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.