My August movies (NOT a ten-best list)Sep 01 '06 (Updated Sep 02 '06) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line "Twilight Samurai" and "Gods of Bali" were the highlights; I thought "The White Countess" was considerably better than its reviews indicated.
The start of my month was heavy in post-classic (in-color) samurai movies, the end in documentaries. (A plus indicates I had seen the movie before; discussions of more than a paragraph are sett off by "---".) + Nanook of the North ( 1922, Robert J. Flaherty, 3.4 stars) is one of the most famous documentaries ever made, a pioneering one that was more staged than observed on the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay. (The wives and children were cast by Flaherty and were not Nanook's real wives and children.) Although it provides a record of an Inuit family ca. 1920, kayaking through icebergs, driving a dogsled, constructing an igloo (with a piece of ice as a window), capturing a walrus, a seal, and some fish, and although the family members have considerable charm and there are some striking ice formations, I find the movie (which I had not seen in a long time) somewhat boring. The DVD includes a very stilted BBC interview of Flaherty's widow, very much maintaining the cult of her husband that he built and nourished during his lifetime (1884-1951; Nanook starved to death on a failed inland hunt for deer in 1922). We're Not Dressing (1934, directed by Norman Taurog, 2.4 stars) How can a brief movie with Carole Lombard, Ethel Merman, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and a roller-skating bear, and based on a frequently filmed property (J. M. Barrie's play "The Admirable Critchton) be boring? The answer is to have Bing Crosby crooning roughly half its running time. I don't like the songs, I don't like Bing Crosby's singing style, and find him unconvincing as a tough proletarian. Ray Milland as a Russian prince doesn't help, either. What fun there is is supplied by the bear and by Burns and Allen shtick. Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935, directed by the Marquis Henri de la Falaise, 4 stars) has a tragic love story involving two sisters (Poetoe Aloes Goesti and Saplak Njoman) who are legong dancers and a handsome gamelan player (with the wonderfully reduplicated name Njijon Nijong Nioman). The two-strip (red and green) Technicolor film was reassembled from prints censored with different priorities in different places--bare breasts cut in the American one, hints of violence in the British one, and I don't know what was cut in the Canadian print). Except when she is dancing the legong, Poetoe is bare-breasted, so must have been nearly cut out of the American version! In addition to the legong, there are scenes of a barong performance, a local market, women carrying offerings balanced on their head, rice-mashing, duck-herding, a cockfight, a note carved onto a bamboo leaf, and one of the elaborate cremations for which Bali is famed. Documentation in color (albeit without any blues) from the 1930s is fascinating. Much credit has to be given to pioneering color cinematographer W. Howard Greene, who went on to lens "The Jungle Book" and "Arabian Nights" for Powell and Pressburger). The love story is fairly basic (concocted by de la Falaise), though the players are attractive. (At the time he filmed "Legong" and "Kliou", de la Falaise was married to Constance Bennett, who bankrolled his forays, He had been married to Gloria Swanson 1925-31--which is to say through the height of the silent era and the start of the sound era. What set him off to Bali and Annan to fill the screen with brown breasts, I don't know.) The movie has intertitles. DVD has both the original soundtrack and a new one performed by Gamelan Sekar Jaya and the Club Foot Orchestra. Kliou, the Killer/the Tiger (1936, directed by the Marquis Henri de la Falaise, 3. stars) is the first feature film made in the hills of Annan(or, indeed, anywhere in French Indochina). It has a gratuitous frame of two Frenchmen (the nonmilitary one is de la Falaise) smoking and drinking on a porch at the outpost of Bsre. The one tells the story of Bhat, a cocky young Moi hunting down a killer tiger, accompanied by Nyam, the young brother of Bhat's intended, the village headman's daughter Dhi. There is less footage of bare breasts than in de la Falaise's earlier Balinese film "Legong" (which was also shot in two-strip Technicolor; the surviving print of "Kliou" is in black and white). The tiger hunt is interesting and the glimpses of Moi village life (in the central highlands of what is now Vietnam) are of historical interest. The love story is very run-of-the-mill (other than the lovers and everyone else being bare-chested). Like "Legong," the cinematography was by W. Howard Greene, the first great master of color cinematography. Alas, the color prints of "Kliou" are lost (it was thought there were no prints of any sort). East of the River (1940, directed by Alfred E. Green, 3.1 stars) was a John Garfield vehicle with the mix of sentimentality and snarling tough guy that was his persona. William Lundigan was nearly a void as the good brother, but Brenda Marshall (The Sea Hawk) dominated the mostly formulaic and sentimental picture. The final twist added a tenth of a star. The heavy-handed Italian stereotyping would have counterbalanced that, but was saved by Ma's (Marjorie Rambeau) confrontation scene disowning Joe (Garfield). I Wake Up Screaming (1941, directed by Bruce Humberstone, 3.6 stars) isn't bad. It has a and excellent noirish cinematography Edward Cronjager and a sinister obsessed policeman in Laird Cregan. The romantic leads, Betty Grable and Victor Mature, are unimpressive. Nazi Agent (1942), the first movie directed by Jules Dassin, is wildly implausible, but at least gave Conrad Veidt (who had, after all, fled Hitler's Germany) a rare opportunity to play an opponent of the Nazis (though he still also plays an especially nasty Nazi, the twin brother of the good American of German birth). The other one, Above Suspicion, also presents major obstacles to suspending disbelief. I guess that Dassin had to start somewhere, and this propaganda flick looks pretty good (cinematography by Harry Stradling, Jr., who went on to win Oscars for "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "My Fair Lady"). + Arsenic And Old Lace (1944, directed by Frank Capra, 4.7 stars) has a great cast, including the sweet but homicidal aunts from the Broadway production of Joseph Kesselring's hit play, Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, and John Alexander as Mortimer's uncle, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and that the corpses are yellow fever victims from the Panama Canal (insanity doesn't just run in the family, it positively gallops, as Mortimer remarks at one point). Cary Grant thought that James Stewart or Bob Hope would have been better in the part of the nephew, Mortimer Brewster, a theater critic distracted from his bride (Priscilla Lane). I think he was wrong. It's one of his screwball comedy performances rather than one of his super-suave ones. On hand as a drunken plastic surgeon is Peter Lorre, with Raymond Massey as a murderer ('s brother) looking like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein (Karloff played the part on Broadway). There's also Edward Everett Horton as an asylum director, and Jack Carson is funny as a genial beat policeman who is writing a play. There is a bit too much plot. Capra had the good sense not to try to open up the play. Much of the humor derives from hiding bodies in the living room of the Brooklyn spinsters and their delusional brother. --- Whisky Galore"(AKA "A Tight Little Island," 1949, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, 4.2 stars), shot on location on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides (off Scotland) concerns the exhaustion of the island's whisky (Scottish spelling) supply, the providential running aground of a ship loaded with whiskey (British spelling, since it's a British ship, headed for the western hemisphere), the attempts by a pompous local nitwit's (played by Basil Rathford) to embargo the cargo which the villagers are more than eager to salvage (after waiting out the Sabbath), and the triumph of the drinkers. It's rarely LOL funny, but is eccentric, and was very strikingly photographed by Gerald Gibbs. The Anchor Bay DVD has no extras, but offers a remastered visual transfer (the original was sometimes very dark). The title character of Lady without a Passport (1950, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, 3.2 stars) is a stateless refugee, a survivor of Buchenwald, was played by Hedy Lamarr. (She looked well-fed, though a bit tired.) The movie is one of those sort-of noirish-looking movies showing a government agent (John Hodiak as an INS agent) going undercover (here, in Havana). George Macready (Gilda) plays the villain. The chase proceeds over the Everglades. Paul Vogel's cinematography is outstanding (he had just won an Oscar for lensing "Battleground" which starred Hodiak; I thought his work on "Period of Adjustment" was particularly good, too). --- Among Fred Zinnemann's many accomplishments was directing the first American movie appearances of Marlon Brando (The Men), Montgomery Clift (the Big Lift), Julie Harris and Brandon de Wilde (Member of the Wedding), Rod Steiger, Pier Angeli, and John Ericson (Teresa). Zinnemman's 1951 movie Teresa was the third of a sort of trilogy with very documentary looks about traumatized survivors of World War II: the paraplegics of "The Men," the catatonic boy living in the rubble in "The Search," a war bride and her weak ex-GI husband in "Teresa." It is unfortunate that there is not a director's cut. This is one instance in which the result would be shorter. Zinnemann's autobiography recalls his frustration at knowing where the movie dragged and not being allowed to make the cuts he thought would solve the problem. A tall blond American soldier who was a petulant coward and, as a voice-over near the start of the movie says has made a career of running away is a tough sell. John Ericson plays the part very well (so well that it probably hurt his career). In the title role, Pier Angeli was lovely and very sympathetic. Steiger's part as a psychiatrist was small (parts for Robert Wagner and Lee Marvin were smaller still). Ralph Meeker made a strong impression as the more seasoned soldier who tries to help Philip (Ericson), and Bill Mauldin (who was also a technical advisor) registered as the one riding the green pretty boy. In good 1950s Freudian fashion his neuroses are blamed on his mother, though the love of a good woman—a furrener (Pier Angeli in the title role) has some chance of getting him away from his failure of a father (Richard Bishop) and undermining and smothering Mama (Patricia Collinge). (The family prefigured "Rebel Without a Cause," whose lead had a publicized romance with Angeli. Both screenplays were written by Stewart Stern. Nicholas Ray seems to have copied the first Steiger-Ericson scene in "Rebel" with James Dean and a policeman. And while on intertextualities, Zinnemann cast Angeli again in "Someone Up There Likes Me" and was pained to watch Hollywood destroy her.) The location shooting (in northern Italy, Rome, and Bellevue) of William J. Miller is a major plus. (Zinnemann started as a cameraman and the painterly visual compositions must owe more than a little to him). The wedding and reunion scenes are very impressive. The jagged, jazzy score by Louis Applebaum is also notable. The whole (the movie) is less than the sum of many excellent parts, partly for structural reasons, partly for having such a failure (and one so devoid of self-knowledge) as its protagonist. (3 stars) --- Gods of Bali (1952, directed by Nikola Drakulic, 4.6 stars) seems to me as a quite good overview of major rites in Bali, including legong, barong, kechak, and cremation in 55 minutes. It was shot in black and white. It is a fine documentary, without the melodrama and sensationalism of "Legong" (with which it has been packaged (as corroboration?) on a Milestone DVD along with the Moi (Vietnamese hill tribe) melodrama "Kliou, the Killer"). Red Ball Express (1952, directed by Budd Boetticher, 3.6 stars) is a quite effective, literally hard-driving B-movie celebrating the truckers who got supplied to Patton as he raced across France. The unit is integrated, with Hugh O'Brian (say it ain't so, Wyatt!) as the racist, with Sydney Poitier refusing to take anything from him. Jeff Chandler plays the lieutenant with whom the sergeant (Alex Nicol) has major prewar Issues. A bit of romance slows the proceedings down, and I don't think there were any racially integrated US Army units in World War II, but the movie is entertaining propaganda for the integrated military then fighting in Korea. (Minstrely is directly addressed.) --- + Killer's Kiss (1955, produced, written, directed, shot, and edited by Stanley Kubrick, 3 stars) has some OK fight scenes, a very good chase scene, and a surrealistic pick and ax fight in a mannequin factory (giving new meaning to "fighting with girls"). Plus a perfunctory romance, a very predictable noir plot, and some unpleasant, shadowy dudes. The 67 minutes do not go by quickly! --- Since some people regard Budd Boetticher's (1957) The Tall T as better than his excellent (1956) "Seven Men from Now," my expectations for it were high. Despite sharp images of Lone Pines (California) scenery (though the locale is supposed to be southern Arizona) and vivid villains played by Richard Boone and Henry Silva, the movie seemed pretty routine with the laconic old-fashioned courtly Randolph Scott, a lady in distress (Maureen O'Sullivan), a no-account husband (Don Hubbard) and some desperadoes (Boone, Silva, and Skip Homeier). Any viewer has seen any westerns knows that Scott is going to save the damsel and kill all the villains. The only question is "How?" and the answer here is completely unoriginal. (I'd expect more from Elmore Leonard, whose story "The Captive" was adapted by Burt Kennedy. Richard Boone's perversity is the only real sign of Leonard's hand, alas, though that's better than none.) The first half suggests that the movie is going to be a comedy influenced by "Shane." The stage-driver played by Arthur Hunnicutt is in the Andy Devine tradition of recalcitrance, and Randolph Scott flashes a lot of teeth. The second half has the psychotic gunslingers somewhat under the command of a somewhat bemused but ruthless Frank Usher (Boone), ransoming the rich mine-owner's daughter (O'Sullivan) while Brennan (Scott) waits for his chance to free her and himself. The title is opaque to me and walking away at the end is inexplicable, since there are at least two horses and two mules available. (Brennan lost his own horse in a bet earlier, which is why he was picked up by the stage). 3.6 stars --- "Quien sabe?" (AKA A Bullet for the General, 1967, directed by Damiano Damiani, 3.2 stars) is, according to its director, "not a western," but a movie about the Mexican Revolution. It has many western elements, a not especially inspired score by Ennio Morricone, and interesting performances by Martine Beswick and Gian Maria Volonté. Samurai Banners (1969, directed by Inagaki Hiroshi, 3.2 stars) has Mifune Toshiro as Yamamoto Kansuke, a strategist with a long-range goal of unifying Japan under the rule of a boy he caused to exist (without seeding) in mid-17th-century Japan (before the Tokugawa unification). Yamamoto is fervently devoted to the feisty Princess Yufu (Sakuma Yoshiko) and manipulates the Takeda lord who is known to history by the Buddhist name he took, Shingen. There are a series of campaigns portrayed in the 166 minutes of running time, flamboyant helmets and armor and banners. The production values are high, the characters sketchy. Testimony, (1988, written and directed by Tony Palmer, 4 stars) has outstanding music and a superb performance by Ben Kingsley as Dmitri Shostakovich, cringing but surviving Stalin. + The Nun's Story (1959, directed by Fred Zinnemann, 4.4 stars) Though the pace is leisurely, the location shooting (Belgium and the Congo) by Franz "Fred" Planer, a very intense performance by Audrey Hepburn, and spicing by Peter Finch combine to maintain interest. Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Beatrice Straight, and Mildred Dunnock are also on hand as senior nuns. It also has Colleen Dewhurst as a madwoman (wrestling the petite Hepburn), Dean Jagger as her father, and the musical score by Franz Waxman amps up tension (it ain't subtle, but it's effective!). It's better than "Ben-Hur," which swept the Oscars, but so are some other 1959 movies. Philip Kaufman is a writer/director of obvious intelligence, whose films usually disappoint me at least somewhat ("The Right Stuff" is the exception). His 1972 The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid only runs 91 minutes, but seems frequently slack to me. It has a vintage steam locomotive, which is always a plus for me, a farcical, very rough and very high-scoring 1876 baseball game (a Saint Paul team visiting Northfield), a calliope, and an outstanding performance by Cliff Robertson as outlaw Cole Younger. It also has a one-note (psychotic) performance by Robert Duvall as Jesse James, a dank look achieved by cinematographer Robert Surtees (The Shootist, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Dirty Harry), and some bits that I take as homages to "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (one of my favorite northern westerns, made the year before). The Northfield posse is at least as brutal as the James brothers (and far more so than the Younger gang), and the banker is as corrupt as the speaker of the Missouri House (who is bribed by Pinkerton, who aims to hunt down the James and Younger gangs). The woods do not look like Minnesota (which has some hills, but no mountains!). Northfield was played (unconvincingly) by Jacksonville, Oregon. (3 stars) "Le Train" (The Last Train, 1973, directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre, 3.7 stars) was a subtle film about a love that ignited under chaotic conditions costarring Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and a steam locomotive. Alas, the DVD is dubbed and has horrendously degraded colors. --- The first hour of "Les Innocents aux mains sales" (Innocents with Dirty Hands, 1975, directed by Claude Chabrol, 3.6 stars) is a seemingly straightforward variant on "The Postman Always Rings Twice" set in St. Tropes. There is a handsome lover Jeff (Paolo Giusti) and a dissatisfied young wife, Julie (Romy Schneider), plotting to kill her impotent, alcoholic, older husband Louis (Rod Steiger) and live together happily ever after, enjoying his wealth. Being a Chabrol movie, there are some twists (including an ironic final one from the realm from which the 1940s "Postman" movie ending came). I do not want to spoil the plot by commenting on any of its twists and turns. None of the seven leading characters (in addition to the standard triangle, there's the accountant and two police inspectors, and a lawyer) is sympathetic. As with many Chabrol movies, the pleasures are akin to watching scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. Schneider is (as she seemingly always was) remote, but her performance is the showiest of any I have seen her give. --- Rooster Cogburn (1975, directed by Stuart Millar, 3 stars) brought John Wayne back to his Oscar-winning role from True Grit, with Katharine Hepburn replacing Kim Darby (or was it Wayne replacing Bogart from "The African Queen"?). The aged stars overacted, but what else was there for them to do? And Oregon passing for Arkansas?! Testimony, (1988, written and directed by Tony Palmer, 4 stars) has outstanding music and a superb performance by Ben Kingsley as Dmitri Shostakovich, cringing but surviving Stalin. Ronin gai (1990, directed by Kuroki Kazuo, 2.8 stars) looks muddy, focuses on a prostitute and a samurai, and cannot compete with the great ronin films of the 1960s or the examination of samurais in the revival of the 2000s. Land & Freedom (1995, directed by Ken Loach, 3.6 stars) seems heavily influenced by George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia--or at least by an idealist volunteer like George Orwell (played by Ian Hart, best known for imitating John Lennon) going off from Liverpool to defend the Spanish Republic. Orwell far more passionately and eloquently described the communists' priority, which was eliminating anarchists, Trotskyites, and democratic socialists rather than defeating Franco's fascists. The best parts are newsreel footage, but more of them are available in "To Die in Madrid"). The framing device (finding mementos of a recently deceased grandfather) made my eyeballs roll. In "Suzhou He" (Suzhou River, 2000, directed by Lou Ye, 4.3 stars) Zhou Xun has a double role in a stylish Shanghai refraction of "Vertigo" and "Chunking Express." "Tasogare Seibei" Twilight Samurai (2002, 4.8 stars) stars a bit slowly but builds to be one of the great dramas about samurais at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The title character is played by Sanada Hiroyuki, who is nothing short of great in the role of the humble, unambitious, but stalwart Seibei Iguchi. The film has no battles or fights in which one samurai cuts down dozens of attackers. It has two brilliantly conceived and executed duels. "Mibu gishi den" (When the Last Sword Is Drawn, 2003, directed by Takita Yojiro, 3.8 stars) is long (133 minutes) also has a strong romance (or two). I was often unclear who the sides were in various battles, though Yoshirmura Kanichi (Nakai Kiichi), Warriors of Heaven and Earth) is clearly going down with the Tokugawa Shogunate side. He sometimes seemed a clown, but proved to be terminally determined (as well as being a highly skilled swordsmen). The flashback (from 1899 to the 1860s) structure seems gratuitously to complicate the story. It is beautifully photographed and Nakai delivers a very rich performance. Less would have been more: 20-30 minutes could profitably have been trimmed, and the flashback expositions seem to me unnecessarily complicated. The DVD includes lengthy, but not very interesting interviews of novelist, director, and star, plus production footage. The audio and visual transfer coulda/shoulda been better. (Like Sanada the year before, Nakai won the Japanese Academy Award as best actor in a film that was judged the best picture of the year.) The White Countess (2005, directed by James Ivory, 4.2 stars), the last Merchant-Ivory film, based on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day was the source for an earlier Merchant-Ivory triumph, has a lot of groundwork to lay (that is, seems to start slowly). It has high production values, and exceptional performances from Ralph Fiennes as a blind American, and Natasha Richardson as a Russian countess who supports a vicious and useless family by working as a taxi dancer. Richardson has more of a Russian accent than her real-life mother and aunt, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, who play her out-of-it screen aunt and Gorgon of a mother. Christopher Doyle provided his usual atmospheric cinematography (as in the Wong Kar-Wai films he has shot) and Sanada Hiroyuki ("The Twilight Samurai") is on hand with exquisite politeness while preparing for the Japanese conquest of the city. What his interest in the nightclub that Fiennes's character opens remains opaque to me. The ending plunges into more conventional melodrama, but mostly the movie shows damaged characters in an alien milieu trying to do what no one else cares about. (I kept expecting one shoe to drop. It never did. Quite another one did, however.) Red Eye (2005, directed by Wes Craven, 4.1 stars). Cillian Murphy is impressively peculiar to me, here as in "Batman Begins" and "Breakfast on Pluto." I was disappointed that Brian Cox had little to do in "Red Eye," but liked the 21st-century technology deployed in a taut "woman in danger" thriller. Rachel McAdams is very satisfying as the problem-solver. The last 20 minutes are fairly conventional, but there are many admirable touches (and more than a little fraught humor) en route. Syriana (2005, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, 4 stars) is not just complicated, but opaque in crucial regards. George Clooney is very good—but how is he a supporting actor in it? Who is the star he is supporting? Matt Damon??? There are many characters, and Gaghan is not very adept at managing traffic (a pun that is unavoidable). Robert Elswit's cinematography is excellent (travelogue footage) and Christopher Plummer is entertaining as a cobra-like establishment lawyer. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005, directed by Douglas Liman, 3 stars) is a preposterous thriller, about as plausible as an Itchy and Scratch cartoon, but far more expensive. Still, I have to admit to enjoying the deadpan Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie dialogue and the automotive chase. They do not have the style and witty dialogue of the 1941 movie of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, alas. Jolie completely lacks the light touch Lombard had. When the Levees Broke (2006, directed by Spike Lee, 4.1 stars) has some very, very raw pain. Eventually, it gets around to the eradication of wetlands. It fails to convince me that federal money should be spent rebuilding anything that is under sea level when sea levels are going to rise. I was disappointed not to see W strumming the guitar or denying that anyone foresaw the levees breaching, but Lee is also gentle with Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, all of whom performed dismally before, during, and after the hurricane. But Lee did include Barbara Bush's remark that showed how successfully she had previously hidden her true nature. © 2006, Stephen O. Murray  |
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