Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana

Cast: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Skip Ward, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller, John Huston, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Art direction: Stephen B. Grimes. Film editing: Ralph Kemplen. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

It's a movie adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams, so you know you're going to see a lot of Acting and hear a lot of rather florid dialogue. As for the capital-A acting, it's Ava Gardner who almost steals the show, just by being her gorgeous, free-spirited self. It's a great part for an actress in her middle years (Gardner was 42), as the casting of Bette Davis in the original Broadway production suggests. Gardner plays Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of a slightly louche Puerto Vallarta hotel, who finds herself welcoming to the hostelry an old friend, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), along with a company of teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college, whose tour bus he has just hijacked. He has come to recuperate from a variety of scandals, including some carrying-on with the nubile Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who is chaperoned by the up-tight Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall in an Oscar-nominated performance). Maxine is reluctant to shelter Shannon's flock, but his apparent disordered state of body and mind breaks down her resistance. Soon they are joined by another itinerant pair, Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her nonagenarian grandfather, known as Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and billed by Hannah as "the world's oldest living poet." If I give the acting award to Gardner out of this company it's because her part is the most entertaining and she knows it. Kerr is stuck in yet another of her spinster roles, and she's given the burden of becoming the voice of truth and righteousness in the film. Fortunately, she's more than up to it, making Hannah a more interesting character than you might expect. It's Burton who comes off worst in the film, maybe because the screenplay's opening-up of the role, giving Shannon scenes that weren't originally contrived by Williams, fragments the character and causes Burton to have to act out what should have been a backstory better left to our imagination. We didn't need the prologue in which Shannon scandalizes his church and the scenes of rebellious misbehavior along the tour to understand why he's so close to a breakdown when they arrive at Maxine's hotel -- Burton is more than capable of delivering that kind of exposition, and seeing them only complicates our reaction to the character. So it's a mixed bag as a movie, though not without its pleasures and some genuinely moving scenes. It also suffers less from Hollywood censorship than most of the film adaptations of Williams's plays: By 1964 things had loosened up enough that the screenplay can be a little more explicit about things that had been swept under the carpet in the 1950s. I do happen to find that the implication that Miss Fellowes is a closeted lesbian unnecessary and tasteless, especially since it inspires disgust in the otherwise freewheeling Maxine, but such were the times.   

Revenge (Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989)

Cast: Aleksandr Pan, Valentina Te, Kasim Zhakibayev, Lyubov Germanova, Oleg Li, Juozas Budraitis, Zinaida Em, Maksim Munzuk, Yerik Zholzhaksynov, Nikolai Tacheyev. Screenplay: Anatoli Kim, based on his novel. Cinematography: Sergei Kosmanev. Production design: Yelena Yelitseyeva. Film editing: Polina Shtain. Music: Vladislav Shut. 

Rhapsodic, enigmatic, brutal, poetic, probing, obscure ... I could go on assembling adjectives to describe Yermek Shinarbayev's Revenge. It may just suffice to say that it was a film made in Kazakhstan as the Soviet Union was crumbling around it, and that it's an attempt to bridge civilizations: The dialogue is in Russian, while the story deals with Koreans. The director is Kazakh, the screenwriter a Russian citizen with Korean ancestry. The story deals with the attempt to avenge the murder of a little girl by her half-crazed teacher, and it spans several decades in the 20th century -- not to mention that it's preceded by a prologue set in 17th-century Korea. But it's not as head-spinning as that sounds: Though there are mysterious, even magical characters involved in its plot, that plot is relatively traditional, a matter of crime and retribution. Those versed in the history of the Korean diaspora into Russia may have an edge on those of us who aren't, but the impact of the story, or perhaps stories -- the film is divided into seven "tales" plus the prologue -- is strong even if you let the eccentricity of the way they're told just wash over you. 

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Kurt Kreuger, Linda Darnell, and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours

Cast: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Finch, Stuart Gilmore. Musical director: Alfred Newman. 

Preston Sturges's familiar "stock company" of character actors like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Julius Tannen, Robert Greig, and others served an important role in creating a context in which otherwise straight leading actor types like Joel McCrea, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck could let themselves go and behave in ways that they normally wouldn't on screen. No film demonstrates this function better than Unfaithfully Yours, in which the silliness of performers like Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, and others let Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell loosen up and go a little bit crazy -- or in Harrison's case, quite a bit more than crazy. Psychotic, to be blunt about it. This was Sturges's least successful with audiences of his major comic films of the 1940s, and it marked the start of the  decline of his career. It may be that postwar audiences were not ready to laugh at the kind of mayhem that Unfaithfully Yours contains -- after all, a man brutally slashing his wife with a freshly sharpened razor is not an image that normally elicits laughs. There's a failure of tone in the way Sturges writes and stages the scene, which takes place only in the mind of Harrison's character, Sir Alfred De Carter, as he conducts a symphony orchestra in a performance of Rossini's Overture to Semiramide (somewhat padded out with a Rossiniesque pastiche by music director Alfred Newman). It's all a setup, of course, for the slapstick sequence in which Sir Alfred tries to follow through on the imagined murder, only to screw things up monumentally and hilariously. But the premise is sour to start with. It encourages us to believe that Sir Alfred is the kind of man who would not only imagine killing his wife but also follow through on the idea persistently, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to off the Road Runner. The film may end with the restoration of order, and the De Carters cozily snuggling up to each other, but it's hard to resist the thought that something else could happen to make him snap tomorrow. Still, that's the major blemish on what is, if you don't think too closely about it, a very funny movie with one of Harrison's best performances, and a lot of sublime comic bits supplied by the stock company players. Sturges's dialogue, as usual, is mile-a-minute laugh lines, going by so fast that the captioners have trouble keeping up with them. It would be pure giddy fun, if the plot weren't intrinsically so dark. 

Law of the Border (Lütfi Akad, 1966)

Yilmaz Güney and Hikmet Olgun in Law of the Border

Cast: Yilmaz Güney, Pervin Par, Erol Tas, Atilla Ergün, Tuncer Necmioglu, Muharrem Gürses, Hikmet Olgun, Aydemir Akbas, Sirri Elitas, Tuncel Kurtiz, Osman Alyanak, Ahmet Dunyal Topatan. Screenplay: Lütfi Akad, Yilmaz Güney. Cinematography: Ali Ugur. Film editing: Ali Ün. Music: Nida Tüfekçi. 

There's a new lawman in this border town, and a pretty new schoolteacher. There's a charismatic outlaw who wants to go straight for the sake of his young son. There's a predatory landowner. There are gunfights and shootouts and a conflict between farmers and ranchers (well, sheepherders). There are, in short, all the tropes and formulas (not to say clichés) of the American Western. But the border in this case is the one between Turkey and Syria, which only goes to show how potent and universal the myth and melodrama that informs both our Westerns and Lütfi Akad's Law of the Border really is. The presiding genius behind this film is not so much the director, although Akad is a fine one, as the star, Yilmaz Güney, who plays the would-be reformed outlaw, Hidir. The film was based on his story, although much revised by Akad, and it solidified him as a major star, kind of the Clint Eastwood of Turkish film. Like Eastwood, Güney not only acted but also directed and dabbled in politics. He was a Kurd, a member of an ethnic group that is the nexus of conflict in at least three countries. His political activity got him in trouble with the Turkish junta and led to his exile and an attempt to destroy all copies of his movies, including Law of the Border. Only one badly deteriorated print of the film remained by the time it was unearthed and an attempt was made to restore it. Even the flawed restoration, however, is a fascinating look at a region that still pervades the headlines. But as the comparison to our Westerns suggests, it's a film that transcends boundaries, a story about old and new, freedom and repression, tradition and change, and other eternal dichotomies. Güney's performance is mesmerizing, and he's well-supported by a cast that includes non-professionals drawn from the village where the film was shot, adding a documentary realism to a familiar story.  

Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka, 1975)

Bembol Roco in Manila in the Claws of Light

Cast: Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel, Lou Salvador Jr., Joonee Gamboa, Pio De Castro III, Danilo Posadas, Joe Jardi, Spanky Manikan, Edipolo Erosido, Pancho Pelagio, Lily Gamboa Mendoza, Tommy Yap, Juling Bagabaldo. Screenplay: Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr., based on a novel by Edgardo Reyes. Cinematography: Mike De Leon, Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr. Film editing: Ike Jarlego Jr., Edgardo Jarlego. Music: Max Jocson.

The title, Manila in the Claws of Light (in which "Light" is sometimes translated as "Neon"), is enigmatic. But there's nothing enigmatic about this straightforwardly harrowing look at the working class in the Marcos-era Philippines. The protagonist, Julio (Bembol Roco), has left his village, where he was a fisherman, to search for his girlfriend, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who was lured away to Manila with other girls by a woman who called herself "Mrs. Cruz" and promised good factory jobs and schooling. When we first meet Julio, he's scrounging for work at construction sites, having been robbed of the money he brought with him to the city. The other workmen help Julio survive after he collapses from hunger on the first day, and their friendship and solidarity in the face of the bosses who routinely cheat them of their full pay help get him on his feet. In his spare time, he continues his search for Ligaya, having learned that she's been lured into prostitution and is now the mistress of Ah Tek, who runs an import-export business. Julio stakes out Ah Tek's business in Manila's Chinatown, hoping for a glimpse of Ligaya. Meanwhile, he endures unemployment with the help of his friends, and survives a bad period by working briefly in a male brothel. His eventual reunion with Ligaya is brief and tragic. The film provides a fascinating look at the underworld of a city that could stand for almost any other metropolis, and director Lino Brocka keeps it moving with a well-paced alternation between desperation and recovery until the shattering end. The cast is uniformly fine, and the realistic view of the city keeps the story from tilting into melodrama.

Bigger (George Gallo, 2018)

Tyler Hoechlin, Calum Von Moger, and Aneurin Barnard in Bigger

Cast: Tyler Hoechlin, Julianne Hough, Kevin Durand, Aneurin Barnard, Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Victoria Justice, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, Max Martini, Colton Haynes, Tom Arnold. Screenplay: Andy Weiss, George Gallo, Brad Furman, Ellen Furman. Cinematography: Michael Negrin. Production design: Stephen J. Lineweaver. Film editing: Sophie Corra. Music: Jeff Beal. 

There is probably a good movie to be made about bodybuilding and fitness, but Bigger isn't it. A good one would deal with the ongoing questions about supplement use and abuse, the influence of steroids and other performance enhancers and practices, and the role of LGBT people in popularizing the bodybuilder image. Bigger ignores the role of supplements and enhancers almost entirely, and reduces the effect of gays on bodybuilding to just one of the stigmas Joe Weider (Tyler Hoechlin) encounters on his way to success as a promoter. What we get instead is a cliché rags to riches story, in which Weider battles antisemitism and a ruthless publisher-promoter called Bill Hauk (Kevin Durand) in the film, but based on fitness entrepreneur Bob Hoffman, to become a leading magazine publisher, fitness equipment and supplement manufacturer, and promoter of professional bodybuilding competitors, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calum Von Moger). Unfortunately, the film generates no real tension in tracking Weider's rise: The ugliness of the antisemitism he encounters feels incidental, rather than pervasive, and the tension with his apparently mentally disturbed mother (Nadine Lewington) feels like hack psychology. Hoechlin is a good, attractive actor, but he's forced to deliver his lines in a strange, tight accent that is, I suppose, meant to be Montreal-Canadian, but just manages to be distracting, especially since it doesn't match the one used by Robert Forster in the scenes in which he plays the older Joe Weider. Durand goes way over the top as the movie's villain, but there's some fun to be had in Von Moger's imitation of Schwarzenegger. It's a little hard to see who the film is for: People into bodybuilding won't learn anything they didn't already know -- and will probably take issue with what the film tells them about the actual people involved -- and people who aren't will take issue with the uncritical approach to the subject. 

On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951)

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in On Moonlight Bay

Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Billy Gray, Leon Ames, Rosemary DeCamp, Jack Smith, Mary Wickes, Ellen Corby, Sig Arno, Jeffrey Stevens, Eddie Marr, Henry East. Screenplay: Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson, based on stories by Booth Tarkington. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Douglas Bacon. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Max Steiner. 

Leon Ames must have felt right at home playing the paterfamilias of a Midwestern household in 1917 in the Warner Bros. musical On Moonlight Bay: It was the same role he had played in 1944, when he was the paterfamilias of a St. Louis household in 1904 in Vincente Minnelli's MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In both films he comes under fire for making the household move, upsetting his wife (Rosemary DeCamp in the former movie, Mary Astor in the latter), his daughter (Doris Day/Judy Garland), his bratty kid (Billy Gray/Margaret O'Brien), and even the family servant (Mary Wickes/Marjorie Main). In both films, the daughter falls in love with the boy next door (Gordon MacRae/Tom Drake). There's even a big scene set at Christmas in both movies. Granted, On Moonlight Bay suffers from comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis. For one thing, the songs in the latter are better, and Garland brings a note of heartbreak to the film that Day can't quite match. But the Warners movie gets a little life from a screenplay based on the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkington, a writer not much read anymore but who inspired two classic movies, Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935) and The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). The stories, about the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy, clearly inspired On Moonlight Bay's subplot about Wesley Winfield (Gray), kid brother to Marjorie Winfield (Day). Wesley is a scamp who purloins one of Marjorie's letters to her boyfriend, William Sherman (MacRae), and tries to pass it off in English class as his own composition. He torments Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith), who tries to court Marjorie, and he even manages to convince his teacher, Miss Stevens (Ellen Corby), that the reason he falls asleep in class is that his father is a drunkard who abuses his mother and sister. Much of this stuff is clumsily directed, but it's an effective enough distraction from the rather routine romance of Marjorie and William and from the tepid musical numbers, set mostly to old parlor ballads and turn-of-the-century love songs like the one that gives the film its title. Day is in sweet voice as usual, but her role in the movie and the songs she's asked to sing don't give her much to do, and she doesn't really have much chemistry with MacRae. Nevertheless, On Moonlight Bay was popular enough that it inspired a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953), that reunited most of the cast. 

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

Will Oldham and Daniel London in Old Joy

Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith, Robin Rosenberg, Keri Moran, Autumn Campbell, Steve Doughton, Matt McCormick, Darren Prolsen, Jillian Wiseneck. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt. Cinematography: Peter Sillen. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Yo La Tengo. 

After watching Old Joy, I went to IMDb to check if I had ever seen Daniel London or Will Oldham in anything else. Turns out, I probably have: Both have done several movies and a lot of TV, but never anything else that forces them to hold the screen the way they do in Kelly Reichardt's film. Often, the very unfamiliarity of the "stars" of a movie is its greatest strength, allowing you to see the characters they play unfiltered through a previously established persona. No matter how effectively someone like Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis may transform themselves from film to film, you're still watching them act rather than be a character; you're conscious to some degree of what they've done before. The freshness of Old Joy lies in getting to know Mark (London) and Kurt (Oldham), to work out their backstories and speculate about their motives. If Mark and Kurt had been played by, let's say, Jake Gyllenhaal and Seth Rogen, we'd have different responses to the characters than we do. Old Joy is a movie without a plot: Mark gets a call from his old friend, Kurt, who wants to take him to a hot springs he has discovered in the Oregon backwoods. Mark feels obligated to check with his pregnant wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), before setting out on this weekend adventure -- the slight tension in their conversation hints that Tanya doesn't quite trust Kurt, and that maybe Mark would be happy with an excuse not to go. But the two men, accompanied by Mark's dog, Lucy (played by Reichardt's own dog, Lucy, the "co-star" of her 2008 film Wendy and Lucy), set out for the weekend. They get lost on the way to the springs and spend the night camping out in a sort of dumping ground on a back road, but get their bearings in the morning and hike to their destination, an isolated spring in the middle of the forest with no one else around. Mark soaks blissfully in his hot tub, but Kurt is more unsettled, getting out to smoke some weed and to give Mark a shoulder rub. Then they return to the city, where at the end we see Kurt wandering restlessly at night. There are no feral mountain men to threaten the two, as in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and no animal predators menace them -- any such tensions we supply from our own imaginations. What we are left with is a portrait of an aging, fraying friendship of two men who have gone different ways in their lives, so that at midlife Mark is settled and relatively prosperous (he drives a Volvo, that token vehicle of the middle class urban liberal), whereas Kurt is still feckless, rootless, and maybe intensely frustrated -- there are some hints that Kurt is sexually attracted to Mark. The past weighs on both of them: The film's title comes from a line spoken by Kurt, "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy." It's a film to be savored, to be recalled in the hours after you've watched it. 

Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor, 2018)

Demian Hernández in Too Late to Die Young

Cast: Demian Hernández, Antar Machado, Magdalena Tótoro, Matías Oviedo, Andrés Aliaga, Antonia Zegers, Mercedes Mujica, Gabriel Cañas, Alejandro Goic, Eyal Meyer, Cecilia Rainero, Michael Silva, Luciano Jadrievich, Pablo Giesen, Millantú Hilbert, Alejandro Garrós. Screenplay: Domingo Sotomayor. Cinematography: Inti Briones. Production design: Estefania Larrain. Film editing: Catalina Marín Duarte. 

Too Late to Die Young tosses viewers into an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and leaves us to figure out where and who they are, and why they're doing things. It's usual for movies to do this, of course, and we've all learned to follow the clues that lead us to the answers. But Dominga Sotomayor doesn't make it easy for us, especially because there are so many characters that it takes us time to figure out which one is the center of the film. In this case, it's Sofia (Demian Hernández), a teenage girl struggling to find her way into womanhood, and that's a situation familiar enough to give us some grounding. Eventually, we realize, if we're patient and attentive, that the group of people around Sofia are Chilean families who are fleeing urban life (and politics) in the city of Santiago, the lights of which we can see from their mountainside retreat, a kind of latter-day hippie commune. As the sometimes feckless adults do their thing, Sofia develops an infatuation with the somewhat older Ignacio (Matías Oviedo), as meanwhile a boy her own age, Lucas (Antar Machado), is falling for her. Sofia's father and mother have separated, and she has come to this new community with him but longs to live with her mother. She expects the mother to visit them for the New Year's celebration but is crushed when she doesn't arrive. The other character on whom the film focuses is young Clara Magdalena Tótoro), who gets separated from her dog, Frida, finds her again (perhaps), but loses her once more. It's a kind of metaphor for the unstable relationships that are the core of the film, which has been seen as a commentary on the instability of Chilean politics and society after the fall of Pinochet. The New Year's party becomes a central focus of the film, and it precipitates the film's denouement by sparking a forest fire that destroys the encampment. It's a movie full of well-observed moments and fine performances by its mostly young cast, especially Hernández, who transitioned to male after the film's shooting ended.