by ·Comments Off on Three Christmas Movies

The Holly and the Ivy (1952, George More O’Ferrall)

A typical holiday family-crisis movie (see also: A Christmas Tale). Bulb-nosed Ralph Richardson (lead butler in The Fallen Idol) is a parson who doesn’t realize his whole family has come to resent him. They trade family secrets amongst themselves, then finally tell off the old man, causing him to proclaim that he’s wasted his life. Merry Christmas!

Ralph and Denholm:

Daughter Jenny (Celia Johnson, star of Brief Encounter) lives at home wishing she was free to marry her (apparently Christmas-hating) boyfriend David and move to South America. Daughter Margaret (Margaret Leighton of The Elusive Pimpernel and Under Capricorn) is a bitter drunk because her secret out-of-wedlock baby died earlier that year. She has towed along some relative named Richard (Hugh Williams of One of Our Aircraft is Missing) – never figured out what his deal was. Michael (a very young Denholm Elliott) is on leave from the military, meddling in his siblings’ affairs, and two aunts are around for comic relief and a teeny bit of wisdom: jolly Lydia and forbidding Bridget.

Celia and Margaret:

A Christmas Carol (1971, Richard Williams)

It’s just not Christmas until we watch some version of the Dickens story. This half-hour oscar-winner from renowned animator Williams (we just saw his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit) is pretty excellent, with complex and impressive character animation. He recast Marley and Ebenezer from the movie Scrooge, which we watched two years ago, and added narrator Michael Redgrave. Marley is horrifying here, his jaw hanging open while he speaks, his coat-tails like tentacles behind him, and Christmas Past is a white flickering flame.

We also love Scrooge’s blue socks and yellow slippers:

Santa Claus Is Coming Tonight (1974, Pierre Hebert)

Opens with live-action footage of Santa descending by helicopter, the bulk of the movie is animated. A lonely old man full of Christmas spirit decorates his house for Santa’s arrival, while elsewhere an identical man working as a department-store Santa gets fired for stealing. Santa comes to the old man’s house and they party all night, then when Santa wakes up the old man is (I think) dead. Strange.

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 The Crimson Kimono (1959, Samuel Fuller)

Dancer Sugar Torch is surprised in her dressing room, then chased down and shot to death in the street. Enter the cops: Glenn Corbett (star of Homicidal) and James Shigeta (of the musical Flower Drum Song). Delightfully drunk artist Mac (Anna Lee of Hangmen Also Die) points Corbett to painter Christine (Victoria Shaw of Edge of Eternity), who knew about Sugar’s new act, The Crimson Kimono, a geisha thing.

Corbett and Mac:

Lots of twisty witness-questioning ensues, and it turns out the killer is a wigmaker who thought her husband was cheating with Sugar. More interesting is the rivalry stemming from both cops falling in love with Christine the painter, which explodes when Joe beats his partner senseless during an official police kendo match. She ends up with Shigeta, the interracial thing being a pretty big deal for 1959.

Shigeta and Christine:

by ·Comments Off on America as Seen by a Frenchman (1960, Francois Reichenbach)

America as seen but not heard – the soundtrack seems like a post-sync invention, with a fun Michel Legrand score (one of his first films, the year before Lola). Reichenbach spent a year and a half in the States, filming everyday scenes (carnivals, prisons and churches) and special events, including a prison rodeo, a festival for identical twins, a hula hoop contest, horse diving and striptease school.

“This man committed two murders. He is in for a hundred years.”

Is this illegal yet?

A cool movie as travelogue, anthropology and time capsule. Chris Marker wrote a full narration, but reportedly this was adapted by Reichenbach, who considered it too harsh, so Marker’s name barely appears in the film’s credits and he published his own version in Commentaires as L’Amerique Reve, film imaginaire (American Dream). No hard feelings, I guess, since Marker and Reichenbach later collaborated on The Sixth Face of the Pentagon. Produced by new-wave kickstarter Pierre Braunberger, with an introductory note by Jean Cocteau.

by ·Comments Off on Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini)

Opens with prostitute Cabiria being robbed and pushed into the river by her boyfriend Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi, shitty husband Fausto in I Vitelloni). She takes comfort in her friend Wanda then goes to work. Severe-looking blond Marisa’s pimp tries to hire her, but Cabiria prefers independence. Most awesome character moment: she grabs a chicken for comfort then quickly regains her composure and tosses it in the air. Cabiria is sorta awful to everyone around her, and there’s much shrill, trebley yelling in the movie, but you warm up to her pretty quickly, especially in the next sequence. . .

After she sees film star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari, heh, dreamy lead of Matarazzo’s Chains) getting dumped by his girl Jessie, he picks up Cabiria and takes her to a fancy nightclub with African dancing. When she cuts loose on the dance floor everyone watches her drearily, her enthusiasm not contagious among the stuffy rich club denizens. Then it’s back to his place (he has a toucan!). They start talking and she gets starstruck, then he hides her in the bathroom when Jessie comes back, and she stays there quietly all night – admirable restraint shown by the loudmouthed Cabiria.

The next night her compadres are teasing about her supposed run-in with a famous actor. She sees a passing religious procession, and follows a man (played by the film’s editor Leo Cattozzo) who provides food to people who live in holes in the ground, including a former coworker, now toothless and destitute. This is the scene I remember best from when I watched this years ago, so it’s surprising to read that it was missing from the film’s original release, cut by demand of producer Dino De Laurentiis, and only restored years later.

Cabiria and Wanda go to some garish candle-lighting Virgin Mary festival that reminds me of the quasi-religious commercialized camp in Tommy. “Madonna, help me to change my life,” she says tearfully, then the next day, “We’re all the same as before.”

At a magic show she’s hypnotised by Aldo Silvani (La Strada), acts out a youthful love scene in front of the crowd then feels humiliated when she awakens, but a man named Oscar (Francois Perier, the princess’s companion in Orpheus, also in Le Samourai) insists on talking to her afterwards. They go on a few dates, and he proposes. Cabiria sells her house, gathers all the money she has in the world, and meets him – but he’s a scam artist, intending to take the money and throw her in the river, back where we started.

But he doesn’t go through with the murder, and she walks sadly home, until cheered by some roaming musicians, smiling into the camera, one of the best film endings (and characters/performances) I’ve ever seen.

Film Quarterly: “All the Fellini virtues are here: the fluent camera, the wit, the elegant composition, the theme-and-variations style, the melange of theatrical and religious symbol, the parabolic eloquence, the vocabulary of private motifs.”

Won an oscar for foreign film (beating Mother India) and Giulietta Masina won best actress at Cannes. Pasolini, a few years before his directorial debut, has a co-writing credit. The disc also includes Cabiria’s scene trying to pick up the new husband in The White Sheik. Remade by Bob Fosse as a Shirley MacLaine musical before shit like that was typical (see also: Rob Marshall’s Nine).

by ·Comments Off on The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)

Perfect movie about the perfect crime.

Johnny is Sterling Hayden (not a very “Johnny”-looking actor, but this was his second Johnny after Johnny Guitar), perfect-crime-planner, with a demeanor nearly as serious as the Dragnet-style voiceover guy who keeps telling us the time. He tells his girl to meet him at the airport, then proceeds to pull off a racetrack robbery with a bunch of inside men and a professional horse-sniper (Timothy Carey, a few years before his opus World’s Greatest Sinner).

Barman Joe Sawyer (in movies since 1930) and cop Ted de Corsia (private eye in Lady From Shanghai) and money man Jay Filppen (of Run of the Arrow) are on board, but sweaty, nervous cashier Elisha Cook Jr (12 years after playing the sex-crazed drummer in Phantom Lady) gives up too many details to his bitch of a wife (Marie Windsor, whose follow-up was Roger Corman’s Swamp Diamonds), which she relays to her boyfriend – who beats Hayden (and the money) to the post-heist meeting place. Everyone gets shot – everyone, even Elisha’s wife who wasn’t even there, and Timothy Carey after insulting parking lot guy James Edwards (of The Steel Helmet). So now it’s just Hayden, who rushes to the airport among heavy police presence, with all his cash in a just-purchased flea-market suitcase with broken locks. After pulling off the perfect crime, Hayden forgot to plan a perfect getaway.

Watched on the Plaza’s big screen in HD. No screengrabs, but here’s a wonderful photo of the male supporting cast from Criterion’s site:

Amazing looking movie, shot by Lucien Ballard (who started with Josef von Sternberg) and produced by James Harris (who’d later make the bizarre Some Call It Loving). Writer Jim Thompson also did Paths of Glory, and his novels would be adapted for Coup de torchon, The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me.

by ·Comments Off on Tammy and the Bachelor (1957, Joseph Pevney)

Katy had a powerful hankering to watch this after we heard the main song in The Long Day Closes. Tammy (Debbie Reynolds, a few years after Susan Slept Here) is a young girl living on a houseboat with granpappy Walter Brennan (two years before Rio Bravo, already quite Stumpy-like). They help a wounded traveler (hunky Leslie Nielsen, only looking like Lt. Drebin occasionally from certain angles) and when Brennan goes to jail for moonshinin’, Tammy goes to stay with the rich city-dwelling Nielsen. Lovesick hijinks ensue.

The great Fay Wray plays Nielsen’s mom, I think, and he has an aunt (Rosemary Clooney-looking Mildred Natwick) who’s a painter, or ex-painter or something. Tammy inspires them all with her country simplicity. Pevney later directed a chunk of the original Star Trek episodes, and Sandra Dee took over as Tammy in the sequels.

by ·Comments Off on The Horse’s Mouth (1958, Ronald Neame)

Alec Guinness, a few years after The Ladykillers, plays dedicated painter Gulley Jimson, introduced getting out of prison and shooing off devoted fan Nosey. Jimson is a gruff-voiced wreck, living on a leaky boat at the docks, spending his days at the bar run by Cokie (Kay Walsh, Guinness’s costar in Oliver Twist and Last Holiday) or harassing a man who owns some of his work (Ernest Thesiger of The Old Dark House in one of his final roles) until he can afford enough paint to create more.

Jimson is extremely interested in feet:

Gulley and Cokie:

“Of course you want to be an artist. Everybody does once, but they get over it, like measles and chicken pox.” Jimson compares his artistic drive to a sickness – more like a drug addiction, taking down everyone around him in his weird quest to create (and sometimes destroy) new works. He finds a rich holidaying couple interested in art and installs himself in their apartment, selling their furniture to buy paints and food, as a similarly obsessed sculptor (Michael Gough, of Horror of Dracula the same year) takes the apartment below. Then he orchestrates a huge wall painting using art students to finish on schedule before the wall is to be demolished, and finally collapses it himself as the students clash with the construction crew.

Michael Gough:

The author gave his beloved creation a Catch-22 ending – Jimson escapes, sailing out of the harbor, contemplating new works on ever-larger canvasses.

I noticed an awkwardly dubbed line in the apartments, and even figured out that the sculptor was originally telling Nosey to “drop dead”. IMDB says the actor playing Nosey did drop dead a few days after shooting, hence the line change.

Film Quarterly liked it: “Guinness’ screenplay and performance amount to a rare comic achievement that speaks of serious things from behind surface flippancies and outrageous hokum.”

Also on the disc:
Daybreak Express (1953, D.A. Pennebaker)

New York train ride, jazzily edited and set to a train-sounding tune by Duke Ellington, really wonderful.

by ·Comments Off on Samurai Trilogy (1954-56, Hiroshi Inagaki)

An epic trilogy, obviously conceived as a single story – it would be foolish to watch just one. It might, in fact, be foolish to watch all three. A weighty, picturesque drama with restrained emotions, occasional action, and side characters I kept losing track of, adding up to a decent story about a great fighter learning to be a great person.

1600 AD: Toshiro Mifune (in his follow-up to Seven Samurai) is violent, spontaneous Takezo, whose weak-willed friend Matahachi (Rentaro Mikuni, lead of the first segment in Kwaidan, son in chains of Profound Desire of the Gods) joins him in going to war, leaving behind Matahachi’s mom and his fiancee Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa, who starred in Madame Butterfly between sequels). Their side is wiped out, and the two misfit warriors wash up with a mother and daughter, where they recover from battle wounds amidst sexual tension cued by rape attempts.

wide-eyed Matahachi and grim Takezo at war:

Takezo up a tree:

Mother and daughter survive by stripping dead samurai and selling their equipment – just like in Onibaba. Takezo flees after defeating the bandit that torments the women, then shrugging off the mom when she throws herself at him. She changes the story: “He attempted to assault me. He’s a savage.” Matahachi marries the mom, while his ex, Otsu, joins the search for Takezo, who is repeatedly captured by a smiling priest, who finally locks T. up in an attic full of books. T. emerges years later, calmer and wiser, renamed Musashi Miyamoto, tells Otsu to wait, and wanders off.

Akemi, Matahachi and Oko:

Otsu left behind:

Part two opens with a duel, MM telling a young kid called Jotaro to leave the arena. But of course he doesn’t, and tags along behind our hero after he kills the chainfighting Old Baiken. Akemi (Mariko Okada, married to director Yoshishige Yoshida, also star of some Ozu films), the girl whose mom married Matahachi is now darkly obsessed with MM, also pops up to torment Otsu, seems to be everywhere. Most of the movie concerns MM challenging the master of a fighting school, who will not fight him honorably so MM kicks the asses of some hundred students instead. By the end, the teacher mans up and meets MM, who does not kill him, after remembering how pissed everyone was when he killed the chainfighter.

MM vs. the chainfighter:

MM controlling his rage at the second duel:

Meanwhile some dickish birdslaying swordsman, supposed to remind us of young MM, wants to duel MM. And Otsu keeps pining after MM, who insists that he needs to keep training. I like the brief moments of animation (a lightning strike, cartoon birds flying across a painted sky) and the catchy theme music.

Akemi:

Part 3: predictably, Akemi has met the birdslayer. MM is still an undefeatable warrior, but now believes it’s best to avoid conflict. He postpones the birdslayer’s duel challenge and lives in a farming town with the kid and ever-suffering Otsu. The town is under siege by bandits (what peaceful small town in ancient Japan was not under siege by bandits?), and Akemi makes a deal with them. The siege goes wrong – MM kills many bandits and they kill Akemi shortly after she fights Otsu with an axe.

Bird guy:

MM and his little follower:

MM finally decides to give up his sword and marry Otsu, but first has to kill the birdslayer, which he does with a wooden sword, keeping the sun behind himself so the other man won’t notice.