Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison, Stan Levitt, Tom McGinnis, Forbes Caldwell, Dan Palmquist, Bill de Jarnette, Steve Boozer. Screenplay: John Clifford. Cinematography: Maurice Prather. Film editing: Bill de Jarnette, Dan Palmquist. Music: Gene Moore.

There aren't many one-offs in movie history, films like Carnival of Souls that come out of nowhere, made by unknown directors who never make another commercial feature, but which capture the imagination enough to develop -- after time passes -- not only a cult following but also critical admiration. Herk Harvey was an employee of a firm based in Laurence, Kansas, that made industrial and education films, when he had an idea for a horror movie that would be set, at least in part, in an abandoned amusement park like the one he had seen near Salt Lake City. He mentioned the idea to his colleague, a writer named John Clifford, who whipped up a screenplay about a woman who survives an accident but then begins to feel that she's going mad. It needed, Harvey told Clifford, to climax with a scene in which ghoulish figures were dancing in the abandoned amusement park. Harvey scraped together the money and hired an actress and model named Candace Hilligoss, who agreed to take $2,000 for her role in the film. There is no credited art director for Carnival of Souls, but Harvey or whoever assisted him found a great variety of evocative locations, including the Saltair pavilion, a former dance hall and amusement park that had fallen on hard times and was standing derelict near the Great Salt Lake. The settings also include a factory that makes pipe organs and a carpenter gothic rooming house, both of which serve the creepy atmosphere of the film. Not all of the semi- and non-professional actors Harvey cast in the film are up to their jobs, but there's a somnambulant quality to Hilligoss's performance as the haunted Mary Henry that's just right, and while Clifford's dialogue is sometimes tin-eared, the story he crafted around Harvey's suggestions takes hold of the imagination. That's Harvey himself as the spookily made-up man who menaces Mary. 

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999)

Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You

Cast: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, David Krumholtz, Andrew Keegan, Larry Miller, Susan May Pratt, Gabrielle Union, Daryl Mitchell, Allison Janney, David Leisure. Screenplay: Karen McCullah, Kirsten Smith, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Production design: Carol Winstead Wood. Film editing: O. Nicholas Brown. Music: Richard Gibbs.

10 Things I Hate About You is a reminder of what we lost with Heath Ledger's early death: an actor capable of elevating even a formulaic teen comedy whose obvious source makes the taming of the shrewish Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) a foregone conclusion. Ledger brings a buoyancy to the role of Patrick Verona, the film's Petruchio, that makes the clichéd role of teen-movie hunk into something fresh and engaging. But that's not to undervalue Stiles's contribution to helping the on-again, off-again role of Kate become somewhat credible. It's not clear why sometimes Kat is clearly infatuated with Patrick and the next minute keeping him at arm's length. I suspect the script underwent so many revisions that everyone lost sight of the thread it was supposed to be following. Stiles gives Kat an edge of wit and charm that is, of course, lost on her fellow high school students, as it must be to keep the story moving. But there are other pleasures to the film, too, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making a breakthrough out of sitcom celebrity into full-fledged movie actor, and the always welcome David Krumholtz as his geeky sidekick. The adult roles are sidelined: Allison Janney is wasted as the horny guidance counselor, irritated that the kids are always interrupting her attempt to write a pornographic bodice-ripper; Daryl Mitchell's irascible English teacher makes no sense; and David Leisure's gym teacher is there mostly to get shot in the ass during archery practice and to be distracted by Kat's flashing him to help Patrick escape detention. Larry Miller does what he can with Walter Stratford, the uptight father of Kat and Bianca, but here again the script isn't helping him much. Still, 10 Things has plenty of enjoyable moments and a glimpse of some young performers with bright (if in Ledger's case shadowed) futures.

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

Aleksey Kravchenko in Come and See

Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ljubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste, Viktors Lorencs, Evgeniy Tilicheev. Screenplay: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov. Cinematography: Aleksey Rodionov. Production design: Viktor Petrov. Film editing: Valeriya Belova. Music: Oleg Yanchenko.

Elem Klimov's hard and harrowing Come and See runs a risk that it almost doesn't avoid: Parts of it are filled with such sustained horror and tension that a viewer can grow almost numb and dismissive. It elicits the response: "It's only a movie. These are actors." But such actors, especially Aleksey Kravchenko, then only 14 and picked by the director precisely for his lack of acting experience, even though Klimov was concerned that putting him through what the character must undergo in the film might be damaging to his mental health. (Kravchenko apparently survived intact, and went on to study acting and to build a steady career in film and television.) It's perhaps worth comparing the intensity of Klimov's film to that of Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977), which put its actors through real hardships to create its portrait of life during wartime. Shepitko, married to Klimov, died in an automobile accident in 1979, and her film almost seems like a challenge to her husband to match or excel. In fact, Come and See seems to have exhausted Klimov as a filmmaker: He didn't make another film for the remainder of his life; he died at 70 in 2003. As harsh as the realism of Come and See is, it also has poetic touches in its cinematography and use of landscape, reminding me of another film about a war-torn boyhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1966).

The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)

Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class

Cast: Peter O'Toole, Arthur Lowe, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Michael Bryant, Alastair Sim, Carolyn Seymour, Harry Andrews, James Villiers. Screenplay: Peter Barnes, based on his play. Cinematography: Ken Hodges. Production design: Peter Murton. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: John Cameron.

The Ruling Class is one of those movies that don't know when to stop. Up to and including the scene in which Jack (Peter O'Toole) is judged sane by an obviously dotty authority after he discovers that they are fellow Old Etonians, Peter Medak's film, which has a screenplay by Peter Barnes derived from his play, is an often amusing, sometimes hilarious blend of the kind of skewering of British eccentricity and class consciousness found in the Ealing Studios movies of the 1950s, with some of the surreal cheekiness of the Monty Python skits and films. Then the whole thing turns dark, as Jack discovers that he isn't God but instead Jack the Ripper. It's a shift in tone that might have worked, if it hadn't been delivered with such heavy-handedness as the flashes that show the members of the House of Lords as desiccated corpses shrouded in cobwebs. Believe me, we have gotten the point by then. There's a good biting satire of about 100 minutes inside this 154-minute film, including a few buoyantly daffy musical numbers. The Ruling Class remains worth seeing for O'Toole's performance, which earned him one of his eight unsuccessful Oscar nominations, along with some delicious work from Arthur Lowe as the communist butler who stays on with the Gurney family to torment them after he gets a £30,000 bequest in the late Earl of Gurney's will; Harry Andrews as that nutty nobleman; Alastair Sim as a befuddled bishop (Sim makes even the act of sitting down funny); Coral Browne as the sardonic Lady Claire; James Villiers as her upperclass twit of a son; William Mervyn as the perpetually scheming Sir Charles; and Carolyn Seymour as Sir Charles's mistress, brought in to pretend to be Marguerite Gautier, the Lady of the Camellias, whom Jack/God believes to be his wife. But the nihilism into which the film descends casts a pall over even these performances.

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.

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.