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Movie Roundup: Crime Movie Lightning Round Edition

Lightning strikes again.
Phantom Lady – Wrong man noir from Robert Siodmak.  A man is imprisoned for murder and his only alibi is a woman with a crazy hat.  His faithful assistant (Ella Raines) must find her before he gets executed.  Franchot Tone, the best friend, tries to help, or does he??  Elisha Cook almost steals the show as a horny drummer.  Suitably weird.  The #14 film of 1944.
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry – George Sanders playing against type brilliantly as a hen-pecked brother of a couple of crazy sisters in another Siodmak noir.  When he meets Ella Raines he plots his escape from his dreary family and small town, with noirish results.  The ending doesn’t work at all, and is even more obviously tacked on than that of a certain Fritz Lang film, but before that we’re treated to a pretty crazy quilt of murder, new England provincialism and insinuated incest.  The #19 film of 1945.
Shockproof – A film noir written by Samuel Fuller and directed by Douglas Sirk.  You wouldn’t think those two sensibilities would go together, but they share an interest in superheated emotion and wild plotting (I would love to see a Fuller Magnificent Obsession, or a Sirk Naked Kiss).  Anyway, Cornel Wilde plays a parole officer (named Griff, naturally) who falls for his parolee, a gangster’s girl.  He gets her a job taking care of his blind mom, she plots to escape and run off with her boyfriend, while stringing Griff along.  It’s not really shocking, nor does it prove anything, but there’s enough there to chew on, if not to the standard of either man’s greatest films.  The #15 film of 1949.
Gone in 60 Seconds – The car chase movie was perfected in 1974, but for some inexplicable reason, people keep making them.  Entirely independent, written, produced, directed by and starring Toby Halicki and a Mustang Mach 1.  The first half of the film is a vague plot about a gang of car thieves stealing a ridiculous amount of cars in a short period of time.  There’s little in the way of acting and most of the dialogue is in post-recorded voiceover.  The second half is a 45 minute car chase that’s just about the greatest thing in the history of the automobile.  Pure cinema.  The #6 film of 1974.
City of Fear – Big disappointment after how much I loved Murder By Contract, also directed by Irving Lerner, especially given the swell title.  It’s a procedural, Cold War panic kind of thing, with Vince Edwards as an escaped convict packing radioactive cobalt that’s slowly killing him and may kill all of Los Angeles if he isn’t found.  Sometimes people in movies are dumb and it makes me sad and bored.  I suspect Lerner is not a wizard.  The #16 film of 1959.

Movie Roundup: 2010 Lightning Round Edition

Still way behind, so I’m going to try to get through these even more quickly than usual.  I wrote some longer bits for Metro Classics a few weeks ago, about some BIlly Wilder films, a Powell & Pressburger and a scary samurai movie.
Easy A – A perfectly charming teen comedy.  Emma Stone is great, Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson plays idealized parents.  The social commentary isn’t particularly incisive, though it does hint at the scary Puritanism of the current generation (The Scarlet Letter doesn’t adapt as well to high school as Emma did, but better than Taming of the Shrew).  This movie makes me feel old: for once, I identified more with the parents than the kids.  The #25 film of 2010.
Restrepo – A fine film as a slice of a year in the life of soldiers defending a remote outpost in Afghanistan, but it lacks the narrative structure or context to make it interesting on anything more than the most mundane, day-to-day level.  These guys deserve a story.  The #43 film of 2010.
The Illusionist – Sylvain Chomet’s animated realization of a Jacques Tati script.  A young girl tags along an aging vaudeville magician, brightening his life and that of his very depressed coworkers.  She grows up and moves on, he stays alone.  Not in the class of Tati’s own films, it’s more sweet and sad than anything else I’ve seen of his.  Brilliant and profound though they are, they never aspire to this kind of sentimentality.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Lovely score, I think Chomet’s animation style is a bit too grotesque.  The #11 film of 2010.
Never Let Me Go – One of those sci-fi films that doesn’t work for me because it’s on the border between believable fiction and wild fantasy.  Like Children of Men, say, I can’t see how the world it creates would ever actually happen, which lessens the drama tremendously.  If the scientific breakthrough that forms the core of the film’s premise were to ever actually happen, I see no way that the world would deal with it in the way the film posits it would (and also forms the foundation for its assertions about society and human nature), certainly not in the timeframe the film allows it.  Absent that firm basis, the film plays more as moody sulkiness and pretty images than anything truly interesting or insightful.  Also not believable: that anyone would pick Keira Knightley over Carey Mulligan.  The #31 film of 2010.
Machete – Robert Rodriguez spinning his wheels.  It’s fun, and kind of funny, but mostly it’s exactly what you expect it to be.  Planet Terror and Once Upon a Time in Mexico did the same thing, but with more style and creativity.  The #39 film of 2010.
Kick Ass – Watchmen without the self-importance, and also without the ambition.  It’s fine.  The #38 film of 2010.
Summer Wars – Nifty anime from the guy who did The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, though this isn’t quite that good.  Weird vision of the internet as a Paprika-style dreamworld almost overwhelms the emotional moments: the family-bonding and coming of age romanticism.  Girl was more heartfelt and grounded, if even more fantastical.  The #25 film of 2009.
Unstoppable – I don’t know if Tony Scott is a genius, but this as as good as the contemporary American action film gets.  Modest and focused where the Bays and Nolans are bloated and chaotic, the film does exactly what it tells you its going to do, with a minimum of fuss.  Not so the visual style, of course, but Scott’s peripatetic camera and editing don’t distract me too much.  I need to watch the rest of his recent films, there’s a big gap between this and Crimson Tide.  The #29 film of 2010.

Movie Roundup: Welcome DFAs Edition

 

The Heartbreak Kid – Is to The Graduate what Two-Lane Blacktop is to Easy Rider: a much darker, more realistic, less populist version of the same basic idea.  Charles Grodin plays a young sporting goods salesman who goes to Miami on his honeymoon and meets Cybill Shepherd, who is everything his new wife is not.  When his wife gets a horrible sunburn, he pursues Shepherd relentlessly, ends his marriage and follows her to Minnesota.  Director Elaine May balances the comedy with the very real cruelty and desperation in Grodin’s character, his breakup scene with his wife is as black as cringe humor gets.  The #5 film of 1972.

 

The Prowler – A film noir from Joseph Losey, in which Van Heflin plays a cop called out to investigate a peeping tom.  He falls in love with the woman placing the call (Evelyn Keyes) and plots to murder her husband as the two begin an affair.  They get away with it, except Keyes’s pregnancy threatens to give away the crime.  Set in only a few iconic locations (Heflin’s spare apartment, a ghost town) and with the husband a constant presence over the radio in the early scenes (he’s a DJ or something), Losey creates one of the blackest noirs I’ve seen, and Heflin’s cop is one of the genre’s scariest protagonists.  The #16 film of 1951.

Ministry of Fear – A wartime film noir from Fritz Lang, though the plot seems a more natural fit for Alfred Hitchcock.  Ray Milland plays a nice guy recently let out of a mental hospital who gets himself involved in a Nazi spy ring and finds himself framed for murder.  He skulks about avoiding the cops and the bad guys while making friends with a pretty girl and every once in a while wondering if he’s crazy or not.  The wrong man setup and the plot convolutions are Hitchcock’s natural territory, but Lang brings more serious bleakness and less comedy to the material.  It’s not as good as Lang’s similar Man Hunt from a couple years earlier, but it has a better ending than the other Lang noir from 1944, the otherwise solid The Woman in the Window.  The #9 film of 1944.

The Marquise of O – Thanks to a couple of sales at amazon.uk, I find myself owning almost every Eric Rohmer film on DVD.  But I haven’t gone on a Rohmer-watching rampage.  Not because I don’t want to see them all, but rather because I want to savor them and parcel them out slowly over the rest of my life.  Watching them all in a few months would just feel wrong, given what the films are like: their decidedly unrushed pace, the value they place in a contemplative approach to life.  This was his first feature after finishing his series of Six Moral Tales with 1972’s Love in the Afternoon (he appears to have been making a TV series in the interim) and it’s a rare Rohmer film that’s not part of a larger series.  Based on a German novel, it’s about a young high-born widow in a war-torn country who appears to have become pregnant without knowing why.  It turns out Bruno Ganz took advantage of her while she was passed out after a battle.  Ganz is desperately trying to get her and her family to let him marry her, but they just think he’s weird to be in so much of a hurry.  When her pregnancy becomes obvious, her family throws her out, despite her protestations of innocence.  Only Rohmer could get us to believe in the romanticism of it all and actually root for Ganz to get the girl and live happily ever after.  The #4 film of 1976.

 

La Commune (Paris 1871) – A massive film from Peter Watkins that recreates the events of the Paris Commune on a big soundstage with barebones sets and covers it like an extended live from the scene news report.  Using modern media techniques to mirror the press of the past and deconstruct the media of the present, our guides for much of the film are two reports from “Commune TV” who interview various Parisian citizens, soldiers, rich and poor women, government and Commune officials, etc, all with a stridently pro-Commune POV (these are contrasted with mainstream news programs that give the establishment line on the events).  The Commune was a democratic socialist revolt that established, for a short time, a new government within Paris.  Why and how the Commune failed is the major subject of the film, as are its big successes (secular public education, the right of women to vote, wage equality between genders and such) and we see it all play out in granular detail over the film’s four hour running time.  But more than just a history lesson, the film repeatedly loops the Commune into the issues of the present, not just in the media, but in many of the same concerns of feminism and anti-capitalism that are on-going and seemingly never-ending.  The most wondrous moment of the film is when we realize that a group of actors we’ve been watching stating their grievances and opinions in character for hours have suddenly started talking about themselves and their own beliefs, and how the experience of just being in the film has made them see their world in a new way.

Best of lists are strange things, and my own don’t aspire to any claim of objectivity, but are instead my own favorites and films I like to watch again and again and their order changes with my mood and my age.  I’ve really never made a claim as to what is the greatest film of all-time, I don’t think such a thing is possible.  When asked, I always say Seven Samurai because that’s usually my favorite.  But there are lots of possible answers for me, and lots more reasonable answers for other people.  It wouldn’t be my choice, but if someone told me La Commune was the greatest film of all-time, I wouldn’t argue with them.  I’d say “Yeah, I can see that.”  But for me right now, it’s the #4 film of 2000.

Movie Roundup: Happy Trails, Blazers Edition

I remain ridiculously far behind, so I’m going to try to speed through some of these.

Bonjour Tristesse – Jean Seberg stars in Otto Preminger’s film about a girl trying to break up her father’s relationship with an old girlfriend while they all live a decadent rich people life on the Riviera.  David Niven plays her father and Deborah Kerr the girlfriend.  It’s like that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper hangs out with rich homeless people in California, but with a bit of The Parent Trap thrown in. It’s lovely, the prettiest thing I’ve seen from Preminger.  The #10 film of 1958.
The Moon is Blue – More Preminger, this a goofy sex comedy with the adorable Maggie McNamera playing a curious, brainy young girl who gets hit on by William Holden and David Niven.  She shocks them with her frank talk about sex (theoretical sex she notes) and various comedic situations ensue.  A fairly successful attempt at bringing the screwball aesthetic into the 50s, it helps that the leads are all pretty charming.  The #17 film of 1953.
Ip Man – Donnie Yen is pretty dour and serious as the Chinese folk hero who resisted the Japanese in a variety of movies (Fist of Fury and Fist of Legend, for two).  The action scenes are, as one would expect from Yen and choreographer Sammo Hung, spectacular.  But the film is really depressing.  Not in a psychotically dark Ong Bak 2 kind of way, that would be more interesting.  More in a self-serious hero-worshiping kind of way.  The #46 film of 2008.
Jewel Robbery – Kay Francis stars as a wealthy woman who hates her husband.  When she’s robbed of her latest jewel during a store holdup, she falls for the thief (him being William Powell, this is entirely understandable).  It’s a slight, but charming proto-screwball, though I think director William Dieterle doesn’t really have the lightness of touch needed to make a film like this soar.  The #29 film of 1932.
Drunken Master – I watched the dubbed version Instant Netflix has of this seminal Jackie Chan film.  Perhaps that’s why I found a lot of the comedy pretty lame.  Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, and costarring his father Yuen Siu Tien as the old master who teaches Chan the revolutionary Drunken Style of kung fu, the fights are pretty great, as you’d expect, and the genius of the Drunken Style, invented for this film, (though it has antecedents in traditional martial arts) is undeniable.  I wish I could see it in its proper form, because as is, I found it a little underwhelming.  The #10 film of 1978.
Jane Eyre – The version with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, two of my favorite actors. Welles I can believe as the imperious lord with a secret looked in a closet of his gloomy mansion.  But I’ll never understand why Joan Fontaine kept getting these parts where she was supposed to be plain or mousy, instead of stunningly beautiful.  Anyway, the film flits along like it’s adapting a book it assumes the audience has read and is therefore able to fill in all the details that make the characters and events interesting.  But I haven’t read the book.  I Walked with a Zombie is better.  So is director Robert Stevenson’s work with Disney (Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Mary Poppins, etc).  The #16 film of 1943.

Movie Roundup: Three More Weeks of Hell Edition

As this spring’s Metro Classics series is winding down, with Seven Samurai playing this week (tickets are going fast!) followed by Night of the Hunter and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I should be able to catch up with the movies I’ve seen this year (I’m 37 movies behind, at the moment.)  I wrote about some Nicholas Ray films over there a couple weeks ago, and have a little thing on samurai movies going up tomorrow.  Here are the Movies of the Year rankings for the newly seen films:

Run for Cover – 24, 1955
Bitter Victory – 8, 1957
The True Story of Jesse James – 25, 1957
The Savage Innocents – 4, 1960
55 Days at Peking – 21, 1963

Louisiana Story – A stunning film by Robert Flaherty, 25 years after his most famous and influential film, the eskimo documentary Nanook of the North.  He chronicles life in a bayou and the ways that primal existence is altered by the coming of an oil rig.  The film was funded by Standard Oil, so you don’t expect it to be particularly polemical against the incursions of heavy industry into nature, but one can’t help coming away disturbed by the contrast between the idyllic, though dangerous, environment and the menacing and very very loud machinery of the rig.  Seen through the eyes of a young boy and his pet raccoon, both the bayou and the rig are places for adventure, and at least in this version of the world, able to exist in harmony with each other, for a little while.  Shot by the late Richard Leacock, the film has a mystical kind of beauty that one would associate more with Flaherty’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas collaborator FW Murnau than Leacock’s cinéma vérité or the more standard images of Nanook.  The  #7 film of 1948, though that’s probably selling it a bit short.

The Furies – Anthony Mann in 1950 may have had the greatest single year for any director ever, certainly for a director in the Western genre.  He began his series with James Stewart with the encyclopedic Winchester ’73.  He created one of the greatest and earliest pro-Indian Westerns ever with Devil’s Doorway.  And he made this film, a tragic melodrama with Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston in his final performance.  Huston plays an aging ranch owner, Stanwyck his daughter.  When Huston buys off the man she loves, hooks up with a golddigger, and declares war on her squatting Mexican friends, she gets her revenge in increasingly cold-blooded ways.  Pointing the way toward the psychological bent Mann would give his Westerns, especially in the Stewart films, The Furies plays up its Freudian complications and allusions to Greek tragedy, going to places far darker and disturbing than most Westerns of its time.  The #9 film of 1950.

Run of the Arrow – Another great progressive Western is this film from Samuel Fuller, the plot of which may be somewhat familiar.  Rod Steiger plays a Civil War veteran who goes West and gets himself adopted into a Sioux tribe.  Inevitably, his new people come into conflict with the US Army, and Steiger, after trying to peacefully resolve things, has to choose which side he’s on.  Yup, it’s Dances with Wolves, but instead of bloated, self-righteous and condescending, Fuller respects both cultures enough to show both their beauty and their brutality, all within a compact narrative that doesn’t waste a single shot and moves forward with a ruthless momentum.  The #10 film of 1957.

The War Game – A harrowing vision of what exactly would happen in the event of a nuclear war, made for the BBC at the height of the Cold War by Peter Watkins (it was pulled from broadcast when, according to wikipedia, the BBC said, “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” Which sounds about right to me.)  A day by day, hour by hour account of what the attack would look like, what it would do to people near the center of the blast and the primitive state the aftermath of the war would reduce British society to, it’s hard to imagine what a more devastating anti-nuke film would look like.  The #8 film of 1965.

Culloden – But that was just a follow-up to another Watkins anti-war film.  A year earlier, he made this document about the 1746 battle in which the Scottish uprising around Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was crushed by British troops, ending 150 years or so of civil war on British soil.  Shot in the style of a TV war report or sporting event (TV tends to treat them the same), the film chronicles the absolute bungle of the battle by the Scottish commanders and the brutal loss of life it caused.  Using the vérité style to film historical recreations, Watkins makes engrossing, wrenching documentaries that a lot of people wouldn’t consider documentaries at all, since they use actors and scripts and costumes etc.  That aside, the fact that the same visual style is now used in every cheap History Channel series can hardly be his fault, can it?  Does the History Channel even show these kinds of things anymore?  Regardless, by including the reporter in with the story, as the narrator who can barely disguise his disgust in the case of this film, Watkins further undermines the myth of vérité as objective documentation and raises a host of questions about the way our news media operates today.  These issues are all more fully explored in his masterpiece from 2000 La Commune (Paris, 1871), which I’ll get to reviewing hopefully in the next few weeks.  The #10 film of 1964.