by ·Comments Off on Summer With Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)

A handsome young man with always-perfect hair and a boring, sickly widower father meets a vivacious girl from a turbulent household. And they fall in love, run off together, and it’s perfect. Or it would be, but the movie sticks with them long enough for her to get pregnant, forcing an eventual return to civilization, at which point she makes herself useless, sleeping around while he slaves to make a living and tries to save for their future. It does not end well for the couple. But at least they’ve got their health.

Beautiful, amazing looking film shot by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who shot all of Bergman’s most famous films in the 40’s and 50’s. Harriet Anderson would appear in some more Bergman films as well as Dogville and The Day the Clown Cried (really). Harry (Lars Ekborg) wasn’t as excellent as Monika was, and thus was only rewarded with a small role in The Magician.

Released in the States in 1956 as an hour-long edit retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl, which is the version that hit U.S. arthouses like a bomb, shocking people who’d gotten used to boringly chaste homemade product like From Here to Eternity, leading horny adults to start frequenting foreign films, which continued until home video destroyed the trend since now we could see all the bare breasts we wanted at home.

D. Micevic:

It happens near the end of the story, after an idyllic summer between two young lovers, Monika and Harry, has turned sour and they awake from their idealistic dreams to an existence of poverty and acrimony. Monika sits in a café smoking a cigarette, about to bed another lover. The camera closes in on her face—Bergman’s calling card of extreme close-ups during moments of intense personal anguish. Yet, in an instant uncharacteristic of the director, Monika looks directly at the camera as everything surrounding her fades to black. The shot holds for nearly a minute, preventing our escape as Monika stares us down, challenging us to pass judgment on her. It would be easy to scorn her decision, but Bergman provides us with no pedestal from which to condescend. If we are to reprimand her, we must confront her directly. It’s unnerving and brilliant, and this moment alone is worth consideration for anyone even slightly familiar with the director.

Bergman: “I have never made a less complicated film than Summer with Monika. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom.”

by ·Comments Off on Lady of Burlesque (1943, William A. Wellman)

Another in an unplanned series of taboo-breaking sexy movies from different time periods. This one is set in a burlesque theater and has sexy dancers being murdered by a g-string strangler. Must’ve been seriously hot stuff in the sexless 40’s. Katy and I had a hard time believing this was such a late Stanwyck film, coming after Remember the Night and Ball of Fire, because the print was in such rough shape it felt older. Backstage drama popping with fast-talking slang for the first half, becomes a slave to its murder-mystery plot by the end. Barbara Stanwyck ends up with a clown named Biff (Michael O’Shea of Fixed Bayonets). One of the girls appeared three years later in something called Queen of Burlesque, which also features strangled bodies found in trunks.

by ·Comments Off on From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinnemann)

Watched one of the most romantic films of all time, recommended by TCM Essentials, on valentine’s day, only to find it neither romantic nor essential. In fact, I didn’t like it much at all, and am dismayed that Zinnemann won a directing oscar over Wilder, Wyler and Stevens. Adapted from an extremely popular, gritty and pessimistic James Jones novel (I found his Thin Red Line tedious and overlong), the adaptation is from a weird time in film history when movies wanted to be gritty and pessimistic themselves but weren’t allowed to by the censors. So the message is muddled, beloved characters from the book brought to life only to behave against their nature, which may explain why I got so little out of it.

But it doesn’t explain the lack of romance, and here I’m not blaming the film but its reputation. One shot of Lancaster and Kerr clinching on the beach as a wave hits has become shorthand for eroticism in pre-60’s cinema – but it’s a shot, not a scene. Immediately after that shot, they stand up and bicker. Kerr hates her husband, is cheating with Burt, who leaves her because he’s “married to the army,” while a drunken Monty Clift falls for prostitute Donna Reed (that’s from the book – in the film she’s a chaste hostess paid to smile politely, talking and dancing with soldiers, a career I’m not convinced has ever existed) then dies stupidly, so after the harbor is bombed Reed sails home alone and Kerr stays with her now-disgraced husband whom she still hates. Some great romance.

The dialogue was generally unmemorable, the cinematography nothing special and the editing sometimes distracting. The actors all seemed decent, not award-winningly spectacular. Clift was more energized than his surroundings, an early Method proponent who’d get drunk to play drunk (then again, I hear he also got drunk to play sober). And I wouldn’t be such a valentine humbug, attacking every facet of the movie, if Katy had at least enjoyed it, which she did not.

Some CAST:
Lancaster: a few years before Sweet Smell of Success
First movie I’ve seen with Monty Clift: he did Hitchcock’s I Confess the same year.
Deborah Kerr: six years after Black Narcissus and looking quite different, almost anonymous without the nun’s habit
Donna Reed: the year after Scandal Sheet
Earliest movie I’ve seen with Frank Sinatra, who was wiry and good in this
Philip Ober acted with Burt again in Elmer Gantry
early film for Ernest Borgnine, who played another bad guy in Johnny Guitar the next year.

Remade as a massive miniseries in 1979 with Kim Basinger as Reed, Natalie Wood as Kerr, William “Who?” Devane as Lancaster, and Peter Boyle (the monster in Young Frankenstein) in the Borgnine role.

by ·1 Comment

One of my most beloved 80’s horror movies, possibly because it’s never been very popular, nor has it been spoiled by sequels (part 2 wasn’t so bad) or remakes (though Bill S. Preston, Esq. has his eyes on one). I watched it again and again on TV, and since it’s not rated R, I probably didn’t miss much. Thanks much to the Plaza and Splatter Cinema, I have now seen it in an actual cinema on actual film. It’s kind of a kids movie, and I still take issue with a giant earth-conquering demon from hell being defeated by a kid with a model rocket, but otherwise perfectly enjoyable.

I’d forgotten some details: a couple of valuable geodes pulled from the hole early on, friend Terry’s dead-mother issues and his collection of moths in a jar. Also didn’t realize how kids’ toys are woven into the movie. There’s the rocket of course – I’d misremembered the devil-thwarting “pure love and light” being a marketing slogan on the rocket’s box, but the shabby, dollar-bin-design box just has a rainbow on it. I guess it’s Dorff’s belief in the rocket as a symbol of love/light that wins out, like the kid in Stephen King’s It spraying monsters with his inhaler while shouting “this is acid!” More child’s play: the hole is initially opened far enough to let those awesome ankle-biting micro-demons out when the kids read words formed by the geode on a toy writing tablet, evil demon-Terry is stabbed with a barbie doll, and the secret of demon banishment is discovered by playing a record backwards. That one is especially fun in a subversive way – parents used to worry that kids would pick up secret satanic messages from metal albums, and this one teaches them how to fight evil, not how to summon it.

Director Tibor, as has been discussed here already, made the pretty cool I, Madman, then Gate II, and went slowly downhill towards the truly stinky Christian Slater movie Lies & Illusions. Writer Michael Nankin is directing respectable TV shows (and CSI) these days. Dorff’s big sister Christa Denton never made it out of the eighties, acting-wise (although one of her slumber-party friends later starred in Candyman 2), and tragically, neither did Louis Tripp, who played Terry, except for a rumored cameo in a late-90’s Edward Furlong comedy.

by ·1 Comment

After watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, which documents the director’s experiments with visual effects and attempts to integrate them with his stories via dream sequences, then reading at the end that he later used all these effects in The Prisoner, what could I do but run straight out to watch The Prisoner.

And boy did he ever put those effect experiments to use. It is full of light and color and lines and boxes, reflections and refractions. Real tight framing and editing, very clockwork in a wonderful way, with outstanding music, acting that seems unexceptional at first, but gets better. I’ve liked all the Clouzot movies I’ve seen, but have heard nothing about this one, so figured it’d be a dull late-career entry (it was his final released film), but no, he went out with a bang.

Gilbert (Bernard Fresson of Z and Street of No Return) is an artist who specializes in mass-produceable objects with geometric patterns that cause optical illusions when you spin them round. Stan (Laurent Terzieff of The Milky Way) runs a gallery where Gil and other guys are putting on a show. And Josée (Elisabeth Wiener of Duelle) is Gil’s girl, who jealously spies her man Gil talking to a reporter in a hall of mirrors, and so strikes up a chat with leering Stan, going back to his place to look at photos of “handwriting”.

The only thing I remember of Josée’s day job is that she spends some hours looking at interview films on an editing table, commenting that she can’t understand submissiveness and masochism in women. Of course this is a setup, and when she’s at Stan’s place she “accidentally” spies a slide of a naked girl in chains, which fascinates and excites her. Oh of course, it’s just another thing Stan dabbles in, photographing nude bondage sessions, but Josée is now obsessed, insists on attending the next one. Maguy (Dany Carrel, returning from Inferno) poses, Stan photographs and Josée watches anxiously.

Josée soon agrees to be photographed herself, and starts a heated affair with Stan. This was one year after Belle de Jour (and given Clouzot’s pacing, he might have written this film before Buñuel even dreamed of his). Clouzot’s picture is both less and more extreme than Buñuel’s – it’s surely more passionate and less clinical, when considering two directors I would’ve expected the opposite. The photographic sessions, even Maguy’s first one with minimal nudity, are erotic as hell, the height of sexy editing. It may be ultimately more tame than Belle de Jour though, with overall less to say about societal norms and sexuality.

Husband vs. lover, splendidly shot through a half-reflecting window:

Stan has a more poetic penchant for suicide than did the desperate, more tragic Dominique in La Vérité:

Interesting to watch this in the same month as Lady of Burlesque (1943), From Here to Eternity (1953), Monika (1953 but released in the U.S. in ’56), The Apartment (1960), Knife in the Water (1962) and even The Girlfriend Experience (2009). Half were (or at least were intended to be) sexually progressive films when released, all seem very of-their-time, and only The Apartment and this one still seem capable of shocking anyone today.

I loved the camerawork – mobile, but always with a specific goal, a plan to paint a picture through time. Clouzot, 60 years old, a widower with heart trouble, doesn’t seem quite up to the task of smashing a complacent society and visual expectations to bits with his camera, but he has no trouble smashing his lead actress to bits with a train, something he attempted earlier in Inferno.

D. Cairns:

And as a final note of strangeness, the film ends with a woman in a hospital bed calling for the wrong man—the very same ending as Richard Lester’s seminal Petulia, released the very same year. No possibility of one film influencing the other. Instead, both films must be hooked into something, something out there in the ether. Cinema can do that.

by ·Comments Off on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009, Bromberg & Medrea)

Very good doc on the film Clouzot almost made between La Vérité and La Prisonnière, starring Romy Schneider (of Welles’ The Trial) and Serge Reggiani (just off Le Doulos and The Leopard). The couple is on their honeymoon, or maybe just on vacation, in a small town shot in black-and-white, and Reggiani becomes increasingly wildly jealous of everyone his wife has contact with, his state of mind represented with color fantasy sequences and optical-illusion effects. Decades after the film fell apart (mainly because the writer/producer/director’s overreaching ambition clashed with his own perfectionism for details, wasting time and money and tiring the cast and crew) the script was filmed in the 90’s by Claude Chabrol, which I believe was the first of Chabrol’s movies I ever watched, too long ago for me to compare the finished movie with the Clouzot fragments.

Clouzot got some great cinematographers and effects people, including Claude Renoir, Rudolph Maté (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and Andreas Winding (Play Time). It was also the first credited film work by William Lubtchansky, who is one of the main interview subjects. The documentary is very excellent, showing much of the never-finished film (the color footage in particular looks amazingly vibrant, like it was shot yesterday), and not getting into irrelevant sidetrack stories. Interiors (and therefore most of the dialogue scenes) were never shot, and there’s no surviving sound recording from set, so two actors read from the script on a black stage, providing missing context.

by ·1 Comment

Brigitte Bardot is woken up for court, checks herself in a broken sliver of mirror, and goes to stand trial for murdering her boyfriend Gilbert, who also turns out to be her sister’s fiancee. They discuss her past suicide attempts, which the prosecution dismisses as theatrical, then the Walter Matthau-looking prosecutor (Charles Vanel of Wages of Fear and Diabolique) carries on attacking not only her crime and her entire way of life, but the entire youth culture.

Deadly mirror:

Incriminating photo:

They criticise her for being loose, then they criticise her for NOT being loose with Gilbert (Sami Frey, in Godard’s Band of Outsiders the year after Bardot was in Contempt). “Mademoiselle, you are not exactly virginal. Why did you put off the only man you claim to have loved?” But it’s the proc’s job to attack her character, since it’s not in question whether she committed the crime, only whether it was a crime of passion, which carries a lesser punishment than premeditated murder.

Through flashback stories, Gilbert emerges as selfish, using the hot girl for sex while he’s a student, promising her marriage while he’s too broke to marry, then wedding the proper sister (Marie-José Nat of Anatomy of a Marriage) once his boat comes in.

Love triangle:

Creeping around an Alexander Nevsky poster:

“For seven months, all he offered her was his bed, and that only for fleeting moments, not to upset his routine. For months she goes hungry, begging, even prostituting herself. Did he reach out a helping hand? No, and you call that love?” This from the defense, which upsets her even more than the prosecution, the thought that Gilbert may not have loved her. Her suicide note, when she finally does herself in with the broken bit of mirror from the first scene, says “He loved me, but we didn’t love each other at the same time.”

Has its share of slow courtroom drama scenes, Bardot motionless, looking like a cardboard cutout of a pouty blonde and its share of less-than-thrilling backstory, but it’s a sharp looking movie and the plot comes together satisfactorily (for the viewer if not for Bardot’s character) at the end.

Bardot’s sister isn’t about to testify on her behalf, so Bardot’s friends come out to give character references, probably lost on the court which already declared them to be lowlifes. Above at left is Ludovic, André Oumansky (Burnt by the Sun). Could the middle man be future director Claude Berri? He was 26 when he appeared in this, and is credited sequentially with the other two, so it might be. [NOTE: not Berri, see comment below] Michel (Jean-Loup Reynold) gives the most impassioned and coherent defense, dismissing the court just as the court dismissed Bardot’s way of life. “Dominique is here because she rejected hypocritical conventions. We’re different. Young people should judge her.”

by ·Comments Off on Foreign Correspondent (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitch’s quickie, less extravagant follow-up to the great Rebecca. He didn’t quite get the cast he wanted, ending up with Joel McCrea (just before Sullivan’s Travels), the poor man’s Gary Cooper, and Laraine Day (of the Dr. Kildare movie series), the poor man’s Barbara Stanwyck. A wartime spy flick, rather stiff with loose and uninteresting parts but a few great thriller setpieces to balance them out. Katy and I started it for being a TCM Essential, but only I saw the second half.

Joel, Laraine, and returning from Hitch’s Rebecca, Mr. George Sanders:

Take it away, TCM:

Official U.S. policy was still one of strict neutrality. Despite the fact that the British government urged their most famous native, Alfred Hitchcock, to remain in America during this time, the director desperately wanted to contribute to the British war effort so he sought out a property that would allow him to make a pro-Britain statement. The subsequent production, Foreign Correspondent, is the story of an American correspondent in Europe who becomes committed to the fight against fascism during his investigation of a kidnapped Dutch diplomat, a situation that requires him to travel from London to Holland.

I’d say Joel was more committed to following a hot story than to fighting fascism, but he certainly gets caught up in it, leading to a fantastic Great Dictator speech into a radio mic at the end as air-raid sirens howl, possibly the most thrilling last-minute ending to a Hitchcock film I’ve seen.

Van Meer, an Armin Mueller-Stahl-looking diplomat, knows a secret clause within a peace treaty that could help the other side when war breaks out, a macguffin that I never fully understood, but that’s why he’s kidnapped and tortured by baddies. Joel is present for VM’s assassination (my favorite scene, above), but smells a rat because the old man, usually very sharp, doesn’t recognize Joel although they shared a cab the previous day. In fact, a lookalike was murdered so nobody would search for the real VM. Joel follows the killer to a windmill for a fantastic sequence of hide and seek, then escapes from killers sent to his hotel room by first crawling out the window then using a comic room-service gag, is later assigned a bodyguard who tries to push Joel off a high building but falls off himself, and finally I was tuning out and didn’t follow exactly what led to the climactic plane crash, a miniature version of Lifeboat.

I read through D. Cairns’ post on the film looking for a great quote to steal, but they’re all great quotes, so I must instead link to the full article.

by ·Comments Off on Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski)

Roman’s other three-actor feature besides Death and the Maiden, and this one truly has only three actors. There isn’t another soul so much as glimpsed in the background. And it’s an amazing film – don’t know how I didn’t appreciate it the first time I watched, but that maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. Polanski has his actors pulling shapes, as the British say, posing to form geometric patterns across the screen at all times, like a suspense flick made by Maya Deren.

Married couple who seems more bored-and-businesslike than sweetly-in-love picks up a third wheel young hitchhiker and takes him along on their overnight boat cruise. Why would they do such a thing? Because the husband has an overwhelming urge to prove himself over other men and a penchant for playing mind games, and detects similar traits in the young man. Splendid ending: husband thinks the hitcher has drowned, swims to shore while the wife finds the hitcher still alive and has sex with him, nonchalantly confessing later to the husband. The husband drives away with her, reaches an intersection… turn left to go home, believing his wife cheated, or turn right for the police station, believing himself a murderer.

“Polanski was given a proposal to remake the film in English with some known Hollywood actors, but he turned it down as he didn’t want to repeat himself.” Maybe Michael Haneke has heard this bit of trivia, seeing how his own remade family-interrupted psychological drama has similarities to this one.

Cinematographer Jerzy Lipman (of Wajda’s A Generation) wouldn’t work with Polanski again after this film, possibly because he dropped the camera into the lake at one point. Movie failed to win an oscar for coming out the same year as Fellini’s 8 1/2.