tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53046914484642672442024-03-14T00:09:54.152-07:00Movie KinksMy scattershot views of a pop art—its twists, curves, and sensual appealDavid Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-15251375133575409612023-09-13T15:05:00.001-07:002023-09-13T16:12:18.661-07:00Succubus<p><i> <span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span> Fool There Was</i> (1915) is one of the few Fox Studios silent pictures to have survived the 1937 Fort Lee, New Jersey, fire, and one of only a handful of surviving movies starring Theda Bara. This Edwardian melodrama, adapted from a play by Porter Emerson Browne, which was itself based on a Kipling poem, portrays Good just about how you’d expect, but the entire movie is energized by the kohl-eyed, fleshy Bara, who is listed in the credits as “The Vampire.” She’s extraordinary — a femme fatale viper who gloms on to men — hapless fools — and drags them away from the light of society and family down into her lair, draining them of their fortunes, jobs, and willpower. The vamp destroys them and their wives and children. The movie’s perspective — that these men are to blame for their own destruction — is encapsulated in numerous intertitles that quote from the poem (“The Vampire”). Evil isn’t specifically blamed, let alone punished. In retrospect, the movie feels like a firebrand’s response to male domination and misogyny.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyu9_70fFZCRjSik2TsQQVOABcWzgaQuLm2idcOjT6Oq1wtUFtvisIBWWzgdm4t-OvtIhBFlDaJYoB1xOnD1TaWSti5zxPLd8gvL-f1khyYpA_zVwGbMVDKjnyBPHbqv9vG98-0MPCtTT8BEKjVjtqWl6z5QWNvvat01RsNmoTjoXCtUhRYYow8rhitxs" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyu9_70fFZCRjSik2TsQQVOABcWzgaQuLm2idcOjT6Oq1wtUFtvisIBWWzgdm4t-OvtIhBFlDaJYoB1xOnD1TaWSti5zxPLd8gvL-f1khyYpA_zVwGbMVDKjnyBPHbqv9vG98-0MPCtTT8BEKjVjtqWl6z5QWNvvat01RsNmoTjoXCtUhRYYow8rhitxs=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></div>In the earlier scenes of family life, the movie is a little draggy and the direction is uninspired — the camera sits and observes in static repose, with characters moving into and out of the frame in the style of stage entrances and exits. But Theda Bara has some sort of mad charisma — at times, she resembles Nazimova in <i>Salomé</i> (1922) — and when she’s on the screen, images and tableaux of immense sophistication and cruelty hit you between the eyes: the first “fool” (Victor Benoit) shoots himself aboard ship and his casket is carted up the loading ramp like baggage, the second “fool” (Edward José, who starred in Theda Bara’s screen debut the year before) turns into a hollow-eyed husk, rejects his young daughter yet again (the child, named Baby, is terribly underfoot in earlier scenes) and slithers down the stairwell like a wounded snake, and in the final shattering scene (a grotesque distortion of romantic love), the vamp, clad in a wispy nightgown, hovers over the moribund husband and drops dying rose petals across his face as he gasps for breath. These are decadent, erotic, warped images you can’t shake or explain outside of the work of German directors like Pabst, Murnau, and Lang. The best elements in this movie reach forward, across Edwardian domesticity and Christian homilies directly into the haunted desiccation of the Weimar era.<br /><p></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-81752606172561224622023-08-15T14:52:00.001-07:002023-08-15T14:54:29.093-07:00Boring Your Enemies to Death<span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span>rançois Truffaut screws around with tone so much in <i>The Bride Wore Black</i> (1968) that we’re alienated from the characters, and all there is to do is sit back and observe the revenge roundelay dispassionately while Jeanne Moreau knocks off the hapless, shallow men who mistakenly shot and killed her husband. I get the feeling that Truffaut was trying to replicate his own earlier triumphs with random narrative twists and disjunctive edits (as <br />in <i>Jules and Jim</i> and <i><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEii1E8IMz8L0BQVQxoA1498y0DR_hSiVry75ot5nXwjewyBLXHfpI1ukGFk0zBdQQlBfDrOek3tysXEBCWiAKGXfOIL15irtJYdEfamhRwUzntfuIAyn0_kwxPrV1-EdOerCuZap7y8NeM6GEHpSFf9P8HcjydaLnVXmrFhItTKWIMEIogY9wAWbMTjK-0" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1017" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEii1E8IMz8L0BQVQxoA1498y0DR_hSiVry75ot5nXwjewyBLXHfpI1ukGFk0zBdQQlBfDrOek3tysXEBCWiAKGXfOIL15irtJYdEfamhRwUzntfuIAyn0_kwxPrV1-EdOerCuZap7y8NeM6GEHpSFf9P8HcjydaLnVXmrFhItTKWIMEIogY9wAWbMTjK-0=w400-h263" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Wear it black. <br /><i>Jeanne Moreau</i>, <i>Jean-Claude Brialy</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Shoot the Piano Player</i>) or try his hand at Godardian displacement in a Hitchcock-like suspense thriller. But Hitchcock was never this blasé. Whatever Truffaut thought he was doing, he apparently didn’t have much feeling for human beings and emotions anymore or even how to generate a sustained arc of suspense. What happened to the director who showed such love and exuberance for the bohemian trio in <i>Jules and Jim</i> (also starring Moreau, gloriously) or for the neglected Antoine falling through Parisian society’s postwar cracks in <i>The 400 Blows</i>? <div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">In <i>The Bride Wore Black</i> (adapted from the Cornell Woolrich noir novel), a pulp sensibility prevails, but the director’s distancing techniques — heavy symbolism (black scarves blown about by the wind, the murderess posing as Diana, the goddess of the hunt), jump-cutting, bright lighting, and what can only be called Brechtian staging — kill most of the suspense. Moreau is monotonous (even her wig seems to be unnaturally weighing down her forehead) when she should seem driven by unhinged passion. Her victims all behave like oafs with stereotypically French male swagger, so we don’t feel any of the terror in their dispatching. The effect is a bewildering brew of overt cruelty and slapstick. With the exception of the first murder victim, pushed to his death off a balcony, most of the shocks are completely predictable because the setups are dragged out interminably; in the end, the movie feels like an affectless chore. A thriller black comedy that deadens one’s responses is a contradiction in terms.</div> </div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-8390913986722453572023-05-22T16:43:00.002-07:002023-05-31T16:24:17.428-07:00Miss Show Business<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span>y the time <i>Presenting Lily Mars</i> was filmed in 1943, the twenty-year-old Judy Garland had already mastered the clowning, fumbling earnestness in her character’s single-minded pursuit of stardom and, for the first time on film, was displaying some of the world-weary show-biz brass that would point the way to her concert triumphs in middle age — that voice like a Big Band trumpet with a mute on it, moaning low or careening into the stratosphere. Chronologically, the Andy Hardy bloom was just barely off her, but she had come into her own mature talent, inexorably and rapidly. She had made an excellent picture the year before (<i>For Me and My Gal</i>, with Judy and Gene Kelly doing their “Ballin’ the Jack” routine) and had even separated from her first husband by then (having had an affair with Johnny Mercer in the interim). The character Garland plays in <i>Lily Mars</i> is a typical Booth Tarkington teenager, a homely duckling with a pie-in-the-sky dream and the gumption to chase it no matter how many obstacles she smacks into. There’s a lot of Alice Adams in Lily, but it isn’t high society Lily craves — it’s the energy that stage performers lap up from audiences (Garland took that energy and apotheosized it in 1961 at her famed Carnegie Hall concert).</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQsMZgB-2Mzg7GXCCRHF_VTDmEuspnVAuDLMbQiltfswtPmqGT4Y5IFVp5areQMk70_6igFi-owwXcg5SzOUYpzAAxhBDc3eBsM3hd2fCFLQ2-dkiGd0ifNiBJ9XzqaeazeKzsm-cFZk_fUyyWnFYmLAyXmT0013Pciiiv_qN_X4bttQmL6zpq2yuU/s1280/Lily%20Mars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="1280" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQsMZgB-2Mzg7GXCCRHF_VTDmEuspnVAuDLMbQiltfswtPmqGT4Y5IFVp5areQMk70_6igFi-owwXcg5SzOUYpzAAxhBDc3eBsM3hd2fCFLQ2-dkiGd0ifNiBJ9XzqaeazeKzsm-cFZk_fUyyWnFYmLAyXmT0013Pciiiv_qN_X4bttQmL6zpq2yuU/w400-h297/Lily%20Mars.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A star is born</i>. Judy Garland, Faye Bainter</td></tr></tbody></table>I’ve always thought that Garland’s core was comedic rather than dramatic, despite her intelligence and honesty in serious roles like Esther, in <i>A Star Is Born</i> (1954). Garland was always at her loopiest and least self-conscious in movie comedy (she said that she learned how to put a song across from Sophie Tucker). She would have made a dazzling farceur in screwballs, with her verbal and physical gag skills and her short stature and elongated limbs (she looks like a Tex Avery drawing from his 1941 classic “Hollywood Steps Out”), but the genre had all but died out by the early 1940s. Joe Pasternak and Norman Taurog, who made <i>Lily Mars</i>, should have done so much more with her comedy savvy here, but they didn’t have the burn and drive that her better directors often did (Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, or Busby Berkeley). Pasternak and Taurog misinterpreted her appeal and kept her suspended in the bland Jell-O of wholesome “family” entertainment. Instead of giving her energetic modern numbers to sing, the Pasternak machine saddles her and her irrepressible quiver with mopey love ballads. It’s a huge relief when the movie finale moves from a starchy “Where There’s Music” into “Broadway Rhythm,” but songs like “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own” or “When I Look at You” don’t exactly help build the Garland legend. Lily is supposed to be the antithesis of the starched-collar “perfection” of Marta Eggerth (whose operetta swill makes your head drop), much the way Garland herself was the swinging antithesis of the ridiculously popular Deanna Durbin at MGM. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">D</span>espite the family-market machinery and misconceptions, Garland swings through and maps out a route forward for her career in <i>Lily Mars</i>, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. Her triumph in <i>Lily Mars</i> was a blueprint for Barbra Streisand in <i>Funny Girl</i> (1968), which re-created several gags from it in the “Lovely Bride” and roller-skating numbers. By 1943, Garland, who would make <i>Meet Me in St. Louis</i> the following year and dispense with the last of her childhood pudge, was paving her own yellow brick road.</p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-813354104970621202023-03-23T17:04:00.005-07:002023-05-22T15:40:08.052-07:00Moldy Camp <p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxsI7KPHYetni3W9_GiFebD4-9dPu6NsL10mSWqILNJdA5XTzX_3vAE15TrtkYtEyy7iDDgycbLiD2z2U977e6Jnjedmffi-JAg8SdWlQZ0BCxiiMZg8fNJC4hIVlpSeN9lc4TGytyieK4yBIJTiHxqtUtVz4iy79bKX86wOeKkR-H1DZXGQfL5QTZ" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1378" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxsI7KPHYetni3W9_GiFebD4-9dPu6NsL10mSWqILNJdA5XTzX_3vAE15TrtkYtEyy7iDDgycbLiD2z2U977e6Jnjedmffi-JAg8SdWlQZ0BCxiiMZg8fNJC4hIVlpSeN9lc4TGytyieK4yBIJTiHxqtUtVz4iy79bKX86wOeKkR-H1DZXGQfL5QTZ=w268-h400" width="268" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Death warmed over.<br /> <i>Brendan Fraser</i>, <i>Rachel Weisz</i></td></tr></tbody></table><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he Mummy</i> (1999) is a stab at camp, a remake of the shlocky <i>Valley of the Kings</i> (1954) with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker, and the tasty adult adventure movie <i>King Solomon’s Mines</i> (1950) with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. This version has nothing at all to do with the arch, creepy, Teutonic 1932 version directed for Universal by Karl Freund, an Expressionist chiller whose troubling imagery is like being entombed with moldy corpses in a graveyard. This version can’t meet any of its humble, imbecile obligations: even the character actors (the movie saviors and scene stealers of the past) are awful. <p></p><p>The jocularity is so broad and cringe that twenty minutes of it puts you in a sour mood. At over two hours and five minutes of frenetic stupidity, you might come out of it convinced that movies have never provided charm or magic.</p><p>Another unintended bit of residue of <i>The Mummy</i> is that it makes you hate the affable Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, Industrial Light and Magic, CGI, Egypt, and even bandages. How can it be ethical — or even legal — to treat the Bronze Age this way? <br /></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-23034410058791885982022-12-14T13:15:00.002-08:002023-05-23T10:57:52.849-07:00East and West<p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgvPAh6G_9b4ndLnylixQajBxUvZy3Q64FefCuF62yHL5dCs4yGLEcoNpwilP1YWQs9lm5CTzjsRV8eTzLtNTm7c4CJ796z6tEPicOsRGvJOR3e4y-UGpPjYYGdP5S-NDFMP-BFgachagpRw9KTs3yhWH7yEiPXO2pMu8UmVgGa-0M7SADCEuQpfKhv" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="480" data-original-width="720" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgvPAh6G_9b4ndLnylixQajBxUvZy3Q64FefCuF62yHL5dCs4yGLEcoNpwilP1YWQs9lm5CTzjsRV8eTzLtNTm7c4CJ796z6tEPicOsRGvJOR3e4y-UGpPjYYGdP5S-NDFMP-BFgachagpRw9KTs3yhWH7yEiPXO2pMu8UmVgGa-0M7SADCEuQpfKhv=w400-h266" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Toshiro Mifune and Keiko Awaji</i></td></tr></tbody></table><i>Stray Dog</i> (1949) is Akira Kurosawa’s tenth film and only his third with the charismatic young actor Toshiro Mifune (his seventh film role). It is one of the rewards of movies to be able to see a budding genius director so openly display his love of American directors: Ford, Welles, Huston, Walsh. Kurosawa takes the police procedural form and inventively expands it in various directions: a buddy picture, a psychological–existential drama, and an Expressionist morality play. The movie is bursting at the seams. It’s a <i>Bildungsroman</i> by a director who is finding a new language to express everything he can in a humanist spirit. <i>Stray Dog</i> has a purity of purpose. Kurosawa directed his first movie in 1943; by 1948, in <i>Drunken Angel</i>, and 1949, in <i>Stray Dog</i>, he was already the greatest master of pastiche and action technique in the world. You can feel the simultaneous forces of the East and the West, yet there is no unease with the material: the tableaus of the desperately hustling, naïve young cop (Mifune) in the ramshackle side streets of Tokyo are both triumphantly personal and universal. Takashi Shimura, a Kurosawa stalwart from <i>Rashomon</i> (1950), <i>Ikiru</i> (1952), and <i>The Seven Samurai</i> (1954), plays the mentor detective. He was an old pro even by 1949. Kurosawa here is right on the cusp of surpassing his American idols. The following year, with <i>Rashomon</i>, those same American directors had the opportunity to see how they’d been topped by this Beethoven of the East.<br /></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-49138769259124066022022-11-30T11:57:00.001-08:002022-11-30T11:57:18.050-08:00Bloodless<p><i>Downton Abbey: A New Era</i> (2022) is a saccharine atrocity. Virtually all the characters are back from the final TV season, but they’ve had the blood squeezed out of them. The script leaves no one any dignity; the actors aren’t just actors anymore — they’re cardboard symbols of the resilient English spirit, diamonds of the Empire with stiff upper lips. This lame, pointless rip-off of <i>Singin’ in the Rain</i> (1952) is presented earnestly, as if nobody had ever heard of the silent-to-sound transition, and despite the fact that the film studio in the current story is the London-based producer of “quota quickies,” British Lion, all the characters keep mysteriously referring to their surroundings as “Hollywood.” What can you say about the writing in a movie that shamelessly treats all these dowagers, lords, ladies, and lackeys as wooden tokens of British class divisions and old-movie stereotypes (<i>This Happy Breed</i> [1944], <i>Mrs. Miniver</i> [1942], <i>The White Cliffs of Dover</i> [1944], and so on, where the only humor in the dialogue is inadvertent), or that relies on piled-up happy outcomes? I don’t remember a single moment in the two-hours-plus romance that was sexy or passionate, and when a baby is carried in at the end, I was baffled as to how it got there. At a time of our current upswing in erotic dramas in streaming programs, <i>Downton Abbey: A New Era</i> is presented as a chaste throwback to the sexless “family” entertainment of Joe Pasternak and Henry Koster. It’s a shame there isn’t a singing nun in it somewhere.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjN5gnbY4XHKO9zCoQvka3EghatJDcmSufKZS8iC3UaR43N7f8fgn82SvsCMoRKvhGoQGNF1jRf2MmLp8Q4SJ_GWoGOhDwc8VaWoGGZ4228ow1tsKmqPJv1Jdy7qY2Y3KbD-8Vs9GpbPwE9WeH7eSIz-1gm92iad0geckji_WPwL93zpBrsfhg_C3Qf" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="681" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjN5gnbY4XHKO9zCoQvka3EghatJDcmSufKZS8iC3UaR43N7f8fgn82SvsCMoRKvhGoQGNF1jRf2MmLp8Q4SJ_GWoGOhDwc8VaWoGGZ4228ow1tsKmqPJv1Jdy7qY2Y3KbD-8Vs9GpbPwE9WeH7eSIz-1gm92iad0geckji_WPwL93zpBrsfhg_C3Qf=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Static pose. <i>Maggie Smith</i></td></tr></tbody></table>The directing is truly primitive; scenes aren’t shaped for dramatic action or montage but for static tableaus. The camera pans slowly across each grouping of primped, posing characters while they deliver measured, mechanical dialogue: “We got through the war — we can get through this.” “You’ve been everything to me. Everything.” Lady Grantham sums it all up patly, in case anyone missed it: “Individual Crawleys come and go, but the family lives on.” This is the sort of sludge that E. F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh were making fun of in the thirties. Nobody raises his voice or spills his tea in this celebration of fortitude and tradition, and even Maggie Smith’s peppery dowager dragon from the TV show is defanged. (Where are all her tart one-liners? The director turns her into a snookums.) All the youngsters are paired off and squared off with clinical precision (the butler gets snapped up by a visiting movie star), but Dame Maggie is left spending most of the time in bed, thinking of an incandescent girlhood love, and we’re not sure whether she’s nobly remembering or just dotty. Dozens of details are either entirely phony or contrived to show off the landscape (the movie closes with a funeral procession that has rarely been equaled in the movies for frosty grandeur). Even the jazz band on the terrace is all wrong — it’s 1927 but the playing and singing sound like a contemporary cruise ship act. <i>Downton Abbey: A New Era</i> isn’t a family saga — it’s a commercial trade name, and Julian Fellowes makes a terrific living by appealing to his audience’s craving for wholesome blandness.<br /></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-48398582501675143362021-12-29T12:26:00.000-08:002021-12-29T12:26:48.113-08:00Propaganda<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span>efore he directed and starred in his marvelous <i>Henry V</i> in 1944, Laurence Olivier made several propaganda films for the war effort: <i>That Hamilton Woman</i> (1941) with his wife Vivien Leigh, in which Napoleon is a clear stand-in for Hitler, <i>The Invaders </i>(1941, <i>49th Parallel</i> in the UK), with actual Nazis as Nazis, various Ministry of Information shorts, and <i>The Demi-Paradise </i>(1943). The latter, directed by Anthony Asquith, was intended to rouse British support for the Soviets in the wake of the 1941 German invasion, which abruptly terminated the German–Soviet non-aggression pact. (The title is from John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Act II of <i>Richard II</i>.) Olivier plays an Englishman’s idea of a Russian: officious and overwhelmingly critical of British reserve and “cruelty.” The screenplay (by Anatole de Grunwald) turns the proletariat Soviet engineer into a bourgeois provincialist — what has always been said about Englishmen — but Olivier is strangely listless. He overlooks the comic potential of the character, which is odd, considering Olivier’s triumphs in so many comic roles in the theater, from Sir Toby Belch to Sergius (<i>Arms and the Man</i>) to Justice Shallow. The artist who so successfully tapped the wit in a madman like Richard Gloucester should have, one would think, been inclined to play up the humor in Ivan Kouznetsoff. Olivier’s halting, overstudied delivery is perhaps a miscalculation. The effect on his characterization turns an engineer into an artistic temperament and gives the impression that Olivier has forgotten his lines. This may have been Olivier’s idea of Slavic dispiritedness.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-MBvhHyVGScg/YczDpWJqfoI/AAAAAAAAfKA/Mo_r01Pc0doHGYmTAUHkzkxScbRFGOV5ACNcBGAsYHQ/Olivier.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="843" height="294" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-MBvhHyVGScg/YczDpWJqfoI/AAAAAAAAfKA/Mo_r01Pc0doHGYmTAUHkzkxScbRFGOV5ACNcBGAsYHQ/w400-h294/Olivier.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Planting her feet apart and adopting martial poses, Margaret Rutherford seems to have taken the propaganda mission much too seriously. She plays the town busybody who makes “stirring” speeches and chews through everything around her. Rutherford’s amateurish histrionics obliterate the casual humor of most of the crowd scenes. (Rutherford was always impossibly broad — she can’t deliver a throw-away bit of dialogue without jerking her head from left to right.) <p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">D</span>espite its occasional warm charm, including a lovely performance by Penelope Dudley-Ward and a brief bit by Leslie Henson in a music-hall number, the movie is prosaic and at least thirty minutes too long. A year later, Olivier’s heroic phase reached its artistic and commercial apex with <i>Henry V</i>, Shakespeare’s emblematic patriotic achievement and the British film industry’s glorious tribute to English empire.<br /></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-30477438326195209592021-11-03T13:49:00.001-07:002023-05-22T16:45:29.461-07:00Robert Altman’s Flying Machine<p><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span>rewster McCloud</i> (1970), Robert Altman’s second feature film, is wildly fluid. Even fans of <i>M*A*S*H</i> (1969) might not be completely tuned in to this movie’s disjointed counterculture lightness. Scenes of episodic, oddball humor, visual shocks and sexual arousal (the movie was originally called Brewster McCloud’s Sexy Flying Machine) butt up against each other like pinballs, and Altman, who heavily rewrote the Doran William Cannon screenplay, is tilting the machine.</p><p>In <i>M*A*S*H</i>, the satire was equally manic but a lot clearer; scenes were constructed to puncture bureaucracy and skewer the military officers and aides who peddled it to the American troops. We know what’s going on in <i>Brewster McCloud</i> and we can catch all the often very funny movie references and in-jokes, but we don’t often know what those references are doing there or why a disparate group of Houstonians are being strangled. The movie doesn’t ever tell us why these particular victims were targeted or even who the killer is. It could be the sensual but mothering older woman (Sally Kellerman), the dimwit tour guide (Shelley Duvall, whose eyelashes are painted in Raggedy Ann spikes), or the taciturn Brewster himself (Bud Cort, who played several of his movie roles as if they were on the spectrum). Are the victims Brewster’s persecutors, establishment materialists threatening to derail his desire to fly, or are they only in the wrong place at the wrong time? The victims are all found contorted in grotesque shapes, with bird droppings on their bodies or faces, but if Altman is attempting to make a deeper satirical point and not just a scatological one, that point is lost. The comic visual scatology is everywhere, in fact: bird shit is constantly being dropped (by unseen birds) on important papers, wallets, badges, and windshields. The movie is practically awash in it. The freedom that Altman gives his cast to improvise dialogue saves a lot of the <i>non sequiturs</i> in the script — for example, while the suave detective (Michael Murphy) is examining one of the victims at a zoo, an enormous tortoise lumbers into the frame, nudging the detective’s right elbow, and Murphy, without losing character, says, “Somebody get this turtle out of here.” Moments like that reinforce the improvisational personality without adding to the confusion.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5wlPiy7ec5Q/YYL0-sUfMxI/AAAAAAAAeIc/08VwlGKq_vcd82RCRfuAaeHVFb8RL_X5wCLcBGAsYHQ/Brewster.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5wlPiy7ec5Q/YYL0-sUfMxI/AAAAAAAAeIc/08VwlGKq_vcd82RCRfuAaeHVFb8RL_X5wCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h225/Brewster.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Weirdos. <i>Shelley Duvall</i>, <i>Bud Cort</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-large;">M</span>ost of the earlier scenes — the farcical police investigation, the bonehead car chases, a runaway wheelchair, the whacked-out accidents and close calls — may not be linked <i>logically</i> to the movie’s climax, but they are, miraculously, linked emotionally, and that inevitability is probably the movie’s chief virtue and triumph. Altman is brilliant enough to loosen plot threads and abandon linear dialogue and still fulfill an audience’s emotional needs. Brewster’s exultant flight in the Astrodome is scored to Merry Clayton’s lovely rendition of a John Phillips song about the emotional abandon of spreading one’s wings and letting go. One of the great reprises in American movies of the seventies, the scene is a metaphor of the entire movie and its spasmodic narrative, the oversize contraption flapping its aluminum bones in order to climb dizzyingly higher and higher. But the emotional strength of that uplift is real, and the conclusion is devastating. The boy with the dream is the only one in the movie whose death is treated with tragic irony. The movie destroys him to liberate him. The audience knows it has lost something it can’t quite articulate, and Altman is compassionate enough to give us a final set piece of distancing theatricality — a circus of the stars and a Felliniesque view of life-as-theater (a sign saying “Greatest Show on Earth” hangs across the stadium seats). If that’s Altman’s point, he certainly takes a roundabout way of getting there, but the side roads are richly inventive, like early Fellini. The framing device alone is sophisticatedly, bizarrely witty enough for ten movies: a professor (René Auberjonois) lecturing on ornithology grows progressively more birdlike in his squawky speech and body movements each time the camera cuts back to his classroom. Once you see it as a hip, modern fable, <i>Brewster McCloud</i> may seem the giddiest flight fantasy since <i>Miracle in Milan</i> (1951).</p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-69447373961632298272021-11-03T13:03:00.002-07:002023-05-23T11:05:46.092-07:00This Is War, Not a Garden Party<span style="font-size: x-large;">Y</span>ou might walk out of the theater after seeing <i>Gone with the Wind</i> (1939) into
the cool, head-clearing night air feeling a little headachy. The first half is all epic and panorama. The last third is bogged down in expensive romance melodrama, an example of movie proto-fatigue. But the structure works in <i>Wind</i>’s favor: audiences are more energetic when the movie is likewise more energetic — for the first ninety minutes — so all that splendor isn’t wasted. Anyone inclined to wonder whether the mighty <i>Wind</i> really merits its eighty years of adulation usually just remembers the first half. When characters die, like Scarlett’s first husband, it’s sometimes treated comically, and good comedy is always memorable. Even dotty Gerald’s fatal fall from a horse is rather humorous, and I’ve heard audiences titter at his stentorian senility. In fact, all the enjoyable comedy in the movie occurs earlier, from the Peahen and Buffalo League (Laura Hope Crews, Jane Darwell, and Mary Anderson) to Uncle Peter (Eddie Anderson) to Charles Hamilton (Rand Brooks in baby curls) to the rollicking, blunt Mammy (Hattie McDaniel). The “intimate” melodrama of the last third is sodden soap opera and feels a little sour and disjointed (a script issue).<div><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-weLz8VDTmRE/YYLoIJNfNoI/AAAAAAAAeIU/kvMi6oJnPuwAadKvIeqah5xLT0_x5j8ZACLcBGAsYHQ/Wind.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-weLz8VDTmRE/YYLoIJNfNoI/AAAAAAAAeIU/kvMi6oJnPuwAadKvIeqah5xLT0_x5j8ZACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h300/Wind.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Father-daughter time. <i>Vivien Leigh</i>, <i>Thomas Mitchell</i></td></tr></tbody></table><div><i>Gone with the Wind</i> is meritorious for its saturated three-strip Technicolor, gaudy production design (including a number of famous matte paintings), pullback and crane shots against blazing sunsets and silhouettes of gnarled oaks, and actors who manage to stand out prominently against the size and scope of this cinematic gargantua. The power that the actors have, despite the lopsidedness the movie gives to production values, is miraculous. Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Thomas Mitchell, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Butterfly McQueen, Victor Jory, Harry Davenport (“Good heavens, woman, this is war, not a garden party!”), Ward Bond, Alicia Rhett, and even brief scene stealers like Cliff Edwards, Paul Hurst (as the sinister Yankee deserter), and Eric Linden (the amputee who puts real terror in his scene and nearly upends the movie) make <i>Wind</i> a vivid personality parade. I guess that the actors’ all-around success is mostly attributable to the director, Victor Fleming, and the care David O. Selznick lavished on casting. By comparison, think of how many actors get swamped by the production in other humongous movies, from the Joseph L. Mankiewicz <i>Cleopatra</i> (1963) to David Lean’s <i>Doctor Zhivago</i> (1965) to James Cameron’s <i>Titanic</i> (1997) — none of them known for shimmering, zesty acting, the way <i>Gone with the Wind</i> is. Its performances weren’t just stellar but influential, too. Leigh’s Scarlett scared and inspired a generation of actresses after her, from Linda Darnell in <i>Forever Amber</i> (1947) and Hedy Lamarr in <i>The Strange Woman</i> (1946) to Elizabeth Taylor in <i>Raintree County</i> (1957), who copied her enigmatic combination of gusto and regal bearing.</div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he movie represents another miracle. After all its sweep and energy and calculated precision, it is, after all, an indie movie. Selznick International was an independent studio that nonetheless made movies the Big Studio way, filming prestige literary properties, building a stable of stars and directors, subcontracting stars from other studios, raising funds from East Coast banks and investors, and slathering movies with mass-production gloss without actually ever going into mass production (only a couple of Selznick movies were produced every year, from 1936 to about 1948). There isn’t much difference in the look of the typical Selznick movie and the big-budget movies from Warner Brothers or MGM: <i>The Garden of Allah</i> (1936), <i>A Star Is Born</i> (1937), <i>Intermezzo</i> (1939), <i>Rebecca</i> (1940), <i>Spellbound</i> (1945), and <i>Duel in the Sun</i> (1946) all look and play as if they came right off the major studio assembly lines. That’s their “personality.” Selznick was an intrusive, busybody producer who controlled every aspect of filming, usually driving his actors and directors nuts, and his movies both gain and suffer for it. The Selznick palette is broad and banal, but the details — including the performances — are often crazily energetic.</div></div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-76508310366006800142021-05-04T12:01:00.001-07:002021-05-04T13:24:44.590-07:00Moaning on the Prairie<p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3ruRqxzuvj4/YJGXsLq5xVI/AAAAAAAAcVI/8SSEf2aa08sZ0pfMAru-PJKOBbiPhWn3ACLcBGAsYHQ/Prairie.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="700" height="266" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3ruRqxzuvj4/YJGXsLq5xVI/AAAAAAAAcVI/8SSEf2aa08sZ0pfMAru-PJKOBbiPhWn3ACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h266/Prairie.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ophelia of the Prairie. <i>Natalie Wood</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>hat the hell is <i>Splendor in the Grass</i> (1961) about? I’ve seen it twice (no more, please) and I still can’t ascertain its point. There’s a confused, self-destructive high school girl (Natalie Wood) who may or may not love the sensitive, troubled jock at school (Warren Beatty), but she’s in the perpetual throes of a nervous breakdown triggered by — unfulfilled sexual longings? — and unable to articulate anything beyond a sort of pubescent quavering and moaning. Directed by Elia Kazan as if this were serious stuff, the movie frames all its dress-ripping nuttiness as if it were a grand passion in a <i>verismo</i> opera; Kazan and the screenwriter, William Inge, hype virtually every scene with turbulent Freudianism and volcanic neuroses. Teens are yelling at parents, parents are yelling at teens, teens are yelling at doctors, police are yelling at parents — everybody’s frustrated and unhappy out there in Small Town, USA. Nobody tells a joke or eats a good, satisfying meal or plays a little fetch with the dog. They’re too busy gnashing their teeth.</p><p>The movie, pitched for soapy hysteria, is both an idealization of misunderstood youth and a criticism of the impetuous promiscuity of high schoolers. Is Deanie, who goes mad, supposed to be a female James Dean in <i>East of Eden</i> (1955)? A teenage Blanche DuBois? Ophelia of the Prairie? The Inge screenplay won an Oscar, but it has much bigger problems than that. Incidentally, Phyllis Diller plays the notorious speakeasy owner Texas Guinan — she may be the stablest person in the cast — and Inge himself plays a reverend.</p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-88095394797249607342020-12-05T13:44:00.000-08:002020-12-05T13:44:05.045-08:00Consuming Movies<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/a-year-without-movie-buzz?utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3mcRitwtDdTUfTRukBoC2I4xyCoTVIHkxxsMG--e9V6zUFgcVKt-nHUaA" target="_blank">A Year Without Movie Buzz</a>”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Richard Brody, <i>The New Yorker</i></span></p><p>Richard Brody treats movie art and movie consumption as two unrelated things, but movie art (a social art for a social animal) and the way movies are viewed have always been intertwined, and the health of one is tied to the health of the other — which Brody hints at when he says that “the rising tide of publicity and its echoes seems to lift all boats.” With nobody going to theaters this year — the Plague Year — we’re all watching movies on our iPads and phones and TVs. It’s a new dimension of experience for audiences, as Brody says. But I don’t think that consuming movies only in private isolation is going to enrich a popular art. Maybe you can even find the same kind of degradation in pop music and attribute it to the same changing patterns.</p><p>Many movies, like <i>The Godfather</i> (1972) or <i>The Conformist</i> (1970) or <i>Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan</i> (1982) — you could go on and on listing such movies — are great, immersive experiences that unleash their full power only in a theater with an audience, where visual dimensions can be appreciated in cinematic terms. The silent comedies, for example (Buster Keaton’s <i>The Cameraman</i> [1928] or <i>Seven Chances</i> [1925], Harold Lloyd’s <i>Speedy</i> [1928] or <i>The Kid Brother</i> [1927], Chaplin’s <i>The Gold Rush</i> [1925]), certainly deserve to be seen in a theater, a collective setting for which they were specifically designed. Those moviemakers intended audiences to feed off the explosive, balletic inventiveness and bust up at the visual gags and camera tricks. Those gags developed in live theater and vaudeville and probably circuses, and were extended and perfected by these artist clowns to make full use of the new medium. And an audience’s enthusiasm for silent comedy has as much to do with the responses of fellow moviegoers as with what’s on screen.</p><p>But imagine watching movies only in privacy or on your personal thingamabobs for the rest of your life. That changes you and that changes movie art. When your reactions are isolated from the reactions of others, the things you’re responding to don’t resonate with the same power; the effects are deadened, and you’re likely to assume that the moviemaker has failed, somehow, to make you laugh. Sooner or later, that “failure” gets back to filmmakers, who make contrived modifications in later projects — usually in kinetic, dizzying extremes in camera work or incompetent scripts — and, slowly, there’s an erosion of quality and sensibility. Movies started as a communal art, although they may not end as one.</p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-76548535439957536552020-12-04T21:41:00.001-08:002022-03-01T16:29:47.076-08:00Suckers<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span> managed with little effort to miss <i>Twilight</i> (2008) until very recently. I knew it was intended for a young adult audience (adapted from a wildly popular series of teen novels by Stephenie Meyer) and figured it probably didn’t have any of the macabre fun of the old Universal horror classics, but I was unprepared for the lurid look and the stoned, senseless rhythm (everybody’s face, human and vampire, is the same sickly gray-green, the same color as the landscape). It’s been awhile since I’ve seen something this mediocre take itself so seriously. It looks and sounds like an Eighties rock opera in some parts and an indie chamber drama in others, and it’s unrelenting. It’s also weirdly static. In many scenes, the actors just stand there, glancing around nervously, hesitating to deliver these awful lines while their mouths twitch, and you wonder whether they’re parodying youth or paying tribute to it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CO-MTagw-jc/X8sbNXngKkI/AAAAAAAAcAI/scdILXX8618aQ9l2A5GyzrQ7JJYlj_xEwCLcBGAsYHQ/s766/Twilight.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="766" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CO-MTagw-jc/X8sbNXngKkI/AAAAAAAAcAI/scdILXX8618aQ9l2A5GyzrQ7JJYlj_xEwCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h200/Twilight.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Postpubes. <i>Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">The pictorial effects are gloppy–beautiful, like an issue of <i>Cond</i><i>é Nast Traveler</i>, and despite periodic moments of suspense, the movement of characters through the frame is poorly staged, and scenes repeatedly turn into pudding before they end. The production feels like a revolving tableau of celebrity glossies without any actual celebrities. Some sort of bizarrely postpubescent world view motivates it all, so the emotions all feel wobbly and terribly phony to adults. These bloodsuckers, who can swim underwater, experience all sorts of internal anguish, and they talk in pained, halting tones. All the actors appear to have used the same acting coach, and whoever it was probably works a day job in the food truck hospitality industry. Aside from their acting, the leads in the movie don’t embarrass themselves because they so obviously belong there; they’re of a piece with the somnambulant banality of the conception. But that unity of form and function is still pretty feeble; these young actors give you the impression they were hired at random in the school cafeteria. It’s obvious they’ve had little experience and even less training, and this movie is perfect for them. But the adults — the parents — all seem lost; in scene after scene, their faces wilt, possibly with shame over being stuck in a movie that is so patently not their own. (Maybe the adults were hired at random in a post office?)</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span> can understand why this movie was such a huge hit. It feeds a primal longing not for shocks or gross-outs (the staples of most teen horror films) but for liberation from high school routines or smothering parents or middle-class values, and I think young audiences projected themselves onto the hip, confused characters. It’s vampire psychodrama. But it all seems the product of an unformed mind and personality; it could have used some comic subtext instead of all this lugubriousness — the two leads must have the heaviest eyelids since Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in <i>Macao</i> (1952). The idea that some vampires don’t want to kill people and so resort to chasing after forest critters does have comic potential (remember how Dwight Frye’s eyes lit up when he ate juicy flies?), and the soundtrack works best when it ditches the gloppy score and incorporates some funky pop songs, but practically none of that potential is tapped. This movie bungles its chance to put the groove back in the undead — it could have been the best thing since Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”</span></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-50917832758201613922020-10-15T10:24:00.001-07:002020-10-15T10:24:18.471-07:00Connections<span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>n an epigraph, Wim Wenders dedicates <i>Wings of Desire</i> (1987) to Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrzej Wajda, but in its imagery and tone, his movie has more in common with Fellini (<i>Nights of Cabiria</i>, 1957), Tarkovsky (especially <i>Stalker</i>, 1979), and the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose incandescent <i>Day of Wrath</i> (1943) and <i>Ordet</i> (1955) and <i>Vampyr</i> (1932) glide through dreamlike landscapes of pain and unfulfillment. <i>Wings of Desire</i> might have been called <i>Wings of Longing</i> — the angel Damiel longs to experience the physical connections of space and time that human beings have, while everywhere the human inhabitants of West Berlin, whose thoughts the angels can hear, long for various connections of their own: to parents or children, to spouses or lovers, to the past, and even to the self.<div><br /></div><div>The angels see this earthly realm in monochrome when they’re most removed from human experiences. But the end of the picture explodes in color as Damiel “crosses over” (in an amusing bit, he sells his angelic breastplate in an antiques store). Damiel is obsessed by his attraction to the trapeze artist and the lusty simplicity a group of children take in a circus performance. He longs to feel what they all feel, and his desire has a childlike naïveté; he doesn’t seem to recognize the unfortunate side of earthbound mortality.</div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zy0gn_WLxyY/X4iFFctyiPI/AAAAAAAAb9E/qLr9gC7XQAEgOE3mH49u87EfAZF57TXlgCLcBGAsYHQ/s700/Wenders02.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="700" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zy0gn_WLxyY/X4iFFctyiPI/AAAAAAAAb9E/qLr9gC7XQAEgOE3mH49u87EfAZF57TXlgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Wenders02.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Angelic observer. <i>Bruno Ganz</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>I think the film has a largely warm-hearted appeal, but its unspooling of interior dialogue (which reminds one of café jazz poetry) is intended to create an atmosphere of sweeping stream-of-consciousness — a sort of Jungian collective language of the Shadow — and I think we’re really not supposed to “interpret” or explicate the arcane prose-poetry. Taken individually, each mental utterance sounds like a bromide, and the overall effect can be deadening if, like Damiel, you’re searching for connections. (Rilke apparently inspired much of Peter Handke’s screenplay.)</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>n a way, the lack of linguistic coherence works in the movie’s favor. The compression of time in traditional narrative is almost entirely abandoned, and you do feel as if you were floating around Berlin with the angels without a sense of beginning, middle, or end — the rising action, climax, and denouement of dramaturgy. You expect temporal and even spatial constructions that just aren’t there, and you may get caught searching for phantoms. The movie might have made a great impact as a silent classic with few title cards, although you’d miss the eerie, evocative score. When the theorists talk of “pure cinema,” they may have something like this in mind. Fairly early on, Wenders gets you to feel cut adrift, like a buoy, from spatiotemporal anchors (the movie subverts your geographic information system). The camerawork is remarkable — it seems unbound by space the way the pacing seems unbound by time. Did the cinematographer (Henri Alekan) use cranes and a Steadicam (which Kubrick used in <i>The Shining </i>in 1980) for all those marvelous aerial tracking shots? Alekan’s work unifies this model of personal filmmaking — it’s transporting. Irrespective of the otherworldly elements, the movie’s experimental spirit takes you right to the core of some timeless human questions.</div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-32772273716344820142020-10-04T17:28:00.007-07:002020-10-21T15:27:01.049-07:00Codgers<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>atching Lindsay Anderson’s shameless <i>The Whales of August</i> (1987) is like being in a mausoleum. But the more energetic scenes are akin to rummaging around in the attic of the Haunted Mansion. This mélange of codgers — Lillian Gish and Bette Davis and Vincent Price and Ann Southern and Harry Carey Jr. — is rather ghoulish; the script drones on and on about the past, and before long you’re not entirely sure whether you’re looking at the actors in real time or at newsreel footage of dead movie stars. I kept expecting a Eugene O’Neill play to erupt at some point, with recriminations and accusations and booze late into the night, but the only thing that really happens is that the floors creak.</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t remember whether there were any whales, but Vincent Price catches some fish, though God knows how, considering that he doesn’t appear to have the coordination to cast his line into the surf without falling off the rocks. I’ve read that many old stars, from red giants like Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea to white dwarfs like Fred Astaire to black holes like Shirley Booth, were asked to take part but turned it down. Why would an old fart whose movie career is a distant memory return to the screen in this — an adaptation soaking in formaldehyde of a play that embalms its characters before they’re laid out on the coroner’s table?</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P2MjzL2KPhs/X3pltkTEj-I/AAAAAAAAb8Y/au9DTiNAH_sZ2tN4MunAtQ9UuLdQ3H6fwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1000/Whales.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="1000" height="172" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P2MjzL2KPhs/X3pltkTEj-I/AAAAAAAAb8Y/au9DTiNAH_sZ2tN4MunAtQ9UuLdQ3H6fwCLcBGAsYHQ/w320-h172/Whales.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Silver treasures. <i>Gish and Davis</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">What is an actor at <i>any</i> stage of life supposed to do with lines like “Photographs fade, but memories live forever”? The dialogue is all mothballs and tea rose: “I have once again been set adrift.” — “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Maranov.” — “Oh, you needn’t be, my dear. I have often been adrift, but I have always stayed afloat.”<br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">A little later, the on-screen embalming is stiffer than ever: “Do you think one can live too long?” — “Life can never be too long.” — “Even if one outlives one’s time?” — “One’s time is all one’s time, even to the end. You see out there, how the moon casts its silver treasures along the shore? There is a treasure that can <i>never</i> be spent.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Sic transit</i> Lillian and Bette.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><br /></span></div></div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-25137186689987844952020-08-10T15:30:00.002-07:002020-08-10T15:51:05.951-07:00The Revolutionary from Bonn<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: xx-large;">T</span>he <i>Ninth Symphony</i> by Beethoven was a revolutionary musical act in 1824, when it premiered in Vienna. Sections of Kerry Candaele’s <i>Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony</i> (2013) are stirring, but the various pieces aren’t always tied together thematically and the links between art and social act are too abstract. Your mind fills in with metaphors of brotherhood and liberation and exaltation lifted from the poet Schiller, whose “An die Freude” inspired Beethoven.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the movie works on a more primordial emotional level. I think it’s a beautiful document of how art and politics can intermingle, throwing a blazing light on the turmoil and despair that keep various social systems locked in darkness. There’s a fervor and urgency in the film that magnify the dramatic news footage of social struggle in China, East Berlin, Chile, and Japan. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VGUthhxHt5U/XzHJ3kGc46I/AAAAAAAAbiI/VldU1HaBH042XTzvyGZTrp0TC3aVZWUeQCLcBGAsYHQ/s800/Ninth.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VGUthhxHt5U/XzHJ3kGc46I/AAAAAAAAbiI/VldU1HaBH042XTzvyGZTrp0TC3aVZWUeQCLcBGAsYHQ/w320-h180/Ninth.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tiananmen Square.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">This war-horse of a symphony has a long history of extramusical use and abuse — it’s widely known that Beethoven’s highest, most ennobling popular work has been co-opted for noxious political ends. Casting its extraordinary shadow across the nineteenth century, it has shepherded human mass movements. Each of the four movements of the <i>Ninth</i> corresponds to a section of the movie. On paper, that structure probably sounds programmatic and boring, but in practice it doesn’t mar the experience. For all I know, <i>Following the Ninth</i> could have started as a position paper — I know practically nothing about the filmmaker other than that he’s a political science professor — but it’s ultimately too ebullient for such doctrinaire, dispassionate nonsense. It generates its own narrative momentum illustrating how the contours of the symphony’s four movements, especially the final choral section that adapts Schiller’s verse, delineate the movement of various social and political acts around the world: revolution against tyranny, the struggle for political rights, and community response to natural disaster.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: xx-large;">O</span>ne of the young Chinese subjects in the movie, a student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, at one point says that Beethoven created an “ambience of hope for social and political change.” The movie doesn’t answer your every question (why this particular symphony, for example, and not any number of other staples of the repertoire?), but it certainly piques your interest in how culture and music and politics can get all jumbled up in an interpretive play of passion that fires entire movements across the globe. We don’t see that depth of response in movies all that often.</span></p>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-38962702291459801222020-08-02T13:30:00.002-07:002020-08-09T12:44:00.913-07:00Nazi Drag<font face="inherit"><font size="6">I</font>t isn’t often, I suppose, that one sees a movie about an SS officer at a concentration camp and his young victim, and the victim is more unhinged than he is. <i>The Night Porter</i> (1974), by the mildly perverse but supremely ungifted Liliana Cavani, takes place in 1957 Vienna but repeatedly flashes back to wartime to give us the seed of their strange relationship. In flash-forwards, Max (Dirk Bogarde) and Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) go at each other like deranged rabbits. Then, to get in the mood all over again, they throw jars on the floor and walk barefoot over the breakage, sucking each other’s bloody wounds like vampires. You see, Max was a Nazi and Lucia was the young, androgynous prisoner he stripped bare, over and over, until her numbness transformed into sexual thrill. Rampling seems the perfect object of a prim Nazi officer’s ambiguous desire: unclothed, she resembles Donatello’s hermaphroditic <i>David</i>. Like two case studies out of Krafft-Ebing, Max eroticizes Lucia’s powerlessness, and she fetishizes his black-booted authority over her (a sort of Stockholm syndrome turned on its S & M head). They meet in a hotel lobby twelve or so years later; he’s a hotel porter and she’s the bourgeois wife of a conductor who’s on tour in Germany with his production of <i>The Magic Flute</i> (in one interminable scene, Max and Lucia keep glancing furtively at each other from separate rows during opening night, and not even Mozart can get the upper hand).</font><div><font face="inherit"><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YpIu22jvuc0/XycgE3z8LtI/AAAAAAAAbhU/tsq-PQwRQHMYGDyptKm3ONid3sSVM-DMACLcBGAsYHQ/s600/Camera.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="600" height="259" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YpIu22jvuc0/XycgE3z8LtI/AAAAAAAAbhU/tsq-PQwRQHMYGDyptKm3ONid3sSVM-DMACLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h259/Camera.png" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Film freak. <i>Dirk Bogarde</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></font><div><font face="inherit"><br /></font></div><div><font face="inherit">But <i>The Night Porter</i> is atrocious without being especially shocking. You could say it fails as pornography, sexual politics, character study, and social criticism. It certainly fails as decadent art—it pales in comparison to outstanding achievements by Cavani’s countrymen Bellocchio, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni in all those areas. Scenes in <i>The Night Porter</i> are so incoherent that the whole movie feels like a cut-rate attempt at a Dada romp, with puzzling outbursts and stony-faced stares punctuating draggy, taciturn dialogue. The movie isn’t even amusingly campy—although one scene, a flashback to the homoerotic carryings-on at an officers’ pleasure party, features Rampling doing a topless striptease and singing a lilting Weimar-era tune as she wriggles and fondles herself, which is obviously a send-up of Dietrich in her scandalous “When Love Dies” number in Sternberg’s classic <i>Morocco</i> (1930). Three guesses as to who is sexier and more iconic.</font></div><div><font face="inherit"><br /></font></div><div><font face="inherit">Is there anybody else of note in this? Let’s see, there’s Gabriele Ferzetti (the enigmatic playboy in Antonioni’s great <i>L’Avventura</i>), who plays the psychiatrist Hans (boy, does he have his hands full!) and Isa Miranda as the countess, who is supposed to be deliciously decadent. The movie treats them both shabbily; they’re turned into crude, distorted jerks, and your moviegoer’s pleasure in their past roles (she worked for Rene Clément and Max Ophüls, among others) is sacrificed to Cavani’s putrid ineptness. Nobody comes out of this mess looking good as an actor, not even Max’s cat or the neighbor’s dachshund—the tabby sits passively, obviously finding the movie as boring as we do, and the dog runs out of the frame entirely. A truly inspired director would at least have supplied a closing shot of a church mouse, “hidden away” in Max’s apartment.</font></div><div><font face="inherit"><br /></font></div><div><font face="inherit"><font size="6">A</font>nd what is it with leftist European filmmakers like Cavani and Alain Resnais who made movies about the death camps but never once mention the word “Jew” in the script? Were such enlightened exemplars of political progressiveness actually proud of themselves for their bravery?</font></div></div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-20477113312776766642020-07-29T12:40:00.003-07:002020-08-09T12:47:30.534-07:00Minor Dundee<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>fter rewatching <i>Major Dundee</i> recently because I had never seen the restoration on it (TCM aired the so-called producer’s cut in November 2019), I’m not convinced that the restored scenes help clarify many of the plot loopholes people used to complain about. Sam Peckinpah still loses control of the material about halfway through, despite the undeniable power of individual scenes and set pieces, although the full cut makes the movie seem less like a studio hatchet job than it used to seem. Peckinpah was inebriated most of the time during the shooting, according to Charlton Heston, so it isn’t surprising that he was unable to exert a hang-together coherence over his script (the well-made play format was never his strength as a director, anyway). Written largely on the fly after production began, it’s brilliant in patches </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">but also meandering and </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">overreaching.</span><div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Man with a mission. <i>Charlton Heston</i></td></tr>
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</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">When you watch </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Dundee</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> from 1965, you see the burn in Peckinpah’s molten vision </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>— the deconstruction of Old West fables — but you also feel the bleary result onscreen of Peckinpah’s confusion with the Melvillean morality play of obsession. It seems as if the whole sordid path of Peckinpah’s infamously self-destructive career is bottled up in this movie.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">S</span>ome of the actors pull through with career-defining performances: Charlton Heston, James Coburn, and Warren Oates (in his big capture scene, his crafty deserter <i>demands</i> his life rather than pleads for it). One shot of the troops crossing a river in the fog rivals Kurosawa for kinetic majesty, but other scenes — especially of festive, cavorting peasants (their dancing and eating are framed in atrociously noble terms) or of speechless young lovers — are stultifying. How drunk do you have to be to copy so little of Kurosawa’s best and so much of John Ford’s worst?</span></div>
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Once Dobbs, Howard, and Curtin are out in the wilderness on their trek for gold, the action is handled beautifully by the script, which doesn’t freight the story with premonitions of catastrophe like a ponderous Robert E. Sherwood play—whose style Hollywood often mistook for depth—but instead adds casual, comic ebullience to scenes so that the audience isn’t tipped off to expect failure early on.</div>
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But back to the flaw: the script mishandles the character transformations, and the movie perhaps overemphasizes this theme and becomes more of a position paper than an adventure story. The theme—of a seed of barely suppressed greed slowly sprouting deep within a character’s psyche, nourished by the desolate environment—strikes me as too insistent. Instead of the measured, insidious spread of greed across the picture, Huston and the script give us brief exchanges of dialogue in which one man says something reasonably “innocent” but is immediately misconstrued by his partner, whose face scrunches up with too-sudden animosity. You know what the movie is trying to dramatize, obviously, but you see the grinding mechanics of overinsistent dialogue spoil the believability of the effect, which not even a John Huston at the top of his game can make fully convincing. </div>
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One other, very minor, flaw is the bandit attack on the train. The action inside the railroad car seems unsteady, not timed quite right—the rhythm a little off. It’s a shoot-’em-up that looks under-rehearsed. I couldn’t help thinking that John Ford would have aced the scene.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Character disintegration. <i>Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston</i></td></tr>
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The story goes that the original scene of Dobbs’s death was much more graphic than what the censors allowed in the movie—that Huston filmed the decapitation and you saw the murdered man’s head roll into a muddy watering hole. I wish that recent restorations of the film for home video would restore that scene because, knowing Huston, it was probably a macabre, witty comment on the greed theme of Dobbs losing his head.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>hese flaws are quibbles. To paraphrase perhaps the movie’s clearest-eyed fan, James Agee, <i>The Treasure of the Sierra Madre</i> is bursting with energy and intelligence and talent. The performances—even the minor performances, like the barber (who snips and trims with panache and self-satisfaction at his grooming skill while toweling Dobbs’s face)—benefit from Huston’s economy and clear eye. Part of an effective screen performance is where the camera is situated, and Huston and his cameraman, Ted D. McCord, keep the camera where it belongs; the best adventure movies of the era excelled at action sequences, not exchanges of dialogue, but <i>Sierra Madre</i> is equally great at both. The camera angle, slightly askew and off to one side in closeup, adds both lyricism and naturalism to the exchange between Walter Huston and Jack Holt in the flophouse. In scene after scene, the action unfolds beautifully, and inspiration is abundant everywhere, from the jig that Howard dances in front of a disbelieving Dobbs and Curtin to the terrifically tense interactions with James Cody (Bruce Bennett) and the bandit honcho Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya), whose grotesquely grinning face and crooked teeth have become one of the iconic images in movie history. Bedoya and his idiot posse unknowingly dump the gold all over the desert floor, but they’re abundant providers of many of <i>Sierra Madre</i>’s truest, most lasting riches.</div>
David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-90393126750276660072020-07-06T16:28:00.002-07:002020-10-13T22:28:30.095-07:00Revolutionary<span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span> don’t think it’s being talked about much, but <i>Shadow</i>, by the major Chinese director Zhang Yimou and released in 2019, is a spectacular advance in film art. I hope that audiences for the film were breathless and dazed at what they saw. Movie audiences for the epics of Griffith and Gance, seeing film grammar for the first time—crosscutting, narrative discontinuity, tracking, framing, flood lighting (the technique that Griffith and other artists used of throwing beams of colored light from the wings)—must have felt a similar sense of wonder, witnessing a young art form take shape in the work of movie pioneers. The greatest thing a director can do in a mass-market industry like the movies is to excite you all over again with the limitless possibilities of the medium.<br />
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I’ve never seen a film lighted as uncannily as <i>Shadow</i>. I don’t know how Yimou and his cinematographer (Zhao Xiaoding) and art director (Ma Kwong-Wing) did it. The only way I can describe the production design is “chthonian.” Much of the film takes place in a hidden cavern, where you wouldn’t expect any dominant light source. But refracted light undulates across the screen in a preternatural play of not-quite-color. In fact, you’re never quite sure whether you’re seeing the story in chromatic color or grayscale—it’s like seeing some newly invented achromatic palette—what some people think they see in dreams, perhaps. Otherworldly lighting is photographed through billowing gowns and translucent scrolls (on which the jagged shapes of Chinese orthography unfurl). This lighting is obviously painstakingly planned and must have been headachy to produce, but the movie blessedly doesn’t give you the impression of watching mind-numbing computer-generated graphics (CGI is what <i>keeps</i> a movie from being a classic, based on the evidence so far). Images breathe and float across your view with fairytale loveliness, beads of rainwater on skin quiver as if alive, and everyday objects are rendered in ebony and ecru and washed-out lime.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beyond color. <i>Deng Chao</i> and <i>Sun Li</i></td></tr>
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The palette has no visible primary colors, except blood, which turns murky and opaque when it mixes with rainwater. The effect isn’t anything like a traditional black and white; it’s elegantly desaturated and, finally, revolutionary. We’re so used to standard color palettes, including the saturated hues of Technicolor or the angular <i>chiaroscuro</i> of noir, that this matte-like lambency seems to create a new physical law of depth perception. The creamy radiance and indiscernible sources of moving light make you feel weightless.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>side from its art design, the film has an abundance of atavistic images that recall the work of Mizoguchi, with scenes of energy that burst forth with the strength and poetry of Kurosawa. In fact, you’re reminded of a number of past masters of Asian cinema, and the overall effect is that of a student having learned the important things from his spiritual teachers and who now proudly and justifiably speaks with an unforgettable personal voice.</div>
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David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-63629896836435898972019-11-25T15:37:00.000-08:002019-11-27T09:54:39.924-08:00European Formalism<span style="font-size: x-large;">J</span>ohn Simon, who died yesterday at age 94, had one of the two or three most unremittingly independent voices in criticism. Advertisers and editors probably tried to control his signature vitriol or his devastating judgments, but it's obvious they failed.<br />
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The most striking thing about his body of work (from <i>Acid Test</i> in 1964 and <i>Movies into Film</i> in 1971 to <i>Something to Declare</i> in 1984 and <i>The Sheep from the Goats</i> in 1987) is its autonomy and singularity (in fact, his 1975 anthology of long theater essays—on <i>Peer Gynt</i>, on <i>The Wild Duck</i>—is called <i>Singularities</i>). Aside from Edmund Wilson, there was nobody else in American letters quite like Simon, a critic by innate temperament who combined academic formalism with a journalist’s impulse for influencing the collective taste of educated readers (many of whom undoubtedly didn’t much care for movies anyway). Dwight Macdonald could cut the spindly legs out from under mass culture with equal ease and spirit, but Macdonald had a jokey, teasing quality which Simon completely lacked. Macdonald hated garbage as vehemently as Simon (read Macdonald’s takedown of the Hollywood biblical epics in the 1969 <i>On Movies</i>), but he didn’t give you the impression, despite all his masscult and midcult categorizing, that he himself was an inaccessible, displaced alien of superiority, passing judgment on a hopeless demotic culture, as Simon always did. Maybe that difference was the innate extension of Simon’s Old World pedantry (he was the sort to correct you on your use of <i>polymath</i> when you <i>really</i> meant <i>polyhistor</i>).<br />
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An ace polemicist, Simon was praised and reviled just about equally throughout his career. One anecdote should suffice: In 1969–70, Simon was a recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (voted on by the Cornell, Princeton, and Yale English department faculty), and that same year the New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted to keep him <i>out</i> of that august body.<br />
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Simon in interviews encouraged his notoriety as a harsh, nearly unpleasable critic with a mandarin disdain for pop and ersatz in the arts. I always thought this was unfortunate because that reputation ossified around him like a crust until it obscured his clarion voice in print. He was almost always described as the “Count Dracula of film critics” or “the skunk at the party” (not to mention the endless agitated charges of sexism, homophobia, and misanthropy), and his funny descriptions of the physiognomies and various protuberances of Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand invariably appeared, way up top, in virtually everything ever written about him. It was his fault: his frequent <i>apologia</i>—that film was a <i>gesamptkunstwerk</i> in which every element, designed or not, played an important part in the viewer’s experience—was never very convincing. He just loved skewering ugliness, whether of a costume, a speaking voice, a set backdrop, or a receding chin.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">C</span>ompared with his contemporaries—other critics in his league—Simon used a prose style that was indistinguishable from the opinions themselves. The singular force of his judgment <i>was</i> his style, whereas his colleagues—Macdonald, Vernon Young, Robert Bentley, Stanley Kauffmann, and so on—had more idiosyncratic styles with a rhetorical lightness that shaped their opinions. When he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, Simon was a starch-collared, stentorian writer who was inclined to announce that he was about to be witty right before being so (although he was often genuinely so—“As Marge, Frances McDormand verges on the cutesy but manages in the nick of time to pull herself back from the verge”). His other recurring weakness was the stringing out of lengthy tropes until you felt as if you were watching money compound in the bank (“A similar visual fakery has the gifted but often excessive cinematographer Allen Daviau bedizen the movie with every sort of unearned visual opulence as further aid in audience-besotting”). Typically, he lines up his perfectly poised, well-structured phrases in a nagging, anal-retentive way that saps his point of some of its energy: “The trouble with <i>JFK</i> is that whereas it solicits a second seeing to unscramble it, it does not offer enough aesthetic compensation to warrant the effort of reimmersion.” Think of how much pithier Rossini was about Wagner, saying the same thing.<br />
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Simon’s voice felt far more authoritative—and inquisitive—when he was writing about European movies and plays. He seemed more at home with European sensibilities. In the introduction to <i>Something to Declare</i>, his anthology of foreign film reviews, Simon admitted that he rejected that view, but it was always true. The art films of early Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Ozu, Troell, and the like were his true purview. In writing about them, he delved more deeply and described more acutely than he did with American studio films, whose messiness and market exigencies probably occupied only a fourth of Simon’s analytic ability and his interest. (He almost never discussed seriously or at length a movie’s financial battles or its box office.) It’s his writing on European movies—on their explorations of sexual politics, their intimacy and reflection, their <i>avant garde</i> rhetoric, and their literary symbolism—that will stay in the memory of Simon’s close readers. Let the rest of the world keep their Count Dracula.David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-34565389238811817972019-11-19T17:07:00.000-08:002019-12-03T14:35:21.911-08:00American Realism<span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span>rancis Ford Coppola’s <i>The Godfather</i> (1972) apotheosizes the American gangster picture genre. It subsumes all other classic gangster pictures, from <i>Underworld</i> (1929), <i>The Public Enemy</i> (1931), <i>Little Caesar</i> (1931), and <i>Scarface</i> (1932) to <i>The Roaring Twenties</i> (1939), <i>White Heat</i> (1949), and <i>The Killing</i> (1956). But <i>The Godfather Part II</i> (1974) does what no other gangster picture—even <i>The Godfather</i>—ever did. With the relentless, excoriating scalpel of nineteenth-century novels and the plays of Chekhov—the laboratory of literary realism—<i>Part II</i> flayed the layers of superficiality (those earlier movies’ stock in trade) off the underlying complexity of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). As a study of despoiled idealism and the effects of social organization on the members of a powerful tribal family, <i>Part II</i> analyzes Michael as profoundly as any of the main characters are analyzed in the novels of Balzac, Howells, Wharton, or Eliot.<br />
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<i>The Godfather</i> was perhaps the single greatest example of epic romanticism in the New American Cinema. The tidal-wave sweep of the story and the gallery of characters are rich and expertly acted but framed in melodramatic terms scaled to the spectacle of the film. Michael, his siblings, his father (Marlon Brando as the old Corleone, the family man as institution), his family’s <i>caporegime</i> and legal retainers, and the maze of partners and “soldiers” are <i>realistic</i> types, but types (and stock characters) nonetheless: the proud patriarch; the thoughtful, independent younger son; the hothead older son (James Caan); and the array of lackeys, bodyguards, and operations men. These characters are vibrant examples of literary and cinematic creations, but they don’t really evolve or reveal new shadings over the course of the movie, and we aren’t shown their doubts or twisted self-hatred. The movie succeeds as brutal enchantment—as a charismatic cast of characters in a sophisticatedly stylized melodrama. There’s something Dickensian about the dramatic parade of character types passing across the screen. The movie’s visual richness, framing, and montage (which speeds up and cross-cuts so suspensefully you may be reminded of the competing and ultimately colliding stories in the climax of D. W. Griffith’s <i>Intolerance</i>) are pitched to the dimensions of the theater. (More than just about any other movie of its era, <i>The Godfather</i> deserves to be seen on the big screen.)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Real men. <i>Al Pacino</i></td></tr>
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<i>The Godfather Part II</i> is equally a triumph of personal filmmaking, but its analytical mind is far deeper. It goes beyond the romanticism of its predecessor into a new vein of realism in American movies. <i>Part II</i> puts Michael, Fredo Corleone (John Cazale) and Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg)—and perhaps even the Frank Pentangeli of Michael V. Gazzo as well as Robert De Niro’s beautifully realized Vito Corleone—under closer scrutiny (as if the camera were a magnifying glass), demonstrating a complexity of character analysis you almost never saw in genre movies until this one. The treatment of these characters fills them out with the complications and completeness of real human beings. Coppola replaces much of the mythic resonance and symbolic significance of the first <i>Godfather</i> film with a new naturalism and verisimilitude. Michael’s and Fredo’s motives and moods alternately lurch forward and fold back on themselves in unpredictable yet totally believable ways, their emotions bubbling to the surface one minute and being sublimated the next (Pacino excels at abrupt flareups of anger—you’re shocked but fully convinced of his frustrations). These characters are anything but stock and they aren’t even symbolic here. They are far too complex for facile symbolism or the creaking mechanics of traditional storytelling devices. Like us, they change their minds and grapple with the messy self-doubts and sordidness of life. The complexity of <i>Part II</i> is that these men aren’t mouthpieces for ideas or dramatic “techniques” or tools for advancing the plot; like the great characters in novels, they seem to have lives <i>outside</i> the text—lives, in fact, that are far richer than even Coppola’s operatic vision can capture.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>s an epic generational saga and a portrait of the moral ambiguity at the heart of finance and business (possibly a metaphor of the movie business itself), <i>The Godfather Part II</i> is peerless. It casts an influential shadow over just about everything after it, including John Mackenzie’s <i>The Long Good Friday</i> (1980), Sergio Leone’s <i>Once Upon a Time in America</i> (1984), and Martin Scorsese’s rather facile <i>Goodfellas</i> (1990). Even Quentin Tarentino’s <i>Reservoir Dogs</i> (1992) and Brian De Palma’s nervy, erotic thriller <i>Carlito’s Way</i> (1993) pay homage to <i>Part II</i> (and have to grapple with new styles to escape its massive imprint). Of what other postwar American film can you say that even major works look like tinfoil up against it?David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-51227519230192945792019-11-11T16:15:00.000-08:002019-11-11T16:18:50.566-08:00Shlock from Shintoho<span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>’ve now seen two movies by the Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa, whose reputation, thanks to Criterion and Turner Classic Movies, has reached ridiculous overinflation. I usually love films that are so ambitious dramatically or visually that you can appreciate their barmy edges; in the very best of these films, such as <i>The Thief of Bagdad</i> (1924) or <i>Napoléon</i> (1927), it’s like watching Jacob wrestle with God’s angel. (The director busts <i>his </i>hip bone, too.)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gelatinous blob. <i>Jigoku</i>.</td></tr>
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In some movies made by brilliant eccentrics such as Raoul Walsh or Abel Gance, enchanted ideas come spilling out, overflowing the ordinary constraints of production design, camerawork, and narrative. Ideas are executed with an almost religious fervor, an impresario’s spirit—as if the director were driven to express something so deep within him that it was as if he needed to make the grandest summing up of all, the Alpha and the Omega of cinematic statements. Because the plots are incoherent or the themes jumbled or the point of view ambivalent or self-contradictory (as it sometimes is in Fritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock or G. W. Pabst), audiences may be befuddled about details or flow, but they watch these movies in a state of heightened excitement. Their senses are alert to possibilities they didn’t even know existed, and the experience can be overwhelming.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span>ut Nakagawa’s movies aren’t barmy and creative in this way; they’re just freakishly melodramatic and puerile, with screams and shrieks filling the soundtrack at random. (Remember those “Sounds of Halloween Haunted Houses” records you bought as a kid?) They’re low-budget bores—thirty minutes in, you’ve had it with the penny-effects and the inanity. You feel as if you’ve been dragging toddlers around the neighborhood on Halloween, enduring garage “funhouses” and stick witches from those converted costume stores. His two most esteemed movies, <i>Jigoku</i> (1960) and <i>Ghost Story of Yotsuya</i> (1959), both made at Shintoho, have none of the elegance, brilliance, or genuine terror of Masaki Kobayashi’s <i>Kwaidan</i> (1965) or Kaneto Shindo’s <i>Kuroneko</i> (<i>The Black Cat</i>) (1968). <i>Jigoku</i>, particularly, is a medieval morality play overlaid with <i>giallo</i> shlock (with none of Mario Bava’s skill with camera angles or basic narrative ploys), ketchup blood from Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations (the kind that appears to have been thickened with cornstarch until it resembles a gelatinous blob of pomegranate juice), and a script that Ed Wood probably turned down. It’s a testament to Nakagawa’s inexpertise, I suppose, that he generates tedium even out of such promising ingredients.David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-35148558658706444492019-08-30T14:59:00.002-07:002019-08-30T19:40:22.720-07:00The Elements<span style="font-size: x-large;">N</span>o wonder that primitive people worshipped nature as a god: the harsher that nature becomes, the more grandeur and beauty it has. In explosive bursts of power, it subdues us, and we exalt it in return. The people in Robert Flaherty’s elemental <i>Man of Aran</i> (1934) live by the skin of their teeth—they can barely manage to keep themselves fed—but they celebrate their proximity to the very force that threatens them daily.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Atlantic Ocean as a venerated threat.</td></tr>
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In movies such as <i>Nanook of the North</i> (1922), <i>The Pottery Maker</i> (1925), and <i>Moana</i> (1926), Flaherty, who started as a still-photographer, developed a style that has been called “narrative documentary,” “docufiction,” and “ethnofiction.” Whatever one calls it, its filmic impact is undeniable. Certain aspects are fictionalized or anachronistic, such as the basking shark hunt in <i>Man of Aran</i>, but audiences respond rapturously to Flaherty’s alchemy—the way he combines anthropological accuracy with the aesthetic drive of storytelling and characterization. Before <i>Nanook</i>, Flaherty had traveled to Hudson Bay with an early movie camera to film the Inuit people. But he rejected the results—the “filmed nature” approach without any artistic shaping or organization, which anthropologists might consider “true” documentary—referring to them as pointless and boring.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trying to save the wooden-hulled craft.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>n <i>Man of Aran</i>, Flaherty scripted characters in naturalistic settings—the tiny hovels and villages in the Aran Islands off the storm-battered west coast of Ireland—and then cast local fishermen and their wives and children in those parts. These non-actors have craggy, leathery faces and gnarled hands; they’re the weather-beaten salt of the earth of primitive myths. No part of their lives is ornamental; everything seems destined either to signify their scrappy religious faith or to increase their chances for survival. Even their homes—huts or shacks—show virtually no sign of impracticality; these people, engaged in epic battles against nature, have no time for tea, as they say.<br />
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<i>Man of Aran</i> is marvelous cinema. Few other movies or styles combine realism and spirituality with this much primitivist poetry.<br />
<br />David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-68831096471964872612019-06-12T14:11:00.000-07:002019-09-19T16:56:26.829-07:00The Razor’s Edge<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shenanigans. <i>Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Donald Sutherland</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>hose of you who think that movies are entirely a visual medium, and that the script is nothing more than a springboard—a prop in a stage play—just try imagining Robert Altman’s <i>MASH</i> (1970) without the script (credited to Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for it). The constant hubbub of overlapping dialogue, the profanity, the screaming, the cockeyed optimism—this corrosive, kinky screenplay does more than delineate character and lay out situations in the traditional commercial-movie way (advancing the narrative by having the characters “talk” the plot). The screenplay—about Army medics trying to save lives and stave off despair a few miles from the fighting front during the Korean War—binds the visual madness together into a cohesive, realistic world. Lardner and Altman make the movie a critique of highfalutin and hypocrisy—it’s blackly funny but not cynical.<br />
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Other American movies of the time reflect the Vietnam War, dirty politics, and the country’s disgust with itself—Sam Peckinpah’s <i>The Wild Bunch</i> (1967), Irvin Kershner’s <i>The Flim-Flam Man</i> (1967) with George C. Scott as an M.B.S., C.S., D.D. confidence man (“Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing, and Dirty-Dealing”), Blake Edwards’s draggy and tasteless <i>What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?</i> (1966), Ted Post’s <i>Hang ’Em High</i> (1968), Don Siegel’s <i>Coogan’s Bluff</i> (1968). These movies seethe with political cynicism and sometimes gratuitous bloodshed (although the carnage in <i>The Wild Bunch</i> is far more complex and ambivalent than a spaghetti western). Altman could have gone entirely cynical, too, but what makes <i>MASH</i> so satisfying is that he expresses a realistic idealism—the moviemakers keep their sanity, the way the medics keep theirs, not by a Frank Burns style of phonily righteous preaching, but by demonstrating integrity and compassion, and disdaining hypocrisy and phoniness. <i>MASH</i> is a picture of redemption.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he bloody work of an army surgical unit is shown in a new way—not for didactic distancing (the way wounded men in war movies in the Forties and Fifties were used as homilies, swollen with sacrificial virtue), and not for the repellent gross-outs and shock effects of movies that use violence pornographically. In <i>MASH</i>, the blood-spattered surgical gowns, scalpels, and clamps are filmed for balance (and mostly in medium shot); the talented medics are humanized by working feverishly in rotten conditions, trying to staunch a wounded soldier’s bloodflow or save a limb (sometimes unsuccessfully). Even the satiric butts, like the prissily bossy “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and the sanctimonious hypocrite Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), are picked up and dusted off after being scraped across the gravel (although Altman perhaps mishandles Burns’s departure by stripping him of any vestige of pride he had—the scene goes for a cheap laugh at the character’s expense). The surgery scenes give weight and purpose to the sexual shenanigans and practical jokes. The <i>MASH</i> campground resembles Freedonia, the mythical kingdom of wartime mayhem in the Marx Brothers’ great <i>Duck Soup</i> (1933), only it’s a Freedonia without the loopy Dada.<br />
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Altman’s direction is excellent; he and his cameraman abruptly pan and zoom in and out to punctuate visual and verbal jokes, and the hip actors in the cast (who seem to know they’re making movie comedy history) take advantage of Altman’s generosity by improvising some bits. If the screenplay is a springboard for anything, it’s improvisation, and the movie has the tone of inspired improvisation. The story goes that Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland quarreled with Altman on the set. But their performances are marvels of corrosive wit, and reflect a cathartic release of tension.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Last Supper.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he miracle of <i>MASH</i> is that it so successfully combines the taboo breaching of gallows humor—laughing at suffering to stay sane—with the naturalistic coarseness of low comedy: the movie balances bone saws and foul mouths, and spills off the screen in torrents. Although Korea is the ostensible setting, you know that the movie is really showing the madness of Vietnam, and telling America that it’s possible to do good work and sustain your sanity and humanity amid the senselessness of bloodshed and strangling bureaucracy. The effect is restorative, a work of humanism. <i>MASH</i> is a Rabelaisian black comedy, and one of the most sensible American movie satires ever.</div>
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David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5304691448464267244.post-52537779979728600822019-06-12T13:54:00.002-07:002022-02-15T11:29:48.999-08:00Elders<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Filial devotion. <i>Teiji Takahashi and Kinuyo Tanaka</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he 1958 <i>Ballad of Narayama</i> is a strangely wrought miracle in Kinoshita’s directorial career, and it’s his one unassailable masterpiece. Filmed almost entirely on brilliantly designed soundstages against mattes glazed in saturated color, this elegy on the transience of life genuinely shakes you. It makes you confront feelings about your parents that most of us push far down beneath the surface of propriety. <i>Narayama</i>, a lambent work of humanism, is almost unbearably moving. The acts of petty meanness build into scenes of barbaric cruelty, particularly the Amaya episode and the slaughter of Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi) in the final moments.<br />
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The film is uncannily beautiful, a moral work of art, and a transcendent vision of filial love. It’s also one of the greatest movie allegories of mortality: how the all-too-briefness of life exacerbates our miseries and poisons our attempts at kindness, which is life’s insuperable tragedy. As Orin, the old woman whose children are all too ready to abandon her to her terrible fate, Kinuyo Tanaka is the apotheosis of the Shakespearean clown: her wizened face framed by a dirty-blonde bob, she’s a miraculous mix of pitiable silliness and heartrending despair. Teiji Takahashi brings understated ambivalence to his role as Tatsuhei, Orin’s one decent offspring, and the two together give the rare movie impression of actual blood relations between actors.<div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he paradox is plain in <i>Narayama</i> (as it is in its thematic kin, <i>King Lear</i>): because of our brief, bookended lives, if we’re sane, we tell humane stories. This particular story was adapted from a 1956 novella <i>Narayama bushiko</i> (<i>Ballad of Narayama</i>) by Shichiro Fukazawa, and was remade in 1983 by Shohei Imamura in a grittier, naturalistic style. But there is no greater use of realism than in the final scene of Kinoshita’s version.</div>David Obermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01914922315840567247noreply@blogger.com0