Take Aim at the Police Van (Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

Misako Watanabe and Michitaro Mizushima in Take Aim at the Police Van

Cast: Michitaro Mizushima, Misako Watanabe, Shoichi Ozawa, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki, Toru Abe. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazuo Shimada. Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine. Production design: Takehara Sakeguchi. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Koichi Kawabe.

Seijun Suzuki's early-career Take Aim at the Police Van is a sold, somewhat overplotted excursion into the realms of film noir, but with none of the flash and dazzle of such later films as Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter (1966), or Branded to Kill (1967). It's the story of Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), a prison guard who's on a bus transporting prisoners when it's attacked and two of the prisoners are shot dead. The attackers get away and Tamon gets suspended -- really scapegoated -- for his inability to stop them, so because he has nothing else to do he decides to figure out what was behind the assault. One of the prisoners who survived the attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), was released on bail the day of the incident, and following up on some things Goro did and said on the bus, Tamon seeks him out. In the process, he winds up uncovering a human trafficking gang, gets slugged and chased a couple of times, and becomes involved with Yuko (Misako Watanabe), the noir "mystery woman" who has some connections to the traffickers. There's big thriller sequence in which Tamon and Yuko are tied up by the bad guys in a gasoline tanker truck that's sent rolling downhill with gas spilling out behind. The bad guys set the trail of gasoline alight and Tamon and Yuko have to free themselves before the burning gas reaches the truck and it explodes. I have to admit that this gimmick was spoiled for me by the TV series Mythbusters, on which Adam and Jamie demonstrated that a truck in that situation probably wouldn't explode, but I also wondered why, if the bad guys wanted to get rid of them, they didn't just kill them outright. But if you go questioning that sort of thing you'll never have any fun at the movies.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)

Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Álvaro Monje. Screenplay: Louis Mellis, David Scinto. Cinematography: Ivan Bird. Production design: Jan Houllevigue. Film editing: John Scott, Sam Sneade. Music: Roque Baños.

As paunchy, suntanned Gal Dove, a retired safecracker played by Ray Winstone, stands beside the swimming pool of his Spanish villa, a huge boulder comes crashing down the hillside behind him. But just as it seems about to flatten him, it takes a bounce and sails over his head to land in the pool. The incident is metaphorical for what's about to occur to Gal with the arrival of deranged motormouth Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley in an Oscar-nominated performance. Don has been dispatched by crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) to persuade Gal to participate in an elaborate heist back in London. Don is as deadly as the boulder, and like it, he too winds up in the pool, but not before doing a good deal of damage. Kingsley's hilariously sinister performance as the unhinged mobster is the most celebrated thing about Sexy Beast, but this decidedly eccentric spin on a film noir plot is also an invigorating reworking of the conventional heist movie. The heist itself, which involves breaking into an impregnable vault underwater, would have been the center of an ordinary movie, but here it's intercut with a flashback to what happened in the confrontation of Don with Gal and his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). Jonathan Glazer's work directing TV commercials and music videos is reflected in the film's occasional hyperactivity and elements of the surreal and bizarre, but he's also able to sustain moments of tension before and between eruptions of violent action.

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985)

Cast: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Emma Ridley, Sophie Ward, Fiona Victory, Pons Maar, voices of Sean Barrett, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, and Lyle Conway. Screenplay: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis, based on books by L. Frank Baum. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Norman Reynolds. Film editing: Leslie Hodgson. Music: David Shire.

As a kid I was completely enthralled by the Oz books, a passion made more difficult by the odd fact that school libraries of the day refused to stock them, so I had to order my copies from the small printing and stationery shop in my town that also stocked a few books. Which is why I have always loved Walter Murch's Return to Oz, even though it was a commercial and mostly critical flop. I suspect that the 1939 Judy Garland movie had so cast its own particular spell that people who didn't know the subsequent books by L. Frank Baum (which were continued not so well by Ruth Plumly Thompson but excellently by Baum's illustrator John R. Neill) were expecting Murch's film to be as brightly colored and as tuneful as the Garland movie. But the Oz books were a much darker business entirely, and Murch's film reflects not only that but also Baum's ambivalence toward technology. In Return to Oz, there's a late 19th and early 20th century mistrust of electricity but a fondness for mechanism, hence the rotund wind-up Tik-Tok, an engaging steampunk character before anyone knew to call it steampunk. Murch and production designer Norman Reynolds have gone back to the source in visualizing Baum's characters, so that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly lion look more like illustrator Neill's visions of them than like Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr in costumes and makeup. The filmmakers rely on puppetry and the stop-motion artistry of clay animation as developed by Will Vinton. The effect is sometimes creepy, and much of the movie is probably too dark for very young viewers, which explains some of the difficulty the movie had finding an audience. There are scenes that evoke horror movies in their dark menace, which is all to the point: The era in which Baum lived was more inured to threats to children than our nervously overprotective one. Unfortunately, the box office failure discouraged Murch, the winner of three Oscars for sound design and film editing, and one of the best-known collaborators with directors like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, from directing more movies, and put the kibosh on further equally imaginative explorations of the Oz books.

Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

Elizabeth Debicki, Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Widows

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Gillian Flynn, Steve McQueen, based on a TV series by Lynda LaPlante. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer.

A solid dark thriller with a powerhouse cast, Widows tells the story of four women married to professional thieves who are bereaved when a major heist goes wrong and the van the men are in goes up in a fiery explosion. The problem is that the loot was also incinerated and it belonged to a powerful Chicago politician and crime boss, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who shows up at the home of one of the women, Veronica (Viola Davis), demanding repayment. Veronica, who had no part in her husband's crimes, is desperate to raise the money, but her husband's chauffeur had the key to his safety deposit box, in which she discovers a notebook full of detailed plans for all of his heists, including one he had yet to pull off. Eventually, she concludes that the only way to raise the necessary millions is to do that heist herself, for which she enlists two of her fellow widows. The film casts fine actors like Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Lukas Haas, and Jon Bernthal in secondary roles as the complications and surprise twists ensue. Steve McQueen's no-nonsense direction and the skill of his cast make the whole thing mostly plausible, mainly by not giving you time to question some of the plot's weaknesses. There's a subplot about the election battle between Jamal Manning and Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the scion of an old Irish political family, which is tied to the main plot by some fairly tenuous threads, a few of which are blatant contrivances. But the focus is on Veronica and her crew, played superbly by Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo.

Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Jean Keraudy, Marc Michel, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, and Michel Constantin in Le Trou

Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel, Jean-Paul Coquelin, André Bervil, Eddy Rasimi. Screenplay: Jacques Becker, José Giovanni, Jean Aurel, based on a novel by Giovanni. Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet. Production design: Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Marguerite Renoir, Geneviève Vaury. 

All prison break movies have to be judged by the standard set by Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Most of them are found wanting, but Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, though it lacks Bresson's moral intensity and political significance, makes a good try at it. What Becker's film has going for it is a fine ensemble of actors, including one of the men who participated in the attempted prison escape in 1947 on which José Giovanni based the novel that Becker turned into a film. Under a screen name, Jean Keraudy, Roland Barbat not only plays the prisoner Roland Darbant but also introduces the film as a "true story." This touch of documentary realism gives Le Trou a solid grounding, and Becker uses it to great effect, especially in a long take in which the prisoners break through the subflooring of their cell into the basement beneath. For a long time we see them hammering away almost ineffectively at the concrete, but just as we fear that this is going to be like watching paint dry, the seemingly impervious substance begins to chip away, revealing the larger rocks and looser material underneath. It's a tour de force of sorts, because the concrete must have been poured especially for the filming and designed to resist the hammering just enough to build suspense. What plot there is other than the elaborately detailed escape focuses on Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), a young prisoner who is moved into the cell after the other four have already made their plans for the escape. Initially they mistrust the newcomer, but he earns their acceptance -- up to a point. The film eschews a music soundtrack, relying instead on the sounds of the prison for atmosphere. There are some darkly comic moments, as when two of the prisoners, having made it into the basement, have to hide from guards making their rounds. We don't see how they do it at first, but then it's revealed that one of the prisoners is standing on the shoulders of the other, dodging the patrol behind a convenient pillar, around which they just barely manage to make their way as the guards circle it. In hindsight, there are lots of things to cavil about, such as how the escape plan was devised and the necessary tools acquired -- matters that A Man Escaped details more interestingly -- but Le Trou holds up well while you're watching it, relying on solid characterization and vivid details to disarm skepticism.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

Ben Gazzara in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Cast: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, John Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban. Production design: Sam Shaw. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

I am never going to be a fan of John Cassavetes's movies, and I don't care if I ever see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie again, but I have to admit that his unconventional moviemaking had a deep influence on American movies. What could be more conventional, after all, than a film about a club owner forced by the mob into assassinating a rival mob leader? It's the stuff of 1940s film noir, and of countless movies afterward. But Cassavetes's unconventional approach to conventional material obviously exerted an influence on directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to name only the best. The club owner is Cosmo Vitelli, played superbly by Ben Gazzara, who runs up gambling debts he can't start to pay. So the mobsters agree to forgive the debt if he will kill their chief rival, the Chinese bookie of the title, who turns out to be the capo di tutti capi in L.A.'s Chinatown. (The film was made two years after Roman Polanski had Jake Gittes told to forget it.) And although a full plot summary would reveal its conventional bones, it's what Cassavetes, along with the improvisatory crew of actors and his freewheling cameramen, does with the material that matters. Cosmo's club, for example, is a strip joint with a master of ceremonies called Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), who resembles Joel Grey's M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) only in that he's heavily made up and a bit epicene. As the girls sashay about topless in shabby costumes, he sings (very badly) sentimental oldies like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "After the Ball," and "Imagination." The effect is gruesomely hilarious, a tone that persists throughout the film. When Cosmo sets out to accomplish his murderous mission, he's been provided with a stolen car that's been hot-wired, so he can't stop anywhere once he's started. But the car blows a tire in the middle of freeway traffic, eliminating that part of the plans. Nevertheless, he persists, calling a cab to get him closer to the target. First, however, he has to buy a dozen hamburgers to feed and quiet the guard dogs, but the waitress argues with him that he really doesn't want them all put unwrapped in a single bag. These mishaps are the stuff of black comedy, and they're nicely handled. But Cassavetes's improvisatory style and the somewhat dizzying hand-held closeups on the action seem more mannered than is really good for the film. There's brilliance here, especially in the performances of Gazzara and the mainstay of many Cassavetes films, Seymour Cassel, but the whole thing seems like a rough draft of a better movie.

Ferdinando and Carolina (Lina Wertmüller, 1999)

Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (Silvana De Santis) with her daughters in Ferdinando and Carolina

Cast: Sergio Assisi, Gabriella Pession, Nicole Grimaudo, Lola Pagnani, Silvana De Santis, Matt Patresi, Carlo Caprioli, Yari Gugliucci, Mario Scacci. Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller, Raffaele La Capria. Cinematography: Blasco Giurato. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Pierluigi Leonardi. Music: Italo Greco, Paolo Raffone, Marcello Vitale.

For a time in the early to mid-1970s, Lina Wertmüller was one of the hottest directors in the world, becoming among other things the first woman ever nominated for an Oscar for best director. The film, Seven Beauties (1977), also earned her a nomination for screenwriting. And then somehow her reputation, at least in the United States, faded. She had signed a five-film contract with Warner Bros. to make movies in the English language, but the first of them, A Night Full of Rain (1978), was a box office failure and the contract was canceled. She continued to make movies in Italy, but they received little attention in the United States. Ferdinando and Carolina wasn't released theatrically here, but was available on a DVD. I caught up with it on the Criterion Channel. It's a lively and opulent historical comedy-drama about the marriage of Ferdinando of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria -- one of the 11 daughters of the Empress Maria Theresa and, incidentally, a sister of Marie Antoinette. There is a certain frenzied, over-the-top character to all of Wertmüller's films, and Ferdinando and Carolina is no exception. It consists of the reminiscences of Ferdinando, King of Naples, as he lies on his deathbed. That most of these memories are sexual is no surprise. Although he was reluctant to marry Carolina, especially after the deaths from smallpox of two of her sisters, and she was equally reluctant to marry him because his portraits showed him to be a man with a large nose, they take to each other almost instantly on their wedding night. Eventually, court intrigue and their own love affairs take a toll on the marriage. The principals, Sergio Assisi as the young Ferdinando and Gabriella Pession as Carolina, are appropriately handsome, and they throw themselves into their roles with abandon. As history, the movie is no better than most, lacking any center but the libidos of its principals, but it has a kind of energy that carries one along. And it features some spectacular interior and exterior scenes shot in various Italian locations, so that the major honors of the film really belong to production designer Enrico Job.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, Wright King, Richard Garrick, Ann Dere, Edna Thomas, Mickey Kuhn. Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Richard Day, Bertram Tuttle. Film editing: David Weisbart. Music: Alex North.

A great American play with a great mostly American cast. Well, three quarters American isn't bad, if the British fourth quarter of the cast is Vivien Leigh, who gives one of the great screen performances, turning Blanche Dubois into a brilliant sparring partner for Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski. But each time I watch the film, I am drawn more and more to Kim Hunter's Stella, who has the difficult role of mediator between Blanche and Stanley. Hunter also superbly captures why Stella is so doggedly faithful to the brutal Stanley, a matter that may trouble us more in an age of heightened consciousness of domestic violence. Stella is deeply, carnally in love with the brute, but also aware of the tormented boy within him. There's no more telling scene than the morning after Stanley, in the notorious torn T-shirt, stands at the foot of the stairs bellowing "Stella!" and bringing her down from her retreat. Hunter demonstrates a full measure of post-coital bliss, looking as rumpled as the bed in which she's lying when Blanche arrives to waken her and is shocked by Stella's about-face. That's why, although the censors tried to eliminate any sense that Stella had forgiven Stanley at the end of the film, we know full well that she'll return to him. For the most part, the avoidance of the censors' strictures is deft, but they do eliminate some of the meaning of the rape scene -- that Stanley's only way to get the upper hand in the power struggle with Blanche is purely physical -- and they turn the ending of the film into somewhat of a dramatic muddle. If it's not a great movie, it's because the play, like most plays, was never intended to be a film. But it's still a great pleasure to hear these actors speaking some of the most potent lines ever written for the theater.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Henrik Norlén, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Henrik Svenson. Film editing: Lucian Johnston. Music: The Haxan Cloak.

Too many makers of films and TV series -- I'm thinking of a particular example, HBO's series The Outsider -- seem to think that scary things happen only in the dark. I'm getting a little tired of squinting these old eyes at bad things happening in the murk on the screen. Ari Aster seems to know what I'm talking about: that weirdness happens in sunlight, too. Though Midsommar begins in gloomycam darkness, including the terrible thing that marks the life of Florence Pugh's character, Dani, a university student majoring in psychology, the film switches refreshingly to the open air and sunlight of Sweden in midsummer, when the sun never really sets. But of course this is where the really weird things happen. Midsommar was a solid commercial and critical success, even though it's really based on an old trope: people too smart for their own good fall foul of ancient rituals and practices. The American grad students who accompany Dani, still suffering from the event that wiped out her family, are a brainy but naïve lot:  Dani's somewhat distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Raynor), his fellow grad student in cultural anthropology, Josh (William Jackson Harper), and their friend Mark (Will Poulter). They have been invited by their Swedish friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to see the midsummer rituals in his home community. It's clear that Dani and Christian are having relationship problems after the trauma of her recent loss, and it's also clear that Pelle is more than a little attracted to Dani. All of this will work itself out over the course of their visit to Sweden. Yes, horrible things will happen -- it's a horror movie, after all. But the film is made more creepy than startling by the sunny context. Even though they may manifest themselves in blood and pain, the real horrors in life are internal ones, Aster seems to be suggesting. As a director of horror movies, he has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than with schockmeisters like Eli Roth.

The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939)

Gladys George and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties

Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Kelly, Abner Biberman, voice of John Deering. Screenplay: Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Jack Killifer. Music: Ray Heindorf, Max Roemheld. 

The Roaring Twenties feels like a kind of valedictory to the golden age of Warner Bros. gangster movies, featuring as it does such specialists in the genre as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the always welcome tough dame Gladys George. But they're not quite enough to overcome the presence of the inexplicable Priscilla Lane and the charisma-free Jeffrey Lynn, or the dogged hectoring of the voiceover narration. The movie seems out to prove that gangsterism didn't exist before Prohibition and that it disappeared magically once it was repealed. There are some good moments of action, but they're overwhelmed by the repetitions of such tired oldies as "Melancholy Baby" and "It Had to Be You," both on the soundtrack and sung (blandly) by Lane. The story is the old one of three guys who meet in a foxhole in World War I, then have trouble adjusting to civilian life. We know that Bogart's George Hally and Lynn's Lloyd Hart are going to go in opposite directions when, just on the brink of the armistice, Hart holds off on shooting a German he has in his sights because "he looks like a kid, about 15 years old," whereupon Hally picks the German off and sneers, "He won't be 16." Cagney has a more complex role, as Eddie Bartlett, a mechanic who can't find work and gradually shifts into bootlegging, teaming up with Hally, but falling in love with the virtuous Jean Sherman, who eventually marries Hart, now a lawyer. After helping Bartlett with the legal end of his illegal business, Hart goes straight and joins the district attorney's office, leading to threats from Hally to keep him quiet. It's the Cagney-Lane-Lynn love triangle that mostly drags the picture down.