A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, Wright King, Richard Garrick, Ann Dere, Edna Thomas, Mickey Kuhn. Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Richard Day, Bertram Tuttle. Film editing: David Weisbart. Music: Alex North.

A great American play with a great mostly American cast. Well, three quarters American isn't bad, if the British fourth quarter of the cast is Vivien Leigh, who gives one of the great screen performances, turning Blanche Dubois into a brilliant sparring partner for Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski. But each time I watch the film, I am drawn more and more to Kim Hunter's Stella, who has the difficult role of mediator between Blanche and Stanley. Hunter also superbly captures why Stella is so doggedly faithful to the brutal Stanley, a matter that may trouble us more in an age of heightened consciousness of domestic violence. Stella is deeply, carnally in love with the brute, but also aware of the tormented boy within him. There's no more telling scene than the morning after Stanley, in the notorious torn T-shirt, stands at the foot of the stairs bellowing "Stella!" and bringing her down from her retreat. Hunter demonstrates a full measure of post-coital bliss, looking as rumpled as the bed in which she's lying when Blanche arrives to waken her and is shocked by Stella's about-face. That's why, although the censors tried to eliminate any sense that Stella had forgiven Stanley at the end of the film, we know full well that she'll return to him. For the most part, the avoidance of the censors' strictures is deft, but they do eliminate some of the meaning of the rape scene -- that Stanley's only way to get the upper hand in the power struggle with Blanche is purely physical -- and they turn the ending of the film into somewhat of a dramatic muddle. If it's not a great movie, it's because the play, like most plays, was never intended to be a film. But it's still a great pleasure to hear these actors speaking some of the most potent lines ever written for the theater.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Henrik Norlén, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Henrik Svenson. Film editing: Lucian Johnston. Music: The Haxan Cloak.

Too many makers of films and TV series -- I'm thinking of a particular example, HBO's series The Outsider -- seem to think that scary things happen only in the dark. I'm getting a little tired of squinting these old eyes at bad things happening in the murk on the screen. Ari Aster seems to know what I'm talking about: that weirdness happens in sunlight, too. Though Midsommar begins in gloomycam darkness, including the terrible thing that marks the life of Florence Pugh's character, Dani, a university student majoring in psychology, the film switches refreshingly to the open air and sunlight of Sweden in midsummer, when the sun never really sets. But of course this is where the really weird things happen. Midsommar was a solid commercial and critical success, even though it's really based on an old trope: people too smart for their own good fall foul of ancient rituals and practices. The American grad students who accompany Dani, still suffering from the event that wiped out her family, are a brainy but naïve lot:  Dani's somewhat distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Raynor), his fellow grad student in cultural anthropology, Josh (William Jackson Harper), and their friend Mark (Will Poulter). They have been invited by their Swedish friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to see the midsummer rituals in his home community. It's clear that Dani and Christian are having relationship problems after the trauma of her recent loss, and it's also clear that Pelle is more than a little attracted to Dani. All of this will work itself out over the course of their visit to Sweden. Yes, horrible things will happen -- it's a horror movie, after all. But the film is made more creepy than startling by the sunny context. Even though they may manifest themselves in blood and pain, the real horrors in life are internal ones, Aster seems to be suggesting. As a director of horror movies, he has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than with schockmeisters like Eli Roth.

The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939)

Gladys George and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties

Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Kelly, Abner Biberman, voice of John Deering. Screenplay: Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Jack Killifer. Music: Ray Heindorf, Max Roemheld. 

The Roaring Twenties feels like a kind of valedictory to the golden age of Warner Bros. gangster movies, featuring as it does such specialists in the genre as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the always welcome tough dame Gladys George. But they're not quite enough to overcome the presence of the inexplicable Priscilla Lane and the charisma-free Jeffrey Lynn, or the dogged hectoring of the voiceover narration. The movie seems out to prove that gangsterism didn't exist before Prohibition and that it disappeared magically once it was repealed. There are some good moments of action, but they're overwhelmed by the repetitions of such tired oldies as "Melancholy Baby" and "It Had to Be You," both on the soundtrack and sung (blandly) by Lane. The story is the old one of three guys who meet in a foxhole in World War I, then have trouble adjusting to civilian life. We know that Bogart's George Hally and Lynn's Lloyd Hart are going to go in opposite directions when, just on the brink of the armistice, Hart holds off on shooting a German he has in his sights because "he looks like a kid, about 15 years old," whereupon Hally picks the German off and sneers, "He won't be 16." Cagney has a more complex role, as Eddie Bartlett, a mechanic who can't find work and gradually shifts into bootlegging, teaming up with Hally, but falling in love with the virtuous Jean Sherman, who eventually marries Hart, now a lawyer. After helping Bartlett with the legal end of his illegal business, Hart goes straight and joins the district attorney's office, leading to threats from Hally to keep him quiet. It's the Cagney-Lane-Lynn love triangle that mostly drags the picture down.

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in Billy Liar

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Ethel Griffies, Finlay Currie, Gwendolyn Watts, Helen Fraser, Julie Christie, Leonard Rossiter, Rodney Bewes, George Innes, Leslie Randall. Screenplay: Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, based on a novel by Waterhouse and a play by Waterhouse and Hall. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett. 

Tom Courtenay's performance as a Yorkshire Baron Munchausen and Julie Christie's smallish role as the former girlfriend who almost rescues him from a life of boredom and mendacity went a long way toward establishing them as major British stars of the 1960s. Courtenay's about-face from the seriousness of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) to the comedy of Billy Liar singled him out as an actor of great versatility. Christie would follow her role as the devil-may-care Liz by winning an Oscar for another John Schlesinger film, Darling (1965), in which she revealed the unhappy emptiness behind the façade of celebrity. But they're hardly the only fine performances in this exploration of the consequences of tedium in a provincial town where London looms like Moscow in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles are Billy Fisher's exasperated parents, Ethel Griffies his garrulous grandmother, and Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are the highly contrasting young women Billy has managed to get himself engaged to -- one of his less disastrous escapes into his fantasy world. It's a comedy with an edge, but it never lets that edginess overwhelm the comedy, keeping a nice balance of both. I'm not a big fan of Schlesinger's more celebrated films Darling and Midnight Cowboy (1969), in which I think he loses control of the tone too often, but Billy Liar seems to me to get it just right.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt
in The Tree of Life

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier, Nicolas Gonda, Will Wallace, Kelly Koonce. Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I disliked The Tree of Life when I first saw it, finding it pretentious and overblown. Seeing it now, I can appreciate that there's a great movie tucked in among the pretentiousness, the reaching after some kind of metaphysical or theological statement. There's a gentle, subtle portrait of growing up in the film, somewhat akin to Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014). I only wish that Terrence Malick had left the theology to the theologians, because what is overlaid on the story of the O'Brien boys and their parents is a muddle of cosmology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and a New-Agey view of the oneness of all life. Critically, the film was a huge success, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, getting three Oscar nominations (including one for best picture), and making several lists of the best films of the 21st century. It also features one of Brad Pitt's best performances, as the strict but loving father who suffers from disillusionment at the course his life has taken. I just wish more time had been spent on the backstory of Jessica Chastain's character, which is seen mostly from the rather Oedipal point of view of Jack, the oldest son who grows up to be Sean Penn. This is a very male-heavy movie. 

A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962)

June Ritchie and Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird, Bert Palmer, Pat Keen, James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Gwen Nelson, John Ronane, David Mahlowe, Patsy Rowlands. Screenplay: Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Ron Grainer.

What we call "the Fifties" -- including the sexual naïveté and conformity to societal norms -- lasted well into the 1960s, as John Schlesinger's first feature film, A Kind of Loving, demonstrates. It also features Alan Bates in his first starring role as Vic Brown, a young man who lets his hormones and adherence to the values of his working-class family and dreary factory town trap him into a marriage to Ingrid Rothwell, a young woman he quickly falls out of love with. Bates is still a bit green as a film actor -- he hasn't yet developed the sexy bravura that would make him a star in films like Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1968) -- but he gives a convincing performance. June Ritchie, who plays the tempting but essentially innocent Ingrid in what was also her debut film, never made it as a big star in an era dominated by the likes of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Glenda Jackson. The film's villain is Thora Hird as Ingrid's sour, shrewish, widowed mother, who dooms whatever chances the marriage had. The film is a bit slow to start -- it spends too much time on establishing Vic's family and work milieu before settling down to the business of the ill-fated relationship of Vic and Ingrid -- and it's less successful in its portrayal of the postwar British working class than such films as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969)

Maggie Smith and Pamela Franklin in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Cast: Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Gordon Jackson, Celia Johnson, Diane Grayson, Jane Carr, Shirley Steedman. Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, based on her play and a novel by Muriel Spark. Cinematography: Ted Moore. Production design: John Howell. Film editing: Norman Savage. Music: Rod McKuen. 

My problem with the title character of the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is that she seems to have sprung full-blown -- mannerisms, catchphrases ("I am in my prime"), ideology and all -- from the imaginations of the people who created her, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen and actress Maggie Smith. I'm no more able to envision a backstory, a childhood, or an inner life for her than I am for a Dickens character like Mr. Micawber. At least in Muriel Spark's novel there are hints of something more, but they haven't translated well to the screen. Which is not to say that Smith didn't deserve her Oscar for playing the role; it's a fascinating, nuanced performance, from Jean Brodie's initial dominance to her comeuppance to her final defiance. If we don't know how Jean came to imagine herself an Übermensch, that's our problem, the film eventually suggests. Better to sit back and watch some fine performances: Robert Stephens as the randy art teacher, the always wonderful and welcome Celia Johnson as the headmistress, and 19-year-old Pamela Franklin convincingly transforming the 12-year-old into the post-pubescent student whom Jean underestimates. But anathema upon the producer or whoever decided to commission Rod McKuen to write a goopy song that unaccountably was nominated for an Oscar. At least it plays only over the end credits when you can easily escape it.

 

The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

Cast: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø, Lise Stephenson Engström, Lilianne Mardon, Marina Shiptjenko, Annica Liljeblad, Elijandro Edouard, Daniel Hallberg, Martin Sööder. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel. Production design: Josefin Åsberg. Film editing: Jacob Secher Schulsinger. 

Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square is a satire, but its objects are so many -- the art world, public relations, economic inequality, social inequity, smug political correctness, and so on -- that it tend to lose focus at moments when it should be sharpest. Added to that, Östlund indulges his absurdist side so often -- a chimpanzee wanders unexplained through an apartment, an interview is persistently interrupted by the shouts of a man with Tourette's -- that it's often hard to decide what's important in the film. The writer-director has been compared to Luis Buñuel, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier, but he lacks Buñuel's control, Haneke's cynicism, and von Trier's cruelty, so that any edge the satire might have is blunted. It's also two and a half hours long -- perhaps half an hour longer than it should have been. Still, it's a film of very funny moments, and a few disturbing ones, and the performances, especially Claes Bang as the museum director hoisted with many of his own petards and Elisabeth Moss as the American journalist who interviews and sleeps with him, are skillfully entertaining.  

The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948)

Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Don Taylor, Dorothy Hart, Frank Conroy, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent, Adelaide Klein, Grover Burgess, Tom Pedi, Enid Markey, voice of Mark Hellinger. Screenplay: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: John DeCuir. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner.

This hugely influential police procedural won two Oscars, for William H. Daniels's cinematography and Paul Weatherwax's film editing. Which is as it should be: What excitement and interest the film has today, after years of derivative movies and TV shows, is in the documentation of New York City streets and landmarks in the years just after World War II and in the brilliantly paced chase scene that comes at the climax, when the murderer scales the Williamsburg Bridge to evade the cops pursuing him. The script now feels clichéd, even if some of the clichés were new, and the dialogue sometimes banal and over-expository. Nor does producer Mark Hellinger's occasionally pretentious voice-over narration sound right to the ear. Barry Fitzgerald overindulges his leprechaun schtick as Lt. Muldoon and Don Taylor is a bit too determinedly callow as Halloran. On the other hand, the supporting cast is convincingly real. It's fun to watch today for some faces that became familiar later, many of them performing on Broadway at the time the film was made and rounded up for bit parts. Look for Paul Ford, Kathleen Freeman, James Gregory, John Marley, Arthur O'Connell, David Opatoshu, Nehemiah Persoff, Molly Picon, and John Randolph among them. The director, Jules Dassin, and the screenwriters, Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, were among those who fell afoul of the witch hunters of the blacklist in the 1950s.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

Mati Diop and Alex Descas in 35 Shots of Rum

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogué, Grégoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adèle Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly, Ingrid Caven. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Tindersticks.

If I hadn't read that Claire Denis said that 35 Shots of Rum was inspired by Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949), I'm not certain I would have spotted it. But once I learned that fact, it became obvious. Both films are about widowers living with their daughters, and both end with the daughter's marriage and the father contemplating loneliness. I would have to rewatch Late Spring to cite other parallels, but the central fact is that both films share a bittersweet, melancholy tone. It's striking to an American, especially one living in the Trump era of heightened racial awareness, that not much is made of the fact that Lionel (Alex Desecas) and Jo (Mati Diop) are black. It may be that it lingers as a subtext in the film, the way the devastation of Japan in the war lingers in the background of Ozu's films, surfacing in Denis's film only when the anthropology class Jo attends begins to discuss postcolonialism, with references to the radicalism of Frantz Fanon and other writers. Mostly, however, we stay in the enclosed world of Lionel and Jo and their friends, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Noé (Grégoire Colin). One of the film's challenges (and delights) is that Denis plunges us into their world without exposition, leaving us to discover the relationships (and even the names) of the characters as the narrative unfolds. For a while at the start of the film, I took Lionel and Jo to be a married couple or lovers, so close is their relationship, until it became apparent that they were father and daughter. Even the title takes some time to work out its significance: It refers to a ritual drinking bout that's supposed to occur at important celebrations, and we first see it at the retirement party of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), Lionel's fellow driver in the metropolitan Paris train system. Though Lionel gets fairly inebriated, he decides the occasion isn't important enough to consume all 35 shots of rum. Eventually, René is unable to cope with loneliness and lack of purpose after the mandatory retirement and kills himself on the train tracks where Lionel is driving. René's death adds poignancy to Lionel's facing life alone after Jo marries -- a wedding at which he does indeed go through with the 35 shots ritual. Denis's film is a subtle, moving delight, full of details that are enough to provoke extended contemplation or even a rewatching. Decas and Diop (who would go on to direct her own fine film, Atlantics, in 2019) give quietly extraordinary performances.