The Blazing Sun (Youssef Chahine, 1954)

 

Omar Sharif in The Blazing Sun

Cast: Omar Sharif, Faten Hamamah, Zaki Rostom, Farid Shawqi, Abdulwareth Asar, Hamdy Gheith. Screenplay: Ali El Zorkani, Hilmi Halim. Cinematography: Ahmed Khorshed. Art direction: Maher Abdel Nour. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

With his big brown eyes and gleaming smile, Omar Sharif was a natural for the movies, and making his film debut, billed as Omar El Cherif, in Youssef Chahine's The Blazing Sun, he proved he could act too. Chahine's melodrama gets off to a bumpy start with some clunky exposition and a bit of scenery chewing from the villains in the piece, wealthy landowner Taher Pasha (Abdelwareth Asar) and his nephew Reyad (Farid Shawqi), but once Sharif appears on the scene and encounters his leading lady, Faten Hamamah, things begin to come together with enough plot twists, suspense, and romance to satisfy even a jaded movie-watcher like me. Sharif plays Ahmed, trained as an engineer, who returns to his village to help his father, Saher Abdel Salam (Abdulwareth Asar), and the peasants harvest a sugarcane crop. But Taher Pasha and Reyad are conniving to keep the peasants from making money and getting uppity. Reyad, whom we first see shooting a cat running across the lawn of his uncle's palatial estate, suggests dousing another poor cat in gasoline, setting it on fire, and letting it loose in the sugarcane. The Pasha is somewhat less sadistic: Just flood the fields, he says, and Reyad complies. Saher and the peasants are ruined. Meanwhile, the Pasha's beautiful young daughter, Amal (Hamamah), is returning home after an absence of many years. While Reyad is driving her from the station, Ahmed spots her and calls out her childhood nickname, "Potatoes." She's delighted to see her childhood boyfriend again, especially since he now looks like a 22-year-old Omar Sharif, much to Reyad's disgust. And so everything is set up for a fateful conflict, which involves a wrongful murder conviction, several other deaths, and a Western-like showdown in the ruins of the temple at Luxor. Handsomely photographed and well-acted, The Blazing Sun doesn't have as much social comment as other films by Chahine that I've seen, but it's thoroughly entertaining.

Street Without End (Mikio Naruse, 1934)

Setsuko Shinobu in Street Without End

Cast: Setsuko Shinobu, Akio Isono, Hikaru Yamanouchi, Nobuko Wakaba, Ayako Katsuragi, Shin'ichi Himori, Chiyoko Katori, Ichiro Yuki. Screenplay: Jitsuzo Ikeda, Komatsu Kitamura. Cinematography: Suketaro Inokai. Set designer: Jokichi Shu. 

The titular street of Street Without End is located in the bustling Ginza district of Tokyo, where Sugiko (Setsuko Shinobu) works as a waitress. One of the most fascinating elements of Mikio Naruse's film is its documentation of the Ginza, now famous as a teeming, neon-lighted network of streets, in the 1930s, images of which constitute both the beginning and the end of the film. In between these shots of the crowded streets, we follow Sugiko's story as she almost marries the man she loves, almost becomes a movie star, loses her first love and her chance at stardom when she's struck by a car, marries the wealthy driver of the car, and suffers from the class snobbery of her sister- and mother-in-law. By the end of the film, she's back working as a waitress. A classic "woman's picture" melodrama, it was made in service of Naruse's concern about the weight of tradition and history that burdens the lives of Japan's women. It was Naruse's last silent film, and you can see him striving toward sound, which was late coming to the Japanese film industry. It is, for example, almost too chopped up by intertitles, as if Naruse were longing for audible dialogue. But Naruse surrounds his heroine with a gallery of well-drawn characters, overcoming the limitations of silent melodrama by making the people in it believable.    

The Land (Youssef Chahine, 1970)

Mahmoud Al Meleji and Ezzat El Alaili in The Land

Cast: Mahmoud Al Meleji, Nagwa Ibrahim, Ezzat El Alaili, Hamdy Ahmed, Ali El Sherif, Yehia Chahine, Salaah El-Saadany, Tawfik El Deken. Screenplay: Hassan Fuad, based on a novel by Abderrahman Charkawi. Cinematography: Abdelhalim Nasr. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Ali Ismail.

I will only betray my ignorance of Egyptian history, literature, politics, and culture, not to mention the Arabic language, if I venture to say more than that I found Youssef Chahine's The Land both stirring and baffling. I may have been baffled occasionally because The Land is based on a novel, and Chahine chose to include some sections that may have worked better on the page, such as the opening sequence about a boy's infatuation with the pretty Wassifa (Nagwa Ibrahim). Chahine spends much time establishing a backstory for the boy, but he disappears from the rest of the film after his sequence ends. But narrative flaws like that one shouldn't deter anyone from watching the film, which is often quite beautiful and features some impressive performances, particularly that of Mahmoud Al Meleji as a farmer struggling with the intractable demands and corruption of government authorities, with the ambitions of his landlord, and with the apathy and ineptness of some of his fellow farmers. The action moves through incidents both comic and brutal, and ends with a masterly final scene that evokes the work of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. The rest of the film isn't on a par with its ending, but that's probably asking too much. 

Inferno (Roy Ward Baker, 1953)

Robert Ryan in Inferno

Cast: Robert Ryan, Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan, Larry Keating, Henry Hull, Carl Betz, Robert Burton. Screenplay: Francis M. Cockrell. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Robert L. Simpson. Music: Paul Sawtell. 

Inferno is a smartly written, capably acted, and crisply directed thriller that deserves to be better known. The reason it isn't, I think, is that it was made during the early 1950s fad for 3-D movies, but happened to appear just at the end of that era, and it loses something when it's shown in 2-D. The story begins almost in medias res: The first characters we meet are the villains, Geraldine Carson (Rhonda Fleming) and Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan), who have just left her husband, the millionaire Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan), in the desert with a broken leg. Will he survive, and will the cheating lovers be caught? You probably can guess the answer, but there's a nice little ironic twist at the end. The movie's 3-D origins show in the usual way, with things getting thrust or flung at the camera, but they're usually integral to the action. Where it fails in the 2-D version is in its use of the Mojave Desert setting: Carson has been left at the top of a ridge, and to save himself he has to descend a steep and rocky hillside with a painfully fractured leg he manages to immobilize with a makeshift splint. There are shots of the slope from the top of the hillside, but they lose their vertiginous steepness when the movie is shown flat. The other obvious legacy of its 3-D origins is an "Intermission" title card that appears in mid-film. Inferno runs only 83 minutes, so it hardly needs an intermission for the audience's sake, but one was provided there for the projectionists. The 3-D movies of the '50s used two projectors running in sync, but most movie houses had only two projectors, which usually ran in alternation, with one showing the film and the other queued up with the next reel. When both projectors were running simultaneously, as they did for 3-D movies, theaters needed a time-out to swap out the reels. Still, unlike a lot of the era's 3-D movies, Inferno holds up well today. 

The Story of O (Just Jaeckin, 1975)

Udo Kier and Corinne Cléry in The Story of O

Cast: Corinne Cléry, Udo Kier, Anthony Steel, Jean Gaven, Christiane Minazzoli, Martine Kelly, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Gabriel Cattand, Li Sellgren, Albane Navizet, Nadine Perles, Laure Moutoussamy. Screenplay: Sébastien Japrisot, based on a novel by Dominique Aubry as Pauline Réage. Cinematography: Robert Fraisse, Yves Rodallec. Art direction: Jean-Baptiste Poirot. Film editing: Francine Pierre. Music: Pierre Bachelet. 

The interiority of novels is what makes them so difficult to film. The characters and action of a novel exist only in the mind of the reader encountering them on the page. When we see those characters and that action on the screen, they usually have a very different effect, especially when the novel and the film deal with sex. When The Story of O, a novel written by a woman, was transferred to the screen by a director who's a man, the "male gaze" inevitably informed the movie, particularly because the story is about a woman submitting to sadomasochistic discipline. So the film, whose subject matter and abundant female nudity got it banned in Britain and labeled NC-17 in the States, was also subject to charges that it was antifeminist. There are those who assert that it's actually a feminist fable, since O (Corinne Cléry) is given frequent opportunities to escape from her submissive role and asserts her equality, if not dominance, at the film's end, but they seem to be in a minority. In any case, The Story of O is not a very good movie. It's drenched in soft-core porn clichés and its soft-focus photography gives it a candy-box ambiance. On the page, the novel could be intellectually and erotically provocative. But on the screen it's just tedious and repetitive.   

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

Cast: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benny Safdie, Skyler Gisondo, Maary Elizabeth Ellis, John Michael Higgins, Christine Ebersole, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ryan Heffington, Nate Mann, Joseph Cross. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography: Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Bauman. Production design: Florencia Martin. Film editing: Andy Jurgensen. Music: Jonny Greenwood.

Ever seen a movie that you liked but a couple of years later couldn't remember a thing about it? That's what Licorice Pizza was for me. Which is odd, because one of the things about Paul Thomas Anderson's movies is that they're so memorable, if only for certain moments, like the rain of frogs in Magnolia (1999) or Daniel Day-Lewis threatening to drink Paul Dano's milkshake in There Will Blood (2007). But there's something comparatively low-key about Licorice Pizza, at least for the first half of the film. It's basically a boy-meets-girl story, or rather a boy-meets-woman story: A more-than-usually assertive 15-year-old boy meets a slacker twenty-something woman. Teenager Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is an actor and an entrepreneur; Alana Kane (Alana Haim), who is either 25 or 28, depending on which you believe of the ages she gives at one point in the movie, lives at home with her parents and her sisters (played by Haim's real-life family). Gary and Alana meet when he's standing in line to have his high school yearbook photo taken; she's an assistant to the photographer, a job she dislikes. They begin a relationship that turns co-dependent and evolves into an off-beat (and possibly illegal) romance. And for a time that's all there is, until after the excursions of the two into the waterbed and pinball machine business put them in contact with some big name Hollywood types: Sean Penn plays a very thinly disguised version of William Holden, and Bradley Cooper a very broadly caricatured Jon Peters. These extended cameos throw the film out of whack for a while until the main story gets its balance back, though it ends with a sequence that's a cliché out of the romcom genre. I think one of the reasons Licorice Pizza is so unmemorable is that Anderson hasn't quite figured out how to turn the autobiographical elements of his story, drawn from growing up as an actor's son in the San Fernando Valley, into a narrative that connects with the audience. It had the same effect on me as Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022), another film that doesn't rise out of autobiography into common experience. Both movies were fun to watch but they didn't quite stick with me.  

The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco in The Savages

Cast: Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour, Tonye Patano, Guy Boyd, Debra Monk, Rosemary Murphy, Margo Martindale. Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins. Cinematography: W. Mott Hupfel III. Production design: Jane Ann Stewart. Film editing: Brian A. Kates. Music: Stephen Trask. 

The Savages are a dysfunctional family who live disjointed lives. The mother abandoned them at some point in their childhood, and Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), well into middle age, are both unmarried. Wendy is having an affair with a married man and Jon is in a relationship with a woman who is about to return to Poland because her visa has expired. Their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), lives in Sun City, Ariz., with a woman he hasn't married, and when she dies he has already begun to sink into dementia. He has also signed an agreement that he has no stake in the legacy of the woman he lives with.This means that Wendy and Jon, who live in New York -- she in New York City, he in Buffalo -- have to drop everything and go tend to a parent from whom they are estranged. (He is said to have been abusive, although we're given no specifics.) Wendy is just a bit flaky: She's an aspiring playwright who supports herself by working as an office temp. Jon is just a bit withdrawn: He's a professor of English whose specialty is drama, particularly Bertolt Brecht. When Wendy comes up with impractical ideas about how to deal with their father, Jon tends to retreat into his shell. As for Lenny, he's just lucid enough to be cantankerous, especially at inconvenient moments. Such a story needs skilled actors to bring it off, and it gets them. There's just enough comedy in Tamara Jenkins's screenplay to keep the film from being a downer, and Linney, Hoffman, and Bosco know precisely how to balance the elements of pain and humor in their stories. Even though the predicament faced by the Savages is heightened by distance and alienation, the basics of the narrative are familiar to almost everyone who has aging parents, which makes The Savages something of a fable for our times. 

Apart From You (Mikio Naruse, 1933)

Cast: Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Akio Isono, Sumiko Mizukubo, Reikichi Kawamura, Ryuko Fuji, Yoko Fujita, Tomio Aoki. Screenplay: Mikio Naruse. Cinematography: Suketaro Inokai. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. 

One of Mikio Naruse's earliest surviving silent films, Apart From You is a fable in support of filial devotion. An aging geisha, Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), is trying to raise a teenage son, Yoshio (Akio Isono), but he has become ashamed of his mother's profession. When she discovers that Yoshio has been cutting school and has joined a gang, her friend and fellow geisha, the pretty young Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), tries to help Kikue by showing Yoshio what her own dysfunctional family is like. The contrast with his own self-sacrificing parent inspires him to give up his adolescent rebellion. Though the film teeters on the edge of sentimentality, it's saved by the complexity of the characters, the performances of the actors, and the fluidity of the direction and camerawork.   

Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958)

Cast: Farid Shawqi, Hind Rustum, Youssef Chahine, Hassan el Baroudi, Abdulaziz Khalil, Naima Wasfy. Screenplay: Abdel Hai Adib, Mohamed Abdel Youssef. Cinematography: Alevise Orfanelli. Art direction: Gabriel Karraze. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

Movies usually treat train stations as venues for the passengers' romantic meetings and partings, but they rarely focus on the lives of people who work there. Youssef Chahine's absorbing Cairo Station is different. It swarms with indigenous life, that of the people who serve the passengers, loading their luggage or selling them newspapers and food and drink. It focuses in particular on a porter, Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), his girlfriend, Hanuma (Hind Rustum), who peddles soft drinks, and a crippled newspaper vendor, Qinawi (Chahine). Abu Siri is something of a bully, but his chief aim, besides courting (and sometimes abusing) Hanuma, is to organize a labor union for the other luggage handlers. Hanuma doesn't have a license to ply her trade, so she and her fellow drink vendors are always scurrying to hide from the police. Qinawi is the lowest of the lowly, living in a shed that he decorates with cutout pictures of women that remind him of the object of his desires, the voluptuous Hanuma. Eventually, Qinami's desire will turn into a sinister obsession, especially as he's goaded by other men at the station who mock him for not having a woman. But the darkness of the plot of Cairo Station is not what makes it an exceptional film, it's the vivid portrait of the station, as lives work themselves out amid the never-ending movement of people and trains.  

Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M. Newman, 1953)

Cast: Jeanne Crain, Michael Rennie, Carl Betz, Max Showalter, Mary Anderson, Marjorie Hoshelle, Willis Bouchey, Yvonne Peattie. Screenplay: Leo Townsend, based on a radio play by John Dickson Carr. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: William Reynolds. 

Someone disappears in a public setting -- a train, a hotel, a passenger ship -- and the person who saw them last discovers that no one else claims to have ever seen them. It's a nice trope for a thriller, like The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) or So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950), so who can blame 20th Century-Fox for taking it out of the mothballs for a low-budget picture like Dangerous Crossing? Ruth (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship for a honeymoon ocean voyage with her husband, John (Carl Betz), who takes her to their stateroom and then goes to make a deposit of some money with the purser. He'll meet her in the bar, he says, but he doesn't show up. When Ruth goes to the stateroom to look for him she finds it locked, and when an attendant opens it for her, their luggage is gone. Ruth has them find the maid (Mary Anderson) who was preparing the room when the couple entered and saw John carry her over its threshold, but she swears she didn't see them and that the room has always been vacant. As Ruth becomes more distraught, everyone begins to suspect she's lying or insane. Only the ship's doctor (Michael Rennie) is willing to put up with her frantic assertions that she really is married and that her husband must be somewhere on board. Naturally, since Rennie gets top billing with Crain, we know that some kind of relationship between Ruth and the doctor is going to develop. Unfortunately, the doctor is such a know-it-all male and Ruth such a basket case that it's a dull romance, not helped by a lack of chemistry between the actors. Crain does a nice job from the start at suggesting that there's something fragile and off-balance about Ruth, so even though we've seen her with John, we feel there's something she's not telling us. There is, but as the story unfolds, the movie gets routine and predictable.