February 2009: 15 Mini Reviews
February 2, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
For Heaven's Sake ('26): Harold Lloyd's first film for Paramount, made between “The Freshman” and “The Kid Brother”, about a cynical young millionaire who softens at the sight of a preacher's lovely daughter, remains one of his best films from a fruitful era, but at a scant 60 minutes, and fraught with a difficult shoot, wasn't one of his personal favorites, despite a staggering 2.6 million dollar gross. Standout scenes include Harold rounding up a gang of hoods for the girl's newly opened mission, a mistaken identity scene where Harold misinterprets a perfume bag for a donut, Harold buying and immediately wrecking an expensive car, and the extended chase sequence, atop a double-deck bus, that concludes the film in breathtaking fashion, one of Lloyd's best chases, and a harbinger of “Speedy” two years later.
The Long Gray Line ('55): John Ford directs this earnest and overlong drama with his usual reverence for the American military system, this time focusing on the decades spanning career of an Irish immigrant who becomes a sort of mascot at West Point. Tyrone Power is especially moving as Marty Maher, an immigrant who starts his career as a dishwasher, enlists to get out of that particularly thankless duty, and slowly climbs the ladder, from swimming instructor, to Master of the Sword, in nearly six decades of service, spanning two world wars, a marriage (to Ford regular Maureen O'Hara), and countless students who look up to him as a father figure. Ford uses the unusually large Cinemascope format best during scenes of military procession, but it's clear that he didn't need so much space to tell such an intimate character story, and as was the case with many of his non-western studio assignments of this point in his career, his direction is only as interesting as his moderate passion for the project.
Revolutionary Road ('08): Sam Mendes takes another crack at the disillusionment of suburbia (“American Beauty”) with this well crafted adaptation of a famed novel by Richard Yates, trading in satire and surrealism for a more realistic emotional battleground. Mendes puts his wife, Kate Winslet, and her former “Titanic” co-star, Leo DiCaprio, through an emotional wringer as the supposed-to-be happy Wheeler newlyweds, '50's suburbanites living a picket fence dream, but beneath a good paycheck, nice lawn, and beautiful children is an expanding bitterness at the lost promise of youth and love, the boring complacency of growing old without excitement, and an increasing divide between lovers who may have married and fell for comfort too early in life. What “Mad Men” does for the false veneer of the early '60's, “Revolutionary Road” does for the boom years of the early '50's, presenting a society that pressures young professionals into towing the line of conformity, eroding freedom of choice, and putting enhanced strain on the private lives of its overtaxed workforce, and like “Mad Men”, or even “Little Children” and “Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, what's left is the notion of marriage that has to compete with expectations and disappointment, a toxic combination in an ever fragile state of moral complacency.
Mister Roberts ('55): Henry Fonda reprises his famous stage role in this screen adaptation of Joshua Logan and Thomas Heggen's long running play, about a WWII Lieutenant marooned on a Navy cargo ship with a sadistic Captain who refuses his transfer requests. As Roberts, the frustrated seaman fearing the war is passing him by, Fonda is likable as always, even if the script is parred down from the play, and as the blow-hard Captain, James Cagney is hilariously over-the-top in a way that plays favorably to his classic screen image, but stealing the show in this John Ford production (co-directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Logan after Ford left due to illness, or by some accounts, a spat with Fonda), is a young Jack Lemmon, who won an Oscar as the playful, irrepressible Ensign Pulver, a conduit between the extremes of Fonda and Cagney. Typical of a John Ford war film, the mood shifts between slapstick, satire, melodrama, and pure hokum, and it's uneven at best, but being a dedicated Navy man, Ford delights in shooting on a carrier ship, and the play between the leads, especially Fonda, who always considered the stage role his greatest achievement, Cagney, Lemmon, Ward Bond, and William Powell, feels genuine and authentic.
I Do ('21): Funny Harold Lloyd two-reeler in which newlywed Harold has tremendous difficulties babysitting his devilish nephew. The sequence where Harold tries, unsuccessfully, to cap a rubber nipple on a baby bottle, is an example of Lloyd's perfect comedic timing; you know he'll never get the cap on the bottle, and the glass bottle is destined to shatter, but how Lloyd uses those expectations to his comedic advantage – overfilling the milk, struggling with a tiny rubber cap, smashing the bottle – is masterful.
The Wrestler ('08): Darren Aronofsky focuses on lost age, faded glory, economic desperation, loneliness, regret, and the limitations of body over determination in this unflinchingly realistic study of a professional wrestler long past his prime. In a much acclaimed and analyzed performance, Mickey Rourke channels personal and professional demons to portray Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a former star wrestler in the heyday of the sport in the '80's, but in the '00's he's living in a trailer park, half deaf, stringing together paltry appearance fees at local contests that stretch his ravaged, steroid juiced body to the breaking point. After one particularly brutal match, in which razor wire, bug spray, and a staple gun are used to disturbingly realistic effect, Ram collapses like a ton of bricks and is told his heart can't take the strain anymore, but what is there for a washed up steroid case with no skills and a painful nostalgia for the past? Aronofsky, writer Robert Siegel, and Rourke take pity less on Ram than on the era/sport that inflated his ego and expectations to unrealistic, and unhealthy heights, leaving a former star, advancing on old age, without means, without meaningful relationships, and without an acceptable plan for retirement, though Rourke, accepting Ram's fate with a determination and heartbreaking sadness that comes from years of personal exile and abuse, wears the burdens of bad choices and inevitability like a wounded, but proud champion, and it's his performance, and Aronofsky's relentlessly tracking camera, that makes the film so brilliantly, and devastatingly affective.
The Reader ('08): In 1950's Berlin, 15 year old Michael has a chance encounter with a lonely train ticket collector; when Michael brings the woman flowers as thanks for helping him out during an illness, passions rise and innocence is lost in a summer affair that culminates in the boy reading literature to the woman as an aphrodisiac. This is a nice, tawdry set up, and the two actors, newcomer David Kross, and the always exceptional Kate Winslet (Oscar nominated) play the love scenes with an appropriate amount of awkward tenderness and excited discovery, but director Stephen Daldry, following the novel by Bernhard Schlink, burdens the love story with a Holocaust twinge (the woman is a former SS guard, on trial for her crimes) that rises the story to familiar melodramatics. It's saved by a coda featuring Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael, who reconnects with Winslet through a prison pen-pal program, after years of silence, but there's no denying how the extended trial in the middle bogs down the film, and by the time Kross is walking through a deserted Auschwitz, debating with agony which side to choose, with the camera tracking along rows and rows of abandoned shoes, the easiness of falling back on the war for dramatic fodder becomes overly tiresome.
Frost/Nixon ('08): Peter Morgan adapts and opens up his prize winning two-man stage play about the extended preparation, negotiation, and debate between disgraced president Richard Nixon and British talk-show host David Frost, which started out as a quick way to get 600,000 bucks into Nixon's pocket, but turned into an intense and devastating examination of Vietnam, Watergate, and the regrets of Nixon's presidency. Of the long line of talented actors who have taken to Nixon impersonations on screen (Philip Baker Hall, Dan Hedaya, Anthony Hopkins), Frank Langella heads the pack with a blisteringly confident performance as a man whose dignity clashes heavily with the disgrace of leaving office in shame, and as Frost, a playboy TV personality who was given little to no credit before the interviews, Michael Sheen uses that insecurity and fear to drive confidence into the Watergate segment. Director Ron Howard has good source material and terrific actors (including Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, and Rebecca Hall) to get him through, but that's just icing on the cake - his pacing is fast, and the documentary-like narrative structure helps tell a well known story with urgency; it's arguably Howard's best film, and one of the best presidents-on-film pics in recent memory.
Gran Torino ('08): Clint Eastwood rebounds from the flat “Changeling” with a story better suited to the self-reflexive nature of his direction, starring as an angry war vet whose once quaint Detroit neighborhood has deteriorated and been overrun by Hmong immigrants. As Walt Kowalski, a recently widowed, retired auto worker with racial hatred tendencies, Eastwood plays with his past violent screen image (a continuation, of sorts, of the reformed violent loner in “Unforgiven”), but softens the edges with light comedy, directed at himself, as a growling old coot, and weaves in a redemptive storyline involving his mentoring of a young Hmong teenager troubled by a pushy gang. That Walt is throwing around racial epithets one minute and hanging with his Hmong neighbors the next, after saving the sweet girl next door from some hoods, is kind of problematic, as is the fact that Walt's racial tolerance seems to simply melt away for the nice boy and girl, but rages again at the sight of the gang, but those problems seem minor after Eastwood subverts Dirty Harry and William Munny, eschewing a violent revenge to teach the boy a lesson about honor, death, and manhood. If this is Eastwood's last screen performance, as he's said in interviews, it fits in nicely with his continuing reexamination of his famous violent image; the progression from the Man With No Name, to Harry Callahan, to William Munny, to Walt Kowalski and peaceful retirement seems complete.
The Big Steal ('49): Exciting, and brief, 70 minute chase film, shot mostly on location in Mexico, reuniting “Out of the Past's” Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in a story about stolen payroll money, double crosses, and love on the run. Mitchum, working for the first time after a very public drug bust, stars as Duke Halliday, an Army Lieutenant wrongfully accused of swiping 300 large from payroll; he's hot on the trail of Patric Knowles in Mexico, the real bandit, while William Bendix tails our hero with ulterior motives. Greer shows up as Knowles' duped moll, only to take up with Mitchum along the way and fall in love; they have a natural chemistry fresh from the earlier, better Jacques Tourneur noir. Don Siegel directs the film with the same eye for precision cutting that kept him employed as a montage editor at Warner Brothers in the '30's and '40's, and though the plot is routine and the double and triple crosses become confusing, and unnecessary, the pace is quick and the leads are enjoyable, a lightweight pseudo-noir from a director who had better films in his future.
Illegal ('55): No longer the top star he used to be, Edward G. Robinson nonetheless gives a star performance in this forgettable crime drama as DA turned mouthpiece to the mob Victor Scott, a brilliant courtroom orator whose ethical makeup takes a nosedive after sending an innocent man to the chair. The courtroom cliches come fast and furious in the film, written by W.R. Burnett (“Little Caesar”, “High Sierra”), and TV vet Lewis Allen doesn't do much to make the script look any more cinematic than your average small screen drama, but Robinson has a way of elevating even mediocre material to watchable strengths, and in a few scenes here – punching out a witness to prove a point, downing poison to prove another – he's in top form. Also of note, a pre-“Star Trek” DeForest Kelley as a cultured mob boss, and a very young Jayne Mansfield as a wispy floosie named Angel O'Hara, whose sole purpose in the film, it seems, is to look good singing a few bad lounge songs, and to inexplicably provide the film's climax with a plausible alibi; come to think of it, that's not too bad after all.
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne ('45): Fans of Robert Bresson's spiritual minimalist masterpieces like “Pickpocket”, “Lancelot of the Lake”, and “Mouchette” are often perplexed when they see this glossy early melodrama, about love and betrayal in Parisian high society, which bears very few of the stylistic hallmarks of the better known films, beginning just two years later with “Diary of a Country Priest”. A wickedly conniving Maria Casares stars as a woman spurned by her long time lover, who tells her one day, though complacent, he no longer loves her; to get her revenge, she orchestrates for the man to meet, and instantly fall in love with a disgraced dancer (Elina Labourdette) who has fallen on hard times because of scandal due to her various love affairs. Bresson's mixture of high studio lighting, especially on Casares, to suggest her evil plans, and outdoor location shooting is a harbinger of his later films, but everything else is purely of the classic French studio system, including the use of famous film stars, and a script with dialogue by Jean Cocteau; it may not be “Bressonian” as we know it, but it's juicy, and beautiful, and belongs alongside better films of its kind by Renoir, Carne, Duvivier, and Becker.
The Searchers ('56): John Wayne gives the best performance of his career as Ethan Edwards, a hate filled loner who sets out to find his kidnapped niece, taken after a murderous rampage on her family by Comanche Indians, in this all time great western by John Ford. Edwards is a seething racist, he's spent years in the desert witnessing first hand the savagery of the Indian, unable to comprehend that it was the white man that brought them to savagery; his quest is of essence, if the girl becomes of age and is taken by a Comanche as a wife, he no longer considers her white, and thus will kill her, much to the disapproval of her part Indian adopted brother (Jeffrey Hunter), Edwards' partner in the search. Ford's supremely economical and confident direction balances the tragedy of the situation (both the massacre of the family and the overriding historical big picture of America's slaughter and mistreatment of the Indians) with comedy and romance that stresses family and ritual (a Ford tradition), but the heart of the film is Edwards and his almost psychotic quest to find the girl, be it to rescue or kill her, and in scene after scene, with a few spare but unforgettable close-ups, Ford turns Wayne into one of the most conflicted “heroes” in film history, a character hard to hate, but equally as hard to like. Shooting “Stagecoach” Ford told Wayne that acting was all in the eyes, a quote they both take to heart here in two famous close-ups, one before the massacre, as Wayne knows all too well what's happening to his family back home, and one during the search, seething with hatred, as he witnesses the psychological devastation left on raped white girls (“they're not white...anymore; they're Comanche”), contributing to a style that owes more to silent film – images and gestures – and Ford's own history shaping the style, and often racist undertones of the genre, than anything else. Winton Hoch's Vista-Vision photography of Monument Valley is achingly beautiful (bookend shots framing Wayne as he enters, and leaves, are two of the greatest singular shots of all time), as is Max Steiner's score, which shifts perfectly with Ford's mood changes, but it's Wayne's masterful performance, Ford's pitch perfect mise-en-scene, and the serene professionalism of his familiar stock company (Ward Bond, Ollie Carey, Harry Carey Jr., John Qualen, Ken Curtis, Hank Worden, and newcomers Hunter and Vera Miles) that forever makes this one of the great classics of American cinema.
Casque d'or ('52): Jacques Becker's legendarily beautiful impressionist romance was a flop upon its first release in France, but after critical raves abroad, and a successful re-release, the film has justly taken its place as one of the best of the pre-New Wave “tradition of quality” period films of the era. Serge Regianni stars as a carpenter who instantly falls in love with gangster's moll Simone Signoret one lovely day at a courtyard dance, circa turn of the century Paris; when he challenges her doltish boyfriend for her hand, a duel ensues and he has to flee to the country, where the lovers' passions play out in beautiful Renorian landscapes. Even though the film concerns gangsters, a fight to the death, a prison escape, numerous murders, double-crosses, and an execution, it's primarily a romantic tragedy, and Regianni and Signoret (at the height of her astonishing beauty) complement Becker's dazzling impressionistic tableau with a realistic portrayal of love at first sight.
Wagon Master ('50): John Ford made this under appreciated, independent black and white western in between the final two, better known, entries in his cavalry trilogy, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande”, but judging on who you ask, including Ford himself, it ranks up there as one of his best. While trying to unload some horses, traders Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. agree to lead a wagon train of Mormons through the desert to a new homestead, but when the renegade Clegg clan joins the party, with guns and all kinds of wickedness, the trip becomes that much more dangerous. Shot almost entirely on location in Utah, on the cheap in less than a month, Ford's film echoes his usual strong sense of community, in that the group of Mormons, shunned from their town, band together not only amongst themselves, but with the two horse traders, who find adventure, and love interests along the way, a wagon of gypsy performers (with Joanne Dru and “My Darling Clementine's” Alan Mowbray), and even a welcoming Navajo tribe, do their best to placate the sinister Clegg's, and reach their destination in peace. With Ward Bond as the leader of the group, stunning location photography by Bert Glennon, tremendous horse work from the usual crew of wranglers and stunt-men (including star Johnson, who always did his own stunts for Ford), and perfectly nostalgic songs by Stan Jones and the Sons of the Pioneers, this wonderful film deserves to be rediscovered (a Criterion DVD would be a godsend, but anything would do), and rightfully join its more famous brethren as one of Ford's most unforgettable, beautifully picturesque westerns.
By Adam Suraf