La Poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951)

Michel Simon and Germaine Reuver in La Poison

Cast: Michel Simon, Jean Debucourt, Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Germaine Reuver, Pauline Carton, Albert Duvaleix, Georges Bever. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Robert Dumesnil. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: Louiguy.

I thought there was something off about the title of Sacha Guitry's La Poison, and I was right: The French word for substances like arsenic and strychnine is masculine -- le poison. When the word becomes feminine, la poison, it can be roughly translated as "pest" or "nuisance." Exploring the psychology behind the genders assigned to words in languages that have such inflections is dangerous, but it seems somehow in keeping with what some have called the film's "misogyny" that the feminine form of the word should take on such connotations. La Poison is a dark comedy about wife-killing, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), though without Chaplin's sentimentality and tendency to moralize. The great Michel Simon, who is lionized in Guitry's extended opening credits sequence, plays Paul Braconnier, married to a slatternly drunkard, Blandine. She hates him as much as he does her, and is in fact the first to put in motion an attempt to do away with him when she buys a supply of rat poison. Eventually, however, he gets the upper hand (which holds a knife). But the film is most centrally about the justice system, in which sharp lawyers like the defense attorney Aubanel (Jean Debucourt) are able to help the guilty escape the guillotine. Braconnier hears Aubanel on the radio, talking about how he has just achieved his hundredth acquittal, so Braconnier goes to see him, pretending that he has just murdered his wife, when in fact he's really there to figure out the safest way to do it. Shrewdly, Braconnier tricks the attorney into pointing him in the direction of the best ways to murder someone -- by, for example, staging it to look like self-defense and to avoid any hints of premeditation. So Braconnier goes back to his village and does Blandine in, then recruits Aubanel for the defense. The lawyer is indignant at being so used, but Braconnier has the goods on him as an unwitting accomplice in the crime. He stands trial and is acquitted. Guitry has learned a lot about filmmaking since his movies of the 1930s, which were often more static and talky than was good for them, and there's a crispness and fluidity to La Poison that's admirable. Simon is at his best in the trial scene, but there's a sourness to the concept that keeps the film from being entirely enjoyable. Critics and scholars of Guitry's work have pointed out that it's a bit of revenge flick, its hits at the judicial system expressive of Guitry's resentment at having been interned as a collaborator after World War II, when in fact he was always anti-Nazi and even helped some Jewish friends escape.

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in The Fountain

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis, Stephen McHattie, Fernando Hernandez, Cliff Curtis, Sean Patrick Thomas, Donna Murphy, Ethan Suplee, Richard McMillan. Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Clint Mansell.

I don't know why Darren Aronofsky's film is called The Fountain, unless Terrence Malick had already reserved The Tree of Life for his 2011 film. There's no fountain of significance in Aronofsky's movie unless it's the Tree itself and the viscous ooze it secretes. Actually, it's worth comparing the two films because both belong to a peculiarly overreaching genre of metaphysical-speculation movies. Malick's works better because it is grounded in a vividly actual portrait of growing up, whereas Aronofsky centers his film on a rather melodramatic story about a research scientist (Hugh Jackman) looking for a cure for the brain tumor that is killing his wife. This story dovetails awkwardly into a story the wife, nicely played by Rachel Weisz, is writing about a 16th-century conquistador's search for the Tree of Life at the behest of the queen of Spain (also Weisz). The Fountain begins in the middle of that story, with an Indiana Jones-like sequence of the conquistador (also Jackman) hacking through the jungle and battling Mayan warriors in his quest. But wait, there's a third story, in which Jackman is now a futuristic spaceman traveling in a transparent sphere -- I couldn't help thinking of Glinda the Good Witch -- along with the Tree itself, whose secrets he is attempting to uncover. No, I don't get it either. Jackman and Weisz give it all they've got, which is a lot, and Ellen Burstyn is always a welcome presence. Here she's the boss to Jackman's scientist, trying to keep him from flipping out when he discovers a cure at the very moment his wife dies. She doesn't succeed. There's a good deal of ponderous pronouncement like "Death is the road to awe" and a few nice special effects, as when the spaceman ingests the ooze from the Tree and begins to turn into a flowerbed. But the film as a whole is too unfocused to be either coherent or convincing.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

Bulle Ogier, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Stéphane Audran,
and Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julien Bertheau, Milena Vukotic, Claude Piéplu. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The frustration of the bourgeoises in Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at having their various attempts to sit down at a table and have something like a meal never reaches the furious breaking point that it does for the characters who try to escape from a house party in his The Exterminating Angel (1962), but not because the director had mellowed in the decade between the two films. He had grown more sly and subtle, I think. The world of The Discreet Charm is liminal; the characters are trapped somewhere between dream and reality, between past and future, in a place they're determined to enjoy come what may. In the celebrated dream-within-a-dream, in which one character dreams what another character is dreaming, namely that they're on stage in a play without knowing what their lines are, even then they seem determined to make a go of it, just as the Sénéchals are determined to have sex even though they know their guests have just arrived for luncheon. There's a "keep calm and carry on" quality to these characters that's almost admirable, even when they're faced with the most absurd situations, like a corpse in the next room of the bistro, or a restaurant that has run out of tea and coffee. Not everything in the movie works, I think: The character of the priest/gardener who listens to an old man's confession that he murdered the priest's parents, gives him absolution, then blows him away with a shotgun, seems to me gratuitous -- Buñuel determined to exhibit his contempt for the clergy come what may. But on the other hand, it stayed with me even when I couldn't quite fit it into my overall experience of the film, which is a mad masterpiece.

The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)

Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Judd Nelson
in The Breakfast Club

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy. Screenplay: John Hughes. Cinematography: Thomas Del Ruth. Production design: John W. Corso. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Keith Forsey.

John Hughes's movies have stood the test of time, not by evoking nostalgia so much as reflecting a moment in American cultural history: the peaking of the Baby Boom. The central figure in The Breakfast Club is none of the teenage detainees -- the jock Andrew (Emilio Estevez), the nerd Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the hood John (Judd Nelson), the princess Claire (Molly Ringwald), and the basket case Allison (Ally Sheedy) -- but rather their harried detainer, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), struggling to assert the authority that he thinks belongs to him. The year of the film's release, 1985, is the point at which the Boomers were on the cusp of turning 40, with all the anxious reappraisal that comes with that birthday. It's summed up in a conversation between Vernon and the janitor, Carl (John Kapelos), in which Vernon expresses his angst at the thought that when he gets older, the detainees are "going to be running the country ... these kids are going to take care of me." To which Carl responds, "I wouldn't count on it." The fear being expressed is clearly that of writer-director Hughes, born in 1950 and hence right in that moment of recognition. A lot of the movie's contemporary critics didn't see this, dismissing The Breakfast Club -- and most of Hughes's other films -- as entertainment for the kind of kids shown in the film, whose actors became rather condescendingly known as the Brat Pack. Hughes, however, recognized and even celebrated the self-awareness that develops in these teenagers, contrasting it with the worn-down cynicism of their parents, who want the kids to achieve the things they failed to do: Brian's parents pressure him to excel in school; Andrew's father looks to him to accomplish the athletic feats he failed at; Claire's obviously see her social status as a validation of their own tenuous success; meanwhile, John's and Allison's have simply given up, letting him run wild and her slump into disarray. The Breakfast Club could have been stronger in moving its subtext into the explicit substance of the movie, but to do so would probably have heightened the didacticism into which the film threatens to fall when Brian reads aloud his essay, protesting against being stereotyped and insisting that each of them is a little bit of a brain, jock, princess, basket case, and hood.

Quadrille (Sacha Guitry, 1938)

Georges Grey and Gaby Morlay in Quadrille

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Gaby Morlay, Jacqueline Delubac, Georges Grey, Pauline Carton, Jacques Vitry. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

One of Sacha Guitry's strengths as a filmmaker was that he was a prolific playwright who knew how to craft dialogue and plot. One of Sacha Guitry's weaknesses is that he was a prolific playwright who never quite mastered the difference between a play and a film -- namely, that the actors in a film have to perform without benefit of an audience, and the dialogue they're speaking shouldn't ramble on, as it tends to do without the interruptions of laughter or other unscripted responses of a live audience. The masters of film comedy -- I'm thinking here of directors like Howard Hawks and George Cukor -- knew that a continued stream of bons mots or wisecracks needed the right pacing to keep a movie theater audience from covering up the best moments. But Guitry's characters in Quadrille talk non-stop, none more so than the director-writer-star himself, never giving us a break to savor what has been so wittily said or so poignantly evoked. Quadrille is a pleasant French romantic comedy about a publisher with a mistress who's a star on the stage. She cuckolds him with a handsome American movie star, just as the publisher is about to propose marriage to her. When she learns that she has just blown the possibility of marrying him, and it looks like the movie star has decamped, she attempts suicide. But things are set right by the fourth player in this quadrille, a pretty reporter who manages to sort things out, rescuing the actress in the nick of time, sending her off with the movie star, and taking the publisher for herself. Guitry plays the publisher, with Gaby Morlay as the actress, Jacqueline Delubard as the reporter, and Georges Grey -- who had made his film debut in a small role in Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown (1937) -- as the movie star. There's a certain French insouciance about playing the actress's suicide attempt for comedy -- it doesn't work in the more American context of Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), for example.

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)

Gena Rowlands in Opening Night

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell, Paul Stewart, Zohra Lampert, Laura Johnson, John Tuell. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Al Ruban. Production design: Brian Ryman. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

If at some moments you're uncertain whether what's happening in Opening Night is taking place on-stage or off-, that's the point. Gena Rowlands's Myrtle Gordon is no longer able, in part (but not entirely) because of her alcoholism, to distinguish art from life. This, to me, is John Cassavetes's most accessible film -- which is ironic, since it was a critical and commercial disaster on its initial release in the United States. Cassavetes was unable to find an American distributor for the film, and it didn't get one until two years after his death. Myrtle is struggling through the New Haven tryouts for a play called The Second Woman, which is about the difficulties the character she's playing has with getting older. After one performance, a hyped-up young fan all but assaults her with adoration, but then, as Myrtle's limousine pulls away from the theater, the fan is struck by a car and killed as Myrtle looks back in horror. The fan's death precipitates a breakdown: Myrtle acts up on stage, objecting to a scene in which her co-star and former lover Maurice (Cassavetes) slaps her, arguing with the playwright (Joan Blondell, in a role that was first offered to Bette Davis) that the play's preoccupation with aging is wrong-headed, fighting with her director, Manny (Ben Gazzara), and breaking character on stage during performances. She also begins to see the young woman who was killed, sometimes explaining the vision away as an actress's technique for getting into character, but eventually resorting to consultations with spiritualists. Rowlands is simply phenomenal throughout the film, a performance that must be seen. But Opening Night is overlong at 144 minutes, and it has some of its writer-director's too-loose improvisatory qualities, especially in the scene in which the play finally opens on Broadway and Myrtle and Maurice improvise the final act to the great amusement of the audience, turning the opening night into a hit. In fact, it doesn't seem nearly as hilarious as that audience finds it, and Myrtle's transition from falling-down drunk at the beginning of the opening night performance into quick-witted improviser is hardly convincing. But it's a mistake to try to put any Cassavetes story into a conventional context; he's doing his own thing, and you either appreciate it or you don't. Look for Cassavetes regulars Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel, along with his friend Peter Bogdanovich, in the crowd at the opening night.

Désiré (Sacha Guitry, 1937)

Alys Delonce, Jacques Baumer, Sacha Guitry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Delubac in Désiré

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Jacques Baumer, Arletty, Pauline Carton, Saturnin Fabre, Alys Delonce. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

Sacha Guitry's Désiré -- not to be confused with Frank Borzage's Desire (1936) or Henry Koster's Désirée (1954) -- is an upstairs-downstairs comedy about a valet and the woman he serves. It's stagy and talky -- especially when Guitry himself is onscreen, as in the scene near the start of the movie when he delivers a lengthy plea to Mme. Cléry to hire him despite a rather sensational report from his former employer, and in the scene near the end when he apologizes at length for his behavior, which he sees as inherent in the relationship between master and servant, as well as between men and women. Odette Cléry, played by Guitry's wife and frequent co-star Jacqueline Delubac, is a former actress who is the mistress of a French cabinet minister, Felix Montignac. She'd like to marry Montignac, but he's reluctant because he feels it's good for his image as a prominent government official to have a mistress. That comedy of manners premise sets up what follows when she hires a new valet, named Désiré and played by Guitry. He's clued in to the nature of the household by his fellow servants, Madeleine the maid, played by Arletty, and Adèle the cook, played by Pauline Carton. Complications ensue when Madeleine overhears Désiré, through the thin wall separating their bedrooms, talking in his sleep about his passion for Mme. Cléry, while Montignac hears Odette talking in her sleep about making love with Désiré. There's some farcical goings-on involving a book of dream interpretations, and the whole thing comes to a crisis at a dinner party for Adrien Corniche (Saturnin Fabre) and his very deaf wife, Henriette (Alys Delonce). There's some very funny, albeit cruel, comic business involving Henriette's deafness, but the whole film may be just a little too arch and loquacious for its own good. It's also a little hard to imagine Guitry as the kind of man who inspires forbidden passion in his female employers, as Désiré is said to do.

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Cast: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, John Ashley, Val Avery, George Petrie. Screenplay: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Hud and Mud as back-to-back blog entries: Purely accidental, but I rather like it. It set me to thinking that if Hud were ever (god forbid!) remade, Matthew McConaughey would be a good substitute for Paul Newman. Or rather, would have been, since McConaughey is 50, where Newman was exactly the right age when he played Hud. But both actors have that innate charisma blended with a soupçon of something not quite trustworthy that makes them such fun to watch. And fun to watch is what Hud is, despite the title character's anti-heroicness and the story's serious overtones about the passing of a way of life. On the latter count, think of the hopefulness of the cattle drivers in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) as compared with the sour fate of the Bannons in Hud. The mantra of Red River was Dunson's "Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, make 'em grow." In Hud it might be Homer Bannon's "It don't take long to kill things, not like it does to grow." But mostly the pleasures of Hud are in the performances: Newman's obviously, and Patricia Neal's as Alma, but most especially Melvyn Douglas's as Homer, when you remember Douglas as the actor who wooed Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), Marlene Dietrich in Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937), and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939). The movie won Oscars for Neal and Douglas, as it should have. Only Brandon De Wilde's performance didn't quite work for me: He seems a little too soft and well-scrubbed for someone who grew up in a landscape as lean and hard as the one James Wong Howe's (also Oscar-winning) images display. We have to think of the randy teenagers in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), also based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, to see what the character might really have been -- a young Jeff Bridges would have been wonderful as Lonnie Bannon. Hud is still hamstrung a little by the moribund Production Code: Characters in it say things like "crap" and "crud" instead of "shit." Like a lot of very good pictures, Hud sometimes has the feeling of having been made at the wrong time in film history.

Mud (Jeff Nichols, 2012)

Jacob Lofland, Matthew McConaughey, and Tye Sheridan in Mud

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon, Joe Don Baker, Paul Sparks, Bonnie Sturdivant. Screenplay: Jeff Nichols. Cinematography: Adam Stone. Production design: Richard A. Wright. Film editing: Julie Monroe. Music: David Wingo.

Mud is often cited as the beginning of the "McConaughnaissance" -- i.e., the start of the resurgence of Matthew McConaughey's career after a spell of vapid romantic comedies and forgotten action movies. His scruffy and sly but deeply self-deluding title character -- we never learn his full name, or even if he has one -- is not so much a departure from his previous persona as it is a new spin on the good looks and charisma of his earlier roles. It would take a physical transformation in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) to earn him an Oscar, but what that film, along with Mud and his much-talked-about performance in the 2014 TV series True Detective, really proved is that good actors need good scripts. And Jeff Nichols's screenplay for Mud is a good one, even if it falls back at the end on a conventional shootout and happy ending. Nichols has acknowledged that the river setting and the role played by two boys in the story are inspired by Mark Twain. Tye Sheridan as the Tom Sawyer analogue named Ellis and Jacob Lofland as the Huck Finn equivalent called Neckbone are superbly natural performers. Sam Shepard brings his usual gravitas to the part of the enigmatic Tom Blankenship, but Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Paulson are wasted in the chief female roles.

Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)

Cast: Basil Radford, Catherine Lacey, Bruce Seton, Joan Greenwood, Wylie Watson, Gordon Jackson, Gabrielle Blunt, Jean Cadell, James Robertson Justice. Screenplay: Compton MacKenzie, Angus MacPhail, based on a novel by MacKenzie. Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs. Art direction: Jim Morahan. Film editing: Joseph Sterling, Charles Crichton. Music: Ernest Irving.

Alexander Mackendrick was unhappy with his first feature as a director, saying that it looked like "a home movie." But Whisky Galore! was a huge and enduring success, perhaps thanks in large part to its editors, Joseph Sterling and the uncredited Charles Crichton, who reassembled its footage and even had some additional takes shot, after initial dissatisfaction from Ealing Studios. In fact, the film helped launch Ealing as one of the major forces in what has come to be known as a kind of golden age of British film comedy, and Mackendrick went on to make two more hit comedies, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), in that era. Whisky Galore! is the story of the residents of an island in the Outer Hebrides who face calamity when wartime shipping blockades deprive them of a vital necessity, the water of life itself, whisky. And then a cargo ship carrying cases of the stuff hits the rocks nearby, is abandoned by its crew, and shunned by salvage authorities. Only the determined Capt. Waggett of the Home Guard stands between the townsfolk and the shipwreck. Waggett, played by Basil Radford, is a stern by-the-books man, despite the fact that no one, including his wife, takes him seriously. There's a subplot involving two sisters, played by Joan Greenwood and Gabrielle Blunt, and their suitors, played respectively by Bruce Seton and Gordon Jackson, but most of the film is about the clash between what authority Capt. Waggett can muster and the efforts of the people to get at the whisky.