January 2009, Part II: 10 Mini Reviews
January 14, 2009
The last ten films I've seen.
7th Heaven ('27): In the slums of 1914 Paris, idealistic atheist Charles Farrell dreams of one day having a golden haired wife and a job above the sewers to call his own; when he saves a dark haired waif (Janet Gaynor) from her tyrannical sister, and takes her in to avoid vagrancy charges, it's not exactly the deal he was hoping for. But in the hands of Fox's third best director (Murnau and Ford rate slightly higher), a man who could make the sappiest and most improbable of melodramatic love stories come alive with impeccable acting, pacing, and direction, not only is it a sweet deal, when the war hits and the man has to go to the Front, he finally realizes the special piece of heaven he's been living with the grateful, beautiful urchin. With its mixture of tragic love, separation, and war, Borzage's film draws comparisons to the 1925 blockbuster “The Big Parade”, and if just for the appearance of an abused Janet Gaynor, the comparison with fellow Fox masterpiece “Sunrise” (released a week later), is inevitable, but Borzage was too good to be lumped in with better directors, his film, while unabashedly melodramatic, is beautiful to look at, and at least one sequence, involving a rising camera, a long take, and a gigantic seven story tenement set by Harry Oliver, stands out as one of the most remarkable shots of the silent era.
The River ('29): Presented on the flip-side of “7th Heaven” is a 60 minute reconstruction of Borzage's acclaimed late silent “The River”, a film all but lost in a warehouse fire, salvaged using what remains of four reels of footage and still set photographs and inter-titles to ably fill in the rest. What remains, about a naïve barge captain (handsome Charles Farrell, again), who gets marooned for the winter at a trading post, with sexy, repressed vamp Mary Duncan warming his fires, is an indication of Borzage's perfectionism, and how peerless his team – set designer Harry Oliver, cinematographer Ernest Palmer – was in invoking a kind of desperate romantic fever dream.
What Price Glory ('52): John Ford helped shoot some war footage for Raoul Walsh's famous 1926 silent of Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings' play, so it's only fitting that he do the complete remake, chucking most of the dialogue from the stage play, and the original film's blue tendencies, and substituting it with a mildly funny and inoffensive back-and-forth between James Cagney and Dan Dailey that only hints at Ford's real attitude towards war. Compared with some of Ford's previous WWI films – the Murnau inspired “Pilgrimage”, the sprawling flop “The World Moves On”, the submarine stiff “Seas Beneath” - this almost entirely studio bound epic, aabout two rivals/friends who command a bunch of green Marines before being sent to the Front, while fighting over the favors of beautiful French cafe owner Corinne Calvet (late of “When Willie Comes Marching Home”), is refreshingly spirited, though those more familiar with Cagney's duel personalities as a gangster and son-and-dance man might be put off by his suitably gruff and sympathetic Captain Flagg, who for all his bluster, is really a John Ford surrogate.
Come and See ('85): Aleksei Kravchenko gives one of the most emotionally demanding child performances of all time in this astonishingly brutal war film from director Elem Klimov, a surrealistic nightmare of death and destruction, as determined Kravchenko, a new recruit in the Russian Resistance of WWII, wanders from place to place as the SS annihilates everything, and everyone, in their path. Klimov films in impossibly long sequence takes, using a Stedi-Cam to float through the devastation as in a waking nightmare, and what we see, either as direct point-of-view shots from the boy, or shots looking back in his direction, is a complete examination of the brutality and comprehensive evil of the Nazi war machine, and in this boy, who starts the proceedings 12, but 130 minutes later looks like he's 70, a strength of will and determination that's both inspiring and heartbreaking. If the film is hard to take, and about the time the SS firebombs a barn full of women and children, its horror is almost numbing, that's the point; there's no artificial happiness in a holocaust, and Klimov, who would never again make another movie after this, stating he had said everything he needed to say with this one deeply personal masterpiece, looks at the devastation and finds, in the boy's painfully expressive eyes, a humanist's spirit.
Separate Tables ('58): An all star cast and classy production design distinguishes this studio-bound blending of two Terence Rattigan one-act plays, about desperate souls trying to connect in a sleepy seaside retirement house in Northern England. Oscar winner David Niven is a pompous old windbag who tells war stories to sheltered spinster Deborah Kerr, whose stern mother disapproves of the friendship, while in other quarters, Burt Lancaster's drunken and damaged novelist tries to escape his past, but finds it difficult when his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth) tracks him down to reconcile. The talented cast, which includes Wendy Hiller (who also won an Oscar) as the runner of the house, and Delbert Mann's classical, economical direction keep this talky character study from drowning in its artificial British setting, and for a Hollywood studio film from 1958, the exploration of abuse – sexual and psychological – is refreshingly candid.
A Story of Floating Weeds ('34): On the commentary track to Criterion's presentation of this all time great Ozu silent, film scholar Donald Richie, always excellent for Criterion, points out the ways in which this seemingly simple film posits Ozu between his early comedies and the devastating family dramas of the '40's and '50's, starting with a burlap background during the titles, and going on to explore the dissolution of the Japanese family unit through suggestions, quiet emotions, and a perfectly constructed mise-en-scene. Takeshi Sakamoto reprises his role from “Passing Fancy” as Kihachi, the wandering hero of the proletariat, who this time is coming back to his hometown as the director of a struggling Kabuki troupe, finding comfort in an old mistress and an estranged son, who calls him “uncle” and shares an achingly beautiful fishing trip with the man, before a jealous mistress ruins the party by interfering with gossip and nasty schemes. It's a testament to the ever burgeoning brilliance of Ozu's mastery of construction and storytelling that, even though the film is silent, the design, staging, camera-work, and effectively dramatic emotions are hardly different twenty five years later in his famed color remake, “Floating Weeds”, and as Richie points out, it's a mature style for a filmmaker whose characters progressed through the years, from militarization, war, devastation, and economic recovery, as the director got older, wiser, and wealthier, from tenement dwelling peasants, to upper-middle class executives, but whose lives, families, and emotional difficulties seemingly stayed the same.
Leon Morin, pretre ('61): The first of three consecutive Melville films to feature newly minted superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead, here playing a good looking country priest who takes the confessions, and intellectual conversations of sexually repressed and psychologically frustrated women during the Occupation, but finds a tough sell in atheist, communist widow Emmanuelle Riva. Melville takes Beatrix Beck's novel, about the yearnings of the woman for the handsome priest, and turns it into a symbolic story where the intellectual conversations between Morin and his flock are as much a form of sanity and resistance during the Occupation as was the silence between the niece and the “good German” in “Le Silence de la mer”, but where the former was marked by expressionistic lighting and the restrictions of budget and location, here Melville, working primarily out of his Rue Jenner studio, takes pains to construct a mise-en-scene, through experimental editing and classical framing, that neither enhances, or devalues Morin's superiority over the women. It's a fine example of Melville's continuing dictatorial directing style, with dramatic and aesthetic hints to the two-years old New Wave, but the philosophical and religious diatribes between Belmondo and Riva wear thin, and in a story where we know nothing can physically happen between the two principal leads, any chemistry between the two is rendered virtually stagnant because of it.
Alphaville ('65): The first film by Jean-Luc Godard to be released by the Criterion Collection, in a no-extras copy that begs for a future two-disc special edition, this altogether bizarre proto sci-fi is notable only, to me anyway, for the way in which Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard manipulate light and photography to turn nighttime Paris into a futuristic netherworld of impersonal glass structures, monotonous computers, and robotic humans devoid of form, function, or personality. The film, about a detective (Eddie Constantine) who infiltrates the totalitarian Alphaville, run by an omnipresent computer, to extricate a professor (Howard Vernon), is a baffling, and often impossible mixture of Godard's politics and his radical examination of human interaction in spite of war and technology (the final shot of Anna Karina, in close up, saying “I You Love”, is about as self reflexive and pretentious as Godard got), and even though the concept is intriguing, and Coutard's photography is groundbreaking, the film ultimately doesn't add up to anything close to comprehension.
Mogambo ('53): MGM's answer to “The African Queen” was to send visiting director John Ford on safari to Africa to remake “Red Dust”, re-casting a much older Clark Gable and replacing Jean Harlow and Mary Astor with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly; it's a noticeable upgrade, but Ford is more interested in the safari than he is with Gable and his woman troubles. That isn't to say the women aren't worth the trouble; Gardner is stern and vulnerable as the playgirl who accidentally falls for our gruff animal wrangler, and Kelly, in the prime years of her short acting career, is lovely as the demure married sophisticate who also has a thing for Clark, despite her loving husband in tow, but legend has it that Ford was merciless on Gable, who is decidedly better eight years later opposite Marilyn Monroe, where his age matches the character's desperation and loneliness, in “The Misfits”, and his uninteresting performance shows.
Tabu ('31): The making of this late silent film, directed by F.W. Murnau, released a week after his tragic death, is as interesting as the film itself, filled with fraught superstar partnerships, difficult location shooting, broken deals, lawsuits, and a tricky marketing campaign selling a film with no stars, no sound in the sound era, and a highly artistic European flavor. That it all comes together, and made good box office, is something of a miracle, but most things Murnau touched was miraculous, despite the way in which he all but forced partner Robert Flaherty to leave the Tahiti shoot due to what Flaherty would later call Murnau's Germanic need to dictate over everything, and how, forsaking Flaherty's realistic blending of nature documentary with staged dramatics, for a more expressionistic, shadowy artistry, he turned a simple story of forbidden love into a universal understanding of freedom, prosecution, and man's inability to leave be the beauty of Earth's natural wonder. The DVD commentary by film scholar Janet Bergstrom suggests that even though Murnau ran into difficulties procuring film stock and a distribution deal, he wasn't averse to Hollywood politics, and though it seems almost prophetic that this greatest of silent directors would die coinciding with the end of the silent era, it's interesting to speculate on how he would have eventually adapted to sound, and if, like his friend and former studio mate John Ford, he would have been able to continue to express his artistic mastery over a format that shackled his camera to clunky, intrusive microphones.