Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1948)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Sanae Takasugi in Women of the Night

Fusako Owada: Kinuyo Tanaka
Natsuko Kimijima: Sanae Takasugi
Kumiko Owada: Tomie Tsunoda
Kenzo Kuriyama: Mitsuo Nagata

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane
Music: Hisato Osawa

Rougher and less polished than Kenji Mizoguchi's prewar films and the masterpieces -- The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) --  that would follow, Women of the Night is still one of his harshest and most unforgiving works, with several breathtakingly raw moments. It begins in the aftermath of the war, with Fusako struggling to get by: Her husband is still missing and their small child is dangerously ill. A woman to whom she tries to sell some spare items of clothing hints that her best option is to prostitute herself, an idea that she rejects in shock. She then learns that her husband has died, and the opening sequence ends with the sick child going into convulsions. There's a remarkable jump cut at this point, and we see Fusako somewhat better dressed and learn that the child has died, but she has gone to work for her husband's former boss, Kuriyama. By accident she also meets her sister, Natsuko, whom she has not seen since the war, when Natsuko and their parents were in Korea. Natsuko is working as a "dance hostess," and when Fusako introduces her to her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko, the girl is taken with what sounds like a glamorous job. Fusako and Natsuko move in together, but Fusako has been cultivating a profitable illicit relationship with Kuriyama, and one day she arrives home early to find that Natsuko is also sleeping with him. Furious, Fusako finds the old woman who had suggested that she become a prostitute and takes her revenge on her sister and her boss by becoming a streetwalker. Meanwhile, Kumiko runs away from home and she, too, winds up prostituting herself. Eventually, the three women find one another and struggle to get out of the destructive cycle into which they have been drawn. The story is highlighted by a couple of remarkable scenes: In the first of them, the naive Kumiko encounters a street hustler who belongs to a gang of young thugs; after raping her, he sics the girls in the gang onto Kumiko, who strip her and then make her one of them. Later, Fusako discovers that Kumiko has become a prostitute, but when she tries to get the girl to an organization that tries to rehabilitate prostitutes she is set upon and severely beaten by a gang of streetwalkers who oppose the reformists. Mizoguchi stages these violent scenes with brutal clarity. Unfortunately, Women of the Night ends with a somewhat sentimental scene in the ruins of a church whose stained-glass window of the Madonna and child seem somehow to have escaped breakage. Even Mizoguchi later felt inclined to apologize for the film, particularly for what he felt was its dominant note of anger. But as a story about the predicament of women, it's still a fascinating postwar complement to his more finished 1936 films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion.

Man Is Not a Bird (Dusan Makavejev, 1965)

Janez Vrhovec and Milena Dravic in Man Is Not a Bird

Rajka: Milena Dravic
Jan Rudinski: Janez Vrhovec
Barbulovic: Stolan Arandjelovic
Barvulovic's Wife: Eva Ras
Bosko, the Truck Driver: Boris Dvornik
Roko the Hypnotist: Roko Cirkovic
Zeleznicar: Dusan Antonijevic

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: Dusan Makavejev, Rasa Popov
Cinematography: Aleksandar Petkovic
Production design: Dragoljub Ivkov
Film editing: Ljubica Nesic, Ivanka Vukasovic
Music: Petar Bergamo

At first glance, Dusan Makavejev's first feature, Man Is Not a Bird, isn't much like his savage, surreal WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974). Its focus on the working class reminded me of some of the other films that came out of Eastern Europe in the 1960s and '70s, such as Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965), Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966), and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (1979) -- humorous but filled with a strong irony, especially where the heavy-handed communist regime was concerned. The events are set in a place of bleak documentary realism, in this case a gray, sooty mining town -- Makavejev began by shooting a documentary in the mining town of Bor in what's now Serbia, but getting to know the people and their stories led to what we might call meta-documentary, a fictionalized Bor and inhabitants. Somehow, they eke out their lives in a dreary place where the only amusements seem to be a con-man hypnotist and a very shabby circus. The mine and adjacent processing plants are visions out of hell: At one point, musicians arrive for the performance of the "Ode to Joy" choral section of Beethoven's Ninth, and a few of them lose their way to the hall where they're performing and find themselves in the smelting area where a shower of sparks ignites one woman's long dress. But Makavejev never makes the depressing setting and the bleak and sometimes brutal lives of his characters oppressive. There is just enough distancing from these characters that we can see them ironically and find even the brutish, abusive Barbulovic a satiric figure rather than a realistic one. The pomposity of the bosses in awarding the engineer Jan Rudinski a medal and a concert instead of a bonus for finishing his installation of new turbines ahead of schedule is a keen glance as the communist bureaucracy. It's not a particularly likable film, and it clearly has moments where it avoids treading on the censors' sensibilities, but I prefer it to Makavejev's later, more unfettered work.

Le Silence de la Mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1948)

Jean-Marie Robain, Howard Vernon, and Nicole Stéphane in Le Silence de la Mer 

Werner von Ebrennac: Howard Vernon
The Niece: Nicole Stéphane
The Uncle: Jean-Marie Robain
The Fiancée: Ami Aaroë
The Orderly: Georges Patrix
The Friend: Denis Sadier

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Based on a novel by Jean Bruller aka Vercors
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film editing: Henri Decaë, Jean-Pierre Melville
Music: Edgar Bischoff

Le Silence de la Mer marked an extraordinary double debut: This was the first feature film for not only its writer and director, Jean-Pierre Melville, but also its cinematographer, Henri Decaë. Both were working under handicaps of budget and location -- the film was made in the home of Jean Bruller, who wrote and published the celebrated underground novel under a pseudonym, Vercors. Exterior shots, such as the countryside and the glimpses of Paris, were filmed mostly on the fly and sometimes rely for their effect more on editing than on camerawork. But it's the spareness and somewhat makeshift quality of the making of the film that gives it such a haunting quality. The novel was embraced by the French Resistance for its object lesson in resisting: Forced to house a German officer during the occupation, an elderly man and his young niece remain completely silent whenever he is present. The German comes to accept this silent treatment, and visits the two in the evening to deliver monologues about his life and his ideals, which were awakened, he says, by the Nazis. He sees the German occupation as a step toward a uniting of Germany and France. He admires French culture to the extreme, particularly its literature, fondling the volumes on the shelves in the room as the Frenchman smokes his pipe and the niece does her mending and knitting. The Germans, on the other hand, he claims are superior in music -- he was a composer before he became a soldier -- and he once sits down at the harmonium in the room to play a Bach prelude. The Frenchman occasionally gives a flicker of wanting to respond to the German's statements, but his niece's steadfast silence hold him in check. These visits continue from winter into summer, when the German goes away to Paris to meet with the German command. He returns a changed man: He has learned to his horror of the death camps and of the designs of the Nazis to obliterate the French culture he so admires. At the end he goes away, having volunteered to serve at the front, a suicidal gesture, and the niece speaks, in a faint whisper, the only word she has ventured in his presence: "Adieu." Melville's manipulation of the relations among the three characters, only one of whom speaks, is extraordinarily subtle, and Decaë's brilliant use of light and shadow -- when we first see the German, he emerges from the darkness in the doorway in a glare of light that makes him look like a sinister presence -- adds immeasurably to the quiet drama of the film.

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.