by ·Comments Off on Ashes & Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda)

A Generation was a pessimistic film about the young resistance movement during WWII nazi occupation and Kanal was an extraordinarily pessimistic film about the near-total destruction of the resistance movement at the depths of WWII nazi occupation. Naturally this third film is a completely pessimistic film about the remnants of the resistance movement at the very end of WWII when the soviets were taking over. Wajda has become less sympathetic to the resistance fighters as the films have progressed, from the idealistic, lovestruck youth of A Generation to the murderous Maciek here, a sunglasses-sporting hit man, who will finally kill his intended target after destroying a few innocent lives.

Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski, the Polish James Dean in the aftermath of this film, later star of The Saragossa Manuscript) takes orders from his more serious friend Andrzej, who works for the bald Major, who works for some vague remaining idea of the resistance army. Maciek, then, is far removed from any real authority, feels more like a freelance gangster than one of the desperate young soldiers of the previous films. Further complicating the alliances, Maciek’s Russian target shows up at his sister-in-law’s house where the Major is plotting to kill him in the next room. The movie goes out of its way to humanize the Russian – and to give Maciek a way out, as he meets a girl named Krystyna and contemplates leaving the dying resistance behind. Eventually Maciek does get his man, and is immediately hunted down and shot, dying like a dog in the street.

Andrzej, at right, mistakenly reporting mission success after killing the wrong guys, as their intended target strolls in at center of frame:

Krystyna with Maciek:

Set on the last day of WWII. Sam Fuller was also interested in what happens on the final day of a war: see Run of the Arrow and The Big Red One. There’s more humor and fun in this one than the others, despite the grim subject matter. Played in Venice along with fellow war-resistance film Il General Della Rovere, also The Magician, Night Train, Some Like It Hot and Come Back, Africa.

D. Gerould:

Until 1958, it had been impossible for a Polish artist like Wajda to make a film in which an opponent of the new society was presented as a tragic victim. The Stalinist period in Poland from1949 to1953 had brought open terror, arrest and torture of members of the Home Army, as well as enforcement of Soviet cultural models. The Thaw in 1956 resulted in a more independent Polish Communist regime. Finally the arts, liberated from Soviet-imposed socialist realism, were allowed to return to the Polish tradition of poetic metaphor and political allusion. During long years of dismemberment and foreign occupation, literature and drama in Poland had always kept alive belief in the nation’s revival. In Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda continues this tradition, posing the question of Poland’s postwar identity.

by ·Comments Off on Purple Noon (1959, Rene Clement)

I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley on video 15 years ago and don’t remember it awfully well, but still, as soon as Freddy appears in this movie (Bill Kearns, short-haired American with a bad french accent) I am disappointed that he’s not Phil Seymour Hoffman. The Fire Within star Maurice Ronet as the rich asshole is no Jude Law either, but I’m a fan of his fiancee Marge (Marie Laforet) and of course Alain Delon. Delon is the primary reason to even shoot a Mr. Ripley film, with his perfect, blank face. It’s a good thriller, Ripley getting to keep his murdered friend’s money and lifestyle as long as he keeps cruising Europe as Greenleaf did without running into any actual friends (sorry, Freddy). I expect Ripley to escape, because there’s a whole series of novels, but when he sells his (Greenleaf’s) boat, it’s lifted out of the water for inspection and Greenleaf’s body is found attached to the anchor line. Author Patricia Highsmith reportedly called this “a terrible concession to so-called public morality.” Watched in HD, but looked soft – I think the Hulu streaming and heavy film grain don’t get along so well.

G. O’Brien:

When it first came out in America, Purple Noon was like an advertisement for a life of luxurious sensuality, with hints of La dolce vita-style decadence and New Wave-style modishness, pristinely opulent hotel rooms and lobbies, and large helpings of sand and sun. The passage of time has only accentuated that allure, since the Italy we sample here in such generous detail is a vanished tourist’s dream, underpopulated and unpolluted, a paradise for footloose Americans: the seaport waterfronts teeming with fresh-caught fish, the bodies bronzed from long and carefree afternoons in the sun, the luscious blues and greens of a sea made for open-ended yachting excursions.

by ·Comments Off on High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)

Striking-looking square, b/w western with loads of great close-ups. Gary Cooper plays a cop on his last day on the job before retirement… and just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in! Years earlier the town had come together to defeat an outlaw and his gang – today, the gang returns, rides through town to meet the outlaw, who has been released from jail and is obviously aiming for revenge. But now that the town has been peaceful for a while, nobody feels compelled to fight. Anyone with a personal stake in the matter (sentencing judge Otto Kruger and love interest/hotelier Katy Jurado) skips town and everyone else backs down from helping Gary, leaving him to face the killers alone. Actually, Gary’s anti-violence quaker wife Grace Kelly (married to him earlier that day) helps out. Gary and Grace finish off the bastards then drive away from the ungrateful town.

IMDB: “This film was intended as an allegory .. for the failure of Hollywood people to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

A character named Sam Fuller who’s a huge coward, has his wife pretend he’s not home when the sheriff comes to the door. Wonder how the real Fuller felt about this. The only interview I can find where he mentions the film, he just complains about the ending, “where the heavy grabs the girl and holds her in front of him, putting the hero in a hell of an embarrassing situation. Always, at the last minute, she pushes him away, and the hero kills him. I don’t like that in any Western. It doesn’t make sense.” Fuller would correct this ending in his Forty Guns a few years later, where given the same situation the hero shoots the girl.

Written by Carl Foreman, blacklisted by the time the movie came out. Being one of the most beloved westerns, it earned a 2000 Tom Skerritt/Michael Madsen remake and a couple of 1980 TV sequels with Henry Fonda and David Carradine. Gary Cooper won an oscar, lost best picture to The Greatest Show On Earth and director to John Ford. The movie has a nice opening credits theme song, but it didn’t keep “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” from remaining stuck in my head.

by ·Comments Off on 12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)

I’ve probably seen this before, but most memory of it was long-gone. Entirely set in jury room, deliberating a murder charge for an 18-year-old accused of stabbing his father. Evidence sounded convincing enough to everyone in the jury except Henry Fonda, who calmly (not angrily – there are really only two or three angry men) expresses doubt in one detail at a time, gradually tearing apart the prosecution’s case and his fellow jurors’ prejudices.

TV director Lumet taking the original TV screenplay into theaters with Jean Vigo’s former cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother). In order of their innocence vote: Juror #8 Fonda was in The Tin Star and The Wrong Man around the same time. #9 (old man with a cold): Joseph Sweeney, mostly did TV. #5 (nervous, says he grew up poor): The Odd Couple star Jack Klugman. #11 (watch maker, foreigner): George Voskovec of a version of Uncle Vany which nobody has seen. #2 (soft-spoken, glasses): John Fiedler, voice of Pooh’s friend Piglet. #6 (painter): Edward Binns, also of murder-trial films Compulsion and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. #7 (striped suit, didn’t want to be late for a ball game but it gets rained-out anyway): Jack Warden of Heaven Can Wait and All The President’s Men. #12 (you don’t hear from him much): Robert Webber of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. #1 (the foreman): Martin Balsam, detective in Psycho, Col. Cathcart in Catch-22. #10 (older racist angry guy): Ed Begley of Sweet Bird of Youth and Billion Dollar Brain. #4 (glasses): early TV star E.G. Marshall, later of the other one-man Creepshow segment, the guy with a cockroach phobia. #3 (lead angry man): Lee J. Cobb, lead baddie in Man of the West.

Cobb vs. Fonda:

Won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Fest but the oscars preferred Bridge on the River Kwai.

by ·Comments Off on Winchester ’73 (1950, Anthony Mann)

Another tough, superb movie from Anthony Mann, who might be my favorite Mann this year (based on early reviews of Blackhat). We saw some plot threads coming a mile away: the baddie James Stewart has tracked for years is his brother, who killed their father over some greedy business. We’re told during a shooting competition overseen by Wyatt Earp himself (Will Geer, train conductor in The Tall Target) that they’ve got the same training. That day in Dodge, Jimmy wins himself the rare and valuable rifle of the film’s title, and his brother Dutch Henry (Stephen McNally of Criss Cross) immediately steals it and rides off.

America in the 1870’s was populated mainly by horrible drunk murderous gamblers, and we meet a procession of them. Dutch loses the rifle to a trader (John McIntire, sheriff of Psycho) in a card game, who is later (deservedly) murdered for it by Indian chief Rock Hudson – yes! Jimmy teams up with Millard Mitchell (ol’ prospector of The Naked Spur), later kills Chief Rock during an Indian battle vs. the cavalry led by Jay Flippen (who played an Indian himself in Run of the Arrow). The rifle is handed off to the shitty Steve (Charles Drake of All That Heaven Allows) to protect his fiancee Shelley Winters (not recognizable from The Tenant). Steve lasts all of one more scene, seeking refuge at the same house where criminal Waco Johnny (Dan Duryea, the Scarlet Street pimp) decides to have a police shootout with his men. Waco kills Steve, takes the rifle and the girl to his planned meeting with Dutch Henry (Jimmy Stewart’s evil brother, remember?). Jockeying to outdo each other in the bad guy department, Waco and Dutch hit a bank, followed closely by Jimmy Stewart, who kills Waco then chases Dutch into the mountains, finally killing him too, earning himself back the rifle and probably the girl.

I guess Tony Curtis played one of Dutch’s men, not that we noticed. Wikipedia claims it was supposed to be a Fritz Lang project with a different story, Stewart more obsessed with the rifle.

by ·Comments Off on The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956, Frank Tashlin)

A pretty dire Tashlin movie. Sure you’ve got the color widescreen (ruined by the low-res letterboxed-SD presentation on our wide-HD monitor) and the humorous attacks on television, but the overall concept isn’t as shocking as it used to be, there aren’t enough actual jokes to keep things light and amusing, pacing is too slow and the lead actors didn’t have the skill or charisma to elevate it.

Who Were They, Anyway: Tom Ewell was actually the lead in The Girl Can’t Help It, but that movie had Jayne Mansfield and the music performances to distract from him. Sheree North (a Marilyn Monroe double, as I suspected and her IMDB trivia supports) was in Madigan and Charley Varrick, later mother-figure of the Maniac Cop. Special/sexy appearance by Rita Moreno of West Side Story, Tom’s agent/buddy is Les Tremayne (most often credited as a narrator, also in The Monolith Monsters and I Love Melvin) and the soldier who’s blantantly trying to steal Sheree is Rick Jason (in The Wayward Bus with Mansfield).

Based on lies and misunderstandings and gifts of the magi, as are most comedies. Sheree signs up for the air force after hearing her husband is being recalled to duty, but he’s dismissed for medical reasons and ends up following her to the base and living in the army-wife suites (see also: Cary Grant in the much better I Was a Male War Bride) to protect her from Rick. “Just get her pregnant,” said Katy repeatedly, advice the movie finally takes at the end, but too late, as Tom has spent the previous hour acting like a psychopath. At least the movie seemed edgy for the first few minutes, and at least it’s about a happily married couple who are still happily married at the end, a rare thing.

by ·Comments Off on Silk Stockings (1957, Rouben Mamoulian)

We lost our little bird, so picked the two dumbest movies we could find to unwind. This is a not-great musical version of Ninotchka with a not-good romance featuring a few sublime dance scenes. Cyd Charisse comes to life in those, is otherwise buttoned up as the humorless Russian sent to collect three bumbling government agents who were sent to collect a defecting music composer who is writing new music for Hollywood producer Fred Astaire who is mangling the serious tunes into upbeat dance numbers and falling for Ninotchka.

Nice Cole Porter songs. Predictably, my favorite was the one about filmmaking with separate verses about color and widescreen processes. I also dug Fred’s attack on the passing fad that was rock & roll music. “Happy” ending has all Russians staying in California, embracing capitalism, decadence and popular music, and Fred making all Cyd’s decisions for her.

Astaire’s last musical for a decade and the final film of Mamoulian (Queen Christina, Love Me Tonight). Cyd and Fred had previously starred together in The Band Wagon. Janis Paige plays the star of Astaire’s film, an Esther Williams caricature whose quirk is whacking her head to get water out of her ears. She got her start in the movies last-billed in Esther Williams’s Bathing Beauty. Naturally no Russians appear in the movie. The composer is Dutch Wim Sonneveld, Hungarian Peter Lorre plays one of the comic-relief agents alongside NYC-born Jules Munshin (Kelly & Sinatra’s co-lead in On The Town) and Lithuanian (close enough!) Joseph Buloff.

by ·Comments Off on The Seventh Seal (1957, Ingmar Bergman)

Great to watch this again in high-def. I remembered it being interesting, but not looking this spectacular. Morose knight (Max Von Sydow) and his charismatic squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand of Winter Light, hard to adjust to him not being the morose one) are heading home through the plague-ridden country, accumulating other characters along the way. It’s both very serious about life and death and also full of jokes and lighter moments, so maybe the first Swedish horror comedy? Along the way, Jons has folksy/philosophical conversations with townsfolk, and the knight has religious/philosophical conversations with Death.

First, Jons rescues an intense, silent girl (Gunnel Lindblom: Sydow’s servant in Virgin Spring, his wife in Winter Light) from a dangerous thief. “I’m a married man, but with any luck my wife is dead by now, so I’ll be needing a housekeeper.” Then they come across actor/jester Jof (Nils Poppe of The Devil’s Eye) with his wife Bibi Andersson, sexy maid in The Magician), who’ve just been ditched by their more serious companion Jonas and need protection. Jonas has stolen the blacksmith’s wife (Inga Gill of Miss Julie), but the smith (Ake Fridell, Monika‘s dad) gets her back and Jonas wanders off to meet Death.

It’s been established that jester Jof can see spirits, so he’s the only one who realizes that the knight’s solo chess games are actually with Death, and that the knight is losing, so he escapes with his wife. The rest of the gang continues to the knight’s castle where his wife Karin (Inga Landgre, recently in Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Remake) is waiting. The six of them are just having dinner when Death catches up, and out in a field with their young son, Jof sees Death leading them all away.

Peter Cowie calls the actors “medieval ancestors of those troubadours, those traveling musicians who are still so popular in Scandinavia today.” I’ve meant to ask Trevor how often he runs across troubadours. Cowie also calls this “the high point of Bergman’s symbolic period.” I’m pretty sure the sudden parade of self-flagellating religious nuts was a Monty Python influence.

Woody Allen:

His big contribution was that he developed a vocabulary to work on the interiors of people. He would choose these great and gifted actors and he would guide them so they could project these inner states of extreme emotional intensity. He would use close-ups and keep those close-ups going longer and longer, and he never let up. Gradually the psychological feelings of the character the actor was portraying just sort of show up on the screen. He was so unsparing with the camera. Finally you start to see the wars that are raging inside the characters, these psychological wars and emotional wars, and it’s no less visual in the end than the movements of armies.

by ·Comments Off on The Maze (1953, William Cameron Menzies)

Oh this was awful! The worst, slowest, MST3K-worthy British (“made in Hollywood USA,” the end titles promise, but trust me) “horror” movie, back when horror meant anything out of the ordinary. And yeah the movie turns out to be about a 200-year-old frog who is lord of a castle, and that ain’t a bad concept, but nobody dies except the frog (one old woman is frightened, and a younger woman screams!) and nothing happens for the first 75 minutes except rich British people speak slowly and properly and act put out by things. Oh, and someone is menaced by an even worse rubber bat than the one in Black Sunday.

Also: the maze isn’t even really important.

Giant frog suicide:

Unwelcome houseguests:

Richard Carlson (of The Ghost Breakers and It Came From Outer Space) is to marry Veronica Hurst (a small part in Peeping Tom) but his uncle dies and Carlson disappears to tend to the family castle. Hurst arrives with her insufferable relative Katherine Emery (Isle of the Dead), and they worry for over an hour then invite some friends who worry more, then Hurst gets out of her room and sees the frog and it jumps to its death and the couple who’ve shown no affection for each other can finally get married. The second-to-last feature by Menzies, who made Things to Come in better days, adapted from a novel by Daniel Ullman (writer of a hundred westerns). I was surprised to see that a 3D version exists, since dull people worrying aloud in 3D is no more thrilling than in 2D.

Carlson conspicuously reading his teratology guide:

Narrator Emery begins the movie centered in-frame but her chair slowly sinks. Here she is at her lowest, pleased as punch after the giant frog suicide: