108: The Reckless Moment

            After questioning the casting of James Mason in Bigger than Life (1956; #111) I’m happy to have found his talents put to such good use in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (1949).  The film was a point of departure both artistically and geographically for Ophüls, who would return to Europe and embark on the most acclaimed, and final, incarnation of his career after its completion.  That he chose to make a studio-controlled noir as his final work in English might seem strange to those familiar with his later European films, but thematically this is pure Max Ophüls. 

            In the remaining years of his life, Ophüls went on to direct The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).  These are two of the best films featuring female protagonists who bend the rules of society.  Here he plays on similar themes, reversing roles and rules of the noir genre and eluding, as he does in those later films, to those unspoken rules about what a lady should and shouldn’t do.

            Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) is determined to end her young daughter’s affair with an older man.  She’s discreet when she drives from the suburbs into downtown L.A.  If anyone knows where she’s gone they’re libel to ask some questions.  She meets the man in a bar and offers terms.  When he asks for money to keep the whole thing quiet she thinks she has his number.  Her daughter (Geraldine Brooks) would never stay with a man who offered to leave her for cold hard cash.  But when she returns home an argument erupts over the matter.  The daughter is irate and it takes every effort Lucia can muster to keep the rest of the house from knowing about the whole affair.  Her husband is away on business and hasn’t the time or ability to deal with such matters. 

            Things take a turn for the worse when the boyfriend stops by the boathouse that evening for a romantic rendezvous.  He and the daughter quarrel, and she strikes him before escaping to the main house.  It all seems to be over, but the next morning his lifeless body lays on the beachfront.  Almost instinctively Lucia disposes of the body out in deep water.  The man’s death appears to have been an accident, but she can’t know that for certain. 

            Paranoia over the incident turns to legitimate fear when a Mr. Donnelly (James Mason) calls the following evening.  It seems that the dead man used several love letters penned by Mrs. Harper’s daughter as collateral for a loan.  Murder or no murder, the contents of these writings would bring scandal, along with questions from the police, upon the family.  Donnelly demands money for the letters, adding further pressure to the household’s already strained finances.  However, as his relationship with Mrs. Harper grows while she attempts to obtain his asking price, his focus may no longer be on the money, but on the woman whom he’s blackmailing.

            Mason is perfectly suited for this role.  He plays it subtly, which is the right tone, as the situation is cause enough for alarm.  What’s so interesting about the film is how social concerns so deeply affect the character’s decisions.  Of course the whole situation could have been avoided had Mrs. Harper simply called the police, but what harm might that cause?  The home owner’s association and the ladies at the country club don’t take kindly to dead bodies on beaches.  And while we neither see nor hear mention of such specific judgmental eyes throughout the picture, they loom large in the unspoken words between the lines.

            The Reckless Moment is a social commentary at heart, and the questions of class and propriety that dictate why young suburban girls don’t date men who live in downtown hotels are at the center of that commentary.  These elements of unspoken sexual morality play a large part in Ophüls European films as well.  Here he also sheds, nay, shines a light on the trappings of suburban society and the false fronts of normality that dictate that order.  Likewise, there are contained herein illusion to a burgeoning commentary on race relations in film, focused on the family’s African American maid.

            The elements of the film: performances, commentary, a tad of Ophüls’ intricate cinematography, are brought together by a fantastic score that knows when and when not, to make its presence known.  This is not an Ophüls masterpiece, but it is a fine piece of filmmaking.

Language: English

Runtime 82 Minutes

Available @ Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off 

109: The Phantom Carriage (a.k.a. The Phantom Chariot; a.k.a. Körkarlen)

            I think what’s most surprising about Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921) is that it is only ostensibly a horror film.  Behind its dark imagery and its special effects – state of the art for the time period – lays a film that is both a lurid social drama and a vivid depiction of the trials of the human soul.  As a motion picture it represented a step forward both technically and thematically, and it put Swedish cinema on the map, becoming an international success. 

            Ironically, this depiction of the murky moments between this life and the next may have had the church to thank for its popular triumph.  Local censorship boards, often run by the religious establishment of the day, were leery about editing material of the afterlife out, fearing legal action from author Selma Lagerlöf, upon whose novel the screenplay was based.  They let the picture slide, deciding that its message about the moral degradation and social ills of alcohol outweighed the potential harm of its depiction of the supernatural.  The international temperance movement was at its height and elements of this picture fit right in to the social cause of the day.

            The complicated story, which includes flashbacks within flashbacks, focuses on the exploits of the self-destructive alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström).  On New Years Eve he sits in a churchyard, drinking and telling ghost stories with two friends.  He relates the legend of the phantom carriage, the cart driven by the death’s minion, the reaper.  The story was told to him by a friend who claimed that the reaper collects the souls of the dead, waiting to be replaced by the one that expires at the stroke of the New Year.  The previous New Year the man who first told the story died himself. 

            Dying this New Year, on the other end of the city, is a nun who has prayed for Holm in his wickedness throughout the year.  She took pity on him the previous winter when he tried to overcome his addiction.  When he eventually rejected her treatment, she promised to pray for him over the year.  Now she has sent a messenger for him, so that she can see if her prayers have been answered before she expires.  When an argument results in his own death as the clock strikes twelve, Holm is faced with his obligation to the reaper and to his ailing former caretaker.  Coming face to face with the phantom carriage and its eerie coachman, he will be forced to account for his sins.

            As a narrative, The Phantom Carriage can be difficult to follow.  It’s a complicated story with fewer subtitles than most silent pictures.  It takes some effort to engage the plot, but the special effects make this film worth the exertion.  Using expertly choreographed double exposures Sjöström creates a luminous and transparent depth to the ghostly vehicle and its driver, and these scenes compliment nicely the element of social commentary the film brings to the table.  Watching this movie I was reminded of numerous pairings of horror and social issues that it preceded, realizing that the best of the horror genre – the original Halloween (1978) and Romero’s Living Dead series – always have something more to say than “Boo!”

Language: Silent (Subtitles in English)

Runtime: 75 Minutes*

Available @ Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off

* Different listings based on what national version of the film you see.  The 1001 text lists 93 minutes.  I suspect the version which Sjöström originally intended or something as close as possible, will be available in high quality home video soon, with a Criterion release of this picture scheduled sometime next month.  I’m looking forward to it.

A Note

The lattest edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die recently hit the shelves.  Black Swan is the cover film if you're looking for it on the shelves.  The updated list has not yet been added to the official website, but I'm sure it's online somewhere by now.

110: Alice (a.k.a. Neco z Alenky)

            “Alice thought to herself ‘Now you will see a film... made for children... perhaps...’ But, I nearly forgot... you must... close your eyes... otherwise... you won't see anything.”

            It’s the “perhaps” that makes the opening monologue of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988) intriguing. In fact, it sets up one of the fundamental questions about this strange Czechoslovakian picture.  Unlike the more recent trend of commercial children’s movies that have something for adults as well – such as Babe (1995) or the best films from the Pixar studio – Alice may be a film for adults simply masquerading as a kid’s movie.  A similar feat was attempted with the animated Animal Farm (1954), a colorful rendering of the classic allegorical novel, but where that film succeeded I’m not sure that Alice pulls off the trick.  The simple fact is that though the combination of a single live actor, the young Kristýna Kohoutová as Alice (who is occasionally represented by a dole), and stop-motion figures in the supporting parts is visually engaging, it is used in a way by the director which might scare children more than delight them.

            While the film and these figures represent some of the best use and execution of stop-motion photography that I can recall, the way in which Svankmajer presents them feels dark, and often borders on the disturbing.  Though the director primarily adheres to the classic children’s tale by Lewis Carroll, he adds his own twist on the visual imagery, once employing a shot of raw beef, brought to life through the technique, slithering across the screen.  Likewise, classic characters such as the White Rabbit and March Hare seem grotesque as they shed sawdust innards and lose eyes made of buttons.  In the most surreal scene of the picture, Alice meets the Caterpillar, a sock with a pair of human false teeth and glass eyeballs which he sows shut when he becomes tired.

            As I watched Alice I anticipated some of the familiar sequences of the Carroll classic, but more often than not I found that each scene dragged, beating the dead horse with the point that Wonderland is filled with oddities and eccentric characters.  It’s clear throughout the film that the elements of Alice’s adventure are the doodads and trinkets of her playroom, which must have once doubled as biology laboratory, rearranged by her subconscious.  This makes as I said for an arresting visual style, but even at a mere 86 minutes the picture feels long.  Svankmajer scripted the piece so that the supporting characters are all voiced by Kohoutová.  This serves as a nod to the dream world in which the story takes place but makes for a poor aural pallet to draw from, and a mind-numbingly repetitive cut to a close-up of Kohoutová’s mouth as she narrates phrases such as “...yelled the Mad Hater.”

            If Alice were a 30 minute film, or if multiple voices had been employed in the production, I can see giving it a positive review.  No doubt it should be given credit for its original visual style which you can see elements of in James and the Giant Peach (1996) and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), but it fails on the whole as feature.  Like Carroll’s original work it functions effectively as a manipulation of size and objects of the physical world.  Unlike that work, it falls short of being a compelling narrative.        

Language: Czech (dubbed to English)

Runtime: 86 Minutes

Available through Netflix.com

Grade: 1 Hat Off

111: Bigger than Life

            I have to disagree with the 1001 text’s contention that James Mason, who also produced, is “perfectly cast” in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life (1956).  The problem is that though Mason still had some of his greatest roles ahead of him, he had already established himself, or his characters I should say, as unworthy of trust, from the audience or otherwise.  Such things tend to happen when you play Brutus in Julius Cesar (1953).  Thus, when Mason’s seemingly good-natured school teacher and suburban father Ed Avery goes mad after an experimental medical treatment, you kind of see it coming.  It’s also a little difficult to believe that Avery, carrying every bit of Mason’s distinguished British way with words and speech, was, for however brief a moment, a football star.

            Things are good for Avery when we meet him, but he has the concerns of any father.  Is his son watching too much TV (an issue Ray notes in 1956!)?  Will he be able to pay for the water heater to be fixed? Will he and his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), ever be able to take that dream vacation?  In between his worries he finds the time to work as a cab dispatcher a few days a week, to help make ends meet.  He’s afraid his wife will find out about this, but it doesn’t seem to matter any more when his absolute worst fears are confirmed.  He may not be around for his wife or his son for much longer after he’s diagnosed with a fatal circulatory disease.  But there is hope in the form of the “miracle drug” Cortisone. 

            After adhering to a regimen of the drug for only a few days he feels better than he has in years.  He finally feels up to a game of catch with the pigskin in his yard with his son.  And all of those worries he’s held on to for so long have begun to fade away as well, gone the way of the chronic pain.  When he begins to buy lavish presents for his family they initially dismiss the actions as the result of a new lease on life.  However, when his energy subsides only in the form a dramatic mood swings it becomes clear that the drug is to blame.  Secretly, Avery does all that he can to keep the high times rolling.  He pops the prescription pills two and three at a time.

            Changes in his behavior prompt an emotional disconnect with his wife and strained relations with his colleagues at school, especially after he unleashes a tirade on the state of education to the PTA: “Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it. We're breeding a race of moral midgets.”  The brunt of his abuse is directed toward his young son.  The boy is denied his meals until he completes tasks from Avery’s new educational regimen.  Feeling larger than life, Avery encourages the boy to reach the maximum of human potential, declaring to Lou that it would be easier had he married his intellectual equal.  In desperation she asks Ed to stop taking the drugs after a friend (Walter Matthau) reveals their causal function.  But without the pills, there would be no more Ed.  The film reaches its climax after a Sunday sermon on Abraham.  Convinced that he knows better than God, Ed decides to sacrifice his son a la Isaac to relieve him of the inhumanities of the world.

            Ray was riding a wave of success (Johnny Guitar; 1954, #114, Rebel without a Cause; 1955) when he directed Bigger than Life.  Personally, he’d also begun to come to terms with his homosexuality, openly inviting his lover onto the set of this film.  Here he drew on his alternative values again to make another critique of the developing middle class ideal in the United States, hinting at the potential for upheaval that lay just below the surface.  He succeeds to a point I suppose, indeed taking some poignant shots, but I must confess that throughout this picture I got the feeling that he was either paying homage to Douglas Sirk (another retrospectively revered filmmaker of the gay icon set) or doing his best impression.  The production values here feel too big for a Ray film and I think Bigger than Life suffers for it. 

            That Mason, an established star, was producing as well as headlining likely contributed to this cinemascope production style, and it just doesn’t have the punch of the Ray of Rebel, with its edgy script and burgeoning talent.  This film has some wonderfully crafted moments and images, but I never felt that the script, the star, and the director melded in the way that makes a picture magical.  With the collection of talent here I still spent much of this film wondering what a different combination would have yielded.  Gary Cooper as the lead might have made for a truly shocking character, or Sirk in the director’s chair might have helmed this project with more confidence.  In the end, that confidence is what this picture lacks.  Its cookie-cutter happy ending proves that though it had the courage to peer into the dark places of the soul, it lacked the chutzpah to reside there.        

Language: English

Runtime: 95 Minutes

Available through Netflix.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

112: Satantango

            It’s hard to imagine a review of Bela Tarr’s 1994 picture Satantango that doesn’t at least note the film’s epic length.  At seven and a half hours, I believe it’s the second longest film to be viewed in the 1001 canon, falling short of only Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985).  While its length certainly makes the film one of the biggest challenges facing any contender for supremacy over the list, I believe that it is not a wholly unjustified runtime.  Within the context of this runtime, much has been made of this film’s average shot length.  At over 145 seconds, Tarr takes his time with each one, likely employing less of them here than most filmmakers would in a more standard two-hour delivery.  But watching Satantango, even as your mind calculates how much left of it you’ve still to view, it becomes clear how much thought Tarr has put into time.

            “Humans are to time as twigs are to rain,” one character laments. “Defenseless” That Tarr chose these words is clearly not an accident, as rain falls almost relentlessly throughout this picture.  An opening voiceover tells us that the autumn rains have begun, and that they will not cease until the first frost, when they will turn to snow.  There will not be another dry day until the following spring.  Such is life in a remote Hungarian agricultural collective.  Though no specific year is given for the setting of this story, several hints suggest that it takes place nearer the fall of Eastern block communism than to the “glory days” of the space race.  It’s abundantly clear that the collective has seen better days as well.

            Cinematographer Gabor Medvigy’s stark almost haunting black and white opens on the main quad of the compound, where the cows seem now to have free reign.  Pigs are as likely to be found in the streets as human inhabitants, and the nearby town square is occasionally overrun by horses.  As we see the townsfolk and learn more about them from sparse voiceover narration, it is clear that they are waiting to leave, waiting for a large sum of money to arrive.  After this final payday (wages for the previous years work) almost everyone who remains will be gone, leaving the town to the livestock. 

            One person who appears to be staying is the doctor.  Aging and fat, he’s content for now to sit at his window and spy on his fellow citizens, perhaps for the authorities.  But whom will he watch when they are gone?  The woman who brings his food is so ashamed to admit that she’s leaving him that she makes up a story about how difficult it is to get to his house after the rains begin.  There also appears to be someone who is returning, a man who was supposed to be dead.  When word reaches the town that he was seen on the road, everyone fears that there payday might be in jeopardy.  It may be anyway, as several farmers have ideas about what they might do were they to abscond with everyone’s earnings.

            These are the events of the day.  People scheme amongst themselves.  Men cheat with each other’s wives, or visit prostitutes just to pass the time.  The doctor gets drunk, only to stumble out into the rain in hopes of finding more to drink.  Gossip fills the pub more so than patrons.  In a scene I was glad to learn was faked, a young girl tortures her cat because there is nothing else to do.  Most of all, these people play a waiting game and we wait with them.  The girl’s older brother steals her pocket change.  She poisons the cat, and then takes some herself when the guilt becomes too much.  She’s mourned, but the wait continues, and when the supposedly dead man arrives he has much to say about this, without really saying anything at all. 

            Sometimes, Satantango feels like a staring contest between Tarr and his audience, as if he is daring them to continue watching.  Blink and you might miss what this all means.  He is often brutal to his viewers, subjecting them to lengthy ordeals such as the cat torture, or the horrendous music of the pub, or a drunk telling the same already repetitive story over and over and over.  Near the film’s conclusion, the doctor seeks out the source of a loud ringing, finding a man in the dilapidated chapel banging a knell and relentlessly yelling “the Turks are coming.” 

            Scenes of silence can be equally frustrating, as long takes of people eating, or the townspeople arranged in a “Last Supper” motif engender that same staring contest feeling.  As the rain continues to fall through all of this, the flies and the spiders of the village all seek refuge indoors with its human inhabitants.  That the actor’s agreed to endure the rain alone is amazing, particularly when considering that the film was in production for nearly four years.     

            I can’t tell you what Satantango is supposed to be.  It’s been read as a commentary on communism, and on capitalism for that matter, but I think that Tarr is less concerned with politics than he is with human nature as a whole.  I believe he intended for this film to truly convey what it feels like to wait for change.  But I’m not sure what his feelings on change are either.  Some hint though might be found in the title and the structure of the narrative.  The story is circular like the tango: six steps forward and six steps back.  Likewise, it is told in twelve sections that end right where they began.  

Language: Hungarian

Runtime: 450 Minutes

Available through Netflix.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

113: Me and My Gal

            If you’re looking for feel good depression era movies then it’s likely that Raoul Walsh’s 1932 picture, Me and My Gal, would meet your search criteria.  Spencer Tracy stars here opposite Joan Bennett in roles that the two performers clearly embraced.  Tracy is the good-natured Irish cop, Danny Dolan, and Bennett is the cashier girl, Helen, at the lunch counter on his dockside New York City beat whom he tries to woo.  The two are spectacular throughout with their rapid-fire delivery of their lines, which bounce off of each other like the drunks that frequent the pier.  One such character, played with charm by Will Stanton, accounts for much of the ridiculous action in the film’s first half, setting the tone for the wild, if not wholly improbable, drama that makes up it’s later segments.

            This is essentially a goofy film made for audiences that were looking to forget their troubles, but its value can be found in its simplicity.  There isn’t a pretentious note to stand on here, just pratfalls, quips, a little action, and some great romantic moments.  One of the film’s best scenes foreshadows Annie Hall (1977) as Danny and Helen snuggle on a couch while her father is away from their apartment.  Their spoken words reflect decorum, but they are immediately followed by their true, lustier, thoughts in voiceover.  The moment is mirrored later by a touching sequence that notes the changing values of the period, in which the two discuss the paradox of giving into such temptations: do so and the object of your affection might lose respect for you.

            Love, however, seems to be in the air.  Helen’s older sister is about to be married, albeit to a man who may not have all of her heart.  When ex flame, the known criminal Baby Face, shows up just before the wedding, the sister begins to have second thoughts.  However, the gangster is arrested before the ceremony and it goes off without a hitch.  There is merriment and dancing, and laughter, and the guest of honor, second only to the couple, is the forbidden substance inside the keg.  When Danny shows up to steal Helen away for a brief moment, he doesn’t seem to care about the booze and neither does this film.

            In fact, much of this picture seems to take a strong anti-prohibition stance, not an unpopular one at this time in such Irish neighborhoods as the film portrays*.  This is ironic, as the picture makes a villain of the organized crime element that thrived on the lucrative bootlegging business.  The film descends into a ludicrous and almost irrelevant bank robbery plot after Baby Face escapes from prison, but this hardly matters.  By this time it’s clear that Danny and Helen are all that really matter, and the rest is simply a set up.  Of course the gangster calls on the older sister looking for a place to lay low while her new husband is conveniently away.  Not so convenient for Baby Face is the fact that the husband’s handicapped and dumb father notices his presence in the attic.  When Danny and Helen just happen to drop by, the man communicates through blinking Morse code, eventually leading to a quick shootout between the cop and the criminal.

            Again, by this point we hardly care what happens with Baby Face because were too busy watching the Tracy and Bennett characters fall for each other.  The action just puts a nice little bow on their romance, as the reward money for Baby Face provides the cash for a fancy wedding.  This film has heart warming characters, moments of genuine humor, great running gags, and quite a bit of fun.  It drags a bit at its middle, and the prop master didn’t know what a revolver was, but watching Tracy and Bennett throughout, as they cut each other just so slightly with their words, alone is worth your time.  The picture ends on its pro-alcohol note, harkening back to a moment from the first wedding, as Helen’s enthusiastically inebriated father stares down the audience and notes, “Well it’s all over. C’mon let’s have another drink huh?”  Though released a year before the repeal of prohibition, his sentiment sounds to foreshadow the joyous end to the Volstead act. 

* In an ultimate irony, the Catholic Church lobbied to end prohibition as they simultaneously denounced films like Me and My Gal for their mild sexual content

Language: English

Runtime: 79 Minutes

Available @ Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off