Line of Demarcation

Jean Seberg and Maurice Ronet

Claude Chabrol's La Ligne de démarcation (Line of Demarcation) is a World War 2 French resistance drama that I found to be better than its reputation. It is one of those rare films that gets more interesting, deeper, and incisive as it goes along. The setting is a small French village bisected by a river which also serves as the line of demarcation between Vichy France and what remained, in 1942, of the German occupied French republic. We see various refugees, spies, and escapees from German terror try to cross into Vichy France during the course of the film. Eventually. the town's populace unites to help a wounded American. The film was based on a memoir by a hero of the Resistance named Gilbert Renault who published it under nom de plume, Colonel Rémy. The memoir has been streamlined and depersonalized by Chabrol with events conflated.

The initial section of the film drags, primarily because it focuses on the film's most lifeless characters, the aristocratic Count Pierre (Maurice Ronet) and his English born wife, Mary (Jean Seberg). Pierre has just come back from a hospital where he recovered from wounds received during the German conquest of France. He is crippled and embittered, epitomizing the defeatist attitude of Petain and his cohorts. Mary, however, has turned into the Mother Courage of the Resistance. So, their bisected union represents, all too baldly, the split between Vichy and the de Gaulle led Free French. The duo doesn't seem to be getting it on, as Pierre's limp signals, all too baldly, impotence. There is little the actors can do to animate these one dimensional placards, though Ms. Seberg seems to be acting only above the neck.

Happily, the other inhabitants of the village are well cast and memorably played. No performance descends into type, but transcends. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Gélin as the village doctor and Stéphane Audran as his wife who provide the film's only erotic spark. I also thought Jean-Louis Maury was delightfully slippery as a Gestapo fiend and Reinhard Kolldehoff was suitably ambivalent as a Wehrmacht major who tries to bond with Mary and Pierre in a tip of the chapeau to La Grande Illusion. 

Collective Solidarity

Line of Demarcation was initially targeted to be a Anthony Mann project, but Mann passed and recommended Chabrol to the producer. The film shoot, larger and more commercial than he was used to, was not a happy one for the director. However, I love the way Chabrol balances the demands of juggling over a dozen characters. I think the look he gives the 1966 film is not far from Mann's noir films, but with more of a gothic melodrama feel that is perfectly apt for a film about the horrors of Nazism. After Pierre sacrifices and redeems himself in the final reel, the town barman, a socialist and class opponent of Pierre, salutes him by leading the villagers in a rendition of La Marseillaise. This display of the collective solidarity of the French Resistance is a myth, given what we now know about the extent of collaboration during this period, but all countries need their own myths and Line of Demarcation is not a bad one.

Lisa and the Devil

Elke Sommer

 Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil is an above average exploitation film from the Italian master. The film was made and released in Spain in 1973 as The Devil Takes the Dead but failed to find an international distributor. Producer Alfredo Leone then shot footage with actor Robert Alda as a priest in order to ride the coattails of The Exorcist. The results were released internationally under the title The House of Exorcism. Happily, the cut streaming on Tubi is the Bava cut. The stream does justice to the lustrous colors of Cecillo Paniagua's cinematography. This is a fairly brain dead film, but there are interesting layers to be found in the gorgeously ghastly mise en scène. 

Lisa and the Devil is a variation on the sick house subgenre of horror which spans from The Fall of the House of Usher to Hotel California. Elke Sommer stars as Lisa, a tourist who gets led astray to this film's house of horrors by the film's playful devil, Telly Savalas. Other interlopers are subsequently bumped off in the mansion presided by a blind matriarch played by Alida Valli. The plot, concocted by a phalanx of scriptwriters is a garbled mishmash of soap opera and Dostoyevsky. The performances are all dubbed. This was the second film in a row that Bava had done with Ms. Sommer and Leone after the rather dire Baron Blood. The dialogue is largely rot delivered spasmodically. I have never cottoned to Elke Sommer. She looks lovely, but is robotic in her bare competence. She seemed much more at ease at farce rather than horror. Alida Valli had been in more masterpieces than I can shake a stick at, but I think she is a stone faced bore. However, a stone face is perfect for a blind matriarch and Bava milks the most of her green eyes.

Alida Valli

Savalas was riding high on the success of the TV show Kojak after playing numerous psychos and villains through his career. Bava lets him coast off and toy with his image with trademark Kojak lollipop in hand. The numerous lollipops, reflections in cigarettes cases, wine spills, and mirrors attest to the playful nature of this film. Lisa and the Devil is a horror film than knowingly verges on burlesque. Still, there is some erudition and feeling on display in the way Bava's camera prowls the interior of the ridiculously rococo and rotting villa; certainly the byproducts of past productions. The manse is a house of the dead in which all who enter succumb. The green of Lisa's outfit is a symbol of her fertility. This is developed in a dream sequence triggered by a Day of the Dead music box. Lisa is transported to a green pastorale idyll which is presided over by a statue of Dionysus. Time's winged chariot comes for all though and Lisa is fated to join the rest of the house of the dead. Lisa and the Devil is no great shakes, but it director manages to extract beauty out of humble material.

A House of Dynamite

Rebecca Ferguson

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite left me with mixed feelings though I did think this film was a marked improvement over her last one, Detroit. Noah Oppenheim's script, in three parts, depicts the response by various components of the US government and military trying to thwart an incoming ICBM that is poised to strike Chicago. The missile was launched by an unknown adversary, nettling a military response. The separate parts of the film all roughly cover the same time span, but focus on different command posts, such as the White House, SAC Command in Nebraska, and a missile site in Alaska. The three part structure has its advantages. Chiefly, the film displays the lack of time and options faced by those in positions of power when a nuclear threat is imminent. A House of Dynamite is a procedural film about the futility of procedure in such a situation.

However, this approach also has its drawbacks. There is so much leaping about from location to location that it tends to flatten out the efforts of the ensemble cast. There are memorable performances in the film, I admired the efforts of Greta Lee, Jared Harris,Tracy Letts, and Gabriel Basso, but too many of the characters come out under drawn and colorless, particularly Rebecca Ferguson's Captain and Idris Elba's President. Zero Dark Thirty did a much better job portraying military and government functionaries. Greta Lee's character, an expert on Korea, is attending a Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg with her young son and this gives Bigelow an opportunity to skewer the American tendency to look back nostalgically on war as spectacle. She makes it clear that America will have no opportunity to look back nostalgically on a nuclear confrontation.

Like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident, A House of Dynamite bogs down in endless shots of officials intoning portents of doom while standing before video and radar screens. Bigelow and Oppenheim want to be Cassandras here, but this largely inert film will tend to lull viewers rather than spark righteous indignation. 

La Collectionneuse

Haydée Politoff and Patrick Bauchau

Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, his first color film, is his first feature to truly bear his stamp. This 1967 release features his trademark mild sexual intrigue and lengthy verbal discourses. If you find, like Gene Hackman's detective in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, that watching a Rohmer picture is like watching paint dry, then this is skippable. However, you would miss the gorgeous summer colors summoned by Néstor Almendros who had previously collaborated with Rohmer on a number of projects. The writer and director claimed that the film's commercial success, it played over nine months in one Parisian theater, was due to the cast's long hair and mod glad rags. However, except for a sequence of girls in their summer clothes, a sequence essentially repeated in La Collectionneuse's twin, 1972's L'Amour l'après-midi, and a copy of Aftermath on a couch, there is little of pop culture. The film's success was also due to the bared bronze skin on display in one of Rohmer's most sensual works.

The film begins with a trio of vignettes, introducing us to the three main characters: Haydée (Haydée Politoff), Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), and Adrian (Patrick Bauchau). The trio come together as guests or fellow layabouts at the French Riviera estate of a mutual friend. Haydée is presented, at first, as an object, wearing a bikini on a beach, glowing in Almendros' warm tones. She racks up an impressive number of bedmates, she "collects" them according to the jealous boys. Daniel is first portrayed polemicizing with a companion. This is his default mode. He is often a foil for Adrien in this way. When Daniel criticizes an older art collector, Sam, who is negotiating a deal with Adrien for a priceless vase, I feel Rohmer is illustrating the class conflicts in French society that would erupt in 1968 as they did during the 1789 revolution. The collector is played by "Seymour Hertzberg", a pseudonym for American critic and auteurist ally Eugene Archer whose premature death terminated a promising career. His performance is an acid etched one of a hustler and brute. Politoff and Pommereulle were given leeway by Rohmer to improvise their dialogue and that is why their own first names are used for their characters.

La Collectionneuse, like all of Rohmer's Moral Tales, was, at first, a novel. In both forms, Adrien is the main character and as an undependable narrator. Mr. Bauchau's character's did not get to be named Patrick and he was not given the leeway to improvise that his co-stars were. He is the villain of the piece, if such a term can be applied in an ambivalent oeuvre. This is established in the opening vignette when we meet Adrien trying to cajole his girlfriend Carole (Mijanou Bardot) to join him at the vacation villa. She has a modeling gig in London which provides the film with a final punchline. Our knowledge of their relationship colors our perception of Adrien's subsequent tortuous flirtation with Haydée. Adrien is both attracted to her and repulsed by that attraction. He ends up virtually pimping her out to both Daniel and Sam. Not for nothing does Sam label Adrien Machiavellian. Rohmer's sympathy, as always, lies with the femme. The pill had given women sexual freedom, but it had and has not eliminated the sexual double standard. Rohmer much prefers sexual license to hypocrisy and manipulation. A moral stand, if you will. A near masterpiece that portends further variations.

 

Battle Beyond the Stars

Sybil Danning and Jeff Corey

Battle Beyond the Stars is a Roger Corman production designed to ride the box office coattails of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Empire opened in May of that year and Battle followed in July. The film was Corman's most expensive production to date, 2 million dollars, yet went on to yield a tidy sum for Corman. Part of the expense was the caliber of the cast which was quite high for a cheapie: George Peppard, Robert Vaughn, Sam Jaffe, John Saxon, Marta Kristen, and Jeff Corey whose eyebrows are the most out of control element of the picture. What elevates the film, slightly is not the pedestrian direction, but John Sayles' savvy script. The basic premise of the film is taken from Seven Samurai, mercenaries band together to save a menaced planet named Akir whose people are known as the Akira. Sayles also pilfers from The Tempest, Barbarella (see above), Star Wars, and numerous Westerns. Richard Thomas, John-Boy Walton on the hit television show The Waltons, applies his usual dithering awkwardness as the protagonist.

The Peppard character is the Han Solo role, here named Cowboy. Through this role, Sayles shows the link between cowboys and space heroes in the pantheon of US juvenile mythos, from Woody to Buzz Lightyear. Peppard seems more engaged than usual and is a hoot. The highlight of the film is his character playing "Red River Valley" on his harmonica to the comically disparate mercenaries as they await their final battle. Sayles shows himself to have been ahead of the curve with his takes here on internet dating, AI, and robotics. The score by James Horner wisely avoids aping John Williams, offering a splendid pastiche of Wagner and Debussy. The film's female lead, the late Darlanne Fluegel whose performance in To Live and Die is one of the best in all of 1980s cinema, has little to do except toss her tresses. I like the gravitas of Robert Vaughn's performance and I am not really a fan of his work. He essentially reprises his role The Magnificent Seven in a more mournful vein.

Unfortunately, overall, Battle Beyond the Stars is more crap than craptastic. Jimmy T. Murakami's direction emphasizes the cartoonish nature of the project rather than its mythic reach. It is telling that he went onto greater success as an animator. Like a lot of Corman productions, Battle Beyond the Stars was more successful retrospectively as a film school project than as a piece of film art. James Cameron got his first big professional break as the special effects supervisor of the film. Bill Paxton made important contacts working on the project as a carpenter.

American Mary

Katharine Isabelle

Jen and Sylvia Soska's American Mary is a superior exploitation film from the Canadian duo that was released in 2012. It is a body horror flick, laced with black humor, in which a medical student named Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) resorts to performing body modification surgeries in order to pay off her student loans. This plunges her into a subculture that, at first, nauseates her, but by film's end she has joined the ranks. Towards the end of the film, she rejects a potential customer as too "vanilla."

Mary stumbles upon her calling when she applies for a job at a strip club. The drunken manager of the club (Antonio Cupo) and his henchman (Twan Holliday) end up helping her with the more grisly aspects of her craft. Her clients range from a stripper who wants to look like Betty Boop to a gal who wants to resemble a human doll. The Soska twins treat their menagerie of supporting characters not as freaks but as humans with ridiculous foibles and fetishes like the rest of us. The characterizations and performances are a cut above most exploitation films of this level. Even the thug gets a winning monologue which Mr. Holliday nails. The visuals are restrained and attractive for a film featuring multiple amputations. The Soska sisters appear in the film as does their mother and father. Apparently, it was all hands on deck. 

The Soska twins were a little too early to get the praise that such recent feminist body horror films like Titane and The Substance have garnered. In my burg of Portland, body modification raises nary an eyebrow these days. Still, the sisters have soldiered on in their beloved genre and I urge horror mavens to visit their website. American Mary is streaming on Tubi.

 

Mother Wore Tights

Betty Grable and Dan Dailey              

Walter Lang's Mother Wore Tights is a pleasant Technicolor musical released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1947. The film, based on the best selling memoir by Miriam Young. is a nostalgic look back at the relationship of two married vaudevillians played by Betty Grable and Dan Dailey. What little discord there is in the film stems from the couples' two daughters shame at the snobbery displayed towards their parents' lowly profession. This predicament is predictably rectified by film's end. There is little suspense to this conclusion because the film is narrated by the youngest daughter, in retrospect, with a warm glow. The plum voiced Ann Baxter provides that narration, often directly from the book, offering the occasional piquant detail such as the gifting of a pickle fork as a wedding present. 

The immediate post-war period has been thought of, in retrospect, as being dominated by increasing realism, location shooting, and film noir. This is a vast simplification. While these developments can be noted in the work of rising young directors, most of these films were B pictures. If one takes note of the films that were the top box-office draws for 1947, one sees that the industry was still dominated by light escapism: such as the relatively forgotten Bing Crosby vehicle Welcome Stranger, The Egg and I, Life with Father, Forever Amber, Road to Rio, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and, yes, Mother Wore Tights. Grable and Dailey are not really persuasive performers in a realistic setting, but this cinematic bon-bon is a perfect fit for their talents. I particularly admire Dailey's hoofing in the film. Lang's direction is graceful and unhurried. The tune are above average. The supporting cast boast many familiar faces who are as cozy as an old shoe: Sara Allgood, William Frawley, Sig Ruman, Mae Marsh, and Señor Wences.

Brute Force

Hume Cronyn and Burt Lancaster 

Jules Dassin's Brute Force, from 1947, is an obvious, yet undeniably powerful prison drama. Richard Brooks' script, set almost entirely at a mythical prison on a isolated peninsula, was inspired by a bloody 1946 uprising at Alcatraz that resulted from a failed escape attempt. Brooks and Dassin use the film to indict the US Corrections system as a punitive dead end that offers no chance for rehabilitation. One could make much the same case now, but Brooks socially conscious script gives Dassin the opportunity to indulge in what would become his chief artistic vice. over statement.

The film's hero is played by Burt Lancaster, an actor given to undynamic over statement. No better example of this is when Lancaster takes a bullet towards the climax of the film. Now receiving a bullet wound is painful, but Lancaster seems to savor it because it gives him an actorly moment to underline his character's nobility. Anyway, Lancaster leads the lumpen proletariat in the cell blocks to escape the tyranny of the bulls presided over by Hume Cronyn's Captain Munsey. Lancaster's cell is a commie cell with token white collar thief Whit Bissell as a weak kneed Willie. The social democrat wing of this Popular Front rebellion is led by the always dependable Charles Bickford. Cronyn is supposed to represent the fascistic tendencies of American authoritarianism or something. He is a veritable SS Gruppenführer who tortures his charges while listening to Wagner, as one does I suppose. "Kindness is weakness" Munsey tells the pixilated doctor (Art Smith) who serves as the film's conscious and futilely tries to debate Munsey about his belief in the Uber mensch.

The proletariat revolts in Brute Force

Dassin's set-ups, particularly those within the cell, are over contrived and work against the realistic tone of the film. However, the scenes of violence in the film really have an palpable impact and that is due to Dassin's commitment to the kino fist of social realism. Dassin is more interested in progressive messaging than ambivalence and, thus, there is a trade-off. Part of what works in Brute Force is due to Brook's well constructed script. The film moves logically from fascist repression to proletarian rebellion. The wordless opening sequence which establishes the prison setting is a good example. As William H. Daniels camera prowls its heavily guarded perimeter, Brooks and Dassin establish the prison as a mechanism designed for enslavement. 

A few moments of relief leaven the somber and overdetermined material. The excellent calypso singer Sir Lancelot is on hand to offer some light comic relief and mournful lyricism. There are four flashbacks involving the girls the prisoners left behind. These are pretty terrible, the nadir being a cancer ridden, wheelchair bound Ann Blyth making goo-goo eyes at Lancaster. Whether as writer or director, Brooks' forte was not the depiction of romance. Even his best films (The Last Hunt, The Professionals, Looking for Mr. Goodbar) lack a convincing romance. Brute Force does boast some good acting on its periphery, from Jay C. Flippen, Richard Gaines, Frank Puglia, and Sam Levene offering effective bits. Brute Force contains the film debut of Howard Duff who smoothly transitioned from radio work.
             

Bring Her Back

Sally Hawkins

Danny and Michael Philippou's Bring Her Back is the creepiest horror film I've seen in some time, a worthy successor to the brothers' Talk to Me. As in that film, the brothers' success with the juvenile members of the cast is variable. but Sally Hawkins gives a ravening performance as a grieving mother who will stop at nothing to be reunited with her dead daughter. Hawkins plays Laura, a retired therapist who adopts two orphans who have recently lost their father. Twelve years old Piper, who is legally blind, is doted on by Laura, but she treats older teen Andy with disdain. By the time we see Laura dumping her own urine on Andy while he sleeps to make him think he is a bedwetter, we are hip to the fact that something inside Laura doesn't jibe with her happy go lucky facade. That and a remaining child who seems to be catatonic creates a properly sinister atmosphere. The audience waits for Laura to go full bore bonkers and Hawkins and the brothers don't disappoint.

I wasn't fully satisfied with the back story that underpins this flick, but if you are dealing with occult cannibalism then you really cannot produce something that makes rational sense. Like almost all horror, Bring Her Back deals with irrational, unconscious fears. I do wonder if the brothers will ever leave the horror genre and their preferred theme of juvenile trauma. Bring Her Back is a good film on its own terms, but, like Talk to Me, does not transcend its genre. Those with squeamish stomachs should skip this unless they want to indulge in some lunch liberation.           

The Best of Diane Keaton

1946-2025

             It's kind of true, you do disappear off the planet if you are a middle-aged

           woman, but that has advantages as well.

     1)   Annie Hall                              Woody Allen                                        1977

     2)   Mrs. Soffel                           Gillian Armstrong                                   1984

     3)   Shoot the Moon                      Alan Parker                                        1982

     4)   Looking for Mr. Goodbar    Richard Brooks                                     1977

     5)   Baby Boom                             Charles Shyer                                    1987

     6)   Love and Death                      Woody Allen                                       1975

     7)   Sleeper                                    Woody Allen                                       1973

     8)   Something's Gotta Give       Nancy Meyers                                      2003

     9)   The Godfather                 Francis Ford Coppola                                1972

    10)  The Little Drummer Girl     George Roy Hill                                      1984

The persona of Annie Hall was so linked to Diane Keaton's image that it served to detract from public appreciation of Keaton as a actress. Certainly, she was a superior comic actor to Woody Allen. Her years with Allen in which she served principally as a muse and a sounding board for his kvetches, opened up possibilities for Keaton as a dramatic performer. These challenges she largely met, though I'm not sure she really nailed the mercurial Louise Bryant in Reds. For that matter, I think she displayed more sexual chemistry with Sam Shepard and Keanu Reeves than she ever did with Jack Nicholson. 

It is difficult to convey what a fashion icon Keaton became in the 1970s. What was most impressive was that Keaton's status was not the result of any public relations campaign, but stemmed from her own quirky individuality and taste. She was grating to some, as was fellow WASP princess Katharine Hepburn back in the day, but I find her adorkable. Challenging roles became hard to find for her this century, but she had many interests outside of acting. I also treasure her appearances in Lovers and Other Strangers, Play it Again, Sam, Manhattan, Interiors, Radio Days, Father of the Bride, Town & Country, Book Club, The Godfather 2 and 3, and The Young Pope.

 

The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Rutger Hauer

Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker is a slice of magical realism that won the Golden Lion at the 45th Venice Film Festival, but has been relatively neglected in the US. The 1988 film is based on the 1939 novella by Austrian writer Joseph Roth. The protagonist Andreas (Rutger Hauer) is alcoholic bum wandering around the boulevards of Paris and sleeping under its bridges. He is a Polish national fearful that he will be deported. He encounters a mysterious benefactor (well played by Anthony Quayle) who gifts him two hundred francs on the condition that he repay his debt as an offering to St. Therese. One thing or another prevents Andreas from achieving this until the picture's conclusion. Friends from his past in Poland pop up and divert him. He has an affair with a dancer. An old flame reappears. St Therese herself appears in the guise of a ten year old girl. Alternately, these figures provide a boon to Andreas or rip him off. The action of the film is most likely the drunken reveries of Andreas as he spends his days in working class cafes drinking cheap red until he is comatose.

Andreas shares many traits with Roth, an emigre who lived in Paris from 1934 until his death on the eve of World War 2. Roth was a Jew who became fascinated with Catholicism and may have converted before his demise. He was also a committed drunkard and The Legend of the Holy Drinker, his final work, may be thought of as a prolonged suicide note. Olmi and co-screenwriter Tullio Kezich have made some minor changes to the book. The film is not set in 1934 as the book was, but exists out of time. The book is set in spring while the movie takes advantage of a dour Paris in winter, perhaps a more appropriate choice to film a downbeat tale such as this. What is important is how well Olmi nails the repetitive compulsion of an addict that is at the core of the material. Olmi is also able to picture something more difficult to conjure visually: the mixture of faith and existential despair that is at the crux of magical realism; especially as represented by artists who have a Catholic background. Each week at mass, Catholics have to contemplate a graven image of a crucified Lord, not a serene Buddha. Yet, the message of both faiths is the same, life is suffering.

Olmi is able to capture the duality of the preternatural existing within a cosmic void through a masterful use of image and sound. Sounds in the picture, such as a bottle rolling along cobblestones, create a palpable sense of a tangible reality. The score, consisting of extracts from Igor Stravinsky's compositions of the 1930s. hints at the spiritual, particularly Olmi's use of the despairing Symphony in C. Olmi himself edited The Legend of the Holy Drinker and the film is fruitfully wedded to its score. The cinematography of Dante Spinotti (Manhunter, L.A. Confidential), with its splashes of color and inky black chiaroscuro, paints a canvas of both degradation and sensual possibility. The continued use of mirrors in the film suggests that the memories and dreams visiting Andreas are portals to his past and not a true reflection of his present. Olmi usually favored non-professional actors and those present bring mixed results. Some of the actors seem to be speaking phonetically. Hauer's performance, however, is a triumph. Olmi saw the expressiveness of Hauer's face in stoic appearances in action films and utilizes it to galvanic effect. It is Hauer's most expansive and best performance. 

Pavements

Pavement circa 1994

Alex Ross Perry's Pavements is a lively tribute to one of the more lasting post grunge American indie bands. As the use of the plural in the title implies, Ross is more interested in the band's mythos and legacy than in rendering a straightforward narrative about the band and its inevitable reunion. There is that aspect to Pavements, but Perry is so in love with the band that he mounted a workshop jukebox musical entitled Slanted! Enchanted! which featured the band's music. This is interwoven into the documentary along with a faux biopic of the band entitled Range Life which features actors Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, and Joe Keery as Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus. All this and a gallery opening of Pavement memorabilia with bands such as Speedy Ortiz and Soccer Mommy playing their music. The resulting product is as knotty and cerebral as any of Pavement's albums.

I'm not altogether sure if this film will appeal to non-fans because I was very much a admirer of the band back in their 1990s heyday. I snapped up all of their albums though I was not fanatic enough to buy all of their numerous EPs. I saw them at Satyricon in Portland during their first national tour. They were fantastic, energized, and very together. Their drummer, Gary Young, climaxed the show by chugging a beer while standing on his head as the band egged him on. Young was older than the rest of the band, a functioning alcoholic, and was out of the band by the next tour. I saw them at the Pine Street Theater (then La Luna) in Portland that next tour and the difference was marked. They were more professional, but the fire was gone. They were just another art rock band going through the motions. The performance was not nearly as half-assed as the one they did at a Free Tibet concert captured in the documentary, the last gasp of the band, seemingly.

Irony and distance are hard to sell at a mass market level, so Pavement was fated for limited success. The band's lyrics owe more to someone like John Ashbery than typical popular song. Malkmus himself was a diffident band leader, ill at ease when forced to glad hand DJs and TV hosts. He sagely reflects this his band's chilly abstractness owes a lot to the "second hand artificiality of suburban culture." To that I would add the post-modern notions that were in the air during Malkmus' undergraduate days at the University of Virginia. Post-modernist theory certainly comes into play during Pavements, a documentary which barely mentions the personal lives of the band members. However, because of the depth of Ross' affection for the band and their music, Pavements never feels bloodless. I don't think it will convert many non-fans, but it is a heartfelt document.

One Battle After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio

Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is the most propulsive and exciting American film since Weapons. I have a few issues with the film, but it confirms Anderson's status as one of the leading Hollywood filmmakers of his generation. The script by Anderson was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, but One Battle After Another, unlike Anderson's film of Inherent Vice, differs considerably from the novel. The book is set in 1984 amidst the Reagan era war on drugs. The film begins in 2010 or so, but is mostly set in the present. Thus, the leftover 60s mythos of armed radical groups seems a little out of place to me. Anderson replaces drug dealing with other American bugbears: chiefly immigration and miscegenation. That said, the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio smokes as much weed during the course of the film as Doc Sportello did in Inherent Vice.

Thankfully, Anderson has changed the name of the hipneck protagonist to Bob Ferguson instead of the overly absurd Zoyd Wheeler. I must say that I find Pynchon's humor to be his greatest defect as an artist. Mad magazine satire for PHDs that is funnier in theory than in practice. Anderson, though, is similar in his approach to humor to Pynchon, which makes him a good fit, for good and ill. The endless japes in the film about Bob not remembering his password strikes the appropriate stoner chord, but are never particularly funny. Mentions of Bedford Forrest and Throckmorton are learned, but will not draw chuckles. Anderson does a good job pruning an even more convoluted and distended novel than Inherent Vice. One Battle After Another builds in momentum much better than the ramshackle novel ever did. Anderson has acknowledged the influence of The Searchers upon his film's main plot, a father's search for his daughter. In this case it is Bob searching for his kick-ass daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). To complicate matters and set up a frenzy of cross-cutting, Willa is pursued by others including the evil racist Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who functions, in more ways than one, as this film's "Scar".

One Battle After Another seizes upon another Fordian motif from The Searchers: the reclamation of lost knowledge. In the Ford film, it is a location known to native lore, but not found on the white man's map. In the Anderson film, long out of date cell phones and pagers help Bob and his cohorts keep one step ahead of the man. As usual, there is more than one influence at play on an Anderson film. The culminating violent chase sequence owes a lot to films like Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, and Two Lane Blacktop. Like those films, One Battle After Another envelops you in how it feels going 100mph wheels eating up a desert highway. The picture also owes a debt to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s like The Parallax View. As in that film, there is a cabal of corporate white dudes pulling strings. So, Bob is justified in his paranoia. Anderson magnifies this feeling of paranoia with an extensive use of extreme close-ups, a technique I usually abhor, but which I feel is appropriate in this case. No one will call Sean Penn vain after the way Anderson has framed his grizzled visage in this flick. 

Chase Infiniti

What has always humanized Anderson's films, no matter how chilly or outlandish, is his warm regard towards and rapport with his players. Character parts, no matter how small, are never tossed off in an Anderson film.  A child of the industry, Anderson's love of actors is intermingled with his love for humanity. DiCaprio responds with his most virtuoso performance since The Wolf of Wall Street. Benicio del Toro, as Willa's dojo sensei, shows off his inner warmth that was so absent in The Phoenician Scheme. Penn does his best to enliven a one dimensional villain, he is, at least, a memorable gargoyle. The best surprise is how dexterous, both physically and verbally, Chase Infinite is. She more than holds her own with the Oscar winners. There are also a host of fine supporting performances from Teyana Taylor, Regina King, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Schweig, Junglepussy, and Kevin Tighe. The score by Johnny Greenwood is his best since There Will Be Blood.

I suppose I can't take One Battle After Another too seriously as a political statement. I find the dichotomies laid out by the film to be overly broad and false. but maybe the film is more satire than the action thriller it was advertised as. At one point, Anderson invokes Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers as a model of revolutionary struggle, but the contrast with that film does One Battle After Another no favors. Pontecorvo, though a committed Marxist, allows the agents of colonial power some degree of ambiguity. The world of One Battle After Another has no room for such nuance. You are either part of the white Christian ruling class or are against them. The tracking shots through immigrant detention centers holding women and children show what side the director is on. When Willa departs from her Dad at the close of the movie, to the strains of Tom Petty's "American Girl", we all know that she is off to join the resistance.

 

Happy Times

Zhao Benshan and Dong Jie

Zhang Yimou's Happy Times is a comic melodrama first released in China in 2000. The protagonist is an unemployed factory worker named Zhao (Zhao Benshan) who lives in the port city of Dalian. We first meet Zhao as he is courting a zaftig divorcee (Lifan Dong) who lives in a crowded apartment with her corpulent son and a blind stepdaughter, Wu Ying (Dong Jie), who she mistreats. Zhao is posing as a well to do manager of a hotel in order to win the divorcee, but his lies will catch up to him. The divorcee charges him with finding a job and new digs for Wu Ying at his non-existent hotel. Zhao enlists his friends, most of whom are retired, to find a solution. They convert an abandoned bus in a local park into a pad for trysting lovers with the intention of using Wu Ying as a maid to clean up the mess the couples leave.

The love shack, which is dubbed the Happy Times Hut, proves viable for only a short time. Wu Ying's stepmother finds another, genuinely wealthy suitor, but shows no interest in taking Wu Ying back. Zhao has taken an avuncular interest in Wu Ying and she responds to his kindness. Learning that she is a skilled masseuse, Zhao sets up a phony massage parlor for her to "work" in at an abandoned factory. Unbeknownst to Zhao, Wu Ying cottons to what is really going on fairly early. However, she plays along, happy to stay useful and enjoying the company of Zhao's friends who impersonate "clients".

The film was loosely adapted by Gui Zi from short story by Mo Yan. Some critics at the time, like Roger Ebert, found the basic premise of Happy Times to be both manipulative and overly sentimental. However, I think the characters suspension of disbelief concerning the faux massage parlor is designed to reflect that of the audience watching the film. Deception is central to both processes. Zhao is a bounder, but he is essentially good-hearted. The parallels to Chaplin's tramp, always helpful to blind girls, children, and the dispossessed, are fairly obvious. Like the tramp, Zhao's grifts are more amusing than sinister. Both the tramp and Zhao exist in hostile landscapes where a little rebellion is understandable. Zhao exists in a land that features the worst of both worlds: the regimented authoritarianism of state socialism alongside the indifference to the impoverished of capitalism.

Chiefly, I found the film to be a good hang. The rhythm of the film feels pokey at times, but Yimou frames his ensemble scenes well, enabling the audience to gauge various characters' reaction simultaneously. Yimou also utilizes color imaginatively, particularly red as a harbinger of romantic hope. The two leads are both wondrous, engaging our empathy without grandstanding. What is most remarkable is how the film never tips over into bathos despite an ending the verges on tragedy. 

Reap the Wild Wind

Raymond Massey and John Wayne

Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind is a Technicolor action romance set in Key West in 1840. Sometimes dismissed as hokum, I found it to be a fairly rousing epic, at least for the first two thirds. The opener is one of DeMille's best as Paulette Goddard spies a ship wreck, ditches her hoop skirt for breeches, and proceeds to rescue the ship's captain played by John Wayne. Soon, Goddard is in a love triangle with Wayne, the man of action, and maritime lawyer Ray Milland, a more rational being. Each has a mascot or pet that represents the character in caricature. Wayne has a pet monkey named Bananas who is all raging id. Milland's pet is a lapdog named Romulus representing domesticated fido fidelity. Milland had top billing, so guess who gets the girl?

The film is set amidst the nascent US shipping industry, particularly its salvage fleet, as it shifts to steam power. The primary villain of the film, the most cutthroat of the salvagers who instigates the film's skullduggery, is played by a perfectly cast Raymond Massey. Robert Preston plays Massey's brother. He is effective as is Susan Hayward who plays his lover in the film's secondary romance. From the very first shot, a bald eagle figurehead on a ship's prow, DeMille invests his material with colorful splashes of early Americana. As Remington provided a model for the look of John Ford's Westerns, N.C. Wyeth provides one, particularly in his illustrations and paintings of pirates, for DeMille to duplicate here. Whenever a dash of red is needed to provide tonal balance or variety, voila a parrot appears. Reap the Wild Wind is always interesting to look at even when certain aspects of it have dated, like its racial typing and its giant rubber squid. However, the backdrop effects, mostly matte paintings and rear projection, are still impressive and attractive.

DeMille liked to research the look of the eras in his films, and it pays off to great effect in Reap the Wild Wind's ball sequence, but he was no more a realist than Ford. As the critical taste for realism increased after World War 2, DeMille and Ford's reputations both declined a bit. In Reap the Wild Wind, based on a Saturday Evening Post story which was then rewritten by a host of scribes, DeMille attempted to craft an American legend to gird his country for the coming conflict. In the trailer for the film, narrated by the director himself, the need for the safety of American sea lanes is pointedly trumpeted. Since the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, America, officially neutral, had seen its merchant marine fleet under attack by German U-boats in the Atlantic. By the time of the film's release in 1942, America was officially at war. 

Another influence on Reap the Wild Wind was the success of Gone With The Wind. The rapport between Paulette Goddard and Louise Beavers tries too hard to mimic the one between Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in the earlier picture. Instead of fiddle-dee-dee, Goddard gets to intone "fiddlesticks". Goddard was once thought to be one of the favorites for the role of Scarlett O'Hara and Reap the Wild Wind gives a sense of what might have been. Her southern accent is shaky, but Goddard plays a feisty hunk magnet with elan. Wayne is stolidly dependable and Milland quite good as a character that is labeled at one point a "namby-pamby". Charles Bickford is wonderful as a grizzled whaler, but disappears after a single sequence. Similarly, Oscar Polk, who was a servant in Gone With The Wind, has an effective cameo as "Salt Meat". Hedda Hopper is well cast as a biddy perpetually on the verge of a faint. It may be patriotic hokum, but Reap the Wild Wind is also engrossing cinema that still feels more vital than most modern fare.

Ladies of Leisure

Barbara Stanwyck, Pre-Code

Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure is an above average early talkie, a romantic melodrama that gave impetus to the career of its leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck, at Columbia Pictures. The picture was adapted from a David Belasco play that opened in 1924. Ladies of Leisure was one of many stage scripts that were converted to film at the start of the sound era. Screenwriter Jo Swerling did his best to wipe away some of the cobwebs, but what remains smacks of the contrivances of a previous era. Luggish film veteran Ralph Graves plays a wealthy painter named Jerry Strong. Strong has forsaken his father's railroad dynasty to pursue his muse. Graves at no times resembles a painter, but proves to be a suitably hulking masculine presence to contrast with the petite Stanwyck, an avatar of downtrodden femininity.

The picture proper begins with a wild party at Strong's penthouse. Drunken revelers are thoughtlessly chucking bottles which smash on the pavement below narrowly missing pedestrians. Capra here, and later, uses miniatures to apt effect. The opening accurately reflects the mood of Capra's country in 1930. The effects of the Crash were now being felt in earnest. There was a backlash to, what was then felt were, the wild excesses of the roaring 20s. A return to traditional and homespun values was in process. In part, this led to the institution of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Strong is so disgusted by the actions of his guests that he storms out of his own party to prowl the waterfront in search of his muse. This he finds her, Stanwyck introduced in a leggy long shot.

Stanwyck is playing Kay Arnold, a party girl who has just departed a swank affair on a yacht by borrowing a rowboat. Strong gives her a ride home and asks if she will model for him. She is surprised, impressed, but eventually miffed when he does not try to take advantage of the situation. She admires his values and falls in love with Strong when he shows her an elevated view of life. The formula is the familiar Victorian one of the fallen woman who finds redemption. At one point, Arnold is called a "gold miner", a precursor to the "gold diggers" derided by Dean Martin and Kanye West and countless other rapscallions. On their first film together, Capra had a tough time adjusting to Stanwyck's style. She tended to giver her all on the first take with little remaining for subsequent takes. What remains onscreen are explosions of masochistic hysteria, what would become Stanwyck's trademark. Her fierce energy redeems a trite role and holds this picture together.

The supporting cast is fully able to inhabit the stereotypical roles. The doomed Marie Prevost is a delight as Kay's best buddy and roommate. The jokes about Prevost's character's weight have not stood the test of time. Lowell Sherman is perfectly cast as Strong's best bud, a pixilated playboy. Nance O'Neal and George Fawcett are both memorable as Strong' understanding mother and obdurate father. However, what lifts the film above the ordinary, besides Ms. Stanwyck, is the energy and craft of Capra. He was very far from the placid and corny director of his late maturity. He doesn't attempt to open up the sections of the film that are taken from the play, but has his camera prowl the limits of the interiors. This establishes the sets as lived in spaces that both define and limit the characters who inhabit them. Capra dollies back numerous times from his urban apartment dwellers to emphasize their confinement. Contrapuntal pans delineate the apartments of both Kay and Jerry and the social chasm that separates them. Ladies of Leisure ends in a flurry of cross-cutting that is as kinetic and exciting as anything Capra produced during his long career.

 

The Phoenician Scheme

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton 

Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme is his most tiresome flick since The Darjeeling Limited. Set in the 1950s, the film is replete with the visual touches that always make Anderson's films watchable. However, the central story, in which an aging and beleaguered business titan (Benicio Del Toro) forsakes his pursuit of lucre to in order to bond with his family, is a flimsy excuse for a road movie. Del Toro's character, monikered Anatole "Zsa-Zsa" Korda must drum up funding for his latest financial flim flam, the titular scheme. In tow are his daughter (a habited Mia Threapleton) and a nebbish (Michael Cera) who is not what he seems. They fly from point to point meeting up with big name stars (Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch) stuck in one dimensional roles. Hanks wields a Coke bottle to underline the fact that his character is an American while Bryan Cranston brandishes a Hershey bar. Most of the supporting players are wasted, but I did enjoy Richard Ayode as a revolutionary leader and Bill Murray as God.

God shows up in black and white dream sequences that haunt Korda and hammer into his, and the viewer's, head his disconnection with his family. The plot is so low stakes that the film feels twee and overly Apollonian, Wes Anderson's Achilles heel. Given the way the decor in Korda's private planes changes, the film should have been called The Color Scheme. The picture feels overly thought over and hermetic. Korda is supposed to be a flamboyant and grandiose persona, but Del Toro is miscast because he is better at burrowing into his character's depths rather than puffing up a character's pretensions. Threapleton seems promising, but her character is locked in deadpan mode. I don't think she blinked the entire film. Cera is redundant in a Wes Anderson film: twee on twee. What is lacking are moments like those in Anderson's oeuvre that have a smack of reality: Owen Wilson looking wistful in prison garb in Bottle Rocket, Brian Cox berating Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore or Saoirse Ronan smiling at her beloved in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Phoenician Scheme is handsomely appointed and diverting with, on paper, a fabulous cast, but it is devoid of such memorable moments. 

The Best of Claudia Cardinale

1938 - 2025

                    Marriage functions best when both partners remain somewhat unmarried

     1)     Once Upon A Time in the West               Sergio Leone           1969

    2)     Sandra                                                   Luchino Visconti          1965

    3)     Rocco and His Brothers                      Luchino Visconti          1960

    4)     The Adventures of Gerard                Jerzy Skolimowski         1970

    5)     Don't Make Waves                      Alexander Mackendrick        1966

    6)     The Leopard                                         Luchino Visconti          1963

    7)     The Professionals                                  Richard Brooks         1966

    8)     8 1/2                                                        Federico Fellini          1963

    9)     Big Deal on Madonna Street               Mario Moricelli            1958

   10)    The Pink Panther                                 Blake Edwards            1963

There used to be a cafe on NW 12th in Portland that I would stroll past from time to time. Visible from the street in the cafe was a huge black and white photograph of Ms. Cardinale having a pleasant chat with Bryan Ferry at a nightclub in the late 1970s. It seemed the essence of glamor.

Nearly all of her appearances in films after 1970 are not worth seeking out. Fitzicarraldo is one of the few exceptions. Nevertheless, her golden decade, which commenced with her eye catching role in Big Deal on Madonna Street, is startling in its range. She was as much at ease in silly farces as she was in stoic action films or costume dramas. The Adventures of Gerard and Don't Make Waves are inferior films to The Leopard and 8 1/2, but they displayed her talents better. No matter what the genre, she always brought warmth and playful sensuality to the proceedings.

Ms. Cardinale and Frank Zappa

Fugitive Road

Wera Engels and Erich von Stroheim

Frank R. Strayer's Fugitive Road is an independent B production from 1934, a romantic drama with comic elements. The film was made for peanuts on the Universal lot and was released by Chesterfield Pictures during its waning days. The company would soon be taken over by Herbert Yates along with other poverty row studios and merged into Republic Pictures. The film is set in an Austrian town on the Italian border. Presiding over the border is Captain Hauptmann Oswald von Traunsee (Stroheim), a career soldier who has been exiled to this Podunk town because of an affair he had with a Minister's wife. Traunsee lords over his small command and still indulges his roving eye. We see him nab a band of diamond smugglers and shepherd a group of emigres into a boarding house where they await processing. Among them are the two other points of the romantic triangle of the film : a Russian peasant girl (Wera Engels) and an American gangster (Leslie Fenton) who is on the lam. 

It turns out the gangster knew the Russian gal's brother in America. Unbeknownst to her, he died in a fracas and the gangster wants to make amends by marrying her and taking her to the States, even if it means turning himself into the authorities. Stroheim's character, in full vile Teutonic seducer mode, stands in their way. Yet, his character morphs into George Arliss, who was forever uniting star-crossed lovers in his pictures, two thirds of the way through this very short flick and works for a happy ending for his youthful charges. There is not much else to the picture except for some excruciating ethnic humor. The Italian patriarch smells like garlic! Oy!

The spare and cramped sets do provide a fitting sense of enclosure for a tale of confined immigrants. Director Strayer, most famous for directing twelve films in the Blondie series, was a journeyman B director who amassed over 80 credits. There is some notion that von Stroheim directed parts of the picture. Tubi lists him as co-director. Certainly, the scenes where von Stroheim drills and berates his regiment in his native tongue smack of his oeuvre. However, much of the film does not. There are two fairly effective dolly shots, a technique the Austrian born master avoided. In general, the direction is workmanlike and unmemorable. I sense the high percentage of Deutsche spoken is because this film was targeted to show in urban independent theaters in cities with an enclave of German immigrants, like my hometown of Baltimore. The film's view of Austria is pleasant and positive. The Italian patriarch and his large family are welcomed with open arms by the Austrians once the matriarch delivers a son in the boarding house. Soon, Austria and Germany would be less welcoming to immigrants, but there is no sense of doom at the rise of the Third Reich. There would be no glimmer in American films of the coming danger until Three Comrades in 1938. Before then, American films held out laurels of peace and compassion, the odd evil Hun aside,  to our World War 1 adversaries: see for example All Quiet on the Western Front, Four Sons, and Little Man, What Now.

Ms. Engels, a native of Kiel was appealing, but bland. She had no onscreen zing. Her attire doesn't help for she is made to look like a doll. She was out of pictures by 1937. Leslie Fenton fares better, he spars well with Stroheim, but is too soft to be a gangster. He was married at the time to Ann Dvorak and served honorably in World War 2. He directed a few minor Westerns after the war. The primary reason to see Fugitive Road is Herr Stroheim. He is his usual tyrannical self, but there is a winning sense of mischief in his acting as if he was truly tired of playing evil Huns. He is already eyeing his next conquest as the film ends. On with the show! There is a slight pre-Code feel to the film, with shots of a washer woman's rump and a men's room. Unfortunately, the print of Fugitive Road streaming on Tubi is atrocious.              

The Flame of New Orleans

              

René Clair's The Flame of New Orleans is an occasionally engaging piece of fluff from 1941. The project was a major production for Universal Pictures, an attempt to craft a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich after she experienced a career revival with Destry Rides Again and Seven Sinners. Dietrich portrays a newcomer to New Orleans sometime in the mid 19th century who draws the romantic attentions of an effete aristocrat played by Roland Young and a roughhewn sea captain played by Bruce Cabot. Guess who gets the girl. Cabot is a fine actor, but has little chemistry with Dietrich in a part, a man's man role, that cries out for Clark Gable or John Wayne. The electricity that Dietrich has with Wayne in Seven Sinners and The Spoilers is absent. All in all, The Flame of New Orleans was a troubled production. Dietrich did not like Cabot and thought he was poorly prepared. She thought even less of Clair, a feeling that was shared by the crew during the production.

The film feels truncated at 79 minutes. Trouble with the censors, a not unusual problem for a Dietrich picture, resulted in the elision of several sequences. Dietrich gets to sing an anodyne parlor ballad for Young and his swell pals, but a sequence in a rowdy cafe, which cries out for a ballsy number by the diva, fails to provide that showstopper. The screenplay by Norman Krasna is a patchy affair. Some of the plot devices he concocts, such as Cabot's pet monkey getting entangled with Dietrich's carriage, seem hoary. There is japery about gout. The device of Dietrich pretending to have an identical cousin, the naughty one of course, is also trite and silly. Cabot does a high wire act and there is a truncated knife duel. The film provides little genuine New Orleans flavor and zero sense of history. We are not really sure if the film is set in 1850 or 1870, Are the African-Americans servants or slaves? Apparently, it doesn't matter. That said, the blacks in this film have more agency in this film than most in this era of Hollywood. In particular, Theresa Harris has her best role ever as a servant who is more partner in crime with Dietrich than a maid. Krasna and Clair utilize  the black characters in the segregated peanut gallery of an opera house where Young and Dietrich meet. Dietrich meets Young's gaze and then faints to draw him to her side while the peanut gallery denizens act as a chorus.

The Flame of New Orleans was a flop, but it has enough production values to make it above average entertainment. The costumes, artistic design, and cinematography by Rudolph Maté are all top notch. Dietrich and Young are always solid performers. The supporting cast is exemplary. Anne Revere, Melville Cooper, and Laura Hope Crews are enjoyable as Young's snooty relatives. Likewise, Andy Devine, Eddie Quillan, and Frank Jenks are fun as members of Cabot's crew. Mischa Auer and Franklin Pangborn are entertaining, if underused as a pair of European roués who know of Dietrich's shady past. Shemp Howard has an effective cameo as a scruffy cafe waiter. With all this talent, The Flame of New Orleans should have been a better film, but it is a fitfully amusing trifle.