by ·Comments Off on The Last Command (1928, Josef von Sternberg)

Another splendid Sternberg movie with an Alloy Orchestra score – how Criterion spoils us. It’s hard to fully embrace a movie with the dialogue “From now on you are my prisoner of war… and my prisoner of love.” But once I accepted the melodramatic story elements, this was almost the equal of Sternberg’s great Underworld.

Supposedly based on a real person, Emil Jannings is a powerful Russian general who escapes the country during the 1917 revolution (between this, Potemkin and Mother, Russian revolutions have been coming up often) and scrapes by in the U.S. as a Hollywood extra. This is not portrayed as a glamorous career path – note that The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra was made in the same year. We’re also shown a bunch of resentful bastards at the studio costuming department, as if Sternberg and his writer were out to de-glamorize the movie-making process.

Directed by Michael William Powell:

Back in Russia, General Jannings (after his three great movies with Murnau, so already a star) clashes with young idealist revolutionary William Powell (with perhaps a thicker, less refined mustache than he sports in the Thin Man films). I was glad to see Evelyn Brent (Feathers in Underworld) again, and Sternberg and his photographer light her as ecstatically as before. She’s attached to Powell until taken prisoner by Jannings, eventually warming to him and helping him escape once the tables are turned. Later in Hollywood, Powell plans to shame the former general by casting him in a film that re-enacts his defeat, but the general gets too caught up in his nostalgic fervor and dies of a heart attack. Powell seems to forgive him after that, seeing that they both loved their country, just in different ways – which helps explain Evelyn’s split loyalties as well.

Evelyn Brent, revolutionary:

A. Kaes for Criterion:

Von Sternberg seems to have been fascinated by Jannings’s acting style and persona and did not restrain them in The Last Command. Instead, he used the actor’s histrionic theatricality to explore the power of performance and filmic illusion themselves—a subject he would continue to mine for the rest of his career.

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year Zero (1948, Roberto Rossellini)

The end of the War Trilogy, and the one I’d seen once before in a mega-depressing Italian Neorealism night programmed by TCM, which included Ossessione and Umberto D.

No Fellini involvement this time, just R.R. in a foreign land with unknown actors. Being an Italian, foreign pictures were no problem – doesn’t matter what anybody is saying because they’ll be dubbed later. A fairly active and mobile camera for 1948, with plenty of exteriors of course, by D.P. Robert Juillard, who’d later shoot René Clément’s Forbidden Games. Big noisy music by brother Renzo.

Little Edmund is being pulled in all directions. He lives with his family, who board with a cranky other family. The elders complain that Edmund is made to go out and work for them, but they barely lift a finger to help – father is ill, brother is a nazi soldier in hiding, and sister dances with men at night for cigarettes. Edmund even picks up tasks for the landlords, who then bitch and moan if he doesn’t do them right. He’s not extremely street smart (Hitler Youth underprepared him for ruinous defeat), is taken advantage of wherever he goes. He falls in with a nazi (and very likely pedophile, extremely creepy, touchy dude who loves hanging out with boys) ex-schoolteacher who plants the idea in Edmund’s mind to poison his father and lessen the burden around the house. But doing this only makes Ed feel worse, and he throws himself off a building.

Rosenbaum:

“This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947,” [Rossellini] declared …, is “an objective and faithful portrait,” not “an accusation or even a defense of the German people.” Yet objectivity was clearly (and thankfully) the last thing Rossellini had in mind. Even the doom-ridden modernist score by his brother Renzo participates in the sense of unfolding disbelief and horror by suggesting some of the mood of science fiction. And the directive later in the preface to care about these Germans rather than call for any further retribution is actually more consistent with Rossellini’s aims than any “objective assessment” could be. This was a brave and principled stance for him to take at the time, and it still places Germany Year Zero well in advance of most films about war made even today.

That ending (Rossellini says the ending was the only part of this film that interested him) is so powerful that although it’s one of the all-time most depressing movie finales, I could watch it over and over. Ed allows himself to be more of a kid here, playing games that get increasingly war-like and suicidal – he pretends that a bit of metal is a gun, and his first instinct is to shoot himself with it. The final pan up to the ruined city skyline (one of many majestic shots of bombed-out Berlin) reminds me of that final skyline shot as the kids walk away from the murdered priest at the end of Rome Open City.

by ·Comments Off on Underworld (1927, Josef von Sternberg)

Mulligan (Fred Kohler of a couple other Sternberg features) is a mean-ass gangster who tries to make a poor drunk pick a tenner out of a spitoon. Funny, since earlier this week Katy and I watched Rio Bravo, in which the same thing happens. Like in Rio Bravo, the poor drunk turns out to be one of our heroes – the smart and loyal Rolls Royce (Clive Brook, an early Sherlock Holmes, also in The Four Feathers). Unlike Rio Bravo, the guy who saves him isn’t the sheriff but another gangster making a show of power: the giddy, reckless Bull Weed (George Bancroft, the marshall in Stagecoach) in front of his lady, pouty Feathers McCoy (Evelyn Brent, a cult member in The Seventh Victim, also in a couple of “anti-Mormon propaganda films”).

Bull and his Feathers:

pre-reform Rolls Royce:

Rolls joins Bull’s gang (which seems to consist of himself and some comedian (played by Larry Semon, formerly a hugely successful comic but on his way to an early grave when he appeared in this). Rolls is a big help, giving his boss valuable tactical advice, but he’s transparently falling in love with Feathers. The boss goes to prison, sentenced to death for shooting down Mulligan in his own flower shop. He escapes with vengeance on his mind, but ultimately decides to surrender himself and let Feathers and Rolls have each other.

It’d be a good, entertaining gangster movie from the story and acting alone. Ben Hecht, who wrote more great movies than I can list, won an oscar for this, although he hated the final product for deviating from his script. But the visual style is so splendid it puts the story to shame, and accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra on the Criterion DVD, it’s a piece of cinema heaven.

Sternberg wrote, with apparently typical contempt for his audience, ““I had provided the work with many an incident to placate the public, not ignoring the moss-covered themes of love and sacrifice.” But as G. O’Brien points out, “His high opinion of his own capabilities and his majestic sense of his poetic vocation might indeed seem like intolerable arrogance were they not so undeniably justified.”

Mulligan inside his flower shop:

…while outside…

Guy Maddin’s article on Sternberg and the films is, of course, wonderful to read, and it sounds from the quote like Sternberg’s own writings might be essential:

Once, wandering the shower rooms among the actors washing the day’s grime off themselves, von Sternberg heard a background player release “a formidable laugh, an inhuman laugh, enormous and savage, monstrous, a child’s laugh and a murderer’s laugh.” This gigglepuss was George Bancroft, and … von Sternberg rushed right into the shower stall and cast the naked, roaring gigantopithicus he found there as Bull Weed, the gangster-king of his new picture, Underworld.

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Middle of R.R.’s war trilogy, six episodes about different wartime encounters with (mostly?) Americans. The movie’s subject is that “war is an epidemic that sweeps up everyone in its path,” sayeth the TV narrator. A pretty active and mobile camera, and big noisy music by brother Renzo. Fellini was co-writer and assistant director. A whole bunch of writers, including Alfred Hayes (later Clash By Night and Human Desire) who might account for the surprisingly not-bad English dialogue.

1.
A couple of misunderstandings. U.S. soldiers come to town, recruit a local girl to lead them over the mine-laced lava path. Joe stays in a building with her while the others go ahead. Nazis wander in as Joe is connecting with the girl despite their language barrier, shoot Joe then toss her off the cliff. When the Americans return, they assume the traitorous Italian girl killed their friend then ran off.

2.
Black American soldier hangs out with kid, drunkenly assaults a puppet show, gets his shoes stolen, later comes after the kid to reclaim his shoes but leaves empty-handed, shocked to realize that the kids live in rubble, their parents dead from the bombings. It’s practically a Germany Year Zero prequel.

3.
This and the previous episode give the impression that there were about 200 people in wartime Italy. Very easy to find someone you’re looking for in the streets, or to run into an old acquaintance. Kind of a cheesy episode, a soldier sleeping with some lowlife whore (Maria Michi, the drug-addled turncoat in Rome Open City), telling her dreamily about this perfect upright Italian girl he met before the war, wishing he could meet her again and marry her – of course they are the same girl. Interesting, the Allies shown as liberating heroes, then as witnesses to (or, more likely, causers of) Italy’s immediate post-liberation decline into poverty and desperation.

4.
Nurse Harriet Medin (later in Blood and Black Lace and The Horrible Dr. Hichcock) enlists headstrong dude named Massimo (Renzo Avanzo, later a co-writer of The Golden Coach) trying to get into zone the rebels (partisans) control, only for her to find out her man, now leader of the locals, died that morning. The most action-packed fighting scenes of the movie.

5.
This was a favorite. Three American chaplains visit a monastery, are welcomed happily until the monks find out one is a protestant and one a jew, then commence praying and fasting in hopes that the two can be saved.

6.
The most typically propagandistic of the episodes, showing Italian partisans, British and American soldiers helping each other and fighting together, while Nazis kill peaceful villagers then capture our heroes and murder them all. A downbeat, defeated finale, ending in death like the other two movies in the War Trilogy.

by ·Comments Off on Under The Volcano (1984, John Huston)

Wanted to check out some more late Huston before the upcoming Emory screening of The Dead, since I don’t believe Wise Blood is typical of his films. But now, having seen these two plus The Maltese Falcon and nothing in between, I still have no idea what is typical of his films. It’s got that familiar 1970’s grime all over it, so either Huston was late in adapting to 80’s-style cinema or, more likely, Mexico was still in the 70’s.

“Some things you can’t apologize for.”

“Hell is my natural habitat.”

Full of fun quotes, mostly spoken by literate drunk Albert Finney, who gave up sobriety when his wife left a year prior. Finney (a few years before Miller’s Crossing) is tended by his brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews, lately of The King’s Speech), and all is depressingly normal until the now-ex-wife (Jacqueline Bisset, the mother in The Ceremony) shows up unexpectedly. Finney goes off the deep end with the drinking and erratic behavior, ending up shot to death in a hostile bar/whorehouse, scaring a horse into trampling to death his wife in front of Hugh, with whom she’d been having an affair before she originally left Mexico. It’s a great ending to a movie which overall didn’t strike me as hard as it seems to strike everyone else.

Finney and Bisset:

Andrews spontaneously goes bullfighting:

Didn’t watch the many DVD extras so I still know nothing about author Malcolm Lowry. Alex North brings his heavy hand to the proceedings, not offending except once during a comedy scene when he got overexcited. Shot with Mexican D.P. Gabriel Figueroa, who worked on at least four of Bunuel’s best films.

C. Viviani makes connections to The Dead:

It was with The Man Who Would Be King (1975), a project that he had been thinking about since the 1950s—based on a Rudyard Kipling story—that Huston made his return to literary adaptation. After the success of that bold “action-adventure” (in which both the action and the adventure are more within the characters than on the screen), Huston began favoring fictional works that were problematic, in terms of translating them to screen, because of the importance given to internal monologue or their absence of action. In less than ten years Huston would adapt three stories considered to be “unadapt-able”: Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, and The Dead, by James Joyce. In each case the adaptation rose to the challenge by deliberately ignoring false problems and by choosing to render the spirit rather than the letter of the original. It was not a matter of filming everything but of filming only what Huston liked, which is, in fact, a constant throughout his work. The culmination of this approach, The Dead (1987), is a film that is both respectful and free, and it became a kind of legacy work, in which Huston does not so much film Joyce’s story as use it as a pretext for offering his daughter Anjelica and his son Tony the gift of his artistic heritage.

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.

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 Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)

I finally watched the saddest movie of the entire 1930’s, now that it’s been recommended by every film critic everywhere and given a shiny new video release by Criterion, and I’m glad to discover that it has more in common with McCarey’s other movies (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth) than with, for instance, Mizoguchi’s cinema of constant sorrow. Just because it’s a movie about a penniless elderly couple being separated and passed around by their middle-aged siblings who won’t make time in their lives for mom & dad doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to watch.

The couple walks in front of a projection screen:

As the Great Depression was wearing off, there were enough eager young unemployed workers around that nobody had to hire retirement-aged old men, so Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore, Fred Astaire’s buddy in Swing Time) finds himself unemployable and loses his house. His mortgage agent at the bank was a rival for the affections of Barkley’s wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi, Fred MacMurray’s mom in Remember the Night) fifty years ago, finally getting his sweet revenge. So the parents gather four of their five kids (the fifth has moved out west) and explain the situation.

L-R: George, Robert, Cora, Nellie:

Robert (Ray Mayer, played a character called Dopey in the Astaire/Rogers movie Follow the Fleet) somehow avoids taking any responsibility, and the husband of Nellie (Minna Gombell, widow of the murdered Thin Man) forbids her from inviting mom and dad into the house, “I married you, not your parents.” The others claim not to have enough room, so forbidding Cora (Elisabeth Risdon of High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties) takes the dad while weak-willed George (Thomas Mitchell, played Doc Boone in Stagecoach) takes his mother.

Louise Beavers as Mamie, one of many times she’d play a Mamie or Mammy, another being Holiday Inn:

Crazy thing about the 1930’s that familes can act like they are so underpaid, just barely getting by, but still employ a black housekeeper. Most of the rest of the movie follows the mother at George’s house, quickly getting on the nerves of his wife Anita (Fay Bainter, oscar-nominated for playing a homeless mother the following year in White Banners) and daughter Rhoda. Anita teaches classes in bridge at her house, and has as little compassion as the mother has a sense of when it’s inappropriate to start telling rambling stories, so it’s not going well. It’s going even worse for the dad, though, who spends his days with awesome shopkeeper Max (Maurice Moscovitch of Love Affair) because Cora is an intolerable bitch. Nobody cares what the parents want, so they never get to see each other anymore.

Max/Maurice:

Dad can’t find work and the kids can’t put up with this any longer. The new plan is to ship Dad off west with the fifth kid, claiming it’s for his health, and to put Mom in an old folks’ home, which she has visited and has told everyone it seems like a terrible place. The parents are wise to these plans, each figuring out that they’re being shuttled away because they have become inconvenient, but they put on a happy face for their last few hours together, walking the streets as a couple before the farewell dinner with the kids. Suddenly their fortunes turn, and everyone in the city is being nice to them. They enjoy a lovely dinner at the hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon, and then say goodbye at the train station, the kids belatedly discovering that they’d been abandoned. It’s all terrible the way the parents are being treated, but when Mom wonders what had gone wrong, she blames her own parenting. “You don’t sow wheat and reap ashes.” It’s all quite depressing, but skillfully written to also be entertaining without becoming a nonstop weepie.

Ellen Drew of Christmas In July in an early role as a theater usher, with George’s daughter Rhoda:

Outside the movie theater. Souls at Sea got three oscar nominations in ’38 and McCarey’s The Awful Truth got six, including a win for best director. No love for this film, however, which was McCarey’s own favorite.

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I saw this ages ago and didn’t get it. Now that I’ve enjoyed Mon Oncle and seen Playtime a few times, I wasn’t thrown by Tati’s Buster Keatonesque style – series of gags setting up the next series of gags, with funny sound effects but almost no dialogue. Other notable similarities to Playtime: jokes about malfunctioning technology (mostly automobiles, but also an indecipherable train station announcement speaker) and an extended delay before the first appearance of our hero Tati/Hulot.

It’s a weirdly understated gag movie – some big slapstick scenes like when Hulot sets off a box full of fireworks, but mostly more subtle. There are enough unnamed characters intersecting in different ways in each scene to make Altman proud (I especially noticed a young woman with a Princess Leia hairdo).

I watched the original full-length version – most DVDs only have Tati’s own re-edit from the 70’s. I’m sure that by the time I rent the Criterion and watch the shorter version I won’t be able to precisely recall the differences. Half of Tati’s movies exist in multiple versions – Jour de fete is in black and white and color, Mon Oncle is in French and English and Playtime had a bunch of different edits.

Leia with an insufferable leftist who insists on talking politics while everyone is on vacation:

Hulot annoying a hotel worker: