by ·Comments Off on The Immortal Story (1968, Orson Welles)

Hour-long, splendorously Wellesian, elegant little movie about storytelling, made between Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake. Why does nobody ever talk about this one? A French production (I watched the English-dubbed version) based on a novel by Karen Out of Africa Blixen and shot by Willy Les Creatures Kurant.

On Macao (a Chinese island then controlled by Portugal), Welles is a fat rich man who takes things very literally, cares only about his accounts, which his accountant (filmmaker Roger Coggio) reads to him every night. One day, Coggio reads his boss the prophecy of Isaiah instead. Welles doesn’t like prophecies, things that are not yet true, so he counters with a “true” story he heard about an old man who hires a sailor to sleep with his young wife, to produce an heir. He’s enraged when the accountant tells him this is a fable, retold by many sailors with variations, and Welles insists that they perform the story for real so that somebody in the world will be able to tell it truthfully. He’s got the old eccentric rich man part covered, now just needs someone to play the young wife and poor sailor.

A poor sailor:

In the town square, the great Fernando Rey (a couple years before Tristana) gives some back-story. It seems that Jeanne Moreau (same year as The Bride Wore Black) grew up in the house Welles now occupies, until her dad killed himself over a 300-guinea debt to the old man. Coggio talks her into playing the wife out of curious revenge – she agrees for a price of 300 guineas. They pick up an honestly down-and-out, recently-shipwrecked sailor (Norman Eshley of a few 1970’s murder films – one thinks of Welles’ own role in The Lady From Shanghai) and pay him five guineas to play the role (he doesn’t seem familiar with the fable).

Coggio awaits Moreau’s reply:

Afterwards:
– “Now you can tell the story”
– “To whom would I tell it? Who in the world would believe me if I told it? I would not tell it for a hundred times five guineas.”

And the accountant finds Welles dead in his chair.

This Is Orson Welles reveals that there were supposed to have been a series of short films based on Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) stories. The Heroine was canceled after a single day’s shoot, and A Country Tale was to star Peter O’Toole. Welles would later adapt another Blixen story into The Dreamers.

PB: You were interested in the idea of power…
OW: No. He doesn’t have the power – you show that it’s meaningless.
PB: He fails-
OW: It doesn’t even begin to work – it’s a dream. That’s the whole point of the story. He has no power: not that he does have it, but that he pretends that he does. It all turns to ashes.
PB: Why does he die?
OW: He’s getting ready to die when the story begins. And he dies when the thing can’t work. He dies of disappointment, in his last gasp of frustrated lust.

Senses:

Welles was only in his early 50s when he made The Immortal Story for French television, but it appears as an almost too perfect summary of his career; a metaphorical tale of impotence, memory, power and mortality made on a tiny budget in Europe it both chases its own tail and is a deeply felt film of melancholy mood and sensibility. The film has the quality of a miniature; short in length and minimalist in design. It also appears depopulated, as if the product of a fragmented dream or imagination.

by ·Comments Off on Merrill’s Marauders (1962, Sam Fuller)

I always remember this wrong: in 1944, Merrill’s 3,000 U.S. troops join soldiers from other countries, launching a mission from India to reclaim Burma from the Japanese. It opens with narration aplenty, stock footage and even animation, all to set up the plight of these anonymous-looking soldier-actors led by silver-haired Jeff Chandler (in his final film, dead at age 42 from surgery complications). It’s a long slog for the soldiers, ordered to march across Burma with not enough food or rest, all sick and short-tempered, but the movie tries to keep things lively for us with its relentlessly boisterous soundtrack. Fuller says the studio convinced him to make this film as a dry run for The Big Red One. He had an actual Marauder hired as technical advisor, and was excited to have Gary Cooper play Merrill, but Cooper was too sick and would die before the film’s release.

The guys win a decisive battle near the start, think they’ll be relieved by the British, but are ordered to keep moving. Nicely shot battle at a railroad – only the aftermath is shown, a survivor standing above hundreds of casualties.

Standing on what looks like giant 3-D coffins – creepy:

The first woman in the entire movie isn’t glimpsed until an hour in, as they crash at a village to recuperate. The doctor reports: “from a medical viewpoint, they’re finished as a fighting unit.” But orders are orders, and Merrill pushes them forward, to another battle, forward again to the next one. Most of the film is the drudgery of pushing wearily forth to the next battle (Fuller: “For cryin’ out loud, the work of GI’s at war is nerve-racking and frustrating, not glorious!”), and that’s how it ends, Merrill dropping (not dead) of a heart attack while ordering them to rise from the mud and move on, and the men moving. The narrator tells us that they achieved their mission, but that only 100 of the 3,000 remained in action.

It’s not all trudging through mud and dropping dead from hunger.
There’s some good action and ‘splosions, too:

Weird for a war film to focus on the dull parts and resign the climactic battle to a mention by the voiceover. Fuller explains:

To my surprise and anger, the studio decided to cut my final scene in the editing room. Right after Merrill’s collapse, they spliced in footage of a victory parade of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue. Jack Warner and his executives wanted an overt patriotic ending, and they decided to end the picture what that propaganda-like crap and a pompous narrator bragging about the American victory at Myitkyina. … Merrill’s Marauders got good reviews. Critics for Time and Newsweek remarked that the film had a documentary flavor, giving realistic depictions of war’s simplicity and death. The only thing they said was ‘Hollywood’ was the ending. Ironically, the opposite was true. The ending that Jack Warner’s boys tacked on was real documentary footage of a military parade. In the context, it seemed phony. My film was fiction. But it smelled of truth.

Lt. Stockton, surrogate son of Merrill: Ty Hardin of I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Doc: large-headed Andrew Duggan, a star of Larry Cohen’s Bone. Jeff Chandler was best known (and oscar-winning) for playing head Apache Cochise in three movies.

Bullseye: Peter Brown, a crimelord in Foxy Brown. At right, Chowhound: Will Hutchins, comic hero of The Shooting

Sgt. Kolowicz: round-headed Claude Akins, the jailed killer in Rio Bravo

Muley: Georgia native Charlie Briggs

Not pictured: Taggy (Pancho Magalona), a Filipino with the movie’s best comic scene, “I will wear my shirt out until all tyrants are dead!”

by ·Comments Off on Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967, Nagisa Oshima)

This is another one like Death By Hanging where Oshima seems to be making broad artistic statements using archetype characters rather than creating any sort of realistic drama. But this one is more sensual, less intellectual than Death By Hanging, and possibly my favorite Oshima movie so far.

A wandering sex-obsessed streaky-haired misfit meets a slow-moving, angsty suicidal army deserter (Kei Sato, male lead in Onibaba). They walk off together when they come across gangsters digging up a cache of guns – so they follow, or possibly are taken prisoner (but she never stops acting like she’s in charge). Soon added to the mix are a gun-crazy boy and two killers: a double-knife-wielding psycho killer and a calm older man with a pistol (Taiji Tonoyama, armor merchant in Onibaba).

Up until now, I don’t think the characters had any names, but the internet tells me she is Nejiko and her death-obsessed man is Otoko. Along comes head honcho Television (Rokko Toura, the doctor in Death By Hanging), bringing news that a white sniper is on the loose, and that the gang fight they’ve been preparing for is cancelled because the bosses were caught by police at the airport.

What’s a bunch of battle-hungry armed criminals to do? The gun-nut kid wanders away and kills a couple people, but that’s not enough. So Television drives them out to the city (stopping to murder the knife guy) where they cautiously approach the sniper, then join him shooting at cops.

Recurring person-shaped indentations, water spots and stains strangely remind me of Pulse. Criterion calls this a “devilish, absurdist portrait of what [Oshima] deemed the death drive in Japanese youth culture.” Glad I watched this the same month as Black Sun, another movie featuring a murderous American teaming with death-defying youth.

Oshima:

Otoko definitely does not want to die. He wants to live, and that is precisely why he has premonitions of death. In other words, in instances where Otoko appears at a glance to want to die, he actually wants to live, and that is beautiful -more so than Nekijo’s straightforward desire to live. In this way, the two embrace two things that have something basic in common, and they are attracted to each other because it is manifested in polar opposite forms. It is absolutely incorrect to judge this work as a diagram that reads: Nekijo = Life, Otoko = Death.

by ·Comments Off on Black Sun (1964, Koreyoshi Kurahara)

A kid called Akira (Tamio Kawaji of Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast) buys a Max Roach record called Black Sun, bumps into a woman outside who smashes the record by accident, so he steals their car and sells it. Gets “home” to the crumbling church tower he illegally occupies with his dog Thelonious Monk and finds the cops are searching it for a murderous American GI.

It’s a reasonable setup – we learn a little about Akira (a carefree criminal who loves jazz) and are prepped for a meeting between Akira and the GI. Good jazzy score, and high-energy filmmaking (plus a weird fisheye effect when the camera moves). But it soon gets much crazier than expected.

Turns out Gill, the shell-shocked American (Chico Roland, who I just saw as a disgraced pastor in Gate of Flesh), doesn’t care for jazz – or dogs. Akira is honored beyond belief to have an actual black man at his place, but Gill trashes it and kills the dog. They go back and forth with the machine gun threatening each other, then Akira steals an idea from a jazz record sleeve so they can go out in public – puts himself in blackface and Gill in clownface.

Gill is badly hurt from a bullet he caught before we met him, starts raving that he wants to visit the sea. Akira’s tower gets torn down, all his remaining jazz records and paraphenalia destroyed, so with nothing to lose, he helps Gill (who has never been nice to him, really) get to the shore. And if you’d have told me a few minutes into this movie that it would end with Gill floating away over the ocean tied to a giant balloon while Akira holds off the cops with a machine gun, I wouldn’t have believed you.

by ·Comments Off on Violence at Noon (1966, Nagisa Oshima)

“I failed to die again, and now I’m alone.”

When I have the time, I’d like to watch and enjoy more movies by Ozu and Naruse, by Kurosawa and Masumura, Shindo and Imamura. Oshima is the only one I feel I ought to study. The movies are fun to watch and enjoy like the others, but I feel like I immediately need to see them again and figure out what they are up to. This one was at least more of a story (like Empire of Passion) than a political abstraction (like Death By Hanging), but still crazy enough that I’m sure I missed a lot.

Shino:

Matsuko:

It took a while to figure this out, but here goes. Eisuke (Kei Sato, male lead in Onibaba but looking more brutal/evil here) is the “high-noon” rapist/killer terrorizing Japan. Two women are irrationally in love with him: his wife Matsuko (Oshima regular Akiko Koyama), a teacher, and a young girl named Shino. Eisuke had “rescued” Shino when she tried to die with her boyfriend Genji (Rokko Toura, “Television” in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide) who knows how long ago, and now feels free to rape her anytime. When he’s finally caught and sentenced, the two women go into the woods to die together by poison, but Shino awakens, still alive.

The High-Noon Killer:

Tragic Genji:

I guess it’s not that hard to figure out the story after all, but I was distracted by the ridiculously great/nuts camerawork and editing for at least the first half.

by ·Comments Off on Gate of Flesh (1964, Seijun Suzuki)

Super colorful and energetic movie – I probably liked this more than his acclaimed Branded To Kill. Very good music, all bendy strings and gunshot percussion.

Green Maya (the typecast Yumiko Nogawa of Story of a Prostitute and Pleasures of the Flesh) joins a group of color-coded prostitutes in postwar Japan – purple Mino (Kayo Matsuo of Tattooed Life), yellow Roku, and red leader Sen. Ofuku wears white so you know she’s not gonna last, then black Machiko is the next to go, each accused of the crime of giving it away for free.

Maya:

Sen:

Machiko with Jo:

The four have a good thing going, living together in a delapidated building and scaring away all competition – until puffy-cheeked fugitive Jo Shishido (returning from Youth of the Beast) arrives to shake things up, barging in and joining the group. He sleeps with Machiko, then Maya (causing discord and some whipping), but he also steals and slaughters a cow (providing much food and cash) and amuses them with his post-traumatic stress war anecdodes, so he’s allowed to stay.

Mino:

Roku:

Chico:

Maya seduces a priest (Chico Roland, the jazz-hating fugitive soldier in Black Sun) driving him mad. But ultimately she falls hard for Jo. “You’re the first man I’ve ever loved. For the first time, I’ve felt human, but now I’ll get kicked out of here. The moment I become a real woman, I’m an outcast.” But when they try to run away together, he’s killed and she’s left roaming.

Remade in ’77. The same writer did Story of a Prostitute, unsurprisingly.

When Maya is stripped of her green clothes and whipped, the whole image is shrouded in green:

by ·Comments Off on When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960, Mikio Naruse)

“Bars in the daytime are like women without makeup.”

Set in the Ginza district where female hostesses converse with male patrons, trying to keep the regular customers coming to their bar in a high-competition area, all told from one woman’s point of view – so naturally I thought of Mizoguchi (Street of Shame, etc.), whose movies I haven’t especially liked. But in the commentary D. Richie compares this to Bresson, which seems more apt. Quite an excellent movie.

Mama (Hideko Takamine of Floating Clouds, Lightning, and thirty years earlier, Ozu’s silent Tokyo Chorus) is the head hostess at one bar, moves on to another when business starts declining because one of the girls left, luring away some regular customers. Mama’s been doing this for a long time and isn’t getting any younger, sees other girls escape through various means (suicide, marriage, or getting financial backing to open one’s own bar) but she doesn’t manage herself, ends up back where she started, ascending the stairs to work another day in another bar.

Mama falls for married businessman Fujisaki (Masayuki Mori, star of Ugetsu) but he’s moving away to Osaka.

Her manager Komatsu (Tatsuya Nakadai, the “hobo swordsman” of Kill!, star of the second section of Kwaidan) comes along when she switches bars. He’s in love with her, finally moves on after he catches her with Fujisaki.

Junko (Reiko Dan of Red Beard, Sanjuro) is a sexy young thing who stays at Mama’s apartment, sleeps with Komatsu and steals away Goda (Ganjiro Nakamura of Ozu’s Floating Weeds and The End of Summer), the older man who’d offered to set Mama up with her own (second-rate) bar.

Yuri (Keiko Awaji, the showgirl sold out by her mother in Stray Dog) is the ex-employee who ditched with some good customers, later kills herself with pills (possibly by accident), ruining the family she leaves behind with her debts.

Sekine (Daisuke Kato, professional rotund sidekick actor) acts like a factory owner looking for a mistress, turns out to be broke and married.

From the writer of a bunch of major Kurosawa films as well as Afraid to Die. Cinematographer was Masao Tamai, a Naruse regular who also shot Godzilla.

P. Lopate:

Though we cannot but sympathize with Keiko, we are also allowed to judge her dispassionately. She comes across at times as self-righteous, at other times as hard. … Asked to help pay for an operation that would correct her nephew’s polio, she discards the plea as too expensive, and we never do find out if she springs for the loan. In short, she is a very human mixture of generous and self-protective. …

Naruse’s gift here is being able to keep alive surprise and the fresh possibility of hope, even as you know deep down that he’s going to snatch most of that hope away. Endurance is the final antidote to despair, and that he does not extinguish. For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, what continuously engages and enthralls in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

by ·Comments Off on Le Doulos (1962, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I actually kept up with all the plot confusion, so better write this down while I still remember it. Thief Maurice (Serge Reggiani, would-be star of Clouzot’s Inferno) kills and robs his fence/friend Gilbert (Rene Lefevre, Monsieur Lange in The Crime of Monsieur Lange), goes home to girlfriend Therese, hangs out with friends Silien and Jean, then gets caught robbing a house the next night, kills a cop who knew Silien and Gilbert, and gets arrested for both killings, neither of which can be proven.

From another POV (with a few holes), as soon as Maurice leaves Therese’s house robbery, buddy Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of three Melville movies he did between Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou) runs in, ties up Therese (smacking her around first) and asks her where the robbery is taking place. Cops cars arrive just as Maurice’s partner has started drilling the safe – the partner and the cop are killed, and Maurice faints with a bullet wound, picked up by persons unknown in a car. Belmondo visits the police station, a known informer, and offers to call around the bars looking for Maurice – they catch him in one, and he’s arrested. Meanwhile, Therese turns up dead in her car at the bottom of a ravine. Looks like Belmondo has locked up Maurice for offing his cop friend, and killed his girlfriend too. On top of that, Belmondo finds the buried jewels, cash and gun from the Gilbert killing (Maurice had left Therese a map, in case anything happened to him). In jail, Maurice (who’s as much the star of the movie as the over-the-title-credited Belmondo) hires a dude to kill Belmondo once they get out.

But Belmondo turns out to be a true friend who’s extremely good at covering for Maurice’s crimes. Belmondo killed the girl for ratting, saved Maurice at the scene of the heist, met up with his own ex-girl (Fabienne Dali of Kill Baby, Kill) and used the jewels to frame Michel Piccoli for the murder(s). So all is well… or it would be, but Maurice remembers that he’s got a hit man after his friend, so he races to Belmondo’s house and everybody gets killed.

So much twisty plot going on, I barely noticed anything else. Seemed like one of Melville’s more busy, exciting films.

by ·Comments Off on My Six Loves (1963, Gower Champion)

The most anti-feminist crap imaginable – could’ve been hilarious camp if it wasn’t so boring and traditional. Each character seems close to expressing some kind of definition or interest before the movie yanks them back into its safe, bland, kiddy-pool world.

Debbie Reynolds (Susan Slept Here) is a successful New York actress, takes time off at her vacation house in Connecticut with her associate Eileen Heckart (Burnt Offerings, The Bad Seed). But they find six children with step-parents even more cartoonishly terrible than the ones in Million Dollar Baby. Debbie, naturally, throws her career away to live in the country and care for them – but first, whom to marry? Her slick New York agent who’s had a crush on her for years, David Janssen of Marooned? Or hunky local-hero minister Cliff Robertson, star of Underworld USA? It’s a no-brainer!

From the director of the great Mystery Science Theater short Once Upon a Honeymoon, the one where the woman sings about wanting a telephone in every room.