Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)

Greta Garbo and Bela Lugosi in Ninotchka

Nina Ivanova Yakushova: Greta Garbo
Count Leon d'Algout: Melvyn Douglas
Grand Duchess Swana: Ina Claire
Iranoff: Sig Ruman
Buljanoff: Felix Bressart
Kopalski: Alexander Granach
Commissar Razinin: Bela Lugosi
Count Alexis Rakonin: Gregory Gaye
Hotel Manager: Rolfe Sedan
Mercier: Edwin Maxwell
Gaston: Richard Carle

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Randall Duell
Film editing: Gene Ruggiero
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Werner R. Heymann

I had forgotten how audacious Ninotchka is when viewed in the context of the volatile international politics of 1939, a year teetering on the brink of a world war that had already begun in Britain when the film was released in November. All of the jokes about Stalin's show trials ("There are going to be fewer but better Russians"), about the ineffectual economic planning ("I've been fascinated by your five-year plan for the past 15 years"), and about the deprivations suffered by the Soviet people feel edgy, even a little sour, when we remember that almost everyone was just about to embrace the Soviets as a valued ally against the Third Reich. It's a film that shows a bit less of the "Lubitsch touch" than of the cynicism of Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay. That it transcends its era and still feels vital and funny today has mostly to do with Greta Garbo, whose shift from the Party-line drone to the vital and glamorous convert to capitalism, along with the delicate way she retains elements of the latter on her return to Moscow, is beautifully delineated. That it was her penultimate film is regrettable, but except for her definitive Camille I think it's her greatest performance.

The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Matt Damon and Tony Hale in The Informant!

Mark Whitacre: Matt Damon
Ginger Whitacre: Melanie Lynskey
FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard: Scott Bakula
FBI Special Agent Robert Herndon: Joel McHale
Mark Cheviron: Thomas F. Wilson
Mick Andreas: Tom Papa
Terry Wilson: Rick Overton
James Epstein: Tony Hale

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns
Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald
Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh
Production design: Doug J. Meerdink
Film editing: Stephen Mirrione
Çomposer: Marvin Hamlisch

Both Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and The Informant! are based on true stories about people who exposed corporate malfeasance. But while the former movie was a solid piece of entertainment showcasing a star turn for Julia Roberts, it was also one that could have been made by any good director. The Informant! is the work of an auteur, a director with a distinct, even idiosyncratic style and a clear point of view, a measure of how Steven Soderbergh has grown in technique and confidence. You can sense that from the gratuitous exclamation point appended to the title and the clunky font, redolent of rock posters from the psychedelic era, that has been imposed on the screen credits. Soderbergh is out to play with our expectations of what a film about a whistleblower cooperating with the FBI should be like. The cast is full of comedians and actors who usually play comedy, such as Joel McHale, Tony Hale, Scott Adsit, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, and both Smothers Brothers -- Tom is a senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland and Dick is a judge -- all of them playing it straight. Their presence creates a kind of tension in the film: We keep expecting them to break out into familiar comic shtick -- for Tony Hale, for example, as Mark Whitacre's continually surprised lawyer to turn into the busybody political factotum he plays on Veep -- but they don't. Soderbergh's ironic tone is designed to fit the facts: Mark Whitacre may have been out to expose the crookedness rife at ADM by cooperating with the FBI, but he was a crook himself. We begin to sense that Whitacre may be a little bit off when we start hearing his thoughts in voiceover, meditations on polar bears and butterflies and anything else that crosses his mind, a delicious stream of consciousness that doesn't begin to hint at the complications of the character. Matt Damon gives one of his best performances as the chubby, cheerful, and morally unhinged Whitacre, and Scott Z. Burns, who had previously written a very different character for Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), gives him wonderful things to say and do. Under his pseudonym, Peter Andrews, Soderbergh is his own cinematographer for The Informant! and he chooses slightly faded colors and casts a soft haze over many scenes, creating a subtly dated atmosphere for a film set in the early '90s, the era before ubiquitous cell phones and laptops. This is a sleeper of a film that almost went under my radar.

Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)

Albert Finney and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich

Erin Brockovich: Julia Roberts
Ed Masry: Albert Finney
George: Aaron Eckhart
Brenda: Conchata Ferrell
Donna Jensen: Marg Helgenberger
Pete Jensen: Michael Harney
Pamela Duncan: Cherry Jones
Charles Embry: Tracey Walter
Kurt Potter: Peter Coyote
David Foil: T.J. Thyne
Theresa Dallavale: Veanne Cox

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Susannah Grant
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Philip Messina
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Thomas Newman

Any film that purports to be what the title character of Erin Brockovich calls a "David and what's-his-name" story is bound to be somewhat formulaic. But I can forgive Steven Soderbergh's movie for its clichés, such as the hunky next-door neighbor who provides Erin with sex and babysitting, or the starchy, tightly wound female lawyer who tries and fails to do the kind of work in signing up participants in the lawsuit that comes so naturally to Erin. We're asked to swallow a lot of narrative shortcutting in the relationship that she builds with Ed Masry, too. But it's to Julia Roberts's great Oscar-winning credit that she makes this fictionalized version of a real person (whom we see early in the film in the role of a waitress) as believable as she does, with the considerable help of the invaluable (but never Oscar-winning) Albert Finney. I've always thought that Soderbergh is undermined by his choice of material: Traffic, which came out the same year as Erin Brockovich and won an Oscar for Soderbergh, is weakened by the difficulty of cramming so many interlocking stories into the confines of a feature film, and it too suffers from some formulaic plotting. But Erin Brockovich makes the case for the feel-good movie with its director's obvious delight in providing a showcase for such skilled actors. This is what makes his Ocean's movies (20001, 2004, 2007) and Magic Mike (2012) so entertaining. Would a grittier approach with less charismatic stars have done a better job of telling the story of Brockovich and Masry's fight with PG&E? Yes, probably. But there's something to be said for good things in glossy packages.

The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)

Ahmed Ben Hassan: Rudolph Valentino
Lady Diana Mayo: Agnes Ayres
Dr. Raoul de St. Hubert: Adolphe Menjou
Omair: Walter Long
Gaston: Lucien Littlefield
Mustapha Ali: Charles Brinley
Sir Aubrey Mayo: Frank Butler
Zilah: Ruth Miller
Yousaef: George Waggner

Director: George Melford
Screenplay: Monte M. Katterjohn
Based on a novel by Edith Maude Hull
Cinematography: William Marshall

Today The Sheik looks more like a classic demonstration of the kind of colonialist condescension toward non-European cultures described in Edward W. Said's book Orientalism than like the campy bodice-ripping romance that both titillated audiences and inspired parodies. It's likely that nobody ever took it seriously until critics like Said made us realize how much its imperialist attitudes had infected our social and political discourse. The key moment comes when St. Hubert reveals to Lady Diana that the man who had abducted her was not an Arab but the son of an Englishman and a Frenchwoman -- thereby making his otherness safe. It provides a kind of wish-fulfillment: kicking off the traces of civilization (as defined by the West) and going "primitive." Setting all that aside (as if we could or should), The Sheik is a still-potent demonstration of the star appeal of Rudolph Valentino, whose eye-popping, teeth-baring, and nostril-flaring have gone out of style, but not his brand of boyish sex appeal. Agnes Ayres, on the other hand, is a rather dowdy heroine.

The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, 1932)

Fay Wray and Joel McCrea in The Most Dangerous Game

Bob Rainsford: Joel McCrea
Eve Trowbridge: Fay Wray
Count Zaroff: Leslie Banks
Martin Trowbridge: Robert Armstrong
Ivan: Noble Johnson
Tartar: Steve Clemente
Captain: William B. Davidson

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel
Screenplay: James Ashmore Creelman
Based on a story by Richard Connell
Cinematography: Henry W. Gerrard
Art direction: Carroll Clark
Film editing: Archie Marshek
Music: Max Steiner

Director Ernest B. Schoedsack and actors Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong were literally moonlighting when they made The Most Dangerous Game: During the day they were working on King Kong (1933), which also used many of the same sets. While not the landmark film that King Kong has become, The Most Dangerous Game has some of the same sexy intensity, much of it provided by Wray's ability to look both wide-eyed and sultry. As in King Kong, she is a damsel in distress, trekking through the jungle in entirely inappropriate and flimsy attire. But although Wray is given little to do but shriek, writhe, and run, she manages to persuade us that if anyone could survive such perils, she's the one. Also like King Kong, The Most Dangerous Game carries an ambivalence about the sport of big-game hunting, articulated by Joel McCrea's Bob Rainsford when he admits that being hunted has let him know how the animals he hunted felt. Leslie Banks is the main show, however, using his war-paralyzed face to convey the madness of his supposedly Russian count -- who doesn't seem to speak Russian but instead some kind of gibberish -- with his credo of "Kill, then love." This is a pulse-pounding classic that moves along at a relentless clip from the exceptionally speedy shipwreck to the well-staged chase. It gets much of its energy from Max Steiner's score, which picks up the two notes of the count's hunting horn and embroiders on them effectively.

To Joy (Ingmar Bergman, 1950)

Victor Sjöström, Maj-Britt Nilsson, and Stig Olin in To Joy

Stig Eriksson: Stig Olin
Marta Olsson: Maj-Britt Nilsson
Sönderby: Victor Sjöström
Marcel: Birger Malmsten
Mikael Bro: John Ekman
Nelly Bro: Margit Carlqvist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer
Production design: Nils Svenwall
Film editing: Oscar Rosander

Not long ago, while watching some YouTube videos of symphony orchestra performances, I was struck by how few women players were in the ranks of the great orchestras of Berlin and Vienna, especially in comparison to the numbers of women in the equivalent orchestras of New York, Boston, and Chicago. Even when the soloist was an Anne-Sophie Mutter or a Julia Fischer, the ranks of players behind her were almost exclusively male. It didn't take much Googling to learn that the fact hasn't escaped the notice of women musicians, especially in Europe. So I wasn't surprised when the crusty old conductor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman's To Joy introduced Marta Olsson, a new member of his orchestra, by commenting that her talent was "against nature." Eventually, Marta gives up her profession to raise the children she and fellow musician Stig Eriksson produce, while (mostly) patiently suffering his ego and infidelity. He's the one who, though tormented by the fear that he's mediocre, tries to move from the orchestra into a concert soloist, suffering a crushing setback when his attempt at performing the Mendelssohn violin concerto ends in disaster. The film is a flashback to their marriage after she dies, and though he's softened a bit by her kindness and good nature, he retains his egotism and self-doubt in equal measures. It's easy enough to see Stig Eriksson as the director's self-portrait, coming as it does after the failure of his second marriage. "Joy" is not an emotion that we readily associate with Bergman, though in this film it's an allusion to the final choral movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony, an excerpt from which is performed at the end of the film. The Freude of Beethoven (and of the Schiller poem that he set to music) is an emanation of the divine, emerging after struggle and pain, and Bergman tries to embody it in Stig and Marta's young son, sitting alone in the concert hall as the orchestra rehearses the symphony. It's a conclusion that teeters on the edge of sentimentality, as Bergman's invocations of the innocence of childhood often do. Still, though a lot of things in the film don't work, such as a resort to a voiceover commentary on the marriage of Stig and Marta by the conductor Sönderby that feels jarringly out of place when it occurs, To Joy is a long early step toward the mastery of Bergman's later films.

Spring Dreams (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1960)

Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu in Spring Dreams

Chizuko Okudaira: Mariko Okada
Miss Yasugi: Yoshiko Kuga
Shobei Okudaira: Eitaro Ozawa
Shinichiro Atsumi: Chishu Ryu
Grandma: Chieko Higashiyama
Miss Yae: Michiko Araki
Tamiko Okudaira: Yatsuko Tan'ami
Mamoru Okudaira: Yusuke Kawazu
Dr. Hanamura: Shuji Sano
Eiichi Kato: Shinlji Tanaka
Ema: Miki Mori
Haruko: Mie Fuji
Kimiko: Meiko Nakamura
Umeko: Yukio Toake

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's attempt at something like screwball comedy, Spring Dreams, has been likened to Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) because of its premise: a member of the lower classes throws a self-centered middle class household into chaos. In this case, it's a sweet potato vendor who has a stroke in the living room of the Okudaira household and is forced to recuperate there. Because most of the action takes place in a few rooms in the Okudaira house, I'm more reminded of the stage comedies of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You, especially since Kinoshita films with long "theatrical" takes. The head of the household, Shobei Okudaira, is an irascible would-be tyrant, bullying and mocking not only his family but also his secretary, Miss Yasugi, taunting her as an old maid. The workers of his pharmaceutical company are threatening to strike as the film begins, so he has a lot to bluster about. In true comic fashion, there are romantic problems to solve -- Shobei's daughter Chizuko wants to marry an artist, while he wants her to marry the son of one of his executives, if only to provide a suitable heir for his business. His own son, Mamoru, is a nerdy would-be philosopher who goes about inquiring into the meaning of life and has no interest in the business or much of anything else. (He's played by Yusuke Kawazu, unrecognizable as the same actor who played the rebellious Kiyoshi in Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, made the same year.) In the course of the film, the spinster Miss Yasugi will also find love, and even the matriarch of the household, Okudaira's mother-in-law, will recognize the sweet potato vendor as the lost love of her youth -- they're played, incidentally, by Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu, the elderly couple of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). Chuji Kinoshita's harpsichord score lends a delicacy to a film with a good deal of charm.

Tout Va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

Him, Jacques: Yves Montand
Her, Susan: Jane Fonda
Factory Manager: Vittorio Caprioli
Genevieve: Elizabeth Chauvin
Jacques: Castel Casti
Lucien: Éric Chartier
Georges: Louis Bugette
Léon: Yves Gabrielli
Frederic: Pierre Oudrey

Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Cinematography: Armand Marco
Production design: Jacques Duguied
Film editing: Claudine Merlin, Kenout Peltier

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's sardonic look at what happened to the leftist intellectuals who were on the forefront of the May 1968 protests in France has two great cinematic showpieces. The first is the multi-chambered two-decker set on which we watch the employees of a sausage factory play out their messy, scattered, and mostly ineffectual efforts at a strike. Though the set is often described as an hommage to Jerry Lewis's similar set for The Ladies' Man (1961), the concept goes back to the era of silent comedy. The other remarkable sequence takes place in an enormous supermarket, in which the camera, placed behind the row of cashiers ringing up purchases, tracks back and forth as shoppers wheel up their goods, a communist hawks his book with a newly marked-down price, and a small revolution starts in which people are told that everything is free. It's a nightmare of consumer capitalism run amok. Godard and Gorin's satire is directed at the complacency into which everyone has sunk in the four years since May 1968, while attempting to demonstrate that the class struggle is still viable. It's conceived as a kind of film about a film, with off-camera voices discussing the need to cast stars -- i.e. Jane Fonda and Yves Montand -- to guarantee the money needed to make the movie. As a demonstration of Godardian film technique, it has moments of brilliance, but even though it scores some points, as political filmmaking it feels inert and now inescapably dated.

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.