Winter Wind

                     
Miklós Jancsó's Winter Wind is a disquieting historical pageant from 1969. The focus on Balkan politics in 1934 is the principle reason for the obscurity of this film in the United States. The film presupposes a knowledge of the Eastern European politics of the era that, then or now, is uncommon in this country. Winter Wind starts with newsreel footage of the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in 1934. Alexander had reigned as King since 1921 and was seen as a bulwark against the rise of fascism in Europe. He was in Marseilles to negotiate a treaty of friendship with France prompted by shared fears of Germany and Italy. The assassin was a member of a Macedonian nationalist group that was based in and supported by fascist Italy.

Even though Winter Wind's prologue shows this assassination, the events of the subsequent film are set just before the assassination. They depict a Croatian Nationalist group based at a country estate in Hungary who engage in terrorist acts across the border. The Croats, like the Macedonians, would not accept the dominance of a Serbian ruler. Recruits to their camp practice their marksmanship on portraits of the king. Into their midst arrives a bold and Byronic leader with a price on his head, Marko Lazar (Jacques Charrier). Lazar distrusts his comrades, knowing that they are likely to sell him out to the Yugoslav authorities or their watchful hosts in Hungary; and he is eventually proved correct. Jancsó constructs his film in twelve long takes, using dollies and pans. The camera whips around Lazar who feels he is already a captive at the estate and the technique coveys both his claustrophobia and his justified paranoia.

Ewa Swann and Marina Vlady

Two comely femmes (Ewa Swann and Marina Vlady) are offered up to Lazar as treats, but he is too wary to engage them, presumably viewing them as honey traps. They seem more interested in each other, nuzzling together like Courbet's sleepers. The presence of noted, non-Hungarian actors is a testament to the rise of Jancsó's international reputation after the acclaim received by The Round-Up and The Red and the White. Vlady and Swann have little to do but stand around and look alluring. Charrier, however, is quite striking as Lazar. He is handsome enough to provide the romantic dash needed for the role, but is actor enough to impress upon us the character's narcissism. He struts and preens across the screen like a tiger in a cage emanating whiffs of Eros and Thanatos. Charrier was a promising romantic lead of the French cinema of the late 50s and 1960s (most notably in Chabrol's The Third Lover), but grew bored with cinema and returned to his first love, painting. His first wife was a woman named Brigitte Bardot.

Winter Wind was Jancsó second color film after the bloated political allegory, The Confrontation. Both of these films are transitional works in which Jancsó is moving towards the colorful musical and political tapestries of Red Psalm and Electra, My Love. The pageantry of The Confrontation lurches into the ridiculous at times. What is meant to portray Hungary adjusting to Communist rule in 1947 is, to my eyes, a sop to the youthful explosion of the Summer of Love and a warning to the countries of the Warsaw Pact not to fall prey to a movement like the youth-led Chinese Cultural Revolution. Whatever the heck it's about, The Confrontation falls prey to its overly broad scope, inordinate length, and modish youth movement jive. Winter Wind use of color is as assured as in The Confrontation, but is a much more compact and focused film at 74 minutes. It represents a bit of a retreat after the excesses of the Confrontation, but is a much better film. Jancsó's warnings about right wing nationalism seems even more prescient today, particularly with the ascendancy of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Armored Car Robbery

An uncredited Gene Evans, Steve Brodie and William Tallman

Richard Fleischer's Armored Car Robbery is an average noir from 1950. A taut, terse (67 minutes) black and white B picture, the film details a heist and the bringing to justice of its culprits. Fleischer ably animates the nuts and bolts of the story, but the screenplay is a strictly by the numbers affair that features little in the way of interesting characters. The film focuses on both the lawmen and the miscreants. The lead detective is played by Charles McGraw who, though he never achieved A lead status, carved out a solid career as a supporting player. His Lieutenant Cordell is a gruff hard case who has to endure the loss of a longtime partner and break in his successor. McGraw's performance is as lean and unyielding as Fleischer's direction. They would reunite for 1952's The Narrow Margin, a signature film for both of them. McGraw also performed ably for Anthony Mann during the early years of noir.

Dave Purvis, the villainous mastermind of the heist, is played by William Tallman who is best known for playing the hapless Hamilton Burger, the D.A. who was bested each week by Raymond Burr on television's Perry Mason. Tallman, whose life story is quite a tale, specialized in playing troubled heavies on the big screen and the OC Purvis is right in his wheelhouse. Besides planning the perfect crime, Purvis is also betraying his ostensible business partner (an appropriately bleary Douglas Fowley) by making time with his wife, an exotic dancer named Yvonne LeDoux. This skirt is filled out by Adele Jergens who reminded me of a tall Virginia Mayo. Jergens left the film business for domesticity in 1956, but not before leaving behind an impressive filmography. She played a gaggle of molls and provides the requisite sass and sulfur for her character. Her striptease scenes are ridiculously tame, even the burlesque theater's crowd doesn't look seedy enough.

Charles McGraw and Adele Jergens

Besides its above average cast, what distinguishes Armored Car Robbery is its location shooting, then in vogue. The home of the minor league LA Angels, Wrigley Field, (since demolished) is the site of the robbery. We see a field of oil derricks, City Hall, and lots of Los Angeles' streets. It's not always well integrated with the studio footage. The LA harbor dock scenes are especially shoddy. The documentary mode of the film is also in evidence in the scenes depicting the communication and forensics prowess of the LAPD. The script of this flick is extremely conformist in extolling the pre-Miranda interrogation and surveillance methods of the police. There is no hope for law-breakers like Purvis in the cosmos of this film, making it, ultimately, a pro forma exercise.

Victimas del Pecado

Ninón Sevilla

Emilio Fernández's Victimas del Pecado (Victims of Sin) is a terrific musical melodrama from 1951. The film is situated within the Mexican caberetera genre. This genre almost always depicts the depredations faced by urban prostitutes and is set in red light district dance halls and dens of iniquity. Victimas del Pecado is no exception, but allows its heroine glimmers of a better tomorrow.

The film's heroine, Violeta, is played by Ninón Sevilla, one of the outstanding female stars of caberetera films. Like many of the leading figures of the genre, Sevilla was of Cuban birth, though she eventually settled in Mexico. Sevilla brings a ferocious intensity to her role whether she is dancing the mambo or rumba or giving a piece of her mind to the male villains of the movie. Her character works in the Changoo, a swanky nightclub that caters to gangsters and is presided over by the lordly and officious Don Gonzalo (Francisco Reiguera). Dance hall girls are expected to cater to the whims of their clients and fork over the majority of their earnings to their pimps. One of these gals, Rosa (Margarita Ceballos) finds herself pregnant, but the father, Rodolfo (a superb Rodolfo Acosta), refuses to acknowledge the child and urges Rosa to ditch the wee bairn and go back to selling her body. Overcome by her masochism, Rosa places her babe in the nearest waste bin thereby regaining her status as one of Rodolfo's trulls. Hearing of this, Violeta endeavors to rescue the male infant and adopt him. This earns the wrath of Don Gonzalo and he evicts Violeta and the newborn from his premises.

However, Violeta has earned the admiration of another club owner, the taciturn Santiago (Tito Junco), for her dancing and moxie. Soon, Violeta not only has a room for her son, named Juanito, at Santiago's club, but is attracting patrons with her dancing at the cantina named La Máquina Loca. It is notable that Santiago runs his club with a more democratic spirit than the autocratic Don Gonzalo. The patrons are mostly working class rather than criminals. Violeta offers them sizzling rumbas, a more proletariat dance than the upscale mambos and cha-chas dished out for the patrons of the Changoo. Violeta fingers Rodolfo for a murder committed during a movie theater robbery and settles down with Santiago, providing a nurturing home for Juanito. After six years, Rodolfo is sprung from the pen and arrives to settle the score. 

Ninón Sevilla and Francisco Reiguera

Even if the dramatic scenes in Victimas del Pecado were less than stellar, which isn't the case, the film would be worth seeing for the musical and dance sequences alone. The dancing is fiery and the musical numbers by Perez Prado, Rita Montaner, and Pedro Vargas are outstanding. All the technical aspects of the film are first rate, a tribute to the craftmanship of those who toiled at the Churubusco Studios. The sound is particularly good, credited to James L. Fields, an American who settled in Mexico after the Second World War and racked up over six hundred credits before his death. The outstanding black and white cinematography is by Gabriel Figueroa, like Fernández a giant of the Mexican cinema. His work here combines elements of expressionism, as in his work on John Ford's The Fugitive and the gutbucket realism of his work for Luis Buñuel, as in the previous year's Los Olvidados. Fernández and Figueroa expertly utilize actual locations to further the film's motifs and themes. The repeated use of Nonoalco bridge and its railyard environs convey how the action of this film is played out on the wrong side of the tracks while the inclusion of the Monumento a la Madre underlies the theme of maternal sacrifice central to the character of Violeta.

The cast of Victimas del Pecado is almost uniformly excellent. The only fly in the ointment is Margarita Ceballos who is not up to the melodramatic demands of the downtrodden Rosa. As Santiago, Tito Junco, a significant Mexican film star who appeared in The Exterminating Angel and Death in the Garden among many other films, is deft at showing his character's humanism lurking beneath his tough guy facade. Rodolfo Acosta, who popped up in many American films and television shows during his twilight years, is a memorably pungent brute. Reiguera, who played the title role in Orson Welles' unfinished Don Quixote, is an effectively snarling menace in bourgeoise garb. Fernández marshals his very disparate band of talents into a short (84 minutes), sharp mural.

Fernández shows great restraint in his handling of the picture. His work here displays that a lurid plot and pleasing performers are enough to involve an audience and that virtuoso directorial flourishes would only distract from the spectacle. He does pan in to his characters for emphasis, but is largely content to hold Figueroa's gorgeous shots in stasis. The wordless prelude in which Rodolfo admires himself in the mirror after tonsorial ministrations, preening like a peacock, is the first of many examples. When that stasis is broken, Sevilla jumping through a window towards the camera to rescue her son, the film's four evocative tracking shots, Fernández is able to provide kinetic moments that remain lodged in memory. The point of cinema. 

Hundreds of Beavers

                                 
Mike Cheslik's Hundreds of Beavers is the sleeper of the year. It has kicked around the festival circuit for over two years and can be viewed now streaming on Tubi. A homage to silent comedy, Hundreds of Beavers is a dialogue free, black and white film that makes up in inventiveness and pure silliness what it lacks in budget. Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who collaborated on the script with Cheslik (probably after a few pops), stars as apple farmer Jean Kayak who has to pivot into fur trapping after his orchard is destroyed. Trapping the various critters proves more difficult than expected, but Jean is compelled to make his fortune in order to win the hand of the fetching daughter of the proprietor of the local general store. The various animals (beavers, but also rabbits, skunks, wolves and frogs) are mostly portrayed by humans in mascot costumes, adding to the gloriously imbecilic tone of the proceedings. The humor is as broad as a barn, but the pacing and ingenious variations on the theme never flag. 

The primary model for this film seems to be the work of Chuck Jones, particularly his Roadrunner and Coyote animation shorts. With the help of Adobe After Effects, Cheslik helps his protagonist defy logic and physics as his Rube Goldberg inspired traps provide much comic mayhem. Even the gutting and skinning of the varmints is done for comic effect. Despite a wonderful pole dance by Olivia Graves as the object of Jean's affections, this is PG13 fun for the ten year old in all of us. Cheslik tips his hat to many of his film forebears. The list of films and video games referenced is too long to include in full, but includes Seven Chances (see above), Steamboat Bill Jr., The Gold Rush, Snow White, The Wizard of Oz, Cannibal! the Musical, and Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat. However, you don't need to be a film buff to enjoy this one. Superior buffoonery!

                 

Desire

Arletty, Sacha Guitry and Pauline Carton

Sacha Guitry's Désiré, from 1937, is a charming comedy from Guitry's peak period as a filmmaker. Guitry plays the title character, a debonair valet who uncorks the unconscious desires of his mistress, Odette, and reciprocates in kind. Odette is played by Jacqueline Delubac, at that time Madame Guitry. Odette has a beau, Felix, but he is a stuffy bureaucrat more interested in career advancement than amour. Guitry has already established the need of the female members of Odette's household for a bit of romantic dash before Désiré arrives to fill the position of valet. The interplay between the distaff members of the downstairs staff, Arletty's chambermaid and Pauline Carton's cook, fosters a randy tone that signals that the project's focus will remain on the boudoir.

Désiré, like a good many Guitry films, was originally a play. It premiered in 1927 with Guitry starring with then wife Yvonne Printemps. It cannot be stressed what a lauded giant of the French stage Guitry was by the mid-1930s, both as a playwright and star. He resisted film in its silent era, but succumbed with a frenzy of cinematic activity that began with The New Testament in 1936. He directed eight features in the three years before the Second World War broke out, after concocting some seventy or so plays since 1902. Some of these plays are still performed, albeit only in the Francophone parts of the world. Désiré reflects the popular, cartoonish view of Freud and the unconscious that was more current in 1927, but still lingered in 1937. Désiré and Odette both have dreams about each other and express their passions in an unconscious verbal fashion to the fascination and vexation of the other members of their household; and to the delight of the audience. A tome entitled The Key to Dreams, a stand in for The Interpretation of Dreams, is consulted by both Désiré and Odette in an effort to understand the meaning of their reveries.

Georges Feydeau and Sarah Bernhardt with the happy couple, after witnessing the marriage of Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps, 1919

What is remarkable about Désiré is how spry and cinematic a stage adaptation it is. Cross cutting between upstairs and downstairs establishes parallelism between the classes, bridging the alleged gap between masters and servants. A slow tracking shot before Odette and Felix greet Madame Corniche for an intimate dinner, a hilarious sequence which derives belly laughs from the lady's deafness, illustrates the gap between appearance and reality in regards to the host's feelings towards their guest. Guitry inserts superimposition shots of Odette from Désiré's point of view that aptly illustrate his yen for her. These small touches, Guitry is never a bold employer of cinematic technique, represent a slight advancement from the primitive skits of Le Roman d'un tricheur and Les Perles de la couronne. 

What unites all of Guitry's films is his facility with actors. Arletty, who like Guitry was accused of collaboration with the Nazis after the war, is indelible as a no nonsense woman who likes her fun, but "is not a slut." Guitry and Arletty's tart interchanges, there is no spark between them but there is a measured respect, are a special treat. Pauline Carton, who tallied nearly two hundred credits in a long film career, is equally memorable as the cook. It is a tribute to Guitry's gifts as a director that he is able to elicit exquisite performances from both veterans and neophytes. Alys Delonce, in her only film appearance, is wonderful as the clueless Madame Corniche. A cameo by Geneviève Vix, in her sole film role, is also outstanding. Vix was a noted French soprano who had recently retired from the opera stage. She was reputably one of the many mistresses of King Alfonso XIII of Spain.

                             

Guitry as Désiré

The film concludes with Odette and Désiré acknowledging their attraction, but they choose to uphold propriety rather than surrender to their passion. This may seem old-fashioned, but Guitry is remaining true to his self. He was conventional rather than modernist (Chaplin is a good contrast) and somewhat more allied to the 19th Century rather than the 20th. In a heartfelt speech to Odette, Désiré seems to be speaking for his author when he admits he is drawn to the ladies he serves out of masochistic desire; he adores his servitude to them. It doesn't seem much of a stretch to suggest that Guitry is expressing his desire to serve and entertain his audience. The self-abnegation may be a pose, but Guitry knows that he is nothing without his audience's acclaim. 

Green Border

                                                            
Agnieszka Holland's Green Border is a handsome and well meaning film focusing on the migrant crisis in Europe. The film begins with an overhead shot of a green forest straddling the Polish-Belarus border. Holland switches to black and white and retains that choice for the remainder of this somber 153 minute flick. Holland and her collaborators have fashioned a polemic that interweaves different sets of protagonists (a Syrian refugee family, a border guard, a group of activists, and a therapist who becomes radicalized by the refugee's plight) into a fitfully effective effort. Holland's desire to posit Green Border as a rebuke to the nationalistic impulses in her country's causes it to lapse into heavy handedness, the Lord's Prayer is chanted at one point as an act of protest, but the picture remains a vivid one. 

The Syrian family suffers so many depredations and calumnies in the first few reels that the effect is exhausting rather than enlightening as Belarus and Polish border squads treat the refugees as hot potatoes. I'll give it to old Agnieszka, though, no director that kills a child onscreen by having him drown in a bog is pulling her punches. The cast is generally quite good, but somewhat dwarfed by the film's scope. Maja Ostaszewska portrayal of the therapist is particularly memorable. A coda set on the Polish Ukrainian border after Russia's invasion  reunites some of the character and refocuses us on the claims that the refugee crisis was, at least in part, ginned up by the machinations of Vladimir Putin And Belarus' leader Lukashenko. Still, Holland's primary focus is on the refugees caught in the maelstrom of global politic. Overwrought at times, Green Border never loses sight of a common humanity that abides despite the many horrors contained within the director's work. 

His Three Daughters

Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon

I'm kind of on the fence about Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters which is currently streaming on Netflix. The film is a high concept chamber piece set almost wholly in the apartment of a dying man in the Bronx. One of the titular daughters, played by Natasha Lyonne, has been living with her father and caring for him for years. Now that the end is nigh, the other two daughters, both living in tonier circumstances, temporarily move in to assist and bear witness to their old man's passing. The film follows a shopworn formula. The differing siblings clash and hash out old grievances, but, ultimately, bond over their shared grief and reach a greater understanding of each other. I found the overall concept hackneyed. In a less than generous moment, I retitled the film The Odd Throuple with Lyonne in the Oscar role, Carrie Coon as the fussy Felix, and Elizabeth Olsen as Mountain Girl. 

Still, despite the predictability of the plot, I was never bored by the film. Mostly this was due to the perfect casting and skill of the three leads. As in his previous features, Jacobs gives enough space to his performers within his unfussy mise-en-scene to let their efforts breathe. I also liked the way Jacobs imbued certain objects in the apartment, a recliner and a New York Jets towel to name two, as totems of their departing owner. The triteness of His Three Daughters prevented me from responding to it emotionally, but I cannot deny that the project was skillfully executed.                

No Man of Her Own

Lyle Bettger, Barbara Stanwyck and John Lund

Mitchell Leisen's No Man of Her Own is a better than average neo-noir from 1950. This film has nothing to do with the other Paramount release with this particular title from 1932 and was based on a Cornell Woolrich novel with a better title, 1948's I Married A Dead Man. The material has been adapted numerous times, the most notable being a 1996 remake, released as Mrs. Winterbourne with Ricki Lake in the role played in 1950 by Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck's character is a pregnant and unmarried woman whose heel of a boyfriend (Lyle Bettger) has spurned her and given her a $5 bill and a train ticket out of town. On the train, she befriends a young couple who are also expecting. After a bathroom scene that beggars belief (in which Stanwyck puts on the wedding ring of her newfound chum), the train derails and Stanwyck wakes in the hospital with the staff telling her that she has given birth to a boy, but has lost her husband. 

Stanwyck's character is put upon and broke, as she often was earlier in her career, thus she eagerly impersonates the dead woman. Luckily her in-laws have never seen a picture of their son's new bride, so Stanwyck moves into their well-appointed manse in small town Illinois. She gets along well with her in-laws and draw the romantic interest of the dead man's brother (John Lund), but her past catches up with her in the form of a blackmailing Bettger. The film's screenwriters, Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, retain the flashback structure of the book in which we first meet Stanwyck and Lund, now wed, waiting in that manse as the police arrive to, we think, arrest one or both of them for murder. This opening device is effectively shot by Leisen who tracks the camera down the all American street and into the protagonists' living room where a pan lovingly caresses the interior. Leisen, best known for his gay comedies, was reaching the end of his tenure at Paramount, but was trying to adapt to changing tastes. The opening strikes an interesting Hitchcockian note of evil lurking in the heart of the homeland. 

Not all of the screenwriter's efforts prove fruitful. Stanwyck is given voiceover monologues expressing her character's anxieties and dilemmas, but they prove cumbersome and redundant. On the plus side, there is a distinct feminist slant to the scenario that is not in the Woolrich original that helps make Stanwyck's character more sympathetic. Certainly, this is one of the earliest American features to feature a Caesarian section. Whoever was responsible for the train wreck and subsequent hospital sequence in which Stanwyck undergoes a C-section to deliver her premature child deserves kudos for boldness at the very least. A mirror in the railcar bathroom explodes into shards, the railcar set rotates, and then we see the hospital from Stanwyck's POV, first from a gurney then from an operating table. This is a similar POV to the one Frank Borzage utilized from the perspective of a wounded Gary Cooper in his version of A Farewell to Arms.

Unfortunately, No Man of Her Own loses some steam after this and becomes a very familiar
 melodrama. The cast is, in general, adequate rather than outstanding. Bettger was always an effective villain, so much so that he became typecast. John Lund's performances always verge on the catatonic, but Leisen got him to produce a faint simulacrum of passion here. Milburn Stone, "Doc" on Gunsmoke, is effective in a bit part. Stanwyck is always nonpareil, but it is Jane Cowl who delivers the most memorable performance as her doomed mother-in-law. Cowl was mostly known as a stage actress, only appearing on film in a few silents and a handful of roles after World War 2. That Cowl was soon to depart this veil herself gives her sensitive performance an added sense of rue that she did not leave us more of her work on film. 

The Debussy Film

Vladek Sheybal and Oliver Reed

Ken Russell's The Debussy Film is a black and white television film done for the BBC's Monitor program in 1965. Both Google and Wikipedia list this as a documentary, but I think this is nonsensical. The film starts as a straight ahead documentary using still photographs by Debussy's friend and agent provocateur Pierre Louys, but shifts into reflexively post-modern territory by focusing on a film crew recreating episodes from Debussy's life. Oliver Reed stars as a version of himself playing the French composer. Vladek Sheybal is Russell's stand-in, playing both the director and Louys in the film within the film. Annette Robertson has the lead female role as Gaby, the most put upon of Debussy's many girlfriends. She plays the masochistic female role that Glenda Jackson ended up playing in Russell's ouevre. The many depredations Debussy heaps upon Gaby resound ironically with the knowledge that Russell and Robertson were having a fling during the filming.

Russell had resorted to documentary work for the BBC after the failure of his first feature, French Dressing in 1964. However, he was too restless and rebellious to churn out staid documentary fare. He wanted to utilize actors to recreate the lives of artists with the flamboyance employed by avant-garde and balmier commercial directors. The Debussy Film marks the beginning of a period of promise for Russell before his better instincts gave way to hysteria. Not that there aren't examples of incipient hysteria and, worse, cutesiness in The Debussy Film. There is a nutty section combining footage of mock duels and bumper cars scored to the Ride of the Valkyries. The early days of Debussy and Gaby's romance is rendered in silent slapstick style to equally stupefying effect. You can't say that Russell wasn't consistent in his approach, 1975's Lisztomania has Roger Daltrey mimicking Charlie Chaplin for similarly mystifying reasons.

There are redeeming features to this one, though. Reed, in the first of many collaborations with Russell, is in fine form. Only Russell and David Cronenberg were able to mine Reed's more subtle side. In Reed's later and lesser work, he would often resort to slapdash bombast. Maybe he knew he could rein it in on a Russell set because the director would be bringing the bombast; see especially Reed's relative restraint amidst the madness of The Devils. Russell seems to regard Debussy as a musical genius and a lower class lout with a streak of sadism towards his female admirers and this conception of the role is certainly right in Reed's wheelhouse. He and Robertson have a nicely rancid rapport. Vladek Sheybal, another Russell regular, indulges in a spasmodic performance that points towards a career in which he played a lot of icy Iron Curtain villains.

Oliver Reed

The script for The Debussy Film is by Mervyn Bragg who would go on to concoct the screenplay for The Music Lovers, a much more conventional biopic that signaled the start of Russell's artistic decline. In The Debussy Film, Bragg and Russell chose to use a didactic method of telling Debussy's story that is influenced by documentary narration, but is not encumbered by a straightforward structure or high culture stuffiness. The constant use of voiceover narration points us to Debussy's influences without leading us by the nose. This approach yields many fine moments, particularly Reed's sensitive readings of Debussy's diary. A visual survey of the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler that influenced Debussy's artistic approach is a highlight, though it did make me wish that the BBC had given the Russell the funds to do this film in color. 

The films about composers and artists Russell made in the 1960s represent his high water mark before he lost all sense of restraint. I don't hate Russell's output, I prefer him to, for example, the equally "outrageous" Baz Luhrmann, but it is slim pickings in Russell's ouevre after Women in Love. It is as if in these films made before his brief commercial heyday, Russell could sublimate his titanic ego in the service of honoring the artistic greats. I remember baiting my high school music teacher, the grandiloquent and gentlemanly John Merrill, about his opinion towards Russell in the 1970s. I knew that a man who described, somewhat facetiously, rock music as blasphemy probably didn't grok the director's work. This was true, but he surprised me by admitting that he very much liked Russell's film about Delius, Song of Summer, released on television in 1968. This happened, I would one day discover, to be Russell's favorite amongst all his films. I hope to track it down one day, but Mr. Merrill's opinion greatly impressed upon the young Biff the importance of keeping an open mind, even when regarding an auteur as disreputable as Ken Russell.

Black God, White Devil

Othon Bastos as the bandit Corisco

Glauber Rocha's Black God, White Devil, from 1964, is an impressive allegorical Western and the harbinger of the Cinema Nova movement in Brazil. Rocha was well versed in Hollywood Westerns, his second feature calls to my mind the work of Budd Boetticher in its use of the arid plains of Northeast Brazil as a backdrop for a stark and violent morality play; albeit one that is a Marxist rejoinder to American Westerns. In this, Black God, White Devil bears a resemblance to the work of Sergio Leone and his compadres who were revitalizing the Western genre in Italy. Happily, the film is not merely a pastiche of classic Westerns, but fluidly incorporates such very Brazilian motifs as religious mysticism, folklore, and the impoverishment of the rural poor. The folk ballads of Sérgio Ricardo offer a commentary on and counterpoint to the action and helps along the film's transitional sequences. Otherwise, Rocha uses orchestral music for satiric effect.

The film tells the story of Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey), a tenant farmer who resorts to violence when he feels cheated by his boss. Manoel and his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães), flee into the hinterlands. Eventually they join, in succession, two groups that represent differing rural responses to the corrupt urban based federal government. One is a populist religious group led by a self proclaimed saint named Sebastião (Lidio Silva), a character loosely based on Antônio Conselheiro who lead a peasant rebellion in the late 19th century. His War of Canudos is told in riveting fashion in Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful novel, The War at the End of the War. Conselheiro supported a fairer shake for the rural poor, but his movement was more reactionary than progressive. One of the issues that united his supporters was opposition to the metric system which the rural poor felt had been unfairly imposed on them by the feds. 

Manoel and Rosa quickly become disillusioned with Sebastião despite his preaching against wealthy landowners. They next join force with a roving and scuzzy band of brigands (known in Brazil as Cangaço) led by the blood crazed Corisco. They soon suss that Corisco is more interested in rape, pillage, and torture than building a better tomorrow and react accordingly. All through the picture, Manoel and his various compatriots are stalked by a taciturn bounty hunter hired by the rich and powerful named Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle). Antonio pronounces Rocha's credo in the film: that reactionary figures like Corisco and Sebastião need to be eliminated from Brazil for a true (i.e. Marxist) change to occur. Like Bertolucci in 1964, Rocha was viewing modern history as being before the inevitable revolution. Rocha liked the character enough to bring him (and do Valle) back for a quasi sequel in 1969, this time in color. The film, alternately titled Antonio das Mortes or The Dragon of Wickedness Against the Holy Warrior, would garner Rocha the Best Director award at Cannes that year.

Black God, White Devil is a handsome and assured picture despite its B level budget. All the actors offer vivid performances and are expertly handled. Del Rey reminded me of the young George O'Brian. The black and white photography gives the ridiculous and gruesome action a disturbing and flea bitten grandeur. Their are a few slow spots, the penitential tortures Manoel undergoes under Sebastião's tutelage taxed my patience, but Rocha's spritely editing generally moves this two hour picture along. Overall, better than A Fistful of Dollars, but not For a Few Dollars More. 

Born Reckless

Edmund Lowe, Lee Tracy and J Farrell MacDonald in the foreground

John Ford's Born Reckless, from 1930, has perhaps the worst reputation of any sound film that Ford directed. Joseph McBride called it "...perhaps the worst film to bear Ford's name." ♈Bill Routt calls it "a dull, bad film." and Tag Gallagher allots it one sentence to it in his 572 page book on Ford. All three of these esteemed scholars are Ford partisans. Ford himself complained "it wasn't a good story." ♉ Scott Eyman and Fernando F. Croce are among the slim number to have a few nice things to say about Born Reckless. William K. Everson calls it "a fast and absorbing picture" and it is with this view that I concur. 

The flick, as it exists, is a brisk, if tumbledown 76 minutes and I feel Everson is correct that it is somewhat above the average Fox release of that period. The film's screenplay, adapted by Dudley Nichols from Donald Henderson Clarke's Louis Beretti, focuses on the life of a New York gangster, Louis (Edmund Lowe) who we meet, in the film's expressionistic prologue, attempting to crack a safe. Eventually, Louis and two of his compatriots are given the choice by J. Farrell MacDonald's DA to either take the fall for the attempted heist or to serve their country by enlisting in the army and be sent to France to fight in World War 1. It is interesting how cynically the film views the men's patriotic sacrifice, a cynicism that never left Ford's work despite his critics accusing of him of wrapping himself in the flag in his later years. We really know we are in a John Ford film when the Doughboy conscripts are presided over by Ward Bond and Jack Pennick playing drill sergeants. The sequences of the war in France are rambunctious fun, featuring some baseball (as in Up the River) , charging horses, and sundry shenanigans.

After this rowdy first third, the rest of the film is beset by its melodramatic contrivances and wooden leads. Edmund Lowe was cast on the strength of his performances in similar he-man roles, particularly two successful films directed by Raoul Walsh, The Cockeyed World and What Price Glory?, the latter of which was weirdly remade by Ford years later. Lowe makes no attempt to display his character's Italian heritage (unlike Marguerite Churchill as his sister) and offers a dull, prosaic, and unmodulated performance. Catherine Dale Owen is much, much worse as his unrequited love. Lee Tracy is perfectly cast and fun as a reporter and offers lots of snappy patter. Randolph Scott appears briefly in the thankless role of Ms. Owen's eventual husband.

Lee Tracy, slouched on the bar. 

As usual in Ford's films, there are numerous entertaining character vignettes by unbilled actors. I especially enjoyed Joe Brown as a bartender and Yola d'Avril as a French gal willing to dispense love pecks for a sack of sugar. I don't know who plays the blonde chippie who ends up working in Louis' club, but I adored her performance and would love to ascertain her identity. Despite its obvious limitations, Ford, at least, responds to the pre-Code friskiness of Born Reckless. The compelling final shoot out of the film, in which Ford mimics the conventions of a Western saloon gunfight, swinging doors and all, suggests he may have wanted to make a different film, but he didn't shirk his duty to Fox.

♈Joseph McBride, Ford at Fox, pg. 13

♉Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, pg. 52

The Substance

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, Ms. Fargeat's second feature, is a memorable body horror flick laced with elements of corrosive satire. Ms. Fargeat's script chronicles the desperation of aging starlet Elisabeth Sparkle, gutsily embodied by Demi Moore, who has been fired from her job hosting a fitness workout show because of her age. A mysterious (corporate) entity offers a seeming cure to her ills, a process that will give birth to a sleeker and younger version of herself that will come to be known as Sue (Margaret Qualley). The two will share a symbiotic relationship, with one of the duo at rest while the other is active. Of course, things don't goes as planned, and one of the duo's monkeying with the prescribed regimen leads to a grotesquely tragic ending. 

The film is influenced by the ideas of the Situationists, for good and ill, particularly Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. ♓ It is hard to boil down such a weighty tome (and its attendant film) to a few blurbs, but the book is chiefly a critique of consumer capitalism in which the corporate commodification of culture supplants personal interaction as one's primary experience. This is what is displayed in The Substance to largely bracing effect. From the opening scenes of the film, with arch demon capitalist Randy Quinn loudly scarfing down jumbo shrimp, consumption is the signal motif. As shiny new, pneumatic Sue enjoys living out Sparkle's dreams, Elisabeth retreats to her lair to gorge on roast chicken in front of the telly. If one can't live up to the ideal image projected by society's video stream, retreat is the only resort. I was swept along by the film's satiric glee and its tactile feel, particularly Raffertie's score and Emmanuelle Youchnovski's costume design. The faceless organization that provides the substance to Elisabeth represents a sly dig at Amazon. Elisabeth's journey to retrieve that substance from its corporate locker is the most effective cinematic conjuring of a nightmare vision of subterranean Los Angeles since Mulholland Drive. 

While the film's neo-Marxist critique of capitalist induced alienation helps to sharpen the teeth of the film's bite, it also tends to flatten out its characterizations. Elisabeth has little back story or depth of character. That is part of the point I know, capitalism has turned her into a zombified consumer, but it leaves the viewer with precious little empathically human to latch onto. Quaid's Mephistopheles character, shot unsubtly with a fish eye lens for close-ups, comes off too broadly and, worse. too goofily. Part of this is due to misfortune. Ray Liotta, who knew how to bring menace to a role, died after being cast and Quaid was a last minute replacement. Quaid has too friendly a screen persona to be an effective villain and Fargeat's over direction makes it seem like he is mugging for the camera. The two lead actresses offer performances that are marvels of physical dexterity and bravery. Their naked corpuses are on display for a quarter of the film, but, to Ms. Fargeat's credit, the end effect managed to sour this confirmed heterosexual on sex for at least two hours after the film's completion. Ms. Qualley's performance brilliantly captures the ferocity and narcissism of a character who is all surface. Ms. Moore is merely adequate, not quite plumbing the depths of her character's resentment and despair. For most of the film, she just seems sullen and doesn't nail her character's rages. Ms. Moore has been quite good in lightweight and charming roles since she caught Tinsel Town's attention as ace reporter Jackie Templeton on General Hospital, but when required to show off her actorly chops, as in The Scarlet Letter, her limitations are obvious. The two dimensional nature of Elisabeth Sparkle, and I place the blame primarily on Ms. Fargeat's conception of the character, prevents The Substance from rising to the level of a true body horror masterpiece like Dead Ringers. The Substance is brilliant and never boring, but it lacks a human touch.

Margaret Qualley as Sue

Like every other horror film released these days, The Substance is rife with cinematic references. Happily, for once, these allusions actually enhance the film's meaning and impact. Not only David Cronenberg's legacy, but the work of Stuart Gordon, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, and Frank Henenlotter has been fruitfully plundered. Mark Kermode has sagely noted the use of a Bernard Herrmann's musical motif from Vertigo, contained in the scene when Sue tries to affix earrings to her head, which amplifies The Substance's theme of doubling. What has not been much commented on is The Substance's numerous Kubrick references. The climactic New Year's Eve show features Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (the musical theme to 2001) and the shot from Elisabeth's door aperture of a nosy neighbor mimics Kubrick's shot from HAL's POV of the two astronauts conspiring against him in that film. Furthermore, the voice of the corporation that Elisabeth consults as she navigates her treatment shares the artificial tonelessness of HAL. It has the empathy of a machine. Elisabeth's white bathroom calls to mind the white room where Keir Dullea finishes his metamorphic journey. The Shining is referenced in the treatment of the television corporation's headquarters. The color scheme of the bathroom greatly resembles The Shining's bathroom where Grady the servant reminds Jack Torrance of his duties. A corridor, with its geometric patterns, calls to mind the Overlook Hotel's interior. These two intimations reinforce the notion that Elisabeth, like Jack Torrance, is involved in a Faustian bargain. There is also the beauty that Torrance encounters in room 237's bathroom who, like the women in The Substance, turns very swiftly into a decayed hag.

The Substance suffers from plausibility issues, but this is a logical result of Ms. Fargeat basing the film in the realm of a media generated fantasy. I thought the showgirls at the conclusion of the film looked like they belonged in the Folies Bergère rather than an American network show, but the director is French, after all. Despite my carping, The Substance is a witty and entertaining film that coasts along on the psychic energy of its gifted auteur. 

♓ I love the description of the aging Debord in Rachel Kushner's new Creation Lake: "...like a dead goldfish in a dirty bowl." pg. 57.

Family Nest

Father and Son: Gábor Kun and László Horváth

Béla Tarr's Empty Nest, his debut feature released in 1979, is a grimy, seamy, and effective slice of social realism. Tarr, then 22, shoots in black and white with a handheld camera at eye level with his non-professional cast. The film documents a young couple with a small child forced to live in their in-laws cramped Budapest flat. There are numerous spats, usually sparked by the patriarch conveying his low opinion of his daughter in law, and Tarr's suffocating close-ups ably convey the claustrophobia experienced by the apartment dwellers. Tarr wanted this film to be a finger in the eye to the Kádár regime and its attendant cultural kitsch, represented in the film by an operetta on television and various schlock pop numbers on the soundtrack. In this he succeeds, but in a fashion far removed from his later, more formal films.

The film was largely improvised and it is remarkable how fully realized the performances are, particularly Gábor Kun as the sulfuric paterfamilias. The male of the species is particularly monstrous in Family Nest treating females as if they were chattel. The Hungary portrayed is grim and unhealthy. Glimmers of humanity remain, but they are faint. The socialist order is portrayed as irrevocably broken with working man and woman getting the short end of the stick, just as they did in feudal capitalist Hungary. Tarr's view of his country has not mellowed with age despite the shift in his technical approach. Elements of the grim realism of Family Nest remain in Tarr's work, but he has varied his somber palette with lunatic dollops of expressionism and surrealism.