1962: The Trick Is Not Minding

It’s time for my annual look back 50 years at the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. For the year 1962, I noted something interesting: All five films nominated were also among the top ten earners in box office. I haven’t checked, but I doubt that happens often; it would be unthinkable today, as there is a clear delineation between art and commerce, with the two rarely coinciding. Of course, this doesn’t mean that audiences were much more sophisticated in those days. Films that did good box office were often nominated for Best Picture, even if no one liked them, as there was great studio loyalty.

Also, the films nominated were very long–all over two hours, four of them over two and a half, and one over four. Two of them had intermissions and overtures, a rarity today. The last film I saw in a theater that had an intermission was Gettysburg, and I can’t remember the last one with an overture.

I start with with The Longest Day, an almost-three hour film about D-Day. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, it was too much for one director–it had three, not including an uncredited Zanuck. Starring a cast of thousands, with cameos by some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, London, and Berlin, including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, and Richard Burton, the film is a clear-eyed, unsentimental chronicle of one of the most pivotal days in world history. It starts the night before the invasion, when bad weather almost cancelled it, and then proceeds throughout the pre-dawn paratrooper jump, then the landing, and the fighting for every inch of the beach. There is a lot of time devoted to the arrogance and stupidity of the Germans, who refused to believe what was going on. As many history buffs know, Hitler was not awakened because he took a sleeping pill. “We will lose the war because the Fuehrer took a sedative,” one German officer moans.

What’s very impressive is the scale of the production. There are no CGI soldiers on the beach–167 actors were hired, and over 450 military extras were used. The actual fighting isn’t as bloody as Saving Private Ryan, this was 1962 after all, but it’s still intense.

Not so intense is The Music Man, a bloated adaptation of the Broadway hit. Directed by Martin Dacosta, the film starts Robert Preston as a con man in Iowa in 1912. His scam is to sell musical instruments for a band to gullible parents, but since the instruments are actually delivered I’m not sure what the profit margin is. Of course he falls in love with town librarian Shirley Jones. There are several familiar songs like “76 Trombones,” “Till There Was You,” and “(Ya Got) Trouble,” and the film uses candy colors that it is almost surreal. But I was bored out of my skull. This is a movie for grandmas. Notable in the cast is young Ronny Howard, who plays a kid with a lisp who sings the song “Gary, Indiana.” The Simpson’s episode, “Marge vs. the Monorail,” is a better spin on the same idea.

Mutiny on the Bounty, one of the few remakes to be nominated for Best Picture (The Departed is the only one that has won) is also bloated, and has a performance by Marlon Brando that has to be seen to be believed. It was a critical failure, but did crack the top ten for the year in tickets sold. The film emphasizes the mutineers love of Tahiti, which is where much of it was filmed, and where Brando met his third wife, Tanita, who is his love interest in the film. The film also emphasizes Bligh’s cruelty as stemming from his interest in getting the shipment of breadfruit to Jamaica, but historical accuracy ends with Brando’s death scene–Fletcher Christian didn’t actually die until four years after the mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island. Directed by Lewis Milestone (after Brando forced Carol Reed to quit), there are some well-done scenes on the high seas, but mostly this is a dud.

Though it didn’t win, I think To Kill a Mockingbird is the most beloved film to come out of 1962. One of the best movies ever made from a good book, the film managed to capture what has made the novel the book that is second only to The Bible as the one that has inspired more people (based on a poll). Gregory Peck stars as Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a sleepy Alabama town in the 1930s. His daughter Scout narrates as an older daughter, remembering the period where her father defended a black man falsely charged with rape.

The film works on several levels. It is an idyllic look at the innocence of childhood, soiled by the evils of racism, but it is also a celebration of humanity, with the use of the character Boo Radley (played silently by Robert Duvall, in one of his first roles). When Scout says “Hey, Boo,” at the end of the picture, it would take a hard-hearted person not to feel a rush of emotion.

Gregory Peck won the Oscar, and deservedly so, but in doing so he beat out newcomer Peter O’Toole, who was brilliant in the Oscar winner, Lawrence of Arabia. I’m sure voters figured they’d have plenty of time to honor him, and fifty years later he has been nominated seven times with no wins. At least he won an honorary Oscar.

Directed by David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia was an easy choice for Best Picture, as it is a masterpiece and won of the great achievements in cinema history. It couldn’t be made the same way today–it would have to be done with CGI, as it would be too expensive (water had to be trucked at $3 a gallon, and think of all the sand that had to be smoothed out after each take). The story of British officer T.E. Lawrence and his command of Arabs against the Turks during World War I, the movie is four hours long but goes by in a flash. It’s desert vistas are breathtaking, but it also works on a small scale–the character of Lawrence, as he goes from an eccentric to a self-appointed prophet.

The film also has one of the great edits of all time: when Lawrence blows out a match, and we cut instantly to the burning desert. Speaking of matches, one of the greatest lines from the film is when, after Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers, a colleague tries it and burns himself. “That hurts!” the man exclaims. “Of course it does,” Lawrence tells him. “The trick…is not minding that it hurts.” Of course, that and several other scenes in the film have us wondering whether Lawrence is as sadomasochist.

Film Noir: D.O.A.

Directed by Rudolph Mate, D.O.A., from 1950, is one of the classics of the film genre, a film ahead of its time that put off some early reviewers. It begins with one the greatest hooks in film history:  a long tracking shot of a man, from behind, walking through police headquarters. He enters the door marked “Homicide Division,” asks to see the man in charge, and tells him he’s there to report a murder. “Whose murder?” he’s asked. “Mine,” he replies. The man isn’t thrown out of the office, instead they know who he is and proceed to listen to his story.

D.O.A., though not told in real time, is one of those films that has a deadline. Edmond O’Brien stars as the man trying to solve his own murder, and along the way he’s often rude, but only because he doesn’t have much time. In a way, it reminded me of that Simpsons episode where Homer only has 24 hours to live after eating incorrectly prepared blowfish, only in the film, O’Brien expresses no need to have sex.

O’Brien plays Frank Bigelow, an accountant in a small California town. He’s off to San Francisco for a vacation, ostensibly to get away from his secretary (Pamela Britton), who’s pushing to make their romance more permanent. When he gets to Frisco he’s instantly on the prowl, and we even hear a slide whistle playing a wolf whistle sound whenever he sizes up a pretty girl.

He meets some people and goes out to a jazz club (in one of the first representations of the beat culture in cinema). A mysterious man switches his drink. The next day, he feels a pain, and goes to a doctor. He’s told he’s ingested “luminous toxin” and has only a few days to live.

The rest of the film is O’Brien tracking down clues to find his killer. He starts with a man who was trying to get ahold of him, but later committed suicide. Britton finds the connection–O’Brien once notarized a bill of sale for the man. This leads to stolen iridium, and O’Brien chasing all over Los Angeles (if traffic were presented realistically, he would have run out of time). Some of the clues seem a little convenient, but Mate and O’Brien never let up the sense of time running out, which keeps the film taut. It’s only 83 minutes long, so there’s really never a dull moment once the diagnosis is made. There are some nice set pieces, such as a shootout in a drug store and a scene in a warehouse where O’Brien tries to avoid a sniper.

D.O.A. is a fine example of the genre and is easy to find–it’s in the public domain and there are more than 20 releases on home video/DVD.

Truffaut: The American Night

Throughout the ’70s, Francois Truffaut attained a revered not-so-elder statesman position in world cinema. He directed films that won an Oscar and several Cesars. He also permanently broke with his former colleague and friend Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut was a lover of Hollywood films down to his bones, and chose to work in that style, while Godard went off into the avant-garde.

The film that broke them was Day for Night. Francois Truffaut won only one Oscar–it was for the 1973 Best Foreign Language film, and the winner was Day for Night. He was also nominated for Best Director and Writer for the film. Aside from The 400 Blows, it is Truffaut’s most acclaimed film.

By this time, it was clear that Truffaut was unabashedly a sentimentalist, and a lover of Hollywood cinema. The French title of the film is La Nuit Americaine, or The American Night, which is a term for shooting a night scene during the day (the American phrase for this is, natch, day for night). By using the word American in his title, Truffaut clearly, even at the height of his game, was still acknowledging the influence of American movies on his work. Consider a dream sequence where Truffaut, playing the director of the film-within-a-film, remembers as a child stealing the stills of Citizen Kane from a movie theater.

Day for Night is the story of a film being made, and it plays like an exciting adventure. Truffaut as the director is dogged but not mercurial–there’s a kind of business problem-solving aspect to him. He also, interestingly, is deaf, and wears a hearing aid on his sleeve. Unlike, say, the demonic figure Peter O’Toole plays in The Stunt Man, Truffaut’s Ferrand is an avuncular nice guy, who’s not above engaging in mischief like having his prop man steal a vase from the hotel they’re staying at.

The plot covers all the vicissitudes of making a movie, from insurance problems to temperamental stars to an actress who is pregnant to a cat not going for a saucer of milk to the death of an actor. Some of them are quite funny, especially embodied by Valentina Cortese as an aging star who hits the sauce a little too hard and can’t remember her lines (Cortese was nominated for an Oscar, and the winner, Ingrid Bergman, said that she should have won).

Several subplots run through the film. Jacqueline Bisset is the English superstar who has just come off a nervous breakdown. Jean-Pierre Leaud is a love-struck actor who gets dumped by a script girl, and then locks himself in his room. He comes out, wearing just a nightshirt, and asks for money for a whore.

But the overall theme of the film is the siren call of cinema to those involved. Nathalie Baye, who plays Truffaut’s assistant, can’t believe that a person would quit a movie for a man: “I would drop a guy for a film,” she says, “but never a film for a guy.”  Truffaut, luring Leaud back to work, tells him: “Go back to your room, re-read the script, learn your lines, then try to sleep. Tomorrow we work. That’s what matters. Don’t be a fool. You’re a very good actor. No one’s private life runs smoothly. That only happens in the movies. No traffic jams, no dead periods. Movies go along like trains in the night. And people like you and me are only happy in our work.”

Truffaut also seems to be interested in showing the sausage-making of film. We see how artificial snow is made, how a simple window dressing can stand in for an entire apartment, and how large crowd scenes are handled. Here, film is magic, but it’s also nuts and bolts and work.

The film is dedicated to Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and Truffaut pays homage to the silent era with his treatment of Bisset. She’s a perfectly capable actress, but Truffaut can’t stop glorying in her face. And it’s a great face.

There have been many films about the making of movies–screenwriters write about what they know, after all–and Day for Night may be the best one ever made.

Truffaut: The Adventures of Antoine Doinel

Francois Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, featured a young actor named Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel, a 14-year-old boy who seeks to escape his horrible family life. The end of the movie is a freeze-frame of Antoine, as he reaches the sea, but faces uncertainty in his life ahead.

Despite that ending, Truffaut and Leaud would continue the story of Antoine, through one short film and three features, in all covering 20 years. It is the longest association of director, actor, and character in movie history.

Truffaut returned to Antoine in 1962 when he was asked to make part of an omnibus film. The result was Antoine and Collette (called Love at 20 in France), a look at Antoine living on his own and trying to romance a young woman (Marie-France Pisier), who kind of strings him along. It would mark a habit of Antoine’s–he would fall in love with a girl’s whole family, making up for the loveless home he grew up in.

The second feature was Stolen Kisses, released in 1968. Much more comic in tone than The 400 Blows, the film views Antoine after being kicked out of the army, struggling to find himself in a series of jobs.

This film is really a confection, not very substantial but with a lot of Gallic charm. This, even though it was filmed during the turmoil surrounding the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinematheque Francais, which caused riots in Paris. The film is dedicated to Langlois, and during the opening credits we see the closed doors of the Cinematheque.

But Truffaut was not an overtly political filmmaker. 1968 was one of the most turbulent years in world history, especially in France, but there’s hardly a whiff of it here. The only direct mention is when Antoine’s girlfriend (Claude Jade) mentions she has been to a demonstration, and he reacts as if she said she went to the moon. Truffaut was a sentimentalist, and this is a delightful but insubstantial romantic comedy.

The opening scenes show Antoine being unceremoniously and dishonorably discharged from the army. He makes faces as his commanding officer dresses him down, reminding him he will be unable to get a civil service job, suggesting he may sell neckties on the street. Recalling Antoine’s urge to roam from The 400 Blows, we hear how often he went AWOL.

As with Antoine and Collette, Antoine’s only family is the parents of his girlfriend. This time she’s Christine, whom he wrote to in the army, but they seem to have settled into a friendship. Christine’s father gets him a job as a night clerk at a hotel, but he gets fired when a private detective tricks him into opening a door to reveal a woman in the midst of adultery. The detective (pointedly name Henri) feels bad for him and gets him a job at his detective agency, where Antoine becomes the most hapless detective outside of Inspector Clouseau.

One of his assignments is to go undercover at a shoe store, to find out why the owner (Michel Lonsdale) is so disliked. He ends up falling for the man’s wife, and, similarly to The Graduate, which came the year before, the two engage in an affair in which Antoine is bumblingly nervous, while the wife (Delphine Seyrig) is assured.

This film is like The Graduate in many ways, as it captures the uncertain time of a young man who doesn’t quite know where he fits in. As with The Graduate, politics are of no interest to the young man–he’s a misfit, not a revolutionary.

The third feature in the cycle was Bed and Board, from 1970. It is an absolutely delightful picture that made me laugh several times, and I always had a smile on my face. In some ways it is proto-Woody Allen romantic comedy.

Antoine is now married, to Christine. They live in a tight-knit apartment building, where a number of endearing oddballs live, such as the man who won’t leave his apartment until Marshall Petain dies.

Antoine and Christine are happy, though poor. She teaches violin lessons. He starts by working in a flower shop, trying to revolutionize a method of dying flowers. That doesn’t work, so he ends up at a hydraulics company, steering miniature boats in a small-scale harbor. They have a baby son, and there’s some comedy about what his name is. Christine wants Ghislain, but Antoine says that sounds like a baby who wears velvet knickers. He wants Alphonse, but Christine thinks that sounds like a peasant. Since Antoine fills out the paperwork, Alphonse it is.

It is at his new job that Antoine meets a Japanese woman, Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer). The two enter an affair, though Antoine is quickly tired of it, as he has trouble sitting at those low Japanese tables and the two have nothing to talk about. Christine finds out about it (in a lovely scene involving opening flower petals) and kicks him out. Will true love conquer all?

Truffaut, as with Stolen Kisses, films this as a meringue, not getting heavy but just following his characters as they bounce through the pinball machine. There are a lot of little quirks and eddies, such as when an old policeman says of Christine, “I wouldn’t lay her well, but I would lay her often.” Jacques Tati makes a cameo, in full Monsieur Hulot costume. There’s a running gag involving a fellow who owes money to Antoine, but every time they run into each other, Antoine is owed even more money. And there’s a recurring appearance by a guy everyone calls “the Strangler” who turns out to be a TV comedian.

But the heart of the film is the buoyant and funny relationship between Antoine and Christine. If indeed Antoine is part Truffaut, there appears to be self-satirization, such as when Christine says of Antoine’s biographical novel, “I don’t like this business of writing about your childhood, dragging your parents through the mud. I don’t know much, but one thing I do know – if you use art to settle accounts, it’s no longer art.” Antoine, who again is friendly with Christine’s parents (he has a pleasant run-in with her father at a whorehouse) says, “I like all parents. Except my own.”

Though the film could be seen as Truffaut’s Scenes From a Marriage, it never gets very serious. Christine never really gets that mad at him, and there’s always a sense that they will get back together. The film was intended to be the last in series, but ten years later Truffaut and Leaud teamed up one more time.

That film was Love on the Run, from 1979. Truffaut said he was dissatisfied with the film, and though it has a certain charm, he was right. The film ends up being a summation of the films before, and doesn’t offer any new insights into the character. As Truffaut pointed out, Antoine never evolves.

The film starts on the day of Antoine’s divorce from Christine. They have amicably split, but Jade has had enough of his affairs and self-centeredness. Antoine is now living with a record-shop employee, Sabine (Dorothee). But when he runs into his old girlfriend, Colette (again Marie-France Pisier) he impulsively hops on a train with her. She has been reading his book, a barely fictional account of his life, which has been told in the four previous Doinel films.

The double-edged sword here is that Truffaut was able to use film clips from those films. When Antoine remembers something, we can see a film clip of it, as when he lies about his mother dying in The 400 Blows, or when he has an affair with the Japanese woman in Bed and Board. But having seen all those films in the last few days, it has the effect of being a highlight reel, not a real movie. Antoine is still self-centered–Pisier tells him so–and his relationship with Sabine is based on a serendipitous, albeit romantic, coincidence.

The one spark here is that Pisier, who co-wrote the script, gives herself a subplot involving her defending a child murderer. Though I appreciate the attempt to give one of Antoine’s woman a life beyond him, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

It’s a shame the series ended on such a flat note. There are some touching scenes, such as when Antoine visits his mother’s grave for the first time (she’s buried next to the woman who inspired Camille). The closing credits are intercut with scenes of young Antoine from The 400 Blows, laughing as he spins around in a carousel. That’s moving, but could have meant so much more with a stronger film.

Leaud, who also made many films with Jean-Luc Godard, was an interesting actor in these films. Of course he was mesmerizing in The 400 Blows, but in the other films he’s a loose-limbed, comic actor, gliding through each film as if he were on roller skates, trying his best to stay out of trouble but failing utterly.  He still makes films today, but nothing with the impact that his Doinel films did.

Truffaut definitively stated that Love on the Run was the last Doinel picture. Sadly, he died in 1984, so there was no chance to go back on that proclamation. As a package, they are an interesting portrait of an artist covering a character through history, which has been done often in literature (as John Updike did with Rabbit, or Richard Ford with Frank Bascombe), but usually a director doesn’t have the luxury of using the same actors. Truffaut did, and we are all the beneficiaries.

Truffaut: Mid-Career

This post will be concerned with Francois Truffaut’s career from 1965 to 1970, absent the Antoine Doinel pictures, which will be discussed in a future post. Based on DVD availability, that includes Fahrenheit 451, Mississippi Mermaid, and The Wild Child.

Fahrenheit 451 was Truffaut’s first film in color, and his only film in English (he was, for a while, attached to filming Bonnie and Clyde, which I would have loved to have seen). It is, of course, based on the famous dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury, in which firemen don’t put out fires, they start them. They burn books.

Book burning is a particularly odious image, mostly associated with Nazis, but pops up every once in a while even in our freedom-loving U.S.A. The opening scene shows a squad of firemen, wearing kind of odd, Victorian-style helmets, riding a vehicle that is both futuristic and antique, to a home where someone is hiding books. Montag (Oskar Werner) is an expert at finding hidden books–false TV sets are a typical place. The firemen then gather the offending material and burn it.

In this society of Bradbury’s creation, printed material is banned (the opening credits are spoken, not typed). Citizens are kept docile by drugs and TV, and told that books lead to unhappiness. Of course, what the government fears about books is that they have alternative ideas, but they have persuaded most that books are dangerous to their well-being.

Montag is in line for a promotion, but a few things start to happen. He meets a vivacious neighbor (Julie Christie, who also plays his vapid wife). Then he becomes intrigued by the books he burns. His captain, Cyril Cusack, says this happens to the best of firemen, but he insists that books are rubbish. But Montag starts to read David Copperfield, and then gets hooked. Soon his house is full of books.

Truffaut handles this high-concept material mostly straight, without filigree or tricks. There are a few inside jokes–in one bonfire, we see a copy of Cahiers du Cinema with Truffaut on the cover–but for the most part this is straight ahead science-fiction, and at times elegantly exciting. A taut sequence in which a woman is found with a hidden library, what Cusack calls the dream find of any firemen, is magnified by her insistence on being burned with the books, an image that Montag can not shake.

The science-fiction elements are handled somewhat strangely. As I said about the uniforms, though this is set in the future, we don’t know how far ahead. For all I know Bradbury may have been referencing the increasing cultural illiteracy of his own time. A few things, such as wall-sized televisions, have the aura of the new, but otherwise there are no “Jetsons”-style gadgets, except for some jetpacks, which are shown in cheesy rear projection.

But this film is not about technical wizardry. Especially noted is a scene in a school, where children are drilled not in their ABCs but in multiplication tables (the old woman recites them mockingly while going up in flames). Which brings me to a question–are people taught to read? Montag stumbles through David Copperfield, reading as a first-grader might. But clearly he knows how to read–how was he taught? Are there no instruction manuals? Apparently not. It’s a bit of a puzzle, but certainly nothing to impinge on the excellence of this film.

Mississippi Mermaid, from 1969, seemed to be an attempt by Truffaut to make an Alfred Hitchcock picture, and he did not succeed. It has many of the elements Hitchcock used, but without the tautness and balance of the master. Instead it’s kind of a mess.

The film also has noir elements, in that its protagonist is a man who acts stupidly over a woman. Jean-Paul Belmondo is a wealthy owner of a tobacco plantation and cigarette factory on the island of Reunion, which is located in the Indian Ocean. He has been corresponding with a woman he met through the classified ads, and they are to marry. When she arrives, she does not look like her picture–she’s Catherine Deneuve–who explains that she did not want their relationship to be about her beauty. Belmondo can’t complain–not only is she a knockout, but he lied about his monetary status, not wanting to attract gold-diggers.

The two marry, and I’m reluctant to go much further in the plot summary, because I didn’t know what was coming, and it was enjoying to ride along with the twists. Suffice it to say that Deneuve is not who she says she is, and when Belmondo gives her access to his bank accounts we can tell this is a bad idea.

While Truffaut idolized Hitchcock, he just doesn’t have a feel for this material. Belmondo, to use a more modern cinematic line, just can’t quit Deneuve, no matter what she did to him. She’s the equivalent of Hitchcock’s icy blonde–I can’t tell if Deneuve’s mostly blank performance was on purpose or not. In any case, it’s hard to sympathize with Belmondo’s character, who continuously does stupid things. There’s an incredible coincidence that occurs when Belmondo and Deneuve, without each other’s knowledge, end up in the same seaside French city. Also, Chekhov’s rule about a gun being introduced to the story is followed to the letter.

At a certain point in the story I stopped caring about these two, as he was so dumb and her motives were so ambiguous. I could swear, though, that the end of the film takes place in the same mountain cabin that Shoot the Piano Player did. Truffaut often put in little inside jokes–the novel that this film is based on, Waltz Into Darkness, by Cornell Woolrich, can be seen in Stolen Kisses being read by Antoine Doiniel. There are other isolated moments of whimsy, such as when Deneuve is changing her top while in a car, and another motorist gazes at her and drives off the road.

From 1970, The Wild Child is a very interesting and compelling film that examines a true story, an example of the “wild child,” a human being that has lived without connection to any other people.

Set in the turn of the 18th century France, the film is about the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a feral boy of about eleven or twelve who was found living on his own, naked, surviving on what ever food he could find. No one ever found out his past, but assumptions were he was abandoned. He is taken to the society for deaf and mute children, though it is discovered he can hear. He is to be turned over to the asylum for idiots when a doctor (Truffaut himself) takes personal charge of the boy and seeks to teach him to be civilized.

The film is presented almost in a documentary style, as the plot mostly concerns the journal of Truffaut, who struggles to teach the boy, as well as coming to grips with whether he is doing the right thing. Over the course of the film we the audience must decide just what “civilized” means. Do we really need to eat with a spoon? Or wear shoes? At times the doctor doubts what he is doing, and wonders if Victor, as he names the boy, would be better off back in the woods.

The Wild Child is also visually interesting. Photographed by Nestor Almendros, who would go on to have a long and fruitful association with Truffaut, the film has the look of a silent–black and white, and with frequent use of irising. The lead performance, by a child named Jean-Pierre Cargol, is quite astonishing, and Truffaut said that he played the part of the doctor not out of vanity, but because he believed it would be better if he worked with the child without an intermediary.

The film can lead to fascinating discussion, as it also ties in with the Enlightenment, and the writing of men such a Rousseau and Montesquieu, as well as the work of naturalists and transcendentalists. Truffaut was inspired to make the film after reading about such cases throughout history, but the case of Victor happened at an interesting time in history, on the cusp of breakthroughs in scientific thought.

Perhaps most interestingly, The Wild Child makes a viewer recall The 400 Blows, in that it is about a child who is an outsider. Some criticism of the film was that Truffaut seems to be taking the side of the oppressor in this film–that we are supposed to think that Victor’s civilizing is a good thing. But I think Truffaut, like the doctor, was ambivalent, especially considering the last shot of the boy’s face, which is not a happy one, but instead one of uncertainty and confusion, much like the last shot of Antoine Doiniel in The 400 Blows.

Truffaut: The Crest of the Wave

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at the films of Francois Truffaut. I’ve already written about his debut film, The 400 Blows, I’ll cover all of his films that I can. A shocking number of his films, including The Soft Skin, The Bride Wore Black, Small Change, and his last two films, The Woman Next Door and Confidentially Yours, are not available on DVD. I’ve seen The Bride Wore Black and The Woman Next Door, but not for over twenty years, so they’re not exactly fresh in my mind.

Truffaut was first a critic, and wrote a controversial article in 1954 viciously criticizing the French film industry. He espoused the “auteur” theory–that a director of a film was equivalent to the author of a novel–that was later picked up by Andrew Sarris in the U.S. Truffaut wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, under the editorship of Andrew Bazin, and he and colleagues Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer turned to directing their own films, in a style that would become known as the French New Wave.

Ironically they were influenced by American films–their holy trinity was Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and especially Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut would conduct a book-length interview with him). Truffaut’s first film, the aforementioned The 400 Blows, was a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. This was quite a coup, considering his criticism of the festival the year before got him kicked out.

Truffaut’s follow-up film in 1960 was Shoot the Piano Player, and it’s American origins are evident. It is based on an American pulp novel, and has noir elements. But this story of minor hoodlums and the pianist who gets caught up with them is secondary to the style. Charles Aznavour, who is known as the “French Frank Sinatra,” stars as a pianist in a saloon. His brothers have fleeced a couple of hapless hoodlums, and are now on the run. These two hoods, called Ernest and Momo, end up trying to use Aznavour to get to the brothers.

The film is less about gangsters than it is about being an artist and getting second chances. We find out that Aznavour was once a concert pianist who learns that his wife slept with an impresario to further his career. Tragedy ensues from this revelation, and he punishes himself by playing rinky-dink tunes in a dive run by a piggish man. But he meets a new woman (Marie Dubois), and is on the cusp of redemption when the hoods interfere.

Shoot the Piano Player, though it has tragic elements, is mostly comedic. Consider the opening scene, which has Aznavour’s brother (Albert Remy) fleeing Ernest and Momo. We settle in, thinking it will be tense and dramatic. But Remy runs into a lamppost, and is aided by a good Samaritan. They have a discussion about marriage–Remy says he would like to get married someday, and the Samaritan says, “You say that like you mean it.”

Later, in a gag worthy of Mel Brooks, Ernest and Momo (who may have been modeled on Thomson and Thompson of the Tintin comics) have kidnapped Aznavour’s little brother. Ernest (or is it Momo?) is bragging about a scarf, and the boy doubts what he is saying. “If I’m lying, may my mother keel over right this instant,” he says, and Truffaut cuts to an iris shot of an old woman, keeling over.

Shoot the Piano Player is the most “new-waveish” of Truffaut’s films. It has jump cuts and a certain self-consciousness, particularly in a shootout at the end of the film. But though shot in a gritty black and white by Raoul Coutard, there is a striking scene of a character sliding down a snowy slope, dead of a gunshot wound.

Shoot the Piano Player did not do well at the box office, impressing only the cineastes. His next film, Jules and Jim, was more accessible, a romantic triangle set over twenty years, from 1912 to 1932. In a dizzying montage that opens the film, with extensive voiceover, Jules (Oskar Werner), an Austrian, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Parisian. Jim is a ladies’ man, while Jules is shy. The two meet a vivacious woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), who strikingly resembles a statue from antiquity they’ve seen on a Greek island. Jules falls for her, and asks Jim to leave her alone.

Eventually Jules and Catherine will marry and have a child, and move to Austria. The Great War interrupts the Jules and Jim friendship,  but when they are all reunited Jim learns that the marriage is falling apart. He and Catherine begin an affair, with Jules’ full knowledge. In fact, the three all live together. Jim and Catherine can’t make it work though, and Catherine, unable to live with Jim or without him, makes a fateful decision.

I’d seen Jules and Jim twice before my most recent viewing, and I just didn’t get it. Maybe multiple viewings and life experience have helped, because on this third viewing, I found it gripping. There’s a lot going on here. It has gained a reputation as being the “menage a trois” film, though it is not, as Catherine, despite being fickle, never shares the men sexually. And though the friendship between the two men is the real love story of the film, it is not a homoerotic one. Truffaut does throw in some ambiguity with a scene in which Catherine dresses as a man (see photo).

Though this is a romantic film, it does have New Wave elements, especially with the extensive voiceover (Shoot the Piano Player does as well, as we often hear Aznavour’s thoughts). I wonder if Woody Allen, who also used a lot of narration in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, another multi-sided romance, was tipping his hat to this film. Truffaut also uses stock footage from silent film days that gives the film an authenticity, and the music, by Georges Delerue, is that of a farce, not a tragedy. Truffaut mentions in an interview that the source material, a novel by Henri Roche, was written many years after the fact, which lessens the melodrama, and Truffaut sought to replicate that in the film. There are many sad things that happen here, but are not milked for maximum effect.

The film’s most striking legacy is the performance of Moreau as Catherine, a woman ahead of her time. She refuses to play along with the double standard–when Jim goes back to Paris to “say goodbye” to old lovers, she does the same. And as unbalanced as she sometimes appears to be, Moreau makes Catherine the kind of woman who would be hard not to be obsessed with. At no time do we question Jules or Jim and what they do.

 

The Godfather

Forty years ago this month The Godfather was released. It had been delayed from a 1971 release, accounting for the unusual opening date (but back then there was less strategy in releasing films for optimal box office). Based on a best-selling book by Mario Puzo, the film quickly became a sensation. I remember a Bob Hope joke at the time: “I was in line for The Godfather and turned to the guy next to me and said, “This is a very long line,” and the guy said, “I know, and I’m Marlon Brando.”

The film became the highest-grossing film of all time up to that time, but, as the lore suggests, this was not a foregone conclusion. There is considerable material to read and see about how Francis Ford Coppola, the Young Turk hired to translate the material into a film, was almost fired. Coppola had directed four features before this massive one, the most prominent the musical Finian’s Rainbow.

The resulting film has been, rightly so, in my opinion, been acclaimed one of the greatest films of all time. It scores a 100 on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and is rated number 2 on IMDB (inexplicably behind The Shawshank Redemption). To prove, though, that the IMDB rating is meaningless, over 26,000 voters gave The Godfather a 1. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1972 (although Coppola did not win Best Director–Bob Fosse did for Cabaret). Marlon Brando won his second Best Actor Oscar, but, in a classic bit of Oscar history, sent a young actress named Maria Cruz, going by the name Sacheen Littlefeather and dressed like the Indian maiden from the Land O’ Lakes butter box, to refuse the Oscar, in protest of the treatment of American Indians in Hollywood films.

I don’t proclaim that I can have anything to say about The Godfather that hasn’t been said before, other than what it means to me. I classify it as my second all-time favorite movie, though I don’t believe I ever saw it in a theater. I did read the book in about seventh grade, and my father, who would go see movies I wasn’t old enough for and then tell me the stories, regaled me with its greatness. Eventually I saw the film when it premiered on NBC in the fall of 1974 over two nights. I was transfixed, and have been ever since.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the structure of the film and the kind of revenge drama that is contained therein. In many ways, the film follows the template of many genre types, from the gangster film to the Western to the Shakespearean tragedy to the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. It is elemental to see two or more opposing forces going to battle, in this case in a shadow world that is both above and below the law. There is also the internecine battles; the sense that no one can be trusted except family. Outsiders are treated with suspicion, and when the chips are down only your family can be relied on (of course, that will be stretched in The Godfather, Part II).

But Coppola’s greatest achievement is taking the pulp novel and making it a commentary on the American dream. The opening line is “I believe in America,” spoken by the aggrieved undertaker Bonasera, who, unable to find justice from the law in the assault on his daughter, seeks a different authority in Vito Corleone (Brando) to find satisfaction. The very success of Corleone, who we learn in the sequel came to America with nothing, but built an empire, is a twisted version of the American success story. As he says late in the film, “I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all those big shots.”

But Vito is behind the times. The hinge of the plot is when Solozzo (Al Lettieri) comes to Corleone to finance his drug racket. Vito doesn’t like the idea of narcotics. He believes that his criminal organization does just fine in the union and gambling rackets, providing those things for the common man that the Catholic church denies. But it’s 1945, and his hot-headed son Sonny (James Caan) and level-headed adopted son and consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) realize that they must make the transition. But when Vito refuses Solozzo, the drug dealer strikes back, nearly having the Don assassinated and igniting a war.

It is here that the main character of The Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) emerges. Vito had hoped he would not get involved in the family business. He is a war hero and a straight arrow. But when he sees his father in danger, and since Solozzo sees him as a civilian, Michael realizes he can be the only one to exact vengeance. By the end of the film, he will have transformed into someone even more ruthless than his father.

Pacino was Coppola’s choice, though the studio fought hard against it. And though Brando won Best Actor, it is really Pacino’s show. Brando, giving a cagey performance, full of tics like stuffing cotton in his cheeks and playing with a stray cat that happened to be on the set in the opening scene, is a pleasure to watch, but Pacino gives the performance of a lifetime. I’ll never forget the mixture of indignity and rage on his face after he is frisked by Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). Pacino knows that he will kill McCluskey shortly. Or the chilling scene at the end of the picture, when he confronts his brother-in-law, Carlo, who had set up Sonny for murder. Carlo lies to save his skin, but Pacino, in a blood-curdling tone, says, “Only, don’t tell me you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.” He says this very calmly, but his intent is clear. It is unfortunate that the later Pacino would have probably shouted these lines, spittle flying.

Pacino, along with Caan and Duvall, were nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Not nominated were composer Nino Rota, as it was discovered that his score, famous today for it’s haunting love theme, was not completely original. Also not nominated, in an absolute crime, was cinematographer Gordon Willis. The Cinematographer’s branch always had it in for Willis, who was tabbed “The Prince of Darkness” for shooting many scenes in very low light. Justice later prevailed when he was awarded an honorary Oscar.

I, along with many other people, have a habit of stumbling upon the film while channel surfing (usually on AMC) and settling in to watch, even though we may own the film on DVD. We know the film so well that we can tell what’s coming up, and like a favorite music album we wait for the good parts. There are so many scenes that are like this, as Coppola structured the movie like an opera, with elaborate set pieces springing up like arias. Many of the scenes begin with moments of calm or quiet–the tranquil dawn outside Woltz’s mansion before he finds the horse’s head in his bed; the sound of the baseball game on the radio before Sonny beats up Carlo; the moments before Sonny is gunned down at the tollbooth (also with a baseball game on the radio in the background); and, most famously, the baptism scene while simultaneously the heads of the five families are being assassinated (for my money, this scene is the greatest ever put on film).

If there’s anything negative to be said about Coppola’s direction in The Godfather is that his symbolism can approach heavy-handedness. Michael, as godfather to his sister Connie’s baby (Sofia Coppola is the infant used in that scene) renouncing Satan and his works while at the same time eliminating his enemies could be seen as obvious. But instead of being heavy-handed, I find it to be viscerally exciting. For instance, using an orange as a symbol of death: When Vito is shot early in  the film, he is buying oranges, and when he dies, he has used an orange to make himself into a literal monster while playing with his grandson. While watching this time I noticed that Tessio, who will come to a bad end, handles an orange during the opening wedding scene. And has everybody noticed that when Luca Brasi meets with Tattaglia in the hotel bar, there are fish engraved on the door? Luca’s end will be, of course, that he “sleeps with the fishes.”

Except perhaps The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca, The Godfather has provided more lines of dialogue that have ingrained in popular culture than any other film. From “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” to “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business,” and “Leave the gun, take the cannoli,” The Godfather is like a cinematic dictionary of famous quotes. The phrase “Ba-da-bing” is said to have originated there, when Sonny describes to Michael how it is to shoot somebody in the head. There’s even a recipe for tomato sauce, courtesy of Clemenza (Richard Castellano). One of my favorite lines is when Solozzo, thinking the Don is dead, is informed otherwise. “He’s still alive! We put five bullets in him and he’s still alive!” The most heartbreaking may be when Tessio (Abe Vigoda), discovered as a betrayer, realizes he’s doomed. “Can you get me off the hook, Tom, for old time’s sake?”

I’ve seen The Godfather probably 20 times, and in bits and pieces a lot more than that. It’s one of the primary reasons the 1970s are seen by many as America’s greatest decade of filmmaking, when box office wasn’t yet a statistic kept in the daily papers and studios believed that making great films was the key to success. For a while, they were right.

1961: When You’re a Jet

Here is my fifth annual look at the films of 50 years ago, highlighting those that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.  Longer reviews are available on my blog, Go-Go-Rama.

1961 was the year John F. Kennedy implored us to “ask what we could do for our country,” Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record, and, most importantly, a blogger calling himself by the absurd name of Jackrabbit Slim was born.

At the movies, family films were king: One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the highest grossing film, and the top ten was full of other innocuous fare like The Parent Trap, Blue Hawaii, and Lover Come Back. But, somewhat unbelievably, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was sixth that year.

The nominees for Best Picture were:

Fanny directed by Joshua Logan, is one those pictures that nobody makes any more, and for good reason. It was based on a Broadway musical, but had all the songs removed. Leslie Caron plays the title role, a girl who gets knocked up by a young man who heads off to sea not knowing her condition, so she marries a rich old goat (Maurice Chevalier), who accepts the child as his own. I was bored cross-eyed by this, and can only conclude that the Francophilia that somehow launched Gigi to the Best Picture Oscar three years older was still at work in the Academy.

The Guns of Navarone is a classic example of the “mission”  picture–story fuel for boys everywhere to use in playing with their G.I. Joes and army men. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn headed a team of saboteurs set on taking out huge guns on an island in the Aegean that blocked Allied naval traffic. It’s big and epic and a lot of fun, though the special effects, which won an Oscar, look cheesy by today’s standards.  If this movie were made today it would probably be a Michael Bay extravaganza that wouldn’t have nearly the heart of the movie that was made 50 years ago.

The Hustler, directed by Robert Rossen, is the one film of the quintet that, like the Sesame Street song, “doesn’t belong.” A seedy look into the demimonde of poolrooms, it starred Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson, a pool hustler who is at odds with his own soul. Much of the film is an unqualified downer, as Newsman enters a relationship with an alcoholic, Piper Laurie, and the man who becomes his manager, George C. Scott, is one of the more venally evil characters that have been on film. Jackie Gleason is memorable as Minnesota Fats, Newman’s arch rival.

Judgment at Nuremberg is the annual Stanley Kramer socially-conscious picture that were regularities of the time period. This one concerns one of the many trials of Nazis held in Nuremberg in the post-war period, but instead of focusing on the big one, which featured Nazi leaders like Goering, writer Abby Mann centered on a trial of four judges that oversaw sending innocent people to concentration camps or undergoing involuntary sterilization. Mann deservedly won an Oscar for his script, which is heavy on talk but brilliantly so, with big speeches by most of the cast, which included big stars like Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland. An unknown actor, Maximilian Schell, won Best Actor in his role as the defense attorney. A long (three hours) movie, it’s none the less gripping.

The winner in 1961 of Best Picture, and overall of 10 Oscars out of 11 nominations, was West Side Story, based on the musical which in turn was based on Romeo and Juliet. The film, viewed with 50 years of hindsight, is great for unusual reasons–it still remains one of the greatest examples of dance ever filmed. Sure, some of it is dated–the gang members wouldn’t scare anyone, and language like “daddy-o” makes it all seem quaint–but the musical numbers are still staggering in their beauty. Leonard Bernstein’s score is the greatest ever to be written for the American stage, and Jerome Robbins’ choreography is still thrilling to behold. When I was a kid my parents had the soundtrack album, and I listened to over and over again, and if I had that record today I could listen to it now. George Chakiris and Rita Moreno won the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards for their performances in the film.

If I were a voter back then, I would have been tempted to vote for The Hustler, but ultimately would have probably gone along with the crowd and voted for West Side Story, if only for its innovation and sheer emotional power.

Sullivan’s Travels

One of the greatest comedies of all time, Sullivan’s Travels was released 70 years ago this month. Despite that ripe old age, the film still makes me laugh, and is still relevant.

Written and directed by Preston Sturges, who revolutionized the American movie comedy, it tells the story of a film director (Joel McCrea), who though rich and famous from making light comedies (like Ants in Your Pants 1939), longs to make movies of gravitas and social commentary. His studio handlers don’t want to hear that–his most recent film, a serious drama, died in Pittsburgh.

Sullivan: What do they know in Pittsburgh?

LeBrand: They know what they like!

Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh!

Sullivan wants to make a movie about poverty in America, called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, that’s where the Coens got that title). The studio bosses convince him that he, who grew up privileged, kind of like Mitt Romney, hasn’t suffered enough to make such a picture. That backfires, though, when Sullivan announces he’s going to incognito as a tramp, with only ten cents in his pocket, to find out what suffering is about.

The genius of Sturges’ script is that it succeeds on two levels: first, it is a tribute to comedy, as Sullivan eventually learns that people living in hard times sometimes need to laugh to forget about their troubles. Comedy has always played second fiddle to drama in many people’s minds, even among those who make it. Woody Allen has always said that he wished he were a tragedian, and that those who make drama are sitting at the grown-up’s table. Secondly, though, it also reinforces the division between the haves and have-nots in America; while ninnies in Hollywood lounge around pools, others are barely making it in shantytowns.

The tone shifts from comedy to melodrama often, and at times not easily, but I think that’s the point. The first half hour is flat-out screwball, as Sullivan sets out in old clothes, but the studio has arranged for an entourage to follow him in a bus. When he tries to make a break for it, we get some well done slapstick with the bus racing after him, the inhabitants tossed about (with some wince-inducing laughs earned from a Stepin Fetchit-style black cook).

Late the film shifts to a sweet romance, as Sullivan meets a struggling actress (Veronica Lake), who teams up with him on his trip. Lake, who is one of my favorite of the old movie stars, was just a teenager when she made this film, her first starring role. She was unusually beautiful, but apparently difficult. McCrea passed on making another movie with her, citing “Life is too short to make another movie with Veronica Lake.” Read up on her to hear a typically sad story of failed romance, alcoholism, and madness that ended much too soon at age 51.

The film’s final third dispenses with comedy altogether. Through a series of unfortunate events, Sullivan ends up arrested and imprisoned to a chain gang. He can’t prove who he is, and everyone back in Hollywood thinks he is dead. It is when, as a member of the chain gang, that he attends a movie at the local black church (this expansive view of African-Americans almost makes up for the cook). When he sees how the Mickey Mouse cartoon brings a little life into the grim lives of the prisoners, he changes his tune. The closing line is “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Now, the film doesn’t always work. For one thing, the cartoon isn’t that funny. It would have been nice if Sturges had gotten the rights to a Chaplin, Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy movie. I’ve never, even when I was a kid, laughed my assed off at a Disney cartoon. And though the film is incredibly audacious for 1941, it still seems to hold back, and can lean toward the corny and sentimental (at one point McCrea says, as if in defense, “What’s wrong with Capra?”).

But these are minor quibbles. The film is so rich, and Sturges such a good writer, that it continues to dazzle. The performances are good down to the minor, with several familiar faces, such as Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest (as a press agent, who’s given to say things like, “It will put Shakespeare back with the shipping news”), and two drolly brilliant turns by Robert Greig and Eric Blore as Sullivan’s British butler and valet. Greig gives a memorable speech about how those who are poor know all about being poor, and only the morbidly rich would find it a glamorous topic.

The movie also is chock full of marvelous whimsy, such as the lines: “What about gin rummy?” “I never touch the stuff.” Or this exchange, early in the film:

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: A little, but I don’t want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: [reluctantly] With a little sex in it.

The DVD from Criterion includes a documentary on Sturges. He was the first screenwriter to make the leap from writer to director, and at one time in the mid-40s he was the highest paid producer/director/writer in Hollywood. His success ended quickly, though. He also made some other outstanding comedies. The ones I’ve seen are The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. His great rival as a maker of comedies in those days was Ernst Lubitsch, and Sturges gets an inside joke in when Lake, not knowing Sullivan is a director, and thinking he’s a hobo, jokingly asks him for a letter of introduction to Lubitsch.

The Films of Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo made only one feature film, another that was about forty minutes long, and two documentary shorts. Nonetheless, he is considered one of the most important directors in French cinema, and inspired no less than New Wave directors Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

Criterion has put out a two-disc set of his entire oeuvre. His four films fit on one disc, and the other contains a 1964 documentary, as well as a conversation between Rohmer and Truffaut from 1968. (Both were television programs–what great TV the French had!)

Vigo was born in 1905. His father was an anarchist, who died (possibly murdered) in prison. His first film, from 1930, is a 27-minute long silent documentary called À propos de Nice, which shows the sights of that seaside city. Vigo breaks it into sections, at first showing the idle rich, stuffed into their beach chairs like curing hams, and then the workers and poor of the city. He also displays some interesting camera tricks, such as an attractive woman seated in a beach chair. The film dissolves so that she is wearing one outfit after another, from a fur coat to a sun dress to finally nothing at all.

His next film was a commissioned documentary Taris, a kind of how-to-swim instructional film featuring the French swimming champion. It’s the kind of thing we saw in schools when we were kids, though Vigo again allows his creativity to seep in. He shot it in a pool that had portholes in the side, so he didn’t have to use underwater cameras. A shot at the end has Taris, again in dissolve, go from bathing suit to topcoat and derby, and he appears to walk across the water.

The most important of Vigo’s films are his two narratives:  Zéro de conduite, from 1933, and L’Atalante, from 1934. The former is something of a tribute to his father, as well as autobiographical, as it deals with the horrid life of boys in a boarding school. This film nakedly inspired Truffaut, who borrowed a scene from it, when a teacher leads a group of boys through the city, and the boys take off on their own without the teacher noticing.

Zéro de conduite, above all, is a masterpiece of style. The editing is crude, prefiguring Jean-Luc Godard by thirty years, and full of rebellion. The boys, who are looked after by a couple of cretinous housemasters, revolt, and in a brilliantly rendered scene in slow-motion, lead a procession out of their dormitory, holding aloft one boy on a chair while feathers from exploded pillows drift around them.

Also, believe it or not, I thought quite a bit about National Lampoon’s Animal House while watching this film, and would love to ask John Landis if he had it in mind. Not only is there a food fight, but the climax is at a school celebration, attended by dignitaries (some of them are represented by garish mannequins, while the headmaster is a midget with a Smith Brothers beard). I also imagine that Martin Scorsese knows this film well. One of the boys in the film, who tells the headmaster that he is full of shit, is named Rene Tabard, the same name given the film professor in Scorsese’s film Hugo.

Zéro de conduite was banned by the French government for several years, so in an attempt to revive his carer, he took on an existing script which turned about to be his masterpiece, and last film, L’Atalante, from 1934. The simple story of a couple on their honeymoon on a canal barge, L’Atalante is again full of stylistic flourishes that makes the rather banal plot into something more universal and timeless.

Jean Daste and Dita Parlo are the newlyweds. She’s a provincial girl who has never left her village; he’s the skipper of a barge called the L’Atalante. The opening scenes are drolly comic, as the pair walk directly from the church to the boat, with the wedding party following behind, dourly, as if they were in a funeral procession.

The first mate is Pere Jules, (Michel Simon), an old sailor who has been around the world. He is a lumpen, vulgar sort with a homely mug and a fondness for cats. Initially there is a tension between him and the skipper’s new wife, but they warm to each other, and in a tremendously rich scene, he shows her his curios from his travels, including a puppet from Venezuela. He then shows her his tattoos, which he says keep him warm.

Daste reacts angrily to this, even though there is no real chance at romance between the two of them. Later, they will go into Paris and she will be enamored by a street peddler, whom Daste angrily knocks through a window. Parlo, feeling lonely, bored, and unwanted, leaves the barge and heads into Paris, where she is robbed and looks for work. Daste is devastated, and after an undefined period of comatose behavior, including being called onto the carpet by the shipping company boss, Simon goes into Paris to try to find Parlo.

L’Atalante was not a hit with theater owners, and was butchered and retitled by the studio. Vigo, who had shot the film during one of the coldest winters on record, was gravely ill, and could do nothing. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 29, and over the years L’Atalante has had several different versions. A new print was released in 1990 to some fanfare, and I saw that one in New York City. I wondered what all the fuss was about, but to be fair, I was suffering from a wicked ear infection at the time.

The film was restored once again in 2002, and that is the print that is on the Criterion edition. It has regularly made the decennial poll put out by Sight and Sound magazine–it’s highest ranking was in 1992, when it was chosen the sixth-best film of all time.

I certainly wouldn’t put it that high, but it in an enchanting film, with a wonderful, big-hearted performance by Simon, as well as lovely photography by Boris Kaufman (who would go on to shoot On the Waterfront). I watched it twice in the last few days (once with a commentary by Michael Temple, author of a book about Vigo) and it’s pieces of the film that stay with me, such as when Parlo, still in her white wedding gown, walks slowly along the length of the barge in twilight, looking like an apparition, or the scene when Daste jumps into the water, told by Parlo that when one looks into water one sees the love of their life.

Vigo’s untimely early death certainly robbed the world of a major talent–it’s something of the equivalent of the death of Buddy Holly to rock and roll. For those interested in the history of world cinema, his two later films are must viewing.

Film Noir: The Set-Up

A minor masterpiece, The Set-Up was directed by Robert Wise and released in 1949, and is part of my series on the best of film noir. Instead of the protagonist being a private detective, he is a boxer, but it still has all the necessary requirements of the genre. It remains one of the best boxing films of all time.

A trim seventy-two minutes, The Set-Up takes place in real time, as we are shown a street clock in the opening moments, showing about ten after nine at night, and before the film ends the same clock reads about twenty after ten. The set, which depicts a street corner in fictional Paradise City, features an arena, which advertises boxing on Wednesdays and wrestling on Fridays. Across the street is the Hotel Cozy, where Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is staying, along with his wife Julie (Audrey Totter). Ryan is a thirty-five year-old has been, still believing he’s one punch from the big time. He’s fighting a young kid on this night, and is sure he can take him. Then, he tells Totter, he may get top billing, which could mean $500, and maybe then they could buy a cigar stand in Union City.

Totter won’t go see the fight, she’s tired of seeing him get his brains beat out. He gives her her ticket and heads to the gym. Little does he know that his manager (George Tobias, later known as Abner Kravitz on Bewitched) has sold him out, taking $50 from the opponent’s manager to take a dive. The kid is owned by a local hoodlum, who has big designs on his charge. Ryan’s cornerman (Percy Helton) thinks Tobias should at least clue Ryan in, but Tobias is sure he will lose, and doesn’t want to share his spoils.

The first two thirds of the film show Wise’s brilliance with the camera and his background as an editor (he edited Citizen Kane, after all). There’s a bit of O’Neillian drama in the fighters’ dressing room, where the boxers get ready, swap stories and then head out, and come back some time later, either victorious or near unconscious. One punch-drunk fellow never tires of talking about the guy who lost 21 fights but still became middleweight champ. This is intercut with scenes from the arena, where tiny little subplots are carried out (the writer, Art Cohn, who adapted the film from a poem of all things, deserves a lot of credit here, too). There’s the blind man who enjoys having his friend describe the action to him–when the ref steps in, he calls out, “Let ‘em fight!” There’s the two suburban couples out for the evening, with one of the wives saying the last time she was at the fights she held her hands over her eyes. Of course, she turns out to be more bloodthirsty than anyone. And there’s comic relief with the silent role of the portly fellow who, every time we see him, is consuming a different concession.

Meanwhile, Totter wanders the bustling streets. She tears the ticket in half, letting it rain down from a bridge over a passing train, a marvelous shot that makes full use of image and sound.

The final third of the film is Ryan’s fight. Tobias and Helton give him bad strategy, hoping he’ll lose, but he has no idea he’s supposed to throw the fight. Wise cuts from the fight to the audience, and unlike some sports films, in which shots of the crowd are used to be excessively manipulative, the shots here are picture perfect, and there is never a wasted moment.

The fight itself is also crisply realistic. Ryan was a champion boxer in his days at Dartmouth, and the photography and low angles, with sweat flying from the fighters’ brows, clearly influenced Martin Scorsese in his shooting of Raging Bull. Scorsese provides the commentary for the DVD.

I won’t spoil the ending, because I would hope anyone who loves film will get to see this film without knowing the outcome. Not only is it a classic of its kind, but it’s also a great snapshot of a time gone by, when fight nights were part of American culture, and an underbelly of corrupt city life. For those knowledgeable of the time period, there’s a cameo by the photojournalist Weegee, who plays the timekeeper.

Hitchcock: Strangers on a Train

After Horrible Bosses besmirched the memory of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, I felt the need to see it again. It’s a good time for it, as the film turns 60 this summer, and it still seems as fresh as ever. I haven’t seen all of Hitchcock’s films (an unofficial tally comes up with 18, which is just over half) but I’d put it in my top five of his, along with Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Rear Window.

Strangers on a Train is not thought of as top-tier Hitchcock, but has all of the elements that made him great. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith (who also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley) and a script that was worked on by Raymond Chandler, the film deals, of course, with murder, but also with Hitchcock’s obsession with guilt and innocence, and of a wrong man being accused. It contains several of Hitchcock’s most famous shots and set pieces, and has one of the great portrayals of a psychopath in movie history.

For anyone who writes or makes movies, the opening is pure delight. Two men are introduced (with shots of their shoes), and meet on a train. One seems perfectly normal, the other seems a little too friendly and intimate. The latter is Bruno Anthony, played in a performance for the ages by Robert Walker, while the former is the bland Guy Haines, a tennis star, played by Farley Granger (I always thought he looked a lot like Jimmy Stewart, and wondered if he was just a fill-in, but I realize now that Stewart would have been too forceful in the role). Walker knows that Granger is married and seeking a divorce to be married to a senator’s daughter (Ruth Roman). He ruminates that a perfect murder would be one in which two men, complete strangers, swapped murders, thus eliminating motive. Granger think he’s a nut, but Walker takes Granger’s mild acquiescence as a green light.

Thus we have the first set piece, a masterful series of shots in which Walker follows Granger’s wife (Laura Elliott) to an amusement park. We know his intention, but the suspense of when and how it will happen percolates. It also includes mordant bits of humor, such as when Walker pops the balloon of a small boy with his cigarette, and the absurd sight of Walker, a solitary man in a suit and fedora, piloting a boat into the Tunnel of Love.

The murder itself is also memorable, shot through the lens of Elliott’s fallen eyeglasses. Hitchcock had a singular ability to make shots like this that had directorial flourish without calling attention to himself–they always served the story. A similar shot is when Granger, now being stalked by Walker (who feels Granger owes him a murder) sees Walker in the stands a tennis match. The heads of everyone in the stands swivel to follow the ball, but Walker’s head does not turn–he’s staring directly at Granger. If I thought of a shot like this I’d be tempted to retire.

As the film goes on and we realize just how crazy Walker is, so does Granger, and we can feel the screws tightening on him. Granger’s character is really a weak man–he seems to have been dominated by his first wife, and the script insinuates that the marriage to Roman is something of a feather in his cap, as he wants to go into politics. I found it interesting to learn that in Highsmith’s book, he does commit Walker’s murder, but in the film he is ostensibly innocent, but one can’t help feel that he somehow did do something guilty.

Walker, enraged that Granger won’t play ball, seeks to frame him by dropping Granger’s cigarette lighter, purloined in the opening scenes, at the murder site. Thus we have a great example of Hitchcock’s McGuffin, a device that everyone in the film is after but doesn’t really matter to the plot. This leads to another great scene, when Walker drops the lighter down a sewer grate. Everything rests on him getting this lighter back, and we discover, perhaps to our surprise, that we root for him to get it, as a closeup of his hand strains to reach the object. Walker, in comparison to Granger, is so interesting that it’s hard to root against him, and furthermore, if he loses the lighter, the movie is over, which is definitely what we don’t want.

Finally the film ends with the spectacular carousel crash (this was not in the original script, and thought up on the fly). It also contains humor, such as the worried mother expressing concern for her little boy on the out-of-control carousel, after which we cut to him, laughing and having the time of his life.

There isn’t a segment of this film that isn’t interesting. The supporting performances are all great, including even Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia as Roman’s sassy little sister. She is supposed to resemble Elliott, and I had somehow misremembered and thought that Patricia had played the murder victim, something I wouldn’t put past Hitchcock. I also got a kick out of the two scenes in which Marian Lorne played Walker’s mother. In the extras, Richard Schickel points out that any middle-aged woman in Hitchcock’s films were presented as monsters. Lorne, who is remembered mostly for playing Aunt Clara on Bewitched, is not exactly monstrous, but dangerously daffy, pampering Walker (we first see her giving him a manicure). She is deaf to accusations against him, and of course she paints the most grotesque paintings. It is one of many of Hitchcock’s demented mother-son relationships.

Strangers on a Train is exhilaratingly fun. Even the tennis scenes at the end are well done, which is unusual for sports scenes at the time. I find it interesting that Granger, who has to try to beat Walker to the murder site, needs to beat his opponent as quickly as possible. If I were presented with that scenario, I’d be tempted to throw the match, losing in straight sets. But Granger never considers this–he is determined to beat his opponent as quickly as possible.

In a sad footnote, Walker, who had a drinking problem, would die within the year, in his early forties. His son, who appears on the DVD extras, looks astonishingly like him.

Film Noir: Detour

Perhaps my favorite type of film is what has come to be known as film noir. The problem is, no one has really come up with a definitive definition of film noir, and some don’t even think it’s a genre–there are gangster noirs, mystery noirs, caper noirs, even Western noirs. When the Hollywood directors were making these films, they didn’t even know it was called film noir–that was a label attached by French critics in retrospect.

Over many entries on my blog I’ve stated my interpretation of what film noir is, mostly about what is not film noir. I don’t think police procedurals like The Naked City are noir, because the hero (or more precisely, antihero) of noir should be a character of mixed motives, and not a representative of uncorrupted authority. Most think of the antiheroes of film noir as being private eyes, and that they always get involved with a femme fatale, but that isn’t always the case.

Over the past few months I received two boxed sets of film noir, and I’m going to share my thoughts on them over the next several weeks. There are numerous sets like these–it seems that noir sells, and studios are repackaging any old black and white movies that might involve a crime and calling it noir. But the ten films in these two sets are all certifiable noir, and all very good examples (I’ve seen them all before, but not for several years).

They don’t include some of the best of the type, such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Crossfire, Narrow Margin, or Night in the City, but it’s a good sampling nonetheless. All of these films were made in the golden age of noir, 1944-1950.

I start with Detour, made in 1945 by Edgar G. Ulmer. This is a B-picture, made on a shoestring, with a no-name cast. In many ways it looks lousy, but as many critics have written, it stays with you like a bad dream. It follows many of the “rules” of film noir–it’s reminiscent of German expressionism, it has dream-like qualities, it’s strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. It’s also a trim sixty-seven minutes, but seems to have more to it than a film twice that length.

The film concerns Al Roberts (Tom Neal, who ironically would go on to serve time in prison for manslaughter), a pianist in a New York nightclub. His fiancee goes to Hollywood to try to make it as an actress, and he decides to hitchhike to go see her. He gets a ride with a high-rolling bookie, and they hit it off, at least until the man accidentally dies. Neal, realizing the police would never believe his story, hides the body and takes the man’s car.

Later, he stops at a gas station and gives a lift to a woman. He describes her, in great pulp language, as looking like “she was thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.” She’s played by Anne Savage, in one of the nastiest performances in all of noir. In technical terms, it’s not a great performance–it would seem that Ulmer just told her to be the bitchiest she could be, but boy does she deliver.

Savage, it turns out, knows that Neal isn’t who he says he is, and blackmails him into taking part in a hare-brained scheme. I won’t spoil it anymore than that, except to say there’s a nasty bit of business with a telephone cord. Neal narrates the story himself, sitting at a diner as he contemplates his fate.

Detour is cheaply made, and their are several home video versions. I’m not sure if it’s the quality of the film or intentional that the tinting of the black and white photography changes from scene to scene–sometimes it’s more blue, other times more brown. Also, some scenes were botched but instead of reshoots, Ulmer flipped the negative, so it looks like the cars are being driven in England.

But the undeniable power of Detour is the elemental forces of desperation, greed, and guilt. Savage, we are led to believe, has some sort of terminal illness. Neal is bitter because he’s a classically-trained pianist who plays for tips in a nightclub. The movie seems soaked in vinegar, and the existential dread is palpable. This is a must-see for those who like these sorts of films–you’ll never forget it.

1960: A Rose in a Garbage Pail

It’s time for my annual look back at the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar fifty years ago, which takes me back to 1960, when Kennedy and Nixon were running against each other, Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, and Don Draper came up with calling the Kodak slide wheel a “carousel.”

The films from 1960 that have the most lasting legacy are Psycho and Breathless. Neither were nominated for Best Picture, although Psycho did get some nominations, including Alfred Hitchcock for Best Director and Janet Leigh for Best Supporting Actress. Though Hitchcock was the most famous working director at the time, it can be understood that his experiment in making a B-picture, especially one about a murderous transvestite, didn’t get top laurels. Breathless, a debut picture from a French New Wave director, broke many of the rules of filmmaking, so that it was left out is not surprising in the least.

Where we can fault the Academy is nominating John Wayne’s bloated vanity production, The Alamo. Wayne had it in his head that the doomed stand of Texans trying to hold off an assault by Mexican troops in 1836 was representative of American courage and freedom. Of course nowhere in the film is it mentioned that one of the reasons Texans wanted independence was because the Mexican government had outlawed slavery. Ah, the strange way early Americans espoused freedom while holding other people in involuntary servitude!

Wayne directed, though he had a hard time raising the money, as studios wanted someone like John Ford to direct. So we get a very long film (the DVD is 162 minutes, which is the short version) of a typical John Wayne film (he plays Davy Crockett as if he were just another Wayne cowboy). The battle itself doesn’t come until the last half hour of the film. There is almost nothing about the film that is historically accurate.

A much more interesting film is Elmer Gantry, directed by Richard Brooks and adapted from the 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis. Brooks’ script gives Gantry much more shading than the book, where he is an outright villain. In the film, Gantry (played effervescently by Burt Lancaster in an Oscar-winning role) is an appliance salesman who becomes fascinated by an tent-revival evangelist, Jean Simmons. He is a master con man, and gets close to her, and the pair become a team, with Gantry whipping up the crowd during meetings. But his performance is full of ambiguity, as we’re never quite sure he believes what he says. We do think his love for Simmons is real, but it remains an intriguing mystery.

Lewis’ novel was condemned in its day for its portrayal of religion as just another commodity to be sold, but by 1960 that wasn’t so controversial any more, and the film softens its attack. Shirley Jones also won an Oscar, shattering her image as a wholesome star of musicals like Oklahoma! and Carousel by playing a hard-as-nails prostitute.

Sons and Lovers was also based on a classic novel, this time one by D.H. Lawrence, set in England right before World War I. The film, directed by Jack Cardiff, only covers the last half of the book, which is about Paul Martel (Dean Stockwell), an artistic young man growing up in the coal country of the Midlands. His father, Trevor Howard, is a mean drunk, and his mother, Wendy Hiller, holds the apron strings a little too tightly.

As one would imagine with a work by Lawrence, the film deals frankly with sexuality. Paul is friendly with a young girl from the village, but she has been so brainwashed by her mother’s religious fervor that she views love as spiritual only, not physical. So Paul finds his way into the bed of a married woman, Mary Ure, but she recognizes that Paul will never break free of his mother’s control. It’s a very good character study, and Freddie Francis’ black and white cinematography won the Oscar.

The Sundowners, directed by Fred Zinneman, is an old-fashioned (and corny) family adventure set in Australia during the 1920s. Robert Mitchum plays a drover who is constantly on the move, looking for his next job, not wanting to settle down. But his wife (marvelously played by Deborah Kerr) and son want to put down roots and have a permanent home. They have a series of adventures: battling a brush fire, taking jobs sheep-shearing at a ranch, and then owning a race horse. They are joined by Peter Ustinov as a sardonic Englishman. It’s all very unobjectionable but not very intriguing. Mitchum’s Aussie accent comes and goes.

The very deserving winner was Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the only one of this quintet that deserves classic status. Mislabeled as a comedy (one of the working titles was Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?–thank goodness it was changed), The Apartment is a searing study of urban alienation. It’s opening scenes recall another film, The Crowd, which is about the same subject.

Jack Lemmon stars as an anonymous cog in a big insurance company. He’s been currying favor by letting middle managers use his bachelor apartment for their extramarital trysts. When the big boss, Fred MacMurray (in an inspired choice of casting) finds out, he demands that Lemmon let him on the fun, too. The catch–his mistress is elevator-operator Shirley MacLaine, whom Lemmon is in love with.

Not everyone liked this film when it came out. Many critics were put off by the open discussion of adultery, and one said that Wilder had “grown a rose in a garbage pail.”

Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script is so rich, and the cinematography by Joseph LaShelle is lit as if for a noir film. Every time I watch it I can’t help but feel a little heart-throb for MacLaine, as she plays the kind of character I would be over the moon for. The closing scene, when Lemmon tells her he loves her while shuffling a deck of cards, is almost as great an ending as Wilder’s film from the year before, Some Like It Hot.

Full reviews of these films, plus some others from 1960, are on my blog, Go-Go-Rama.

Bergman: The Magician

A few years ago I did a multipart series on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and at the time I regretted that I couldn’t write about The Magician, because it wasn’t available on DVD. Well it is now, on a pristine Criterion Edition disc, and I viewed it last night. It is sublime.

Made in 1958, a year after my favorite Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, it starts out similarly to that film. A troupe of entertainers are traveling across the countryside by carriage, only this time it’s not the Middle Ages, but 1846. The travelers include a mysterious magician/Mesmerist named Albert Vogler (Max Von Sydow), who wears a fake beard and wig and is mute. He is accompanied by his wife (Ingrid Thulin), who poses as a young man, a loud and vulgar master of ceremonies (Åke Fridell), and Vogler’s ancient grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), who sells love potions and tells people she’s 200 years old.

Hearing reports of strange occurrences at his performances, the leaders of the town compel the troupe, who call themselves Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater, to perform for them. They are a bureaucrat, Egerman (Erland Josephson), his sexually frustrated wife (Gertrud Fridh), the pompous and toupeed Chief of Police (Toivo Pawlo), and most diabolical, a Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand). Josephson and Björnstrand have bet, with the doctor taking the position that there is no such thing as the supernatural, and he means to expose Vogler as a fraud.

Knowing Bergman’s other films helps here, as he re-uses character names. Vogler was also the name of the mute Liv Ullman in Persona, Egerman was a name he used frequently for ridiculous bureaucrats and noblemen, and Vergerus was a name used for the villainous, most memorably for me as the treacherous clergyman in Fanny and Alexander.

The film’s Swedish title is Ansiktet, The Face, and it ties in with Bergman’s recurring theme of the masks people wear, which can be found in almost every film he ever made. Von Sydow, of course, is wearing a disguise, as is Thulin, but we all wear some sort of mask during the course of our lives. But beyond that Bergman explores, in a parallel manner, two antagonisms–art vs. science, and the artist vs. his audience.

In the supplemental materials, Peter Cowie relates that this film was made at the end of a seven-year run Bergman had as the director of a theater in Malmo. He was fed up with the audiences he was getting, and vented his spleen by depicting Vogler’s audience as hypocrites and liars (early on, Thulin reads from a book that a land was so rife with deception that those who told the truth were seen as the biggest liars). Von Sydow can hardly stand to be in their presence.

That is the innermost layer, but the more easy to spot is the battle between art and science, as well as the other things symbolized by the fatcats in the audience–authority and bureaucracy. Björnstrand tells Thulin, as he tries to seduce her, “You represent what I hate the most–the inexplicable.”

The Magician also has an underlying sense of menace, starting with the carriage ride through spooky woods, when they find an old actor who seemingly dies (no one seems to stay dead in this film), and climaxes with one of the most frightening sequences I’ve ever seen, when the presumed ghost of Von Sydow menaces Björnstrand.

Whether seen as Bergman’s “fuck you” to his bourgeois audience or as a chilling tale of suspense, The Magician only adds to my esteem for the great director.