Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Cast: May Robson, Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks, Walter Connolly, Jean Parker, Nat Pendleton, Barry Norton, Halliwell Hobbes, Hobart Bosworth, Robert Emmett O'Connor. Screenplay: Robert Riskin, based on a story by Damon Runyon. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Stephen Goosson. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: Howard Jackson.

There's almost enough salt in Robert Riskin's screenplay for Lady for a Day -- much of it supplied by the Damon Runyon story on which it's based -- to offset Frank Capra's characteristic indulgence in sweets. Much of the fiber of the movie is provided by such worthy character actors as pickle-faced Ned Sparks, brassy Glenda Farrell, florid Guy Kibbee, and beefy Nat Pendleton, who help us tolerate the saccharine qualities of the tale of mother love. We never find out a lot of the backstory of Apple Annie, the gin-swigging street vendor who must pose as a society dame to fulfill the illusions she has raised in the letters she's written over the years to her daughter, Louise. The girl was raised in a convent in Europe and is now engaged to the son of a Spanish count; she wants to bring her fiancé and prospective father-in-law to New York to meet her mother. Covering up the truth about Annie necessitates a lot of manipulation by the swanky Dave the Dude, one of the denizens of the Runyon underworld. But what is the truth about Annie? Riskin and Capra never tell us who Louise's father was, let alone how Annie managed to send the child abroad and keep her secret all these years. Or, at the end, exactly how Dave the Dude saves the day when all looks lost. But this is for the good: Finessing the backstory turns Lady for a Day into what it has to be in order to be palatable at all: a fairy tale. To my tastes, which usually can't tolerate Capra's sentimental populism, this is one of his best films. Just don't look to it for plausibility.

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Canavale, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Jack Huston, Kathrine Narducci, Jesse Plemons, Dominick Lombardozzi, Paul Herman, Gary Basaraba. Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, based on a book by Charles Brandt. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Bob Shaw. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Robbie Robertson.

The Irishman feels valedictory, and not just because it's about gangsters growing old, but also because it's about the kind of gangsters Martin Scorsese and others introduced us to as well as the aging actors who played them: De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel. And also because it feels like Scorsese's farewell to conventional theatrical release. Movie theaters today thrive on the kind of blockbusters Scorsese has recently dismissed as "not cinema" and more like theme parks. His collaboration with the king of home streaming services, Netflix, seems to announce that a new era of movie distribution and exhibition has arrived -- one in which the old limitations of film content and even length no longer apply. Scorsese recently said that The Irishman's three-and-a-half-hour length would probably hinder its release in today's theaters, where the only movies that long are ones like the three-hour Avengers: Endgame, a "theme park" movie. Exhibitors want films that fit tightly into a schedule, which discourages producers from making epic-length features like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). Netflix audiences, on the other hand, can watch on their own time, with the leisure to interrupt the film at any point for a snack or bathroom break. So a movie like The Irishman, which has an epic length but also a subtle, intimate treatment of its characters, doesn't fit in today's theaters. What's lost, of course, is the communal experience of moviegoing, the sharing by complete strangers of dreams in the dark. But we should be glad that anything makes movies like The Irishman possible. I don't know if it's a "masterpiece," as some enthusiasts have called it, but it's a damn good movie, with the best performances by De Niro and Pacino in years, and a wonderful return from semi-retirement by Pesci, who tamps down his usual ebullience for a quietly sinister but also, in later scenes, touching portrayal of a mob manipulator. The whole thing is a kind of morality tale, with De Niro's Frank Sheeran paying for his many sins by waiting for death in an existential loneliness. It takes a wizard like Scorsese -- helped by Steven Zaillian's screenplay -- to keep that kind of fable from going mawkish and sentimental.

Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990)

Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990)

Cast: Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, Alison Parisi, Dylan Hundley, Bryan Leder, Isabel Gillies, Will Kempe, Ellia Thompson. Screenplay: Whit Stillman. Cinematography: John Thomas. Film editing: Christopher Tellefsen. Costume design: Mary Jane Fort. Music: Tom Judson, Mark Suozzo.

Twenty-six years after Metropolitan, his debut film, Whit Stillman made one of the best Jane Austen movies ever, his adaptation of her unpublished epistolary novel Lady Susan, which he retitled (borrowing and slightly altering the title of another unpublished Austin novel) Love & Friendship. It's a witty look at the manners and mores of an insular privileged class, which almost exactly describes Metropolitan as well. Instead of Regency gentry, the privileged class in Stillman's first film consists of young Manhattan preppies, all of them well-educated, many of them wealthy, as they make the rounds of parties during debutante season. It's not surprising, too, that Jane Austen makes her own presence known in this scene, through conversations between Tom Townsend and the young woman he finds himself escorting through these parties, Audrey Rouget. She's a lover of Austen's novels who is shocked to find, first, that Tom thinks Mansfield Park is Austen's worst book and, second, that he's never read it or any other novel by her, but is just echoing the criticism by Lionel Trilling: "I don't read novels," he says. "I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist's ideas as well as the critic's thinking." Metropolitan floats along through the debutante season as Tom, Audrey, and their friends skim the surface of ideas about class and society and sex in their blithe, unformed way. Nothing really happens in the movie, though Audrey develops a crush on Tom to which he remains mostly oblivious until he finally sets out to "rescue" her from the clutches of the film's villain, Rick Von Slonecker, whom the cynical Nick Smith describes as "tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, drunk, and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women." Metropolitan has some rough edges -- its young, inexperienced cast, many of them making their film debuts, are sometimes not quite up to making polished delivery of Stillman's lines -- but it's mostly a delight.

Nobody's Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951)

Nobody's Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951)

Cast: Yvonne Sanson, Amedeo Nazzari, Françoise Rosay, Folco Lulli, Enrico Olivieri, Enrica Dyrell, Teresa Franchini, Gualtiero Tumiati, Alberto Farnese, Aristide Baghetti. Screenplay: Aldo De Benedetti, based on a novel by Ruggero Rindi. Cinematography: Rodolfo Lombardi. Production design: Ottavio Scotti. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Music: Salvatore Allegra.

If you think of postwar Italian cinema in terms of the neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica, the satiric grotesquerie of Fellini, or the existential angst of Antonioni, you owe it to yourself to go to the Criterion Channel and check out the popular film of the era as represented by Raffaello Matarazzo. To judge from the one movie there that I watched, Nobody's Children, and a couple of shorts about Matarazzo's works, he crafted a bunch of melodramas that combine the delights of soap opera, Hollywood weepies, and Italian opera libretti. Nobody's Children features the handsome Count Guido Cavalli, who is in love with the lovely Luisa, whose elderly father is the security guard at the marble quarry in Carrara, owned by the Cavalli family. But the relationship of the count and Luisa is stymied by his imperious mother, the countess, who connives with the scheming quarry foreman, Anselmo, to separate the lovers. Eventually, the count gives up Luisa to wed his mother's choice, the unwed Luisa gives birth to their child, Anselmo abducts it and makes it look like the baby died in a fire, Luisa enters a convent, the child grows up and goes in search of his parents, and ... oh, much, much more. It's all so well done that I couldn't hate myself for enjoying it as much as I did.

Indiscretion of an American Wife (Vittorio De Sica, 1957)

Indiscretion of an American Wife (Vittorio De Sica, 1957)

Cast: Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi, Richard Beymer. Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi, Truman Capote. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo. Art direction: Virgilio Marchi. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Alessandro Cicognini.

This plodding romance suffered from the micromanaging of its producer, David O. Selznick, who wanted a big hit for his wife, Jennifer Jones. Director Vittorio De Sica and Selznick fought constantly over the film, and when De Sica's hour-and-a-half version received disappointing comments in previews, Selznick took it out of his hands. Among other things he cut it to a little over an hour and changed De Sica's title, Terminal Station (in Italian, Stazione Termini), to the more blatantly sexy Indiscretion of an American Wife. It was a commercial flop that did nothing for Jones's career. Fortunately, De Sica's cut survived, and it the one more generally seen today. It contains some of the director's neorealistic elements, including the crowds that throng through the film's big set, Rome's railway station. They seem livelier and more real than the lovers played by Jones and Montgomery Clift, a well-to-do Philadelphia woman with a husband and child back in the States, and an Italian academic whose fluent English is explained by his having an American mother. Jones's Mary Forbes has decided to break off their affair and return home, but Clift's Giovanni Doria pursues her to the station, where he makes various attempts to persuade her to stay. They meet various impediments, including Mary's nephew Paul (played by a teenage Richard Beymer), who comes to the station to bring her some things she has left behind and lingers long enough to guess that her aunt and Giovanni are more than just friends -- especially when Giovanni gets so angry that he slaps her. Mary waffles a lot about whether she should stay, and at one point she and Giovanni sneak into an isolated railway car sidelined on the tracks for a last snog, only to be arrested and hauled to the station's police office. The lovers are not very well-drawn, and the scenes between them feel derivative of better movies: There are closeups of the embracing pair that recall the classic ones of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), and the railway station setting brings to mind scenes from Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1941). Ultimately we don't feel as involved with Jones and Clift as a couple as we do with the lovers in those movies.