by ·Comments Off on The Bed Sitting Room (1969, Richard Lester)

I was disappointed to not understand this one very well. I appreciated that a movie with a dull-as-dirt period-drama-sounding title turned out to be a post-apocalyptic absurdist comedy, but all the references to British places and culture flew over my uncultured American head, leaving me only with some Airplane-style puns and the welcome sight of Marty Feldman (in his first film, hence the “introducing” title card, though he was already a TV star with his own show).

I suppose the central characters, if there are any, are a young couple in love (Rita Tushingham of The Knack, with a great surname for comedy, and Richard Warwick of If…) and her parents, mother Mona Washbourne (of Billy Liar), who eventually turns into a (perhaps Dali-inspired) cupboard due to nuclear mutation, and father Arthur Lowe (the only actor I liked in The Ruling Class), who later turns into a parrot. Captain/Doctor Bules Martin (Michael Hordern, memorable as Jacob Marley in Scrooge) marries the girl after paying off her father, but she still only sleeps with Richard Warwick. Ralph Richardson (butler in The Fallen Idol) is Lord Fortram, who mutates into a bed sitting room (just a one-room apartment, I guess), where everybody gathers for the climax.

The BBC:

Some stuff I liked: Frank Thornton (Are You Being Served) is a newsman who wears the top third of a ragged suit and frames himself with a TV cutout. “I am the BBC, as you can see.” Also, the short-lived third world war is referred to as “the nuclear misunderstanding.” When the men think they’re being addressed by God, they sing “for he’s a jolly good fellow”.

The fourth movie I’ve seen with famed comedian Spike Milligan and I still don’t know who he is – the closest I got was recognizing which character he played in History of the World Part 1. Here he played “Mate,” whatever that means. Perhaps he’s the guy driving a wrecking ball with Dudley Moore.

Looking at the screen shots after the fact, it seems like a much more remarkable movie.

by ·Comments Off on For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert)

Very nicely assembled space doc, a tribute to the Apollo missions. Some 16 years after we stopped going to the moon, Reinert montaged audio interviews and film records from the flights into a concise movie with some familiar imagery (still good to see it in well-restored HD) but plenty of new stuff for a space novice like myself.

Lots of anti-gravity play, and talk about music. I was impressed that one astronaut took the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack into space, forgetting that the film predated the first moon landing. And speaking of music, I liked the documentary’s music without paying much attention, didn’t realize until the end credits that it’s all by Brian Eno. Nor did it really occur to me until more than halfway through the short feature that multiple missions were being shuffled without comment. These are two things I’ll have to focus on next time. Turns out Reinert cowrote that Final Fantasy movie I hated, but I can’t hold that against him now.

T. Rafferty:

What he does in this project, editing millions of feet of film and hundreds of hours of audio recordings into an eighty-minute feature, is treat the whole Apollo adventure as a single, epic trip to the moon, peopled by a crew so anonymous that it seems to represent, well, all mankind. … [Nobody] is identified by name. The film simply proceeds, with serene inevitability, from one fiery liftoff to one gentle splashdown, not troubling itself to distinguish any individual mission from any other and never interrupting the hypnotic flow of otherworldly imagery with a shot of a talking head. At first, when one of the offscreen voices says something unusually poetic, or funny, you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering. It doesn’t seem to matter. It’s everybody’s voice.

Reinert:

I began interviewing the Apollo astronauts in 1976. They were mostly retired astronauts by then, changed men. Over the years I taped nearly 80 hours of interviews with those original extraterrestrial humans, and excerpts from the tapes constitute the major part of the soundtrack of For All Mankind. The movie thus speaks with the intimate voice of personal experience.
…
For All Mankind is the firsthand story of a great mythic adventure. Touching the Moon was by definition a work of inspired imagination and high art, and scarcely requires further embellishment. It speaks for itself more eloquently than it can ever be interpreted: an age-old dream that at long last was fulfilled.

Rafferty again:

It takes enormous daring to make an avant-garde movie about people as determinedly square as the scientists, technicians, and pilots of the Apollo team; where this journalist, who had never directed a movie before, found the inspiration for that unlikely project is—like so much in the film—unfathomable. … In the late nineties, HBO aired a twelve-part docudrama series called From the Earth to the Moon, to which Reinert contributed two scripts. (The series is less exciting than it should have been—it tries too hard to be stirring—but its history is pretty reliable.) Reinert also had a hand in writing Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, which effectively (if, again, a bit too strenuously) dramatizes the 1970 mission … But For All Mankind is irreplaceable: one of a kind and likely to remain so. It is, formally, among the most radical American films of the past quarter century and, emotionally, among the most powerfully affecting.

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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.

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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 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.

by ·Comments Off on The Savage Innocents (1960, Nicholas Ray)

“The rules have grown stronger than those who made them.”

Bob Dylan’s fabled hero Anthony Quinn is a mexican eskimo (MEXIMO). Eskimo culture in the far north is apparently a whole racial melting pot, with eskimos from Japan and China and Singapore and Guyana, and even white eskimos with skin makeup.

Peter O’Toole, in his first year in the movies, already knew how to behave like a star, insisting his name be stricken from the credits upon learning that he’d been dubbed.

Opens unpleasantly with a swimming polar bear getting speared. Later we’ll see more hurt or killed animals, not always sure which are real. A narrator condescendingly fills us in on eskimo culture: “in the age of the atom bomb they still hunt with bow and arrow … they are so crude they don’t know how to lie.” Then Quinn shows up, a giggling simpleton with a short temper, a strong hunter without a wife. At first he’s too cartoonish, overplaying the cultural differences, but it’s a charismatic film and you get used to the movie version of the eskimo way of life, so that halfway through when guns and white men first appear, it’s startling. And then the movie gets to its point, or at least what I assume Ray felt was its point since he loves to hide bunches of social commentary in his action-packed dramas, which is best represented by Quinn’s great line: “When you come to a strange land, you should bring your wives and not your laws.”

Narrator plays it like a Nanook educational film at times. Quinn has a friendly fight with a buddy, smashing his head through an igloo wall, but while returning home after an uncomfortable encounter with modern civilization (guns and swing music) he busts the skull of a white missionary because he refuses to eat their old wormy marrow. “One did not intend to kill … his head was too soft.” Peter O’Toole and some guy who freezes to death after falling into water chase Quinn, arresting him for the murder, but finally O’Toole lets Quinn go, using exactly the same method as John Lithgow did in Harry and the Hendersons.

Hits from the DVD commentary by Krohn and Ehrenstein:
Technically an Italian movie (hence the dubbing). Opens with plain white nothingness, a little bit of Antonioni creeping into Ray’s work already. “Swingin’ and swappin’ in the great white north.” Ray was in the arctic for a long time getting all these shots. Released in 70mm. Marie Yang plays the mother of Quinn’s bride, is not Anna May Wong as frequently miscredited, but another actress calling herself Anna May Wong (not the famous one) also appears. Refusing to sleep with someone’s wife can get you killed, just as [sleeping with someone’s wife] can here. All of ray’s movies are about “the impossibility of communication.” Quinn is a rare Ray hero who is not neurotic. Ray’s trademark anguish is missing. The Four Saints song “Don’t Be an Iceberg” plus second song “Sexy Rock” heard in the distance then over closing credits, because movies had to have theme songs back then. And Krohn recommends the John Landis movie The Stupids.

This post has been released under the Movie Journal Amnesty Act of March 2011, which states that blog entries may be posted in an unfinished state, since I am too busy to write them up properly.

by ·Comments Off on Roman Polanski Shorts (1957-1962)

Knife in the Water is playing at Emory tomorrow so I prepped with some early shorts.

Murder (1957)
A man is murdered in bed with a pocket knife. That’s all. Damn good effect, too.

Teeth Smile (1957)
A peeper is dissuaded from his pasttime by the man of the house. At a full two minutes including credits, it’s the longer film so far.

Break Up The Dance (1957)
A pleasant outdoor party. Everyone is having a good time until some miscreants hop the fence and trash the place. The first one with sound. All of these so far have been tightly wound, shadowy and threatening.

Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958)
Two men carry a mirrored piece of furniture. Later, miscreants (maybe the same ones) kill a kitten, annoy a woman with its corpse, then smash the mirror and beat up our two moving men. Defeated, they go to a barrel graveyard and get pummelled by a cop, then retreat back into the sea. This was probably my favorite of the bunch. One of the moving men later cowrote Knife in the Water, and the composer would work with Polanski through Rosemary’s Baby. Most of these shorts are wordless – probably with international festivals in mind. This was the first award winner of the bunch, so it’s paying off.

The Lamp (1959)
A dollmaker replaces his lantern with an electric lightbulb. The electric box turns into a demon and burns his place to the ground. Dolls missing the tops of their heads always remind me of the Quay brothers.

When Angels Fall (1959)
An elderly black-and-white bathroom attendant has color flashbacks. Second movie with animal killing in it, this time a boy whipping a frog with sticks, and the first Polanski film to depict the horrors of war.

Too many great shots in this one:

The Fat and the Lean (1961)
A flunky is serenading a lazy fat man outside on a hot day. Every day the flunky helps the lazy man hunt and rest and eat and cool off, then tries to escape and gets stopped, until the lazy man ties the flunky to a goat. Times are tough for a while, but one day the flunky is released from the goat, and works twice as hard to please the lazy man, planting flowers all around him instead of trying to escape when the lazy man falls asleep. I was impressed by the acrobatic performance of the slave. IMDB says it’s Polanski himself, but then, IMDB also says Polanski played the old woman in the bathroom.

Mammals (1962)
Two dudes have one sled. Each pretends to be injured so the other will tow him in the sled. My favorite bit is when one wraps himself completely in bandages, turning invisible against the snow. Weird that R.P. would finally make an all-out comedy the same year Knife in the Water came out. I guess even Roman has to unwind once in a while. I don’t know an awful lot about Polish film, but this came after Wajda’s war trilogy, a few years before The Saragossa Manuscript was made, and before Kieslowski’s career had begun.

by ·Comments Off on The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)

While everyone is pretending to count down the minutes until the academy awards (I’m not convinced that most people care as much as they let on), we’ve declared February to be TCM Essentials Month, catching up on past Essentials (and yes, oscar winners) that we’ve missed. There’s nothing more essential than The Apartment, which is on every list of great American films made since it came out. Unsurprisingly, we both loved it (much better than Avanti!, that’s for sure).

Jack Lemmon works at an insurance company where all the executives are terrible connivers, cheating on their wives with floozies and office girls they bring to Lemmon’s apartment in exchange for the promise of promotions. He does a good job fitting in, pretending to be a selfish skirt-chasing careerist himself, even outside the office with his neighbors, but ultimately he’s too nice a guy. He’s got a crush on Shirley MacLaine (doing well for herself five years after Artists & Models), a sweet elevator operator who happens to be carrying on a long-term affair with big boss Fred MacMurray (weirdly in the midst of starring in family-friendly Disney films). It all goes wrong, Shirley attempts suicide in Lemmon’s apartment, and he (with his doctor/neighbor) nurses her back to health. All very intense and dark for what’s supposed to be a comedy.

I enjoyed a small Tashlinesque attack on television, as Lemmon tries to watch Grand Hotel on TV only to be put off by the constant commercials.

TCM sez:

Billy Wilder created in The Apartment what many consider the summation of all he had done on screen up to that point. He was the master of a type of bittersweet comedy that had a sadness and a barbed commentary of modern life at its core. … With this film, he managed to make a commercially successful entertainment that, for all its laughter and romance, took a serious stab at the prevailing attitudes and way of life of a country where getting ahead in business had become the greatest measure of personal success.

Won best picture, writing and directing, all for Wilder who did it all himself, but lost the acting awards for Lemmon, MacLaine and Jack Kruschen who played the neighbor/doctor. The writing especially was pretty wonderful, my favorite dialogue of any Wilder movie so far. Also did not win for its glorious b/w widescreen cinematography, which surprised me until I found out a Jack Cardiff movie won instead.