Seduced and Abandoned (Pietro Germi, 1964)

Saro Urzi, Stefania Sandrelli, and Aldo Puglisi in Seduced and Abandoned

Agnese Ascalone: Stefania Sandrelli
Don Vincenzo Ascalone: Saro Urzi
Peppino Califano: Aldo Puglisi
Antonio Ascalone: Lando Buzzanca
Amalia Califano: Lola Braccini
Baron Rizieri Zappalà: Leopoldo Trieste
Cousin Ascalone: Umberto Spadaro
Matilde Ascalone: Paola Biggio
Orlando Califano: Rocco D'Assunta
Police Chief Polenza: Oreste Palella
Francesca Ascalone: Lina Lagalla
Lawyer Ciarpetta: Gustavo D'Arpe
Consolata: Rosetta Urzi
Rosaura Ascalone: Roberta Narbonne
Pasquale Profumo: Vincenzo Licata
Priest: Attilio Martella
Brigadier Bisigato: Adelino Campardo
Don Mariano: Salvatore Fazio
Uncle Carmelo: Italia Spadaro

Director: Pietro Germi
Screenplay: Pietro Germi, Luciano Vincenzoni, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli
Cinematography: Aiace Parolin
Art direction: Carlo Egidi
Film editing: Roberto Cinquini
Music: Carlo Rustichelli

Bigotry is fun to watch, as long as it's someone else's. There's no fun to be had from the recent story about the high school valedictorian who was kicked out of the house for being gay, even though it had a happy ending: He received a full college scholarship. That's because it hits too close to where we live: a United States constantly beset by bigots sanctioned by our government. But Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned delighted audiences because it made them feel superior to the small-minded, small town Sicilians who cause such a ruckus over Agnese Ascalone's out-of-wedlock pregnancy. To them, the story was much ado about "honor," a concept long regarded as outmoded ever since it was mocked by Shakespeare's Falstaff, and the notion that things could be set right by marriage, even if the marrying couple was a rapist and his victim. In this case, however, the seducer, Peppino, refuses to marry Agnese, whom he impregnated, because she's not a virgin -- no matter that it's his fault that she isn't. Much raucous but edgy humor ensues from this Catch-22, as the irascible head of the Ascalone family, played wonderfully by Saro Urzi, tries to work out the complications while maintaining the family honor -- a word that will be engraved on his tombstone. Seduced and Abandoned is a keen-eyed, cold-hearted film that works best if you realize that Germi and his screenwriters are making a point about the danger of imposing societal values on private matters, the risk run in communities of all constituencies and convictions.

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Hideko Takamine in Floating Clouds

Yukiko Koda: Hideko Takamine
Kengo Tomioka: Masayuki Mori
Sei Mukai: Mariko Okada
Sugio Iba: Isao Yamagata
Kuniko Tomioka: Chieko Nakakita
Seikichi Mukai: Daisuke Kato

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Film editing: Eiji Ooi
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds brings to mind some of Ernest Hemingway's stories about war-damaged lovers trying to make the best of a doomed relationship. Yukiko is a young woman returning to Tokyo after working in Japanese-occupied French Indochina as a secretary. There she had an affair with the bitter, cynical Kengo, an employee of the Japanese forest service who is married to the sickly Kuniko. Trying to make it on her own in postwar Japan, Yukiko finds that her secretarial skills are in little demand because she doesn't know English, a necessity under the American occupation. Desperate, she picks up an American soldier and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, she also seeks out Kengo, and finds him trying to make a go of it in the lumber business, still married to Kuniko but unwilling to divorce her and marry Yukiko. So over the course of the film, these two deeply wounded people meet and part repeatedly, not only lacerating themselves but also hurting others with words and deeds. At the end, they have seemingly found a way to live together, partly by retreating from the world onto a remote Japanese island, but even that rapprochement is ill-fated. Naruse's film is an absorbing downer, gaining much of its energy from our suspense about what the protagonists will do to each other next, as well as a showcase for Hideko Takamine's marvelous performance. There are those who think it a masterpiece. 

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

Isuzu Yamada and Fumio Okura in Sisters of the Gion

Omocha: Isuzu Yamada
Umekichi: Yoko Umemura
Shimbei Furusawa: Benkei Shiganoya
Sangoro Kudo: Eitaro Shindo
Kimura: Taizo Fukami
Jurakudo: Fumio Okura
Omasa Kudo: Sakurako Iwama

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Aleksandr Kuprin
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane

"Why do there even have to be such things as geisha?" laments Omocha at the end of Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion. The line could well be a motto for Mizoguchi's career as a filmmaker, as he returned again and again to the theme outlined in the film, not just for geisha but also for prostitutes, mistresses, and wives: Why do women have to spend so much of their lives employing their talents, intelligence, and energy at pleasing men? In this larger sense it's a theme that preoccupied not only Mizoguchi but also Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other Japanese filmmakers, especially after the war, when political and social change altered the roles of both sexes. Sisters of the Gion is decidedly pre-war, but it's a film that can hold its own with those of the postwar renaissance of Japanese film. It's both of its time and prophetic of what is to come, embodying the dynamic of tradition and change in its two sisters, Omocha and Umekichi, the former outwardly faithful to but inwardly rebellious against her profession, the latter resigned to its demands. In the end, both suffer defeat, but the film implicitly endorses Omocha's defiant strength.

A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed, 1955)

Jonathan Ashmore in A Kid for Two Farthings

Joanna: Celia Johnson
Sonia: Diana Dors
Avrom Kandinsky: David Kossoff
Sam Heppner: Joe Robinson
Joe: Jonathan Ashmore
"Lady" Ruby: Brenda de Banzie
Python Macklin: Primo Carnera
Blackie Isaacs: Lou Jacobi
Mrs. Abramowitz: Irene Handl
Madam Rita: Sydney Tafler

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Wolf Mankowitz
Based on a novel by Wolf Mankowitz
Cinematography: Edward Scaife
Art direction: Wilfred Shingleton
Film editing: Bert Bates
Music: Benjamin Frankel

Carol Reed's first color film is a very talky, somewhat claustrophobic one, best remembered today as a portrait of the London Jewish community that inhabited Petticoat Lane (called "Fashion Street" in the film) in the East End. The story centers on young Joe, a lover of animals (often to the animals' misfortune, as he can't seem to keep some of them alive) who lives with his mother, Joanna, over Mr. Kandinsky's tailoring shop. Kandinsky indulges Joe with stories about animals, telling him that if he ever found a unicorn it would bring everyone good luck. So naturally Joe finds one, a feeble little goat with one deformed horn, that a merchant is happy to get rid of. Joe thinks it will bring luck to the pretty Sonia and her body-builder boyfriend Sam Heppner, who want to get married but don't have the money; to Mr. Kandinsky, who would like to have a better trousers press; and to himself and his mother, who are waiting for his father to return from South Africa, where he has gone to seek his fortune. Things eventually work out for Sonia and Sam and Mr. Kandinsky, but at the film's end Joe and his mother are still waiting for the return of his father. There's a fair amount of whimsy at work, but it's subsumed in much local color and the hard-scrabble realism of the neighborhood. Diana Dors shows considerable depth as an actress, rising above the exploitation that tried to turn her into the British Marilyn Monroe. But the great Celia Johnson is wasted in the thankless role of Joe's mother, with little to do but look worried. The wrestler Primo Carnera appears as Python Macklin, whom Sam must conquer in the ring to make the money he and Sonia want, even though he's reluctant to develop the unphotographic muscles needed by a wrestler.

Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

Gibson Gowland and Jean Hersholt in Greed

McTeague: Gibson Gowland
Trina: Zasu Pitts
Marcus: Jean Hersholt
Maria: Dale Fuller
Mother McTeague: Tempe Pigott
"Mommer" Sieppe: Sylvia Ashton
"Popper" Sieppe: Chester Conklin
Selina: Joan Standing
Zwerkow: Cesare Gravina
Charles W. Grannis: Frank Hayes
Miss Anastasia Baker: Fanny Midgley

Director: Erich von Stroheim
Screenplay: June Mathis, Erich von Stroheim, Joseph Farnham (titles)
Based on a novel by Frank Norris
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds
Production design: Erich von Stroheim

One of the legendary mutilated masterpieces, Greed isn't one film but several, most of which are lost. The gravest loss would have to be the original 42-reel cut (about eight hours) of the film, which was seen only by a handful of people, several of whom were the first to call it a masterpiece. What we're most likely to see now is the 1999 reconstruction of the film, gathering the scenes that remained after various hands cut it down to about 10 reels (about an hour and 50 minutes) before its 1924 release, which was a critical and commercial flop. After that, the footage deteriorated or was trashed, so the four-hour restored version is pieced out with what remained in various archives along with stills and other archival material. I doubt that anyone other than professional film historians would be willing to sit through more of Greed than that: It's an exhausting experience, not only because of the length but also because Erich von Stroheim's dedication to telling as much of the story in Frank Norris's novel as he could led him into some extraordinarily bleak places. The bleakest of those places is of course Death Valley, where the climactic standoff of McTeague and Marcus takes place -- a sequence that still has the power to astonish even when seen independently of the rest of the film. But much of the bleakness also lies in the characters of McTeague and Trina, especially the latter, whose transformation from sensitive, shy virgin to monster of greed is harrowing -- a reminder that Zasu Pitts, now best known as a comic character actress, was a performer of real skill. The restoration also includes the sordid subplot of the greedy junk dealer Zwerkow and his half-mad henchwoman Maria, which ends in murder and suicide. Balancing that was a sentimental subplot involving the McTeagues' rooming-house neighbors, the elderly bachelor Grannis and the spinster Miss Baker, who don't meet for a long time, even though their rooms are separated by a partition so thin they can hear each other's every move. If the junk dealer subplot serves to indicate the depths of degradation that threaten the McTeagues, the story of the lonely elders helps sweeten the film as they meet and fall in love, using a monetary windfall in constructive ways -- a counterpoint to Trina's miserly hoarding of her lottery winnings. Greed is a fascinating film, but I suspect that the story of its mishandling outweighs any significance it might have had if it had remained intact and coherent.

Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)

Ronald Colman in Random Harvest

Charles Rainier: Ronald Colman
Paula: Greer Garson
Dr. Jonathan Benet: Philip Dorn
Kitty: Susan Peters
Dr. Sims: Henry Travers
"Biffer": Reginald Owen
Harrison: Bramwell Fletcher
Sam: Rhys Williams
Tobacconist: Una O'Connor
Sheldon: Aubrey Mather
Mrs. Deventer: Margaret Wycherly
Chetwynd: Arthur Margetson
George: Melville Cooper

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Claudine West, George Froeschel, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Harold F. Kress
Music: Herbert Stothart

It's a good thing that amnesia is as rare an affliction in real life as it is, because it gives the crafters of melodrama free rein to imagine its effects, such as the case of what might be called "double amnesia" that plagues Charles Rainier in Random Harvest. For not only does Rainer forget who he is once, after suffering shell shock in the trenches of World War I, he then forgets what happened to him during that bout of amnesia after being hit by a taxi and brought back to his senses. That is, having once forgotten that he was heir to a lucrative family business, he now forgets that he wandered away from the asylum where he was being treated and fell in love with Paula, a music hall performer who devoted herself to him as he launched a career as a writer named John Smith -- she calls him Smithy. But plucky Paula learns the truth about her Smithy, goes to business school and learns to be a high-powered corporate secretary, and gets herself hired as Charles Rainier's executive secretary -- all without revealing the truth about that lost passage in their lives. Was ever such nonsense taken seriously? Yes, indeed, because it's filmed through MGM's highest-quality gauze, with Ronald Colman at his handsome stoic best and Greer Garson at her plummiest and dewiest, full of trembling self-sacrifice. It was a huge hit, partly because it hit wartime audiences where they lived: separated wives and husbands, uncertain whether they they would be reunited and made whole again. Today, we can look back on Random Harvest with irony, or view it as a product of a particular period of Hollywood history that will never come again. But it's made with such affection for its improbabilities, which are manifold, that I can't help admiring it.

Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951)

Maj-Britt Nilsson in Summer Interlude

Marie: Maj-Britt Nilsson
Henrik: Birger Malmsten
David Nyström: Alf Kjellin
Kaj: Annalisa Ericson
Uncle Erland: Georg Funkquist
Ballet Master: Stig Olin
Henrik's Aunt: Mimi Pollak
Aunt Elisabeth: Renée Björling
Priest: Gunnar Olsson

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Herbert Grevenius
Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer
Production design: Nils Svenwall
Film editing: Oscar Rosander
Music: Erik Nordgren

Maj-Britt Nilsson gives a stunning performance as the ballerina haunted by death -- both the literal death of the young man with whom she once had the titular summer interlude and the slow death of her career, which depends on the youthful vitality she can feel beginning to slip away. Like Ingmar Bergman's earlier To Joy (1950), which starred Nilsson and many of the same actors, it's a fable about art and life, about the conflict of the public persona of a career with the personal needs of an intimate relationship. Unlike To Joy, in which Nilsson's character is subordinate to that of her musician husband, Bergman has shifted the focus to the woman -- a focus that he would maintain for most of his remaining career. Summer Interlude may be his first great film, and Nilsson's ability to move from the winsome young Marie -- sometimes evoking the young Audrey Hepburn -- to the toughened, successful prima ballerina is remarkable. Perhaps the most startling moment comes when the older Marie removes her stage makeup, which has the effect of making her look older and harder, to reveal the remaining traces of the younger woman -- a fine reversal of the usual film trope of removing the makeup to reveal the effects of aging. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)

Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Matthew Bennell: Donald Sutherland
Elizabeth Driscoll: Brooke Adams
Jack Bellicec: Jeff Goldblum
Nancy Bellicec: Veronica Cartwright
Dr. David Kibner: Leonard Nimoy
Dr. Geoffrey Howell: Art Hindle
Katherine Hendley: Lelia Goldoni
Running Man: Kevin McCarthy
Taxi Driver: Don Siegel

Director: Philip Kaufman
Screenplay: W.D. Richter
Based on a novel by Jack Finney
Cinematography: Michael Chapman
Production design: Charles Rosen
Film editing: Douglas Stewart
Music: Danny Zeitlin

Speaking of remakes, as I did recently, there are few more successful than Philip Kaufman's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, first filmed by Don Siegel in 1956. Siegel's film was informed by the red scares of the 1950s, which had faded into a more free-floating paranoia 18 years later when Kaufman returned to the material. Siegel was perfectly happy to go along with the idea of remaking the story, and contributed an amusing cameo as a cabbie in Kaufman's film. Kaufman also wittily used the star of Siegel's version, Kevin McCarthy, in a bit as the "running man" who races through San Francisco streets shouting "They're coming! They're coming!" It's the wit that pervades Kaufman's version that makes it such a worthy successor to Siegel's more straightforward sci-fi horror film. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in which we see Robert Duvall as a priest on a playground swing and ask ourselves "Was that ...?" There's the casting of Leonard Nimoy as a psychiatrist possessing the same sangfroid as Mr. Spock, a more benevolent alien being. And there are Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright (a year before her appearance in Ridley Scott's Alien) as the somewhat loopy Bellicecs. Kaufman has a little trouble establishing the tone of his version, so that it plays better on a second viewing than on a first one, but it's one of the few films in the genre that I'm more than happy to give a repeat viewing.

Les Grandes Manoeuvres (René Clair, 1955)

Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan in Les Grandes Manoeuvres

Marie-Louise Rivière: Michèle Morgan
Armand de la Verne: Gérard Philipe
Victor Duverger: Jean Desailly
Félix Leroy: Yves Robert
Lucie: Brigitte Bardot
The Colonel: Pierre Dux
Armand's Orderly: Jacques Fabbri

Director: René Clair
Screenplay: René Clair, Jérôme Géronimi, Jean Marsan
Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre
Production design: Léon Barsacq
Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur, Denise Natot
Music: Georges Van Parys

René Clair's first film in color is a pretty pastel confection set in a French village at the end of the 19th century, a period many French filmmakers were drawn to in part because it held a kind of autumnal glow before the harsh winter that would set in during the second decade of the 20th century. A handsome womanizing lieutenant, Armand de la Verne, stationed in the village before the beginning of the army's summer maneuvers, wagers that he can seduce the first woman to enter the room. She happens to be Marie-Louise Rivière, a divorcée who has opened a millinery in the village. And they happen to be played by Gèrard Philipe and Michèle Morgan, two of the biggest French stars of the day, both of them in middle age and endowed with a kind of gravitas that means the movie is not going to be a frivolous sex farce. For sexiness, we have a parallel flirtation between another lieutenant, Félix Leroy, and the saucy young Lucie, played by the saucy young Brigitte Bardot. Yet the film is weighed down by the more mature couple, to the point that Clair's romantic nostalgia never quite comes off the screen and engages the audience. It's lovely to look at, and it has admirers who defend its bittersweet tone, but it feels to me more like an exercise in period filmmaking than a fully committed work -- even though it was one of Clair's favorite films.

Beguiling

The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971)

Geraldine Page and Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled (1971)

John McBurney: Clint Eastwood
Martha: Geraldine Page
Edwina: Elizabeth Hartman
Carol: Jo Ann Harris
Doris: Darlene Carr
Hallie: Mae Mercer
Amy: Pamelyn Ferdin
Abigail: Melody Thomas Scott
Lizzie: Peggy Drier
Janie: Patricia Mattick

Director: Don Siegel
Screenplay: Albert Maltz, Irene Kamp
Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan
Cinematography: Bruce Surtees
Production design: Ted Haworth
Film editing: Carl Pingitore
Music: Lalo Schifrin

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017)

Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled (2017)

Corporal McBurney: Colin Farrell
Miss Martha: Nicole Kidman
Edwina: Kirsten Dunst
Alicia: Elle Fanning
Amy: Oona Lawrence
Jane: Angourie Rice
Marie: Addison Riecke
Emily: Emma Howard

Director: Sofia Coppola
Screenplay: Sofia Coppola
Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan and a screenplay by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp
Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd
Production design: Anne Ross
Film editing: Sarah Flack
Music: Phoenix

Why some movies get remade and others don't is one of the abiding mysteries of the business. There doesn't seem to be a very clear reason why Don Siegel's 1971 The Beguiled should be a movie that Sofia Coppola would choose to remake 46 years later other than that it's a pretty good premise: a wounded Yankee soldier is taken in by a Southern girls' school who hide him from the Confederates until events turn them against him. The premise does have a slightly pornographic quality to it, but that's unlikely to have motivated this particular version. Whatever the reason, we now have two pretty good versions of the story, the first starring an actor who became known for a taciturn masculinity, the second with a softer, more feminine (not to say feminist, because who knows what that means in any given context) approach. In fact, the two films are almost complementary, notable as much for what the remake leaves out as for the way in which Coppola changes the tone of the first version. Siegel's film is rougher and more action-filled, and it treats the sexual tension of the material in a more heated manner -- not to say overheated, which the 1971 version veers toward in its suggestions that Martha, the girls' school headmistress, not only committed incest with her brother but also had a lesbian relationship with (or at least attraction toward) the head teacher, Edwina. Times have changed, and Coppola steers clear of both, probably because they add nothing to the main story and same-sex attraction doesn't have the the power to shock in 2017 that it did in 1971. Coppola also eliminates a major character from Siegel's version, the slave Hallie, who serves as a kind of interlocutor with Clint Eastwood's McBurney, the two commenting on their different forms of captivity. Although the major characters retain the same general outlines, Coppola's Martha and Edwina, Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst, are less eccentric performers than Siegel's Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman. I think this works to Coppola's benefit, making the women's turn against McBurney more startling, even a little tragic, than in Siegel's film. In Siegel's version, the girl who lures McBurney, called Carol in his film, is more vulgarly hot to trot than Coppola's Alicia, played with more subtlety by Elle Fanning. As for the two versions of McBurney, Coppola gives hers more of a backstory: an Irish immigrant lured into the Union Army by the promise of ready cash when he agrees to serve as a substitute for a Yankee reluctant to fight. Colin Farrell is also a more versatile actor than Eastwood, whose tough guy persona makes it hard for us to accept his acquiescence. The scene in which McBurney eats the poisoned mushrooms comes off better in Coppola's version because Farrell lets us see the poison taking its effect, whereas Siegel decides not to show the effect on Eastwood's McBurney. Yet somehow, I prefer the Siegel film, perhaps because there's an inherent cheesiness to the story's melodrama that Siegel embraces but Coppola strives to downplay.