Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Marnie

Marnie Edgar: Tippi Hedren
Mark Rutland: Sean Connery
Sidney Strutt: Martin Gabel
Bernice Edgar: Louise Latham
Lil Mainwaring: Diane Baker
Mr. Rutland: Alan Napier
Susan Clabon: Mariette Hartley
Sailor: Bruce Dern

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Marnie, once dismissed as just a stew of melodrama and pop psychology, has undergone a wholesale re-evaluation in recent years, much of it spurred by revelations about Alfred Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren. Now it's often seen as not only one of his most revealing films about his personal obsessions -- second perhaps only to Vertigo (1958), which it much resembles -- but also one of his greatest. Its champions include the New Yorker's Richard Brody and filmmaker Alexandre Philippe. In the introduction to a recent showing of Marnie on Turner Classic Movies, Philippe even compared Hedren's performance to that of Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001). I wouldn't go that far. In fact, the most I'm willing to say is that Marnie is a very odd duck of a movie, one that just thinking about for a while can give me the creeps, especially in these times when each day seems to bring a new revelation about powerful men and their treatment of vulnerable women (and men). That's why the key to Marnie seems to me not so much Marnie herself but Mark Rutland. Hedren is very good in her role, fully playing up her character's ever-present self-consciousness, born of being the constant object of the male gaze. But the film turns on an actor's ability to make Mark's obsession with Marnie, his persistence in trying to treat her disorder, and the breakdown of his endurance when he rapes her into something both credible and meaningful. I doubt that even Hitchcock's most gifted leading men, i.e., Cary Grant and James Stewart, could have brought off the role with much success. Sean Connery brings his Bondian smirk to the part, which heightens our sense of Marnie's fear of men, but also undercuts what should be at least a plausible interest on his part of treating her illness. There's no gentleness in Connery's performance, so that even Mark's attempts to win her over -- buying her beloved horse, for example -- look like power plays. But Marnie's response to Mark is equally perverse: After the rape, she tries to drown herself in the ship's swimming pool, and when he asks why she didn't just jump overboard, she replies, "The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish." Not only is the reply nonsensical but it also underscores the truth: The idea was obviously to let herself be found, either to be rescued or by her death to score another point against men. So it's clear that Marnie is the kind of film that invites exhaustive comment, which is not exactly the same thing as saying it's a great film, or even a good one. To my mind, it's a showcase of Hitchcockian technique without heart or wit. It has some fine touches, such as the scene in which Marnie goes to rob the Rutland safe and we watch as she goes about it on one side of the screen while on the other a cleaning woman comes closer and closer to discovering her. Once again, Hitchcock makes us root for someone who's doing something we should disapprove of, but there's also something overfamiliar about it: We saw something like it in Psycho (1960), when Norman tries and almost fails to sink the Ford containing Marion's body in the swamp. But there it was an important alienating moment; here it just seems like a trick to build suspense in a film that doesn't particularly need it. It's style for style's sake, the essence of decadence, and Marnie may be Hitchcock's most decadent film.

The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Sword of Doom

Ryunosuke Tsukue: Tatsuya Nakadai
Ohama: Michiyo Aratama
Hyoma Utsuki: Yuzo Kayama
Omatsu: Yoko Naito
Taranosuke Shimada: Toshiro Mifune
Shichibei: Ko Nishimura
Bunnojo Utsuki: Ichiro Nakaya
Kamo Serizawa: Kei Sato
Isami Kondo: Tadao Nakamura

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on a novel by Kaizan Nakazoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Murai
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Yoshitami Kuroiwa
Music: Masaru Sato

One of the joys of my pilgrimage through film history has been the discovery of great actors who aren't exactly household names in the United States. One of the best of them is Tatsuya Nakadai, who threw himself into roles with such commitment that it's almost a surprise to realize that he's still alive: He's 84 and still making movies. Even with the presence of the charismatic -- and, in the West, better-known -- Toshiro Mifune in the cast, Nakadai carries The Sword of Doom on his considerable shoulders, playing Ryunosuke, a psychotic samurai, with frightening conviction. In his first appearance, his face is partly hidden by the latticework of a hat, but his eyes burn brightly through the shadowing. He calmly murders an old man whose granddaughter has gone to fetch water. Granted, the old man is praying for death, but an easy one, not the blow of the titular sword. By the end of the film the madness that glitters in Ryunosuke's eyes has been responsible for countless deaths, and it flares up in a cataclysmic ending in which he slashes out at the ghosts he sees behind the bamboo shades of a brothel and eventually at the assassins who come for him. Nakadai does something extraordinary with his body in this final sequence: As Ryunosuke's mind comes unhinged, so does his body, killing in a kind of Totentanz that looks spasmodic but never loses its lethal precision. And there the film ends, on a freeze frame of Nakadai's face and its glittering eyes. The Sword of Doom was meant to have sequels, but they were never made. Yet although we never learn what happens to several other characters whose subplots have centered on Ryunosuke, or indeed whether he survived this orgy of blood, it doesn't really matter much. It's almost enough to have watched Nakadai in performance. 

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in Toni Erdmann

Ines Conradi: Sandra Hüller
Winfried Conradi: Peter Simonischek
Henneberg: Michael Wittenborn
Gerald: Thomas Loibl
Tim: Trystan Pütter
Anca: Ingrid Bisu
Steph: Lucy Russell
Tatjana: Hadewych Minis
Ilescu: Vlad Ivanov
Flavia: Victoria Cocias

Director: Maren Ade
Screenplay: Maren Ade
Cinematography: Patrick Orth

The nearly three hours -- well, two hours, 42 minutes -- of Toni Erdmann don't exactly fly by. It's more that they sometimes pause while we accustom ourselves to the eccentricity of the characters and begin to absorb some of the satire, build up another head of steam, and speed into another head-spinning but frequently funny episode. There's a feeling of improv about the film, and with improv there are often dead spots between outbursts of brilliance. The film is about a father and daughter, Winfried and Ines Conradi. He's a shaggy old prankster who teaches music in a school; she's an intensely driven corporate consultant now working to land a contract in Romania that would help companies streamline -- but mostly by jettisoning their unionized work force. The film is thus a satire on global corporate capitalism, with side glances at the pervasive sexism in that world. But writer-director Maren Ade has chosen not to weight the film in the direction of either character study or satire, and I think the film suffers from tone problems occasionally. Granted, it would be easy to slip into formula with such mismatched characters, and I say this knowing that an American remake with Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig is in the works, both of whom are more than capable of doing the conventional if satisfyingly funny thing with the setup: a father who delights in comic disguises like fright wigs and false teeth to shake up his uptight daughter's aggressively workaholic ways. It's to the credit of the film that there are enough unexpected moments -- such as Ines's singing "The Greatest Love of All" at a Romanian family's Easter celebration that Winfried has crashed -- that it never sinks to the routine and conventional. Finally, the film does, I think, go too far, when Ines suddenly decides to host a corporate party in the nude, insisting that all the guests strip too, and claims that it's a "team-building" exercise. Winfried, of course, crashes this party as well, wearing a Bulgarian kukeri costume -- it almost literally turns the film into a shaggy-dog story. Toni Erdmann was a big critical hit, and was a major contender for the foreign film Oscar that went, I think correctly, to Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman.

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

Josette Day and Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast

The Beast/The Prince/Avenant: Jean Marais
Belle: Josette Day
Félicie: Mila Parély
Adélaïde: Nane Germon
Ludovic: Michel Auclair
Father: Marcel André

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Based on a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Christian Bérard, Lucien Carré
Film editing: Claude Ibéria
Costume design: Antonio Castillo, Marcel Escoffier
Music: Georges Auric
Makeup: Hagop Arakelian

There are no singing teapots in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but there's more than enough magic -- almost too much to provide a satisfying ending, hence Greta Garbo's alleged lament, "Give me back my Beast." This is a fairy tale old style, which means that there's something unsettling about the happily-ever-after. Why does the Beast revert to the form of Avenant, whom it is never quite clear that Belle really loves? Where are they sailing off to at the end? Why does Belle seem oddly not quite enraptured with the turn of events? It's a sublimely erotic, if slightly kinky, film: I love the moment when, making his exit after seeing Belle, the Beast reaches out to caress the bare breast of a statue, as if copping a feel denied to him by his deeply conflicted nature. "Love can make a beast of a man," says the Prince at the end, and it's Cocteau's great achievement that this idea simmers beneath the surface of the entire film.

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein in Aliens

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Newt: Carrie Henn
Hicks: Michael Biehn
Burke: Paul Reiser
Bishop: Lance Henriksen
Hudson: Bill Paxton
Gorman: William Hope
Vasquez: Jenette Goldstein
Apone: Al Matthews

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Peter Lamont
Film editing: Ray Lovejoy
Music: James Horner

Before James Cameron become "king of the world" and infatuated with the possibilities of CGI, he made this exciting sequel to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), which is not only a superb movie on its own but also one of the few sequels whose creator has actually studied what made the first film so satisfying. In this case, characters. Just observe the still above and compare it with the one I chose from Alien in which the crew of the Nostromo gathered around the infected Kane. In the one from the sequel we see Newt, Hicks, Ripley, Hudson, Burke, and Vasquez gathered around a schematic to plot out a way of dealing with the alien threat. And if you remember the film at all, you can immediately recall what made these characters so appealing -- or in the case of Burke, so appalling. Aliens could have been your standard shoot-'em-up in space, with lots of mindless action. In fact, it starts out that way, with an obnoxiously gung-ho crew of space marines blustering about how they're going to kick some extraterrestrial ass. But as the cast is whittled down by the monsters, we get to know the seven survivors -- Bishop, the android so mistrusted by Ripley, is missing from the picture -- and to feel a genuine concern about their fates. Moreover, because Cameron hasn't yet fallen under the spell of CGI, what takes place looks and feels real -- there's a tactility about the sets that computers have yet to learn how to supply. Action movies don't come any better than Alien and Aliens. 

War and Peace (Sergey Bondarchuk, 1966)

Pierre Bezukhov: Sergey Bondarchuk
Natasha Rostova: Lyudmila Saveleva
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky: Vyacheslav Tikhonov
Field Marshal Kutuzov: Boris Zakhava
Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky: Anatoli Ktorov
Princess Maria Bolkonsky: Antonina Shuranova
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov: Viktor Stanitsyn
Countess Natalya Rostova: Kira Golovko
Nikolai Rostov: Oleg Tabakov
Petya Rostov: Sergei Yermilov
Hélène Kuragin: Irina Skobtseva
Anatol Kuragin: Vasili Lanovoy
Napoleon Bonaparte: Vladislav Strzhelchik

Director: Sergey Bondarchuk
Screenplay: Sergey Bondarchuk, Vasiliy Solovyov
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Yu-Lan Chen, Anatoliy Petritskiy, Alexsandr Shelenkov
Production design: Mikhail Bogdanov, Aleksandr Dikhtyar, Said Menyalshchikov, Gennady Myasnikov
Film editing: Tatyana Likachyova
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

No film adaptation of a great novel is going to satisfy admirers of that novel. The best we can hope for is a work that stands on its own, that supplies cinematic equivalents for some of the achievements of the prose work. But War and Peace, with its epic battles and accounts of the social lives and romantic entanglements of 19th-century Russians, cries out for filming on the grand and glamorous scale. And few films have assumed a grander scale than Sergey Bondarchuk's seven-hour-long version of Tolstoy's novel. I saw it in a theater in Dallas, where it was shown in four installments, sometime in the early 1970s and have never quite forgotten it, particularly those moments when the camera soared away from the heat of the battle into what seemed like the high heavens, or when it sailed above the dancers at Natasha's first ball. But I've read the novel several times, the latest reading a couple of months ago, and the best I can say, watching Bondarchuk's film again, is that his version is a magnificent failure. We get great gulps of the source material, sometimes in voiceover narration, and the performers are apt embodiments of the characters I see in my mind's eye as I read the book. But no film can capture the interiority of the novel, the psychological insights that make Prince Andrei, Natasha, and especially Pierre into people we feel like we know. Bondarchuk tries to supply some of this with voiceovers in which the characters speak their inner thoughts, but only succeeds in blurring the focus: The voiceovers are distractions from the drama that should be unfolding through action and dialogue. That said, watching the film over four successive nights is a unique experience.

Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

The longest of the four parts of War and Peace, Andrei Bolkonsky is the expository vehicle, introducing the three major characters, though it gives the lion's share of exposition to the two men, Andrei and Pierre. Natasha, still a little girl, virtually bursts into the film when she flings open a door in a brilliant flash of light, but the narrative concentration is on the youthful indecision of Pierre and on Andrei's unhappy marriage. Why he's so unhappy with the pretty, pregnant Lise is never made clear in the film -- and not much clearer in the book, other than that he's a man who hasn't found a direction in his life. Neither has Pierre, to be sure. He's still spending his time with boisterous companions. Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Bondarchuk are too old to be playing these characters -- Tikhonov was in his late 30s and Bondarchuk in his mid-40s -- but the war and the death of Andrei's wife allow Tikhonov to assume maturity swiftly, whereas Bondarchuk is stuck playing the naïf, railroaded into marriage with Hélène and later into a foolish duel with Dolokhov.

Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva and Vyacheslav Tikhonov in War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva is an exquisite Natasha, but I think Bondarchuk does the character a disservice by not allowing her more time to fall into the clutches of Kuragin. Tolstoy's novel delineates the gradual stages of Kuragin's seduction and Natasha's yielding to him. It also makes more clear that Kuragin really does fall in love with her -- as who wouldn't? The ball is the spectacular set piece of the installment, and the camera dances along with the people. Andrei's father is of course the real villain of the story, and I wish we had more of the torture he inflicts on his daughter, Maria, and on her retreat into religion to bolster the depiction of the old man's cruelty. But as Bondarchuk has chosen to eliminate the very interesting (but not essential) story of Nikolai Rostov's throwing over his cousin Sonya for Maria, there doesn't really need to be much development of the character. Too bad, because Antonina Shuranova does a fine job with what's left of Maria in the film -- like Tolstoy's Maria, she really does have beautiful eyes, but unlike her, she could never be considered "ugly." Bondarchuk has also cut, perhaps wisely, Pierre's involvement with the Freemasons, which takes up many of the less interesting pages of Tolstoy's book.

Part III: The Year 1812

Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

There are no more spectacular battle scenes than the ones in this film, and probably never will be, even now that we have CGI to supplant the thousands of extras and borrowed Soviet soldiers that Bondarchuk employed for the film. I think the thunder and carnage of war is made more impressive by the presence of Pierre, immaculately garbed, with a white top hat, absurdly stumbling around as the soldiers go about their terrible business. As the narrator puts it, "On June 12, the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontiers of Russia and war began. In other words, an event took place that was contrary to all human reason and human nature." Bondarchuk pulls out all stops in proclaiming the love of Mother Russia that animates the soldiers, but when the icon of the Holy Mother of Smolensk is brought out for mass adoration, I was ironically reminded of the scene in Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929) in which a procession of Orthodox clergy comes out to pray for rain and is mocked by cuts to images of bleating sheep. Clearly, much had changed in the treatment of religion in the Soviet Union by the time Bondarchuk made War and Peace. This part does end on a rather heavy-handed patriotic sermon, which I suspect may have been inserted to placate the censors.

Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

There is something rushed and jumbled about the concluding part of Bondarchuk's epic, which is forced to wind up the stories of Andrei and Natasha as well as concentrate on the burning of Moscow, the retreat of the French, and Pierre's imprisonment and release. This leaves little time for Tolstoy's epilogue, in which Pierre and Natasha wed and start a family, as do the mostly absent Nikolai and Maria. The coincidence of Pierre's rescue and Petya's death feels particularly rushed: I wonder if anyone who hasn't read the book recently will even be able to follow the action. But we are also spared much of the interaction of Pierre and Platon Karataev (Mikhail Khrabrov), one of Tolstoy's founts of peasant wisdom, which even on the page tends toward mawkish sentimentality. There are still some enormously effective scenes. The burning of Moscow puts the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) to shame -- which may have been Bondarchuk's intent. The execution of prisoners by the French is movingly staged, as is the fate of the retreating French soldiers, summed up on one last spectacular overhead shot as the ragged and freezing French stream toward a huge circle around the fire.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945-46)

Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Nikolay Cherkasov in the color sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part II

Czar Ivan IV: Nikolay Cherkasov
Czarina Anastasia Romanovna: Lyudmila Tselikovskaya
Boyarina Ephrosinia Staritskaya: Serafima Birman
Prince Andrei Kurbsky: Mikhail Nazvanov
Czar's Guard Malyuta Skiratov: Mikhail Zharov
Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov: Amvrosi Buchma
Fyodor Basmanov: Mikhail Kuznetsov
Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky: Pavel Kadochnikov
Boyar Fyodor Kolychev/Archbishop Philip: Andrei Abrikasov
Nikolay the Fanatic: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pyotr Volynets: Vladimir Balashov
Archbishop Pimen: Aleksandr Mgebrov
Sigismond, King of Poland: Pavel Massalsky

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein
Cinematography: Andrei Moskvin, Eduard Tisse
Production design: Iosif Shpinel, Sergei Eisenstein
Costume design: Leonid Naumov, M. Safonova
Music: Sergei Prokofiev

David Thomson has made a suggestion that a better film epic could be made of the life of Sergei Eisenstein than the one that was made about the life of John Reed -- i.e., Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). In fact, Eisenstein's life was so crowded with artistic and political drama that it would probably have to be an HBO miniseries like Game of Thrones (which is not a bad subtitle for Ivan the Terrible, come to think of it). The drama surrounding Ivan the Terrible alone would be enough for a whole season's episode, with Eisenstein struggling to bring his proposed three-installment film about Stalin's favorite czar to the screen while at the same time dealing with the lethal whims of the dictator himself. After Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released to great acclaim in 1945, including a Stalin Prize from the hands of the man himself, Stalin soured on the project: The mad frenzy of Ivan in Part II cut too close to the bone and it was not released until 1958 -- five years after Stalin's death and ten years after Eisenstein's. Part III had begun filming but was canceled, and what existed of it, except for some stills and scraps, was destroyed. After all this Sturm und Drang, it would be nice to conclude, as some critics have done, that Ivan the Terrible is one of the masterpieces of world cinema. But I can't go that far. It seems to me a great directorial folly, akin to Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) in its directorial excesses, its indulgence in style for style's sake. That the style is immensely entertaining in its artistic wrong-headedness pushes Ivan the Terrible in the direction of camp, a world's fair exhibition of stained-glass attitudes, early silent film poses, great garish sets, costumes that make even the hairiest 16th-century Russians look like drag queens, and in Part II there's a sequence in the most lurid color this side of some of the ballet sequences in MGM musicals of the 1950s. The first time we see Sigismond, the king of Poland, in Part II, he's sprawled across the throne in a position that almost screams for a sign proclaiming "Careless Decadence,"  and really looks extremely uncomfortable. Ivan's enemy, Archbishop Philip, swans about in a billowing cloak that has no known sartorial or clerical necessity, and which allows Ivan to forestall his exit by simply placing a foot on it. When Philip does manage to leave, the cloak raises a cloud of dust that suggests Ivan needs to liquidate the housekeeping staff. The collection of poses in Ivan the Terrible is balletic and operatic in the worst senses of the words, but the film is also watchable for all those reasons. There are some redeeming values, of course. It's a window into the mind of the Stalinist Soviet Union, both in what it approved and what it banned. It has a distinguished score by Prokofiev, though unfortunately muddied by poor sound reproduction -- in restoring the film, it's too bad that as much attention wasn't paid to providing a new music soundtrack as to cleaning up the images. Visually, it's fascinating, even when the visuals are absurd.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Vera Miles, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quayle in The Wrong Man

Manny Balestrero: Henry Fonda
Rose Balestrero: Vera Miles
Frank D. O'Connor: Anthony Quayle
Det. Lt. Bowers: Harold J. Stone
Det. Matthews: Charles Cooper
Tomasini: John Heldabrand
Mama Balestrero: Esther Minciotti

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Paul Sylbert
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock's docudrama The Wrong Man is not so anomalous in his career as his rather portentous backlit introduction suggests: It may be based on an incident about a real Manny Balestrero, but there are lots of wrongly accused men in his movies, and this time he simply landed on one who happened to be an actual person. And Hitchcock's gravitation to the theme of undeserved punishment and consequent mental anguish (in this case Rose Balestrero's) was something we could expect from him if we knew of the trauma caused by the notorious childhood incident in which his domineering father had the local constabulary lock young Alfred in a jail cell for five minutes. The lesson learned was less "be a good boy" than "fear the cops," who loom large in many of his films. But the real novelty of The Wrong Man is its tone: There's virtually no leavening of gloom in the film by the usual Hitchcockian humor. Only at the very ending, when we are assured that Manny and Rose and the kids moved to Florida and lived happily ever after, is there any attempt to mitigate the rather oppressive quality of the black-and-white, location-shot tale of the struggling Balestreros. And anyone who knows much about the difficulty of "curing" depression, which Rose suffers from, is likely to feel a little skeptical about that. That said, it's a very good film, making especially fine use of Henry Fonda -- his only appearance for Hitchcock -- whose naturally haunted look is a perfect fit for the victimized Balestrero. Vera Miles, whom Hitchcock was grooming as a replacement for Grace Kelly after her recent elevation to Princess of Monaco, gives a convincing performance as Rose, managing to suggest that her depression was in the cards even before Manny's arrest. The realism of the Balestreros' financial struggle is also well-handled, as is the climactic revelation of the "right" man, accomplished by a double exposure in which he walks into and fills the image of Balestrero in closeup. For me, the other only false note besides the oversimplified happy ending is the invocation of religion as a cure to Manny's dilemma: Mama Balestrero's urging him to pray for strength and his gaze at a rather kitsch picture of Jesus is too swiftly followed by his deliverance. It turns a serious emotional and spiritual struggle into a cliché as old as the movies. The Wrong Man has been favorably compared to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), a distinction I don't think it quite merits, but then what film does?

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging

R.: Do-yun Yu
Warden: Kei Sato
Education Officer: Fumio Watanabe
District Attorney: Hosei Kamatsu
Doctor: Rokko Toura
Chaplain: Ishiro Ishida
Chief of Guards: Masao Adachi
Sister: Akiko Koyama
Narrator: Nagisa Oshima

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

It's becoming clearer to me that Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Ozu often know little about him. Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque."