Edward Dmytryk - 1964
KL Studio Classics BD Region A
There is an inspired moment in The Carpetbaggers where the camera rests on the entry to a bathroom in a mansion. George Peppard is seen walking into the bathroom where Carroll Baker has been taking a bath. We do not see them but we hear the dialogue. I do not know who came up with this idea, director Dmytryk or screenwriter John Michael Hayes, but there are a couple more scenes that have similar moments. In any case, there is a soupçon of visual wit in a film that is otherwise not known for being subtle.
The Carpetbaggers already was pre-sold, based on an enormously popular novel loosely based on the life of Howard Hughes. The pre-release publicity was centered on Carroll Baker's nude scene, part of the European theatrical version, unseen stateside. Producer Joseph Levine may have seemed high-minded with the arthouse releases under his name, but he understood that the audience for Contempt was there for Brigitte Bardot's backside and not Jean-Luc Godard's philosophy. The Carpetbaggers was made in part to challenge the U.S. production code that would be in place for another five years.
The Carpetbaggers is every bit as garish and vulgar as the red velvet wall paper on the walls of the Cord mansion. To call the acting melodramatic is an understatement. The story is almost a parody of Greek tragedy with Peppard worried that he will suffer the madness that took his twin brother, takes on the coldness and cruelty of the father he hated, and has a volatile relationship with Carroll Baker, the girlfriend who became is step-mother. While Peppard and Baker represent the last vestiges of the studio system, the majority of the cast also features older Hollywood stars Alan Ladd, Lew Ayres and Audrey Totter. Only the former boxer, Archie Moore as Peppard's chauffeur, keeps his dignity intact. While Joe Levine was unable to have onscreen nudity in a Paramount film, he does have a scene with the young widow Baker in black diaphanous lingerie, and Martha Hyer in nothing but a white fur stole.
This new blu-ray edition comes with two commentary tracks. The more serious of these is by film historian Julie Kirgo. The first forty minutes are spent discussing The Carpetbaggers, both the novel and film, within the context of the cultural changes in the early 1960s. There is also the expected coverage of the main stars and the filmmaking team. Note to Ms. Kirgo that Edward Dmytryk's The Juggler might still be available on Tubi. Historian David del Valle and filmmaker David DeCoteau provide a casual conversation mostly discussing the cast members. Agreed by all concerned is that in spite of his ill-health, Alan Ladd's performance could have initiated a career resurgence had he not died prior to release of the film.
Edward Dmytryk made a second adaptation of a Harold Robbins novel, Where Love is Gone. Based on the murder of of Lana Turner's gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stopanato, that film is almost as entertaining. The ending of The Carpetbaggers is abrupt, although it is from the novel. Even as a work for hire, the film's conclusion does fit in with several other Dmytryk films such as The Juggler and Christ in Concrete in which a questionable man finds redemption in the end.
]]>E.A. Dupont - 1929
Milestone Film & Video BD Region A
I had seen Piccadilly once before, as a British DVD, roughly twenty years ago. The first thing that struck me, that I had totally forgotten, was that actress Gilda Gray had top billing, her name larger than anybody else in the cast. Gray was originally known as a dancer, credited with inventing "The Shimmy", and had starred in about half a dozen films prior to Piccaadilly. The evaporation of her screen career coincided with the transition to talking pictures. By what appears to be a cruel coincidence, Piccadilly has also been the artistic peak for director E.A. Dupont, and the actress more notably remembered with the film, Anna May Wong.
Gray and Cyril Ritchard play a dance team that is the featured entertainment at the oversized Piccadilly nightclub, run by Jameson Thomas. Ritchard is in love with Gray who is in love with Thomas. After firing Wong for distracting the other scullery workers with her own dancing, Thomas re-hires her to be a novelty performer. Wong is to perform a Chinese dance in an authentic costume. The dance and the costume are both as authentic as chop suey. All eyes are on Anna May Wong with her large helmet, exposed midriff and bare legs. Between that costume and a dance that is mostly arm waving, Wong does not have to do much to make Gilda Gray yesterday's news. While Thomas falls in love with Wong, who knows just how to get what she wants, there is Jim, a Chinese man whose relationship with Wong is the subject of speculation. Two different but connected love triangles made more complicated by race and class.
Director E.A. Dupont was known at the time for his creative camerawork, especially for his 1925 film, Variety, with its unmoored camera mimicking the point of view of being on a trapeze. That film brought Dupont to Hollywood for one production, followed by working in England for a few years. Notable are several traveling shots, one of the hands of bartenders and the hands of the customers, culminating with the camera resting on the hands of Wong and Thomas taking their drinks. Also a shot taken on a bus moving past the various theaters in Piccadilly Circus. Shadows across faces are used for artistic effect. For all the stylistic flourishes, my favorite shot is a tight close-up of Gilda Gray's face as she nibbles on a cookie, satisfied that she has put would-be lover Cyril Ritchard in his place.
The blu-ray is taken from the British Film Institute restored print. Most of the film is in sepia tone with some night scenes tinted blue. While commentary tracks are usually expected to cover information on the stars, the director and other top crew members, Farran Smith Nehme shows exceptional research in her information on the virtually forgotten Gilda Gray and Jameson Thomas. There is also discussion on Arnold Bennett's standing as a novelist by his contemporary, Virginia Woolf. Of interest is that Piccadilly was Bennett's only filmed screenplay. A possible collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in 1930 collapsed reportedly because Bennett wrote specifically for a silent film at a time when that was no longer commercially viable. Composer Neil Brand has a supplement explaining his musical choices for creating a score that in part was influenced by jazz and popular dance music of the time. The excerpts of a 2004 panel discussing Wong's life and career, featuring actress Nancy Kwan, is marred by the echoey audio. Of more interest is the sound prologue that was added after the initial release, with Jameson Thomas as a bartender of a small, rural pub about to tell about his time as the owner of a nightclub in London. Although his scene does serve a narrative purpose, the prominently billed Charles Laughton appears briefly as the most belligerent gourmand at the Piccadilly Club.
]]>Fu hou qi ri
Essay Liu & Wang Yu-Lin - 2010
Cheng Cheng Films
In 7 Days in Heaven, the weeklong preparations for a funeral get in the way of the closest remaining family having time to remember the deceased. The film takes place in a rural village in Taiwan, where there are traditions as part of the period of mourning, although some have idiosyncratic twists under the auspices of a ceremonial priest, Yi, with a flexiblilty to lead ceremonies that are recognizably Buddhist as well as more folk practices and a professional funeral arranger, Chin. The film is adapted from Essay Liu's writing, "Seven Days after Father", available online, about the absurdities she noted in her own experience.
The film opens with the delirious scene of Yi wearing his priest's robes in front of a family altar, dancing to Harry Belafonte singing, "Hava Negila". Chin is a woman whose main profession is that of professional mourner, flinging herself in front of coffins, wailing loudly. The character of Mei is Liu's stand-in in the film as the source writing was done in the first person. Chin has Mei and the others follow a script every day determining when and how they should be expressive of their mourning. Part of the ceremonies includes a memorial service at a tent with two very tall stacks of canned drinks arranged to resemble the Eiffel Tower, and a brief musical interlude from a high school marching band. Prior to being sent off to the crematorium, the father's favorite cigarettes and girlie magazine with be with him in his passage to the afterworld.
The narrative breaks for flashbacks, memories of the father. It is not until the various ceremonies are over that the family members experience their own sense of grief. Mei tries to effect an escape not only from rural Taiwan, but also Taipei, by taking a job involving international travel throughout Asia.
A curious change from Liu's original piece in its conversion to film is that her original story references only Buddhism, while in the film there is a hodgepodge of religious expression. Since there is virtually no available information on Liu, my guess is that she has chosen to express a sense of skepticism towards religious and folk beliefs in general. Curiously, Liu's previous film work was co-writing the film Mailie (2005), also about the Chinese tradition of of the seven day period between death and cremation. While Liu's career has been in writing screenplays, co-director Wang Yu-Lin has directed three more films.
7 Days in Heaven is available on DVD and on several VOD platforms.
]]>Mark Cousins - 2021
Cohen Media Group DVD Region 1
It was probably a given that Jeremy Thomas would work in the film industry. His father was Ralph Thomas, best known for making Dirk Bogarde a star in the Doctor series and a handful of more serious efforts. Uncle Gerald Thomas made a career of directing the Carry On series. There was also the more distant connection of grand-uncle Victor Saville, remembered mostly as the producer of Kiss Me Deadly. What was not a given were the films that Jeremy Thomas chose to produce. Nothing could be described as mainstream British cinema. Thomas managed to make a career out of producing films that garnered attention based as the work of very individualistic directors that were more likely to earn awards and critical praise than make a dent in the box office. The one major exception was early in his career with The Last Emperor, the first of five collaborations with Bernardo Bertolucci. It is perhaps not insignificant that while Thomas has produced several films by British directors, he has done more work with filmmakers from outside the United Kingdom.
Film historian Mark Cousins' film is part biography, filmography and road trip. With Thomas at the wheel, the two drove to Cannes for the 2019 festival where Takashi Miike's First Love was to premiere. The title was inspired by Thomas' reaction to a sudden rain storm at Cannes that caused others to flee for shelter while Thomas marveled at the change of weather. The storms would also be the reactions to some of the films such as the controversy over Crash (David Cronenberg - 1996) with its depiction of sex. While Thomas is a producer who gets the money and support but generally sees his job as supporting his directors, Cousins does find some thematic connections with several of the films, particularly with sex and violence.
Cousins does make the odd choice of having two actresses, Tilda Swinton and Debra Winger, discuss working with Thomas, both remarking on his intelligence. I would have wanted this insights of the directors he has worked with more than once like Matteo Garrone, Takashi Miike or Jerzy Skolimowski. The road trip depicts someone who likes to drive fast when he can, sing along with the Grateful Dead, and is also thoughtful to have stopped at the Drancy Memorial outside Paris, infamous as the site where French Jews were rounded up prior to being placed in cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. Cousins does appear to like some of his actors praising Theresa Russell, Jack Nicholson, and Marlon Brando, while offering a little anecdote about Tony Curtis.
Even with the brief exploration of thematic concerns that connect the films, only the surface of Thomas' life and career has been touched. Perhaps a film with a longer running time than an hour and a half would have been better. For myself, I would have liked to have known more about the making of that first production, Mad Dog Morgan when the Australian government was helping prop up the local film industry for an international market, with novice filmmakers shooting a film starring a perpetually inebriated Dennis Hopper. There is also the three years that it took to make The Last Emperor and the logistics of shooting Little Buddha in Nepal. What is understood is Mark Cousins' interest in Jeremy Thomas as a kind of unicorn among film producers, truly independent, going against the grain with films marked in varying degrees by their artistic aspirations.
]]>Chalit Krileadmongkon & Pakphum Wongjinda
WellGo USA BD Region A
I admittedly have not been keeping up with Thai cinema as I had in the past. It has been a while since I last wrote about any films and even longer since I have seen any Thai horror films. I would think the most ideal way to watch Creepy Crawly would be in a full Thai theater with an audience there to scream and laugh, usually in that order. I should note that the film's original English language title in The One Hundred, which is how the film is known outside the U.S.
There may be a bit of eyeball rolling at the initial set-up. The story takes place soon after the Covid-19 lockdowns begin in Bangkok, March 2020. A group of travelers are required to quarantine in a second rate hotel for two weeks. When cleaning a room, a staff member discovers an infestation of centipedes. We are talking about bugs the size of small mammals, not the insects found in somebody's garden. Dead bodies appear in odd places have met gruesome fates. The hotel manager has everyone locked in. When you are stuck in a crummy hotel with people killed by someone or something, somehow a pandemic hardly seems terrifying.
While none of this is to be taken seriously, there are more than enough glaring plot holes that were either overlooked in constructing the screenplay or were edited out. Much of the potential suspense is dissapated by a major reveal that comes too early. Some of the publicity also mentions that the story was inspired by Battambang, a city in Cambodia. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any online information about this source of inspiration. Does any of this matter? As a creature feature, Creepy Crawly probably comes closest to resembling John Carpenter's version of The Thing, but lacks the older film's attention to detail.
While this may sound condescending, Creepy Crawly is a Thai movie made for the mainstream Thai audience, meaning not to expect more than a diverting hour and a half of entertainment. One of the nicer performances is by Chanidapa Pongsilpipat as one of the hotel maids. At one point, her face is in close-up. There is no cutting to what she is looking at but Chanidapa conveys the sense of horror with her eyes slowly widening. The Thai television star with the anglicized name of Mike Angelo provides a few martial arts moves. The most information I could find on the cast and crew was under the title, The One Hundred at themoviedb.org.
]]>Emanuele Crialese - 2022
Music Box Films BD Region A
The title literally translates as "the immensity". That is easy enough to figure out. Inspired by the director's own life, especially his relationship with his mother, the immensity is the difficult work of living one's own life. Penelope Cruz plays the mother, Clara, an upper middle class housewife who finds ways of making life with her three children fun, and whose generosity of spirit allows room for her children to express themselves freely. The infrequently seen father, Felice, is a traditionalist, clamping down where he can on the idiosyncrasies of the family. The eldest child, in the early years of adolescence, lives as much of his life as a boy, although within the family he is still address with his female birth name. The film takes place in Rome in the early 1970s, roughly a decade after the economic boom years, which still left parts of the population untouched and in generational poverty.
The son is the proxy for the filmmaker who identified himself as a transgender last year. A side note about the name of the character - birth name is Adriana or Adri, but he names himself Andrea. Due to Andrea, a common first name for Italian men, being occasionally misgendered by those who only associate the name with women, the subtitles have the son's name rendered as Andrew. I choose to refer to the character as Andrea.
At a time when there was less understanding or language for gender dysphoria, Andrea is allowed to present himself as a boy in his appearance, save for one unhappy moment when he is forced to wear a dress for a family portrait. A glimpse indicates he is already wearing some kind of chest binder. Andrea is attracted to Sara, a girl of similar age, about 13, but is in a brief panic when it appears that Sara is about to initiate some kind of sexual relationship. Sara lives with the kind of community of working poor that were romanticized by Vittorio De Sica in the 1950s, living in shacks in field separated from Andrea's apartment by thick field of reeds. Clara forbids Andrea from going across the field, revealing a sense of class prejudice. A final shot of the shantytown cleared for a new apartment building is a reminder of the past being erased for what is suppose to be a promising future.
What Crialese means by immensity is also indicated in an interview - "To look within is to try to change individually, instead of wanting to change others. Breaking free from the addiction of wanting to dominate the other, resisting the compulsion of having, of appearing and perhaps trying to focus a little more on being. Abandoning classifications of gender, race and sexual orientation, because they do not define us, they actually limit us and create divisive barriers; we are what we are in perpetual change. Human nature is inherently unpredictable and immense."
Crialese likes to work with non-professional actors. Andrea is played by Luana Giuliani, chosen by Crialese who was scouting girls who played traditionally male sports. Giuliani races motorcycles in real life, making her life somewhat similar to that of the biker girls in the recent French film, Rodeo. Giuliani holds her own sharing the screen with the established powerhouse Penelope Cruz. Uncertain if she is a human or an alien from another planet, the shot that introduces Andrea almost convinces the viewer that she does have the ability to fly.
]]>Ann Oren - 2022
Oscilloscope
The title is an equestrian term, basically having a horse trot in place. Eva, who becomes so horse identified, is unable to stay in place, compulsively in motion. Ann Oren's film is made up of ellipses in the beginning. The various seemingly unrelated pieces do come together to create a narrative that at certain points share some of the themes of David Cronenberg. Eva's body mutates, but Oren dispenses with any kind of direct pseudo-scientific explanations.
Eva is working as a foley artist, attempting to create the sounds of a horse to be used in a television commercial. She is substituting for her transgender sister, Zara, currently a patient in a mental hospital. The commercial is for a psychotropic drug called Equali. Even the name of the drug is a kind of pun with horseback riding compared to mood enhancement. Eva tries various methods of creating realistic sounds of both the horse and its trot. The itch on her lower back is the horse tail that she grows. Rather than be horrified by this mutation, Eva lets the tail grow long enough to be seen under her dresses.
The botanist, Novak, seen in the the film's beginning sequence is introduced studying slides of various plants. When he explains some of his work to Eva, Novak discusses a fern that has both male and female spores, concluding that the concept of gender in plants can not be understood in human terms. While not stated as such, this scene raises questions as to whether there could be a genetic component to gender dysphoria as with Zara, or if Eva's horse tail is the physical manifestation of psychological imbalance. Novak caresses Eva's tail and the two make love. Eva's identity as a female is called to question with a close-up of her shaved tail, like that of many mammals with a shape resembling that of a penis.
Piaffe is the German based Ann Oren's first narrative feature. The film grew from her short film, Passage which was about a foley artist creating the sound for a film about a dressage horse. That film starred Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, who appears as Zara in Piaffe. It seems too coincidental that Eva is played by another Simone, the Mexican actress Simone Bucio. That sense of coincidence repeats itself knowing that Bucio appeared in the film The Untamed, in which women are seduced into sex with an unearthly creature. Shots of legs, those of Eva and horses, get repeated. Multiple viewings might be needed to understand the use of dressing the main cast in clothing of solid colors. While Piaffe has been released in NYC and Los Angeles, it is getting a very slow rollout nationwide in select theaters.
]]>Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, etc. - 1956-1968
Icarus Films Home Video BD Region A Two-disc set
To describe these nineteen short films as being part of the Nouvelle Vague is a bit misleading. What unifies this group of films is that they were all produced by Pierre Braunberger, who also produced several features by several of the directors. In the accompanying booklet, Braunberger is quoted as saying that he financed the short films to test the young directors prior to backing such films as Shoot the Piano Player and My Life to Live.
Along with the filmmakers who have been associated with either Cahier du Cinema or the Left Bank group, there are several directors either peripherally associated with the Nouvelle Vague because they were making films at the same time, as well as one film by a total outlier, the African-American Melvin Van Peebles. The other outsider is Jeanne Barbillon, though her short film stars Bernadette Lafont, providing a link to the other filmmakers. What little I could find out a Barbillon indicates that she directed on television film, but primarily worked as as Assistant Director for French television. It should be noted that the two films by Alain Resnais, "All the World's Memory" and "The Song of the Styrene" are also part of the previously released set of five shorts by Resnais.
What is frustrating, at least for me, was while the booklet provides an overview of Pierre Braunberger, some of the non-narrative films could have used some additional information for context. Agnes Varda's "O Saisons, O Chateaux" appears to be a combination travelogue and fashion shoot. With "In Memory of Rock" by Francois Reichenbach, born in 1921, and "The Fifteen Year Old Widows" by Jean Rouch, born in 1917, these two documentarians seem bewildered by youth and youth culture of the early 1960s.
Jacques Rivette's "Fool's Mate" (1958) might be considered the first all-star Nouvelle Vague film, both in front and behind the camera. The screenplay was co-written with Claude Chabrol and cinematographer Charles Bitsch, with Jean-Marie Straub serving as Assistant Director. One of the lead actors is Jean-Claude Brialy, who also appears in some of the other shorts in the collection, and would star in several features. Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol are briefly seen wandering in and out of frame in a party scene. The only mystery for me is why the delightful Virginie Vitry has such a short career that ended in 1960. The title comes from the relationship between a husband and wife presented as a chess game.
I would not have imagined a collaboration between Maurice Pialat and Claude Berri with what would seem to be opposing sensibilities, but "Janine" has Pialat working from Berri's screenplay. The story of two men unknowingly spending part of a late night talking about the same woman, ends on a note of wry humor. There is also fun with Godard's, "All the Boys are Called Patrick", with a screenplay by Eric Rohmer, with Jean-Claude Brialy in the title role. Godard's short is almost a mirror image of "Janine", though both films share an ending with the women getting the upper hand. There is about six hours of viewing altogether with the two discs - best to be seen a couple of films at a time rather than binging.
]]>Birth / Rebirth
Laura Moss - 2023
IFC/Shudder
At times I felt that there was too much underlining of the differences between the two main characters in Birth/Rebirth. Celie, the obstetric nurse, is empathetic. Rose, professionally known as Dr. Caspar, a pathologist, almost totally clinical. Celie works with birth, Rose with death. The two, who both work at the same Bronx hospital, are united after Rose essentially kidnaps Celie's six year old daughter, who officially died of a sudden bacterial meningitis infection. The two women create a synergy based on secrecy and need. Celie wants to keep her daughter alive as the act of a mother's unconditional love. For Rose, the daughter is a human guinea pig, proof of the ability to regenerate cells and restore life.
This is a little movie exploring some big ideas. There are a couple of moments that we remind viewers that they are indeed watching a horror movie. It is also possible that some of the male viewers may be squeamish about what pregnant women go through, before and during childbirth. Moss, who also co-wrote the screenplay, was inspired by Frankenstein, and the reborn, as it were, child has her moment as a little monster. The film is visually dark, many scenes are dimly illuminated with it difficult to really discern what is happening on screen.
Moss has also has her actresses look as plain as possible, making Judy Reyes and especially Marin Ireland almost unrecognizable from their previous screen images. One of the more interesting creative choices was to incorporate songs by some lesser known and untraditional female musicians and singers, most frequently the experimental group Saada Bonaire. Marin Ireland's character of Rose is certainly intriguing with her view of the world as her laboratory for whatever experiment she has in mind at the moment.
We Kill for Love
Anthony Penta - 2023
Yellow Veil Films
Taking off primarily from the academic writings of Linda Ruth Williams, Anthony Penta takes a look at the films gathered under the label of erotic thriller. These would be American films mostly made for the home video and cable market from the mid-1980s, dribbling out by the end of the century. There are the few mainstream theatrical films cited, notably Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. What we have here is an exploration of what has been a critically ignored genre that comes at a time when the depiction of sex in cinema is the current hot topic. That the Criterion Collection channel has also presented a series of several of the theatrical films has added a sense of legitimacy.
At 163 minutes, you might think everything has been covered, or uncovered as the case may be, but Penta had an earlier version that was five hours long. Those looking for clips of conventionally attractive women with little or no clothing will find those here, but this mostly a rambling history with interviews with film historians, including Williams, filmmakers like prolific Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski, and actors including Dan Anderson, Monique Parent and actor turned producer Andrew Stevens. What the more serious cinephile may find of interest, and possibly dispute, are the genre roots, primarily film noir but also the gothic romance.
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray would probably be horrified to know that Double Indemnity may have inspired a genre of films with titles like Bedroom Eyes and Animal Instincts. There is some similarity between the femme fatale of film noir and the women of the erotic thriller, with the women now more powerful and independent. The films are described by one person as "guys, girls and guns". Not discussed here is a closer examination of women and guns, both as an erotic image and the implications of the gun as a phallic symbol. This is especially vexing as Penta briefly brings up the question of audience identification, suggesting not to rely on conventional assumptions. Several reasons are given for the erotic thriller no longer being viable, one being the easy availability of scenes of real sex privately viewed over the internet.
As an additional supplement, I suggest checking out Sonny Bunch's interview with Penta at the website, The Bulwark. To say that the erotic thriller is dead or disappeared is an exaggeration. While the number of films is a small fraction of what was produced in the past, there are more recent variations, often outside of Hollywood such as Alain Corneau's Love Crimes, Chan-wook Park's The Handmaiden and Francois Ozon's Double Lover. So maybe We Kill for Love will still not convince you to see Stripped to Kill, even with the Museum of Modern Art presenting a retrospective of films directed by Katt Shea. If nothing else, I defy anyone not to chuckle at the comic improvisations of B-movie staple Ross Hagen.
]]>Duan Qiao
Li Yu - 2022
I hope that in the near future, someone will write a comprehensive look at neo-noir films from mainland China. What is interesting to me is that this is a genre that represents some of the more interesting work in contemporary Chinese films, a overshadowed it would seem by the special effects blockbusters that usually make up the imported films seen in the west, as well as the patriotic epics extolling the heroism of Communist party members primarily during World War II. That what is seen by U.S. viewers is scattershot at best, a handful of films that play the festival and arthouse circuit.
The Fallen Bridge follows classic noir tropes. A bridge spontaneously collapses in a small city. During the excavation, a skeleton is discovered to have been buried in the cement. It is revealed that the skeleton is of a man missing for eight years. The man's daughter is certain that the deceased, her father, has been murdered, and seeks revenge. The young woman is assisted by a man who claims to have witnessed her father and two men just before the father's death, but can not go to the police because he is also a wanted man. Corruption in the upper levels of the city government are uncovered.
With the stricter rules in place for filmmakers, Chinese neo-noir is similar to classic film noir in that no bad deed goes unpunished. Ms. Li, who started as a documentarian, begins the film with what appear to be a series of shots taken from surveillance camera, with images of the collapse of the bridge from several angles and locations. This first series of shots very convincingly appears to be real documentary footage. The shift to narrative involves a sleight of hand as the rest of the film appears to have been shot on video tape, the visual quality similar to television shows that are presented as being live.
Li has also discussed the title as referring to the broken relationships within in the film. The young woman's most stable relationship is with her godfather, referred to as an uncle. She is otherwise estranged from her mother. Family relationships are broken or absent among the other characters. In the search for the murderer, additional murders take place as part of the coverup. Some reviews of The Fallen Bridge have complained that the film lacks suspense because the identity of the killer is fairly obvious. I think what Li is more interested in is her heroine's journey that takes her through the marginalized parts of Chinese society, most pointedly the modes of survival of ex-wives and mistresses.
The Fallen Bridge is currently available on several VOD platforms.
]]>Herbert Brenon - 1923
Milestone BD Regions ABC
My first time watching The Spanish Dancer and I am thinking this is another fanciful silent film about an exotic time and place, and yes, Pola Negri is attractive, but this looks like just another period piece taking place in early 17th Century Spain. And then the action moves from the countryside to Madrid, with a huge citywide celebration. The set itself is huge, with a colossal cathedral in the back, with rows of multistory buildings. And literally hundreds of extras either in period dress or costumes, clogging the streets, many doing their own dances if not watching Negri perform in the middle of the square. There is also the constant shower of confetti in every shot. One guy is wrestling an actual bear. Another guy is wearing a skeleton costume. I had to wonder how Herbert Brenon and cinematographer James Wong Howe coordinated everything. I was awestruck by the spectacle.
The Spanish Dancer begins with a prologue stating that the film takes place three hundred years before the film was made, and indeed, 1623 was the year when King Philip IV of Spain (Wallace Beery) posed for a painting by Diego Velazquez. That event is reenacted in the film. Negri plays Maritana, a gypsy fortune teller also famed for her dancing. Through a series of circumstances, Maritana encounters Don Caesar, a recently disgraced nobleman, and later rescues the King Philip's son from a runaway horse. Maritana is invited by the Queen to perform for the court during the celebration. In Madrid, Maritana is pursued by Don Salluste (Adolphe Menjou), and has her honor defended by Don Caesar. Goaded into having a public sword fight by Salluste, Caesar is arrested for breaking the law. Add to that palace intrigue between the king and queen.
Fortunately, not all of this is done as a serious enterprise. Much of the credit should probably go to Antonio Moreno as Don Caesar. He brings out the sense of humor of a man who does not take himself too seriously. In a latter scene, Caesar arranges to die by firing squad rather than hanging, but not before having a celebratory dinner in which he gets his executioners drunk. There is even one visual gag with Negri wearing a formal dress for the first time, one with a very wide hoop underneath as was the style, requiring her to walk sideways through a door.
Although Pola Negri and Herbert Brenon reportedly did not get along, Negri's performance shares some similarities with other Brenon actresses. Especially in the introductory scenes of her skipping through the countryside, Negri seems to anticipate Betty Bronson in Peter Pan (1924) and Clara Bow in Dancing Mothers (1926).
The commentary track is unusual as it has been split between film historian Scott Eyeman and dance historian Naima Prevots. While the history of choreographer Ernest Belcher is of interest, both specifically to The Spanish Dancer and as part of early Hollywood, there is a conflict in listening to Prevot discuss Belcher's work on the silent Phantom of the Opera while watching Brenon's film. I suspect Scott Eyeman could have easily filled the full running time himself, but packs a lot of information within the hour that he has with history of the making of The Spanish Dancer. There is also an interview with composer Bill Ware, best known as a jazz vibraphonist. Ware's score straddles traditional movie music with jazz and avant-garde improvisation, performed by a small band.
The blu-ray itself is sourced from a 2012 restoration by the Dutch Eye Filmmuseum from four different surviving prints. Based on the film script, the restored version is 95% complete. Some portions still are damaged, but still watchable. A very brief extra shows excerpts to compare the surviving prints with the restored version.
]]>Les Inconnus dans la maison
Henri Decoin - 1942
KL Sudio Classics BD Region A
It has been four years since Henri Decoin's Razzia sur la Chnouf was made available on home video in the U.S. With this new release only the second from a lengthy filmography, Decoin remains very much a subject for further research as Andrew Sarris might have put it. Even though Decoin is not named among his French director peers as being part of "cinema de papa", Strangers in the House comes close to being part of the so-called tradition of quality. The film is a combination murder mystery/courthouse drama from a novel by Georges Simenon. The screenplay was by Henri-Georges Clouzot, still relatively early in his career. Even though the film was produced during the Nazi occupation of France, there appears to be what might be read as subversive moments in what otherwise appears to be an apolitical thriller interjected with some comic moments.
The film begins with off-screen narrator, Pierre Fresnay, and an overly poetic description of a small town during one very rainy night. The former lawyer, Loursat, and his daughter, are eating dinner. The narrator points out that the dour looking Loursat has let his legal practice slide along with care for his large house, ever since his wife left him eighteen years earlier. It is not stated, but implied that the wife left soon after the daughter, Nicole, was born. Loursat has settled into a life of indifference, remaining in the house, chain smoking and drinking whole bottles of wine. An unknown single cracking sound causes Loursat and Nicole to explore the dilapidated upper floor of the house where the body of a dead man is found. The biggest mystery is who killed the local gangster known as Big Louis. The suspects are a group of young men in their late teens, a quartet that also counts Nicole as part of their gang. The title refers not only to the various people, known and unknown, that made their way into the Loursat house, but also the strained relationship between Loursat and Nicole.
What unfolds is a series of connections between cousins and various in-laws that ties everyone in the trial that makes up the final third of the film. The gang members petty criminality is more of an act of rebellion against filial piety. Loursat is sufficiently roused from his state of constant inebriation to act as the defense lawyer for the young man railroaded into being convicted for the murder of Big Louis. Loursat's socially conscious speech to the jury seems shoehorned in as a way to justify the film's existence, but is only a slight detour to the resolution of the mystery and Loursat's return to his dissolute self.
Strangers in the House stars Raimu, the French actor best known for his role as Cesar in the 1930s film version of Marcel Pagnol's "Marseilles" trilogy. Howard Berger and Nathaniel Thompson provide a commentary track that discusses French films during the occupation and courtroom dramas. The blu-ray was sourced from Gaumont's 2K restoration made in 2018.
]]>Le jour et l'heure
Rene Clement - 1963
KL Studio Classics BD Region A
The Day and the Hour combines two recurring themes for Rene Clement, the French resistance of World War II, and relationships of characters who may hiding their true agendas. The film was made at a time when wartime thrillers were still very much part of the cinematic mainstream. With dialogue in both French and English, plus some German, produced by MGM, this was the kind of international film made to appeal to an audience beyond the art house. The Oscar winning French actress, Simone Signoret, alternated between French and English language productions. Stuart Whitman, mostly known for starring in action films, was at his career peak. Having received an Oscar nomination as a reformed pedophile in The Mark (1961), Whitman probably saw working with Rene Clement as another chance to expand artistically. Reggie Nalder, with his skull-like face, shows up in a mostly dialogue free performance as a Gestapo agent. The elements are all here, yet it does not always gel.
Taking place primarily in Paris, Whitman plays an officer whose plane has been shot down. On the run with two other Allied soldiers, he is trusting of a network of resistance members and sympathizers. Due to circumstances, he is reluctantly taken in by Signoret, staying in her house for a couple of days until he can make a trip to the southern countryside and eventually Spain. In the meantime, Reggie Nalder auspiciously appears, casting his eyes on everyone. For a guy being pursued by Nazis, Whitman is hardly discrete, speaking English aloud in public and even going on a bender one night. The day soon comes when he is to take a train from Paris. Signoret, feeling protective, but also concerned about her own safety, goes along on the journey.
The best moments are saved for the train. Sardines have more standing room than these train passengers. Whitman has to push his way through to reach Signoret at the other end of one of the cars. Nalder squeezes through in pursuit of the two. Clement and cinematographer Henri Decae manage to film a series of traveling shots, the camera moving backwards as the characters face the screen. The passengers are all seen tightly within the Scope screen. The sense of claustrophobia, the lack of empty space, is almost overwhelming. And knowing how bulky those cameras were makes the scene a technical marvel. That scene is representative of how critic Dudley Andrew has assessed Clement's work: ". . . Clement's experiments are always limited. Technical problems continue to interest him, but he has never relinquished his belief that a film must be well-crafted in the traditional sense of that term. This is what must always distinguish him from the New Wave filmmakers with whom he otherwise has something in common."
There are no sparks between Signoret and Whitman. Even as she settled into middle age, Signoret was still able to charm Oskar Werner and the audience in Ship of Fools (1965). The closest Whitman came to being a romantic lead was with Maria Schell in The Mark, which having been filmed independently in Ireland feature a code busting scene of the two sharing a bed. In The Day and the Hour, declarations of love fall flat.
If The Day and the Hour does not rank among Rene Clement's better films, the train sequence assures that it is not a total misfire. Of interest also are brief appearances by Michel Piccoli and Marcel Bozzuffi in small roles. Future directors C;laude Pinoteau and Costa-Gavras served as Assistant Directors. Costa-Gavras would soon make his own thriller set on a train, The Sleeping Car Murders. While the music score is mostly traditional, it was composed by jazz musician Claude Bolling.
Samm Deighan's commentary track mostly places The Day and the Hour within the context of World War II films, touching on the history of the French resistance. The blu-ray is sourced from a 2020 4K restoration commissioned by the French studio Gaumont.
]]>Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile / The Slasher is the Sex Maniac
Roberto Montero - 1972
Every once in a while, someone makes a post about watching the cinematic equivalent to comfort food. For myself, this means checking on Tubi. The brief commercial breaks do not disturb me, especially as the film returns to a couple of seconds prior to the break so no part of the film is lost. While it is often surprising how many good and even great films pop up on Tubi, what I like to seek out are previously unseen or unknown gialli or Italian westerns. I can not explain my attraction to Italian genre films from the 1970s. Both genres were considered critically disreputable at the time with the possible exceptions of Sergio Leone and Dario Argento. Both genres have gone under considerable critical reevaluation in the past fifty years. In the intervening years, the trashiness of the Italian thrillers has become a feature and not a bug.
I have not read Farley Granger's autobiography, but I would not be surprised if he never mentioned this film. After starring in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Luchino Visconti, why bother? Not only was Granger's stardom quite diminished even though he was only 47 years old, but the U.S. distribution was by William Mishkin, a specialist in grindhouse releases. Granger appears to have a ragged hair cut or a bad toop, plus a mustache in his role as a police inspector. A man dressed in black, his face obscured by a black stocking, is murdering the unfaithful wives of the elite in an unnamed city. The women have their throats cut. The killer leaves photographs of the women, nude with their respective lovers. The men in the photographs have their faces scratched out. As these things go, So Sweet, So Dead is relatively restrained with the violence save for close-ups of slashed throats, but generous on the nudity with actresses Sylva Koscina, Susan Scott and Femi Benussi.
There are the expected red herrings, misdirection and J & B Scotch product placement. There are also a couple of scenes involving the daughter of one of the victims where it seemed like no one noticed that they made no sense. In one scene, the daughter has returned from school at the same morning time as her father is leaving the house to go work. The followup to the scene of the daughter witnessing her mother's murder made me wonder how no one on the set noticed its incongruity. The clues all seem to point to a man whose job is to reconstruct and repair the bodies of the victims. He is played by Luciano Rossi, a supporting player in many genre films. Rossi physically looks somewhat like the guy you would hire if you wanted Klaus Kinski but had to hire a cheaper actor. Rossi's English dubbed voice sounds at times like the cartoon version of Peter Lorre. Rossi is so creepy and deranged that only someone who has never seen a movie would peg him as the mad slasher. A surprising aside, Luciano Rossi is the subject of a book written by horror film specialist Kier-La Janisse.
What little I know about director Roberto Montero is found in Wikipedia and IMDb. Like many Italian directors, his career was largely dictated by whatever genre was in favor at the time. The only bit of artistic flash here is some color tinting in a flashback. Montero may not be in the same league as Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi, but that should not be held against him. Not all comfort food is of nutritional value. Neither should all movies need to have any significance beyond their existence.
]]>Alice Winocour - 2022
Music Box Film DVD
Hands are a key part in several films by Alice Winocour. The title character in Augustine is a young epileptic woman with a clawed left hand. After she takes a serious tumble, Augustine realizes her hand is no longer paralyzed and in addition to moving her fingers, she is apparently cured of her epilepsy. She is last seen running away from the medical institution which was as enlightened as might be expected in 19th Century France, that both improved her condition but also kept her imprisoned as a subject for experimental treatment. In Disorder, the right fist of the veteran soldier, used with powerful force to fatally punch a would-be kidnapper in the face, also forces the soldier to distance himself from the woman he has been hired to protect.
In Revoir Paris, Mia searches for the unknown man who held her hand in the darkness, among the people hoping to survive a terrorist attack at a restaurant. When Mia makes love with Tommy, another survivor of the attack, Winocour films close-ups of the hands of her actors caressing each other, exploring their respective wounds.
The French title translates as "Paris Memories" which not only sounds sappy but is misleading. Winocour's film was inspired by Bataclan shooting, one of several coordinated terrorist attacks that took place in Paris in 2015. Winocour's brother was a survivor of the theater massacre that left 90 people dead. Most of the film is about Mia's recovering of her memories of what happened that night. While not always signified as such, several of the fragmented memories are from Mia's point of view. The terrorists are only visible as partial black shapes. There are brief bursts of light illuminating the bodies on the restaurant floor. At one point, Winocour breaks to have the Senegalese cook, the man Mia is looking for, tell his story. The fragmented memories has its literal iteration in the form of a postcard, a small detail in one of Monet's Water Lillies paintings, the link a young woman has with her parents who were among the restaurant victims.
While the film does not discuss the identity or motivation of the terrorists, it is not entirely apolitical. By breaking the narrative to show the cook's point of view, Winocour touches upon how the Parisian restaurant industry depends of immigrant labor, some of which is extralegal. Mia connects with other survivors of the attack both as a means of remembering that which has been forgotten or blocked out, but also to verify her own memories. The psychological wounds such that even after several months, Mia finds it diffucult to resume her former life. Mia moves to a friend's apartment located across the street from the Place de la Republique. Winocour recreates the gathering of people who have annually gathered to memorialize the Bataclan shooting since 2015.
The DVD comes with interviews with Winocour and stars Virginie Efira and Benoit Magimel, plus a post screening discussion from the Cannes Film Festival of 2022.
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