Minor Dundee

After rewatching Major Dundee 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 but also meandering and overreaching.

Man with a mission. Charlton Heston

When you watch Dundee from 1965, you see the burn in Peckinpah’s molten vision 

— 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.

Some of the actors pull through with career-defining performances: Charlton Heston, James Coburn, and Warren Oates (in his big capture scene, his crafty deserter demands 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?

True Gold and Fool’s Gold

The biggest flaw in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), one of the Hollywood studio system’s mysteriously wrought miracles (the mystery is how people of exceptional talent were occasionally able to beat back the deadening forces of a mass-market industry and bring personality and vision to the screen), is a flaw that really doesn’t affect your enjoyment of a damn good movie. Sierra Madre is a superb adventure picture, but the character transitions (largely in Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs) from decency and generosity to greed and sociopathy seem a little forced and abrupt. These dramatic transitions occur in five or six specific scenes in which two characters confront each other—Dobbs and Howard (Walter Huston), Dobbs and Curtin (Tim Holt), and occasionally Howard and Curtin, who, in a scene of comedy that rises to classic French farce, eye each other warily from their bed rolls at night as they take turns getting up to “check on the burros.” In fact, the movie is better at dramatizing Dobbs’s cynicism and violence in the opening scenes, in the way he interacts with the Mexican boy (Robert Blake) trying to repeatedly sell him a lottery ticket and the work overseer McCormick (Barton MacLane, in an oily, great performance). With premonitory irony, Dobbs whips around on the young boy and yells, “Get away from me, you little beggar,” only to walk up to a mysterious tourist in white (John Huston) and ask three times for a handout. The movie is filled with a number of sophisticated layers of irony; the story’s richest veins are mostly comedic, not mineral.

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.

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. 

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.

Character disintegration. Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston

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.

These flaws are quibbles. To paraphrase perhaps the movie’s clearest-eyed fan, James Agee, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 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 Sierra Madre 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 Sierra Madre’s truest, most lasting riches.

Revolutionary

I don’t think it’s being talked about much, but Shadow, 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.

I’ve never seen a film lighted as uncannily as Shadow. 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 keeps 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.

Beyond color. Deng Chao and Sun Li

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 chiaroscuro 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.

Aside 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.

European Formalism

John 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.

The most striking thing about his body of work (from Acid Test in 1964 and Movies into Film in 1971 to Something to Declare in 1984 and The Sheep from the Goats in 1987) is its autonomy and singularity (in fact, his 1975 anthology of long theater essays—on Peer Gynt, on The Wild Duck—is called Singularities). 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 On Movies), 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 polymath when you really meant polyhistor).

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 out of that august body.

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 apologia—that film was a gesamptkunstwerk 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.

Compared 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 was 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 JFK 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.

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 Something to Declare, 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 avant garde 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.

American Realism

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) apotheosizes the American gangster picture genre. It subsumes all other classic gangster pictures, from Underworld (1929), The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), and Scarface (1932) to The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949), and The Killing (1956). But The Godfather Part II (1974) does what no other gangster picture—even The Godfather—ever did. With the relentless, excoriating scalpel of nineteenth-century novels and the plays of Chekhov—the laboratory of literary realism—Part II 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, Part II analyzes Michael as profoundly as any of the main characters are analyzed in the novels of Balzac, Howells, Wharton, or Eliot.

The Godfather 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 caporegime and legal retainers, and the maze of partners and “soldiers” are realistic 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 Intolerance) are pitched to the dimensions of the theater. (More than just about any other movie of its era, The Godfather deserves to be seen on the big screen.)

Real men. Al Pacino

The Godfather Part II 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. Part II 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 Godfather 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 Part II 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 outside the text—lives, in fact, that are far richer than even Coppola’s operatic vision can capture.

As 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), The Godfather Part II is peerless. It casts an influential shadow over just about everything after it, including John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and Martin Scorsese’s rather facile Goodfellas (1990). Even Quentin Tarentino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Brian De Palma’s nervy, erotic thriller Carlito’s Way (1993) pay homage to Part II (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?

Shlock from Shintoho

I’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 The Thief of Bagdad (1924) or Napoléon (1927), it’s like watching Jacob wrestle with God’s angel. (The director busts his hip bone, too.)

Gelatinous blob. Jigoku.

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.

But 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, Jigoku (1960) and Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959), both made at Shintoho, have none of the elegance, brilliance, or genuine terror of Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1965) or Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (The Black Cat) (1968). Jigoku, particularly, is a medieval morality play overlaid with giallo 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.

The Elements

No 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 Man of Aran (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.

The Atlantic Ocean as a venerated threat.

In movies such as Nanook of the North (1922), The Pottery Maker (1925), and Moana (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 Man of Aran, but audiences respond rapturously to Flaherty’s alchemy—the way he combines anthropological accuracy with the aesthetic drive of storytelling and characterization. Before Nanook, 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.

Trying to save the wooden-hulled craft.

In Man of Aran, 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.

Man of Aran is marvelous cinema. Few other movies or styles combine realism and spirituality with this much primitivist poetry.

The Razor’s Edge

Shenanigans. Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Donald Sutherland

Those 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 MASH (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.

Other American movies of the time reflect the Vietnam War, dirty politics, and the country’s disgust with itself—Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1967), Irvin Kershner’s The Flim-Flam Man (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 What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Ted Post’s Hang ’Em High (1968), Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968). These movies seethe with political cynicism and sometimes gratuitous bloodshed (although the carnage in The Wild Bunch is far more complex and ambivalent than a spaghetti western). Altman could have gone entirely cynical, too, but what makes MASH 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. MASH is a picture of redemption.

The 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 MASH, 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 MASH campground resembles Freedonia, the mythical kingdom of wartime mayhem in the Marx Brothers’ great Duck Soup (1933), only it’s a Freedonia without the loopy Dada.

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.

The Last Supper.

The miracle of MASH 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. MASH is a Rabelaisian black comedy, and one of the most sensible American movie satires ever.

Elders

Filial devotion. Teiji Takahashi and Kinuyo Tanaka

The 1958 Ballad of Narayama 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. Narayama, 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.

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.

The paradox is plain in Narayama (as it is in its thematic kin, King Lear): because of our brief, bookended lives, if we’re sane, we tell humane stories. This particular story was adapted from a 1956 novella Narayama bushiko (Ballad of Narayama) 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.

Out of Italy

The celebrated partnership of Vittorio De Sica, an actor who became one of Italy’s—and the West’s—most revered directors, and Cesare Zavattini, a screenwriter and film theorist, was inaugurated in the movies with the luminous The Children Are Watching Us in 1944, although the two knew each other for more than a decade prior. Together, their collaborations of Italian neorealism were more mystical and allegorical than the harsher social portraits of corruption and decay in the work of other Italian neorealists like Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. The De Sica-Zavattini films are smaller-scale studies in frailty and innocence; instead of making Grand Statements about politics and society, they paint individuals in unselfconscious but lyrical strokes—prose poetry character studies. If, years after viewing, we’ve forgotten the scenes of wartorn Rome and its political infighting in Rossellini, we probably still remember the disillusioned faces in De Sica.

Zavattini’s realism is an homage to the nineteenth century Russian novelists, particularly Turgenev and Tolstoy. (Jean Renoir paid tribute to the Russian and French realists in much the same way.) De Sica, a great director, uses actors’ faces and classic narrative conventions like linearity and situational irony to tell stories of the bereft—losers, dreamers, and children enduring the cold hopelessness of life on the skids. He hits his mark, too. The emotional impact of these movies wells up like a rising tide, evenly and surely. In the final scene of The Children Are Watching Us, the camera fixes on the back of the abandoned child as he trudges away, and the indictment of all squabbling, selfish, vain adults is complete.

Scenes from childhood. Luciano De Ambrosis

The De Sica-Zavattini collaboration produced about twenty films, including the hallowed masterpieces Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us isn’t quite one of the masterpieces, but its incandescence and Petrarchan sweetness can’t be shaken off easily. It points the way to the fables of childhood in Truffaut, the Taviani brothers, and Shunji Iwai.