Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Cast: Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano, Melanie Lenz, Maria Hofstätter. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Sexually explicit but not pornographic, Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love, the first in his Paradise trilogy, tells the story of a middle-aged Austrian woman, a sex tourist, who goes to Kenya for thrills and mistakenly tries to find love instead. Margarete Tiesel plays the woman, Teresa, and in scenes that take place in Austria we get introduced to her sister (Maria Hofstätter) and her daughter (Melanie Lenz), whose own stories are told in Paradise: Faith (2012) and Paradise: Hope (2013). The film was shot on location in Kenya, using a mixture of non-professional and professional actors. It's an unsettling, sometimes even shocking film, and a little longer than it needs to be, but also revelatory of post-colonial attitudes. 

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)

Thelma Ritter and Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street

Cast: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, based on a story by Dwight Taylor. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Leigh Harline.

What better thing can you say about Pickup on South Street than that J. Edgar Hoover hated it? Even though the bad guy in the film is a commie spy, he's really not much less a sleaze than the good guys: The film's protagonist is a pickpocket, after all, who sneers at patriotism and flag-waving. Samuel Fuller's peculiar mastery of the pulp genre was never more effective than in this film, which is distinguished by its performers: Richard Widmark as the pickpocket, teetering between vice and a grudging kind of virtue; Jean Peters as a bad girl with a good streak that only gets her beat up; and best of all, Thelma Ritter as the aging snitch who only wants enough money to have a good funeral. Ritter got an Oscar nomination out of the film, too. One of the darkest, and one of the best, film noirs.

Violence at Noon (Nagisa Oshima, 1966)

Cast: Kei Sato, Saeda Kawaguchi, Akiko Koyama, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, based on a novel by Taijun Takeda. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Production design: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoda. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Violence at Noon is an edgy, jumpy film about a serial rapist and killer of women, played with his characteristic intensity by Kei Sato. It's a notable departure in technique by director Nagisa Oshima, usually given to long takes, in that it's constructed of thousands of individual shots. Akiko Koyama and Saeda Kawaguchi play the two women, both victims of the rapist, who try to piece together the truth about his life.

Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)

Robert Forster in Medium Cool

Cast: Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, Harold Blankenship, Charles Geary. Screenplay: Haskell Wexler. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Art direction: Leon Ericksen. Film editing: Verna Fields. Music: Mike Bloomfield.

The first time I saw Medium Cool was the year of its release, in a theater in downtown Dallas. I remember walking from the theater to the parking lot, still stunned by the movie's blend of fiction and actuality, past a high-end restaurant whose plate glass windows gave passersby a good view of wealthy Dallasites enjoying themselves. It felt like a continuation of the film, an ironic coda to the political passions it had documented. Seeing Medium Cool many years later, I can realize how cooked-up Haskell Wexler's movie really is, with its heavy-handed ending, so obviously recapitulating what now seems like a similarly contrived opening. I can watch Verna Bloom striding through the mobs of Chicago protesters, easily spotted in her bright yellow dress, and recognize how blatant a bit of staging that is. I have learned that the film's most celebrated line, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," was dubbed into the soundtrack later: It may have been spoken by the cameraman to the director in the heat of the moment, when he was being teargassed along with the protesters, but Wexler wasn't recording sound at the time, so it's a bit of a con. And yet, Medium Cool remains for me a potent demonstration of art imitating life, and doing it so well that I hesitate to call it fakery. Wexler shrewdly knew this: Just look at the picture of Robert Forster above, cigarette dangling like Jean-Paul Belmondo's in the poster, and remember that truth is rarely pure and never simple.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)

Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster

Cast: Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, James Craig, Anne Shirley, Jane Darwell, Simone Simon, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, H.B. Warner, Frank Conland, Lindy Wade, George Cleveland. Screenplay: Dan Totheroh, based on a story by Stephen Vincent Benet. Cinematography: Joseph H. August. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

With its historical figures and rural setting The Devil and Daniel Webster could have sunk into sentimental Americana, but it stays just shy of that with the help of a good screenplay, solid direction, and most of all some fine performances, particularly Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold as Webster, a turn away from Arnold's usual fat-cat persona. (Arnold was a replacement for Thomas Mitchell, injured in an on-set accident just after filming started.) Bernard Herrmann's Oscar-winning score, giving a sophisticated twist to old folk tunes like "Pop Goes the Weasel," and Joseph H. August's moody cinematography also help. James Craig gives a solid performance as Jabez Stone, the victim of Scratch's soul-buying, especially in his scenes with Simone Simon as the little devil Belle sent to tempt him. 

The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

John Garfield and Patricia Neal in The Breaking Point

Cast: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez, Wallace Ford, Edmon Ryan, Ralph Dumke, Guy Thomajan, William Campbell, Sherry Jackson, Donna Jo Boyce, Victor Sen Young. Screenplay: Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Ted D. McCord. Art direction: Edward Carrere. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Max Steiner.

If the setup, an honest fishing-boat captain forced into some intrigue he really doesn't want to get mixed up in, sounds familiar, that's because The Breaking Point was based on Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. And that had been the basis for a much looser adaptation (it mostly just kept the title) by Howard Hawks, with the aid of screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, in 1944. But here, instead of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we get John Garfield and Patricia Neal -- considerable actors both, but striking no sparks and teaching no one how to whistle. The New York Times's ineffable film critic Bosley Crowther much preferred The Breaking Point, calling the Hawks version a "feeble swing and a cut at Ernest Hemingway's memorable story of a tough guy" whereas director Michael Curtiz and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall "got hold of that fable and socked it into a four-base hit." Crowther's baseball metaphors aside, it's possible to admire the professionalism of Curtiz's direction and the adherence to a downer ending for Garfield's Harry Morgan, while still feeling that in their film Hawks, Furthman, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall, et al. knew and displayed a lot more about the Hemingway virtue of grace under pressure.

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima, 1970)

Cast: Kazuo Goto, Emiko Iwasaki, Sukio Fukuoka, Kenichi Fukuda, Hiroshi Isogai, Kazuo Hashimoto, Kazuya Horikoshi, Tomoyo Oshima. Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima, Tsutomu Tamura, Masato Hara, Mamoru Sasaki. Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Nagisa Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film owes something to Michelangelo Antonio's Blow-Up (1966) in that both involve photography that tantalizes and hints at an unsolved (unsolvable?) mystery. But Oshima's film has political overtones, a kind of goodbye-to-all-that movie about the waning of student protests in Japan. The story it tells is about the quest of Motoki (Kazuo Goto) to find out why a young activist, Endo (Kazuya Horikoshi), committed suicide when he was being chased by police across a rooftop. Motoki tries to puzzle out Endo's motives by retracing the footage he left in the camera he was holding when he leaped (fell? was pushed?). But the film resists interpretation almost as much as the one Oshima made about it. Oshima is always surprising and enigmatic, and this is one of his more challenging works.

The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)

David Byrne in True Stories

Cast: David Byrne, John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Spalding Gray, Swoosie Kurtz, Jo Harvey Allen, Alix Elias, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Tito Larriva, John Ingle, Matthew Posey. Screenplay: Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, David Byrne. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Caroline Biggerstaff. Music: David Byrne.

Does David Byrne's film about Texans celebrating the state's sesquicentennial reflect the condescending view of a hipster or is it a good-hearted tribute to human eccentricity? It's probably a bit of both, I suspect, having done time in Texas, where a non-native can find a good deal to smirk about but can also be worn over by something warm and genuine. There's a good deal of the ludicrous in the "Celebration of Specialness" mounted by Byrne's Texans, but allow yourself to rise above ironic distancing and get swept up in the variety of human individuality in True Stories and I think you can sense that Byrne isn't really there just to poke fun at his characters, that he kind of loves them. Some of the film falls flat, but it's usually picked up again by performers like John Goodman and Swoosie Kurtz, and of course by the music of Byrne, Talking Heads, and others.

The Better 'Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926)

Syd Chaplin in The Better 'Ole

Cast: Syd Chaplin, Harold Goodwin, Jack Ackroyd, Edgar Kennedy, Charles K. Gerrard, Theodore Lorch, Doris Hill, Arthur Clayton. Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck, Charles Reisner, intertitles by Robert E. Hopkins, based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar. Art direction: Ben Carré. Film editing: Ray Enright. Music: Maurice Baron.

Slapstick comedy starring Charles Chaplin's older brother Syd Chaplin as "Old Bill," a British soldier in World War I. Based on a 1917 stage musical that had been filmed once before, The Better 'Ole was released in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process with a synchronized music track and sound effects but no dialogue. The character of Old Bill was created by Bruce Bairnsfather in a newspaper cartoon published as a morale builder during the war. The film, which centers on Bill's involvement in exposing a German spy ring, tends to drag a bit as it works out some plot switches, and most of the physical comedy is old hat.