The Big City (Satyajit Ray, 1963)

Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee in The Big City

Arati Mazumdar: Madhabi Mukherjee
Subrata Mazumdar: Anil Chatterjee
Himangshu Mukherjee: Haradhan Bannerjee
Edith Simmons: Vicky Redwood
Priyogopal, Subrata's Father: Haren Chatterjee
Sarojini, Subrata's Mother: Sefalika Devi
Bani, Subrata's Sister: Jaya Bhaduri
Pintu: Prasenjit Sarkar

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Based on stories by Narendranath Mitra
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Art direction: Bansi Chandragupta
Film editing: Dulal Dutta
Music: Satyajit Ray

For a long time, cities got a bad rap in the movies: Think of Fritz Lang's soul-devouring futuristic city in Metropolis (1027), the hedonistic town that sends out tendrils like the sinister Woman From the City to ensnare country folk like The Man and The Wife in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), or the weblike New York City that blights the lives of John and Mary in The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928). But these are surviving remnants of the Romanticism that proclaimed "God made the country and man made the town." By the mid-20th century, even our poets, or at least our songwriters, had turned the great big city into a wondrous toy, just made for a girl and boy, and a place where if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere -- a heroic challenge. In The Big City, Satyajit Ray's Kolkata retains some of the old sinister qualities, but it also represents opportunity, especially for women emerging from the shadows of male domination. Ray's domestic drama doesn't set up a contrast between town and country so much as a contrast between the dark, cramped home that Subrata and Arati Mazumdar share with his mother and father and sister and their young son, and the expanse of the city, which offers up tempting alternatives to the tight nuclear household. And those alternatives are something that the older members of that household view with disgust and horror: Arati's going out to work and to supplement the small income of the traditional breadwinner, Subrata. A world opens up for Arati, though it's also a world that can easily crumble around her. Madhabi Mukherjee's wonderful performance as Arati, tremulous and naive at first but gradually gaining fire and courage, animates the film. Obstacles present themselves: Subrata loses his job as a bank clerk, and Arati eventually loses hers by standing up for the Anglo-Indian Edith. But at the end, husband and wife, who have found their marriage tested by her employment, summon up reserves of courage to face the job market. The ending has been criticized as sentimental, but Ray has so carefully shown the growth of both Arati and Subrata that I find it hopeful.

Farewell to Dream (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Noriko Kikuoki, Shinji Tanaka, and Yoshiko Kuga in Farewell to Dream

Yoichi Akimoto: Shinji Tanaka
Oshin, Yoichi's Mother: Yuko Mochizuki
Toyoko, Yoichi's Older Sister: Yoshiko Kuga
Genkichi, Yoichi's Father: Eijiro Tono
Kazue, Yoichi's Younger Sister: Noriko Kikuoki
Sudo: Takahiro Tamura
Seiji Harada: Ryohei Ono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The English title, Farewell to Dream, seems to be grammatically or idiomatically off: We would expect Farewell to a Dream or ... Dreams instead. (The Japanese title is Yûyake-gumo, which Google Translate renders as "Sunset Cloud.") But then there's something a little off about this entire short film -- only 78 minutes long. Its young narrator, Yoichi, tells us his story about how circumstances made him bid farewell to his dreams, except that he doesn't seem to have had any substantial dream other than not following in his father's footsteps as a fishmonger, a job he hates because it makes him smell of fish, causing other boys to taunt him. We can't really blame him, but the film never suggests that Yoichi had a clear plan of escape from that life. He spends a good deal of his time looking out over the rooftops of Tokyo through his binoculars, sighting a pretty young woman whom he dreams of meeting. Eventually, he and his friend Seiji make their way across the city to where they think the young woman lives, only to arrive in her neighborhood as she's getting into an automobile with the man she's engaged to marry. Yoichi's story is also mixed with that of his sisters: The elder one, Toyoko, is pretty and vain, and has a handsome boyfriend, Sudo. But when Sudo's family goes broke, she marries an older man -- and then carries on an affair with Sudo. When his father falls ill, Yoichi's parents allow a rich uncle to adopt his younger sister, Kazue, in exchange for some financial support, and we see Yoichi bid a sad farewell to the girl. I think we're meant to sympathize with Yoichi in the collapse of his family, but the irony is that after his father dies, Yoichi turns out to be a very good fishmonger, building a thriving business from his own talent as a cook by developing a sideline as a caterer and seller of prepared meals. Like it or not, Yoichi has become what many families would see as a blessing: the son who successfully keeps the family business alive. The effect is that Yoichi's lament for his lost future feels like self-pity rather than legitimate dismay at unfulfilled potential.

The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)

Hans Scholten: Folker Bohnet
Albert Mutz: Fritz Wepper
Walter Forst: Michael Hinz
Jurgen Borchert: Frank Glaubrecht
Karl Horber: Karl Michael Balzer
Klaus Hager: Volker Lechtenbrink
Sigi Bernhard: Günther Hoffmann
Franziska: Cordula Trantow
Stern: Wolfgang Stumpf
Unteroffizier Heilmann: Günter Pfitzmann
Hauptmann Fröhlich: Heinz Spitzner
Oberstleutnant Bütov: Siegfried Schürenberg
Sigi's Mother: Edith Schultze-Westrum
Albert's Mother: Ruth Hausmeister
Jürgen's Mother: Eva Waiti
Walter's Father: Hans Elwenspoek
Walter's Mother: Trude Breitschopf
Karl's Father: Hans Hellmold
Barbara: Edeltraut Elsner
Sigrun: Inge Benz

Director: Bernhard Wicki
Screenplay: Michael Mansfeld, Karl-Wilhelm Vivier, Bernhard Wicki
Based on a novel by Manfred Gregor
Cinematography: Gerd von Bonin
Production design: Heinrich Graf Brühl, Peter Scharff
Film editing: Carl Otto Bartning
Music: Hans-Martin Majewski

Something of a landmark in the revival of German filmmaking before the burst of creativity wrought by Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others in the 1960s and '70s, The Bridge is an appropriate title in that it not only looks back to what Germany was during the war, but also suggests some of the trauma that lingered into the increasingly affluent present. The decimation and psychic mutilation of the generation that came of age during the war is the film's central subject. It focuses on seven young men, still in their teens, in the final days of the Third Reich, inspired by the dream of military glory but undermined by the incompetence of the remnants of the Wehrmacht, facing a defeat it cannot admit is coming. The boys have grown up together in the same town, and they all receive their draft notices on the same day. But a well-meaning officer decides not to send these raw draftees into the heat of battle but to give them a nonsensical task: defending the bridge across the river near their town -- even though the bridge is slated to be blown up as a deterrent to the advancing Allies. It will keep them out of harm's way, the officer thinks. But communications wires get crossed and the boys on the bridge never get the message to retreat. Instead, they die "heroically," doing all the right things -- including blowing up an Allied tank -- as they make their futile stand. The story, from the novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, under his pseudonym Manfred Gregor, is based on a real event told to Dorfmeister by one of the survivors. The film is full of well-staged action and an effective re-creation of the real setting which had been completely transformed in the years since the war ended. The interaction between the boys and their families is touching without slopping over into mawkishness.

The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

Hiroki Iwase and Ken Ogata in The Demon

Sokichi Takeshita: Ken Ogata
Oume: Shima Iwashita
Riichi: Hiroki Iwase
Kikuyo: Mayumi Ogawa
Yoshiko: Miyuki Yoshizawa

Director: Yoshitaro Nomura
Screenplay: Masato Ide
Based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Art direction: Kyohei Morita
Film editing: Kazuo Ota
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

The title suggests a horror film, which in its profoundly disturbing way The Demon is. Except there are no supernatural demons to be exorcised in Yoshitaro Nomura's film. There are only horribly flawed human beings who do things that we encounter frequently in the news media: They abuse children. Nomura is so unsparing in his treatment of the subject that for many the film will be impossible to watch, and only the distancing inherent in the medium of film made it possible for me to work through its more disturbing moments. I had to remind myself of what a tremendous acting job Ken Ogata brings off as he plays Sokichi, whose mistress one day dumps their three small children -- an infant, a 4-year-old girl, and a 6-year old boy -- on him and his wife, Oume, who until this point hasn't known of their existence. I steeled myself by admiring the camerawork and editing when Sokichi, pressured by Oume, sneaks away from the little girl and abandons her amid a throng of tourists, only to have their eyes meet as the elevator door taking him away closes. He has already allowed Oume to "accidentally" bring about the death of the infant, and there is worse to come when they plot to rid themselves of the boy. In the end, however, I'm not certain that The Demon entirely justifies telling us of the horrors inflicted on the children. There is an ironic ending that suggests justice will be done, although whether that justice is in measure to the pain that has been inflicted is doubtful. The result is a kind of nihilistic acceptance that things like this occur and will continue to occur, despite our disgust at them, and there's not much we can do about them.

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.