by ·Comments Off on Silver Linings Playbook (2012, David O. Russell)

Our second “guy just out of mental institution struggles to readjust” romantic drama-comedy in a row, after The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This one seemed to try harder for slightly lesser results. But the two leads were great, and Robert De Niro and Chris Tucker are better than they’ve been since Jackie Brown.

Bradley Cooper is our disturbed hero – I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who mainly knows him from Midnight Meat Train, yet there was a MMT reference in this movie – and Jennifer Winter’s Bone Lawrence is his disturbed new friend with whom he tries to enter a dance competition. Bradley moves back in with his mom (Jacki Weaver from Picnic at Hanging Rock) and dad (compulsive gambler De Niro) and spends all his time stalking his ex-wife and hurting J-Lawrence’s feelings, until they realize after the dance thing that they were meant for each other.

Also, Dewart from Take Shelter plays Bradley’s brother and Dash Mihok from The Thin Red Line shows up as a cop.

by ·Comments Off on The Charters and Caldicott Trilogy

I’ve always wanted to watch The Lady Vanishes, and since I found out that it has two recurring characters who appear in two other Criterion-released British wartime comedies, I checked out all three.

The Lady Vanishes (1938, Alfred Hitchcock)

Opens with the fakest model town since Beetlejuice. The DVD extras and interviews make much of how cheaply-made the film was, but after the first scene you never notice it. Snappy, briskly-plotted comedy-mystery with charming leads – at least as good as The 39 Steps.

Our eventually-romantic couple:

Margaret Lockwood meets annoying freewheeling musicologist Michael Redgrave in her hotel, tries to get him kicked out for making too much noise. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to a new hit comic duo Charters and Caldicott – the gimmick is that they’re incredibly British, clueless about foreign customs, but always travelling.

C&C:

They’re all on the same train out of town, along with Linden Travers (title role in No Orchids for Miss Blandish), her lying secret lover Cecil Parker (Ingrid Bergman’s unmemorable brother-in-law in Indiscreet), a not-at-all-sinister surgeon with a neat mustache (Paul Lukas, oscar winner in ’44), travelling magician Doppo and a thoroughly pleasant British woman named Froy (May Whitty, wealthy flower grower in Mrs. Miniver). But then Froy vanishes and Margaret seems to be the only person who remembers her. All the Germans (they’re from Unspecified Euro-Country, but they have nazi-like tendencies and this was the pre-WWII era, so let’s call them German) lie because Froy is a spy and they’ve kidnapped her, and all the Brits lie because they don’t want to get involved. But Margaret finds an ally in the musicologist and they set off to cracking the mystery, which involves fighting the magician through secret compartments and dealing with a fake nun. Trains are diverted, and Charters and Caldicott step up (and the cheater gets killed) in a climactic shootout. It’s all too tense and fun to worry that the central premise and the secret Froy is protecting are all ridiculous – Hitchcock admits so himself in his Truffaut interview.

Lukas with giant poisoned drinks, reminiscent of The Small Back Room:

Hitch’s second-to-last British picture (Jamaica Inn was last) Writer of the original story also did The Spiral Staircase. Remade in the 70’s with Angela Lansbury as Froy. It all reminded me of Shanghai Express, though I guess train dramas were pretty common.

G. O’Brien:

The whole film breathes an air of delight like nothing else in Hitchcock. The central situation—the disappearance of a woman whose very existence is subsequently denied by everyone but the protagonist—may seem to provide the perfect matrix for the kind of paranoid melodrama that would proliferate a few years later, in the forties, in films like Phantom Lady, Gaslight, and My Name Is Julia Ross, but here the dark shadows of conspiracy are countered by a brightness and brilliance of tone almost Mozartean in its equanimity. Most of the time we are too exhilarated to be frightened.

C. Barr:

While the train speeds Iris back toward her loveless marriage, her attempt to solve the mystery of Miss Froy’s disappearance is blocked by the obstinate intransigence of her countrymen, working in unconscious collaboration with the forces of European fascism that have kidnapped her. Clearly, this gave the film an especially potent meaning for the England of 1938, a time when the ruling classes were still working to appease Hitler and a class-stratified country was patently unready to pull together effectively if war should nonetheless become unavoidable.

Night Train to Munich (1940, Carol Reed)

See if this sounds familiar: Margaret Lockwood meets and immediately dislikes a handsome musician who ends up helping her flee from nazis aboard a train. Rex Harrison (Unfaithfully Yours) seems blander than her Lady Vanishes costar at first, but ends up being the highlight of the film. The effects are even cheaper-looking than the previous picture, but the action’s all there and the stakes are higher, war with Germany having started.

Charters didn’t have many options at the German railway book store:

Lockwood is the daughter of a Czech scientist working on some super armor. They flee to England as the nazis invade, hiding out with music salesman Rex, but get easily kidnapped by rival spy Paul Henreid (more dashing here than as Bergman’s husband in Casablanca) and flown to Germany. Not taking this defeat lying down, Rex grabs a nazi uniform, forges himself a letter of introduction with unreadable signature and flies down in to kidnap them back, all ending up aboard the titular train, where Charters and Caldicott are miffed to learn that Britain has declared war on Germany that same day, and so the ever-patriotic comic duo help our heroes escape the train to safety, via a cable-car shootout.

Margaret and Rex:

Defeated Henreid:

P. Kemp:

If its view of the Third Reich now seems frivolous, not to say naive, it should be remembered that it was made, and released, during the period known as the Phony War—before France fell, the British Army narrowly escaped annihilation at Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe began to rain bombs on British cities. At that time, with the full horrors of Nazism not yet widely known, Hitler and his storm troopers were often treated as figures of fun (other British films of the period, such as Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, adopt a similar stance). … [Henreid] plays Marsen not unsympathetically, far from the standard ranting Nazi blowhard, and the final shot of him lying wounded and defeated, watching his rival make off with everything, including the girl, even exerts a certain pathos.

Crook’s Tour (1941, John Baxter)

A huge step down from the previous films. It’s not necessarily the fault of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott, who now play the leads, foiling an enemy spy plot and even getting the girl. They’ve got a new set of writers and a lesser director, and the whole thing feels cheap and unnecessary, and rarely funny – the silly cartoon music does it no favors.

This time the guys are touring the middle east, and Caldicott (the smaller, mustache-less one) is engaged to marry Charters’ sister Edith, whom they’re meeting in Budapest. Some setup in the Saudi desert where they meet a sheik (Charles Oliver, who had small roles in all three movies) who went to Charters’ school in England, who mentions that he’s protecting the British oil pipeline from German shit-starters. Then a ludicrous mixup with a ridiculous waiter leads them to gain possession of a gramophone record containing secret German plans to steal oil from the Saudis. Caldicott has eyes for Greta Gynt, and nobody seems to think it’s super weird that she’s the live entertainment at the next two cities they visit as well.

I didn’t know this kind of thing was allowed in the 1940’s:

Greta has an owl!

Baddie Ali (Abraham Sofaer of Bhowani Junction) is accidentally killed when Charters pushes him into the “bathroom,” which turns out to be a hole straight into the sea. Edith (Noel Hood, somebody’s aunt in The Curse of Frankenstein) shows up and gets mad that Caldicott is involved in spy-business with Greta. Ali’s partner Rossenger is a terrible spy, so his boss Cyril Gardiner gets involved, promises to kill and torture and all that, but our heroes (including Greta, a British spy all along) manage to escape.

Baddies Ali, Rossenger and double-agent Greta:

I’m aware that there’s another C&C movie, Millions Like Us, directed by Lady Vanishes and Night Train writers Launder and Gilliat. Holding off on watching it for now, since I presume the deluxe Criterion restoration is just around the corner.

by ·Comments Off on Battling Butler (1926, Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline)

Based on a hit stage play. Rich, useless Alfred Butler goes on a ludicrously well-outfitted camping trip with his valet and meets a beautiful mountain girl. But he can’t marry her without impressing her father and brother, strong wilderness men. Fortunately Alfred shares a name with an up-and-coming lightweight boxer, so they pretend that he’s “Battling” Butler, and he marries the girl. He’s off to the boxer’s training camp to keep up the charade, and Keaton goes from fake-training to real-training when the other Butler swaps roles with him, leaving Keaton to face the Alabama Murderer for the championship. But the boxer returns, wins the fight then gets plastered by Keaton in the dressing room after being a huge asshole to everyone.

Happy ending:

Battling B with Keaton’s valet:

The Haunted House (1921)

Crooks have a foolproof plan to avoid capture: make their hideaway into a haunted house. But first: Keaton and Big Joe Roberts are bank clerks, and Joe’s men are planning a heist. Keaton foils the holdup through incompetence, having spilled glue on all the money. Mistaken for a criminal, the cops are after him, and an angry audience is after the cast of a nearby stage performance of Faust – all end up at the house, with Big Joe’s thieves donning ghost costumes and pulling levers to turn the stairs into a ramp (which would be frustrating but not exactly scary). Keaton again foils the robbers and gets the girl (I forgot to mention there was a girl). Also Keaton gets konked on the head and goes to heaven then hell. And it’s only a twenty minute movie.

And this happens:

with Virginia Fox of The Love Nest, The Playhouse, Neighbors, etc.

The Frozen North (1922)

Keaton falls asleep during a movie and imagines himself in the sort of town where Chaplin would lose and then get the girl in The Gold Rush. A weird short which makes little sense, with Keaton as the bad guy: opens with him holding up a casino before he shoots a neighbor couple to death as a gag. He loses another girl, shacks up in Big Joe’s igloo, goes snowshoeing and ice fishing (what else can you do in the frozen north?) then gets shot going after that girl again. Apparently a parody of western director William S. Hart’s films – Keaton was feuding with Hart over the Fatty Arbuckle scandal.

Keaton emotes:

And turns into Erich von Stroheim:

Janitor Eddie Cline:

by ·Comments Off on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Robert Zemeckis)

Having worked in animation for a decade, I still don’t know how they did some of the stuff in this movie. Pretty fantastic. Katy was impressed by Christopher Lloyd’s sinister plot: to buy and shut down the bus company, then destroy Toontown to make room for a freeway, then profit off gas stations and convenience stores. Neither of us understood much of that on initial release, but it’s not important – you just need to realize that Lloyd has an Evil Plan.

A guy named Stubby (also Nicely-Nicely in Guys and Dolls) plays Marvin Acme, benevolent ruler of Toontown who is killed after getting caught playing pattycake with Roger’s wife. Detective Bob Hoskins is off-and-on dating Joanna Cassidy (of Blade Runner). He’s a former toon lover turned into a bitter drunk by the death of his brother (caused by Lloyd, which neatly ties everything together). Also great: Donald vs. Daffy piano duel, Droopy as an elevator man, Baby Herman and the talking cab.

by ·Comments Off on Max Ophüls double-feature

Madame de… (1952)

A talky rich-person drama with lots of fainting – not usually my thing. Of course it’s sumptuously shot, and I got caught up in the drama by the end.

The earrings of Madame:

Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, costars of Mayerling seventeen years earlier, are an upper-class married couple (she also played a married cheater in La Ronde, and I know Boyer from Stavisky twenty years later and Liliom twenty years earlier). He’s a general and a count, and she’s a socialite, secretly running up debts, so she sells a pair of diamond earrings, a gift from her husband.

Boyer in bed:

After she claims to have lost her earrings there’s a blow-up about possible theft at the theater, so the jeweler (Jean Debucourt of The Eagle Has Two Heads) contacts the general, tells him the story, and Boyer buys them back, gives them as a parting gift to his affair Lola. She immediately gambles them away and they’re bought by Baron Vittorio De Sica (the year after he shot Umberto D, six years before Il Generale della Rovere), who sees Madame Darrieux then stalks her at every party until she falls in love with him.

He eventually gives her the earrings, and she claims to have found the lost earrings – a sign to her husband of her extramarital affair, and a reminder of his. Feelings are hurt, honor is challenged, a duel is arranged – she gives away the earrings to a church before fainting to death as her husband shoots Baron Vittorio off-camera.

Ophuls’s second-to-last film, after Le Plaisir. Written by Louise de Vilmorin, who would adapt other writers’ stories into screenplays on The Immortal Story on Malle’s The Lovers.

M. Haskell:

[Madame de…], beginning in the lilting superficiality of a frivolous woman looking to pawn her jewels and ending in death and the ironic sanctification of those jewels, is Ophuls at his bleakest and most beautiful. The very opulence and swirl of the world from which Madame de is ostracizing herself — the opera, the gowns, the balls, the jewels, the servants — will be stripped away as love burns through the outer layers of life. A woman is rescued from shallowness and inauthenticity, but at what a price!

The Reckless Moment (1949)

The last of his quartet of Hollywood films (nobody ever talks about the Douglas Fairbanks period drama The Exile). Ophuls’ attempts at style and elegance are mostly lost here, trampled by the silly thriller plot of this cheapie noir.

Best part is Joan Bennett (star of four Fritz Lang films in the 40’s) who goes to ever-lower depths to protect her foolish young daughter who’s been going out with a sleazeball (Shepperd Strudwick, who’d once starred as Edgar Allen Poe). Joan drives from her idyllic small lake town into the big scary city to tell the guy to piss off, but he comes by the house that night, falling to his death onto an anchor after the girl whacks him on the head with a flashlight. Great, wordless scene follows as Joan discovers the body the next morning then dumps it in the lake.

So the cops have found the body and suddenly irish-accented James Mason (returning from Ophuls’s Caught six months earlier) shows up to blackmail Joan over the dead guy. She tries to raise the cash, but with her husband out of town can’t manage it. Fortunately, unbelievably, Mason falls for her and tries to protect her from his partner who still wants the money (Mason is a terrible blackmailer). They nearly kill each other and Mason stages a car crash to get Joan off the hook.

Mason in the shadows:

Since it’s a 1940’s movie the family has a black housekeeper, Cybil, who once says an entire line fully on-camera that got erased by the music score. Wonder what it was. Joan’s daughter mostly pouts in her room while Joan’s insufferably hollywood-youth-talkin’ son putters with his jalopy.

Based on a story for Ladies Home Journal, naturally. Remade with Tilda Swinton in 2001.

by ·Comments Off on Chocolat (1988, Claire Denis)

A young white woman named France (Mereille Perrier of Boy Meets Girl) hitching rides through Cameroon flashes back to when she was young and Isaach de Bankole used to feed her ants. Her dad (Francois Cluzet of Chabrol’s L’Enfer) was a colonialist governor and Protee (Bankole) their house servant.

Protee and mom:

When dad attends to local and distant affairs, France and mom (Giulia Boschi) and Protee stay home showing each other displays of power and hidden attraction. A nearby missionary is having a difficult time because lions have killed all his farm animals. The house chef pretends to consult his cookbook, but can’t read.

Young France:

Finally a Big Event: a plane crash-lands nearby and the pilot and passengers stay with the family while getting parts and repairs. Their stay causes all sorts of racial tension. A self-important coffee-grower has a weird relationship with his black housekeeper. One of the white passengers works on the plane with the black locals, eventually starts sleeping and bathing outside, getting on Protee’s nerves. Some of the passengers are more blatantly, vocally racist than the family is used to. Protee is kicked out of the house, plays a weird trick on the little girl where they both end up with their palms burned.

Older France:

Senses of Cinema: “a semi-autobiographical film that functions as a political allegory examining gender, age and colonial relationships.”

Raised by missionaries into a white colonialist culture, removed from his cultural and racial heritage and emasculated by the domestic duties he performs, Protee is a liminal figure trapped between two cultures. This is clearly signified by the arrival of Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), a young lapsed priest who lives, eats and showers outside like the native servants. Luc threatens Protee, upsets the fragile equanimity, and induces Aimee’s betrayal of Protee and in turn Protee’s betrayal of France. This moment of betrayal explains the transformation in France’s gaze from the innocence and intensity of a child to the cynical wary gaze of an adult remembering and re-examining a complicated past.

by ·Comments Off on Forest for the Trees (2003, Maren Ade)

Not all mumblecore comedies of young-adult awkwardness come from the States, apparently. This one is from German filmmaker Ade, one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50.

Melanie moves to a new town where she knows nobody, starting work as a teacher, breaking up with her boyfriend (who helps her move). She is enthusiastic to the point of desperation – gives all her neighbors gifts to introduce herself. She dodges a fellow teacher who wants to hang out with her, manages to make friends with a woman named Tina across the courtyard instead. But Tina has friends, throws parties, is in a relationship, deals with personal problems, and doesn’t want to hang out with Melanie 100% of the time – so Melanie becomes more and more desperate and stalkerish.

Adult life isn’t going too well. She even goes to a petting zoo and gets pushed around by little horses. Nothing intensely interesting happens until the final scene, where Melanie goes for a drive alone listening to Grandaddy and decides to crawl into the backseat and stare out the side window while the car is still going.

Pretty good little indie movie – I don’t get all the excitement, but I’ll take Cinema Scope’s word for it and watch her next movie. She’s also recently worked on Ulrich Kohler and Miguel Gomes movies I wanted to see. M. Peranson in Cinema Scope says this was her “DV student-film debut” and mentions that Melanie’s accent is a source of humor for native Germans.

by ·Comments Off on The Barkleys of Broadway (1949, Charles Walters)

A fluke Fred & Ginger movie ten years after their other collaborations. They’re a married song-and-dance act, best friends with their songwriter Oscar Levant (I liked him more than I did in The Band Wagon – he gets a good solo piano number here). Ginger’s husband is critical of her performance but smooth-talking stage director Jacques Francois says she’s wonderful and should do dramatic work. So Fred carries on with understudy Gale Robbins while his wife acts with the french guy, but Fred sneaks into rehearsals and secretly gives her acting tips. She finds out, they get back together.

Too much breaking-up and acting serious, not enough dance numbers

This Scottish routine was horrible:

The best scene is Fred solo as an enchanted-shoe salesman:

by ·Comments Off on 8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)

I remembered the atmosphere of this movie but not the story or characters, so watched it again – turns out it’s 98% atmosphere. What story? What characters? Even Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido is a weak and confused lead. Instead it’s an impressionistic glimpse into Fellini’s life and work, a film about filmmaking, or about itself. I’m not saying anything that everyone doesn’t already know, but I had to be reminded – there’s not really a story of Guido casting and shooting some big picture, just fragments: agents and critics and hangers-on as the director deals with his fame, personal life and artistic indecision.

Opens with a wordless dream sequence – film director Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) floats away from an oppressive traffic jam, flies over the ocean but is roped and pulled down by business partners.

Guido is “taking the cure” at a vacation retreat, prescribed holy water, keeps running into people he knows in a sort of choreographed dance of acquaintances. Soon he’s on his film set, arguing with a writer (Daurmier?) who criticizes the script, placating coworkers and avoiding making decisions. Soon I lose all ability to describe plot or characters as it spirals inevitably into the spinning whirl of an ending.

I’ve seen an even five of Fellini’s 7 1/2 previous films. Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo shot about half the Italian movies I’ve heard of – this was his first for Fellini, having just worked on L’Eclisse.

Guido

Claudia Cardinale of The Leopard the same year, supposed to be starring in Guido’s film, seems good-natured about the whole thing.

wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée, shortly after Lola) with mistress Carla (Sandra Milo of Juliet of the Spirits)

His buddy Mario Pisu with new mistress Barbara Steele

Magician Ian Dallas, who according to IMDB inspired the song Layla. He and his apparently psychic partner pull magic words from Guido’s psyche cueing a flashback schene wherein young Guido is told that these words could make a portrait come to life… a “motion picture,” if you will.

Saraghina, wild woman of Guido’s youth

Guido and Carla

A. Sesonske:

8 1/2 is a film about making a film, and the film that is being made is 8 1/2. Notice how everything Guido says about the film he is making turns out to be true of 8 1/2, even the sailor doing a soft-shoe dance; how all the screen tests are for roles in the film we are seeing; how some camera movements create an ambiguity between Guido, the director in the film, and Fellini, the director of the film, thus taking self-reference one step beyond the work to its maker.

Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969)

“I composed a poem on the ruins of your film.”

This masquerades as a documentary on Fellini’s working methods, but is really a self-conscious fake-doc made by Fellini himself. Suspension of disbelief lasted about 30 seconds – you can’t convince anyone you’re making a documentary, interviewing random people on the street, when all the voices are badly dubbed.

In 1966-ish the director was to film Mastorna, “perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema.” Its half-built sets sit unused on huge lots, so Fellini shoots them here, haunted by poets, then roams Rome at night. All the places he goes are full of people who seem like… well, like characters in Fellini films.

Giulietta Masina introduces the “man with the sack” sequence from Nights of Cabiria, which at this point had never been seen, claiming it’s based on a true story. Some Satyricon, then we get a frenetic sepia-toned ancient-Rome silent short watched by a screaming audience (including a raptly attentive young Fellini).

Recreating Fellini’s childhood cinema:

A cab ride with a clairvoyant, and a subway ride with a professor. This last one is great because he tries to talk about lost societies beneath Rome but Fellini keeps interrupting, asking him to speak into the camera – then their train accidentally travels through time, proving the professor’s point.

We visit Mastroianni, who gives us a fake screen test, then off to an early morning slaughterhouse to summon the feeling of ancient sacrifices, where the workers keep transforming into ancient Romans. Then a stream of non-actors come to Fellini’s office to submit themselves for film roles.

That’s F.F. at left:

Criterion: “Producer Peter Goldfarb … had suggested the project as a way for Fellini to deal with his inability to make the film The Voyage of G. Mastorna. As Tullio Kezich and others have pointed out, 8 1/2 is strikingly prophetic of this development in Fellini’s career.”