Down With a Cold

Back when I recover.

Nothing Sacred (William A. Wellman, 1937)

It's a bit startling to see a classic screwball comedy like Nothing Sacred in color. We're used to movies from the 1930s in the crisp elegance of black and white, so if you came across this movie without knowing anything about it, you might think it was one of those films that Ted Turner tried to "colorize." Part of the problem is that the tones in early Technicolor films are so muted: Some have faded with age, but getting the true sharp color contrasts that we're used to was more difficult in these early films, especially since Technicolor had very conservative ideas about what could be done with the process, and its "consultants," like the oft-credited Natalie Kalmus, the wife of the company's founder, were there to peer over the cinematographer's shoulder at all times. In addition, one of the problems with the color on Nothing Sacred is that a lapse of copyright on the film allowed many inferior prints to circulate before it could be restored to its original version. To my way of thinking, color adds little to this particular film, except in the glimpses of New York City in 1937. Carole Lombard plays Hazel Flagg, who, through a misdiagnosis by her small-town Vermont physician, Dr. Downer (Charles Winninger), is thought to be dying of radium poisoning. A New York reporter, Wally Cook, reads a short item about Hazel in the newspaper and persuades his editor, Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly), that it has the makings of a circulation-building sob story. Although Hazel and her doctor have subsequently learned that she's perfectly healthy, they agree to go along with the scheme to celebrate her as a dying heroine in the big city. And so it goes, in a frequently deft skewering of high-pressure journalism -- the very thing you might expect from the screenwriter, Ben Hecht, a former newspaperman who did a similar skewering in his play The Front Page. After Hecht had a falling-out with the film's producer, David O. Selznick, the screenplay was worked over by a number of uncredited wits, including Dorothy Parker, Moss  Hart, George S. Kaufman, and Budd Schulberg. The film could have used a somewhat lighter hand at directing: William A. Wellman is best known as a tough guy -- his nickname was "Wild Bill" -- with credits like Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and Battleground (1949), but he does get to stage a very funny fight scene between Lombard and March.

The Sea of Trees (Gus Van Sant, 2015)

For a movie that attempts a "feel-good" ending, The Sea of Trees sure does spend a lot of time making you feel bad, from the moment its grim-faced protagonist, Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey), arrives in Japan. He plans to kill himself in the "Suicide Forest" near Mount Fuji. But then he tries to help Takumi Nakamura (Ken Watanabe), a man he meets there, find his way out of the forest, and encounters all manner of hardships and injuries. There are also flashbacks to Arthur's troubled marriage and the death of his wife, Joan (Naomi Watts). We are plunged into one misery after another before a twist into fantasy convinces Arthur not only that life is worth living but also that love persists after death. Yet the misery dominates the tone of the film, despite three excellent actors and a well-regarded director, Gus Van Sant. Some of the blame must fall on the screenwriter, Chris Sparling, but mostly it seems to be a failure to leaven the material with anything that gives us a sense that the promise of its ending has been earned. Imagine Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) without Whoopi Goldberg and instead two hours of moping around by Demi Moore recalling life with Patrick Swayze, and you'll have a sense of the overall effect of The Sea of Trees. One major problem, I think, is in the miscasting of McConaughey as the lead. He's a very good film actor, as his Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013), his scene-stealing bit in The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013), and his work on the first season of the series True Detective (2014) amply demonstrates. But he is, I think, a character lead, terrific in roles full of wit and sass and energy, whereas what's called for in films like The Sea of Trees is a conventional romantic leading man. As hard as he works to make it plausible, his character in this film never rings true. But then not much else in the film does, either.

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, 1928)

Buster Keaton in The Cameraman

Buster: Buster Keaton
Sally: Marceline Day
Stagg: Harold Goodwin
Editor: Sidney Bracey
Cop: Harry Gribbon

Director: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton
Screenplay: Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton, Richard Schayer; titles by Joseph Farnham
Cinematography: Reggie Lanning, Elgin Lessley
Art direction: Fred Gabourie
Film editing: Hugh Wynn, Basil Wrangell

The Cameraman, Buster Keaton's first film under contract to MGM, isn't quite up to the standards set by The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926) or Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner and Keaton, 1928), but then what is? Keaton plays a sidewalk photographer who is smitten with Sally, a receptionist in the studios of MGM's newsreel department. To try to win her, he buys an antique movie camera and sets out to get a job with the studio. Of course he screws up his first attempt and is shown the door, but several adventures later he succeeds in getting not only the job but also the girl. Keaton would come to regret signing with MGM, a studio strongly producer-driven, and he fought with producer Lawrence Weingarten over the concept and script for The Cameraman, eventually getting his own way after persuading the studio's creative director, Irving G. Thalberg, to back him. But the relationship with the studio was fated to end, especially when sound arrived and Keaton came to be seen as a relic of a fading era. There are some masterly moments in The Cameraman, such as the scene in which he and a much larger man struggle to change into their swimsuits in a too-small changing cubicle, (The scene, incidentally, gives us a glimpse of a shirtless Keaton, revealing a strikingly toned athletic body, the product of years of doing his own stunts.) There are perhaps too many scenes that Keaton is forced to share with a very cute trained monkey, distracting us from his own work, but this is probably the last of the great Keaton films.

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Aleksandr Kaidanovsky in Stalker

Cast: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolay Grinko, Alisa Freindlich, Natasha Abramova, Fame Jurno, E. Kostin, Raymo Rendi. Screenplay: Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Boris Strugatskiy, based on their novel. Cinematography: Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy, Georgi Rerberg. Production design: Aleksandr Boym, Andrei Tarkovsky. Film editing: Lyudmila Feyginova. Music: Eduard Artemev.

Andrei Tarkovsky's dystopian fantasy has something of the flavor of a Russian folk tale. The archetypes are there: the perilous quest, the trio of seekers, the anagnorisis, the catharsis, the disillusioned return. The title character, splendidly played by Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, is not a "stalker" in the current sexual sense but rather a man who guides others into the Zone, a mysterious area cordoned off from the rest of the world by the military. In the Zone, the Stalker says, is a Room that fulfills each person's secret desires. The men he guides in the film are a cynical Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) and an ambitious Professor (Nikolay Grinko) -- archetypes of art and science, who throughout their journey make the cases for their respective world-views. The film begins in monochrome -- sometimes stark black-and-white, sometimes a bilious orange -- in the Stalker's bedroom, where he shares a bed with his wife (Alisa Freindlich) and his young daughter, whom they call Monkey (Natasha Abramova). Before he leaves to meet the the Writer and Professor, the wife chides him for taking on another dangerous mission. To get to the Zone, they have to pass through a heavily guarded section, and when they reach it, the film turns to color. But the Zone is no Oz, despite the obvious allusion. It is distinguished from the bleak industrial outside world by an abundance of vegetation that covers not only ruins of a former industrial society but also the tanks, weaponry, and corpses of the military that tried to invade and conquer it. The Zone is also magical, continually frustrating attempts to move through it and reach the Room, but the Stalker has learned how to anticipate and avoid its tricks. He says that as a Stalker he is forbidden to enter the Room, but the truth is that he knows the fate of an earlier Stalker, called Porcupine, who did enter it. Tarkovsky's usual long takes demand actors of considerable skill, and all of the company possess it. Although Freindlich's role as the wife is a smaller one, since she doesn't accompany them on the journey, she has a compelling scene at the film's end that's a master class in how to deliver a monologue. The shoot was a legendarily troubled one, since the locations were actual badly polluted industrial ruins, and many of the crew grew ill from the toxins in the abandoned chemical plant -- there are those who claim that the deaths from lung cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife, Larisa, who was a second-unit director, and Solonitsyn were a result of exposure to chemicals during the filming of Stalker. In fact, much of the film was shot at least twice, after cinematographer Georgi Rerberg was fired and replaced with Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, doubling the exposure of many of the cast and crew. Backstory aside, Stalker is a fascinating glimpse into Tarkovsky's mind and milieu.

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

The Russian mafia seems to have supplanted the Italian kind in the popular imagining of the violent criminal world. It has long been a staple of TV crime shows like Law & Order, but David Cronenberg gave it the most impressive and terrifying embodiment yet in Eastern Promises. The film, set in London, is a strikingly globalized production, with a Canadian director and English screenwriter (Steven Knight) and actors who are Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), British (Naomi Watts), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), French (Vincent Cassel), Polish (Jerzy Skolimowski), and Irish (Sinéad Cusack). Yet the film somehow maintains a strong semblance of authenticity, thanks to strong performances. Mortensen, long a favorite of mine, gives an intensely compelling, and Oscar-nominated, portrayal of a Russian undercover agent infiltrating the mob. His celebrated battle in the steam bath, in which he, naked and unarmed, is attacked by two well-clothed thugs carrying linoleum knives should never let you take another two-against-one battle in a James Bond film seriously. (Or not until Daniel Craig does it in the nude.) Mueller-Stahl demonstrates once again that one can smile and smile and be a villain, and Cassel steals scenes with his portrayal of Mueller-Stahl's careless, dissipated weakling of a son. My only complaint about Eastern Promises is a rather saccharine ending to Watts's portion of the story. The story of Mortensen's character ends inconclusively, with his apparent ascension to the role of boss of the mob, a risky position for an undercover agent. A sequel has been proposed and postponed, and at last report seems to be dead.

Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre, 2004)

It's a measure of how the discourse on sexual identity has changed over the past 12 years that Stage Beauty, in which it is a central theme, seems now to have missed the mark completely. Billy Crudup, an actor who should be a bigger star than he is, plays Edward Kynaston, an actor in Restoration London who was noted for his work in female roles at a time when such parts were usually still played by boys and men. Kynaston, as the film tells us, was praised by the diarist Samuel Pepys as "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life." As the film begins, he is performing as Desdemona in a production of Othello, and is aided by a dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), who longs to act. After his performance ends, she borrows his wig, clothes, and props, and performs in a local tavern as "Margaret Hughes." When King Charles II (Rupert Everett) lifts the ban on women appearing on stage, Kynaston not only finds his career threatened, but when the king's mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoë Tapper), overhears him fulminating about the inadequacy of actresses, she persuades the king to forbid men from playing women's roles: The king gives as his reason that it encourages "sodomy." Although the actual Kynaston performed male as well as female roles, in the film he is stymied by an inability to act male parts. Eventually, Maria, who is having trouble with her own new career, calls upon Kynaston to coach her in his most famous role, Desdemona, while at the same time teaching him how to act like a man on stage. Together, they appear as Othello and Desdemona and, with a violently naturalistic performance of the death scene, bring down the house. The premise, taken from a play by Jeffrey Hatcher, who also wrote the screenplay, allows for some insight into the nature of gender, but the film never approaches it satisfactorily. Instead, we have a conventional ending that suggests not only that Kynaston and Hughes revolutionized acting with less stylized performance -- something that certainly didn't occur in the classically oriented Restoration theater -- but also that they fell in love. Earlier in the film, Kynaston is shown in a same-sex relationship with George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who leaves him to get married. The film never quite resolves whether Kynaston is gay, bi, sexually fluid, or simply somehow confused by having been celebrated as a beautiful woman. And while it's risky to apply 21st-century psychology to 17th-century sexual mores, Stage Beauty's indifference to historical accuracy seems to demand that it do so. As unsatisfactory a film as it is, Stage Beauty has a few things to recommend it, starting with Crudup's fine performance. Danes is hindered by a screenplay that never concentrates on her character long enough to bring it into focus, but she and Crudup have strong chemistry together. And the supporting cast includes such British acting stalwarts as Everett, Chaplin, Tom Wilkinson, Richard Griffiths, and Edward Fox, as well as Hugh Bonneville, now best known for Downton Abbey, as Pepys. It's startling to see Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, peering out from beneath a Restoration periwig.

What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)

As a film genre, the screwball comedy flourished for about a decade, from 1934 to 1944, or from Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) to Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944.) Like so much else in movie history, including the Western, it was killed off by television, by half-hour sitcoms like I Love Lucy that slurped up its essence and made the 90-minute theatrical versions seem like overkill. We can still glimpse some of the heart of the screwball comedy in films like David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013) or Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but Peter Bodganovich's What's Up, Doc? is probably the last pure example of the genre as it was in its heyday. Like the masters of the genre -- Hawks and Sturges are the masters, but Gregory La Cava, George Stevens, Mitchell Leisen, and Frank Capra made worthy contributions -- Bogdanovich followed a few rules: One, get stars who usually played it straight to make fools of themselves. Two, make use of as many comic character actors as you can stuff into the film. Three, never pretend that the world the film is taking place in is the "real world." Four, never, ever let the pace slacken -- if your characters have to kiss or confess, make it snappy. On the first point, Bogdanovich found the closest equivalents to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (or Clark Gable, Joel McCrea, James Stewart on the one hand, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur on the other) that he could among the stars of his day. Ryan O'Neal was coming off the huge success of the weepy Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and a five-year run on TV's Peyton Place and Barbra Streisand had won an Oscar for Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968). Granted, O'Neal is no Cary Grant: His timing is a little off and he overdoes a single exasperated look, but he makes a suitable patsy. But has Streisand ever been more likable in the movies? She plays the dizzy troublemaker with relish, capturing the essence of Bugs Bunny -- the other inspiration for the movie -- to the point that you almost expect her to turn to the camera and say, "Ain't I a stinker?" As to the second point, we no longer have character actors of the caliber of Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, or William Demarest, but Bogdanovich recruited some of the best of his day: Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy, and others, and introduced moviegoers to the sublime Madeline Kahn. And he set it all in the ever-picturesque San Francisco, while making sure no one would ever confuse the movie version with the real thing, including a chase sequence up and down its hills that follows no possible real-world path. And he kept the pace up with gags involving bit players: the pizza maker so distracted by Streisand that he spins his dough up to the ceiling, the banner-hanger and the guys moving a sheet of glass, the waiter who enters a room with a tray of drinks but takes one look at the chaos there and turns right around, the guy laying a cement sidewalk that's run over so many times by the car chase that he flings down his trowel and jumps up and down on his mutilated handiwork. This is masterly comic direction of a sort we don't often see -- and, sadly, never saw again from Bogdanovich, whose career collapsed disastrously with a string of flops in the mid-1970s. Here, he was working with a terrific team of writers, Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, who turned his story into comedy gold.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc

Music has been an integral part of the cinematic experience since the days before sound, when the small-town exhibitor would hire a local pianist to play "Hearts and Flowers" to sweeten the love scenes. So it was a surprise to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc with no soundtrack at all on the new streaming service Filmstruck,* which has pulled the great Criterion Collection of classic films away from its old home on Hulu. I have seen The Passion before, and I'm certain that it had a music track then -- almost all restorations of silent films have some kind of music, typically a pastiche of themes from classical music. Over the years, since its rediscovery, there have been many attempts to add a music track to The Passion, including a pastiche of music by Baroque composers like Bach and Vivaldi that Dreyer heard and disliked. I notice on the Criterion site that the disc set includes an oratorio, "Voices of Light" by Richard Einhorn, that was inspired by the film, but it apparently wasn't approved for the streaming version. And after all that, I'm glad it wasn't. The Passion shines forth in silence, allowing you to reflect on the spareness of its images and the astonishing performance by Renée Falconetti as Joan. We don't need underscoring for Joan's emotions: They are present on Falconetti's face and in her extraordinarily expressive eyes. Dreyer's celebrated use of closeups throughout the film is varied with remarkable compositions of figures in groups that always feel organic, not something imposed by the director, and when the film erupts in violence as the soldiers attack the crowd at the film's end, the irruption of action is startling. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté, who later turned director, and his low-angle camerawork -- Dreyer reportedly had holes dug in the floor of the set to get the angles he wanted -- anticipates that of Yasujiro Ozu, giving us a sense on the one hand of Joan as floating above us and on the other of her judges as looming menace. The final shots of Joan's slumped, burned body seen through the smoke and flames are harrowing and poignant without being grisly. There aren't many greater films than this one.

*So far, Filmstruck hasn't moved much beyond streaming on the computer, though it's supposed to be included on Roku early next year. In my household, with two others competing for bandwidth, this meant that I had frequent interruptions as the film refreshed itself. Oddly enough, I didn't mind as much as I usually would, because Dreyer's images are so compelling that I was content to pause and study them.

Wizard of Oz (Larry Semon, 1925)

Dorothy Dwan and Larry Semon in Wizard of Oz

A critical and commercial flop that seriously damaged the career of its director and writer, Larry Semon, Wizard of Oz (as the on-screen title has it) somehow survived the mass extinction of silent films, perhaps because of the perennial interest in Oz stories that was fed by the later and greater 1939 film with Judy Garland. But only the most die-hard Oz fans need to bother checking it out: It's a hopeless mess, a mishmash of conventional slapstick comedy and rather lame fantasy. It features characters from L. Frank Baum's book: Dorothy (Dorothy Dwan), the Wizard (Charles Murray), the Scarecrow (Semon), and the Tin Woodman (Oliver Hardy). But it does nothing with them but place them in various kinds of comic jeopardy that usually climax in pratfalls. Much of the film takes place in Kansas, where Dorothy is a farm girl about to turn 18, an age when she can open a mysterious letter that was delivered to her Uncle Henry (Frank Alexander) and Aunt Em (Mary Carr) when she was a foundling infant. The letter, of course, reveals that she is Princess Dorothea of Oz. She is being courted by two farmhands, also played by Semon and Hardy -- perhaps the inspiration for the 1939 film's casting of Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr as both farmhands and the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion. In Semon's film, the farmhands are swept off to Oz by a tornado -- or rather just a strong windstorm, since there's no funnel cloud -- along with Dorothy and Uncle Henry, where they assume disguises: Semon swipes the clothes off of a scarecrow and Hardy improvises an outfit from a scrap heap. In addition to the others, there's a black farmhand known, inevitably, as Snowball played by Spencer Bell under the pseudonym G. Howe Black. Get it? We first see him eating a watermelon, too. Aside from that, the racist humor is fortunately kept to a minimum, and in Oz, to which Snowball is somehow chased by lightning, he adopts a lion costume, creating the third in Dorothy's familiar trio of companions. The scenario was written by Semon, Leon Lee (who also wrote the intertitles), and Frank Joslyn Baum, credited as "L. Frank Baum Jr." (Frank J. Baum's efforts to capitalize on his father's name led to a break with the rest of his family.)