Une affaire de femmes

Marie Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert

Claude Chabrol's Une affaire de femmes, which was released in the US in 1990 under the unsatisfactory title Story of Women, is set in Cherbourg under the Nazi occupation. It focuses on a lower class woman named Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert) who finds her calling as an abortionist after taking it up to make ends meet. The film was based on a novel by Francis Szpiner who is better known in France for his careers in politics and law. Marie Latour is based on the real life Marie-Louise Giraud who was guillotined in 1943. In the film, Marie is saddled with a traumatized husband, Paul (François Cluzet) who returns from a POW camp after the first reel to reunite with Marie and their two small children. Marie wants nothing more to do with her quietly seething husband and takes up with a young wheeler-dealer named Lucien (the dashing Nils Tavernier) who has profited by collaborating with the Nazis.

Part of the reason I think Une affaire de femmes is second tier Chabrol is its predictability. As soon as scorned Paul learns that Marie has taken a swanky lover, we know he will rat on his wife to the authorities. Paul never seems truly damaged, just sullen and frustrated because the talented Mr. Cluzet is busy tamping down his natural charisma. I also don't completely buy Ms. Huppert as a semi-literate. A bigger problem is the film's shaky point of view. During the course of the film, we learn that the tale is being told later in life by Marie and Paul's son, Pierrot. However, Chabrol doesn't really adhere to Pierrot's perspective, so that reveal comes off as clumsily as the film's one onscreen shooting. On the plus side, Marie's relationships with the women she encounters who need her services are superbly and empathically rendered. Best of all is Marie Trintignant as Lulu who befriends Marie and mentors her on expanding her client base. A seaside tracking shot of the two conversing is the highlight of the film.

Roger Ebert suggested that Ms. Huppert was the perfect performer for Chabrol and I concur. Whenever Chabrol needs her to show what Marie is thinking or feeling in the film, Ms. Huppert is able to make it plain to the viewer without punctuating the proceedings with unrealistic demonstrativeness. Marie is the only multi-dimensional character in the film and Huppert is able to range across a wide spectrum in displaying both her character's grasping materialism and lyrical love of music. It is a commanding performance and was duly rewarded with the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival in 1988. She has gone on to prove and continue proving that she is the premier film actress of her generation. Une affaire de femmes may not be one of Claude Chabrol's best films, nor one of his worst, but it does contain one of Isabelle Huppert's best performances.

Violent Streets

Noboru Andō and Akira Kobayashi

Hideo Gosha's Violent Streets is a terrific yakuza film from 1974. It ranks with the best of the dozen or so of his 24 films that I have seen: Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Wolf 2, Goyokin, and The Geisha; all outstanding. I have been a champion of his work since seeing Goyokin, still my favorite, at the Vinegar Hill Theatre in Charlottesville in 1984. May it rest in peace. Violent Streets is only one of three modern day films Gosha directed. He was best known for working in the samurai genre. Certainly, he stands as one of the outstanding action directors of the late 20th century. Every bit as stylish and interesting as Sam Peckinpah or John Woo.

The protagonist of Violent Streets is a retired, for the moment, yakuza named Egawa (Noboru Andō). Egawa owns and manages a flamenco club named the Madrid located on the Ginza. The first fifteen minutes of the film establish Egawa's back story and the tone of violence that dominates the film. While a flamenco trio entertains, Egawa dispatches a quartet of rude hoods with clever aplomb. Then, to fully establishes that he is beyond the pale, he violently rapes his drunken mistress, Minami (Minami Nakatsugawa). She alludes to him loving another woman (Miyoko Akaza) who is now married to a yakuza boss. We eventually learn that Egawa had to leave organized crime and hand over his fiancee to broker a deal. The Madrid was his consolation prize, but he holds onto it tightly as if it were his last shred of self-respect. Andō was a tough customer himself, getting his trademark scar while serving a stint in prison before appearing in over fifty films. He is superb at putting up a stoic front that masks the seething need for vengeance inside him.

Violent Streets is a thorough composed picture, every shot that goes into its brisk 96 minutes is there for a reason. When the first segment entirely set in the Madrid concludes Gosha inserts a flashing green pedestrian walk sign to connote a transition. The film opens with the title backgrounded with barking dogs. Animals are a constant motif in the film (dogs, chickens, and a parrot), highlighting the barely evolved level of the characters. Another motif is that of performance, there are numerous shows within shows in the film ranging from classical theater to striptease. There is even a "lesbian' sex show featuring a performer who we learn is a kick-ass trans assassin (Lady Joy!). This is a movie of masks and that is one way to interpret it. Another is that show biz is a guise, a mask for organized crime. Indeed, as in the contemporaneous Charley Varrick and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it is the titans of big business who are the ultimate criminals.

A masked marauder

Minami's brother helps mastermind the kidnapping of a pop star with dire results. A battle of completing clans subsequently erupts and Egawa is compelled to return to the yakuza life. He gains his revenge in a series of bravura sequences which include Egawa driving a car into his rival's nightclubbing, blasting away and a final coup de grace in which Egawa interrupts his target's menage a trois. Violent Streets is greatly helped by the appearance of Bunta Sungawara's gunsmith who calmly guzzles a Coke while Egawa is massacring his foes. Sungawara brings needed comic relief to a fatalistic flick. Violent Streets has much to offend sensitive modern viewers. Its fire engine red blood seems out of a Herschel Gordon Lewis movie and it certainly fails the Bechdel test. Ms. Nakatsugawa was used in the film because of her experience in softcore porn. Like Lady Joy, this was her only mainstream film. However, if you look beneath the veneer of commercial exploitation, you will find a multi-level masterpiece and crackerjack picture.

Return to Silent Hill

Jeremy Irvine

Christophe Gans' Return to Silent Hill is a reboot of the Silent Hill horror franchise that commenced in 2006, with a film also directed by Gans. The original is not a good film, but it has some mitigating assets that make it one of the better video game adaptations. The script, by Roger Avary, is ludicrous, but Gans manages to elicit solid performances from a good cast including Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Alice Krige, and Deborah Kara Unger. The CGI for this film was ahead of its time and the production design is impressive.

Likewise, Return to Silent Hill's attributes are wholly contained by its look and design. The script, co-written by Gan, is drivel and, this time, the acting ensemble is second rate. Whatever power the original film had derived from its sense of place, a mining town in West Virginia. There was a sense of ecological decay that is lacking in the new film, mostly because Silent Hill is now set next to a pristine lake in Serbia. Silent Hill becomes not a place, but a state of mind. Unfortunately, the film's script provides a jumbled back story that provides the viewer with few tangible plot threads to grasp. The monsters that haunt Silent Hill, the only holdovers from the original film,  are vague unconscious emanations that have little connection to Return to Silent Hill's flimsy plot. 

Shadows in Paradise

A bad date at the bingo parlor: Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää

Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise, from 1986, is the first distinctive Kaurismäki feature. Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen play Nikander and Ilona, a couple whose rocky romance we witness through the course of the film. Pellonpää ended up appearing in 18 Kaurismäki features and Outinen five. Most of the supporting cast reappear in Kaurismäki films multiple times. Along with his nascent stock company, almost all of the attributes of the filmmaker's work are fully formed and on display in Shadows in Paradise: a concern with the economic struggles and romantic travails of working class people, deadpan humor, and an unfussy visual style.

The jobs of Kaurismäki's character are central to their identities, a trait he shares with, of all people, Howard Hawks; another unfussy visual stylist. The credit sequence establishes Nikander's daily routine driving a trash truck and collecting garbage. It is a model of classical filmmaking in which there is not a wasted shot, something that holds true for the remainder of the film's scant 74 minutes. We glimpse multiple times that totem of the capitalist work place: the punch clock. Nikander and Ilona meet cute at her place of work, a supermarket where she works as a cashier. There, she utter her first magic words to Nikander, "37.20." Workplaces are shown to be cutthroat, but the director tosses off the message instead of beating the viewer over the head. As the manager of the supermarket says to Ilona when he lays her off, "A supermarket is a merciless machine." Worse is the fate of a co-worker of Nikander's who dreams of owning his own trucking concern and building a better future for himself. He drops dead of a heart attack on the job before those dreams can be fulfilled.

The world of Kaurismäki would be very bleak without the vein of humor he provides. The stoicism of his characters is pronounced to the point of absurdity. Compared to Kaurismäki, the characters in other Scandinavian films, like those of Joachim Trier, seem animated. During the course of their romance, Nikander is able to open up to Ilona about his meagre aspirations, but won't reveal to her his first name. He is an extremely diffident and clumsy Casanova. He takes her to a bingo parlor on their first date which almost immediately puts the kibosh on their relationship. His enticement for a second date is even worse: let's go see my institutionalized sister. What a card! Yet, Nikander's caveman straightforwardness eventually wins over Ilona. She briefly dallies with the manager of a department store, but ultimately decides she is not cut out to join the petit bourgeoisie. When Nikander threatens to punch out her new swain, she realizes she has found her true lug.

The other leavening agent in the dour films of Kaurismäki is his use of music, both on the soundtrack and in live performance. Kaurismäki loves to use rock music for his transitional scenes. The scenes of people in transit in Shadows in Paradise almost all feature blaring rock instrumentals. The live performances range from cocktail jazz in bourgeois haunts to the Schlager music that accompanies the working class drinking themselves to sweet oblivion at their haunts. It is the counterpoint to their life of toil, a brief respite until the workers trudge back to the salt mines. The pattern repeats in most of the best of Kaurismäki's work: Ariel, Fallen Leaves, The Match Factory Girl, La Vie de Boheme, Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, and Le Havre.

Madonna of the Seven Moons

Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger strike a pose

Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is a ridiculous melodrama released by Gainsborough Pictures in 1945. Unlike most of the Gainsborough romantic melodramas which are set in Restoration England, the picture is set in Italy before the Second World War. The picture centers on Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert) who, as the picture begins, is a teen being educated in a remote convent. In the first reel, Maddalena is raped by a peasant, the subsequent trauma triggers a "dual personality" in her with tragic repercussions. The film leaps two decades ahead and finds Maddalena married to a rich aristocrat (John Stuart, suitably dull as dishwater) and living in Rome. They are awaiting the arrival of their daughter Angela (Patricia Roc) who has been abroad in the UK for the past five years attending finishing school. She is not her mother's little girl anymore.

Whereas Maddalena has her hair up and is dressed primly. Angela has her hair down and shows as much skin as the British censors would allow. One of the many absurdities of the picture is that Ms. Calvert was only four months older than her onscreen daughter, Ms. Roc. Another is that the notion that the curvy Ms. Roc could have been birthed by the more boyish Ms. Calvert. Yet another is that even though almost all of the characters are Italian they speak with pronounced British accents. I don't think modern audiences can suspend this much disbelief. However, I must say I enjoyed some aspects of the picture. Peter Glenville has the most ridiculously pronounced British accent, but he superbly embodies an oily rake named Sandro. Angela succeeds in loosening up her tightly wound Ma, but an incident at a ball triggers her split personality.

This is when the script of the film, based on Margery Lawrence's novel goes as cuckoo as that justly forgotten author. We subsequently learn that Maddalena has had these episodes before in which she has abandoned hubby and child for a year at a time and then returned offering no explanation. While her husband dithers during her absence, the audience happily follows Maddalena to Florence where we meet her feisty doppelgänger, Rosanna. Calvert gets to let her hair down and show some cleavage as Rosanna. You can tell Calvert is having some fun with the role, unlike her clenched performance as Maddalena. Whenever Maddalena is having a traumatic flashback she curls her lip like Carol Burnett in her old comedy skits lampooning 40s movies and quakes. She looks like she is digesting a rotten apple and I suppose she is. Luckily, Rosanna has a dashing thief for a lover named Nino who is played by Stewart Granger. Granger adds some dash to the film without putting too much sauce on the pasta.

Stewart Granger and Phyllis Calvert

Granger and Calvert had both been featured in 1943's The Man in Grey which had been a big hit for Gainsborough and on which Crabtree had been the cinematographer. Madonna of the Seven Moons was his first effort as a director, both a reward for past services and a concession to wartime scarcity. Crabtree's pedestrian direction is the weakest aspect of the film. The lighting looks good, but the choreography of sequences is stilted. Even when he tries something relatively outlandish, a circle dolly around Angela after she has been slipped a mickey, it has little impact or emotional heft. The film's Carnival in Florence is especially feeble compared to similar sequences in Sternberg's films. The ludicrous script could only have been brought to fruition by a director with the audacity of a Sternberg, Hitchcock or Buñuel. Instead, what we have is an enjoyably bad movie. 

Neighboring Sounds

Irma Brown, WJ Solha and Gustavo Jahn     

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds is set amidst a three block section of the coastal Brazilian city of Recife. The 2013 picture depicts interconnected lives that range across class and racial spectrums. The main character if there is one is a young mother named Bia (Maeve Jinkings) bedeviled by a neighbors' yapping dog who won't shut up at night. Slightly higher up the economic ladder is Joao (Gustavo Jahn) who manages the condo complex his grandpa Francisco (W. J. Solha) owns. We meet Joao after he has drunkenly hooked up with Sofia (Irma Brown). The movie follows the romantic arc of their relationship. A group of sinister seeming men arrive in the neighborhood promoting themselves as a security team, but they have really arrived to settle a lifelong vendetta. When the score is settled, it brings the film full circle back to the days of exploitive sugar plantations shown in period photographs that commence the film.

The film is a cross cut look at society, like many of Altman's films especially Short Cuts. As with Altman's best films, the acting is exceptional. Some of the cast are amateurs, but you can barely tell. Even Mr. Solha who delivers a marvelous portrait of a fading patriarch boasted a scant six film acting credits. Part of the verisimilitude is due to the flow of Mr Mendonça's direction. His self-written script boasts a number of weighty themes, such as European emigration to Brazil in the 20th century, but they are not trumpeted as if on a soapbox. Rather Mr. Mendonça adroitly slips his themes fluidly into the criss-crossing rivulets of Neighboring Sounds. A part of the mix, not surprisingly gives the title, is the interesting soundscape constructed by Mendonça and the talented DJ Dolores. The film mixes pop songs (Queen, Jorge Ben) with a score that mixes electronica with found sounds, like in the work of Tom Ze. The soundtrack becomes one with the lives of the characters who use sound to vent micro-aggressions and camouflage murder.

Neighboring Sounds has the density of a great novel. I was fully engrossed by it. Mendonça has gone on to greater international acclaim with Bacurau and The Station Agent, but I think Neighboring Sounds is still his best film because of its polyphonic expansiveness.

The Caretakers

                        Janis Paige and Robert Stack                       

Hall Bartlett's The Caretakers is a turgid 1963 melodrama almost wholly set in a public mental hospital. The film is complete dreck, possibly the worst American feature of that year. Mr. Bartlett was at least consistent. His 1973 film of Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the worst American films of any decade. Bartlett co-wrote the script with Jerry Paris who makes a brief cameo appearance during the film's opening as Polly Bergen runs into him on the street. Ms. Bergen then enters a movie theater and has a public meltdown which gets her a one way ticket to the loony bin. Bergen's performance is the type of Oscar grasping fiasco that can blight a career and it did. The rest of the cast is made up of fresh faces (Diane McBain, Robert Vaughn) and veterans reaching the end of their tether (Joan Crawford, Herbert Marshall). For the record, the best performances are by Ellen Corby and Barbara Barrie.

The Caretakers was made with the best intentions. Its brief is to make the case for the deinstitutionalization of public mental health in America. Making that case is Robert Stack as a crusading psychiatrist who has the novel notion that mental patients would be helped best by being treated like human beings as opposed to inmates. Most of the film is taken up by the group therapy session with his borderline patients, Bergen and a motley group of female patients each with a separate tic and traumatic backstory. Opposing the newfangled notions Stack champions is head nurse Crawford, here monikered Lucretia,  who wants to treat the inmates as the crazies they are. She touts the safety of the staff as her first priority. The camp highlight is the judo class Lucretia "teaches" in which Crawford and a bevy of beauties don leotards. Crawford sports a bizarre blonde wig. Indeed, The Caretakers is a veritable wig fest, an unsparing look at how the conformist styles of the 1950s were getting a little rococo in the Kennedy era before all hell broke loose. Individual characters' sanity levels can be gauged by how askew their wigs are. It is that kind of movie.

Yes, a movie that is over serious, slipshod, and kooky. The Caretakers feels both endless and abortive. Plot lines, like the film's parallel romances amongst the staff members, feel truncated. Bergen is about to be gang raped by the men's ward when the film cuts to her being comforted by Stack and the cast. What the heck happened! Bartlett utilizes a lot of distorted POV shots when Bergen is first in the hospital, but then drops the technique like a hot potato. Stack was the most emotionless actor of his generation, but the film gives him a traumatic backstory that explains his lack of people skills. He gives a committed performance, I'll avoid the obvious joke, but it ends up over emphasizing the overly earnest humorlessness of the project. Such talents as Lucian Ballard and Elmer Bernstein worked on this picture. All for nought. 

Though worthless as art, The Caretakers is interesting as a reflection of changes within the American mental health system. The borderline diagnosis was first formulated in 1938 by Adolph Stern. To boil it down to its essence, it describes patients who veer from neuroticism into psychosis. The concept took some time to be accepted which The Caretakers reflects. It was not until 1980's DSM3 that the diagnosis was codified by the America's psychiatric establishment. The Caretakers presents a false dichotomy between borderline patients and other mental health sufferers. In the film, if you aren't borderline, you are seemingly doomed to wallow in a catatonic state. The Caretakers posits outpatient clinics as the hope for the post-institution future. Needless to say, things have not worked out that way. The legacy of deinstitutionalization stalk the streets of America's urban centers to this day.

I think that the nature of psychiatry and mental health therapy is antithetical to drama. This is probably why the two best American nut house movies aren't really about mental health issues, but are allegorical portraits of the nation: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sam Fuller's truly great and crazed Shock Corridor.

Liliom (1930)

                             Lee Tracy and Charles Farrell                         

Frank Borzage's Liliom is an uneasy mixture of fantasy and romantic melodrama from 1930. The source material for the film was Ferenc Molnár's play which also served as the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel. A word about Mr. Molnár aka Franz Molnar aka Ferenc Neumann. Even though his plays are rarely performed today in America, Molnar's work was widely popular and revered in the first half of the 20th century. Over a hundred films have been derived from his work which also includes such chestnuts as The Guardsman, The Swan, One Two Three, and The Good Fairy. Liliom was a flop when it first premiered in Molnár's native Budapest in 1909, but a Broadway production with Joseph Schildkraut and Eva La Gallienne in 1921 proved to be a runaway hit and established the play in America. Molnar's work is marked by fantasy and romantic wish-fulfillment, but there is a decided element of realism in his mix. Certainly, Liliom's striking his daughter in the concluding section of this film gives it a slap of reality especially compared to a modern marshmallow confection like Project Hail Mary.

Liliom proved to be a flop at the box office and I think I know why. Borzage and his art director, Harry Oliver (Seventh Heaven, Scarface), give the film a look that is both spare and expressionistic. The fairy tale nature of the tale is reinforced by this look, but it is also designed to heighten the grim determinism of the tale's moral. The lights of the carnival where Liliom (Charles Farrell) works as a barker are visible from the absurdly huge window in the denuded tenement where his lady love Julie (Rose Hobart) toils. The glittering artifice of the carnival cannot mask the base passions and treachery that motivate Molnár's characters. The slashing angles of the steps and bridge where a bungled robbery leads to a suicide emphasize that the characters in the film are caught in a trap of their own devising. Yet, I feel that audiences had had enough of this look, a vestige of the recently departed silent era and its masterpieces by Borzage and Murnau. Liliom is also paced deliberately like a silent film which helps gives an otherworldly feel that is appropriate for the film. However, by 1930, this too felt out of date and the modern rat-a tat-tat rhythms found in Scarface and James Cagney features would soon be ascendent.

The most obvious flaw of Liliom is the miscasting of Charles Farrell in the title role. Farrell had co-starred with Janet Gaynor in a recent spate of hits for Fox and Borzage. Farrell always seems a lover not a fighter. His character is a brash and macho narcissist who beats Julie and is easily led into criminality. Farrell is not nearly brutish enough for the role and his pinched voice doesn't help. Borzage wanted Farrell for the role, over Joel McCrea, and Farrell does have his moments when Liliom shows vulnerability. Ultimately though, he cannot exude the thoughtless brutality of the character. Rose Hobart fares better in her film debut. She was plucked, like a lot of actors in response to the coming of sound, from Broadway. Significantly she was a member of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. Some have ventured that Janet Gaynor would have brought a nice sweetness to the role of Julie, but I find Ms. Hobart's sullenness to be appropriate for the character, a much put upon serving girl. Like Farrell, Hobart would soon descend to B pictures. Farrell ended up being a longtime mayor of Palm Springs, whereas Hobart would fall afoul of the blacklist; allegedly fingered by Lee J. Cobb. Still, she achieved immortality thanks to the divine intervention and devotion of Joseph Cornell. 

The supporting cast of Liliom is largely a delight. Lee Tracy is perfect for the role of "The Buzzard", a  smooth-talking brigand who coaxes Liliom into criminality. Tracy would have a brief ascendancy before his misadventures in Mexico. Dan Duryea would eventually don Tracy's mantle as Hollywood's number one weasel. H. B. Warner's uprightness is perfect for once as the "Chief Magistrate". I also enjoyed the efforts of Estelle Taylor (dripping venom), Bert Roach, and Anne Shirley. The film, for both good and bad, is all Borzage. His naive Catholicism makes his romanticism seem corny and out of date to some modern viewers, but I find his films to be fervent and memorable in the brief glory he grants his lovers. Even when his lovers suffer, they do so beautifully. Liliom is currently streaming on Tubi in a good print comparable to the one on the Murnau Borzage Fox box.

As an aside, I have only seen one production of Carousel that captured the underlying grimness contained in Molnár's original. It was Nicholas Hytner's Royal National Theatre production. Hytner prefaced the musical with a rhythmic pantomime of Julie and her cohorts working in a mill. This established the dull and repetitive nature of Julie's life and undercut the cloying sweetness that undermines most productions of the piece. 

Highest 2 Lowest

Denzel Washington

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is a dully mechanical remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. Alan Fox's script changes the locale to New York and makes the 'high' character, Denzel Washington's David King, a music executive, but the core narrative remains the same. In both films, kidnappers target the son of the executive, but wind up snatching the son of his driver (here the always exemplary Jeffrey Wright) instead. Highest 2 Lowest never really recovers from its laborious and trite setup. Pretty much every member of the cast urges King to pay the ransom money, but he hems and haws how the music business has changed and the crime is ruining his last chance to be top dog. No one in his right mind, even if they haven't seen High and Low, thinks that King will not do the right thing.

The film gets better when it slips into action mode in its second half. Lee has always been expert in his use of New York locales and I enjoyed the tunes employed that range from Rogers and Hammerstein to Eddie Palmieri. Washington is always fun to watch and gets to both puncture his own pomposity and remain a kick ass dude. I very much enjoyed his face-offs with Princess Nokia and A$AP Rocky. Nonetheless, this is not a memorable film. Like many a Spike Lee joint, it feels over stuffed and gaseous. The film is at least twenty minutes too long. As with his version of Old Boy, Highest 2 Lowest is an unnecessary redo. High and Low is available to stream for free on Tubi and is highly recommended.

Intermezzo vs. Intermezzo

The winner: Ingrid Bergman and Gösta Ekman

I decided to re-view the 1939 American version of Intermezzo after moderately enjoying the 1936 Swedish version. Both films feature Ingrid Bergman, the later Selznick production was her American film debut. The scenario is standard romantic tripe: an aging violinist falls in love with a comely young pianist. He leaves wife and kids and the new duo make beautiful music together, but this idyll cannot last and the violinist returns to home and hearth. Both films did boffo biz at the box office. I prefer the original, but the American version has its merits.

The American version clocks in at 70 minutes while the original version is some twenty minutes longer. The American version therefore is not as slavish a rendition as Algiers was of Pépé le Moko. 👷 George O'Neil, who adapted the earlier Molander/Ekman script, rightly jettisoned some material, but the remake seems truncated. The Swedish version has more music, though many scenes are verbatim. An early scene in the 1939 film between the violinist Holgar Brandt (Leslie Howard) and his missus (Edna Best) has a few distracting jump cuts that makes one believe a page or two of dialogue was tossed. Similarly the American version excises most of the first twenty minutes of the Swedish version which focuses on the retirement of Brandt's musical partner. 

The American version boasts better production values. The 1939 film substitutes a nice faux Riviera village for the Swiss one of 1936. The cinematography of Gregg Toland gives the American film's close-ups a luxe feel. Ms. Bergman glows with an inner mounting flame in both films, but her English dialogue is a little slushy. The supporting casts of both films are very good, but the 1939 film's making Brandt's son younger displays its tendency towards sentimentalizing the material. That sentimentality extends to the use of the Brandt's family dog who is given a bigger role in the later version with lots of comic reaction shots. The use of the pooch as a totem of fido fidelity is beyond the ken of the filmmakers.

The direction in both films, by Gustaf Molander and Gregory Ratoff respectively, is stolid and unremarkable. The trump card for the Swedish version is its Holgar Brandt. I like Leslie Howard well enough, particularly in The Scarlet Pimpernel. However, his matinee idol charm sometimes strikes me as wan and wooden. That's why he was so well cast as Ashley Wilkes. However, the role of Holger Brandt requires a dark charisma that was beyond Mr. Howard. And after all, the role was made for and by Gösta Ekman. He possessed the grandiose and saturnine qualities required, being the continental equivalent of John Barrymore. Like Barrymore, his greatest triumphs were on the stage where he played roles by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw. His film appearances were more limited, but include the title role in the greatest silent film of them all, Murnau's Faust. Sadly, both Ekman and Howard (and Gregg Toland) would be dead by 1945.

👷 One day I will tackle Gaslight vs. Gaslight. I'm a George Cukor fan, but Thorold Dickinson is under appreciated.
             

Lettres d'amour

Odette Joyeux and François Périer review the Révolution nationale

Claude Autant-Lara's Lettres d'amour is one of the director's better films, a lightweight romantic confection released to appease the filmgoers of Vichy and occupied France when it was released just before Christmas in 1942. The picture was Mr. Autant-Lara's first collaboration with screenwriter Jean Aurenche who based his script draft on his own novella. Messrs. Autant-Lara and Aurenche, along with co-writer Pierre Bost, would go on to work together on a number of films such as Douce, Devil in the Flesh, and The Red and the Black. Aurenche and Bost would emerge as France's leading screenwriting team, penning such acclaimed films as Forbidden Games and Gervaise. Lettres d'amour also is the second of four films directed by Autant-Lara that starred Odette Joyeux, films which first brought him renown as a director.

That said, I have been nonplussed by Mr. Autant-Lara's work after barely staying awake watching The Red and the Black in French class four decades ago. This was before I knew about the director's odious politics or grokked les politiques des auteurs. In fact, the first blast of the auteurs, in 1954, was François Truffaut's essay decrying the work of Aurenche and Bost. In the privacy of my own home, I observe the cultic rites of the auteurist and burn incense to the memories of Murnau, Renoir, Ford, and Mizoguchi, but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy the occasional film by a metteur en scène. I believe it is important regarding aesthetics not to be too doctrinaire. Autant-Lara's direction in Lettres d'amour does little to heighten any mood of romance or anything else, it merely functions to present his, admittedly first class, actors as they declaim. A good example are the not quite whip pans he employs in the courtroom scenes. Shots that ping pong from speaker to speaker. However, I suspect that the director was not fully responsible for what we see on the screen. Lettres d'amour feels like it was severely truncated in post-production. There are omissions and leaps in the narrative which unnecessarily confuse an already tangled plot.

The picture is set in 1855 during the reign of Napoleon III. The emperor is depicted having a chaste assignation with the film's heroine, Zélie (Odette Joyeux), while visiting the rural town where she works as a postmistress. The film primarily tells the story of the romance of Zélie and a young district attorney named François (François Périer). François has been having an affair with the wife, Hortense (Simone Renant), of the local prefect. A love letter between the two is unearthed during a legal proceeding and Zélie is wrongly branded with the scarlet A. François visits Zélie to thank her for her discretion, but is soon smitten and vice-versa. The road to true love has many obstacles, of course, but the goal is achieved. The film climaxes with a ball which reconciles the film's romantic conflicts, but also that between the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Reconciliation occurs as the characters check out that new dance craze, the quadrille. 🎀 I am a sucker for any film that concludes with a dance off.

Odette Joyeux

What ultimately won me over was the romantic byplay, full of thrust and parry, between Ms Joyeux and Mr. Périer. In her previous film for Autant-Lara, Le Mariage de Chiffon, Ms. Joyeux was miscast as a sixteen year old. ✂ Zélie, a young widow, is a much more suitable and knowing vehicle for her talents. Zélie is smart and attractive enough to be a coquette, but is too scrupulous to toy with a lover. Joyeux and Périer have that irresistible it in Lettres d'amour, a spark of romantic attraction that enables the hackneyed script to work. I associate Périer with the middle aged functionary roles I first saw him in (as in Le Samouraï and Z), so it was fun seeing him display some youthful charm and ardor. One of the other virtues of Lettres d'amour are the splendid costumes. Autant-Lara started in the film biz as a costume designer and performed that function on a number of the films he directed, so I'm sure he deserves some of the credit. I've never seen a woman look as graceful in a hoop skirt as Ms. Joyeux does when she is hurrying to her tête-à-tête with Napoleon III. The lion's share of the credit must go to the actual costume designer of Lettres d'amour. A gentleman named Christian Dior.

🎀 Mary Todd Lincoln danced the quadrille with Stephen Douglas at her husband's first Inaugural Ball in 1861.
✂ In three of the four films Joyeux made with Autant-Lara during the Nazi Occupation, she plays a teenager. 

 

Islands

                 Sam Riley               

Jan Ole Gerster's Islands is a slow burn mystery set at a resort in the Canary Islands. Sam Riley plays Tom, a tennis instructor at the resort. Tom is an over aged tennis bum who responds to his utter boredom with his job by going out and getting blitzed every night. His depressive cycle is broken by the arrival of Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), two fellow Brits with a seven year old would be tennis prodigy in tow named Anton. Anne and Dave, both seemingly bored and entitled, soon monopolize Tom's time. He is wary of the duo, though attracted to Anne (who is vaguely familiar to Tom), but manages to be a good mentor to Anton. However, Dave's disappearance after a night of revelry throws Tom's life into turmoil.

This is a sturdy premise for a film and can go in a number of directions. The hangdog Tom, well sketched by a taciturn Riley, could be a patsy for a femme fatale or the mystery could remain unresolved as in L'Avventura. Gerster opts to go with the shaggy dog story option and, thus, the slow burn fizzles. The answer to the "real" mystery is obvious to the viewer by the midway point, though it remains beyond the dim Tom. Gerster is able to conjure the tenuous nature of relationships at a resort destination, but doesn't give his characters enough dimensions for the viewer to care. Stacy Martin is a cipher instead of a sphinx as Anne, but Farthing is quite good as the sleazy Dave.

Bombshell

Jean Harlow and Lee Tracy

Victor Fleming's Bombshell, released by MGM in 1933, is a lively comedy, part Hollywood satire, part antic screwball. Michael Sragow's excellent biography of Fleming gives a good précis of its genesis. Bombshell was based on a play about an actress beset by the perils of stardom that ends with a tragic suicide. Thankfully, Fleming and producer Hunt Stromberg wanted to shift the material's tone and concoct a vehicle for Jean Harlow who had collaborated with Fleming on Red Dust, a hit the previous year. What emerged was a boisterous comedy with the ratatat dialogue of The Front Page. Jules Furthman wrote a first draft, then frequent Fleming collaborator John Lee Mahin, a protege of Ben Hecht's, took a whack at it. When Lee Tracy replaced John Gilbert (thankfully) in the co-lead role of a wisecracking press agent, Norma Krasna was brought into beef up his part.

Tracy had played the part of Walter Burns in the smash Broadway production of The Front Page and is a perfect fit for the cynical flak monikered Space Hanlon. In general, Bombshell succeeds because it was concocted expressly for its crack cast. Mahin, who was Fleming's closest friend, knew of Clara Bow's romance with Fleming and used that for fodder. However, Bombshell is even more about Harlow and her persona. The opening montage presents Harlow under the guise of Lola Burns as a product of the star making machinery of her studio which makes her a target to be brought down by the tabloids. This was as true for Harlow as it was for Bow. Both women were perpetually linked with scandal once they attained fame. Both starlets also had family members who leeched from them along with the usual Hollywood hangers-on who inflict themselves on film icons to this day; like the Church of Scientology. These weasels bear the brunt of the satire in Bombshell including an underused Una Merkel as Lola's Gal Friday, Ted Healy as her degenerate gambler brother, and Frank Morgan as a pixillated papa. They are all excellent and superbly cast, but the amount of unrepentant drunkards (Morgan, Tracy, and Mahin were all eminent tankard-men) on this flick is startling.

Pat O'Brien, the onscreen Walter Burns of 1931, plays a director named Jim Brogan who is a virtual stand-in for Fleming. Brogan and Lola have a romantic past, just like Fleming and Bow, and are giving each other the eye through the picture. Fleming even has O'Brien and Harlow recreate the bath in a barrel sequence from Red Dust for old time's sake. How post-modern! Lola always has a bevy of potential lovers hounding her during the course of the picture including Brogan, Ivan Lebedeff as a foreign aristocrat of dubious provenance (Hollywood had a lot of those in its early days), and Franchot Tone as a preppy scion. Nobody in Bombshell, however, is who they seem. The biggest four flusher of them all is Space, Lola's true twin and nemesis. Whenever Lola is about to have a tryst or a meeting with a respectable personage, like a reporter from the Women's Home Companion or some biddies from an adoption league, Space sabotages her plans by calling in favors from the police or the press or both. All heck breaks loose in the foyer and Temperance League members brush shoulders with tipplers and other oddballs. Humanity in all its screwball glory is unleashed.

Some have cited Bombshell as the first screwball comedy, but this is not so. There are plenty of other films from this period (like Three-Cornered Moon) and even earlier, like The Coconuts, that equally fit that rubric. Certainly, the anarchic antics of the Marx brothers and other vaudevillians brought a new energy to the American sound film. I think the genre really got its start with Oscar Wilde whose work poked fun and eventually upended the conventions of the drawing room comedy. This cocking a snoot at convention and the screwball's embrace of the common man made it very audience friendly to a beleagured American in the Depression.

Every little character role in Bombshell is perfectly cast and delivered. Of those I haven't mentioned, there are plum bits by Louise Beavers, Isabel Jewell, Leonard Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith. Fleming gives the action flow, it moves but not haphazardly. A flood of innocent merriment is always threatening to burst. It is this feel of fluid spontaneity that help Harlow and Tracy give their best film performances. The picture is also greatly helped by the expert editing of Margaret Booth. She emulates the frisky rhythms Fleming finds in his choral scenes giving the film a burbling and winning perkiness. I find the last reel of the film a bit mechanical, but the self-mocking tone of the dialogue is a continuous delight. Franchot Tone manages to keep a straight face while telling Harlow, "Your heart is like a gardenia open to the sun." Harlow intones "You might get leprosy or something" with just the right amount of emphasis on the last two words. A fun flick.
  

Vie privee

Jodie Foster

Rebecca Zlotowski's Vie privée (Private Life) is a passable mystery from the French director. Jodie Foster, a Francophile since she was a tot, stars as a psychiatrist named Lillian Steiner. Dr. Steiner has a chichi psychoanalytic practice in Paris. She strikes us immediately as buttoned down and cerebral, catnip for an actor like Ms. Foster. Steiner's life unravels after the death of a beloved patient named Paula (Virginie Efira) who has committed suicide by overdosing on medication Steiner prescribed. Naturally, Paula's husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) resents Lillian, but his and Paula's daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) convinces Lillian that there is more to her mother's death than meets the eye. Simon and Valérie both seem like slippery suspects. Lillian enlists her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) for emotional and physical support as they attempt to unravel the past.

The mystery aspect of Vie privée is one of its weaker points. This is especially so because Zlotowski has Lillian's mentor (Frederik Wiseman, what a mensch) spell out the answer to the mystery about halfway through the picture. In essence: "Physician heal thyself." There is never a sense of thanatos in the film, it is a lightweight bourgeoise mystery like Agatha Christie, Only Murders in the Building, and certain Woody Allen films. The comparison to Allen is illustrative because Zlotowski sets the film firmly in the world of the Jewish intelligentsia of Paris. Unfortunately, Ms. Foster seems like a total shiksa.

The other intersection with Woody Allen is the use of a magically realistic plot device to get a strict Freudian to loosen up and live a little. In Allen's film this usually comes in the form of a ditzy but lovable shiksa, a fortune teller, or a deus ex mama. In Vie privée, it is an "Eriksonian Hypnotherapist" who helps Lillian find a portal in her unconscious. The accoutrements of her unconscious are hoary and trite cliches: stairs leading down to doors. As if the unconscious were an episode of Let's Make A Deal. Once Lillian opens a door we view a past life in which she and Paula were lovers. Sigh. The unconscious is never a mirror of existence. At best, it is a view through a glass, darkly.

What redeemed the film for me was Zlotowski's elegant framing, superb use of music, and ease with her talented cast. This is one of the most distinguished French casts I've ever seen and all the players listed above are superb. I also enjoyed the contributions of Vincent Lacoste, Noam Morgensztern, Sophie Guillemin, and Irene Jacob. The highlight of the film for me was the warm and tender rapport between Foster and Auteuil. Watching them share cigarettes in an auto while giving a post-mortem of their marriage showed me yet again what a team player Foster is as an actress. Whether she is paired with Auteuil, Anthony Hopkins or Kristin Stewart, Foster never grandstands, but engages in a true give and take that helps her partners shine. 

The Best of Sam Neill

1947-2026

    

                                               I was christened 'Nigel'. It set me back years.        

1).    Reilly, Ace of Spies                           Martin Campbell, etc               1983

2).    Peaky Blinders                                     Steven Knight                2013-2014  

3).    The Piano                                              Jane Campion                     1993 

4).    Possession                                           Andrzej Zulawski                 1981 

5).    In the Mouth of Madness                   John Carpenter                     1994

6).    Sleeping Dogs                                      Roger Donaldson               1977

7).    My Brilliant Career                            Gillian Armstrong                  1979

8).    Dead Calm                                            Philip Noyce                       1989

9).    Hunt for the Wilderpeople                   Taika Waititi                        2016 

10).  The Hunter                                          Daniel Nettheim                    2011

The versatile Kiwi had a range that extended from subtle charm to cold eyed villainy. His best role displayed his ease with both. He was one of the most self-deprecating major actors of his generation and one of the most generous. He raved about working with directors as disparate as John Carpenter and Taika Waiti. His self-abnegation came in handy when playing second fiddle to some of the leading ladies of his day. Judy Davis, Isabelle Adjani, Meryl Streep, and HollyHunter won the lion's share of the plaudits, so Neill's willingness to defer to his co-stars in sturdy support went unnoticed. He did work constantly, but seemed to prefer to do that in Australia or New Zealand no matter how many times Hollywood came calling. The fact that Neill never received an Oscar nomination is nothing short of scandalous.

I also appreciated Neill's efforts in The Final Conflict, Plenty, A Cry in the Dark, The Hunt for Red October, Until the End of the World, Jurassic Park, Sirens, Restoration, Children of the Revolution, Merlin, The Tudors, Old School, and Cinema Quarantino.

    

House of Strangers

Richard Conte and Susan Hayward

I was inspired to watch this chestnut after reading not one, but two, rave reviews on one of my favorite film blog sites, the Gallic Shangols. I often disagree with the (mostly) French writers, but I enjoy their lively commentary just the same. While I certainly do not think that House of Strangers is a great film, the scenario is extremely hoary, I do find it interesting enough to recommend. I think it is one of the better cast films of the era. Richard Conte (born in Jersey City), Susan Hayward (born in Brooklyn), Edward G. Robinson (born in Bucharest, but immigrated to New York at the age of ten), Luther Adler (born in New York), and Efrem Zimbalist (born in New York) are all perfectly chosen for this saga of a modern Italian-American banking titan and his family based in the lower east side of Manhattan. Robinson spouts a little too much verbal linguini at times, but he is supposed to be an over blown and operatic character, he blasts arias during family dinners, so the grandiosity is appropriate. It is one of his many little Caesars.

The film starts in 1939 with Conte a free man after seven years in the slammer. We learn that Dad (Robinson) has passed away in 1934 after Conte's brothers (Adler, Zimbalist, and Paul Valentine) had wrested control of the bank the patriarch founded. Conte also feels his brothers are responsible for his incarceration. He visits an old flame (Hayward) who still holds a torch. Then he visits the old family manse, now abandoned, and a flashback to 1932 ensues. We see Conte's brothers resentment at his favored son status and the way they chafe at their padre's domineering leadership at the bank. Conte, a lawyer, is living the life of Riley. He is engaged to one woman (Debra Paget, under utilized) while squiring another (Hayward) around town. However, his world comes tumbling down after his father is prosecuted for predatory lending. Conte takes up his defense, but ends up getting busted for jury tampering after Adler finks on his bro. After a viewing of Robinson's casket, we return to 1939 and, presumably, Conte's revenge.

Edward G. Robinson and Hayward

The scenario for House of Strangers, penned by Philip Yordan and Mankiewicz and based on Jerome Weidman's novel, is overly rhetorical and redundant. Three times we get to hear the same grievance, that Robinson has gained the world but lost his soul, recited in turn by his sons, wife, and Hayward. The details of the financial chicanery in the film are never properly explained. Mankiewicz, never the most dynamic director, is mostly content to construct static verbal tussles in drawing rooms and nightclubs. He does employ two tracking shots, but scenes containing a run on the bank and a boxing match are undynamic and visually dull. I did like his touches in a Greenwich Village checkered table speakeasy that revealed the joint's seam underbelly: a man passed out and a young chick casually brutalized by her much older date. However, such little touches are rare in this film. The film contains some location shooting, then gaining currency in Hollywood, but it is poorly integrated with the footage on the Columbia backlot.

I do think Mankiewicz deserves praise for what is Conte's finest performance. There is a delicacy and exactness to his work here that I haven't encountered anywhere else. Just see what Conte does with his fingers here, whether he is eating popcorn or examining Hayward's powder puff. There is more to this character than the numerous hood roles Conte was saddled with. Speaking of which, Bosley Crowther, in his New York Times review of the film, noted correctly that Robinson's banking career is a fig leaf for organized crime. Even after the Kefauver and McClellan hearings in the 1950s shed light on organized crime, Hollywood film producers were wary of alienating Italian-Americans. As late as 1971 when The Godfather was in production. producer Albert Ruddy did a bit of fence mending by reaching an agreement with the Italian-American Civil Rights League to not use the words mafia and Cosa Nostra in the film. The League had been masterminded as a PR move for the Mob by Joseph Colombo, then boss of one of America's five mafia families.

The Best of 2025

            

 1)    The Shrouds                                         David Cronenberg

 2)    Caught By the Tides                            Jia Zhangke

 3)    Black Bag                                             Steven Soderbergh

 4)    Weapons                                               Zach Cregger

 5)    L'Empire                                               Bruno Dumont

 6)    Miséricordia                                        Alain Guiraudie

 7)    Nouvelle Vague                                    Richard Linklater

 8)    Little Trouble Girls                              Urška Djukić

 9)    Resurrection                                          Bi Gan

10)    Cloud                                                    Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Films I Enjoyed

Vermiglio, Blue Moon,

It Was Just An Accident,

Frankenstein, The Housemaid,

Song Sung Blue, Peter Hujar's Day,

One Battle After Another, 28 Years Later,

Hedda, Bugonia,

Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Sly Lives!,

Sentimental Value,

The Mastermind, Bring Her Back,

When Fall is Coming, Who By Fire,

The Devil and the Daylong Brothers, The Baltimorons,

L'Accident de piano, 

Rabbit Trap, Sunlight,

Pavements, Grand Tour,

The History of Sound, Night Call,

Companion, The Gorge, 

Eephus, El Jockey,

Sinners, Materialists, 

My Undesirable Friends Part 1,

Afternoons of Solitude,

Holy Cow, The Ugly Stepsister,

A Minecraft Movie, Dust Bunny,

A House of Dynamite, Dracula, 

Sisu: Road to Revenge, Mickey 17,

Devo, Broken Rage,

Sirāt, Vie Privée, 

K Pop Demon Hunters, The Great Flood,

Final Destination: Bloodlines, Americana,

Hamnet, Chaos: The Manson Murders,

Below the Mendoza Line

Die My Love, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, 

The Decedent, Islands,

Predator: Badlands, Haunters of the Silence,

Caught Stealing, Train Dreams,

Drømmer, Roofman, 

The Monkey, Eddington,

Marty Supreme, Freaky Tales

Nirvanna the band the show the movie,

Highest 2 Lowest, The Toxic Avenger,

Nuremberg, A Working Man,

Father Mother Sister Brother,

Eden, The Smashing Machine,

F1, Knives Out 3,

Vulcanizadora, Warfare,

Becoming Led Zeppelin, Ella McCay,

The Phoenician Scheme,

The President's Wife, Honey Don't,

Zero Day, Nobody 2,

After the Hunt, Happy Gilmore 2,

Marshmallow, 

iHostage, Match,

Fixed, The Parenting

Remains to Be Seen

The Chronology of Water, Sorry, Baby,

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, 

The Secret Agent, The Testament of Ann Lee,

No Other Choice