May 2008, Part II: 15 Mini Reviews
May 28, 2008
The last fifteen films I’ve seen.
The Lost Patrol (’34): An interesting action film from John Ford made at RKO in the early ‘30’s, produced by adventure master Merian C. Cooper, about a wandering troupe of WWI soldiers, led by Victor McLaglen, who get stranded in the Mesopotamian desert at an unknown oasis while Arab snipers pick them off one by one. McLaglen is powerful as usual, trying to keep his wits end while his men, who each get a monologue or two before they’re assassinated, grow increasingly erratic in the dire situation, with fine supporting work from Wallace Ford and Boris Karloff as bickering opposites, a hedonist and a bible thumper respectively. While this doesn’t hold up quite as well as Ford’s later RKO landmark, “The Informer”, it is artistic and terrifying just the same, and the powerful final shot, of McLaglen overlooking the graves of his seven dead men, could have inspired Akira Kurosawa’s mournful finale of “Seven Samurai” two decades later.
Jackie Brown (’97): A bit overlooked in its day, despite critical praise, Quentin Tarantino’s much anticipated third film doesn’t have the complex narrative tricks of “Reservoir Dogs” or “Pulp Fiction”, but what it does have is a crackerjack script that posits a standard Elmore Leonard heist plot, with Pam Grier and Robert Forester pulling the wool over Samuel J. Jackson’s eyes, within the confines of a carefully choreographed homage to ‘70’s era exploitation yarns. Jackson, as gunrunner Ordell Robbie, is little more than a fouler mouthed version of his hit man from “Pulp Fiction”, and there’s nothing wrong with that, he’s commanding and delivers Tarantino dialogue better than anybody, but the joy of the film is watching the unlikely bonding of stewardess Grier and bail bondsman Forester, veterans of the genre the film is gloriously modeling, dupe both the Feds and Jackson out of a half mil in a mall shopping bag.
Heaven Can Wait (’43): Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson’s charming and decidedly dark comedy stars Don Ameche as a turn of the century New York playboy who recounts the romantic mishaps of his life, including a long marriage to gorgeous Gene Tierney (a year before her star turn in “Laura”), to a dapper Satan (Laird Cregar) who will decide which way the recently deceased soul will go, up or down. This isn’t Lubitsch’s easiest film, the plodding Ameche monologue goes through the years in a leisurely manner, but when we get to the Tierney years, and Ameche’s pain at her sudden death, the somewhat playful narrative takes a heartbreaking turn, giving the bright Technicolor film a hint of regret and sadness at the cruel fates of love, time, and aging.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (’32): Paul Muni as wrongfully imprisoned convict James Allen, and the socio-realist production from Warner Brothers young maestros Hal B. Wallis and Darryl F. Zanuck, are just two of the highlights of this important classic from director Mervyn LeRoy, based on the two-time escape of Georgia prisoner Robert E. Burns. Muni gives the performance of his sometimes maligned career as Allen, a returning war vet who travels the country looking for architecture work, but when he’s railroaded for a heist he doesn’t commit, the chain gang prison he’s sent to is utterly devoid of human compassion, a story of corruption and rootless homelessness that provoked a powerful response from an audience mired in the Great Depression, and started a chain of events that indirectly led to the abolition of such ruthless prison camps in the south. LeRoy was a workhorse for Warner Brothers in the ‘30’s, churning out genre pics at an alarming rate, some decent, some not, and some genuine classics; this is the best film of his long career, and an important example of the kind of daring, socio-realistic melodrama that made Warners the leading studio of proletariat drama during the depression.
I Live in Fear (’55): The final film in Akira Kurosawa’s post-war period to be directly influenced by the war and the reconstruction economy, with Toshiro Mifune as an elderly family patriarch whose neurotic paranoia over the bomb drives a rift amongst his family, who worry when the old man threatens to spend their life savings on a farm in South America, as he calls it, the only safe place on the planet. Coming after the biggest success of his career with “Seven Samurai”, this carefully observed slice of post-war fatigue and paranoia was met with yawns by the Japanese critics and audiences, not unlike “The Idiot” following the grandeur of “Rashomon”, but Kurosawa’s commentary is heartfelt, as is Mifune, almost unrecognizable in old age makeup, suggesting that as Japan heads further into their economic miracle, the wounds of the past decade will forever be scarred on the psyche of those who lived to tell about it.
Croupier (’98): Director Mike Hodges and writer Paul Mayersberg create a convincing casino atmosphere, on a studio built soundstage, for this neo-noir starring Clive Owen as a writer who takes a night job as a roulette/blackjack dealer for inspiration for his new novel, only to get sucked in by the seedy glamour and desperation of the scene. Adding to the noir feel, besides a subplot in which a pretty femme fatale (Alex Kingston) seduces our hero and involves him in a plot to swindle the casino, is Owen’s constant monologue, which plays like the first few sentences in his novel’s chapters, but is really our window into the character’s morally compromised double life. It’s not easy to make a film about gambling on a soundstage, replicating the authenticity of a true casino floor often looks mechanical and phony, but Hodges is smart to place his action in a private London one-room casino, where the mirrored walls, dim lighting, and cocktail waitresses make it more like a dingy nightclub, than a glamorous Vegas hotspot.
Death of a Cyclist (’55): The Criterion Collection release of Juan Antonio Bardem’s classic Spanish thriller, about an adulterous couple who accidentally strike a bicyclist and leave him for dead, for fear their affair will be made public, doesn’t have the usual bells and whistles a Criterion disk usually has for the premiere DVD of an important director, but it does have a lengthy interview documentary with Bardem’s closest colleagues, who remember a man of incredible insight and conviction, even when his communist beliefs clashed with Franco’s fascist government. But despite the lack of a commentary track or career-spanning documentary on Bardem, the DVD does feature a gorgeous new print of the black-and-white film, with its mixture of upper-middle class intrigue and street photography, looks and feels like a Neo-realist thriller with touches of Hitchcock and Renoir.
Carnival of Souls (’62): This cult psychological horror film remains interesting to me simply for the bravura independent filmmaking on display, made on the cheap in Utah and Kansas for less than 20,000 dollars by men whose day job - making how to instructional films for tractor companies – left them proficient in the ways of framing and editing. Stiff newcomer Candace Hilligross rises from the dead after a grizzly car accident, seemingly unscathed, but when she starts experiencing strange phenomena, like the appearance of a pasty-faced ghoul (director Herk Harvey in a creepy cameo) in her car window, we begin to suspect she wasn’t supposed to survive the crash. With few special effects, and only a gothic organ score to set the mood, Harvey has to rely on symbolic framing and basic editing techniques to make this nominal story scary, and thanks to his history as an industrial filmmaker, those white-faced goons, and a creepy abandoned amusement park at the finale, the film is able to overcome its terrible acting and limited budget.
The Threepenny Opera (’31): G.W. Pabst directs Bertolt Brecht’s famous stage sensation with only a little of the biting social commentary that made it the toast of Berlin in ’28, but with enough of the play’s emphasis on capitalist corruption and the seemingly inseparable line between criminal and politician/police, that it was banned by the Nazi’s two years later. Mackie Messer (Rudolf Forster) is the king of London’s underworld, in leagues with the chief of police, but when he makes off with a capitalist’s daughter, even his old friend has little power to save him from the gallows, until, remarkably, the criminal element suddenly transform into the capitalist powers-that-be, and the proletariat element on the street is left to wander the darkness, as the rich get richer and corruption rules outright. Criterion’s stuffed DVD has everything you’d want to know about the film’s troubled history, from lawsuits filed by Brecht and composer Kurt Weill for utilizing so little of the original play and score, to critical analysis of the stunning set designs of Andrej Andrejew and remarkably fluid camera of master cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, which help make the film one of the best of the post-silent Weimer era.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (’08): Laborious and CGI drenched adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ second, and perhaps weakest, book in his ‘Narnia’ adventures, placed hundreds of years in the future, where Narnia is run by wicked foreigners who banish the talking animals and dwarfs to the dark forest, and only a handsome prince (Ben Barnes), and the future-swept children of the first book can possibly restore order. There is nothing wrong with director Andrew Adamson’s exuberant action set pieces, or the touching relationships between the children, a sulky dwarf (Peter Dinklage), the prince, and Aslan, the computer generated Jesus lion, but the presentation lacks any kind of magic realism that made Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy so memorable, and when not in combat, it drags along on the cutesy tails of talking mice, badgers, and grown men in horse costumes.
Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (’08): Steven Spielberg still knows how to direct an action sequence, and Harrison Ford still knows how to deliver a goofy quip as Indiana Jones, 19 years after the director and star last unearthed the popular hero, sipping from the Holy Grain, battling Nazi’s in 1989’s rousing ‘The Last Crusade’. This time around our man has traded WWII and the Nazi’s for the Cold War and the Russians, who seek the powers of a mysterious Mayan skull, though that’s just a premise for Spielberg to bounce around the globe yet again, from a cheeky opener in Roswell, New Mexico, to an alien themed finale somewhere in the Peruvian jungle, alternating well choreographed action pieces with exposition about the 19 years we’ve missed in between adventures, nominally, a few deaths, and a few new sidekicks (Ray Winstone, Shia LaBeouf). I can’t say I particularly agree with Spielberg and George Lucas’s diverting shift to Science-Fiction, I always thought the religious themes of “Raiders of the Lost Arc” and ‘The Last Crusade’ held more dramatic and moralistic weight, but that’s just a minor quibble for a film with such exciting craftsmanship, especially an extended chase sequence through the Amazon rain forest, and enthusiastic performances from Ford, LaBeouf, and Cate Blanchett as Russian villainess Irina Spalko. This franchise may not be as original as it once was, but Indy ages well, and as long as there is still demand (given the big grosses, there certainly is), and if Spielberg can get over his childlike obsession with aliens, than maybe we’ll see more of Jones and his fantastic adventures in the future.
The Lovers (’58): Louis Malle’s second feature, following the success of the jazzy noir “Elevator to the Gallows”, is a film stuck in time, somewhere between the classical elegance of France’s cinema of tradition, and the groundbreaking freedom of the upcoming New Wave, which is why it’s usually defined only by one unusually erotic sex scene, instead of the lush quality of Malle and Henri Decae’s gorgeous visuals. An on-the-rise Jeanne Moreau stars as a country housewife who, bored with her busy husband and dreamy but needy lover, falls hard one magical night for a casual acquaintance (Jean-Marc Bory), suggesting loose morals and high susceptibility amongst a wealthy crowd disinterested in feelings and commitment. Of the famous sex scene, in which the camera hangs a bit too long on the pleasured face and tense hands of Moreau, Malle says in an archived interview, presented on Criterion’s new DVD, that to break from convention he needed to show real human interaction, rather than the standard fade-out, placing the scene, and the film, squarely between two eras, one of traditional repression, and independent freedom.
The Kid Brother (’27): In a year that featured such landmarks as “Sunrise” and “The General”, Harold Lloyd’s contribution to what many consider to be the peak of silent cinema is this crowd pleasing masterpiece, positing our favorite glasses character in the rural south, fighting for the respect of his father and two older brothers, falling in love with cute carnival girl Jobyna Ralston, and thwarting a duo of robbers with the help of one highly expressive pal monkey. Lloyd’s gag set-ups are particularly complicated throughout the film, including a much-admired bit where he scurries up a tree to wave goodbye to Ralston, and then carefully tumbles down the limbs with perfection, and the entire climax aboard a deserted boat, where Chicago the monkey helps Lloyd deceive the villain (Constantine Romanoff) by stomping around in work boots, a brilliant sound gag in an entirely silent film. Comparing Lloyd’s best films is like comparing “Rubber Soul” to “Revolver”, they’re too well crafted and perfectly executed to favor one over the other, but this one easily stands along “The Freshman” and “Safety Last” at Lloyd’s absolute pinnacle, and for that matter, rivals both “The General” and “City Lights” as the greatest silent comedy of all time.
Little Caesar (’31): Mervyn LeRoy’s adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s crime blockbuster, a thinly veiled portrait of Al Capone, remains a powerful evocation of greed and ego more than 75 years after its initial release, thanks in no small part to Edward G. Robinson’s dynamic performance as the titular gangster, one of the first true anti-heroes in a stable of key anti-heroes from Warner Brothers in the early ‘30’s. As Rico Bandello, a hood who rises to the tops of the Chicago gang scene with little more than an intimidating voice and a gigantic hand cannon, Robinson rattles off Burnett’s dialogue, written for the screen by Francis Faragoh, but overseen primarily by producer Darryl F. Zanuck, with an effective sneer and overpowering gaze, dominating his peers (notably ex best friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) with a kind of frightening criminal elegance. Along with James Cagney in “The Public Enemy” and Paul Muni in “Scarface”, Robinson’s performance helped usher in the popularity of the gangster film as escapist art/social commentary during the depression; the rattling of the film’s many gun shots, on the ever progressing sound recording techniques of early ‘30’s Hollywood, blasting a needy and suffering audience into pure cinematic complacency.
The Magic Flute (’75): To pretend that I’m an expert on the history of opera would be like pretending to be an expert on the inert gases of Neptune, it just isn’t true, but I do portend often to be an Ingmar Bergman buff, and any Bergman buff worth his weight in Kronors ranks this wonderful concert film, a less than by-the-books adaptation of Mozart’s final opera, as one of the director’s most charming films. With a highly photogenic cast of singers, all unknown to the usual Bergman stock company, and a brilliant stage design, which presents the opera as both a classical stage production (with numerous backstage inserts and cuts to a receptive audience), and as a cinematic devise for Bergman and Sven Nykvist to break the stage barrier and push in on the actors and the fairytale drama, the film bursts of genius with the combination of two art forms, and two masters (one dead, one on the back side of his prime) in perfect sync and harmony.
by Adam Suraf