Weekly Movie Roundup #11: European Unions

Yeah, we've all been there, buddy.

Masculin Feminin (1966)

This is a typical Jean-Luc Godard provocation from the 60's, a movie that's ostensibly about a romance between a young student radical (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and a budding pop star (Chantal Goya). As the film unfolds though, it takes turns focusing everywhere but the romance. There are interviews of young women about politics and their lives, scenes of violence that seem to wander in from other films, a rant about projecting movies in the correct aspect ratio and even a cameo from Brigitte Bardot. The camera even occasionally focuses on disembodied arms or scenery during dialogue scenes  as though it was losing interest in what is being said.

Some of these impressions only come up at a remove of fifty years from the movie's making. At the time the sentiments espoused by Leaud and his friends were the coming thing in France and as, subsequent films like Weekend showed, Godard  was in tune with the leftist thinking of the day. Now of course we've since seen that Maoist philosophy didn't work out so well, so the film's political sentiments come off as a curio of the times. Still Godard's playful disregard for the rules of narrative filmaking still make the movie enjoyable to watch today.

L'eclisse (1962)

In Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse narrative is subverted in other ways. This plot concerns a tentative romance between a stock trader (Alain Delon) and a literary translator (Monica Vitti)  who parry and chat with each other but never seem to be able to commit to love. Antonioni shoots the film in such a way that location becomes almost an active character. People are constantly framed within doorways and other frames and there's always a sense that the characters are trapped, whether by  the patterns of their lives or by the buildings and rooms they inhabit. Anything representing freedom, whether a balloon rising into the sky or the African wilderness where one supprting character once lived, is shot down or tamed in brutal fashion.  At the end of the movie the lovers plan to meet at 8:00 one evening but when the time comes, you never see them. You see trees, buildings and streetlights with no one around. It's as though their material world has devoured the pair. Antonioni took a lot of stick in some circles for the dessicated view of society represented by films like this but the artistry and precision of his filmaking really makes despair into something profound and artistic.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

When you first see films some time after their initial releases you are bound to run across a few performances that you think should have gotten more attention when the movies originally came out. My personal list of these include Vera Farmiga in Higher Ground, Sigourney Weaver in A Map Of The World and going way back Rosalind Russell in Mourning Becomes Electra. Add to those Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea.

     This is director Terence Davies' treatment of a Terence Rattigan play about a titled noblewoman in 1950's England who leaves a stifling marriage with her decent but unexciting husband to live with a younger man whose great life achievement was being a fighter pilot in World War II.  She eventually finds that relationship so unsatisfying she tries to kill herself leading to even more problems when her boy friend find out what she attempted.  Davies does a fine job creating a cozy yet claustrophobic atmosphere that sets the tone for the story and Weisz is tremendous showing shifting emotions from seething hostility to starry-eyed love and finally weary desolation. She comes off like a woman being torn apart by her frustrations and she is always sympathetic helped by the fact that Tom Hiddleston, playing her lover, comes off as a selfish, immature prick. It's a really compelling study and if the film had gotten more play in this country Weisz should have gotten serious consideration for a Best Actress Oscar.

The Captive City (1952)

This is a low-budget independent production about gangland corruption infiltrating small town America that looks a lot better than you'd expect thanks to photography by Lee Garmes and direction by Robert Wise that uses close-ups and shadows to create a dark and sinister atmosphere. John Forsythe stars as a newspaper editor in a sleepy small town who gets a tip about a divorce case that leads him to small bookmaking operations run by local merchants. He is discouraged from digging any deeper by the local police and advertisers but does so anyway and finds out the bookmakers have ties to the Mafia. As a result of all this he and his wife find themselves on the run from mob assassins,

The film is supposedly based on a true story and comes with the on-screen endorsement of Senator Estes Kefauver who was known at the time for his investigations into organized crime. It contains what has to be one of the first mentions of the Mafia in a film and is pretty blunt about the spread of its influence into small towns through gambling. There are very few recognizable actors in the cast and those (Forsythe, Ray Teal, Martin Milner) are familiar through their subsequent television work. Other than that it's mostly ordinary looking people acting out this tale which adds to the story's realistic feel.

Charles Lloyd's Map Of The World

As comedian Dick Gregory said during the 75th birthday celebration of saxophonist Charles Lloyd at the Kennedy Center last night, "Follow the career of Charles Lloyd and you'll have a map of the world".  This concert was proof of that.

Lloyd originally came to prominence in the 1960's, first as a member of one of drummer Chico Hamilton's groups, then with his own band. Lloyd was a pioneer in using rock and funk rhythms in his group's music though, unlike later experimenters such as Miles Davis, he never went electric. He had a big hit with his tune "Forest Flower" and his quartet, which included young pups like Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, played at rock venues like the Fillmore East. Then in the 1970's he abruptly dropped from sight, retreating to a hermit's life in California's Big Sur country, studying transcendental meditation and emerging only to record with such folk as the Beach Boys (He plays flute on "Feel Flows" on the Surf's Up album.) Then in 1981 he reemerged to mentor and play with pianist Michel Petrucianni and at the end of the decade began to record for the ECM label where's he been a  constant presence ever since.

What's been notable about the last twenty years of Lloyd's career, other than his playing with heavyweight artists like Bobo Stenson, Geri Allen, Billy Higgins and Jason Moran, is the way he has more and more embraced musics from other cultures. That was on display through the guest artists who appeared at the Kennedy Center show. It began with Lloyd walking out with his current quartet, Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland accompanied by Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran's wife and an accomplished classical singer. She sang the spiritual "Go Down Moses" slowly and powerfully and Lloyd answered her, sololing on his tenor sax with a tone that was full of both prayer and exultation. Then the quartet played "Abide With Me" and slid into a swinging and jovial blues that showed their communication and highlighted the subdued sweetness of Lloyd's playing.

After remarks by Gregory, an old friend of Lloyd, tabla master Zakir Hussain came out. Moran and Rogers left the stage and we were left with the trio that recorded Lloyd's CD, Sangam. Lloyd moved around to the piano and slowly built up an ominous melody while Harland shook a tambourine and other percussion instruments. While this was going on Hussain slowly worked rhythms on his tabla drums. Then as things were going good, Harland shifted to the piano and Lloyd went over to his flute. Eventually Harland would go back to his drum set matching Hussain stroke for stroke while Lloyd also played tarogato and tenor and the three of them worked up to a boiling climax that sounded more Brazilian than Indian.

Following this Hussain left the stage and Moran and Rogers returned bringing with them two Greek musicians, lyre player Sokratis Sinopoulos and singer Maria Farantouri, whom Lloyd has been studying with for the past decade. The ensemble took off again, playing sorrowing but bluesy Greek melodies led by Farantouri's beautiful low voice. Sinopoulis had some intense moments bowing his lyle in tandem with Rogers bowing his bass. Harland and Moran were both animated and Lloyd was amazing, his tenor singing with his poignant cry. There is still an echo of John Coltrane in his sound and it's not hard to imagine that if Coltrane had lived longer and had more of a chance to explore other cultures, he might have wound up making music something like this.

The finish of this brought the audience to their feet and for an encore all eight musicians returned as Farantouri led them in another Greek melody. The drummers, string players and singers all sounded wonderfully together regardless that they were from so many different countries and musical backgrounds. Over it all Lloyd played with that beautiful devotional tone sounding like a benediction.

Before the concert I ran across a horde of high school kids from New York down here on a field trip to participate in some kind of "Mock UN" exercise. I don't know exactly what they had to do but if they wanted to learn about the harmonious blending of cultures, they should have been at the Kennedy Center Friday night.

Weekly Movie Roundup #10: Tigers Will Survive

Life Of Pi (2012)

I now know that the 2012 Best Director Oscar went to the right person. Ang Lee's Life Of Pi is an amazing film that uses CGI wizardry as well as I've ever seen it, creating beautiful spectacles of imaginary oceans and  islands as well as making you completely believe you are seeing a tiger prowl around a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

This is all in the service of the moving story of an Indian man who tells a writer the story of his childhood growing up next to a zoo owned by his father, surviving a shipwreck that kills his family and almost all of the zoo animals and surviving for 277 days at sea in a lifeboat accompanied by a zebra, hyena and orangutan as well as the tiger. The tiger is soon the only animal on board (for obvious reasons) and eventually settles into an uneasy coexistence with Pi for the rest of their journey. The film is as much about Pi's internal journey to maturity and inner peace  as his ocean trip and at the end, an alternate, less fantastic explanation for his odyssey is put up but in such a way that you can believe whichever version you want. In the few reviews I've read of this movie, some people roll their eyes at the religious and metaphysical aspects of this tale even as much as they love the visuals. Their loss. The film works so well because its physical beauty is in the service of real ideas.

The Crazy Gang

The Frozen Limits (1939)

The Crazy Gang was a British comedy troupe formed in the 1930's that was a gathering of three double acts,  Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold and Jimmy Norvo and Teddy Knox. They were most famous as a stage act but they made a few films in the 1937-1941 period, one of which was   The Frozen Limits.

The plot of this is typical comedy team fodder. The Gang plays carnival entertainers who hear about a gold rush in the Yukon and go there to get rich not realizing that the gold rush they heard about happened twenty years earlier. They end up in a deserted town inhabited only by an old prospector and his daughter, get involved in a real gold hunt and help foil the inevitable bad guys after both the gold and the daughter. I don't know how well the troupe worked in their other films but in this one you're left wondering why all these comics are necessary. Six guys trying to be funny at once does not leave much room for any of them to make an impression.  There's a theatrical melodrama sketch where all six men have specific roles and a variation on the Marx Brothers' "mirror" scene in Duck Soup where all six dress up in identical nightshirts and creep around town pretending to be the old prospector. Those bits work well. Outside of that the comedy mostly seems cluttered with little that a smaller grouping like Abbott & Costello or the Three Stooges could not have done more efficiently. Indeed the best dialogue bit comes from just Flanagan and Allen as they do a wordplay sketch ("Gold ore! Gold or what?") in the familiar manner of Bud and Lou talking about baseball players.

Square Dance Jubilee (1949)

This is the movie that shares a DVD in the "Showtime USA" series with last week's Yes Sir, Mr. Bones. Like that one this is basically a bunch of musical performances pretending to be a narrative feature, in this case a western. The story has two New York talent scouts, played by cowboy actor Don "Red" Barry and comedian Wally Vernon going out west to find musical acts for a TV show. They find plenty but also encounter a gang of rustlers robbing a pretty ranch owner which accounts for the dramatic part of the movie.

I was a little leery about watching this because one of the top billed performers is Western Swing star Spade Cooley. I can never watch him without remembering that a few years after this he would beat his wife to death in a drunken rage. Fortunately Cooley's just in a couple of performance sections in the first half of the film and the other singers and musicians in his band dominate those. As for the rest of the music, again Richard Roberts and his friends fill you in about everyone else on the commentary track. I will mention that the singing cast includes two fairly big country stars of the day, Cowboy Copas and Claude Casey and one of the great guitarists of the day, Jimmy Bryant, is in the main backing band. Red Barry even sings a song himself and shows that as a singer, he was a great movie tough guy. Vernon makes for annoying comic relief but proves to be an accomplished eccentric dancer. There are all sorts of other singing and dancing acts and the show is closed by the Elder Lovelies, a dance troupe of former chorus girls in their Sixties and Seventies with moves tha defy gravity, time and logic. Like its companion feature this is a piece of goofy, fun entertainment that preserves lesser known performers on film.

Carmel

In the 1980's as the ashes of Britain's punk rock explosion cooled off, a new musical wave seemed to emerge every few weeks, supposedly making the last one passe. At one time or another, there were the New Romantics, industrial, goth, the Germanic influence of Martin Hannett and the Factory records label, and a ska revival. For a while there was a turn away from all types of rock music in favor of other, more sophisticated pop musics like Jazz, Bossa Nova, and continental pop. This movement really got kickstarted when Paul Weller disbanded the Jam to form the Style Council but soon all sorts of seductive female singers on their own or fronting bands and dealing in sophisticated blends of Jazz, funk and soul came along. These included performers like Sade, Everything But The Girl, Weekend, Swing Out Sister and the subject of this piece, Carmel.

Carmel, The Band: Darby, McCourt, Parris.

Carmel was both the name of a trio and its lead singer, Carmel McCourt. In school in Manchester after other musical adventures McCourt joined up with bassist Jim Parris and his cousin, drummer Gerry Darby to form the band. I got their first EP way back in 1982 and immediately paid attention.  The lead track, "Tracks Of My Tears" stayed most in my mind. Their treatment was very skeletal with the song's distinctive melody replaced by a simple downbeat jazz-blues walking rhythm by acoustic bass and drums with Carmel doing the heavy work singing the lyrics in a unique tough and brassy style that didn't sound like any of the softer voiced singers around at the time. She didn't have a conventionally pretty sound or a big range but there was power and emotion along with a note of wavering uncertainty in her voice that underlined the fact this was a real person singing. It got me to pay attention when further records came out, a chilling gospel-powered single, "Bad Day" that had Carmel shouting over organ and a backing choir, and two full albums, The Drum Is Everything and The Falling, which featured excellent songs like "More, More, More", "The Drum Is Everything" and "Mercy" and found the trio further experimenting by adding African and Caribbean elements to their mix.

As time went on I didn't see any further releases by the band in the stores outside of a live CD, Live At Ronnie Scott's, so I basically forgot they existed.  Then about a month ago I came across a small review in Jazzwise magazine of a new Carmel CD called Strictly Piaf, an Edith Piaf tribute that was her first recording in 17 years. After searching around on the Internet I learned that the band had been hugely successful in France for many years and that of late, they had been busy separately with writing, teaching and performing gigs. Darby officially left a few years ago leaving McCourt and Parris as the core players on the new CD. Thanks to Amazon almost no CD is hard to find anymore so I ordered Piaf and was happy to find things much the same as I remembered but improved.

McCourt's range is stronger now. She hits high notes and holds them more effortlessly than she did before but the human, soulful bleat that makes her voice so arresting is still there. The CD is all Piaf material but, as in the past, wildly rearranged. "Sous Le Ciel De Paris" is done as mid tempo lounge jazz, "Les Amants D'un Jour" is sung in French to a dark reggae beat and "Running" is done as ambient funk with trumpet and piano featured. "Autumn Leaves" is sung hauntingly over rippling electric piano, "The Poor People Of Paris" is sludgy like a slow motion carousel and "La Vie En Rose" is unrecognizable with a chorus of treated voices singing the song's lyrics over a rippling synthesized vamp. Only "Mon Legionnaire" sticks close to Piaf's torchy vibrato and McCourt is as good doing that as she is at everything else.

Further investigation revealed there had been four other Carmel CDs released in the 80's and 90's I had completely slept on, Everybody's Got A Little...Soul, Set Me Free, Good News and World Gone Crazy. Fortunately all four were reissued just last year in fully tricked out deluxe packages  with remixes, b-sides, and live recordings. I have the first two now and I expect the others will follow. This music is gutsy and thrilling in all the best ways.

Here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. First a live TV performance of "Sticks And Stones":




And a TV clip of "Mercy". They may be playing along to the record but Lord what a record! Have mercy, indeed...

Weekly Movie Roundup #9: More Movies About Lizards And Gambling

Bay Of Angels (1963)

Director Jacques Demy was famous for lushly romantic films like The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg so it shouldn't be a surprised that even when he did a film about gambling addiction he made it look like a happy and carefree life.

Bay Of Angels is about Jean, a bank clerk who, never having gambled in his life, goes to a casino with a friend, wins a little at roulette and immediately catches the fever. He meets a beautiful woman named Jackie, gets involved with her and that's all she wrote. For the rest of the film the two of them alternately win money, lose money, make love and break up while traveling around various European casinos. Jackie is played by Jeanne Moreau so obviously there's something else besides the thrill of gambling tempting the poor guy. It's a little odd at first seeing Moreau with bright blonde hair but this film was made near the time of Jules And Jim and she's at the peak of her beauty.

In this film's universe, heavy gambling does not lead to any rendezvous with shady characters in flashy suits or musclebound legbreakers. Everything looks sunny, bright and gay and when the couple is down to their last chip, they miraculously start winning again. There is a point at the end where Jean seems about to return to a normal life but as soon as Jackie runs after him, he takes her back and there is no sense that the two of them will ever change. The film embraces Hollywood escapism to an extreme degree but Demy makes this such a gorgeous looking fairytale, you don't really mind.

"The monkey had biplanes. I gotta deal with tanks!?"

20 Million Miles To Earth (1957)

Meanwhile in Italy, there are a whole different set of problems going on in the shape of a two-legged lizard man from Venus. In this classic 50's science fiction film, this fellow arrives in Sicily as a embryonic specimen in an American rocket ship returning from an expedition to the planet. An inquisitive little boy in a fishing village takes the embryo out of its container and the alien immediately starts growing to gigantic size and eventually runs amok in Rome.

Comparing this film to the bloated length of recent science fiction movies, it seems remarkable how effiiciently it does its business. It plows through its story in a trim 82 minutes at which point a modern remake would probably be just showing the monster for the first time. That 82 includes subplots spent on the annoying kid and the romance between the expedition leader and a female doctor.  The film's greatest claim to fame is the work of the legendary Ray Harryhausen who brings the creature to life. His stop-motion work still looks credible today even stacked up against all the wonders of CGI. His lizard man rampages through Rome, fights an elephant, tears up bridges and makes a last stand atop the Coliseum that is very reminiscent of what Harryhausen's mentor, Willis O'Brien, did with a certain giant gorilla stomping around New York City 24 years earlier. The alien's fall from the Coliseum doesn't have the tragedy of Kong's plunge from the Empire State Building but it's a pretty convincing climax to the whole spectacle.

Pete Townsend: Music from Lifehouse 

This is a video of a concert given by The Who's Pete Townsend in 2000 of the music from a science fiction story he had been working on for decades called Lifehouse. The Who never recorded the full tale but several songs from it ended up on the Who's Next album and Townsend continually revised the material for years, recording other pieces solo and with the band, before eventually doing it as a BBC radio play in 1999 and then putting on this concert.

For this show Townsend was accompanied by a full orchestra and a band with guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion, harmonica and background singers. Townsend himself played only acoustic guitars but he still attacked them with as much aggression as his electric ones. The familiar songs here, Who's Next classics like "Behind Blue Eyes", "Baba O'Reilly" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" along with stray tracks like "Pure And Easy" and "Join Together" sound a bit different without Roger Daltrey's snarl or the Entwhistle-Moon rhythm section's pomp but they are no less exhilarating.  Townsend is no bad singer in his own right and he really seems charged up performing some of his most profound material. This is a really enjoyable show from one of the masters.


"Yes Sir, Mr. Bones" (1951)

And now to the problem child.  In 2007,  VCI video put out a four-volume set of 1940s-1950s musical variety features under the title Showtime USA.  One of them is "Yes Sir, Mr. Bones", a 1951 recreation of an old-time minstrel show.

The problems a lot of people would have with this film are obvious. There is no question that minstrel shows  trafficked in the worst kind of stereotyping of black people and there is plenty of that here if anyone wants to get worked up over it. On the other hand this film is also an invaluable record of several historic performers who left few if any other filmed records.

The film begins with a little boy spying on some old-time minstrel performers as they sit in their club and reminiscence about the old days.  The bizarre thing about this scene is that most of the old guys are white but they all wear some kind of tan makeup that seems to be supposed to make us think they're really black men. The little boy walks into the club and asks what minstrel shows were and there's a flashback to a full-blown minstrel performance full of singing, dancing and comedy that takes up the balance of the movie. In this part the white minstrels are in full-on blackface but some of them are black men as well. The film scholars who do the DVD commentary on this DVD, like Richard Roberts, do a much better job than I could in describing who's who among these folks but one notable in the cast is the legendary country songwriter and singer, Emmett Miller, who was one of the progenitors of Western Swing and wrote Hank Williams' hit "Lovesick Blues". The black performers include one of the pioneers of black vaudeville, Flournoy Miller as well as Scatman Crothers and Brother Bones, the man whose recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown" provided the Harlem Globetrotters' theme song. There are also some classic comedy routines done by the likes of Abbott and Costello and Mantan Moreland in other films and eccentric dance routines which really become remarkable when you realize that the old-timers doing them were in their fifties and sixties. Altogether this is not a bad little movie if you can get your head past the obvious problems.

Weekly Movie Roundup #8: The Spirit Of The West

I haven't said anything about the Oscars for the simple reason I haven't seen all of the nominated films.  I know that doesn't seem to stop some people in Blogworld but I like to know something of what I'm talking about before I open my mouth. As for what didn't get nominated I could be disappointed at Marion Cotillard not getting any Best Actress love for Rust And Bone but the Motion Picture Academy usually seems to only pump up one foreign film a year and since that was the amazing Amour this time, I can't say a word in protest. Having seen Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook I totally agree with the awards to Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence. I would still like to catch up with Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Life Of Pi while they are on the big screen. For various reasons I'm not so hot to catch up with Les Miserables and Django Unchained. As indicated below not all of last year's critical favorites are my cup of tea.

"I'd like to talk to you about your car insurance..."

Rango (2011)

I've always had a bit of a prejudice against CGI animation. A lot of it doesn't seem to have the individuality and personality of the hand-drawn variety.  I've only seen one Pixar feature, Finding Nemo, and I liked it but that didn't sell me on the format itself.  Rango may be enough to make me change my mind.

This film is a spaghetti western spoof that tells the familiar story of a stranger coming to a desert town ruled by a sinister mayor and putting things right for the townsfolk who are a cast of animated lizards, owls, mice, turtles, moles, snakes and similar creatures.  The movie is funny without resorting to kiddie humor or an excess of pop culture references like the Shrek films. The characters are humorously grotesque and very individual looking and the story flows along with a nice crazy energy.

Like most animated features it uses a voice cast of well-known actors but nobody whose voice is so instantly recognizable it would take you out of the movie.  Johnny Depp is really good as the hero, a chameleon with acting pretensions, using inflections that call to mind Don Knotts in blustery Barney Fife mode. Other dusty character voices are provided by the likes of Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton, Alfred Molina, and Bill Nighy. As "The Spirit Of The West", Timothy Olyphant does such a good job impersonating Clint Eastwood I actually thought it was Eastwood until the credits rolled.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Wes Anderson's films are something else I've never cuddled up to. I know a lot of critics love his work but the deadpan self-absorption in what movies of his I've seen drives me up a wall.  I've tried to watch Bottle Rocket twice and bailed both times in the middle of a motel scene. The one time I sat down with The Royal Tenenbaums I couldn't even last ten minutes.

I did watch Moonrise Kingdom all the way through and that confirmed my feelings. The man is very skilled at what he does but I cannot relate to his work at all.  This story of two 12-year-old misfits running off together at a Northeastern lake resort community in 1965 is just way too insular for me. The two kids who play the lovers are so controlled and emotionless they don't register. The throwaway bit of a terrier shot dead from a arrow wound didn't endear me to the picture either.

Anderson does assemble impressive casts and the frantic adults looking for the kids include Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray all trying hard to get something out of the minimalist script. Tilda Swinton also makes an amusing appearance near the end looking like a demonic Mary Poppins as she comes in to take one of the kids to an orphanage but the whole movie has a dull center that shuts out anyone unfamiliar with the world of summer camps and 12-year-old true love.

The Anniversary Party (2001)

Jennifer Jason Leigh starred in one of the films of the short-lived Dogme 95 movement, The King Is Alive, in  2000. A year later she and Alan Cumming came out with this comedy-drama which adheres to most of the naturalist, here-and-now Dogme rules.

Leigh and Cumming play a married Hollywood couple, an actress and author-turned-director, on the day of their sixth wedding anniversary which comes a few months after reuniting following a separation.  They host an anniversary party for all their friends which, this being Hollywood, include ex-lovers, financial advisers, the actors and directors they are currently working with and the hostile next-door neighbors. There are underlying tensions between all the guests from the start which slowly get worse as the night wears on and really disintegrate when one person pulls out some Ecstasy for an anniversary gift.

The film has the interweaving flow of a great social comedy like Rules Of The Game. Various insecurities and jealousies flare up as people worry about getting passed over for acting roles, the burden of having children and their spouses' exes among other things. It sounds like a load of Hollywood navel-gazing but a very good cast consisting mostly of Leigh's and Cumming's friends makes all these tribulations immediate and engaging. Said friends include Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Beals, Parker Posey, Phoebe Cates and Gwyneth Paltrow so you'd expect the acting to be top notch.  This is a fine and compelling little movie that shows Leigh and Cumming have real talent on the back end of a camera. It's a shame they haven't followed up with anything else since this movie came out.

My Baby Is Black! (1961) / Checkerboard (1959)

This is one of Something Weird Video's inimitable double feature DVDs featuring a pair of French exploitation films directed by one Claude Bernard-Aubert that both dealt with the then super-taboo subject of interracial romance.

My Baby Is Black! is not all that exploitative. It starts with, as the title suggests, a scene of a young white woman in a hospital giving birth to an extremely dark baby. Then the film goes back in time to detail the meeting and romance of two college students in Paris, a young white French woman and a black American man. There is a lot of dialogue about racial prejudice but the couple goes through very little of it as the movie progresses. All their friends are cool with the relationship and few others care as they walk down the street together. A few scenes do bring it up as when a few young punks attack another black man walking with a white woman and the leading man is arrested for helping out a little black kid attacked by a store owner but even these scenes are more described than shown. This version of this film was edited for an American audience and it feels like there are pieces that would flesh everything out that have been removed.

The big conflict, such as it is, comes when the couple argue and break up.  The girl then finds out she's pregnant and tells her parents who raise holy Hell using copious amounts of the "N---" word. At the end the girl is visited at the hospital by her college buddies and, with no ceremony, her boyfriend who just shows back up saying he's sorry. The movie ends with the young couple happily wheeling their new baby down a Paris street. That's it, no further hint of future problems with society. As unsexy as this all is, it does demonstrate how different the European attitude towards interracial love was from American standards then. I can't think of a single American film of that time that showed a black-white love affair ending happily. Here and in the British "Jazz Othello" film All Night Long, not only is that possible but it's treated as no big deal.

In Bernard-Aubert's earlier Checkerboard, the black-white thing does lead to all sorts of violence but tellingly this film is set in America. At least a reasonable facsimile of the American South, a small shanty town called Cicada, where the black people all work for the whites but are forced to live in a rundown section of the town and forced to stay there after dark. In one of the details that show the filmmakers were a little unclear on how this segregation thing worked, all the town's youths (who all look about 25-30) go to the same school together because "the town is too poor for real segregation" as one local explains.

In the midst of all this, a plot breaks out as one white kid, a returning war veteran starts romancing one of the local black girls. The local rednecks dislike this, beat the kid up and blame it on the blacks. There's a vigilante march on the black section, some homes are burned and a lot of guns are waved around but miraculously no one gets killed. The families of the vet and his girl eventually leave town while everyone else stays stuck in their stew of prejudice.

The movie has a somewhat cockeyed view of the American South with details like the school business and none of the black men (really Africans going by the cast names) wearing shirts at any time. On the other hand  few American films back then or since have touched on the ugly reality of race riots where crazed white men burned out black communities and murdered everyone they could find. Being an exploitation film there is the occasional flash of both male and female nudity (from the back) and the ending features a dead man carried out of town by his friends who turns out to be alive, a trick I remember seeing used in spaghetti westerns several years after this.

Like all Something Weird doubles, this has a bunch of extra features, the class of which is a short called Paris After Hours. This is no nudie oo-la-la. It's a film of a jazz party held inside a small Paris apartment. Dizzy Gillespie can be heard on the soundtrack while the onscreen performers include Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters. Roger Vadim and Sydney Chaplin are supposed to be among the partygoers but Lord knows where.

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.