Meek’s Cutoff – A group of settlers making their way through the Oregon Territory break off from their main group to follow a mountain man named Meek’s shortcut.  When we join them, they appear to be most definitely lost, though Meek, in a well-mumbled performance by Bruce Greenwood, insists he knows exactly where they are and where they are going.  As the settler’s distrust of Meek grows, and their water supply dwindles, they come across a lone, silent Indian.  Led by Michelle Williams, they slowly take their faith away from Meek and place it onto the Indian, who claims (wordlessly) to be able to lead them to safety but may very well be leading them to their doom.  A major step up from director Kelly Reichardt’s last film, Wendy and Lucy which, despite an excellent performance from Williams I thought was a little lacking in the plot motivation department.  Reichardt films in 1.33, an aspect ratio that not only recalls the classical Western, of which this is in many ways a subversion (there’s an interesting compare and contrast to be made here to Ford’s Wagon Master) but also mimics the POV of the women in the group, their heads bound by 19th Century bonnets, their blinder-vision making palpable both the claustrophobia of their place in society and the group’s limited knowledge of where they are going and the world around them.  It’s a movie about faith and feminism, about a group of women learning to reject the authority of their alpha male and place their trust in a despised and mysterious other, with no assurances that their new guide will be any better.  One of those movies whose resonances grow the more I think about it.  The #4 film of 2010.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams – The consensus line on this Werner Herzog documentary about cave paintings is that it’s the best argument to date for 3D cinema and I’m not going to disagree with that.  The paintings, found in pristine condition in Southern France, are the earliest yet discovered and Herzog examines them in exhaustive detail.  His narration, as always, is a blend of sardonic rationality and breathless cheesiness, but it’s the images that are unforgettable.  Because the cave walls and ceilings are contoured and uneven, and because the paintings were made with these surfaces in mind, the 3D camera brings them to life in a way that would be impossible with a conventional film.  We can see the ripples of the limestone and the way the uneven surface serves to almost animate the images on the walls, especially when combined with the flickering shadows that must have accompanied their ceremonial use as religious totems.  Herzog, as usual, doesn’t so much have an idea about the paintings as he has a dozen questions to which he poses possible answers.  Who made the paintings and why and what does that say about us, about the urge to create?  His speculations lead him, again as usual, to some strange places, but any film that starts with 30,000 year old cave paintings and ends with albino alligators has to be doing something right.  The #14 film of 2010.

The Tale of Zatoichi – The first of a massive series of films about a blind samurai (charmingly played by Shintaru Katsu) who solves crimes (or something, this is the only one I’ve seen), its debt to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is obvious.  Like in that film, a wandering ronin comes to a town and is hired by one side of a local gang war.  The ronin here is blind, a masseur (a common profession for the blind in Japan, in the movies if not in reality) who is both jovial and cunning (he repeatedly plays on other people’s underestimation of him due to his blindness, not only in swordplay but in everyday tasks like gambling as well).  Unlike in Yojimbo (itself indebted to Dashiell Hammett), the ronin does not play both sides of the war against each other, instead he bonds with the ronin the rival gang has hired (who is dying of tuberculosis) and the two stand apart from the petty criminals who employ them by their samurai codes of honor and dignity.  That doesn’t prevent them from fighting, of course.  Zatoichi very much lives in the same world as Yojimbo‘s Sanjuro, but he’s a bit more amoral and a little bit more sentimental.  But the major difference between the two films is in the visual style, where Kurosawa’s meticulous genius imbues every shot with meaning and purpose and Zatoichi director Kenji Misumi performs a competent job filming his actors in a noiry, occasionally flashy black and white.  The #16 film of 1962.

The Pajama Game – Doris Day becomes a union leader at a pajama factory and attracts the eye of the company’s superintendent John Raitt (looking like Rene Auberjonois as a Lifetime movie villain).  Their romance complicates union negotiations, as the uppity Miss Day won’t know her place as a proper 1950s housewife.  Until she does when Raitt proves the company had been ripping off the workers even more than was previously thought.  The workers get their little raise, Day goes home to raise Raitt’s kids and everyone lives happily ever after.  The plot manages to combine the glories of capitalist patriarchy with all the excitement of union negotiations.  Ah, but there’s music.  A couple of pretty great numbers, choreographed by the man who can do no wrong, Bob Fosse.  The standout is Broadway actress Carol Haney (she danced with Fosse in the memorable number in Kiss Me Kate) and her two big numbers here, “Steam Heat” and “Hernando’s Hideaway”, which ends up somewhere between the finale from The Gang’s All Here and the “Bohemian Rhapsody” video, are exceptional.  In general though, this was a big disappointment coming from director Stanley Donen.  I’m going to blame his co-director George Abbott.  The #26 film of 1957.

Wait Until Dark – An effective thriller with a somewhat perplexingly out-sized reputation.  Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who’s apartment accidentally contains a MacGuffin wanted by a gang of criminals led by Alan Arkin.  The crooks play on her blindness in an attempt to either find the object or get her to give it to them, and there are plenty of solid suspense sequences built by director Terrence Young, the man behind two of the better James Bond films (From Russia with Love and Thunderball).  But other than that, there’s not a whole lot to appreciate here.  The plot rests on a card house of contrivances, which wouldn’t be too bad if there was more going on underneath.  This is the fundamental difference between Hitchcock and his imitators: with Hitch, the suspense was never enough, there was always another layer, a set of meanings beyond the visceral experiences technique and construction can provide.  Neither of Hepburn’s Hitchcockian films (this and Charade, which is much more fun, one of the most charming movies ever made) have the depth of even a middling Hitchcock.  Without that, there’s nothing to see here but a very frightened woman.  The #16 film of 1967.

Samson and Delilah – Victor Mature plays Samson and Hedy Lamarr Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s way way way overblown biblical epic.  Samson is the popular Jewish judge from the tribe of Dan who is engaged to a pretty young Philistine (played by Angela Lansbury).  But he attracts the eye of Lansbury’s sister, Delilah, a vicious, lusty girl who sets a riot in motion at their wedding feast which leads to Samson killing a bunch of people and Lansbury herself getting killed.  Samson becomes an anti-Philistine revolutionary cutting down bad guys left and right armed with a jawbone.  The local ruler, played by George Sanders, of course, conspires with Delilah to capture Samson.  She seduces him and gives him a haircut.  Brought to the Philistine temple in chains, Samson is tortured until he brings the whole thing crashing down in a spectacular finale.  The whole thing is pretty ridiculous, yet the sheer perversity of the Samson/Delilah relationship is fascinating.  Unfortunately, it all has to be sold by Lamarr, who is certainly up to the task, but Mature, in trying to portray Samson as the ultimate square, sacrifices the seediness he brought to another twisted relationship, that between him and Gene Tierney in Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture.  It’s important, of course, that Samson be virtuous and upstanding, but without the spark of illicit uncontrollable desire for Delilah, his actions come off as just plain stupid, rather than tragic.  It’s probably my least favorite DeMille film, feeling more like a dry run for the corny greatness of The Ten Commandments, and a far cry from the potent mix of religion and sex of his thirties bible movies.  The #24 film of 1949.

The Sign of the Cross – This is much more like it.  Not technically a bible movie, as it takes place during the early years of Christianity, when the small cult was trying to grow within the Roman Empire under Nero.  Frederic March plays a Roman prefect who becomes enamored with a young Christian girl named Mercia (really), despite his long-standing relationship with Nero’s wife Poppaea.  When March releases a couple of accused Christians on the girl’s behalf, Poppaea (played by Claudette Colbert at her most amorally luscious) arranges with a rival prefect to have the girl and the other Christians attacked and arrested.  March saves the girl, barely (the sequence of the soldiers descending on the large Christian prayer meeting is all the more terrifying for the very real feeling of persecuted brotherhood we get right before the arrows start to fly), and proposes to her, but she accuses him of just wanting her for sex.  Somehow they all end up at an orgy, which has some creepy and intense dance sequences as March tries and fails either to get Mercia to loosen up or face his own evil lusts and convert to her religion.  In the end, Nero, played by Charles Laughton as an imbecilic lunatic, has the Christians fed to the lions (and various other animals) in another spectacular finale.  This is probably DeMille’s greatest blend of the sacred and the profane, as sequences like a lesbian orgy dance and Claudette Colbert nude in a milk bath are balanced by scenes of genuine Christian belief and piety.  The mixture is as self-contradictory as it gets, at least if you happen to belong to the particularly prim version of Christianity that got the film banned and censored for years and years.  For the rest of us, it’s a whole lot of fun, and might reasonably be seen as an attempt to resolve the tension between body and spirit that has been so fundamental to the religion for two thousand years.  That, or DeMille is just a huge hypocrite: he wants us to root for both the Christians and the lions.  The #5 film of 1932.

Cleopatra – A less successful DeMille/Colbert collaboration tells the familiar story of the Egyptian queen and her two Roman lovers.  From the first meeting with Julius Caesar (smuggling herself in a carpet), to his assassination, to her affair with Marc Antony, the film offers few surprises, other than making Cleopatra a much bigger part of the story than she really was (it’s her who has a vision of Caesar’s impending death, for example).  Colbert is fine, but Warren William (as Caesar) and Henry Wilcoxon (as Antony) are pretty dull.  Actually, I’m having trouble remembering any real differences between this version and the Joseph L. Mankiewicz version with Elizabeth Taylor, other than that one is more than twice as long.  For once, someone topped DeMille in the overblowing department.  The #14 film of 1934.

The King of Kings – This film though is much different from its early 60s remake, which was directed by Nicholas Ray with Jesus as a Martin Luther King-style non-violent revolutionary.  HB Warner plays Jesus here, and DeMille plays the Passion story absolutely straight, except for a little prologue where we see Mary Magdalene being all whorey (kind of like in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, except more flapperish).  Other than that, the film follows the various events pretty closely (many of the intertitles are direct quotes from the Gospels): Jesus performs some miracles, enters Jerusalem, gives some speeches, gets betrayed by Judas (who in this version is a monarchist who hopes to make Jesus King and conspires with Caiaphas and the Romans to have him arrested), meets with Pontius Pilate (always a great sequence, and here is no exception as Jesus calmly freaks Pilate out) is crucified and rises again (in Technicolor!).  It’s a heartfelt, moving and reasonable telling of the story, DeMille reportedly went out of his way to tone down the anti-Semitism that had been a fundamental part of Passion stories for centuries.  Though Caiaphas and the rest of the evil Jews are shown to be largely to blame for Jesus’s execution, DeMille makes sure to show that they were not representative of the Jews as a whole.  HB Warner, who played the druggist in It’s a Wonderful Life 20 years later, brings a real otherworldly quality to Jesus, which, along with DeMille giving him a heavenly glow in every scene, manages to be both ridiculous and totally convincing.  The #6 film of 1927.

The Indian Epic – In the late 50s and early 60s, massive costume epics by great old directors like William Wyler (Ben-Hur), Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (The Land of the Pharaohs), Nicholas Ray (The King of Kings), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Cleopatra), Anthony Mann (Spartacus, until he got fired), etc were all the rage.  The trend even spread to Germany, where Fritz Lang returned after almost three decades in Hollywood and managed to top them all with this film, a totally different kind of epic from a totally different kind of filmmaker from the DeMille films I’ve been discussing.  This two-part film (The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb are the two titles, based on a novel by his ex-wife Thea von Harbou that had been previously filmed way back in 1921 by director Joe May from a Lang and von Harbou script) is about a German architect who is hired to build a temple for the local maharaja. On the way, he meets a dancer and saves her from a tiger.  He and the dancer, played by Debra Paget, fall in love, but she belongs to a religious order and will be given to the maharaja.  After various intrigues and setup and a sexy dance sequence, the two escape and are recaptured in the desert.  Brought back to the palace, they’re imprisoned just as the architect’s sister and her husband show up.  They in turn try to solve the mystery of her missing brother.  More intrigue, some mazes, another, sexier dance and wild animal attacks follow.  It’s a fantastic film, in the sense that all kinds of crazy things happen (at one point the lovers are saved by a helpful spider) and in that it’s just a tremendous amount of fun.  It’s the ultimate expression of Fritz Lang’s comic book side (and I don’t just mean the cartoonish version of India that probably should never be taken to have any relation to reality), where evil geniuses develop elaborate schemes for power and revenge, while young lovers struggle not merely to understand the nature of the trap they’re in, but that they’re even trapped at all.  The #9 film of 1959.

The Aviator’s Wife – 3, 1981

A Good Marriage – 6, 1982

Pauline at the Beach – 3, 1983

Full Moon in Paris – 8, 1984

My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend – 3, 1987