Staying Alive

Wolves. Nobuko Otowa, Kei Sato, and Jitsuko Yoshimura

Onibaba (1964), the Kaneto Shindo film I’d been meaning to see for ten years, isn’t particularly terrifying or scaled to overwhelm. But its photographic inventiveness and shocks (which are both visual and sexual) have an atavistic creepiness; watching these famine-stricken peasants run through fields of Susuki grass, wolfishly chasing down mortally wounded soldiers, puts your nerves on edge.

Like the barren heath in King Lear, the setting is a Hobbesian marketplace of killing, pilfering from the dead, and exchanging the plunder for food. The Japanese countryside is a wasteland, bereft of a moral center. The social hierarchy (during a period of medieval civil war) is nothing more than an immediate function of who cooperates with whom, or who preys on whom. It’s often the smaller, nimbler predators—like the two women—who maintain control. But the movie’s point of view is that “nature red in tooth and claw” will out; alliances disintegrate amid a heated atmosphere of animal sex and betrayal. In the end, the two women and their male partner are revealed as opportunistic demons who have sacrificed their humanity.

Onibaba isn’t as all-encompassing as Kon Ichikawa’s masterpiece Fires on the Plain (1959)—the latter has a forgelike intensity that makes it a visionary, emotional experience. But the two movies have similar themes: the grisly horrors of war, cannibalism (figurative in Onibaba and literal in Fires on the Plain), and the black comedy of the superior strength of flesh over spirit.

Pretensions

“[It] possesses a distinctly playful atmosphere and carefree cadences.” [The Criterion Collection catalogue]

No, it most certainly does not. All These Women (1964) is a limp, desultory farce. Apparently, Ingmar Bergman, one of the most sophisticated spiritual artists in film—the equal of the great, dour existentialists in the other arts—decided to write and direct this disoriented, enervated gimmick in order to make extra money. Bergman and Sven Nykvist developed a pastel color palette for the movie, which gives the nonsense onscreen far more visual depth than it merits.

The red and the black.

All These Women is like watching discarded reels of Jacques Tati, Woody Allen, and Blake Edwards, without any of their gift for low farce. This movie gives you a chance to see some of Europe’s best actors embarrass themselves—including Jarl Kulle as the reptilian critic who invades his idol’s manor house, Eva Dahlbeck as the wife of the cellist, Bibi Andersson as the cellist’s mistress, and the sexy Harriet Andersson as the gamine housemaid (she’s like a Swedish Joan Blondell). Kulle moves from one lady to the next in the Continental style; it’s a love round interspersed with witless dialogue like this: “He has such wonderful fingering. Isn’t that what it’s called?” Have we piqued your interest yet?

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen another movie by a master filmmaker that’s both stylishly pompous and hamfisted. I certainly never expected to see a pie thrown in someone’s face in a Bergman film. But if this knucklehead production had happened on the stage, I think people would have thrown tomatoes.

Show Biz

Dollar for dollar. Ginger Rogers

Ruby Keeler, bless her heart. It’s tough to say which skill of hers is clumsier—her hoofing or her acting. But no matter, because her real expertise in Mervyn LeRoy’s entertainingly dumb-ass Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) is mooning after Dick Powell. Powell’s a young songwriter in a tenement room across the alley from Keeler and her girlfriends Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, and Aline MacMahon. The girls want to be in show biz, but it’s the Depression and shows keep closing down because producers can’t pay the rent.

The movie, an early thirties Warner Bros. classic that certainly deserves its status, goes in a million different directions: it’s a cascade of daffy visual non sequiturs, thanks in large part to a series of libidinous musical numbers created and photographed by Busby Berkeley. James Agee wrote about a 1944 Preston Sturges movie that it “raped the Hayes office in its sleep,” and there’s plenty of pre-Code monkey business going on in Gold Diggers, too. This is undoubtedly the most manic, vivacious Depression you’ve probably ever seen in movies, and it’s framed in a soft, silvery Art Deco production design. Ned Sparks is the irascible, put-upon producer with faith in Powell’s talents, Ginger Rogers is a superb camera subject (singing “We’re in the Money” in pig Latin), and the excellent Joan Blondell, with her bee-stung pucker, adds fizz to this sparkling champagne. And there’s poor Ruby Keeler, amateurishly puffing her way through a pair of good songs with Dick Powell, but even her inability to keep up with the studio orchestra seems bizarrely right; as she manages to do in many of her movies, this klutzburger wins the audience over. You’re both flabbergasted and amused by her—when she says her lines, she crinkles her face with pride at having remembered them. Aline MacMahon plays the wisecracking pragmatist with many of the best punch lines (the same role that stars like Eve Arden and Paulette Goddard played a decade later).

A huge hit in 1933, Gold Diggers of 1933 must have sent audiences out feeling buzzy and lighthearted. In its uniquely American energy and its punchy, sexy tomfoolery, Gold Diggers is emblematic of Hollywood’s life-affirming inclination, at a time of pervasive hardship, to good-naturedly remember the nation’s forgotten men.

The Greatness of Audacity

Mesmerizer. Jack Barrymore

In answer to the question: What is the greatest American movie performance of the early sound era? Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) or Scarface (1932)? Chaplin in City Lights (1931)? Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931)? Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929)? Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight (1933) or the barely remembered Emma (1932)?

John Barrymore (Broadway’s Orson Welles) in Svengali (1931) unpacks theatrical traditions and his own sly, self-referential archness into a variety of grand gestures—the sing-song accents, interrogative upturns, and squeaky upper registers of the Eastern European Jew; the static postures and bearing of the angular nobles in the Eisenstein historical epics (Barrymore is made up to resemble Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible); and the tortured self-doubts and sadism of the Shakespearean villains. Barrymore is so audacious that all these styles blend seamlessly—he gets to the essence of the art of acting: creating a character that is both lifelike and larger than life. When his great death scene occurs, you expect him to spring uncannily back to life. And the special effects in the mesmerism scenes have sensual heat: Svengali’s eyes glow like molten metal.

Watching John Barrymore spellbind in Svengali is like watching a fabled stage performance from some long-lost age of theater. He stalks the floorboards in high-heeled boots and overcoat, as gaunt as a vampire. But his voice and mien are so commanding that the gothicism never degenerates into camp—Barrymore is no mandarin nut job. Like watching Karloff’s terrifying, confused monster in Frankenstein or Sam Jaffe’s nebbishy Grand Duke Peter in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), the experience is too appallingly profound for camp.

Screwball

The loose, romantic playfulness of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is lifted from screwball comedy of the 1930s. This laid-back romp gives Woody Allen and Diane Keaton an opportunity to be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Ray Milland and Jean Arthur in Easy Living (1937), and Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche in Midnight (1939), and it has the most sustained tempo of any of Allen’s movies of that time. (Alice, from 1989, is a lovely flight fantasy for the first hour, but gets bogged down in marital melodrama in the last half—its whimsical romance dissipates into sodden confusion and leaves moviegoers bummed out.)

Daffy detectives. Diane Keaton and Woody Allen

This movie’s central conceit is the romantic gambol of the old screwballs: the frisky girl (often played by Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, or Jean Arthur) is in the mood for an adventure, while the shy, straightlaced guy wants no part of it, but nervously follows her anyway because she’s such a babe—Henry Fonda was the quintessential lovestruck nerd in The Lady Eve (1941). Here, it’s Keaton, back to form after The Lemon Sisters (1990) and the atrocious Father of the Bride (1991), leading a constantly protesting Woody Allen around with a ring in his nose, sneaking into people’s apartments to scout for clues.

Like those earlier screwballs, Manhattan Murder Mystery has its classic sequence: Allen, Keaton, and friends (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston), a quartet of intrepid amateur detectives, concoct a plan to blackmail the suspected killer by playing prerecorded messages on a cassette tape over the phone to simulate an actual conversation. Naturally, the tapes get all jumbled and the “conversation” hits a snag and ends up sounding like gobbledygook. It plays better than it sounds—it’s a sidesplitter. The last scene, too, is delightful—a climactic shootout amid a maze of mirrors and projection screens (it was a mistake, however, for Allen to project The Lady from Shanghai on one of the screens to underscore the idea).

Manhattan Murder Mystery is a plush, snug recliner: you can settle yourself in and have a good time watching Keaton and Allen ham it up and banter inventively—they make marvelous company—while old movie references fly back and forth. Things are close to the spirit of the madcap ’30s here—a lot closer in spirit than Peter Bogdanovich’s nagging, largely witless What’s Up, Doc? (1972) or even several of the 1980s Allen comedies. In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody Allen got his groove back.

Blubber

What made Rex Harrison want to be in Dr. Doolittle (1967)? Was he strapped for cash? Did he screen Barabbas (1961) or Fantastic Voyage (1966) or The Vikings (1958) and have an overwhelming urge to be on a set with Richard Fleischer? Was he hankering to deliver dialogue written by the insipid Leslie Bricusse, or sing-speak his mind-numbing songs, with their canned Broadway blandness, about the virtues of vegetarianism? Did Harrison think that his style of drawing-room urbanity would be complemented by the obnoxious Anthony Newley, whose acting career was distinguished by broad yuk-yuks and refrigerated ham?

Did Harrison think that audiences in the late sixties—Film Generation college audiences who were getting turned on to European directors and experimental styles—wanted gut-busting dances and stale, phoned-in stupidity from a bygone age of movie musical crap, an anachronistic big-studio production that’s too long for kids to sit still through and too asinine for normal adults to stand?

Maybe Harrison had a more practical motive. Did 20th Century-Fox offer to put his grandchildren through college?

Seal abuse. Rex Harrison

This monstrosity of a musical achieves a dubious distinction: even at a time of awful musicals from the major studios, it’s completely devoid of merit. Not a single scene, not a single song, not even a single sentence has any charm or appeal. It’s in another universe entirely from the sometimes brilliant and reliably entertaining Freed Unit musicals from MGM—Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), and a few of those dazzling Judy Garland musicals.

It’s hardly surprising that this waste of celluloid has absolutely nothing in common with the craftsmanship and energy of Arthur Freed. What is surprising is that contemporaneous movie musicals—blubbery movies at the time like Camelot (1967), The Happiest Millionaire (1967), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Hello, Dolly! (1969), Paint Your Wagon (1969), and Sweet Charity (1969), nearly all of which were ruinous disasters that ultimately sank the big Hollywood studios financially—have moments with some appeal: a passable number here, a clever bit of comedy there. Dr. Doolittle stands apart even in such a crowd; it may be the worst stinking musical of its time.

Every response you’re likely to have, scene by scene, song by song, seems inadvertent. Watching the posh, sexless Harrison in his silk opera hat sing a love song to a seal doesn’t exactly generate tender feelings in you; you’re more likely to react with revulsion. For hapless viewers, including the kids whom parents probably dragged to this thing in droves in 1967, this beached whale of a movie is human–animal abuse.

Moviegoing

Generation gap. Al Pacino and Marlon Brando

I spent my preteen years in movie theaters with friends, gobbling up a lot of dumb movies—the Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers (The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, The Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978), The Gumball Rally (1976), Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), Animal House (1978), King Kong (1976), Rollercoaster (1977), and all those damned Irwin Allen disaster epics (The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, The Towering Inferno in 1974, Earthquake in 1975). So I’m nostalgic for those stray movies I saw between about 1979 and 1984 that I honestly loved, movies that gave hip audiences a sense of deeper connection to those movies (unlike the bland mass-audience productions that were designed to get kids into the mall)—a smaller-scale version of what appealed to college audiences in the late 1960s with Antonioni and Altman and Mike Nichols. By the end of the decade, we had already been dumbed down by the space-serial blockbusters and the ripoffs of Jaws (1975), or been scolded by the didactic, calculated emotions of The Goodbye Girl (1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). But these other movies—lovely, low-key movies like Peter Yates’s Breaking Away (1979) and the Bill Forsyth movies Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983) and Fred Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982) and the extraordinary Iceman (1984)—treated moviegoers like intelligent people with sharp minds and good taste in stories and dialogue. I was at U. C. Santa Barbara when Local Hero and Peter Weir’s alluring The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) opened in theaters, and the university audience in Isla Vista just ate them up. I remember fellow viewers walking outside afterward into the crisp night air, hit with the pleasurable reminder that movies could actually be good.

But whatever it was, it was evanescent and got swallowed up, again, in crummy commercialism and emotional banality—crass and impersonal junk like Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Top Gun (1986): TV on steroids. My heart sank just thinking about how the deluge of teen crud in the 1980s was pushing out what little bits of quality appeared, almost by magic, every so often in American commercial film.

Thirty years later, American movies are largely a crass, obnoxious art of hyperactive cutting and visceral sensations—computer dinosaurs and what-all—with the mental dimensions of arcade games and theme park thrill rides. Movies are designed for ultra-high dpi resolutions and nanosecond refresh rates. Those who find the current experience of today’s blockbusters breathtaking must be having the time of their lives.

Transformation scene. Bette Davis

Before HDTV and home theater systems, people were better off going to the theater to see not only those movies with impressive visual dimensions (Citizen Kane, 1900, La Ronde) but also movies whose intended effects relied on communal audience involvement—sidesplitting comedies and melodramas like Now, Voyager (1942) seemed stronger when people around you laughed or gasped as you did when you first saw the slimmed-down, elegant Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in spectator pumps and hat on the ship’s gangway. When we opt to stay home to watch, I think we forgo the communalism of an audience of strangers who are reacting just like us. In many cases, moviegoing really is a shared experience—like a neighborhood’s banding together in the face of adversity.

Not so much these days, but there were times when I went to see an old movie (Genevieve, for example, or a Jack Barrymore comedy) at a revival theater to experience the audience reaction to my favorite parts. I wanted to see these strangers respond like me, because their responses made them seem, momentarily at least, closer than actual friends. After a good movie—an immersive, great narrative experience like The Godfather Part II (1974), for example—I loved walking back up the aisle in the dim light with the rest of the audience, and I just knew that everyone was dazedly thinking the same thing, and the god of movies had bestowed a rare gift.

A Capricious Masterpiece

Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) was voted the third greatest film of all time by an international group of critics for a 1962 Sight and Sound poll, and the fourth greatest film of all time by a 2012 panel of critics and scholars brought together by the British Film Institute. This fabled masterpiece is widely regarded as the greatest French film by a master French director, and decade after decade hangs on to its hallowed place at the summit of world cinema.

The hunt. Mila Parely

Apart from its standing with the experts, La Règle du jeu is in just about every movie lover’s Top Ten. It’s as rich an experience as you are likely to have in a theater; you’ll never see the movie’s neoclassical sources of continental theater performed with as much shattering brilliance. Renoir and his team (which included Henri Cartier-Bresson as an assistant) infuse centuries of high comic tradition into a Modernist farce that only appears as if it were spinning out of control. In fact, it’s a completely controlled tragicomedy in which chance, or fate, is the prime mover.

Just about every social or cultural anchor—love, honor, class, even classical distinctions between literary genres—is dismantled in La Règle. The title is doubly ironic: the social classes abided by their rules in prewar Europe, love had its rules, comedy and tragedy had their rules. Renoir smashes these rules into pieces. La Règle in 1939 points the way to the absurdist strain in Modernism. The animal hunt is a shocking, profound visualization of the slaughter during the Great War and the slaughter to come—warfare on land (the rabbits) and in the air (the birds). (When Germany marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, several of Renoir’s technicians left the filming to join the army.)

The idea of the disintegration of class distinctions, of class relationships teeming with infidelity and jealousy, had been dramatized in Musset (whose Les Caprices de Marianne Renoir used as a springboard), Beaumarchais, and Molière. In La Règle, ignobility is society’s great leveler (the way cats all seem to be the same color at night), much as you find it in Enlightenment theater traditions. But the movie pounces on the modern: civilization itself becomes a witches’ sabbath in which sentiment is juxtaposed with raunchy sex chases, heroes (like the hapless aviator) are turned into victims of mischief, and the intricate organizing impulse of society itself crumbles into a mayhem of poaching (both animal and sexual). In earlier French literature, immoral and moral were binary opposites, but in La Règle it’s the revelrous commingling of the immoral with the amoral that drives our experience. That’s what makes the movie so absolutely modern, and so sustaining. Like the Shakespearean comedies, this Renoir masterpiece lets us peer more deeply into our social and sexual selves.

The Boom

The Great Gatsby (2013) is a brashly kinetic adaptation of a literary landmark. Filled with flaws of taste, it nonetheless has a primal power, balancing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Americana lyricism with a eurotrash sensibility. Baz Luhrmann’s direction goes beyond realism—beyond hyperrealism, even—into a garishly ornate romanticism, a jewel-encrusted, stylized vision of the 1920s as distant from historical reality as a fairy tale. Luhrmann makes the florid hysteria of Ken Russell (The Devils, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah) seem tranquil by comparison. But Fitzgerald’s poignant, homespun longing elevates this movie above Russell’s emotional barrenness.

Boulevard of broken dreams.

Except for Leonardo DiCaprio (a clotheshorse who looks a little pudgy around the jowls), the cast is much too tightly controlled by the iron-clamp production to be able to create human beings with believable idiosyncrasies—the kind of visual or verbal toss-offs or imperfections that allow a performance to breathe, to acquire deeper and sometimes darker dimensions as a movie unfolds. The actors, including the appealing Tobey Maguire as Nick, Carey Mulligan as an unmagical Daisy, Joel Edgerton (whose face is as stony as Gary Cooper) as the cruelly pragmatic Tom, and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan, are unfortunately all swamped; they’re doll-like props in Luhrmann’s explosive tableaus. New York is designed like a steampunk variation of Jules Verne, and the Art Deco mansions look like steely, cartoonish Studio 54s. This is the sort of production design that blurs the line between movie dreams and nightmares. (You might want to bring aspirin for after the movie.)

DiCaprio is able to do more than adopt Jazz Age poses against these flaming tableaus. He impressively navigates the megatechnology and whiz-bang camera (which swoops over Manhattan like a Star Wars spacecraft), and he steals a great many scenes (except perhaps those with his gorgeous Duesenberg, whose shimmering yellow coat of paint mirrors Gatsby’s tailored suit). Nearly a century after it was published, Gatsby’s self-made man stills pulls people in deeply enough so that their emotions are profoundly resonant. In post-Horatio-Alger America, Gatsby was serendipitously mentored, financed, and launched. Fitzgerald’s golden tale has exerted its power through four or five film versions (and another several TV adaptations), always washing away most of the production flaws. American audiences are attached to Fitzgerald at the hip—fixated on the boulevard-of-broken-dreams theme of corrupted hope, which is the green light of our collective movie past.

Fast Food

The Bank Job (2008) is a cheap buzz, neither likable nor memorable. This heist thriller fulfills the most superficial purpose of movies: you get a slight kick out of the twists and folds, and then easily walk away from it. There’s practically nothing in the way of humor, let alone wit, and the plot lurches around in fits: the silly business with the head burglar and his estranged wife comes out of nowhere, trying to generate poignancy, but it’s a no go. A neurasthenic action film is a bummer for moviegoers.

That subplot wraps up in the lamest scene in the movie—only a child or a dunderhead would fall for it. Not a single performance stands out, either as especially skilled—or as notably bad, for that matter. In fact, nothing stands out at all. One of the few responses I can remember having was thinking how much the crime boss looked like David Suchet; when I looked up the character online and found that he was David Suchet, I nodded and said, “Hmm” to myself. Everything goes down quickly, without eliciting love or disgust—other than the disgust you might feel at having yet another nondescript action flick shoved your way. This movie isn’t embraced or repelled, it’s consumed.