Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)

Alva Rogers, Trula Hoosier, and Barbarao in Daughters of the Dust

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao, Trula Hoosier, Umar Abdurrahamn, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, Bahni Turpin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tommy Redmond Hicks, Tony King, Cornell Royal, Vertamae Grosvenor. Screenplay: Julie Dash. Cinematography: Arthur Jafa. Production design: Kerry Marshall. Film editing: Joseph Burton, Amy Carey. Music: John Barnes.

The Great Migration, the movement northward of Black Americans in the 20th century, was one of the most unreported major stories of its day, and it's only in hindsight that authors and filmmakers have been able to re-create the immense cultural upheaval that it represents. Julie Dash does it in the most intimate and delicate way possible, by letting us meet the Peazant family on the eve of their departure from the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for an unknown future in the North. It's one of those films that need a solid grounding in American history, and particularly in the history of Black people in America, to be fully appreciated, for Dash throws us into the lives of the Peazant family and the centuries of tradition, religion, and oppression that they embody, not to teach us about these things, but to spur us to learn. The film was originally released without subtitles to aid the viewer's comprehension of the dialogue, spoken in the Gullah dialect, and though I'm happy to have that help now, the beauty of the setting and the faces in it communicate nearly as much as the words. It's a film about the ability to endure and prevail, as Faulkner might have put it. 

D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)

Neville Brand and Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand, Laurette Luez, Jess Kirkpatrick, Cay Forester, Frank Jaquet, Lawrence Dobkin, Frank Gerstle, Carol Hughes, Michael Ross, Donna Sanborn. Screenplay: Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene. Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Arthur H. Nadel. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Who knew that being a notary public could be so dangerous? D.O.A. is a frenetic, mostly implausible thriller that somehow works, even though no one in it acts like a human being. I mean, if you found that you'd been poisoned and had only a short time to live, you'd get in touch with the police, check into a hospital, and call your loved ones, right? Not Frank Bigelow, a tax accountant on a rather odd vacation to San Francisco, who visits a jazz bar where he's given a drink containing a "luminous toxin." The next morning, feeling a little unwell, he goes to a doctor who gives him the bad news, so he rushes to a hospital for a second opinion, and then, following a slim lead, rushes to Los Angeles to try to find out why he's being done in. All this rushing, which includes a famous tracking shot of Bigelow running down Market Street, elbowing aside the crowds, can't have been good for him, perhaps only speeding up the effects of the poison. But by this time we have been so caught up in his plight that we don't really care. One of the reasons is that Edmond O'Brien, an actor who was typically a kind of movie Everyman, is perfectly cast as Bigelow. The other is that Rudolph Maté, abetted by a pounding score by Dimitri Tiomkin, never gives us time for anything so mundane as thought. It's a film full of absurdities, starting with Bigelow's curiously distant relationship with his secretary and lover, Paula (Pamela Britton), and continuing through his arrival at a hotel in San Francisco during "Market Week," where hordes of salesmen, clients, and (presumably) hookers are partying. (I don't know who thought it was a great idea to add a slide-whistle wolf whistle on the soundtrack every time a pretty woman appears on screen. Surely it isn't indicated on Tiomkin's score.) Anyway, Bigelow gets swept away to a bar where a lot of hipsters are grooving to some hyped-up jazz, and it's there that he gets slipped the mickey. The film takes off and never lets up from there, with some fisticuffs and gunplay and a toothy psychopath named Chester (Neville Brand), as the plot thickens so much that by the end I really couldn't tell you why Bigelow's notarizing a bill of sale put him in such final jeopardy. Nor do I care: By the end, I was so exhausted by its audacious silliness that I was content to accept it as the classic good bad movie.

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers

Cast: Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Manfredi Aliquo, David Ford, Daniel Franco, Rossana Canghiari, Fabrizio Sergenti Castellani, Mario Cotone, Giancarlo Previati, Antonio Serrano. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers exploits the enclosed and labyrinthine character of Venice for sinister potential, but unlike Roeg, Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, following Ian McEwan's book, make the city into a place where psychosis and not the supernatural seems to flourish. It was probably the wrong place for a handsome young couple like Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) to come to, as they say, "work on their relationship." She is the divorced mother of two small children, an actress who does voiceover work for commercials; he's apparently some kind of editor, for he sometimes fiddles around with a manuscript that he proclaims "unreadable." But what matters more than what they do is how they look: They're quite beautiful. And that attracts the notice of Robert (Christopher Walken), a bar owner who surreptitiously photographs them and, we later learn, takes the pictures back to his opulent flat to show his disabled wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren). Eventually, Robert lures Colin and Mary to his bar, where he tells them stories of his past, of his cruel, overbearing father. Colin and Mary get lost on the way back to their hotel, and an exhausted (and perhaps drugged) Mary collapses, so they spend the night huddled in an alley. The next day, they agree that Robert is not someone they want to spend a lot of time with, but nevertheless he manages to find them and invite them to his apartment to meet his wife. The spider has lured them to his web. Eventually, we will learn that Robert is a psychopath and that his relationship with Caroline is sadomasochistic. That fact makes the emotional and sexual vulnerability of Colin and Mary more acute. This is one of those instances where the casting of an actor, namely Everett, inevitably adds a layer of significance to the character he's playing. Everett had come out as gay only the year before The Comfort of Strangers was made, and it's almost too easy to read this aspect of the actor's real life into his art. When we first meet Colin and Mary there's an element of sexual tension between them: They are sleeping in separate beds in their hotel room, and at one point she says that what he really needs is more sex. Later, after their encounter with Robert and Caroline has released something in them, Colin and Mary have passionate sex, but at one point he admits that he has always wondered what it's like to be the woman during sex. Robert, meanwhile, accuses Colin of being a "communist poof," and later tells him that he has told the men in the bar that Colin is his lover. I can't help feeling that Schrader has exploited Everett's real-life sexuality in the film, and Everett himself has notoriously advised gay actors not to come out of the closet if they want major careers -- his own hit the skids not long after the release of The Comfort of Strangers. Setting that aside, the film is opulently staged and filmed, well acted, and Schrader sets up the revelations of its plot and characters skillfully. But there's also something airless and perfunctory about it. I don't know enough about Colin and Mary to feel a sense of violation at what happens to them, to regard it as more than just formulaic psychological thriller stuff.  

The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934)

Ramon Novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Jeanette MacDonald, Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal, Frank Conroy, Henry Armetta, Adrienne D'Ambicourt, Joseph Cawthorn. Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Sam Spewack, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Frank E. Hull. Music: Herbert Stothart, songs by Jerome Kern and Otto A. Harbach.

The Cat and the Fiddle marks a change in Jeanette MacDonald's career: It was her first film for MGM after the classic series of witty, racy movies co-starring Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, and it neatly bridges her way into the more famous but less interesting operetta films she made with Nelson Eddy at MGM. Here her co-star is Ramon Novarro, a charming actor with great comic skills and a nice singing voice, but they don't mesh the way she did with either Chevalier or Eddy; she seems a little too stiff, he a little too boyish. Made before the full introduction of the Production Code, the movie tries for some of the sexiness of the Paramount films made under the aegis of the master of the sly wink, Ernst Lubitsch. The lovers, Novarro's Victor and MacDonald's Shirley, live together without benefit of clergy, a thing impossible under the code. There is fun to be had watching the film: The dialogue -- among the uncredited contributors to the screenplay are Anita Loos and James Kevin McGuinness -- is often smart and funny, the songs are pleasant, and the giddy nonsense of the plot skips along merrily. And at the end there's a nice surprise: The final reel is in Technicolor, giving audiences a first glimpse of MacDonald's red hair. But this is minor MGM musical stuff, even in comparison with the later MacDonald/Eddy movies.

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

Paul Robeson, Julia Theresa Russell, and Mercedes Gilbert in Body and Soul

Cast: Paul Robeson, Mercedes Gilbert, Julia Theresa Russell, Marshall Rogers, Lawrence Chenault, Lillian Johnson, Madame Robinson, Chester A. Alexander, Walter Cornick. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No other credited crew. 

The melodramatic imagination that crafts stories out of feelings and emotions is a precious thing, giving us an insight into the hidden lives of human beings uninflected by ideology. But the manners and behavior that grow out of these emotions change with the times, so what stirs the emotions of one generation seems ludicrous to the next, leading to an undervaluing and neglect of melodrama as an art form. Add to this a general intellectual mistrust of and contempt for appeals to the emotions, and it's easy to see why so much of the cinematic past that stemmed from this imagination has vanished, the victim of a kind of sanctioned neglect. And a special victim of this neglect would have to be the so-called "race movie," aimed almost exclusively at Black audiences. All of which makes the survival of even a deeply flawed film like Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul so remarkable. Even in its carefully restored form, it has narrative gaps and character inconsistencies that suggest still-missing pieces. But it also preserves the essence of what Black audiences of the time thought and felt about themselves, along with portrayals of the desperation of poverty, the intense and sometimes blinding religiosity, and the indomitable hope. We can fault Body and Soul for its too-facile "it was all a dream" resolution, but we should also value it for endorsing the necessity of dream as an antidote for crushing despair. Watching it 95 years later, it's easy to be distracted by its antiquity, by the title cards written in a dialect that offends us, by the florid acting -- Paul Robeson apparently later tried to hide the fact that this was his first film, even though his is certainly the most impressive performance in it. Call the film naïve if you will, but see it as its first audiences saw it, as a validation of their hopes and fears, and it can be an intensely moving experience. 

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, and Clelia Matania in Don't Look Now

Cast: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste, Giorgio Trestini, David Tree, Ann Rye, Nicholas Salter, Sharon Williams, Bruno Cattaneo, Adalina Poerio. Screenplay: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: Giovanni Socol. Film editing: Graeme Clifford. Music: Pino Donaggio.

A beautifully textured film, Don't Look Now fills every frame with portents, making it one of the most influential "horror films" of all time. And like the best horror films, like Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), it doesn't rest content with simply scaring people. It's unsettling mostly because it preys not on our nerves but on our conscience, needling our sense of guilt, our self-consciousness about grief, our denial in the face of the inevitability of death. Its supernatural element is preposterous, but we accept it because each of us has our preposterous superstitions, our wishful fantasies, our falling away from logic and reason. Nicolas Roeg accomplishes a near-perfect integration of story and setting in his use of Venice, a beautiful, historic city, riddled with decay and threatened by time and tide. In his hands, it becomes a correlative for the dance between acceptance and despair that the Baxters, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland), are treading as they try to survive the death of their daughter. I think the film falls apart a little at the end, with too much flashbackery to summarize what has happened to the Baxters, and it could have been leavened with the kind of wit that Hitchcock and Polanski resorted to in their films, but I'd call it a near-miss classic.

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948)

Pat O'Brien and Dean Stockwell in The Boy With Green Hair 

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Barbara Rush, Richard Lyon, Walter Catlett, Samuel S. Hinds, Regis Toomey, Charles Meredith, David Clarke, Billy Sheffield, Johnny Calkins, Teddy Infuhr, Dwayne Hickman, Eilene Janssen, Curtis Loys Jackson Jr., Charles Arnt. Screenplay: Ben Barzman, Alfred Lewis Levitt, based on a story by Betsy Beaton. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Frank Doyle. Music: Leigh Harline.

Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair has endured, mutating with the times to reflect whatever social issue dominates at the moment. When it was made in the postwar 1940s, it was intended to carry a strong antiwar statement -- one that RKO's new owner, Howard Hughes, hated so much that he tried to re-edit the film to eliminate it. Today, it might be seen as echoing some of the passion behind Black Lives Matter. In any case, it's a film close to the liberal heart, produced by the premier Hollywood liberal, Dore Schary. Fortunately, it makes its point without preachiness and, mercifully, without overindulging in whimsy. (An exception to the latter is the boy's fantasy about his grandfather's encounter with a king.) Dean Stockwell, 12 years old at the time but looking a couple of years younger, gives a refreshingly natural performance as the boy, Peter, free from the cutesiness that often weighed down performances by children in that era.

Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, P.J. Byrne, Joe Cortese, Maggie Nixon, Von Lewis, Iqbal Theba. Screenplay: Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly. Cinematography: Sean Porter. Production design: Tim Galvin. Film editing: Patrick J. Don Vito. Music: Chris Bowers.

Peter Farrelly's Green Book is not a bad movie, just an unoriginal one, especially with its soft-landing, feel-good ending, set at Christmas no less. It's certainly among the least worthy best picture Oscar recipients of recent years, especially from nominees that included such original works as Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, and my personal favorite, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite. What Green Book has going for it is powerful performances by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali and a sharp reminder of the cruelty and injustice of the Jim Crow era, in which a phenomenon like the Green Book, a travel guide for Black people in an age of segregated accommodation, was necessary. The film has been criticized for resorting to the White Savior trope, in which Mortensen's Tony Vallelonga saves Ali's Don Shirley from mayhem and possible death. There is, in fact, a White Savior in the film, but it's the off-screen Bobby Kennedy who rescues Vallelonga and Shirley from jail in a Louisiana "sundown town" after a well-placed phone call by Shirley to his well-connected lawyer, a moment in which Shirley plays Magical Negro to Vallelonga's White Savior. The film tries to be even-handed in depicting the growing rapport between the two men, in which each tries to correct the other's flaws, namely Shirley's hauteur and Vallelonga's crudeness. It doesn't entirely succeed, largely because the point of view in the film is white, that of Vallelonga's son Nick, who wrote the screenplay. The Shirley family, in fact, protested the treatment of their relative in the film as a "symphony of lies," falsely portraying Shirley as alienated from the Black community and estranged from his brother. Setting aside any issues of accuracy -- Green Book is a fiction film, not a documentary -- the real problems with the movie are two: One, that it treats racial tensions as a thing of the past, something hardly acceptable in the age of Black Lives Matter. The other is the heaviness of its clichés, which are those of almost any odd-couple road trip movie, which led some of its critics, mindful of another undeserving best picture Oscar winner, to dub it "Driving Dr. Shirley." 

Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989)

Michael Lake, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, and Geneviève Lemon in Sweetie

Cast: Geneviève Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, Michael Lake, Andre Pataczek, Jean Hadgraft, Paul Livingston, Louise Fox, Ann Merchant, Robyn Frank, Bronwyn Morgan. Screenplay: Gerard Lee, Jane Campion. Cinematography: Sally Bongers. Art direction: Peter Harris. Film editing: Veronika Jenet. Music: Martin Armiger.

Jane Campion's Sweetie is a sharply filmed, deftly styled, rawly acted family tragicomedy, and one of the most remarkable feature directing debuts in movie history. I use the word "tragicomedy" reluctantly because there's no easy way to capture the tone of Campion's film. It can make you laugh but uneasily, because its characters are so damaged and unpredictable that there's an element of pity and fear in our responses to them. The point of view is largely that of Kay (Karen Colston), a neurotic young woman -- among other things, she suffers from dendrophobia, the fear of trees -- with a sister, Dawn (Geneviève Lemon), aka "Sweetie," who dances on the edge of psychosis for much of the film until she finally goes over the edge. Kay is the kind of person who, when a fortune teller reads her tea leaves and sees a man with a question mark in his face, almost immediately runs into one. He's Louis (Tom Lycos), who, when Kay meets him, has a lock of hair dangling down over a mole on his forehead, an irresistible embodiment of the prophecy of the tea leaves. Louis has just gotten engaged to another woman, but before you know it, he and Kay are living together. Their life has just stalemated into sexlessness when Sweetie arrives, with her "producer," a narcoleptic guy named Bob (Michael Lake), in tow. Eventually, we meet Kay and Sweetie's parents, Gordon (Jon Darling) and Flo (Dorothy Barry), and learn that Gordon has spent most of his life spoiling Sweetie, encouraging her to believe that she has an abundance of talent. Summary of Sweetie fails at this point to capture the crisply distanced way that Campion presents this ensemble and works out their interplay. Her achievement in this film has been likened to the films of David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, and there are moments that for me recall David Byrne's True Stories (1986) -- the Australia of Sweetie is very much kin to the Texas of Byrne's film -- but Campion is really doing her own thing, and doing it well.