Miracles of Thursday (Luis García Berlanga, 1957)

Guadalupe Muñoz Sampedro and Manuel Alexandre in Miracles of Thursday

Martino: Richard Basehart
Don José: José Isbert
Don Salvador: Paolo Stoppa
Don Antonio Guajardo Fontana: Juan Calvo
Don Ramon: Alberto Romea
Don Evaristo: Félix Fernández
Don Manuel: Manuel de Juan
Doña Paquita: Guadalupe Muñoz Sampedro
Mauro: Manuel Alexandre

Director: Luis García Berlanga
Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, José Luis Colina
Cinematography: Francisco Sempere
Production design: Bernardo Ballester
Film editing: Pepita Orduna
Music: Franco Ferrara

I have always admired filmmakers who could get things by the censors. In the United States, for example, nobody did it better than Preston Sturges, who could get away with such outrageous gags as, for example, naming the lead character of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) Trudy Kockenlocker and having Trudy become pregnant by a soldier (whom she of course married) whose identity she isn't quite sure of. So there's much to admire in Luis García Berlanga's finessing the Franco censors in Miracles of Thursday, a film that sends up small town chicanery and piety. Berlanga does it in part by providing an ending that seems to validate at least the piety, but the main effect of this raucous, entertaining comedy is to portray the easy credulity of the faithful where miracles are concerned. The plot centers on the efforts of some of the prominent citizens to revitalize a moribund spa town by faking a miracle: the appearance of St. Dismas. This, they think, will draw the faithful the way the miracle at Lourdes did, and spark the return of the people who used to come to their town to "take the waters" at their mineral spring. The fall guy for the miracle is Mauro, a mentally challenged man who lives in a boxcar by the railroad station (which has been bypassed by express trains since the decline of the spa). As ineptly staged as their miracle is, Mauro is convinced that he has experienced a holy vision. But the initial flurry of excitement dies down until a stranger named Martino arrives, and helps the plotters with their scheme. Martino is played by the American actor Richard Basehart, who appeared in numerous European films, most notably Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954), during his marriage to Italian actress Valentina Cortese. He's a sardonic fellow with some tricks up his sleeve, and Berlanga keeps us guessing whether he's devil or angel until the very end -- and perhaps beyond. The ending feels a bit flat and perfunctory, but there's fun to be had before then.

The Funeral (Juzo Itami, 1985)

Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki in The Funeral

Wabisuki Inoue: Tsutomu Yamazai
Chizuko Amamiya: Nobuko Miyamoto
Kikue Amamiya: Kin Sugai
Shokichi Amamiya: Hideji Otaki
Shinkichi Amamiya: Kiminobu Okumura
Shokichi's wife: Hiroko Futaba
Priest: Chishu Ryu

Director: Juzo Itami
Screenplay: Juzo Itami
Cinematography: Yonezo Maeda
Art direction: Hiroshi Tokuda
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Joji Yuasa

The Funeral has been compared to the films of Luis Buñuel for its satiric, sometimes almost surreal portrait of a bourgeois Japanese family, and to the Jean Renoir of A Day in the Country (1936) and  The Rules of the Game (1939) and for its amused look at people tempted by an unusual situation to cast off conventional behavior. But do I also detect something of an homage to Yasujirio Ozu? There's a wonderful cameo by Ozu's favorite actor, Chishu Ryu, as the Rolls-Royce-driving priest, of course, but there's also something about the quiet, almost meditative ending, after the turmoil of the arrival of the mourners, the wake, and the funeral itself, when Kikue Amamiya, the widow, gives her heartfelt eulogy to her husband. Until this point, Kikue has hardly shed a tear while going on with the endless preparations and the inevitable unexpected screwups. But mostly, it's a Juzo Itami film, not so raucous as Tampopo (1985), but as witty in its treatment of human obsessions. In this case, it's the obsession with doing things right, especially on the part of Wabisuki, the son-in-law of the deceased, who with his wife, Chizuko, wants to follow Japanese tradition to the letter, even though both of them are very modernized people. Both are actors, whom we first see filming a TV commercial, and they want to get things staged just right. But since neither has experienced a traditional Japanese funeral, they resort to watching a video called The ABCs of the Funeral, which explains all the elaborate protocol involved. Inevitably, things get more complicated, particularly when Wabisuki's mistress shows up, gets drunk, and drags him into the bushes for sex. There's also the wake, where there's more drinking and a problem of getting the inebriated guests to go home, most of which is shown in a wonderful long take in which we watch outside the windows of the several rooms where guests are being urged to leave. Even the cremation takes a macabre-funny turn when the oven attendant invites the mourners backstage, as it were, to discourse on the difficulties of turning a corpse to ashes. The Funeral is a bit overlong, but it has heart to compensate for its bite.

A Song Is Born (Howard Hawks, 1948)

Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in A Song Is Born

Prof. Hobart Frisbee: Danny Kaye
Honey Swanson: Virginia Mayo
Prof. Magenbruch: Benny Goodman
Prof. Twingle: Hugh Herbert
Tony Crow: Steve Cochran
Dr. Elfini: J. Edward Bromberg
Prof. Gerkikoff: Felix Bressart
Prof. Traumer: Ludwig Stössel
Prof. Oddly: O.Z. Whitehead
Miss Bragg: Esther Dale
Miss Totten: Mary Field
Buck: Ford Washington Lee
Bubbles: John William Sublett

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Harry Tugend, Helen McSweeney
Based on a story and screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art direction: Perry Ferguson, George Jenkins
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Hugo Friedhofer, Emil Newman

If you've seen Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941), there's really only one reason to see Hawks's A Song Is Born, a musical version of the earlier film that retains its rather silly plot and a large part of the dialogue. But that one reason is a good one: the music is provided by the likes of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and a host of other stars of the big band swing era. Otherwise, Hawks's direction is mostly a carbon copy of the first film, except that instead of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, he's working with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, neither of whom Hawks liked. I happen to like Mayo, but I have a low tolerance for Kaye's shtick, his mugging and his patter songs. Fortunately, he's more subdued than usual in A Song Is Born, reportedly because he was going through marital problems and was under heavy psychoanalysis. Still, to hear Kaye repeating some of the dialogue carried over word for word from A Song Is Born makes me appreciate how good Cooper was in screwball comedy. The chief switch in the plot is that the encyclopedia Kaye's Prof. Frisbee is working on with six other professors has become a musical one, so that instead of rushing to compile a volume on slang, as Cooper's Prof. Potts was tasked to do, Prof. Frisbee has to cobble up a volume on jazz -- of which he has somehow remained ignorant. There is less emphasis on the other cute little professors in A Song Is Born than there is in Ball of Fire, which was inspired in part by Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). One of them, however, is played rather amusingly by Benny Goodman, who is invited by the other musicians to join in a jam session and of course distinguishes himself. The gangster plot, featuring Steve Cochran in the role played by Dana Andrews in the earlier film, is also trimmed down. Mayo's singing voice was dubbed by Jeri Sullavan.

Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)

Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki in Tampopo

Goro: Tsutomu Yamazaki
Tampopo: Nobuko Miyamoto
The Man in the White Suit: Koji Yakusho
Gun: Ken Watanabe
Pisuken: Rikiya Yasuoka
Shohei: Kinzo Sakura
Noodle-Making Master: Yoshi Kato
Rich Old Man: Hideji Otaki
Mistress of the Man in the White Suit: Fukumi Kuroda
Mistress of the Rich Old Man: Setsuko Shinoi

Director: Juzo Itami
Screenplay: Juzo Itami
Cinematography: Masaki Tamura
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Kunihiko Hirai

I would like to experience bliss like that of the baby at its mother's breast at the end of Juzo Itami's Tampopo, oblivious to anything else but its food and its source. If Itami's charmingly satiric film is to be trusted, of course, that kind of bliss is available to us at any well-made meal. I say "well-made" because that's the process that forms the plot of the movie: the quest for the perfect bowl of broth and noodles. There weren't as many foodies around in 1985 as there are today, and Tampopo may be credited with awakening some who now dabble in gastronomy, not to mention the others like me who are voyeurs of the food-obsessed and the translation of cuisine into competitive sport on shows like Top Chef or Chopped. The recent death of Anthony Bourdain brought on a wave of mourning that used to be reserved for the passing of beloved movie stars. But Tampopo is not just a celebration of food and eating; it's also a survey of food as accessory to other pursuits, such as sex -- the interpolated scenes featuring the Man in the White Suit and his girlfriend -- and business -- the scene featuring the stodgy corporate honchos baffled by a French menu and one-upped by a lowly but savvy junior executive. Tampopo feels as alive as it did more than three decades ago.

Wedding Ring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring

Noriko Kuki: Kinuyo Tanaka
Takeshi Ema: Toshiro Mifune
Michio Kuki: Jukichi Uno
Tetsuya Kuki: Kenji Susukida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Wedding Ring could easily have been made by MGM in the 1930s with Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Franchot Tone, and audiences would have lapped it up while critics dismissed it as old-hat. What Kinoshita's movie has going for it is the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka and the young and hunky Toshiro Mifune. In truth, Tanaka, whose own production company was responsible for Wedding Ring, is a little old for her role -- she was 10 years older than Mifune -- and not particularly suited for the film's frequent celebrations of her beauty. Kinoshita seems more fascinated with Mifune's virile presence, giving him multiple opportunities to appear shirtless, and even providing a scene in which Tanaka's Noriko cuddles the sweat-soaked jacket Mifune's Takeshi Ema has just removed. The plot is familiar stuff: Noriko's husband, Michio, whom she married just before he went to war, has come home with tuberculosis, and Ema is the doctor who visits him to supervise his recovery. Noriko spends much of her time running the family business, a Tokyo jewelry store, and she and Ema frequently encounter each other on their commutes to the seaside resort where Michio is recovering. One thing leads to another, of course. But Ema is made of sterner moral stuff than Noriko, and when Michio, becoming aware of his wife's attraction to the doctor, makes an attempt to kill himself by going swimming, something Ema has demonstrated his proficiency at, the doctor remembers the Hippocratic Oath and determines to break it off. Duty conquers love, and so on. The film is nobody's finest hour, but it's fun to watch Mifune when he was not being directed by Akira Kurosawa -- their Rashomon was released the same year, making Mifune an international star. As for Tanaka, she gave what is perhaps her greatest performance two years later for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Ken Ogata in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

November 25, 1970, and flashbacks:
Yukio Mishima: Ken Ogata
Masakatsu Morita: Masayuki Shionoya
Gen. Mashita: Junkichi Orimoto
Mother: Naoko Otani
Grandmother: Haruko Kato
Mishima, age 18-19: Go Riju
Mishima, age 9-14: Masato Aizawa

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:
Mizoguchi: Yasosuke Bando
Kashiwagi: Koichi Sato
Mariko: Hisako Manda
Monk: Chishu Ryu

Kyoko's House: 
Osamu: Kenji Sawada
Kiyomi: Reisen Lee
Mitsuko: Setsuko Karasuma
Osamu's Mother: Sachiko Hidari

Runaway Horses: 
Isao: Toshiyuki Nagashima
Lt. Hori: Hiroshi Katsuno
Kurahara: Jun Negami
Izutsu: Hiroki Ida
Interrogator: Ryo Ikebe

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader, Chieko Schrader
Based on novels by Yuko Mishima
Cinematography: John Bailey
Production design: Eiko Ishioka
Film editing: Michael Chandler, Tomoyo Oshima
Music: Philip Glass

In the midst of watching Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, I found myself having feelings of déjà vu -- specifically, during the chapter titled "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," a dramatization of one of Yukio Mishima's novels. Then it came to me: It was the novel on which Kon Ichikawa's film Conflagration (1958) was based. I had faulted Ichikawa's film for the confusions caused by a "truncated" adaptation of Mishima's novel and for its "sometimes plodding narrative," while praising the intensity of Tatsuya Nakadai as the crippled young acolyte. Seeing the condensed version of the Mishima novel in Schrader's film makes me want to go back to watch Conflagration again, or really to read the novel along with the others integrated into Schrader's film about Mishima's troubled but intensely creative life. The point of the Schrader film is that Mishima's art was inextricable from his life, from his coddled and repressed childhood through his sexual excesses and finally his disastrous paramilitary adventure and suicide. Ken Ogata doesn't look much like Mishima, but as his work in such films as The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978) and Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979) shows, Ogata has the kind of raw commitment to acting that makes him perfect for the role of the charismatic and self-destructive artist. Schrader's Mishima is one of a kind, a fascinating blend of superb cinematography, evocative art direction, and hypnotic music, along with a disturbing story. In some ways, I prefer Schrader's film to the more celebrated ones made by Martin Scorsese from Schrader's screenplays, namely Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

Miss Julie (Alf Sjöberg, 1951)

Anita Björk, Märta Dorff, and Ulf Palme in Miss Julie

Miss Julie: Anita Björk
Jean: Ulf Palme
Kristin: Märta Dorff
Countess Berta: Lissi Alandh
Count Carl: Anders Henrikson
Viola: Inga Gill
Robert: Åke Fridell
Julie's Fiancé: Kurt-Olof Sundström
Farmhand: Max von Sydow
Governess: Margarethe Krook
Doctor: Åke Claesson
Julie as a child: Inger Norberg
Jean as a child: Jan Hagerman

Director: Alf Sjöberg
Screenplay: Alf Sjöberg
Based on a play by August Strindberg
Cinematography: Göran Strindberg
Art direction: Bibi Lindström
Film editing: Lennart Wallén
Music: Dag Wirén

"Opening up" a play when it's made into a movie is standard practice. Directors don't want to get stuck in one or two sets for the entire film, so they shift some of a play's scenes to different locations or have new scenes written. But nobody has done it with such imagination and finesse as Alf Sjöberg, taking August Strindberg's Miss Julie out of the kitchen in which the play confines the characters and into the other rooms of the house and onto the grounds of the estate. Sjöberg plays fast and loose not only with space but also with time, giving us scenes from the childhood of some of the characters, showing us the cruelties that warped them into the twisted adults they have become. But he also does it by letting the characters from the past appear in the same room as their equivalents in the present, giving a sense of the indivisibility of past from present. Granted, Strindberg's play, with its long reminiscent speeches, facilitates this reworking of the drama by providing the material for Sjöberg's added scenes, but there's a fluidity to Sjöberg's melding of memories into the tormented present of Julie and Jean. There are some who argue that Miss Julie is meant to be a claustrophobic play, that dramatizing too much of Julie's relationship with her mother or Jean's early lessons in not transgressing the limits of class undermines the play's psychological realism with too much action and melodrama. The answer to this, I think, is that the play remains, and continues to be performed with success -- and, incidentally, to be filmed repeatedly in ways more faithful to Strindberg's original plan. What we have with Sjöberg's film based on Strindberg's play is a second creation, rather the way Verdi's Otello and Falstaff can stand on their own as masterpieces without denying the virtues of the Shakespeare plays on which they're based.

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986)

Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa

George: Bob Hoskins
Simone: Cathy Tyson
Mortwell: Michael Caine
Thomas: Robbie Coltrane
Anderson: Clarke Peters
Cathy: Kate Hardie
Jeannie: Zoë Nathenson
May: Sammi Davis

Director: Neil Jordan
Screenplay: Neil Jordan, David Leland
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Jamie Leonard
Film editing: Lesley Walker
Music: Michael Kamen

If prostitution didn't exist, the movies would have had to invent it. What profession, other than doctors and lawyers, has generated more film footage? Mona Lisa is one of the worthier films about the life of a sex worker, never sinking into prurience or glossiness, even though occasionally it did bring to mind one of the worst movies in the genre, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), in which an LA streetwalker undergoes an Eliza Doolittle transformation from tawdry to chic in the hands of a high-class john. Here, writer-director Neil Jordan reverses the process: It's the glamorous high-class London call girl Simone who turns schlubby George, her mob-appointed chauffeur, into a fashion plate, making him a better man and unintentionally causing him to fall in love with her. We're in the realm of romantic fantasy in both films, but Mona Lisa at least creates a plausibly cruel and dangerous milieu for its story, and Simone's fate after murdering the mob boss and her former pimp is ambiguous at best. Mona Lisa is distinguished by its cast, especially a star-making performance by Bob Hoskins, who won as best actor at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. But it's Jordan's screenplay, co-written with David Leland, that gives the cast so many interesting things to say and do, especially Robbie Coltrane as George's quirky chum and Michael Caine as the sinister Mortwell.

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

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

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Nadine Nortier in Mouchette

Mouchette: Nadine Nortier
Arsène: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Mouchette's Mother: Marie Cardinal
Mouchette's Father: Paul Hébert
Mathieu: Jean Viminet
Schoolteacher: Liliane Princet
Undertaker: Suzanne Huguenin '
Luisa: Marine Trichet
Grocery Shop Owner: Raymonde Chabrun

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Film editing: Raymond Lamy
Music: Jean Wiener

I used to think that Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was the most depressing and enigmatic of Robert Bresson's works, but I hadn't seen Mouchette. It's an unsparing film, in which I can't find even a feint at Bresson's usual religious consolation or symbology. Mouchette's name means "little fly," and her existence is as brief and mucky as that. Yes, I've read the essays on Bresson and on Georges Bernanos's source novel that posit some kind of redemptive motif in Mouchette's bleak life, but experiencing the film doesn't reinforce that for me. Abused endlessly, Mouchette is no martyr, no saint; she is as spiteful and deluded as you might expect. She refers to her rapist as her lover, and once her mother, to whom she was at least dutiful, is dead, there seems nothing to which she can connect, even her baby brother, whom she carelessly swaddles, and when she goes out to get milk for him she dawdles, leaving him at the mercy of her gin-soaked father and brother. She is too proud to accept charity, scrubbing her muddy shoes into the carpet of the crabby old lady who at least is kind enough to give her a shroud for her mother and some clothes for herself. When she goes out to roll down a slope next to a pond, it looks like she's spitefully dirtying these gifts. And then we realize that what looks like mean-spirited play is in fact preparation for a most unusual suicide, which Bresson doesn't actually film but leaves us to infer. The film has been called tragic, but it looks to me like unfettered naturalism.