Winter Wind

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

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

Ewa Swann and Marina Vlady

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

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

Armored Car Robbery

An uncredited Gene Evans, Steve Brodie and William Tallman

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

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

Charles McGraw and Adele Jergens

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

Victimas del Pecado

Ninón Sevilla

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

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

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

Ninón Sevilla and Francisco Reiguera

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

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

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