Madeleine (David Lean, 1950)

Ivan Desny and Ann Todd in Madeleine

Madeleine Smith: Ann Todd
William Minnoch: Norman Wooland
Emile L'Anglier: Ivan Desny
Mr. Smith: Leslie Banks
Mrs. Smith: Barbara Everest
Bessie Smith: Patricia Raine
Janet Smith: Susan Stranks
Christina Hackett: Elizabeth Sellars
Thuau: Eugene Deckers
Defending Counsel: André Morell
Prosecuting Counsel: Barry Jones
Dr. Thompson: Edward Chapman
Mrs. Jenkins: Jean Cadell

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps
Cinematography: Guy Green
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Clive Donner, Geoffrey Foot
Music: William Alwyn

I wanted Madeleine to have the emotional depth of Brief Encounter (1945) or the imaginative finesse of Oliver Twist (1948), just to sustain my argument that David Lean was a greater director before he aimed for the epic scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). But even Lean would later admit that Madeleine is something of a dud. The story of an "unproven" murder -- the verdict the Glasgow jury returned at the trial of the real Madeleine Smith -- the film needs to generate a Hitchcockian tension that Lean never quite masters. One reason, I think, is that it stars the rather pallid Ann Todd, Lean's wife, who had played Madeleine Smith in a stage version of the story, when it needs a more accomplished and charismatic actress, a Deborah Kerr or a Jean Simmons, to bring out the ambiguities in the character. Todd rises to the role only in the final scene, when Madeleine rides away a free woman, a mysterious smile flickering across her face as the voiceover narrator questions whether she was guilty or not guilty. Otherwise, she generates little heat in her love scenes with Ivan Desny as L'Anglier* and the scene in which she throws him over for her father's choice as a fiancé, William Minnoch, comes as an abrupt about-face. Lean seems to be trying to do something with the character of the lover, including much business with his brandishing a phallic walking stick, but it doesn't come off. On the plus side, there are good performances by Leslie Banks as Madeleine's father, the quintessential tyrannical Victorian paterfamilias, and André Morell gives a rousing argument for the defense in the trial scene. Guy Green's chiaroscuro cinematography creates the proper mood, as do John Bryan's sometimes oppressive interiors.

*The spelling in the credits. The historical figure was called L'Angelier, which is also the way André Morell, playing the defense counsel, pronounces it.

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Bicycle Thieves

Antonio: Lamberto Maggiorani 
Bruno: Enzo Staiola 
Maria: Lionella Carell 
The Charitable Lady: Elena Altieri
Baiocco: Gino Saltamarenda 
The Beggar: Giulio Chiari
The Thief: Vittorio Antonucci

Director: Vittorio De Sica 
Screenplay: Oreste Biancolli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vittorio De Sica, Adolfo Franci, Gheraldo Gherardi, Gerardo Guerrieri, Cesare Zavattini
Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini
Cinematography: Carlo Montuori
Production design: Antonio Traverso
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 
Music: Alessandro Cicognini

One of the many things I love about Bicycle Thieves* is the omnipresence of bicycles. At the beginning of the film, we spot them whizzing by the bike-deprived Antonio, as incidental and elusive as birds in the sky. But by the climactic scene, when Antonio and Bruno are sitting despondently on the curb, they are everywhere: There are hundreds of them parked outside the nearby sports arena; a bike race whizzes by only inches from the father and son; and of course there's that fateful bike outside a doorway just around the corner. Bikes become as tempting to Antonio as bottles and glasses would be to a recovering alcoholic in a bar. I wonder how much of the greatness of Bicycle Thieves depends on that list of no less than seven screenwriters: Did Vittorio De Sica really need six other people to tell what is essentially one of the simplest of stories? I think perhaps he did, for the film is crowded with incidentals, with scenes and details that give it such a wonderful texture, from the relationship between Antonio and Maria to the crowd of job-seekers outside the employment office to the bustling bike market scene, and so on. Details such as Antonio's ignoring the fact that Maria is carrying two heavy buckets of water when he finds her to tell her of his job add immeasurably to our sense of his flawed, self-obsessed character. Did the scene in which Antonio watches a man climb up and up and up stacks of shelved, pawned sheets arise from observation on location, or was it suggested by a writer as a way of signaling the depth of poverty in postwar Rome? There are small, non-essential but telling moments in every scene, such as the man at the bicycle market who is clearly a pedophile trying to lure Bruno astray. De Sica and his writers have loaded every rift of Bicycle Thieves with ore. But only De Sica could have been responsible for drawing such miraculous performances from unknown actors like Lamberto Maggiorani, who has the haunted look of a young Robert Duvall, and Enzo Stailolo, whose Bruno verges on cute -- especially when his face lights up at the thought of food -- but never becomes cloying, and at the end exhibits a wonderful mixture of disappointment and love for his father.

*This seems to have become the official English-language title of the film, sanctioned by IMDb among others, after many years of being known as The Bicycle Thief. It is, of course, the literal translation of the Italian title, Ladri di Biciclette. But it's not only preferable because of fidelity to the original but also because, as David Thomson puts it in his entry on the film in Have You Seen...?, "in the world it shows, there are thousands of bicycle thieves because of the terrible economy."

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)

Tim Streeter and Doug Cooeyate in Mala Noche

Walt: Tim Streeter
Johnny: Doug Cooeyate
Roberto Pepper: Ray Monge
Betty: Nyla McCarthy

Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant
Based on a story by Walt Curtis
Cinematography: John J. Campbell
Film editing: Gus Van Sant
Music: Creighton Lindsay

It occurs to me that Gus Van Sant's first feature, Mala Noche, has something in common with his best-known and most commercially successful films, Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which earned him Oscar nominations (and won Oscars for, respectively, actors Robin Williams and Sean Penn): They're all about dispossessed young men. Harvey Milk manages to overcome the political stigma of being gay, but is gunned down by a homophobe. Will Hunting emerges from South Boston as a mathematical savant, but never quite overcomes the feeling of being out of place. And Walt, the protagonist of Mala Noche, is a gay man living apparently by choice on Skid Row in Portland, working as a janitor and as a clerk in a tiny liquor store that mostly sells cheap hooch to winos. It's pretty clear that Walt is not much for impulse control: The object of his obsession, Johnny, with his long dark eyelashes and full lips, looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and a Pre-Raphaelite angel, and Walt pursues him relentlessly. Unable to get Johnny to sleep with him, Walt goes for proximity -- having rough sex with Johnny's friend Roberto. (Wouldn't a gay man have a better lube in his medicine cabinet than Vaseline?) Van Sant intentionally withholds much of Walt's backstory: We suspect from his good looks and affable, articulate manner that he comes from middle-class origins, so his slumming and his frustrated erotic obsession look like a kind of masochism. Mala Noche is no masterpiece, but it's a fascinating work of first-film ultra-low-budget ingenuity, with its location shooting, its high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and its plausible performances by actors who were then unknown and have pretty much remained so.

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.