The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2018)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Tim Blake Nelson in the title segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Buster Scruggs: Tim Blake Nelson
The Kid: Willie Watson
Curly Joe: Clancy Brown
Curly Joe's Brother: Danny McCarthy
Frenchman: David Krumholtz

Near Algodones

James Franco in the "Near Algodones" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Cowboy: James Franco
Teller: Stephen Root
Posse Leader: Ralph Ineson
Drover: Jesse Luken

Meal Ticket

Liam Neeson in the "Meal Ticket" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Impresario: Liam Neeson 

Artist: Harry Melling 

Bawd: Jiji Hise 

Chicken Impresario: Paul Rae

All Gold Canyon

Tom Waits in the "All Gold Canyon" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Prospector: Tom Waits
Young Man: Sam Dillon


The Gal Who Got Rattled

Grainger Hines in "The Gal Who Got Rattled" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Billy Knapp: Bill Heck
Alice Longabaugh: Zoe Kazan
Mr. Arthur: Grainger Hines
Gilbert Longabaugh: Jefferson Mays


The Mortal Remains

Jonjo O'Neill and Brendan Gleeson in "The Mortal Remains" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Englishman: Jonjo O'Neill
Irishman: Brendan Gleeson
Frenchman: Saul Rubinek
Lady: Tyne Daly
Trapper: Chelcie Ross

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
"All Gold Canyon" segment based on a story by Jack London, "The Gal Who Got Rattled" segment based on a story by Stewart Edward White
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production design: Jess Gonchor
Film editing: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Music: Carter Burwell

Are the Coen brothers the most "American" of filmmakers? That thought occurred to me once before in commenting on No Country for Old Men (2007) and the way it and others among their major movies seemed to form "an American collage." And the six short films collected into The Ballad of Buster Scruggs only reinforce the idea: Not only are the six set in the central period of the American myth, the Old West, but they also evoke major American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, as well as the two chroniclers of the vanishing American wilderness cited as sources for the segments "All Gold Canyon" and "The Gal Who Got Rattled," Jack London and Stewart Edward White. It's a very "literary" film whose characters often don't just talk, they orate, in florid 19th-century diction. And it's a film based in that very American folk genre, the tall tale. Those who task the Coens with cynicism and coldness will find ammunition in all of these short films for their argument: Every good deed or noble intention in these stories gets thwarted or maimed. There's probably no crueler story on film than the "Meal Ticket" segment. And yet, we treasure Poe and Twain and Faulkner for their frequent heartlessness, praising their ironic vision. Is it that we expect more warmth from our movies than from our literature? As a genre, the anthology film has gone out of favor, largely because so many of them are uneven in quality, and while it's easy to rank the segments of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs -- I would put "The Gal Who Got Rattled" at the top and "Near Algodones" at the bottom -- the Coens have a unifying vision that makes each segment play off of the others, the way short stories in an anthology by Alice Munro or George Saunders set up reverberations among themselves.

The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind

Jake Hannaford: John Huston
The Actress: Oja Kodar
Brooks Otterlake: Peter Bogdanovich
Julie Rich: Susan Strasberg
Billy Boyle: Norman Foster
John Dale: Robert Random
Zarah Valeska: Lilli Palmer
Pat Mullins: Edmond O'Brien
Maggie Noonan: Mercedes McCambridge
Zimmer: Cameron Mitchell
Matt Costello: Paul Stewart
Jack Simon: Gregory Sierra
The Baron: Tonio Selwart
Max David: Geoffrey Land
Themselves: Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles
Cinematography: Gary Graver
Art direction: Polly Platt
Film editing: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles
Music: Michel Legrand

Inevitably (and intentionally), Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind is going to remind us of other films, including movies about making movies like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and such garish post-Code counterculture movies as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Zabriskie Point *(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970). But what it doesn't remind me of very much are the movies made by Orson Welles. In his most troubled and inchoate films, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), Welles always gave us something to look and marvel at, even if it was only Michael Redgrave in a hairnet. The long-posthumously assembled Other Side doesn't give us much we haven't seen before, aside from a naked Oja Kodar wandering around the ruins of old Hollywood studio sets. Welles's intention is to spoof those counterculture movies while telling a story about how hard it is to make one. I think perhaps the chief problem lies in Welles's casting John Huston as the ill-fated Jake Hannaford, the aging and put-upon director, when he should of course have cast himself. Hannaford's young leading man, John Dale, has left the film in a huff, and what forward drive the narrative part of the film has consists of the director's response to that defection. Huston's predatory grin feels all wrong -- I never sense that his Hannaford has lost control of anything, except perhaps his libido. We need the vast imperturbable presence of Welles in the role, if only to make the point that this is the most personal, the most autobiographical of all his films. It's lamentable that it took almost half a century to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, but the truth is, the story about why it took so long -- which Morgan Neville tells in his 2018 documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead -- is more interesting than the film itself.

*Some of The Other Side of the Wind was shot in a house across the street from the Arizona house featured (and blown up, at least in miniature) in Antonioni's movie.

Ginger and Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986)

Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina in Ginger and Fred

Amelia Bonetti / Ginger: Giulietta Masina
Pippo Botticella / Fred: Marcello Mastroianni
Host: Franco Fabrizi
Admiral Aulenti: Friedrich von Ledebur
Transvestite: Augusto Poderosi
Assistant Director: Martin Maria Blau
Brother Gerolamo: Jacques Henri Lartigue
Totò: Totò Mignone

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Toninio Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnerini
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nicola Piovani
Costume design: Danilo Donati

The two actors most associated with the films of Federico Fellini had never worked together before Ginger and Fred, and the movie is enough to make you wonder why not. To be sure, the waifish Masina of La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) seems worlds apart from the worldly, jaded Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), but both transcend those stereotypes in this film, one of the director's last. They also manage to soften and sweeten a hard and sour film that expresses Fellini's distaste for the vulgarity of modern entertainment. Ginger and Fred is an expansion on the satiric impulse that Fellini displayed much earlier in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), with its nightmarish awards show. Here we have a television extravaganza in which Masina's Amelia Bonetti and Mastroianni's Pippo Botticella have been asked to reunite their old dance team, in which they mimicked the routines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But they are herded into a phantasmagoric assemblage of headline-grabbing pseudo-celebrities and dubious variety acts. Amelia pluckily maneuvers the fading Pippo through it all. The film gained some notoriety when Rogers decided to sue the producers and distributors for trademark violation and defamation, thereby betraying the fact that she may have been a great dancer and comic actress but lacked a sense of humor. She lost. There is a shrillness to Ginger and Fred that makes it sometimes hard to take, but the two performers shine through.

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990)

Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, and Scott Glenn in The Hunt for Red October

Jack Ryan: Alec Baldwin
Marko Ramius: Sean Connery
Bart Mancuso: Scott Glenn
Capt. Borodin: Sam Neill
Admiral Greer: James Earl Jones
Andrei Lysenko: Joss Ackland
Jeffrey Pelt: Richard Jordan
Ivan Putin: Peter Firth
Dr. Petrov: Tim Curry
Seaman Jones: Courtney B. Vance
Capt. Tupolev: Stellan Skarsgård
Skip Tyler: Jeffrey Jones

Director: John McTiernan
Screenplay: Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart
Based on a novel by Tom Clancy
Cinematography: Jan de Bont
Production design: Terence Marsh
Film editing: Dennis Virkler, John Wright
Music: Basil Poledouris

What to make of the fact that the KGB man assigned to be "political officer" on the Red October (and swiftly offed by the defecting captain) is named Putin? Coincidence, of course, but it's one of the things that make John McTiernan's film of Tom Clancy's blockbuster novel The Hunt for Red October still relevant. The film turns on the perpetual dilemma summed up in the oxymoronic Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan turned into a foreign policy, "Trust, but verify." This first Jack Ryan movie is a bit overplotted and occasionally slow to generate the tension a thriller needs, but it has weathered the fall of the Soviet Union better than a lot of stories about the Cold War, and having a character named Putin (though he's Ivan, not Vladimir) with a background similar to the current Russian strongman's does tickle the imagination a bit. The best thing about the film itself is its casting. Even though this was Alec Baldwin's only outing as Jack Ryan (he was replaced by a bigger box-office draw, Harrison Ford, in the next two Tom Clancy movies, Philip Noyce's 1992 Patriot Games and 1994 Clear and Present Danger, and the role has been played by Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski), Baldwin gets the souped-up everyman quality of the role right. But he's overshadowed -- as who isn't? -- by Sean Connery, as well as by those two exemplars of Actors Who Make Every Movie They're in a Little Better: Sam Neill and Scott Glenn. The fantasy of Neill's Capt. Borodin is one of the screenplay's high points: "I will live in Montana and I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck and maybe even a recreational vehicle." It makes the character's dying words, "I would like to have seen Montana," an unexpectedly poignant moment for an action thriller. Glenn similarly finds the humanity within a character who could be just a stereotype, the tough-talking cowboy with an empathetic streak that keeps him from shooting first and asking questions later.

The Legend of Drunken Master (Chia-Liang Liu, 1994)

Jackie Chan in The Legend of Drunken Master

Wong Fei-hung: Jackie Chan
Wong Kei-ying: Lung Ti
Ling: Anita Mui
Tsang: Felix Wong
Master Fu Wen-Chi: Chia-Liang Liu
John: Ken Lo
Fo Sang: Kar Lok Chin
Henry: Ho-Sung Pak
Tso: Chi-Kwong Chung
Uncle Hing: Yi-Sheng Han
Counterintelligence Officer: Andy Lau

Director: Chia-Liang Liu
Screenplay: Edward Tang, Man-Ming Tong, Kai-Chi Yuen
Cinematography: Tony Cheung, Yiu-Tsou Cheung, Wen Yung Huang, Jingle Ma
Production design: Chong-Sing Ho, Eddie Ma
Film editing: Peter Cheung
Music: Michael Wandmacher, Wei Lap Wu

Jackie Chan is his usual charming whirligig self in Chia-Liang Liu's The Legend of Drunken Master, a movie that kung fu film aficionados take a good deal more seriously than I'm able to do. In 2010 Time critic Richard Corliss placed it on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest movies made since 1923. There are certainly some breathtaking moments of action in it, along with a hilarious performance by Anita Mui as Chan's stepmother -- she was actually almost a decade younger. And I go along with Roger Ebert's comparison of Chan to Buster Keaton, though where Keaton was mostly stillness punctuated by moments of action, Chan is hyperactivity distilled to its essence. Unfortunately, the version of the film shown on Starz is dubbed into English and shorn to fit a different aspect ratio than the original. It also lacks a concluding scene in which Chan's character, Wong Fei-hung, exhibits the effects of drinking methanol, which he does in the climactic fight scene. Apparently it was played for comedy, which the American distributors (perhaps rightly) thought distasteful. If a version of the film closer to the original ever comes around, I'd be happy to give Drunken Master II, which is what its hardcore fans call it, another look.

Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide

Lt. Commander Ron Hunter: Denzel Washington
Capt. Frank Ramsey: Gene Hackman
COB Walters: George Dzundza
Lt. Roy Zimmer: Matt Craven
Lt. Peter Ince: Viggo Mortensen
Lt. Bobby Dougherty: James Gandolfini
Lt. Darik Westerguard: Rocky Carroll
Petty Officer Danny Rivetti: Danny Nucci
Petty Officer Third Class Russell Vossler: Lillo Brancato Jr.
Officer of the Deck Mahoney: Jaime P. Gomez
Chief of the Watch Hunsicker: Michael Milhoan
Tactical Supervising Officer Billy Linkletter: Scott Burkholder
Lt. Paul Hellerman: Ricky Schroeder
Seaman William Barnes: Steve Zahn
Rear Admiral Anderson: Jason Robards

Director: Tony Scott
Screenplay: Michael Schiffer, Richard P. Henrick
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Production design: Michael White
Film editing: Chris Lebenzon
Music: Hans Zimmer

I miss Gene Hackman. That is, I miss new movies with Gene Hackman in them. Lord knows he made enough movies before he up and decided to retire in 2004; IMDb credits him with 100 titles, including some TV series he appeared in before Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) gave his career the boost it needed. There was a time when he seemed to be vying with Michael Caine to be in every movie made. Which is as it should be: I don't know many actors who could bring such nuance to roles like the submarine captain in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, carefully cutting his new XO, Hunter, down to size before his fellow officers. Notice the way he says "Harvard" in reading from Hunter's résumé, trying to suggest that Hunter is overqualified for the position and that he, Ramsey, makes up for lack of intellectual achievement with experience. Hackman and Denzel Washington are beautifully matched performers in this battle, Washington riding with the punches. Both play with the racial tension between the two characters, with Hackman making it clear that Ramsey regards Hunter as "uppity." He constantly calls Hunter "son" in a way that makers it sound like he's saying "boy."  Even when Ramsey gratuitously brings up the fact that that the Lipizzaner stallions are white and Hunter retorts that they were born black, there's a delicate restraint in the exchange in which Hackman makes Ramsey's insecurity and Washington makes Hunter's toughness manifest. All of this is bolstered by a gallery of fine supporting performances, clever dialogue in which Quentin Tarantino reportedly had a hand, and a stirring score by Hans Zimmer that makes effective use of the naval hymn "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." Crimson Tide rises well above the level of most action movies, so much so that we almost regret that the film has to fall back on suspense clichés in which the world is saved from destruction at the last second.

Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2017)

Gary Oldman and Ben Mendelsohn in Darkest Hour 

Winston Churchill: Gary Oldman
Clementine Churchill: Kristin Scott Thomas
King George VI: Ben Mendelsohn
Elizabeth Layton: Lily James
Neville Chamberlain: Ronald Pickup
Viscount Halifax: Stephen Dillane
Sir John Simon: Nicholas Jones
Anthony Eden: Samuel West
Clement Atlee: David Schofield

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Anthony McCarten
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Film editing: Valerio Bonelli
Music: Dario Marianelli

Joe Wright's Darkest Hour starts off well as a story of backstage power plays in the runup to World War II, after Neville Chamberlain's attempts at making peace with Hitler had so notably failed. If it had stayed on this level, we might have had an absorbing drama about the way history gets shaped in secrecy, with backbiting and one-upmanship as the forces that drive the world. But instead, we have to have yet another take on Winston Churchill, and not a particularly novel one at that. Gary Oldman's Oscar-winning performance carries the movie much further than it deserves to be carried after the biopic clichés begin to fly. The most egregiously bogus moment comes near the end, when Churchill decides to ditch the car that's taking him to Westminster to deliver the decisive "never surrender" speech that puts the kibosh on Chamberlain and Halifax's desire to initiate peace talks after the disaster at Calais and the rescue from Dunkirk. So Winston, cigar protruding, descends into the Underground to talk to The British People and to get their advice on whether Britain should talk or fight. It's a badly written scene that even includes Churchill inventing that old joke about how all babies look like him. In addition to the working-class folks, there is a token black man, representing the Empire. They all assure him that they will fight them on the beaches and in the streets, and Churchill is so emboldened that he goes and tells Parliament just that. My objection is not that the scene never happened, but that the filmmakers' imaginations were so constricted that they had to invent this implausible scene to explain Churchill's overcoming his doubts and fears. Churchill was a more complicated man, and the politics surrounding him so much more intricate and fierce, than this feeble fiction suggests.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971)

Murray Head and Glenda Jackson in Sunday Bloody Sunday

Daniel Hirsh: Peter Finch
Alex Greville: Glenda Jackson
Bob Elkin: Murray Head
Mrs. Greville: Peggy Ashcroft
Mr. Harding: Tony Britton
Mr. Greville: Maurice Denham
Answering Service Lady: Bessie Love
Alva Hodson: Vivian Pickles
Bill Hodson: Frank Windsor

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Penelope Gilliatt
Cinematography: Billy Williams
Production design: Luciana Arrighi
Film editing: Richard Marden
Music: Ron Geesen

Seeing John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday so soon after Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) made me question how far we have really come in the 46 years that separate the two films. In writing about the later film, I noted the compromises that filmmakers still feel constrained to make in mainstream movies that deal with same-sex relationships. But Schlesinger's film is blithely nonchalant about the fact that one of its protagonists is a gay man sleeping with a bisexual man who is also sleeping with a woman. I remember seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday when it first came out, and there were no ripples of shock running through the Dallas theater when Daniel kissed Bob. This was, after all, the early 1970s, when the full effect of the sexual revolution was making itself known; Stonewall was two years behind us, and even in Dallas being openly gay was possible if not always practical. So Sunday Bloody Sunday engendered little talk other than about the fine quality of the acting -- with some expressing reservations about Murray Head ("I don't know what either of them saw in him," said one mostly closeted gay friend) -- and the general feeling that it was a satisfying entertainment for grownups. I think the film has grown in stature over the years, as few of Schlesinger's movies have: Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) have dated badly. Much of the credit for Sunday Bloody Sunday must go to Penelope Gilliatt's screenplay, which seems to have held in check some of the sourness that afflicts those earlier films. Even in the scenes that satirize the chaotic permissiveness of the Hodson household, in which among other things the unruly children are allowed to smoke pot, the point of view is provided by Alex and Bob, who are babysitting these little monsters, providing them with the affection and attention they so clearly need. Granted, some of the maturity in the film's portrayal of then-unconventional sexuality may lie in the fact that it was made before AIDS tested the straight world's tolerance for nonconforming behavior. But having weathered that long crisis, we can now see Sunday Bloody Sunday for what it is: a film about love and lust and loneliness, and a very good and moving one at that.

Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)

Machiko Kyo in Gate of Hell

Morito Endo: Kazuo Hasegawa
Kesa: Machiko Kyo
Wataru Watanabe: Isao Yamagata
Shigemori: Yataro Kurokawa
Rokuro: Kotaro Bando
Kogenta: Jun Tazaki
Kiyomori: Koreya Senda

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Screenplay: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Masaichi Nagata
Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Ozawa
Film editing: Shigeo Nishida
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

Can a movie be too stylish for its own good? As Pauline Kael says of Gate of Hell, "It's as if the director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, had read those critics who compare every Japanese movie to a Japanese print and had decided to give them more pictorial effects than they could handle -- delicately choreographed battles, the flow and texture of garments, and everywhere the grace of movement and composition." What gets lost in Gate of Hell is the simple dignity of its story about a wife who sacrifices herself for her husband's sake. The film won an Oscar* for costume design, one of those rare Academy Awards to go to a film not made in English, and it certainly deserved it. But when the eye is continually caught by the color and texture of surfaces, the film risks being superficial. Fortunately, the wife, Kesa, is played by the superb Machiko Kyo, who makes the character into more than a mannequin for exquisite robes.

*The award was presented to Sanzo Wada, whereas the credited costume design is Shima Yoshizane. I haven't been able to discover whether Sanzo Wada is the same person as the credited "color consultant" for the film, Mitsuzo Wada, but Sanzo was a noted designer and the author of the six-volume Dictionary of Color Combinations, so it seems likely.

There Was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, 1942)

Chishu Ryu and Haruhiko Tsuda in There Was a Father 

Shuhei Horikawa: Chishu Ryu
Ryohei Horikawa: Shuji Sano
Ryohei as a boy: Haruhiko Tsuda
Yasutaro Kurokawa: Shin Saburi
Makoto Hirata: Takeshi Sakamoto
Fumiko Hirata: Mitsuko Mito
Seiichi Hirata: Masayoshi Otsuka
Minoru Uchida: Shin'ichi Himori

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Yanai
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Kyoichi Saiki

With its low-angle long takes and shots of buildings and landscapes bridging scenes, There Was a Father is unmistakably a film by Yasujiro Ozu. What doesn't seem characteristic of Ozu is the didactic, moralizing tone, the persistent stress on duty, on hard work, on self-sacrifice. You don't need to check the release date for the film to realize that this was Ozu's contribution to the war effort in the form of home front propaganda, very much in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) and Keisuke Kinoshita's The Living Magaroku (1943), designed to encourage greater wartime productivity. What sets Ozu's film apart from those two slightly later films is the relative absence of actual reference to the war, except for the grownup Ryohei's passing his draft physical and the remarkable moment when Shuhei encourages his son to bow at the shrine to his dead mother and give her the news. Ozu gives us a Japan in which life goes on, not one in which consciousness of the enemy dominates every waking moment. It's a film without much of a plot, in which the dramatic tension stems from the always postponed hope of father and son that they will one day live together. The main thing that keeps There Was a Father from becoming mawkish is the beautifully controlled performance by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor, who had the great ability to play characters of almost any age. In Early Summer (1951), for example, he plays Setsuko Hara's brother, while in Tokyo Story (1953) he plays her elderly father-in-law. In There Was a Father we first see him as the dark-haired, stubble-bearded widower, raising the young Ryohei; by the end of the film Ryohei is grown and Shuhei is gray-haired and ill, but he's vividly convincing in both appearances. He also makes the determinedly self-sacrificing Shuhei convincing, when he gives up his teaching job because he feels responsible for the accidental death of one of his students, and even his moralizing speeches bear the weight of conviction. There Was a Father is the work of a great director forced to compromise by a totalitarian regime and managing to remain as true to his art as circumstances will allow.