Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940)

Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X

Cast: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden, Sig Ruman, Natasha Lytess, Vladimir Sokoloff, Edgar Barrier, Georges Revenant, Mikhail Rasumny. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, Walter Reisch. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Film editing: Harold F. Kress. Music: Bronislau Kaper.

Comrade X is one of those "what could they have been thinking" movies. It's a farce about international relations made as Europe was skidding into nightmare. Hitler and Stalin had just signed their infamous pact and the Germans were beginning to bomb London. Although the United States was still officially neutral, it was clear that everything was about to be sucked into a major war. So why make such a silly movie about the love affair of an American reporter and a beautiful Soviet streetcar conductor? Actually, it's quite clear what MGM was thinking: Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) was a hit, and we've got this new star Hedy Lamarr who has an accent, and Clark Gable's available, so why don't we put them in a kind of remake? Walter Reisch, who worked on the screenplay for Ninotchka, can surely come up with some sort of variation on the theme of lovely Russian commie seduced by Western capitalist, and we can get some reliably funny writers like Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer to punch up the dialogue. We can even throw in some of the guys from the cast of Ninotchka that we've got under contract, like Felix Bressart and Sig Ruman. Write a part for a wisecracking dame like Eve Arden and hire a top director like King Vidor, and what could go wrong? Pretty much everything, as it turned out. Comrade X's lampoon of Soviet spycraft and censorship would look rather odd only a couple of years later, when the United States entered the war and found itself allied with the Soviets. The comedy turned sour when references to mass executions found their way into the script. Lamarr is pretty and Gable is virile but they don't really connect. And the plot climaxes with an absurd scene in which the protagonists steal a tank and lead a whole battalion of tanks (pretty obviously miniatures) on a chase that ends with all of them plunging off a cliff. It's as clumsy as that sounds. Hecht and Lederer do contribute a few bright lines: "You can't have a revolution in a country where the people love hot dogs and boogie-woogie." There's some fun in the character bits contributed by Bressart, Ruman, and Oskar Homolka, and in Arden's acerbic asides. But the whole thing feels cobbled together from leftovers and uninspired by original thought.

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

Daniel Craig in Knives Out

Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Christopher Plummer, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Riki Lindholme, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, Noah Segan, K Callan, M. Emmett Walsh, Marlene Forte. Screenplay: Rian Johnson. Cinematography: Steve Yedlin. Production design: David Crank. Film editing: Bob Ducsay. Music: Nathan Johnson.

Knives Out is an old-fashioned whodunit with a brilliant detective on the case, but folded into the intricacies of its plot are some sharp-edged politics. It's almost as if Agatha Christie gave us Hercule Poirot's views on Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler or Dorothy Sayers had employed Lord Peter Wimsey to confront Sir Oswald Mosley. In Rian Johnson's screenplay, the plot is given some spin by the Trumpist sympathies of some of the Thrombey family and by the plight of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who fears that her mother's status as an undocumented immigrant will be revealed. But the politics is largely there as a flavoring for the stew of motives and meanness. The setup is this: The wealthy thriller novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, his throat cut, after the family has gathered to celebrate his 85th birthday. The verdict is suicide, but someone has hired the celebrated detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate -- even Blanc doesn't know who sent him a cash payment that put him on the case -- and demands for an investigation only get hotter after Thrombey's will is read and the eager would-be heirs learn that he has left everything to Marta, his nurse. She naturally becomes a prime suspect, but she has an amusingly improbable quirk: She can't tell a lie without vomiting. And she knows a lot more than she's willing to tell, including the fact that she thinks she's the one responsible for Thrombey's death. Various theories of the case come to light as Blanc weighs the evidence, but eventually the truth will out -- almost literally, when Marta blows chunks on the culprit. There's a lot of sly, wonderful acting in the movie, starting with Craig playing against the James Bond type as the Southern-accented sleuth. The movie was a big hit, so there's talk of more Benoit Blanc mysteries, but it will be hard to top this one.

Fireworks (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)

Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks

Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu, Yasuei Yakushiji, Taro Itsumi, Ken'ichi Yajima, Makoto Ashikawa, Yuko Daike. Screenplay: Takeshi Kitano. Cinematography: Hideo Yamamoto. Art direction: Norihiro Isoda. Film editing: Takeshi Kitano, Yoshinori Ohta. Music: Joe Hisaishi.

Perhaps a film about a rogue cop like Fireworks is not the most appropriate thing to be watching in these days of protest against police brutality. It certainly doesn't skimp on bloody violence and a disregard for rule by law as its protagonist, Nishi (Takeshi Kitano, who also wrote, directed, edited, and painted the pictures featured in the film), kills and robs his way toward vengeance for the wrongs done to him and his fellow policemen. As an actor, Kitano channels such taciturn vessels of wrath as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood in his "Dirty Harry" phase. But it's so often also such a beautifully photographed and sensitively crafted film that I can't help feeling that it transcends its baser moments and motives. Nishi has got himself deep in debt to a yakuza loan shark to pay the medical bills for his wife, who has terminal leukemia. Moreover, their young daughter has recently died, and he has left the police force after one of his colleagues was killed and two others seriously wounded in a shootout. He finds an unscrupulous junkyard owner who sells him an old taxicab and a police car rooftop light bar, paints the cab to look like a cop car, puts on a police uniform, and robs a bank -- eluding the cops called to the scene of the robbery with this disguise. He pays off the yakuza and takes his wife away on a vacation. But he is tracked down by both the yakuza, who claim he still owes them interest on the money he borrowed, and two of his fellow officers. He guns down the yakuza, but when the two policemen arrive, he and his wife are on a secluded beach. Nishi loads two bullets into his revolver, and as the film ends we hear two shots. We're left to decide whether the shots were fired at the cops as they close in or if Nishi has killed his wife and himself, but the film has tilted us so far in the direction of believing him to be an honorable man driven to the limits by painful experience that only the latter conclusion makes thematic and emotional sense. Integrated with Nishi's story is that of Horibe, his fellow officer who was wounded in the shootout and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife has left him, and Horibe tries to fill his days by painting pictures, some of which blend flowers and animals and some of pointillist-style scenes. The last picture we see Horibe painting is of snow falling in darkness and the word "suicide" inscribed on it. But once again, Kitano, who actually painted the pictures, gives us no clear resolution: Does the word refer to Horibe's intention or to Nishi's? The ambiguities of Fireworks sit oddly with the more conventionally staged movie violence of the film, but it's clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker.

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Farhad Kheradmand and Hossein Rezai in Through the Olive Trees

Cast: Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Farhad Kheradmand, Zarifeh Shiva, Hossein Rezai, Tahereh Ladanian, Hocine Redai, Zahra Nourouzi, Nosrat Bagheri, Azim Aziz Nia, Ostadvali Babaei, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Babek Ahmed Poor. Screenplay: Abbas Kiarostami. Cinematography: Hossein Jafarian, Farhad Saba. Production design: Abbas Kiarostami. Film editing: Abbas Kiarostami. Music: Amir Farshid Rahimian, Chema Rosas. 

Through the Olive Trees is the concluding film in what has become known as Abbas Kiarostami's "Koker trilogy," which is made up of the neorealistic Where Is My Friend's House? (1987), the semi-documentary And Life Goes On (1992), and this lyrical, pastoral, slyly comic work. It's possible to impose a variety of shapes on the trilogy as it moves from the simple narrative of the first film, made on the eve of the 1990 earthquake that devastated northern Iran, through the anxious quest for survivors of the cast of the first film that constitutes the middle film, and into a kind of post-disaster healing that centers on both the making of a film and one of its actors' nervous, intense courtship of a young woman, also an actor in the film. Through the Olive Trees also answers a question that was raised but never answered in And Life Goes On: Did the two boys who were the focus of Where Is My Friend's House survive the quake? But like most of the questions the third film deals with, the answer is oblique or obscure to the inattentive. In this case, it's a yes: The boys, Ahmed and Babek Ahmed Poor, appear in this film bringing potted geraniums to the set of the film that's being made in post-quake Koker. Kiarostami doesn't identify them as such, but leaves the recognition to viewers familiar with the first film. In fact, it's best to watch the trilogy as a whole, as Kiarostami manages to move actors and characters around among the three films. In Through the Olive Trees, the actor/character known as Farhad is the same actor, Farhad Kheradmand, who played the director in And Life Goes On. A different actor, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, plays the director in Through the Olive Trees. Sometimes we don't know whether we're watching actors performing in scenes for the film that's being made or the actual lives of the actors out of character -- in fact, the actors find it hard to separate the two. The third part of the trilogy is linked visually to the first by the zigzag path that people traverse to surmount the steep ridge that separates villages. And Through the Olive Trees links visually with And Life Goes On in that both films conclude with remarkable long-shot long takes in which characters from the film encounter each other at great distances from the camera. Taking the three films together, I think, only binds them into a whole masterwork -- an enigmatic, moving, frustrating, fascinating masterwork.   

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

Robert Ryan in House of Bamboo

Cast: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Brad Dexter, Sessue Hayakawa, Biff Elliot, Sandro Giglio, DeForest Kelley, Eiko Hanabusa. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: Leigh Harline.

More slickly made and visually spectacular than the typical Samuel Fuller movie, House of Bamboo was the product of his flirtation with a major studio, 20th Century-Fox. Made on location, it gives us some fine CinemaScope images of mid-1950s Tokyo, though it sometimes drifts away from the story into tourist mode to justify them, as in the scene in which the guy we know as Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) tours a Buddhist temple on the pretext of having a clandestine meeting with the cops he's secretly working for. There's also not much reason why Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) should climb to the rotating observation platform on top of Matsuma department store for the final shootout, other than to provide some views of the city below. There's also an infusion of romance between Eddie and his supposed "kimona girl," as Sandy calls her, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), that's a little more sugary than we expect of Fuller's men and women. Despite his concessions, the studio wasn't happy working with Fuller, and he went his independent way again. It's certainly not a bad movie -- it has action and suspense and fine work by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald -- but it feels a bit superficial.

Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931)

Olga Breno in Limite

 Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira, Carmen Santos, Mario Peixoto, Edgar Brasil, Iolanda Bernardes. Screenplay: Mario Peixoto. Cinematography: Edgar Brasil. Film editing: Mario Peixoto.

Limite is a film for cinéastes, by which I mean anyone who feels compelled to watch almost anything that has a measure of acclaim from other cinéastes. I don't know that I fall neatly into that category, since I have some expectation from films that is satisfied only by the ones that have a coherent narrative. Limite almost has that, but only in hindsight and in reading what others tell me about it. Left to my own devices, I don't know that I would have figured out that the film is about the memories or past experiences of the three people, two women and a man, who are seated in a boat, aimlessly drifting in the sea. And even having been told that, I'm not sure I can make it cohere in my memory of watching the film. But Limite has a reputation as a great experiment, a film made by Mario Peixoto, a 22-year-old poet who never made another one though he lived to be 83. It was exhibited in his native Brazil shortly after it was made, and though it was caviar to the general it acquired some admirers of the years, including Orson Welles and David Bowie, but like the vast majority of movies, especially silent ones, it suffered from neglect until it was restored in 2010 and became widely available. I found it oddly hypnotic, especially in its use of a shrewdly assembled pastiche of musical themes by a variety of composers, including Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, Borodin, and Prokofiev, which underscore and perhaps illuminate what's being done and felt by the people on screen. I doubt that I would have responded to it as positively as I did without the soundtrack, which is only to say that I expect cinema to be distinct from other visual arts like painting and still photography, which don't need to be "sweetened" by music to make their effect. There are some lovely images in Limite but they tease us into wanting them to fall into emotional and narrative shape. Life is so full of unanswered questions that I expect art to help us toward answering them. So if you watch Limite asking why these three people are in this boat together, you may find yourself hungering for more conventional film. Unconventional, let's say, isn't always a good thing.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Aleksa Palladino, Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Brían F. O'Byrne, Rosemary Harris. Screenplay: Kelly Masterson. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Christopher Nowak. Film editing: Tom Swartwout. Music: Carter Burwell.

This unrelentingly bleak family/crime drama was Sidney Lumet's last film as a director, and I can only say that he went out at the top of his form. That it was also one of the last films of Albert Finney and also starred another actor gone before his time, Philip Seymour Hoffman, only adds to its melancholy weight. Hoffman is at his best as Andy Hanson, the financially overextended older son, who tries to drag his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a scheme to rob their parents' suburban mall jewelry store. Andy persuades Hank that it would be a victimless crime: They'd collect the loot and their parents would collect the insurance. Everything goes wrong with this scheme that you might imagine. It's complicated, for example, by the fact that Hank is sleeping with Andy's wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hawke is superb in the role of Hank, a weak, spoiled younger brother now gone to seed -- a part that fits the actor perfectly as he ages out of the boyish good looks that once made some critics dismiss him as a lightweight. And midway through the film, when things have gone so wrong that the men's mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), lies comatose from the shooting that took place during the botched robbery, we meet Charles, their father, played by the always reliable Finney. The brothers are already in trouble because the wife and brother of the man Hank hired to do the job, who was killed in the heist, want hush money. Things get even worse when their father, urged implacably on by grief and anger, begins investigating what brought about his wife's death. Kelly Masterson's screenplay doesn't give Tomei enough to do in the story, but every moment when she's on screen is memorable, particularly the scene in which she leaves Andy. Lumet stages this in their apartment with a long take that holds Andy in the background as Gina struggles to haul her suitcase to the door, all the while delivering the news that she's been sleeping with his brother. Andy doesn't react immediately to this bit of information, but even later when he meets with Hank again, Hoffman lets us see how it's seething inside him. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is not an easy film to watch; it's perhaps a little too grim and sordid for its own good. But at its best it's the kind of morality tale you might find in medieval literature, in the darker moments of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and it has some of the burden of greed and hubris that afflicts the families of Greek tragedy, even to the point of reversing the story of Oedipus in its stunning outcome.

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Cast: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Michael Beach, Aunjanue Ellis, Diego Luna, Emily Rios, Ed Skrein, Finn Wittrock, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco, Pedro Pascal. Screenplay: Barry Jenkins, based on a novel by James Baldwin. Cinematography: James Laxton. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders. Music: Nicholas Britell.

I wish I could watch and critique If Beale Street Could Talk, a two-year-old movie based on a 46-year-old novel, as a work of drama and filmmaking, instead of being tugged by it into considerations of politics and society. But George Floyd's death and the following two weeks of protests make it, to put it tritely, timely and topical. Writer-director Barry Jenkins subsumes an American tragedy in a richly detailed love story filmed with a slow, loving camera. We watch what should be the charmed lives of Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) turned into nightmare by systemic racism, to use a phrase that echoes through our current moment. Jenkins is a master at mixing moments of pain with moments of beauty. The film's great raw scenes -- Fonny's hyperreligious mother (Aunjanue Ellis) denouncing Tish's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and Tish's mother (the brilliant Regina King) confronting the woman (Emily Rios) who accused Fonny of rape -- are made even rawer by the contrast with the lyrical moments that depict the lives of the lovers before catastrophe, in the form of a bad cop (Ed Skrein), descends upon them. It's the kind of film that makes you want to explore what brought even its secondary characters to be what they are: What made Skrein's cop so bitter? What traumas underlie the victim's choice to pick Fonny as her rapist? What drove Fonny's mother so blindly into the arms of religion? Jenkins makes these characters and others so vivid that we don't just dismiss them as plot devices. Each of them could be the subjects of their own films, as could Fonny's friend Daniel, the ex-con who can barely speak of the horrors of prison. They make If Beale Street Could Talk a film of rich texture, allowing it to go beyond social-political commentary into a lived actuality.  

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

Theresa Harris and Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Theresa Harris, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Darryl F. Zanuck. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Howard Bretherton.

Baby Face has a reputation as the raunchy film that helped bring about the stifling Production Code in 1934, the year after it was released. But even in its original version -- for years only the expurgated film could be seen -- it doesn't exhibit much that would bring a blush to today's maiden cheeks. To be sure, its heroine, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), sleeps around in her determination to get somewhere, which in her case is marriage to a bank president. But this moral deviance, the film suggests, is the result of having been pimped out by her bootlegger father from the age of 14. So when he's blown up by the explosion of one of his stills, what else can she do but head for the big city and try to better herself? She has, after all, only the guidance of a middle-aged German, a customer of her father's speakeasy, who quotes Nietzsche at her. Her will to power involves the only capital she has: her body. So she sleeps her way up the flowchart of a New York bank until she's the kept woman of a vice-president, and when that ends in his being murdered by an ex-lover who also commits suicide in what the newspapers call a "love nest," she gets paid off -- to prevent her selling her diary to the newspapers -- with a job at the bank's Paris branch. And then she goes straight, fending off the attentions of various men, and making a success of the bank's travel bureau division. It can't end there, however, because when the bank's young president, Courtland Trenholme (George Brent), comes to Paris on a visit, they fall in love and get married, causing a scandal that leads to the bank's closing and Trenholme's indictment for some kind of corporate malfeasance. When he asks Lily to help him out financially -- she has accumulated half a million dollars in gifts from him, and presumably from her former lover -- she refuses, reverting to the ruthless, hard-edged Lily. But just as she's about to leave him she has a change of heart, only to find that the desperate Trenholme has tried to commit suicide. He's not mortally wounded, however, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she confesses that she really loves him and he gazes gratefully at her. Fade out. Censors in states like New York bridled at the apparent rewarding of sin and forced Warner Bros. to cut some of the more scandalous scenes and to change the ending so that Lily does penance by returning to her old home town to live a chastened life. But even in its long-lost uncensored version, there's something a little off about Baby Face, a feeling that it wants to be more than just a story about sex and upward mobility. The men in the film, including the young John Wayne, are an unmemorable series of himbos and sugar daddies, easy pushovers for the likes of an ambitious and unscrupulous young woman. The last-minute change of heart and the squishy happy ending feel unearned. What coherence the film has comes not from the script but from Barbara Stanwyck's performance, from her tough likability.

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018)

Xi Zi, Kong Yixin, Peng Yuchang, and Wang Uvin in An Elephant Sitting Still

Cast: Zhang Yu, Peng Yuchang, Wang Uvin, Xi Zi, Dong Xiangrong, Lin Zhanghui, Guo-Zhang Zhao-Yan, Ning Wang, Guo Jing, He Miaomiao, Huang Ximan, Kong Wei, Kong Yixin, Li Binyuan, Li Danyi, Li Qing, Li Suyun, Zhu Yanmanzi. Screenplay: Hu Bo. Cinematography: Fan Chao. Production design: Xie Lijian. Film editing: Hu Bo. Music: Lun Hua.

Albert Camus formulated the most familiar tenet of existentialism: "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide." It's a phrase that haunts every moment of Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, and not only because the writer-director chose to resolve the problem by taking his own life after completing his one and only feature film. The irony is that for his film, after depicting the desperate, intersecting lives of four people, Hu chose a different answer to the problem, something more in line with Samuel Beckett's familiar formulation, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." That's the choice made by the young Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) and Huang Ling (Wang Uvin) on the advice of the elderly Wang Jin (Xi Zi), even though the last has already admitted that in his long life he has never found anything different from the existential misery in which they exist. "So I have to sugar-coat it," he says. "There must be a difference." So the three of them, along with Wang Jin's young granddaughter, continue their journey to see the titular elephant, a ponderous symbol of elective inertia, introduced into the film by the gangster Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), telling his girlfriend about "an elephant in Manzhouli. It sits there all day long. Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks. Or maybe it just enjoys sitting there. I don't know." This is a four-hour film that's anything but epic. Hu makes no attempt to enliven it with sensational moments, though it contains violence: two suicides, several other deaths including that of Wang Jin's small dog, and several beatings. But all of them occur just off camera. In perhaps the central event, when Wei Bu shoves the bully tormenting his friend down a flight of stairs, we barely even see the shove, but only hear the muffled sound of the fall, and finally glimpse the bully on the flight below. The bully, who dies in hospital, is Yu Cheng's brother, which serves to link his story with that of Wei Bu, but it's not the only death Yu has witnessed today: Earlier, he has slept with the wife of a friend who, on discovering Yu Cheng in their apartment, jumps off the roof of the building. We don't see that fall either. Instead, the camera lingers throughout the film in extended takes, usually keeping one or more of the characters in close-up. Even when encounters between characters take place, there's none of the usual cross-cutting, and often they enter and even remain out of focus in the background. If this sounds like mannered filmmaking, I'm afraid it often is. And if the existentialist drift of the narrative sounds pretentious, I'm afraid that's also true. And yet, this is a film that can draw you in and hold you in its spell for an unconscionably long time, simply because it's so beautifully assembled, so deft at drawing you into its world, holding you to its characters and their plight.