The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona

Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.

Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker in Much Ado About Nothing

Cast: Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Jillian Morgese, Sean Maher, Spencer Treat Clark, Riki Lindholme, Ashley Johnson, Emma Bates, Tom Lenk, Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney. Screenplay: Joss Whedon, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Jay Hunter. Production design: Cindy Chao, Michele Yu. Film editing: Daniel S. Kaminsky, Joss Whedon. Music: Joss Whedon.

Fleet, light, and lucid, Joss Whedon's film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is made without undue reverence or pretense, which is pretty much the way Shakespeare ought to be filmed -- or at least his romantic comedies, which have so much in common with the classic Hollywood screwball comedies. Amy Acker, who should be a bigger star, is a pitch-perfect Beatrice, and Alexis Denisof is well-matched as Benedick. The obvious comparison here is with Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version of the play, a more elaborate and star-studded affair, but Whedon's film, shot mostly in and around his house in Santa Monica, more than holds its own in comparison. It actually comes off a little better in casting Sean Maher as the villainous Don John, where Branagh's choice of Keanu Reeves in the role shows off some of that actor's limitations. The weakest casting in Whedon's version is Nathan Fillion as Dogberry, which Branagh bettered with Michael Keaton. Fillion is too bulky and handsome an actor to play the clown, and he struggles to make Dogberry quite as fatuous as he should be, whereas Keaton relished every one of the character's malapropisms. But as Dogberry himself put it, "Comparisons are odorous." Fran Kranz makes more of the somewhat flimsy role of Claudio than is usual, and it's fun to see Clark Gregg step out of the Marvel universe into the Shakespearean one.

The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

Hafsia Herzi and Habib Boufares in The Secret of the Grain

Cast: Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Farida Benkhetache, Abdelhamid Aktouche, Alice Houri, Bouraouïa Marzouk, Cyril Favre, Leila D'Issernio, Abelkader Djeloulli, Bruno Lochet, Olivier Loustau, Sami Zitouni, Sabrina Ouazani, Mohamed Benabdeslem. Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix. Cinematography: Lubomir Bakchev. Production design: Benoît Barouh. Film editing: Ghalia Lacroix, Camille Toubis.

With its unsparing closeups and its two great extended sequences, the family dinner and the restaurant tryout, The Secret of the Grain is obviously designed to be an immersive film.  Sometimes it calls to mind the Italian neo-realists with its focus on ordinary people and their doggedness in the face of social circumstance, but it's "realer" than those films, with an improvisatory quality in its best scenes that evokes the films of Mike Leigh. Best of all, it plunks you right in the middle of a culture, that of North African immigrants living in France, and lets you find your footing in it. The focus of the film is Slimane (Habib Boufares), a 60-something worker in the shipyards of Sète, a small Mediterranean port city explored more than half a century ago by Agnès Varda in La Point Courte (1955). (In that film the exploration was done by outsiders, a Parisian couple. In this case, the city is seen from the point of view of residents with one foot in their original Arab culture, the other in the adopted culture of France -- people who are both insiders and outsiders.) Slimane is being laid off as the film begins, but he doesn't relish the prospect of retirement. Instead, he wants to open a restaurant on an old ship he has acquired. He's aided in this plan by Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the young daughter of his mistress, who owns the hotel where Slimane lives. Rym helps him put together a prospectus that they present to a skeptical but intrigued bank loan officer. Complications are inevitable because Slimane wants the restaurant to feature couscous and fish as prepared by his ex-wife, Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk). And so we're drawn into the lives of Slimane's doubly extended family, whom we meet at a dinner in Souad's home. The Franco-Arab mixture is enriched by a touch of Russian: Souad and Slimane's daughter-in-law, Julia (Alice Houri), married to the philandering Majid (Sami Zitouni). These and other characters get introduced to us in various ways, but primarily at the raucous, noisy family dinner. Eventually, Slimane decides that the only way around the bank's reluctance and the bureaucracy's red-tape about permits, is to stage a party on the ship and invite bankers, bureaucrats, and potential investors and to serve them Souad's couscous and fish. Abdellatif Kechiche is a master at working out all the complicated relationships of family and town, and at setting up the eventual roadblocks that constitute the plot, but he also lets his actors carry the emotional burden of the story, which they do superbly. I have to admit that The Secret of the Grain sometimes feels like a party you want to leave but can't. That's partly because of its 151-minute run time -- I felt like it could lose half an hour without diminishing its immersiveness, the suspense of the last section of the film, and its overall tragicomic effect. But I would hate to be the one who had to decide which of its often astonishing scenes to cut.

The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)

James Cagney in The Public Enemy

Cast: James Cagney, Edward Woods, Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Murray Kinnell, Mae Clarke, Mia Marvin. Screenplay: Kubec Glasmon, John Bright, Harvey F. Thew. Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Edward M. McDermott.

James Cagney has always seemed to me the movies' greatest loner, and the film that made him a star bears that out. The scene that brings it home for me is the one in which Cagney's Tom Powers is hiding out from the rival mob, and the woman named Jane (Mia Marvin) who looks after him gets him drunk and seduces him. In the morning, when he remembers that they had sex, he's shocked and slaps her, then storms out of the hideout. It's a less famous scene than the one in which he shoves a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face, but that's partly because the scene with Jane was cut by the censors after the Production Code went into effect; it was restored only after the movie made it onto video. The two scenes are similar in suggesting that although Cagney's characters aren't exactly chaste, they don't connect with women except for their mothers, like Beryl Mercer's Ma in The Public Enemy or Margaret Wycherly's Ma Jarrett in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949). Almost every major leading man of the 1930s and 1940s can be identified with his on-screen teamwork with a leading lady (or two): Cary Grant with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy likewise, James Stewart with Jean Arthur or Margaret Sullavan, Clark Gable with Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper with Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich, and so on. But Cagney never struck sparks with any of his leading ladies. He seems too coiled and defensive to give up any part of himself to a woman. In The Public Enemy, he's matched with Harlow, who does her best to thaw him out, but their scenes are not particularly memorable. In his private life, Cagney was notable for having married only once and having stayed married from 1922 till his death in 1986, without rumors of extramarital dalliance, something of an anomaly in Hollywood. The Public Enemy uses this enclosed quality of Cagney's to good effect, and it's a tribute to whoever made the decision to give him the lead -- claimants include director William A. Wellman and producer Darryl F. Zanuck -- after initially casting him in the secondary role of Matt Doyle, played by the now mostly forgotten Edward Woods. It's largely thanks to Cagney that The Public Enemy still hold up today, even though it has some of the stiffness and uncertainty of early talkies, especially when it comes to dialogue. Robert Emmett O'Connor, for example, who plays Paddy Ryan, tends to introduce long pauses between sentences when he's delivering his lines, as if afraid that the audience won't keep up with what he's saying.

Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies

Cast: Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karvanová, Julius Albert, Jan Klusák, Marie Cesková, Jirina Myskova, Marcela Brezinová, Oldrich Hora, Václav Chochola, Josef Konicek, Jaromir Vornácka. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová. Ester Krumbachová, Pavel Jurácek. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Production design: Karel Lier. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Jirí Slitr, Jirí Sust.

Girls just wanna have fun. The adjective usually applied to Vera Chytilová's Daisies is "anarchic," but that doesn't quite apply to a film so cleverly staged, photographed, and edited. To be sure, the impish young women whose adventures the film chronicles are in some sense anarchists, in that they try to break all the rules they can find to break. And if you're looking for the conventional beginning-middle-end narrative structure you won't find one. But Daisies is not just Dadaist nose-thumbing. It's framed by images of the mass destruction of war, against which, the film seems to be saying, the sheer mad hedonism of its two uninhibited sprites should be viewed as trivial. Chytilová takes her cue not only from Dada but also from the Marx Brothers, whose antics would be appalling in real life but are liberating to the spirit when viewed in the context of a work of art. Daisies is akin in this sense to an apocalyptic comedy like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, made only two years earlier, and its spirit and some of its techniques come from Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, also from 1964. They reflect an era when youth thought it could change the world, only to be put down, as the Czech filmmakers like Chytilová would brutally be put down, by the establishment it so gleefully mocked. That Daisies can be grating as often as it is giddy suggests an awareness that the road of excess may lead to the palace of wisdom, but not without paying a price.

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.