's wife, erotically fascinated by her husband's father, by Mayumi Ogawa as the manager of a sleazy inn who gets fatally ensnared by Enokizu, and by Nijiko Kiyokawa as her grasping, voyeuristic mother. It's part crime film and part horror movie.

Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964)

Anthony Quinn and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek

Alexis Zorba: Anthony Quinn
Basil: Alan Bates
The Widow: Irene Papas
Madame Hortense: Lila Kedrova
Mavrandoni: Giorgos Foundas
Mimithos: Sotiris Moustakas
Soul: Anna Kyriakou
Lola: Eleni Anousaki
Pavlo: Yorgo Voyagis
Manolakis: Takis Emmanuel

Director: Michael Cacoyannis
Screenplay: Michael Cacoyannis
Based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Cinematography: Walter Lassally
Art direction: Vassilis Photopoulos
Film editing: Michael Cacoyannis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis

For a film that supposedly celebrates the life force embodied in its title character, Zorba the Greek sure is full of cruelty and death and destruction. I don't think I know a scene more horrifying than the ransacking of Madame Hortense's hotel after her death, when the black-clad, toothless harpies of the village swarm through in a riot of looting that ends with the dead woman on her bed in the stripped room. And yet at the end, after their mining efforts have collapsed spectacularly, after Basil has unwittingly caused the death of the widow and the suicide of his rival for her affections, Basil and Zorba dance. I suppose this is supposed to signify that life goes on. It was, nevertheless, a critical and commercial success, even though to my mind it's a disjointed film with radical switchbacks in tone. What it has going for it is a couple of colorful performances by Anthony Quinn and the Oscar-winning Lila Kedrova. Alan Bates, usually a fine actor, seems a little off in his performance, as if he hadn't quite got a hold on the character beyond the obvious odd-coupling of his mildly stuffy Brit with the flamboyant Zorba. It might be fun to see this film back-to-back with An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978), in which it's Bates who plays the life-force character, the shaggy artist Saul Kaplan, who brings Jill Clayburgh's Erica out of her post-divorce funk.

The Sun's Burial (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Isao Sasaki and Kayoko Honoo in The Sun's Burial 

Hanako: Kayoko Honoo
Shin: Masahiko Tsugawa
Takeshi: Isao Sasaki
Yosehei: Fumio Watanabe
Batasuke: Katamari Fujiwara
Chika: Tanie Kitabayashi
Yotsematsu: Junzaburo Ban
Agitator: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Toshiro Ishido, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Production design: Koji Uno
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Riichiro Manabe

A harrowing portrait of gangster life in Osaka, filmed with the kind of widescreen eloquence that Nagisha Oshima and cinematographer Takashi Kawamata brought to Cruel Story of Youth, made the same year. This is a cruel story of all ages in the Japanese underworld, with a remarkable performance by Kayoko Honoo as the ruthless young woman who survives (and perhaps thrives on) degradation. For a little perspective, see my comments on Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn, also from 1960.

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

Joan Crawford and Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce 

Mildred Pierce: Joan Crawford
Wally Fay: Jack Carson
Veda Pierce: Ann Blyth
Monte Beragon: Zachary Scott
Ida Corwin: Eve Arden
Bert Pierce: Bruce Bennett
Lottie: Butterfly McQueen
Mrs. Maggie Biederhof: Lee Patrick
Inspector Peterson: Moroni Olsen
Kay Pierce: Jo Ann Olsen

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Ranald McDougal
Based on a novel by James M. Cain
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Art direction: Anton Grot
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Max Steiner

Mildred Pierce provided Joan Crawford with her shining Oscar moment, even if she had to accept her statuette from her sickbed -- surrounded, to be sure, by press photographers. But I don't think it's her best performance. I prefer her as Crystal Allen in The Women (George Cukor, 1939), who, though she loses her sugar daddy still manages to kiss off the "respectable" women with a splendid curtain line. Or as Helen Wright, the consummate rich and predatory patroness in Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), treating the Fannie Hurst melodrama as if it were Ibsen, inhabiting every absurd moment with full conviction. Or even as Millicent Weatherby in Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956), in which she fights against the hardness into which her face was beginning to settle as she turned 50 by crafting an image of a younger, more vulnerable woman. There are things about Mildred Pierce that don't quite work,  particularly the shifts from film noir, shot with expressionist flair by Ernest Haller, to "woman's picture" opulence of setting. But it is still an indispensable film, as essential to defining Crawford's career -- and hence to an understanding of how Hollywood viewed women in the 1940s -- as Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) was to Bette Davis's.

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

Ulrich Matthes and Bruno Ganz in Downfall

Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz
Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Laga
Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch
Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes
Eva Braun: Juliane Köhler
Albert Speer: Heino Ferch
Ernst-Günter Schenk: Christian Berkel
Werner Haase: Matthias Habich
Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann
Gen. Weidling: Michael Mendl
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Screenplay: Bernd Eichinger
Based on books by Joachim Fest and Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller
Cinematography: Rainer Klausmann
Production design: Bernd Lepel
Film editing: Hans Funck
Music: Stephan Zacharias

Downfall may be best known today for memes: the video parodies that take parts of the film, particularly the ranting of Bruno Ganz's Hitler, and supply new subtitles that spoof everything from contemporary politics to the efforts of the producers to suppress the parodies on YouTube because of copyright concerns. The producers were misguided: The parodies probably led more people to watch the actual film than would have without their notoriety. It's a well-made film, particularly because it manages to deal with an inherent problem: Would a dramatization of the last days of Hitler and his coterie tend to glamorize their futile struggle to survive, turning it into something like heroism? Ganz's superb performance helps the film sidestep that danger: His Hitler is humanized, to be sure, even to the point of once shedding a tear, but ultimately it's a portrait of repellent fanaticism and megalomania. He's a twitchy old man, one hand held behind his back in a palsied claw, but it's easy to see how the rather beleaguered men and women who surround him could be filled with a terrified awe of the man. I'm not particularly happy with the framing of Downfall, however. I think the decision to see much of the story through the eyes of Hitler's pretty secretary, Traudl Junge, shifts the focus away from the desperate horror of the final days, using a somewhat glossy survival story to keep the audience entertained. The footage of the real Traudl Junge that begins and ends the film doesn't much help illuminate why the "ordinary" German could be hoodwinked by Nazism, and her insistence that she didn't know of the true horrors of the Reich feels a little specious. There are, however, some moments of genuine drama in the film that emphasize how foul a spell Hitler cast over his followers, particularly the hysterical collapse of the otherwise icy Magda Goebbels at Hitler's feet when she realize the end is at hand. She pulls herself together and then proceeds to systematically murder her five children. I also liked the depiction of the cynicism of the Nazis who, when someone reminds them of the plight of the German people, sneeringly retort that it was their fault for bringing them to power in the first place. There's a lesson in the film somewhere for contemporary Americans, but I don't want to be the one to spell it out. Kudos to Stephan Zacharias for avoiding Wagnerian clichés in his score, although I thought the quotation from Purcell's aria "When I Am Laid in Earth" might have been a touch too sentimental.