Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)

Yosuke Irie and Aiko Mimasu in Street of Shame

Mickey: Machiko Kyo
Yasumi: Ayako Wakao
Hanae: Michiyo Kogure
Yumiko: Aiko Mimasu
Yorie: Hiroko Machida
Eiko: Kenji Sugawara
Otane: Kumeko Urabe
Kawadaki: Yosuke Irie
Tatsuko Taya: Sadako Sawamura
Kurazo Taya: Eitaro Shindo
Shizuko: Yasuko Kawakami

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Masahige Narusawa
Based on a novel by Yoshiko Shibaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Hisao Ichikawa, Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Kanji Suganuma
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

In his last film, Kenji Mizoguchi returned to one of his most frequent settings, the world of prostitutes. The English-language title, Street of Shame, is slightly more exploitative than the Japanese, Akasen Chitai, which means "red-light district," although even that one is inevitably freighted with sensationalism. But Mizoguchi is hardly shaming his prostitutes -- whom we would call today, in a not entirely successful attempt at neutralizing the stigma, "sex workers." He wants us to understand who they are and why they pursue their occupation. He focuses on five women in the brothel known as "Dreamland," each of whom has dreams of her own, even if the most fundamental dream is that of survival in a world of exploitation and corruption. In the end, some of them triumph, some are crushed, and some stoically continue in a routine they can't rise above. Mizoguchi punctuates their stories with news of the ongoing debate in the Japanese parliament over the abolition of prostitution, which actually took effect after the film was released. At the film's end, we see a new young woman, fresh from the country, timidly taking her place in Dreamland, calling out in a weak and nervous voice for the clients who prowl the street. It's a heartbreaking moment, particularly since she has been given the job as a replacement for one of the women who suffered a nervous breakdown after being rejected by her son, ashamed of his mother's work. But Mizoguchi is no sentimentalist, and Street of Shame is not a conventional "message movie." Instead, it's a richly ironic and keen-eyed look at a fact of life: Sexual desire is universal, and as long as it exists, there will be those who take advantage of it.

The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963)

Nino Manfredi (second from left) in The Executioner

José Luis Rodríguez: Nino Manfredi
Carmen: Emma Penella
Amadeo: José Isbert
Antonio Rodríguez: José Luis López Vázquez
Álvarez: Ángel Álvarez
Director of the prison: Guido Alberti

Director: Luis García Berlanga
Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Art direction: Luis Argüello
Film editing: Alfonso Santacana
Music: Miguel Asins Arbó

The scene shown above comes near the end of The Executioner; it takes place in the antechamber to the room in which a prisoner will be strangled to death by the machinery of the garrote. But the man struggling against his fate is not the prisoner, he's the executioner. The prisoner is in the small group at the upper right of the frame, moving resignedly toward his death. Although it's a scene to inspire horror, beautifully staged by director Luis García Berlanga and shot by cinematographer Tonino Delle Colle, it's the deliciously ironic climax to a very funny film. Tone is everything, and García Berlanga deftly maintains a kind of buoyancy in his treatment of the predicament of José Luis Rodríguez, the film's extremely reluctant executioner, who has managed to maintain his composure up to this point by denial. How he got into this situation is the bulk of the film, and how his denial has brought him to this point is also the setup to the kicker at the film's ending: Having performed his grisly duty, José Luis vows never to do it again. Whereupon his father-in-law, the former executioner whose job José Luis has been forced to assume, tells him that's what he said the first time he had to do it. How can we laugh at this? We do because García Berlanga has cozened us into accepting the unacceptable, just as the state cozens us into accepting capital punishment. It's a tour de force of a film, a comedy that dares us to laugh and keeps making us do it.

Crazed Fruit (Ko Nakahira, 1956)

Yujiro Ishihara, Mie Kitahara, and Masahiko Tsugawa in Crazed Fruit 

Natsuhisa: Yujiro Ishihara
Haruji: Masahiko Tsugawa
Eri: Mie Kitahara
Frank: Masumi Okada
Eri's Husband: Harold Conway

Director: Ko Nakahira
Screenplay: Shintaro Ishihara
Based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Masanori Tsuji
Music: Masaru Sato, Toru Takemitsu

The eternal triangle, this time involving two brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji, and a young woman, Eri. Crazed Fruit is somewhat of a landmark movie in Japanese film history, part of a genre known as taiyozoku or "Sun Tribe" movies, featuring the idle, affluent postwar Japanese youth. Every culture had its rebels without a cause in the 1950s, and the Japanese older generation was as scandalized (and titillated) by them as the rest. Crazed Fruit was singled out as more scandalous than most, partly because it seems to relish the erotic energy of the young without condemning it. The focal point of the film is the younger brother, Haruji, who becomes infatuated with a pretty young woman he sees in a train station, and becomes involved with her after he meets her again while out in a motorboat -- she has swum much farther out from shore than is usual, and he gives her a ride back. Her name is Eri, and she mysteriously keeps him away from the place she lives, agreeing to meet him elsewhere. She is taken with Haruji's innocence and shyness -- for a long time they stop short of having sex -- in part because he reminds her of her own lost innocence. She is married to a wealthy middle-aged American businessman, a fact she keeps from him, but which the older brother, Natsuhisa, learns and uses to blackmail her into having an affair with him. Haruji's learning the truth leads to a cataclysmic ending, of course. The material is handled with a good deal of sophistication that somewhat mitigates its exploitative qualities. The film made its young leads into big stars: After outgrowing his rebellious youth persona, Masahiko Tsugawa became a leading man and then a familiar character actor, while Yujiro Ishihara (the screenwriter's young brother) and Mie Kitahara married and became frequent costars -- the TCM commentary on the film calls them "the Bogart and Bacall of Japan."

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

Leticia: Silvia Pinal
Edmundo Nobile: Enrique Rambal
Steward: Claudio Brook
Leandro Gomez: José Baviera
Doctor: Augusto Benedico
Sergio Russell: Antonio Bravo
Alicia de Roc: Jacqueline Andere
Colonel: César de Campo
Silvia: Rosa Elena Durgel
Lucia de Nobile: Lucy Gallardo
Alberto Roc: Enrique García Álvarez
Juana Avila: Ofelia Guilmáin
Ana Maynar: Nadia Haro Oliva
Raúl: Tito Junco
Francisco Avila: Xavier Loyà
Eduardo: Xavier Massé
Beatriz: Ofelia Montesco
Cristián Ugalde: Luis Beristáin
Rita Ugalde: Patricia Morán
Blanca: Patricia de Morelos
Leonora: Bertha Moss

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Production design: Jesús Bracho
Film editing: Carlos Savage
Music: Raúl Lavista

The Exterminating Angel teeters occasionally on the brink of heavy-handed satire -- the sheep entering the now-blocked church at the film's end, for example -- but somehow Luis Buñuel always recovers his balance. I think it's because he knows that surrealism -- the movement which gave him birth -- must always be underpinned by a dutiful semi-documentary realism, that we must never be entirely sure whether the improbable characters we're encountering and the unlikely events we're witnessing are external to us or are products of our own unstable minds. Take the déjà vu effect near the beginning of the film, when we witness the guests arriving at the mansion of the Nobiles and ascending the staircase only to watch the same scene repeated almost immediately from a somewhat different angle. For a moment we wonder if the projectionist has put on the wrong reel or the film editor has forgotten to excise the repeated scene. Or perhaps we wonder if we dozed off for a second and missed something that would explain the repetition. But no, the director must be playing with us, we conclude. That, or we're trapped in his own world, just as he is to trap the guests inside a room later, never bothering to provide an explanation of the force that keeps them there. It's one of those tricks that can only work in the movies, where we, like the house guests, have gathered and found themselves unable to escape. We can choose to escape from the experience The Exterminating Angel presents to us -- nothing prevents us from leaving the theater or turning off the video -- but we don't. So there's much to be said for the observation that the house guests are us, that Buñuel's point is not just that the Spanish bourgeoisie of the Franco years were seething in their own corruption and inertia, but also that we are all trapped by something in our psyches and/or societies that limits and lames us.

Danger Stalks Near (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1957)

Hideko Takamine in Danger Stalks Near

Yuriko Sato: Hideko Takamine
Kaneshige Sato: Keiji Sada
Tetsu Sato: Akiko Tamura
Bunichi Akama: Koji Nanbara
Sakura: Toshiko Kobayashi
Miyoko: Hiroko Ito
Ayame: Masako Arisawa
Shintaro: Ryo Ono
Kazuo: Kotohisa Saotome
Mr. Suzuki: Yoshihide Sato
Mr. Kitamura: Koji Satomi
Tatami repairman: Saburo Sato
First thief: Akira Oze
Second thief: Shoji Sayama
Kohei: Shinji Tanaka

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

A rather pleasant surprise. Nothing about the English title suggests that you're going to get the comedy of errors that Danger Stalks Near turns out to be, or that its star, Hideko Takamine, usually seen in serious, often glamorous roles, will play a mousy, bespectacled housewife under the domination of her tyrannical mother-in-law. The film starts out with two young thugs bullying Kohei, a man from the country who needs money to return home, into robbing a suburban house. But as they case the joint from a nearby hillside, things constantly happen to keep them from their goal. The house is the property of Tetsu Sato, a war widow, who lets her son, Kaneshige, and his wife, Yuriko, and their son, Kazuo, live there. She also rents a room to Miyoko, a flighty young woman who starts the day's madness off by burning a hole in the tatami mat in her room. Tetsu immediately evicts her. Things snowball from there, with the tatami repairman coming and going, movers arriving, Yuriko's sisters showing up with various problems of their own, Yuriko returning with her boyfriend to demand the remaining day she had paid for in rent, an old friend of Kaneshige's arriving and revealing his own larcenous aims, and various other unexpected incidents. The three would-be thieves watch in dismay as their opportunity to bust in and steal what they -- and others -- believe to be a considerable amount of money belonging to Tetsu disappears. Kinoshita piles on the complications, and in the process unveils some of the hidden motives and simmering resentments of the members of the household. For once, Kinoshita lets his cynical side dominate, diluting some of the syrup that often makes his films a little sticky.

The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

Katamari Fujiwara, Minoru Chiaki, Misa Uehara, and Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress

Gen. Rokurota Makabe: Toshiro Mifune
Tahei: Minoru Chiaki
Matashichi: Katamari Fujiwara
Princess Yuki: Misa Uehara
Gen. Hyoe Tadokoro: Susumu Fujita
Gen. Izumi Nagakura: Takashi Shimura
Lady in Waiting: Eiko Miyoshi
Farmer's daughter: Toshiko Higuchi

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
Cinematography: Kazuo Yamazaki
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Masaru Sato

There's a kind of boyish glee in even the title, The Hidden Fortress, promising secrets and surprises. This rousing, entertaining, and, yes, occasionally silly adventure story is remembered most today for inspiring George Lucas on the first Star Wars film, which is now clunkily known as Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (1977). From Akira Kurosawa's film Lucas borrowed the spunky rebel princess and the fretful, quarreling sidekicks, and renamed them Leia, C3PO, and R2D2, but more importantly he borrowed the insouciance, the delight in cinematic action. For once, Toshiro Mifune's bravado doesn't steal as many scenes as it usually does, thanks largely to Kurosawa's employment of the disgruntled foot-soldiers Tahei and Mataschichi, whose cynicism, venality, and outright greed serve as foils for the heroics of Mifune's Gen. Rokurota. Like the first Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress never rises to the level of serious thought -- in fact, it's more straightforward fun than the Lucas oeuvre: There's no mysterious Force to suggest spiritual overtones and to weigh down the adventure with mythmaking.

Endless Desire (Shohei Imamura, 1958)

Hiroyuki Nagato and Misako Watanabe in Endless Desire

Satoru: Hiroyuki Nagato
Shima Hashimoto: Misako Watanabe
Onuma: Taiji Tonoyama
Ryochi: Shoichi Ozawa
Ryuko: Hitome Nozoe
Yakuza: Takeshi Kato

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Hisashi Yamanouchi
Based on a novel by Shinji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Production design: Kazu Otsuka
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

Commenting on lesser-known films, even though they've been made available on Filmstruck by the Criterion Collection, can be a problem. The IMDb listing for Endless Desire is curiously incomplete, lacking some cast names and identification of which roles some actors are playing, and there's little commentary available online to help refresh my memory of some plot details and to provide background information on the film. Which is a pity, because Endless Desire is an involving black comedy, that a few commentators have likened to Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). It's less genially whimsical than the former and less explicitly bloody than the latter, but it holds its own in their company. The setup is this: Ten years after the surrender of Japan, a small group of former soldiers gather as planned to try to relocate a barrel full of morphine that was buried when the war ended. They expect to meet their former lieutenant, but discover that he's dead and that a woman, Shima Hashimoto, who says she is his sister, plans to help them recover the stash. In the meantime, however, a shopping district has grown up over the site, so the group leases an empty shop planning to tunnel over to the presumed location. And so it goes, as the greedy tunnelers squabble toward their goal, with Shima directing their moves and fending off such amorous advances as she may not wish to entertain. Somehow caught up in all of this is young Satoru, whom the landlord insists the treasure-hunters must hire in their phony real-estate office, and the pretty Ryuko, whom Satoru loves but who keeps him at an arm's length. The whole thing builds to a cataclysm, of course, in which the plans are complicated by the municipal authorities' decision to raze the shopping district over the tunnelers' heads, and the general greed leads to their killing one another off. This is early Imamura, and a film that he was pressed by the studio into doing, but it has much of his characteristic sardonic humor and jaundiced view of human beings.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)

Henri Danglard: Jean Gabin
Nini: Françoise Arnoul
Lola: Maria Félix
Esther Georges: Anna Amendola
Baron Walter: Jean-Roger Caussimon
La Génisse: Dora Doll
Prince Alexandre: Giani Esposito
Oscar: Gaston Gabaroche
Bidon: Jacques Jouanneau
Coudrier: Jean Parédès
Paulo: Franco Pastorino
Eleonore: Michèle Philippe
Le Capitaine Valorgueil: Michel Piccoli
Eugénie Buffet: Édith Piaf
Yvette Guilbert: Patachou

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Michel Kelber
Production design: Max Douy
Film editing: Boris Lewin
Music: Georges Van Parys
Costume design: Rosine Delamare

The Moulin Rouge is a kind of metonymy for the Parisian Belle Époque, that period of French culture that forms the core of Marcel Proust's fiction and represents an efflorescence of the arts before the disaster of World War I, which is why the cabaret has been the setting of so many movies, including at least half a dozen that bear its name in the title. So it's entirely fitting that Jean Renoir, whose father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was so prominent a figure in the Belle Époque, should have chosen the Moulin Rouge as the setting for a film that marked his return to working in France after an exile that began in 1940. The central story of French Cancan is bogus: The Moulin Rouge was not founded by Henri Danglard, who is a made-up figure. But since he's played by Jean Gabin, the greatest of French movie stars, it doesn't really matter. Gabin gives a solidity to the character that few actors can muster. It's a lavish, riotously colorful movie, a heavily fictionalized treatment of the founding of the nightclub, and one of the best film musicals ever made. It's also a celebration of a certain kind of French insouciance about sex, a gleeful nose-thumbing at puritan moralizers.

The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)

Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Princess Sophia Frederica/Catherine II: Marlene Dietrich
Count Alexei: John Lodge
Grand Duke Peter: Sam Jaffe
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: Louise Dresser
Prince August: C. Aubrey Smith
Capt. Grigori Orloff: Gavin Gordon
Sophia as a Child: Maria Riva

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Manuel Komroff, Eleanor McGeary
Based on a diary of Catherine II of Russia
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg, Sam Winston
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold

The Scarlet Empress may be the silliest movie ever made, and never sillier than when Marlene Dietrich, her hair done up all in curls, pretends to be innocent and naive by opening her eyes wide beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. Now mind you, I have nothing against silliness; some of of my favorite movies are silly, like Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), which may be the silliest great movie ever made. (Or the greatest silly movie, depending on which way you come at it.) So I love The Scarlet Empress, for all its outrageous camping-up of 18th-century Russia with cartoon icons and ubiquitous gargoyles -- the greatest of which is Sam Jaffe's grinning idiot of a grand duke. But we all know that Catherine II didn't earn the sobriquet "Great" just by sleeping with her soldiers (and perhaps some of the horses we see clattering up the palace staircases in the movie). So you really have to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept Josef von Sternberg's film for what it is: an outrageous parody of the historical epic, the sort of thing that people were expected to take seriously when, for example, Norma Shearer played Marie Antoinette for W.S. Van Dyke four years later. If The Scarlet Empress was a box office failure at the time it was because audiences weren't keyed in to the joke. Now we are, so we can revel in Hans Dreier's febrile vision of a Russian palace and the music arrangers' delirious pastiche of Tchaikovsky mingled with Mendelssohn and laced with a bit of Wagner's Valkyries (for when those horses are galloping through the halls). 

A Woman's Face (George Cukor, 1941)

Joan Crawford in A Woman's Face

Anna Holm: Joan Crawford
Dr. Gustaf Segert: Melvyn Douglas
Torsten Barring: Conrad Veidt
Vera Segert: Osa Massen
Bernard Dalvik: Reginald Owen
Consul Magnus Barring: Albert Bassermann
Emma Kristiansdotter: Marjorie Main
Herman Rundvik: Donald Meek
Christina Dalvik: Connie Gilchrist
Lars-Erik: Richard Nichols
Judge: Henry Kolker
Defense Attorney: George Zucco
Public Prosecutor: Henry Daniell

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart, Elliot Paul
Based on a play by Francis de Croisset
Cinematography: Robert H. Planck
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Music: Bronislau Kaper

I don't know why the screenplay for A Woman's Face is credited as an adaptation of the play Il Était une Fois by Francis de Crosset with no mention of the 1938 Swedish film En Kvinnas Ansikte, directed by Gustaf Molander and starring Ingrid Bergman. The 1941 A Woman's Face is clearly a remake of that film, which was released in the United States in 1939. Both films are set in Sweden, when as far as I can tell, de Croisset set his play in France, and both Bergman and Joan Crawford play characters named Anna Holm. Moreover, Crawford had seen Bergman's film and pressured MGM to buy the rights to it for her. As well she should have: Although Louis B. Mayer reportedly objected to Crawford's determination to play a disfigured woman, thinking it would hurt her at the box office just as she was entering her mid-30s, a dangerous time for a female movie star, the film gave Crawford a chance to show her stuff -- to play vulnerable as well as tough. She starts off tough, as a member of a gang of blackmailers, then softens when Torsten Barring begins to woo her, apparently indifferent to her scarred face. But since he's played by Conrad Veidt, we know he's up to no good. Meanwhile, another man, the cosmetic surgeon Dr. Segert, enters Anna's life -- ironically, since his wife is the target of one of the gang's blackmail schemes. Several implausible plots begin to intersect and everything winds up in court with Anna accused of murder. Flashbacks abound as everything gets sorted out. Meanwhile, Crawford acts up a storm in a role that's a bridge between her younger, scrappy MGM persona and the put-upon middle-aged women of her later career at Warner Bros.