Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Betty Balfour and Gordon Harker in Champagne

Cast: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Ferdinand von Alten, Gordon Harker, Jack Trevor, Claude Hulbert, Marcel Vibert, Hannah Jones, Clifford Heatherley. Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Eliot Stannard. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold. 

Champagne is flat. Still, thank you to the Criterion Channel for the opportunity to see one of the Alfred Hitchcock films I hadn't seen before. Hitchcock himself disowned the movie, hating its cobbled-together script and disliking his leading lady, Betty Balfour, whom, according to Stephen Whitty's invaluable The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, he called "a piece of suburban obscenity." Balfour is not that bad, I think, though she resorts to cutesy mannerisms and she's obviously more in love with the camera than with her leading man, the bland Jean Bradin. The movie is a romantic comedy about an heiress whose pursuit of her man involves flying to mid-ocean to meet him on an ocean liner headed for France. When they reach Paris they quarrel and break up, whereupon she decides to live it up until her father (Gordon Harker) arrives to tell her that he's lost his fortune. She looks for work and lands a job as a "flower girl," handing out flowers to male patrons at a rather sketchy restaurant. A slightly sinister man (Ferdinand von Alten) whom she met on the ship takes an interest in her, but her boyfriend arrives, wanting to make up. A surprise twist makes everything all right. Without much to work with either in story or cast, Hitchcock, with the aid of cinematographer Jack E. Cox, turns his attention to some innovative camerawork, at least providing us with something to watch as the plot grinds on. Some of my disaffection for the movie may lie in the fact that it's a silent film without musical accompaniment, perhaps owing to copyright issues. Although the music supplied for silent films today is often sub-par, it at least distracts one a bit from trying to figure out what the actors are saying between intertitles. 

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Gabrielle Anwar and Billy Wirth in Body Snatchers

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Billy Wirth, Reilly Murphy, Christine Elise, R. Lee Irmey, Kathleen Doyle, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips. Screenplay: Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara's version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers is nothing if not economical. The economy extends to the title: Don Siegel's 1956 version and Philip Kaufman's 1978 one were called Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Ferrara even drops the definite article. The story, too, has been pared down. Ferrara's version sets the story on a military base in Alabama instead of the urban California of the previous films. It also shifts the focus to a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), who comes with her family to the base when her father (Terry Kinney) is sent there by the EPA to investigate chemical pollution. The dynamic of a rebellious adolescent in a military culture is perfect for the conflict between individualism and conformity, the theme that unites all of the versions of Finney's story. In addition to her father, Marti's dysfunctional family consists of her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she dislikes, and her young half-brother, Andy (Reilly Muphy), who annoys her. Andy is the first to sense that something is seriously wrong in their new home when, during an art class at day care, all the other kids produce identical finger paintings. As they hold up their paintings, the teacher murmurs approvingly at each one until she comes to a halt at Andy's, which is unique. She clearly disapproves. One by one, the fact that people are being somehow replaced by identical but emotionless beings becomes clear. Ferrara is not particularly interested in the mechanics of invasion and transformation that took up more narrative space in the previous films. We get some nicely disgusting body horror scenes, but the response of Marti to the alien takeover is what drives the plot as she teams up with a handsome young helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth) to fight off the invaders. Tim's stoic military manner keeps us unsure whether he's not already one of the pod people, an ambiguity that persists until the end of the movie. Body Snatchers is a good rethinking of material whose previous versions are now considered classics. The source material was mined again for a fourth version, The invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), which starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig but bombed with the critics.   

Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

Koji Yakusho in Cure

Cast: Koji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Anna Nakagawa, Misayo Haruki, Yoriko Doguchi,  Denden, Ren Osuji, Masahiro Toda, Toji Kawahigashi, Yukijiro Hotaru, Shun Nakayama. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Tomoyuki Maruo. Film editing: Kan Suzuki. Music: Gary Ashiya. 

The endings of horror movies typically don't provide a definite resolution of the plot, completely eliminating the cause of the horror, if only to leave things open for a sequel. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is no exception: The ending is a kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it, except that even if you don't blink it's still enigmatic. That's not because Kurosawa has a sequel in mind, but that he wants you to stay as unsettled as you've been throughout the movie. The title is ironic: There's no cure for the "disease" the film has shown us because the dark drives that afflict the characters and the motiveless crimes they commit may be endemic, part of the nature of being human, submerged until something triggers them. Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is a police detective in charge of investigating a series of strange murders in which ordinary, even respected people -- a teacher, a doctor, a policeman -- kill people and leave an X slashed across their chests. In some cases, the victim is close to the killer and in others they're random. Eventually, Takabe discovers that the one link between the killers is that they all came in contact with a very eccentric young man who at first claims to be suffering from amnesia. Takabe discovers that his name is Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), and that he's a former student of psychology with a special interest in the 18th century physician Franz Mesmer, a controversial figure in the use of hypnotism to treat patients. Is Mamiya, whose manner is infuriatingly passive-aggressive, responsible for the psychotic breaks of the unlikely killers? It's a conventional horror-movie plot treated in a brilliantly unconventional way by Kurosawa, who perhaps in his own way hypnotizes the viewer into a persistent sense of dread. The performances by Yakusho and Hagiwara are terrific.     

No Man of Her Own (Wesley Ruggles, 1932)

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in No Man of Her Own

Cast: Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, George Barbier, J. Farrell MacDonald, Tommy Conlon, Walter Walker, Paul Ellis, Charley Grapewin. Screenplay: Maurine Dallas Watkins, Milton Herbert Gropper, Edmund Goulding, Benjamin Glazer, based on a novel by Val Lewton. Cinematography: Lee Tover. Film editing: Otho Lovering. Costume design: Travis Banton. 

If actors weren't cattle, as Alfred Hitchcock is reported to have said, they were at least property, and their studios treated them as such. Clark Gable was becoming one of MGM's most valuable properties when he was loaned out to Paramount to make the only film in which he starred with Carole Lombard, who later became his wife. It was part of a complicated talent swamp initiated by Marion Davies, who had clout with MGM because of her relationship with William Randolph Hearst, who produced films for her that were distributed by MGM. Davies wanted Bing Crosby for a movie, so Paramount traded him to MGM for Gable and No Man of Her Own. Lombard became his co-star only because Miriam Hopkins didn't want to take second billing to Gable. The studio mountains labored to bring forth a cinematic mouse: a passable romantic comedy remembered only for the star teaming. Gable and Lombard are very good in it, though he comes off somewhat better than she does. Lombard was best in movies that gave her license to clown, like Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) and My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936). In No Man of Her Own she's simply a woman who knows what she wants, and it isn't necessarily Gable, it's just to get out of the dull little town where she's the librarian. Gable on the other hand is in a role tailor-made for him: "Babe" Stewart, a raffish professional poker player who's as adept at wooing women as he is at cheating at cards. On the verge of getting caught by the detective (J. Farrell MacDonald) who's been tailing him, he skips town and winds up in the burg that Lombard's Connie Randall wants to escape. She catches his eye -- in one pre-Code scene she climbs a ladder and he looks up her skirt -- and with improbable speed they get married. Eventually she finds out that he's not the stockbroker he pretends to be, but nothing fazes her. He gets in trouble again, but just as he's about to take it on the lam, deserting her, he finds of course that he really loves her. The story lacks snap and tension: It was cobbled together from several sources, nominally from a novel by Val Lewton called No Bed of Her Own, a title the Hays Office nixed, but also from another story in Paramount's files. What life the film has comes from Wesley Ruggles's direction and from its performers, including Dorothy Mackaill as Babe's former partner in card-sharping. Lombard and Gable work well together, but reportedly didn't strike any off-screen sparks at the time -- they were both married to other people. They met again at a party four years later and were married in 1939.   

 

Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002)

Connie Nielsen in Demonlover

Cast: Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Dominique Reymond, Jean-Baptiste Malartre, Gina Gershon, Edwin Gerard, Thomas M. Pollard, Abi Sakamoto, Naoko Yamazake, Nao Omori. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Jim O'Rourke, Sonic Youth. 

Demonlover is a kind of message movie, and we all know the Hollywood truism about those: "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." But Olivier Assayas is not a Hollywood director, and his message comes through loud and clear. It's a familiar one: In the hands of globalized corporate capitalism, the internet has the potential to become a corrupting and alienating force. The film opens with a bunch of corporate capitalists luxuriating in business class on a flight to Japan to negotiate the rights to pornographic anime produced by a studio there. On the flight, Diane (Connie Nielsen) slips a drug into the Evian water being drunk by her superior at the Volf Corporation, Karen (Dominique Reymond), who collapses when they land in Tokyo. Diane then takes her place in the negotiations. It soon becomes clear that Diane will stop at nothing to seal a deal, but also that she's a double agent working for Volf's competitor, Mangatronics. Once Diane and her partner, Hervé (Charles Berling), land the rights, they begin negotiations with Demonlover, an internet company represented by Elaine Si Gibril (Gina Gershon), which also runs a site called The Hellfire Club on the dark web that specializes in torture porn and perhaps even snuff films. Diane's aim is to acquire Demonlover for Mangatronics instead of Volf, and she'll stop at nothing to do so. Unfortunately for Diane, her assistant, Elise (Chloë Sevigny), is also a corporate spy, and the spy vs. spy plot takes a bloody turn. Assayas isn't content to tell this story in conventional thriller fashion, so what we get involves a lot of disorienting camerawork and editing, and the movie makes its point with a somewhat disjointed ending. It was a critical and commercial flop, but the awareness that its message was prophetic has caused it to be reevaluated. 

Back Street (John M. Stahl, 1932)

Irene Dunne and John Boles in Back Street

Cast: Irene Dunne, John Boles, George Meeker, Zasu Pitts, June Clyde, William Bakewell, Arletta Duncan, Doris Lloyd, Paul Weigel, Jane Darwell, Shirley Grey, James Donlan, Walter Catlett, James McWade. Screenplay: Gladys Lehman, Lynn Starling, based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Milton Carruth. 

The 1932 version of Back Street (the first of three films Hollywood made from Fannie Hurst's novel) suggests that there are some things you couldn't say even in a pre-Code movie. Ray Schmidt (Irene Dunne) and Walter Saxel (John Boles) have fallen in love, but he's engaged to a woman of whom his mother approves. He thinks that if his mother meets Ray, she might be inclined to let him break off the engagement and marry her instead. But on the day of the scheduled meeting, Ray's sister, Fred (June Clyde), comes to her in distress: The man she's been seeing is leaving town and she desperately needs Ray's help in persuading him to stay. If he doesn't, she tells Ray, she'll kill herself -- and she opens a window to prove the point. Why is Freda so desperate? The answer becomes apparent with an exchange of Meaningful Glances: She's pregnant. The word or any of its variants is never spoken. So Ray misses the meeting with Mother and loses the chance to marry Walter. Years pass and Ray and Walter meet again, after he's married and become a wealthy businessman. He sets her up in an apartment as his mistress, which she tolerates for a time until she realizes what she's lacking in life and begs him, "Walter, give me a child." Walter is shocked at the very idea. The mechanics of an illicit sexual relationship, including the veiled subject of contraception, are summed up in the reticence around Freda's plight and Ray's plea to Walter, which sounds a bit like she wants him to go down to the baby store and pick one off the shelf. Euphemisms aside, your acceptance of the movie depends to some degree on whether you enjoy watching Dunne, an actress who can slip into coyness and archness. The film gives her a gamut to run, from the flirtatious Ray who likes to drink beer with the fellows in the early part of the film, to the nobly suffering kept woman of the later part. Boles is a little stiff in his role, though that rather suits the character. On the whole, Back Street is a solid "woman's picture" of the kind that would be treated with more life and color by filmmakers like Douglas Sirk in the 1950s. 

The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in The Raven

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lester Matthews, Irene Ware, Samuel S. Hinds, Spencer Charters, Inez Courtney, Ian Wolfe, Maidel Turner. Screenplay: David Boehm. Cinematography: Charles J. Stumar. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Clifford Vaughan. 

The Criterion Channel includes The Raven in its collection of pre-Code horror movies, but in fact the movie started filming after the Production Code was introduced, and director Lew Landers had to negotiate over details in the script. The enforcers were nervous about "excess horror," and in particular wanted the film not to show any details of the operation that Dr. Vollin (Bela Lugosi) performs on Bateman's (Boris Karloff) face. Even so, censors took aim at what they called "horror for horror's sake," and The Raven was banned in several countries. The defense from Universal Studios that the movie was a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe impressed nobody. It's still a fairly creepy movie, largely because the filmmakers managed to include some torture devices from Poe's stories like "The Pit and the Pendulum." The poem "The Raven" mainly gives Dr. Vollin an excuse to explain to everyone that the bird is a symbol of death, but it also prompts a rather silly dance recital by the object of Vollin's obsession, Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware). Vollin is a neurosurgeon who saves Jean's life after she's injured in an automobile accident. She's engaged to another surgeon, Dr. Halden (Lester Matthews), and when her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), stymies Vollin's interest in Jean, Vollin takes his revenge. He has a collection of torture devices and an old house outfitted with gimmicks like a bedroom on an elevator and a secret room whose walls close in on people trapped in it. Karloff's Bateman is a bank robber who escaped from San Quentin and is on the run, so in the guise of giving him plastic surgery to change his identity, Vollin instead disfigures him, and then makes him play servant at a house party to which Halden, the Thatchers, and various other guests are invited. Madness ensues. The movie's chief virtue is brevity -- it runs 61 minutes -- so it never gets tedious even though it also never gets either scary or plausible.   

Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959)

Yvonne Buckingham in Sapphire

Cast: Nigel Patrick, Michael Craig, Paul Massie, Bernard Miles, Yvonne Mitchell, Olga Lindo, Earl Cameron, Gordon Heath, Jocelyn Britton, Harry Baird, Orlando Martins, Rupert Davies, Freda Bamford, Robert Adams, Yvonne Buckingham. Screenplay: Janet Green, Lukas Heller. Cinematography: Harry Waxman. Art direction: Carmen Dillon. Film editing: John D. Guthridge. Music: Philip Green. 

The police procedural/whodunit faces several problems inherent to the genre when it comes to not giving away the ending: One is that the "who" is never the one the police suspect. Another is that it's also never the one you first suspect. And a third is that if either the victim or the prime suspect (or both) belongs to a socially marginalized community -- racial, religious, sexual, etc. -- then the perpetrator is not going to be a member of that community. So when a Black woman who is passing for white is found dead on Hampstead Heath, the first suspect is her fiancé, a white man. Still, as the evidence mounts, there are more and more reasons to suspect him until suspicion arises and evidence is found that the murderer was a Black man. Is Basil Dearden's procedural Sapphire going to be an exception to the rules of the genre? Dearden's film has not aged well. Its portrait of British racism is outdated, and even the jazzy musical underscoring by Philip Green is of another era. At one point, the score even resorts to a "dun-dun-DUNN" sting when a somewhat minor revelation occurs. In short, it's a lot like an old-fashioned one-hour TV procedural. The chief inspector, played by Nigel Patrick, is one of those British cops who keep their cool at any turn, while his assistant (Michael Craig) is a hothead who jumps to conclusions that are invariably wrong. There are moments of real energy in the film, especially when the cops are invading the turf of London's Black community, though the movie's point of view is as secure in middle-class respectability as the victim's father (Earl Cameron), a physician dressed in tweeds.   

 

Dust Devil (Richard Stanley, 1992)

Robert John Burke in Dust Devil

Cast: Robert John Burke, Chelsea Field, Zakes Mokae, John Matshikiza, Rufus Swart, William Hootkins, Terry Norton, Marianne Sägebrecht. Screenplay: Richard Stanley. Cinematography: Steven Chivers. Production design: Joseph Bennett. Film editing: Paul Carlin, Jamie Macdermott, Derek Trigg. Music: Simon Boswell. 

Dust Devil is a mess, but it's sometimes a gorgeous mess, as in the moment when its characters, after a long time in the Namibian desert, reach the edge of the Fish River Canyon. Richard Stanley aspires to myth and magic but falls short, possibly because his story and his actors aren't capable of delivering them. No matter, because it's a film that often perplexes and startles through images and incidents that may not fit into a satisfactory whole but have their own lingering power. Robert John Burke plays a Dust Devil, the physical embodiment of desert winds, who makes his way through the desert preying on humans, though to what purpose is never really clear. One of his prey is Wendy (Chelsea Field), a woman who has fled her abusive husband (Rufus Swart) and picks up the hitchhiking Dust Devil on her way toward the sea. The Dust Devil himself is being tracked by police sergeant Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae), on suspicion of having murdered another woman and torched her house. Mukurob is skeptical of the counsel given him by a Namibian medicine man, a Sangoma called Joe Niemand (John Matshikiza, who also narrates the opening), that the killing was the work of a Dust Devil. The interactions of the three, Wendy, Mukurob, and the Dust Devil, form the narrative, which sputters a little toward the end, but cinematographer Steven Chivers's visions of the desert keep the film going. Dust Devil was originally a two-hour movie, but underwent several cuts along the way. The Criterion Channel's version runs about 87 minutes, but there's also a "final cut" version of 108 minutes and a "director's cut" of 103 minutes.  
 

The Quick and the Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995)

Gene Hackman in The Quick and the Dead

Cast: Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobin Bell, Roberts Blossom, Kevin Conway, Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Pat Hingle, Gary Sinise. Screenplay: Simon Moore. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Patrizia von Brandenstein. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

I miss Gene Hackman. When he retired in 2004, it had seemed for a while that he was in every other movie being made: In 2001, for example, he made five, including one of his best comic performances in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. In the year he made The Quick and the Dead he was also in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide and Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty. He's certainly the best thing about Sam Raimi's mock-spaghetti Western, in a role that echoes his Oscar-winning one in Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992). He brings the same infuriating self-satisfied smirk to his performance as John Herod, the ruthless boss of the town of Redemption as he did in the role of the ruthless sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett in Eastwood's movie. Hackman's great gift was the ability to give memorably watchable performances without overwhelming a film's ensemble, and the ensemble for The Quick and the Dead is a good one, even if they're playing slightly skewed versions of Western stereotypes. Sharon Stone, who was one of the producers of the movie, plays the stranger who rides into town; Russell Crowe is the outlaw who wants to give up killing; and Leonardo DiCaprio is the gun-happy kid. The setup is that Herod is staging a tournament, pairing off gunslingers in one-on-one shootouts until only one is left standing. You can guess immediately who the final four will be. It's by no means a landmark film, but Raimi's direction gives it the right pace, and the actors, including good character turns by Pat Hingle, Lance Henriksen, and Keith David, make it watchable, as does Dante Spinotti's cinematography.