My May movie-viewing
May 31 '05 (Updated Jun 15 '05)
The Bottom Line The best of the lot was one I've wanted to see for a very long time: "The Young Törless." I also particularly enjoyed watching "My Name Is Nobody" again.
Wracking my brain to try to recall all the movies that I saw in 2004 led to a resolve to list the ones I see in 2005, a resolve that has lasted five whole months! (though it is flagging.
Again, listing led to writing a few sentences and writing a few sentences led to some express reviews I never would have written had I not been compiling the list, and a few express reviews outgrew their containers. The list, like the ones for January, February, March, and April
is in chronological order of the movies' making. Comments longer than a paragraph are set off by "---".
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Westfront 1918 (1930, directed by G. W. Pabst, 4 stars) a movie about German infantrymen near the end of the trench warfare of World War I that managed to show that sound movies need not be visually static, and shocked 1930 audiences with a realism about combat.
Midnight (1935, directed by Mitchell Leisen, 4.2 stars ) has a surprisingly restrained John Barrymore as a rich man trying to end an affair his wife is having by turning her paramour on to the unsucessful American chanteuse played by Claudette Colbert. As the taxi driver who loves her, Don Ameche is hammier than Barrymore. The plot is outlandish, but the writing team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett gave witty lines and screwball comedy business to the players who made the most of these gifts.
On Borrowed Time (1939, directed by Harold S. Bucquet, 3.3 stars) has one of the more tolerable crotchety grandfather performances by Lionel Barrymore, who traps Death, played by Cedric Hardwicke with a very dry wit, in a tree. The kid (Bobs Watson) is annoying, but Beulah Bondi added pathos, and Una Merkel menace (more so than Death).
Two-Faced Woman" (1941) was Greta Garbo's last movie, a screwball comedy that its director George Cukor did not think was funny and did not appeal to wartime audiences. It has some great skiing stunt work and the last five minutes are worth watching. There are some traces of what led the Catholic Legion of Decency to condemn what Cukor filmed which they judged as having "immoral and un-Christian attitude toward marriage: impudently suggestive scenes, dialogue, and situation; suggestive costumes." Louis B. Mayer had it recut with the husband recognizing the hoax from the start, though it still plays at adultery and has some suggestive costumes for Garbo's party girl guise. 2.6 stars.
Robert Wise's apprentice direction of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher (1945, 3.2 stars) is a slow 73 minute movie about supplying corpses for medical training in 19th-century Edinburgh. Boris Karloff has a complex role, Russell Wade a very uninteresting protagonist. The movie has creative use of sound but hackneyed use of shadows (though that is preferable to the gorefests of today's horror movies).
In Edgar Ulmer's Strange Woman (1946, 3.5 stars) Heddy Lamarr looks like Vivien Leigh in "Gone with the Wind" and portrays a woman more calculating even that Scarlett O'Hara. She gets what she wants but throws it all away in a paroxysm of misplaced jealousy. George Sanders plays a hero without any trace of cynicism(!). I thought that Lamarr's accent sounded Scandinavian rather than Austrian-German. Most certainly it did not sound New Englandish. Lucien Andriot's cinematography was not as good as he provided for Jean Renoir's "The Southerner," more like that he did for René Clair's "And Then There Were None" (that is, good but not special). Louis Hayward as a toyed-with lover looked forlorn but never passionate. As his father and Lamarr's rescuer, Gene Lockhart (who was also notable in Lamarr's American debut, "Algiers"), conveys craftiness and lust and nearly steals the movie.
Battleground, an ensemble MGM sound-stage-made movie (with second string MGM "stars"), directed by William Wellman in 1949, 3.4 stars), has a typically hokey generic "cross-section" US platoon thrown into what they don't know is the "Battle of the Bulge." The platoon (in typical generic fashion) grouses a lot, but rises to every challenge (of which there were a great many). It has the typically propagandistic uplifting ending and a lot of comic relief (and a bit of cheesecake) early on. The patently Cold War Christmas Day sermon ruined the attempts at realism for me. ("The Story of G. I. Joe", made in 1945 before the war was over, is Wellman's best WWII movie in my opinion, and on my list of best WWII movies focused on combatants.
Mr. Arkadin (1955, written and directed by Orson Welles, who did not have final cut control, 3.8 stars). As striking as the visual compositions (and cameos) are (and they are very striking), neither the subject of the research (Arkadin, a magnate with a very shady past, played by Welles) nor the quasi-detective (played by the totally uninteresting Robert Arden) have any depth. "Mr. Arkadin" may be the only movie in which Katina Paxinou is mildly entertaining (though not the only one in which she was over-the-top). Welles himself seemed to be having a good time mixing Harry Lime into a sphynx. The romances are laughable.
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The Intimate Stranger (US title "Finger of Guilt," 1956, 4 stars) was directed in England by blacklisted director Joseph Losey (credited at the time to the producer), written by blacklisted writer Howard Koch (Sgt. York, Casablanca, Letter from an Unknown Woman) under a psuedonym. It starred Richard Basehart (Decision Before Dawn, He Walked by Night), who made a number of movies in Europe during the 1950s (most notably "La Strada" and "Il Bidone," both directed by Federico Fellini), but not, apparently, because he was blacklisted in Hollywood.
The movie begins unpromisingly with a medical consultation by an American movie director Reggie Wilson (Basehart) in English exile (for sexual rather than political reasons). The head of the studio is his father-in-law Ben Case(played by Roger Livesey, considerably aged in the decade since he was the romantic lead in "She Knew What She Wanted"). The big-budget movie Wilson is directing, stars a former amour who still carries a torch for him (played by Constance Cummings). After about half an hour of dull movie business, things get more interesting when Reggie and his wife Leslie (Faith Brook) go to confront a seeming blackmailer, Evelyn Stewart (played with great sange froide by Mary Murphy), whom Reggie denies he has ever met. Leslie is a classic noir femme fatale, and the movie turns noirish with a somewhat pat resolution. Gerald Gibbs's black-and-white cinematography gets arty in the final reel. The mistrust all around (and more than a little manipulation) prefigures the Losey movies of the 1960s (many scripted by Harold Pinter), and it would not be very difficult to read the story as a parable about false accusations of communist sympathies or affiliation made by hacks to bring down their betters rather than the suspicions of marital infidelity.
(The original British release ran 95 minutes, the American one 71, the one I saw on TCM 88 minutes.)
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Night Passage (1957, 3 stars) A James Stewart western that was supposed to be directed by Anthony Mann (who found the script too formulaic), with Brandon de Wilde somewhat grown since "Shane" and Audie Murphy as the Utica Kid, lacks the bite of Mann's westerns, but has plenty of Colorado scenery skillfully filmed by William Daniels. Stewart sings and plays the accordion, as well as serving as a surrogate father and resourceful gunslinger. Dan Duryea chews up a lot of scenery in one of his many villain parts (but seems to have been forgotten by the script-writer in the last reel, as Audie Murphy character changes).
The Tin Star (1957, directed by Anthony Mann, 3.8 stars) has nuanced performances from Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins, who learn from each other. It's a mentoring movie, not a "buddy picture, with racism a refrain. The (unfortunately black-and-white) movie also includes a Brazilian child, Michel Ray [de Carvalho], affectingly playing a a boy whose Native American father is dead and who is being raised by pariah single mom Betsy Blair. In the movie, he gets rich on bounty money. In life imitating art, he was from a rich family, and by marrying the heiress of the Heineken fortune, has become one of the richest men in the world.
Imitation of Life (1959, directed by Douglas Sirk, 4 stars) was a big hit, partly, no doubt, because audiences wanted to see Lana Turner in a movie in which her daughter lusts after her mother's boyfriend, since her real-life daughter had just killed her real-life (gangster) boyfriend. The movie is more about a young woman passing as white (Susan Kohner) and dissociating from her loving mother(Juanita Moore) than about the rivalry between the two generations of white women, I think, though it could just be that the latter (Turner and Sandra Dee) were portrayed by stars without a lot of acting talent or training. John Gavin was wooden (as always).
Sergio Leone had directing credits on only ten movies, of which Colossus of Rhodes (1961, 3 stars) is the first. It is a sword and sandal epic with Rory Calhoun in first a yellow cocktial dress, then a blue one. He plays a famous Athenian warrior visiting the island of Rhodes ca. 280 B.C., who gets caught up in a plot to kill the king and forge an alliance with the Phoencians to dominate the Mediterranean. There are some striking visual composition, insistent music, and the collosus is surprisingly convincing. Calhoun's sword fight out on its arm (after he and his pursuers crawl out the ear) is quite entertaining. There are no super-tight closeup shots. There is a lot of bondage and torture, lots of sword-fighting, a love interest or two for the star (and a male youth to win over, too). There's not enough there there to justify a running time of 129 minutes.
Simón del desierto (1965, directed by Luis Buñuel, 2 stars) only runs 43 minutes but 41 of them are boring, even with Satan as a bearded woman (Silvia Pinal, who was also Virdiana in a far better Buñuel movie) who eventually whisks the sanctimonious solipsistic anchorite San Simeon Stylites (Claudio Brook) off his column to a jet plane and into a1965 Anglo disco.
"Der Junge Törless" (The Young Törless (directed by Volker Schlöndorff,1966, 5.9 stars) is a visually and musically striking adaptation of Robert Musil's great short pre-WWI novel with heavy implications for shrugging off evil (specifically torture rationalized as for a greater good). I've wanted to see it for decades and Criterion has enhanced the experience with the inclusion of a very informative and engaging memoir by Schlöndorff on the DVD.
The Immortal Story (1968, directed by Orson Welles, made for French televsion from a novella by Isaak Dinesen, 2.4 stars) is very slow, seeming to crawl for for more than 58 minutes. In his first foray into color, Welles plays an aging, friendless, unscrupulous, successful businessman on Macao who wants to have a story about a sailor being hired to impregnate a rich old man's wife enacted. His assistant (the dour Robert Coggio) hires Jeanne Moreau as the woman to be impregnated. A sailor bets he can seduce a wealthy man's wife, not knowing the man has hired a woman to play the role. The sailor looks like a Cocteau fantasy stud. It would be difficult to decide which character has the most stilted lines to deliver.
My Name Is Nobody is the most comic of sphagetti westers. It was directed in 1974 by Tonino Valerii, produced by Sergio Leone, based on a story by Leone, and starring one of the stars of Leone's ultimate wester, Henry Fonda. He plays a legendary gunfighter who wants to retire and to to Europe. His plans are interfered with (in ultimately helpful ways) by a fan (Nobody, played by Terence Hill),who knows the names of everyone the gunfighter killed in various shootouts and dreams of his hero taking on the 101-member Wild Bunch. Like Leone's westerns (which also have their drak humor, though to a lesser extent) there is a splendid musical score (and use of ambient sound) by Ennio Morricone. 4.5 stars.
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Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris (1975, 1.6 stars) is congery of music videos for unmemorable Jacques Brel songs.
Philadelphia, Here I Come (1975, 2.8 stars) is so conventional and undramatic a portrait of the artist as a seething young man on the verge of self-exile that I'd say it is deservedly forgotten, though it does preserve some Irish acting talent otherwise not otherwise much preserved.
F for Fake (1976, director Orson Welles, 3.8 stars) is a sort of documentary about art forgery and memoir forgery involving Howard Hughes, Clifford Irving, Pablo Picasso, Elmyr de Hory, The Mercury Theater radio "War of the Worlds," "Citizen Kane," and many posthumous Matisse and Modigliani paintings. Like "Citizen Kane" and "Mr. Arkadin," the movie is structured as an investigation into a charlatan. Unlike them, it does not reach a concluding explanation.
Empire of the Sun (1997, 4.4 stars) is perhaps the most Spielbergian of Steven Spielberg's movies, with a lost child and World War II and a concentration camp, albeit a Japanese internment camp for the enemy aliens from the Shanghai international zone. Christian Bale (the new Batman after "American Psycho") was excellent as a spoiled child of a British factory owner in Shanghai who twice is the only person left and bicycles indoors. He also has a thing about Japanese planes (Zeroes) and admires their pilots (the camp is next to a Japanese airbase). John Malkovich (as the cynical operator in the camp: see "Stalag 17") and Nigel Havers as the camp physician. There are some ravishingly beautiful images, big crowd scenes, some haunting scenes, way too many heavenly choruses, and the movie is long (154 minutes). Besides being ultra-Spielberg, I think "Empire of the Sun" is an example of a great movie that is not always a good movie. The DVD has a "making of" feature from the time that is very interesting in showing Spielberg working with Bale and with Chinese crowds intercut with memoirs by J. G. Ballard, whose experiences he fictionalized into the novel on which the movie is based.
La Reine Margot(1994 directed by Patrice Chéreau, 4.7 stars) is difficult to get into (especially for anyone unfamiliar with the religio-political situation around the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre), and the American version is cut, but surprisingly I began to care about the characters, even Virna Lisi's Catherine de Medici, the primary villain. Isabelle Adjani is superb, too, the music by Goran Bregovic and the cinematography of Philippe Rousselot (which, at the start, looks rather monochrome brown) are notable, as is the naked body of Vincent Perez.
Why do the movies John Malkovich makes in Europe with major directors (and in English) take years to be released in the US? In addition to Ripley's Game, there was The Ogre, Volker Schlöndorff's excellent 1996 adaptation of Michel Tournier's Prix Goncort-winning novel Roi des aulnes. It's hard to imagine anyone else in the role of the survivor who has some very unusual positions as a POW in eastern Prussia during World War II. An alumnus of a St. Christopher's school, he eventually becomes a St. Christopher carrying a Jewish child out of a Nazi military academy.
Tadpole (2002, directed by Gary Winick, 3.4 stars) is sort of like the recut "Two-Faced Woman." It's about adult women bedding a fifteen-year-old prep school student, Oscar. (His mother is French so that he has inherited sophistication in the screenplay's schema). Any pedophile shock is undercut by having a 23-year-old (Aaron Stanford) play the fifteen-year old. He plays it pretty convincingly, but doesn't look 15. Bebe Neuwirth jumps his bone and otherwise has a good time, though Oscar is enamored of his father's current wife (an overly buttoned-up Sigourney Weaver). Many think the ending is a cop-out. It is a little overly symmetrical with the beginning, but is plausible to me.
Lost in Translation (2003, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, 2 stars) has an outstanding performance by Bill Murray and some interesting Tokyo locations, but is a "character-driven" movie with practically no character development other than Bill Murray's and a lot of comedy relying on ethnic stereotyping. I also think that the movie would have been accused of misogyny if it had been written and directed by a male.
Motorcyle Diaries (2004, directed by Walter Salles, who also directed "Central Station") is a ravishing road movie/highly scenic travelogue across Argentina, Chile, and Peru (though the intra-Peru itinerary makes no sense to me) involving an intense advanced medical school student, Ernesto Guevera de la Serna before be became "El Che," and pharmacologist about to turn 30, Alberto Granado, who is much slyer, can dance, knows how to seduce women, etc. Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna are excellent as the travelers out to discover South America, alternating picaresque adventures with glimpses of suffering. The DVD includes an interview with Granado that should be watched after the movie, two tv interviews of Gael García Bernal that give nothing away, and a very good "making of" feature (that also should be watched after the movie itself). The movie has been exhaustively discussed on epinions. I'd rate is 4.2. It makes me nostalgic for the Andes in general and Macchu Picchu in particular.
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