From the good people at The House Next Door, where you can also find my friend Ryland‘s very fine appreciation of Revenge Of The Sith.

In the comments section for Ryland’s post, you can find this great summary of George Lucas from House founder Matt Zoller Seitz:

“But what he’s good at — immensely complex action scenes packed with so much information you can’t absorb it all in one viewing; primal pulpy metaphors for emotional states and moral quandaries — are things very few filmmakers even attempt post-silent cinema, and he succeeds. That’s why the movies are great in spite of the fact that they’re always teetering on the brink of incoherence and stupidity and often toppling in.”

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was hailed as a masterpiece immediately upon its premiere, and that ranking doesn’t appear to have dimmed in the collective reckoning in the nine years since. Well, I thought it was overrated then, and after watching it for a third time last night, I’m more convinced than ever that my initial reaction was the correct one.

The case for SPR generally runs along these lines: the opening 25 minute Omaha Beach sequence is groundbreaking in its technique and realism, and the remainder of the film is a powerful tribute to The Greatest Generation, a reminder of what they sacrificed for the rest of us in World War II. There are variations, but generally it boils down to realism and patriotism as the reasons SPR is great. It’s telling that few, if any, advocates of SPR have anything to say about the film’s script (written by Robert Rodat, who also wrote Fly Away Home and The Patriot), which is, at best, maudlin and sentimental.

Omaha Beach – It’s one of the great stories of American history: the D-Day landing and the hard slog up the beachhead in the face of overwhelming German firepower. It’s a sequence that appears in a number of different WW2 movies, most notably Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One and the multi-director epic The Longest Day. There are also variations of it in, among other films, Allan Dwan’s The Sands of Iwo Jima and Don Siegel’s Hell Is For Heroes, the former features a beach landing under heavy fire, the latter a suicidal uphill attack on a German bunker. Another noteworthy comparison is Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which was released a few months after SPR, is just as viscerally intense, but with none of the moral or filmic complications of Spielberg’s film, and also features an extended assault on an uphill bunker, one that is superior to SPR‘s in just about every way. Watching the sequence again, I was surprised at how small it seems. There’s no sense of the vast 10 mile expanse of the beach, we’re pretty much confined to the same 300 yard stretch of sand through the whole attack. Spielberg’s never been strong on continuity, a problem which repeatedly comes up here: the same shots (especially a POV shot of the German machine gun firing at the same half dozen troops, which we see at least three times) repeat several times, and appear to have no geographic relation to the main thrust of the plot, which is how Tom Hanks destroys a bunker, thereby making the beachhead safe for the invasion (the absurdity of which should be self-evident). The sequence appears to function in real time, making the whole of the Omaha Beach landing appear to take about 20 minutes, when in fact it stretched on for several hours before the troops were finally able to break through.

Spielberg’s decision to show the battle from Hanks’s point of view is especially limited, in that it reduces the heroism of many to that of one: the star and protagonist. In SPR, Spielberg repeatedly reduces the general and the epic to the specific and generic. Thus the massive Omaha Beach landing is reduced to a half dozen guys in a small space fighting one gun and a handful of Germans. In the same sequence in The Longest Day, a massive array of troops must crawl under enemy fire to set up a bangalore torpedo and take out one of the many bunkers on the beach. Soldier after soldier volunteers to run out there only to get shot, as true a depiction of collective heroism in war as I’ve ever seen. In SPR, the nameless soldiers’ deaths are instead often reduced to macabre jokes: a GI wanders the beach holding his severed arm (a shot lifted from Akira Kuroawa’s Ran), a medic frantically works to save a wounded man, only to have his patient get shot in the head as soon as he says “I’ve stopped the bleeding!”, Hanks barks commands repeatedly to his radio man, but the third time he pulls him over he’s missing his face and the radio’s been shot, Hanks gives a comical look and throws the radio away.

So, the Omaha Beach sequence is neither epic in scope nor particularly noble in character, nor original in plot. What about in its film technique? Speilberg shoots the sequence with a shaky handheld camera, with desaturated color, both of which were (and are) supposedly revolutionary. And indeed, the use of a handheld camera was revolutionary. . . when Roberto Rossellini and the Italian Neo-Realists started doing it in Rome, Open City 53 years before Saving Private Ryan. The shaky POV action sequence is a recurrant trope in war, action and horror movies, and had been for years before SPR. Spielberg may have been the first to splash blood and mud on the camera, but I’m not sure. Similarly, his may be the first film where we see people being shot underwater, a dubious achievement at best. As for the color, well, as with his decision to shoot Schindler’s List in black and white, it’s an homage to the war movies he grew up watching (and the documentaries shot during the war, which were very often shot in black and white. And it’s hard to be original when you’re making an homage. Yes, Saving Private Ryan is far gorier than a film like The Longest Day. But is that really what we mean by realism? More blood?

The Rest Of The Film – Given much of the talk about SPR, you’d think the film ended when Omaha Beach was taken. But no, there’s over two hours left of film time to go! Two hours that basically consists of generic characters doing stupid things for no clear reason and ascribing great meaning to them, with the occasional justification for war crimes thrown in.

1. Generic Characters – Like many a war movie, SPR‘s characters are a collection of representative types, both in genre iconography and as a PC multicultural mix. There’s the captain who’s sick of killing, but serves as a father figure to his men (he’s even a school teacher back home), played by Tom Hanks; his sergeant, big and gruff but also brave, honest and protective, Tom Sizemore; the medic, smart and sensitive, as horrified by war as Alan Alda and who also fills the role of the soldier who takes abut his mother, Giovanni Ribisi; the wisecrackin’ kid from Brooklyn, Ed Burns; the Southern sharpshooter, lifted whole straight out of Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York, right down to the pre-shot prayer, played by Barry Pepper; the New York Jew, there to remind us of why the Germans are bad, played by Adam Goldberg (who will always be Chandler’s roommate Crazy Eddie to me); the big dumb Italian who carries a rosary, Vin Diesel; the cartographer/interpreter who knows nothing of war (think Lawrence Of Arabia), quotes poetry, translates Edith Piaf and who functions as our surrogate in the group: we meet the other characters through him, Jeremy Davies; and finally the holy grail himself, Matt Damon as the corn-fed blonde Iowa farmboy (a type which appears as a symbol of wasted youth and innocence and possible homoerotic desire in The Sands of Iwo Jima, but functions as the American ideal here). A brief sequence with Pvt. Ryan’s mother is as generic as possible: a white picket-fenced farmhouse amidst amber waves of grain. I swear there’s even an apple pie cooling on a window sill. Many films, war films in particular, use this kind of generic character setup. But it’s telling that films like The Big Red One and Platoon don’t follow that structure, as both Samuel Fuller and Oliver Stone actually fought in wars, unlike many a war movie writer or director.

2. Doing Stupid Things –

A. The initial stupid thing is the mission itself. Back in Washington, a secretary discovers that three of the four Ryan boys were KIA on the same day. A debate ensues with Gen. George Marshall over whether or not to find the fourth Ryan and send him home, despite the fact that he’s missing somewhere far behind enemy lines and any rescue mission will likely lead to many more men being killed to save one. In an astounding display of irrationality, Marshall reads a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a Mrs. Bixby, expressing his regrets over the loss of her sons during the Civil War. (Note that in the reaction shot to Marshall’s reading, his staff member is framed next to a portrait of George Washington, in case we don’t know who Lincoln is, I guess). Somehow, this letter is so moving to Marshall and his staff that they decide Mrs. Ryan cannot be allowed to sacrifice as much as she did for the cause of freedom, though there’s nothing but respect, sympathy and admiration in Lincoln’s sentiment. The power of the letter is supposed to trump any question of the utility of wasting several lives to save one, though there’s no logical reason for it to convince us of that fact.

B. The next stupid thing occurs when the small band reaches the besieged town of Ramelle (fictional, naturally), where Ryan is supposed to be. It’s a bombed-out village, with no inhabitants. Except, of course, for a French family who for some unknown reason are still in their half-destroyed house when the group arrives. Inexplicably, the father tries to pass his daughter to the soldiers, and even more inexplicably, Vin Diesel disobeys direct orders, takes the daughter, stands out in the open and gets himself shot by a German sniper. There’s no reason for any of this to happen but expediency: Spielberg wants to show us some civilian French, he wants to show off Pepper’s sharpshooting, and he wants to subject us to a long death sequence for Diesel (which is also apparently why the sniper never shoots him again, but instead waits five minutes for Pepper to get into position before looking for a second shot).

C. Disobeying orders is a recurring type of stupid thing in SPR, most clearly when the wisecrackin’ Brooklynite refuses to assault a machine gun, and then wants to shoot a German POW and Hanks won’t let him. Insubordination of this type would hardly be tolerated in a war, let alone from a veteran like Burns who’s been with Hanks for several months. Hanks, of course, defuses the tense standoff by sharing a little bit about his life back home. If only someone had thought of that at My Lai.

D. The final battle is a seemingly endless series of stupid things. Why do the Americans so desperately protect the bridge when they planned to blow it up anyway? Why do they wait until the Germans show up to string the wires for their mines, both in the street and on the bridge? Why do they have Davies carrying ammunition from point to point under heavy fire instead of stocking the ammunition in their foxholes and sniping points before the battle? Why does Davies cower in fear instead of saving Crazy Eddie’s life? The answer to that last one is simple enough: Spielberg is asserting that we, the audience (for whom Davies has been the surrogate throughout the film), and especially the brainier types out there, are incapable of functioning in the horrors of war, and were we placed in the same position as The Greatest Generation, would be entirely worthless. And did I mention the absurd deus ex machina at the end of the sequence?

3. War Crimes – I’d always remembered that it was Davies at the end of the film who shoots the POW, committing the film’s major war crime. Watching it again, I was surprised at how often these murders occur. In fact, the film can easily be interpreted as a coming-of age story in which we learn how necessary it is to execute POWs because they shot at us first. After the Omaha Beach sequence, the Americans shoot defenseless Germans in a trench and murder surrendering Germans with their hands raised in the air. The emotional power (and graphic bloodinesss) of the preceding beach landing is apparently supposed to justify the murdering of these POWs, just as the death of the medic is later supposed to justify the murder of the German that Burns causes so much trouble over. These crimes reach their culmination when Davies, after cowering throughout the final stages of the final battle, assassinates the German soldier he let kill Crazy Eddie, as that soldier is telling his compatriots what a coward Davies is. Davies, of course, had been the one stridently protesting Burns’s attempts to murder the other POW. Thus the audience member, after being shown their own cowardice, is asserted to be a murderer as well. It’s one of the most insulting things I’ve ever seen on film, and I can’t believe how many people are willing to let Spielberg get away with it. How can this film be taken as a glorification of The Greatest Generation when it shows them repeatedly engaging in the same brutal habits as the pure evil Nazis of Schindler’s List? It’s like the Bixby letter: the overwhelming assertion of emotion precludes any logical examination of what the film is actually saying.

Finally, I have a couple of minor quibbles with the film. The opening sequence shows an old man wandering through a cemetery with his family following. He stops at a grave and the camera slowly zooms in on his eyes. From there we cut to Tom Hanks preparing to land at Omaha, thus setting up an identification of the old man with Hanks. The slow zoom on the eyes is often a precursor to that person’s flashback. Of course, it’s Pvt. Ryan who is the old man, and what follows can’t possibly be a flashback (Ryan wasn’t at Omaha, he parachuted behind enemy lines). The only purpose of the zoom appears to mislead the viewer into believing that Hanks will live and thereby increasing the shock when he dies and we realize the old man must be Ryan. This kind of incoherent manipulation is something a director of Spielberg’s caliber should be better than. Also the faded US flag we’re shown twice appears to have 50 stars, which is two too many for 1944, but maybe that’s intentional. The old Ryan appears to know exactly where he’s going in the cemetery, though this is supposedly his first time visiting Hanks’s grave. Also, Hanks’s grave is conveniently placed such that there’s lots of space for Ryan’s family to stand well behind him, instead of bunched together like all the other grave markers.

To conclude, here are 53 War Movies I’ve Seen from the last 50 years that are better than Saving Private Ryan:

Paths Of Glory
Bridge On The River Kwai
Hiroshima mon amour
The Horse Soldiers
The Guns Of Navaronne
Lawrence Of Arabia
Hell Is For Heroes
The Longest Day
The Great Escape
Dr. Strangelove
Zulu
The Train
Shenandoah
In Harm’s Way
The Heores Of Telemark
The Battle Of Algiers
The Dirty Dozen
Hell In The Pacific
The Sorrow And The Pity
Patton
A Bridge Too Far
The Deer Hunter
Apocalypse Now
Kagemusha
The Big Red One
Breaker Morant
Das Boot
Gallipoli
The Killing Fields
Platoon
Salvador
Top Gun
Empire Of The Sun
Full Metal Jacket
Good Morning, Vietnam
Glory
Henry V
The Hunt For Red October
Europa Europa
Last Of The Mohicans
A Midnight Clear
Schindler’s List
Gettysburg
Braveheart
Starship Troopers
The Thin Red Line
Three Kings
Black Hawk Down
Pearl Harbor
Master And Commander
Gods And Generals
A Very Long Engagement
Munich

/Film has some stills up from Wong Kar-wai’s latest film My Blueberry Nights, which kicks off the Cannes Film Festival this week.

Fallen behind again, thanks to yet another cold. So, as word breaks that the A’s have acquired former Mariner folk hero Chris Snelling, I’ll drown my sorrows with my brand-new copy of Conan The Barbarian and try to kick out a quick-hit version of the roundup. This is Part One, which I wrote on Wednesday but am only getting around to posting now. Part Two will follow later this week, hopefully.

Lancelot du lac – Robert Bresson’s version of the end of Camelot has essentially the same plot as the godawful First Knight (#86, 1995): Lancelot returns to Camelot after the failed grail quest, tries not to sleep with Guinevere, fails and the whole thing falls apart. However, Bresson takes the opposite route to filming a medieval epic. Instead of overblown melodrama, Bresson made a minimalist epic, consisting of little dialogue, his typically emotionless acting and a camera that willfully avoids showing the most obvious images of a scene in favor of sounds (hoofbeats in particular), and lingers longer than it has any right to over apparently inconsequential things (the knights’ unarmored legs being a particular favorite). Like all the Bresson’s I’ve seen, it unnerves you, defies your expectations and provides a wholly unique experience. The #6 film of 1974.

Wild Strawberries – Somehow I missed this when I saw it a few months ago, but frankly I was underwhelmed. The dream sequence was pretty cool, but other than that, this quite famous roadtrip movie about about an old professor traveling the countryside and flashbacking on his life (think Deconstructing Harry, without the jokes) just left me cold. The #10 film of 1957.

Metropolis – Fritz Lang’s hugely influential mashup of the Communist Manifesto and the Tower Of Babel is perhaps the most influential sci-fi film of all-time. Tremendously expensive in its time, it set the template and standard for the way we think of the filmed future (Blade Runner’s only the most obvious example of it’s influence). As a movie though, it’s got some serious flaws: a whiny protagonist, some obvious plot holes (complicated perhaps by the incomplete nature of the most recent restoration, though Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler had the same problem), and the interesting thematic choice of resolving the eternal struggle of rich and poor through a damsel in distress love story rescue.

The Long Voyage Home – John Ford’s adaptation of a quartet of Eugene O’Neill plays set on board a ship near the beginning of World War 2. Shot by Gregg Toland not long before he did Citizen Kane, it’s got the same brilliant deep-focus black and white photography. Terrific performances from Ford’s regulars (Ward Bond, Thomas Mitchell, John Wayne, etc) liven the generally dour material.

They Were Expendable – Much to his distress, John Ford was pulled out of the war to shoot this propaganda film about the guys who proved the usefulness of PT boats in waging war during the battle for The Philippines at the start of WW2. As war films go, it’s pretty great, with top notch performances from John Wayne and Robert Montgomery, some really nice scenes with Donna Reed, and some exciting action sequences.

8 Women – François Ozon’s musical murder mystery stars three generations of hot French women, some of whom can actually sing. They’re all gathered one winter eve only to learn that the family patriarch has been murdered. Cut-off from the outside world, it’s up to them to solve whodunnit, airing all their dirty secrets and essentially exposing themselves as the most screwed up family you’ll ever see. And all with a solo musical interlude for each actress. Stars Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant and Ludvine Sagnier. My first Ozon film, but it won’t be the last. The #5 film of 2002.

The Informer – Tag Gallagher ripped on this a lot in his great book John Ford: The Man And His Films, though I liked it quite a bit. Gallagher didn’t like the lack of tonal variance (all-serious, all the time), whereas I enjoyed the atmospheric, proto-noir, hyper-foggy images, and found plenty of humor and sympathy in Victor McLaglen’s portrayal of a desperately poor former IRA operative who turns his old buddy into the police for the reward money. Sure, it doesn’t rank with Ford’s greatest films, but it’s in the next tier.

The Wings Of Eagles – Another Ford film, this one a biopic about naval aviator turned paralyzed screenwriter Spig Wead. Wead and Ford were friends, and it shows in this rather tame film. Sure, Wead has his bad qualities, but he’s still a helluva guy. Ward Bond does a hilarious Ford imitation as the Hollywood director Wead goes to work for, and like all Ford films, there are some really terrific moments, but they’re way too few and far between. The #11 film of 1957.

A Scanner Darkly – Richard Linklater’s interpolated rotoscope adaptation of a Philip K. Dick mindbender is perhaps the best Dick adaptation ever (yes, that includes Blade Runner). The fluid, squggly animation is perfect to the shifting realities of Dick’s druggy, schizophrenic worldview. Keanu Reeves plays an undercover cop who loses his identity in his job (thanks to a killer new drug) and begins to suspect reality is even more fucked-up than it appears when you’re high. Also stars famous druggies Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson and the sorely missed Winona Ryder. The #4 film of 2006.

Rome, Open City – Roberto Rossellini’s breakthrough film, and the movie that launched Italian neo-realism, shot with whatever the crew could find around town in the middle of a war. A story of the Italian Resistance during WW2, it builds to a devastating climax halfway through the film, such that everything that follows is, well, anti-climactic (much like Full Metal Jacket). Still, unlike, say Metropolis, it manages to be both stylistically influential and a tremendous film of its own. I’m not a big fan of neo-realism, at least, I didn’t like Bicycle Thieves, but this was great.

How Green Was My Valley – The last of my Gallagher-inspired Ford marathon is this story of a Welsh coal mining town that famously beat Citizen Kane for the best picture Oscar. It’s a fine film, with some wonderfully lyrical sequences (Maureen O’Hara’s wedding, Roddy McDowell digging for his father) but after a single viewing I don’t think it’s the masterpiece Gallagher describes in his book. I don’t know if he was overcompensating for the film’s subsequent overshadowing by Kane, or if I just missed the many, many subtleties he found in the film. Perhaps a little of both.

House Of Yes – Parker Posey gives a fine performance as a crazy rich girl in an incestuous relationship with her brother (Josh Hamilton from Kicking And Screaming) in this decent enough pice of filmed theatre. Tori Spelling(!) plays Hamilton’s appalled fiancée and Freddie Prinze Jr his younger brother. The #40 film of 1997.

The Trouble With Harry – Essentially Alfred Hitchcock’s version of Weekend At Bernies, as a collection of eccentrics (including Shirley Maclaine and Jerry Mathers) in a small New England town discover, bury, exhume, and rebury (again and again) a dead body. Quirky and entertaining, with a marvelous sense of place. It’s light Hitchcock, and a lot more fun than the similarly weightless To Catch A Thief. The #12 film of 1955.

Coconuts – The first true Marx Brothers film is also the worst one I’ve ever seen. There are some classic jokes, and some funny Busby Berkeley-esque dance sequences, but there’s way too many lame songs sung seriously by non-Marxes.

Woman In The Dunes – Hiroshi Teshigahara’s beautiful, mysterious and odd little film zigged when I was certain it was going to zag, almost always a pleasant experience. A high school science teacher on vacation to study some bugs in a desolate desert gets tricked into living in a deep, inescapable sand hole with an odd, and not unattractive, widow who wants to ‘marry’ him. I was prepared for an intense Japanese ghost story along the lines of Kwaidan or Ugetsu, instead it’s naturalistic and more than a little political allegory. Lyrical and kinky, it looks a little like Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour with sand. The #7 film of 1964.

2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her – One of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s favorite Jean-luc Godard films, I found it more of a way station between the Godard highlights Pierrot le fou and Week End: absurdist and comically self-referential like the first; logorrheic and blatantly political like the second. The plot setup is essentially the same as Buñuel’s Belle de jour: middle-class housewife is a prostitute in her spare time, but it’s more a slice of French life in the late 60s than an actual story. The #7 film of 1967.

The Loyal 47 Ronin – Kenji Mizoguchi’s two-part adaptation of the classic Japanese story (think their version of The Gunfight At The OK Corral or the Omaha Beach landing) is a masterpiece of action withheld. Through its nearly four hour running time, there’s almost no scenes of violence, including none of the many many ritual suicides that punctuate the story. Clearly what Mizoguchi’s after is not the action violence of a great revenge epic as the titular ronin seek to avenge their lord who was forced to kill himself after insulting a venal superior. Instead, he examines the culture and society that leads to a world in which mass suicide is the greatest possible act of honor. Filled with his signature long tracking shots, his camera constantly cranes over walls following the characters from above and thereby exposing and transcending the boundaries they choose to live in.

The Mizoguchi Movies I’ve seen, and all are great:

1. Ugetsu
2. Sansho The Bailiff
3. Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums
4. The Loyal 47 Ronin
5. Sisters Of Gion
6. The Life Of Oharu
7. Street Of Shame

As reported on David Bordwell’s blog (see link on the sidebar), Werner Herzog speaking at Ebertfest:

“Our technological civilization is not sustainable on this planet. Nature is going to regulate us very quickly. . . . We’ll be the next ones [to go extinct]. But that’s okay. Let’s enjoy movies and friendship and beer.”

From “Tender Buttons” by Gertrude Stein:

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

It’s been too long, but here we go back to the countdown. Caveats, methodologies and all previous years, with the addition of any films I’ve seen since the original entries, can be found at The Big List, now in two parts!

16. Them! – Giant ants attack a city in a classic 50s sci-fi Cold War parable (the ants are caused by nuclear tests in the desert.) The only time I saw this was on TV as a kid, but I still have an irrational fear of insects.

15. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea – Live-action Disney sci-fi film about an obsessive captain, his submarine and the giant squid that attacks it. Cheesy special effects and aimed at an audience of kids, but it’s got Kirk Douglas and James Mason, and was directed by Richard Fleischer, who had one interesting career. From cheap but great noir (The Narrow Margin, His Kind Of Woman), to big budget crap (The Jazz Singer, Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) to B-movie wallowing (Fantastic Voyage, Soylent Green, Red Sonja), he was all over the auteurist map.

14. Dragnet – Essentially just an overlong episode of the TV series, but in Technicolor. Jack Webb’s just the facts procedural is a fine genre exercise, but it’s lacking in visual style. Compared to a procedural like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, which tells a similarly straight story but with an expressive noir pallet, Webb’s brightly colored and evenly light LA comes off as drab and boring.

13. The Caine Mutiny – Filmed theatre of the well-acted variety, with Humphrey Bogart as the martinet commander of a naval vessel whose crew rebels during World War 2. Bogart’s great as the tightly wound, possibly insane Captain, but the crew comes of just as bad (especially that weasel Fred MacMurray). Also stars José Ferrar, Van Johnson and Lee Marvin, and directed by Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet, Back To Bataan) who was one of the Hollywood Ten who backtracked after being thrown in prison and named names.

12. Track Of The Cat – Very interesting William Wellman film about a family on a remote, snow-covered mountain. A panther of some type has been attacking their animals, so two of the sons (including Robert Mitchum) try to kill it. When the panther kills his brother, Mitchum sets off alone to find it. Meanwhile, the crises sets off a series of domestic squabbles at home, between the parents, the daughter and the third son, and the neighbor girl he wants to marry. Half low-key, yet intense, theatrical melodrama, half outdoor adventure film, Wellman shot the whole thing in pseudo black and white: it’s in color, but only a few key items are not black or white. It’s like Day Of Wrath meets Grizzly Adams. An odd film, and worth a second viewing.

11. A Star Is Born – The version with Judy Garland and James Mason isn’t as good as the one with Fredric March and Janet Gaynor, but it’s still pretty good. Mason’s the celebrity actor with a drinking problem that only becomes worse when the young wannabe he discovers and marries becomes more successful than him. Compared to the earlier version, directed by William Wellman, this George Cukor film is rather boated, especially by the addition of some mediocre Judy Garland songs (the songs are mediocre, not Judy, naturally. She’s as great as ever.)

10. Samurai I: Musashi Myamoto – The kind of samurai film Akira Kurosawa spent much of his career deflating, this first part of a biopic trilogy of Japan’s greatest samurai hero is full of colorful scenery and costumes, features a great performance by the always great April Fool Toshiro Mifune and was directed by Hroshi Inagaki in a reverential, if uninspiring style. It’s going to be on TV in a day or two, I’m a-gonna watch it again and see if it’s improved any in the decade or so since I last saw it.

9. The Far Country – One of the several dark Westerns directed by Anthony Mann starring James Stewart. Stewart plays a loner driving cattle across Alaska who becomes embroiled, very much against his will, in a dispute between a gang of criminals and the small town they control through violence and fear. This is similar to the character Stewart plays in the other Mann films: anti the typical Western hero, whose sense of duty and honor obliges him to protect the innocent. Instead, Stewart is a selfish jerk, only concerned with his own interests and avoiding conflict not for some non-violent ideal (as Stewart did in Destry Rides Again) but out of pure apathy for the public good. Being a Western, of course, this anti-hero eventually comes to protect civilization, but it’s a long struggle to get him there. The genre conventions are preserved, but the sense of post-war alienation is the dominant emotion, not the visceral excitement of the triumph of imperialism.

8. The Barefoot Contessa – Beautiful counterpart to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s masterpiece All About Eve. Where that film was all cattiness and ambition in the world of Broadway actors, writers and directors, this film is wistful nostalgia and innocence corrupted by Hollywood, romanticism destroyed by cynicism. Humphrey Bogart gives one of his better performances as a run-down director who discovers Ava Gardner in Spain and watches her rise to stardom and tragic collapse as a result of love gone horribly wrong.

7. Dial M For Murder – Ray Milland plots to kill his wife, Grace Kelly, but has to improvise when she manages to fight off and kill the man he hired to murder her in this elegant little suspense film from Alfred Hitchcock. This is Hitchcock in his light, entertaining mode, despite, you know, the murder and everything. Milland is terrific as the scheming husband, sure of his own brilliance and Kelly’s as beautiful as ever. Made to be seen in 3D, I’ve only ever seen it on TV. I understand it’s much better with the silly glasses.

6. Sabrina – Speaking of charming, this is perhaps the great misanthrope Billy Wilder’s most ingratiating film, about a young girl, the daughter of the chauffeur, who loves the playboy son of her father’s employer. When she returns home from Paris she’s turned from a cute little wallflower into Audrey freakin’ Hepburn. The flighty son falls for her, as does his strictly business older brother, played by Humphrey Bogart at his fussiest. Sweet and romantic, and more than a little silly, I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to remake it.

5. La Strada – The great Giulietta Masina stars in this Federico Fellini film about a young woman sold off by her family to be the wife of a traveling strongman, played by a dubbed-into-Italian Anthony Quinn. Quinn’s a brute who mistreats the poor girl at every opportunity. On their travels, they meet Richard Basehart, another circus performer, who treats the poor girl well enough to confuse her by explaining that Quinn, despite his boorishness, actually loves her. Masina is great, but the film feels to me like a warm up for Nights Of Cabiria (#3, 1957), in which she plays a similarly put upon character but with a more knowing, more existentially uplifting and moving impact.

4. On The Waterfront – A great example for the politics vs. art debate is this Elia Kazan film about longshoremen with a corrupt union in New York (or is it New Jersey?). Karl Malden plays the local priest who’s trying to get the workers to organize and inform on their mob boss union leaders so the government can lock them up. Marlon Brando plays an ex-prize fighter (Coulda been a contender) and brother of the boss’ right-hand man (Rod Steiger), who after falling for the ridiculously hot Eva Marie Saint starts to become morally confused and decides to talk to the feds. All of this is fine and moral, but for the fact that Elia Kazan named names to the House Un-American Activities Commision and this film was the defense of his actions. Like most Kazan films, the visual style is decent if unremarkable while the acting is phenomenal. Brando gives perhaps the finest performance by the greatest actor of his generation, and the other leads are at the top of their game as well. It’s a film I’ve seen maybe a dozen times, but I can’t bring myself to love it because of that rat Kazan.

3. Sansho The Baliff – Kenji Mizoguchi is perhaps the greatest filmmaker whose films remain largely unavailable on DVD (a situation which is slowly, finally, being remedied). I saw this years ago on video and thought it was one of the most depressing movies I’d ever seen. A few months later, I watched it in class and though it was one of the greatest movies I’d ever seen. Earlier this year, a traveling retrospective of Mizoguchi films played at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, and I got to see it a third time. While it’s not one of My Top 20 Movies, and right now only my third favorite Mizoguchi (after Ugetsu and The Story Of Late Chrysanthemums), it’s still a phenomenally great and powerful film, and, yes, one of the most depressing movies I’ve ever seen. A family of rich folks (mother and two kids) are on the way to their father’s new post in the country, when they’re kidnapped by slave traders. The mom is sold into a brothel and the two kids are trucked off to a slave labor camp, where they grow up battered and terrorized. A decade or so later they attempt to make their escape and reunite with their mother. Horrible things happen, hopes are dashed and yet humanity struggles on and many other great humanist themes. Like all Mizoguchi films, it’s shot in a beautiful black and white with long-take, long-shot tracking and crane shots that emphasize the reality of the hellish space the film depicts while simultaneously provoking a profound sense of aesthetic satisfaction. Criterion’s releasing it in a few months, I’ve already got my copy pre-ordered.

2. Rear Window – One of the greatest, and most famous, of all Alfred Hitchcock films is this essay on voyeurism in which James Stewart plays a wheelchair-bound photographer who passes his convalescence watching his neighbors through their open windows. Not even the quite nubile Grace Kelly can manage to draw his attention away from the little dramas he invents for the people across the courtyard. Of course, this being Hitchcock, Stewart thinks he sees Raymond Burr kill his wife, and enlists Kelly and his nurse, Thelma Ritter, to help solve the mystery. As perverse as any Hitchcock film and one of the greatest metaphors for cinema ever filmed. It’s also a relentlessly entertaining suspense film. Few directors were as able to be both profound and popular at the same time as Hitchcock. Ford, Scorsese, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Renoir, Welles, Keaton, Chaplin, Hawks. . . .

1. The Seven Samurai – The greatest film ever made. The story is simple enough: poor farmers learn they’re going to be attacked by bandits, so they hire a group of samurai to defend them. Defenses are prepared, the bandits attack and life eventually goes on. Along the way, the whole realm of human emotion and community experience is chronicled, satirized, critiqued, and explored, with Kurosawa at the peak of his artistic powers. The film is huge, and not just in its running time (I find the film’s three and a half hours fly by faster than most 90 minute films). From that simple premise ideologies of book-length complexity grow through masterful, original, sometimes breathtaking, though often surprisingly subtle, technique. Dozens of characters are created and brought to life by some of the greatest actors of mid-century Japan, from stars Toshiro Mifune and Takeshi Shimura to minor character actors like Bokuzen Hidari and Seiji Miyaguchi.

It seems to be popular among the trendy critics of today to either dismiss or ignore Kurosawa in favor of his not-quite-contemporaries Mizoguchi and Ozu (as if there were a quota on how many Japanese directors are allowed into the Pantheon. Some of this criticism is an extension of the racist and xenophobic charges against him on both sides of the Pacific in decades past: that he was too Western and not “Japanese” enough. But largely the criticism now seems to be that he’s too popular, too simplistic and too epic compared to the intricate long takes of Mizoguchi and the simple family dramas and character studies of Ozu. Even the greatest critics occasionally fall victim to this misapprehension: my favorite film critic, Jonathon Rosenbaum, for example, includes only two Kurosawa films in his Top 1000 List (Ikiru and Rhapsody In August). Not surprisingly, Kurosawa’s being treated by the trendy today in the same way his idol (and most comparable director) John Ford was treated by critics before the auterists came along and showed how stupid everyone was being. Ford is now revered by critics good and bad, and I love his work as well. But I’d still take Kurosawa if I had to choose between them. There’s nothing Ford has that Kurosawa doesn’t.

Some good Unseen Films this year, but the first is the one I want to see most. I’m just barely getting into Roberto Rossellini, there’s a whole lot I need to see.

Voyage In Italy
Magnificent Obsession
Touchez Pas Au Grisbi
Broken Lance
French Cancan
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers
White Christmas
Godzilla
Brigadoon
Creature From The Black Lagoon
Animal Farm
The High And The Mighty
Suddenly
Wuthering Heights
Chikamatsu Monogatari
Johnny Guitar
Salt Of The Earth
Silver Lode
Senso
River Of No Return
Executive Suite
Adventures Of Hajji Baba

This clip has been making its way through a series of tubes for the last several days, but if you haven’t seen it yet, do so. Courtesy of Sergio Leone And The Infield-Fly Rule.

Been a busy few weeks around here at The End Of Cinema HQ. I got flattened with a cold for a week, went on vacation for ten days and have been watching as much baseball as possible during opening week (melt damn snow!). I have managed to watch a few movies, but not too many (I still haven’t made it to Grindhouse, one of my most anticipated movies of the year). I anticipate getting back in the swing of things over the next couple of days, with a Movie Roundup and the next installment of the Movies Of The Year countdown, 1954. Can anyone guess what #1 from that year will be?

I’ve also been working on making The End Of Cinema a theatrical experience, trying to program an experimental repertory series at my theatre. We’re currently in negotiations with the execs at corporate headquarters, but it looks like we’re going to get the chance to try and make it work. Repertory cinema has died a slow death over the last 15 years, as the cost of prints, the plague of corporate multiplexes and fear of advanced technology (DVD and cable) have made suits wary of the effort required to try to market a rep series effectively, even in a film-crazy urban market like Seattle. But I and my coworkers think we can make it work at our theatre, and it looks like we’ll get the chance (knock wood).

We proposed an initial calendar of nine films, playing one day a week for nine weeks. Each film represents a decade of film history, from the 20s through the present:

1. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans
2. Duck Soup
3. Casablanca
4. The Searchers
5. Pierrot Le Fou
6. Taxi Driver
7. Do The Right Thing
8. Miller’s Crossing
9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Wish us luck. Further updates to follow if and when The End draws near.