High Hopes (Mike Leigh, 1988)

Ruth Sheen and Phil Davis in High Hopes

Cyril: Phil Davis
Shirley: Ruth Sheen
Mrs. Bender: Edna Doré
Valerie: Heather Tobias
Martin: Philip Jackson
Laetitia: Lesley Manville
Rupert: David Bamber
Wayne: Jason Watkins

Director: Mike Leigh
Screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Diana Charnley
Music: Andrew Dickson

Mike Leigh's excoriating satire of Thatcherite Britain, High Hopes, ranges from shrill to droll, from gratingly silly to quietly touching. A film like it from any other director might have been said to be out of control, but as usual Leigh knows exactly what he's doing, and he does it brilliantly if annoyingly. Annoyance is, in fact, part of the process: If we object that his characters are unreal, over the top, his response would have to be yes, but you know who they are, don't you? And we do, from the shabby socialists, Cyril and Shirley, to the working-class strivers who can't rise above their bad taste, Valerie and Martin, to the parvenu Tories, Laetitia and Rupert. We've all seen their likes, even in the United States -- perhaps they're even more noticeable in today's Trumpian America. Fortunately, Leigh knows to ground his satire in people we can sympathize with, namely, Cyril and Shirley. They are menial cogs in the capitalist machine, he's a motorcycle courier, she works for a landscape gardener, and they rage against the system, especially Cyril, who drags Shirley to Highgate Cemetery to worship at the grave of Karl Marx. She's more interested in the foliage -- "That ivy could use a pruning," she notes -- than in the moribund class struggle, but she loves her man, even if he doesn't want to have children because he doesn't want to bring anyone else into an overpopulated world in which socialism has failed. Poor as they are, they have good hearts, taking in the mentally challenged stray Wayne for a night and putting him up in their "spare room," which is a large closet with a mattress and sleeping bag. But they have to contend with family: Cyril's aging mum, who precipitates a crisis by locking herself out of her house, and his giddy sister, Valerie, whose husband runs a used-car lot and is a thorough cad. The crisis introduces us to mum's gentrifying next-door neighbors, Laetitia and Rupert, who have bought one of the row houses in a council estate and are renovating it to the height of yuppie chic. Rupert proclaims his mantra: "What made this country great was a place for everyone and everyone in his place." Then he adds, "And this is my place." The scenes from the lives of Laetitia and Rupert and from those of Valerie and Martin are hysterically funny, but Leigh knows that a little of them goes a long way -- a little of Valerie's manic giggle goes a very long way indeed -- so he wisely turns back to the more identifiably human (and humane) Cyril and Shirley to put things into perspective. The film concludes with Cyril and Shirley taking his mum up to the roof of the building in which they live to admire the rather drab view of the St. Pancras railway yards and the gasworks, with just a peek at St. Paul's. For once in the film, mum, who is usually sunk in senile confusion and depression, brightens a little: "This is the top of the world," she says. God help us, but it probably is.

Camille (Ray C. Smallwood, 1921)

Alla Nazimova in Camille

Marguerite Gautier: Alla Nazimova
Armand Duval: Rudolph Valentino
Gaston Rieux: Rex Cherryman
Count de Varville: Arthur Hoyt
Prudence: Zeffie Tilbury
Nichette: Patsy Ruth Miller
Nanine: Elinor Oliver
Armand's Father: William Orlamond
Olympe: Consuelo Flowerton

Director: Ray C. Smallwood
Screenplay: June Mathis
Based on the novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils
Cinematography: Rudolph J. Bergquist
Art direction: Natacha Rambova
Costume design: Natacha Rambova

It's hard to judge from her performance in this silent version of Camille why Alla Nazimova (billed in the film, which she produced, as just "Nazimova") was so celebrated an actress, especially if you've seen Greta Garbo's performance in George Cukor's 1936 version of the Dumas fils story. To us, Nazimova's Marguerite Gautier is camp: a series of pouts and poses, with lots of swooning backbends, and an unfortunate hairdo that looks like a cross between an afro and an explosion in a wig factory. But it's very much Nazimova's movie: Her Armand is Rudolph Valentino, but she constantly upstages him, even to the extent of cutting the usual ending of Camille, in which Marguerite and Armand are reunited for her great resurgence of life just before she expires. In this Camille Marguerite dies unreconciled, with just the faithful Nanine and the just-married Gaston and Nichette as witnesses to her last swoon. It's as if she foresaw Garbo's grand demise and knew she couldn't compete. What the film mostly has going for it are the set and costume designs of Natacha Rambova (who may have been Nazimova's lover and who did marry Valentino). At some point, a decision was made to update the story from the 1840s to the 1920s, so Rambova's designs for Marguerite's Paris haunts are a fascinating version of Art Deco with touches of Art Nouveau and some hints of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings. Marguerite breathes her last in a round bed under a rounded arch in her Paris bedroom, which has a round window outside of which snow is falling. But Rambova seems less interested in Marguerite and Armand's country idyll, and the cottage is a rather drab affair, very obviously a three-walled stage set, and one that the director, Ray C. Smallwood, unimaginatively treats as such. As for Valentino, he's his usual handsome and dashing presence, but deprived of his final scene he makes less impact on the film than usual. In short, this Camille is a briefly tantalizing glimpse at some legendary figures, but not much of a drama.

The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1964)

Françoise Dorléac and Jean Desailly in The Soft Skin

Pierre Lachenay: Jean Desailly
Nicole: Françoise Dorléac
Franca Lachenay: Nelly Benedetti
Clément: Daniel Ceccaldi
Ingrid: Laurence Badie
Theater Manager: Philippe Dumat
Sabine Lachenay: Sabine Haudepin

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Claudine Bouché
Music: Georges Delerue

Some film titles almost seem to invite critical snark: I'm sure I'm not the first to be tempted to say that The Soft Skin is "only skin deep." But that sums up my reaction to François Truffaut's film: Its characters aren't developed enough. According to Truffaut, the inspiration for the film was seeing a couple kissing in a taxicab and wondering if they were cheating on their respective spouses, which led to meditations on the topic of adultery. Truffaut was working on his book about Alfred Hitchcock at the time, and perhaps Hitchcock's own explorations in voyeurism turned Truffaut into a voyeur as well. The protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, is a celebrated intellectual, a writer and editor whose lectures draw admiring crowds and even bring news photographers out to greet his arrival and ask him to pose with the pretty flight attendant he has encountered on the plane. The flight attendant is Nicole, although the appropriate word for her job would have to be "stewardess," for the film takes place in a time when flight attendants were exclusively young and female, almost airborne geishas, whose job was to please the mostly male business travelers. Their supposed sexual availability was of course an illusion, but one exploited in gag lines like "Coffee, tea, or me?" and in soft- and hard-core porn films. It's also a subtext to the character played by Françoise Dorléac, who captures Lachenay's roving eye on a flight to and from Lisbon, where he gives a talk on Balzac. The development of their affair begins to take on the character of farce, especially when they try to get away from Lachenay's wife for a few days under the cover of an introduction he is giving to a film about André Gide at a theater in Reims. Trying to hide their relationship is harder than they expect: Lachenay keeps encountering obstacles like unexpected dinner engagements and awkward hotel arrangements, and more especially an officious manager of the event who even winds up inviting himself on a ride to Paris with Lachenay, who has tried to cover up the fact that he's at another hotel with Nicole by saying that he has to return to the city that same evening. These scenes are mutedly funny: Their farcical character is tempered by Truffaut's skillful development of tension. Of course, the affair is doomed, but not before Mme. Lachenay learns of it, which leads to a ending marked by melodramatic violence. The whole film is an exhibition of Truffaut's skill; he plays with stretching and foreshortening time, with building suspense, with scenes that echo one another, and with subtle eroticism, all of it heightened by Raoul Coutard's exquisite black-and-white cinematography and Georges Delerue's score. But in Lachenay he hasn't given us a character who draws our sympathy, and his directing Jean Desailly to maintain an inexpressive face allows us to wonder what, exactly, this beautiful young woman sees in this ordinary-looking middle-aged man. It's an often provocative film, but one that depends more on film technique than on engaging characters and effective storytelling, so it left me cold.

Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016)

Natalie Portman and Billy Crudup in Jackie

Jackie Kennedy: Natalie Portman
Bobby Kennedy: Peter Sarsgaard
Nancy Tuckerman: Greta Gerwig
The Journalist: Billy Crudup
The Priest: John Hurt
Bill Walton: Richard E. Grant
John F. Kennedy: Caspar Phillipson
Lyndon B. Johnson: John Carroll Lynch
Lady Bird Johnson: Beth Grant
Jack Valenti: Max Casella

Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Jean Rabasse
Costume design: Madeline Fontaine
Music: Mica Levi

I will give the benefit of the doubt to director Pablo Larraín (born in Chile in 1976) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (born in 1978) and assume that they didn't know what a thudding sentimental cliché ending Jackie with a reprise of the title song from Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot would seem to those of us who actually lived through the Kennedy years and experienced the assassination and extended period of mourning that followed. Back then, you couldn't avoid Camelot allusions, even when we were fully aware of the shortcomings of JFK and the Cold War mentality, especially that of his "best and brightest" who were about to lead us into the Vietnam quagmire. Even as early as June 1964, reporter Tom Wicker was trying to evoke a less sentimental vision in his Esquire piece titled "Kennedy Without Tears." This absence of real historical context is a blemish on a well-meaning and sometimes very good film. The very good part is the heroic effort of Natalie Portman to bring together a coherent portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman undone by grief but struggling to keep a family and a legacy together. The best scenes in the film are those in which Jackie, briefly obsessed with the history of American political assassination, waffles between giving JFK a funeral that would rival Abraham Lincoln's and her fears that her husband's assassination might be part of a larger plot. She chooses a grand procession in which she, members of the administration, and foreign dignitaries would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the church. Then, when Lee Harvey Oswald is gunned down, she calls the procession off and rages at her brother-in-law Bobby for having kept the news of Oswald's murder from her while she and her two small children were making a vulnerable public appearance.  But then she changes her mind again, after LBJ's assistant, Jack Valenti, has already informed the foreign dignitaries, including the very difficult Charles De Gaulle, that there will be a motorcade instead of a walk. "I will march with Jack, alone if necessary," she tells Valenti. If the rest of Jackie were as good as these scenes, it would be a major achievement. Unfortunately, it's blurred by an unnecessary frame story in which she is interviewed by a journalist and exercises an iron-willed control over what he will print, even as she spills the most intimate details of her experiences to him -- a way of launching flashbacks. There are too many lugubrious moments, scenes of Jackie wandering alone through the White House. There's also a rather sententious conversation with a priest in which he and Jackie flirt with existentialist concepts of the meaning of life and death -- even John Hurt, in one of his last film appearances, can't quite bring this one off. There's some miscasting, especially Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy, whom he neither looks nor acts like. But throughout it all, Portman skillfully evokes Jackie Kennedy in voice and manner without mimicry. I have to credit the producers for making a film with a powerful lead role for a woman, but Jackie Kennedy was a more interesting person than this segment of her life suggests. I'd like to see a fuller biopic, perhaps a TV miniseries, that takes in her reaction to her husband's well-known infidelities and carries her through the controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis and the rest of the Kennedy tragedies. I'll bet Portman could play the hell out of the rest of Jackie Kennedy's life.

Dragnet Girl (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Dragnet Girl

Tokiko: Kinuyo Tanaka
Joji: Joji Oka
Kazuko: Sumiko Mizukubo
Hiroshi: Koji Mitsui
Misako: Yumeko Aizome
Senko: Yoshio Takayama
Misawa: Koji Kaga
Okazaki: Yasuo Nanjo

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Yasujiro Ozu (as James Maki)
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Art direction: Yonekazu Wakita

Yasujiro Ozu clung to silent film for a long time, but who needs sound when you and your cinematographer, Hideo Shigehara, can use the camera as eloquently as they do in Dragnet Girl? Early in the film, the camera explores an office setting, panning over rows of young women at typewriters, clocks slowly ticking away the workday, and rows of men's hats hanging in a hallway. In the last take, one of the hats drops from its hook, as if impatient for quitting time. One of the typists, Tokiko, is summoned from her machine to the office of the president, where she finds his son, Okazaki, who has been putting the moves on her by giving her jewelry, this time a ruby ring. She shrugs off his advances but accepts the ring -- she's living with a gangster, an ex-boxer named Joji, and it's his world that she prefers. This is one of Ozu's forays into the underworld made familiar to us by Hollywood, and it's permeated with echoes of Warner Bros. movies of the 1930s. American culture creeps in everywhere: Even the rules of conduct in a pool hall are written in English on the wall, and in the boxing gym that Joji frequents a sign proclaims the virtues of "The Manly Art of Self-Defense." When an eager young kid named Hiroshi shows up in the gym wanting to become a champion fighter, Joji takes an interest in him, and through him meets his sister, Kazuko, who works in a record store that prominently features the RCA Victor mascot, Nipper. Tokiko gets jealous of Joji's interest in Kazuko, but when she decides to emulate her rival by taking up knitting and other domestic pursuits, she and Joji quarrel. She storms out, but later returns to persuade Joji that it might be a good thing to go straight. Things get complicated, however, when Hiroshi, Joji's protégé, steals money from the cash register at his sister's store. Joji persuades Tokiko that they should pull off one last heist, robbing from the office where Tokiko works to get cash so Hiroshi can pay back what he stole. Ah, but crime does not pay. All of this melodramatic business is elevated not only by Ozu's sure-footed direction and attention to visual detail but also by the performances, especially that of  Kinuyo Tanaka, who once again shows why she should be honored as one of the great film actresses. She has Bette Davis's toughness combined with Lillian Gish's gift for pathos.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Jeff Spicoli: Sean Penn
Stacy Hamilton: Jennifer Jason Leigh
Brad Hamilton: Judge Reinhold
Mike Damone: Robert Romanus
Mark "Rat" Ratner: Brian Backer
Linda Barrett: Phoebe Cates
Mr. Hand: Ray Walston
Mr. Vargas: Vincent Schiavelli
Charles Jefferson: Forest Whitaker

Director: Amy Heckerling
Screenplay: Cameron Crowe
Based on a book by Cameron Crowe
Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Art director: Daniel A. Lomino

Of the few standouts in the teen comedy genre, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the one most beloved of that pig in the python, the Baby Boomers. It's not as nostalgic as the granddaddy of the genre, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), or as smart as Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993), or as savagely witty as Tina Fey's Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004). It's not even as cleverly conceived as director Amy Heckerling's other major outing in the genre, Clueless (1995). But it is the one most frank about teenage sexuality, especially in the relationship between Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy and Phoebe Cates's Linda, in which the supposedly "experienced" Linda serves as the virginal Stacy's mentor. The film also admirably confronts the question of abortion straightforwardly: Stacy has one and suffers no lasting trauma. Instead the condemnation lands on the guy, Mike Damone, whose callous treatment of Stacy is devastatingly portrayed. Otherwise, Fast Times is best seen as a landmark in the careers of future Oscar winners Sean Penn, Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage (who has a small part billed as "Brad's Bud" under the name Nicolas Coppola), and as a demonstration of the skill of someone who has always deserved the Oscar she hasn't won, namely Jennifer Jason Leigh. The cast also features future big names like Eric Stolz and Anthony Edwards in small roles, and gave a brief boost to the career of Judge Reinhold that flared in the mid-1980s and then fizzled. But while Fast Times at Ridgemont High is never quite the "scuz-pit" that Roger Ebert, on an off night, saw it as, it hasn't worn very well. The acting is sometimes just this side of amateurish and the blend of the seriousness of Stacy's scenes with the more familiar classroom comedy involving Spicoli and Mr. Hand lacks finesse. While the movie has a slight feminist edge in its treatment of sex, it also involves some gratuitous breast-baring on the part of Leigh and Cates.

Dry Summer (Metin Erksan, 1964)

Ulvi Dogan and Erol Tas in Dry Summer

Osman: Erol Tas
Bahar: Hülya Koçygit
Hasan: Ulvi Dogan
Veli Sari: Hakki Haktan

Director: Metin Erksan
Screenplay: Metin Erksan, Kemal Inci, Ismet Soydan
Based on a novel by Necati Cumali
Cinematography: Ali Ugur
Music: Manos Hatzidakis

"Other cultures, other customs." That's the liberal mantra when it comes to things other countries do that we disapprove of, though we usually work on persuading them toward our views, especially when those things seem exceptionally cruel, like footbinding or female genital mutilation. Sometimes, though, we have to swallow hard and accept. This blog is a record of movies that I've seen, and I don't expect (and don't often get) drop-ins looking for recommendations. But I welcome them, and if you're one of those, I feel obliged to issue a warning: Metin Erksan's Dry Summer, a much-praised Turkish film, contains two instances of animal cruelty that may be more than you can take. The first is a close-up of a chicken having its head cut off. We've grown so far from our rural roots that a scene like this can be shocking, but we should be obliged to realize that it's a routine occurrence on farms around the world -- and that thousands of chickens are slaughtered in supposedly more humane ways every day so they can arrive in supermarkets neatly wrapped in plastic. The other scene is much harder to take: A dog is shot and yelps in pain before it dies. I see no way that director Metin Erksan has faked this animal's suffering and death -- we later see its carcass being hauled away, head lolling -- and I can't bring myself to countenance its raw inclusion in Dry Summer, even though the killing plays a role in establishing the mood and intensity of the film. Otherwise, Dry Summer, which was chosen for inclusion in Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project and released in the Criterion Collection, is a savage melodrama about a war between a landowner and the other farmers who depend on the spring on his property to water their crops. As characters in the film repeatedly say, "Water is the earth's blood." When Osman decides to dam up the water near the source on his property, he naturally inspires animosity: The dog that's shot is Osman's. But there is a war in Osman's household as well, when his younger brother, Hasan, takes a pretty young wife, Bahar. Osman is a widower, and he spies through a crack in the wall at Hasan and Bahar making love. As the war between the water-deprived farmers and the brothers intensifies, with the dam -- little more than a sluice gate -- continually under attack, Osman finally sheds blood, killing Veli Sari, the leader of the rebelling farmers, during a nighttime assault on the gate. But he persuades Hasan to take the rap: Osman claims that he's more mature and experienced and so the better choice to keep the farm going while Hasan goes to prison. Naturally, Hasan's absence also gives Osman an opening to seduce his brother's wife, which he finally succeeds in doing when a newspaper report says that a man named Hasan has died in prison. Osman has been intercepting Hasan's letters to Bahar, so ít's easy for him to tell her that her husband is now dead. Erksan stages Osman's obsessive pursuit of Bahar well, including a scene in which he's milking a cow as she watches, so he begins fingering and even mouthing the teats suggestively. In another scene, Bahar is bitten by a snake, and Osman relishes the opportunity to suck the poison from the wound in her leg. Eventually, of course, Hasan turns up alive, after being released from prison in a general pardon, and takes his revenge on his brother, resulting in a strong closing scene in which Osman's corpse floats down the watercourses after the dam is broken. Some very sophisticated camerawork adds to the impact of the story, and Erol Tas makes Osman into a memorable villain. Which is why I regret that the killing of the dog mars my reception of the film.

The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks, 1932)

James Cagney in The Crowd Roars

Joe Greer: James Cagney
Lee Merrick: Ann Dvorak
Anne Scott: Joan Blondell
Eddie Greer: Eric Linden
Spud Connors: Frank McHugh
Pop Greer: Guy Kibbee

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: John Bright, Niven Busch, Kubec Glasmon
Based on a story by Howard Hawks and Seton I. Miller
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox, John Stumar
Film editing: Thomas Pratt

The "Hawksian woman," able to crack wise and exhibit grace under pressure as well as any man, is one of the glories of Hollywood movies. Actresses as various as Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Lauren Bacall, Joanne Dru, and Angie Dickinson held their own with domineering males like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne, among others. So when I saw that TCM had scheduled a Howard Hawks film I hadn't seen starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell, I thought I knew what I was in for. If anyone could take down a peg the Cagney who became famous for abusing Mae Clarke with half a grapefruit in The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) it would be Blondell, Warners' likable tough girl. Blondell never got the chance in The Public Enemy, in which she's linked up with Edward Woods instead of Cagney. Well, here's another missed opportunity: Though Blondell gets top billing with Cagney, he's paired off with Ann Dvorak; Blondell gets the forgettable (and forgotten) juvenile Eric Linden instead. And Dvorak's character is no Hawksian woman: Instead of toughing it out with a wisecrack when Cagney's character dumps her, she goes into hysterics. So instead of the witty battle of the sexes we have come to expect from Hawks, in The Crowd Roars we get a passable and sometimes exciting action movie about race car drivers, with a little romantic entanglement thrown in to bridge the well-shot and well-staged racing scenes. Cagney's Joe Greer is a champion race car driver -- he's won at Indianapolis three times -- who goes home to find that his kid brother, Eddie, wants to follow in his footsteps. So Joe takes Eddie back to L.A. with him, where he's been living without benefit of wedlock -- this is a pre-Code film -- with Lee Merrick. Initially he tries to hide his relationship with Lee to protect the younger man's morals -- to "keep him off of booze and women," as he puts it -- but truth will out. When he decides to break up with Lee, she enlists her friend Anne in a revenge plot: Anne will frustrate Joe's puritanical scheme by seducing Eddie. This doesn't work out: Anne and Eddie fall in love. Meanwhile, Joe and Eddie compete in a race in which Joe's sidekick Spud is killed in a flaming crash -- there's a remarkable series of scenes in which drivers, including Joe, drop out of the race because they're nauseated by having to repeatedly pass the crash site with its smell of burning flesh. Eddie wins the race and goes on to become the star driver that Joe was, while Joe hits the bottle and the skids. Redemption and reconciliation of course ensue. None of this is new and all of it is predictable, but Hawks knows how to pump up the action when everything gets soppy. As for the Hawksian woman, she will have to wait until 1934 and Twentieth Century for Carole Lombard to give her the first satisfactory outing.

Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, 1930)

Minoru Takada and Hisao Yoshitani in Walk Cheerfully

Kenji Koyama: Minoru Takada
Yasue Sugimoto: Hiroko Kawasaki
Senko: Hisao Yoshitani
Chieko: Satoko Date
Ono: Takeshi Sakamoto
Gunpei: Teruo Mori
Yasue's Sister: Nobuko Matsuzono
Mother: Utako Suzuki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Hiroshi Shimizu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Set decoration: Hiroshi Mizutani

The English titles of Yasujiro Ozu's films are typically oblique, ranging from the atmospheric but uninformative -- Late Spring (1949),  Early Summer (1951) -- to the proverbial or epigrammatic (but only in Japanese) -- The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), A Hen in the Wind (1958) -- to the simply mistranslated -- Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947). The title of Walk Cheerfully would seem to be similarly somewhat aside of the mark for what started as a gangster movie, but at least the phrase appears in an intertitle in the film as the parting advice given by Yasue to Kenji as he's being taken away by the police -- she seems to mean it somewhat in the spirit of "take care." The film itself is a curious blend of gangster film and romance. In fact, the work it reminded me of sometimes was Frank Loesser's musical Guys and Dolls, which has a similar theme of a shady guy being redeemed by a good girl. The analogy leaped to mind when some of Ozu's gangsters did synchronized routines and gag soft-shoe dances in the pool hall where they meet. For these are not hard-core American gangsters or even murderous yakuza; they're small-time pickpockets and thieves. We meet our hero, Kenji, while he's still a thug known as "Ken the Knife" for the tattoo on his left forearm. The movie begins with a chase: Kenji's sidekick, Senko, being pursued by a mob who think he has stolen a man's wallet. When the mob catches up with Senko, Kenji appears out of the crowd and suggests that they search him for the wallet. Nothing turns up, so Senko goes free, but later we see them meet up and discover that they're in cahoots: Kenji has picked the wallet from Senko as the mob was roughing him up. Eventually, however, both Kenji and Senko try to go straight when Kenji meets and falls in love with Yasue. When they first see her, they think Yasue is a rich woman: She arrives at a jewelry store in a large car and goes in to buy a diamond ring. But it turns out that she's running an errand for her boss, the head of the Ono Trading Co., who puts the moves on her when she brings it to him. Eventually, after Kenji and Yasue meet up again and he learns the truth, that she's just an office worker, he will have an opportunity to beat up Ono for sexually harassing Yasue. This is very minor Ozu, but he handles it well, demonstrating not only his skill at telling a story but also the way American movies influenced him: On the wall at Ono Trading Co. there's a poster for Joan Crawford's Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928). Movies, big cars, and pop music -- Senko has written the English lyrics to the 1928 song "The Gay Caballero" on the wall of the room he shares with Kenji and is trying to learn them -- figure large with these very modern Japanese gangsters.

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top

Joe Lampton: Laurence Harvey
Alice Aisgill: Simone Signoret
Susan Brown: Heather Sears
Mr. Brown: Donald Wolfit
Charles Soames: Donald Houston
Elspeth: Hermione Baddeley
George Aisgill: Allan Cuthbertson
Mr. Hoylake: Raymond Huntley
Jack Wales: John Westbrook
Mrs. Brown: Ambrosine Phillpotts

Director: Jack Clayton
Screenplay: Neil Paterson
Based on a novel by John Braine
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Music: Mario Nascimbene

Laurence Harvey's narrow eyes and sharpish features (and a long brush cut that makes him look a little like Clint Eastwood) provide the right wolfish look for Joe Lampton, a young man from the provinces on the make. Heir to such classic challengers to the class system as Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, and Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths, Lampton is determined to break down the British barriers to upward movement. He arrives in the Yorkshire city of Warnley to take on a government job and walks right into a hormonal stew, the eager young men and women of his office casting eyes on one another, but especially on the newcomer. But Lampton knows what he wants when he sees her: a rich young woman named Susan Brown, whose father is a local factory owner. Learning that Susan is a member of an amateur theatrical group, Lampton joins up, only to find himself edged aside by the well-to-do Jack Wales, who is paying court to Susan. Every move Lampton makes to ingratiate himself with Susan, who is inclined to return his attentions, is thwarted by her parents, especially her formidably snobbish mother. We sense Mrs. Brown's backstory: She has married rich herself, to a working-class self-made man, and is determined to keep climbing higher -- no lower-class Lamptons allowed. Determined as he is to win Susan, whose parents send her away on an extended vacation on the Riviera,  Lampton comforts himself with another member of the theater company, Alice Aisgill, an older woman with a bullying, unfaithful husband. When Susan returns, Lampton resumes his pursuit of her, but finds that he has fallen in love with Alice, whose maturity offers something that makes Susan's girlishness seem cloying. When he manages to seduce Susan, he's bored and annoyed by her reaction to losing her virginity: She doesn't feel different, she simpers and keeps asking him if she looks different. But Susan gets pregnant, forcing the Browns into an accommodation with him: marriage and a lucrative job -- everything he wanted. The crisis with Alice this precipitates is predictable, but the film makes a sharp turn into melodrama before the ending. Room at the Top was a hit, winning Simone Signoret a best actress Oscar and Harvey a nomination (along with a nomination for Hermione Baddeley in the very small role of the friend who lends Alice her flat for the trysts with Lampton). It's a little slow in the middle section, as the affair with Alice progresses, and Harvey was an actor of limited range, so the shift from the predatory Lampton of the first part of the film to the man infatuated with Alice doesn't quite come off. But it's a perfect example of the Angry Young Men films, plays, and novels that revolutionized British culture in the austere postwar 1950s.