The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy

Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre

Andre Gregory: Andre Gregory
Wallace Shawn: Wallace Shawn
Waiter: Jean Lenauer
Bartender: Roy Butler

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Cinematography: Jeri Sopanen
Production design: David Mitchell
Film editing: Suzanne Baron
Music: Allen Shawn

How interesting that a film that has no story of its own should be such an engaging tribute to the power of storytelling. Having realized that My Dinner With Andre is going to be just watching two rather ordinary-looking men having dinner in a nicely appointed but not particularly unusual restaurant, we have to supply our own visuals. That is, we supplement what's on screen with our imagined visualizations of the stories Andre Gregory tells Wallace Shawn about his travels. Gregory is such an artful raconteur that our task is easy, and we conjure up our own versions of his experiences in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, the Findhorn community in Scotland, and an especially weird Halloween on Long Island. But Shawn is not a sponge: He's us, a bit skeptical, willing to affirm "Enlightenment values" and ordinary life against Gregory's spiritual enthusiasms and dodgy adventures. Meanwhile, we're also watching the men eat -- or perhaps not eat, for I grew rather impatient with their ignoring the meal they have ordered. And we're watching the ambience, the comings and goings of the restaurant, the waiter and bartender and the servers in the background -- and sometimes the foreground, for director Louis Malle has provided flickers of action as people pass between the camera and the Shawn-Gregory table. The designers have also cleverly positioned a mirror over the table, so that we get glimpses of people other than our interlocutors. Malle uses this mirror smartly toward the end of the film when we see the waiter standing still in the mirror and realize, before Shawn and Gregory do, that the staff is waiting to close up, delayed only by their conversation. That so much can be made out of so little is one of the surprises and delights of My Dinner With Andre. For some people, I know, it's like a film about watching paint dry, but I find it a small triumph of unconventional filmmaking.

Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz, 1949)

Joan Crawford and Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road 

Lane Bellamy: Joan Crawford
Fielding Carlisle: Zachary Scott
Sheriff Titus Semple: Sydney Greenstreet
Dan Reynolds: David Brian
Lute Mae Sanders: Gladys George
Annabelle Weldon: Virginia Huston
Doc Waterson: Fred Clark
Millie: Gertrude Michael
Boatright: Sam McDaniel
Pete Ladas: Tito Vuolo

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Robert Wilder
Based on a play by Robert Wilder and Sally Wilder
Cinematography: Ted McCord
Art direction: Leo K. Kuter
Film editing: Folmar Blangsted
Music: Max Steiner

In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris paid grudging tribute to Michael Curtiz: "The director's one enduring masterpiece is, of course, Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory." Sarris's point is that Curtiz was one of the most skillful of studio-era directors, able to take almost any project handed to him by the front-office bosses and deliver it with polish and finesse. Certainly Flamingo Road fits that role precisely. As a script, it must have looked like a routine though somewhat overheated melodrama, its sexiness and violence toned down by the Production Code office, with a female lead who setting out on the downslope of a long career and a male lead who not only never quite made it big but also found the film taken away from him midway by a second lead whose career also never took off. At least there was ham to be had in the presence of Sydney Greenstreet, even though he's cast in a role for which he wasn't quite suited. And yet, Flamingo Road works, largely because Curtiz doesn't just grind it out. He treats the material as if it deserved its swift pacing and its occasional injections of humor. He knew enough to let Joan Crawford have her way, which he had done earlier with Mildred Pierce (1945), their finest couple of hours together. There's not much mileage to be got out of either Zachary Scott or David Brian as leading men, but we're not watching them. We're watching Crawford, and Greenstreet (trying to swallow his British accent and play a backwoods political boss), and Gladys George as the proprietor of a "roadhouse" (read: brothel). True, none of the story makes a lot of sense, especially the political intrigues, but there's enough sass and edge in the dialogue to make you forget about the improbabilities.

Tragedy of Japan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

Keiji Sada and Yuko Mochizuki in Tragedy of Japan

Haruko Inoue: Yuko Mochizuki
Utako, Haruko's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Seiichi, Haruko's Son: Masami Taura
Sato: Teiji Takahasi
Tatsuya, a Street Musician: Keiji Sada
Masayuki Akazawa: Ken Uehara
Mrs. Akazawa: Sanae Takasugi
Wakamaru: Keiko Awaji

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Tragedy of Japan is the Criterion Channel's title for Keisuke Kinoshita's film, but I prefer the one used on IMDb and elsewhere: A Japanese Tragedy. Not only does that title echo Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but it also particularizes the story better. What happens to Haruko Inoue and her children is not a microcosm of recent Japanese history but a product of it -- one among millions, including those told in Kinoshita's many films. The film also demonstrates something of Kinoshita's tendency to overreach, often with distracting innovations such as the oval masks that frame scenes in You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955) or the color washes that creep into The River Fuefuki (1960). Here it's an unwise use of extensive documentary footage of the war and its aftermath as a frame for the fictional story. The contrast between the raw actuality of news footage and the artifice of movie storytelling works to the disadvantage of the latter. Which is unfortunate because Kinoshita has a good story to tell about Haruko's attempts to survive and to provide for her children and the unforeseen consequences of her efforts, as well as the problems faced by Seiichi in his ambitious pursuit of a medical career and Utako in her disastrous involvement with her English teacher. None of Haruko's good deeds, it seems, go unpunished, as the skirting of the law that she found necessary is held against her in more peaceful and prosperous times. Despite the mistaken attempt to fold these stories into a larger historical context, this is one of Kinoshita's better films, marked by some very good acting and genuine human dilemmas.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Giancarlo Esposito in Night on Earth

Béatrice Dalle and Isaach De Bankolé in Night on Earth

Paolo Bonicelli and Roberto Benigni in Night on Earth

Matti Pellonpäá in Night on Earth

Victoria Snelling: Gena Rowlands
Corky: Winona Ryder
Helmut Grokenberger: Armin Mueller-Stahl
YoYo: Giancarlo Esposito
Angela: Rosie Perez
Paris Cab Driver: Isaach De Bankolé
Blind Woman: Béatrice Dalle
Rome Cab Driver: Roberto Benigni
Priest: Paolo Bonacelli
Mika: Matti Pellonpää
Man No. 1: Kari Väänänen
Man No. 2: Sakari Kuosmanen
Man No. 3: Tomi Salmela

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz
Music: Tom Waits

I guess people don't smoke in taxis anymore -- at least in tobacco-hostile America -- so Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth probably evokes a kind of nostalgie de la boue in smokers or ex-smokers. Everyone lights up in the five segments of the movie, although Los Angeles resident Victoria Snelling at least chides her driver, Corky, for indulging the habit -- only to light up her own after Corky sarcastically refers to her as "Ma." Perhaps Victoria's advice crosses some kind of line between passenger and cabbie. In Rome, it will be the cabbie who crosses the line, persuading his priest-passenger to hear his taxicab confession, an experience that will bring about the priest's demise. In New York, passenger YoYo even becomes the cabbie, taking over the wheel from the incompetent driver, new immigrant Helmut Grokenberger. At least in Paris and Helsinki the old conventions remain, although Isaach De Bankolé's driver is infuriated at the liberties some of his passengers take with him, especially the well-to-do Africans who taunt him for his lowly Côte d'Ivoire origins. In Helskini there's a kind of working-class solidarity between Mika and his drunken passengers, one of whom has not only just been fired but has also learned that his daughter is pregnant and his wife has left him. What do all of these slices of life add up to? That's one of the charms of reflecting on an anthology film like Night on Earth, in which discrete segments seem to echo and enlarge one another. One of the reasons that taxicabs are so effective a setting for movies is that they can become crucibles for temporary relationships, moments out of time and space that seem more freighted with meaning than they really are -- Roberto Benigni's cabbie makes the resemblance of taxi to confessional booth part of his appeal to the priest. Put together five such moments, in five distinct cities, and you have something that looks like a statement about our common humanity. Although each segment neatly evokes the character of its particular city -- the glitz of LA, the grubby hopefulness of New York, the weary cosmopolitanism of Paris, the religion-steeped past and skeptical present of Rome, the chilly Cold War-haunted between-two-worlds quality of Helsinki -- the space and time inside their taxicabs seems oddly universal. That's what I love about Jarmusch's movies: Long after you've watched them, you're still savoring the details while bemused about the whole.

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky (Masaki Kobayashi, 1954)

Masami Taura and Akira Ishihama in Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky

Ryochi Morita: Keiji Sada
Hiroko: Yoshiko Kuga
Yasuko: Hideko Takamine
Noboru: Akira Ishihama
Shun-don: Minoru Oki
Hisako: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mitsui: Masami Taura
Shige: Kumeko Urabe
Natsuko: Chieko Nakakita
Imai: Shin'ichi Himori
Shinkichi: Ryohei Uchida

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Toshiyasu Morita
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky* is a reminder that Masaki Kobayashi began his career as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita. It not only employed Kinoshita's brother Chuji as composer of the score, along with the director's usual film editor, Yoshi Sugihara, it also displays one of Kinoshita's usual domestic drama themes: the conflict of tradition and modernity as several generations of a family try to work out a way of living together in postwar Japan. And it shares some of Kinoshita's sentimentality in the developments of its plot. In tone and theme, Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky could not be more different from the film Kobayashi made just before it: the harsh, fierce The Thick-Walled Room, which was made in 1953 but which the studio withheld from release until 1956. For that matter, it's not much like Kobayashi's bleak slum drama Black River (1956) or his unsparing three-part antiwar epic The Human Condition (1959-1961). Kobayashi would find his way out of the genteel trap that Somewhere etc. represents. Which is not to say that he didn't make a pleasant, thoroughly enjoyable film in which everyone seems to find themselves on the right path by the time the plot works itself out. Ryochi and Hiroko, who run the family liquor store, have married for love, which alienates his stepmother, who would have preferred an arranged marriage. Abetted by Ryochi's depressed, self-loathing sister, Yasuko  the stepmother constantly finds fault with Hiroko. Eventually, however, everyone makes peace, thanks in large part to Ryochi's steadfast good nature in defense of his wife and to Yasuko's unexpectedly finding love and a new purpose in life. The feel-good elements of the film are not quite so convincing as the harsher parts, but the performances -- especially that of Hideko Takamine in a cast-against-type role -- are persuasive.

*The Criterion Channel title is a translation of the Japanese title Kono hiroi sora no dokoka ni. IMDb gives it as Somewhere Under the Broad Sky, and I've also seen it referred to as Somewhere Beneath the Vast Heavens.

Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Jean Marais in Orphée

Orphée: Jean Marais
Heurtebise: François Périer
The Princess: María Casares
Eurydice: Marie Déa
The Editor: Henri Crémieux
Aglaonice: Juliette Gréco
The Poet: Roger Blin
Jacques Cégeste: Édouard Dermithe

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer
Production design: Jean d'Eaubonne
Film editing: Jacqueline Sadoul
Music: Georges Auric

Though it's not as sumptuous as his Beauty and the Beast (1946), Jean Cocteau's Orphée seems to me in some ways the more beautiful film. It embraces ugliness as a foil for beauty in ways that the earlier film doesn't. (As many have noted, the Beast of Cocteau's film is too beautiful a creature to inspire the disgust he presumably was doomed to evoke.) In Orphée the ugliness is that of the modern world, still in the time of the making of the film filled with the rubble of war, such as the bombed-out Saint-Cyr military academy that serves as the film's underworld. So the entire film is a kind of balancing act between antagonistic forces, not just ugliness and beauty or ancient myth and modern reality, but also and especially Eros and Thanatos. It is, of course, dreamlike, not in the cliché surrealist manner of most movie dreams, but in the oddities of its settings: an upstairs bedroom, for example, accessible only by a trapdoor or a ladder outside the window. I'm particularly drawn to the low-tech special effects, created by obvious means: film run backward, rear-screen projection, sets built on an incline. Even if we know how the tricks are done we marvel at the magic they add. Cocteau has de-sentimentalized the Orpheus myth. The marriage of his Orpheus and Eurydice is hardly an ideal one: He's a self-centered crank, and she's a wimp. But by doing so he has made the film's "happy ending" more poignant, as the couple return to life in improved versions and the Princess and Heurtebise (a marvelously imagined character) wander deeper into the underworld. It's an ambiguous fairytale at best.

The Garden of Women (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Mieko Takamine and Chieko Higashiyama in The Garden of Women

Mayumi Gojo: Mieko Takamine
Yoshie Izushi: Hideko Takamine
Tomiko Takioka: Keiko Kishi
Akiko Hayashino: Yoshiko Kuga
Sankichi Shimoda: Takahiro Tamura
Yoshikazu Sagara: Masami Taura
Masao Izushi: Takashi Miki
Masao's Wife: Kuniko Igawa
Landlady: Yoko Mochizuki
Schoolmaster: Chieko Higashiyama
President: Kikue Mori

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a story by Tomoji Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Youth rebellion films became a prominent genre in Japan, but Keisuke Kinoshita's The Garden of Women is distinctive in that the rebels are all women. They have a lot to rebel against: They are students in a hidebound women's college more determined to turn them into proper young ladies than into educated women. This causes difficulties for Yoshie Izushi, who is a few years older than her fellow students. Most of them come from wealthy families, but Yoshie had to work for several years to earn enough money for the tuition. She wants an education that would make her a fitting partner for her upwardly mobile boyfriend, Sankichi. But she struggles with some subjects, especially math, and when she tries to study after hours she comes up against school rules that forbid her from studying anywhere except in her room -- which is usually filled with her roommates' friends, who are plotting against the stern headmistress, Mayumi Gojo, aka "The Shrew." Yoshie wants no part of the rebellion: She wants to graduate and marry Sankichi before her family forces her into marriage with a wealthy man of their choosing. Eventually, the student rebellion succeeds, but Yoshie gets caught in the crossfire. The Garden of Women is one of Kinoshita's more successful films, mostly because it gives us an unexplored angle on Japanese society and its tumultuous postwar society. But it's somewhat overplotted, with a few too many characters whose backstories take away from the central narrative.

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune in Rashomon

Tajomaru: Toshiro Mifune
Masako Kanazawa: Machiko Kyo
Takehiro Kanazawa: Masayuki Mori
Woodcutter: Takashi Shimura
Priest: Minoru Chiaki
Commoner: Kichijiro Ueda
Medium: Noriko Homma
Policeman: Daisuke Kato

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka

Rashomon is one of those films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) that you had to have seen just to be considered culturally literate. So I was a bit surprised when, watching one of the Criterion Channel supplements to Rashomon that featured Robert Altman commenting on the film, Altman praised the acting of Toshiro Mifune by name but funked it on Machiko Kyo, referring to her as "the actress." For if there's any key to the success of Rashomon as drama it's Kyo's performance. It's not like she was an unknown, either: She's the star of another 1950s imported hit, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953), and gave memorable performances for Kenji Mizoguchi in Street of Shame (1956) and especially Ugetsu (1953) as well as for Yasujiro Ozu in Floating Weeds (1959). She even crossed the Pacific to play opposite Glenn Ford and Marlon Brando (in yellowface) in the film version of The Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1956) -- though that's one that Altman might well have forgotten seeing. I don't want to labor the point too much, but it's the nuances of Kyo's performance that make Rashomon work, that keep us guessing whether she was the dutiful wife or the savage wanton. As I steep myself more and more in Japanese film of the late 1940s, '50s, and '60s, it becomes ever clearer that this was a great period for female actors like Kyo, Setsuko Hara, Kyoko Kagawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, and many others -- most of whose names are unknown to Americans today. As for the film itself, it was a career breakthrough for Akira Kurosawa and Mifune, and while it remains essential viewing for the cinematically literate, I don't hold it in as high esteem as I do such Kurosawa/Mifune collaborations as  Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Lower Depths (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), or High and Low (1963). Rashomon feels arty and remote in ways that those don't.

A Generation (Andrzej Wajda, 1955)

Tadeusz Lomnicki in A Generation

Stach Mazur: Tadeusz Lomnicki
Dorota: Urszula Modrzynska
Jasio Krone: Tadeusz Janczar
Sekula: Janusz Paluszkiewicz
Jacek: Ryszard Kotys
Mundek: Roman Polanski

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Bohdan Czeszko
Based on a novel by Bohdan Czeszko
Cinematography: Jerzy Lipman
Production design: Roman Mann
Film editing: Czeslaw Raniszewski
Music: Andrzej Markowski

There are few more accomplished directorial debuts than Andrzej Wajda's A Generation, with its daring footwork around the Polish censors and its loving portrait of the titular generation, working their way through the wartime years as they try to embrace something that would represent a future after the German occupation. It doesn't have the nerve-stretching tension of Kanal (1956) or the poetic audacity of Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the two films that would constitute Wajda's wartime trilogy, but its gritty authenticity gives it a distinction all its own. The mostly young cast, including the young Roman Polanski, is authentically real. Wajda keeps both the action and the romantic business between Stach and Dorota, whose commitment he finds incredibly sexy, convincingly on the mark. There is a smudge of sentimentality and a touch of agitprop at the film's end, when the torch of rebellion is handed on to a fresh-faced new group, but it's not enough to mar the total effect of the film.