by ·Comments Off on Five Graves to Cairo (1943, Billy Wilder)

German and British forces and some chaotic individuals are shacked up together in an understaffed desert hotel in Egypt, like a WWII Dragon Inn. The Five Graves are where Rommel’s archaeologist friend buried advance supplies for the nazis to take Cairo. Escaped British soldier masquerading as hotel worker Franchot Tone (Phantom Lady) hopes to use his position to kill Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), but his captured compatriots instruct him to escape with the map details to foil the African campaign. During the escape, our guy steals a gun from a loud Italian general (Fortunio Bonanova, actually Spanish) and kills handsome, talkative Lt. Peter van Eyck (billionaire of 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse). Local girl Anne “Eve” Baxter stays behind and takes the blame, and gets executed. It’s dark, but these are Necessary Wartime Sacrifices (see also: This Land Is Mine). Wilder’s second or third feature (depending who’s counting) is good, with the best Rommel you could ask for.

Eve and hotelier Akim Tamiroff:

A noirish Tone:

by ·Comments Off on Soldier of Orange (1977, Paul Verhoeven)

Good twisty wartime spy story from Paul “subtlety is for cowards” Verhoeven. Not one of his best movies – too plotty and obvious – but clearly crucial to his whole deal (it wouldn’t be his last film about resistance fighters betraying their own people for profit).

Rutger and his college buds bond over his hazing experience by entering WWII (“a spot of war would be quite exciting”), ending up on different sides, then bumping into (and/or killing) each other. Guus (4th Man star Jeroen Krabbé) becomes a bigwig friend of the Queen, sleeping with her secretary Susan (of psychic horror Patrick), while Robbie becomes a Gestapo collaborator to save his skin. Guus and Rutger team up in England, running missions back into the Netherlands. Only Rutger and his friend Paul from Turks Fruit survive (no definite word on the cockatoo).

Pre-war college dickheads:

Post-war, a dickhead in an outhouse is about to eat this grenade:

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Feest! (1963)

Since I’m watching early Verhoeven movies, I dug up this short. Slick b/w little near-drama about a schoolboy who likes a girl. After days of glances and whispers, they hang out at the school dance, dancing occasionally but with nothing really to say to each other. Meanwhile up in the tower the older boys are playing a blindfolded couples kissing game, our couple plays along but she’s not into it, slaps him and runs off. The movie’s highlight: a boring assembly speaker is named Albert Vogler.

by ·Comments Off on Journey Into Fear (1943, Norman Foster)

My movie watching is outpacing my progress on the James Naremore book, so I don’t know the whole deal with Norman Foster and this Mercury Theater production, but it stars all my Kane and Ambersons buddies and is obviously a part of the big Welles picture. Annoyed to discover that there’s a longer reconstructed version with ten extra minutes that played MoMA a decade ago, but which never came out on video, so I watched the dull censored version, and it was still pretty great.

The Kane Boys:

An assassin is after arms dealer Joe Cotton, but this was during WWII so we’re supposed to be rooting for the arms dealer, not the assassin. Turks and Russians and nazis are involved, Cotton is sent undercover on a small ship but the assassin is also onboard (very nicely introduced via his skipping turntable). Now we get to meet all the other passengers and try to sort out their loyalties in time to save Cotton’s life.

Major Ship Captain Amberson:

Orson is apparently an ally, Major Amberson great as the ship’s captain, Agnes not great with a French accent, Dolores del Rio hot as a dancer in a catsuit. Cotton (a married man!) gets pushed around by everyone, has no plan or confidence, is overly insecure about the dancer, then when they arrive on shore he escapes a kidnapping attempt through actual quick thinking and defeats the assassin during a rainy rooftop struggle.

Remade in the 1970s with Sam Waterston, assassin Ian McShane, Shelley Winters in the Moorehead role, and some crazy additional cast (Zero Mostel, Vincent Price, Stanley Holloway).

by ·Comments Off on Two by Straub-Huillet (2006/08)

These Encounters of Theirs / Quei Loro Incontri (2006)

I’ve grappled with these guys before, trying to figure out their whole deal in previous posts. Think they stated in the Pedro Costa doc their moral grounds for cutting sound with picture with no attempt towards soundscape continuity, but I don’t remember the details. Today I’m here not to grapple, just to space out on the couch with a couple of their late works.

Familiar setup: some people (not actors, we’re told) are declaring/reciting dialogue, their performances engaging and alienating at once. This all brings to mind Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene in the staging. They pause strangely in the middle of sentences, and at the end of a scene they face each other in silence, having run out of lines, the wind blowing their clothes. Their words were written for Greek immortals by depressed communist Cesare Pavese in the 1940s. Played in competition in Venice alongside eleven others I’ve seen – what a year.

Neil Bahadur gets it:

Huillet once said about Straub, “Jean-Marie is always looking for paintings.” Perhaps they wanted to show us that the world itself is a painting, a moving one, always alive. Here is a film about the beauty that the world is capable of, not just by humans, but by the shapes and patterns that sunlight makes when it passes through the leaves and the branches of a tree. The world is so beautiful, so ephemeral that even the gods wish to become mortal. We humans don’t know what we’re missing.

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Itinerary of Jean Bricard (2008)

First we motorboat around Coton Island a couple times, looking at wintry trees in 4:3 b/w. I assumed this was to demonstrate the size of the island (small enough to circle twice in 15 minutes) but Bahadur sees impressionism, abstraction, a tribute to Cezanne. Then onto land while the titular narrator tells stories of the area’s nazi occupation and beyond. Jake Cole: “He also talks of postwar projects that have dramatically affected the entire ecology and terrain of the area, which further complicates the tranquil images. Left hanging in the air unspoken is the notion that, to the land, the French are every bit the ruinous occupiers that the Germans were.”

by ·Comments Off on A Diary for Timothy & The Stranger Left No Card

A Diary for Timothy (1945, Humphrey Jennings)

Narrator explains to Baby Tim on his birthday – also the fifth anniversary of Britain entering WWII – what we’re fighting for, and how we’ve got a difficult recovery ahead. He sketches out the next six months, closing by asking whether the kid will make the world a better place (spoiler: he did not). Starts out as boring wartime propaganda and gets increasingly complex, until by the end I almost see why this keeps popping up on best-movie lists.

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The Stranger Left No Card (1952, Wendy Toye)

“They’d never seen anything like me before,” says the stranger, an overly facial-haired street magician, but that’s because Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals hadn’t been invented yet. All the townspeople take interest in this guy as he runs around being whimsical. Some sync sound issues, but mostly narrated by our self-delighted stranger (Alan Badel of Day of the Jackal and Children of the Damned). After establishing himself all week as someone who shows up everywhere playing harmless tricks, he shows up in a contractor’s office at closing time and revenge-kills the guy for sending him to prison years earlier. It’s the perfect crime, but it’s also the 1950s so he can’t quite get away clean, leaving a trail of glitter to the train as he’s leaving town.

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla Minus One (2023, Takashi Yamazaki)

I get that in today’s marketplace you’ve gotta reboot everything at least once per decade, but it’s a shame to churn out new reboots so soon after the superior Shin Godzilla. This is as talky as the Anno, but some cheesy shit from the director of Parasyte. What’s funny is this movie stops every 20 minutes so our hero (coward would-be-kamikaze Shikishima, survivor of Godz and war, played by the voice lead of Your Name and Summer Wars) can have a trauma breakdown, while Hideaki Anno, who invented trauma breakdowns, never did this in Shin.

He shacks up with a neighbor whose kids died in WWII bombing (she’s the great Ruri-Ruri from Shin Kamen Rider) and gets work as a minesweeper, until Godz returns. They blow up a mine in its mouth, but it has hyper-healing abilities and nuclear-blast-attack, which it uses to destroy a battleship. When the wild-haired doctor’s plan to sink the lizard using bubbles(?) doesn’t work, our guy gets help from a mechanic who hates his guts (Munetaka Aoki of the new Serpent’s Path) then uses his plane-crashing skills to blow up the monster’s head. His not-wife, who’d apparently sacrificed herself to a nuclear attack to save him, escapes with minor injuries.

by ·Comments Off on Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

Blackie and his bestie, the thinner-mustached Marko are communists in 1941. The nearby zoo is bombed, panicking Marko’s brother, the stuttering zookeeper Ivan, and nazis overtake the town. Enter Natalija, Blackie’s girl, an actress also beloved by Marko and Nazi Franz. Marko hides Blackie and his fellow revolutionaries in a basement and when the war ends he decides not to tell them, so he keeps Natalija above ground and the undergrounders keep manufacturing weapons for him to sell. When a monkey blows a hole in the wall during Blackie’s son’s wedding they escape, come across the set of the film reenacting Blackie’s war heroism, and he starts killing German actors. Thirty years later as Yugoslavia is violently dissolving, Ivan finds his lost monkey then everybody dies tragically.

Young Ivan and flock:

Marko and Nat preparing to take drastic measures:

Inserting Blackie into documentary footage from the era was well-done. I think the internet is saying the movie is pro-genocide, but I don’t follow why. Even if so, this is counterbalanced by the movie’s major macaw presence. Won the top prize at Cannes versus Dead Man, City of Lost Children, Shanghai Triad, Hou, Oliveira, Terence Davies, and a pissed-off Theodoros Angelopoulos. Blackie appeared with a couple of James Bonds and played Santa Claus in the nutty-looking anthology Goodbye 20th Century. Marko was in Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, and Franz was in Ozon’s Frantz. Natalija came to Hollywood and ended up hundredth-billed in Maid in Manhattan, playing a maid, that’s embarrassing.

Old Blackie:

Old Ivan finds Old Marko:

by ·Comments Off on Fear and Desire (1953, Stanley Kubrick)

Very Twilight Zone opening narration, four soldiers crashed in enemy territory, in a forest of the mind. The lieutenant with his cocky officer’s hat suggests they build a raft and ride the river home. But first a bit of action: assault on some nazis eating dinner, they die clutching fistfuls of stew. The Lt is calm, stands around composing philosophy on the nature of war while his men are in a hurry to get to safety.

They kidnap a girl who spots them (she’s best known as the disembodied head in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) and leave her tied up in the care of young Sidney. He immediately starts freaking out and crying, then does an unfunny improv routine and is upset that she doesn’t chuckle. Sid is extremely insecure, paws and kisses at her then releases her and shoots her dead when she runs, then he rants that the river is blood and runs off cackling. Meanwhile Mac (Frank Silvera of Dassin’s Uptight) spots an enemy general and figures they can assassinate him on the way home. The plan works out: Mac gets blasted riding the raft as a distraction while the two others storm the general’s cabin then steal his plane.

You’ll never guess who half-dead Mac meets downriver:

“I wish I could want what I wanted before.” A real tortured screenplay, overwritten but nice looking – the writer later worked on Saint Jack with P-Bog, and Kubrick disowned this film to the point of trying to destroy all copies. Why does the annoyingly wordy lieutenant also play the annoyingly wordy enemy general?

by ·Comments Off on Lola (2022, Andrew Legge)

A found-footage film (oh no) but improved by the sci-fi aspect. Thomasina “Tom” and Martha “Mars” are happy with their time-television, dancing to David Bowie in 1940. Military agent Sebastian locates and joins them after they start broadcasting warnings about near-future nazi bombings, and inevitably one girl (Mars) falls for him. Some cute multiverse moments: they sing “You Really Got Me” and a ragtime version becomes the theme song and slogan of the war effort. But the girls aren’t great war strategists and botch a couple important things leading to (in order of increasing horror): the USA dropping support for Britain, the nazis winning the war, and erasure of David Bowie’s career. No longer trusted by anyone, the back half of the movie is all running around spy/escape scenes. Mars shooting nazis while hanging from a noose isn’t the movie’s strong suit, the early cross-timeline TV stuff is. Finally they leave messages from their alt-present to their unspoiled past selves and manage to undo the damage.

Tom (the serious, dark-haired sister, whose large eyes get put to good use) is also in a netflix fantasy show, Mars in that horrorish movie Make Up, and Seb in that movie about the Bronte sisters.