1917: The Making of a Revolution

Maxim Gorky

I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed Stan Neumann's documentary 1917: The Making of a Revolution which is currently streaming on Tubi. I am mad keen on the Russian Revolution and will watch even the blandest collection of archival footage and talking heads. However, this doc has no newsreel footage or talking heads. It switches from expertly chosen still photographs to animation and footage of historic sites as they look in present day St. Petersburg. Neumann was born in the Czech Republic and lives in France. The 53 minutes length of this documentary makes me think that it was probably made for French television, but I could not pin this down for a fact.

The French title for the documentary gives a better idea of the scope of this film: Lénine -- Gorki, la révolution à contretemps. The film uses the polemical blasts and op-ed pieces by Lenin and Gorky to portray the dialectical push and pull of revolutionary ferment in 1917. This is not the best approach for an overview of the revolution, Trotsky is barely mentioned, but it serves well the constrictions of a film this length. What is here has great impact. The animated sections are lively, I particularly liked the breakdown of political parties in the style of Malevich's Suprematist Compositions. I also adored the use of Alexander Blok's poem The Twelve. The narrator recites passages as we glimpse Jury Annenkov's illustrations for the original edition which gives as much a flavor of 1917 in Petrograd as any period photo.

The clincher for me was the use of the great Denis Lavant to portray Gorky in his Italian exile. Lavant's passionate yet mellifluous readings of Gorky's Revolutionary era essays are beautiful. History comes alive. 

Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke

Blue Moon is a another winner from Richard Linklater and another testament to his handling of ensemble work from his players. That said, Robert Kaplow's script is centered entirely on Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, on the most humiliating evening of his life. Kaplow, who wrote the script for Me and Orson Welles, foreshadows Hart's demise in a brief prologue. We then travel back months in time to the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is making its New York debut to a rapturous reception. Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers for two decades before becoming increasingly drunken and unreliable, can't stomach sitting through the show. So, he repairs to a lovingly recreated Sardi's where the remainder of the film occurs. Rodgers and Hammerstein eventually arrive to toast their triumph, further nudging Hart towards despair and a relapse.

The downbeat and insular nature of the project is magnified by the closed in nature of the action. Instead of opening up what is essentially filmed theater, Linklater closes the action down as much as he can to reinforce our sense of Hart's claustrophobic debasement. Debasement is the key theme of the film. Even when Hart's muse (Margaret Qualley) confides to him about her deflowering, the story ends not with catharsis, but humiliation. Despite the downbeat nature of this picture, I actively enjoyed it. This is primarily due to Mr. Hawke's outstanding performance. Hawke not only captures the pathos of his character, but also his wit and warmth and that makes all the difference into keeping this flick from falling into morbidity. Hawke has always been a ridiculously talented actor, but this is most soulful effort.

Linklater and his editor, Sandra Adair, masterfully weave the staff of Sardi's around Hawke.  They act as a contrapuntal chorus to the tragic hero in a picture attuned both to Broadway melodies and the music of dialogue. I particularly relished Bobby Cannavale's ripostes and double takes as the bartender. I also enjoyed the contributions of Jonah Lees, Patrick Kennedy, Aisling O'Mara, and Caitríona Ennis. Decades of accumulating evidence has led to this conclusion, but Blue Moon further cements Linklater's reputation as an American master. 

Bugonia

Emma Stone

Spoiler Alert...I enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, but I have always had an affinity for his work and can certainly understand those who are repelled by his misanthropy. Bugonia takes its premise from a Korean film that I have not seen entitled Save the Green Planet. Two small town Georgia cousins, Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, kidnap a big tech CEO played by Emma Stone. They, or least Plemons character, is convinced that Stone is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy intent on supplanting the human race. Control and its abdication is one of the repeating themes in Lanthimos' work. Plemons is the dominant partner between the two cousins. We learn that his mother is in a coma and that the attendant stress has compelled him into a paranoid spiral. He wants Stone to bend to his will, but she remains obdurate. 

Delbis is to Plemons here as Lennie is to George in Of Mice and Men. This is the film's most glaring flaw. Every time the two talk of maybe finding a new home in another galaxy, I can't help but think of the dream of the rabbit farm in Steinbeck's book. Delbis' character is a few bricks short of a load and too good for this savage world. The contrast between the two cousins is over much in an already schematic movie. The warm tones of the cousins' rustic house is juxtaposed with with the cold contemporary feel of Stone's home and corporate headquarters. She drives a loaded Mercedes truck while Plemons navigates a ten speed. An elitist versus the common man, etc., etc. The contrast is a comic one though Bugonia is the blackest comedy one can imagine. ECT torture, a murder, a suicide, a beheading, and more, ultimately culminating in the extinction of the human race.

The finale is soundtracked by Marlene Dietrich's version of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, an ironic capper akin to Kubrick's use of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove. Lanthimos has the same chilly remove and misanthropy as Kubrick. There are no warm close-ups in Bugonia. Most shots are at a remove. There are almost as many Easter eggs and threads to pull in Bugonia as in any Kubrick film and like Kubrick, Lanthimos is under appreciated for his work with actors. Stone and Plemons both do superb work in the film as does Stavros Halkias as a clueless cop. Lanthimos represents a humanism that can conceive of the extinction of humanity as a positive for the planet. As one character puts it, "this isn't Death of a Salesman." Bugonia is another of Lanthimos' portraits of man as a "sick ape".

The Wonderful World of Tubi, February 2026

Greta Garbo in The Kiss

Jacques Feyder's The Kiss, from 1929, is the last, and perhaps best, silent film that Greta Garbo made for MGM. The witty script, based on a George Saville short story, was by Hanns Kräly, a frequent collaborator of Ernst Lubitsch. However, Kräly's career in Hollywood would be severely affected after Lubitsch discovered that Kräly was carrying on an affair with Lubitsch's soon to be ex-wife. Kräly soldiered on as a screenwriter, but was consigned to B pictures after 1930. The Kiss is a romantic melodrama with comic flourishes set in France. Garbo is married to an older banker, but is in love with a lawyer played by Conrad Nagle. A young swain, wonderfully played by Lew Ayres, is also infatuated with her which leads to tragic consequences. Cedric Gibbons' Art Deco sets are eye popping. So are Adrian's outfits for Ms. Garbo, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Feyder's direction is light on its feet, resulting in a melodrama that never bogs down or loses momentum. It is a great pity that this was the only English language feature that Feyder directed in America. Highly recommended.

Joe May's Asphalt, from 1929, is an Erich Pommer production which makes me wonder if Pommer produced any poor or even mediocre films in Germany during the 1920s. Asphalt is a melodrama that combines romance and crime in Weimar Berlin. Thief Betty Amann seduces young cop Gustav Frölich. It ends badly after the requisite trysts and heists. The picture boasts extraordinary subjective POV shots and impactful close-ups. A masterpiece on par with Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Joe May's reputation declined when he was consigned to B pictures in Hollywood, but for me he is now a subject for further research.

Tubi has three musical comedies from the early 1930s, all starring Eddie Cantor, that are worth a peek. The best of the three is Roman Scandals with completely gaga musical numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley also contributed to Whoopee!, shot in two strip Technicolor, which is bogged down by its stage bound presentation; like the film version of the Marx brothers' The Cocoanuts. The runt of this litter is Kid Millions, but it does contain wonderful turns by Ethel Merman and the Nicholas brothers. All three films were typically classy Samuel Goldwyn productions and all three films are greatly helped by Stuart Heisler's editing. Cantor was a quadruple threat talent who was already a huge star on stage and thanks to his recordings. Cantor's lineage of wisecracking smart alecks includes token goy Bob Hope and Woody Allen, though Cantor always remained a naif. He never employed a leer. Cantor proved to be good value for Goldwyn in response to the success of The Jazz Singer. Both Jolson and Cantor's film careers suffered parallel declines in the late 1930s. Scholars of the Production Code can note the difference between 1933's Roman Scandals and 1934's Kid Millions. 

Jiří Weiss' The Golden Fern is an epic Czech fantasy film from 1963. The film is shot in wide screen black and white, gorgeously lensed by Beda Batka (Marketa Lazarova, and, um, Little Darlings). The film concerns a 18th century shepherd who happens upon the titular and magical fern. A forest sprite morphs into a beautiful woman in order to retrieve the fern, but falls for the studly if arrogant shepherd. They have a brief idyll until the shepherd is pressed into service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in their latest conflict with the Ottoman Empire. While serving the Empire, the shepherd become entangled with a haughty aristocrat played by Daniela Smutná who gives the film's best performance. She is just toying with the lad, but true love is betrayed and the fern crumbles to dust. The film is uneven. Some of the action and supernatural scenes are quite clumsy, but the scenes of life in an 18th century military camp are compelling. These moments left their impact upon Kubrick's Barry Lyndon much as Jaromil Jireš' The Joke influenced Full Metal Jacket. Interested parties should check out the immaculate disc from Deaf Crocodile.

Frank Borzage's Song o' My Heart, from 1930, is Fox's attempt to concoct a vehicle for Irish tenor John McCormack. McCormack was one of the top recording stars and concert draws of the day. His repertoire ranged from traditional Irish ballads to opera. Fox paid him 500,000 clams and he liked Hollywood enough to buy an estate there. However, the film is a slipshod affair. I guess Fox figured they had already shelled out enough on this project, so every expense was spared. The story is drivel and the acting is horrid. The version on Tubi is mostly silent with 14 songs. Other, all talking, versions exist, but a 70 mm print is presumed lost forever. A half dozen of the musical numbers were taken from a recital, so this is one static picture. Featured are Alice Joyce, Maureen O'Sullivan (an Irish discovery by Borzage), John Garrick, and J. Farrell MacDonald, billed here without the J. Unless you want to see what McCormack looked like while performing, this is eminently skippable.

Even with its commercials, I can't think of a better streamer for budding cinephiles than the free, for now, Tubi. Right now you can watch scores of films by DW Griffith, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Blake Edwards, Ernst Lubitsch, etc. I think Tubi has a better lineup of classic films than any streamer, including The Criterion channel. Also check out these classics currently streaming on Tubi: Godard's Contempt, Chabrol's This Man Must Die, Brian de Palma's Sisters, Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jarmusch's Dead Man, Andre de Toth's Pitfall, GW Pabst's The Diary of a Lost Girl, Sirk's A Scandal in Paris, Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Bigelow's Point Break, Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat, Melville's Le Samourai, Rossellini's Journey to Italy, Davies' A Quiet Passion, Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, Siegel's The Lineup, Leni's The Man Who Laughs, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Rush's The Stunt Man, Marquand's Eye of the Needle, Lynch's Eraserhead, Margarethe von Trotta's Sheer Madness, Stroheim's Greed, Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Keaton's Our Hospitality, and many more. A cinematic feast awaits.

Betty Amann in Asphalt

L'Empire

Fabrice Luchini

Bruno Dumont's L'Empire is a pleasantly lunatic vision, meshing Dumont's beloved northern France settings with a science fiction parody. Two dueling extraterrestial clans seek to renew their legacy by assuming a human form and propagating in the Côte d'Opale. Mythic themes are parodied and burlesqued: rival dynasties, star-crossed lovers, and an anointed child preordained to lead the next generation. Unlike the George Lucas efforts it mocks, L'Empire offers genuine spasms of violence and sex. The aliens races are equally eager to decapitate with their light sabres and to copulate in their newly acquired human flesh. The cheekily comic couplings occur in nature, on land or sea, in landscapes worthy of Courbet.  

The two warring clans are monikered the 0s and the 1s, the building blocks of our digital age. The 0s have a spaceship that looks like Versailles. They have a patriarch (Fabrice Luchini) and resemble, in their non-human forms, merde emojis without  Gallic charm. The1s have a mother ship that resembles Reims Cathedral and resemble rays of light. Dumont is parodying the French dualism that has dominated it national discourse even before Descartes posited a mind/body split. French discourse and French humor have never really caught on in the States and L'Empire opened here with barely a ripple.

Dumont contains this film within his own cinematic universe of northern France seen before in his mini-series L'il Quinquin. As in that project, he strikes gold with youthful performers. Based on her previous work, I expected  a fierce and committed performance from Anamaria Vartolomei, but Dumont gets equally compelling work from newcomer Brandon Vileghe. Only Fabrice Luchini overdoes it, but what can you expect when Luchini is playing a character named Belzébuth. 

Crime 101

Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth

Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the most satisfying noir in some time. Layton has relied heavily, but not slavishly, on Don Winslow's sleek and superb novella. A number of critics have compared this new film to Michael Mann's Heat, but the surface similarities between the two films, both are LA based heist flicks, are simply that. Heat, like most Michael Mann films, is focused on the mythos of machismo. I revere Heat, but, frankly, that daylight robbery of the bearer bonds or whatever the hell they were is ludicrous. Now I enjoy the kinetic rush of the sequence, but it is not, in any way, a realistic portrayal of how and where to go about an armed robbery. Nevertheless, the whole tone of the film is mythic rather than realistic, so why carp. Winslow's novella and Layton's film(s) are more interested in realistic characterization than mythic figures. At the end of Heat, the cop upholds his duty and nails the perp. That is not what happens at the end of Crime 101. The cop in the Layton film knows the beast of societal justice must be fed, but he ultimately follows his own code.

Every character in Crime 101 masks his true self. This Layton makes plain in the scene in which Halle Berry goes through her daily make-up routine. One's true self is irrelevant to one's success in society. This is as true for the cop (Mark Ruffalo) as it is for the insurance agent (Ms. Berry) and thief (Chris Hemsworth). It is when these character put down the masks they have constructed for themselves that they can find a sense of commonality. The main problem I have with this movie is Chris Hemsworth. He's ok when the mask is in place, but he telegraphs his character's moments of vulnerability. Think of Brad Pitt in this role and you might see what I mean. I also felt that Nick Nolte's performance is disastrous. It was like watching Willie Mays when he played for the Mets. Otherwise, the ensemble is superbly cast and at the top of their game. Excellent work from Ms. Berry, Mr. Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, Tate Donovan, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The score by Blanck Mass is spine tinglingly effective without being obtrusive.

The Best of Robert Duvall

1931 -- 202

                                     To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove was my best part.

1)     Lonesome Dove                                       Simon Wincer, etc.                                   1989

2)     Apocalypse Now                                      Francis Ford Coppola                              1979

3)     The Great Santini                                    Lewis John Carlino                                  1979

4)     Tomorrow                                                 Joseph Anthony                                       1972

5)     Colors                                                       Dennis Hopper                                         1988

6)     The Godfather                                         Francis Ford Coppola                              1972

7)     To Kill A Mockingbird                             Robert Mulligan                                       1962

8)     The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid  Philip Kaufman                                         1972

9)     The Apostle                                              Robert Duvall                                          1997

10)   Tender Mercies                                        Bruce Beresford                                      1983

He rarely made a bad performance. Often, as in Apocalypse Now and The Betsy, he gave by far the best performance in the film. I want to stress the above rankings are not based on the overall quality of the film. Tomorrow is a poor film and I've never been too thrilled by either To Kill a Mockingbird or Tender Mercies. However, the sheer volume of his varied film work rivals any of his contemporaries, even Gene Hackman. I especially enjoy his work in The Chase, True Grit, The Rain People, MASH, Joe Kidd, The Outfit, The Godfather 2, The Killer Elite, Network, True Confessions, Rambling Rose, Geronimo..., Something to Talk About, Sling Blade, Assassination Tango, Thank You for Smoking, and The Road. 

There was a chameleon quality to his work and he never suffered typecasting. He was not sought out for romantic leading man roles, but his turn in Assassination Tango showed he could command oodles of charm if need be.  After he had established himself in Hollywood, he was often called upon for villainy at which he was adept: his Jesse James is the most vicious in film history and Duvall was also quite pungent in True Grit, Joe Kidd, The Killer Elite, and Network. His death scene in Colors is a model of his realistic understatement.

   

Quick Takes: February 2026

Mirjami Kuosmanen

Erik Blomberg's The White Reindeer is a 1952 Finnish fairy tale film set in a gorgeously glacial Lapland. Mirjami Kuosmanen stars as a Sami maiden cursed with a legacy of pagan gods and witchcraft. The horror elements of the film are mild and predictable, but the ethnographic documentary aspects are stunning in their beauty. There is a little animal cruelty, reindeer are lassoed and wrassled like steers, but children would be entranced by the sequences featuring the reindeer both in the wild and harnessed to sleighs for races. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Robert Day's The Initiation of Sarah is a mildly horrific exploitation film made for ABC television in 1978. The direction is indifferent and the story is a Stephen King ripoff: mostly Carrie and the maze out of The Shining. Kay Lenz stars as a college freshman with telekinetic powers who gets involved in sorority shenanigans. The California Institute of Technology locations are attractive and the cast is way above average. Ms. Lenz offers a sensitive performance and Morgan Fairchild is delightful as the head mean girl on campus; a role that led to her being typecast forever as a conniving bitch. I also enjoyed the efforts of Tisa Farrow, Shelley Winters, Tony Bill, Kathryn Crosby, Morgan Brittany, Robert Hayes, and Talia Balsam. What a cast for a throwaway piece of crap!

François Ozon's When Fall is Coming is an ironic melodrama set in Burgundy and spanning a decade or so. The tone is subdued, especially for Ozon, and autumnal. The focus is more on a decades long friendship between two seniors (Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko) than on the more feckless younger generation. The film contains three deaths, sins of the past, poison mushrooms, and a ghost. I could have done without the ghost but found When Fall is Coming droll and arresting. The cast is sublime and the production design, costumes, and cinematography unostentatiously gorgeous.

Howard Bretherton and William Keighley's Ladies They Talk About, from 1933, is a subpar Barbara Stanwyck vehicle from the Pre-Code era. The plot, in which mob moll Stanwyck falls for milquetoast evangelist Preston Foster, is tommyrot with one of the worst finales I've ever seen. Ladies They Talk About was originally a play, but passed through the hands of many scribes before reaching the screen: too many cooks, etc.  The chemistry between Stanwyck and Foster is nil, but at least Stanwyck ends up in prison, San Quentin, twenty minutes into this 69 minute flick. The prison depicted is the cushiest jail I've ever seen in an American film, it even has a beauty parlor. Stanwyck is well cast and wonderful, but the picture is haphazard, veering from crude to punchy. This is one weird film. Lillian Roth is a welcome sight as Stanwyck's best bud in stir. She even gets to warble a love song to a studio portrait of Joe E. Brown, then a Warners contract player. The picture's racial humor is particularly offensive.

Kogonada's A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a miss, but not the debacle some have declaimed. Kogonada's Bressonian distance doesn't ever mesh with the twee romantic fantasy penned by Seth Reiss. I loved Benjamin Loeb's cinematography and the performances of Kevin Klein, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, and Lily Rabe. Rabe, who is 42, plays the mother of Margot Robbie, age 35. The appeal of Robbie continues to elude me. Colin Farrell's charming performance is the reason to see this flick, particular when he gets to relive his character's high school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

John Sturges' The Law and Jake Wade, from 1958, is an average Western from MGM. Surges handles the action scenes well, particularly the opening in which top billed Robert Taylor busts old pal Richard Widmark out of jail. Robert Surtees' cinematography makes stunning use of the Death Valley exteriors. The production design stands out, especially the ghost town in the finale where a bag of loot is buried. However, the script is an assemblage of cliches. Studio shots mesh poorly with magnificent exteriors. Widmark is outstanding, as are Robert Middleton, Henry Silva, and DeForst Kelly. Unfortunately, Robert Taylor is a black hole at the center of this picture. Any Western associated leading man would have been better, but he was MGM's (aging) boy. 

Claude Sautet's Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen) is a genuine sleeper, a film that lingers. Max (Michel Piccoli) is a divorced robbery detective with a wintry heart who is getting heat from his superiors. He needs to take down a crew and, to his dubious fortune, finds a patsy in the person of an old Legionnaire buddy named Abel (Bernard Fresson). Abel and his small time hood pals strip precious metals from abandoned buildings and construction sites in the suburb of Nanterre. However, Abel has a prostitute girlfriend named Lily (Romy Schneider) who turns tricks in Paris and thinks Abel should ditch his penny ante career. Max becomes fixated on her. Posing as a wealthy banker, Max manipulates Lily into convincing Abel that a local bank is easy pickings. Things end badly for all concerned in this 1971 flick.

Max... is a low key, almost humdrum police procedural. It is more of a character study than an action film. The Nanterre cafe that serves as the clubhouse for Abel's gang is dappled with the pop colors of the era. The police stations are a putrid blue, grey, green. Max's fake love nest, a study in beige. The characters' cigarettes are matched, also: Marlboro for Abel, Kool for Lily, Gitanes, bien sûr, for Max. The story all told in a flashback as distant as Max who prefers to tinker with clocks instead of schtupping Lily. Sautet may not be a master, but he directed many fine films and has received insufficient attention in the anglophone world.

 

Send Help

Rachel McAdams

Sam Raimi's Send Help is genuinely exciting cinema, his best film since Spider-Man 2. As usual, the pulpiness of Raimi's style has led him to be underrated; as Hitchcock was in his day. Yet, history will show that Raimi is just as expert a craftsman as Hitch with an equally mordant sense of humor. Raimi, however, is devoid of Catholic guilt. The screenplay, by the team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, swiftly engineers a battle of the sexes on an uncharted desert isle. The combatants are office mouse Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) and her odious nepo baby boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Linda is a hardworking grinder, who talks to her pet bird and eats tuna fish salad sandwiches at her desk. Raimi has frumped up Ms. McAdams as much as one can and dressed her in tones of beige to make her as dorky and unappealing as possible. Bradley doesn't prefer the image she projects and passes Linda over for a long overdue promotion. She objects and her moxie gets her a ride on the corporate jet to Thailand where Bradley plans to jettison her.

Of course, the tables are turned after Raimi provides us with one of the most hair raising plane crashes in cinematic history. The duo are stranded on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Bradley has an injured leg and is as helpless as a baby, a whiny and entitled one at that. The casting, McAdams is a decade older than O'Brien, plays up his lack of maturity. Linda, a Survivor fan, is in her element. She thrives in this environment where survival is a true battle of the fittest and Daddy's riches can't bail one out. Bradley becomes a mouth to feed in a film in which the central motif is what is going into and out of people's mouths. The level of gore and effluvia is high. Raimi really emptied his amniotic sac on this one. That the film champions women as the stronger and more resilient sex should be no surprise to fans of the director who has broached feminist themes since Xena. 

I admired Dylan O'Brien's performance as Dan Ackroyd in Saturday Night and he does equally good work here in tamping down his natural charisma to play a spoiled and aging adolescent. Bradley is never able to countenance that Linda could be an equal partner and that helps bring about his downfall. Thus, McAdams has the plum role and she delivers a gutsy and memorable performance. Raimi has said that he felt he under utilized McAdams talents in Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but this role makes up for that neglect. I have been a big fan of the actress since I first spied her on the wonderful first season of Slings and Arrows and am glad she gets to strut her stuff in a good genre film as she did in Wes Craven's Red Eye. You don't get an Oscar for appearing in pulp horror that open in February, but McAdams has already racked up enough great performances for a lifetime achievement award in, let's hope, forty years.

Art College 1994

          
Liu Jian's Art College 1994, from 2024, is an animated drama that looks at the intersecting lives of college students. The main characters are feckless art student Zhang Xiaojun and his best bud "Rabbit". Most of the film is taken up with ruminative BS sessions between the two in their dorm room and on the quad. The two indulge in navel gazing while they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Zhang flirts with a shy piano student, but their furtive relationship eventually evaporates. Liu juggles over thirty speaking parts, some impersonated by noted figures in Chinese music and cinema like the director Bi Gan, to create a broad picture of academia that is both warm and mildly satiric. 

The only classroom lecture shown in the film, which the students largely ignore, lays out the twin poles of artistic influence that the students must individually confront. The shifting perspectives of Eastern art is contrasted with the single fixed point of view which the lecturer says categorizes Western art. The mise en scene of Art College 1994 reflects this bifurcation. Nearly all of the conversational scenes in the film resemble the rotoscoped animation used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Art College 1994's hand drawn animation is cruder than those films, but captures their first person immediacy. Between these scenes of digressive dialogue are snippets that focus on nature: a butterfly floating above the quad, bugs and lizards negotiating rocks. These are the moments that reflect Asian art's influence upon Liu Jian, reminiscent of Eastern landscape painting and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Zhang Xiaojun ultimately rejects traditional Chinese painting and embraces Western experimentalism, bringing an end to his academic career.

The funny and frank dialogue redeems the more aimless sections of the film. It is hard to capture the puffed up bubble of academic life without indulging in the rabbit holes of digression. Art College 1994 often feels jejune, but it is true to the limited scope of its youthful characters. 

Broken Rage

Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Broken Rage has languished all 2025 on Amazon Prime with little notice. It is an odd film, divided in two discrete parts, the former a crime drama, the latter a comedic parody of a crime drama, à la Jerry Lewis. Kitano plays Mouse, a hit man who lives anonymously and follows an almost ritualistic existence. We follow him as he executes two jobs, but he is then apprehended by the cops who put the screws to him. Mouse agrees to infiltrate a yakuza mob who control the heroin market. Mouse helps brings down that gang and struts off, presumably to enter the witness protection program. The tone is tossed off and minimal, like the protagonist. The comic second half of this very short film, 67 minutes, has the same narrative, actors, and situations as the first half; with the addition of pratfalls and very broad humor. 

Broken Rage is certainly a self indulgent film, but it is an accurate reflection of the bifurcation of Kitano's career. He is best known in the US for directing and starring in hard boiled action films like Sonatine and Fireworks. Kitano had a brief vogue here in the 1990s, but has fallen off the map critically in America during this century. In Japan, he is best known as a comic performer and that has been his bread and butter in his homeland. Thus, Broken Rage displays the poles of his talent: half Jean Gabin, half Leslie Nielsen. Broken Rage barely qualifies as a feature, but it has structural integrity and strong performances. It further establishes Kitano as a minor director, but a major performer.

He Who Must Die

Pierre Vaneck

I've been itching to see Jules Dassin's He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir) since I read Peter Wolf's memoir, Waiting on the Moon. In it, Wolf recounts his being taken to the film by his parents whereupon he eventually falls asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to him. That lady was named Marilyn Monroe who was there on a date night with her husband Arthur Miller, just two everyday New York intellectuals paying homage to one of Joseph McCarthy's victims as Wolf's parents were. The movie is a French language wide screen version of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Both works are set in a Greek village under Ottoman rule in the year of 1921. Refugees from a town sacked by the Turks arrive, are spurned by the town's ruling class, the Church and bourgeoisie, and flee to the hills. The village people are rehearsing their version of the Passion Play which they put on every seven years. However, events spin out of control and Christ's sacrifice recurs after a class war erupts. The battle rages on as the film ends. 

In his review in The New Leader, Manny Farber detected the "tang of propaganda" in the film's images and I concur.⛨ However, I don't think this was necessarily a problem since Kazantzakis was fellow traveler if not a doctrinaire Communist. I am not so sure about Jesus. The film reminded Farber of Steinbeck. Nevertheless, Dassin's allegorical groupings of the lumpen rural proletariat results in stasis rather than movement, posturing rather than acting. This is social realism at its most ham-fisted, turning an ambivalent and questioning book into a Marxist fresco. There are endless shots of the choreographed peasantry happily warbling or intoning their dignity. I, unlike Peter Wolf, did not fall asleep, though. Enough of Kazantzakis' dialogue remains and I especially enjoyed the readings by Jean Servais and Fernand Ledoux as the film's good and bad pharisees. However, the film's performances are all over the map. Melina Mercouri has a bad case of the cutes as the picture's Magdalene figure and Pierre Vaneck is hopeless as the film's creeping Jesus. The film's Pilate figure is the most broadly drawn, a Turkish Snidely Whiplash avec catamite. A pretentious curiosity, all in all. 

⛨ Manny Farber, The New Leader, Three Art-y Films, pg. 26.

Who by Fire

Noah Parker

Philippe Lesage's Who by Fire (Comme le feu) is a Canadian drama than conveys the claustrophobia of intimacy from first shot to last. It is a long film, over two and a half hours long, and a slow burn that unspools at its own pace. It is set at a remote lakeside lodge in Northern Quebec owned by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a maverick filmmaker. The film chronicles a troubled reunion he hosts with his former collaborator, Albert (Paul Ahmarani). Albert brings along his two late adolescent children and, crucially, a friend of one of them named Jeff (Noah Parker). Jeff is the main witness to the various entanglements that ensue, the only character given point of view shots by the director. 

Jeff's awkwardness and essential estrangement mark this film as a coming of age drama and, indeed, we do detect some growth in his compassion by film's end. The film has its outdoor sequences which contain more than a whiff of danger, hiking, hunting and canoeing through rapids, but the real battles occur indoors over many bottles of wine as the temporary housemates share meals around a table captured by the largely fixed gaze of Lesage's camera. Despite the many stunned onlookers, which includes Blake's staff and the odd film star (Irène Jacobs), Albert and Blake partake in verbal sparring, taking the opportunity to trade recriminations and old resentments. The backbiting gets so vicious that the film becomes a nightmarish dreamscape of bourgeois neurosis. The frantic party mood, highlighted by a conga line to "Rock Lobster", quickly devolves into bleary disenchantment. The constant petty humiliations and lengthy harangues that dot Who by Fire recall Dostoyevsky who Lesage's script alludes to. So too does the final scene which highlights compassion to a beast allegedly dumber than a man. 

The film does reach discordant heights, but it is far from perfect. The scenes of canoes maneuvering through white water are unconvincing. Some of the motivations for actions by the characters are sketchily motivated. Still, there is a sense of unease in Who by Fire that I found unsettling and memorable. The cast is outstanding, delivering the high falutin dialogue mellifluously.

The Whip and the Body

                

Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body, from 1963, is so much more accomplished than the average exploitation flick from this period that it threatens to be art. The film's narrative is a Poe pastiche (mostly Usher and The Premature Burial) which opens with prodigal son, Kurt (Christopher Lee) returning to the family castle on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Kurt is so despised by the castle's inhabitants that we wonder why he bothered to return, but the plot really kicks into gear when it is revealed that Kurt had a previous relationship with his brother's fiancee, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi). Their relationship is revealed and rekindled on the beach as Kurt brandishes and unleashes his whip. Nevenka says she despises Kurt, but after more than a few hearty lashes, she becomes aroused and yields to him; a sub to his dom. Even after Kurt is mysteriously murdered, Nevenka follows his ghostly bidding and accomplishes Kurt's revenge. Bava lets this S/M relationship unspool to its illogical conclusion with eros and thanatos irreparably linked. Doom awaits us all.

The Whip and the Body was made for peanuts as a co-Italian and French production designed to have its dialogue post-synced so it could be released in at least those two markets. So, the dialogue is an afterthought for this flick, which, fortunately, is largely silent for most of its 87 minutes. The best sequences of the film contain no dialogue per se: the funeral ceremony (above) or Nevenka pacing through the labyrinthine castle unable to sleep because she hears the snap of Kurt's whip. Bava and cinematographer Ubaldo Terzano give the film an appropriately dark palette: blue, green, black and purple with occasional spots of light. The film exudes a whiff (or is that a whip) of the exotic perfume of transgressive beauty. Lavi writhes amusingly and Lee is perfect for a stone cold ghost in a film that would probably be PG-13 today. Out of the ten or so Bava pictures I've seen, The Whip and the Body along with Black Sunday ranks at the top. I kind of wish that Bava got the chance to direct an A production like The Leopard, but that was not his fate.

Melvin Purvis: G-Man

Matt Clark and David Canary

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Dan Curtis' Melvin Purvis: G-Man, a made for television movie that premiered in April of 1974. Like many American TV movies of that era, it was released abroad theatrically and, because Purvis is relatively unknown overseas, the title was changed to The Legend of Machine Gun Kelly. The film come at the end of a mini-boom in Depression era gangster films that was sparked by the 1967 success of Bonnie and Clyde. The film was a joint production of AIP and Curtis' production company. Curtis had had an overnight success when his daytime vampire soap Dark Shadows, briefly, became a hit. Both Melvin Purvis and Dark Shadows aired on ABC, the upstart of the then three major American television. It was more prone to display exploitation fare than the more staid CBS and NBC.

Part of my interest in this film is the discernable impact John Milius had on the production. He is credited with the story, shares credit for the screenplay with William F. Nolan, and is listed as the flick's creator. The project was originally intended to be a spin-off of Milius' feature debut Dillinger in which Purvis was portrayed by Ben Johnson. There was conflict between Curtis and Milius and the latter spent the rest of his days castigating both Curtis and television production in general. Dale Roberson ended up being cast as Purvis, but the script's right wing slant, violence, and male camaraderie remain as hallmarks of Milius' efforts. This is not a film that passes the Bechdel Test.

It is also a film that stands as a Thermidorian rebuke to most of the Depression era gangster films of this period like Bonnie and Clyde and The Sting which glamorized criminal behavior. Milius, a law and order reactionary, has Purvis provide an opening narration in which he describes the film's miscreants as psychotics and punks. The G-Men are not totems of virtue, they cadge cigars and booze from a kidnapped millionaire, but they are definitely the good guys in this film's cosmos. After his aide-de-camp (a note perfect Steve Kanaly) complains about dealing with the press, Purvis replies that their interest is an opportunity to shift public sympathy away from the desperadoes and put it firmly behind J Edgar Hoover and his minions. 

None of this would matter if Melvin Purvis was as clumsy and poorly acted as most exploitation fare. However, Curtis keeps things rolling along, the film is a brisk 75 minutes, and the ensemble acting is superior to most American A features from 1974. Robertson keeps within his range, portraying Purvis like the droll sheriffs he played in numerous B Westerns and on television's Death Valley Days. Harris Yulin is somewhat miscast as Machine Gun Kelly, but he deftly reveals his character's psychosis. Margaret Blye, as Kelly's domineering wife, is even better and makes me wonder why she didn't nab more challenging roles. The scene where she vents her class resentments at the kidnapped millionaire is a highlight of the film. That smarmy dilettante is well embodied by Dick Sargent, best known as the second Darren on Bewitched.

There are an array of small scene stealers in the film: John Karlen, Woodrow Parfrey, Don Megowan, and the ubiquitous Eddie Quillan. Best of all are familiar faces Matt Clark and David Canary as a duo with more guts than brains. The byplay between the two is lively and they are given the film's most dramatic exit. Dan Curtis made all sorts of disparate crap, mostly for television. However, The Winds of War and especially Melvin Purvis: G-Man makes me want to check out more of his work. It is probably more dross than diamonds, but Melvin Purvis is the kind of find that will keep me searching. It was so successful that a sequel of sorts was made: The Kansas City Massacre, also featuring Dale Robertson and Harris Yulin. 
                   

Ascenseur pour l'echafaud

Jeanne Moreau

Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) is a crisp and sleek thriller released in 1958. The film was based on an Série noir novel by Noël Calef published in 1956. Jeanne Moreau stars as Florence Carala, the unfaithful wife of a munitions magnate played by Jean Wall. Florence, we immediately discern, is involved in an affair with a subordinate of her husband named Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a former soldier in the French Foreign Legion. We first see the lovers talking to each other on the phone, expressing their love for one another and going over the last few details before Julien attempts to rub out Florence's husband. Malle frames Moreau in enormous close-ups here, heralding her arrival in a role that helped make her a major film star after a decade of playing bar girls in B pictures; albeit, usually superbly.

I first saw this film nearly fifty years ago through the snow on my television on a broadcast from Washington D.C. 's WETA. Viewing the Criterion Collection's disc gave me a greater appreciation for the high contrast black and white cinematography of Henri Decaë, but my overall impression of the film remained the same. The film is effective when it focuses on Tavernier and his somewhat unbelievable plight after he manages to get stuck in an elevator while trying to escape from the site of the murder. Even better are the scenes following Florence as she prowls the streets of Paris searching for her lover. Moreau's face, like Garbo's at the end of Queen Christina, becomes a mask that both hides and projects a myriad of conflicting feelings. Malle's tracking shot of Moreau striding down a boulevard, shot apparently by Decaë using a pram, cemented her as a cinematic icon.

What still didn't work for me was Malle's handling of the two beatniks in love who steal Tavernier's car and go on a spree that ends with murder. Part of this is due to the actors. Malle was tentative at this point in his handling of his players, so that those actors who needed the least guidance (Moreau, Wall, and Lino Ventura as a homicide chief) fare best. One thing I can better glean from this viewing was the effects of Malle's influences on this picture. Malle confessed that the film was an amalgam of Bresson and Hitchcock. He had been an assistant to Bresson on that master's A Man Escaped and that picture informs Ascenseur's interiority: especially Florence's monologues and the trapped Tavernier. The frisson of excitement in the film owes much to the cross-cutting utilized by Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train. What the film lacks is the lovers on the run fervor of Ray in They Live By Night and Rebel Without A Cause.

And that leads me to the question of Louis Malle's artistic personality. Ultimately, it was more malleable than forceful. His best films display a lively intelligence and some sensuality, but lack the flair or intellectual rigor of great filmmakers. I like Ascenseur, The Fire Within, Atlantic City and a few others, but the impression they leave strikes me as the work of a nice man, but not an artist who wants to break ground. His disasters were numerous: Zazie dans le Métro, A Very Private Affair, Black Moon, Crackers. I warn all semi-interested parties to avoid these pictures. They are among the worst films of anyone considered a major director

Small Things Like These

Cillian Murphy

I enjoyed the film adaptation of Claire Keegan's novel Small Things Like These more than I expected to, if enjoyment is not quite the right word for a work concerning the depravations of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. Set in 1982 or so, both film and book concern a simple and honest lorry driver named Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) who discovers dark secrets about the local church run facility while making his deliveries. The laundries employed and sheltered Ireland's unmarried mothers who were forced to give away their babies for adoption. The laundries were Dickensian work houses, David Copperfield figures prominently in Small Things Like These, that became satanic mills of abuse and exploitation. Screenwriter Enda Walsh has streamlined the novel, yet retained its very Gaelic flavor.

What worried me about the material is that there is no subtext, book and film are both righteous screeds against the Laundries. Fair enough, but not necessarily the stuff of multi-dimensional art. However, the film is superbly acted by all concerned and director Tim Mielants' technique is interesting and evocative. He conjures the period by giving the film a throwback look and audio design. The colors are muted, appropriate for this grim tale of the 1980s. The sound is multi-layered and scratchy like an old cassette mixtape. Furlong is constantly going back in time within his head to revisit his troubled childhood. Mielants includes many shots of characters looking through windows conveying how we are constantly rewitnessing the past, but are forever cut off from it. The past is a foreign country as L.P. Hartley put it. Mielants uses long and slow pans to give the viewer a queasy sense that some undiscovered horror is just around the corner or in a disused coal bin. Furlong is a virtual saint, devoted to his wife and five daughters. We have little doubt that he will do the right thing even if he has to oppose his beloved church. As in Oppenheimer, Murphy underplays beautifully in what was a pet project for him. Emily Watson delivers in the juicy role of the Mother Superior who personifies the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy.

El

Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova

Luis Buñuel's Él (Him), from 1953, is probably the most personal of his masterpieces from his Mexican period. Buñuel and Luis Alcorize's script was derived from Mercedes Pinto's 1926 novel Pensamientos. That novel was a roman à clef about Pinto's relationship with her jealous husband who descended into paranoia when he could not control her. The first part of the film focuses on Francisco (Arturo de Córdova), a middle aged business magnate and his wooing of the much younger Gloria (Delia Garcés). Francisco spies Gloria in church during a Maundy Thursday service and with one look at her ankles, the torch is lit. Buñuel indulges full bore in his foot fetishism in this one. Even though Gloria is seeing the dependable Raul (Luis Beristáin), an employee of Francisco's, she is swept away by Francisco's profession of love and he soon manipulates her into a hasty marriage.

The second part of the film is a flashback that is from Gloria's perspective, as she recounts the horror of her married life to Raul some time in the future. Francisco's jealousy erupts almost immediately after they pledge their troth, ruining their wedding night and honeymoon. He moves her into his palatial family estate, an art nouveau palace with surrealistic flourishes, brilliantly designed by frequent Buñuel collaborator Edward Fitzgerald. This house soon becomes the prison it resembles on the outside, a gilded cage for Gloria. Francisco's behavior descends into the pathological and goads Buñuel and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa into some of their most disturbing imagery: a pin through a keyhole with the intention of blinding a imagined peeper, Francisco collecting tools in order to sew up Gloria's vagina; a harbinger of That Obscure Object of Desire. It is no surprise that Él tanked with critics and audiences in the repressed 1950s. There is a bell tower scene that prefigures Vertigo, Hitchcock was an avowed admirer of Buñuel, in which Francisco threatens to throw Gloria to her doom and castigates the people below as "worms".

Gloria tries to find an ally who will help her in her plight, but no one will listen to her. Francisco's servants, his business associates, the local curate, all buy into Francisco's projected image as magnanimous yet traditional bourgeois grandee. Even Gloria's mother is fooled. When Gloria goes to her mother for counsel, she responds by, in essence, telling Gloria that boys will be boys. The final third of the film goes back to Francisco's perspective as he becomes more paranoid and delusional. He stalks Gloria after she wisely leaves him and endeavors to get out of Dodge. Francisco mistakes a couple for Gloria and Raul and follows  them into the church we encountered earlier in the film, bringing us full circle. Francisco imagines that the parishioners are mocking him. Buñuel cuts between reality and Francisco's delusions in purposefully crude cuts, the line being thin between reality and delusion. The coda, a sop to the conventions of melodrama, shows Gloria wed to Raul. They are parenting Francisco Jr. Francisco has retreated from society and is now a brother in a monastery. His mustache, an emblem of his machismo, is gone. The final shot is of Francisco walking a crooked path, as he did on the stairs of his mansion. His madness still lingers.

The fact that it is Buñuel in a cassock in this last shot is indicative of his identification with the divided nature of Francisco. To the world Buñuel was an icon of Surrealism and Leftist humanism, or, as Dali dismissed him, an atheist and a Communist. At home though, he was a traditional Spanish patriarch, stern and unyielding. He demanded unconditional fealty from his wife and children. Disobedience was not to be tolerated. Now, the fact that Él can be read as an auto-critique makes me think that Buñuel was not the domestic tyrant that some have made him out to be. Still, boys will be boys. He does deemphasize the theme of divorce and the difficulty of obtaining one in a Catholic country compared to the original novel. The subject is briefly mentioned, but then ignored. Buñuel was so in thrall to his own Romantic agonies to ever be fully sympathetic to feminism. 

Él may have the best lead performances in any Buñuel film. The line on him is that he let his professional performers be while micro-managing his amateur ones. If this is true, and I've read and seen nothing to contradict this, then he was very fortunate in the casting of Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova. Garcés was an Argentine actress who took a hiatus from her homeland with her husband during the Perón era. We can glean what Francisco sees in her, she is a dish, but Garcés gives Gloria a backbone even when Francisco tries to spatchcock her. Cordova was the greatest leading man of the Mexican cinema, appearing in over a hundred Mexican features and quite a few American ones (like For Whom The Bell Tolls). One of the delights of Él is watching Córdova and Buñuel gleefully deconstruct Córdova's image as a romantic leading man.

The Gallant Hours

James Cagney and Ward Costello

Robert Montgomery's The Gallant Hours is a peculiar mix of docudrama and hagiography. The picture illustrates Admiral Bull Halsey's leadership during World War 2's Guadalcanal campaign. The film is bookended by scenes of Halsey's retirement from service. The limited scope of this feature is a kindness to Halsey whose personal life and naval career were far more checkered than this flick lets on. Halsey in the film is a salt of the earth mensch, his door always open to the plaints of a troubled junior officer or swabie. James Cagney, in a role that is tailor made for him, holds together this rather static flick. There is an attempt to parallel Halsey's strategizing with that of his opponent, the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. This film does a reasonably good job of humanizing the enemy for an American film from 1960.  However, Yamamoto's death, which serves as the ambivalent climax of this film, occurred five months after the end of the Guadalcanal campaign. There are a few other inaccuracies because when you do a hagiography there has to be a little hogwash.

The documentary aspect of the script, by Frank D. Gilroy and Air Force veteran Beirne Lay Jr., uses extensive narration to outline, poorly, the strategy of the campaign. What works better is an effort to humanize the characters by offering details about individual's make-up and ultimate fate. The narration, alternated by Montgomery and Art Gilmore, is compelling when offering us such tidbits as Yamamoto's passion for poker and that one character ends up Governor of South Dakota and another a paraplegic. Would that Montgomery's visual approach had been half as interesting. Instead, the approach is torpid and seems chintzy. This was a film produced by Montgomery and Cagney, so there seems to have been more attention to cutting corners than usual. Most of the camera set-ups are primitive and there are no battle scenes in this war movie. It is an actor's movie of the war.

Now that may not have been such a bad idea with one of the greatest actors of the century in the lead. Cagney underplays, the mythos of the role preceding him, and captures an exemplary senior officer who displays more charm than the real Halsey did. Cagney's deft touch is best seen in the moment he hears of Yamamoto's death. While his comrades are celebrating, Halsey seems aggrieved. Earlier in the film, Halsey had narrowly escaped a similar fate as that of his opponent. We can see what Halsey is thinking in Cagney's eyes: there, but for the grace of God, go I. I also enjoyed the scenes of Cagney interacting with faces that would become increasing familiar in the future: Dennis Weaver, Richard Jaeckel, and William Schallert. I don't really like The Gallant Hours as a film, but admire Montgomery for providing moments of dignity for those who gave all. A large portion of the cast of this film served in the war. Some, like Montgomery and Ward Costello, were genuine heroes.

The Rip

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon

Joe Carnahan's The Rip is a good meat and potatoes crime film that stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and is now streaming on Netflix. The duo are members of a Tactical Narcotics Team investigating crooked cops ripping off narcotics dealers in Miami. The portrayal of law enforcement officials on the border line of criminality couldn't be more timely. No character in the film seems completely trustworthy and there are two outright rat finks among them. Carnahan's films are pretty much always studies in machismo and The Rip is no exception. Even the distaff members of Ben and Matt's crew, Teyana Taylor and Catalina Sandino Moreno, engage in the chop busting banter so typical of males in packs. 

Carnahan's screenplay is well constructed and smart, but there is an inevitable sense of déjà vu to the proceedings. If you've seen one corrupt cop movie, you've seen a facsimile of The Rip. Still, the performances are solid and Juan Miguel Azpiroz's cinematography bathes the action sequences in delirious colors, making this, by far, Carnahan's most visually exciting film. The finale of the film has Affleck and Damon having a beer together on a beach as the sun rises over Miami. If this is their last film together, then this would be a fittingly romantic capstone to an onscreen bromance that has spanned the decades.

A Confucian Confusion

Shiang-Cyi Chen and Shu-Chun Ni

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is an engrossing polyphonic portrait of Taipei released in 1994.  If I had to categorize this winning film, I would call it a workplace based romantic comedy, since a number of the characters work at a public relations agency, but that would be pigeonholing a work that defies easy categorization. What strikes me about the film, which juggles the lives of over a dozen characters over the course of of two days, is the overall mood of romantic dissatisfaction that permeates throughout. All of the couples we witness are well past the honeymoon period of their relationship. This is more a movie about conscious uncoupling than one about romance sparking. When a relationship is consummated in the film, regret is inevitable and almost instantaneous. Yet, the film, though rueful, is never depressing, but is ultimately buoyant in its handling of its characters' travails.

A Confucian Confusion fragmented narrative mirrors the disconnected lives of its characters. The film is edited into shards of plot, Confucian parables, painted legends, and advertising slogans. The mise-en-scene entraps the characters at luxurious offices and TGIFridays giving the picture a lost in the supermarket feel of anomie. The surfaces are bright, reflecting the lives of the pretty young things enjoying the luxuries of Taiwan's economic miracle. The characters are miserable despite the appointed decor, the to die for couture, and the bling. They careen around after work doing cartwheels, puking into potted plants, and bickering in cabs. Dual poles within a narrow society are displayed. Postmodern amorality is contrasted with delusional traditionalism, ascetic artists with gleefully vulgar ones. The film is on a par with such masterpieces as A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi. It has been paired in an attractive package by the ever dependable Criterion Collection with Yang's 1996 effort Mahjong.

Mahjong is less successful, but most movies are. The international actors seem ill at ease. Once again we are faced with Confucian parables and perfidious western influence. TGIFridays is reprised and The Hard Rock Cafe is the featured location. Amoral criminality reigns supreme. The film's most successful procurer, Diana Dupuis' Ginger, struck me as a double for Ghislaine Maxwell in this farsighted and somber film whose main theme is sexual grooming. This Criterion two pack would grace any film lover's video library.

Springfield Rifle

Philip Carey, Gary Cooper, and Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams

André De Toth's Springfield Rifle is a very good and under sung Western released in 1952.  It was a part of wave of films that featured weapons in their title, a trend heralded by the success of Winchester '73 in 1950. Titles included Colt .45, Carbine Williams, Kentucky Rifle, and many more on American television. The film, which had multiple writers attached to it, seems a little like a stitched together Frankenstein's monster. It is set during the Civil War and has Gary Cooper attached to a fort in Colorado where he and his cohorts must thwart Confederate rustlers who are stealing Yankee horses. The titular rifles are one of the stuck on bits. They are mentioned briefly at the beginning and arrive at the nick of time as a deus ex machina to save Coop and the Yanks. Springfield rifles had been made at the armory in Massachusetts since the Mexican War era, but a new innovation occurred during the 1860s. The Civil War marked the shift from muzzle loading rifles to the easier to use breech loading models which gave the more industrial North an edge. 

Another negative aspect of this filmic kluge is the romance angle. Phyllis Thaxter travels all the way from West Chester, PA. to Coop's fort to beg him to turn his sword into a plowshare. The scenes are pointless, a repeat of Coop's equally tedious scenes with Grace Kelly in High Noon which had opened three months before Springfield Rifle. Hollywood always has been a place with many echo chambers. What is original about the film is that it is an espionage flick with Western trappings. There is a spy at Coop's fort who must be unmasked. Coop, we learn, must go under cover, even undergoing a trumped up court martial. Once he is cast out of the Yankee fort with the yellow stripe of cowardice on his back, he ingratiates himself with the rustlers and is able to unmask the traitor. Critics and audiences at the time bridled against the film as needlessly convoluted for a Western. However, this is what I like about the film. Cooper's character has only a limited number of people he can trust, the number of whom diminishes as the movie unspools. The air of the film is rife with paranoia. Most of the characters, Yank or Reb, seem nice enough, though we know there is a two faced traitor in their midst. Characters often hide their true motivations and De Toth treats them all equivocally. This is not a film of good guys and bad guys. Even the villain has his reasons.

I view Springfield Rifle as largely a Cold War allegory concocted in the shadow of the arrest and trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950 and their trial began in March of 1951. They were executed in 1953. Springfield Rifle trumpets its theme: that counterespionage is necessary to the preservation of our Republic. A message that must have seemed pertinent in the age of the Red Menace. This theme seems most obviously to be the work of screenwriter Charles Marquis Warren. As the late Philip French has pointed out 🌵, Warren was on the Hollywood right wing and wrote and directed another 1952 Western, Hellgate, that can be seen as a pro-McCarthy statement. Despite the rigidity of Springfield Rifle's theme, Warren and De Toth sketch ambivalent characters with multiple dimensions. Cooper's character can bond with the Rebs as well as he can with his compatriots. It helps that such capable and familiar, to my generation, actors such as Martin Milner, Alan Hale Jr., and Fess Parker are on hand. De Toth handles his cast with aplomb. Even Lon Chaney Jr., a clumsy performer if you ask me, is effective as a craven killer. De Toth handles his exteriors as well as his actors with Mt. Whitney and its surrounding standing in for the Rockies. The snow draped hills provide an apt setting for treachery, as they do in De Toth's Day of the Outlaw.

Phylllis Thaxter's profile and Paul Kelly

                                                                  Spoiler Alert

Cooper is an axiomatic personality: if you've seen him once, you pretty much know what you are going to get. The performance that most impressed me was Paul Kelly's as the traitor. He provides a smooth and unruffled facade, but also hints at the inner turmoil of a man who is not what he seems. I'd enjoyed Kelly in a number of films, like The President Vanishes, The Roaring Twenties, Flying Tigers, Crossfire, and Side Street, but wonder why he had a career that seems partially submerged. He began onstage, but was featured in film as early as 1919 when he wooed Mary Miles Minter in Anne of Green Gables. In 1927 he beat to a pulp actor Ray Raymond, a brawl precipitated by Kelly's affair with actress Dorothy Mackaye. Raymond never regained consciousness and Kelly was convicted of manslaughter. Kelly was sentenced to serve ten years, but was sprung after 25 months. He eventually married Mackaye and they were wed until her death in 1940 from injuries resulting from a automobile accident.

🌵 Philip French, Westerns, Pgs. 81-82.