A Shameless Plug from Vinyl Is Heavy.

The AFI updated its Top 100 American Films List last night, but I didn’t know it was on and failed to watch it. The list’s a bit better than the one from ten years ago, but not much. Apparently, “America” now not only includes England (Lawrence Of Arabia, Bridge On The River Kwai, several works by Stanley Kubrick), but New Zealand (Fellowship Of The Ring) as well. Yay America!

On the plus side, a number of Metro Classics made the list. Casablanca dropped from #2 to #3, and Taxi Driver went from #47 to #52 but The Searchers rode from #96 to #12, Duck Soup flew from #85 to #60, Sunrise burst onto the list at #82 and the right thing was done as Do The Right Thing joins the list at #96.

Speaking of Sunrise, did I mention it’s playing at the Metro Cinemas next Wednesday, June 27? And that the rest of the Metro Classics will be playing every Wednesday for the rest of the summer? Bring you friends, meet Duff and Bill and score some free popcorn by mentioning The End Of Cinema.

A couple weeks ago I included a couple of lines dismissing Anthony Mann’s Man Of The West in a speedy Movie Roundup:

“Mediocre Western starring the always(?) mediocre Gary Cooper. Anthony Mann made far better films, I was just never into it. Maybe I should give it another shot? The #13 film of 1958.”

Which prompted a detailed response from faithful reader Andrew, in which he asserts that the film is, in his opinion, the best Western ever, and possibly the best American film of the last 50 years. He urged me to revisit the film and come up with a more detailed response to it. Well, it was on TCM last week, and I watched it again, being careful to pay closer attention to it. What follows is Andrew’s comments and my responses to them.

Cooper’s performance is brilliant, a perfect portrait of a dying man who can barely muster the energy for one last burst of violence, though I can see why some people might not be so impressed by it or Cooper in general. I know many are turned off by his overemphatic “folksy” delivery, but watch any of his good movies with the sound off for a few minutes and you’ll see a great performer whose moves, looks, and gestures are perfectly choreographed. Then watch him with sound again, and you’ll probably be more impressed.

Acting is a difficult thing for someone like me, who knows very little about that art. But I do know what I like, and Gary Cooper isn’t it. I will admit that Cooper’s a wonderful physical actor, his comic sequences in the beginning of the film, showing his characters discomfort in both a town and a train are well done. But his voice bugs the hell out of me and he always seems to have the same expression on his face (a kind of befuddled determination) which works in some films (The Fountainhead) but not really here.

Part of the problem is that he’s playing a Mann character that James Stewart set the type for: the former outlaw trying to go straight and sucked back into a world of violence. This is set up well in the beginning (the aforementioned fish out of water jokes) but falls apart towards the end, when Cooper seems bored where Stewart brought a maniacal intensity to the same role in films like Bend Of The River or The Naked Spur. This is a game Cooper can’t help but lose: Stewart’s quite possibly my favorite actor.

Mann’s direction, though, is impeccable; it reaches the level of the best work of Rossellini, Melville, Ford, and Bresson, where every composition and camera movement is perfect and, more important, _necessary_ to the whole. Watch the way Mann tracks back behind a wagon wheel as a humiliated outlaw crawls for a gun, or the astonishing way in which he shoots the climax in the ghost town. The latter sequence is the definition of great action direction; the spatial relationships are so clear you could draw a map of the entire event after one viewing (see the beautiful track capturing Jones and the two gunmen in one shot), and the way Mann splits up horizontal and vertical areas of the Scope screen to define the action reveals a more sophisticated formalist than Peckinpah or Leone.

This I must agree with absolutely. The final shootout sequence in the ghost town is brilliantly done, both in the mise-en-scene (an empty wasteland of a town, devoid of both human and vegetal life (except for the poor Mexican couple who get caught in the crossfire) and in the camera movement. The crane shot up and away from Cooper preceding the final battle is as elegant as anything in the genre. Mann was a great director, and like any great director there’s always something interesting in even their worst films (which this film isn’t for sure).

I agree he’s superior to Peckinpaugh, but Leone’s aesthetic is so radically different (while being similar, perhaps, thematically) that I wouldn’t compare them in this way.

But unlike those two directors, who he resembles and influences in his violence and awareness of genre, Mann brings a genuine, unironic sense of tragedy to the action; both the urgency and the inevitability of the theme (all the usual suspects: desert/garden, outlaw violence/civilized community contrasts, inescapable past) are felt more strongly than in similar (and similarly great) films from My Darling Clementine and The Searchers to The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country.

Here I disagree, Yes, the film is thematically similar to many great Westerns, with the usual oppositions in place and worked out through the action. But this film feels far more schematic and theatrical than the best Westerns (The Searchers, Once Upon A Time In The West, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Winchester 73, Unforgiven). The characters in Man Of The West never feel real and organically human, but instead as echoes of Mann films past. Part of the problem is the acting (aside from Cooper, it’s a collection of unremarkable B-listers and scenery-chewers) and part of it is the construction of the narrative itself. I’m still trying to figure out when the film took place (less than ten years after the railroad reached eastern Texas, I guess, but wasn’t that long before The End Of The West that the film thematically deals with?) or why Cooper, after being left behind by the train went straight to his old gang’s hideout, or why the fugitive gambler is such a coward (he was outlaw enough to be known by the Law) or why the only people left behind by the train are the two who’d previously interacted with Cooper, or why the gang thought they’d rob a bank in a ghost town (it’s established that the crazy old leader is totally out of touch, but why are his underlings as well?). There are more holes and questions that keep popping up and I think that no matter how great the directing, a narrative so full of holes just can’t be a truly great genre film. I spend too much time asking questions about the story to care about the characters or the ideas the film is trying to convey.

I only saw it for the first time a year ago, when it immediately vaulted into my all-time top ten, and subsequent viewings confirm its greatness. I can only urge you to take a longer look, or else figure out more concretely what about the film doesn’t work for you.

I thank Andrew for his post, because Mann certainly deserved a closer look than I initially gave the film, but in the end my feeling for it hasn’t changed much. The film it most reminded me of was Howard Hawks’s Rio Lobo: a fine film, but one he had done better a few times before. I’d rank any of the Mann-Stewart Westerns above this, as well as several films by Ford, Hawks, Leone, Eastwood and the Westerns I’ve seen from Fuller, Boetticher and possibly even Peckinpaugh. I’m comfortable with it as my #13 film of 1958, though I may bump it above Gigi, but I should watch that film (which I haven’t seen since college) again before making a final decision.

Metro Classics is now up on the Landmark Theatres website. Remember, free popcorn for anyone who finds me and mentions The End Of Cinema!

And now, back to the countdown. 1953 was a pretty good year, with a number of great American films, but the top of the list is dominated by France and Japan. Check out The Big List links on the sidebar for up-to-date list for 1954-2006, plus explanations, methodologies, apologies, equivocations, etc.

22. Glen Or Glenda
21. Peter Pan
20. Shane
19. From Here To Eternity
18. How To Marry A Millionaire
17. The Wild One
16. The Wages Of Fear

15. Julius Caesar – Joseph Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the Shakespeare play. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, and all I remember is the acting, by Marlon Brando, James Mason and John Gielgud. It’s probably my least favorite of the Shakespeare I’ve seen or read (which unfortunately, isn’t all that much), I don’t know why, it just seems unfocused and kind of all over the place. It’s a fine film, and the performances are pretty good, and of course Brando (playing way against type, but that’s acting) and Mason (one of my favorite underrated actors) are terrific.

14. I Confess – One of the less well-known Hitchcock films, but a good one. Montgomery Clift plays a priest who through confession learns who committed a murder. He becomes the police’s #1 suspect, however, when he won’t violate the privileged communication and tell them whodunnit. Anne Baxter and Karl Malden costar, but Clift is the real standout. He’s one of my favorite actors and he gives a great performance here. As method actors go, he’s every bit as good as Brando and James Dean were, in my opinion.

13. The Blue Gardenia – Fritz Lang’s fine film noir stars Anne Baxter as a depressed woman who agrees to go out with womanizing journalist Raymond Burr. When he tries to date rape her, she hits him and passes out. When she wakes up, Burr’s lying dead on the floor. Richard Conte plays the journalist who tracks her down and tries to get her to turn herself in, and Ann Southern and George Reeves also star, along with Nat King Cole playing himself singing the title song. Baxter’s great and Burr’s really good as a sleazeball, and Lang’s direction is as solid as ever. Probably not one of his best films, but not bad at all.

12. Mogambo – John Ford’s remake of the 1932 film Red Dust, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Gable stars again in the same role as an African hunter at the heart of a love triangle between the slutty Ava Gardner and the proper Grace Kelly (ah, movies). The Technicolors are really great, but the film didn’t impress me that much on first viewing. Tag Gallagher made a great case for it in his Ford book, though, so it’s one I’ll definitely be watching again.

11. Roman Holiday – Audrey Hepburn’s breakthrough role as a visiting princess who runs away from her boring structured life and runs wild on the streets of Rome with journalist Gregory Peck. It’s an entertaining light comedy-romance, and all right-thinking people can’t help but love Audrey Hepburn. Directed by William Wyler and co-written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (I Married A Witch, Spartacus).

10. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Howard Hawks lunatic screwball musical stars Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as a pair of hot chicks looking for husbands on a cruise ship. Monroe’s after money (diamonds, apparently, are her friends), while Russell’s more into muscles. Like The Seven-Year Itch, I think the consensus likes the film more than I do. While the two leads are great, and the plot’s pretty zany, the songs are mostly just OK and the supporting performances aren’t particularly good (or at least memorable).

9. The Naked Spur – Another Anthony Mann-James Stewart western, this time with Stewart playing a bounty hunter out to capture Robert Ryan. Unfortunately when catches him, he’s got to bring Ryan’s girlfriend (Janet Leigh) along for the ride, with Ralph Meeker (an itinerant ex-soldier) and an old gold prospector tagging along as well. It’s not on of the best Mann westerns, but, as usual, Stewart is great. While it slows a bit in the middle, as Ryan tries to play all members of the party against each other to win his freedom, the ending, on the eponymous spur, is really cool.

8. The Hitch-Hiker – Ida Lupino’s ultra-low budget noir about a couple of regular guys who pick up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be an escaped murderer. The killer forces them to drive him through Mexico trying to evade the law. The three actors (Edmund O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy and William Talman) are terrific and Lupino photographs the stark desert landscapes with a lot of menace, adding to the psychological intensity of the whole thing.

7. The Big Heat – One of Fritz Lang’s best American films is this noir starring Glenn Ford as a cop out to revenge himself on the people who murdered his family (among them Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame). Not as nihilistic or black as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly or a few other noirs, but it’s still pretty bleak. Marvin famously throws a pot of coffee in Grahame’s face.

6. The Band Wagon – My favorite Vincente Minnelli musical stars Fred Astaire as a performer trying to make a comeback on Broadway. He signs on to a musical version of Faust directed by and starring a wicked caricature of Orson Welles (played by Jack Buchanan) and a snooty Cyd Charisse with songs written by Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray (apparently based on Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote the film, as well as On The Town and It’s Always Fair Weather). The Faust thing falls apart, but they pull things together to rewrite the play as a noir parody, the famous “Girl Hunt” sequence, which caps the film. One of the all-time great self-reflexive musicals, along with Comden and Green’s Singin’ In The Rain and Minnelli’s The Pirate.

5. Pickup On South Street – Samuel Fuller’s near perfect noir stars Richard Widmark as a pickpocket who accidently picks the pocket of a Soviet spy on her way to deliver secrets to the bad guys, right under the noses of the FBI agents who are watching her. Soon, he’s the uncooperative target of the feds and the commies, with everyone out to get everybody else. The highlight is a brilliant supporting performance by Thelma Ritter (for which she won an Oscar) as a small-time stool pigeon trying to save enough money to buy herself a nice grave site. Fuller and noir were a perfect match, with his remarkable skill at hard-nosed, cynical dialogue and striking black and white compositions.

4. Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu’s classic film about how the post-war generation of young Japanese are a bunch of jerks who don’t respect their elders. An aged couple (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) travel around Tokyo visiting their grown-up children and their families and are largely perceived as annoying bothers. Eventually they give up on the kids and spend the rest of their vacation hanging out together. It’s probably Ozu’s most famous film, though it’s a bit too bitter for me to call it his best (I prefer Late Spring, personally).

3. Madame de. . . – Max Ophuls masterpiece about a pair of earrings winding their way through high society infidelity. Danielle Darrieux (The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg) plays the eponymous madame, the wife of a high-ranking military officer who pawns the earrings to pay off her gambling debts. Boyer, her husband, buys them back and gives them to his mistress as a going away present. Vittorio DiSica buys them traveling in Egypt (or somewhere far away) and brings them back to Paris, where he eventually gives them to Darrieux during the affair he’s having with her. The dizzying plot is paralleled in the directing, featuring Ophuls trademark long, flowing tracking shots up, down and around the opulent decadence.

2. M. Hulot’s Holiday – Jacques Tati’s great film introduces his most famous character (one he never could escape) with his vacation to a beach resort populated by a typical variety of vacationers. Tati was perhaps the only sound film successor of Keaton and Chaplin, with his comedy having almost nothing to do with dialogue (though sound is essential, some of the best gags in this and the other Hulot films revolve around sound effects). Tati filmed in deep focus longshot, with little or no closeups, the better to utilize the entire frame for the gags, all of which are grounded in a basic reality (unlike most other physical comedians of the sound era). Basically, if you’ve never seen a Tati film, you’ve never seen anything like a Tati film. It’s not as good, because not as resonate or, dare I say, spiritual, as his great Playtime (#1, 1967), but it’s an amazing film and a must-see for anyone who likes film or comedy (does that leave anybody out?).

1. Ugetsu – My favorite Kenji Mizoguchi film is the two part tale of a pair of potters from a small village who abandon their wives in the midst of war to pursue their own ambition. One lives out his dream of becoming a samurai while his wife is raped and forced into prostitution while the other is ensnared by a ghost and waylaid while his wife and child are chased across the country by brigands. A beautiful, beautiful film, full of haunting sequences (the trip down a foggy river is my favorite, though the final sequence is as gut-wrenching as anything in cinema) and Mizoguchi’s signature long tracking shots. The performances are all terrific, and the film stars Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo, who both also starred in Rashomon.

Lots of good stuff among the films I haven’t seen this year, adding to what was already a terrific year for film.

Anatahan
The Sun Shines Bright
I Love Melvin
Give A Girl A Break
The Golden Coach
Stalag 17
The War Of The Worlds
House Of Wax
Niagara
Beat The Devil
The Robe
I Vitelloni
Kiss Me Kate
The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T
Hondo
El
Thunder Bay
Gate Of Hell
Summer With Monika
Sawdust And Tinsel
The Story Of Three Loves
Dangerous When Wet
99 River Street

Trying to kill time while waiting for Metro Classics to get rolling (bring your friends!), here’s a little roundup of the new films I’ve seen in the last week. Written while listening to Roger Ebert’s commentary on the Criterion version of Ozu’s Floating Weeds (#5, 1959). (By the way, it looks like Criterion’s going to release Days Of Heaven (#1, 1978) this fall. At least, that’s what their latest newsletter hints. I know I can’t wait.)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . And Spring – Mesmerizing Buddhist fable by Korean director Kim Ki-duk. On a small floating temple on a remote mountain lake, a monk raises a young boy. The five chapters follow five phases in their lives, as the boy grows up, fails to resist temptation, suffers and finally learns a bit about life, with some sex and self-immolation along the way. Shot amid beautiful landscapes, the film is chock full of the kind of symbolism that makes stoned college students rhapsodize incoherently til the wee hours of the morning (a different animal for each story, doorways without walls, long walks with a big rock, that kind of thing). Nonetheless, Kim directs with a light touch and the narrative never bogs down in inaccessibility or incomprehensibility. One of the best religious films I’ve ever seen, not least because of that humility. The #3 film of 2003.

Forty Guns – Barbara Stanwyck stars in Samuel Fuller’s Western about a “high-ridin’ woman with a whip”. Three bounty hunter brothers show up in a small town in search of a fugitive, who happens to be one of the eponymous gunmen Stanwyck employs to run her cattle empire. The oldest brother (Griff, played by Barry Sullivan) also manages to start a feud with Stanwyck’s little brother, who’s rather psychotic. But, of course, Griff and Stanwyck fall in love, with unfortunate consequences for both of their brothers. The dialogue’s got some famous double entendres, and Fuller uses the ‘Scope frame well, with wide Western vistas and some tense showdowns. If any director was made for the Western, it was Samuel Fuller. The studio enforced ending is pretty hilarious too. The #8 film of 1957.

The Big Sky – Howard Hawks adventure/western that is generally highly praised though not in circulation (two facts which may or may not be related). The print TCM ran a few days ago was in pretty bad shape, hopefully someone will come along and restore it. Kirk Douglas and dewey Martin are young mountain men who join grizzled vet Arthur Hunnicutt on a keel-boat trip up the Missouri River to trade with the Blackfoot Indians. The plot’s essentially similar to Hawks’s own Red River, made a few years before, but it lacks that film’s narrative tightness or the psychological complexity that film reaches in the father-son relationship between the heroic Montgomery Clift and the psychotic John Wayne. The film is notable for its sympathetic, and not entirely condescending, treatment of the Blackfoot, though both the Crow and Sioux are given the stereotypic movie-Indian role. Douglas, despite being the biggest star of the film, has been given the least interesting role, and doesn’t do much with it beyond flashing his big grin. Hunnicutt is terrific, however, both as the sage Zeb Calloway and as the film’s narrator.

The Dawn Patrol – Also known as Flight Commander, Howard Hawks’s first sound film sets the template for any number of aviation/war films that followed. Richard Barthelmess (Broken Blossoms, Only Angels Have Wings) plays the Captain of a WWI fighter squadron who’s always at odds with his disintegrating commanding officer (Neil Hamilton) who’s cracking up under the pressure of sending men off to die day after day. After directly disobeying orders and taking on a German airstrip (led by a thinly-veiled Red Baron) with only Douglas Fairbanks Jr to back him up, Barthelmess is promoted to flight commander as Hamilton is also promoted. And history repeats itself as Barthelmess begins to crack under the pressure. The flying scenes are very well done (I haven’t seen William Wellman’s Wings, from 1928, but this has to be state of the art for aerial photography). The acting is pretty good. A few of the minor roles are clearly played by people who still think they’re in silents, and Barthelmess can be a bit overexpressive at times, but he and Fairbanks are generally pretty good.

Rio Lobo – Howard Hawks’s last film is yet another reworking of the basic premise of Rio Bravo, but whereas he arguably improved on that great film with El Dorado, this is more of a dud than anything else. During the Civil War, John Wayne learns there’s a traitor in his troop. After the war, he teams up with some clever soldiers from the other side to track don the traitor, who happens to be part of a gang terrorizing the village of Rio Lobo. Wayne and the two men, with the help of some local girls, take on the bad guys and save the day. It’s not a bad film, but it’s certainly worse than the other two versions, and it’s got the most mediocre cast (Jack Elam and Jennifer O’Neill are no Robert Mitchum and Angie Dickenson). The #8 film of 1970.

Knock On Any Door – I missed this in the last roundup, I think, but this Nicholas Ray courtroom drama is a pretty mediocre addition to that genre, with a lackluster Humphrey Bogart performance as a lawyer defending a juvenile delinquent from a murder rap. Turns out the slums forced John Derek to be a petty thief and copkiller, at least that appears to be Bogart’s argument. It’s all a little more complex than that, and nothing shot by Ray can be without interest, but there’s not much of a story here.

Wuthering Heights – William Wyler’s adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic stars Laurence Olivier as the stable boy turned angry young gentleman jerked around by Merle Oberon’s crazy Cathy, who’s torn between sex with Olivier and money with David Niven. Perhaps as is necessary with an adaptation of such a famous book (which I’ve never read) the whole thing feels extremely rushed (every conversation is about Heathcliff, it’s like these people have nothing else to talk about). The Cathy character, in particular, seems underwritten. There’s no explanation for her radical changes of mood from scene to scene, the only explanation I’m left with is that she’s totally insane, which I guess works because Heathcliff’s stalker stable boy isn’t exactly Mr. Rational. The sexual psychology is cheap and obvious (Penistone Crag? Seriously??) Gregg Toland’s cinematography is quite nice though, tracking deep-focus shots and all that, but he did better with Welles and Ford. The film’s alright, but I don’t get its enduring reputation as a great film.

Usually with these roundups I like to devote more than a couple sentences to each film. But once again I’ve fallen way behind and am playing catchup, so we’ll try to speed through this as quickly as possible.

The Immortal Story – Late Orson Welles made for TV movie based on an Isak Dinesen story. Fine performances from Jeanne Moreau and Welles himself, and interesting story and a lack of typical Wellsian flourishes make for a fine, if not necessarily great film. The #7 film of 1968.

Moby Dick – John Huston’s adaptation of the Melville classic that I’ve still only made it halfway through, despite three attempts (the last was a decade ago). Orson Welles is great as the thundering preacher, and Gregory Peck makes a fine Ahab (though he was apparently panned at the time) but otherwise just an above-average literary translation. The #12 film of 1956.

Broken Blossoms – DW Griffith classic about an abused wife who finds refuge with a Chinese storekeeper, which ends in tragedy. Relatively racism-free, for Griffith, and a touching melodrama, actually quite a beautiful film. The world would be a better place if this was the film Griffith was most remembered for.

Little Women – Pedestrian literary adaptation enlivened by the perhaps too on the nose casting of Katherine Hepburn as Jo, her 19th Century doppelganger.

The Man Who Knew Too Much – I’d resisted seeing this Hitchcock remake of his own 1930s British film for such a long time, that it likely couldn’t help being surprisingly good. James Stewart is as good as ever, but Doris Day’s the real shocker with a fine performance as a mother caught up in international intrigue. The #5 film of 1956.

My Name Is Julia Ross – Very fine psychological noir film about a secretary who gets brainwashed into thinking she’s a rich guy’s wife. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a B movie auteur worthy of further study (his Gun Crazy is terrific).

Little Miss Sunshine – Generic indie comedy that somehow won a massive audience and a number of Oscar nominations despite its mediocre, cliche-ridden and generally messy script. The #27 film of 2006.

Madame de. . . – Max Ophuls masterpiece about a pair of earrings winding their way through high society infidelity. Gorgeous camera movements, fine performances from Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio Di Sica.

The Kid – Very fine Chaplin comedy/melodrama in which the Little Tramp comes to adopt an orphan. Jackie Cooper gives a tear-inducing performance and Chaplin’s in top form both in physical comedy and in his unique ability to sidestep maudlin in even the most sentimental works.

A King In New York – Late Chaplin about a deposed monarch who flees to America and is overwhelmed by modernity. Some very fine setpieces (Chaplin as TV advertiser, and a communist propaganda-spouting child are the funniest bits). The #7 film of 1957.

Blonde Venus – Marlene Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg combine for this melodramatic tale of infidelity and a mother on the run. Dietrich’s as great as ever as an ex-showgirl who goes back to work to make money for a life-saving operation for her husband. But while he’s away, she has an affair with another man. When the husband returns, he chases her all over the country to get his kid back. Overlong, but still good.

The Heroes Of Telemark – Decent enough WW2 action film set in Norway as the Allies try to blow up some Nazi reactors to prevent them from developing heavy water (necessary for an atomic bomb). Entertaining, but I expect better from director Anthony Mann. The #17 film of 1965.

The Train – This is more like it. Burt Lancaster leads a group of French Resistance trying to prevent Paul Scofield’s Nazi commander from stealing precious works of art during the last stages of WW2. Lancaster and friends try every means possible to stop Scofield’s train, without damaging the art. Lots of train wrecks and some exciting action and a fine supporting cast that includes Jeanne Moreau and Michel Simon. Lancaster’s really grown on me in the last year or so, I know longer hate him. Directed by John Frankenheimer. The #11 film of 1964.

New Rose Hotel – Ahead of its time noir from director Abel Ferrera stars Christopher Walken (in one of his great wacky performances) and Willem Dafoe as corporate espionage guys who hire Asia Argento to seduce a scientist and get him to move to another company. Has to be seen to be believed, the last 20 minutes are bizarre and wonderful. The #13 film of 1998.

The Quiet American – Joseph Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the Graham Greene story about a cynical Brit and idealistic American (who may be a CIA agent) in Vietnam and the woman they both love. A beautiful film with excellent performances by Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy. I haven’t seen the remake yet, but it’d be hard to top. The #6 film of 1958.

Pan’s Labyrinth – Quite overrated. Sloppy story construction is totally not excused by the film being a “fairy tale”. Del Toro makes it clear in the end that the whole fantastical aspect of it is in the girl’s imagination (the objective shot in the climactic scene showing her talking to empty space). Really, I found the whole thing ugly and depressing. The editing is great though, I love the creative use of the wipe and Del Toro uses it a lot, to great effect. The #20 film of 2006.

Man Of The West – Mediocre Western starring the always(?) mediocre Gary Cooper. Anthony Mann made far better films, I was just never into it. Maybe I should give it another shot? The #13 film of 1958.

Some Came Running – Fine combination of Vincente Minnelli and James Jones, as Frank Sinatra plays a writer who returns to his small town after the war only to get himself into trouble along with Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. The #11 film of 1958.

Pal Joey – Another Sinatra film, this time as a wanna-be club owner torn between the rich and vicious Rita Hayworth and the poor and honest Kim Novak. The great Rodgers & Hart soundtrack elevates it quite a bit. The #10 film of 1957.

Unknown Pleasures – Probably the most accessible of Jia Zhang-ke’s films, as it has a lot in common with a lot of other films, most notably Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye. Young Chinese unemployed, flirting with lives of crime and angst, beautifully filmed with fine performances. The least weighty Jia film I’ve seen, but still pretty great. The #6 film of 2002.

The Trial – Some flashy Wellesness, great creepy modernist architecture, a very good performance from Anthony Perkins and some weird supporting work from Welles, Jeanne Moreau, and Akim Tamiroff. But, in the end, it’s a Kafka adaptation and my enjoyment of it is dependent on how I’m feeling about Kafka. And I like Welles better than Kafka. The #12 film of 1962.

Paisan – Six-part Roberto Rossellini film about the conquest of Italy in World War 2. Unusual for this type of film, I actually really liked every section. Some great action and suspense sequences (the opening story in a castle, the story about a woman attempting to reach her husband) and very moving non-action sequences (the bonding between an African-American soldier and an orphan who steals his shoes, a priest a rabbi and a minister having dinner in a monastery). One of the best war movies I’ve seen.

Europa 51 – Ingrid Bergman plays a high society housewife so distraught be the tragic death of her son that she dedicates her life to helping the poor. Quite naturally, her family has her declared insane and locks her in an institution. Great performance from Bergman in another terrific Rossellini film.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated – Mediocre documentary about the MPAA. The director hires a PI to track down the secret MPAA members for way too much of the film, as if anyone cares what they look like. The stuff about the history of the organization and the examples of their wacky decisions and decision-making processes is interesting though. The #26 film of 2006.

One Week/The High Sign – A pair of Buster Keaton shorts. The High Sign has a great climax as Keaton bests a house full of assassins with some amazing stunts, and One Week is a lot of fun with a build-it-yourself house gone horribly wrong. Not as brilliant as the best Keaton, but still very physically impressive.

Spiderman 3 – An entertaining enough mess of a film. One villain too long, and James Franco doing his best to fight Hayden Christensen for the title of The Worst Actor Of His Generation. The middle section homage to Saturday Night Fever and The Nutty Professor is the funniest part, but Tobey Maguire is generally speaking, pretty bad. Kirsten Dunst does a fine job of looking cute and singing terribly, though,

A Prairie Home Companion – Perhaps the most human of all Robert Altman films, he abandons his steady microscopic zooms for a camera the fluidly moves around the mise-en-scene like recent Hou Hsiao-hsien. A film explicitly about death and the lovable Midwestern existential acceptance of it. A perfect little film from a man who specialized in big messy films. The #4 film of 2006.

Mudhoney – Like Baby Doll on acid. Russ Meyer’s Southern Gothic horror film (can I call it that?) about a drifter who gets entangled in an exploitation web of God, sex and violence. Not quite as exhilerating as the first 20 minutes of Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill!, but a better film on the whole. The #9 film of 1965.

The Reluctant Debutante – Terrifically charming Vincente Minnelli film about a young girl (Sandra Dee), raised in America, who enters British high society at the insistence of her step-mother (Kay Kendall) to upstage her rival (Angela Lansbury). Of course, she falls in love with the wrong guy, and it’s up to her father, wonderfully played by Rex Harrison, (who abhors all the nonsense, but goes along with it anyway) to fix things. Fun and entertaining, with some great Minnelli color and compositions (I recall a certain lamp quite particularly). The #7 film of 1958.

Tropical Maladay – Mesmerizing masterpiece from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The first half is a fairly typical gay romance, set in the forests, factories and caves of rural Thailand. The second half reenacts the emotional arc of the first, while resolving its psychological complications with a eerie and suspenseful mythological cat and mouse game between a soldier (one of the men from the first part) and a shadowy panther. The #5 film of 2004.

The Quatermass Xperiment – British sci-fi film that was apparently the first of a whole series of Quatermass films. Astronauts come back to space infected with some kind of alien plant life that threatens to kill us all. The #21 film of 1951.

The Garden Of Allah – The beautiful gold tones of two-strip Technicolor are about the only highlight of this Marlene Dietrich melodrama about a priest on the run who marries a saintly woman (Dietrich, if you can buy that). Also stars Basil Rathbone and Charles Boyer.

The Mating Season – Thelma Ritter (Pickup On South Street, Rear Window) gives yet another standout performance in this Mitchell Leisen comedy about a hamburger stand owning woman who goes to visit his son and his new rich wife (Gene Tierney) and through some mistaken identity, ends up as the maid. Sweet and funny.

Superman Returns – Better than any of the current cycle of superhero films, and the best since Batman Returns.
I had kind of the opposite reaction to it that I’ve had to the Spiderman trilogy. With those films, the action and effects are great, but the melodrama is dull, repetitive and all-around unbearable. In Superman, though, I really dug the drama and thought the effects were kinda lame, dare I say cartoonish. There’s a real dramatic problem with Superman, in that he’s essentially perfect and invincible. The Kryptonite plot is OK for one film, but if they make a sequel they need to follow the lead of Superman II and give him some extra-terrestrial villains to fight. I dug the whole Superman as God/Christ motif, I thought it ran through the film at a nice, not quite beating you over the head level. It raises but doesn’t really answer some interesting questions about the role of heroes/saints in modern life. The performances were fine all around, with nobody really sticking out, though I think Kate Bosworth had the same problem Katie Holmes had in Batman Begins: namely that she’s not really believable as an adult. The #8 film of 2006.

Bienvenue a Cannes – TCM documentary about the Cannes Film Festival has some good anecdotes and gossip, but ultimately isn’t very insightful about the history of the festival or the films that have played there. Kind of like that foreign film montage at the Academy Awards last year that reduced the history of non-American cinema to the most boring and maudlin films the US could find.

Mutual Appreciation – A worthy addition to the existential slacker comedy genre that I’m generationally predisposed to be a fan of. Director Andrew Bujalski shows some real skill as he gets surprisingly good (considering how indie the movie is) performances from his actors and keeps an slow, but never boring, pace to the film, creating a believeable reality out of it all. The #5 film of 2005.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley – So much better than I expected. Ken Loach’s Palme d’or winner at last year’s Cannes film festival is pretty much a perfect historical epic. Cillian Murphy stars as a young doctor who joins the post-World War I IRA, becomes increasingly radical and eventually finds himself on the wrong side of the civil war over the creation of the Irish Free State. Essentially the micro story of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, except with all the Hollywood touches stripped away leaving a raw core of historical realism and melodrama. The #2 film of 2006, though that may change. I’ve only seen it one and a half times and I’ve seen Miami Vice several more, but this may very well be the better film.

The Alamo – John Wayne’s directorial effort is a by-the-numbers telling of the fate of the famous mission and its Texican defenders. Wayne plays Davy Crockett, Richard Widmark is Sam Bowie and Laurence Harvey as Col. Travis. It takes way too long to get going, and Wayne doesn’t appear to have much of an eye, though the transfer shown on TCM wasn’t particularly good. The #17 film of 1960.

Once More, With Feeling! – Stanley Donen’s light comedy stars Yul Brenner as an over-the-top maestro and Kay Kendall as his longtime girlfriend who breaks up with him after an apparent infidelity. Through a variety of plot contrivances, the two have to get married and then get divorced. Pleasant, but unremarkable. The #13 film of 1960.

The Glass Bottom Boat – Zany Frank Tashlin comedy starring Doris Day and Rod Taylor (along with a thin Dom DeLuise and Dick Martin, from Laugh-In). Taylor’s a NASA scientist who may or may not suspect Day of being a KGB agent. Wackiness ensues. 60s comedies are very strange, I don’t know that I quite understand them. But the most shocking discovery: Doris Day is hot. The #12 film of 1966.

The Edge Of The World – Early Michael Powell film about the last days of a small island north of Scotland. Some fine scenery and decent performances, the story’s kind of a poor man’s How Green Was My Valley. The editing is out of control though. I’d never noticed such an Eisentstein influence on Powell before, it’s a good thing he lost it later, as it’s just way too much here. On the meagre evidence of this and Peeping Tom (both very fine films), I’d have to say Powell needed Pressburger.

Where Eagles Dare – Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood star in this mediocre WW2 action film about spies and assassins and a daring assault on a Nazi castle high in the mountains. The plot twists left and right, but the direction (by Brian G. Hutton, who did Kelly’s Heroes and the Tom Selleck masterpiece The High Road To China) is pedestrian and clunky. Burton and Eastwood deserved better. The #16 film of 1968.

Still Life – As yet unreleased in the US is Jia Zhangke’s most recent film, about a two people from Shanxi each searching for people in and around the town of Fengjie, as it’s in the process of being dismantled to make way for the flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Might be Jia’s most beautiful film thus far. At least in terms of the colors he gets out of the digital camera, it ranks with Miami Vice as the best digital movie I’ve seen. The deliberately-paced realism is lifted into the sublime by a few shots I refuse to give away until more people have a chance to see it. The #5 film of 2006.

Where Danger Lives – Decent enough John Farrow noir starring Robert Mitchum as a doctor who gets suckered by a crazy woman. Her husband ends up dead and the two of them try to flee to Mexico, while Mitchum’s got a concussion and the girl gets crazier and crazier. Great supporting actors are largely wasted in much too small roles, namely Claude Rains and Farrow’s wife, Maureen O’Sullivan.

Ryland’s got his review of Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End up at The House Next Door (Warning: There Be Spoilers!), so I’d thought I’d kick in the two cents I wrote last week about the film, in response to complaints that the two sequels are such much messier than the tidy first film (an aspect Ryland touches on as well).

The messiness of it, the sheer crazy incomprehensible insanity of the whole enterprise is exactly what I love about Pirates 2 & 3. I thought the first one was alright, but aside from Depp, it was pretty standard. These last two though, are just all over the map.

So many action/adventure blockbuster movies are straightforward and earnest and linear, full of exposition and tearful Tobeys. The last two Pirates, though, are wholly unique. Avant-garde summer blockbusters that are in every way Anti-Ratners.

I thought of two films while watching At World’s End, and the first is Miami Vice, a beautiful, expositionless tone poem of a film in an action movie’s clothing. Pirates 3 is a beautiful film, with some fascinating imagery and only tops the intricately complex and deep compositions of the second one, especially in the action sequences. The baroque Looney Tunes stunts within frames of overwhelming detail are always stunning, the only action sequence I’ve seen equal it is in the opening shots of Revenge Of The Sith.

Which is a nice segue to the second movie I was reminded of . . . Star Wars (oh yeah, I said it). We ran Star Wars at the theatre Tuesday night for the staff (for the anniversary: the original, non-Special Edition one, naturally). I was struck again by just how relentless the last half of the film is, and how little information there is to orient the viewer. It’s just one action sequence after another, with the bare minimum of information conveyed as efficiently as possible in a few lines of dialogue to connect the action. Now, the Pirates films aren’t as good as Star Wars (I’m not that crazy). But they’re clearly following the same model and I think they work for the same reason.

I just find the anti-Pirates camp to be inexplicable. Too me, it’s like saying there weren’t enough explosions in Citizen Kane. I don’t understand what it is they expect . . . a straightforward narrative? Bleh. Give me chaos instead any day.

And all of this is not to mention the fascinating web of ideological explorations in the Pirates films. Many a master’s thesis can (and will) be written on the transformations in the sexualities of Depp and Knightly in these movies.

As you can see, there’s a new addition to the sidebar. We’ve managed to convinced the powers that be at Landmark Theatres to allow us to program and run a repertory film series this summer at the Metro Cinemas in Seattle. It’s going to be a nine week series constituting a decade-by-decade survey of film history from the 1920s to the 2000s. If the series is successful (meaning if we can draw enough customers to break even) then they’re going to let us continue to program rep films in the future, and possibly expand the program to Landmark theatres in other cities around the country.

So if you, or anyone you know is in the Seattle area this summer, come on out to the scenic U-District and catch some great films and help further the nationwide cause of repertory cinema.

Free popcorn for anyone who finds me and mentions The End Of Cinema!

Found at The Screen Grab.