Here's to the Young Lady (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano in Here's to the Young Lady

Keizo Ishizu: Shuji Sano
Yasuko Ikeda: Setsuko Hara
Sato: Takeshi Sakamoto
Goro: Keiji Sada
Yasuko's Mother: Chieko Higashiyama
Yasuko's Sister: Masami Morikawa
Yasuko's Brother-in-law: Junji Masuda
Yasuko's Father: Yasushi Nagata
Yasuko's Grandmother: Fusako Fujima
Yasuko's Grandfather: Sugisaku Aoyama
Bar Owner: Sachiko Murase

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Shizuko Osawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Stop me if you've seen this one: A middle-aged working-class single man meets a pretty young woman from the upper classes and.... Okay, right. It's a romantic cliché, one that's so irresistible that Samuel Goldwyn once ordered a screenplay to be written on the basis of a title alone, The Cowboy and the Lady (H.C. Potter, 1938), and it's the inspiration for the teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But what sets Keisuke Kinoshita's Here's to the Young Lady apart is its country and time of origin: postwar Japan. In part the film is a manifestation of the occupying forces' desire to bring about a more egalitarian Japan, one in which a system of caste and class would be broken down, but it's also a reflection of economic reality in a recovering country whose male population had been decimated by the war. So Keizo Ishizu, a 34-year-old man who owns a thriving auto repair business and has dreams of getting into manufacturing, is introduced by his friend Sato to Yasuko Ikeda, from a cultured and educated family, as a potential wife. Ishizu is smitten instantly by the lovely but very shy young woman, but he also has doubts that she would ever be interested in him -- and he is sort of a schlub, whose chief recreation is drinking at his favorite bar. But then Ishizu visits Yasuko at her home and meets her family, learning that they are on the brink of financial disaster. Kinoshita starts with mostly long shots of the living room of the Ikeda home, but then switches to some shots from Ishizu's point of view that reveal the threadbare upholstery and well-worn furnishings. It turns out that Yasuko's father is in prison because after the war he was tricked into joining a company that was on the shady side. When its fraudulent practices were exposed, he honorably took the blame, even though it's suggested that he was ignorant of them. Moreover, a loan is about to come due, one that was taken out to help the family -- which includes Yasuko's mother, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law -- to survive. Ishizu has every reason to flee from this entanglement, but he's so taken with Yasuko that he agrees to court her for a while to see if their marriage would work out. She suggests that they go to the ballet, where he winds up in tears -- partly because he realizes that he can never be a match for her in culture. He takes her to a boxing match, where she winces at the violence but nevertheless winds up cheering for one of the fighters. And so on as obstacles to their marriage rise. We know how it will end, but Kinoshita makes that ending almost plausible, especially with the help of a talented cast that features the always magnificent Setsuko Hara. One blot on the film is the overbearing and sometimes inappropriate use of Chuji Kinoshita's repetitive score, augmented by the overuse of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor, the one spoiled for many of us by its use as the melody for the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949)

Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, and Mercedes McCambridge in All the King's Men

Willie Stark: Broderick Crawford
Jack Burden: John Ireland
Anne Stanton: Joanne Dru
Sadie Burke: Mercedes McCambridge
Tom Stark: John Derek
Adam Stanton: Shepperd Strudwick
Tiny Duffy: Ralph Dumke
Lucy Stark: Anne Seymour
Mrs. Burden: Katherine Warren
Judge Monte Stanton: Raymond Greenleaf
Sugar Boy: Walter Burke
Dolph Pillsbury: Will Wright
Floyd McEvoy: Grandon Rhodes

Director: Robert Rossen
Screenplay: Robert Rossen
Based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Art direction: Sturges Carne
Film editing: Al Clark, Robert Parrish
Music: Louis Gruenberg

Where psychological realism is concerned, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men plays more like a temperance lecture than a political movie. One moment Willie Stark is a naive, teetotaling reformer, faithful to his wife, and the next he's a drunken, avaricious demagogue and womanizer. All it took was a bender and a hangover, along with a little bit of disillusionment about the reason he was being promoted as a gubernatorial candidate. It's possible, however, that some of the subtlety in the characterization of Willie Stark ended up on the editing floor. The first cut of the film was notoriously overlong -- over four hours -- until it was subjected to some ruthless editing from Robert Parrish, who was called in as "editorial adviser," receiving no screen credit but rewarded with an Oscar nomination. All the King's Men is still something of a ramshackle affair in its structure and character development. While it won the best picture Oscar, it's no masterpiece. What it is, however, is a moderately good entertainment, with some effective location filming by Burnett Guffey in various California settings, and a showcase for some good performances: Broderick Crawford as Willie and Mercedes McCambridge as his factotum (and sometimes mistress, if you know how to decode the censorship runarounds) won their own Oscars, and John Ireland was nominated. But the film falls apart where it comes to politics, never quite showing how Willie managed to con the voters into their avid support while stifling and even bumping off the opposition. Instead, we get sidetracked into the relationship between Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, the melodramatic suicide of her uncle, and her brother's transformation into an assassin. Maybe someday we'll get a solid portrayal of populist demagoguery in the movies, whether based on Huey P. Long or Donald J. Trump, but All the King's Men isn't it.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night 

Mae Doyle: Barbara Stanwyck
Jerry D'Amato: Paul Douglas
Earl Pfeiffer: Robert Ryan
Peggy: Marilyn Monroe
Joe Doyle: Keith Andes
Uncle Vince: J. Carrol Naish
Papa D'Amato: Silvio Minciotti

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Alfred Hayes
Based on a play by Clifford Odets
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Roy Webb

There's a wonderful directorial touch in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Robert Ryan light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Barbara Stanwyck. She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but I like to think of it as Lang's own employment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character, Mae Doyle, is hardly ever fully in charge -- she can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Robert Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.

Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Michel Subor and Anna Karina in Le Petit Soldat

Bruno Forestier: Michel Subor
Veronica Dreyer: Anna Karina
Jacques: Henri-Jacques Huet
Paul: Paul Beauvais
Laszlo: László Szabó
Activist Leader: Georges de Beauregard

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman, Nadine Trintignant
Music: Maurice Leroux

Le Petit Soldat was Jean-Luc Godard's second feature film, made in 1960 but held up by French censorship because of its political content until 1963. Its characters are dour and talky, but there's a great deal of life stirring in the film as they try to navigate the existential dilemmas they find themselves in. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier, is a kind of freelance soldier of fortune, a Frenchman exiled in Switzerland, not coincidentally Godard's country of birth. He poses as a photographer, and utters Godard's famous statement, "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second." Bruno woos the pretty Veronica Dreyer, a Danish woman who shares the surname of the great film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, by taking pictures of her. Blackmailed by French intelligence into assassinating a pro-Arab leader, he gets caught and tortured in scenes that are quite graphic: He's handcuffed in a bathtub and his hands are singed by the flame of a lighter, he's waterboarded, and he's given electric shocks. (Michel Subor, the actor who plays Bruno, evidently underwent all of these tortures, though not for the extended periods Bruno experiences.) Eventually he gets free and goes through with the planned assassination, having struck a deal with the French that he and Veronica can escape to Brazil, but in the meantime the French have discovered that she's been working with the Arabs and she's tortured to death. All of this is staged in the deadpan manner characteristic of early Godard, and with a certain amount of ironic humor, especially in the scenes in which a frustrated Bruno pursues his target in a car down two-lane French roads, never quite able to get alongside the target to take the shot. Clearly, there's a lot to chew on in Le Petit Soldat, a Godardian mélange of politics and sex and alienation -- Bruno says, looking in a mirror, "When I look myself in the face, I get the feeling I don't match what I think is inside." Whether you think it's worth watching -- and I do -- probably depends on your taste for mid-20th-century Angst.

The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)

Fred Savage and Peter Falk in The Princess Bride

Westley: Cary Elwes
Buttercup: Robin Wright
Inigo Montoya: Mandy Patinkin
Prince Humperdinck: Chris Sarandon
Count Rugen: Christopher Guest
Vizzini: Wallace Shawn
Fezzik: André the Giant
Grandson: Fred Savage
Grandfather: Peter Falk
The Impressive Clergyman: Peter Cook
The Albino: Mel Smith
Miracle Max: Billy Crystal
Valerie: Carol Kane

Director: Rob Reiner
Screenplay: William Goldman
Based on a novel by William Goldman
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Norman Garwood
Film editing: Robert Leighton
Music: Mark Knopfler

Screenwriter William Goldman's death happened just a day or two after I watched The Princess Bride, and the film was mentioned in almost all of the newspaper articles about his life and career, on a par with the two movies that won him Oscars for screenwriting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976). But when it was released, The Princess Bride was something of a box office flop and got no attention from the Oscars. It has since become one of many people's most-loved movies, a beneficiary of its availability on home video. Countless parents who skipped it when it was in the theaters rented it for their kids and wound up watching it, too. Its huge success has been attributed to Rob Reiner's breezy direction, to the attractiveness of its cast, and to its immense quotability: Almost no one today utters the word "inconceivable" without expecting someone to reply, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." But most of all, The Princess Bride works because it's a celebration of storytelling, a reminder of the kind of transformation that a well-told story can bring about, the way the grandson in the film's frame story comes to regard his grandfather as more than an unwelcome cheek-pincher, and a "kissing book" can have unexpected rewards, especially since, as the boy puts it, "Murdered by pirates is good." Some unique chemistry of writing, acting, and directing has made The Princess Bride the classic of a subgenre, the spoofy movie, which has almost been played out by its imitators.

The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951)

Richard Loo, Richard Monahan, and James Edwards in The Steel Helmet

Sgt. Zack: Gene Evans
Pvt. Bronte: Robert Hutton
Lt. Driscoll: Steve Brodie
Cpl. Thompson: James Edwards
Sgt. Tanaka: Richard Loo
Joe: Sid Melton
Pvt. Baldy: Richard Monahan
Short Round: William Chun
The Red: Harold Fung

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Ernest Miller
Art direction: Theobold Holsopple
Film editing: Philip Cahn
Music: Paul Dunlap

We tend to think of the American civil rights movement as beginning on May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, declaring segregated schools illegal. But it's worth giving credit for the climate change that led to the decision to many precursors, including, of all things, the Hollywood film industry. Timid and tepid as "race-conscious" films like Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949) and No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) seem to us today, they were made by major directors, and showed a willingness to confront American racial conflict that would have been unwelcome a decade earlier. But maybe no movie suggests how profound that change in attitudes would become than Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, an unabashedly low-budget movie, shot in ten days, by a director regarded as second-string and a producer, Robert L. Lippert, known as "The Quickie King." It's a war movie with all the clichés of the genre, including the old familiar melting-pot cast of soldiers, except that in the war movies of the 1940s, made as morale boosters, the ingredients in the melting pot were mostly of European origins: Irishmen, Italians, Swedes, and so on, and a mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. But Fuller's Korean War-era melting pot added an African-American medic and a Japanese-American sergeant to the mix. And it directly confronted the issue of racial discrimination when a North Korean POW taunts both men about their lives back home. Granted, the response of the medic, Cpl. Thompson, is a little disappointing, essentially a these-things-take-time shrug, but the fact that a black actor, James Edwards, has been included in the cast, and on a more-or-less equal footing -- he sasses back when sassed -- is extraordinary. And the POW's mention of the American internment camps for Japanese-Americans is one of the first references in a movie to what was then still a little-known blot on American justice. Because Fuller is just so damn good at telling a story and keeping the action hot, all of this goes by without feeling like a blatant attempt to stir the liberal conscience. If his characters are stereotypical -- Sgt. Zack isn't much more than the hard-bitten, cigar-chomping old hand, and Lt. Driscoll is the greenhorn officer a bit out of his depth -- Fuller still knows how to put them into play. He works miracles with locations that are clearly not Korean or even Asian -- they were shot in Griffith Park in L.A. -- and with studio sets -- a door in the Buddhist temple slams and the wall visibly shakes. It's doubtful that The Steel Helmet converted any racists in the audience, but the fact that it must have got them into the theater at all -- it grossed more than $6 million on a budget of a little over $100 thousand -- is a tribute to Fuller.

The Living Magaroku (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1943)

Toshio Hosokawa and Ken Uehara in The Living Magoroku

Sagara Kiyomatsu: Ken Uehara
Sakabe Katsusuke: Toshio Hosokawa
Yoshihiro Onagi: Yasumi Hara
Makoto Onagi: Kurumi Yamabato
Mrs. Onagi: Mitsuko Yoshikawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Osamu Motoki

There must have been Japanese movies of the 1940s that were as vicious about the American enemy as our war movies were about the Japanese, that had lines as callous as "Fried Jap coming down!" when a fighter pilot gets shot down in Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), but we don't see them today. Instead we see the wartime work of directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, whose films seem surprisingly softcore in comparison with America's wartime movies. Sometimes in The Living Magoroku I think that Kinoshita is pulling a fast one on the military censors. This is a movie designed to support the war effort by encouraging people to forsake tradition and do things previously taboo like plant crops on sacred ground, but that's the least interesting plot thread. Instead, Kinoshita is always directing our attention elsewhere: to the psychosomatic illness of Yoshihiro, or to the young couple whose plans to marry are thwarted by convention, or even to the mystique of ancient swords. Granted, that last plot element has propaganda purposes -- Sagara wants his sword to kill 20 or 30 "American weaklings" -- but its the craftsmanship of swordmaking that gets most of the attention. The result is a war movie that's less bloodthirsty than heartwarming, as Yoshihiro finds his manhood, the couple gets the go-ahead to marry, and Sakabe not only gets a sword that will restore his honor after he carelessly sold the family heirloom but also gets the hand in marriage of Makoto. The ending, with the farmers breaking ground in the previously hallowed Onagi fields, is more like a Soviet propaganda movie about collective farming than like a war-effort flag-waver. Even Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) was about building war machinery, not about planting crops to feed people.

Himiko (Masahiro Shinoda, 1974)

Masao Kusakari and Shima Iwashita in Himiko

Himiko: Shima Iwashita
Takehiko: Masao Kusakari
Adahime: Rie Yokoyama
Mimaki: Choichiro Kawarasaki
Ikume: Kenzo Kawarasaki
Ohkimi: Yoshi Kato
Nashime: Rentaro Mikuni

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Masahiro Shinoda, Taeko Tomioka
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Kiyoshi Awazu
Film editing: Sachiko Jamaji
Music: Toru Takemitsu

The observation I made about Masahiro Shinoda's The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970) is equally applicable to his Himiko: I was "culturally ill-equipped" for watching it. The film is based on a legendary or at least semi-historical figure, a queen and shaman who supposedly ruled part of Japan in the third century C.E. In the film, she's treated as a spokeswoman for the Sun God, whose followers sometimes clash with the followers of the Land God and the Mountain God. A young man, Takehiko, who has traveled widely among these other people, enters Himiko's realm. The two fall in love, even though he's really her half-brother. Himiko's task is to deliver the words of the Sun God, but day-to-day business of the realm is handled by a king, Ohkimi, and when Himiko, following the advice of Takehiko, proclaims that the Sun God wants peace with the Land God and the Mountain God, Ohkimi protests. After Ohkimi is assassinated by Nashime, a servant of Himiko's, there's a power struggle involving two brothers, Mimaki and Ikume; Ohkimi has designated Mimaki as his successor. Meanwhile, Takehiko is seduced by Adahime, one of Himiko's acolytes, and when the queen hears of it, she banishes him. Mimaki declares war on the peoples of the Land God and the Mountain God, leading to the deaths of almost all concerned. It's all a tangle, though in many ways a familiar one -- prophecies, power struggles, and wars are universal. What sets the film apart is Shinoda's staging, which alternates between some spectacular natural landscapes -- mountains, forests, and waterfalls -- and stylized interiors. I found the design of the latter a bit too stylized: They look a lot like the interiors of a modern convention center or office building, and the bright and unsubtle way they're lighted doesn't minimize that effect. The acting, too, is stylized, imitating traditional Japanese drama, which makes some of the exposition and declamation too stiff and mannered for my tastes. But there are compensations, such as the fascinating treatment of the followers of the Mountain God, who paint their bodies white, wear tattered garments, and never stand up straight but crouch and creep with an eerie, uncanny effect. The score by Toru Takemitsu is also effectively unearthly.

The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960)

Tamio Kawaji in The Warped Ones

Akira: Tamio Kawaji
Yuki: Yuko Chiyo
Masaru: Eiji Go
Kashiwagi: Hiroyuki Nagato
Fumiko: Noriko Matsumoto
Shinji Kumaki: Kojiro Kusanagi
Gill: Chico Roland
Yuki's Mother: Chigusa Takayama
Neighbor: Reiko Arai
Woman in Atelier: Yoko Kosono

Director: Koreyoshi Kurahara
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Cinematography: Yoshio Mamiya
Production design: Kazuhiko Chiba
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The TCM programmer who scheduled Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones right after Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) evidently has a dark sense of humor. Both are fine examples of movies about people doing bad things and getting away with it. Funny Games ends with its mass murderer smirking at the camera, and while the bad-boy protagonist of The Warped Ones doesn't get away with murder, since as far as we know he hasn't committed one, he does get away with rape, theft, and assault. The film ends with Akira and his prostitute friend, Fumiko, laughing it up at an abortion clinic, amused that they are there with the virtuous Kashiwagi and Yuki because the former has impregnated Fumiko and the latter is pregnant with Akira's child. The Warped Ones belongs to a genre known as taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe" films, portrayals of the undisciplined youth of postwar Japan. Among them are movies like Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and three released the same year as The Warped Ones, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial and Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury. But even hard-edged directors like Oshima and Shinoda couldn't resist putting a moral spin on their portraits of wayward youth. Kurahara could, and The Warped Ones is all the more fascinating for its willingness to see the world the way Akira sees it. Tamio Kawaji gives an amazing over-the-top performance in the role, never quite standing still for a moment. He doesn't walk, he dances, prances, skips, and contorts, and Yoshio Mamiya's camera swirls and jogs along with him, ever restless, ever kinetic. Even in closeups his face is constantly in motion, often with a cigarette stuck between his lip and teeth or in the corner of his mouth. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of existential freedom, so self-centered that he refuses, unlike his friend, Masaru, to join a gang that might multiply his opportunities for mayhem. The only thing on Earth to which he pays obeisance is jazz, provided by Toshiro Mayuzumi's score. But even without punishing Akira for his considerable crimes, the film manages to make the point that he's no role model. Instead, he's an object lesson in the impossibility of achieving pure freedom.   

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Arno Frisch in Funny Games 

Anna: Susanne Lothar
George: Ulrich Mühe
Paul: Arno Frisch
Peter: Frank Giering
Schorschi: Stefan Clapczynski
Gerda: Doris Kunstmann
Fred: Christoph Bantzer
Robert: Wolfgang Glück
Gerda's Sister: Susanne Meneghel
Eva: Monika Zallinger

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Production design: Christoph Kanter
Film editing: Andreas Prochaska

Funny Games is Michael Haneke's cold and nasty take on the horror-thriller genre, particularly the home-invasion subgenre in which a psychopath traps a family in their home and torments them. The locus classicus of the genre is probably Cape Fear, in both the original film by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and the 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, although there have been plenty of other movies designed to needle our complacent sense that we're safe at home. Haneke's version is effective in that regard, although he takes the suspense a step further by making us complicit in the torture: Paul, the more dominant of the two young psychopaths in the film, breaks the fourth wall to wink and smirk and even talk at us as we watch his plans unfold. At one point, he says to us, referring to the family he's tormenting, "You're on their side, aren't you?" And at the point where, as in a conventional horror-thriller, the family seems to have turned the tables on their captors, he comments, "We're not up to feature film length yet," meaning that the plot must have a few twists to go. And finally, he shows us that we are among his captives: When Anna suddenly grabs the rifle and blows away Peter, the other tormenter, Paul grabs a video remote and rewinds the scene, then gains the upper hand again, leaving the family (and us) at his mercy. In sum, this is a nihilistic film, which Haneke designed to rub our noses in our prurience where violence is concerned. He wanted to film it in the United States, as a kind of statement about American violence, but was forced to make it in Austria. But after the film succeeded and Haneke had built his international career, he was able to remake Funny Games with an English-speaking cast in 2007. More on that version later.