Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)

Adrienne Shelly and Martin Donovan in Trust

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Martin Donovan, Rebecca Nelson, John MacKay, Edie Falco, Karen Sillas, Matt Malloy, Suzanne Costollos, Jeff Howard, Tom Thon. Screeplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Nick Gomez. Music: The Great Outdoors, Philip Reed. 

Hal Hartley's second feature begins like his first, with a teenage girl played by Adrienne Shelly having a fight with her father and storming out. But unlike The Unbelievable Truth (1989), this time the girl is pregnant and, the moment she leaves, the father drops dead. As Tolstoy informed us, each unhappy family is different from the others. And as if to prove that point, on the other side of town a thirtyish man (Martin Donovan) is fighting with his father (John MacKay), but this time the father doesn't drop dead, he makes his son go clean the bathroom. Again. (It's the most spotless bathroom I've ever seen.) And the son, whose name is Matthew Slaughter, doesn't storm out then, instead he goes to work, fights with his boss, and quits his job. Eventually, the girl, whose name is Maria Coughlin, and the man have to meet and have to work out the problematic attraction that develops between them. If that reminds you of The Unbelievable Truth, in which a teenage girl and an older man fall in love, I should add that Matthew Slaughter, like Joshua Hutton in the earlier film, has a shadowed past: He hasn't been to prison like Joshua but we learn that he has a record and spent time in reform school. He's also so volatile that he carries around with him a hand grenade. (We might call it a Chekhov's grenade.) The similarities between Hartley's first two films extend to the deadpan performances and eccentric twists on conventional situations, which troubled some critics: Roger Ebert, for example, referred to the "soap opera idiom" of the story and "the arbitrary nature of his plots," but couldn't quite see where Hartley was going with the film. I wasn't sure where Hartley was going either, but I was happy to accompany him on the trip. In the second film he seemed to have learned more about making a movie: The performances are more consistently good, the pacing is more steady, and his unique voice and vision more securely articulated. 

Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin, 1971)

Cast: Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Fred Haltiner, Luc Merenda, Christopher Waite, Louise Edlund. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner. Cinematography: René Guissart Jr., Robert B. Hauser. Production design: Phil Abramson. Film editing: Ferris Webster Ghislaine Desjonquères, Donald W. Ernst, John Woodcock. Music: Michel Legrand. 

The real antagonists of Le Mans are Porsche and Ferrari, not Michael Delaney (Steve McQueen) and Erich Stahler (Siegfried Rauch). And the real directors of the film are not Lee H. Katzin and John Sturges (who quit or was fired from the film, depending on whose story you believe) so much as the cameramen who shot the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans in June 1970 -- one of whom, David Piper, who seriously injured during the shoot -- and the editors who put together their footage. Which is to say that the movie is as much about technology as it is about human beings. Granted, the docudrama tries to dramatize the human element more than it documents the actual race. You don't cast an actor like Steve McQueen unless you want to bring out something of human toughness in the face of the perils of a race like Le Mans and to soften it with a romantic element. Delaney has previously been involved in a crash that killed his opponent, and wouldn't you know it, the beautiful widow, Lisa (Elga Andersen), shows up at Le Mans, giving McQueen a chance to show Delaney's guilt and to deal with the attraction that blossoms between him and Lisa -- lots of poignant gazes. There's also a subplot about a driver who tells his wife he's going to give up racing and settle down, which only signals to the savvy moviegoer that he's about to get in a crash. But the thing that lingers with the viewer after the film is over is the cars, zooming around turns, skidding on rain slicks, and coming apart spectacularly and sometimes pyrotechnically when they crash. The substance of the drama is really the rivalry of two corporations and their designers, engineers, and pit crew mechanics. The drivers are skilled, of course, but they're at the mercy of their machines and those who create and maintain them. The rivalry even took place behind the scenes of the film. Enzo Ferrari refused to supply cars for the film when he learned that Porsche was going to be depicted as the winner, so the producers had to borrow them from a Belgian distributor. Le Mans is an exciting film, but I'm tempted to ask Lisa's question, "What is so important about driving faster than anyone else?" And to find my answer in Delaney's description of racing as "a professional blood sport."   

Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, Paul Lukas, and Hedy Lamarr in Experiment Perilous

 Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, Carl Esmond, Olive Blakeney, George N. Neise, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Warren Duff, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Roy Webb. 

Cary Grant was the original choice to play the male lead in Experiment Perilous and Gregory Peck was the second. If the role had gone to either of them, the film might be remembered as more than just the other gaslighting movie of 1944, but it has been eclipsed by George Cukor's Gaslight. The part of the psychiatrist Huntington Bailey went to the stolid old reliable George Brent. Dr. Bailey gets caught up in the drama of the Bederaux family when he has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly dotty Clarissa (Cissie) Bederaux (Olive Blakeney), who tells him she's writing the biography of her brother Nick (Paul Lukas), who has a beautiful wife named Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Bailey is intrigued, but not much more, until a mixup in luggage puts him in possession of one of Clarissa's bags. That, and the enthusiasm of his artist friends Clag (Albert Dekker) and Maitland (Carl Esmond) for Allida's beauty, draws him into the Bederaux circle and arouses his suspicions that Allida is not the mentally fragile woman that her husband and others say she is. When he learns that Cissie has died of a heart attack, he opens her valise and finds the manuscript of her biography and her diary, confirming his suspicion -- and putting him in jeopardy. This is solid melodrama stuff, and director Jacques Tourneur, who directed the Val Lewton romantic horror movies Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), knows just what to do with it. He's hindered a little by an over-complicated screenplay based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, which necessitates a lot of flashbacks and switches in point of view, so the film doesn't proceed as smoothly as it might. But he maintains the right atmosphere as the plot moves to its resolution, which involves literally lighting gas as well as gaslighting. There's a goopy happy-ending coda to the main story that strikes the wrong note for the film, but Experiment Perilous deserves to be known as more than an also-ran.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on a play by Aladar Laszlo. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Music: W. Franke Harling. Costume design: Travis Banton.

If you want a good example of the damage done to American movies by the enforcement of the Production Code, look no further than Trouble in Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch's comic masterpiece could not have been made two years later, when the Code went into effect. It could not even be re-released or shown commercially until the death of the Code in the late 1960s. The loss to the art of cinema is incalculable, even though filmmakers including Lubitsch went on to find other ways of being witty and sexy. On the face of it, Trouble in Paradise sounds trivial: Con artists Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) fall in love when each tries to filch the other's belongings: a wallet, a brooch, a watch, a garter. So they team up and go off to Paris where their target becomes the wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of a leading parfumerie. What will happen to Lily when Gaston falls in love with Mariette? What makes it work is Lubitsch's unflagging wit: A film that will soon be wafting the scent of Mme. Colet's perfume opens with a Venetian garbage man dumping the contents of a can into a loaded garbage scow and punting off into a canal singing "O Sole Mio." It's only the first of the many Lubitsch touches. But perhaps the greatest touch of all is the casting: Hopkins was never funnier or sexier and Francis never more radiant. I have to admit that on my first viewing I was initially put off by the casting of Marshall: a sad-eyed, somewhat slumped middle-aged man with a wooden leg. (The scenes in which Gaston sprints up and down Mariette's staircase are probably the work of a body double.) But Marshall turns out to be perfectly charming in the role, credibly wooing both leading ladies. A heartthrob like Cary Grant would have wrecked the chemistry, becoming the apex of what needs to be an equilateral triangle. William Powell would have been too vivid in the part, echoing his previous teamings with Francis. Fredric March had a touch too much of the ham -- Marshall succeeds by underplaying the role. There are some other nice surprises: Those peerless character actors Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton were usually used as comic relief, but Trouble in Paradise is a comedy that needs no relieving; Ruggles and Horton are there to do their own thing and they do it well. The ending, which flouts a key commandment of the Code, is suitably bittersweet, but paradise needs a little trouble to make you appreciate it the more.

Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin. Screenplay: Kogonada. Cinematography: Elisha Christian. Production design: Diana Rice. Film editing: Kogonada. Music: Hammock.

Kogonada's debut feature, Columbus, had a lot of critics scrounging for superlatives, one of them being a comparison to the films of the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Which is apt, considering that Kogonada is a pseudonym -- his birth name is a slyly guarded secret -- derived from that of Ozu's co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda. But the filmmaker that Columbus most reminded me of was Éric Rohmer, whose films, like Claire's Knee (1970) and My Night at Maud's (1969), typically center on a man and a woman talking. Sometimes sex is involved, but usually only as one of the things they talk about. The man in Columbus is Jin (John Cho), a Korean in early middle age who works as a translator of books in English. The woman is Cassandra, called Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), not long out of high school and working in a library until she decides on a course for her life. They meet in the small city of Columbus, Indiana, which is chiefly famous for the many buildings -- churches, banks, schools, and so on -- designed by famous architects like the Saarinens, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and others. Jin is in Columbus because his father, an architect, went there to give a lecture but suffered a stroke and is comatose in the hospital. Casey is there because she grew up in Columbus and hasn't yet decided to leave because her mother (Michelle Forbes) is a recovering drug addict. Jin is estranged from his father but bound against his will by Korean family tradition to stay near to him. Casey would like to leave Columbus and have a career, but she fears what may happen to her mother if she does. They're both single, though Jin has a longstanding crush on his father's assistant, Eleanor (Parker Posey), who accompanied his father to Columbus and remains there after his stroke. Casey is carrying on a flirtation with Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a co-worker at the library who's more interested in her than she is in him. Jin and Casey meet, he bums a cigarette from her -- there's an awful lot of smoking in the film, a reason why the film echoes French movies for me -- and they start to talk. Over the next few days in Columbus they will talk about architecture as they wander through some of the city's landmark buildings, and they will talk about life, family, culture, and so on. In a more conventional film, the talk would lead to romance, and there is a kind of spark between Jin and Casey, but Kogonada isn't interested in making a conventional film. Instead, he leaves us to ponder the substance of the talk, the beauty and function of architecture, and the nature of relationships. Which makes Columbus sound more abstract than it is: Cho, Richardson, and the rest of the cast create people that are as real and individual as the settings through which they wander.

 

Mandalay (Michael Curtiz, 1934)

Kay Francis, Warner Oland, and Ricardo Cortez in Mandalay

 Cast: Kay Francis, Ricardo Cortez, Warner Oland, Lyle Talbot, Ruth Donnelly, Lucien Littlefield, Reginald Owen, Etienne Giardot, David Torrence, Rafaela Ottiano, Halliwell Hobbes, Bodil Rosing, Herman Bing. Screenplay: Paul Hervey Fox, Austin Parker, Charles King. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Thomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

You get what you might expect from a movie titled Mandalay: Orientalist hooey, with lots of gun-running and opium dealing in sleazy night clubs, with expat Europeans and Americans fleecing tourists with the aide of sinister Eurasians. (There was no other kind of Eurasian in Hollywood movies of the '30s; here they're played by Warner Oland, who made a career of the type before going straight into yellowface as Charlie Chan, and Rafaela Ottiano, who filled the bill whenever Gale Sondergaard was unavailable.) Kay Francis does what she can with a role that doesn't make a lot of sense: She's the Russian-born Tanya Borodoff, who has somehow fallen in love with Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez), a gun-runner and all-around heel. When he dumps her, she becomes Spot White (no, I don't get the name either), the madam of the sleazy night club in Rangoon run by Nick (Oland). She doesn't want to fall that far from grace, but needs must. When she's threatened with deportation to Russia by the police commissioner (Reginald Owen), she blackmails him by reminding him that they once had a night together when he was drunk, and that she has her garter adorned with his medals to prove it. He gives her the money she needs to leave Rangoon and head for the "cool green hills" near Mandalay. Now calling herself Marjorie Lang, she boards a paddle-wheel steamer upriver, on which she meets an alcoholic doctor (Lyle Talbot) who intends to atone for accidentally killing a patient by working with black fever patients in the jungles. They hit it off and she helps him sober up, but, wouldn't you know it, Tony Evans resurfaces on the very steamer. This sounds like a lot more fun than it is, although Michael Curtiz's professionalism and Tony Gaudio's cinematography gives it some occasional finesse. Francis slinks about nicely -- a woman passenger tells her, "You certainly can wear clothes" -- but she doesn't have the spark she fires in her best roles, perhaps because Cortez and Talbot are such dull leading men. The ending is the sort of thing that would have the heads of the Production Code enforcers exploding, but even that isn't enough for me to recommend sitting through the rest of the movie.

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

 

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)

Derrel Maury in Massacre at Central High 

Cast: Derrel Maury, Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, Kimberly Beck, Ray Underwood, Steve Bond, Rex Steven Sikes, Lani O'Grady, Damon Douglas, Dennis Kort, Cheryl Smith, Jeffrey Winner, Tom Logan. Screenplay: Rene Daalder. Cinematography: Bertram van Munster. Art direction: Russell Tune. Film editing: Harry Keramidas. Music: Tommy Leonetti.

With its often clunky acting, gratuitous nudity, and marginal production values, Massacre at Central High looks like a standard exploitation flick. And knowing that writer-director Rene Daalder's mentor was the master of exploitation flicks, Russ Meyer, only goes to confirm that first impression. The film's teenagers are played by actors in their mid-20s; there is a sappy musical score with an inane song over both the opening and closing credits; the visuals* reflect the tightness of the film's budget. The setup is familiar: A new student comes to a high school where the student body is harassed by a group of bullies. When he stands up to the bullies he is seriously injured. So he decides to take revenge by offing the bullies, one by one, in imaginative ways. But murder will out, and in the end he is hoist with his own petard -- literally. And if Massacre at Central High had stuck to that formula, it could have been the conventional exploitation flick. But Daalder takes things a step further, adding some provocative and intelligent twists to the tale. The revenge plot doesn't end with the protagonist, David (Derrel Maury), taking care of the bullies. Once he's done that, the bullied students become bullies themselves, and David has to deal with that unforeseen problem. And for the better part of the film, we never see an adult authority figure, a parent, a teacher, or a school administrator. David takes their role on himself. It's an adolescent's dream world turned nightmare. Even at the end, the adults who do appear, at an improbable "Student-Alumni Prom," are ineffectual -- they seem to be the students' grandparents -- and in danger of becoming victims of David's planned massacre. The film takes an unrelentingly harsh view of human nature: It's often compared to William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies and the films made of it by Peter Brook in 1963 and Harry Hook in 1990, and considered a precursor to the movie Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). I don't think Massacre at Central High quite measures up to that standard -- there's still a lot of cheesiness for the viewer to overcome -- but it's a kind of classic in spite of itself.

*Cinematographer Bertram van Munster is better known as the Emmy-winning creator and executive producer of the reality competition series The Amazing Race.

The Best House in London (Philip Saville, 1969)

Joanna Pettet and David Hemmings in The Best House in London 

Cast: David Hemmings, Joanna Pettet, George Sanders, Dany Robin, Warren Mitchell, John Bird, William Rushton, Bill Fraser, Maurice Denham, Wolfe Morris, Martita Hunt, Marie Rogers. Screenplay: Dennis Norden. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Wilfred Singleton. Film editing: Peter Tanner. Music: Mischa Spoliansky.

Is there anything worse than a sex comedy that's neither sexy nor funny? Well, maybe a sex comedy predicated in part on the toxically masculine idea that sex workers choose their occupation because of the sex and not because they need work -- in short, that any woman would become a prostitute if it just meant having a lot of sex all the time. Philip Saville's The Best House in London endorses that notion. Joanna Pettet plays Josephine Pacefoot, a character based on, or rather parodying, the real-life Josephine Butler, a 19th-century English social reformer who, in addition to campaigning for women's rights, sought an end to human trafficking. In the movie, her campaign is ridiculed: The women she's trying to take off the streets and tech marketable skills are recalcitrant, constantly slipping back into prostitution as easier, more lucrative, and from the film's point of view more fun, with the result that the streets of Victorian London are crowded with hookers. This plays into the schemes of Walter Leybourne (David Hemmings), who persuades the British Home Secretary (John Bird) to allow him to establish an opulent bordello that will cater to the cream of English society and thereby ease the street traffic. The brothel is an enormous success and thereby becomes a target for Pacefoot's campaign, in which she is aided by Benjamin Oakes (also Hemmings), who is serving as a sort of publicist for her cause. The inevitable clash between the brothel and the reformer, and between the two characters played by Hemmings, forms the main plot. But that story is overlaid with subplots, one about the secret parentage of Leybourne and Oakes -- the justification for the double casting of Hemmings is that they are secretly half brothers -- and another, almost unrelated to the rest of the film, about Leybourne's assisting a pioneering aeronaut, Count Pandolfo (Warren Mitchell), in the construction of a giant dirigible. Meanwhile, the film is littered with cameo appearances of eminent Victorians: Dickens, Tennyson, Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett, Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and fictional ones like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. (One of the few successful jokes in the film comes as invitations to the brothel opening are being sent out; when Dr. Jekyll's name comes up, someone says they'd better send him two.) The movie is cavalier about chronology: It doesn't seem to matter, for example, that Lord Alfred Douglas was born in 1870, the year that Dickens died. Still, the messiness of the plotting and insouciance about history matter less in the end than the fact that most of the comedy falls flat, the sex is of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink order, and the underlying premise of the film is distasteful.

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

Jessica Harper in Suspiria

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Cassini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Barbara Magnolfi, Susanna Javicoli, Eva Axén, Rudolf Schündler, Udo Kier, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett. Screenplay: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Production design: Giuseppe Bassan. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Dario Argento, Goblin (Agostino Marangolo, Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti). 

I've seen movies in which the sets were more interesting than what's going on in them, but I don't think anyone would say that about Dario Argento's Suspiria. At the very least, in the competition of setting and action for the viewer's attention, it's a draw. When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) tells a cab driver to take her to Escherstrasse, I should have been alerted to the visual phantasmagoria that is to come. It's clear that Argento means us to pick up on the allusion to the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, known for his plays on perspective and visual puzzles; Argento has the surly cabbie force Suzy to repeat the street name twice before saying it himself. But Escher's work was in black and white; Argento's, and that of his production designer, Giuseppe Bassan, and his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, is in color -- the most lurid Technicolor seen in a movie since the heyday of the MGM musical. Not that Suspiria has much in common with those musicals: The dominant color in Suspiria is red, and a lot of that red is blood, often artfully splattered. (One large blood splat looks like a Rorschach test.) I can't say that I was shocked by anything in the movie, although the many murders in it verge on overkill. It's too gaudy and noisy -- the background music by Goblin is the aural equivalent of the decor -- to build much tension. I could wish the dubbing of the dialogue didn't have the depthless quality, the lack of ambiance, of speech recorded in a studio -- even the English-speaking actors were post-synched in the manner of many Italian films of the era. But then the dialogue doesn't matter much: It's nonsense about witches, and the plot is only a device to hang horrors on. Still, Suspiria is a one-of-a-kind movie -- maybe we should be grateful for that -- and a landmark in its genre.