Ensayo de un Crimen

Ernesto Alonso and Miroslava

Luis Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime) first premiered in Mexico in 1955. It got a belated release in the USA under the clunky title The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. The film is based on a 1944 novel by Rodolfo Usigli, better known in Mexico as a dramatist. Usigli was a socially committed leftist playwright whose work was on occasion banned by his own government. He felt that the ideals of the Mexican Revolution had been betrayed, a notion that floats beneath the surface of the luxe, decadent, and evil bourgeois milieu of Ensayo de un Crimen. Usigli's politics jibe well with that of Buñuel's. A wedding in the third act of the film provides Bunuel an opportunity to satirize his usual targets: the unholy trinity of Church, state, and the aristocracy. To this tale of a music box that can conjure death, Buñuel lays on his trademark perversity and surrealism. A supremely crafted black comedy, Ensayo de un Crimen is among the best of the twenty or so films Buñuel made in Mexico between 1946 and 1965.

The film begins with a flashback to Archie's youth during the time of the Mexican Revolution. As a device, this allows Bunuel to sneak in some horrifying images from that era which we glimpse in a book. Then we meet the spoilt young Archie who is gifted a music box by his mother. That night, Archie's governess tell her charge a folk tale of a music box than can cause the death of one's enemies. Archie tests the box and his governess subsequently dies from a stray bullet shot by a rowdy bandolero in the street. Moving forward from the flashback, we see a now suave and grown up Archie (Ernesto Alonso) unburdening himself about his sins to a nun. Archie admits to the nun that he enjoyed the power his musical box gave him and in just a jiff the nun is herself deceased at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Archie tries to claim that he is culpable to the police and, in another flurry of flashbacks, he reviews the body count he has accumulated.  

Any film that hinges on a haunted musical box is playing with the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Similarly, the device of the flashback, which Buñuel utilizes gleefully, places the actions of the film outside the normal realms of time and space. Ensayo de un Crimen even employs a flash forward which turns out to be misleading. The sole touchstone we have throughout the film is Archie himself, who, despite his moral perfidy, is debonair and charming if a little weird. He wears a cape unironically and only drinks milk. He lives in splendor, seemingly magically, and indulges himself in a curious hobby, pottery. He romances, and contemplates killing, three women, each of whom has an inappropriate lover either due to age or marital status. Archie is never quite able to put the kibosh to his victims. They manage to die from other hands with, of course, the unseen help of the music box. 

Archie, thus, suffers the pain of contemplating his crimes without the pleasure of committing the deeds. His frustration is with both sex and death which are linked visually in the film from the get go: Archie's gaze goes from the face of his governess as she lies dying to her exposed legs. At the finale, he is able to renounce the music box's legacy by tossing it in a lake. He reunites with the one remaining femme who, earlier in the film, he has ritually killed by incinerating a mannequin of her. The melting figure is given loving close-ups by Buñuel. To further blur whatever boundaries remain, Buñuel alternates between shots of the actual mannequin and his actress (the doomed Miroslava) done up as the mannequin. Before the final walk off, Archie contemplates a mantis for a moment or two. We wonder if he will squash the creature, but he leaves the bug be. Animals recur throughout the films of Buñuel, a perpetual reminder from the master that man, despite his pretensions, is a finite creature, too. Perhaps Archie, freed from the music box, can lead a normal life of blissful domesticity. Behind the polished actors and production values, we can hear Buñuel suppress a chortle. Ensayo de un Crimen is a diabolically fun provocation.

Dark Victory

Death awaits for Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, from 1939, is one of Bette Davis' better melodramas from when she ruled as queen of the Warner Brothers lot. The scenario, an adaptation of a play that opened on Broadway in 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead as the lead, requires Davis to play a Long Island heiress dying of a vaguely specified brain ailment. Robert Benchley described the play as "Camille without all the coughing." The film is total hooey, yet redeemed by Goulding's graceful direction and a superior cast. Goulding's graceful pans of the many party scenes nimbly introduce characters and pivots us to the dramatic crux of each scene. Davis gets to play a gamut of emotions and delivers. Playing a full of beans rich kid, she takes on the pose of a madcap hellion after learning the diagnosis that has been hidden from her. Of course, she see the light and weds the stolid doctor (George Brent) who loves her. She withdraws with him to Vermont for a few blissful months before accepting death with dignity and gaining the dark victory of the title.

Davis and George Brent

As a person, Davis was a piece of work, but no one can deny her facility as an actress. Dark Victory gives her a chance to do a few variations on her usual brittle bitch schtick. Audiences and critics lapped it up and so did I. Davis was coming off her first divorce and, during filming, co-star Brent fell into her romantic clutches. This probably accounts for the warmth (not heat) between the two which far outstrips anything generated in their other films together. Brent was a fairly wooden presence, but his casting in Dark Victory suits him. His character is a decent, one dimensional sort lacking either sex appeal or neuroses.

For sexual and neurotic appeal, we get Humphrey Bogart as Davis' stable groom. The groom has the hots for the heiress and the insolent banter between Bogart and Davis is fun. Bogart had not yet reached the top rung of stardom. This role was a godsend after playing villainous gangsters for the studio or worse: like his cowboy in The Oklahoma Kid or his vampire in the dire The Return of Doctor X. Another suitor for Davis in the film is played by an actor who never reached the top rung of movie stardom, but overachieved in another field, Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays a drunken playboy. Reportedly, Goulding wanted to give the role a dash of sexual ambivalence, but ambivalence was foreign to Reagan in all aspects of his life. The role must have given him pause because he was the son of an alcoholic, but he acquits himself well.

Davis and Bogart

I usually hurl brickbats at him, but Max Steiner's score is quite good. Best of all is a young Irish actress making her American film debut, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Hal Wallis had signed her after seeing her in New York in the Mercury Theater production of Heartbreak Hotel with Orson Welles. She plays the thankless role of Davis' secretary and confidante with amiable aplomb. Life imitated art, as Fitzgerald was mentored by Davis in how to navigate the hazardous byways of Hollywood. Despite acclaim for this picture and her performance in Wuthering Heights, Fitzgerald floundered at Warners and was released from her contract in 1946. Davis, who had tangled with Jack Warner and many others during the course of her career, met the same fate in 1949.

 

Best of 1946

1. Notorious                                                                         Alfred Hitchcock
2. La Belle et la Bête                                                           Jean Cocteau
3. The Big Sleep                                                                  Howard Hawks
4. It's A Wonderful Life                                                       Frank Capra
5. My Darling Clementine                                                   John Ford
6. A Scandal in Paris                                                           Douglas Sirk
7. Diary of a Chambermaid                                                Jean Renoir
8. Cluny Brown                                                                    Ernst Lubitsch
9. Paisan                                                                               Roberto Rossellini    
10. A Matter of Life and Death                                              Michael Powell

       Films I Enjoyed

       The Best Years of Our Lives, Morning for the Osone Family,

       La Otra, 

       The Killers, The Stranger,

       The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gilda,

       Anna and the King of Siam, The Yearling, 

       The Spiral Staircase, Green for Danger,

       The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Harvey Girls  

       Below the Mendoza Line  

       Cloak and Dagger, The Strange Woman, 

       Bedlam, Caesar and Cleopatra,

       Till the Clouds Roll By, 

       Tomorrow is Forever, Adventure,

       Night and Day

                                                        

Summer Storm

Linda Darnell and Edward Everett Horton cut the cake in Summer Storm

Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm is a delightfully diabolical adaptation of Chekhov's only novel, The Shooting Party. Sirk, who had been working on the screenplay even before emigrating to America, transposes the melodrama from the 1840s to the revolutionary era. There are bookend sections set in 1919, with all the main characters in reduced circumstances, but the majority of the novel is set in 1912. Sirk captures Chekhov's ironic tone in telling the tale of a Russian peasant siren, Olga, who drives a large number of men in her local burg to their doom.

Linda Darnell entered into a new phase of her career with this picture, shifting from playing, as she put it, "sweet young things" to sexy femme fatales. Almost all of the posters advertising United Artists concocted for the picture features Darnell's gams with such pulpy copy as "She Devil", "Don't Go Near this Woman", and "She was an Invitation to Murder". The hype did the trick and the film was a moderate success, at least for a Chekhov adaptation. Sirk and cinematographer Archie Stout milk the most out of Darnell's physical charms. Traipsing around the California countryside in bare feet, Darnell gives the film some needed oomph. Stout's outdoor shots bestow to the film a tang of eroticism and sun dappled beauty. No one in Hollywood photographed horses as magnificently. Stout had had plenty of practice, shooting scores of B Westerns before graduating to A pictures such as Beau Geste and Fort Apache.

The erotic charge Darnell gives the film really helps because without her the picture sometimes seems to emanate from an English drawing room rather than the Russian steppes. Of course, one shouldn't complain when such stalwarts as George Sanders, Anna Lee, and Edward Everett Horton are in the cast. Horton, as Count "Piggy" Volsky, is the very embodiment of aristocratic fecklessness. Sanders plays the Count's friend, a local Judge. He is well-cast as the caddish magistrate who is engaged to Lee's publisher's daughter, but soon goes gaga over Olga. Sanders, born to Russian parents, even got to sing in his native language in a thrilling musical number. This precedes, if you are keeping score Sirk fans, the second of two key mirror shots in the film. 

Anna Lee seemed to be a perennial second female lead in Hollywood, but I would rate her a better actress than a large number of her co-stars with higher billing. Her best work is in numerous John Ford films, Tay Garnett's Seven Sinners, and Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono. 

Summer Storm contains the second most creepy Russian Orthodox wedding in cinematic history, besides The Scarlet Empress, and the reception that follows is comically ghastly. The print currently streaming on Tubi is murky, but you can still find better DVD versions. Sirk's other feature with Sanders, 1946's A Scandal in Paris, is even more delightful.

Brute Force

Hume Cronyn and Burt Lancaster 

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

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

The proletariat revolts in Brute Force

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

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

The Best of Diane Keaton

1946-2025

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

           woman, but that has advantages as well.

     1)   Annie Hall                              Woody Allen                                        1977

     2)   Mrs. Soffel                           Gillian Armstrong                                   1984

     3)   Shoot the Moon                      Alan Parker                                        1982

     4)   Looking for Mr. Goodbar    Richard Brooks                                     1977

     5)   Baby Boom                             Charles Shyer                                    1987

     6)   Love and Death                      Woody Allen                                       1975

     7)   Sleeper                                    Woody Allen                                       1973

     8)   Something's Gotta Give       Nancy Meyers                                      2003

     9)   The Godfather                 Francis Ford Coppola                                1972

    10)  The Little Drummer Girl     George Roy Hill                                      1984

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

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

 

The Best of David Lynch

1946 - 2025

              Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies depict it in a

              completely flat way.  

                1)     Twin Peaks                                                            1990-2017

                2)     Mulholland Drive                                                      2001

                3)     The Elephant Man                                                    1980

                4)     Blue Velvet                                                                1986

                5)     Inland Empire                                                           2006

                6)     The Straight Story                                                    1999

                7)     Eraserhead                                                                1977

                8)     Wild at Heart                                                             1990  

                9)     Dune                                                                           1984

               10)    Lost Highway                                                            1997

Bifurcated from the start, he veered from Americana to dislocations of time and space, Lynch became one of the most successful surrealists in the history of the cinema. Whatever Mel Brooks, producer of The Elephant Man, saw in the the wall scraping textures of Eraserhead, his prescience resulted in a singular career in Hollywood. Despite his love for coffee, pie, and Bob's Big Boy burgers, Lynch was too abstract and rarified to craft blockbusters, but has done more than any other director of his generation to expand Hollywood's artistic horizons. 

                       

John Waters, David Lynch and friend.

                         

               

                   

Tomorrow is Forever

Orson Welles and Natalie Wood

Irving Pichel's Tomorrow is Forever is an entropic melodrama from 1946. A woman's (Claudette Colbert) husband (Orson Welles) supposedly dies in World War 1, but returns twenty years later to work for her second husband (George Brent). Complications ensue. Pichel was never a very dynamic or distinctive director, but the pacing lumbers. There are too many two shots of people conversing on patio chairs. Pichel displays more animation heralding the invasion of Poland as an offscreen radio announcer than he does directing here.

In his pan in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther noted that the plot of Gwen Bristow's source novel was a rehash of Longfellow's "Enoch Arden". Of course, the central conceit goes back further, in ballads like "John Riley" all the way back to Homer. I am afraid Ms. Bristow is solely responsible for such leaden retorts as "You are not only a man, you are mankind" or "We must live for tomorrow (long Wellesian pause) because tomorrow is forever". I'm not sure even Douglas Sirk could have redeemed a film with lines like these. However, there are consolations amidst the clunkers.

I was fairly pleased with two contributors who I'm usually nonplussed about. Max Steiner's score is solid schmaltz without too much Mickey Mousing or gloop. George Brent's hairpiece sits upon his head like an ill-fitting crown, but he assays a thankless role with ease. 

This was the first screen appearance of Richard Long, a mainstay on television in my youth. He is adequate which is more than I can say of Colbert. She was more at ease in light comedy than melodrama. The role seems more tailored to Stanwyck or even Jane Wyman. Her chemistry with Welles is zilch, but that was always a dicey proposition when dealing with the wunderkind from Kenosha. What leading lady did have chemistry with Welles?  Hayworth is more object than equal in The Lady from Shanghai. Only when Welles could dominate, as in Jane Eyre, was the Romantic torch lit. The grand exception, which Welles milked, was with Micheal Mac Liammoir as his secret sharer in Othello.

Natalie Wood, relaxed and offering a passable Germanic accent as Welles' daughter, has much better chemistry with him. Indeed, there scenes together are the highlight of the film. This was Wood's first credited screen appearance. She had appeared uncredited in Pichel's The Moon is Down and liked the director, so this might help explain her facility here. Crowther thought Welles guilty of a "studied display of overacting", but he was always an easy target. I actually think this is one of his more restrained foreign accent aided performances. He is the best reason to examine this middling fare.