The Eternal Rainbow (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Yoshiko Kuga and Yusuke Kawazu in The Eternal Rainbow 

Osamu Sagara: Teiji Takahashi
Chie Obita: Yoshiko Kuga
Shiro Machimura: Takahiro Tamura
Kikuo Suda: Yusuke Kawazu
Fumi Kageyama: Kinuyo Tanaka
Naoji Kageyama: Chishu Ryu
Minoru Kageyama: Kazuya Kosaka
Kyoichiro Obita: Minoru Oki
Hiroko Sonobe: Hizuru Takachiho

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

An unstable mixture of documentary and domestic melodrama, The Eternal Rainbow begins with shots of the Yawata steel mill complex and a voiceover narration telling us how steel is made and then wandering out into the surrounding industrial community, where the company has built recreation and cultural facilities for the workers as well as what the narrator calls "beautiful apartment buildings." (They're rather bleakly landscaped multistory boxes with stairwells open to the elements.) We're also told that the smoke that rises above the mill appears in five distinct colors, although I couldn't discern much beyond various shades of gray and yellow. Despite the idyllic tone of the documentary, the lives of the workers don't seem particularly blissful: There's some resentment and discrimination between the factory workers and the office workers, which extends to the romantic entanglements that form the plot of the "fictional" side of  Keisuke Kinsoshita's film. The hazards of factory work are not overlooked, either. Twice we learn of accidents that send the steelworkers to the company hospital, though Kinoshita doesn't show either accident taking place. The second accident involves one of the principal characters, Suda, a handsome young worker whose job it is to ride on the front of the engine through the factory's railyards and leap off to run ahead and pull the switch. Suda rents a room from the Kageyamas, who have a son, Minoru, who never made the grade in strength or ability to work in the mill, and continually searches for a job. Naoji Kageyama is nearing retirement, and he and his wife will be forced to move out of the apartment they rent from the company. Suda also gets involved in pleading the case for his older friend Sagara, who is in love with the pretty Chie, who's not sure she wants to marry a steelworker; her parents want her to marry the engineer Machimura, who has just accepted a job with the company's Brazilian branch. These rather paltry domestic matters are not enough to carry the film by themselves, which may be why Kinoshita chose to insert them into the documentary. What interest the film has lies mainly in some impressive scenes inside the mill and in its environs, but it gets bogged down in scenes of the "Water Carnival" staged for the entertainment of the workers, consisting mainly of young women dancing to pop and light classical music in front of a band shell in the middle of a pond. There are too many characters to sort out for the fictional story to have much impact.

Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)

Ethan Hawke and Gore Vidal in Gattaca

Vincent Freeman: Ethan Hawke
Irene Cassini: Uma Thurman
Jerome Morrow: Jude Law
Director Josef: Gore Vidal
Detective Hugo: Alan Arkin
Anton Freeman: Loren Dean
Dr. Lamar: Xander Berkeley
German: Tony Shalhoub
Caesar: Ernest Borgnine
Marie Freeman: Jayne Brook
Antonio Freeman: Elias Koteas

Director: Andrew Niccol
Screenplay: Andrew Niccol
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak
Production design: Jan Roelfs
Film editing: Lisa Zeno Churgin
Music: Michael Nyman

It's refreshing these days to see a science fiction movie not dependent on special effects to make its point, which is why the 21-year-old Gattaca feels retro, even dated in so many ways. The focus remains on ideas about genetic manipulation as its protagonist, Vincent, tries to elude detection as an "in-valid" -- one who was conceived in the messy old random way rather than the "valid" one of pre-screened fertilization that produced his brother, Anton. Vincent wants to go to space, and by working with a shady organization that provides in-valids with the identities of certified valids, he gets his chance, taking on the identity of Jerome Morrow, an athlete who was so depressed at coming in second that he walked in front of a moving car and is crippled for life. The film strains a bit to persuade us that people will accept Vincent's new identity, since Ethan Hawke's Vincent doesn't look a lot like Jude Law's Jerome, except in an ID photo that tries to strike some kind of plausible middle between the two. And later in the film we'll be forced to believe that Vincent and his brother, Anton, don't immediately recognize each other as the grownup versions of the siblings who used to compete with each other in swimming races. But suspension of disbelief aside, Gattaca manages to be a fairly witty and intelligent film. I particularly like the scene in which Vincent/Jerome and the other astronauts board the spaceship to Titan, wearing business suits, not the usual Mylar spacesuits we associate with space travel. It reminds me a bit of the men who board the rocket ship in Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902), wearing top hats.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)

Aurora Cornu and Jean-Claude Brialy in Claire's Knee

Jerome: Jean-Claude Brialy
Aurora: Aurora Cornu
Laura: Béatrice Romand
Claire: Laurence de Monaghan
Mme. Walter: Michèle Montel
Gilles: Gérard Falconetti
Vincent: Fabrice Luchini

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Film editing: Cécile Decugis

Call me naïve, but I never realized before how much Claire's Knee is a kinder, gentler version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Éric Rohmer's characters exist to talk, not to act, so that physical seduction recedes in the face of verbal dalliance. The novelist Aurora in Claire's Knee is not, like the Marquise de Merteuil of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel and its many adaptations, out to deflower the innocent, using Jerome, her equivalent of Valmont, as her instrument. For her, the dalliance of older man and teenager is an intellectual exercise, one that might result in a novel for her and only incidentally in pleasure for him. So it's also of importance that of the two jeunes filles en fleurs of the film, it's the more intellectual Laura who truly attracts Jerome, while the strikingly pretty but vapid Claire may be dismissed along with the brief erotic thrill he gets from caressing her titular joint. But has a film ever been sexier without actual nudity and copulation? Add to that the taboos about underage sex, and we get a film taut with suspense yet essentially light-hearted and full of wisdom about the complexities of love.

Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924)

Mary Astor and John Barrymore in Beau Brummel

George Bryan "Beau" Brummel: John Barrymore
Lady Margery Alvanley: Mary Astor
The Prince of Wales: Willard Louis
Lady Hester Stanhope: Carmel Myers
Duchess of York: Irene Rich
Mortimer: Alec B. Francis
Lord Alvanley: William Humphrey
Lord Stanhope: Richard Tucker
Lord Byron: George Beranger

Director: Harry Beaumont
Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum
Based on a play by Clyde Fitch
Cinematography: David Abel
Film editing: Howard Bretherton

The slow, stagy, and occasionally cheesy-looking costume drama was the film that lured John Barrymore away from Broadway to Hollywood. It's about the rise and fall of George Bryan Brummel (usually spelled with two l's) in the court of the Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and then George IV. Barrymore gets to load on the old age makeup -- which makes him look startlingly like his brother, Lionel -- as the film goes on. The supporting cast plays a gaggle of semihistorical figures who are mostly there for atmosphere; I was surprised, for example, to discover that the rather ordinary fellow limping around in the background was supposed to be Lord Byron. None of the film's history can be trusted, of course, so there's really not much to be said about it other than that Barrymore chews the scenery with aplomb and that the 18-year-old Mary Astor is pleasant to look at.

Rock and Doris (and Tony)

Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961)

Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Tony Randall in Lover Come Back 

Jerry Webster: Rock Hudson
Carol Templeton: Doris Day
Peter Ramsey: Tony Randall
Rebel Davis: Edie Adams
J. Paxton Miller: Jack Oakie
Linus Tyler: Jack Kruschen
Millie: Ann B. Davis

Director: Delbert Mann
Screenplay: Stanley Shapiro, Paul Henning
Cinematography: Arthur E. Arling
Art direction: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen
Film editing: Marjorie Fowler
Music: Frank De Vol

Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964)

Tony Randall, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, and Clint Walker in Send Me No Flowers

George: Rock Hudson
Judy: Doris Day
Arnold: Tony Randall
Mr. Akins: Paul Lynde
Winston Burr: Hal March
Dr. Morrissey: Edward Andrews
Bert: Clint Walker

Director: Norman Jewison
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein
Based on a play by Norman Barasch, Carroll Moore
Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp
Art direction: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen
Music: Frank De Vol

The gag "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin" has been attributed to various wags, including Groucho Marx and Oscar Levant, but in fact the canard that the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies were all about Day defending her virginity stems mainly from the second of the three films, Lover Come Back. In the first, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959), Day's character seems perfectly willing to go off for a weekend with Hudson's, and in the third, Send Me No Flowers, they're already married. Still, these are sex comedies, and Day's characters are, if not virgins, at least naïve. Pillow Talk remains the best of the trio, if only because its initial teaming of the perky Day with the handsome Hudson feels inspired -- as if its makers had been watching the great screwball comedies of the past and had looked around for contemporary equivalents to Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard on the one hand, and Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and Joel McCrea on the other. If Day and Hudson don't seem quite as distinguished as that company, I think that's because the movie industry had changed so much in the interim, with stars no longer seen as members of a studio's repertory troupe. To my mind, Day and Hudson hold their own nicely. What had also changed was a certain coarsening of the treatment of sex as the Production Code began to crumble -- there's a sense that writers and directors in the heyday of screwball comedy were content to finesse the limitations of the Code while those of the early 1960s were thumbing their noses at it. Certainly there's nothing so crass in the great comedies of the 1930s and '40s as the scene in Lover Come Back in which Day's Carol Templeton orders a designer to remodel the container of a potential client's product, saying that whoever gets the contract will have "the most attractive can." Cut to a closeup of the bunny-tail-adorned bottom of Edie Adams as the nightclub dancer Rebel Davis. There's also a lot of humor in these movies that feels sadly dated in ways that the classic '30s and '40s comedies don't, especially the play on symbols of the Confederacy when Hudson's Jerry is trying to woo a Southern client: Rebel exposes an array of Confederate battle flags across her chest as the band plays "Dixie." Send Me No Flowers feels a little less crass than either Pillow Talk or Lover Come Back, partly because we have moved from sex comedy to domestic comedy of the sort more familiar from TV sitcoms: Hudson's George is a hypochondriac who mistakenly thinks he's dying and wants to provide for Day's somewhat ditzy and impractical Judy. If the toned and brawny Hudson seems like a misfit in this part, we have to accept it as a given -- just as we have to accept the goofiness of Cary Grant as a paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). Perhaps one reason the producers cast the impossibly tall and bulked-up Clint Walker as Judy's old boyfriend was to make Hudson look comparatively normal.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

The Snow Flurry (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

Yusuke Kawazu and Keiko Kishi in The Snow Flurry

Haruko: Keiko Kishi
Sakura: Yoshiko Kuga
Suteo: Yusuke Kawazu
Sachiko: Ineko Arima
Tomi: Chieko Higashiyama
Nagura: Yasushi Nagata
Hideo: Masanao Kawakane

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

Like so many of Keisuke Kinoshita's films, The Snow Flurry tells a conventional, melodramatic story while using innovative, even audacious film techniques. It's a family drama spanning about 18 years, from 1940 to the year the film was made. At the beginning we are watching a wedding procession in one of the long shots that are characteristic of the film, which seems to want to isolate its figures in its mountainous landscape. Suddenly, a young man breaks away from the onlookers and runs away, pursued by a woman. We will learn that they are Suteo and his mother, Haruko, and that the bride is Suteo's cousin, Sakura, but Kinoshita leaves it to us to piece together this information, first by flashing back to 1940, when Haruko, pregnant with Suteo, survived an attempted double suicide with her lover, Hideo. Hideo's father, patriarch of the Nagura family, reluctantly takes Haruko into the household, but on a decidedly subordinate status: Once the child is born, the tyrannical old man, a wealthy landowner, goes behind Haruko's back and officially registers the boy's name as Suteo, which means "outcast" or "abandoned." Mother and child live in an outbuilding, take their meals in a separate room from the rest of the family, and are expected to do menial chores. As a boy, Suteo is teased and bullied by other children, but he grows close to his cousin, Sakura, who is the only member of the "legitimate" Nagura clan who shows him kindness. When we return to the scene that opened the film, we understand why he is so distraught at her marriage, and why Haruko runs after him, afraid that he may do himself harm. What distinguishes this rather thin story is Kinoshita's almost experimental technique in telling it, relying on frequent jump cuts back and forth in time that are initially confusing but have a certain payoff in keeping the story from bogging down in sentimentality, Kinoshita's usual failing. It also helps that there are some fine performances, especially by the great character actress Chieko Higashiyama as the matriarch, who survives the death of her cruel, apoplectic husband to rule the family with an iron will. She has a great scene in which, learning of Sakura's engagement, she breaks down in a mixture of laughter and tears -- joy that the family lineage will continue, sorrow that it has taken so long to ensure and that it will continue through the female line and not the male. Only 78 minutes long, it's not a great film but an impressive display of filmmaking skill.

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Jinpachi Nezu and Mieko Harada in Ran

Lord Hidetora Ichimonji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Taro Takatora Ichimonji: Akira Terao
Jiro Masatora Ichimonji: Jinpachi Nezu
Saburo Naotora Ichimonji: Daisuke Ryo
Lady Kaede: Mieko Harada
Lady Sué: Yoshiko Miyazaki
Shuri Kurogane: Hisashi Igawa
Kyoami: Pîtâ
Tango Hirayama: Masayuki Yui

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda
Production design: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Costume design: Emi Wada

Lavish in color and pattern, Ran may be Akira Kurosawa's most pictorial film, to the point that the images and costumes and sets sometimes threaten to overwhelm the human drama at its core. To the extent that this is Kurosawa's second effort at translating a Shakespeare play into medieval Japanese terms, I have to say that I prefer his adaptation of Macbeth, the 1957 Throne of Blood, to this reworking of King Lear. It seems to me that in Ran, Kurosawa stumbles over the analogous figures from Shakespeare in ways that he doesn't in his earlier film. Turning Lear's daughters into Hidetora's sons robs much of the delicacy and painful sadness of the Shakespeare play, especially in the final reunion of Lear and Cordelia. And King Lear is a more complex play than Macbeth, with its intricate subplot involving Gloucester and his sons, and the multiple intrigues of the households of Goneril and Regan. Kurosawa has pared down and fused some of these secondary stories, but he still loses sight at times of his central figure, the Lear analog, Lord Hidetora. Tatsuya Nakadai is unquestionably one of the world's great film actors, but he's too sturdy a figure for the enfeebled Hidetora, and the stylized old-age makeup often hides his features -- except for the great, glaring eyes. There are grand things, however, in the film, including a wonderfully villainous performance by Mieko Harada as the Lady Kaede, and a curiously effective Fool, performed by the androgynous actor-dancer known as Pîtâ.

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in lady Bird

Lady Bird McPherson: Saoirse Ronan
Marion McPherson: Laurie Metcalf
Larry McPherson: Tracy Letts
Danny O'Neill: Lucas Hedges
Kyle Scheible: Timothée Chalamet
Beanie Feldstein: Julie Stefans
Sister Sarah Joan: Lois Smith
Father Leviatch: Stephen Henderson
Jenna Walton: Odeya Rush
Miguel McPherson: Jordan Rodrigues
Shelly Yuhan: Marielle Scott

Director: Greta Gerwig
Screenplay: Greta Gerwig
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Chris Jones
Film editing: Nick Houy
Music: Jon Brion

Maybe it's not the "female 400 Blows" that Greta Gerwig reportedly wanted to make, but it'll do until that comes along. We could only hope that Gerwig has something like François Truffaut's "Antoine Doinel cycle" in the works. It doesn't have to be the "Lady Bird McPherson" cycle, either, but just more sensitive, intelligent films about family and environment, capturing the essence that she caught of growing up in Sacramento. And I hope that if she does, she'll find more roles for the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, whose nuanced performance as Lady Bird's hard-working, hard-bitten mother, skeptical of anything that smacks of overreaching one's station in life, to my mind easily outshadows the performance that beat it for the supporting actress Oscar. Not that Allison Janney wasn't terrific in I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie), but her role was one-note when compared with the subtleties that the part of Marion McPherson demanded -- and Metcalf supplied. I also found myself thinking about a movie that stars Gerwig but which she didn't write or direct, Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan (2015), and realizing how movie formulas can either sustain or cripple a film that tries to reach beyond them. In Maggie's Plan, Miller tries to make a conventional domestic comedy rise above its conventions, to infuse its sometimes over-familiar comic situations with a bit of poignant realism. She fails because she's not willing to let her characters transcend the situations, to surprise us. Lady Bird is equally formulaic: It's essentially a coming-of-age teen comedy, something we've seen before. But Gerwig and her performers flesh out the characters into something more plausibly real than the genre demands.

Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015)

Travis Fimmel and Greta Gerwig in Maggie's Plan

Maggie: Greta Gerwig
John: Ethan Hawke
Georgette: Julianne Moore
Tony: Bill Hader
Felicia: Maya Rudolph
Guy: Travis Fimmel

Director: Rebecca Miller
Screenplay: Rebecca Miller
Based on a story by Karen Rinaldi
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Alexandra Schaller
Film editing: Sabine Hoffman
Music: Michael Rohatyn

Director-screenwriter Rebecca Miller keeps the comedy in Maggie's Plan in check, so that scenes that might have been hilarious wind up amusing, and scenes that might have been amusing take on an edge of melancholy. In the end, the film feels a bit overburdened by the necessity of working out the titular plan: a career woman who, in midlife crisis, decides to have a child with a sperm donor. That's the contemporary equivalent of the kind of formulaic dilemma that used to spin the plots of Doris Day's movies. As Maggie is going through her plan to inseminate herself with sperm donated by the agreeable, if somewhat oddball Guy, she manages to fall for a married man, John, who is at odds with his wife, Georgette. This leads to a comic scene that I don't think I've ever encountered in another film: Having just inseminated herself, Maggie hears the doorbell and crabwalks her way to answer it, only to have a rather messy accident when she stands up. It's John, of course, there to proclaim his love for her and to sleep with her. We jump ahead three years: John and Maggie are married and have a little girl. But as their marriage goes sour, and we realize that John and Georgette were really meant for each other after all, another plan is introduced: Georgette and Maggie plot to undo what has been done. Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore are marvelous performers, of course. But there's something off about Miller's touch, so that the humor is lost in the mechanisms of the plot. The ending kicker, however, in which Maggie realizes that Guy, and not John, is the actual father of the child, is nicely done.