The Life Cinematic

The Screening Log

There’s Always Tomorrow

Posted December 24, 2009 with 3 comments

1956, US Dir Douglas Sirk Cast Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett IMDb

"I had to escape because I was still alive. Alive, and wanting you."

As expressed elsewhere, my fourth Sirk film confirms him as a filmmaker I like and respect tremendously, and consistently, but he has never been the satisfying whole experience I always expected him to be. Opulently framed, veiled critiques of 50s society are perhaps not so intrinsically interesting to me as I imagined—or I get too stuck in the superficial silliness of it all to really take pleasure in the underlying ironies as I watch. There’s Always Tomorrow is much less opulent, and much less veiled, a more direct and effective portrait of the effects social constructions have on the unwary, the great majority of perfectly decent people who will not fight for something real and before they know it it has become an impossibility. It is an unflattering and insightful portrait of contemporary masculinity (the robot metaphor was adorable, and much too much), and husbands and wives—and Joan Bennett’s chilling assertion of what a woman really wants is a sort of fascinating chicken- »»»

80 Years Ago

Thunderbolt

Posted August 8, 1929 with 1 comment

1929, US Dir Josef Von Sternberg Cast George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen IMDb

"I feel terrible. I feel like I'm going to die."

1929 is shaping up to be a big year for underworld pictures, and one or two of them are very good. Hot on the heels of Alibi, Von Sternberg’s contribution is more languidly paced and equally stunning to the eye. Again gang hideouts and prisons are presented as lush and sinister places, taking on larger than life proportions in high-contrast black and white. And again the story that fuels it is not quite up to par: the condemned men’s wry realization that downfall always comes after a dame aside, the compulsion to put a flimsy love story at the center of the action is usually the biggest drag on a picture of this type. Here Fay Wray plays the nervous, fidgety girlfriend of wanted man Thunderbolt, not half as beguiling as she was in The Wedding March, and looking to go straight with a bloodless bank clerk. The film gets much more interesting when Thunderbolt is caught in a surprisingly charming incident involving a stray dog and sentenced to die. There, the interaction between the hardened »»»

The Screening Log

The Love of Sumako the Actress

Posted August 5, 2009 with 0 comments

1947, Japan Dir Kenji Mizoguchi Cast Kinuyo Tanaka IMDb

If it isn’t quite up to the staggering fluidity and layers of meaning of Ugetsu, this is above all things a gloriously beautiful film, reminding me why—before I had a leg to stand on (and I still don’t)—I proclaimed Mizoguchi by far my favorite Japanese filmmaker a long time ago. (It may be true, but a handful of films from each of the majors and none from the overlooked talents won’t decide the matter now.) At least, Mizoguchi’s cinema is easier for me to grab on to, easier for me to be wowed by, prettier, more identifiable. Then, Kinuyo Tanaka is better than anyone. And that’s about as far as Sumako goes for me, which is plenty far. The unrelenting melodrama and simplicity of the story tested my patience—why here and not elsewhere, I can’t say, and I recognize the unfairness in that. Expectations, I suppose: when a film opens with a monologue on personal ethics, honest living, the relationship between art and life, and then turns swiftly to bringing Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” yes »»»

80 Years Ago

Alibi

Posted August 2, 1929 with 0 comments

1929, US Dir Roland West Cast Chester Morris, Harry Stubbs, Regis Toomey, Mae Busch IMDb

A tremendously exciting picture: talkies take a big step forward in maturity and artistry with this film. The story and dialogue are hardly more imaginative than the average underworld picture. There are tough-talking cops who bend the rules and slick mobsters without conscience who are ultimately revealed to be cowards—in its more interesting moments, the film flirts with blurring the line between the two sides, but doesn’t delve deeply into the idea. Caught in between is the virtuous, independent blond beauty, the daughter of an officer and girlfriend of a convict, convinced the police are nothing but a gang of brutes setting up innocent men who need society’s help to escape the abusive hands of the law. The dialogue, generally, adds nothing to the image.

But what an image: art-deco meets German expressionism in a foggy, geometric, relentlessly »»»

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Wyler Marathon Saturday

Posted June 6, 2009 with 0 comments

Following along with TCM & written lamely with 10 min between films.

"I went on the set of Dodsworth, and Ruth Chatterton said, 'He's a stupid little man. Don't work with him.'" —Joel McCrea

Dead End (1937)

Wyler wanted to film on location. Goldwyn wanted to build a set. Naturally Goldwyn wins, and the result is the most elaborate and impressive indoor set I’ve ever seen, to capture a tenement slum bordered by high-rise luxury apartments. That the set obtains such a degree of realism is down to Wyler, who insisted slums were a dirty and dangerous place, while Goldwyn railed that if he’s paying so much for them they ought to be really nice slums. The use this set is put to is brilliant–much more than an magnificent stage piece with Toland’s trick photography and Wyler’s fluid navigation of it. It is a living, suffocating thing. »»»

80 Years Ago

Madame X

Posted May 31, 1929 with 2 comments

1929, US Dir Lionel Barrymore Cast Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett, Holmes Herbert IMDb

"A man just died because he thought I was worse than I am."

Madame X is, at its borders, occasionally and unfortunately a dull film, a conclusion all the harder to understand when one accounts for the scandal at its core. The film begins and ends strictly in the vein of melodrama, and takes its time at exposition and dénouement. The circumstances we first find Jacqueline Floriot in are intriguing enough: she is in a park in Paris, alone, watching children play. She inquires after one child in particular, whether she might ever find a boy named Raymond at this park, and on learning he has been gravely ill, she departs in haste.

She arrives at a stately residence that we learn, over an agonizingly slow twenty minutes of conversation with the man of the house, the maid, the doctor, the family friend, had been her home until she left it and her son to live with a lover, now dead. She has returned asking only to see »»»

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Godard Marathon Saturday

Posted May 24, 2009 with 2 comments

Usually I don't care about the pictures. The text is important. But this time I'm wrong--because here everything is beautiful. No noise, no music. Silence.

Une histoire d’eau (1961, with Francois Truffaut)

Playful and cool, can easily imagine this as an idea over morning coffee & cigarettes filmed later that afternoon, nothing new after Breathless and 400 Blows, but a satisfying lark anyhow to creators, participants, and viewers. Young couple flees rural floods for Paris, flirting and fighting and discoursing on literature and nationalism, backtracking and changing course on their route as often as does their conversation and the images of their short adventure. Like all Godard films of 61/62 I wish I could move right in. »»»

The Screening Log

The More the Merrier

Posted March 8, 2009 with 5 comments

1943 US Dir George Stevens Cast Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn IMDb

A superlative romantic comedy, although Stevens’ entries in the genre lack the speed and sass of his best contemporaries. His films make it up with thoughtfulness and sensitivity: punctuated by outbursts of zaniness, carried along by pleasant vibes of charm and sweetness, they are basically earnest affairs. Frank Capra, plainly, has more edge. At the same time, they never drift into meaningless sentiment or crass manipulation, regardless of the material (and consider how easy it would have been with something like the laughable-on-paper, much-afflicted lovers of Penny Serenade) — Stevens’ films are above all grounded in moments of refreshing human intimacy.

Merrier’s plot speaks to both the time and a screwball sensibility: in a small gesture of patriotism, amidst war and a housing shortage, kind and orderly Jean Arthur offers half her apartment for »»»

The Current Cinema

Revolutionary Road

Posted January 20, 2009 with 0 comments

2008 Dir Sam Mendes Cast Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates IMDb

I feel like I must apologize, and you must forgive me, for how very, very much I loved this movie—but surely you must have a movie like it, which is so hideously close to you that you are blind to its faults. If it were otherwise, perhaps I could call this a classically adequate Hollywood prestige piece, give it a perfunctory 7 or 8, and get on to more exciting things. But to start with, let us say, it is a little bit Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (TOTAL WAR! + total Albee absurdist moments, eliciting and deserving much uncomfortable laughter in my theater), it is a little bit A Woman Under the Influence (RELAX AND COME BACK TO ME!), it is a little bit Jeanne Dielman (), and so it would always have been a film for me. And it is a lot all my own stupidest dreams and worst fears—worst fears are always so much closer to one than realistic concerns, aren’t they? How I’ve believed in a kind of natural specialness and superiority, planned escape, never really tried at anything, succeeded »»»

Projects: David Lean 101

Brief Encounter

Posted January 17, 2009 with 2 comments

1945 UK Dir David Lean Cast Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Joyce Carey IMDb

"Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long."

Due to hateful weather, I shut myself in last weekend, and regrettably missed the screening of Brief Encounter. I loved the film when I first saw it several years ago, I loved it anew on my laptop today, and at the end of this survey it will probably stand as my favorite among Lean’s films (although I continue to be a great cheerleader for The Passionate Friends). But I’ve missed my chance with this film to have the grand romance and absorbing emotional experience that I’ve so far found in his work on the big screen, and I must meet this unhappy fact with stoic resignation.

So I’ve learned to face life’s disappointments from Laura and Alec, the thwarted lovers in Lean’s last and by-reputation best adaptation of a Noel Coward play. What makes Brief Encounter so powerful, and really so unsentimental, is that the ultimate rejection of their mutual desire represents more »»»