Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)

Yoo Ah-in, Jun Jong-seo, and Steven Yeun in Burning

Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jun Jong-seo, Kim Soo-Kyung, Choi Seung-ho, Mun Seong-kun, Min Bok-gi, Lee Soo-Jeong, Ban Hye-ra, Cha Mi-Kyung, Lee Bong-ryeon. Screenplay: Oh Jungmi, Lee Chang-dong, based on a story by Haruki Murakami. Cinematography: Hong Kyung-pyo. Production design: Shin Jum-hee. Film editing: Kim Da-won, Kim Hyun. Music: Mowg.

Not surprisingly, given that it's based on one of his short stories, Burning gave me the unsettled feeling I get from reading Haruki Murakami's fiction: the sense that the world is stranger than it appears when we go about our daily routines. And that looking too closely at its anomalies can be dangerous. Certainly, if Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) had never paused to reacquaint himself with Shin Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seao), a friend from his childhood now grown up, he would never have been drawn into the mystery that surrounds her and Ben (Steven Yeun), the acquaintance she brings back from a trip to Africa. But who's to say that Jong-su's life, marked by his mother's abandoning the family when he was a child and by his father's trial for an act of angry violence, would have taken an easy course? The tension that builds throughout Burning is born of peeling back the layers of the quotidian. If we all did that, we probably wouldn't encounter elusive cats, disappearing women, Korean Gatsbys, and compulsive acts of arson the way Jong-su does, but Lee Chang-dong makes it entirely plausible that we might, which results in a brilliant, challenging, haunting film.

Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

William Holden and June Allyson in Executive Suite

Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, Dean Jagger, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Cameron Hawley. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters.

It has been called "Grand Hotel in the boardroom" more than a few times, because what it has in common with Edmund Goulding's 1932 best picture winner is that it was made by MGM and features an all-star cast. Executive Suite doesn't have much else in common with the earlier film, which was an entertaining stew of intrigue among the glamorous guests of a Berlin hotel. This is a story about power plays in a Pennsylvania furniture manufacturing company, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. The company's president has died without leaving a designated successor. We even see him die -- or rather, we die with him, as the film opens with a subjective camera as Avery Bullard leaves his Manhattan office to take a plane to Pennsylvania for a meeting with his vice-presidents. Through his eyes we see employees greet him as he leaves his office, the elevator doors closing on him, and finally the sidewalk as he collapses from a stroke. A passerby filches the wallet he drops, empties it of cash, and tosses it in a trashcan, thereby postponing the identification of his body. So much for any real action in the movie: The rest is talk, as the company's vice-presidents gather for the meeting and then gradually learn of his death. But one person knew of Bullard's death before them: George Caswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the company's board of directors who from his office window saw Bullard's body taken away by an ambulance and now uses this knowledge to try to pull a fast one with the company's stock. Eventually, there will be a struggle among the vice-presidents to take over Bullard's job as president. It will pit Loren Shaw (Fredric March), the bean-counting company controller, against Don Walling (William Holden), the v.p. for development who is excited about a new manufacturing technique he and his staff have been working on. And that's about as dramatic as it sounds. We all know that Walling will triumph over Shaw, probably because Walling has a nice, faithful wife played by June Allyson and a son who plays Little League baseball, and Shaw doesn't. It looks for a long time like Shaw will win, partly because he is in cahoots with Caswell, promising to make his stock deal work in exchange for his vote. Walling has to win over the other members of the board, who include old-timer Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), who is on his side from the start; Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), the v.p. for sales who is carrying on an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), making him susceptible to blackmail by Shaw; and most crucially of all, the daughter of the company's founder, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been involved in a frustrating love affair with Bullard and now threatens to dump her stock in the company. In the end, Walling triumphs with a big speech about the company's ideals and how they're being undermined by Shaw's insistence that the only thing that matters is the stockholders' return on investment, which has led to the construction of cheap and shoddy products. It's a sentimental fable about the "good capitalist" that mercifully doesn't indulge in the red-baiting that might have been expected in a film of the 1950s but ultimately rings false. Ernest Lehman's screenplay does what it can with Cameron Hawley's novel, Robert Wise directs as if it were a better film than it is, and Nina Foch won an Oscar for her role as the company's capable executive secretary, the only woman in the film who isn't completely under the thumb of the men. A trivia note: The narrator and the off-screen voice of Tredway is future NBC newman Chet Huntley.

Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in Human Desire

Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan, Kathleen Case, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLare, Grandon Rhodes. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Glenn Ford's boyish nice-guy looks and personality always seemed to me to make him an odd choice for tough-guy roles like the ones he played in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953). Lang apparently didn't have a problem with that disjunction: Having cast Ford opposite Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, he reteamed them in the latter film, with good effect. Still, Ford's limitations are apparent when you compare him with Jean Gabin, who played much the same role, a railroad engineer caught up in seamy doings, in Jean Renoir's earlier version of the Émile Zola novel, La Bête Humaine (1938). Gabin had a solidity that Ford lacks. Human Desire is, for the most part, a good contribution to the film noir genre, especially Burnett Guffey's cinematography, which uses the railway yard shadows to good effect. The screenplay has a few good lines -- "All women are alike. They just got different faces so the men can tell them apart." -- but it cheats with a happy ending for Ford's character that's at odds with the spirit of both Zola's novel and Renoir's version of it. Daniele Amfitheatrof's score is laid on too heavily, as if the filmmakers didn't trust the actors or the screenplay to carry the burden of what's being done and said.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn. Screenplay: John Guare. Cinematography: Richard Ciupka. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Michel Legrand*.

Old gangsters, like old gunfighters, make good movie protagonists, witness the success of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019). There's something about a survivor's story that draws us in, giving veteran actors good roles to play at the waning of their careers. But director Louis Malle and screenwriter John Guare give us a special twist on the survivor's story, eventually revealing their old gangster to be a bit of a fraud, a hanger-on after all the big guns have been killed off, a has-been who is really a never-was. Hence the glee of the elderly Lou Pascal when he actually guns down two thugs -- something he never had the nerve to do when he was a bit player in the mob. Atlantic City works neatly with two kind of dreamers, both with impossible dreams. Lou's dreams are impossible because they're about an illusory past in which he was a big shot, whereas the dreams of the young, like Sally Matthews's, are impossible because they don't have what it takes to fulfill them. Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon got Oscar nominations for playing Lou and Sally, and the film itself racked up nominations in the three other categories in the "top five": picture, director, and screenplay. It won none of them, but like so many Oscar also-rans it has become more valued over the years than most of the winners: Who today remembers Chariots of Fire, which won for best picture and for Colin Welland's screenplay, or has the endurance to sit through Reds, for which Warren Beatty won best director? I cherish Atlantic City for the many unexpected angles through which it views its sort-of-lovable losers, for its use of the crumbling old Atlantic City as a metaphor for the ravages of time, and for lines like Lou's "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

*A courtesy credit: Although Malle commissioned a score from Legrand, he decided not to use it. The only music in the film is diegetic, like Sally's tape recording of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and Robert Goulet' s rendition of Paul Anka's "Atlantic City, My Old Friend."

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.