Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)

Van Johnson, Barry Jones, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse in Brigadoon

Cast: Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Van Johnson, Elaine Stewart, Barry Jones, Hugh Laing, Albert Sharpe, Virginia Bosler, Jimmy Thompson, Tudor Owen, Owen McGiveney, Dee Turnell, Dodie Heath, Eddie Quillan. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his book for a stage musical. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. 

Three years after Brigadoon, MGM's biggest musical star wasn't Gene Kelly or Judy Garland, it was Elvis Presley, who made Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, 1957) and eleven more movies for the studio. Arthur Freed, Brigadoon's producer, made six more musicals for the studio before leaving it in 1961, but Brigadoon is often regarded as a sign that MGM's golden age was ending. It's not an original movie musical like An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) or Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), the most highly regarded of the films produced by the Freed Unit, but an adaptation of a Broadway hit. It's also filmed in Ansco Color, widely regarded as inferior to classic Technicolor. It was originally intended to be shot on location in the Scottish Highlands, but the studio decided the weather was too uncertain there. After considering another location in California near Big Sur, the decision was made to film it entirely on a soundstage in Culver City. The expensive set earned an Oscar nomination for art direction, even though the decision to make the film in CinemaScope only magnified the artificiality of the artificial turf and painted sky. Brigadoon is not just stagey -- there are pauses at the end of musical numbers where the Broadway audience would have applauded -- it's soundstagey.  Kelly, who also choreographed, is in good voice and Cyd Charisse (whose singing voice was dubbed by Carol Richards) dancers beautifully, The song score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is one of their best, including hummable tunes like "The Heather on the Hill" and "Almost Like Being in Love." (Although some of the songs from the stage version, including "Come to Me, Bend to Me" and "There But for You Go I," were cut.) Yet there's something lifeless about the movie. Van Johnson, who was cast in the role of Kelly's sidekick after Donald O'Connor was considered, seems a little bored with his part. The cutesiness of the village that outwitted time and space is a little too thick: There's something almost refreshing about the scenes satirizing life in New York near the end of the film, which are supposed to indicate that Kelly's character made a big mistake in not staying in Brigadoon. Vincente Minnelli directs these scenes with a sharpness and vigor that's absent from the rest of the movie. 

Backfire (Vincent Sherman, 1950)

Edmond O'Brien, Gordon MacRae, and Virginia Mayo in Backfire

Cast: Gordon MacRae, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien, Viveca Lindfors, Dane Clark, Ed Begley, Sheila MacRae, Mack Williams, Leonard Strong, Frances Robinson, Richard Rober, David Hoffman, Ida Moore. Screenplay: Lawrence B. Marcus, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts. Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof. 

Backfire is a hyperplotted whodunit that aspires to some of the narrative complexity of Raymond Chandler but doesn't quite have what it takes. Gordon MacRae plays Bob Corey, recovering from war wounds in an Army hospital, who receives a visit one night from a mysterious woman (Viveca Lindfors) who tells him that his friend Steve Connolly (Edmond O'Brien) has been in a serious accident and is threatening to commit suicide; she asks for his help, but Corey has just been given a shot to help him sleep and passes out as the woman is talking. The next morning, he's not certain whether the woman was really there or if he dreamed about her visit. When he gets out of the hospital, the police contact him: Connolly is wanted for the murder of a notorious gambler and has disappeared. While in the hospital, Corey has fallen in love with a nurse, Julie Benson (Virginia Mayo), and with her help he begins the search for his friend. The rest of the story is told mostly in a series of flashbacks, some of them provided by people who get killed for telling Corey their stories, which all point to a high-roller with a mistress who is none other than the mysterious woman who visited Corey in the hospital. Some suspenseful moments and some entertaining performances keep the movie going, but the outcome is just a little too predictable. It's like one of those TV detective shows where the bad guy turns out to be that character actor you've seen before but can't quite place. This time, it's the actor whose name recognition is a little larger than their role in the movie seems to justify. 

Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, 1977)

Tabata Ndiaye in Ceddo

 Cast: Tabata Ndiaye, Alioune Fall, Moustapha Yade, Mamadou N’diaye Diagne, Ousmane Camara, Nar Sene, Makhouredia Gueye, Mamadou Dioum, Oumar Guèye, Pierre Orma, Eloi Coly, Marek Tollik, Ismaila Diagne. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Bara Diokhane, Orlando Lopez, Seydina D. Saye. Art direction: Alpha W. Diallo. Film editing: Dominique Blain, Florence Eymon. Music: Manu Dibango. 

In Wolof, ceddo means something like "outsiders" or "others," but the subtitles for Ousmane Sembene's film translate it as "pagan." Which is appropriate in that Sembene's film is about that essential precursor to colonialism: the obliteration of an indigenous religion by a proselytizing religious authority. Ceddo is set in a village in Sub-Saharan Africa in precolonial times -- Sembene said that he imagined it to be the 17th or 18th century. The colony of French West Africa was established in 1895, but the colonizing vanguard was there much earlier in the form of Islamic and Christian missionaries. In Ceddo the village has been mostly converted to Islam, which the village king has accepted. But the ceddo resist the new religion, and kidnap the king's daughter, Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye), who is supposed to marry a Muslim, in conflict with suitors upholding tribal tradition. The struggle to return the princess is bloody. Two white men, a slaver and a Catholic priest, observe the action like eager scavengers. Sembene tells the story with a mixture of straightforward narrative and touches that evoke the future under colonialism. The music track, for example, at one point contains a gospel song sung in English, suggesting the diaspora of slavery. And we see the Catholic priest with what appears to be his sole parishioner in his makeshift chapel, but Sembene cuts to a vision of what the priest longs for: a large congregation with nuns dressed in white and an image of black men rising into heaven. At one point, when the Islamic villagers have won a victory over the ceddo, the imam gives the forced converts their new names. The first one is called Ibrahim, but the second is tellingly given the name Ousmane. Ceddo is an ambitious film, made under difficult circumstances -- the dailies, for example, had to be sent to France to be processed, resulting in a lag of some weeks before Sembene and his crew could know if what they had shot was acceptable. But Sembene's achievement is a remarkable portrait of a continent in transition.   

A Mother Should Be Loved (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934)

Mitsuko Yoshikawa in A Mother Should Be Loved

Cast: Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Den Ohinata, Koji Mitsui, Seiichi Kato, Shusei Nomura, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryu, Yumeko Aizome, Shinobu Aoki, Choko Iida. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Tadao Ikeda, Masao Arata, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Isamu Aoki. 

Ordinarily, I would regard watching a silent movie about mother love as a chore, not a pleasure. Especially if the movie is missing its first and last reels and doesn't have a music soundtrack to sweeten it. But A Mother Should Be Loved is an exception, mostly because it's directed by Yasujiro Ozu, who can be trusted not to slip into mawkishness and also to provide visuals that compensate for what's lacking in audibles. The story is emotionally complex: After the death of their father -- a role, played by Yukichi Iwata, that was lost with the movie's first reel -- Sadao (Seiichi Kato) and Kosaku (Shusei Nomura) are raised by Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa). But when Sadao comes of age (now played by Den Ohinata) and applies to the university, he sees his birth certificate and realizes that Chieko is not really his mother -- he's the son of his father's first wife. He's upset at the deception but is quickly assured by Chieko that she loves him equally with Kosaku (now played by Koji Mitsui) and has tried to raise him as her own son. Eventually, however, Sadao suspects Chieko of overcompensating: treating him more generously than Kosaku. They argue, and when Kosaku learns that Sadao has upset their mother, he strikes him. Unwilling to fight back, Sadao leaves home and takes up residence in a brothel. When Chieko comes to plead with him to return home, Sadao refuses at first, but a maid in the brothel overhears their conversation and tells him her own story, which moves him so much that he relents. The reconciliation scene has been lost with the last reel, but is narratively inessential -- if the loss of any of Ozu's work can be deemed inessential. The delicacy of the performances and the lovely framing of each scene in the film overcome sentimentality. Ozu also slips in one of his allusions to other movies by decorating the brothel with a poster of Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson in Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932).  

The House of Yes (Mark Waters, 1997

Tori Spelling, Josh Hamilton, and Parker Posey in The House of Yes

Cast: Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr., Geneviève Bujold, Rachael Leigh Cook. Screenplay: Mark Waters, based on a play by Wendy MacLeod. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Patrick Sherman. Film editing: Pamela Martin. Music: Rolfe Kent. 

Meeting the in-laws is such a familiar rite of passage that it's no wonder it has become a common movie plot device, as in Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000) and its sequels in 2004 and 2010. Wendy MacLeod's play and Mark Waters's film The House of Yes turn the device into a black comedy influenced by another genre: the wacky family comedy -- think You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938) and Auntie Mame (Morton DaCosta, 1958), in which a prospective spouse is introduced to a household of eccentrics. In The House of Yes Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) brings his fiancée, Lesly (Tori Spelling), to meet his family in a D.C. suburb. Lesly, who works as a waitress in a doughnut shop, finds herself out of her element: For one thing, the Pascals are clearly more affluent and better educated than she is. Moreover, Marty's twin sister (Parker Posey), known as Jackie-O because of her fixation on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has recently been institutionalized, his mother (Geneviève Bujold) is hardly the most stable of parents, and his younger brother, Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), only appears normal. Marty's no-nonsense manner also turns out to be a façade as Lesly becomes the vehicle for the revelation of various family secrets, including incest and possibly even the real reason for the death of Marty's father. In fact, Lesly's obvious out-of-placeness suggests that Marty's invitation to spend Thanksgiving with his family may even have been a kind of sadistic prank. There's some smart dialogue and some wincingly funny moments, but the film is stage-bound. It never touches base with reality, suggests an idea behind its conception, or reveals a satiric target. 

The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Walter Slezak, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, George Zucco, Fayard Nicholas, Harold Nicholas, Lester Allen, Lola Albright, Ellen Ross. Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, based on a play by S.N. Behrman. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Lennie Hayton, Conrad Salinger, Cole Porter (songs). 

Props to Walter Slezak, who is the only person in the cast of The Pirate who knows how to pronounce the name of the heroine. Everyone else refers to Manuela (Judy Garland) as "Man-you-ella." Manuela is a young woman in the Caribbean village of Calvados who is engaged to the town's portly, middle-aged mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Slezak). Her head is full of tales of the dashing pirate Macocco, aka "Mack the Black," and she fantasizes about him taking her away from the village for a life of adventure. Don Pedro, however, likes the village perfectly well and never wants to leave. Visiting the city of Port Sebastian to have her wedding gown fitted, Manuela encounters a traveling player named Serafin (Gene Kelly), who falls for her, and during his act he hypnotizes her, hoping she'll fall in love with him. Instead, she reveals her passion for Mack the Black. Serafin follows her with his troupe to Calvados, where he recognizes Manuela's fiancé as the real Macocco, retired from piracy and hiding his secret past. From there, the plot thickens into a series of complications as Serafin decides to win Manuela away from Don Pedro by pretending that he's the real Macocco. It's not a bad premise to hang a series of songs and production numbers on, and there's some spectacularly athletic dancing by Kelly and Garland is in fine voice. The songs by Cole Porter are not his best work, however. The lyrics are sometimes silly: "Niña," for example, rhymes the name Niña with "neurasthenia" and "schizophrenia." Only "Be a Clown," which Kelly dances to first with the Nicholas Brothers and then with Garland, has had any life outside the film, and that mostly because producer and songwriter Arthur Freed notoriously copied it for Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Garland's increasing emotional problems, which worsened after she experienced postpartum depression following the birth of Liza Minnelli in 1946, also affected the production. The film feels a little disjointed and the ending is perfunctory, a reflection of some script problems and cost overruns. It wasn't a box office success. Still, it has moments that are as good as any of the more successful Freed Unit productions. 

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Ewan Mitchell. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

With its fine cinematography and production design and skilled performances, Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is an exquisite container that's so hollow it echoes. The echoes are those of sharper literary and cinematic satires on the English class system. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a first-year student at Oxford from an affluent and apparently loving middle class family who pretends to be a poor young man from a dysfunctional family and winds up conning his way into a decadent aristocratic family. Oliver's skill at lying and his lethal ways of covering up his lies recalls Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, whose adventures began in The Talented Mr. Ripley, memorably filmed by René Clément (as Purple Noon) in 1960 and by Anthony Minghella in 1999. Like Ripley, Oliver is sexually fluid, and makes his way into the Catton family through his infatuation with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a handsome and popular fellow student who invites Oliver to spend the summer at the family estate, Saltburn. The Cattons, who include Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and Felix's sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), are a collection of quirks and vices, including the other guests that summer: Felix's cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), an American who sees Oliver as a rival, and Elspeth's neurotic friend, Pamela (Carey Mulligan). If the gathering at Saltburn reminds you of Brideshead Revisited, Fennell name-checks its author when Oliver says Felix's description of his family reminds him of Evelyn Waugh; Felix replies that Waugh based his characters on the Cattons. Another analogue might be found in Alan Hollinghurst's novel, a satire on Thatcherite Britain. The Line of Beauty, whose protagonist becomes a part of the wealthy household of an Oxford classmate on whom he has a crush. And Oliver's sexual attraction to Felix, which has him slurping the bathwater in which Felix has masturbated, is an inevitable reminder of the cum-filled peach in André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name and Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film version. Now, I don't have anything against borrowing, but it has to be done with some originality. The time is ripe for a satire on post-Brexit Britain, for example, but Fennell doesn't even give us that: Saltburn is set in 2007. The film lacks sharpness and clear intent, so it winds up being a well-mounted, very well acted but wholly derivative collection of mildly shocking incidents.  

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (William Nigh, 1948)

Elyse Knox in I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

Cast: Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey, Charles D. Brown, Rory Mallinson, Robert Lowell, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, based on a story by Cornell Wooolrich. Cinematography: Mack Stengler. Art direction: Dave Milton. Film editing: Roy V. Livingston, Otho Lovering. 

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is a tidy, by-the-numbers Wrong Man thriller with an eleventh-hour climax -- in short, the kind of drama that would become standard on television a few years after it was released. Tom (Don Castle) and Ann (Elyse Knox) are a young dance team getting by between bookings on Ann's pay (and tips) as an instructor in a dance hall. One night, Tom flings his shoes out the window at a yowling cat. That same night, an elderly miser in their neighborhood is murdered and robbed. Tom's shoes become an important clue in the search for the killer, leading to his conviction for murder and imprisonment on Death Row. His only hope lies in Ann's attempt to persuade the police detective, Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), with whom she has flirted at the dance hall, to find the real killer. The movie was made by Poverty Row studio Monogram, so there's nothing fancy about it. The stars are low-wattage: Castle had been a bit player at Paramount before World War II, and had trouble restarting his career after being drafted and serving in the Army Air Force. Knox was a former model whose career never quite took off before she was signed by Monogram to play the girlfriend of Joe Palooka in a series of movies based on the comic strip hero; she married football player Tom Harmon and became the mother of Mark Harmon. Regis Toomey was probably the best-known member of the cast, with an IMDb list of 273 credits, stretching from 1929 to 1985, mostly in character roles. Director William Nigh started as an actor, but turned director in 1914, working steadily for B-movie factories like Monogram. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes was his next-to-last feature. Mostly a straightforward movie, it does try a little too hard in a montage in which Tom, counting the hours until he goes to the chair, is haunted by echoes of the word "shoes." It comes off, unfortunately, as a little silly. Otherwise, it's solid, unpretentious and modestly entertaining. 

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in Maestro

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Gideon Glick, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Vincenzo Amato, Michael Urie, Greg Hildreth, Brian Klugman, Nick Blaemire, Mallory Portnoy, Yasen Peyakov, Zachary Booth, Miriam Shor, Alexa Swinton. Screenplay: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Michelle Tesoro. Music: Leonard Bernstein. 

The Aussies call it "tall poppy syndrome." It's that tendency to try to undermine or underestimate the achievement of anyone who excels. And I think we saw it directed at Bradley Cooper when the first big wave of negative publicity came out from a critic from the Hollywood Reporter who saw the trailer for Maestro and called the prosthetic nose Cooper wore to play Leonard Bernstein "ethnic cosplay." The word "Jewface," analogous to blackface and "yellowface," labels for white performers pretending to be Black or Asian, was tossed about, as if Cooper were somehow guilty of antisemitism, or even depriving a Jewish actor of the role. Defenders came to the fray, including Bernstein's family, who indicated their approval of Cooper's choice, and others who pointed out that Cooper wasn't playing a negative stereotype, or even a character like Shylock or Fagin, but an authentic musical genius. But the damage was done, and the controversy continues to be a kind of scrim through which we watch and assess the film. I think much of it stems from the fact that Cooper is one of the most exceptional talents of our time, recognized for excellence as an actor, director, and screenwriter  -- a tall poppy indeed. He has a total of nine Academy Award nominations in all three of those fields plus producing -- for Todd Phillips's Joker (2019) and Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley (2022). He won a BAFTA for the music of A Star Is Born (2018), for which he wrote and sang several songs, and for which he also won two Grammys. He was nominated for a Tony in 2015 for his performance on Broadway in The Elephant Man. (One of the critics of the prosthetic nose observed that he wore no disfiguring makeup for the role of John Merrick, suggesting that if he's that good an actor, he should have played the role of Bernstein without the help of makeup.) All of this is preface to saying that Maestro is an exceptional film that only adds luster to an already distinguished career. It has been labeled a biopic, which is inadequate. Biographical films are usually distanced from their subjects, dramatizations of events in a career. Maestro is more intimate than that, a portrait of a man and a marriage. Cooper goes beyond mimicry of Bernstein in a serious effort to suggest the social and sexual and artistic tensions seething within the man. If I have to voice a criticism it's that he doesn't quite bring it off -- it's a little too much for any actor or screenwriter to achieve. But Cooper shows us the depths even if he doesn't plumb them. He wisely lets us have our own thoughts about something even Bernstein probably couldn't define about his sexuality: whether he was gay or bisexual, or whether that question is stupid and irrelevant. Carey Mulligan's performance as his wife, Felicia, brittle and burning, is a perfect match for Cooper's. If they don't have the chemistry that Cooper had with Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) or Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, that's partly the point: The marriage of Lenny and Felicia was one of unresolved tension. Hence the epigraph for the film: "A work of art does not answer questions, if provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers." I have the feeling that Maestro will be remembered and studied for years to come.

Emitaï (Ousmane Sembene, 1971)

Cast: Andongo Diabon, Robert Fontaine, Michel Renaudeau, Osmane Camara, Ibou Camara, Alphonse Diatta, Pierre Blanchard. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Michel Renaudeau. Film editing: Gilbert Kikouïne. 

I grew up on Hollywood films, which were all that were available in the small town where I lived. (This was before cable TV, not to mention streaming.) They made me love movies, but they also gave me a limited awareness of what film could do. So when foreign films finally became part of my movie-watching life, I was astonished at how little I knew about what cinema could be, but also about how limited my experience of human behavior was. The people in the French and Italian and Swedish films I saw didn't behave the way people in American movies did and the way the filmmakers told their stories was somehow different from the way Hollywood did. There were fewer happy endings and predictable plot turns. And when I moved beyond European films into the work of Asian directors, there was still more culture shock coming. But as my cinematic horizons widened, and I came to embrace Satyajit Ray along with Nicholas Ray, to rank Ozu and Renoir among my favorite directors alongside Hitchcock and Hawks, there still remained (and remains) an ignorance of what's called "world cinema," the work of filmmakers outside the developed countries of Europe and Asia. I still approach these movies with a bit of trepidation, uncertain whether the differences between the cultures they show and my own will stymie my understanding and appreciation of their work. So I'm working my way through the Criterion Channel's collection of the films of Ousmane Sembene with a kind of divided awareness. I have to remind myself that these movies weren't made for me, but for an African audience. There's a kind of urgency about his films that's more vital for the intended audience than it is for me. Emitaï is set in Senegal during World War II, when the French drafted the native people of their colonies into the fight. It takes place in a village that resents having its young men taken away and its rice crop collected as taxation. But there's no resisting the superior arms of the French authorities, and the film evokes the impotence and frustration of the villagers. The elders decide to call on their gods, which we actually see in a fantasy sequence, but they get no help. Sembene depicts the latent strength of the tribe, especially its women, but this conflict of cultures can only end tragically. Sometimes, Sembene's storytelling relies on blatantly expository dialogue and didactic speeches that verge on propaganda, but this is anything but naïve filmmaking. Emitaï is a subtle and poignant depiction of the destructive absurdity of colonialism.