Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

Choi Woo-sik, Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, and Park So-dam in Parasite

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-sik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin, Lee Sun-kyun, Jo Yeo-jeong, Jung Ji-so, Jung Hyun-jun, Lee Jeong-eun, Park Myeong-hoon, Park Keun-rok. Screenplay: Boon Jong-ho, Han Jin-won. Cinematography: Hong Kyung-pyo. Production design: Lee Ha-jun. Film editing: Yang Jin-mo. Music: Jung Jae-il.

Comedy that turns violent seldom works. I'm thinking in particular of my recent viewing of Peter Medak's The Ruling Class (1972), which goes abruptly from a giddy satire of upperclass manners into a dark tale about homicidal mania, losing the audience's assent to its original vision. So why does Parasite, which takes a similar turn, work so well that it won over international audiences and walked off with three of the most prestigious Oscars, for picture, director, and screenplay? It's a story of how the Kim family, eking out a living in a sub-basement, conned their way into the household of the wealthy Park family, who live in a classy house designed by a famous architect, but are then undone by a secret built into the house itself. I think it works because Bong Joon-ho's vision is dark from the start, but his touch is light, making us appreciate what drives the Kims -- poverty and class resentment -- and what makes the Parks so vulnerable -- snobbery and vanity. Both families need a comeuppance, the Kims for their lack of scruples, the Parks for their sense of entitlement. Maybe the comeuppance is overkill, but Bong has kept his characters at a slight distance throughout the film, so that we don't feel the shock of loss when they meet their fates. The ambivalence we may feel about them is summed up in the title: Parasite could refer to either family, the Kims who exploit the Parks, the Parks who ride the crest of societal privilege unaware that their good fortune is built on the misery of others.

Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)

Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall McGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Jeanette Sterke. Screenplay: Norman Corwin, based on a novel by Irving Stone. Cinematography: Russell Harlan, Freddie Young. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

After watching Julian Schnabel's take on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), I thought it made sense to go back and see Hollywood's portrait of the artist, Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Schnabel is himself an artist, of course, so it's not surprising to find his film focused on the aesthetics of madness (along with propounding a theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was the victim of an accidental gunshot). Minnelli and screenwriter Norman Corwin are less successful in finding a coherent image of Van Gogh than Schnabel and his co-screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg were, partly because the latter were working with one of the most insightful actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, while Minnelli's Van Gogh is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the role a physical resemblance to the artist but is never quite strong enough to craft an integrated characterization. Lust for Life seems to suggest that Van Gogh's problems stemmed from a lack of reciprocated love -- from his father, the church he tries to serve, the several women in his life, the art-buying public, the citizens of Arles, and his fellow artists -- most notably Paul Gauguin, played (perhaps overplayed) by Anthony Quinn in an Oscar-winning performance. The film is visually stunning, although the transformation of the landscapes that Van Gogh sees into what he painted is handled more subtly and intelligently in Schnabel's film. Minnelli seems content merely to juxtapose place with painting. The sensational events in Van Gogh's life, especially the amputation of an ear, are treated sensationally in Minnelli's film, which only suggests that Van Gogh did it out of frustration with Gauguin, as if pleading for that artist's attention. We also get a sentimental deathbed scene, a kind of reconciliation with Vincent's brother, Theo (James Donald). Lust for Life is a watchable but flawed and inconsistent film -- even the name of the artist gets a variety of pronunciations, from "Van Gokh" to "Van Gog" to "Van Goh."

Pushover (Richard Quine, 1954)

Kim Novak in Pushover

Cast: Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak, Philip Carey, Dorothy Malone, E.G. Marshall, Allen Nourse. Screenplay: Roy Huggins, based on novels by Thomas Walsh and Bill S. Ballinger. Cinematography: Lester White. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Arthur Morton.

Pushover is a noirish cops-and-robbers movie that gave Kim Novak her first big role -- the only reason some people remember it. But it's a good deal better than that bit of trivia would suggest -- a well-paced, well-acted film that begins with a skillfully directed bank robbery, played entirely without dialogue. Then it cuts to mink-clad Lona McLane (Novak) coming out of a movie theater -- Pushover was made for Columbia, so the posters and marquee titles are those of 1954 Columbia releases. She finds that her car won't start, but a guy (Fred MacMurray) offers to help, then takes her back to his apartment while it's being repaired. They hit it off immediately and begin an ongoing affair. It turns out that their meeting is a set-up: The guy, Paul Sheridan, is a cop, and Lona is the mistress of one of the bank robbers, Harry Wheeler (Paul Richards), who killed a bank guard making his getaway. Sheridan is part of a team staking out Lona's apartment -- which they can see into from another apartment across a courtyard -- in expectation that she'll make contact with Wheeler. But Sheridan is a bad cop, and he soon enlists Lona in a plot to double-cross Wheeler and take the loot from the robbery. It's this dual role -- cop and robber -- that generates much of the film's suspense, as things go wrong, one by one, with their plans and Sheridan has to keep coming up with alternate plans to foil the cops with whom he is supposed to be working. One of the complications involves the occupant of the apartment next to Lona's, a nurse, Ann Stewart (Dorothy Malone), whom Sheridan's partner, Rick McAllister (Philip Carey), begins watching through his binoculars more avidly than he does the real object of the surveillance. The voyeurism in Pushover is reminiscent of Hitchcock, and though that master might have made a richer film of the material, Richard Quine does a good job of it.

Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)

Mickey Rooney and Dianne Foster in Drive a Crooked Road

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Dianne Foster, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Kelly, Harry Landers, Paul Picerni, Dick Crockett. Screenplay: Blake Edwards, Richard Quine, based on a story by James Benson Nablo. Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: George Duning.

Mickey Rooney, usually the most ebullient, not to say overbearing, of actors, gives a subtle, reined-in performance in Drive a Crooked Road as a shy, quiet auto mechanic and amateur race-car driver who is seduced into becoming the getaway driver for bank robbers. But the film is also subtextually about sex in that most ostensibly repressed of decades, the 1950s. Rooney's Eddie Shannon works in a repair shop where the fellow mechanics gather at the windows and hoot lasciviously at any passing "dame." One mechanic even slobbers on the plate glass. They poke fun at Eddie, whom they call "Shorty" for obvious reasons, because he doesn't follow suit, questioning him on his sex life. The pack behavior suggests that any male who doesn't behave the way they do must be "queer." And then one day a beautiful woman named Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) shows up at the auto shop wanting her car checked out and asks for Eddie by name. She flirts with him, and though he responds with shy embarrassment, she calls on him again the next day, after he has repaired her car, to say that she can't start it. So he pays Barbara a visit at her apartment, fixes the connection that had somehow come loose, and gets flirted with a bit more. Gradually, she breaks down his reticence and, though even at the height of their relationship he's still so awkward that he doesn't even kiss her good night, he's hooked. We know by now that she's up to something, and we find out that her real boyfriend, Steve Norris (Kevin McCarthy), who had seen Eddie in an auto race, needs a driver who can negotiate the backroads between Palm Springs and the highway to Los Angeles, so he and his friend Harold (Jack Kelly) can rob a bank and make their getaway before the police have time to set up a roadblock. Barbara has grown ashamed of deceiving Eddie, but she's forced to go through with the plan of persuading him to take part in the job. This can't end well for anyone, and surprisingly for a Hollywood film of the era, it doesn't. Drive a Crooked Road lags a bit in its storytelling and doesn't build the suspense it should, but the performances are good. And the sexual subtext is what makes the film fascinating. In the depiction of Eddie's repressed sexuality, there's a suggestion that he may be afraid that he really is gay, just as there are suggestions that Steve and Harold may be more than just friends. The rampant machismo of the garage mechanics is also present in Steve's treatment of Barbara, whom he expects to do his bidding come what may. Sometimes hindsight makes a film more interesting than it was when it was released.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, and Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Judith Anderson, Roman Bohnen, Darryl Hickman, Janis Wilson, Ann Doran, Frank Orth, James Flavin, Mickey Kuhn, Charles D. Brown. Screenplay: Robert Rossen, John Patrick. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, John Meehan. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers doubles up on Lorenz Hart's line about "the double-crossing of a pair of heels" to give us a quartet of duplicity. There are no really good guys in the movie, though it tries to persuade us that tough guy Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) and lost girl Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) are more to be admired than ruthless Martha Ivers O'Neil (Barbara Stanwyck) and her weakling alcoholic husband, Walter (Kirk Douglas). After all, teenage Martha (Janis Wilson)  did kill her imperious aunt (Judith Anderson) and, with the connivance of young Walter (Mickey Kuhn) and his father (Roman Bohnen), not only cover up the murder but also frame someone else for the job. So when Sam returns to Iverstown after 18 years, Martha and Walter naturally think that he witnessed the murder and is there to blackmail them. Actually, young Sam (Darryl Hickman) beat it out the door before the aunt was conked on the head and fell downstairs, so he's ignorant -- until well into the film -- of their crime. It's not exactly clear why Sam, who makes a living by gambling, has drifted back in town, but he's not there long before he hooks up with Toni, fresh out of prison for a theft she didn't really commit, and the two of them get dragged unwittingly into the machinations of Martha and Walter. The movie was Douglas's film debut, so he receives fourth billing after Scott. He feels a little miscast as the manipulated Walter. For one thing, he was nine years younger than Stanwyck, but he also had, even then, a stronger hold on the screen than Heflin. This is, I think, a movie that doesn't have the courage of its own nastiness, trying to make us think that Sam and Toni really deserve a happy ending when it's more likely that they will eat each other alive. Trivia note: The sailor in the car with Sam when he has his accident is played by future writer-producer-director Blake Edwards. 

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."