Ojos de Aguila Film Review

The Last Woman on Earth (1960)

2011-04-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

Race With The Devil (1975)

2011-04-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

2011-04-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Passenger (1975)

2011-02-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

Bad Lieutenant (1991)

2011-02-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

Fear City (1984)

2011-02-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

Duck, You Sucker (1971)

2011-02-18T16:21:00.000-08:00

Maid in Sweden (1971)

2011-02-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Cria Cuervos (1976)

2011-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

Viva Maria! (1965)

2011-01-16T13:15:00.000-08:00

Fairytale Of New York (1987)

2010-12-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Straight to Hell (1987)

2010-12-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

The Warriors (1979)

2010-12-16T08:07:00.000-08:00

The Hunger (1983)

2010-12-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

Tales of Terror (1962)

2010-12-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

Moby Dick (1956)

2010-12-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

Cape Fear (1962)

2010-12-06T09:39:00.000-08:00

Cape Fear (1991)

2010-12-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Teaserama (1955)

2010-12-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Belle de Jour (1967)

2010-12-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

Port of Shadows (1938)

2010-12-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

Obsession (1976)

2010-11-21T09:46:00.000-08:00

Les Diaboliques (1955)

2010-11-20T16:58:00.000-08:00

No Way Out (1950)

2010-11-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954)

2010-11-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

2010-11-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

D.O.A.

2010-07-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

"I'd like to report a murder."

"Who was murdered?"

"I was."

With that Edmond O'Brien (star of Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist) opens Rudolph Mate's 1949 noir masterpiece told in flashback that follows O'Brien's Frank Bigelow--an accountant, notary, and bachelor whose drink is spiked with "luminous poisoning" while on a vacation from his otherwise forgettable secretary and love interest Pamela Britton--from Banning to San Francisco to Los Angeles. The shadowy nighttime location shooting and interior cinematography was handled by Robert Aldrich-regular Ernest Laszlo in collaboration with the Krakow-born Mate, whose own career as a cinematographer spanned famously from Vampyr (1932) to Gilda (1946). Like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, Mate was among the many artists and filmmakers who exiled their lives to Hollywood during Hitler's rise in Europe during the late-1930s. The original film was firmly set in postwar America (unlike the 1988 remake starring Dennis Quaid and Charlotte Rampling) by both hinting at some unspoken pseudo-atomic destruction centering around a mysterious man named Majak and a stolen shipment of iridium, a dense metal that has been used for military projects (though not on atomic or nuclear weaponry) and containing a brilliant scene at a beatnik-era jazz and jive club called The Fisherman. Listed with the National Film Registry, D.O.A. contains period footage of the Bradbury Building on Broadway in Downtown L.A., and was guaranteed "scientifically accurate" by a medical advisor in the closing credits.

Astro Zombies

2010-06-20T19:53:00.001-07:00

Ted V. Mikels' Astro Zombies (1969) deserves a wider audience than simply Misfits fans seeking out Danzig's inspiration for sending his Astro zombies to rape the land and exterminate the whole fucking human race. B-movie legend John Carradine and Chinese Communist spy Tura Satana (Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill) star alongside switchblade-wielding Mexicans, square CIA agents, body-painted strippers, and an ubiquitous trail of young, bloody corpses. Look for LBJ--and with him the war in Vietnam--in the background (literally) of this space age thriller.

Top 20 Westerns

2010-04-05T15:40:00.001-07:00

Top 20 (29) Westerns in chronological order, 1940-1980

1940 Santa Fe Trail d. Michael Curtiz. Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland
1941 They Died With Their Boots On d. Raoul Walsh. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland
1943 The Outlaw d. Howard Hughes. Jane Russell
1943 The Ox-Bow Incident d. William Wellman. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn
1946 My Darling Clementine d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, Victor Mature
1948 Ft. Apache d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, John Wayne
1948 Red River d. Howard Hawks. John Wayne, Montgomery Clift
1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre d. John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston
1948 Duel in the Sun d. King Vidor. Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones,
1949 I Shot Jesse James d. Sam Fuller. John Ireland
1952 Viva Zapata d. Elia Kazan. Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn
1952 Rancho Notorious d. Fritz Lang. Marlene Dietrich
1952 High Noon d. Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado
1955 Vera Cruz d. Robert Aldrich. Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper
1956 The Searchers d. John Ford. John Wayne, Natalie Wood
1957 Forty Guns d. Sam Fuller. Barbara Stanwyck
1957 3:10 to Yuma d. Delmer Daves. Glenn Ford, Van Heflin
1960 The Magnificent Seven d. John Sturges. Yul Brenner, James Coburn, Steve McQueen
1961 One-Eyed Jacks d. Marlon Brando (fired Stanley Kubrick). Marlon Brando, Karl Malden
1962 Ride the High Country d. Sam Peckinpah. Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Warren Oates
1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance d. John Ford. Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin
1964 A Fistful of Dollars d. Sergio Leone. Clint Eastwood
1966 The Appaloosa d. Sidney Furie. Marlon Brando
1966 The Professionals d. Richard Brooks. Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale
1969 The Wild Bunch d. Sam Peckinpah. William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
1970 The Ballad of Cable Hogue d. Sam Peckinpah. Jason Robards
1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid d. Sam Peckinpah. James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan
1974 Don't Touch the White Woman d. Marco Ferreri. Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve
1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson d. Robert Altman. Paul Newman, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Chaplin,

Jamaica Inn

2009-12-09T19:19:00.001-08:00

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.

Chess Fever

2009-12-04T09:02:00.000-08:00

Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) is a comedic classic of Soviet cinema that builds on early Russian silent cinema, not just upon the revolutionary impulses of October 1917. The film presents a domestic picture of wintry Moscow in the grip of “chess fever,” and includes both actual footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow that year as well as cameo appearances by famed chess stars of the day, such as the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (world champion 1921-1927). Chess Fever stars Anna Zemtsova (later billed as Anna Pudovkin) and Vladimir Fogel as they prepare, in much different fashion, for their wedding day. When Fogel’s obsession with chess—shared by the entire male population of the city, including the chemist who unwittingly mistakes lipstick and poison—tears apart their engagement, Fogel and Zemstiva must each evaluate what is truly important. Will a chance encounter with chess champion Capablanca (who prefers beautiful women to chess) save the day? The 27-minute Soviet silent features chess-loving kittens, checkered socks, and an attempted suicide.

After Hours

2009-12-03T15:25:00.001-08:00

Martin Scorsese’s dark, postmodern comedy After Hours (1985) stars Griffin Dunne as computer programmer Paul Hackett, whose casual and nervous encounter with Rosanna Arquette leads him on a nightmare voyage through Soho’s dark and rainy streets. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Hackett’s only thoughts are of finding an illusive and elusive way home “home”-- which in his case is back at work in his corporate office. On his journey through New York’s underground, where he encounters (but does not participate in) the libidinous world of drugs and sex, he will be tempted and tormented by an increasingly strange collection of women, from the trauma-inflicted Arquette to a sexually threatening sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino, from the obsessive, beehived, and potentially-castrating Teri Garr (who has access to a Xerox machine) to Catherine O’Hara (and her Mister Softee truck), and finally to the mysterious and maternal Verna Bloom, who lives in the basement of the Oz-like Club Berlin. Also features fantastic location shooting, mis-communication, repetition, an angry mob, and a cameo by Cheech and Chong. As a fantastic portrait of downtown in the early 1980s, After Hours is best viewed in conjunction with Downtown 81 or Permanent Vacation.

Ramona (1928)

2009-11-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.

The Gaucho (1927)

2009-11-21T16:53:00.000-08:00

Starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mexican actress Lupe Velez, The Gaucho was released in 1927 as “The Gaucho Starring Douglas Fairbanks” to largely positive reviews that noted, nonetheless, “a rather gruesome undertone to an otherwise gay symphony.” The film’s Argentine setting allowed Fairbanks to operate in an essentially Zorro-like adventure plot that ostensibly skirted Mexican concerns, with the Andean highlands functioning in the same manner as the fictive Costa Roja. Released a month earlier than The Dove, Fairbanks’ film contained many explicit allusions to Mexican themes and images. As a return to the hero-bandit formula that Fairbanks had helped popularize with The Mark of Zorro (and the 1924 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro), The Gaucho pits Fairbanks against a greedy, corrupt, drunken, and ineffectual state government, ruled in this case by Ruiz, the usurper, played by German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz. Armed with an Argentine bolas that replaces Zorro’s sword, Fairbanks must the native peasants with the elite ruling class, which, in this case, is represented by the Catholic Church. The film adds the specter of infectious disease as a plot twist that differentiates The Gaucho from previous incarnations of this Ramona and Zorro theme of a corrupt state unable to protect its land, women, or gold. Infected with the “Black Doom,” a leprosy-like disease, that the state has been unable to successfully quarantine, The Gaucho finds his religious calling via a ghostly vision of the Virgin Mary (played by Mary Pickford) at the City of the Miracle. Following his miraculous cure from the Black Doom at the shrine of Mary (aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), the Gaucho leads the people against Ruiz and his corrupt and inebriated army. Like in the Zorro films, Fairbanks’ own celebrity operates as part of the narrative as well. It was not only reinforced by the apparition of Mary Pickford but by the Gaucho’s magnetic appeal to common men and women alike. Not only does Velez, as the Mountain Girl, fawn over the Gaucho’s pictures on her wall and decorate herself with make-up when he visits her small town, but when we are introduced to the Gaucho/Fairbanks he is signing autographs in a local cantina. Though the film is in many ways reflects the basic Zorro narrative, it cinematographically recalls the visual language employed by D.W. Griffith’s Ramona in 1910, as sweeping long-shots of the landscape and natural beauty of this simpler time and place are fore-fronted in The Gaucho. Compared to The Mark of Zorro, the film featured a toned-down version of the arched doorways, bleached-white walls, and ornate tile work representative of the same Spanish-style architecture and interior design that was popular in 1920s California, as modern local boosters were reshaping Southern California in this Spanish/Mexican hybrid vision by re-constructing historical sites such as Olvera Street (a Mexican marketplace billed as the oldest street in Los Angeles) and the El Camino Real. The styling was somewhat subdued in the film, in part reflecting the larger trend of 1920s set design. As Simon Dixon has argued, 1920s set design was involved in a visual discourse with celebrity homes, and film magazines like Photoplay featured lavish photo spreads on estates like Marion Davies’ San Simeon-by-the-Sea “Ocean House,” Rudolph Valentino’s “Falcon Lair” in Beverly Hills, and Fairbanks and Pickford’s own Spanish-styled house, called “Pickfair,” that Fairbanks and Pickford constructed in 1927, the same year that The Gaucho premiered, in an elite and exclusively white subdivision of Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, California. This is more than conjecture: “Pickfair” was discussed in the film’s original program book as well as in newspaper articles as the new home of the over 600 head of longhorn cattle that Fairbanks purchased for the pivotal stampede scene near the end of the film. Such discussions of Fairbanks’ extravagant spending on The Gaucho was not merely a nod to his own celebrity but were also an attempt to elevate the film’s critical appeal and cultural significance. Again mirroring the film’s official program book, newspapers lauded The Gaucho’s high production costs while, simultaneously, commenting on Fairbanks’ creativity and genius as a producer. Sections of the program called “When Fairbanks Gets An Idea” and “Things Only Fairbanks Can Do” were printed in the New York Times leading up to the film’s release, including a discussion of the construction of the massive set of the City of the Miracle, which included an 800-foot street and the development of a camera lens that “would picture such a street in a way that all parts of it, down to the pilgrims entering the shrine at the end.” The establishing shot of the village, consisting of a long backwards pan, was an impressive innovation that, according to the Times, was an example of how “Fairbanks’s fanciful notions of one sort or another in his new picture come into reality” and were “the sort of thing that has given him name for accomplishing in a seemingly easy manner some seemingly impossible technical problems.” The film’s program book that went to great lengths to explain that an Argentine gaucho was not very different from a Mexican caballero. The “gaucho of yesterday,” the program informs us, “was a romantic, audacious guerilla of the plains.” He was “tall, handsome, and lighter-skinned than the North American Indians, but with black eyes.” As “King of the Pampas,” he was an “excellent cattleman and a savage fighter . . . a fierce, uncompromising son of Spanish-Indian stock,” a “picturesque figure” in “flamboyant” clothing armed with the traditional weapon of choice, a bolas. The program then notes that Fairbanks has taken some poetic liberties with the historical presentation of the Gaucho, believing, as he does, that “’things as they are’ are never as appealing as ‘things as we would like them to be.” That the program comments on the light skin of the Argentine gaucho is rather surprising considering the dark make-up that Fairbanks wears in the film. But, as Paula Marantz Cohen has written, Fairbanks’ skin tone was one of the many closely controlled aspects of his on and off screen image that he and Pickford adeptly and closely controlled. Fairbanks, who was a quarter Jewish, had skin “far darker than that of the conventional leading men of the period,” and negotiated this darkness in his earlier roles by lightening his skin with a heavy layer of white make-up. But in his later films set in “exotic” Mexican, South American, or Arabian locale (such as The Gaucho), Cohen argues that Fairbanks pioneered the use of sun-tanning his skin even darker to not only to connect his character with the illicit and foreign persona he is portraying, but also to navigate his own darkness by “normalizing a look that would otherwise have marginalized him in mainstream culture.” Neither The Gaucho’s narrative and visual connections to Zorro and Ramona, nor the use of its pointedly non-Mexican setting as in The Dove, nor its focus (like Zorro) on Fairbanks’ own celebrity were the most significant aspects of the film to our understanding its complex and ambiguous response to the heightened Mexican pressure of derogatory depictions in Hollywood films. Perhaps most crucial to the way the film engages with Mexican protest was in the film’s cast, with the introduction of Lupe Velez in her first starring role. Of course, it should be noted, Velez was not the only Mexican in the film. Indeed, as the New York Times wrote, “most” of The Gaucho’s “cantankerous bandits . . . are Mexicans, to whom the bolas was as unfamiliar as croquet to an American Indian or baseball to an Eskimo.” Velez, who was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and educated in Texas, inaugurated an exaggerated version of the “Mexican Spitfire” character she was most known for. Although Dolores Del Rio had broken into Hollywood movies two years earlier, it was Velez’s portrayal of the star-struck/love-smitten Mountain Girl whose performance inaugurated the stereotype of the hot-blooded (and specifically) Mexicana whose uncontrollable passions are, in the end, subdued by a dominant man. Velez’s passion smolder as The Gaucho literally intertwines the pair with his bolas in a suggestive dance in the cantina where they first meet, but are aroused to their fiery fullest as a rival appears for the affections her “Gaucho mio.” Velez, who was quick to fight women rivals, other men in the Gaucho’s gang, or even the Gaucho himself (often biting or slapping him and getting bitten or slapped back in an extremely casual presentation of domestic violence in which love, anger, and passion are intertwined), was praised in film reviews. She was acclaimed for her performance as a peasant girl who, even when civilized in fine clothing, does not overcome the hot fervor of her station. She was perfect in the role of the Latina “termagant, quickly fired to anger. Whether she is in rags or laces she gives blow for blow to the men who get in her way or incur her anger . . . never heeding for an instant that she is arrayed in silks and laces.” Even the reviewer noted that although “Miss Velez gives a capital characterization . . . it does seem strange that she is so suddenly tamed in the end, when she becomes the bride of the Gaucho.” As Carlos Cortes has shown, the pairing of a Mexican female character and Anglo man had long been an acceptable pairing in Hollywood films, as long as the white man was successfully able to tame his Mexican or Indian bride. The casting of a Mexican actress to serve as Fairbanks’ onscreen bride was an important development in Hollywood’s response to ongoing protests. The development of a Mexicana star not only reflected a calculated decision in ethnic marketing that reflected the increased distribution into the Mexican and Latin American markets as well as the growing purchasing power of Mexican American audiences. It also served to inherently temper Mexican criticism, as a film featuring a Mexican movie star could be popular even if the character portrayed presents a negative or derogatory stereotype, the feature at the very heart of Mexican complaint about Hollywood films dating back a decade. As Laura Serna has written, when The Gaucho premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, theater magnate Sid Grauman attempted to exploit the Mexcana star’s popularity with the Mexican American population in Los Angeles and “organized a special event in honor of Velez, who had just signed a five-year contract with United Artists, called Fiesta de Mexico in the English language advertisement.” The event, though a blatant attempt to connect Mexico with the film’s Argentine setting, was a failure. Velez, however, proved to be extremely popular with both Mexican and Anglo audiences and critics alike. In fact, two years later, in a less than stellar review of a Lupe Velez film that paired her with Gary Cooper, the Times laments the loss of some of the passionate temper than Velez displayed in The Gaucho. “The exotic and curiously attractive Mexican actress,” they wrote, “…is now to be seen as a more placid but not wiser young woman” in a film called Wolf Song (1929). Velez had not been Douglas Fairbanks’ first choice for The Gaucho. After seeing Dolores Del Rio in Edwin Carewe’s Resurrection during a private screening for Mary Pickford and her mother, Fairbanks had inquired as to her availability. Carewe informed the swashbuckling star that the twenty-two year-old Del Rio was already signed to star in Carewe’s remake of Ramona, which would go into production at the end of the year. The role of the Mountain Girl then went to Velez, who had arrived in California the year before following many Mexican stage roles, and was, herself, originally considered for the lead in The Dove the year before.

The Dove (1927)

2009-11-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

Another film that demonstrates the ambiguity of the American response to Mexican protest was The Dove, released by Norma Talmadge Productions and distributed by United Artists in December of 1927. Set in the fictional Latin American nation of “Costa Roja,” The Dove was produced by Joseph Schenck, directed by Roland West, and starred Norma Talmadge in one of her last screen roles. The film was billed as a romantic melodrama and was based on a 1925 play by Willard Mack, which was in turn based on a short story called “The Blue Ribbon” by Gerald Beaumont, published in Red Book Magazine in 1923. Like The Bad Man, the Norma Talmadge silent was remade by RKO Radio Pictures in sound in 1931 as The Girl of the Rio, starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, and again by RKO in 1939 as The Girl and the Gambler, starring the Hungarian-born actress Steffi Duna. While this transnational lineage of the character of Dolores ‘the Dove’ (later renamed Dolores ‘the Dove’ Romero in the 1939 version) is interesting, the Norma Talmadge version of the film was deeply engaged in Mexican protests over the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood movies. Indeed, it was for a time at the very center of the protests. Though films of the 1920s such as The Bad Man and The Dove continued to present derogatory stereotypes of Mexican villains, they each demonstrated the ploys that Hollywood used to soften their message. The growth of Mexico and Latin America as a viable market for films was a concern for both Hollywood and Washington. As Ulf Jonas Bjork has written, the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC)—the agency in charge of trade promotion in the U.S. Department of Commerce—had established strong ties with Hollywood dating back to 1921. Bureau employee Clarence Jackson North was the point man in Washington for establishing the strong relationship with the film industry. His comment that “through American motion pictures, the ideals, culture, custom, and traditions of the United States are gradually” resulting in a “subtle Americanization process” in other countries mirrored Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s 1927 claim that American films were central in “transmitting ‘intellectual ideas and national ideals’ from the United States to other nations.” North’s primary contact in Hollywood was Frederick Herron, who worked for William Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).Hays, who had famously held that foreign trade “followed the film, not the flag,” was equally eager to assist the BFDC and profit from the extensive material and intellectual support that Hoover offered Hollywood in the realm of foreign trade and distribution. The Dove’s release in 1927 came during the same year that relations between the BFDC and MPPDA were at their closest, when North’s office began sending the Hollywood trade press weekly press releases and updates from his Commerce Reports, which had begun publishing film items and reports two years earlier. The Dove’s use of the fictional “Costa Roja” as a setting has been seen by historians as one of the most novel ploys by Hollywood to give attention to the expanding Latin American market, while leaving their biased narratives and imagery about Mexicans and Latin Americans largely unaltered. It was also viewed as a transparent at the time. In a January 3, 1928 review, the New York Times wrote that “geography” was meaningless to this “yarn,” noting that the producers “decided to pluck Mexicana from Mr. Mack’s original effort, call it Costa Roja and then fling it over to the blue Mediterranean.” The Times then explicitly connects The Dove to the Mexican protest, commenting that the lead male character Don Jose Maria y Sandoval, played by Noah Beery (modeled on the theatrical role played by “The Bad Man” star Holbrook Blinn), was “a screen character to which the Mexican Government may have objected to, for he is greedy, sensuous, boastful, cold-blooded, irritable, and quite a wine-bibber.” The review continues, however, by suggesting that Don Jose may not offend Mexican officials because, after all, “he does dress well . . . hates to have his luncheon spoiled by a noisy victim of his shooting squad [and] adores beauty.” Mexican politicians were not fooled by these (ostensibly) positive traits presented in the film and The Dove was the first high-profile attempt at economic boycott. As Wilbur Morse wrote in 1931, after years of “having its diplomatic representations so disregarded, Mexico took its first step toward definite action about two years ago when it barred Norma Talmadge’s silent version of The Dove. Soon, every film in which the villain said ‘carramba’ or was known as ‘Pancho’ or ‘Lopez’ was refused showing in any Mexican theater.” It is quite appropriate that Morse’s examples of derogatory Mexican names were the exact full name of Holbrook Blinn’s character in the Bad Man, for Mordaunt Hall, writing a second article about the film in the New York Times, declared that “this film should have been called ‘The Bad Man’s Brother’ instead of The Dove.”The Dove featured cinematic similarities to the Bad Man as well, including the same exaggerated Mexican accents used in the inter-titles of the 1923 film Not only does Don Jose speak in broken Spanish/English, proclaiming himself as the “Bes’ dam caballero in Costa Roja,” and commenting “Dios, what a man I am!,” but so too does the Dolores “the Dove” speak in a manner that even contemporary reviewers related to an attempt at a more subtle form of derision. “As you watch the scenes flash by,” Hall wrote, “it seems rather strange to perceive through the subtitles that Dolores talks in broken English when conversing with Don Jose, a fellow countryman. This is obviously done to give her the chance to use the expression, ‘You betcha my life!’ quite a number of times.”

The Bad Man (1923)

2009-11-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

The image of Mexicans portrayed in The Bad Man (1923) contrasted heavily with that in The Mark of Zorro. Directed by Edwin Carewe (who later directed the 1928 version of Ramona starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio), the film starred Holbrook Blinn as the “notorious Mexican bandit Pancho Lopez,” in a revival of his stage performance as the Bad Man in the play by Porter Emerson Browne. The film is not, however, a return to the directly derogatory representation of Mexicans as dangerous villains or bandits that marked prior Hollywood films. Instead, as the New York Times wrote, this “clever and restrained . . . production” lost none of the whimsical humor of the play and Blinn, as the comic anti-hero Pancho Lopez, is “never at a loss for a smirk, a smile, a look of surprise, threatening gestures, or interest in what is going on around him. Blinn’s hands and feet appear to suit the very expression of his darkened countenance.” The film is a comedy that features the loyal Lopez, the mal hombre of yesteryear, defending the patriarch Gilbert Jones, who has once saved his life. By killing Morgan Pell, the rival of his friend Jones (and setting Jones up with Pell’s wife), Lopez is an allegorical stand-in for the mysterious and appealing side of Mexico and represents the complex tension of attraction and repulsion that marked relations between the United States and Mexico. It is not an irony that his very repulsive nature—the ability to kill—is also the source of his nobleness, albeit a naturalistic and primitive form of nobility. The Bad Man repeatedly undermines even this primitive nobility awarded Lopez by making the sound of his thick accent a featured part of the “silent” movie. As Melinda Szaloky has examined in an essay about F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), visual acoustics as “a dimension of silent cinema that . . . does not originate from extrafilmic sound effects but, instead, issues from the images [of the films] themselves” is an underappreciated aspect of the silent film. When Lopez informs Morgan Pell that he is going to kill him, the inter-titles exaggerated the sound of his voice for the audience. Turning to his chief assistant, Lopez declares, “Pedro, I do not hunt rabbits—you keel heem.” According to the Times, the comedic effect was not lost on the audience, as the film was surely a “picture which sends one away joking about the lingo of the Bad Man.” When the film was remade in 1930 by First National Pictures, Walter Huston supplied in sound the exaggerated Mexican accent of the comedic anti-hero Pancho Lopez. The portrayal of Pancho Lopez in the film as a noble yet comic, murderous yet and unthreatening hero-villain came amidst increased pressures by the Mexican government to influence the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood films. Pressure came in the form of diplomatic protest and economic boycott, including the “ban on motion pictures which contain Mexican villains or incidents that may portray Mexican life unfavorably” that was delivered to Hollywood studios via Mexican General G.S. Seguin in 1922. The letter sent to the Hollywood studios by Seguin was not the first form of protest by the Mexican government, who had “long made efforts to control the image of Mexicans produced in the United States.” The Bad Man attempted to navigate official protests by the Mexican government by attempting to ennoble its comic villain-hero; it is Lopez’ actions, after all, that guarantees the happiness and love interest of the film’s American protagonist. But as Wilbur Morse, Jr. pointed out in a 1931 article in Motion Picture Classic, audiences inside and outside of the Mexican government were not fooled. Commenting on the remake of the Bad Man, Morse wrote that Walter Huston had given “an added sting to the lines which, as silent picture titles, had enraged the good citizens of our Sister Republic” in 1923. Mexican efforts at banning American films (and controlling the image of Mexicans) throughout the 1920s were undercut by a combination of external factors. These included the popularity of non-derogatory Hollywood films in Mexico, the sheer size and dominance of Hollywood productions, and by the conflicted needs of Mexican President Alvaro Obregon, who was president of Mexico from 1920-1924. Obregon was attempting to reconstruct the Mexican economy and political system and was forced to balance differing goals: the quest to avoid United States domination and the need for diplomatic recognition from the United States.

The Mark of Zorro (1920)

2009-11-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

The Mark of Zorro (1920) bore many resemblances to Griffith’s Ramona. Starring Douglas Fairbanks as the mysterious “Castilian” hero, the film was directed by Fred Niblo, produced by the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, and distributed by United Artists, the company Fairbanks co-owned with D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. Based on a 1919 short story “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCully, the screenplay was originally credited to Eugene Miller and has since been credited to Elton Thomas, a pseudonym of Douglas Fairbanks. Like Ramona, the story of Zorro has had tremendous staying power. Following a decade in which the image of Mexicans in Hollywood films was largely based on the shifting American allegiances during the Mexican Revolution or on blatant racism, The Mark of Zorro represented a return to the mythological past of pre-1846 California. The reference to Capistrano, the most famed of the Spanish missions of Old California, was credited at the beginning of the film and firmly established the mission-era setting and plot. Whereas Ramona portrayed Mexican characters physically unable to protect their women from Anglo encroachment, The Mark of Zorro featured a corrupt Mexican government morally unable to protect its own citizens. Inter-titles near the beginning of the film instruct the viewer about the “greedy, licentious, and arrogant” military and government who declare that Zorro, as protector of the poor and native Mexican, poses the threat of rebellion. The governor personally vows to capture the mysterious bandit. The shift away from the explicitly derogatory “Greaser” films of the 1910s to a more complex representation of Mexican nationality was in part influenced by rising protest from the Mexican government following the election of Venustiano Carranza and drafting of the Mexican Constitution in 1917. As Helen Delpar points out, the shift also reflects the increased distribution of Hollywood films into Mexico following World War I, as the French film industry that had previously dominated the Mexican market was devastated during the war. In addition, the 1920s featured the rise of the Mexican American as a consumer of Hollywood films, especially in Los Angeles and San Diego, where, “as in [Anglo] American families, movie tickets were an essential feature of these Mexican families’ spending ways” (George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p.173). The increased purchasing power of Mexican Americans may have affected the types of Mexican characters portrayed by Hollywood. The Mark of Zorro was notable, however, in that the “noble-blooded” Zorro was a bandit hero in the model of Joaquin Murrieta, the “Mexican Robin Hood” of Gold Rush-era California. Murrieta is a complex figure in Mexican culture, and has represented a wide breadth of political ideologies and factions—seen as both a leader of the resistance to Anglo encroachment in 1840s California and as a representative of the tyranny during the Mexican Revolution. Just as Zorro is described in the film, Murrieta appears in Mexican letters “like a graveyard ghost and like a ghost he disappears.” Jose Vasconcelos, the former Secretary of Public Education and director of the National University of Mexico (who had procured public subsidies for the murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros), wrote a 1944 essay called “The Tragedy of California” that expressed a nostalgic reading of Murrieta as defender of the people while at the same time demonstrated his keen disillusionment with the Mexican Revolution. In the essay he compares Murrieta’s descent into banditry and terrorism with the actions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, who he claimed had manipulated the “Mexican lower classes” into revolt against wealthy hacienda owners, only to find United States banks buying up the “despoiled” Mexican lands. Like the folk tales about Joaquin Murrieta, The Mark of Zorro offered an intertwined interpretation of both the Mexican-American War and Mexican Revolution in which the bandit hero represented simultaneous and contradictory factions. Douglas Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro presented audiences in 1920-21 with a simultaneously comic but sexualized body through which these tangled and ambiguous history lessons were viewed. In the story on which the film is based, the lead character shares a double-identity as both Don Diego Vega, the elite and effete son of a noble Spanish family, whose languid mannerisms and lingering bachelorhood cause the consternation of his father and the rejection of his would-be marriage partner Lolita Pulido and as the masked and adventurous Zorro, whose righteous defense of the poor and masculine sexuality make him the object of respect and desire by his father and love interest alike. The film’s denouement, however, introduces a third persona to the lead character, as an unmasked Zorro (and non-effete Diego Vega) fights the rival Captain Ramon: the acrobatic swordfight at the film’s end is clearly won by Fairbanks himself, whose considerable celebrity made him easily recognizable to the audience and all the more attractive to the film’s (Pickford lookalike) heroine. Reviewers at the time took this “triangular” construct as rather matter of fact. In the March 1921 issue of Photoplay, Burns Mantle wrote that Fairbanks was graceful and thrilling as the “romantic hero, who is the alleged weakling son of a Mexican don, but who doubles at odd moments, and especially at night, as a bandit set on freeing the people of his state from the oppression of their political rulers . . . and in the end rescues the trusting heroine . . . as ever the knights of old.” By commenting on Zorro’s nighttime escapades as both revolutionary hero and sexual conqueror, Mantle expanded upon image of Zorro as weakling son/Murrieta figure while at the same time noting that Fairbanks, as a major Hollywood star, provided for American audiences the romantic idol that the dark-skinned Murrieta, Villa, and Zapata could not. But not all contemporary reviewers agreed with Mantle’s assessment. Other reviewers commented on this triangulation in rather negative terms. Upon the film’s release at the Capitol Theater, the New York Times wrote that Fairbanks was more of an “athletic comedian” than romantic hero, and that The Mark of Zorro sacrificed “plausibility . . . for headlong action.” Not only did the film contain too much “romantic nonsense,” but the casting of Fairbanks as the Mexican “stranger with a sure sword, swift horse, and a sense of humor” was directly questioned by the Times. They wrote that the film’s picturesque settings often contrasted “amusingly with the emphatically non-Spanish appearance of some of the players, including, of course, Fairbanks himself.”Although Fairbanks’ own appearance was distracting to some contemporary reviewers, it successfully confirmed the pure Spanish blood of Zorro, the Mexican romantic bandit hero. As an unmasked Zorro (now clearly representing Fairbanks himself) warned the corrupt politicians at the end of the film, “here your abuse of power ends. Every Californian of noble blood stand with me.” After declaring “Justice for All!,” Fairbanks acrobatically leaps to the balcony above him where Marguerite de la Motte, as the pale-skinned Lolita Pulido, awaits. De la Motte, a close friend of Fairbanks and Pickford, tells him “You talk, you fight, you look like Zorro!” to which he replies “And I love like Zorro.” To a crowd of cheering onlookers below, Fairbanks and de la Motte (as a stand-in for Pickford) feign a comic and bashful kiss in the same exaggerated manner with which Pickford and Fairbanks entertained the American public in “real” life. Celebrity and narrative functioned simultaneously at the end of the film, and Zorro and Fairbanks cannot be separated from one another. Mexican folk heroes were white Hollywood stars. When Fairbanks returned to the Latin hero in The Gaucho (1927), he did so as a darker-skinned, more sexualized, and more exotic figure. The image of Fairbanks presented in this later film comments on the development and death of Hollywood icon Rudolph Valentino, whose Arabian and Latin characters in the mid-1920s were in many ways re-workings of this Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro.

Ramona (1910)

2009-11-18T21:21:00.000-08:00

D.W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) starred Mary Pickford as the half-white, half-Indian title character in a highly condensed adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Indian-reform novel Ramona. The sentimental novel, in 1910, was still well known in Southern California and (as cited in film reviews) remained well remembered throughout the rest of the nation. Griffith’s film was an important part of a long cultural process that transformed the sentimental novel into commercialized mythology in the form of tourist promotion and regional development strategy. By combining the book’s popularity with the romantic visual decorations of 1890s parades and festivals such as La Fiesta de Los Angeles and La Fiesta de Las Flores (which were also modeled on the novel), Griffith was able to present his film as a reclamation of the novel’s original reform intent while, simultaneously, introducing the work to a new audience composed largely of middle-class businessmen. Filmed on location in the “real” settings of the novel—such as the verdant mountains above the Camulos estate in Ventura County—and introduced with a title card crediting Helen Hunt Jackson, the film was subtitled “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.” Louis Reeves Harrison, reviewing the film for Moving Picture World in 1910, commented that Griffith and the Biograph Company had harmoniously blended narrative and location, signifying an advanced “step in the evolution of a new art and blazed the way forward for additional, greater achievement.” The review also described a filled-to-capacity theater of “earnest-looking” businessmen for the film’s premiere—an audience that contrasts heavily with Jackson’s largely female readership at the time of the novel’s publication. It was an audience, Harrison wrote, that viewed Griffith and the Biograph Company to be reflections of themselves: models of business-minded progressivism. The film’s producers were “strongly entrenched in public confidence” and “known to be earnest, striving to attain the best results, never pandering to the baser elements of society nor catering to perverted instincts.” Harrison enlarged upon this relationship between the business-minded audience and Griffith’s revision of the original text, writing “it seemed as though the playwright or director, or possibly both, had consciously emphasized a bigger and broader and finer theme . . . Natural Selection!” This association between Griffith’s Ramona and Social Darwinism was implicit in the visual language of the film itself, which was undoubtedly based on theatrical versions of the novel as well. Griffith, who had starred as the character Alessandro in a traveling production of Ramona that toured California from February 28—April 23, 1905, was intimately familiar with the original novel and adapted theater versions. The visual depiction of the Indian Alessandro and Mexican Felipe as meek, helpless, and feminine reconfigured the plot of the reform novel into a sexual melodrama centered the eroticized body of Mary Pickford. The contrast of Pickford’s languishing body and Felipe’s un-masculine response functioned as a dual message to the progressive businessmen of the audience, at once appealing to their libido and serving as valuable history lesson. In Griffith’s reworking of the text, Felipe has become and allegory for the Mexican state prior to the Mexican-American War. By representing the inability of the Mexico state to protect its women and defend its territory against invasion—from either the Anglo settlers depicted in the novel or the United States military during the Mexican-American War—Felipe’s feminine weakness suggested the intertwined notions that the physical protection of lily-white Mary Pickford (even when portraying the half-Indian Ramona) was better suited for the modern businessman in the audience than for the onscreen Mexican, and that American imperialism was justified.

The Saphead

2009-10-15T14:40:00.001-07:00

Buster Keaton's first feature-length film, The Saphead (1920), famously includes his last onscreen smile. While the film is not the best choice to acquaint a first-time viewer to Keaton's comedy, it represents an essential and pivotal point in his career and will be watched with great interest by any fan of his later work. Building on his earlier work supporting Fatty Arbuckle (they made 15 two-reel films together before Keaton's service in France during WWI and three more after the war), The Saphead foreshadows several plot points familiar in his later films. Keaton stars as Bertie Van Alstyne, ne'er do well son of the richest man in New York (Willaim H. Crane) whose "shortcomings, ambitions, misfortunes and final triumph" are intertwined with the film's complex narrative in which Bertie's conniving brother-in-law, an illegitimate child, and falling stock prices of the family mine are intertwined with Bertie's love for Agnes, his adopted sister (Beulah Booker). The film features the development of Keaton's deadpan style, his restrained performance a conscious choice that reflected his innovative interpretation of Bertie as a "person who does not properly connect with his surroundings, his failure to understand being paralleled by his failure to respond emotionally." Keaton's performance subverts the class structure and conservative ending of the source material, a novel and play called "The Henrietta" (and "The New Henrietta") that was originally intended to star Douglas Fairbanks on screen. The film also is noted for Keaton's extended slap-stick acrobatics at the New York Stock Exchange. [Above quotes taken from Peter Kramer's excellent essay "The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead" (1995)].

Fat City

2009-09-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

John Huston's Fat City (1972), a terse, funny, and unsentimental meditation on youth, marriage, and wine that played for a two-week run at the Film Forum this month, was at its roots a lover's elegy to all the lost dreams of the Stockton, California: the bars, the boxers, the migrant farm workers, the faded rooms, the peeling paint, the broken hopes. Stacey Keach starred as Billy Tully, an aging (30) and alcoholic man who once boxed against the 5th in line for the title. Based on the 1969 novel by Stockton-born Leonard Gardner, Huston took over production from Monte Hellman and directed one of his finest films, aided by the sunlit color cinematography of Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke) and by Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" (taken from his 1970 album Kristofferson). Susan Tyrell was superb in an Oscar-nominated performance as Oma that was equally lighthearted and heartbreaking. Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark were featured as visions of Tully and Oma's idealized youth, while Curtis Cokes (as Earl), Sixto Rodriguez (as Lucero), and Nicholas Colasanto (as Ruben) gave the film depth and life from smaller roles. Fat City moved seamlessly across the San Joaquin Valley's world of migrant labor from the predawn allotment of jobs to the onion fields and walnut farms picked by black, Mexican, and Chinese laborers. The workers in these fields, like the young boxers in Ruben's gym, provided some of the best moments in the film. For Keach, who played Mike Hammer on CBS in the the 1980s and was excellent in The Killer Inside Me (1976), Billy Tully was a career-defining role.

The Bedroom Window

2009-09-19T06:59:00.001-07:00

The pairing of Steve Guttenberg and Isabelle Huppert as illicit lovers in The Bedroom Window (1987) should warn first-time viewers that a plot twist is soon forthcoming. Directed by Curtis Hanson (Bad Influence, L.A. Confidential), Huppert is the wealthy and otherworldly Sylvia Wentworth—aka the boss’s wife—who goes home with the hapless everyman Guttenberg following a work party. Huppert, witnessing the attempted rape of a girl through Guttenberg’s bedroom window, is hesitant to call the police as she, of course, would not be able to explain the her presence in his apartment without revealing her liaison dangereuse (with the Brooklyn-born star of Diner, Police Academy, and Bad Medicine no less). When Guttenberg calls the police to report the crime himself, he soon becomes the focus of both the police investigation and the attack victim played by Elizabeth McGovern (Once Upon A Time in America). Though its billing as a “romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense” was a bit of a stretch, The Bedroom Window should nonetheless please fans of Huppert as it marks one of her very few American films, along with Michael Cimino's brilliant Heaven's Gate (1980), a turn-of-the-century historical epic starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. The Bedroom Window features several 80s-style chase scenes and was filmed by Gilbert Taylor, the director of photography of The Omen (1976) and Star Wars (1977). Look for Wallace Shawn in a scene-stealing performance as defense attorney for the lead suspect in the attack.

The Stranger

2009-09-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

Orson Welles' Nazi-fugitive thriller The Stranger (1946) starred Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young. Each play a sort of perfected version of their screen self: Welles as the duplicitous college professor Charles Rankin/fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler; Robinson as the tireless federal agent Mr. Wilson, doggedly on Kindler's trail; Young as the resilient but desperate damsel in distress. Like The Night Porter (1974), Liliana Cavani's sadomasochistic cult film starring Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling, Welles' film begins with an examination of fugitive psychology, a process involving confession, conversion, guilt, and murder. As the movie begins, Rankin performs the ultimate film noir daily double--a marriage followed by the secret burial of a man he has killed in the woods of his small Connecticut college town. Rankin/Kindler, part-author of the final solution, must evade not only Robinson but his strongest "ally" as well, Loretta Young's subconscious. The film is full of textual gags such as the USE GYM AT OWN RISK sign in the beginning, admonitions like "in Harper there's nothing to be afraid of," and casually-spoken lines like "we'll catch up with you." 1946 was an eventful year for Welles who also used his radio show that year to work in conjunction with the NAACP to publicize the case of Isaac Woodard Jr., a returning African American soldier beaten and maimed in his South Carolina hometown while still in his Army uniform. Stylistically, The Stranger bears an unmistakable nod to Hitchcock. Robinson's character of the Nazi-hunting federal agent also brings to mind the role of "Vampire Hunter" Van Meer played by the great Sam Fuller in Larry Cohen's A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Fuller, a notorious cigar smoker, guaranteed Cohen that he would carefully regulate the use of his on-screen and off-screen cigars so that continuity would not be disturbed during editing. The problem was that Sam Fuller did not really have an on-screen and off-screen cigar; watching the film today it is more than amusing (for Fuller fans) to watch his cigars magically change back and forth in length. The Stranger's melodramatic ending, high above the town in the giant clock tower, should not distract from this well-paced thriller.

Gran Casino

2009-09-03T04:54:00.000-07:00

The first of Luis Bunuel's 20 Mexican films, Gran Casino (1947) is part melodrama, part musical. It is also, of course, total Bunuel. Set in the booming Gulf Coast oil fields of pre-Revolution Mexico, Gran Casino intertwines greed, fate, and desire in a tale hinging on the foreign ownership of Mexican natural resources. Though it was Bunuel's first film in 15 years, it was--in his own words--not half bad. The musical numbers performed by stars Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque are filled with suggestion and surprise (including the hilarious "Trio Calaveras" as Negrete's backing chorus who appear out of nowhere). Though missing the usual dream sequence, the layout of the casino in the film's title was utilized as a kind of map of the mind--characters pausing on the stairs between the conscious and subconscious worlds where scheming and dreaming evolve into murder and suspicion. Having fled Franco's Spain, Bunuel edited propaganda films at MOMA in New York and dubbed features into Spanish in Hollywood before his Socialist ties and distaste for life in the U.S. led him, unbeknown to himself at the time, towards a career and citizenship in Mexico. After a long layoff from the three films of his youth, Le Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age D'Or (1930), and Land Without Bread (1933), Bunuel was asked to direct Gran Casino for producer Oscar Dancigers, who he had known in Paris. Dancigers is thus one of the most important men in film history, resurrecting the career of one of the medium's most innovative and international directors; their collaboration in Mexico included, among other films, Los Olvidados (1950), El (1953), and Abismos de Pasion (aka Wuthering Heights)(1954). Though Bunuel, the master of surrealist cinema, would undoubtedly reject such a simplistic reading, as Negrete claims in Gran Casino to have "won something out of our defeat," it is difficult not to see Bunuel's comments veering toward the defeated Republicans of the Spanish Civil War, toward the oppression of workers everywhere, and toward his own directorial career.

Don't Touch the White Woman!

2009-08-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.

The Last Mistress

2009-08-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (2008), which opened in New York at the IFC Center last summer, starred Asia Argento and Fu'ad Ait Aattou as ill-fated lovers in a brilliantly filmed version of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1851 novel Une Vieille Maitresse (aka An Old Mistress). D'Aurevilly was a minor French writer and newspaper critic whose career spanned the Second Republic and Second Empire of Napoleon III. Like many of his other works, Une Vieille Maitress presents characters in a vice-like grip of passion who are drawn to excess, criminality, and self destruction with an almost-supernatural obsession. For Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell), the period-costumes and mannerisms of d'Aurevilly's novel seemed more liberating than restrictive, and The Last Mistress was her most balanced and human work. Likewise, playing the outcast Spanish mistress Vellini opened new possibilities for Argento, whose carnality--while central to her on and off-screen image--is usually handled awkwardly by lesser directors (including her father). In surrendering herself to Breillat, however, Argento displayed the emotional depths of her talents as an actor and took the film to heights it would not have reached without her. Co-starring with Argento and the fey Ait Aattou was Roxane Mesquida as the demure bride Hermangarde and Yolande Moreau as La comtesse d’Artelles, the spiritual matriarch of the film. Shot by Greek cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis (Romance, Anatomy of Hell) and edited by Pascale Chavance (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy), The Last Mistress was ultimately about the complex banality of doomed love-triangles (in any era) and will stand as one of the most complete films of the decade. Old lovers, literally, will haunt your dreams after watching this film.

The Exiles

2009-08-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.

The Limits of Control

2009-08-08T08:21:00.001-07:00

Throughout his long career (almost 30 years) Jim Jarmusch has continually reasserted himself as this country's finest filmmaker. Each of his films have been a regeneration of his idiosyncratic and obsessive vision, and no one has painted a portrait of urban and national geography quite like Jarmusch. Like most great American art, this vision has been in the form of a quest. From James Fenimore Cooper's captivity narratives to John Ford's Western films, American art has traced the lines of the quest and hunt in both physical and moral terms. Occasionally, this quest has been subverted to show the hollowness and madness of America's violent obsessions. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is, of course, the great standard of subversion. Released in 1851, amidst violent territorial expansion and a headlong course to Civil War, its message was largely ignored before resonating with European intellectuals in the 1930s, as fascism descended upon Spain and Germany. Jarmusch's work is as relevant to his own time as Melville's was to his; amidst the Reagan Revolution and revival of the Wall Street ethos, Jarmusch released Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986). Amidst the culture wars, he offered the poetic Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999).

The Limits of Control (2009), which opened at the Angelica last spring, starred Isaach De Bankole, Paz de la Huerta, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Bill Murray. De Bankole is excellent as the mysterious and meticulous Lone Man in Spain who is met by a various ensemble of mysterious international characters who each greet him with the same line “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” De la Huerta, as the Nude girl, delivered one of the most subtle performances in the film; though everyone is an enigma, her character exudes more emotion than anyone else and yet keeps the most hidden as well (quite remarkable given her bared state throughout the film). The comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville and John Boorman are obvious, but the film is far more than an existential homage to Le Samouri or Ponit Blank: Jarmusch has again reinvented himself by flooding the screen in Sevillian color and light and a seemingly disjointed soundtrack by Japanese noise band Boris. But this reinvention also represents a return to the same obsessive quest that has marked all of his movies; The Limits of Control, strangely, is most similar to Jarmusch's student film Permanent Vacation (1980), also about a mysterious loner who encounters mysterious characters as he wanders around burnt-out New York City. Though filmed with different budgets, each utilized brilliant location shooting to etch a portrait of time and place and memory through the eyes of a wandering stranger.

House of the Sleeping Beauties

2009-08-06T07:29:00.001-07:00

Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?

Young and Innocent

2009-08-04T07:03:00.001-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) starred Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam in the classic man-on-the-run formula that Hitchcock had perfected two years earlier with The 39 Steps. Thanks in part to a surprise ending featuring a jazz band in blackface, Young and Innocent deserves re-evaluation as one of his more significant prewar films. De Marney plays Robert Tisdale, an innocent man turned preordained suspect who, after his mistress is found strangled on the beach, must chase the real killer while he himself is chased by the police. Nova Pilbeam stars as Erica Burgoyne, the young and adventurous daughter of the lead police detective and romantic interest of the fugitive Tisdale. For Pilbeam, who was just 18 at the time, this was her first adult role; as a 15 year-old she had played the daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) with Peter Lorre. Based on a Josephine Tey mystery, Young and Innocent was written by Charles Bennett who had scripted several of Hitchcock's U.K. films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage (1936), and The Secret Agent (1936). Tisdale's freedom (to pursue the detective's daughter, no less) rests on finding a missing raincoat and the man with the twitching eyes. Along the way are a multitude of hats, phones, cars, a chase through an old mill, and a strange birthday party. As Paul Duncan has written, the climactic crane shot in a London hotel was one of Hitchcock's most difficult, panning from 145 feet high down into a 4 inch close-up. The opening scene of this film--a strangled woman washed upon the shore--later reappeared at the beginning of Frenzy (1972).

The Devil is a Woman

2009-07-30T07:11:00.001-07:00

Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) was based on La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by Pierre Louys, an 1898 novel that was also the basis of Luis Bunuel’s 1977 masterpiece That Obscure Object of Desire. Louys is also famed for his more explicit erotica such as Trois Filles de Leur Mere, published anonymously in 1926, a year after his death in Paris. Bunuel’s version was co-written by Jean-Claude Carriere and starred Fernando Rey as Mathieu and both Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet in the role of the bedeviling tease Conchita. In Von Sternberg’s version, which was written by John Dos Passos, Marlene Dietrich plays the Sevillian flamenco dancer Concha Perez, a fiercely independent woman with “ice for a heart” who beguiles Lionel Atwill as “Pasqualito” and Edward Everett Horton as “Paquitito,” as she affectionately nicknames them (look for Cesar Romero in a small role as well). The film, like Bunuel’s, is told in a series of flashbacks, here to the tune of "El Gato Montes" and other pasodobles. Much of the story was told visually through the bars of iron gates and fences as well as in the presence of caged birds, reinforcing the theme of Atwill's imprisonment by becoming more and more elaborate as the movie progresses. As they return home together one night, Dietrich declares “Look mama I caught a fish,” holding up a goldfish in a glass bowl. Even as she repeatedly rebuffs Atwill's amorous advances, she ensnares him deeper and deeper into an intricate emotional plexus; he offers protection from worry (and cash to her mother) but she insists that she does not want a father or husband or any man to control her. Yet when he violently beats her, she returns to him in the morning happier than ever. Though difficult to accept Dietrich as Spanish, the film features the memorable song “he gives me butter and carrots and onions that no other farmer would . . . and other things that are so good.” Filmed in Hollywood, this was Von Sternberg and Dietrich’s last film together, ending a famed collaboration that included Morocco (1930), The Blue Angel (1930), Blonde Venus (1932), and Shanghai Express (1932). Von Sternberg later made the sly Shanghai Gesture (1941) with Gene Tierney and Victor Mature. La Femme et le Pantin was also filmed by Julien Duvivier in 1958, starring Brigitte Bardot and Antonio Vilar, though it plays considerably more dated and straightforward than either the Von Sternberg or Bunuel versions of the same novel.

His Kind of Woman

2009-07-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

His Kind of Woman (1951) was a kind of film-noirette set in Mexico and made by RKO, starring Robert Mitchum as the sap Dan Milner and Jane Russell as singer Lenore Brent. The production, like many headed by Howard Hughes, was filled with false starts, conflicting direction, jealousy, pride, envy, etc. The film was directed by John Farrow, better known for The Big Clock (1948) with Ray Milland and Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow's longtime wife) and Hondo (1953) with John Wayne and Geraldine Page--who is always slightly disturbing once you've seen Don Siegel’s Civil War film The Beguiled (1971) with Clint Eastwood. Farrow also wrote the screenplay to the excellent adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956) starring David Niven and Cantinflas. Filmed by Harry Wild, whose credits include Johnny Angel (1945), Murder My Sweet (1945), and Macao (1952), His Kind of Woman traces the story of loner Mitchum on vacation at a seaside Mexican resort and his involvement with Russell; Raymond Burr as mobster Nick Ferraro; Vincent Price as vacationing actor Mark Cardigan. Like all noirs, the film addresses the whims of fate and the hidden motivations behind courtship, crime, and love. Jane Russell’s name “Lenore” is nearly synonymous with young death, as it was used repeatedly in the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe (Price's presence reinforces the connection to Poe). A film that does not quite live up to the sum of its many parts, it is still a work of note for any fan of Mitchum, Russell, Price, Burr, Hughes, RKO, movies set in Mexico, or all of the above.

D.C. Cab

2009-07-27T06:26:00.001-07:00

One of the funniest movies of the 1980s, D.C. Cab (1983) delivers hilarious comedy and first-rate social commentary at the same time in way that few films can match. As a kid, everyone saw this movie in the theater as it was Mr. T's follow-up to Rocky III and premiered during the first season of The A-Team. D.C. Cab was one of many "inspirational" movies that came out from 1976-1986 (look it up) but one of the very few that offered such an obvious critique of the Reagan administration by calling for collective action over personal glory (the film's locale was the first hint). Directed by Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys), the film is the story of the wide-eyed Albert Hockenberry who comes to the inner city to work at the cab company owned by Harold, his deceased father's buddy from Vietnam. D.C. Cab, of course, is the misfit cab company, employing the indigent, indulgent, and apathetic alike. It is also extremely diverse, from the cross-dressing Tyrone to the would-be ladies man Xavier to the Barbarian Brothers. Will this motley group band together to save D.C. Cab? The film stars: Max Gail, Mr. T, Gary Busey, Bill Maher (yes, that Bill Maher), Paul Rodriguez, Jill Schoelen, and features Timothy Carey in one of his last screen roles as well as 1980s sensation Irene Cara ("Flashdance," "Fame") as herself. The cinematography was by Dean Cundley, a John Carpenter regular who pioneered the use of the steadicam on Halloween, and who also filmed The Fog, Escape From New York, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future ,Romancing the Stone, Jurassic Park, and Roadhouse.

The Sex-Killer

2009-07-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

Barry Mahon's voyeuristic The Sex-Killer (1966) has been one of my favorite films from Something Weird Video for some time, having purchased a VHS copy from their catalog about 15 years ago. Filmed on location in New York in (what appears to be) 16mm black & white, The Sex-Killer is the surreal and strange story of Tony, a creepy and reclusive worker in a Garment District mannequin factory. Tony’s favorite hobby, when not trying to sneak broken mannequins home with him for “dates” at a local bar, is to utilize his high-powered binoculars from the roof of his building on unsuspecting sunbathers (there was apparently a lot of nude rooftop sunbathing in those days). The film features Uta Erickson, Helena Clayton, Rita Bennett (a Mahon regular), and Sharon Kent as Tony’s various girlfriends/murder victims. Mahon was a film producer, director, writer, and cinematographer of various mid-sixties Z-grade movies. His directorial canon betrays a common theme: She Should Have Stayed in Bed (1963), Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera (1963), Nudes on Tiger Reef (1965), Nudes Inc. (1965), The Love Cult (1966), and P.P.S. - The Prostitutes Protective Society (1966). His first feature, however, was called Cuban Rebel Girls aka Assault of the Rebel Girls (1959), which was co-written by and starred Errol Flynn in his last screen role, along with his 16-year old girlfriend Beverly Aadland. Flynn plays himself as a war correspondent, assisting Fidel Castro’s revolution against the Batista government. Flynn, who lived in Havana at the time, also appeared in the amazing lost-documentary by Victor Pahlen called "The Truth about Fidel Castro Revolution," recently released as Cuban Story. Barry Mahon, who had become close friends with Flynn, had a life story to match the tales recounted in Flynn’s hilarious autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways (also released in 1959, the year of Flynn’s death at age 50). Born and raised in California, Mahon volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941 months before Pearl Harbor, earning an outstanding reputation as a fighter pilot before being shot down over the ocean on August 19 1942. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was held at Stalag Luft III, where he helped dig the escape tunnels made famous by the John Sturges film The Great Escape (1963). The baseball-tossing character of Captain Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, was partly based on Mahon.

Simon of the Desert

2009-07-24T06:56:00.001-07:00

Simon of the Desert was Luis Bunuel's last film made in Mexico, released in 1965. One of the few movies based on an original story by Bunuel, its source material was the life of Saint Simeon Stylites--a Fourth Century hermit who spent 37 years atop a 60-foot column outside of Aleppo (modern day Syria). In My Last Sigh Bunuel wrote that he was first introduced to Simeon Stylites by Federico Garica Lorca, who had given him a copy of Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Column (written circa 1260-1275), a kind of a cult-book lives of the saints that was very popular in Medieval Europe. The book detailed Simeon's diet and excrement, which amused Bunuel and Lorca when they were students in Madrid. The rest of the story was researched at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Though many scenes of the film were cut (or never shot), the film won 5 awards at the Venice Film Festival including the Special Jury Prize. At 45 minutes long, the film (still rarely shown in movie theaters) stars Claudio Brook as Simon and Sylvia Pinal as the trickster Satan, arriving to tempt Simon in various disguises including a bearded Jesus carrying a lamb, in a self-propelled coffin, and as a school-girl in a sailor suit complete with stockings and suspender belt. Pinal, a popular Mexican actress who had starred in Bunuel's other two last Mexican films, the brilliant Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), was excellent as the temptress devil, revealing her legs, exposing her breasts, and caressing the beard of the implacable Simon del desierto. Shot by Gabriel Figueroa and edited by Carlos Savage, the film presents the absurdity of Catholicism while at the same time exposing Bunuel's basic belief in a higher ascetic lifestyle. Motifs, of course, abound as well: women's legs, ants, solitude, the dual nature of freedom/enslavement. The most shocking aspect of Simon of the Desert, upon rewatching, is how closely the film prefigures many visual and narrative elements of his later work in France (usually viewed as a stylistic break from his Mexican films). The shots are so similar that you could dissolve from Silvia Pinal's legs directly onto Jeanne Moreau's in Diary of a Chambermaid and wind up in another century and country. Of course, that is exactly what happens in Simon of the Desert as well, as Pinal takes Simon (via airplane) to the very bottom depths of hell (for Bunuel): a Greenwich Village disco where the kids dance the last dance aka the "Radioactive Flesh." Simon, his beard closley trimmed, idly smokes a pipe as he sits alone amongst the pre-hippy crowd. The overhead shots of the East River and Manhattan skyline were perhaps Bunuel's only filmed of New York (I cannot think of any others). Simon of the Desert's disjointed narrative/fantasy structure (which he had not used in this way before) also foreshadowed both Belle de Jour (1967) and The Milky Way (1969). The column used for Simon was too heavy to move and remains today in the field in Mexico where they filmed the movie.

Spellbound (1945)

2009-07-18T07:52:00.001-07:00

There was a near-riot at MOMA last week during Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) when the audience at a 4:30pm screening mistook the 5 minute overture for an incompetent and/or sleeping projectionist. Yelling, shouting, and a strange dirge-like clapping were met by reactionary counter-yelling and bemused laughter until someone finally called out "this movie premiered with an overture!" The restlessness, panic, and anxiety that these darkened 5 minutes provoked whipped the elderly would-be hooligans in the crowd to a frenzy--you can't imagine just how close they were to ripping up the seats and storming the projection booth. Starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (in his first major role), the film was written by Hollywood legend Ben Hecht, who also wrote His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), and Kiss of Death (1947). Peck played Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly-arrived director of the secluded clinic Green Manors, where he meets Bergman's Dr. Constance Petersen, a sexually-repressed psychoanalyst (Hitchocock and Hecht were not shy with the "librarian" and "egg-beater" jokes). The David O. Selznick production featured the famous dream-sequence painted and choreographed by Salvador Dali and a theremin-heavy score written by Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa. The innate connections between Hitchcock and Luis Bunuel were most apparent in Spellbound; though the Dali sequence remains the most obvious, with Dali cutting eyeballs with giant scissors in an homage to Un Chien Andalou, Peck's journey through the Labrynth of the Guilt Complex directly anticipated Bunuel's Rehearsal For a Crime (1955) by commenting on childhood murder-fantasy and the return of the repressed. Peck's amnesia, however, was not triggered by a long-lost music box but rather through visual stimuli, which provided reason for one of Hitchcock's most macabre shots of all time. Another basic connection between the two masters of (surrealist) cinema is Hitchcock's latent Catholicism, which was here on full display, expressed as usual in fetishism and guilt. This particular screening was perhaps one-of-a-kind, as the near riot amidst the suffocating smell of the Bloomingdale's perfume counter added a heightened anticipation of violence and was the perfect set-up for the psychological thriller. The film features Hitchcock trademarks such as projected backgrounds, visual-textual juxtapositions (i.e. Peck and Bergman declaring that it is not love between them as they kiss for the first time), as well as beautiful shots of Old Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

Tony Manero

2009-07-16T08:28:00.001-07:00

Tony Manero (2009), which opened at Cinema Village this month, is a disturbing and important film set in Pinochet's Santiago,

circa 1978, when the cold reality of the United States-backed coup, thousands of political executions, constant surveillance by secret police, a steady stream of exiles, and forced free-market economics were converging into a feel of permanence over Chile

. Under military dictatorship, political repression becomes paralleled by personal detachment; silence rules over discussion; life becomes cheap. Directed by Pablo Larrain, the film starred Alfredo Castro (who was also co-writer with Larrain and Mateo Iribarren) as Raul/Tony Manero, a loser in his mid-50s caught between Pinochet and Travolta. On surface level, the film is a dark comedy about a Saturday Night Fever-impersonator who will kill, literally, for his art. But the film is pure tragedy, and Tony's cold-blooded obsession was not played with a wink to the audience ala American movies. Castro's performance was matched in empty ruthlessness (glass) brick by brick by that of the film's co-stars (and Tony's co-stars in their Saturday Night Fever act performed at a local cafe): Amparo Noguera (as Cony, his lover), Paola Lattus (as Pauli, Cony's daughter), Héctor Morales (as Goyo, Pauli's socialist boyfriend) and Elsa Poblete (as Wilma-the cafe owner). The women were the true emotional touchstones of the film, strange combinations of resilience, resignation, and desperation who (each) cling to Tony in spite of his impotence, emptiness, and distraction (perhaps the common man under Pinochet). Strange, disturbing, and ugly, the film presents a narrative of modern South America that is far removed from the poetry of Garcia Marquez or Borges or the Chile of Bolano or Jodorowsky. The sometimes blurry, hand-held scenes, filmed by Sergio Armstrong and edited by Andrea Chignoli, add to the movie's overall feeling of dislocation and detachment. Tony Manero (the film and character) does not simply take Saturday Night Fever as a starting point, instead enmeshing itself into the social tensions of Bay Ridge, the desperation of youth, the whiteness of Tony's suit/dreams (perfectly replicated by Raul/Tony and other contestants in the Saturday afternoon Chilean variety show to which the film builds its arc), and the exaltation of dance explored in the film by John Badham (Blue Thunder, War Games). With deadpan brutality diffused everywhere, leaking out of rusted pipes, shining beneath the dance floor, hiding in the hall closet, crawling through the dead grass, the film's horrors get more frightening the farther away from the picture you get. But is the story of a Chilean loser obsessed with New York disco supposed to have a Hollywood ending?

Turkish Delight

2009-07-14T09:26:00.001-07:00

Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight (1973) starred Rutger Hauer and Monique Van der Ven as the star-crossed bohemian lovers Eric and Olga, who meet in the Netherlands when Van der Ven stops for the hitch-hiking artist Hauer. Told mostly in flashback, the film explores the charms, whims, and pettiness of new romance, of sexual escapade, of drunken debauchery. Like Keetje Tippel (aka Katie's Passion) (1975), which was set in 19th-century Amsterdam and also starred Hauer and Van der Ven, Turkish Delight seems at first glance like an anacronistic period piece, quite different in form, content, and philosophy from Verhoeven's American films such as RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995). But, even as such, both films demonstrate the same kind of disconnection to reality and the strange transient nature of life and death. Turkish Delight was not only one of Verhoeven's first features, but one of Hauer's as well, made a decade prior to Blade Runner (1982), Nicolas Roeg's Eureka (1983), and Sam Peckinpah's Osterman Weekend (1983). In between this film and those, Hauer starred in the obscure Mysteries (1978), based on a Knut Hamsun novel about a enigmatic stranger, a suicide, a dwarf, and an ill-fated love triangle. Mysteries co-starred Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) and Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, The Leatherboys). Based on a novel called Turks Fruit by Dutch author and sculptor Jan Hendrik Wolkers (1925-2007), Turkish Delight ended rather melancholically for some tastes, but then again there's not much fun in brain tumors. The dubbed (vhs) versions of both Turkish Delight and Katie Tippel are awful, though the bad sync and cut-rate voiceover artists used in Katie Tippel are kind of funny at the same time.

Once Upon a Time in America

2009-07-09T06:27:00.000-07:00

Sergio Leone's swan song, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), was an old man's lament about memory, absence, architecture, and the inevitability of death. Rightly called an epic poem of violence, greed, and betrayal, the film was also a masterpiece of narrative structure in which the ringing of a telephone inside of a Chinatown opium den initiates the (opium-induced) dream-memory-fantasy of "Noodles" Aaronson, the Jewish gangster played by Robert De Niro. The movie begins in the center, travels to the past, fades to the future, and returns/flashbacks to the center again, much as our dream life operates. Like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (and the end of Taxi Driver), this "flashback" ending can be interpreted both as a dream itself and as a return to consciousness at the end of a dream. This film was in many ways Leone's lifetime project, as he had been ready to go into production since the early seventies. The principle cast, as assembled, was superb: James Woods as "Max" Bercowicz (aka Christopher Bailey); Larry Rapp as "Fats" Gelly; Elizabeth McGovern and Jennifer Connelly (pictured above at age 12) as Fats' sister Deborah, both true love and date-rape victim of De Niro. In smaller roles were Tuesday Weld; William Forsyth; Treat Williams; Joe Pesci; Burt Young; Danny Aiello. Marked with fantastic period settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to the 1930s to 1968, the film was also supported by a tremendous score by Ennio Morricone (as usual). The film's dream-like narrative was centered in mythology, with the anti-hero De Niro returning from exile to New York City, the land of his boyhood. His return to Fats' bar was filled with an almost violent nostalgia, as he quietly surveys the building itself, the feel of the walls, the empty space, the removable plank in the bathroom wall from which he spied (and spies again) on his young love practicing ballet on the empty storeroom stage. The graphic violence, the corruption, and the betrayal seem to fade for De Niro, and Leone, beneath the inability to recover the lost dreams of youth.

Bunny Lake is Missing

2009-07-06T04:54:00.000-07:00

Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) masterfully toyed with its audience at MOMA last month with a tale of incest, intrigue, and insanity. Carol Lynley stars as an American single mother, alone in London, whose 4-year-old girl "Bunny" goes missing from elementary school on her first day. No one--including the audience--has seen Bunny, and chief detective Laurence Olivier would at least like a verifiable photograph of the child before prolonging his investigation into a second day. Lynley, a former child model and actress, was perfectly cast as the wide-eyed Ann Lake, her innocent optimism fading into a zoned-out deceitfulness, or so Preminger would have you believe. As usual in a Preminger film, the acting was superb: in addition to Olivier and Lynley, Bunny Lake featured Noel Coward as the alcoholic thespian/landlord with a collection of African masks and S&M relics (De Sade's "skull" and original whip); Martita Hunt as retired school owner Ada Ford whose studies of children's nightmares cannot but help drive the investigation forward; Kier Dullea as Lynley's brother in a performance rivaling Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock's Psycho or Karlheinz Boehm in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (both 1960). The film was adapted from a novel by Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell) that was recently republished by the CUNY Feminist Press. The wide-screen black & white cinematography by Denys Coop--who had previously shot the brilliant Billy Liar (1963) with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie--perfectly matched Preminger's sinister pseudo-noir vision that was consistent in his work, whether set in London, New York, or the California coast. Among his finest films are Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Saint Joan (1957). What separates Bunny Lake is Missing from his other work is that it is as subversive as it is suspenseful. Watch for The Zombies in an extended performance on British television performing "Just Out Of Reach" during an important scene in a local pub.

Maitresse

2009-07-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

Barbet Schroeder's Maitresse (1976) has retained an "underground" following, which perhaps is all one can expect from an X-rated romantic dark comedy that graphically portrayed professional S&M encounters using real customers, real masks, real chains, real cages, real torture racks, whippings, piercings, nailings. The film also portrayed the nuances of romance, the power struggles in new relationships, the limits of 1960s sexual liberation, and the role of class differences in social movements. Bulle Ogier starred as Ariane, a dominatrix working out of the basement of her bourgeois apartment (actually a separate downstairs apartment that is connected by a hidden mechanical stairway). This is Ogier's finest role, though she is excellent in her other work for Schroeder, including The Vallee (1972), set in the New Guinea rainforest, and the gambling movie Tricheurs (The Cheaters) (1984). She also has the distinction of having worked for Luis Bunuel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and for taking on the Catherine Deneuve role of Severine in the 2006 sequel to Belle de Jour, called Belle Toujours which stars Michel Piccoli in his original role of Husson and was directed by (98 year old) Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. Starring alongside Ogier in Maitresse was Gerard Depardieu as Olivier, a cocksure ex-con who stumbles upon Ogier's dungeon while burglaring her building. Though Ogier attempts to keep her two worlds (and apartments, even with separate phones) separate, the lines between dominantion and submission blur as her relationship with Depardieu grows. He, still somewhat indignant to her lifestyle and her boss Gautier, tries to control her. She, by seducing him into her professional life, tries equally to control him. Neither the film nor these relationship boundaries are predictable or static, and Schroeder's tender "climax" of the film seems to suggest that only in masochistic desire--complete surrender--does true love reside. The film's extraordinary visuals--the domestic Parisian scenes, the dimly lit basement, the great scene at the country manor--were shot by Nestor Almendros, a Schroeder regular who won an Academy Award for Terrence Mallick's Days of Heaven (1979). The costumes were by Karl Lagerfeld. The breadth of Schroeder's work, like Werner Herzog, is both very obsessive and very diverse, directing feature films as well as documentaries such as General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), Koko: The Talking Gorilla (1978), and The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1987). He was also, famously, an important figure in the French New Wave, producing, among other movies, Eric Rohmer's The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (1963), Nadja a Paris (1964), La Collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud's (1969), Claire's Knee (1970), Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). He later produced Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (with Anna Karina)(1976) and was featured in Pierre Zucca’s infamous Roberte (1979) based on the novel and artwork of Pierre Klossowski, translator and interpreter of De Sade and brother of the painter Balthus.

Tattooed Life

2009-07-02T19:50:00.001-07:00

Tattooed Life (aka Irezumi Ichidai) was an existential Yakuza film made by Seijun Suzuki in 1965 for the Nikkatsu Film Corporation during one of Seijun's most prolific and controversial eras. It was preceded by Gates of Flesh (1964) and Story of a Prostitute (1965) and followed by Tokyo Drifter (1966) and the classic Branded to Kill (1967). By the end of the decade he was fired from Nikkatsu and essentially banned from making movies in Japan; his resurfacing in the 1980s pleased many of his loyal fans. Yakuza movies were strictly b-movies and Seijun was like a Japanese Sam Fuller, figuring that as long as his pictures came in on time and under budget anything goes. Yakuza films, of course, also predate other "tattoo" films such as the hallucinatory Illustrated Man with Rod Steiger (1969) (based on a Ray Bradbury short story) and David Cronenberg's Russian mafia movie Eastern Promises (2007) with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. Tattooed Life starred Hideki Takahashi as Tetsu the "White Fox" (or "Silver Fox" depending on your translation) and Masako Izumi as Midori who falls in love with the marked man with a secret past. Tetsu and his art-school brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananomoto) are on the run from a killing (in self defense) and arrive in a port city on the Sea of Japan seeking passage to Manchuria where they can escape the police and the Yakuza family who is chasing them. While working for a small mining company, the brothers meet Midori and her sister Masayo (Hiroko Ito), who happens to be married to the boss of the mining company. The brothers are pursued by a strange man in red shoes, and dodge text-book shady waterfront characters left and right, including the pencil-pushing Ezaki (Yuji Odaka) whose unrequited love for Midori drives him toward jealous revenge. Tetsu, who has raised his younger brother since childhood (their parents died when they were young) warns him that "sometimes there are things you have to give up when you become a man" and "don't get carried away by emotion." Kenji's death, it seems, was fated when he was unable to control his forbidden love for the married Masayo. The film, which features many shots with character's backs to the camera, through open windows, etc., works despite its cardboard characters, sparse dialogue, and see-through plot lines.

Les Carabiniers

2009-06-29T07:28:00.000-07:00

Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) is an allegorical journey of two brothers in an unspecified country who are enlisted in the unspecified King's army to fight all the King's enemies until the King has finally won the war. Marino Mase and Albert Juross star as Ulysses and Michel-Ange, rural peasants who live in a wooden shack without electricity or indoor plumbing, along with their girlfriends Cleopatra (Catherine Ribeiro) and Venus (Genevieve Galea). Godard co-wrote the original script with Roberto Rossellini and the film makes obvious cross-allusions to the beginnings of WWII, albeit translated to the modern-day 1960s. Two of the King's soldiers visit the quartet on their bleak farm and offer not only all the riches and marvels of the world (taken at their enemies expense) but all of its atrocities as well (rape, arson, execution). Filmed in a desolate b/w and intermixed with newsreel footage and war-torn urban locations, the camera accompanies Ulysses and Michel-Ange on their Odyssey across the European and North African countryside as they transform into willing and eager carabiniers, executing the blond Leninist spokeswoman of the 4th Territorial Action Group who compares Bourgeoisie Capitalists to evil insects, yet faithfully writing letters home to Venus and Cleopatra from every stop along the way. Upon their return, they indeed have all the world's riches and marvels with them. Though Godard's work, at times, seems to betray a need to insulate himself from criticism by intertwining style and message (if you fault one he blames the other), Les Carabiniers is a tragic-comedic homage to the theater of the absurd; its deadpan style (and title cards) reminiscent of Chaplin at his best--The Great Dictator being an obvious starting point. The film also manages to employ many of Godard's usual motifs: movie theaters, bathtubs, American cars, cigarettes, revolutionary politics, advertisements, guns. Upon its release, Louis Chauvet wrote in Le Figaro on June 5, 1963 that it offered only "childish paradoxes of war" and Michel Cournot, writing in L'Express on June 13, 1963, said that its unbearable ignominy was a disaster to French filmmaking and that it should be shown in an empty lot with a sheet on the wall and viewers sitting on empty milk crates instead of in a nice theater with velvet seats (Cournot did not realize that he was way ahead of his time). Les Carabiniers remains a kind of forgotten film of the French New Wave, though it deserves a place alongside Band of Outsiders (1964) as Godard's finest work. Watch for Barbet Schroeder (Maitresse, Barfly) in a small role as a car saleman.

Salt of the Earth

2009-06-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

The only movie banned by the United States government, the neo-realist Salt of the Earth (1954) is a film of stunning beauty and grace made by three blacklisted filmmakers on location in New Mexico, depicting the real-life story of the 1951-1952 strike by Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers against the New Jersey Zinc Company in Bayard, New Mexico. Local 890 was the Mexican American chapter of the union and the story interweaves the miners' hostility toward the company regarding the lack of on-the-job safety regulations, poor company housing with no indoor plumbing, and lesser pay compared to white workers as well as disruption within the Mexican American community regarding the newly-formed Women's Auxiliary--which in both real-life and in the film, won the strike after male employees were barred from striking by court injunction (courtesy of the Taft Hartley Act of 1935). The film offers a blistering critique of racism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of workers, yet balances very human and nuanced portrayals of the inner conflicts of the miners, their wives, Mexican tradition, the white union representatives, the company bosses, and the local police. A local union meeting is transformed into a community meeting, allowing wives and sisters an equal vote. When women and children are arrested they literally overflow the small jailcell, turning the deputies into the prisoners. The eviction scene that closes the film is another particular triumph. Salt of the Earth was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, one of the original Hollywood Ten who would not name names when called before the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1947. Biberman was one of only two directors (along with Edward Dymtryk) in the original ten, and served six months in federal prison for his refusal to talk. The film was written by Michael Wilson, an Oscar-winning co-writer of A Place in the Sun (1951) who served in the Marines during WWII before being blacklisted (and later wrote the 1969 Che! starring Omar Sharif as Guevara and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro), and was produced by Paul Jarrico who had written a U.S. military-funded pro-Soviet movie during WWII called Song of Russia (1943) for MGM. It was Jarrico who came across the striking miners during a vaction in Taos, and who quickly put the film in motion. The production, though free from Hollywood, was beset by protests from neighboring towns and the national press, investigated by the FBI, denounced by the House of Representatives, and banished following its premiere from U.S. theaters though it triumphed in Paris and Mexico City. The cast was largley made up of local miners and actual participants in the 1951-1952 strike; foremost among the "non-professional" actors was Juan Chacon (the President of Local 890) who starred as Ramon Quintero, the de facto leader of the strikers (begun after a Mexican miner is killed in a highly-aviodable accident) . The true heart of the film, however, was Esperanza Quintero, the reticent-leader of the women (and community) played by the Durango-born actress Rosaura Revueltas. Revueltas, who appeared in Emilio Fernandez's The Torch (1950) with Paulette Goddard and Pedro Armendariz, was blacklisted after the movie was released and eventually deported to Mexico, where she continued to work in theater and film. It is somehow extremely fitting to realize that Salt of the Earth was released almost simultaneously with Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando and Eve Marie Saint. Brando's performance as Terry Malloy, the heroic informer against mob (union) corruption helped the film sweep the Oscars, though it remained a see-through attempt by Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg (who personally named Biberman) at self-exoneration for talking when called before the same committee, with exactly as much to gain or lose, as the filmmakers of Salt of the Earth.

Twinky

2009-06-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

Charles Bronson and Susan George starred in the Lolita-inspired Twinky (1969) about an affair and marriage between a 38-year old American writer of pornographic books living in London and a 16-year old redhaired school girl whose stiff, old-fashioned parents do not approve. Bronson, who teaches his young wife about sex, spanking, and how to cook a proper breakfast, enjoys the level at which he and Twinky communicate. She loves the way he smiles at her. Coming immediately off the classic Dirty Dozen (1967) directed by Robert Aldrich and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone, Charles Bronson (1921-2003) plays somewhat against type as the struggling writer Scott Wardman. Susan George, on the other hand--who is best known for her stunning performance in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and for dating Prince Charles (pre-Diana)--was rather in type as the headstrong nymphet Lola Londonderry. Her clandestinely debauched Grandfather (Trevor Howard) was excellent in flashback scenes depicting his own reading of erotic novels and taking of bubble baths with a variety of young girls. The best part about Twinky is that it says fuck all to Blow-Up or Alfie and presents a picture of swinging London for the working-class. When the film switches to New York, it features night shots of the Silvercup sign in Queens and 59th Street Bridge, a few token scenes near South Street, a great Puerto Rican rights demonstration outside of Twinky's high school (where Bronson goes to jail for accidentally punching a cop), and many images of Twinky bicycling through the city streets. The film, renamed Lola in the United States, as if the Lolita connection was somehow not obvious enough, was directed by Richard Donner, whose long career has included movies such as The Omen (1976), Superman (1978), The Goonies (1985) and also TV, including episodes of The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone, Kojak, Gilligan’s Island, and Tales From the Crypt (Donner once appeared on a funny episode of the self-indulgent Jon Favreau show Dinner For Five (IMC), where Favreau warns him "you don't want me talk about Gilligan's Island do you?")(in another episode Favreau admits he yearns to one day be considered a Hitchcock or a Coppola)(the drinking on the show was apparently not faked). Twinky is not for the Bronson fan of The Magnificent Seven (1960) directed by John Sturges or even Death Wish (1974) by Michael Winner, but rather the Bronson fan who might rewatch House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price or enjoyed the sly Breakout (1975), about a complicated Mexican jailbreak of Robert Duvall (in a helicopter) that Bronson undertakes to woo Duvall's wife (Jill Ireland). Breakout also features John Huston as the mysterious man who sets Duvall up and Randy Quaid as Bronson's loyal assistant.

Ace in the Hole

2009-06-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) paired Kirk Douglas as the ruthless, scheming New York newspaperman Chuck Tatum with Jan Sterling as Lorraine Minosa, the petty and conspiring wife of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) who has become half-buried under debris in a deep cave while uncovering Indian artifacts near his home in New Mexico. Douglas has wound up at the small Albuquerque Sun Bulletin by way of his heavy drinking, fighting, and skirt-chasing at other newspapers across the country. Craving a big story that will put him back on top of the journalistic world, Douglas controls both the rescue effort (only he can access Minosa) and the press (he has exclusive coverage) and rapidly turns the quiet desert into a raging, untrammeled carnival of tourism, games, rides, and entertainment (the film was released, to Wilder's dismay, as "The Big Carnival"). Though his trademark cynicism is more bare under the glare of the New Mexican sun and not tempered with the same kind of humor or emotion that marks Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity, Wilder's vision of America is perfectly embodied by the calculating stare of Douglas. Whereas Joe Gillis (William Holden) or Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stumbled across their darker natures (each at the hands of a domineering woman), Douglas needed no guide to reach the lower depths of his soul. Particularly amusing in the film was Sterling's complicity gernerated by the increased profits at her (and her trapped-husband's) roadside diner as well as the slow corruption of the wide-eyed staff photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur), who idolizes Douglas. The film was loosely based on the real-life fatality of Floyd Collins, who had been trapped in a cave in Kentucky and the local Louisville newspaper that earned a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Kids trapped in wells still generate frenzied coverage on television and by morbid curiosity-seekers today. I first saw this movie in Oklahoma City in 1996.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

2009-06-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) was a delicate and poetic parable of greed, revenge, and love made by Sam Peckinpah in between two of his most violent movies--The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). Like most of Peckinpah's work, the film was set in the last fading days of the Old West when capitalism, technology, and modern life were encroaching upon the few good years of anarchaic freedom possible only in mythology. Jason Robards starred as Cable Hogue, who was left to die in the Arizona desert without water (like the end of the brilliant novel McTeague by Frank Norris--filmed in 1924 as Greed by Erich von Stronheim). After swearing revenge on his betrayers (Peckinpah regulars L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin), Hogue was rescued by the miraculous discovery of an underground spring of water halfway between stops on the stagecoach line. In town, the gruff and unkempt Hogue purchases land claims for his well and falls in love with Hildy, the town prostitute, who longs to move to San Francisco and marry a wealthy man to save her from her rooms above the local saloon. Hildy was a career role for Stella Stephens, a former Playboy model who had previously worked on Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis movies and afterward as (another) former-prostitue in The Poseidon Adventure with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Carol Lynley. With homemade underwear featuring a removable flap that displayed her name underneath, Hildy falls for Hogue only after a rocky but endearing courtship. Hogue was also befriended by a wandering and philandering preacher played by David Warner; the character of Reverend Joshua Duncan Sloan bore an uncanny resemblance to the real-life George Wharton James, a wandering and philandering Methodist minister who arrived in California in the 1880s and looked to the desert and to the American Indian way of life as a model for the white man's ultimate salvation and peace (this never came to pass). James' record of philandering superceded the fictional Sloan's: his wife brought suit against him in 1889 for "an absolutely prodigious number of adulteries with ladies of the parish, including one heroic feat of bedding down, all together, a matron and her three daughters" and other lurid activities that the Los Angeles Times deemed "of such a filthy nature that it would be impossible to print it" (Kevin Starr, Americans and the Californian Dream, 1850-1915, 1973, p. 204-205). The film stands out, however, not only for the career-best performances of Robards, Stephens, and Warner, but also as an elegy for a lost dream of happiness and peace. Hogue's death (obvious from the beginning) was not unlike that of the Wild Bunch when confronting General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) in southern Mexico; though under much different and less violent circumstances, the automobile that will render Hogue's water stand out of date was, in the end, not that much different from the one that Mapache used to drag Angel (Jaime Sanchez) to his slow and brutal death. In Peckinpah's world, men like Pike Bishop (William Holden) and Cable Hogue do not belong to the modern age and cannot pass into it. Their deaths offer the audience a spiritual regeneration but one devoid the dignity and honor that passes along with these men. The Ballad of Cable Hogue was neither Peckinpah's only comedy nor his only "sensitive" film, as certainly Junior Bonner (1972) and even parts of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia attest. It was a financial ruin at the box office (the public wanted the violence of his other films) but remained Peckinpah's personal favorite for the rest of his life, serving as a memorial to his own pioneer family who had settled in parts of Fresno County and the High Sierras in the late-nineteenth century (his grandfather was a local politican and the last hanging judge in California). The film has many flaws, the sequence featuring the song "Butterfly Mornings" foremost among them, but was beautifully shot by Lucien Ballard, a Peckinpah staple (Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, Junior Bonner) who had previously filmed The Killing (1956) for Stanley Kubrick and The Outlaw (1943) for Howard Hughes, among many other films in a long and successful career.

Warren Oates as "Nobody"

2009-06-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Warren Oates is my favorite actor, and there is nobody who stands even a close second. Equipped with the face of a loser and a wide, toothy smile, Oates thrived in supporting roles throughout the 1960s and 70s, usually playing Southerners, Westerners, or expatriates living (and dying) in Mexico. But, as Benny warns the mobsters in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, "nobody loses all the time." Oates' filmography is well known to his devoted fans, from his starring roles in Alfredo Garica (1974) or Dillinger (1973) to his astute charater pieces such as Sissy Spacek's father in Badlands by Terrence Mallick (1973) or the small-town deputy in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger (1967). He starred with Peter Fonda in a cheap horror movie called Race With the Devil (1975), which was also a kind of parody of Easy Rider, with the now-settled down Fonda and Oates driving across Texas in an RV (with their wives) when they encounter a group of Satanist hippies in the middle of an orgy/sacrifice, and he was masterful in Ivan Reitman's 1981 comedy Stripes, starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. But while Oates was great in all of these movies, the hard drinking, Kentucky-born, former Marine became something truly legendary in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman: Ride the High Country (1962 with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott), Major Dundee (1965 with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris), The Wild Bunch (1969 with William Holden, Robert Ryan, and Emilio Fernandez), and Alfredo Garcia (with Isela Vega and Fernandez) for Peckinpah, and The Shooting (1967 with Jack Nicholson), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971 with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson), Cockfighter (1974 with Harry Dean Stanton from a novel by Charles Willeford), and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978 with Jenny Agutter from Walkabout) for Hellman. The more you watch Oates on screen--in any role--the more you see in his sheepish grin certain things about loyalty, dignity, honor, and a kind of spiritual kinship that you don't find packaged in one place very often.

But prior to and during all of this Oates maintained a prolific television career, getting a break in the late 50s with supporting roles in the Peckinpah-created The Rifleman (with former pro athlete Chuck Connors) and other westerns. In 1967 he appeared in two episodes of the otherwise forgettable Cimarron Strip, set in the 1880s Indian Territory and starring Stuart Whitman as Marshall Jim Crown and Jill Townsend as Dulcey Coopersmith, a doe-eyed and demure English girl intent on civilizing the Old West. The 90-minute show was produced (at cut rate) by the makers of Gunsmoke and aired for one season on CBS. Oates appeared in the pilot episode (with Telly Savalas) called the "The Battleground" and guest starred in the fantastic "Nobody" as the half-Indian drifter Mobeetie, a kind of "lean hound for the long ride" and "half-wit saloon swamper." The plot invloves a boxcar full of dynamite, a secretly-hatched murder plot, and the chance for a loser's redemption. Oates was, as usual, the most brilliant and noble loser around.

Boudou Saved From Drowning

2009-06-20T11:58:00.001-07:00

Jean Renoir's critique of middle-class values Boudou Saved From Drowning (Boudu Sauve des Eaux) made a star of Swiss actor Michel Simon (La Chienne, L'Atalante). Simon's performance as a Parisian tramp named Boudou, who is "rescued" from a suicide attempt by bourgeois bookseller Edouard Lestingois, caused riots in theaters when it was released in 1932. When his dog runs off from the shade of a tree where they had been lounging together in the Bois de Boulogne, Boudou searches desperately before jumping into the Seine, in a remarkably-filmed scene featuring a long take on a Paris street with hidden camera. Lestingois, who has been spying on girls walking on the sidewalk through a telescope, spots Boudou prior to his dive into the water and comments that he is a perfect specimen of vagrant. Lestingois rushes to Boudou's rescue from the river, diving in and carrying him to safety to the bemused amazement of the Depression-era public, who have been watching the scene unfold from bridges over the Seine. All hell breaks loose when Lestingois completes his rescue of Boudou by dressing him up and tutoring him in middle-class manners and values. Boudou disrupts the entire household, cuckolding Lestingois of both wife and mistress (his maid Anne Marie) who, in dispassionate bourgeois custom, live under the same roof. Boudou, the pure id that Lestingois has repressed, revels in the anarchy he creates but finds he must, once again, plunge himself into water to escape the constrictive conventions of modern society--though this time to much different ends. Renoir, who had paired with Simon the year before with La Chienne, went on in 1937-1939 to make three of the greatest movies of the decade: La Grand Illusion, La Bete Humaine, La Regle de Jeu (Rules of the Game). Seemingly never far from water, Simon later starred as the tattooed barge sailor Jules (and his many mechanical objects, kittens, and accordian) in Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante (1934). Boudou Saved From Drowning was needlessly remade as the horrible Down and Out in Beverly Hills in 1986.

Blood and Sand

2009-06-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

Blood and Sand (1922) starred Rudolph Valentino as torero Juan Gallardo who rises from his poor Seville roots to become the most famous matador in Spain. Still one of the most accurate bullfighting movies ever made, Blood and Sand was based on a novel by Vincente Blasco Ibanez and featured Lila Lee as Gallardo's childhood sweetheart Carmen, who he marries before achieving his greatest successes in the arena. Enmeshed in a world of both sicophantic enablers and guilt, Gallardo begins an affair with wealthy widow Dona Sol, who was played by Nita Naldi, a dark-eyed Irish-Italian vamp, former Ziegfeld Follies girl, model for pin-up artist Vargas, and co-star of Valentino in two other films who is now buried in Calvary Cemetery off Greenpoint Ave. in Queens. Blood and Sand was directed by Fred Niblo, an Oklanhoma-born veteran of Vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood who directed Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. Remade in 1941 by Rouben Mamoulian (who had a career remaking classic silent movies in sound), the Technicolor film featured Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Anthony Quinn, and Rita Hayworth (as Dona Sol). A much better 1941 bullfighting movie, however, is the Cantinflas classic Ni Sangre, Ni Arena (Neither Blood nor Sand), a parody about an unemployed misfit named El Chato who, while running from the police, gets confused for his doppleganger--a famous matador also played by (of course) Cantinflas, albeit sin moustache. Although it is hard to find a subtitled version (if needed) it is just as funny if you don't understand Spanish for, like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the humor of Cantinflas is universal. Directed by Alejandro Galindo and shot by Gabriel Figueroa, Ni Sangre, Ni Arena was a smash hit in Mexico. As Betty Kirk wrote for the New York Times on June 15, 1941, the film outgrossed Chaplin's Great Dictator by 70% while also shattering all records for foreign or domestic movies ever released in Mexico. Kirk wondered if the premiere of Neither Blood nor Sand just before the Tyrone Power version "raises the question as to whether this is not a sharp piece of sabotage for the Hollywood movie . . . That the two movies approach the bull fight from opposite poles is still, however, evident, for Blood and Sand deifies the life of the matador, while Ni Sangre, Ni Arena ridicules it." The Valentino Blood and Sand was released on dvd with several extras, including a Will Rogers parody and a fantastic introduction by Orson Welles. I bought the Cantinflas dvd for five dollars in Jackson Heights one rainy afternoon last winter.

Hanky Panky

2009-06-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

One of the better Hitchcock spoofs, Hanky Panky (1982) is a cross-country suspense thriller comedy starring Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. It was directed by Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier, who had directed Wilder and Richard Pryor in Stir Crazy two years earlier. Wilder plays a Chicago architect named Michael Jordan (the real Michael Jordan wasn't drafted by the Bulls until 1984) visiting New York on business, where he becomes infatuated with Radner and embroiled in a vague pseudo-militaristic conspiracy at the same time. Wilder, as stand-in for Cary Grant in North By Northwest, is never quite sure which side Radner, as Eve Marie Saint, is on. Is she simply investigating her brother's murder or is she a double agent? Richard Widmark (Kiss of Death, Pickup on South Street) as "Ransom," the head of the conspiracy, will stop at nothing to retrieve the missing reel-to-reel sized computer tape. Though the New York Times called Radner "not ideally cast" for this film on June 4, 1982--no doubt they would have preferred Pryor--it was on the set that Wilder and Radner fell in love. They married two years later and lived, by all accounts, a tremendously happy life together until Radner's death in 1989. They also worked together in The Woman in Red with Kelly LeBrock (Wierd Science). Hanky Panky travels from Manhattan to Boston to Maine to the Grand Canyon, and has a fantastic scene in a secret room underneath Madison Square Garden. Watch for "Mister Magic."

Call Me Mike

2009-06-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

Originally filmed in 1979, Llamenme Mike (Call Me Mike) premiered in a few theaters on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1982 before achieving a brief domestic cult status. That it is relatively unknown in the U.S. is a shame. Alfredo Gurrola, who has had long career in Mexican film and television, directed this minor masterpiece starring Alejandro Parodi as a corrupt but hapless narcotics cop named Miguelito who is obsessed with Mickey Spillane novels. When he is busted stealing drugs from a local gang of smugglers and dealers, he is removed from the police force and sent to prison. It is only here that things go bad for him, though, as he is thrown into same cell as many of the drug smugglers he himself had put away. Beaten unconscious, he is revived by the prison doctor but is clearly not the same--now convinced that he is the real Mike Hammer and that the Mexico City drug dealers are part of an international Communist conspiracy (ala Kiss Me Deadly) . After escaping the prison mental ward, "Mike" goes on a one-man crusade to uncover the secret Communist plot. The drug dealers think he is insane as do his own family and friends, among whom is Sasha Montenegro, who he now treats with a confidence and arrogance she has never seen from him before (and which vaguely turns her on). Montenegro was perfectly cast as the femme fatale, as both Gurrola and Parodi--who also worked in academia--were interested in commenting on American film noir, Mexican masculinity, and the state of the cinema in Mexico, where throughout the seventies the most popular films were El Santo/lucha libre movies and soap operas (Montenegro starred in both). Montenegro, an Italian-born Yugoslavian, is also notable for her long time affair with Jose Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico from 1976-1982, which coincided with her work on this film. After each obtaining a divorce, they finally married in 1995. Llamenme Mike is a must see for any fan of Robert Aldrich or Sam Peckinpah's later films. Once you get past the slow start, the movie becomes a hilarious Mexican cross between Dirty Harry, Bad Lieutenant, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with plenty of surprises thrown in. Perhaps also of interest is cinematographer Miguel Garzon who later shot Death and the Compass (based on a Borges story) for Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy, Repo Man, Straight to Hell) in 1992, and had earlier worked as a cameraman on Jodorowsky's 1973 Holy Mountain.

She-Devils on Wheels

2009-06-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

She-Devils on Wheels (1968) is the story of a South Florida all-girl biker gang called the Man-Eaters who race motorcycles for first choice on the "stud line" back at their headquarters. New recruit Karen sneaks out of her house to ride with the girls but must continually prove her loyalty to the gang who, led by the Queen, also includes members knicknamed Whitey, Honeypot, Supergirl, Poodle, Ginger Snap, among others. The film was made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, one of the all-time low budget kings of filmmaking (along with Roger Corman and Russ Meyer), better known for films like Blood Feast (1963), Monster a Go-Go (1965), A Taste of Blood (1967), and the Gore Gore Girls (1975). Partly in response to charges of misogyny in his gore-based splatter films, Lewis devised the all-girl gang who use men for their pleasure, defend their turf against rival gangs, protect their own, and will fight, brawl, maim, and kill if necessary. The movie was filmed on location in the small rural town of Medley, Florida which is just outside the Everglades in greater Miami. The diminuitive and underaged mascot of the gang, Honeypot, who rides a scooter rather than a motorcycle before winning her longed-for initiation, was played by Nancy Lee Nobel. Nobel also starred in Lewis' Just For the Hell of It, also released in 1968, about a deviant group of social misfits who terrorize the residents of a small South Florida town. The She-Devils on Wheels theme song "Get Off the Road" features the refrain "We are the hellcats that noboby likes, Man-Eaters on motorbikes!" It was covered by the Cramps (with Ivy singing) and is now included on the cd version of the 1985 classic A Date With Elvis.

Le Cercle Rouge

2009-06-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 Le Cercle Rouge starred Alain Delon (Le Samourai, L'Eclisse) as an ex-con who returns to Paris with the familiar trinity of trenchcoat, cigarette, and gun. Delon befriends fugitive Gian Marie Volonte (who has hid in the trunk of Delon's car) and leads one of the greatest jewel heists ever filmed. Melville's genius is to work with the tropes of American gangster movies without irony and completely within his own time and place. Melville had, of course, been long obsessed with the United States. While it is often noted that his nom de plume was taken from Herman Melville, his films seem to owe much to the restrained/repressed dynamic of Hemingway's Paris-based fiction, such as The Sun Also Rises and Men Without Women--which could double as a title for a book on Melville's cinematic characters. Le Cercle Rouge is easily among Melville's most important films, along with Bob le Flambeur (1956), Le Samourai (1967), and Army of Shadows (1969). While perhaps not quite as sparse and stylized as his other works, Le Cercle Rouge had many touches that his earlier films lacked, and the particular brand of melancholic fatalism that marks this film was never grim or bleak. Delon's sang froid performance was masterful as usual. Of special note were the roles of the lead inspector, played by Andre Bourvil, and that of the alcoholic ex-policeman sharpshooter (a brilliant performance by Yves Montand) who comes to play a significant role in the plot of the film. His detox scene was one of the best filmed.

What Have You Done to Solange?

2009-06-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

Another important giallo was What Have You Done to Solange? (1972). Not exactly a pick-me-up film, it is laced with brutal misogyny, poor dubbing, shower scenes, rowboats, orgies, hippies, repressed memories, schoolgirls in uniform, sex-killing, imaginative camerawork, Catholic priests, and true suspense. Though one of the more beguiling and beautiful films of the early seventies, don't suggest it to your in-laws the first time you meet them. Directed by Massimo Dallamano (cinematographer on Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), What Have You Done to Solange? was set in London with an internationally diverse cast. Fabio Testi stars as a married teacher at an all-girls Catholic school who is having an affair with an 18-year old student (Christina Galbo). While row-boating with her at a suburban park, Galbo senses they are being watched and witnesses the flash of a knife (and gloved hands) through the long grass along the banks. Unable to explain why he was at the scene of the crime, Testi becomes, in true giallo fashion, suspect, prey, and detective of the murderer. Pressure mounts as other local schoolgirls become the target of a supposed sex-killer. Teachers are questioned by police and, in one of the film's best scenes, Catholic priests in full robes are formed into a police line-up at the station. Karin Baal is excellent as Testi's wife, and Camille Keaton, the grand-niece of Buster Keaton and fourth wife of Sidney Luft (former husband of Judy Garland and step-father to Liza Minelli) played the titular character Solange. Keaton went on to star in the notorious rape-revenge-sadist-hillbilly film I Spit on Your Grave, about a young Manhattan woman on a weekend trip to upstate New York that goes horribly awry. What Have You Done to Solange? was greatly enhanced by the voyeuristic camerawork of Aristide Massaccesi aka Joe D'Amato who worked in all genres (horror, western, comedy, suspense) for two decades before shooting hard-core porn in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

2009-06-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Dario Argento’s first film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo) was the first and most important giallo movie ever made. Released in 1970, the film established many of Argento’s visual and textual trademarks, including stunning cinematography and the plot of a foreigner involved in a crime he/she does not fully understand. Tony Mustante stars as an American writer living in Rome who witnesses an attempted murder in a local art gallery. Trapped between two glass walls, he is unable to stop the violent action before him or to escape for help. When local cop Enrico Maria Salerno confiscates his passport and warns him not to leave Rome, needing him as both witness and possible suspect, every traveler’s nightmare has come to life. Both Mustante and his English model girlfriend (played by the minor horror actress Suzy Kendall) become targets of the killer in the black leather gloves. It is only the faint sound of an extremely rare bird, one with the piume di cristallo, that provides Mustante and local police their primary clue—as Mustante’s memory of the crime and trust in his senses are blurred, faded, distorted (common in Argento’s later work). Filled with many features of the giallo, such as the special blend of lurid violence, erotic undertone, whispers, confusion, primary colors, and sadism, The Bird With Crystal Plumage was scored by Ennio Morricone and filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—whose remarkable body of work in the seventies alone included Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore (a strange film known only to Charlotte Rampling fantatics); and The Driver’s Seat (an even stranger film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol). The Bird With Crystal Plumage, while perhaps overshadowed by Argento classics such as Suspiria, remains among his very best work.

Bed of Roses

2009-06-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Another pre-code favorite is Gregory La Cava's Bed of Roses, made for RKO in 1933. Set on a Mississippi River cotton barge, the lackluster-named Bed of Roses starred Joel McCrea and Constance Bennett. La Cava, who later made the brilliant comedy My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard, seems to have infused his best movies with a keen attention to class differences, social climbing, and the value(s) of masquerading. Constance Bennett was superb as the wise-talking prostitute Lorrie Evans who will do anything for a life of luxury. Bennett and fellow parolee Pert Kelton (who was later blacklisted in Hollywood) leave reform school and sneak aboard a fog-lined steamer bound for New Orleans. After robbing a drunken, lecherous businessman of his money, Bennett jumps overboard rather than risk a return to jail, but loses her money in the muddy waters of the river when she is fished out by the crew of the cotton barge. McCrea (whose later work included Sullivan's Travels by Preston Sturges, Foreign Correspondent by Hitchcock, and Ride the High Country by Sam Peckinpah) was excellent as the barge captain. But Bennett refuses to settle for McCrea's catfish dinners and escapes to a posh set-up with a rich older man in New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras. Though it once debuted at Radio City Music Hall, there does not now seem to be copies of Bed of Roses available on dvd or video. I taped a copy off late night cable about 10 years ago.

Night Nurse

2009-06-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

1931’s Night Nurse featured Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell and was directed by William Wellman the same year as his more renown Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow. Wellman later made Lady of Burlesque (aka The G-String Murders) in 1943 with Stanwyck starring as the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (based on Lee’s autobiographical novel). Night Nurse was a rather involved pre-code tale of high school dropout Stanwyck, who trained as a nurse in a hospital alongside her friend Blondell, where she treats a bootlegger for a gunshot wound, earning his respect and admiring eyes. After taking a private nursing job looking after a socialite’s two children, things unravel for Stanwyck, who has fallen for the chauffeur/thug Clark Gable. Gable's death at the end provided his cinematic regeneration:immediately following Night Nurse, he starred in 1932’s Red Dust with Jean Harlow, directed by Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz) and No Man of Her Own with future-wife Carole Lombard; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert followed in 1934. Joan Blondell, who went on to play in numerous prewar musicals and Broadway movies such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames by Busby Berkeley, was also excellent in the 1947 noir Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power as an alcoholic and ill-fated carny (the movie included real-life carnies and sideshow people as well). But it was the Brooklyn-born Stanwyck whose appearance in Night Nurse is of greatest note, as it is impossible when watching the film not to be reminded that Phyllis Dietrichson, Stanwyck’s greatest character, was a private nurse turned cold-blooded killer in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), starring Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, reminding you to take caution if Barbara Stanwyck is your private nurse: she will either rescue your children or kill you.

Loulou

2009-06-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was one of the best French directors of the post-New Wave period. His unsentimental Loulou (1980), starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, was a masterpiece of naturalism set amongst the minor bars, cafes, and nightclubs of modern working-class Paris. Called “the French Cassavettes” by Film Comment a year after his death, Pialat’s movies focused on the subtle charms of his downtrodden characters and were marked with the feeling of real life: however inconsistent, vague, strange, contingent that real life may be. Though he achieved greater recognition for A Nos Amours (1983) with Sandrine Bonnaire and Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987) with Bonnaire and Depardieu (as a Catholic priest), it was Loulou’s palate of muted blues and grays that helped give this film such long lasting affect--as well as the fact that it was based on his own relationship with the film's writer Arlette Langman, who left her husband to live with Pialat. Depardieu and Huppert are at their best. They had worked together before, in Bertrand Blier’s all-but-forgotten 1974 Les Valseuses (Going Places) with Miou-Miou and Jeanne Moreau. In Loulou, Huppert's married, middle-class Nelly meets Depardieu's local playboy and ex-con Louis (Loulou) on the dancefloor of a neighborhood disco. After an encounter with her insufferable, balding husband (played admirably by Andre Marchand), Nelly and Loulou spend the night fucking in a cheap hotel room, breaking the bed under Depardieu's considerable weight (this scene was probably improvised), and discussing what she will tell her husband in the morning. Nelly escapes the petty violence of her husband (his best line: "music bores me") and begins living with unemployed Loulou at a hotel which she of course pays for. Depardieu had, by 1980, perfected the role of the charming thug with an idiosyncratic nobility (Barbet Schroeder's brilliant 1976 Maitress with Bulle Ogier, for example). In one scene Loulou considers pimping his new girlfriend, but leaves the decision totally up to her. In another he offers his mother, who is a maid at an office building, some of Nelly's money. Though told from Huppert's perspective, from the beginning--when Loulou brushes off the petulant Dominique (played by Frederique Cerbonnet) to when he is knifed outside the Bar L'Oasis yet enjoys his time in the hospital (the wheelchair was fun)--the film was Depardieu's, as the title makes clear. It is at its best in its moments of random humor, particularly: the saxophone, Big-Ass Marite, the old lady with the mailbox, the stuffed tomatoes, the girl with the cat, the strange scene when housesitting a friend's apartment.

I'm Keith Hernandez

2009-06-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

Rob Perri's 2009 documentary I'm Keith Hernandez came closer to revealing the truth about the hidden connections between neo-liberal politics, the international drug trade, and the 1986 World Series than perhaps the filmmakers intended. An intertwined story of baseball, cocaine, porno movies, rock and roll, Ronald Reagan, and the Iran Contra Scandal, it also posed as a "vehicle to discuss how male identity is shaped by TV/film, sports, advertising, and pornography," mostly through a discussion of Hernandez's trademark moustache. The filmmakers are no doubt responsible for the proliferation of "I'm Keith Hernandez" graffiti and posters around Brooklyn (and elsewhere) since the beginning of the new year. You can watch the 20-minute film free on the website below, as the movie was a strictly not for profit venture by the artist. Watch in conjunction with Cocaine Cowboys, the gritty, fantastic, surreal, (and more serious) documentary about the connections between Miami's deadly 1970-80s Colombian drug trade and the local (and national) real estate and banking industries, directed by Billy Corben in 2006. I'm Keith Hernandez, for its part, was easily the best baseball film since 1989's Major League starring Wesley Snipes, Tom Berenger, and Corbin Bernsen. Well done.

View the movie here:

http://www.imkeithhernandez.com

Rehearsal for a Crime

2009-06-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Luis Bunuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (1955) (aka The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz), starring Ernesto Alonso, Miraslava Stern, and Rita Macedo, was one of the three masterpieces of Mexican cinema that he made while living in Mexico City, along with Los Olvidados (1950) and El (1953). While Alonso, who had appeared in Bunuel’s Abismos de Pasion (Wuthering Heights) in 1954, went on to a long career in Mexican television production, the female leads met more tragic fates. Like Bunuel, the Czech-born Miraslava Stern (who was doubled in the movie by an exact replica mannequin that she, oddly, exchanged clothes and underwear with in one scene) fled the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Most of her adult life was spent in Mexico, where she dated bullfighters in real life and appeared in The Brave Bulls with Anthony Quinn in 1951 as well as the documentary Torero (released 1956). She committed suicide just days before Ensayo de un Crimen's premier in 1955. Rita Macedo, who was once married to the writer Carlos Fuentes, committed suicide two days before her 68th birthday in 1993.Typical for Bunuel, the film’s obsessions recalled themes he addressed twenty years earlier and predicted those he would address twenty years later. Rehearsal for a Crime updated the particular coitus interruptus of L’Age d’Or (1930), where the consummation of two lovers’ desires were continually thwarted by the conventions of religion, middle-class society, and the state, into a kind of murderus interruptus for lead actor Alonso, whose childhood fantasy-memories of murder were rekindled by the discovery of his mother’s long lost music box. Similarly, the double flashback structure (almost none of the movie takes place in real time) brings to mind the I-had-a-dream-within-another-character’s-dream configuration of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Not only does the preoccupied, wealthy Alonso serve as a prototype of the Fernando Rey character of Tristana (1970) and Cet Obscur Objet du Desir (1977), but the leg that breaks away from the Miroslava Stern mannequin is undoubtedly the origin of the prosthetic leg that Catherine Deneuve later wore in Tristana (and which Hitchcock raved about). An often-overlooked homage in this movie was the music box and its diabolically sweet tune that announces the arrival of the murderous impulse in Archibaldo de la Cruz, much as Bunuel’s idol Fritz Lang used the Peer Gynt whistle for Peter Lorre’s character in M (1931). Ensayo de un Crimen is typical of Bunuel’s Mexican movie career in many other ways—low budgets, small production companies, familiar obsessions, and a cast, crew, and source material with which he had worked before—including cinematographer Augustin Jimenez who had filmed El Bruto (1953) and Abismos de Pasion (1954) and novelist Rudolfo Usigli who had written the books on which Susana (1951) and Una Mujer Sin Amor (1952) were based. Bunuel’s Mexican films seemed to infuse, if not undermine, European social realism by his reliance on dream imagery, sexual obsession, and de-romanticized lead characters. His social-surrealist influence on New York street photography can be seen in the work of Helen Levitt, who worked with Bunuel during the filming Los Olvidados and returned to the United States with the wonderful book Mexico City. Her later work maintained a sort of surrealist nod to the playfulness and wretchedness of children.

Les Levres Rouges

2009-06-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

Though rumors of new Erzebeth Bathory movies have appeared with regularity over the last decade, Harry Kumel’s Les Levres Rouges (1971) remains one of the finest films about the Hungarian Blood Countess ever made. The Antwerp-born Kumel (who later made the strange Malpertuis, featuring a bed-ridden Orsen Welles) utilized an isolated hotel in the mysterious city of Bruges to set this classic in magical realism/horror. The medieval canals and blood red lips foreshadow, in a way, the Venice of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Le Levres Rouges (aka Le Rouge aux Levres, Blood on Her Lips, Daughters of Darkness) featured Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) as Countess Bathory and Andrea Rau (a television star from Stuttgart in a Louise Brooks wig) as her charming and masochistic servant Ilona. A Belgian-French-German-U.S.-Italian production, co-written and dubbed into three languages, the film's cast and aesthetics set it apart from other 1970s lesbian vampire movies such as those by Jean Rollin, Jesus Franco, or Hammer Films. In place of the campiness of The Vampire Lovers, for example, Les Levres Rouges was marked with an enigmatic eroticness inspired by the isolation of its surreal setting and mood.

Deadlier Than the Male

2009-06-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

Among the highlights of MOMA's Julien Duvivier retrospective last month was his 1956 Deadlier Than the Male (aka Voici le Temps des Assassins) starring Jean Gabin and Daniele Delorme. This underappreciated noir featured Gabin (Grand Illusion, Pepe le Moko) as a successful chef who, though warned by his mother, quickly married the young daughter of his (supposedly deceased) ex-wife only to be caught in a web of lies, murder, drug abuse, betrayal, suicide. Duvivier's unrelentingly dark gray vision of postwar Paris and surrounding countryside was reminiscent of his 1950 Sous le Ciel de Paris (which also played at MOMA) and doubled as a subtle critique of the aging bourgeois male, still fighting against his mother's control of his personal life yet still running to her for help. From Bosley Crowther's review for New York Times, October 9, 1957:

"To look at this fetching young lady (Delorme) with her doll's face, her slightly crossed eyes and her air of innocent enjoyment . . . you would hardly suspect she had in her . . . the venom, the sang-froid and the contrivance of a (Catherine) Corday. Yet that's what she gives us in this picture—a beguilingly beautiful girl with an utterly ruthless aggression against the whole category of males."