A Criterion Channel journey, films #131-140

This is the 14th entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve been watching on the Criterion Channel streaming service since September 2021. I watched this set of ten films in August 2022.

This latest set of films include Mira Nair’s hit from 1991 starring Denzel Washington, a comedy/spy-thriller from the 1960s starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, a couple of classic American comedies starring the dazzling on-screen pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy, a poignant film about the tragedy of war by Italian master Vittorio De Sica, a searing portrait of social decay by Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, a biopic of American boxing champion Jim Corbett starring Errol Flynn, and three engrossing films by British humanist director Mike Leigh.

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Mississippi Masala (1991): Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair‘s sophomore feature is a romantic drama, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury as a young interracial couple in love, who struggle to overcome prejudices from their respective communities. The cast is peppered with an impressive array of American, British and Indian actors including Roshan Seth, Sharmila Tagore and Charles S. Dutton. But it’s Sarita Choudhury, in her film debut, who steals the show as the sexy and fiercely strong-willed daughter of Indian immigrants, who like many second-generation youngsters, seeks to break away from the shackles of her community. The film was nominated for a Golden Lion at Venice, building on the Oscar nomination Ms. Nair received for her 1988 debut film, Salaam Bombay!; she would go on to win the Golden Lion for her 2001 drama, Monsoon Wedding.

Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991)

Arabesque (1966): Stanley Donen made his name directing some of Hollywood’s biggest musicals like On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the 1950s, then graduated to big-budget romantic comedies like The Grass Is Greener and Charade. Following in the same Hitchcockian vein as Charade, this comedic spy-thriller featured two of the biggest box office draws of the era – Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. Peck plays Prof. David Pollock, an unassuming professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, who is drawn into an international web of intrigue involving a message written in hieroglyphics that different parties want to get their hands on. Sophia Loren plays the glamorous femme fatale whose loyalties are initially unclear. There are plenty of twists and turns to the plot before it reaches a satisfying conclusion. The score by Henry Mancini was nominated for a Grammy, and is reminiscent of his Pink Panther theme from three years earlier.

After the Thin Man (1936): Myrna Loy and William Powell were among Hollywood’s most successful onscreen couples, appearing in 13 movies together. They were particularly well-known for the Thin Man series of films, one of the earliest movie franchises in Hollywood history. Dashiell Hammett’s novel about Nick and Nora Charles, a retired private detective and his whip-smart socialite wife, was first adapted to the screen in 1934 and audiences fell in love with Loy and Powell’s witty banter and natural comic timing. This sequel features more of the same blend of comedy and mystery…the plot is almost immaterial, as the entertainment value comes mainly from Loy and Powell’s on-screen chemistry. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and four more sequels followed over the next 11 years, although with diminishing box office returns.

I Love You Again (1940): W.S. van Dyke directed the first four Thin Man films and after the third, he reteamed with stars Myrna Loy and William Powell in yet another comedy of manners built around their celluloid charm. The plot revolves around Powell’s character, who experiences amnesia, causing him to switch between two diametrically different characters. Throw in a love triangle and a real-estate scam, and you have the recipe for a laugh-a-minute movie-watching experience.

Sunflower (1970): Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni star as ill-fated lovers separated by World War II (shades of The Cranes Are Flying) in this international co-production directed by Italian master Vittorio De Sica. Antonio, a soldier posted in Naples during World War II, falls in love with a local girl, Giovanna. In spite of his best efforts to avoid being sent to the frontlines, Antonio is dispatched to the Russian front, leaving Giovanna behind to wrestle with loneliness and anxiety. After the war ends, she is among the thousands of women waiting to learn the fate of their beloved. Is her husband dead or missing in action? Sophia Loren brings pathos to her role as the presumed war widow, seeking closure while clinging to the memory of those few days of joy in the distant past. A sombre and at times, heart-rending film, this is considered one of director De Sica’s lesser efforts when held up against his body of work. A few months after its release, De Sica released another war-themed film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

La Cienaga / The Swamp (2001): Several years ago, I watched Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel‘s highly acclaimed 2008 film, The Headless Woman. I struggled to get through it and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I am happy to say that I had a very different experience with Ms. Martel’s debut film La Cienaga. This tale of ennui and spiritual decay, depicts the comings and goings of a wealthy family vacationing at their country estate during a hot and humid summer. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, the slow-burning narrative strips away the family’s thin façade of respectability to reveal the baseness of their human needs and wants. The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale and won several awards in its native Argentina.

Gentleman Jim (1942): Prolific American director Raoul Walsh brings to the big screen this biopic of boxing champion “Gentleman Jim” James Corbett, with the title character played by the charismatic Errol Flynn. The film picks up the narrative during Corbett’s days as a bank teller when he was introduced to boxing during its emergence as an organized professional sport. As with all sporting biopics, the film follows Corbett’s battles both on and off the sporting stage, the latter being his attempts to win the heart of Victoria, a young upper class woman who is in equal parts, annoyed and attracted to the brash young man. The film was among the last of Flynn’s big hits, with his star starting to fade towards the late 1940s. Director Raoul Walsh made over 150 films, including classics like High Sierra (1941) with Humphrey Bogart, White Heat (1949) with James Cagney and Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) with Gregory Peck.

High Hopes (1988): Mike Leigh was the featured director on Criterion in August 2022, and I ended up watching a bunch of his films at one stretch. High Hopes was his first film to receive wide theatrical distribution, and is a bittersweet comedy chronicling the ups and downs in the lives of a working-class couple living in central London. The film is an exploration of relationships – between partners, with siblings, an elderly parent, and with friends and neighbours. It is also a subtle commentary on the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies in the 80s. All of this is delivered in a matter-of-fact style, through everyday mundane events and the interactions of the soft-spoken, unassuming protagonists, played by Philip Davis and Ruth Sheen. The international film community sat up and took notice, with the film being nominated at festivals in London, New York and most importantly, at the Venice Film Festival.

Life is Sweet (1990): Mike Leigh’s first major commercial success was also the breakthrough film for many of its cast members, who would go on to sterling careers – Alison Steadman (the excitable Mrs. Bennett in the 1995 BBC hit Pride and Prejudice), Jim Broadbent (Oscar winner for Iris in 2001), Timothy Spall (Wormtail in six Harry Potter movies), Stephen Rhea (Oscar nominated for 1992’s The Crying Game) and David Thewlis (nominated at Cannes in 1993 for Naked). Andy (Jim Broadbent) and Wendy (Alison Steadman) are a working class couple living in North London with their twin twenty-something daughters; the film follows their lives over the course of a summer, covering events that are humorous, disturbing, heart-breaking and bittersweet. David Thewlis plays the lover of one of the twin daughters, and Timothy Spall is hilarious as a slightly unhinged family friend with delusions of grandeur.

Secrets & Lies (1996): Mike Leigh’s most commercially successful film features yet another memorable ensemble performance from some of Britain’s most talented actors. Brenda Blethyn is extraordinary as an emotionally fragile middle-aged woman who is contacted by the illegitimate daughter who she had given up for adoption at birth. Her instinctive reaction is denial, but eventually she accepts the reality and they start meeting in secret, getting to know each other. There are subplots involving the other members of her dysfunctional family – her kind-hearted son (Timothy Spall), snobbish daughter-in-law (Phyllis Logan, the housekeeper from Downton Abbey), her rude and discontented daughter (Claire Rushbrook). The bombshell final act brings the entire cast of characters together who react with disbelief, resentment and anger at the revelation. Actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste navigates a difficult role as the birth daughter who maintains her poise amidst all the family hysterics. The film won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, was nominated for five Oscars and 7 BAFTAs, deservedly winning the BAFTA for Best British Film and Best Screenplay. Mike Leigh works at the peak of his powers and handles a difficult topic with great sensitivity and empathy.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70, #71-80, #81-90, #91-100, #101-110, #111-120 and #121-130.

Rebel Moon: A fine line between homage and copycat

The first part of Zack Snyder’s space opera duology, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, hit Netflix in Dec 2023. What started off as a Star Wars spec script that Snyder pitched to Lucasfilm, eventually morphed into an “original” IP with ambitions of kicking off a multimedia franchise, including video games and graphic novels. Given its origins, it’s only to be expected that the script would have recognizable elements from the Star Wars universe, which in turn has inspired space operas for the past half century. But while watching the movie, it became clear that it’s not just Star Wars that Snyder has copied, or paid homage to. The entire film appears to be a pastiche of stereotypes, story beats, characters and imagery culled from a range of science fiction, fantasy and action films. Certainly, as a filmmaker, Zach Snyder has the right to bring to screen whatever he feels like, and if Netflix wants to spend $150 million financing it, that’s their prerogative too, but it really makes me wonder why such a gifted director and his screenwriters could not come up with one original idea in a two hour space opera with so much opportunity for world building. I’ve listed the more obvious “influences” below, and perhaps sharp-eyed movie buffs may have picked up other references.

Rebel Moon Storyline – Seven Samurai (1954): The overall storyline borrows heavily from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, in which a village of farmers hire a group of ronin to protect them from bandits who will come to the village after harvest to take their crops. In Rebel Moon, a farming community on an isolated moon seeks to recruit warriors to protect them from soldiers who threaten to take away their crop. They send one of their farmers, Gunnar (played by Michiel Huisman) along with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious woman who joined the community the previous year.

Opening Exposition – all Star Wars films: No one would dare copy the on-screen scroll which has become a hallmark of the Star Wars franchise, and has become one of the most elegant devices to deliver exposition at the start of a movie. Instead, Rebel Moon delivers the audio equivalent via Anthony Hopkins’ instantly recognizable and clearly enunciated voice. He describes a galactic empire thrown into chaos due to regicide, an ambitious and ruthless senator who steps into the power vacuum, and rebellion emerging on the outer fringes of the Imperium…all familiar story beats for Star Wars fans.

Imperium Soldier’s uniforms – Nazi Wehrmacht: In Star Wars, the Empire’s ruthless troops were called Stormtroopers after the Nazi infantry soldiers of World War II, however their white armor and skull-like helmets were a wholly original design. In Rebel Moon, the troops of the Imperium are kitted out to look like Nazi stormtroopers, and Admiral Atticus Noble (played with fiendish delight by Ed Skrein) certainly looks the part of a Nazi Field Marshall, with his jackboots, trench coat, collar patches, metal gorget and rigid peaked cap.

Ed Skrein as Admiral Atticus Noble in Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)

Imperium Scribes – The Bene Gesserit from 2021’s Dune: The admiral and his troops are accompanied by tall, red-robed characters who look a bit like the black clad Bene Gesserit priestesses in Dune, with their shroud-like veils and high hats. The background notes for Rebel Moon state that the red-robes are Scribes, a religious order tasked with recording the achievements of the Imperium, who accompany armies and delegates to view events as they take place. Unlike the vocal and politically active Bene Gesserit, the Scribes appear to be passive observers, and in fact remain very much in the background in the film.

Jimmy, the mechanical knight – C3PO from the Star Wars films: For fans of C3PO, the humanoid robot famous for his dulcet tones voiced by British actor Anthony Daneils, Zack Snyder has created the character of Jimmy, a mechanical soldier, voiced by another British actor, Anthony Hopkins.

Kora’s combat experience – “No Man’s Land” battle scene from 2017’s Wonder Woman: As Kora recounts her upbringing as a soldier of the Imperium, the accompanying flashback features a combat sequence clearly inspired by the World War I scene in Wonder Woman (on which Zack Snyder was a producer). Although it lasts only a few seconds, the slow motion shots of soldiers charging across a desaturated battle-scarred landscape while tracer rounds streak past them, will be familiar to fans of the thrilling scene in which Diana charges across open land against a hail of German bullets.

Ecto-restraints used by bounty hunters – Boba Fett’s carbonite from 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back: Rebel Moon has bounty hunters called Hawkshaws, reminiscent of Mandalorian bounty hunters like Boba Fett in Star Wars. While Boba Fett famously used carbonite to incapacitate and transport Han Solo, the Hawkshaws have a visually similar, though far more sophisticated device called an eco-restraint. In this one aspect, I have to say that the Rebel Moon writers and production designers actually came up with something superior to the idea they copied.

Bar scene in the port city of Providence – Mos Eisley cantina scene from 1977’s Star Wars: In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi journey from Luke’s farm to the spaceport town of Mos Eisley, where they go into a tavern looking for transportation off the planet. There they encounter various scum and get into a bar fight, a scene surely inspired by similar set-ups in various Westerns of the 40s and 50s. In what is virtually a lift of that story beat, Kora and Gunnar arrive at the Port City of Providence, looking for information and transportation…and of course, they get into a bar fight.

Kai, the mercenary – Han Solo from the original Star Wars trilogy: Charlie Hunnam seems to be channeling Harrison Ford in every scene he’s in as Kai, a roguish and handsome mercenary who Kora and Gunnar meet in Providence.

Bennu – The hippogriff from 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The third instalment in the Harry Potter film series features an entertaining sequence in which Harry uses respect and empathy to befriend a dangerous mythical creature called a hippogriff (inspired by the gryphon from Greek mythology). Rebel Moon features an almost identical looking creature called a bennu, and here too, the untamable beast is won over by an ex-nobleman named Tarak through empathy rather than by force.

Harmada, the spider-creature – The scorpion monster from 2001’s The Mummy Returns: Jenna Malone plays a human-spider hybrid named Harmada in Rebel Moon. She bears an uncanny resemblance to the CGI human-scorpion monster in The Mummy Returns, which was the resurrected embodiment of Mathayus, the Scorpion King (and was Dwayne Johnson’s first ever big-screen role).

All of the above happens by the half-way point of the film, and these scenes and characters were so derivative, that I found it challenging to focus on the storyline. Fortunately, the second half of the film charts its own path and is capped off with an entertaining action sequence in the third act. This gives me reason to hope that the second part, due in April 2024, will feature similarly well executed scenes, which even if not original, put a fresh spin on tired tropes. All credit must go to Sofia Boutella, who effectively portrays the intensity and pain of her character Kora. She also shows off some amazing moves in the action scenes.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #121-130

This is the thirtheenth entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve been watching on the Criterion Channel streaming service since September 2021. I watched this set of ten films from the end of June till end July 2022.

This latest set of films include two classics from the British filmmaking duo Powell & Pressburger, a beautifully shot romantic drama from Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai, an indie crime drama directed by Paul Schrader, a classic Western pairing James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, a Japanese family drama starring the incomparable Setsuko Hara, a WW2 spy thriller from legendary director Fritz Lang, a Japanese-set film noir from indie director Samuel Fuller, a fictionalized account of the great Chicago fire of 1871 and a dark psychological thriller starring Gene Tierney.

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Light Sleeper (1992): Paul Schrader emerged in the 1970’s as the enfant terrible of American cinema, with his hard-edged, male-oriented scripts for leading directors like Sydney Pollack, Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma. He hit the headlines during the 80’s for writing or directing controversial films like American Gigolo, Patty Hearst and The Last Temptation of Christ. From the 90’s, he entered a mellow phase, starting with this drama/thriller, Light Sleeper. Willem Dafoe plays John LeTour, a drug dealer working for a woman (Susan Sarandon) with a high class clientele. After years in the drug business, LeTour has become a jaded lost soul, living with insomnia (hence the film’s title) and experiencing a midlife crisis. A chance encounter with his ex-wife rekindles some of his old spark and a longing for a better life. But it’s not so easy to escape his circumstances, and LeTour becomes embroiled in a series of events beyond his control. Willem Dafoe infuses every scene with LeTour’s existential pain, and forms the emotional core of this sombre film. Schrader followed up Light Sleeper with a series of middling films for the next 25 years, and then made something of a comeback after 2017, directing three well-regarded films all featuring conflicted “lone wolf” men – First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener.

Ministry of Fear (1944): This spy thriller set in England during World War II comes with amazing credentials – directed by Fritz Lang, based on a novel by Graham Greene and starring Ray Milland. I found the storyline to be quite convoluted and somewhat far-fetched, making the entire viewing experience feel like something of a chore. I am not even going to attempt to summarize the film, except to say that it involves a palm reader at a fête, a medium at a séance, a blind man who is not blind, a “Macguffin” in the form of a cake, and exploding bombs. It wasn’t really my cup of tea. Apparently director Lang apologized to Graham Greene for the liberties that the film’s script took with his novel. On the other hand, the BFI has included this film in its list of Top 10 film adaptations of Graham Greene’s stories, so clearly it has some merits. A year later, actor Ray Milland would go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for his best known role, as the alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943): This film was the first colour production from the celebrated British filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in the early years of their incredibly fertile creative period spanning the 1940’s. Featuring pioneering technicolor cinematography, it is considered one of the greatest British films ever made. It tells the engrossing story of a career military officer, his military achievements and his personal life. Soft spoken Roger Livesey plays the character of Clive Wynne-Candy, ageing on-screen over four decades, from his days as a Lieutenant in 1902 until his return from retirement during World War II. Wynne-Candy is an eccentric character, frequently at odds with his superiors and peers on account of his seemingly whimsical decisions, which in fact are driven by a sharp tactical mind and strong moral code. Deborah Kerr, at the tender age of 21, was cast as three different characters, each playing a significant role in Wynne-Candy’s life over the years. This film is a product of its time, capturing the essence of British military gentry during the first half of the 20th century; irrespective of one’s opinion of British foreign policy during this period, this film is a must-watch for cinephiles for its story of a life fully lived.

Black Narcissus (1947): Black Narcissus is an adaptation of a 1939 novel exploring the efforts of a convent in setting up a school in a remote Himalayan kingdom. Faced with a barrage of cultural barriers and distractions, the nuns become increasingly unstable and emotionally disturbed. One of them in particular, Sister Ruth (played by Kathleen Byron in an extraordinary performance), starts lashing out at her colleagues and becomes desperate to leave the nunnery, while Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) tries to maintain order and decorum among the group. It was Kerr’s second film with Powell/Pressburger after The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and soon after, she would cross over to Hollywood and superstardom. Indian-born actor Sabu plays a notable role as the local prince, a few years after he made a splash in the films The Thief of Bagdad and Jungle Book. Besides the incredible acting performances, the film features Oscar-winning colour cinematography by Jack Cardiff. The mountainous locales are breathtaking, and I was amazed to learn that none of it was shot on location, but done entirely through camera trickery involving matte paintings and scale models.

Destry Rides Again (1939): There have been three different films bearing this title, all supposedly adaptations of the 1930 Max Brand novel. This middle version only borrows the novel’s name but features a completely different story; however, the classic pairing of James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich makes this the one to watch. Stewart plays Tom Destry, a newly arrived deputy lawman in an unlawful town, whose pacifist approach makes him the object of ridicule. However, an iron hand lurks under the velvet glove and soon the chief baddie (played by Brian Donlevy) realizes he has to resort to strong arm tactics to get rid of Destry. Marlene Dietrich gets top billing in the film as the saloon singer/gangster’s moll with a heart of gold, although by this time her star was on the wane in Hollywood. Director George Marshall had directed three Laurel and Hardy films in the early 30’s and certainly knew how to create an entertaining blend of comedy and action.

In Old Chicago (1938): The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 provides the framework for this highly fictionalized account of the real-life O’Leary family, from whose barn the fire is alleged to have originated, as per some historical accounts. The first two-thirds of the film concerns itself with the rising fortunes of the O’Leary brothers, particularly the hustler Dion O’Leary (played by heartthrob Tyrone Power) and his rivalry with businessman Gil Warren (Brian Donlevy, in one of his standard villainous roles). The action-filled third act depicts the city-wide conflagration, with the burning homes, crowds and chaos acting as the backdrop for the showdown between O’Leary and Warren. Although the film purports to be based on real-life events, most of the names and incidents are fictitious, and this is essentially a formulaic Hollywood Golden Age film with music, romance and action. Director Henry King was a reliable filmmaker for 20th Century Fox studios, making a number of successful and well regarded films with Tyrone Power (Jesse James, The Black Swan) and later with Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High, The Gunfighter).

Sound of the Mountain (1954): Setsuko Hara is well known for her roles as the good-natured and frequently self-sacrificing wife/daughter in a number of films by Japanese master Yazujiro Ozu (hence her nickname, the “Eternal Virgin”). She also appeared in similar roles in a couple of films for another iconic Japanese director, Mikio Naruse, who specialized in downbeat social dramas. Sound of the Mountain is adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, and stars Ms. Hara as a woman living in an unhappy marriage with a philandering husband. The key difference in this drama, compared to her other on-screen roles, is that her character demonstrates resolve and agency, rather than conforming to social norms. Prolific character actor, Sō Yamamura plays a key role as her father-in-law, who loves her as a daughter and provides emotional support. The mid-1950’s proved to be director Naruse’s most successful period, as he followed up this film with his two most celebrated works – Late Chrysanthemums and Floating Clouds (both of which I have yet to watch!).

House of Bamboo (1955): Samuel Fuller‘s diverse film repertoire included Westerns, war dramas and noirs. House of Bamboo is a crime drama released midway during Fuller’s prolific run in the 1950’s, when he was directing a film every year, and in some cases working on multiple productions at the same time. During his career, Fuller made a few films set in Asia (Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets! in Korea, China Gate in Vietnam and Merrill’s Marauders in Burma), and this one, House of Bamboo, takes place in Japan. Of course, the protagonists in all these Asia-set films were white men (no other sort of movie could get made for US audiences at that time). The story revolves around a group of ex-US military servicemen who have set up a criminal gang in Tokyo, and the attempt by an undercover Army investigator to infiltrate them. Robert Ryan continues his streak of playing menacing baddies while Robert Stack is the undercover investigator. DeForest Kelley, better known as Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, has a role as one of the gang members. Other than the novelty of the overseas setting, this is a by the numbers 1950’s crime drama, although the end product is elevated by the performances of Ryan and Stack.

Leave Her to Heaven (1945): Gene Tierney is chilling in her portrayal of a beautiful socialite who marries a successful novelist after a whirlwind romance, and then reveals the dark side of her romantic obsession. I was reminded of similar characters played by Ida Lupino in They Drive By Night (1940), Jean Simmons in Angel Face (1952), Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (2014). What made this film notable at the time of its release is that it is scripted as a film noir, but shot like a glossy Douglas Sirk melodrama, filmed in glorious Technicolor (for which cinematographer Leon Shamroy won an Oscar). Tierney’s character Ellen Berent, is breathtakingly beautiful in every shot, which only makes her scheming, manipulative behaviour all the more shocking. Her performance garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination, one of the highlights of a successful career which included hits like Laura, Heaven Can Wait and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

In the Mood for Love (2000): This stunningly shot romantic tale of love and longing features Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as star-crossed lovers in 1962 British Hong Kong. In their period costumes and hairdos, they rank among the best looking romantic pairs ever seen on screen, in the same league as Alain Delon/Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse, Penelope Cruz/Javier Bardem in Jamon Jamon and Jean-Louis Trintignant/Anouk Aimee in A Man and a Woman. The heart tugging and evocative performances by Cheung and Leung, plus the stylish and atmospheric look created by cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s stark lighting and dark shadows, are the highlights of this modern classic; every scene aches with desire and melancholy. Director Wong Kar-Wai had to feverishly sort through hours of footage to complete the film in time for its debut at Cannes; among the scenes left on the cutting room floor is this one of the pair dancing in a hotel room…probably discarded because it was too lighthearted, it nevertheless gives a sense of their natural chemistry. Sofia Coppola credited the film as a key inspiration for Lost in Translation and named Wong Kar-Wai when accepting her Oscar for best original screenplay.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are the star-crossed lovers in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000)

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70, #71-80, #81-90, #91-100, #101-110 and #111-120.

Godzilla Minus One – redemption and family drama amid kaiju chaos

Takashi Yamazaki is that rare director who has successfully directed both family dramas and big budget action spectacle. His 2005 heart-warming, nostalgia-driven 1958-set neighbourhood drama, Always – Sunset on Third Street won the Japanese Academy Award for best film. In 2013, he repeated the feat with The Eternal Zero, a film that delves into the life and motivation of a kamikaze pilot during World War II. In between, he brought to the big screen the much anticipated adaptation of the classic anime show Space Battleship Yamato, featuring a star-studded cast including veteran heartthrob Kimura Takuya. Yamazaki now becomes the latest director to tackle one of the oldest film franchises in the world – Toho Studios’ Godzilla.

The latest iteration of the world-famous mutant monster in Toho Studios’ Godzilla Minus One, directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Godzilla cinematic history

The Godzilla “brand” co-exists today in two parallel media franchises – the Japanese language series produced by Toho, and the English language Hollywood series produced by Legendary Pictures under license from Toho, and released worldwide by Warner Bros. Following a disappointing 1998 version directed by Roland Emmerich, the current Hollywood franchise was launched in 2014 with Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, and subsequently has been mashed up with the King Kong character into a lucrative franchise dubbed the MonsterVerse, which now also includes an animated series on Netflix and a well-received live action series on Apple TV+.

The Japanese Godzilla films from Toho have been releasing almost continuously since the monster’s debut in 1954. The various on-screen incarnations have been classified into four different “eras”, Showa (1954-75), Heisei (1984-95), Millennium (1999-2004) and Reiwa (2016-present). The Reiwa era kicked off with the highly acclaimed Shin Godzilla and was followed by three anime feature length films (released 2017-18), before this much-awaited return to live action directed by Yamazaki, with the title Godzilla Minus One making it a reboot of the 1954 origin story.

Ryunosuke Kamiki as Kōichi Shikishima, the main human protagonist of Godzilla Minus One

Plot summary

The film is set in the aftermath of World War II and therefore represents a return to a familiar period setting for the director. Its main human protagonist is a navy pilot, Kōichi Shikishima (played by Ryūnosuke Kamiki, who started his career as a child voice actor on Studio Ghibli films). In the closing days of the World War II, Kōichi returns to an island airfield, unable to complete his kamikaze mission due to mechanical problems. When the mechanics check the plane, it emerges that Kōichi faked the trouble as an excuse to avoid death. Soon after, the outpost comes under attack from a horrifying dinosaur-like creature; Kōichi has the opportunity to kill it with his airplane’s machine gun, but is frozen with fear, and his fatal hesitation results in widespread death and mayhem. Overcome with shame, Kōichi returns to a ruined Tokyo, only to find that his parents have been killed in a bombing attack. With no family and no honour, Kōichi is at the end of his rope, when a chance occurrence leads to him providing shelter to a young widow and an orphaned infant. Over time, the three traumatized survivors form a cohesive family unit; Kōichi is recruited as a minesweeper and finally puts his gunnery skills to good use destroying unexploded wartime mines. He is able to support the widow and the little child, and seems well on his way to recovering his self-esteem and living out a comfortable life.

At this point, the fully grown creature appears off the Japanese coast, perhaps mutated by American nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean. With the American navy reluctant to enter into military action for fear of ratcheting up the Cold War with the Soviets, its left to the Japanese navy to protect the nation. Kōichi’s minesweeper boat is called into action to support the navy, and their encounter with the creature, as it attacks naval vessels and subsequently lays waste to Tokyo, forms the central part of the film’s second act. A nation battered by war is now on its knees following the kaiju attack, and in the final act, it is left to a ragtag group of individuals to come up with a plan to destroy the monster. Drawn from both military and civilian backgrounds, the team brings together a wide range of skills and capabilities – engineering, naval strategy and undiluted courage – to take the fight to the monster.

Key characters and performances

What distinguishes this Godzilla film from its predecessors is director Yamazaki’s focus on the human characters, leading the audience to be heavily invested in the final outcome. For a kaiju film, there is an unusually large number of human protagonists that we are rooting for.

Kōichi’s partner (played by popular actress Minami Hamabe) is more than just a filler character. She is resourceful, financially independent and shows compassion and empathy as Kōichi grapples with his inner demons. Sae Nagatani as the little girl Akiko, is an endearing child actor and has a couple of emotional moments that tug at the heartstrings.

Kōichi’s minesweeper crew comprises a mix of character tropes that one would expect to see in an ensemble film – a brilliant and cheerful engineer with a mop of wild salt and pepper hair, a no-nonsense ship captain whose brusque exterior hides a heart of gold, a sincere crewman whose courage saves the day at a critical moment and a reliable technician who works around the clock to deliver the equipment in the nick of time.

Another notable character is Kōichi’s neighbour, Sumiko, a brusque woman who initially harangues Kōichi for his cowardice but thereafter emerges as a critical pillar of support. Played by a de-glamorized Sakura Ando, she has a particularly endearing scene towards the end, delivering an important piece of news to Kōichi, and unable to manage her own emotions.

This brings me to the performance of Ryunosuke Kamiki as Kōichi Shikishima. An actor of diminutive stature, Kamiki brings a controlled and underplayed intensity to his role, successfully portraying a man who constantly lives with a sense of shame, unable to erase the memory of his past cowardice. At the end of the film, his outpouring of suppressed emotion when he redeems himself is indeed heartwarming.

The evolution of Godzilla from Toho to Hollywood and back

Long time Godzilla fans will be familiar with its various onscreen representations in Japanese and Hollywood productions.

The original Japanese films of course, had the kaiju played by a man in a rubber suit, with a tiny head, googly eyes, an upright stance and “thunder thighs”. That look has largely remained unchanged across the first three eras, with the creature played by a man in a suit even into the 21st century; minor tweaks include the eyes getting smaller and the dorsal plates becoming bigger.

In contrast, the much reviled 1998 Hollywood CGI version reimagined Godzilla as a slinky T-rex with an evil grin. The 2014 Hollywood revival consciously retained the original look, although more muscular and bigger, topping off at 354 feet; in the subsequent two MonsterVerse movies, Godzilla grows to even larger 394 feet. The Hollywood Godzillas certainly look like real beasts, rather than a man in a suit.

I believe this influenced the Toho designers when they kicked off the Reisei era in 2016. Firstly, Shin Godzilla took the unusual approach of manifesting the creature in various stages of its physical development, like the metamorphosis of a butterfly; in the early stages, it looks like a bug-eyed worm, making for one of the ugliest kaijus I have ever seen; the full-grown version is the largest ever Godzilla at 388 feet height, and is also the most grotesque iteration with a narrow upper torso contrasting with its outsized legs, and red lesions showing up through cracks in the skin.

In Godzilla Minus One, we initially see a younger version of Godzilla, only 50 feet tall and looking like a regular bipedal therapod; the grown-up Godzilla which attacks Tokyo a few years later is 164 feet tall (the same height as the 1954 original) and is back to the traditional Toho proportions. However, the significantly larger dorsal spikes and meaner facial features contribute to bringing this iteration closer in line with the look of the Hollywood MonsterVerse avatar.

Fans will enjoy scrolling through Gizmodo’s slide by slide run-through of the various versions.

Box office performance and future

Buoyed by near universal critical acclaim, Godzilla Minus One has been a box office hit in Japan since its release in early November, and also has become the highest grossing Japanese language live action film in North America. A total worldwide gross of $74 million (and counting) doesn’t appear too impressive until one realizes that the film was made in Japan for less than $15 million, making it highly profitable. With the film being shortlisted for Best Visual Effects at the upcoming Oscars, and also featuring in various year-end lists, it is likely to keep bringing in audiences for the next few months. A black & white version titled Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color will be released in Japan in early January as an homage to the 1954 original, and will likely draw in repeat viewers.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #111-120

This is the twelfth entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve been watching on the Criterion Channel streaming service since September 2021. I watched this set of ten films from the end of May till mid June 2022.

This latest set of films includes a British drama from 1940 starring Laurence Olivier, a 1975 action film featuring blaxploitation queen Pam Grier, an American romantic drama scripted by Billy Wilder, provocative French director Louis Malle’s debut film, an American noir film starring Ida Lupino as an unhinged femme fatale, a British period drama with a narrative built around popular songs of the time, a beautifully shot biopic of American poet Emily Dickinson, and three WW2 films – an extraordinary thriller set in Northern Africa, a romantic comedy set in post-war Berlin, and a propaganda piece starring Humphrey Bogart.

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21 Days (1940): I usually associate British thespian Laurence Olivier with heavy-duty dramatic roles. But during the same period that he was making a name for himself with big-budget Hollywood films like Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and Pride and Prejudice, he also starred in this modest British thriller. Given that the film’s script was co-written by famed novelist Graham Greene, featured an extra-marital affair and a murder, and starred Vivien Leigh and Olivier, this should have made for compelling viewing. Unfortunately, I found it rather tedious, but thankfully was saved by the short running time of 72 minutes. This was Basil Dean’s final film as a director, and thereafter with the onset of WW2, he was appointed as the director of the entertainment branch of the British armed forces.

Friday Foster (1975): A-list African-American actors Pam Grier and Yaphet Kotto headline this film about a photographer who gets caught up in a conspiracy to murder the leading figures in African-American politics. As a key entry in the blaxploitation film genre, it delivers exactly as advertised, with the usual diet of nudity (just a few seconds, but highly anticipated in the days before online porn) and action, intertwined with commentary on the race and gender issues of the day. Singer Eartha Kitt and actor-musician Scatman Crothers make appearances, and Carl Weathers can be seen in one of his earliest big-screen roles. Director Arthur Marks is recognized by film historians for his contributions to blaxploitation, with the last half dozen of his films made in this genre; Quentin Tarantino supported a 1998 theatrical re-release of his 1973 film, Detroit 9000.

Hold Back the Dawn (1941): Charles Boyer and Olivia de Havilland make for a captivating screen couple in this critically acclaimed romantic drama from prolific director Mitchell Leisen. Boyer plays a European man trying to cross over to the US from a Mexican border town, who pretends to fall in love with a naive American school teacher, so that he can marry her and obtain a US citizenship. Naturally, various developments come in the way of him carrying out his cunning plan, not unlike the Sandra Bullock-Ryan Reynolds immigration dramedy The Proposal. The onscreen charm of the two stars make this an engaging watch, in spite of the implausible plot. Billy Wilder co-wrote the script, and it was amongst his last credits as a screenwriter before he launched his celebrated career as a director. The film received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actress.

Elevator to the Gallows / Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958): Louis Malle was just 24 years old when he made his feature debut with this noir-inspired crime thriller. His cinema verite approach, honed after three years of documentary filmmaking with naturalist Jacques Cousteau, foreshadowed the French New Wave which officially kicked off a few months later with the release of Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge. Malle directed actress Jeanne Moreau without make-up, revealing her true beauty and bringing her international stardom after years on the fringes. Moreau and Maurice Ronet play lovers who plot to kill the woman’s husband; the title of the film refers to the role played by an elevator in the unraveling of their carefully laid out plans. The film is noted for its desolate jazz score by Miles Davis, which he improvised and recorded in the studio while the film footage was screened for him. I fell in love with the photography and the lighting (particularly the interior scenes later in the film), although I’ve never been enamoured by Moreau as a leading lady. Malle went on to a storied filmmaking career, equally adept across thrillers, romances, comedies and dramas.

They Drive By Night (1940): Prolific director Raoul Walsh directs this intense film noir headlined by 30’s and 40’s leading man, George Raft, with Humphrey Bogart playing a key supporting role, just before his big breakthrough with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. Set in the world of commercial trucks, the script shines a light on the exploitation of truck drivers and the unsafe conditions they were asked to work under. Raft and Bogart play trucker siblings; one wants to move up the food chain and get into big business, while the other wants to stick to his roots and remain self-employed. Their onscreen chemistry works well, highlighting their different personalities but also their unshakeable bond. But the real star of the movie is British actress Ida Lupino, who plays a psychotic femme fatale who will do anything to get what she wants, not unlike Jean Simmons’ character in Angel Face a decade later. The powerhouse cast and compelling, twisty plot makes for quite a ride. Raoul Walsh’s next film was the acclaimed film noir, High Sierra, which reunited him with Bogart and Lupino.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988): As I write this blog, I’ve just read the news that the film’s director Terence Davies has passed away at the age of 77. All obituaries refer to this semi-autobiographical film as one of the high points of his career. It is set in his native Liverpool and stars the incomparable Pete Postlethwaite as an abusive, controlling father ruling over a working-class family in the 1940’s and 50’s. Much of the film’s slice-of-life narrative is built around how families and communities spent time together, inevitably at pubs and frequently entertaining themselves by singing the most popular songs of the day; with so many of these set-pieces, the film could technically be classified as a musical. Unfortunately, as a viewer who is neither from that era nor that region, I could not appreciate this film nearly as much as a native Britisher. What does come through is how desperate the hopes and dreams of women and young people are in a patriarchal society, when the man of the house had the power to give and to take away.

A Quiet Passion (2016): I followed up right away with another Terence Davies masterpiece, an impeccably mounted period drama set during the mid-19th century, which follows the life of reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson. It stars Cynthia Nixon (best known as Miranda from Sex and the City) as the poet, and the luminous Jennifer Ehle as her younger sister. There is also a pleasing supporting turn from veteran Keith Carradine as their strict but supportive father. The film tracks Dickinson’s life from a relatively normal and carefree youth to an increasingly severe, bitter and reclusive middle age, wracked by various personal tragedies, both overt and hidden. Cynthia Nixon is the very embodiment of the character and sadly this performance was not sufficiently recognized during the awards season.

Cynthia Nixon (left) and Jennifer Ehle in Terrence Davies’ A Quiet Passion (2016)

Five Graves to Cairo (1943): I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining WW2 film set in a small town in Northern Africa during the desert campaign of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (a scene-chewing performance by Austrian director-turned-actor Erich von Stroheim). Franchot Tone is perfectly cast as Corporal Bramble, the sole survivor of a British tank crew, who seeks shelter in the hotel only to find it taken overrun by the Germans preparing for the next phase of their campaign. With only the hotel owner and a French chambermaid as his protectors, Bramble must use his wits and his luck to escape…and perhaps thwart the German onslaught in the process. Anne Baxter is thoroughly entertaining as the saucy and somewhat unreliable chambermaid, while Armenian actor Akim Tamiroff uses his distinctive natural accent to great effect as the Arab owner Farid. This was Billy Wilder’s second film as a director and a year later, he shot to fame with his next effort, the crime/noir thriller, Double Indemnity.

A Foreign Affair (1948): I moved on right away to one of Billy Wilder’s best known films, a cynical comedy-drama set in post WW2 Berlin. A highly principled Congresswoman (played by Jean Arthur) arrives in Berlin as part of a congressional committee to review how US troops are operating in peacetime Europe. She is shocked to hear rumours that a possible Nazi sympathizer is freely operating as a cabaret singer (played by Marlene Dietrich) under the protection of a US Army officer. She sets out to uncover the truth and gets caught up in a comedy of errors. The film was essentially a face-off between two screen legends at the tail end of their careers as leading ladies. Like all Billy Wilder products, the film has charismatic characters delivering snappy dialogue and memorable comedic set-pieces. This is definitely one to watch for all cinephiles.

Action in the North Atlantic (1943): This film was conceived as a tribute to the Merchant Marines, the civilian naval arm of the US government, which played a key role transporting war supplies during WW2. Imposing character actor Raymond Massey and Humphrey Bogart (fresh off the success of Casablanca) play the captain and first officer respectively of a Merchant Marine cargo ship. Tasked with carrying supplies to the Soviet port of Murmansk within the Arctic circle, the crew must rely on their courage, wits and experience to survive a cat-and-mouse pursuit by German U-boats. This by-the-numbers wartime propaganda film benefits from authentic war footage provided by the US government, and the screen presence of its stars.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70, #71-80, #81-90, #91-100 and #101-110.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #101-110

This is the eleventh entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve been watching on the Criterion Channel streaming service since September 2021.

I watched these ten films between from the end of May to late June 2022, some of it while recovering from Covid!

This latest batch of films being reviewed include two Japanese comedy-satires from one of the masters of the genre, two films from the Czech New Wave of the 60’s, an all-time Russian classic from the 50’s, an all-time French classic from the 30’s, an early effort from one of Britain’s most celebrated directors, a UK spy film that predates but shares DNA with James Bond, an American comedy from the 30’s starring W.C. Fields, and a 70’s blaxploitation thriller featuring the top three male stars of the genre.

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Tales of a Golden Geisha / A-Ge-Man (1990): This is a film from the middle period of Juzo Itami‘s career, after he made a splash in the mid-80’s with three highly acclaimed comedy-dramas, The Funeral, Tampopo and A Taxing Woman. All his films feature his wife Nobuko Miyamoto, and in this one she plays the lead role of a geisha named Nayoko, who brings good luck to her male companions (known as an “Ageman”, hence the title). Itami, in his usual style, skillfully uses humour to shine a light on the human foibles of corruption, greed and pride. Not as good as Itami’s first three films, but a fun viewing experience all the same.

Intimate Lighting / Intimní osvětlení (1965): Lovers of world cinema are familiar with the Czech New Wave film movement of the 1960’s, from which emerged world famous directors like Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel and Ivan Passer. Passer started off as a writer, collaborating with Forman on several of his films before making his directorial debut with Intimate Lighting. It is a simple slice-of-life story about a cellist who is invited back to his home village to play in an upcoming local concert. The cellist arrives with his girlfriend and the rest of the film uses the interactions between the villagers and the two visitors to meditate on friendships, generational gaps and cultural differences. Watching the movie in the 21st century provides a a quietly humourous, heart-warming and at times, wistful look back at a simpler time. I also loved the B&W cinematography by Miroslav Ondříček who went on to become a regular collaborator with Miloš Forman. Passer eventually crossed over to international and Hollywood productions in the 70’s and late in his career directed the award-winning biopic Stalin for HBO (1992).

Zdeněk Bezušek and Věra Křesadlová as the cellist and his girlfriend in Ivan Passer’s Intimate LIghting (1965)

The Cranes are Flying / Letyat zhuravli (1957): I finally got to watch this landmark film, which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 1958. It’s production signposted a new era in Soviet filmmaking marked by greater artistic freedom, following the death of Stalin in 1953 and the more open policies adopted by his successor Nikita Khruschev. Put together the keywords “Soviet”, “pacifist” and “humanist” and it’s no spoiler to state up front that this film is steeped in tragedy; in fact such an outcome almost feels inevitable after the opening shot of the two carefree lovers Veronika and Boris skipping happily along the riverside. News soon follows that the Germans have invaded and the lovers are to be separated as Boris must go to the front. Things get progressively more grim for Veronika in the months and years that follow, and the story comes to its conclusion with the end of the war in 1945. Besides the intense acting performance from Tatiana Samoilova as Veronika, the lighting and the camera angles create a stunning viewing experience; cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky’s work has surely been the inspiration for an entire generation of filmmakers. Director Mikhail Kalatozov had been directing documentaries and features since the 1930’s, but this film remains his most celebrated work.

Tatiana Samoilova in Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying (1957)

The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion / Minbo (1992): Juzo Itami’s follow-up to Tales of a Golden Geisha has Nobuko Miyamoto cast as a lawyer who specializes in dealing with yakuza-related crime. Miyamoto’s character helps out a hotel which is losing its clientele after it becomes a favourite haunt of the local yakuza. As with all Itami films, there are craven villains and do-gooders with hearts of gold, all wrapped up in an entertaining mix of satire and physical comedy. As with Tales of a Golden Geisha, this film too is a lightweight by sufficiently entertaining entry in Itami’s oeuvre. It’s a well documented fact that Itami’s irreverent depiction of yakuza in this and other films earned their ire, and it’s considered highly likely that his death in 1997 after falling from a rooftop was actually murder rather than suicide.

The Human Beast / La Bete Humaine (1938): This is the middle entry in Jean Renoir’s trifecta of critically acclaimed masterpieces released in the late 30’s, sandwiched between Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. Loosely adapted from Emile Zola’s 19th century psychological thriller, the film features Jean Gabin as Lantier, a train engine driver with a history of violent behaviour, triggered by alcohol and sexual desire. Obsessing over his train engine and immersing himself in his work has helped him control his urges. But everything begins to unravel when a beautiful young woman convinces him to help her conceal a crime. His subsequent emotional entanglement with this femme fatale unleashes his bestial side and leads to tragic consequences. La Bete Humaine can be considered a proto-noir, and with most of the narrative set on a train or near the railroad, there is plenty of symbolism for film aficionados to delve into. Although it is a much admired classic, I found it a disquieting and not particularly enjoyable viewing experience.

49th Parallel (1941): Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger together wrote, directed and produced a series of influential films in the 1940’s which are considered classics of British and world cinema. The first of their films to gain critical attention was this war film, their 3rd effort, which received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Although rising star Laurence Olivier headlines the picture, the story in fact focuses on the six surviving members of a German U-boat crew who are marooned on the North American coast during the war, and their attempts to secretly travel across Canada and get a boat to Japan. As this was a war propaganda film funded by the British government, the purpose of the story was to show the infighting and lack of honour among the Germans, and also to highlight to the then-neutral US government the dangers posed to the US by German action in the North Atlantic against Canadian ships. I found the opening act engaging but then the pacing started to drag in the middle before ending strongly with an action-led finish.

Capricious Summer / Rozmarné léto (1968): Of the half dozen acclaimed Czech New Wave films from the 1960’s that I’ve watched, this one by Jiří Menzel is my least favourite. The film presents village life as experienced by three middle-aged friends, whose summer repose is enlivened by the arrival of a traveling magician and his beautiful assistant. Although it’s highly regarded, I think I just didn’t have the cultural context to appreciate it, and therefore found it to be slow and uninteresting. In comparison, Menzel’s My Sweet Little Village made nearly 20 years later, and providing much of the same human insight in a village setting, is a more accessible and enjoyable film.

Q Planes (1939): This lighthearted spy thriller stars Laurence Olivier and is the film he made in the UK just before hitting the big time in Hollywood with William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights. Olivier plays test pilot Tony McVane, who works for a company building experimental aircraft for the British government. But the aircraft and their crew start vanishing during test flights and neither the government’s best spymaster (played by Ralph Richardson) nor intrepid reporter Kay Hammond (played by Valerie Hobson) can unravel the mystery. McVane volunteers to be the bait and pilots the next experimental plane, hoping to discover the fate of the other missing aircraft. Sure enough, he uncovers foreign machinations, leading to an action-packed finale. With its mix of spies, international villains, advanced technology and dry British humour, one would think I was describing a James Bond film. Well, guess what! Twenty years later, one of the film’s writers, Jack Whittingham, was hired by Ian Fleming and production partner Kevin McClory to help write the script for the first James Bond film. That script ended up becoming the novel Thunderball, which although not the first Bond film, did provide the template for the film series.

Million Dollar Legs (1932): Watching a W.C. Fields comedy is a very particular experience. Irrespective of the film and the character he plays, Fields typically adopts the persona of a hard-drinking scoundrel with contempt for children and dogs, who nevertheless has a heart of gold and does the right thing. As with many comedies of that era, the story played second fiddle to the lead comic (e.g., Harry Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Bros.) and the comedic elements – either slapstick or outlandish dialogue. In Million Dollar Legs, Fields plays the President of the fictitious nation of Klopstokia, who decides to enter his country into the Olympics in order to win a cash prize to save his country from bankruptcy! As I said, the story doesn’t really matter. There’s a gag every few minutes and the one hour run time goes by pretty quickly.

Three The Hard Way (1974): Gordon Parks Sr. kicked off the blaxploitation wave with Shaft in 1971. Three years later, his son Gordon Parks Jr. brought together three iconic Black superstars – martial artist turned actor Jim Kelly, NFL player turned actor Fred Williamson and another NFL player turned actor, Jim Brown – in this film about a secret plan by a white supremacist organization to perpetrate a black genocide. As with all films in this genre, there is gratuitous nudity and plenty of action and violence (by the standards of the 70’s). The brisk 90 minute runtime keeps everything ticking along and it’s always fun when the bad guys get what’s coming at the end.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70, #71-80, #81-90 and #91-100.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #91-100

This is the tenth entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve been watching on the Criterion Channel streaming service since September 2021. I watched these ten films in April 2022, which means I a a year behind in writing about them! Whereas the majority of films I’ve watched on Criterion have been from the mid-twentieth century, there were coincidentally a number of contemporary films in this set.

The films include a French-Belgian comedy-drama, a Japanese anthology about love, a Danish drama that won the Oscar for best foreign film, a Mexican film that delves into the little-known lives of hotel maids, the 1978 adaptation of a famous Agatha Christie novel, the sequel to one of the best-known blaxploitation films of all time, an early directorial effort by celebrated Italian screenwriter Pier Paolo Pasolini, a classic American romantic drama from the pre-Code era, a Palm d’Or winner from Romania, and the screen adaptation of a classic Jack London novel.

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My Worst Nightmare / Mon pire cauchemar (2011): If you are looking for a lightweight film featuring heavyweight actors, this movie is worth your time. 16-time Cesar nominee, Isabelle Huppert, pairs off with Belgian multi-hyphenate, Benoît Poelvoorde, in this pleasing but formulaic comedy-drama. It seems to me that Huppert typically choses to portray characters who are stern, cold or uptight, and that’s certainly the case here, as she plays a perfectionist art dealer Agathe, who lives with her son and her partner in a wealthy Parisian district. Into their lives arrives Patrick (played by Poelvoorde) a fun-loving, skirt-chasing, building contractor whose irreverence and free-thinking approach upends Agathe’s orderly lifestyle. Director/co-scriptwriter Anne Fontaine introduces some twists and turns to keep this typical “clash of the classes” romance from becoming too predictable. Fontaine previously worked with Poelvoorde in the 2005 drama In His Hands and more recently, was widely celebrated for the 2016 film, The Innocents.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy / Gūzen to Sōzō (2021): Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi hit the headlines in 2021 for his slow-burning and thoughtful Oscar-nominated drama, Drive My Car. It was actually his second feature release that year, with the first being this engrossing three-part anthology spotlighting three different female characters experiencing intensely emotional interactions with other people. In Episode 1, Kotone Furukawa plays a model who discovers that her best friend is in love with her ex-boyfriend. In Episode 2, Katsuki Mori plays a woman who agrees to participate in a deception to help out a friend, but her actions have unintended consequences. In Episode 3, Fusako Urabe plays a woman who is at a train station and has a chance encounter with an old school classmate; their reminiscing leads to the unexpected dredging of long-buried, unresolved feelings. Hamaguchi does not take sides in his storytelling, his lens is an objective watcher of people, using a filmmaking style hewing closely to Dogme 95, the now discarded Danish filmmaking movement which eschewed the use of props, background score or artificial lighting in films. It allows us to focus entirely on the conversations and emotions of the characters; well worth the effort of a patient viewer.

In a Better World / Hævnen (2010): Celebrated Danish director Susanne Bier won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film for this fascinating story that straddles two worlds connected by its pacifist protagonist’s response to violence. Anton (played by Mikael Persbrandt) splits his time between a Sudanese refugee camp and his native Sweden. He witnesses unimaginable horrors inflicted by Sudanese warlords on innocent civilians, but is compelled by his principles to offer his services to both victims and perpetrators. His furloughs home are not stress-free either, as his young sons find it difficult to reconcile their father’s pacifism to their first-hand experience of bullying. From this helpless situation, Susanne Bier and her frequent writing collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen, bring Anton’s narrative threads together to a satisfying resolution. Jensen incidentally directed the entertaining 2020 revenge drama Riders of Justice starring Mads Mikkelsen. In the past decade, Bier has expanded her footprint into some impressive English-language thrillers including the post-apocalyptic Bird Box and two mini-series, The Night Manager and The Undoing.

The Chambermaid / La camarista (2018): Much as the maid Cleo occupied the moral and narrative center of Alfonso Cuarón’s award-winning Mexican drama Roma in 2018, another film from the same country in the same year took the audience on an insightful journey into the life of a hotel housekeeper. Lila Avilés graduated from small acting roles to directing short films to this extraordinary feature directing debut. The film could easily be a companion-piece to HBO’s The White Lotus anthology series, as it lays bare the lives of the privileged as seen through the eyes of the hotel support staff. Gabriela Cartol portrays housekeeper Eve, toiling to cater to the exacting whims of the hotel management and its wealthy customers, while striving to make incremental improvements in her own life during her off-duty hours, many of which are spent in the bowels of the hotel; one can’t help but think of the Eloi and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. With absolutely no melodrama, Cartol’s stoicism quietly tugs at your heartstrings; well worth the watch.

Death on the Nile (1978): I am an unabashed fan of actor-director Kenneth Branagh‘s two sumptuously produced Agatha Christie adaptations – 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile. Having watched the latter upon its release on Netflix in early 2022, I was curious to know how the 1978 version compared. As with all Agatha Christie adaptions past and present, this film too boasts an all-star cast, with Peter Ustinov playing Poirot, supported by Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury and cultural icon Jane Birkin. The only characterization that I found annoying was Indian actor I.S. Johar’s portrayal as the obsequious Mr. Chaudhury. Of course, with source material of this calibre, the film is wholly serviceable, but I must admit that the eye-popping production design of Mr. Branagh’s modern adaptation (along with the equally noteworthy cast) has an advantage, and its his version which pops up in my visual memory when the name comes up. The 1978 version was directed by John Guillermin, one of the go-to directors for big-budget adventure films of that era, having helmed The Towering Inferno and the King Kong remake in the preceding four years.

Shaft’s Big Score (1972): Confident in the success of Shaft, their seminal 1971 blaxploitation film, MGM had already contracted writer Ernest Tidyman, director Gordon Parks and star Richard Roundtree to return a year later with another adventure featuring the tough-talking, hard-loving private detective, John Shaft. The result is Shaft’s Big Score, which like all sequels has more of everything, but naturally loses the spontaneity of the original. However, the film delivers on the strength of Roundtree’s charisma, the action set pieces (cars, boats, helicopters), the big brassy 70s score and of course the obligatory nudity; in fact, the character was marketed as a brash American version of James Bond. In between the two Shaft films, writer Tidyman had won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for The French Connection, with which the Shaft sequel shares a few action beats. One year later, John Guillermin directed the next entry, Shaft in Africa, after which the character moved to the small screen with a TV series and TV movies.

Mamma Roma (1962): Pier Paolo Pasolini was a giant of Italian 20th century art and politics, with a body of work that spanned novels, poetry, essays, theatre and film. He co-wrote the screenplay for the Fellini classics, Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, and other well-regarded dramas such as Il bell’Antonio and Girl in the Window, before launching his own directorial career in the early 60’s. I had read so much about Pasolini and enjoyed watching the aforementioned films which he had written, so I was looking forward to watching something directed by him. I had also heard a lot about the film’s star, Anna Magnani, known for portraying boisterous, earthy characters. That’s certainly the case in Mamma Roma, in which she plays a prostitute who leaves her profession so that she can bring up her teenage son in a more wholesome environment. As with most Italian neorealist films, one shouldn’t expect a happy ending. Honestly, I was a bit underwhelmed by the film with the unsympathetic characters (particularly her son) and the depressing subject matter putting me off, which was surprising, given I’ve felt intense empathy while watching many other neorealist tragedies.

Morocco (1930): Marlene Dietrich shot to fame with The Blue Angel directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1930. The film’s success in Germany brought her to the attention of Paramount studios, who put her under contract, and quickly paired her opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco, with the same director. Morocco thus became the first Marlene Dietrich English language film released in the US in 1930, and created the famous on-screen Dietrich persona of an exotic and daring femme fatale (the English language version of The Blue Angel was released in the US the following year). Dietrich was cast as a night club singer in both these films, giving her the opportunity to show off her singing and performing talents. In particular, the night club sequence in which Dietrich performs wearing a man’s formal evening attire and kisses a female member of the audience was considered scandalous for its time (this was before the Hays Code of self-censorship was adopted by Hollywood in 1934). The film is set during the late 1920’s in Morocco and focuses on a unit of the French Foreign Legion, coming into town after a military campaign. Gary Cooper plays a hard-living, womanizing soldier in the unit, and needless to say, sparks fly when he meets Dietrich’s character at a local night club. Their relationship is complicated by romantic entanglements that each of them has with other partners on the side. Various twists and turns ensue putting their relationship in jeopardy before the inevitable melodramatic ending.

Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Joseph von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930)

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days / 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile (2007): I have had this film on my watchlist for years, ever since it won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. The film is set in an unnamed Romanian town in 1987 during the period of communist rule; at this time, the country had an abortion law, Decree 770, that made it very difficult to get a legal abortion. Naturally, a black market emerged for illegal procedures, resulting in medical complications and thousands of fatalities over the years. These are the circumstances under which a young woman Găbița (played by Laura Vasiliu) finds herself pregnant, and enlists the help of a close friend Otilia (played by Anamaria Marinca) to find a doctor willing to perform the abortion. The two women then enter a downward spiral involving bad luck and bad people. I struggle to find the right words to describe their harrowing experience, and the uncaring social underbelly that exploits their need. This hard-hitting drama is more relevant today than ever before, and a must-watch for any cinephile or student of the human condition. Director Cristian Mungiu‘s career will probably be defined by this film, although he has continued to win awards for his subsequent efforts like Beyond the Hills (2012), Graduation (2016) and R.M.N. (2022).

The Sea Wolf (1941): Jack London’s classic 1904 adventure story got its fifth screen adaptation, this time helmed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Bros. studio. Powerhouse actor, Edward G. Robinson, is aptly cast as sadistic boat captain Wolf Larsen, a learned man with the heart of a beast, who makes life hell for his crew. Larsen’s boat picks up a man and a woman from a sinking ship, and the captain incorporates them into his on-going psychological games, driving his crew further to the edge of mutiny. British actress Ida Lupino and character actor Alexander Knox play the two hapless rescuees, Ruth Webster and Humphrey Van Weyden, while John Garfield switches on his standard on-screen brooding persona as George Leach, one of the mutineers. The film adaptation deviates from the original novel to dial up the adventure angle, and creates a romantic relationship between Ruth and George, whereas none exists in the novel. I can’t say that I “enjoyed” the film, as there was a bit too much melodrama and negativity for my liking. Director Curtiz had previously delivered several Errol Flynn hits such as Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood and his next film Casablanca, would make him a Hollywood legend for all time.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70, #71-80 and #81-90.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #81-90

This is the ninth entry in my series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve watched on the Criterion Channel streaming service. I finished off this set of 10 films between February and early April 2022. It includes three films featuring Harry Belafonte in the cast (including his film debut), another satire from Spanish auteur Luis Garcia Berlanga, a Swedish drama with Ingrid Bergman in her first lead role, an all-time Hollywood classic from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a Douglas Sirk melodrama, an Italian farce about sexual impotence, a truly unpleasant rural drama from the great John Ford, and an Italian anthology film featuring Silvana Mangano.

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Island in the Sun (1957): Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Santa Marta, this star-studded film is an adaptation of Alec Waugh’s novel of the same name. The ensemble cast includes James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge and Stephen Boyd. The story revolves around the members of the wealthy plantation-owning Fleury family and the intersection of their lives, both romantically and politically, with others on the island. These include an ambitious black union leader (played by Belafonte), a retired war hero, the island’s governor, and his eligible bachelor son. Another sub-plot involves a romance between an aspiring young mixed-race woman (played by Dandridge) and the progressive-minded aide of the island’s governor. With two interracial romances portrayed in the film, it was controversial enough to be banned in some parts of the US; to put it in perspective, this was ten years before the Sidney Poitier starrer Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The plot and commentary on race politics was a key reason that Belafonte chose to be cast in the film. And of course, he gets to sing the song, Island in the Sun, which turned out to be one of his greatest hits. This was the third film of Belafonte’s career and coincidentally, he had costarred with Dandridge in all of them. Director Robert Rossen had previously received a Best Director Oscar nomination for All The King’s Men, and a few years later would go on to direct Paul Newman, The Hustler, one of the landmark films of his career.

Bright Road (1953): Since it was Harry Belafonte month on Criterion, it was inevitable that I would watch, Bright Road, his film debut. Belafonte establishes himself as a charismatic on-screen presence, even in a small supporting role as the principal of a rural black elementary school in Alabama. Most of the screen time however, goes to the legendary Dorothy Dandridge and the child actor Philip Hepburn. Dandridge plays an idealistic new teacher at the school, who takes it upon herself to encourage a problematic student to realize his potential. This big-hearted, low budget film is based on a short story and sticks to the source material, avoiding unnecessary padding, and coming in at a runtime of just 69 minutes. The following year, Dandridge appeared in the musical, Carmen Jones, and became the first African-American to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Her two other notable screen roles are in Island in the Sun (see above) and the immortal Porgy and Bess opposite Sidney Poitier. Sadly, these watershed films did not help her career, and she died in 1965 of a drug overdoes at the age of 42.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959): My third Harry Belafonte film in a row was this emotionally-charged noir crime thriller which ranks as one of the finest examples of the genre. It stars perennial bad boy Robert Ryan as Earl Slater, a racist criminal hired by a crooked ex-cop to pull off a bank heist, and partnered with a black man (Belafonte), who he naturally detests. Slater’s prejudice is so deeply entrenched that no rational argument or element of pragmatism can overcome his hatred towards his partner. Belafonte’s character is no pushover either, and gives as good as he gets. Naturally, the tensions, bickering and threats come in the way of the meticulous preparations required to pull off the robbery. Director Robert Wise invests as much time in fleshing out the characters and their back stories, as he does in the tautly filmed heist sequence. The standard aspect B&W cinematography adds to the claustrophobic feel of the film. Wise’s next effort was the diametric opposite in every way – West Side Story, for which he won Oscars for directing and Best Picture. He repeated the trick a few years later with The Sound of Music. One of the most versatile directors in Hollywood history, he was equally proficient with action, horror and sci-fi genres, but notably started his career as a film editor, with an early career highlight being the Oscar nomination he received for Citizen Kane.

The Executioner / El Verdugo (1963): The ever-entertaining Spanish thespian José Isbert stars in this amusing drama as Amadeo, a public executioner whose approaching retirement will make him ineligible for government accommodation. His solution is to convince his daughter’s fiancé to replace him, assuring the man that there are hardly any executions conducted and he will never actually have to do the deed. Things don’t quite work out as planned for the ill-starred fiancé-turned-husband, played by Italian acting icon Nino Manfredi. Isbert, as the highly persuasive and garrulous father-in-law and Manfredi, as the hapless milksop are a treat to watch together, while Spanish actress Emma Penella plays the daughter trying to make the best of the situation. The final act features some striking and symbolic imagery by cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, who went on to work on three Sergio Leone films. This was the third of director Luis Garcia Berlanga‘s films that I found on Criterion, and I am so grateful to have been introduced to this remarkable director’s oeuvre. The film was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Intermezzo (1936): This Swedish drama was 20-year-old Ingrid Bergman’s first lead role in a film; her luminous performance brought her to the attention of Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, leading to its English language remake in 1939 and her rapid climb to international stardom. In the film, Bergman plays a Anita Hoffman, a piano instructor who provides home lessons to the daughter of a famous concert violinist, Professor Brandt (played by Gösta Ekman). Impressed by her talent, the violinist invites her to accompany him on his next concert tour. During their travels, they fall in love and Anita Hoffman must choose between following her heart, or sacrificing her love to safeguard Prof. Brandt’s family. Bergman was a few years away from maturing into the beauty that the world fell in love with in Casablanca, but she certainly lights up the screen with her presence. The chemistry between her and her older costar heralded her future screen pairings with the leading men of Hollywood, including Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.

All About Eve (1950): All About Eve usually finds itself included in the lists of “greatest films of all time”, and rightfully so. The narrative centers around the power play between a successful Broadway actress, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and an ingénue (Anne Baxter) who tries to insinuate her way into Channing’s personal and professional life. The supporting cast includes veteran character actors Thelma Ritter and George Saunders, and future star Marilyn Monroe in a minor role. The script is packed with acerbic dialogue and melodramatic scenes, which provides the perfect sandbox for the seasoned cast. Hollywood loves movies about showbiz, and typically rewards them with Oscar glory. But even by those standards, this film was an extraordinary success, garnering a record 14 Oscar nominations, and winning six, including one for Best Picture and two to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay. He had won the same two awards the previous year for A Letter to Three Wives.

Imitation of Life (1959): The last of Douglas Sirk’s amazing run of 1950s melodramas, addresses complex themes of racial identity and white guilt. The plot of the film involves multiple dysfunctional relationships, particularly involving parents and their children, a recurring theme in Sirk’s films. The acting is top-notch from Lana Turner (as a struggling single mother Lora Meredith, who becomes a Broadway star), Juanita Moore (as Annie, her black housekeeper and confidante who enables Lora’s success) and Susan Kohner (as Annie’s fair-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, who is able to pass as white, and is ashamed of her mother). I appreciated the film for its tackling of difficult subject matter, but I found the unrelenting negativity to be heavy going as a viewer seeking “entertainment”. Moore and Kohner received Oscar nominations for their emotionally charged performances as mother and daughter. Incidentally, Koehner is the mother of Hollywood directors Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.

Il bell’Antonio / Handsome Antonio (1960): Sitting firmly in the genre of Commedia all’italiana, Marcello Mastroianni stars as a small-town playboy with a big secret – he’s impotent. His parents, proud of their son’s macho reputation, marry him off to the local village beauty (Claudia Cardinale), but their son’s inability to consummate the union leads to disbelief, shame and consternation for the entire family. A scathing commentary on gender politics and the unabashed patriarchy of Sicilian society of the time, the story was adapted from a novel by celebrated playwright and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Mastroianni is his usual deadpan self, an acting style which suits his disingenuous protagonist, and Cardinale is magnetic as the blameless young woman who must fend off insinuations that it’s all somehow her fault. The film was directed by frequent Pasolini collaborator, Mauro Bolognini, whose body of work included five films nominated for the Palm d’Or at Cannes.

Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroianni in Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio (1960)

Tobacco Road (1941): I was searching for movies by directing legend John Ford, and chanced upon this inexplicably unpleasant film set in rural Georgia. I discovered that this so-called comedy was a significantly toned down adaptation of a novel and Broadway play, so I can only imagine how much worse this film could have been. The plot of the film centers around farm owner Jeeter Lester’s desperate attempts to prevent the bank from possessing his unproductive farm. His schemes are upended by the unpredictable behaviour of his grown-up children – a bumbling son and a nearly feral daughter. It’s difficult to describe how disagreeable every character in this film is, and how desperate I was for its 85 minute runtime to come to an end. Clearly I am in the minority, as the film was a box office success, and the only complaint from critics of the time, was that the film was too sanitized compared to the play! Vivacious actress Gene Tierney and dour leading man Dana Andrews both appear in supporting roles, a few years before they hit the big time as the leads in the 1944 film noir, Laura.

The Witches / Le streghe (1967): This anthology film consists of five segments, each directed by the cream of that era’s Italian filmmakers – Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini and Vittorio De Sica. The film was financed by uber-producer Dino De Laurentiis and all five segments starred his wife, acting superstar Silvana Mangano. The stories also feature well-known actors Alberto Sordi, Totò and Clint Eastwood (this was his next screen appearance after the Sergio Leone trilogy). As expected, some segments work better than others – the weakest was De Sica’s story, An Evening Like the Others, with Eastwood; Visconti’s segment, The Witch Burned Alive was intriguing for its exploration of fame and narcissism; the most annoying was Pasolini’s over-the-top fable, The Earth Seen from the Moon. The anthology format found great favour in the Italian film industry in the 50s and 60s, with films like The Gold of Naples (1954), Yesterday Today and Tomorrow (1963), Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) and Boccaccio ’70 (1970) attracting the top directors and stars of the time.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60, #61-70 and #71-80.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #71-80

This is the eighth entry in a series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve watched on the Criterion Channel streaming service. I finished off this set of 10 films in January 2022 (yes, I’m terribly behind!). Compared to my usual fare of 40s and 50s Hollywood classics, this time around I had a British WW2 film, a Taiwanese period drama, a low-budget Western, an unusual family drama set in rural Italy, a feel-good Christmas movie from the 40s, two films from prolific German director R.W. Fassbinder, two films from legendary American screenwriter-producer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and a Douglas Sirk melodrama.

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Green for Danger (1946): The lists of great English-language films of the twentieth century are inevitably dominated by Hollywood productions, with relatively few British films making the cut. This was probably because many of them did not benefit from the distribution might of Hollywood studios, and were unavailable to international critics until the VHS/DVD era. One such hidden gem is Green for Danger, a murder mystery set during the V-1 bombing attacks on England in 1944. The film is headlined by British thespian Trevor Howard in one of his early roles, and filled out by a cast of skilled stage and screen actors. On the night of a V-1 attack in rural England, one of the injured villagers unexpectedly dies on the operating table. The anesthetist, played by Howard, is charged with negligence. Subsequent events indicate foul play, and other hospital staff are added to the police’s list of suspects. The ensuing mutual distrust among the staff is exacerbated by workplace conflicts and romantic entanglements, with everyone’s nerves strained to breaking point due to continuing bombing attacks. Director Sidney Gilliat had previously worked with Alfred Hitchcock, co-writing The Lady Vanishes in 1938, and he certainly picked up some tricks from the great master in ratcheting up the tension. Incidentally, the film title provides a clue to the modus operandi of the murderer.

A Bright Summer Day / 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 (1991): Set in Taipei in 1960, this is a slow-burn coming-of-age story of surly teenager Xiao Si’r. The boy has his hands full, attending night school to make up for poor grades, whilst navigating the politics of two rival gangs out on the streets. To further complicate matters, Si’r finds himself obsessing over Ming, the girlfriend of one of the gang leaders. All this plays out against the backdrop of raids by the Taiwanese secret police to root out sympathizers of the Chinese Communist Party, with one such investigation targeting Si’r’s father. Director Edward Yang incorporates everyday slice-of-life moments into the narrative to provide relief from the tension; child actor Wong Chi-zan in particular, has a few memorable scenes as Si’r’s street smart best buddy, “Cat”. Xiao Si’r is played with tragic authenticity by 15-year-old Chang Chen on his acting debut; since then he has risen to international fame, with key roles in Happy Together, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Red Cliff I and II, and most recently, as Dr. Yueh in the 2021 scifi epic, Dune. With a running time of about 4 hours, it’s possible to watch this absorbing drama episodically, like a mini-series. Nearly a decade later, Yang scaled similar heights with his contemporary family drama, Yi Yi: A One and a Two…; both films deservedly featuring in the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll at #78 and #90 respectively.

The Shooting (1966): This low budget Western was directed by Monte Hellman, a protégé of American B-movie guru Roger Corman. In 1965, Hellman shot two Westerns back-to-back, The Shooting and Ride in The Whirlwind (both featuring Jack Nicholson and Millie Perkins), which have subsequently achieved cult status. The films have been retrospectively categorized as “acid westerns”, a term coined by film critic Pauline Kael in a review of the 1970 Mexican film, El Topo. The expression refers to a Western that subverts the genre by incorporating metaphysical themes and a hallucinogenic tone into the narrative, giving audiences the sense of being on an “acid trip”; something that was very much a part of the late 60s zeitgeist. In The Shooting, a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) hires two men to escort her to a town across the desert; during the journey they are pursued by a black-clad assassin (Jack Nicholson). There is no attempt to explain the woman’s motives nor the purpose of her expedition, with her cryptic (and unpleasant) behaviour adding to the sense of intrigue. With a crisp 82-minute runtime, the absence of a plot doesn’t bog the narrative down too much, with the stark imagery being a key contributor to the entertainment factor. Hellman’s greatest achievement is considered to be the 1971 road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, while Nicholson went on to decades of mega-stardom following the release of Easy Rider in 1969.

The Wonders / Le meraviglie (2014): This unusual drama centers on a family of beekeepers living in rural Tuscany. The film’s events are seen through the eyes of the teenager Gelsomina, the eldest of five sisters living on the farm with their mother and ill-tempered bully of a father. The initial scenes depict the typical hardship and monotony of rural life, but then their drudgery is interrupted by an unexpected sequence of events. These disruptions activate the natural restlessness of the youngsters and brings them into conflict with their father, a man firmly resistant to change or external influence. His behaviour led me to reflect on the psyche of people who are trapped in a way of life which they cannot escape from, even when given the opportunity. The Super 16mm film used by the filmmakers gives the interior shots the raw, intimate feel of a home movie, while the 1.66 aspect ratio does justice to the beauty of the Italian countryside. For its documentary-like realism, it reminded me of another Italian film – Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Director and scriptwriter Alice Rohrwacher was only 23 when she made The Wonders, and received a Palm d’Or nomination at Cannes. Her follow-up, Happy as Lazzaro, won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes a few years later.

Holiday Affair (1949): Tough guy and film noir specialist Robert Mitchum made a brief genre switch early in his career, co-starring with Janet Leigh in this Christmas-themed romantic comedy. In the days leading up to Christmas, single mother Connie Ennis (Leigh) buys a toy train from Steve Mason (Mitchum), a war veteran turned department store salesman. One thing leads to another, and the two become romantically involved. Of course, there are many hurdles to be crossed before we can get to the mandated happy ending. Gordon Gebert, playing Connie’s precocious young son, and sad-faced character actor Wendell Corey, as Connie’s doomed-to-failure suitor, are part of an entertaining ensemble cast. The same year, Janet Leigh played Meg in Little Women, but she’s probably best known for the role of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho, and for being the mother of versatile actress, Jamie Lee Curtis. Before switching to a career in directing, Dan Hartman had already garnered two Oscar nominations for scriptwriting, including for the celebrated 1942 Bob Hope-Bing Crosby comedy, Road to Morocco.

The Merchant of Four Seasons / Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (1971): Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the leading lights of the New German Cinema movement, and one of the most prolific directors of his generation. Having never watched any of his films, I was gratified to discover all his well-known works on Criterion. I opened my account with this, his twelfth feature, which also represented his international breakthrough. It’s a rather bleak story of a fruit vendor (colloquially referred to in Germany as “a merchant of four seasons”), who just can’t catch a break in any aspect of his life. Fassbender’s incisive exploration of an uncaring and selfish modern urban society, is as unsentimental as the community it depicts. The circumstances and emotions depicted are even more relevant in the present day, given the rising number of broken marriages and general trend of weakening familial bonds. The film’s international success brought Fassbinder to the notice of domestic film critics who had previously ignored or dismissed him. It led to ten years of high profile film and TV projects before his untimely death from a drug overdose at the age of 37.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul / Angst essen Seele auf (1974): I immediately opted to watch another Fassbinder film, and perhaps his most highly acclaimed work. Many commentators consider Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to be an update of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, but that would be like saying Star Wars is George Lucas’ remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress; in both cases, the director has remade the film for a different era altogether, and added unique new elements that make the film all his own. As if tackling one social taboo wasn’t enough (young man falls in love with much older woman), Fassbinder decided to make the relationship interracial as well, an understandable choice given how race politics had become so central to Western society in the late 60s (and continues to be so). One rainy evening, Emmi, a lonely German widow meets Ali, a young immigrant worker from Morocco in a bar. The chance encounter eventually blossoms into love, but the couple’s attempts to live a normal life together are thwarted by the disgust and contempt they face from friends, family and society. The way Fassbinder portrays the impact this has on Emmi and Ali, is heartbreaking. The film is as powerful today as it was 50 years ago and it deservedly features (at #52) in the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll.

5 Fingers (1952): This outstanding thriller is based on the true story of a spy (codenamed “Cicero”), who leaked top secret documents to the Nazis, while employed as a valet to the British ambassador in Istanbul during World War II. James Mason plays “Cicero” and French actress, Danielle Darrieux plays a key role as his confidant, an exiled Polish countess named Anna Staviska, whose late husband had ties with the Nazis. The film contains some of the most witty dialogue written for the screen. Take for example, this bit of small talk between Countess Staviska and German ambassador Count von Papen; the Count says: “Countess, why did you leave Warsaw?”; her droll response: “Bombs were falling, I felt I was in the way”. And later, to clarify her feelings towards Nazi leader Hermann Göring, she says “I refused to invite Göring <to hunt at our estate>. I couldn’t tolerate his killing a wild pig; it seemed too much like brother against brother.” The plot is full of fantastic twists and turns and keeps you glued to the screen right till the end. The film was deservingly nominated for Best Screenplay and also garnered a third Best Director nod for Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mason had just moved to Hollywood after a successful film career in England, and this was one of his early successes; two years later he would receive his first Oscar nomination for The Star is Born.

James Mason and Danielle Darrieux in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 5 Fingers (1952)

A Letter to Three Wives (1949): After watching 5 Fingers, I turned back the clock three years to this Joseph L. Manckiewicz film, one of his earliest successes as a director. While we are familiar with “high concept” sci-fi and action films, here we have a social drama powered by a high concept. In fact, the pitch is in the film’s title – one morning, three well-to-do women who are about to leave on a boat trip receive a letter from Addie Ross, a common acquaintance, informing them that she has run off with one of their husbands, but not specifying which one! Stuck on the boat, the three friends frantically try to figure out which of them is the unlucky one. A series of flashbacks reveal the dynamics of the three marriages, all plagued by self-doubt and friction, exacerbated by the demands of the “social ladder” rat race. One common source of the three wives’ insecurities is the their husbands’ unanimous admiration for Addie Ross, the epitome of social success in their local community. High drama ensues in the final act, as the women rush home after their boat trip to uncover the culprit. Although considered a Hollywood classic, I found the film a bit dated, and not something I would be inclined to watch again. The drama won Mankiewicz an Oscar each for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. Kirk Douglas, who at that time was considered a fast rising young actor, plays one of the husbands; a few months later, his lead role in the sporting drama Champion represented a turning point in his career, garnering him his first Oscar nomination.

Written on the Wind (1956): Douglas Sirk was the king of the Hollywood 1950s melodrama, whose films I suspect, influenced a number of Indian directors of that era. Sirk formed a strong personal bond with Rock Hudson, with Written on the Wind being the seventh of nine films they collaborated on at Universal Pictures. The story revolves around Kyle, the self-destructive son (played by Robert Stack) and Marylee, the love-starved daughter (Dorothy Malone) of a Texas oil billionaire. The brunt of their actions are borne by Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a senior employee and close friend of the family, and Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), an office secretary who is drawn into the family politics. The plot involves themes of impotence and promiscuity, and the overt depiction of these on the screen reflected the steady decline of Hollywood self-censorship (aka the Hays Code) in the late 50s. Under Sirk’s direction, these ingredients serve up a high octane melodrama, whose emotional beats have echoed down the years onto shows like Dallas, Dynasty and Yellowstone. Dorothy Malone deservedly won an Oscar for her portrayal of the emotionally fragile heiress Marylee, whose ill-judged actions are a result of her failure in love. A sad footnote for one of the stars – the film was released just weeks before Lauren Bacall’s husband, film icon Humphrey Bogart, died of cancer.

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50, #51-60 and #61-70.

A Criterion Channel journey, films #61-70

This is the seventh entry in a series of thumbnail reviews of films I’ve watched on the Criterion Channel streaming service, starting in September 2021. I finished off this set of 10 films during December and early January 2022. This lot includes two early French New Wave films, one Hitchcock thriller, a “railroad” Western, a post-WW2 drama, a fictionalized account of a real-life scam, a film noir, a crime docudrama, a drama set in the Aussie outback, and an Italian drama from the late-neorealist period.

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Till the End of Time (1946): Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum star as US Marines who return home to Los Angeles after the end of WW2 in 1945. Both face challenges settling back into civilian life, as they re-engage with family and friends, meet other ex-servicemen, and make new acquaintances. Dorothy McGuire, fresh off her acclaimed performance in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, headlines the movie, playing a war widow who falls in love with Madison’s character. Although a reasonably well made film, it doesn’t have the emotional depth of the similarly themed The Best Years of Our Lives, which was released around the same time. Robert Mitchum became a genuine star a year later with the release of the film noir classic, Out of the Past. Director Edward Dmytryk continued to make well-regarded films with big movie stars for another two decades, including The Caine Mutiny (Humphrey Bogart), The End of the Affair (Deborah Kerr), Raintree Country (Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor), The Young Lions (Clift and Marlon Brando) and Shalako (Sean Connery and Brigette Bardot).

The Baron of Arizona (1950): Samuel Fuller’s second directorial effort is the highly fictionalized account of a real-life scam which made headlines in the late 19th century. Vincent Price is compelling as the fraudster, James Reavis, a real-estate agent who concocted an audacious scheme in the 1870’s, using forged documents to lay claim to about 19,000 square miles of land across Arizona and New Mexico. The story becomes progressively more bizarre and sordid, as Reavis builds layer upon layer of falsehood to shore up the legality of his claim. Famed cinematographer James Wong Howe infuses even the daytime scenes with a sense of darkness, in keeping with the subject matter. Given the period and location, the film is sometimes classified as a Western, although not with the usual tropes of that genre. Fuller followed up with the progressive-minded war film Steel Helmets (covered in #11-20 in this series), thereby setting a pattern of war, westerns and noir as his preferred genres.

His Kind of Woman (1951): Australian director John Farrow (father of actress Mia Farrow) directs this unconventional film noir set at an upscale resort in Baja California. “Noir king” Robert Mitchum plays a professional gambler, who is offered $50,000 to complete a mystery assignment at a retreat for the rich and famous; Jane Russell brings her typically sassy screen persona to the role of the femme fatale; Vincent Price delivers a shamelessly over-the-top performance as a hammy Shakespearean actor, also a guest at the resort. Mitchum’s character soon discovers that there is more to the assignment than he has been told, and has to use his wits and new-found allies to survive. The release of the film was delayed after studio owner Howard Hawks took control away from the director, and added reshoots to incorporate additional story elements and a recasting of a key role. Given the added costs, it wasn’t a surprise that the film lost money at the box office. However, audiences enjoyed the on-screen chemistry between Mitchum and Russell (as did I), and they were immediately cast by the studio in the entertaining noir thriller, Macao. Director John Farrow survived the mistreatment and went on to win an Oscar a few years later for co-writing the screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days.

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in John Farrow’s His Kind of Woman (1951)

Boomerang! (1947): Elia Kazan’s third feature film was shot in a factual, semi-documentary style, and tells the true-life story of a high profile murder case in Connecticut in the 1920’s. Square-jawed leading man Dana Andrews, brings his grim-faced, no-nonsense acting approach to the role of the State Attorney, who comes under relentless pressure from local politicians to close the case quickly, in the face of mounting public anger. The Attorney is determined to see that justice is done, rather than just push through a convenient prosecution. Jane Wyatt plays his wife, who also is targeted by vested political interests to make her husband toe the line. This was the first of Elia Kazan’s films to garner him awards for directing (winner of the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle Awards); he also got a nomination at Cannes. His next film, Gentleman’s Agreement, would win Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture, besides a host of other nominations.

Le Beau Serge (1958): Claude Chabrol’s debut effort as director is considered to be the first film of the French New Wave. Chabrol was the first of the contributors to the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who went on to become a director and along with other critics-turned-directors, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, changed the course of French and world cinema. Le Beau Serge starts off with a young man, François (played by Gérard Blain), returning to his village in central France, to rest and recuperate after a recent illness. He seeks out old acquaintances, and discovers that his close friend, Serge (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), has become a bitter alcoholic in the intervening years. The film narrates François’ efforts to navigate the social fabric of the village, where everyone appears to be discontented and resentful. In terms of tone, the film is grounded and austere, compared to the irreverence and spontaneity of subsequent French New Wave films…nevertheless, shooting on location with no props and no movie stars gave Chabrol’s film the authenticity that was the hallmark of the La Nouvelle Vague movement. It was a low key start, and in fact, it was only after the release of Chabrol’s second film, Les Cousins, and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a few months later, that the movement became recognized as such. Chabrol was just 27 years old when he made this film, and he would go on to direct a film a year for the next half century, in addition to documentaries and TV shows!

The Sundowners (1960): This engaging and well-made drama, adapted from Jon Cleary’s 1951 novel of the same name, is set in the Australian outback in the 1920s. The term “sundowners” refers to transient laborers who would travel from farm to farm for work. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr bring great heart and warmth to their roles as the Irish-Australian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Carmody, traveling with their son Sean through rural Australia. Mr. Carmody loves the nomadic life, whereas Mrs. Carmody and the boy dream of buying a place and settling down. The story takes us through various episodes in their lives, and the interesting characters they meet, particularly an Englishman played by Peter Ustinov. It’s a touching story, let down by a somewhat unsatisfactory ending (not to mention Mitchum and Kerr’s dodgy Aussie accents!). Although nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, it is less well-known compared to director Fred Zinnemann’s classics High Noon, From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.

Les Cousins (1959): By the time Claude Chabrol had the financial wherewithal to release his debut film Le Beau Serge, he had already finished his follow up, Les Cousins, featuring the same two actors Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. There is a symmetry to these two films – Le Beau Serge is set in the countryside and showcases village residents bitter and resentful about their lot in life; Les Cousins is set in Paris and chronicles the cynical, devil-may-care lifestyles of the young urban set, who lived for the day and couldn’t care for tomorrow. In Les Cousins, studious and earnest Charles (played by Blain) comes to Paris to study law; he stays with his cousin Paul (played by Brialy), who is Charles’ diametric opposite in terms of value systems and behaviour. We follow Charles’ wide-eyed introduction to Paul’s wild life in the big city – the women, the parties, the booze – and the inevitable impact that Paul’s decadent lifestyle has on him. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Ironically, although he kick-started the movement, Chabrol was perhaps the most restrained and least experimental of the French New Wave directors, which makes his films more accessible to the casual viewer.

Rope (1948): I went through a phase about 15 years ago, when I diligently watched a dozen of Alfred Hitchcock’s most well-known movies. Given how prolific he was, there are several remaining on my watchlist that I tick off from time to time, with Rope being one that I was happy to find on Criterion. Two privileged young men (played by John Dall and Farley Granger) plan and execute a “perfect murder” in their penthouse apartment, confident they won’t get caught. James Stewart plays their former prep school housemaster, who is unwittingly responsible for their convictions of intellectual superiority, and may be the only person who can bring about their downfall. The film is notable for its long takes, with the entire narrative taking place in the apartment in real time. This required an extraordinary degree of on-set choreography, leaving many critics of the view that the technical challenges distracted from the storytelling. The film was not well received by the public either, perhaps because none of the characters are particularly likeable (in fact, some are downright unpleasant) and because of the homosexual subtext. I found it to be a gripping viewing experience and was completely drawn in by the dialogue and the suspense. Granger reappeared three years later in Strangers on a Train, and these two Hitchcock films remained the highlights of his career. John Dahl had further success as the lead in the 1950 film noir, Gun Crazy, and a key part in the 1960 historical epic, Spartacus.

Girl in the Window / La ragazza in vetrina (1961): The 1940’s heralded the era of neorealism in Italian cinema, but by the early 50’s, audiences started resenting these soul-crushing stories of poverty and destitution; filmmakers responded by including comedic elements into these films, giving rise to the term “pink neorealism”, which then morphed into the commedia all’italiana, or “Italian style comedy” genre of the 60’s. The Girl in the Window is considered an example of pink neorealism, although there is nothing intentionally comedic in the narrative. It was an early starring vehicle for Italian acting icon Lino Ventura, as well as for striking French actress Marina Vlady. Ventura plays a seasoned Italian coal miner, working in a mine in the Netherlands, who takes a newcomer (Bernard Fresson) under his wing and shows him the ropes. The first half of the film puts the audience into the heart of the black seams underground, while the second half sees the two men let off steam during a night out on the town. Given the daily hazards the men experience at work, one can understand their almost childlike need for entertainment and companionship. Overall, I would describe the film as informative and insightful, rather than entertaining. This is not surprising, given that director Luciano Emmer was known primarily for his documentaries, although he did make a few well-regarded comedies. Remarkably, he continued to work until just before his death in 2009, at the age of 91.

Denver and the Rio Grande (1952): This American “railroad Western” is a fictitious retelling of an armed confrontation that took place in the late 1870’s, between two competing railroad companies for “right of way” through a pass on the Colorado-New Mexico border. Edmond O’Brien and Sterling Hayden play the chief antagonists representing the two railroads; character actor O’Brien is cast as the conscientious engineer, Jim Vesser, while Hayden brings his signature tough guy act to the character of McCabe, a bully who must win at any cost. The story is packed with gunfights, legal battles, corporate espionage and even a spectacular train crash, although the obligatory love interest subplot feels a bit forced. It’s a watchable movie, but Edmund O’Brien did not really tick the box for me as a charismatic leading man. Director Byron Haskin had previously directed the excellent noir, I Walk Alone, which I covered in #21-30. He does a good job managing the large-scale action in this movie, and this experience probably helped when he graduated to big-budget sci-fi films like The War of the Worlds (1953), From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).

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Here are the links to the previous thumbnails: #1-10, #11-20, #21-30, #31-40, #41-50 and #51-60.