Weekly Movie Roundup #7: Men And Women

A Man And A Woman (1966)

This came as something of a surprise. I knew A Man And A Woman had been a big hit film in the Sixties with a famous musical theme. What surprised me on finally seeing it was its look. With jump cuts, flashbacks, improvisation, non-direct sound and constant switching between black and white, tinted and full color film, this uses all the techniques of the French New Wave to tell a conventional love story of two widowers, a script girl and a racing driver, getting together.  The means are used to very different ends than anything Truffaut or Godard ever did but director Claude Lelouch tells a really beautiful story. All the setups and camerawork looks familiar today because these have been borrowed by a thousand music videos and commercials over the years. That doesn't take away from the understated charm of the original. I especially like the fact that so much of the film is told visually without resorting to large chunks of dialogue. Today you could never get the same story told without five minute soliloquies from the principal actors.

There was a drawback to my viewing of this film however. I saw it at the AFI Silver Theatre in a film print that was in heinous shape with scratches, speckles and echoey sound throughout. The problem, as I understand it, is that studios are reluctant to make prints on film anymore as they try to get theaters to switch to all digital projection. So you're left with old, worn out copies like this with that have warmth and texture in their images but look like hell. I'd never really thought about the film vs. digital debate before but this demonstrates that we're losing something in the changeover.

Cries & Whispers (1972)

I remember all the discussion about this Ingmar Bergman film when it was first released but I never had a chance to see it until now.  It turned out to be a shorter work than I expected, a simple, straightforward piece more like a short story than a novel. It concerns three sisters in 19th century Sweden. The eldest is dying of cancer while the other two and their maid attend to her. While in this situation the two younger sisters flashback to incidents that show the sexual frustration in their lives and also try to overcome their emotional distance from each other.  The film has an austere color scheme of red, white and black and features three of Bergman's finest actresses, Harriet Andersson as the dying sister, Ingrid Thulin as the rigid, repressed one and Liv Ullmann as the one given to flirting and adultery.  It flows along so naturally and quickly it goes by almost before you know it. It may not be up to the greatness of The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries but it's definitely the work of an artist.

Four In A Jeep (1951)

This is an unusual piece of post-World War II cinema. It's actually a Swiss-made film concerning four soldiers working police duty together in post-war Vienna. Since Vienna was still split into four Allied occupation zones then, the patrol consists of one American, one Russian, one British and one French soldier. Conflicts arises when the four come across a Russian woman waiting to hear from her husband who's due to return from a POW camp. The Russian authorities are taking special interest in this woman which arouses the protective instincts of the American solider and things get more complicated from there.

The first thing unusual here is that the Russian soldier is made out to be a human being, something you probably would not have seen in an American film with this plot in 1951. He is by the book and a bit hard-headed but he is still shown to be a nice guy down deep. There's even a flashback sequence where he and the American solider, played by Ralph Meeker, are laughing and roughhousing together when they meet in the final days of the war, a sequence that would have gotten this movie's producers hauled before Congress if this had come out of Hollywood.

Overall the movie seems to try for the dark atmosphere of another post-wat thriller set in Vienna, The Third Man. There's even a climatic chase through a construction yard that echoes the earlier film's famous chase through the Vienna sewers. Nothing in this movie matches that one but the shadowy compositions do give some distinctinon even through the version on this DVD looks a bit dark.

The DVD also came with a surprising extra, a short  called Your Job In Germany made for the American troops who would be occupying the country after the war. It warns against fraternization with locals but it does so by suggesting in pretty extreme terms that the German people have been warmongering villains since the days of Bismarck and are just laying low and waiting for the chance to start another war. This may have been sound thinking in 1945 but considering the way events played out this comes off really bizarre now. (By contrast Russia is mentioned  only as one of Germany's many victims.)  Even stranger is the fact that this was made by two men you wouldn't associate with a film this belligerent even though they were both key parts of the Army's motion picture unit at the time. The director was Frank Capra and the writer was one Theodore Geisel, later better known to the world as Dr. Seuss. The sentiments here are way removed from his later writings about Grinches and Sneetches.

The Prizefighter And The Lady (1933)

Today a big boxing or MMA match will most likely be promoted by a series of documentaries on cable about the fighters' backgrounds and training.  In 1933 they did this by making a full-blown dramatic movie.

Actually I don't know for sure if The Prizefighter And The Lady which starred real-life fighters Max Baer and Primo Carnera was intended as a promotional gimmick but the two did fight for Carnera's heavyweight title a year after the film's release with Baer winning.  The film itself is a fine little romantic drama with maybe more authenticity about the boxing world than usual because of its casting.

Baer stars as a bouncer who becomes a boxer at the urging of an old-time fight manager played by Walter Houston. He meets a nightclub singer played by Myrna Loy and immediately falls for her despite the fact that she's the mistress of a big-time gangster.  The two fall in love and get married with the gangster's grudging approval, but Baer immediately starts messing things up by playing around with every other woman he meets even as he keeps winning fights and rising through the ranks. Things turn as they usually do in boxing movies with the fighter becoming so full of himself he turns his back on both his wife and manager and continuing his high living leading up to the climatic fight with the champion played by Carnera.

Baer is a decent actor and makes an able foil for Loy who looks so good here you wonder why he would have any inclination to mess around with other women. The movie comes from that early 30's era when gangsters were often portrayed as being tough but gallant so Loy's mobster lover, played by Otto Krueger,  does a lot of snarling and threatening but in the end he steps aside to let Baer and Loy live happily ever after. Another feature of the day, musical numbers, shows up along the way as Baer does an extended musical training sequence with a bunch of chorus girls under the excuse of his being in a stage show to promote his fights.  There are cameos from a lot of other legendary old-time fighters like Jack Dempsey, Jess Willard and James Jeffries and even a wrestler, Strangler Lewis and the big fight is given plenty of time to unfold before ending in a draw. Incidentally Baer is supposed to have said that studying Carnera's fighting style in this film helped him win when they fought for real. I bet HBO would never have let that happen.

Weekly Movie Roundup #6: Missions

Drive, He Said (1971)

This is a lesser known film from the production company BBS which tried to revolutionize American cinema in the early 70's and produced the likes of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. It's the directorial debut of Jack Nicholson and comes off like the poor relation of those classics, particularly Pieces.

It's a typical youth story of the period. The main character is Hector, a college basketball phenom who is ambivalent about much of life, especially the focus on the game his coach demands and his clandestine relationship with the girlfriend of one of his professors. Meanwhile his friend, Gabriel, is a vague counterculture type, terrified of going into the army, who is gobbling uppers and staying awake  so he'll be too wired to pass his draft physical.

The film was a critical and commercial flop in its day and it hasn't improved with age. Hector and Gabriel don't project any kind of personality and it's hard to feel empathy with either of them. William Tepper, playing Hector, really loses out because it's hard not to compare his character to Bobby Dupea, the insecure drifter played by Nicholson himself in Pieces, and that's a comparison the poor guy cannot win. He even has Pieces' Karen Black playing his girlfriend. As Gabriel, Michael Margotta is just annoying and creepy. It's especially hard to like him after one extended scene where he breaks into Black's home and terrorizes her. You think he's going to either rape or kill her but thankfully neither happens. It's then really hard to care later when he's led away, naked and insane, to an institution. The best acting in the film comes from the two people who would go on to have substiantual careers, Black, whose character here is a lot more intelligent and independent than her sad little country girl in Pieces, and Bruce Dern who plays the hard-assed basketball coach with more depth than you might think. With a younger Nicholson and Dennis Hopper in the leads, this might have been something. What's here is just "meh".


Spaced Out (1979)

Sometimes when an odd film comes to the top of my Netflix queue, I try to remember why in the world I ever put it in there.  This one showed up after I watched an interesting low-budget horror film, Prey, that was a take on the D.H. Lawrence story "The Fox" with the man invading the woodland home of a lesbian couple turing out to be a vampiric alien. The director of that movie was Norman J. Warren and in the accompanying interview on his career he mentioned a sex comedy he'd done called Spaced Out.  I found it and it turns out it wasn't one of his finest hours.

The film is a silly low-budget British sex farce, the kind of thing that filled late night cable schedules back in the Nineties.  The plot has three aliens, all busty, scantily-clad females of course, landing their spaceship on Earth and collecting some samples of the local animal life, namely a cocky macho guy, a frustrated businessman and his frosty fiancee and a spindly young nerd with a handful of porno magazines. The aliens have no idea what men are and know nothing about the usual beast-with-two-backs stuff. If you've ever seen any direct-to-video movies starring the likes of Jacqueline Lovell, Kira Reed or Shauna O'Brien, you can imagine what happens next...

...but in case you can't, the macho guy seduces one of the aliens who becomes so insatiable it freaks him out, the businessman beds his fiancee and the little guy makes it with all three aliens. At the end the first three people leave the ship but the nerd decides he's got nothing to stay here for (and you can't blame him) and goes with the aliens back to their home planet. Unfortunately the spaceship, which has been falling apart all through the picture, blows up killing everyone on board which I thought was an unneccesarily nasty way to end things. I hope that at least Warren's other horror films are an improvement on this.

Mission: Impossible, Season 1, Disc 4

Just to be clear I am talking about the TV show Mission: Impossible, not those "Tom Cruise, Macho Man" movies that have been showing up the last few years.  It's always interesting to me to look back at the early episodes of a long-running television show and see how it played before it found its winning formula. The four shows on this disc from Mission's first season show more differences from the familiar format than I expected.

 It's not just having Steven Hill star as the head of the IMF team before Peter Graves took over in the second season. It's that three of these four episodes do not follow the usual pattern of the entire team concocting some elaborate scheme to foil a villain. Two of the shows, "Elena" and "The Reluctant Dragon" featured Martin Landau without most of the others, solo on the first show and with only Greg Morris on the second. Another program, "The Short Tail Spy", featured just Hill, Morris and Barbara Bain. Only "The Legacy", an episode about a hunt for a hidden Nazi fortune, had the entire cast of Hill, Bain, Landau, Morris and Peter Lupus.  Landau's solo stories feel the least like the Mission: Impossible we've all come to know. There's no elaborate trickery in either one, epscially "Elena". They are just straightforward spy tales about an agent who's possibly gone insane and Landau convincing an Iron Curtain scientist to defect, things that I Spy, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in its serious days, or any other espionage show could have done. I don't know if they tried this format to save the expense of having all the regulars in every episode or if they were just feeling out what worked but "The Legacy" is the only one of these that feels like the show everyone remembers.

Weekly Movie Roundup #5: Working Man's Blues

American Splendor (2003)

A movie about a lonely guy who is an obsessive music collector and works in a dead end government job?  Has somebody been peeking at my life?

This film has nothing to do with me of course. American Splendor is the true story of Harvey Pekar, a grumpy Cleveland file clerk who became a renowned comic book writer simply by telling stories from his own life.  The film follows the arc of Harvey's life from childhood to his befriending a young artist named Robert Crumb over a mutal love of ingjazz and blues records and Crumb later agreeing to illustrate the stories Harvey wants to write about his day to day struggles. From there Harvey goes on to become famous in the comics world while still holding on to his clerk job at a VA hospital, meets his eventual wife, Joyce Brabner, becomes a familiar face on David Letterman's talk show and has a protracted bout with cancer, all the while remaining the same cranky grouch.

Not only do we get to see Paul Giamatti do a great job playing Pekar, but the real Pekar narrates and sometimes appears in the film being interviewed by the directors. When we actually see him you really appreciate how Giamatti nails his posture, expressions and voice. It's an unusual but somehow warming story about how a downtrodden guy can really persevere in life that has a sense of the boring but telling details of reality. I especially chuckled at the first scene in Harvey's apartment when we see racks of metal shelves buckling under the weight of record albums. I used to have an album collection in similiar precarious shape.  Hope Davis is similarly quirky but real as Joyce and you get the sense in this film of a man who despite appearances, found a satisfying creative outlet for his life and came to enjoy his time on this earth. Pekar died in 2010.

They Won't Believe Me (1947)

A compact little piece of California noir that seems to have been forgotten about. It takes place mostly in sunlight but there is a sense of claustrophobic fatalism in the film that is very much of a piece with wifeother post-war works of its studio, RKO, like Out Of The Past and Crossfire. Robert Young stars as an unhappily married stockbroker who plans to leav e his rich for a hot little secretary in his office but finds things going horribly wrong and ends up being tried for a murder he didn't commit.  The weaknesses of Young's character constantly lead to his making bad decisions and you don't find out just how bad until the movie's surprisingly grim ending.  Young is fine in his role but a couple of other actors present recall other noirs of the time. The police detective who pursues him is played by none other than Tom Powers who was doomed by fate himself in the classic Detour while Past's indelible bad girl, Jane Greer, here plays the only good woman in the cast. The major bad girl role is reserved for a young Susan Hayward as the secretary and she looks so good you completely understand ehy Young wants to leave his wife.  Irving Pichel directed the film and while it doesnt' have the distinctive, shadowy look of the best noirs there is still a nasty little sting to it.




Sirens At Work: Emmylou, Gillian and Alison

 Down From The Mountain (2000)

I don't care if it is based on the Odyssey, I've never cared much for the forced hillbilly humor of the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? However it led to this movie which is quite another matter. This is D.A. Pennebaker's film of a concert given at Nashville's famous Ryman Auditorium by the country, blues, and bluegrass artists who provided music for O Brother, a gathering of regional artists, national stars, legends and a few up-and-comers of the time who all come off like happy members of a huge family in the backstage sections.

The concert itself is mc'd by the great John Hartford who plays fiddle and sings a bit in addition to introducing the acts.  Those acts include the gospel group, the Fairfield Four and family bluegrass bands like the Cox Family. The main focus though is on the three women who gave the film its best musical moment, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Gilliam Welch. Together the three sing that moment, the mesmerizing "Nobody But The Baby" and also perform separately. All sound great but one of the greatest moments in this film for me was Welch and her partner, David Rawlings playing and singing with their close, sensual harmony on their own "Dear Someone" and "I Want To Play That Rock And Roll".  The other outstanding appearance was by bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley who came out and sang an acapella "O Death": that brought tears to my eyes before leading the entire cast in a rendition of "Angel Band".  This was a special concert film. My only mild disappointment is that you hear snatches of recordings of "Man Of Constant Sorrow", O Brother's breakout hit, but the actual song is never played during the concert.

The White Gorilla (1945)

There are creative ways to incorporate old footage into a newer film. Then there's stuff like this. About half the running time of this jungle movie is taken up with footage from a 1927 serial, Perils Of The Jungle.  Not just various shots of chimpanzees, hippos and other wild animals, but scenes of people menaced by lions, tigers and African tribesmen. This is intercut with scenes at a trading post of a tattered guide telling others about the doomed expedition he was part of, his story being the 1927 scenes. Additionally there are new scenes of a guy in a white-haired gorilla suit lumbering around the jungle and having the occasional clunky wrestling match with a guy in a black-haired gorilla suit. On top of all that actor-stuntman Ray "Crash" Corrigan plays both the guide and the white gorilla he is supposedly hunting. Pul this all together and you have one hour of solid "Huh?".  I will admit though that the serial pieces are well done and make me curious to see what the uncut Perils Of The Jungle looks like.

Weekly Film Roundup #4: Bollywood, Bubbles and Charlie

Ten Minutes To Live (1932)

Oscar Micheaux was the first significant African-American film director with a long career that stretched from 1919 into the late Forties.  The first film of his I ever saw was one of his late ones. With its clunky acting and cheap sets, it made me write him off as just another bad filmmaker.  After seeing more of his work, especially his silent films I now know better.

In the silent era, without microphones and other sound equipment to worry about, Micheaux was able to do striking camera compositions that gave a sense of space. The best example I've seen of this is Within Our Gates, a 1919 social problem drama that rally uses outside locations well and, by the way, also contains the most frightening depiction of a lynching I've ever seen.  If his later films look cramped and cheap it's partially because the low budgets he had to work with  didn't allow for the kind of sound equipment that would allow outdoor shooting.

Ten Minutes To Live shows the difference between the two looks. Though it was released as late  as 1932, it's still a part-talkie, part-silent movie.  There are actually two parts, both conventional melodramas and set in the same Harlem nightclub.  The first part is all-talking and concerns a conman who seduces young women with the promise of a movie role but is shot by one of his victims.  The second part is the more interesting. It's about a young woman at the club who gets a note telling her she has ten minues left to live. After this, the movie goes into a silent flashback section showing how she got to this point and that's where you see some of Micheaux's eye. Scenes go through a train, Grand Central Station, New York streets, a residential neighborhood and a rooming house, and even though the film itself looks worn and dark, you get a feeling of tension and drama that is not in the talkie parts. Since this is an early talkie there are also a few early 30's specialties to stretch things out, like singers, comedians, scantily-clad dancers and a couple of actresses lounging around in their lingerie.  It's standard Poverty Row work but there is some glimmer of real artistry here.

Chaplin's Essanay Comedies, Volume 2

Essanay Studios was the second stop in Charlie Chaplin's rise to movie fame, after beginning with Mack Sennett at Keystone and before moving on to Mutual to do his most-seen shorts.  The six shorts on this disc show that Essanay was a period of transition for him.  Three of them,  By The Sea, Work and A Woman are standard slapstick farces of the time but two others, The Tramp and The Bank, show the beginnings of his more serious side as in both films, his downtrodden character foils robbers and thinks he gets the girl only to find out at the end she's in love with someone else, leaving Charlie to shuffle alone into the distance.  A Woman is also notable as the only time I've seen so far where Chaplin indulges in the time-honored low comic tradition of dressing up as a woman.

 The sixth short on the disc, His Regeneration, is a "for completists only" inclusion because it isn't really a Chaplin film. It actually stars Essanay's owner, G.W. "Bronco Billy" Anderson, as a thief who turns over a new leaf. Chaplin only appears as a cameo in a dance hall scene, cutting up in his Little Tramp outfit.

Kaajal (1965)

I've only seen a couple of Bollywood films but those have lived up to the standard image of the genre, three hour melodramas with singing, dancing, comedy and lavish sets and costumes.  This one fits the picture as well.  It's about an Indian prince, his family and the people he's grown up with as his virtual siblings.  The plot has enough layers and twists in three hours to last an entire season of Downton Abbey. I won't attempt to describe it all but it includes jealousies, two attempted suicides, one drowning, alcoholism, role reversals, a love affair between two servants and of course delirious song and dance numbers.  Meena Kumari, a big star in Indian film, plays the put upon heroine with the virtuous suffering of a Loretta Young or Greer Garson and the film is entertaining for what it is. Personally though I can take one of these heavy breathing Indian concoctions every few months.

Robot Monster (1953)

For a while I watched this thinking it didn't really deserve its reputation as one of the worst movies of all time. Yes, there's no getting around the fact that its space alien, Ro-Man, is a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet over his head or that his great population-destroying device is a giant bubble machine. On the other hand there are competent actors in the cast and the opening scene clearly establishes the whole thing as a little boy's dream.  Then the movie went on and Ro-Man started to spout off about wanting to be human and the Earth got invaded by fighting lizards (courtesy of the movie King Dinosaur)  and stop-motion dinosaurs (courtesy of The Lost World) and I thought "God, this is bad." At least it's entertainingly silly and, best of all, short.

Weekly Movie Update #3: The Haneke-Sondheim-Kaye Edition

Amour (2012)

It amazes me that Amour got as many major Oscar nominations as it did. It's not that the honors aren't warranted. The film is incredible and deserves every accolade it gets. It's just that a foreign film about old age and death is not the sort of thing Hollywood usually endorses.

The plot is very simple. Georges and Anna, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, are an elderly couple, retired music teachers, living happily in Paris.  One morning Anna has a stroke, paralyzing her right side. The rest of the film charts her slow decline while Georges does all he can to care for her. This film will probably resonate with every person who has ever been involved in taking care of a aging loved one who is slowly wastin away. Watching Anna go from being confined to a wheelchair but alert to having small seizures contort her face and finally in the state of being bedridden and deliriously talking about her childhood, brought up unpleasant memories for me of watching my mother go through similar things when she was slowly succumbing by cancer.

Director Michael Haneke is notorious for films that spotlight the darkest sides of human nature like Cache, Funny Games, and The Piano Teacher.  This time he still deals with an unplesant subject but the emphasis is on true love and devotion, not casual sadism or suicide. Georges uncomplainingly tends to all of Anna's needs whether feeding her, cleaning up after her or exercising her legs.  Eeverything he does he does out of love.Not to be greedy about this award thing but Trintignant deserved as much Oscar consideration as Riva.  His character's tenderness and underlying sorrow are as crucial to the film as Riva's playing of a woman helplessly losing her strength and vitality.  Isabelle Huppert, one of Haneke's favorite collaborators, plays their daughter with a note of bewildered anger and sorrow that is again resonates for those of us who've been there. Haneke's handling of all this is sympathetic but not maudlin and the last couple of scenes end the movie on a note of dreamlike grace. This is a work of remarkable sensitivity and compassion from a director who's shown little of it in the past.


Follies In Concert (1985)

Netflix's synopses of its DVDs can be inaccurate sometimes but in this case, it was downright misleading.  The summary of this disc made it sound like this was a straightforward film of the 1985 concert version of Stephen Sondheim's musical drama, Follies.  Instead this was a documentary whose first half covered the three days of rehearsal leading up to the show and whose second half consisted of excerpts from the actual concert.  A lot of the big numbers were included in rousing versions such as Elaine Stritch belting out "Broadway Baby", Carol Burnett doing "I'm Still Here" Lee Remick vamping through "The Story Of Lucy And Jesse" and Barbara Cook singing "Losing My Mind" but half of the show was nowhere to be found. Still there was enough here to rekindle my appreciation of Sondheim.  After watching this I added Into The Woods, Passion and Sunday In The Park With George to my DVD queue and the next day bought the CD of the full concert.

Danny Kaye 100th Birthday Salute

Yesterday Turner Classic Movies spent the entire day showing Danny Kaye movies in honor of his 100th birthday celebration. (During the broadcast his daughter, Dena, confided that he was actually born in 1911, making this his 102th birthday but since he always said he was born in 1913 they're going along with that.) I was going to do other things yesterday but the thought of watching Kaye for the first time in dog's years sucked me in and I checked out three of the movies.

The Kid From Brooklyn (1946) and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947) both came from the early part of his film career when he was under contract to Samuel Goldwyn.  Both were big, splashy comedies full of physical shtick, pretty chorus girls and garish Technicolor that showed Goldwyn positioning Kaye as the successor to Eddie Cantor who made musical comedies for the studio in the Thirties. Kid From Brooklyn is actually a remake of an earlier Harold Lloyd comedy, The Milky Way, about a milkman who is deluded into think that he's a champion boxer while Walter Mitty starts with the basic James Thurber story about an inveterate daydreamer and tacks on a wild spy plot.  Kaye is very good in these showing off his physical agility and verbal skills, but really any skilled comedian of the period could have done most of this stuff.  The parts where he really shined for me were the language twisting musical numbers written by Kaye's wife, Sylvia Fine, "Pavlova" in Kid and "Symphony For Unstrung Tongue" and "Anatole Of Paris" in Mitty. These are the sort of numbers that no one but Danny Kaye could pull off.

The other Kaye movie I caught was The Inspector General (1949), a post-Goldwyn movie of a more satiric bent. This was based on the Nikolai Gogol story with Kaye playing a vagabond who is mistaken for one of Napoleon's inspector generals by a village's corrupt politicians and plied with bribes and favors. This is a richer movie than the other two with Kaye getting some moments of poignancy as well as craziness, some wonderful physical comic sequences including an extended exercising routine and an overall feel of well-staged comic opera.  There's a fine supporting cast featuring the likes of Walter Slezak, Elsa Lanchester and Gene Lockhart and another excellent Fine-Kaye showcase in the "Gypsy Drinking Song" number.

Weekly Film Roundup #2

Rust And Bone (2012)

It's yet another romantic film about misfits finding each other but this is a very different beast than the two movies I've talked about in previous posts.  This French drama concerns the relationship between a whale trainer who loses her legs in an accident and a brutish but naively direct man who does underground fighting.  From the trailer you get the idea that this is going to be a story about a simple guy who helps a bitter, disabled woman adjust back into society. It;s that way for about ten minutes  but the movie eventually goes to different places.  The relationship between the two develops from friendship to sex into romance and finally love and this is mostly displayed through subtle gestures from the two great leads, Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. Cotillard is especially wonderful at displaying her changing emotions with her facial and body expressions. You really get a sense of her character's slowly returning confidence and Schoenaerts is great at evoking the mix of violence and innocence in his charatcer.  Director Jacques Audiard does this without ever resorting to the kind of snappish dialogue and big histrionic scenes an American version of this story would probably use. It unfolds with poetic visuals, even in the slow motion scenes of alley fighting and a magical scene where Cotillard returns to the water park where she had her accidents and rebonds with one of the whales she used to train.

The special effects are also standouts, able to create a complete illusion that Cotillard's legs are really amputated at the knees. You see stumps or artificial legs from every angle, even to the point where she is crawling around legless on the floor like Lon Chaney Sr. in one of his "legless cripple" roles.

Some Came Running (1958)

This is one of those films that is widely regarded as a classic but which isn't discussed very much and I can see why. It is a great film but one that is pretty downbeat especially for its time.

It's certainly a different role for Frank Sinatra who plays a disillusioned author and ex-soldier who comes back to his home town and is repulsed by its phony, repressive atmospehte especially as personified by his glad-handing brother played by Arthur Kennedy.  The only bright spots in the place for him are a schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) who he falls in love with and two people from the so-called "wrong side of town", a gambler (Dean Martin) and a bar girl (Shirley MacLaine).

There's no Sinatra swagger in this. He is subdued and does a lot of subtle conveyance of his emotions. Martin's character is complex. The actor's easy-going, hard-living persona acquires a mean edge here. MacLaine whose character carries an unrequited torch for Sinatra, is heartbreaking. Hers is one of the classic "Should Have Won An Oscar" performances.  The real magic is put into this film, though, by director Vincente Minnelli. Usually given to lighter, more optismic fare, he dials down his visual flamboyance until the movie's amazing carnival-set climatic sequence which he fills with quick cuts, garish colors and panoramic camera sweeps.


Cartoon Craze, Vol. 18

I've had a long-standing jones for animated cartoons ever since I was a kid. I enjoy modern work but I also love watching classic studio work with an adult eye, even on grab bag DVD collections like this. 

As usual for these discs, this was a collection of random public domain cartoons from various sources like the Paul Terry studios, Famous Studios, and Warner Brothers.  Some of the prints were washed out and choppy but there were points of interest.  "The Talking Magpies" was the first Heckle and Jeckle cartoon ever made. It's actually a Farmer Al Falfa item where he is menaced by prototypes of the birds, here husband and wife.(!)  The single Warner Brothers item is Friz Freleng's "Jungle Jitters" one of Warners' infamous "Censored 11", cartoons pulled from official circulation because of their racial stereotyping.  This one has a salesman trying to hawk his wares in Africa and winding up on the dinner menu of a tribe of cannibals. Like most of the others on that list I've seen, it really isn't that great a cartoon and the stereotyping is really no worse than in most films of the period. 

The most interesting cartoon here was "Cheese Burglar", a Famous Studios piece starring Herman the Mouse before he was teamed up with Katnip.  It had a pretty nasty plot of Herman scheming to get a buddied-up dog and cat to kill each other so that he can have free hand with the food in their house. The best part of the show is that most of it features the distinctive and exaggerated animation of Jim Tyer.

 In The Valley Of Elah (2007)

Films that have been made about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have a reputation for being box office flops because of their very heavy and downbeat nature although Zero Dark Thirty looks to break away from that cliche.  That applies to this film but it's a shame few people know about it because it is pretty good.  Tommy Lee Jones plays a father who learns his son is missing after coming home from Iraq and goes to his Army base to find out what happened. His son turns up dead and the mystery behind it turns out, of course,to be a very bleak story.  Paul Haggis directs this with a somewhat heavy hand but there is a sad reality to the plot and the acting is uniformly fine.  Tommy Lee Jones is as magnificent as ever, going from flinty and determined to devastated and humble with excellent timing, and Charlize Theron is very good as the determined cop who becomes his ally. There is also nice support from the rest of the cast including James Franco, Susan Sarandon and Barry Corbin.

Weekly Film Roundup #1

I Like Your Nerve (1931)

I said before that I don't rely on Turner Classics Movies a lot. I didn't say I never watched the channel.  That happens to be where I saw this. It was shown as part of their month-long Loretta Young showcase. It's an early 30's trifle with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. starring as a typically cocky young American who wanders around in South America until he meets and is smitten by Young, the daughter of a shady finance minister who is about to be married off to a much older English nobleman. You can guess what happens.  It seems to be a try at putting Fairbanks fils in the same kind of breezy comedy his father made in his early career but without the acrobatics the older Fairbanks was famous for. The most striking things about it now are Young's great beauty (She was 18 when this was made.) and the presence of Boris Karloff in a small part as a palace secretary in the same year when the Frankenstein monster would take him away from bit parts for good.

Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)

You see one quirky comedy about a guy who finds his true love while trying to get back with his old girlfriend and suddenly more show up.  This film has that plot point in common with Silver Linings Playbook but everything else is different.  To begin with it starts when the main character, despondent over breaking up with his girlfriend, commits suicide. Then he ends up in a dilapidated urban limbo populated only by suicides. He finds out that his girlfriend did herself in a few weeks after he did and goes searching for her. Along the way he meets a cute punker chick who keeps saying she's not a suicide and is there by mistake. You can figure out what happens from there.

It's nowhere as charming as Playbook but the film does have a nice consistency to its concept with everyone riding around in junky, rusted out cars and travelling over desolate settings like deserts and a beach full of used needles and condoms.  Cleverly the soundtrack is full of songs either associated with suicide in some way like "Gloomy Sunday", "Telstar" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart".  There's also the welcome presence of Tom Waits as a camp leader.


Battles Without Honor And Humanity: Deadly Fight In Hiroshima (1973)

This is the second film in a Japanese series by genre director Kinju Fukasaku about the bloody rivalries between Yakuza gangs in post-World War II Japan.  The films overall detail the rise of an ex-soldier played by Bunta Sugawara through the mob ranks but he's only a peripheral character in this story. The focus here is on another hood who bounces between two rival gangs until he falls in love with one boss' widowed niece which leads to all sorts of bloodshed breaking out.

Sugawara has a tough, Robert Ryan-like presence and it's a shame he's seen so little in this particular episode.  The actual lead, Kinya Kitaoji, is okay but nothing special. On the other hand martial arts star Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba is a hoot as a crazed, trigger-happy gang boss.

The Story Of A Cheat (1936)

Thanks to Criterion's Eclipse series some of the films of French writer-actor-director Sacha Guitry are available for viewing and this one is really entertaining. It's the whimsical tale of a man who spends his life being tempted to do wrong in various ways and resisting before finally giving in and becoming a successful card cheat.  It's a lighthearted comedy pulled off with grand flourishes like being narration from the main character and the use of newsreel footage and camera tricks in ways that prefigure the Nouvelle Vague gang twenty years later.  Guitry also has the novel notion of introducting the cast at the beginning verbally as they stand around a soundstage, a bit that Orson Welles would do five years later in the trailer for Citizen Kane.

Resolving...

This is the time of year when many people take stock of themselves and make resolutions about what they want to do over the coming year.  I don't want to commit to anything really specific in print but I have taken some stock of myself the last few days.  I have to face the fact that I'm not getting any younger. I'll turn 58 in two and a half months and I had a potentially life-saving operation last October.  It's time I started really doing some of the things I want to do in life.  I'm pretty certain what that means and hopefully I'll be taking more decisive steps in that direction.

As for this blog I want to be more consistent in updating it than I have been.  I've really fallen off when ir comes to discussing the many movies I see.  I think I get intimidated because I don't follow the viewing patterns of other movie bloggers I read.  I don't simply concentrate on the new stuff that hits theatres or what Turner Classic Movies is showing.  Most of my watching comes from what I get from Netflix and ClassicFlix which covers a wide range of material. I'll be getting the recent documentary The Woodmans in the mail today and the next few things in my Netflix queue include some Charlie Chaplin shorts, classic TV dramas, an Indian film and two very different types of concert movies. It's finally dawning on me that wide range is what might make my opinions valuable to someone. If nothing else I want to spend 2013 keeping a running diary here of the movies I have watched though I'll also be writing my thoughts on music and other things as they come to mind.

I haven't actually seen a feature film yet this year but I'll start with a couple of things by two of my favorite comics I've seen over the last of couple days:

Man On The Flying Trapeze (1935)

"There are burglars singing in the cellar."

That line alone suggests the best of this W. C. Fields comedy.  It's one of the films he did for Paramount that cast him in a domestic setting as a henpecked husband with a nagging wife, a loving older daughter, relatives  who make his life miserable and a plot where he looks foolish for a while but emerges in triumph by the end. It's the same formula he used earlier in It's A Gift and You're Telling Me and would later lampoon brilliantly in The Bank Dick. This film is not as funny as the rest of those.  His final victory, being promoted at his job, is on a smaller scale and, unlike the others, this film does not make room for any of his classic vaudeville routines.  Still the entire sequence where he comes upon the aforementioned singing burglars, played by Walter Brennan and Tammany Young, and ends up singing and drinking his own homebrew with them is as memorable as anyting else in his movie career.





Buster leaps in. From Grand Slam Opera.

 Lost Keaton - Disc 2 (1936-37)

This is part of a Kino set of a very obscure period of Buster Keaton's career, a series of 16 short comedies he made for Educational Pictures in the mid-30's.  I've actually only watched four of the eight comedies on the disc so far. Most of them aren't that great, cheap and goofy with little plot and the only fun coming from Buster's physical gags.  The exception to this is Grand Slam Opera, a film for which Keaton is credited as co-writer.  Its plot, such as it is, has Buster going from Arizona to New York to appear on a radio talent show to compete as a juggler. (Think about that for a minute.)  This two-reeler is hilarious. Buster has almost no dialogue, except to repeatedly ask an irritated young lady "How about dinner and a show?", and does two amazing dance sequneces, one where he is dancing enthusiastically all over his apartment furniture. There's also a but where he and an orchestra conductor repeatedly whack each other to the rhythm of the "Anvil Chorus", something reminiscent of his mentor, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.  It certainly isn't Cops or Sherlock Jr. but it's much funnier than you would expect from this low point of Keaton's life.