December 2008, Part II: 15 Mini Reviews
December 21, 2008
The last fifteen films I've seen.
City Girl ('30): Country boy travels to big city to sell his father's wheat stock for the season, but when the volatile market plummets the worth below asking price, the boy has to take in the city while awaiting a surge, in which he meets a cute counter waitress and marries her almost overnight. This amiable, if implausible scenario to F.W. Murnau's little seen silent film is almost in stark contrast to his previous film, “Sunrise”, in which the couple at the center seems invariably doomed when the man tries to drown the wife in a rowboat, but it's not all sunshine and cupcakes, for when the boy takes the girl home to meet dad, furious already for the bungling of his wheat stock, the old man thinks the girl is milking the boy for all he's worth, and a standoff ensues. Mishandled by Fox due to a lack of faith in a director who went way over budget with his previous film, “City Girl” has been virtually impossible to see for decades, and though it gets a no-extras treatment on DVD, it's nice to finally have it available again, even if the pacing, story, and often uninspired direction (except for an expressionistic storm scene near the end) doesn't hold up to its predecessor's weighty reputation.
Man on Wire ('08): In 1974 wire-walker Philippe Petit and an unlikely team of friends pulled off the impossible, after years of planning, and an anxiety riddled night ducking security guards, they spliced a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, and for 45 glorious minutes, Philippe danced with the wind on the wire nearly a mile above New York City. James Marsh's unbelievably entertaining account of that feat, told through interviews, archived photos, video footage, and surrealistic staged reenactments - which uses shadows and lookalike actors to lend a thriller aspect to the story – is by all accounts a story of true belief in one's art, and an insane determination to conquer even the most impossible of dreams. Indeed, Petit, in his dangerous determination to accomplish his goal, and in his hyper idealistic vision of wire-walking as the ultimate dance between life and death, comes off as slightly touched, but in a way, to plan, obsess, and carry out such an impossible mission, fraught with legal, and mortal consequences, you'd have to be a bit loose in the first place. Marsh doesn't ridicule Petit, he's just one of the bizarre heroes of his own story, and the still image of him between the now inexistent towers is awe inspiring, but there's a bittersweet nature to the interviews with the friends, who admit the miraculousness of the walk, but lament that afterwards, as Petit struggled to top himself, their close friendships deteriorated amidst arguments about safety. Edited and presented like a heist film, the personal and highly improbable wire-walk makes for one of the year's most remarkable stories, and with enthusiastic interviews and terrific photo montages visualizing every step of the way, it's arguably the most complete, and fascinating film of the year.
Milk ('08): Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant's take on the life and politics of Harvey Milk is anything but your everyday bio-pic, but that's okay, because Milk was anything but your everyday politician, and given the weight of the subject – the advancement of gay rights in the face of puritanical right wing opposition – and the relative familiarity of the story, an unconventional approach was essential. Van Sant frames the story with Milk (Oscar worthy Sean Penn) narrating his life and accomplishments into a tape recorder, cutting back and forth as the story progresses from New York to San Francisco, where Milk and his partner (James Franco) set up shop in the Castro and become politically involved when their rights are questioned, leading into Harvey's tireless grassroots campaign for city council, which eventually made him the first openly gay official in America, and a target for assassination. It's a testament to Van Sant's approach, Penn's uncanny ability to make his characterization more than just an impersonation, and the heroic nature of the story, that when the murder does come, at the hands of disturbed, disgruntled council member Dan White (Josh Brolin), it's still devastating, and though the film is ultimately a tragedy, there's no denying the uplifting, and altogether important details of this triumphant examination of the American Dream.
White Dog ('82): Sam Fuller's adaptation of Romain Gary's apparently non-fiction novel, about a dog bred by racists to attack black people, was unjustly shelved by a studio that thought cries of racism from an early screening would prove detrimental, though in fact the film is plainly anti-racist, as Fuller has nothing but compassion for the dog, the black trainer trying to “cure” him, and contempt for the society that bred him to be a killer. Whether the film is any good depends on how you take your symbolism, blatant or coy, for when the dog kills a man in a church, and the camera pans up to St. Francis with a pup at his feet, the leap between ludicrous and inspired may not be too wide. Criterion's DVD features interviews with co-writer Curtis Hanson and Fuller's widow, who relate how devastated the old man was when the film was suppressed, leading to an eventual exile to France where he made his final films.
Seas Beneath ('31): John Ford had the full support of the Navy, his future wartime designation, for this exciting but stilted sea adventure that finds an American decoy ship, captained by Ford regular George O'Brien, luring a dangerous German U-boat to port during the waning days of WWI. Ford obviously gets a kick out of the machinery, upkeep, and machinations of the boats, and the action scenes, be it the flooding of the U-boat's hull, or the carpet bombing of the American vessel, are generally exciting, but the acting is sterile, the story, which focuses on O'Brien's flirtations with a German spy (Marion Lessing), is flat, and compared with the director's later naval gem, “They Were Expendable”, as well as his famous documentary war footage, the film just doesn't hold up.
Four Men and a Prayer ('38): In Imperial India a decorated British Colonel is dishonorably discharged in a cover-up involving a munitions ring and militants; when the Colonel winds up dead, presumed suicide, his four grown sons, thinking conspiracy, undertake a globe-trotting adventure to find his murderer and clear his name. John Ford reportedly didn't care for this assignment, pushed on him by producer Darryl F. Zanuck, so he spent much of his time playing pranks on the cast and only mildly paying attention to the making of the film, and it shows, though it's glossy and at times comedic, especially when David Niven is involved, the sprawling plot and boring romantic play between leads Richard Greene and Loretta Young is tedious. A plus though, C. Aubrey Smith as the disgraced Colonel and father to the four sons, playing virtually the same stern-but-kind military father he played in Ford's earlier, much better India set “Wee Willie Winkie”, he's terrific, though he only lasts ten minutes, the rest is spotty at best.
Among Those Present ('21): Harold Lloyd two-reeler in which his glasses character pretends to be a dashing aristocrat to win the favor of a girl (Mildred Davis), only to be exposed as a bumbling fraud during a fox hunt. Lloyd excelled in playing these types of well meaning dorks who amiably fail at pulling off alter-egos to impress the girl, and here he's especially funny in dream sequences in which he tames a bear and wrestles a lion with his bare hands.
A Prairie Home Companion ('06): Robert Altman's homage to Garrison Keillor's long running radio variety show is, like many of his films, an ambitious undertaking that only gets bogged down when the story fails to support its many voices. With an impressive cast, multiple cameras, and a well designed soundtrack that captures the nearly 45 songs with clarity and precision, Altman takes a backstage approach, roaming a camera in and out of rooms as players prepare their songs and reminisce about the past as Keillor guides the ship, the last of its kind, from the auditorium stage. Like a less successful, less political, entirely more wholesome cousin to “Nashville”, Altman relishes in the bittersweet bygone days when performance was as auditory as it was visual, and coming from a man whose sound designs throughout his career were often groundbreaking and complex, it's a fitting finale to a grand career.
Ikiru ('52): Winner of the 1953 Kinema Junpo award for Best Picture, Akira Kurosawa's beloved post-war masterpiece examines the social conditions of a Japan still reeling from the war, near the end of the American occupation, through the final days and death of a city bureaucrat who, when he discovers he has six months to live, realizes the waste his life, and job have been the past thirty years. Takashi Shimura gives one of cinema's most quietly effective and humanist performances as Watanabe, a city section chief who sits at his desk behind a mountain of papers and shuttles complaints from one department to another with a rubber stamp; when he finally realizes that stomach cancer will kill him in six months, he decides to live a little (the title, “To Live”), going on a bender with a drunken novelist, taking a young girl out for fun, reminiscing about the lost innocence of his all but estranged son, and finally, seen in flashbacks after his death, as his equally wasted subordinates try to figure out the man's passion and reasoning, tirelessly pushing to build a playground for poor slum children. What Kurosawa shows us is a man so dedicated to the everyday ordinariness of his job at city hall that it completely blows his mind when his death sentence confirms his life as meaningless, and as pinned onto the post-war Japanese economy, yet to begin its “economic miracle”, a country with officials complacent in back door deals, black market economics, and letting the proletariat hang out to dry. What's so glorious about Watanabe's triumph, and so devastating about his co-workers' inability to figure it out, is that for maybe a brief moment life was more than what you make of it, and as Shimura swings in the snow, singing a sad love song that earlier in the film was a drunken harbinger of death, in arguably the saddest and most beautiful single scene in all Kurosawa, the war, the struggling economy, and the politics of City Hall, the black market, and the Yakuza, rendered powerless in the face of pure human emotion.
Arrowsmith ('31): I've never read the Sinclair Lewis novel this John Ford production is based on, but knowing other Lewis works, it's probably safe to say that the finished product, which is about as incoherent and boring as you'll find in all of Ford's work, despite a Goldwyn sheen that landed the film four Oscar nominations, is less than the book's political intentions. Here we have a brilliant medical researcher (Ronald Colman) who is told he's ruining his career by marrying a country girl (Helen Hayes) and moving to town to practice medicine, but less than a reel or two later, he's already ditched that job for research, and a chance to travel to the plague stricken Caribbean to test a placebo on dying patients, where personal tragedy and professional triumph ensue. What's so incoherent about the plot is the relative ease in which the doctor and his wife pick up lives, and professions, with little to no explanation, and by the time we're in the foggy, death shrouded Caribbean setting, we don't know if it's medical genius or outright quackery the way in which Arrowsmith handles his assignment. And we don't much care, and given the complete lack of visual inspiration, neither did Ford; this was an obvious hand out from Fox to Goldwyn to shape a prestige picture using their most competent director; what they got may have been prestigious, but it's anything but competent.
Sisters of the Gion ('36): Immediately following “Osaka Elegy”, Kenji Mizoguchi and star Isuzu Yamada made this even better companion piece, with Yamada as an independent minded geisha who orchestrates rich “patrons” for herself and her more demure older sister, only to have her carefully laid out plans blow up in her face. Mizoguchi suggests the outdated model of geishadom as little more than a higher class sex trade, where lonely old man can buy their helpless benefactors, who live with and care for them, and just as much leave them without a dime when a better opportunity arises. It's a bold social feminist criticism in an era when the national psyche was all about aggression and male dominated militarism, proving Mizoguchi's importance on the political, as well as humanist film-making map.
Doctor Bull ('33): Will Rogers is the scapegoat in a puritanical country town, as the local doctor, when the town gets hit with the flu, in this forgettable down home comedy from John Ford. His crime, making time with a wealthy widow, though even in a pre-code Hollywood, there is very little to suggest anything more than an afternoon tea or a trip to tend to the woman's sick bovine, which makes his ouster that much more unlikely. Rogers is decent enough in the lead role, but there's nothing particularly funny about the story, or the laconic way in which he delivers his jokes, slow, without much irony, and in a film with a thin plot, that's unforgivable.
Vampyr ('32): The greatest vampire film ever made, even though it hardly adheres to what we consider the vampire genre, Carl Dreyer's first sound film, shot silent with post-sync added on, is one of the most atmospheric and moody horror films you'll ever see, and thanks to a brilliant presentation from the Criterion Collection, you'll see it almost as it was meant to be seen, restored to Dreyer's German theatrical cut after years of spotty public domain cuts. The plot, as such as it is, balancing itself between a foggy dream state and a conscious reality, follows a young occult student (Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, the film's sole financier, under the stage name Julian West) as he chases shadows and stumbles onto the lair of an elderly female vampire, who has under her control a creepy doctor and a bedridden teenage girl (Sybille Schmitz), and in doing so, finds his conscious split into three (awake, dreaming, dead) using a remarkable amount of trick photography. You don't watch this film to follow the plot - though Criterion's exhaustive presentation does include both the original screenplay and the 1872 novella it's very loosely based on (Sheridan le Fanu's “Carmilla”), and it's interesting to note the differences between the three - you watch it for Dreyer's amazingly fluid, subjective camera movements, the way in which he uses found locations (an abandoned factory, a cemetery, a country castle) to express an otherworldly atmosphere, and, if you're familiar with his previous “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, how he builds on that film's stark minimalist expressionism using detailed close-ups, cross cuts, and subjective POV shots. The film was a flop when it was first seen in '32, either in a German or French language cut, and Dreyer wouldn't work again for another decade, but time has been kind to this special work of experimentation, and today it rightfully stands as one of the master director's best films.
The World Moves On ('34): Underrated John Ford war drama that spans 100 years in the life of a New Orleans cotton family, beginning with the signing of a partnership in pre-Civil War south, through WWI, and finally to ruination at the hands of the 1929 stock market crash. Franchot Tone is the fourth generation son of the Girard family, who meets and instantly falls in love with the fourth generation daughter (Madeleine Carroll) of his partner; when the war breaks out in Europe, he joins the French Foreign Legion while she stays in England to man the factories. Ford tells the story in three distinct acts, pre war, war, and 1929 market crash, and really only the long middle war section is worthy of his best talents, especially the trench warfare scenes, which are some of the best ever filmed. A big complaint though, for a film without much use for religion, Ford ends the film with a gigantic, shimmering closeup of a Jesus statue, the most blatantly religious symbol of his career, and for a film that's ultimately an anti-war melodrama, the image seems out of place and leaves a weird after taste.
The Sword in the Stone ('63): Forget the Arthurian legend, or the titular sword, which doesn't show up until the final ten minutes, this Disney comedy, based on a book by T.H. White, has more to do with slapstick hocus pocus than it does with Camelot and the heroics of a legendary king. But that isn't all bad, as some of the sequences, in which the long-bearded old wizard Merlin prepares a scrawny young Arthur to accept challenges by turning him into, respectively, a fish, squirrel, and bird, are wonderfully funny and inventive, it's just that that's all they are, with little depth and little characterization. The animation style jibes with other Disney films of the '60's, in which the usual studio sheen is replaced with a more rough edged modernist style (often leaving sloppy pencil marks to outline the ink cells), and if it lacks the visual complexities of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella”, the funny old wizard and his cynical pet owl should be enough to keep you entertained for 70 odd minutes.
By Adam Suraf