CinePete Reviews

The Lighthouse (I) (2019)

Way offshore

[6/10 · 5 November 2019]

Two wickies (lighthouse keepers) on a life-denying pile of rocks somewhere off the New England coast become subject to a wild hallucinatory experience, or, should I say, many of them. The mainland is far away, and a storm rises, and all hold on civilized sanity loudly and rapidly disintegrates.

Such is The Lighthouse, with narrow restricted focus on two men in almost endless antagonism. But we don't know who these two men are. The slender backstory comes in bits and pieces, but we never get enough definite knowledge of their characters to either empathize or sympathize with their most singular situation. We look on as in a scientific experiment, detached, uninvolved.

The Lighthouse is fraught with dense obscure symbolism. I thought of Ingmar Bergman's visionary fantasies in the late 1960s -- there is something Nordic, cold, and perplexing in this apparent fable. There are mysteries never solved, a mystical dimension to the actual light that is never explained, a scary mermaid and ravenous seagulls of a quite alarming nature. All narrative logic, time scheme and clearly laid-out plot structure are -- as in a true visionary experience -- pushed aside.

The Lighthouse offers two splendid performances from two very dedicated guys, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. They emit every single line as if they really believed in the material. These are committed performances, and they overpower the entire film. There is a rage deep inside both men that boils up like the sea around them. These inner passions are unfettered, far from mainland reason and thinking -- and they surge in motiveless frenzy for almost two intense hours.

This is an old-salt sea story, half-legend, half-horror and in the imagination of creator Robert Eggers and his cameraman Jarin Blaschke, the basis for a real fireworks of possibilities. It's experimental, and daring -- elaborate black-and-white photography and confined aspect ratio give the film a distinct visual look.

Overall, it's a bit tedious after a while, despite some compelling aspects. For the most part The Lighthouse, is too far out to sea.

Judy (II) (2019)

Closing Nights

[8/10 · 27 October 2019]

Renee Zellweger gives a show-stopping performance as Judy Garland. It takes me back to Marion Cotillard's work as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose -- and another Best Actress Oscar seems imminent here.

Renee's depiction of Judy has practically every trait we associate with the legendary star. Just when we think her resources have been exhausted, another small gesture or nuance uncovers the volatile, tormented Judy and the tortured addiction that now threatens the closing nights of her career.

Judy may really be a story about a mother trying to reclaim her children. It is 1968, and Joey & Lorna Luft are in custody of an unflinching ex-husband. Garland is desperate for money to pay off debts, and regain some degree of authority over her family.

Her determination to complete a 5-week engagement at Talk of the Town in London is the pushing drive of the movie. For the sake of the children, and the recovery of her own motherhood, Judy pushes herself to the very limits.

It makes for a rather exhausting movie. The film is strictly without humor or any kind of relief. Judy is scrutinized with a kind of merciless gaze by the camera, often in close shot, clinging to every passionate word and agonized expression. All this arguably becomes a bit too intense for a two hour movie.

And the film does not adequately fill out the side stories. We don't really get more than a cursory glance at Liza, or at husband #5 (Finn Wittrock), and not quite enough of the early Judy (well played by Darci Shaw) in flashbacks to MGM studios in 1939.

But the film belongs to Renee from first to last. By the very end, when Judy does an "Over the Rainbow" number (the one we've been waiting for), it all seems to come from an unattainable dreamland far away. Yes, there is a dangerous tilt towards maudlin feel-good stuff at this final point, but Renee reminds us that there was, for fleeting moments anyway, real dream-magic at the core of Judy's legend.

The King (I) (2019)

No Majesty, No Chivalry

[7/10 · 21 October 2019]

It is totally opposite to its predecessors, the Olivier and Branagh versions of Shakespeare's Henry V. In The King, there is no majesty or nobility, neither in kingship nor in war. Collaborators Joel Edgerton and David Michod give their film strong anti-war and anti-monarchy sentiments, re-imagining the literary tradition in an unflattering way.

The pace is slow and the decor stark, drained of colour and vitality, without any pretense to rousing historical spectacle. Most of what occurs seems little more than drudgery -- the drudgery of office, of diplomacy, of battle. Even in speech, long pauses between lines make it seem that even to articulate a thought requires effort, and talk is a kind of drudgery in itself.

The odd, deliberate miscasting of Timothee Chalamet gives the soldier-king a rather startling effect. He isn't given many dramatic high points, but we still keep watching Timothee's pallid Henry in his various predicaments. He is enigmatic, even compelling sometimes, a misplaced boy-king stumbling through history.

The King has a cold, Nordic look, maybe like a Carl Dreyer film. We expect Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) to enliven the general spirit, but the famous buffoon here is merely a dry advisor to the king. Any lightening of mood comes from Robert Pattinson as a clumsy, loony Dauphin of France, and Lily-Rose Depp as the insightful and superior Princess Catharine.

The Battle of Agincourt itself is a superb mud-bowl, with armoured knights clashing blindly at one another, filmed in sharp lines and grey tones like a medieval etching.

In its own fashion, The King is engrossing, maybe even once in a while a bit exciting. If the film's intent is to depict a cheerless, unheroic age, it does so well enough. As a dark meditation on royalty and militarism the film more or less succeeds on its own terms.

The Trial (1962)

In the Labyrinth

[8/10 · 10 October 2019]

It's either labyrinthine or elephantine (maybe both), depending upon your taste. Orson Welles turns Franz Kafka's novel into a hallucinatory psychodrama, bewildering, yes, alternately tedious and brilliant. But it's hard to pull away.

The Trial takes us inside an agitated, anxious mind. It belongs to bank clerk Josef K. who inexplicably becomes embroiled in a legal wrangle, the nature of which is beyond anyone's grasp. We're in a surreal, absurdist landscape, like Waiting for Godot, with suggestions of Michelangelo Antonioni. Huge fantastical backdrops reduce K to insignificance - he is a mere initial in the grand scheme of things.

Anthony Perkins gives a single-note, atonal performance. He's a mechanism all wound-up, despairing, tossed about like a toy. True to Kafka's K, Perkins is nervous and cowed, yet he still demands to know the truth.

This is his fatal error -- he demands to know. Josef K stands up to his accusers, and makes demands. Never throughout the film - no, not even at the very end -- does K. submit to the Unknowable Authority.

Welles himself plays The Advocate, the man supposedly in charge, but even he denies any access or real understanding of the Law. The system is so intrinsically corrupt that no case can ever come to actual trial. Josef K is one of many, it seems, who undergo a persecution which can be neither identified nor resolved.

There is Cold War hysteria here, reflected in the jittery editing and rattling dialogue -- everybody is on edge, overcome with unspecified anxiety. In the era of the Communist witch hunts, Welles gives Kafka's vision the feel of the contemporary world.

Arguably,The Trial often baffles the spectator, and some languorous sequences require not a little patience. But the visual dynamics are extraordinary. The penultimate Tintorelli sequence -- with big-eyed little girls in pursuit of K. through distorted passageways -- may be one of the most compelling sequences Welles has ever done.

Little Big Man (1970)

A Film Truly of its Era

[8/10 · 7 October 2019]

The novel is big - there's nothing little about it. The film version of Little Big Man has difficulty in funnelling Thomas Berger's far-reaching epic of the American west into a two hour and 20 minute movie. Reportedly, director Arthur Penn intended Little Big Man as a three-hour film, but studios altered plans when long epics faltered at the box-office in the late 1960s.

We are left with a disparate, sometimes clumsy final half hour - a crucial part - of an otherwise highly entertaining, politically insightful movie. Penn is famous for his endings (Alice's Restaurant, Bonnie and Clyde and Night Moves, in particular), and the faltering of Little Big Man in the last reel still disappoints.

The film fared poorly at the 1970 Academy Awards, with only a single nomination for actor Chief Dan George, a sign, perhaps, of the discomfort of the times. Little Big Man had an uneasy kind of acceptance. It is notably anti-Establishment, with daring, revisionist sentiments about war and history.

It is all, of course, part-frontier, part-Vietnam. Admirably, Penn and writer Calder Willingham do not force the allegory: the Asian actress selected to play Sunshine, the massacre of the native village by Yankee soldiers -- the impulses towards genocide, the glorification of Cheyennes as "human beings", the smashing of social values of the white frontier -- all these mark Little Big Man as a movie genuinely of its era.

As General Custer, blond-haired Richard Mulligan, glorious in white, more fop than militarist, updates the Errol Flynn prototype from the 1940s. The "victory in defeat" motif clearly marks the earlier They Died With Their Boots On and, for that matter, John Wayne's 1960 epic The Alamo. But not here: such sentiments in the post-hippie era belong to an earlier tradition.

Dustin Hoffmann, fresh off Midnight Cowboy, pairs adroitly with Chief Dan George as son to spiritual father Old Lodge Skins, whose half-bemused, half-puzzled view of life gives a warm heart to the film.

We can still appreciate the film's respectful attitude towards Native Americans, who are complex and layered in representation. We relate warmly to Younger Bear, Little Horse, Burns Red in the Sun, and Sunshine, all complementing Chief Dan George's wonderful patriarch figure. This, after all, is the founding intent of the movie and, in this respect, Little Big Man admirably succeeds.

The Long Voyage Home (1940)

One of the Best O'Neill Adaptations

[8/10 · 30 September 2019]

Dark in tone, primarily enclosed on sound-stage, no major stars -- and Eugene O'Neill not an easy transfer from stage to screen -- this project does not have much working in its favour. But there's a great team at work here -- cameraman Gregg Toland, writer Dudley Nichols, director John Ford -- and an Irish-inflected ensemble, much like a troupe of players transported from Dublin's Abbey Theatre.

The Long Voyage Home compresses four short O'Neill plays into a single narrative, updated from World War I to the onset of World War II. The plays have been softened in language, and the overriding doom-and despair motif is lightened with bits of Irish-style shenanigans. Still, the considerable fidelity to O'Neill's text is one of the pleasures of viewing.

We are seldom outside the studio soundstage, but even with process shots and projections, the filmmakers still create the illusion of the open sea. The storm sequences have considerable impact, even for the contemporary viewer. Some sequences here are worthy of Ford's earlier spectacle The Hurricane, albeit on a smaller scale.

Toland's striking camerawork, with its deep focus and Expressionist lighting, gives the film a foreboding, unsettling quality, well suited to the precarious nature of the wartime voyage from the West Indies to England.

There's a likeable interplay among the actors. I get a bit tired of John Quelan with his whining falsetto brogue, and to an extent smart aleck Barry Fitzgerald with his supercilious chin. But I engage easily with Thomas Mitchell's bossy, streetwise good nature, and especially Ward Bond, who, contrary to his usual gruff, rough-edged manner, gets some soulful moments as the unlucky sailor named Yank.

Youthful John Wayne is surprisingly right as the Swedish sailor on his long voyage home, perhaps the pivotal member of this crew, attached to one another for better or for worse. He and dockside bar-maid Mildred Natwick share a few poignant moments in the last part of the film.

From a modern perspective, some sentiments and attitudes are incorrectly expressed, but in the period, Long Voyage Home admirably gives O'Neill a measure of 'realism' and respect from Hollywood. It is the only O'Neill film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (and 5 other awards).

Mogambo (1953)

Ava Takes Africa

[6/10 · 9 August 2019]

Mogambo, John Ford's remake of a 1932 film Red Dust, is transposed from a Singapore rubber plantation to a safari camp in Africa, and it's only mildly successful, although apparently it was a major hit on first release. It's overlong, politically naive in its imperialist notion of Africa, with little spark or appeal to the contemporary viewer.

Surprisingly, Ava Gardner pretty much makes the film her own. She's an American socialite, newly arrived by mistake in the camp, where she asserts herself into the male community with unapologetic brashness. Ava dispenses with considerable delight all the protocols of 1950's gender and decorum.

We have seen her kind in other John Ford films -- there are shades of Maureen O'Hara here, as well as Claire Trevor in Stagecoach, Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, Anne Bancroft in Seven Women.

Ava has a rival in the elegant Grace Kelly, playing the respectable wife of a British researcher. The core of the narrative is their rivalry for the affections of Clark Gable, and they shift our sympathies away from the drab, less appealing men in the movie. They are given much more dimension than the standardized male characters. Gable himself has little vitality compared with his female co-stars, both of whom won Oscar nominations for their performances.

But it's a big empty canvas. Contemporary widescreen and on-location filming give little energy or sense of spectacle into the flaccid story line. Mogambo, even if the title suggests the wilds of Africa, is essentially a story of Europeans - safari and hunting adventure have very little to do with anything. The wild animals obviously are spliced into the film from different film strips, and the thrilling jungle adventure that we presume will happen, never does.

A Private War (2018)

Uncompromising

[8/10 · 7 August 2019]

The film does not pretend to be a war thriller, or a bio-pic. It is a tribute to journalist Marie Colvin, a war correspondent primarily in Syria until her untimely death in 2012. She is played here by Rosamund Pike with a single note intensity -- hers is an uncompromising spirit and dedication which is perfectly mirrored in the film itself.

A Private War is a harrowing film. It offers no comfort in false war-action spectacle -- the anguish of many civilians acts as a kind of recurring motif. Constantly -- and relentlessly -- we are dragged back into things that we would rather not see.

This frank and brutal anti-war statement comes in a plain blunt package. There is sufficient personal backstory to allow us a full picture of Marie Colvin, and enough background explanation to clarify the political situations -- most of it given in earnest, eye-witness testimony from locals with authentic, first-hand experience of life in a war zone.

We come to understand Marie's compulsion to expose the truth, and her urges to keep returning to dangerous combat arenas, despite both physical and psychological traumas. Marie eventually speaks to the world through media, broadcasting from a besieged area in Syria, stressing the urgency for some kind of international response.

If the journalistic intent is to powerfully invoke the human toll in various conflicts in the Middle East, then the film accomplishes its task several times over. Writer Arash Amel and director Matthew Heinemann, cinematographer Robert Richardson, and the quite remarkable staple of players, professional and non-professional, all give Pyke their valiant support.

It seemed to have little life at the box office, perhaps understandably. But A Private War is a respectable, daring movie that needs to find a wider audience.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Don't Answer the Phone!

[8/10 · 29 January 2019]

I've read that Hitchcock did not think highly of Dial M For Murder, his adaptation of the hit play by Frederick Knotts. Time has shown, however, that the movie is probably better than its filmmaker claims.

We might even say that this is what a mystery-thriller should be - not really all that serious, clever, absorbing, still popular (IMDb 8.2). Hitch may be disparaging, but Dial M For Murder is one of the better attempts in the 1950s to translate stage material into cinematic language.

Knott's play pits two British intellects against each other -- upper-class gentleman Ray Milland and Scotland Yard Inspector John Williams. There is clever combat here. We are in a lair, full of tricks and treachery. The camera snakes about the expensive London flat, looking for things, taking off-kilter perspectives on the actors, pausing on key objects: sports trophies, heavy green draperies, the handbag, the crucial telephone, and a quite renowned photograph on the wall.

As a bonus, Dial M For Murder contains a pivotal - and still startling - "telephone" moment of the movies. Grace Kelly answers the pre-arranged phone call from Milland just as murderer Anthony Dawson creeps up behind her with a strangling weapon. Contrary to all expectations, Grace makes adroit use of a pair of scissors.

As a further twist, the prestigious society woman becomes a convicted felon herself. This unexpected reversal gives Dial M For Murder a real mid-point surprise. Tension keeps increasing. We know that the story engines are busy devising a way to free Grace from the hangman's noose, but we are never quite sure how this is going to work in the details.

The film suffers a bit in the third act. A miscast Robert Cummings interferes in an annoying way. And the culminating trap to expose the villain seems needlessly entangled, with its criss-crossing of trench coats and latch-keys. The inspector, truth be told, turns out to have quite a remarkable skill at guesswork.

This was apparently intended for the new 3D camera, but Hitch has never needed 3D, or, for that matter, wide-screen or loud-screen to enhance his effects. They exist in pure cinema. Even with something as stage-bound as Dial M For Murder, he still grips our attention with his clever, sometimes mischievous, devices.

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

The Wild Crazy West

[7/10 · 10 December 2018]

It is 1976, bicentennial year, when this film comes out, and the New Hollywood has taken a rueful stance. Previously Nashville, Chinatown, the Sam Peckinpah Westerns, The Last Picture Show speak to the dying down of the American spirit, a disillusionment with the era, now into its post-Watergate phase.

Missouri "breaks" - true enough. Good title. Everything breaks up. And the film breaks all the rules. Marlon Brando in particular is willfully arrogant (also in his public image in the press at the time, disdainful of Oscar and Hollywood racism). He gives an outrageous, out-of-control performance as a maniac known as a Regulator (or bounty hunter) come to wipe out a gang of Montana horse thieves led by Jack Nicholson.

His name "Robert E. Lee Clayton" suggests a fallen aristocracy that originates in the East after the Civil War - the 'breaks' in Southern aristocracy move westward.

The people here have nowhere to go, no pattern or purpose. They are listless in a cloudy grey landscape, and continually dark interiors. Intensely photographed by Michael Butler, The Missouri Breaks creates a feeling of lost dreams inherent in the very landscape itself. The frontier is inert, paralyzed. Suitably, the land baron suffers a debilitating stroke himself at the end of the film.

Into this social order comes Brando, totally unstable, with a level of disruption and craziness never before seen in a Western. In cultural tradition, he is part Confidence Man, part Joker; in modern psychology he's a psycho-sadist killer without human feeling. Our attitude is one of disgust and impatience - he keeps moving further and further from any kind of coherent explanation, dispensing with cruel flippancy the comparatively likeable rustlers one by one -- and then he greets joyfully his own execution.

The Brando figure here may be a precursor of the serial killer emerging in the American cinema - Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy.

This is a new kind of Western - loony, inhumane, wanton, debauched, a desecration of the old frontier. At the end, Nicholson as the garden-farmer Logan wisely packs up and sets off to find another West.

Audiences did not respond. This was a commercial bomb at the time, even with stars Brando and Nicholson just completing enormous popular success. Brando recuperates with Superman, Nicholson not until The Shining in 1980. Unfortunately for the American cinema, Arthur Penn never finds his prestigious position again.

Confidential Report (1955)

The Greatest Showman

[8/10 · 7 December 2018]

Who is this Arkadin guy anyway? He's a giant of finance, a fairy-tale ogre, a doting father, an international criminal, a war profiteer, some kind of parable figure with a knack for quick travel, maybe the god Neptune, a scorpion following his own ineluctable nature, a man hidden in a waxy false face -- and yes, finally, a murderer.

Welles himself plays this so-called "Mr. Arkadin", who claims to have lost all memory of how he attained his fortune. On the eve of his daughter's marriage, Arkadin employs his would-be son-in-law to track down the secrets of his earlier life. He wants a "Confidential Report" (the film's original title). Apparently, he is trying to shield his precious daughter from any knowledge of who he truly is, or, at least, may have been.

But the real fascination comes from the fact that, as it turns out, Arkadin himself is stalking his hired sleuth to eliminate all those mysterious personages in his past who might -- if they remain alive -- incriminate and expose him.

This double chasing gives Mr Arkadin a narrative that zigzags all over the place and creates, not entirely without intent, a story line that is both fantastical and obscure. Nothing is ever fully explained, nor ever possibly can be.

The deeper we get into Arkadin's past, the more bizarre his former associates become. Sad-faced Akim Tamiroff, for example, is a garrulous tramp figure out of Samuel Beckett. Mischa Auer, as a flea-circus owner with a magnifying glass, gives the film its most famous shot. There are also Michael Redgrave, Patricia Medina, Suzanne Flon, Peter Van Ecyk in various guises, and finally a grandly remorseful Katina Paxinou, the center, as it turns out, of Arkadin's past circle.

The film has a baroque, carnivalesque manner -- over-stylized, over-dramatized, over-edited. Distortions are the norm. Everything seems stitched together in an urgent frenzy. The landscape, regardless of where we are in the world, is grotesque, ornate, unnatural. The twentieth-century world has gone awry.

Welles, the supreme virtuoso, as always, dazzles. Rich in visuals, audacious in concept, perplexing, it's a wild card from the 1950s. But something is happening in cinema in this period - the French New Wave is only a few years away. And decades later I still find Mr Arkadin one of the most daring films of the period.

It's all quite fabulous, a truly American show of megalomania. Orson Welles, despite the claims of a recent film, is still America's "greatest showman."

Corral (1954)

Classic Round-Up

[8/10 · 26 November 2018]

Very much part of its period, there is a magisterial "Shane" aura to the cowboy in the opening shots, as he comes over the Alberta terrain and looks down onto the range. He rounds up a band of wild horses and leads them into the Corral, which in turn becomes a kind of combat ring between horse-breaker and wild mustang. Everything goes smoothly, however.

We become readily absorbed into the action. This is "participatory cinema", using hand-held camera and intense close shots, taking the spectator inside the corral with the cowboy. There's a quiet impact in the professionalism of the horse-breaker, and the quick taming of the horses. Filmmaker Colin Low seems to have remarkable good luck in getting just the right shots, with the horses doing all the right things.

We seldom see clearly the cowboy's face as his close-ups tend to be obscured by angle or shadow. In this respect, he becomes an archetype of the Canadian cowboy.,

The strumming of the balladeer on the guitar seems playful, and relaxed in the latter half, giving a quieter feel to the film and suggesting a quick bond between cowboy and horse. The guitar plays a kind of campfire melody, and the lack of any other sound in the film turns Corral into a visual ballad of the Canadian west.

A later American film The Misfits also shows the same kind of Western action - the taming of wild horses - but the tradition has become debased through use of trucks and unethical advantages over panic-induced horses. This 1961 film, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, is director John Huston's protest against the modern round-up. It makes an interesting contrast to Corral, which celebrates the traditional ''romance'' of the cowboy,

If You Love This Planet (1982)

Timely and Timeless

[8/10 · 6 November 2018]

Apparently, this film has been criticized for its "talking heads" approach - but what talk it is! For much of If You Love This Planet Dr. Helen Caldicott mesmerizes the spectator with her clearly articulated and persuasively argued lecture against the nuclear arms race, circa 1982.

The intercutting of newsreel shots gives us a disturbing picture of the nuclear age. "As we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe", the images of bomb development, all supported by government policies, prove beyond doubt that scientists and politicians have unleashed a force capable of destroying the planet.

Dr. Caldicott speaks as scientist, medical doctor, historian and political activist. The film, directed by Terre Nash and an Oscar winner in 1983, presents a complete overview of nuclear age history, and a clear decisive statement of the dangers of irresponsible actions by the heads of government. The facts as she presents them are indisputable. The supporting visual evidence, particularly the newsreel shots of Hiroshima casualties, give impact and authority to her lecture.

Like Peter Watkins in the 1965 film The War Game, Dr. Caldicott is not afraid to present the grim, realistic facts of nuclear catastrophe. (The nuclear accident at Chernobyl later in the decade partly verifies her warnings.) At this time, Reagan is proposing the Star Wars program and she undermines the "lunatic-type statements" that all the president's men make to justify the arms build-up.

What can I do? Caldicott speaks to our social responsibility, and outlines the democratic policies of peaceful protest and persuasion. She takes the role of a doctor for the threatened planet, to some extent already diagnosed as a "terminally ill" patient. But it can still be saved. If you love this planet.

A wonderful time capsule for the early 1980s - and a timeless argument for social responsibility.

City of Gold (1957)

The Golden Touch

[8/10 · 4 November 2018]

As with many of its films in the 1950s, the National Film Board again has a golden touch. The film was one of two NFB films nominated for the 1957 Academy Award in the Short Subject category. (The other was Norman McLaren's A Chairy Tale.)

Using archival photographs of the period, filmmakers Colin Low and Wolf Koenig turn City of Gold into a cinematic scrapbook of the era. This is the summer of 1898, when Dawson City became the base of operations for thousands of gold-seekers in the Klondike.

The film owes much of its impact to its innovative moving-camera technique. The camera roams over the photographs, giving us the feel of living history. Things seem to still be alive, happening now as we watch. This technique is a forerunner of what later became known as the Ken Burns Effect.

Several of the photographs have become part of the gold rush's visual history, particularly those of Eric A. Hegg, who gave the Klondike its famous shot of a long line of prospectors climbing Chilkoot Pass.

Narrator Pierre Berton looks back with a mixture of both regret and affection. The hindsight of history has not turned our narrator unsympathetic or critical - no harsh judgment, no scorn, no melodramatic sentiment. There may even be some admiration here for the foolhardy willfulness of the human spirit.

Well worth a look. City of Gold is a short companion piece to Berton's history Klondike, published in 1958. It may also bring to mind Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, made thirty years earlier and which, despite the obvious comedy, presents a much harsher picture of the Klondike era.

The Fugitive (1947)

Running On Empty

[6/10 · 10 March 2018]

John Ford has tackled literary adaptations before. The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley won critical praise, many awards and commercial success. The Fugitive, however, lacks the depth and power of these earlier works.

The film moves too far from the source novel. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene is a morose, introspective tale, intensely personal and psychological. Ford turns it into a pictorial allegory, with more allegiance to Eisnestein's Que Viva Mexico and the Mexican film Maria Candelaria than to Greene's novel.

The film is allegorical to a fault. Even if many sequences of The Fugitive are beautifully composed, on the whole it is an empty canvas. There never seems to be much urgency in the storyline, nor is there sufficient human dimension to the characters.

I wonder if the Production Code stripped the narrative of any objectionable elements. Ford tones down the novel's moral dilemmas, particularly the self-deprecating, intensely bitter character of the priest, full of shame for his sins and his failure as a priest. The sanitized version eliminates any mention of his illegitimate offspring or the local designation as a "whiskey" priest as in the novel. The priest, stripped of his human dimension, is now merely a fugitive, and not much else.

The pacing is slow, almost inert, and the fugitive, on the run from Mexican police during an anti-Catholic purge, does not engage us in his plight. Henry Fonda lacks any deep material to develop his personality. Similarly, Dolores del Rio has little opportunity to move beyond the static Madonna figure posturing. Some interest derives from J. Carroll Naish as a groveling Judas figure, and Ward Bond as a gringo renegade also running from the police. It is the formidable Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz who has the most vigorous presence as the officer in charge of the pursuit.

An insistent musical score, loud and grating, fails to heighten emotions, and may be partially responsible for turning us away from the priest's dilemma.

This is one of several films that employed distinguished Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, noted for The Pearl and later for Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados. The abstract backdrops of arches, town squares, rays of light streaking into abandoned churches, shawled peasant women and police officers on parade give The Fugitive a visual dynamic that is not reflected in the drama itself.

Stage Fright (1950)

No Real Fright in Stage Fright

[7/10 · 10 March 2018]

This is Hitchcock-lite. The director takes a casual approach to his material, intended more as social satire than crime thriller. Filmed in London, Stage Fright owes as much to the Ealing Studio comedies of the period as it does to its famous director.

A man has been murdered in the mansion of stage star Marlene Dietrich, and her boyfriend Richard Todd is the prime suspect. Coming to his rescue, loyal friend Jane Wyman, a dramatic arts student, disguises herself as Dietrich's personal maid to uncover evidence that will free Todd from suspicion.

Several people take an interest in the murder investigation, but no one seems particularly alarmed or fearful - nor is anyone ever in a really perilous situation. Wyman seems emotionally removed from all that goes on, and her new boyfriend Michael Wilding, assigned to the case, has a debonair style, but no particular conviction as a detective.

A central weakness in Stage Fright is the unfortunately under-written role for Marlene Dietrich, a supposedly "dangerous woman" who never poses much threat to anyone.

It is Richard Todd who makes the strongest impact. He is responsible for the notorious "lying flashback" which opens the film (his version of the murder turns out to be a total fabrication). Stage Fright achieves its best Hitchcockian moments in the tense climax when Todd is cornered beneath an empty theatre stage, with glowing "psycho eyes," suddenly an actual, murderous threat to his supportive friend Wyman.

Apart from Todd, the best part is Hitchcock's playful satire of British class types. Several British thespians upstage the principal actors: Alistair Sim as Jane's smuggler-father who joins the game for fun, Sybil Thorndike as her overly proper mother, Miles Malleson as an obtrusive masher in a pub, Joyce Grenfell as "Lovely Ducks," a carnival barker with a mordant sense of humour.

Most engaging is Kay Walsh as Dietrich's chambermaid, a wry opportunist with schemes of her own. Ms. Walsh, as the conniving, ironically-named Nellie Goode, practically steals the picture from its more widely-known stars.

There's an interesting theatre metaphor working itself out, beginning with the rise of a theatre safety curtain during the credits, and ending (most appropriately) in its deadly sudden fall. The murder investigation is a playful stage drama for the main characters, one reason perhaps why Stage Fright lacks the serious tone of other Hitchcock thrillers of the period.

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

The Times They Are a-Changin'

[7/10 · 5 February 2018]

Arthur Penn's debut film was scorned in 1958, but has since gained recognition as a forerunner of the Revisionist Westerns that emerged in the 1960s.

The original ad calls Billy a 'teenage desperado' and Penn's film gets the manic side to young Billy the Kid, wild at heart in a 1950s delinquent style, unrestrained, juvenile, engaged freely in bad boy antics, almost a clown. Billy is really the "Kid" in Penn's version - cast off from family and home, living with a "gang", as it were, losing his father figure (here, almost as soon as he meets him), then running loose and wild. The spirit of adolescence infuses the film's initial sections, but Billy becomes disillusioned quickly, and almost invites his own downfall without fully comprehending much of anything in the world around him.

Surprisingly, as quoted in the movie, the Biblical phrase "through a glass darkly" comes to accurately suit the world-view of Billy - and several later Arthur Penn figures in the 1960s.

His story as presented here (from an original television treatment by Gore Vidal) contradicts the dime-novel frontier legend that an eager writer (Hurd Hatfield) fabricates as the film goes along, manufacturing "fake news" for his own profit.

Ideas are introduced into the Western that no one has yet dared to think about - the possibility of a gay frontier character in Hurd Hatfield's Moultrie, the links with James Dean's kind of 'angst', the macabre, almost comic nature of the sheer act of sudden dying. As will become significant in Penn's cinema, violent deaths here are prolonged, anguished, senseless; there is no clean, quick or merciful way of dying.

Perhaps the French critics who praised the film were more attuned to the visually cinematic touches - anguish accentuated by close shot, rambling episodic structure, heightened treatment of violent acts, clash of horseplay with sudden deadly gunplay, the abrupt changes in mood and tone.

Without a fully realized screenplay and with alleged studio interference (particularly noticeable in the ending sections), The Left-Handed Gun leaves us only partially satisfied, but still impressed by Penn's creative disregard for established conventions.

Well worth a look for its times-they-are-a-changing attitude towards both the Western genre and America's founding myths.

The Stranger (1946)

Peril in a Small Town

[7/10 · 5 February 2018]

This film may have the questionable label as the weakest in Welles' canon, but The Stranger is particularly significant in the development of post-war film noir.

Posing as a teacher at a boys' school in Harper, Connecticut, a Nazi war criminal-in-hiding (Orson Welles), about to marry the daughter of good family (Loretta Young), discovers the presence of an FBI agent (Edward G. Robinson) sent by the government to track him down.

The cat-and-mouse game that ensues arguably does veer into the preposterous; it is over-emoted, full of curious improbabilities and implausible coincidences. But in its own peculiar way, the film compels.

Earlier in the decade, Thornton Wilder's Our Town set the prototype of small-town America, but film noir brings out an alternative view, notably in Shadow of a Doubt, Out of the Past, The Killers and the noir underbelly of It's A Wonderful Life. The cycle of films expresses the national anxiety following World War II as threatening crime intrudes into America's safe places. Loretta Young here represents the complacent American suddenly traumatized by the inconceivable.

This is part of Welles' point. Harper assumes itself to have nothing to be afraid of. But in the circumstances, the small town turns perverse, full of harsh lighting effects, odd camera angles, grotesque faces, murderous events stretched to the limits of plausibility - all achieved through Welles' preference for the angular and distorted, harsh lighting and layered compositions.

Harper eventually closes in on the Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler; the radius gets narrower and narrower, the world shrinks finally to the space inside the church bell tower, trapping 'the stranger' in the deadly mechanism of a medieval clock.

The clock, operating randomly, with medieval figures that move and (when needed) pierce sharply with their spears, is a sign that time itself is out of joint. Appropriately, Kindler the Nazi is fatally wounded by clock figures that, as he has himself explained earlier, derive from Teutonic mythology. Thus, figures from the historical past destroy the modern abomination.

The most lucrative for Welles of all his films, The Stranger had good box office. It moves quickly, and there is always an unexpected situation coming up, and we keep wondering about that clock in the church square.

The use of concentration camp newsreel and the release of the film during the Nuremberg trials make it contemporary and relevant to the post-war era.

The Hurricane (1937)

Terrific Tempest

[8/10 · 5 February 2018]

One of John Ford's best films of the 1930s -- and certainly the best of the so-called "disaster" spectacles in mid-decade.

Unlike those epics, it's not just a trite build-up to a big climax. As fashioned by Ford and writer Dudley Nichols (after the Nordoff & Hall novel), The Hurricane is a passionate narrative of wronged humanity, with strong outrage against European colonialism in the South Seas. In this case the brute force of the French penal system awakens an intense, vindictive doggedness in the defiant hero, Terangi (Jon Hall), not dissimilar to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.

Ford uses his strong visual sense, heavily influenced by German Expressionism, to give a torturous, altogether grim picture of Terangi's ordeals as a convict. French Governor Raymond Massey and prison warden John Carradine, each with exceptional sternness and malice, invoke the harsh brutality of the Law. The European sense of superiority overrides any natural compassion for fellow humans.

It is up to a sincere Mary Astor and a wonderfully irascible Thomas Mitchell to advocate a more benevolent European attitude.

When the hurricane comes, it strikes with relentless fury, crashing, pounding, smashing up things, sweeping away islanders in a still breathtaking 14 minutes of screen time. The backlot staging, Oscar-winning sound design, montage editing and process shots (some a little too ambitious for the time ) still impress the techno-savvy 21st century viewer. A constantly ringing church bell - as if a plea for divine mercy - works to striking effect. Executed by effects supervisor James Basevi and A.D. Stuart Heisler, it's a terrific accomplishment, rendering The Hurricane superior to disaster films as San Francisco and In Old Chicago.

In the larger framework, nobody seems ill at ease with native rituals and customs, possibly from the long association of writers Nordoff and Hall with the South Seas, Ford's own love of the islands, and Jon Hall's lineage as part Tahitian himself (his mother was Tahitian-born); albeit defined by the larger attitudes of the period, the conception of spirited islanders struggling against European domination seems genuinely achieved.

I Confess (1953)

Hitchcock in Quebec

[7/10 · 5 February 2018]

Father Logan, a priest in Quebec City receives a murderer's confession and must respect his vow of secrecy, even when circumstantial evidence incriminates him in the murder itself. He also has obligations to a politician's wife, herself involved in the case through a previous love affair with Father Logan.

We expect Hitch to do something quite startling with the material, but I Confess is comparatively flat and somber, without the trademark Hitchcock humour. The opening and closing scenes have some compelling stylistic flourishes and considerable tension, but generally I Confess is more of a psychological drama than a suspense thriller. And the psychology here, unlike other Hitchcock films, lacks much intensity.

There are two central problems that I Confess cannot quite overcome. The first is the impenetrable nature of Father Logan (Montgomery Clift). We never get inside his psyche. Logan remains closed to the spectator, guarded, emotionally removed from his predicament. Apart from a "via dolorosa" moment of anguish, he is, for the most part, a wooden, saint-like figure. Reportedly, tensions between director and Clift prevented full treatment of the character. In addition, the Production Code would prohibit too much license outside a strict clerical portrayal of a Catholic priest.

This relates to the second problem with the film, The romance with the Quebec politician's wife, played earnestly here by Anne Baxter, does not seem fully integrated into the narrative. Nor does it have much impact. It is highlighted by a decorative, overly romanticized flashback which seems unreliable and trite.

Surprisingly, it is Alma, the murderer's wife, who slyly engages our attention. The burden of confession falls on her as well as Father Logan - they are compatriots, condemned to rigorous silence. As Alma, German actress Dolly Haas conveys deeper anguish than does Clift, and there is great satisfaction in seeing her set things right at the end, standing up against a judgmental mob and her own deadly husband.

The murderer Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse) also has more dimension than the main characters - truly a treacherous figure, abusive, manipulative, filmed in sinister angle throughout the film. His final "confession" has intensity and feeling, and when he tells the priest, "I am as alone as you are," he offers valid insight into the plight of Father Logan himself.

Despite misgivings, I still find I Confess an intriguing film. As always, Hitchcock injects a level of tension into his visual style. The film is well photographed: the alleyways, churches, stone walls, and Old World architecture, along with the landmark Chateau Frontenac, give Quebec City both a Gothic and a contemporary film noir quality.

The occasion of filming I Confess in Quebec City was apparently an event in itself, and provides the basis for Robert Lepage's later Canadian film Le Confessional (1994)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Still a classic of the 1960s

[8/10 · 28 November 2017]

The New Hollywood Cinema is merely a year or so away when this film opens in 1966, and the freedom with language, controversial depiction of marriage, the 60s' notion of games people play, and so-called "daring sexuality" are precursors of a more mature and serious era in American filmmaking.

Groundbreaking, not exactly, but it picks up many currents of actual thinking about film, and director Mike Nichols, while faithful to Edward Albee's explosive Broadway hit, tries to break the material out of its stage boundaries, The end result, sometimes unevenly, merges post-war realism in American theatre with the new consciousness of cinema.

To some extent, adherence to stage origins works in its favour: the sparring foursome Taylor- Burton-Segal-Dennis play off one another in sharp and ferocious verbal combats, superbly performed by all four participants. George and Martha's marriage has itself become a kind of theatre - they play-act, pretend, tear away their public masks, act out fantasies about their private lives.

Elizabeth Taylor has been justly recognized for her role as Martha, a second Oscar canceling out the sympathy vote for Butterfield 8 in 1960. Her intensely fluctuating, flamboyant Martha is the signature performance of her career. In some respects the "game" of the imaginary son seems a contrivance, but motherhood is essential to Martha's identity as a woman. Arguably, she is still the little girl trying to please her father. In the compelling final act, Liz really makes us believe in Martha's desperate need for "illusions".

Nichols' flexible camera and editing style, along with Haskell Wexler's expressive photography and Alex North's furtive melodies, give the stage text an admirable cinematic dimension.

Regrettably perhaps, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marks the passing of black-and-white film. This film is the last recipient of Academy Awards in separate black-and-white categories - and also the only film to be nominated for Academy Awards in every category for which it is eligible.

One of the more important, and bravely honest, American films of the 1960s.