Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

Bill Gunn and Seret Scott in Losing Ground

Cast: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Billie Allen, Maritza Rivera. Screenplay: Kathleen Collins. Cinematography: Ronald K. Gray. Film editing: Kathleen Collins, Ronald K. Gray. Music: Michael Minard.

A philosophy professor and her husband, a successful artist, lease a summer home in the country, where she tries to work on a paper about ecstatic experience and he is struck by the beauty of the countryside as well as the young Puerto Rican women in the neighborhood. Her discontent with the isolation and his flirtations leads to some reassessments of their marriage. This is the stuff of which New Yorker short stories are written, and writer-director Kathleen Collins makes her best of it. But did we mention that Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), are Black? It's not something that Collins makes much of in the expected sense: They don't experience bigotry or discrimination in the course of the film. Collins, who was also Black, does something more deft with the fact: She keeps it present in the consciousness and the dialogue of the Rogerses, who seem to cling to the antiquated term "Negro" in ways that we don't expect from hip, educated people in the 1980s. Losing Ground is not about race, but it's informed by it in subtle ways. The film was made on a shoestring budget and sometimes shows it: The photography is sometimes murky and some of the acting a little amateurish. But its exploration of ideas and emotions is the product of keen observation and sharp writing. Collins died only a few years after the film was made, and didn't get to see it find an audience: The film played only at a few festivals and never received a theatrical release, but it was greeted with praise by critics after it was screened at a retrospective of Black films in 2015.

Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975)

Thierno Leye and Dyella Touré in Xala

Cast: Thierno Leye, Myriam Niang, Seune Samb, Fatim Diagne, Younouss Seye, Mustapha Ture, Iliaman Sagna, Dieynaba Niang, Langouste Drobe, Farba Sarr, Abdoulaye Boye, Papa Diop, Martin Sow, Mamadou Sarr, Makhouredia Gueye. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Orlando L. López, Seydina D. Saye, Farba Seck. Film editing: Florence Eymon. Music: Samba Diabare Samb.

Xala is a sharp-edged, often very funny satire on the failings of postcolonial Africa, namely, the adoption of European ways to the neglect of traditional African culture. The result is a kind of impotence, which is what the title means, and which manifests itself not only in the sexual dysfunction experienced by El Hadj Aboucader Beye (Thierno Leye) on the night of his wedding to his third wife but also in the dysfunctional business and political world to which El Hadj belongs. His first wife, Adja (Seune Samb), and his second, Oumi (Younouss Seye), are very much alive and present to kibitz at the wedding reception. Adja sticks to traditional garb, while Oumi adopts European dress, so they represent two polarities in El Hadj's life and culture. He also has a daughter by Adja, Rama (Myriam Niang), who is sharply critical of his Westernized ways: When he offers her a glass of water and pours it from an Evian bottle, she snaps that she doesn't drink imported water. (Evian becomes another symbol of his European ways, when we see his chauffeur use a bottle of it to wash El Hadj's Mercedes and another to fill up the radiator.) Rama also refuses to speak anything but Wolof to El Hadj, even though he replies in French. The film deals largely with El Hadj's attempts to cure his sexual dysfunction, which leads him eventually to the holy man of his chauffeur's village, who temporarily cures him, but then exacts a revenge when El Hadj's check bounces, teaching him a lesson about ignoring the people of his country while kowtowing to the Europeans. Xala is a keenly observant movie, sometimes to the point of discomfort, and though its two-hour run time is a little slackly paced and the acting sometimes not all you could wish, it makes its point effectively.

Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

Invention for Destruction (Karel Zeman, 1958)

Cast: Lubor Tokos, Arnost Navrátil, Miroslav Holub, Frantisek Siégr, Václav Kyzlink, Jana Zatloukalová. Screenplay: Frantisek Hrubín, Milan Vácha, Karel Zeman, based on a novel by Jules Verne. Cinematography: Antonín Horák, Bohuslav Pikhart, Jirí Tarantik. Production design: Karel Zeman. Costume design: Karel Postrehovsky. Film editing: Zdenek Stehlík. Music: Zdenek Liska.

Where has this wonderful film been all my life? Invention for Destruction (aka The Deadly Invention and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) is catnip to a lover of Victorian book illustration like me, with its miraculous transformation of old line engravings into sets and costumes as well as its astonishing blend of animation with live action. It makes other attempts to bring the steampunk aesthetic and the adventures in the books of Jules Verne, including such well-known movies as the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1958) and the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954), look phony -- they look like they were made in the 1950s, whereas the world of Karel Zeman's film looks authentically late 19th-century. This is the real thing: Verne, and just as importantly, his illustrator Léon Benett, brought to life with both respect and whimsy. The latter quality, which gives us some fantastic machinery and even some roller-skating camels, is just as important as the first. Zeman takes Verne more seriously than his great predecessor Georges Méliès did in his pioneering evocations of the Vernesque future, but not as seriously as Hollywood did, preferring occasional tongue-in-cheek renditions of the author's visions. Still, Invention for Destruction, based loosely on Verne's 1896 novel Facing the Flag, has serious undertones in its treatment of the titular invention, a clear analogue of Einstein's investigation into the potential of atomic energy and the terrifying weapons that evolved from it. I'm just astonished that it has taken almost a lifetime of movie-watching for me to get around to discovering this amazing film. 

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949)

Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Garrett in Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin, Richard Lane, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Harry Tugend, George Wells, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Roger Edens, Conrad Salinger, songs by Edens, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Energetic almost to the point of frenzy, Take Me Out to the Ball Game had a legendarily troubled production. Although the credited director is Busby Berkeley, he reportedly had some sort of breakdown early in the filming and the direction was taken over by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who are also credited with coming up with the rather thin story, as well as the choreography. Esther Williams, who later confessed her unhappiness with the shoot, was not the first choice for female lead, but Ginger Rogers turned it down and Judy Garland was deemed too unwell to take on the role of K.C. Higgins, the woman who inherits a baseball team on which Kelly's and Frank Sinatra's characters are star players. Williams doesn't even get her usual water ballet extravaganza, but just a turn in a swimming pool that sets the ogling Kelly and Sinatra characters in pursuit of her. Though Sinatra was in the midst of his early fame as an idol of the bobby-soxers, he wasn't considered handsome or strong enough to be a romantic lead, so he lost Kathryn Grayson to Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945). This time, Kelly's Eddie O'Brien wins K.C., and Sinatra's Dennis Ryan is left with Betty Garrett's character, as the Sinatra character would be in On the Town (Kelly and Donen, 1949). Take Me Out to the Ball Game belongs to the peak MGM Technicolor musical era, and it was produced by the head of the musicals unit, Arthur Freed, but it's a decidedly second-rank movie. Although billed third, after Sinatra and Williams, Kelly takes over, including a long solo number, "The Hat My Dear Old Father Wore Upon St. Patrick's Day," in which he dances jigs and shows off Irish step-dancing moves, as well as borrowing a few of James Cagney's familiar struts and stiff-legged movements. The best Freed Unit musicals can leave you exhilarated, but the clumsy plot, the flat romance (Kelly and Williams have no chemistry), and the mediocre songs of this one are more likely to induce exhaustion.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Jack Conway, 1987)

Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Cast: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales, Áine Ní Mhuiri, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Peter Nelson, based on a book by Brian Moore. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Terry Rawlings. Music: Georges Delerue.

The Dublin of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a nest of vipers, full of people with stunted lives, blinkered vision, and downright meanness. The effect of this is to make Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) look good by comparison, even though her life has been stunted and her vision is none too wide either. Perhaps she has had enough of the meanness exhibited by her late Aunt D'Arcy (Wendy Hiller) and by her spiky landlady (Marie Kean) and the other denizens of the boarding house into which she has recently moved, that she seems almost sunny and pleasant as if to defy them. She carries with her two icons of her past: a dour portrait of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These images represent her efforts to control her alcoholism through self-discipline and religion, but the truth is that both only serve to make the problem worse, exacerbating her guilt when she fails at the task. In late middle age, with a small annuity and a clump of savings, she has little to look forward to, so she grasps at anything that represents hope -- or at least a surcease from loneliness -- which manifests itself as her landlady's brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins), a stubby middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed mustache who has recently returned from the United States. He's a phony, of course, a man full of schemes like opening a hamburger restaurant in Dublin that will never turn out, and whose American career in the New York hotel business amounted to being a doorman. He latches on to Judith because he thinks she has money stashed away. She gravitates to him because he represents a wider world than she has known in her years taking care of her aunt and earning a little money by giving piano lessons. It's a bleak and unforgiving tale, spiked with a little unsavory sex -- the rivalry between Madden and his nephew (Ian McNeice), a corpulent would-be poet who sponges off of his mother, for the attentions of the housemaid Mary (Rudi Davies), whom Madden rapes when she spurns him. No one comes off well in this movie, but I couldn't help being drawn in by the performances of Smith, Hoskins, Hiller, and the others, even when their characters were at their most unlikable.

The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

Paul Newman in The Hustler

Cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Murray Hamilton, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Clifford A. Pellow, Jake LaMotta, Gordon B. Clarke, Alexander Rose, Carolyn Coates, Carl York, Vincent Gardenia. Screenplay: Sidney Carroll, Robert Rossen, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Kenyon Hopkins.

You can't say The Hustler isn't educational: It made me Google the difference between pool and billiards. Otherwise, it stands as a direction the American film might have gone in the 1960s, after the breakup of the studios, the waning of anticommunist hysteria, and the weakening of Production Code enforcement. Instead, the movies went in the direction signaled by the Oscars for that year, in which Academy voters chose West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins) over The Hustler as best picture, indicating a trend toward big, bright entertainment rather than gritty, intense films of the sort that were being turned out in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and '60s. The Hustler seems more like a film from the 1970s than one of the better films of the 1960s. It did land Oscars for Harry Horner's production design and Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, as well it should have. CinemaScope could be an unwieldy format, especially in black-and-white, but Schüfftan mastered it beautifully, working with director Robert Rossen to make the most of Horner's unglamorous and sometimes cramped settings. The camera sometimes gives us the full spread of a set and lets us search for the key figures in it: The introduction of Piper Laurie's Sarah is not a grand entrance or a tell-all closeup but an at first insignificant figure in a train station diner, gaining prominence only through the eyeline of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson. Later, when Sarah returns to that diner, Eddie is seated at the far right of the frame, not front and center as you'd expect the protagonist of a movie to be. Pool, being a horizontal game, is more in line with the demands of CinemaScope, and it's here that Dede Allen's editing works particularly well. As for the actors, Newman, Laurie, George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason all covered themselves with glory -- and Oscar nominations, which of course Scott declined. If I have reservations about The Hustler it's that the bluesy score by Kenyon Hopkins is laid on a little too thickly and that its story, hinging on a suicide and a redemption, strays to the edge of being contrived and melodramatic, but at least doesn't fall completely into happily ever after mode.

Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941)

Robert Newton, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, and Emlyn Williams in Major Barbara

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Walter Hudd, David Tree, Deborah Kerr, Donald Calthrop, Marie Ault, Cathleen Cordell, Torin Thatcher, Miles Malleson, Felix Aylmer, Stanley Holloway. Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, based on his play. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: Charles Frend, David Lean. Music: William Walton.

George Bernard Shaw's plays often seem to me as if they're about to collapse underneath their own cleverness: so many paradoxes, so much witty dialogue, such tantalizingly heretical ideas. Major Barbara is a prime example of this, a duel between faith and realism, between rich and poor, between capitalism and Fabian socialism, between men and women, all treated with the would-be drawing-room-comedy lightness of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, down to the climactic revelation that the play's ostensible hero is a "foundling" (a euphemism for "bastard"). But the film version slumps down into tedium because Shaw can't resist trying to make his characters, especially Barbara (wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller), into something like real people whenever he wants the audience to feel something instead of just laughing at the bright repartee. The film remains a three-act play, despite attempts to provide some scenes -- the initial meeting of Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison being archly ardent), the fight between Bill Walker (Robert Newton) and Todger Fairmile (Torin Thatcher), Barbara's tossing her Salvation Army bonnet (and almost herself) into the Thames, and the tour of the hellish munitions factory and its heavenly benevolent-capitalist planned community -- in between the ones we would ordinarily see on stage. We are supposed to continue the dialogue of ideas among ourselves after the movie's over, but the effect of the two-hour-plus barrage of wit is to make me want to be stupid again. The film was rightly celebrated for the skill of its performers and for the tenacity with which it was filmed during the Blitz, but as a whole it's an achievement that hasn't stood the test of time.

On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1949)

Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, and Gene Kelly in On the Town

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Florence Bates, Alice Pearce, George Meader. Screenplay: Adolph Green, Betty Comden, based on their book for a musical play. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: orchestrations by Conrad Salinger, songs by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Edens, Adolph Green, Betty Comden.

A funny thing happened after I watched On the Town: I found myself humming "Lucky to Be Me" and "Some Other Time," songs by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden that aren't in the movie. They were in the original Broadway production, but were cut by producer Roger Edens, along with several others, and replaced by his own songs, almost all of which are forgettable. Bernstein was pissed off, as he should have been: "Lucky to Be Me" was perfect for one of Gene Kelly's numbers, and "Some Other Time" almost begged to be sung by Frank Sinatra and the rest of the company. Those excisions, and the Breen Office's insistence that the song "New York, New York" had to describe the city as "a wonderful town," instead of the original "helluva town," weigh down this much-loved but overrated MGM musical, which at least managed to do some location filming in the city after Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen rebelled against shooting the entire musical in the New York sets of the studio's back lot. The location shots give some life to the movie, but it still looks cheap and stagy in comparison with later, more lavish productions like An American in Paris (1951). Kelly and Donen, along with Comden, Green, and cinematographer Harold Rosson, would redeem themselves with Singin' in the Rain (1952), which has the wit and buoyancy On the Town sadly lacks.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, Anne Jackson. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson. Cinematography: John Alcott. Production design: Roy Walker. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind.

There are those of us who don't love The Shining. There used to be a lot more of us: When it first opened, Stanley Kubrick's movie met with lukewarm reviews and a general feeling that it was a well-made but not particularly interesting horror movie. Today, the word tossed about often is "masterpiece," and the ranking on IMDb is a whopping 8.4 out of a possible 10. But for me the film is all tricks and no payoff, and the central problem is Jack Nicholson. I know, it's an intensely committed performance, like all of his. But it's one-note crazy almost from the start, partly because the demonic eyebrows and sharklike grin are in full play. Jack Torrance should go mad, nut just be mad, and Kubrick hasn't allowed Nicholson to make the transition of which the actor is fully capable. But Kubrick is less interested in creating characters than in playing with shock effects. Shelley Duvall is forced to turn from a loving and resourceful mother to a blithering nutcase before reverting to the former by the end of the film. Then, too, there are the clichés on which the story is based: the isolated hotel built on the old Indian burying ground, the hedge maze, the kindly but obviously doomed Black man, and so on. Even the supernatural elements are muddled: What does the extrasensory communication, the "shining" of Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Halloran (Scatman Crothers), have to do with the presence of ghosts in the hotel beyond being a way to provide a rescue at the end? The film works for me only if I let myself take on some of its director's notorious cold detachment, and I want movies to let me do more than just admire technique.