Biff's Favorite Books Read in 2023

 
                                     

1)   Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

This novel marks an expansion in the scope of Catton's work. The Luminaries and The Rehearsal were brimming with ambition, but Birnam Wood, which also explores a host  of  weighty themes, successfully grafts them to the thriller form. The novel reminds me of Joseph Conrad's Victory in that it seeks to wed the author's high falutin preoccupations within a more populist framework. Victory was criticized at the time, by H.L. Mencken in particular, as a potboiler not worthy of Conrad's talent. Catton interweaves her characters  into an inexorable, bloody, and Shakespearean tragedy, giving the book a dynamism largely absent from her previous work. The social and political complexity in Catton's work, inspired by models like Austen and George Eliot, are very much in evidence in Birnam Wood.  An anti-capitalist and ecological fervor informs the book, but Catton is too much of a psychological realist to not know that the better angel's of mankind's nature are oft ignored. Accordingly, even the Musk like villain of the piece has his reasons. 

2)    Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

3)   White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Fiercely funny fables for adults.

4)   The Winter People by John Ehle

This 1982 novel is set in Appalachia during the Depression. Ehle's exploration of the mountain folk transcends "regional writing" and has a density and seriousness to its portraits that put to shame most of the highly praised American literature of the era. As for me, on to more of his books.

5) Toad by Katherine Dunn

An caustic look at the counterculture, Portland Oregon style. Dunn's best book.

6) The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry is a slippery figure who went from debunker to mythologist of the American West, but he never wrote a more elegantly concise book

7) Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

I've enjoyed all of Ms. Groff's work, but this novel about a playwright and their mate is her most enjoyable. I especially appreciated the burlesquing of the various theatrical styles of the last half century.

8) Country Girl by Edna O'Brien

This memoir is as tart and compelling as her fiction. Whether romancing Robert Mitchum or being brought down from her RD Laing induced trip by Sean Connery, Ms. O' Brien offers one compelling anecdote after another.

9) Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

I've been holding this in reserve because I knew it would be a sheer pleasure.

10) Nobody's Fool by Bill Griffith

The graphic novel Griffith was born to write, an affectionate biography of Schlitzie the Pinhead. Schlitzie was one of the featured players in Tod Browning's Freaks and the inspiration for Griffith's greatest creation, Zippy the Pinhead.

I also thoroughly enjoyed:

One Hundred Demons by Lynda Berry

What About This by Frank Stanford

City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Come Early Morning

Ashley Judd

Joey Lauren Adams' Come Early Morning is a sleeper, an overlooked drama that had an abortive theatrical release in January of 2006. Adams penned the original screenplay and most of the film's locales are situated in her hometown of North Little Rock, Arkansas. The film has a relaxed, lived in feel and makes one regret that Ms. Adams has not directed another feature. Come Early Morning does not have the patrician glamour that haunts most Southern melodramas. The setting and dialogue are convincingly working-class in a film focused on a female contractor who is rudderless in her personal life.

Ashley Judd plays the lead and she is quite effective. Ms. Adams was initially planning to assay the role, but Ms. Judd's star power was needed to give the film financing. Though the director might have brought a little more grit to the role, Ms. Judd's Kentucky roots make her a fairly snug fit. The sight of the Weinstein Company logo gave me an involuntary shiver at the start of the film. Who can tell now if Harvey Weinstein's abuse of Ms. Judd may have culminated in this film being buried, released in a dead box office month by Roadside Attractions.

A domestic abuse subplot featuring Diane Ladd and her onscreen spouse feels a bit cliched, but Come Early Morning steers clear of well worn tropes. The film is a feast of solid supporting roles and performances by Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Wilson, Laura Prepon, Tim Blake Nelson, Stacy Keach, Wally Welch, and Ray McKinnon; the latter playing a preacher far different from the one he played in Deadwood. All in all, Come Early Morning is an overlooked little gem.

Les Carabiniers

                       

Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers is at once his most ramshackle and precise work. Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deglamorize every visual aspect of this slipshod satire of a war film. The pallor of the film is a murky grey, the production design as minimal as a Mack Sennett short. The cast lacks star power, it is a motley assortment presented as Manny Farber described them as "woodchucks camouflaged by Nature". Barbet Schroeder cameos as a car dealer. 

Two bumblefucks are recruited to the "King's army' with the promise of riches and the license to rape, murder, and pillage. They enlist unthinkingly, leaving behind their two main squeezes. The two recruits take to soldiering, eagerly harassing women and executing enemies. The grade C action is intercut with newsreel footage of cannon firing, destruction and horror. They send postcards back home to their lady loves that offer terse summation of their activities and the most basic of sentiments.

The "action" is also juxtaposed with intertitles, these along with Philippe Arthuy's witty organ score, help give this 1963 film the feel of a silent movie. Godard plays with this idea further by having Michelangelo ( Patrice Moullet, brother of Luc) go to the cinema and see a series of shorts that harken back, meaningfully, to Buster Keaton and the Lumiere brothers. Because of its in-jokes and its unattractive surface, I would not recommend Les Carabiniers to the neophyte Godard viewer. The fan will find moments to cherish. My favorite was a firing squad momentarily disarmed by Mayakovski and feminine beauty. Only momentarily because this is a Brechtian satire of war and war films that eschews characterization for rhetoric. As one of the intertitles puts it, "There is no victory, only flags and fallen men." Les Carabiniers is undistilled Godard for better and worse.

Biff's Best Vintage Films Viewed in 2023

                

1)       Touchez pas au Grisbi                          Jacques Becker                       1954

2)       The Milky Way                                       Luis Bunuel                             1969

3)       The Round Up                                      Miklós Jancsó                         1966

4)       Macario                                                Roberto Gavaldon                    1960

5)       The Swindle                                         Claude Chabrol                        1997

6)       Les Miserables                                     Raymond Bernard                   1934

7)       The Brass Legend                                 Gerd Oswald                          1957

8)       L'Important C'est d'Aimer                    Andrzej Zulawski                      1975 

9)       Kuhle Wampe                                       Slatan Dudow                          1932

10)     Ruthless                                                Edgar G. Ulmer                       1948

I also recommend:

Merci pour le Chocolat , Summer Storm , Nine Queens.

Rouge, Crime of Passion, The Breaking Point , Gervaise ,

Valerie, Happiness , Sans Lendemain , The Mystic.

I Cover the Waterfront , Elektra, My Love 

Godland

Elliott Crosset Hove in Godland

Hlynur Palmason's Godland tells of a Danish minister sent on a mission to a remote part of Iceland in order to establish a parish. The first half of the film details the arduous overland journey that the priest named Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) endures and barely survives. Lucas is a nascent photographer who wants to document the sights and people he encounters, but he soon learns that he is unprepared for the harsh conditions he experiences. Furthermore, he is estranged from the natives, particularly his guide Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson) , separated by a language barrier and a vast cultural divide. In the 19th century, the era of the film, Iceland was still under rule by Denmark; it did not gain its independence until 1918. Even when Lucas reaches his destination, he is unmoored and fails to fit in with the community. This leads to tragic consequences.

Palmason is more adept at crafting tableau than in choreographing action. This is not fatal to a film in which man is a speck of dust compared to the vastness and fearsomeness of nature. The film has some of the most spectacular cinematography of recent vintage and it must have been a very challenging shoot for the cast and crew. There are no poor performances, but characterization is somewhat secondary in a yarn that seizes upon mythic archetypes to picture man's dominion as extremely small in the natural order.

Turn Every Page

Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Lizzie Gottlieb's Turn Every Page is an endearing documentary on the relationship between the noted biographer Robert Caro and his editor, the late Robert Gottlieb. Caro is famous for his book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and his still not yet completed five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Even if he had not collaborated with Caro, Gottlieb would still be renowned for the revival of The New Yorker under his editorship and his work with such notable writers as Toni Morrison, Charles Portis, and Joseph Heller. The film examines Cano's exhaustive and tortuous research and writing process and the wrangles he has had with Gottlieb over the years. 

A film which features arguments about the use of semicolons is going to have a limited audience, but count me very much in that audience. I have eagerly awaited to devour each new volume by Caro pretty much my whole adult life. He combines meticulous research, a broadness of vision, and a literary stylishness that is rare in a historical writer. The boundless affection expressed by the various talking heads in Turn Every Page captures the admiration inspired by his work. That affection is shared by Lizzie Gottlieb, one of the subject's daughter. Normally, I would be hesitant to recommend such a starry eyed valentine to a subject, but I share the reverence and love expressed for these storied collaborators and cannot remain objective about this terrific film.

I Cover the Waterfront

               

James Cruze's I Cover the Waterfront, from 1933, is a raucous pre-Code melodrama set in an anonymous San Diego. Ben Lyon plays a reporter assigned to the titular beat who is investigating a fishing boat Captain (Ernest Torrence) suspected of ferrying illegal Chinese immigrants into the country. In one shocking scene, the Captain and his minions casually wrap an immigrant in chains and drop him to the bottom of the sea so as to avoid being busted by the Coast Guard. I Cover the Waterfront has the saltiness and vigor of the best pre-Code features: there is sex galore, torture devices, jokes about lesbians, much flouting of Prohibition, and the casual racism of the era.

Wells Root's screenplay is very loosely adapted from Max Miller's book based on his exploits as a reporter for the San Diego Sun. A love interest for the reporter was introduced in the person of the Captain's daughter played by Claudette Colbert. Ms. Colbert, as was her want, wears a little too much makeup for a wharf rat, but delivers her gutsiest and most full bodied performance. She was always best when a little sauciness was allowed to puncture her glamorous facade as in It Happened One Night, Cleopatra, and The Palm Beach Story. She gets to show a little unfulfilled potential in a scene where she physically chastises a hooker who has rolled her Dad. Her rapport with Lyon, who is serviceable, is good. The two create some chemistry despite Cruze posing them on dock sets with subpar rear projection backdrops.

Her scenes with Torrence are even better and it is his performance that is the best in the film. A Scottish actor with nearly fifty film credits, Torrence was one of the leading supporting actors of the silent era and was poised to carry on in the sound era. His performance here captures the grandiosity of a character quite willing to live above morality in order to further his own ends. Highlights of his career include Tol'able Davy, Clopin in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, Peter in The King of Kings, Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes, and Buster Keaton's father in Steamboat Bill Jr.. His six foot four frame often gave him hulking villain roles, but he could also play more avuncular roles as he did in Cruze's biggest hit, The Covered Wagon. The pity was that Torrence died soon after the completion of I Cover the Waterfront. He would have made a memorable Ahab.

Because it was an independent feature released by United Artists, I Cover the Waterfront's copyright lapsed years ago. There are a lot of truncated and bowdlerized versions floating about. The version on Tubi is a cautionary example, seemingly a dupe of a version cut for television broadcast in the fifties. As William K. Everson noted in his lecture on the film in 1953, what could be shown in the theaters pre-Code could not be shown on television in America two decades later. The version on Tubi is extremely murky and has been snipped of ten minutes, particularly a lengthy and key scene in a bordello. The version currently streaming on Max is the real deal, as is the Film Detective DVD.

L'Important C'est d'Aimer

Fabio Testi and Romy Schneider

Andrzej Zulawski's L'Important C'est d'Aimer, from 1975, is a crazed melodrama derived from Christopher Frank's novel La Nuit americaine. Romy Schneiders stars as Nadine, a down at her heels actress who draws the romantic attentions of a scuffling photographer named Servais (Fabio Testi). Servais cobbles together a living shooting pornography and, behind a two way mirror, the occasional orgy which his mob employers use for blackmail. Nadine is ensnared in equally tawdry circumstances. Her husband, Jacques (Jacques Dutronc) is a louche parasite. He bailed Nadine out of a scrape years before and is now content to pimp her out for demeaning projects that pay the rent. Someone describes Nadine's most recent film as "two dykes in a castle with a dwarf."

A feeling of degradation permeates the film. The living quarters in the film are worn and shabby. The heat has been turned off, as has the phone. The dishes are piling up and so are the empty wine bottles. No one has a satisfying job and  the first blush of youth is long gone. "I'm 30" insists Nadine more than once, but no one believes her. Zulawski stresses his characters' sense of entrapment by largely keeping the action inside. The defining shot of the film is a shaky track down a cramped corridor. There is no exit.

All of this might be insufferable if not for Zulawski's twisted and very Polish sense of humor. This is a melodrama that flirts with. but stops just short of self-parody. Georges Delerue's magnificent score, which adds to this film's references to Contempt, apes the melodramatic music of Hollywood's golden era. That era is also echoed by the numerous classic film posters that decorate Jacques and Nadine's villa. The heroic ghosts of that era look down on a world that is now seamy and unsatisfying. Jacques, a jack of all trades, but master of none, has a side trade in dealing classic film stills.

Schneider and Klaus Kinski

L'Important... really goes off the deep end when Servais finagles a role for Nadine in a production of Richard III which features Klaus Kinski as the hunchbacked monarch. The production is a riotously enjoyable fiasco with Kinski frothing away in samurai armor. Kinski adds to the feel of polymorphous perversity by bedding two female prostitutes despite describing himself as a homosexual. Similarly, Jacques describes himself as gay, but it is intimated that he is impotent. That is only some of this film's romantic entanglements, deceptions, and tortured frolics. Whew. Offscreen, Schneider and Dutronc had an impassioned fling. 

The casting helps make the film. Kinski can upend any film with his eye rolling, incisor baring schtick, but he has an appropriately outlandish role here. Dutronc is superb as Jacques, providing soulful depths to a character who is hopelessly superficial and knows it. Fabio Testi is an almost comically limited performer, but Zulawski uses his broad frame well here. Servais is so besotted with Nadine that he is most often silently mooning after her on the sidelines and Testi can handle that. Servais' explosions of passion, not so much.

Like Servais, I am so smitten with Ms. Schneider, I can't hope to be objective about her performance. Her beauty has something to do with it, as does her sad and premature death. I think the role fits her like a glove, degradation and all, and that she is superb. The voters of the premier Cesar awards for best actress thought so, too, and selected her over an especially strong field consisting of Isabelle Adjani (...Adele H), Delphine Seyrig (India Song), and Catherine Deneuve (Lovers Like Us). Maybe they were trying to boost a falling star, but I appreciate the sentiment. 

L'Important C'est d'Aimer is not a film for everyone. If you are offended by explicit sex, drug use, violence, cruelty to women or Klaus Kinski chewing the scenery, steer clear. However, it is a prime example of the bonkers cinema of Andrzej Zulawski and his principle theme, summed up in the title of one of his films, mad love. Streaming on Kanopy for free and on Apple TV for a fee.

Jacques Dutronc and Schneider

 

Birds of Passage

Natalia Reyes

Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego's Birds of Passage, from 2018, is an intriguing chronicle of the rise and fall of one family caught up in the Colombian drug wars. The film starts in 1968 with a ritual marking the emergence into womanhood of teenage Zaida (Natalia Reyes). Zaida belongs to the Wayuu people, an Amerindian ethnic group based in northern Colombia. Birds of Passage is partly an ethnographic portrait of the Wayuu with each of the five parts of the film structured around a tribal ritual. However, the film also portrays the estrangement of the Wayuu from their traditional ways as they grow wealthy from marijuana cultivation and embrace Western culture.

Jose Acosta plays Rapayet, an impoverished suitor of Zaida who enters the drug trade in order to pay off Zaida's dowry and wed her. He is able to do so, but, eventually, at a dear cost. The film illustrates the next twelve years in the life of Zaida and Rapayet's family and their eventual downfall. Like Guerra's previous film, Embrace of the Serpent, is handsomely shot and also somewhat ponderous. The directors tend to line up their cast in straight lines as if they are a chorus, a technique that is efficient, but unimaginatively static. Still, Birds of Passage resounds as a tragedy of almost Shakespearean dimensions. Mr. Acosta is a blank slate as an actor, but Ms. Reyes, Carmina Martinez as her mother and Greider Meza as her hot headed cousin all create three dimensional characters that add to the desolate feeling of eventual loss. 

Mr. Guerra's career has been waylaid by accusations of sexual misconduct. This led not only to a professional split from Ms. Gallego, but also led to the dissolution of their marriage. Because of this, some may be disinclined to watch Birds of Passage, but I would urge all to separate the man from his work and give this ultimately affecting film a gander. 

The Best of Ryan O'Neal

1941-2023

                                           I am flippant. That's one of my charms

1)   Paper Moon                             Peter Bogdanovich                            1973

2)   So Fine                                     Andrew Bergman                               1981

3)   What's Up, Doc?                     Peter Bogdanovich                            1972

4)   Barry Lyndon                          Stanley Kubrick                                 1975

5)   Nickelodeon                            Peter Bogdanovich                            1976

6)   Tough Guys Don't Dance       Norman Mailer                                  1987

7)   Wild Rovers                             Blake Edwards                                  1971

8)   Chances Are                             Emile Andolino                                 1989

9)   Love Story                                Arthur Hiller                                      1970

10) Zero Effect                               Jake Kasdan                                      1998

Busy with guest spots on 60s television, he hit paydirt as Rodney Harrington on Peyton Place, typing O'Neal as a preppie heartthrob. He parlayed that to leading man status, becoming a star due to the smash success of Love Story. The popularity of that waste basket of tissues was somewhat preordained by the way America had clutched Erich Segal's slim tome to its collective breast. The slick facility of the film managed to please both the youth market and the silent majority. O'Neal's lightweight charm, which carried the picture, was a throwback to that of the romantic leads of the classic American cinema and was in contrast to the edgy, alienated, and urban new breed exemplified by Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro.

O'Neal's heyday was brief, he was undone by appearing in too many expensive flops, culminating in Oliver's Song; an echo that failed to resound. His personal life was unstable and contributed to his limited opportunities after 1980. The failure of The Driver displayed his limitations as an action star. Films after his decline that used him well either utilized his lightweight talent (So Fine, Chances Are) or had him work against it (Tough Guy..., Zero Effect) His best work has held up better than I expected it to. I also enjoy his efforts in The Thief Who Came to Dinner and Irreconcilable Differences. 

May December

             
Todd Haynes' May December, streaming on Netflix, is a bracingly sardonic take on the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. Samy Burch's screenplay differs from the case in ways that make its seamier details a teeny bit more palatable, it was child abuse after all, and helps the film function as an auto-critique. Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe's(Charles Melton) relationship does not begin in the classroom, but at a pet store where they are co-workers. This makes the union between the two seem slightly less exploitive, though Joe's status as a victim who was thrust into manhood too early is painfully established by the film's end. The action of the film occurs two decades after the couple's affair became a tabloid sensation. They have raised three kids and have uneasily settled in the town that birthed their affair, Savannah.

An interloper is introduced, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a well-known actress who bird-dogs Gracie around town as research for an "indie film" that will be based on Gracie and Joe. Haynes emphasizes the access Elizabeth's celebrity status provides her with tracking and static shots of her gawkers. Everyone in town peripherally related to the duo is eager to spill their guts to Elizabeth. Everything for Elizabeth is grist for the mill. She is a self centered user who shows little regard for anyone, including her fiancée. Her passive aggressive manipulativeness is mirrored by Gracie's, who belittles her children and infantilizes her husband. Haynes seizes upon this by including multiple shots of mirrors and shots from the point of view of a mirror (like above). This proves more effective that the Sirkian use of the same device in Far From Heaven because Hayes and Burch are exploring multiple perspectives instead of monophonically echoing Sirk's critique of 50s conformism. The device here is also a homage the the melding of personalities in Bergman's Persona. The difference being that Elizabeth doesn't bond or meld with Gracie, she just dons Grace's persona as part of her artistic process.

The script seizes between Gracie and Elizabeth's class differences and Haynes and his players are alive to the satiric intent. Gracie is happy to embrace the veneer of the American petit-bourgeoisie. Savannah in the film is a bourgeoise playland with nary a wilted flower or homeless person in sight. Gracie seems desperate to keep herself busy through cooking and flower arranging classes. Elizabeth is an elitist and that can't help but rub against Gracie and her lifestyle. Because of her glamor and psychological astuteness, Elizabeth is able to manipulate Joe into an affair, but to no good end. Haynes uses high angle shots to stress the manipulation going on, most meaningfully during Elizabeth and Joe's act of consummation. Normally, shots of sex stress the intimacy of the act, but that is not the case here. Elizabeth and Grace are succubae draining the life force from Joe. Joe is drained and wallowing in a premature midlife crisis. He is more nurturing than his wife (or Elizabeth). He's good with the kids and, in a metaphor too far, even cares for Monarch butterfly pupae. However, as Elizabeth notes even as she gets in her licks, he is damaged inside and cannot hope to find his way in life.

The last sequence of May December shows Elizabeth performing in the film about Joe and Gracie. The scene displays Gracie brandishing a snake and seducing Joe in the pet shop. The sequence depicts how the media both glamorizes (the pet shop stock room is a veritable love nest compared to one in Savannah) and vulgarizes its subject (that damned serpent). As with the conclusion of Killers of the August Moon, the myths and legends produced by American media are shown to be artificial and somewhat fraudulent. Since The Karen Carpenter Story, Todd Haynes has often used postmodern devices to distance his audience from his subject matter. May December is likewise alienating. Its two leading females are unlikeable and there is no comforting message. This explains popular indifference to the film and also why Charles Melton has won most of the acting plaudits. His character is one of the few sympathetic figures in the film, but I don't think his performance is particularly superior to his co-stars. They are all superb. May December is a knotty, multi-layered film that will reward repeat viewing. It ranks among Mr. Haynes' best films which include Safe, I'm Not There, and Mildred Pierce

First Love

Sakurako Konishi and Masataka Kubota in First Love

Takashi Miike's First Love, from 2019, is one of the more satisfying releases from this ridiculously prolific Japanese director. A mashup of a dizzying array of genres, First Love tells the story of a boxer (Masataka Kubota) compelled to protect a much abused call girl (Sakurako Konishi) who has fallen afoul of both the yakuza and a Chinese gang. Muneyuki Kii's script efficiently introduces a cast of over a dozen supporting characters and the players deliver a host of finely etched performances. Miike memorably fills the negative space of the frame with all sorts of bric a brac that give the film a lived in feel. As usual, the director adroitly handles the choreographed splatter, but it is the film's moving portrait of its protagonist donning the mantle of chivalric heroism that makes First Love memorable. Currently streaming on Tubi. 

Madeleine Collins

Virginie Efira unravels in Madeleine Collins

Antoine Barraud's Madeleine Collins is a mildly engaging psychodrama about a woman attempting to juggle two households in separate countries. In France, Judith is wife to a conductor and they are raising two boys. In Switzerland, under the name of Margot, she plays house with a man who we eventually learn was married to her sister and his young daughter. Judith works as a translator, so she is able to use the travel necessary for her job as cover for her clandestine relationship. Her brother in law knows about her husband, but not vice versa. Most riffs on this theme, like The Bigamist or The Captain's Paradise, have had male protagonists, but no matter the gender, the focus of the narrative naturally concerns the unraveling of the protagonist's double life and Madeleine Collins is no exception.

Some have embraced this film as a Hitchcockian thriller, but Barraud is no Hitchcock. Barraud tries to give the film a subjective focus so we can empathize with his protagonist as her world collapses around her, but his directorial personality is not forceful enough to paper over the plot's improbabilities. However, he is fortunate enough in having a leading lady with enough personality and charisma to hold the film's flimsy framework together. Virginie Efira is originally from Belgium where she first found work on television as what they call on the continent a presenter. Her stunning beauty gave her access to film work, but it is her acting chops which has led her to become a significant leading lady in the French cinema during the past decade. She is best known in this country as the lead in Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta. Her sensuality in Madeleine Collins makes it believable that the male leads in the cast are in thrall to her, the most interesting being Nadav Lapid's forger. More importantly, Efira captures her character's hubris which precipitates her fall. Madeleine Collins could have been a film of shattering intensity. That it hold one's attention is mostly due to Ms. Efira efforts. 

The Romantic Agony of The Falling

Florence Pugh and Maisie Williams enjoy some splendor in the grass in The Falling

I watched Carol Morley's The Falling, currently streaming on Tubi, primarily because it was Florence Pugh's film debut and I think she is the most interesting actor to emerge in the last decade or so. However, I was unexpectedly taken by this 2014 film and recommend it to the adventuresome. The film is set at an alternative girls school in England circa 1969 where, in a case of mass hysteria, the students begin fainting, first individually and then en masse. Spoilers follow...

Abbie (Pugh) and Lydia (Maisie Williams) are best friends, united by their regard for each other and a shared rebelliousness. Their friendship has an almost erotic intensity common to female besties who have not quite ventured into the tumult of heterosexual courtship, like Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It. Things begin to shift when Abbie begins to have sexual experiences with boys, including Lydia's brother, and Lydia feels a little left behind. After her sexual initiation, Abbie begins experiencing fainting spells. Morley explicitly links the ecstatic loss of control experienced during these spells with sexual release. She also links the spells with the occult or, as the pentagram button wearing brother puts it, "sex magick with a k". Abbie dies after one of her fainting spells, a death that has no rational explanation, but that is explained away as "natural". The contagion is not contained, though, and soon the girls of the school are swooning and dropping left and right.

If one is tied down by the dictates of realism, The Falling must seem a muddle. Morley goes to great lengths to avoid any grand psychological reasoning for the fainting spells. What she is concerned with is the pagan pantheism of England's heritage bursting underneath the Christian morality of official culture. The "non-denominational' chapel the school puts on is an empty ritual where students and faculty rotely sing hymns like "All Things Bright and Beautiful." A living culture exists elsewhere. The school seems cut off from the world at large, but the school's grounds are teeming with the natural beauty of falling leaves and swans gliding on the pond. When Pugh recites a Wordsworth poem, "Ode on Intimations on Immortality", a link is made with the Romantics who could spy the preternatural in a puddle. 

Morley links this with 1969 by using pop songs of the period and original music from Tracey Thorne, tunes that seem more truly alive than the moldy old bromides sung in chapel. This is apt because the pop stars of that era were truly the descendants of the English Romantics in their rejection of traditional British culture and religion. Donovan, whose "Voyage of the Moon" is sung by both Mary Hopkin and Ms. Pugh in the film, was the nature loving successor to Wordsworth of the flower power era and, like Wordsworth, had a very limited shelf life as a vital artist. Like the Romantics, Morley explores aspects of sex that exist outside the confines of English Christian morality: namely sapphism and incest. Now these themes, particularly Lydia's infatuation with her brother probably doomed the film commercially, but I admire Morley sticking to her guns and exploring aspects of the Romantic tradition that usually get swept under the rug. Certainly, Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley all had a more than passing interest in the theme of incest.

Rationally, I can understand those with issues with The Falling. Pugh, the life force of the picture, is killed off too soon and the film's climax provides little catharsis. However, the film and its concerns stuck with me. The performances of the leads are spot on as are the contributions of Maxine Peak, Anna Burnett, Greta Scaachi, Monica Dolan, and Joe Cole. I group the film with other works by English filmmakers, particularly Ben Wheatley and Mark Jenkin, who are interested in exploring the pagan roots of Perfidious Albion.  

The Invisibles

Hiding in plain sight: The Invisibles

Claus Rafle's The Invisibles, released in Germany in 2017 as The Invisibles: We Want to Live, tells the stories of four German Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding out in wartime Berlin. Reenactments of the four narratives are interlaced with period documentary footage of Berlin and the reminiscences of the four actual protagonists. That we know the four survived does nothing to lessen the tension or sense of paranoia. The Invisibles stands partly as a portrait of indomitable courage, but also one of a wartime Berlin where the Nazi elite wined and dined while most starved and dodged bombs. Like Errol Morris' The Pigeon Tunnel, The Invisibles sometimes suffers from redundancy due to its intermingling of survivors' testimony with the visual recreations. In its favor, the characterizations are largely vigorous and the social scope of the narrative is impressively broad. Rafle allows enough subjective feeling to bleed into the narrative that the film never feels like a history lesson.

The Orphanage

         
J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage was roundly praised when it was released in 2007. I found it well-crafted, but dull. Sergio Sanchez's script situates the film in the sick house genre which includes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, and many others. A medium (Geraldine Chaplin) baldly states the film's credo that structures carry traces of past trauma. The protagonist, Laura (Belen Rueda), spent some of her youth at the orphanage and, in a fit of misplaced nostalgia, wants to turn the shuttered building into a home for the disabled. She and her husband are parents to an HIV+ adoptee named Milo who has a penchant for acquiring imaginary friends in a film is overladen with significance, Of course, the ghostly inhabitants of the house start communicating with Milo who disappears, leading to Laura discovering the abode's deadly secrets.

The cast is fine and the visual, sound and  production design are so expert that it is not surprising that Hollywood came calling for Mr. Bayona soon after. However, the script is derivative, not only of the above films, but also The Haunting, The Innocents, and the work of The Orphanage's producer, Guillermo del Toro. Also, like The Haunting and The Innocents, two horror classics I'm not crazy nuts about, The Orphanage is overly tasteful and reserved. There is very little sense of palpable horror even when the scarecrow boy attacks and bodies are uncovered. A suitable horror film when one is entertaining an elderly Aunt Sadie and Uncle Mort on Halloween, then. 

EO

Jerzy Skolimowski and friend

Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, by my measure the best feature film of 2022, is a remarkable capstone to a magnificent career. The film illustrate vignettes from the life of a donkey, starting with his stint in a circus to his ultimate end in an abattoir. The vivacity and freshness of the director's approach would be impressive in a tyro much less an octogenarian. EO is an ornery and unpredictable film that exposes human folly and cruelty.

The obvious inspiration for Skolimowski and his co-scenarist Ewa Piaskowska is Robert Bresson's sublime masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar. EO is an interesting counterpoint to the work of that peculiar French Catholic Marxist. In contrast to Armond White calling Skolimowski a nihilist in National Review, I would type him as a secular humanist. Balthazar the donkey in Bresson's film is a symbol of Christian suffering and humility. EO the donkey is more of a tabula rasa providing the director an opportunity to offer a heartfelt and sardonic look at his homeland of Poland in the 21st century. Stylistically, the two directors are chalk and cheese. Bresson is an austere director who largely eschews stylistic flourishes. His camera almost always remains fixed, with lots of close-ups of hands. Skolimowski uses all the tricks of the trade to offer a dizzying array of points of view: Steadicam tracks, strobe effects, drone shots. I doubt Bresson would have used a drone shot if a gun was put to his head.

Au Hasard Balthazar

The craft of Michal Dymek's cinematography and Pawl Mykietyn's score help unify the disparate elements that make up EO. Skolimowski has always been an unruly talent with his share of duds, but EO is up there with his masterworks which include Deep End (1971), The Shout(1978), Moonlighting(1982), and 11 Minutes (2016). 

The Round-Up

Janos Gorbe, in black hat, and fellow detainees 

Miklós Jancsó's The Round-Up, from 1966, is a pitiless depiction of ethnic cleansing in the Austro-Hungarian empire circa 1870. Jancso's fourth film was the first to bring him widespread acclaim in the West. Magyar peasants undergo torture and humiliation under the knouts of the largely Austrian military. The army, reeling after their defeat by Prussia, are forcibly taking new recruits for their depleted regiments, but they have other motives. They use the detainment of the men to weed out and eliminate veterans of the 1848 Hungarian rebellion which was led by Lajos Kossuth. Some sources, including the Kanopy website where the film is streaming, have indicated that this film takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 1848-9 uprising, but this is not so. The veterans of the rebellion served as young men and are now in late middle age. However, the fact that they are still facing reprisals twenty years after the fact, bears witness to the depth and bitterness of the enmity that lingers. 

Janos Gorbe as Janos Gajdor, a wheedling and desperate informant, is the de facto protagonist of the first half of the film. His frantic and futile attempts to save his skin make up the majority of the drama and give the film a sense of the era's paranoia and cruelty. Despite positioning his film as a Marxist critique of Hungarian history in the prologue, Jancsó eventually admitted he wanted the film to reflect the fallout from the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. After Gajdor meets his just desserts, the film eschews psychological characterizations for the Cinemascope pageantry and allegory that was to become Jancsó's distinctive style in the next decade. Multiple fields of movement, usually infantry and cavalry units drilling, fill the widescreen frame. I find The Round-Up to be a bit dour compared to what was to follow, but if you've never seen a Jancsó film, this is the place to start. 

 

Dark Victory

Death awaits for Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, from 1939, is one of Bette Davis' better melodramas from when she ruled as queen of the Warner Brothers lot. The scenario, an adaptation of a play that opened on Broadway in 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead as the lead, requires Davis to play a Long Island heiress dying of a vaguely specified brain ailment. Robert Benchley described the play as "Camille without all the coughing." The film is total hooey, yet redeemed by Goulding's graceful direction and a superior cast. Goulding's graceful pans of the many party scenes nimbly introduce characters and pivots us to the dramatic crux of each scene. Davis gets to play a gamut of emotions and delivers. Playing a full of beans rich kid, she takes on the pose of a madcap hellion after learning the diagnosis that has been hidden from her. Of course, she see the light and weds the stolid doctor (George Brent) who loves her. She withdraws with him to Vermont for a few blissful months before accepting death with dignity and gaining the dark victory of the title.

Davis and George Brent

As a person, Davis was a piece of work, but no one can deny her facility as an actress. Dark Victory gives her a chance to do a few variations on her usual brittle bitch schtick. Audiences and critics lapped it up and so did I. Davis was coming off her first divorce and, during filming, co-star Brent fell into her romantic clutches. This probably accounts for the warmth (not heat) between the two which far outstrips anything generated in their other films together. Brent was a fairly wooden presence, but his casting in Dark Victory suits him. His character is a decent, one dimensional sort lacking either sex appeal or neuroses.

For sexual and neurotic appeal, we get Humphrey Bogart as Davis' stable groom. The groom has the hots for the heiress and the insolent banter between Bogart and Davis is fun. Bogart had not yet reached the top rung of stardom. This role was a godsend after playing villainous gangsters for the studio or worse: like his cowboy in The Oklahoma Kid or his vampire in the dire The Return of Doctor X. Another suitor for Davis in the film is played by an actor who never reached the top rung of movie stardom, but overachieved in another field, Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays a drunken playboy. Reportedly, Goulding wanted to give the role a dash of sexual ambivalence, but ambivalence was foreign to Reagan in all aspects of his life. The role must have given him pause because he was the son of an alcoholic, but he acquits himself well.

Davis and Bogart

I usually hurl brickbats at him, but Max Steiner's score is quite good. Best of all is a young Irish actress making her American film debut, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Hal Wallis had signed her after seeing her in New York in the Mercury Theater production of Heartbreak Hotel with Orson Welles. She plays the thankless role of Davis' secretary and confidante with amiable aplomb. Life imitated art, as Fitzgerald was mentored by Davis in how to navigate the hazardous byways of Hollywood. Despite acclaim for this picture and her performance in Wuthering Heights, Fitzgerald floundered at Warners and was released from her contract in 1946. Davis, who had tangled with Jack Warner and many others during the course of her career, met the same fate in 1949.

 

Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl adaptations

Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Currently streaming on Netflix are four films (The Ratcatcher, The Swan, Poison, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) that Wes Anderson has adapted from Roald Dahl short stories. They are a near perfect merger of Dahl's very English salt and vinegar with Anderson's very American pastel Easter egg sweetness. The English cast bites into the pungent dialogue and narration more entertainingly than the American ones in Anderson's previous Dahl adaptation, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The usual Anderson preoccupations are present,  but Dahl's prose has freed Anderson's imagination to concentrate on what really busts his buttons: the artifices designed to frame his cinematic fables. Anderson uses both theatrical effects (spotlights, actors addressing the audience, visible stagehands and set changes, scrims) and cinematic ones (tracking shots, CGI, split screens, odd camera angles) at the service of Dahl's words and vision. The narration of each film is foregrounded. Sometimes Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself , ensconced in his work office, narrates the action, but all members of the ensemble chime in, capturing the crackling vitality of Dahl's language. 

Dahl's darkly ironic view of life prevents Anderson from falling into the traps of his own fussiness and bloodlessness. Even Tim Burton has more Dionysus in him than Anderson, our most Apollonian filmmaker. The moments of death and loss in Anderson's films tend to end in the communal hug he thinks we all need. There is a short sharp shock of life and death in Dahl's work that strengthens Anderson's often anemic worldview. The characters in these short films seem to spring to life more than the caricatures in Asteroid City; and I enjoyed Asteroid City. I hope for more Dahl adaptations from Anderson, but I won't hold my breath for his version of Switch Bitch. 

  

Angst

Erwin Leder and friend in Angst

Gerald Kargl's Angst, from 1983, is a splatter filled home invasion film that is a chilling portrait of the mind of a psychotic killer. The film is wholly nihilistic without even a trace of humanistic uplift. Erwin Leder (Das Boot) plays the protagonist who we meet in jail on the day he is sprung. Leder's voiceovers give us a glimpse into the miscreant's messed up and murderous past while he searches for new victims. Leder's antic and full-bodied performance is remarkable, but the film belongs to Kargl's mise-en-scene. His camera work, with swooping crane shots and gyroscopic dolly shots, evokes the protagonist's unhinged mind.

Ultimately, Angst has third act problems. Still, it is a tight and elegantly constructed 78 minutes; Kargl's only feature film. Angst didn't generate much goodwill despite Kargl's obvious talent. It was banned in most of Europe and bankrupted the director. Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream provides the serviceable techno score though Kargl uses silence and repetitive sounds, like water dripping, to further give a sense of psychic dislocation. The missing link between Stanley Kubrick and Gaspar Noe, Angst will entrance fans of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Golden Glove, and Sam Raimi. Mom, you should skip this one.

Secret Beyond the Door

Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett

Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door, from 1947, is the last and least of Lang's collaborations with Joan Bennett and her husband, producer Walter Wanger. At the time, the film was a commercial and critical disaster, but its critical defenders were one day to include Tom Milne, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Fernando C. Croce. Lang wrangled not only with Bennett during the course of the shoot, but also with distinguished cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Andersons, The Night of the Hunter, Shock Corridor).Despite these travails, the film looks pretty rich. Lang could conjure a cinematic nightmare even with the leftover sets on the Universal lot. Natalie Schafer (Lovey on Gilligan's Island) provides adept and welcome comic relief while Ann Revere is always a sturdy presence even if she is underused here. The theme of homicidal compulsion should be right up Lang's alley, but there is a large impediment and that would be the script. 

If Citizen Kane is, as Orson Welles put it, dime book Freud than Secret Behind the Door is comic book Freud. Now I am married to a psychiatrist and am favorably inclined to the father of psychoanalysis, but the script is so baldly and self-trumpetingly Freudian that the end effect is ridiculous. Architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) is so hung up on his Oedipal issues that lady love Celia (Miss Bennett) has to bring his repressed trauma, the secret behind the door, to light in the final reel in order to cure her man. The film was made at the height of Hollywood's fascination with psychoanalysis in films such as Lady in the Dark and Spellbound. The film's reliance on Freud would not have been fatal to this project if the screenplay had a sound structure. Unfortunately, the screenplay, concocted by Silvia Richards from Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No 13, is a slipshod affair overly beholden to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. We have a widower who lives in a spooky mansion where his first wife died a mysterious death. We also have an embittered member of the household staff who, in a fit of jealous fury, endeavors to torch the mansion at the film's end.

Amidst this leftover hash, there is little Bennett can do to make her character believable. The script is overly reliant on her voiceovers. Bennett looks alternately glazed over or beset with indigestion while her offscreen voice narrates her character's tale of woe. Michael Redgrave's performance is even more problematic. Redgrave's success in Dead of Night briefly gave him leading man status, but here he is so one dimensionally creepy it is hard to see what Celia sees in him. The role required the broodingly Romantic fatalism Olivier carries off in Rebecca. The score is by Miklos Rozsa who is at his string pounding worst.

If you are a card carrying auteurist like me, Fritz Lang's name on the credits of Secret Beyond the Door will be sufficient to pique your interest. Indeed, Lang's eye almost redeems the second hand nature of the screenplay. Almost. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

            

I respected and admired Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, from 2021, but didn't love, love, love it. Most, but not all, of Coen's choices seem reasonable to me. The Scottish play is the Bard of Avon's most dour and dire effort, so the choice to film in black and white is apt. The simple sets give the film the feel of a German Expressionist work as does the boxy aspect ratio. Macbeth and his lady walk the labyrinthine corridors and steps of his castle, usually alone with their thoughts, and lose their moral moorings and minds. The elisions from the text, like the Hecate scene, are sensible. Because of this, the film has a sense of momentum and never bogs down.

There are no lousy performances and all the players seem at ease with the text, something you cannot say for many Hollywood version of Shakespeare. I particularly enjoyed Henry Melling, Corey Hawkins, Moses Ingram, Susan Berger, Alex Hassell, and Stephen Root. Kathryn Hunter's performance as the three weird sisters has been justly praised. For those seeking more of this special performer, I would urge them to track down the disc of Julie Taymor's production of A Midsummer's Night Dream from 2014. 

Both Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are fine leads. Macbeth, like Othello, is a warrior more at home planning battle strategy than palace intrigue. Washington is always good at macho swagger and gangster menace, but he is also good at portraying his character's confusion when confronted with forces he does not understand. McDormand has always struck me as flinty rather than fiery, so she is not ideally cast. She does, however, sink her teeth into the text to good effect. I would say she is probably the finest Lady Macbeth yet on screen, but that is damning with faint praise.

Overall, I have my niggles. The finest onscreen versions of Macbeth are Throne of Blood, the second season of Slings and Arrows, and the Orson Welles film from 1948. For a point of comparison I'm going to use the Welles version. It has a subpar Lady Macbeth and raggedy ass production values, but it has a primal spark and pagan passion that the Coen version lacks. Take the scene when Macbeth hires on Banquo's assassins. The killers in the Welles version are skeezy ragamuffins who seem subhuman. I want to take a bath after looking at them. The murderers in the Coen version seem anonymous in comparison.

I also think Coen has bungled the scene of Macbeth spying Banquo's ghost, one of the most powerful scenes in the play. Coen doesn't have Banquo come to the banquet table, but he has Macbeth spy him going down a corridor and then Macbeth pursues him. This ties in with the film's notion of the castle's hallways resembling the haunted corridors of the protagonists' mind, but something is lost. Having the ghost attend the banquet is a symbol of a pagan defilement of the Christian ritual of communion. This is a reflection of Macbeth's devil's bargain with the supernatural and his committing the mortal sin of regicide, a sin very much on the mind of Shakespeare's contemporaries who had just experienced Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up King James I. Ultimately, this is a somewhat bloodless and respectable Macbeth that never captures the pagan furies lurking in the text.