My October movie-watching (NOT a ten-best list)Nov 01 '06 (Updated May 24 '08) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Once Upon a Time in America" are not for every viewer, but were the best movies I saw in September.
Between traveling and rewatching the first season of "Weeds" (along with the current one that ended Sunday night in a real cliff-hanger!) and of "Rome" (when's the second one unfolding?), and starting on the first season of "Noah's Arc," I saw fewer movies than usual. No Japanese ones and something of a resurgence of French ones. As usual, comments of more than a paragraph are set off by dashes, and a " " means I'd seen it before. Directed by Fritz Lang in 1928, the silent "Spione" (Spies) is supposedly the first romantic melodrama movie about spies. (However, before Garbo and Dietrich, Asta Nielsen played Mata Hari in 1920, as did Magda Sonja in 1927.) The gadgetry is primitive, the supervillain, Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who was also the villain in "Metropolis," here made-up to resemble Lenin) one-dimensional (less interesting than Dr. Mabuse in earlier and later Lang movies), the instantaneous romance of the suave and resourceful (and seemingly British) Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch) with a beautiful enemy agent (Gerda Maurus) unconvincing, and there are few striking visual compositions. There is a drive-by shooting and a heroine locked up in a death-trap and many shots of ticking clocks (Lang leitmotifs) plus a sepukku scene (!). Like most Lang movies, "Spies" starts fast and then slows down (in plot, not in actors' gesticulations) and has a bravura ending (that surely influenced Hitchcock's "39 Steps"). I fail to understand how Haghi can prevent a treaty taking effect by managing to seize copies of it. Didn't embassies telegraph their home countries then? (2.7 stars) Animal Kingdom (1932) is more a photographed stage play (by Philip Barry, who also wrote "The Philadelphia Story") than a film adaptation of one. William Gargan is a delight as the palsy butler to a publisher played by Leslie Howard. He abandons his long-time artist friends, including his intimate friend played by Ann Harding (who chastises herself for being "a foolish virgin, or at least foolish": the word "virgin was banned by the Production Code and Otto Preminger fought to have it said in "The Moon is Blue" in 1953, so I took notice of it and "promiscuous," not to mention leaving a wife. One odd thing is that the maternal-looking Ann Harding played the "other woman," and the chicly haute couture-wearing, manipulative one, the young Myrna Loy, played the wife. She looked like she would playing wives to William Powell, so it's hard to accept her as the villain, even knowing she played a number of them early in her career (often orientalized, as in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" and "13 Women" from the same year). As in a number of other roles, the weak-seeming Howard is underestimated by everyone and eventually shows his mettle. Thirteen Women (1932, directed by George Archainbaud, 3.1 stars) had Myrna Loy as a young Eurasian woman avenging herself on a dozen women who had persecuted her at an exclusive boarding school. Irene Dunn is the culmination of the series of women terrified by horoscopes forged by Ursula (Loy), but, like all the rest, is less interesting than Loy was. Ricardo Cortez is on hand as the savvy lawman (a break from playing rotters the audience was happy to have shot by women he outraged in many other movies). Mandalay (1934, directed by Michael Curtiz, 3.3 stars) is not a precursor of "Casablanca" except in being set in a locale far from Hollywood (though filmed in the latter). Nor is it nearly as good as "Shanghai Express," Kay Francis plays Tanya, a "fallen woman" somewhat like "Shanghai Lily," but without Dietrich's brashness--or von Sternberg's delirious romanticism. The movie is not particularly impressive visually, but has one of those fitting endings Hollywood loved to provide for the man who betrayed her (Ricardo Cortez, who was shot on a regular basis by women in 1930s movies—though not here). Lyle Talbot plays an alcoholic young doctor who could have stepped out of one of Georges Simenon's colonial novels, and Warner Oland (Charlie Chan in a whole series of movies) plays a standard cynical, exploitative "Oriental" villain, who runs a nightclub in Rangoon and wants Tanya as a hostess in it (compare "The White Countess"?). There are hints of "white slavery," unpunished murder, and a hokey shot at redemptive suffering scheduled for after the end of the movie, but the movie was too "immoral" to be rereleased in 1936 after the Production Code had infantilized American movies. --- The sentimental Wallace Beery vehicle Sergeant Madden (1939, 3.6 stars) was directed by Josef von Sternberg after his deliriously romantic making love to Marlene Dietrich with a camera ceased to make money. Beers plays the title character, an Irish policeman devoted to the police force and doting on the memory of his wife, who allowed him to take in stray children he found on the beat, including an Irish infant who grew up to be Laraine Day (definitely no Dietrich!). The sergeant wants his son (played as an adult by Alan Curtis) to follow him onto the force, hoping that this will straighten him out. Instead, it gives a sadist a license. There is a complicated plot centering on framing the younger Madden and his father's attempts to clear him, and a romantic triangle involving his biological son (Curtis) and an adopted one who is much more what he hoped for in a son (Tom Brown). Family loyalty conflicts with professional duty. The movie has a flashy mobster played by Marc Lawrence, though the villain is more the biological son. Especially with a cop turning rotten, the second half of the film is a proto-noir. Curtis lacks subtlety (a word one does not expect to find mentioned in a review of a Beery vehicle!) but is effective. Beery's brogue is cloying; Day's is inconsistent. There are some Sternberg visual flourishes, but nothing compared to those in his Dietrich movies or his much later noir Macao. --- I'm not sure whether I saw The Return of Frank James (1940, directed by Fritz Lang, 4 stars) as a child. It is a straight-ahead western, albeit with limited shooting it out, and a very lengthy and comic trial (and attempted captures by a Pinkerton detective played by J. Edward Bromberg). Henry Fonda was excellent underplaying the title character (foreshadowing his part decades later in "My Name in Nobody," an even more comic western). --- "Les yeux sans visage" (Eyes without a Face, 1960, 4.1 stars) has some very conventional elements, including a deranged surgeon, a secret operating theater, and a set of hounds. In one of the excellent bonus features on the Criterion disc, director Georges Franju recalls that he was supposed to make a horror film with "no sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudity because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market, and no animal slaughter because of the English market." Although there is one grisly scene with blood, he rose to the challenge with the aid of writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Norcejac, who had managed the same feat in writing "Diabolique" for Henri-Georges Clouzot. (They also wrote the basis for Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before "Eyes," but that was not a horror film and was not recognized as a masterpiece at the time.) Both the female leads recall (to me anyway) figures in Jean Cocteau movies (and Franju made a great movie of Cocteau's WWI novel Thomas, l'imposteur). Alida Valli seems cut from the same cloth as María Cesares's Death in Cocteau's "Orphée"; Edith Scob as Christiane) provides great evidence for my recurrent claim that screen acting is done with the eyes (the veritable title role). Not to neglect body language, particularly hers at the end of the movie. Dialogue is of little importance. The images in "Eyes without a Face" are almost ever Also, there is the Oedipal drama of Claude Brasseur playing a determined police inspector bringing down his real-life father, Pierre Brasseur, playing Dr. Génessir. I admire the skill of the moviemaking while being repelled by the story (which plays with the structure of the Frankenstein story with a real daughter being the site of a physician's creativity/hubris). I found the bonus feature on the writing duo of Boileau and Norcejac totally fascinating. The Criterion disc has a superb image transfer. It also includes the even more horrifying and earlier Franju 1950 documentary on a slaughterhouse "Le sanges bes bêtes" (Whew!) and some interview footage of Franju (from which i quoted above). --- + Point of Order (1964, made by Emile de Antonio, 4 stars) draws from the 188 hours of televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, in which the junior senator from Wisconsin was revealed to doctor and outright makeup evidence, and squirmed while Army lawyer Joseph Welch crucified him onscreen. Some of the issues puzzle me and I have some idea who the players were, so think the drama must be even more confusing for those unfamiliar with the era and --- + The Sicilian Clan (1969, 4.1 stars) was directed by Henri Verneuil, who also directed Jean Gabin and Alain Delon in the earlier (1963 ) heist film Any Number Can Win and Yves Montand in "I... comme Icare" (1979). Delon plays Roger Sartet, a hot-blooded criminal who is escaping from a prison-transport van at the start in a sequence worthy of Melville (Jean-Pierre, not Herman). The aged Jean Gabin played Vittorio Manalese, a Sicilian mobster with three not-very-bright sons, one of whom is married to Jeanne (the beautiful Irina Demick), who at one point tells him that he cares about nothing but himself, which seems to be true. What Gabin does is consistent with being a Sicilian patriarch, but he is so prototypically French (and was the star of so many major French movies) that I had difficult accepting him as being Sicilian. Still, I loved his exchanges with the tough police inspector played by Lino Ventura, whose usual irritability is increased by attempting to quit smoking and while hunting down the elusive cop-killer played by Delon. In addition to centering on a sang-froid trio of ruthless antagonists, the movie has a very spaghetti-western musical score by Ennio Morricone (with a mouth-harp, like Charles Bronson's in "Once Upon a Time in the West," and cinematography by the great Henri Decae of locations that include the Villa Borghese, Orly airport, the streets of Paris, and a yet-to-be-opened motorway somewhere. There is a lot of action along with showing the characters of the three leading men (and, to a lesser extent, Demick's). I don't remember whether there were metal detectors for airline passengers at the time, but those involved in an unusual hijacking had no difficulty getting guns on board with them. (I think the heist influenced Scorcese in making "Goodfellas.") In the version that periodically airs on the Fox Movie Channel, I think that Delon and Gabin were recorded in English or dubbed themselves in English. Ventura's words and lips are out of synch, so he clearly did not. --- + Slaughterhouse-Five (1972, directed by George Roy Hill, 4.5 stars) was a brilliant feat of adapting Kurt Vonnegut's genre-blending, time-jumping 1969 novel to the screen (the screenplay was by the otherwise undistinguished Stephen Geller. Both novel and movie have a listless, affectless protagonist, but the movie has more developed characters, superb cinematography (Milos Forman's frequent one, Miroslav Ondríeck), and a great musical score by Johann Sebastian Bach (mediated by Glenn Gould). Like "The Little Drummer Girl," (also directed by Hill), "Slaughterhouse-Five" is of considerable relevance now and deserve discovery or rediscovery. --- The opening of Le Magnifique (1973, directed by Philippe de Broca) looks like a parody of James Bond, with suave and unflappable super-agent Bob St. Clair (Jean-Paul Belmondo) operating against impossible numbers of enemies (Albanian scuba divers with machine guns coming out of the Pacific onto an Acapulco beach). St. Clair is smugger than any Bond I've seen—world-class smug in the league of George Hamilton. Belmondo also plays François Merlin the low-paid genre novelist in Paris, imagining Walter Mitty-like exploits and romance with the woman across the way, Christine (Jacqueline Bisset), a student of popular culture who want to write a thesis on his ever-growing body of work and who is written into the spy novel as the sultry Tatiana. Vittorio Caprioli appears as Merlin's editor Georges Charon (who is putting the moves on Christine) and the Bondish Albanian arch-villain, Karpof. Bond movies are already so campy that it is difficult to parody them, but the Belmondo/de Broca team had a lot of energy, a Pirandellian concept (with dull life and flamboyant fictional shenanigans bleeding into each other, as also in Buster Keaton's "Sherlock, Jr.", and the very beautiful Jacqueline Bisset, so that the movie is enjoyable as the 1960s tv "Batman" was. I enjoy the even-more-frenetic Belmondo/de Broca confection "That Man from Rio" (1964), but "Le Magnifique" is more enjoyable than their swashbuckler "Cartouche" (1962). (De Broca's (1966) "King of Hearts" is his best known film; Belmondo was defined forever by Godard's (1960) "Breathless.) --- + Interiors (1978, directed by Woody Allen, 4.3 stars) Allen's first drama has great performances from Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton, a whole lot of anguish, and underpraised cinematography. I wrote at considerable length about why Sergio Leone's final film (1983) Once Upon a Time in America is a great film, but one for which there are many solid reasons for the dislike. 4.6 stars Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983, directed by Stephen Frears, 2.2 stars) has half a good movie in it: the one about a CIA agent played by Frederic Forrest and the US Ambassador to Vietnam (played as determined and delusional by E. G. Marshall) as it crumbled during 1975 and the latter blocking the urgent insistence on evacuating "friendlies" and the corruption of intelligence fed back to Washington. Unfortunately, in its way is an unbelievable and uninteresting sexual liaison between Forrest's character and a British bank employee played by Judi Dench. The Vietnamese are peripheral and, as we know, many were left behind to be persecuted by the conquerors. Angel Rodriguez (2006, written and directed by Jim McKay, 2.4 stars) is a dull tale of the title character, played by Jonan Everett, running out of options at age 17, despite the efforts of a pregnant guidance counselor played by Rachel Griffiths. He and she turn in very good performances, but like the title character, the movie goes nowhere. © 2006, Stephen O. Murray  |
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