Suspicion (1941)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Suspicion (1941) – A. Hitchcock

Hitchcock (always a master self-plagiarist) here provides shades of Rebecca (1940), a recent hit for him. So again, we see Joan Fontaine anxious and doubtful of her husband (but this time she won the Oscar she was earlier denied). Cary Grant plays the charming cad well enough for us to think that he could be a murderer (which is what Fontaine eventually suspects – hence the title).  Accounts differ as to whether the censors (or Cary’s backers at the studio) tampered with the ending or whether Hitch wanted all along to portray a woman’s paranoid fantasies.  Indeed, things are mostly ambiguous most of the time – although we can probably agree that Cary is irresponsible and thus rather unlikeable.  No real MacGuffin here but a glowing glass of warm milk that may be spiked with an untraceable poison is a memorable touch.  A key plank in the construction of Hitchcock’s image, if not his best work. 

Early Summer (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Early Summer (1951) – Y. Ozu

Ayako and I had a discussion about what the Japanese title “Bakushu” means – she thought it should signify “beer” and some homework reveals that the correct translation is probably “The Barley-Harvest Season” rather than “Early Summer”.  I’m not quite sure what is being harvested – possibly Noriko (played by Ozu regular Setsuko Hara) who is being urged to marry because at 28 she is at risk of becoming an old maid.  However, Noriko is a modern post-war Japanese woman who wants to make up her own mind.  However, her boss and her family conspire to match her with a rich (though 12 years older) businessman – who we never meet.  Indeed, Ozu very playfully includes numerous ellipses in the plot, never quite allowing us enough information to expect Noriko’s ultimate decision.  Although it comes as a surprise, this decision may actually have had a basis in experiences not shown in the film – that is, Noriko does spend offscreen time with her eventual husband, perhaps a considerable amount of time (and late in the film, some potentially pivotal time searching for her missing nephews with him).  As usual, Ozu also disorients the viewer with his camerawork, often cutting in ways that are distinctly different from the invisible Hollywood style that we know and sometimes from one place to another without warning.  His usual counterpoints are here:  traditional Japan vs. modern Japan, male vs. female, old vs. young, city vs. countryside – but they are used subtly to tell a story about the complexity of families (across three generations) and their sad but inevitable dissolution.

Libeled Lady (1936)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Libeled Lady (1936) – J. Conway

I don’t know if this is officially a screwball comedy (or a comedy of remarriage, as many of them were) but it is pretty damn close.  Myrna Loy and William Powell are delicious as usual (as the libeled young lady in question and the man hired to get her to drop her lawsuit, respectively) but throw in Spencer Tracy (brash newspaperman, of course) and Jean Harlow (his gal, who marries Powell who aims to seduce Loy so Harlow can sue for alienation of affection thus throwing the libel suit against Tracy’s newspaper into doubt) and you’ve got the goods.  The plot/plan in that last parenthetical naturally does not go off without a hitch – but things work out anyway (or do they?).  The four stars are at the top of their game and the script rolls merrily along, inexorably to a complicated comedic conclusion.  Great fun!  

Madame de… (1953)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Madame de… (1953) – M. Ophuls

A stylish and seemingly superficial offering from Max Ophuls that is actually deceptively complex, deepening dramatically as it progresses.  Danielle Darrieux is Madame de (no surname given, which is something of a running gag) who decides to hock the earrings her husband the General (Charles Boyer) gave to her on their wedding day to support her lavish lifestyle.  Of course, her husband finds out (when Madame decides to pretend they were stolen and the jeweller seeks to clear his name).  The earrings then make a circuitous journey, full circle if you will, becoming imbued with an incredible amount of emotion (more than they had originally).  This is one of the fascinating insights of Ophuls’ film – to see that any old object can become a fetish object.  The alchemy involves true love or at least that deep and exciting passionate attachment that can occur between two people (in this case, Madame de and her Italian lover played superbly by Vittorio de Sica, yes, the neorealist director), sometimes if only for a short while.  However, Madame de is already married and the film juxtaposes her marriage to her illicit love, a partnership of position and appearances (and companionship) versus an intense and absorbing (those dances!) mutual longing.  Of course, one relationship is right and one is wrong (or perhaps Ophuls is daring to question this) and fate (or society) will have its way.  Top it all off with amazing tracking shots and set decoration and you have a masterpiece.  

Seven Samurai (1954)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Seven Samurai (1954) – A. Kurosawa

Exhilarating – even at over 200 minutes long – because Kurosawa knew exactly how to judge the audience’s interest and attention span.  With cinematographer Asaichi Nakai he does amazing things with dappled light and furious movement (by horses and men).  The story has many fabulistic qualities – poor farmers find seven disparate men to help them ward off an army of bandits (who descend on them each year) – although Kurosawa’s strengths lie in depicting the little details of their social interactions and their strategies.  Of course, each man has a different quality and backstory – the actors often bring mannerisms to the task of differentiation (Takashi Shimura as the leader often rubs his shaven head and, famously, Toshiro Mifune scratches, pull faces, and clowns around – later inspiring John Belushi).  The first half of the film shows us how the samurai are recruited and form the seven whereas the second half is all battles scenes (with a little romance in the daisies thrown in for the youngest of the force).  As the film progresses, step by step, we are drawn into the action with maps of the area (weak spot to the North), the crossing off of bandits (from the total of 33), and the burial mounds of the samurai (complete with swords on top).  Not everyone survives and the relationship between samurai and farmer may remain unchanged.  A film that can replenish and sustain your energy (like some sort of magic spell).

Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) – R. Wise

Robert Wise has a lot to answer for – after all, he is responsible for editing The Magnificent Ambersons when it was taken away from Orson Welles (there is also The Sound of Music).  But he does know how to craft a film – something he may have learned when he was part of Val Lewton’s stable of directors doing low budget but effective horror films in the ‘40’s.  You can see this craft in films like Odds Against Tomorrow or The Haunting…and in this film which is based on boxer Rocky Graziano’s autobiography (with a screenplay by Ernest “North by Northwest” Lehman).  Paul Newman is young and hungry as Rocky – and once you get used to his cruddy Brooklyn accent, his performance is electrifying.  Method acting probably but it works and everything hangs together just right.  Wise creates a good sense of time and place and, although predictable, the story is punchy and compelling.  You can see how this may have influenced Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Won an Oscar for B&W cinematography and it shows.

Peeping Tom (1960)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Peeping Tom (1960) – M. Powell

Essentially Michael Powell’s last film of interest (after decades of work with Emeric Pressburger) – in effect, this film killed his career.  But oh is it bold!  Not unlike Hitchcock’s move to darker (if still playful) material with Psycho, Powell’s film also plays with audience expectations – after all, don’t we expect a serial killer to be unsympathetic?  But Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) seems gentle and shy in his everyday interactions and particularly with his “love interest” Helen (Anna Massey).  Yet, he’s twisted inside, due apparently to some vicious experiments by his biologist father (played by Powell himself, in a brief filmed clip) who wanted to understand reactions to fear in children.  This, too, makes us want to “understand” Mark – who is still creepy due to his tendency to film everything he sees (and his sideline shooting nudie pics).  Powell indicts the moviegoer for his/her voyeuristic tendencies (as does Hitch in Rear Window) – or perhaps he is indicting himself for wanting to control what is being filmed?  Mark imposes himself on reality and films it – but his terrible childhood seems to incline him toward filming women’s reactions to fear, as he kills them.  He then plays the footage back in his own hidden projection room – private snuff films that may or may not arouse him.  No doubt, it’s clear just how volatile and challenging this material would be in 1960 – and it still retains the ability to shock today.

     

Stroszek (1977)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Stroszek (1977) – W. Herzog

Apparently, this is the film that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis watched the night he died and it is pretty bleak.  Herzog’s very unique perspective on life is made manifest by the script he wrote, the actors he chose, the locations he found, and an incredible dancing chicken.  Bruno S. (previously the star of Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser) plays a street musician who has spent most of his life institutionalized – in fact, he is playing himself, although there is apparently little improvisation in the film (so we are really getting Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” version of Bruno).  After being released from jail, Bruno hooks up with Eva, a down-on-her-luck prostitute, and they get messed around by her pimps. Berlin turns so depressing that they decide to travel to the USA with Herr Schweitz (an elderly eccentric, also featured in Kaspar Hauser) who has a nephew in Wisconsin.  Arriving there (after a journey that evokes many moods), they get a trailer home, jobs as a mechanic and waitress (respectively), and settle in outside a truckstop.  Herzog’s dead eye sees some black humor in this situation – as the characters struggle to make a living and American capitalism tightens its noose around them.  In the end, there is only the dancing chicken – an apt metaphor for our workaday lives if ever there was one and fully in keeping with Herzog’s heightened (but dark) sense of the absurd.

The Tin Drum (1979)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Tin Drum (1979) – V. Schlondorff

It isn’t always comfortable viewing, this story about a boy (Oskar) who at age 3 refuses to grow anymore.  Of course, he still grows through experience (and apparently sexually).  The actor playing Oskar was really 12 at the time – but he looks like a little boy observing and sometimes doing very adult things.  All of this occurs against the back-drop of Poland in the 1930s and 40s; Hitler’s rise (and the corresponding human folly) is the ostensible reason for Oskar to stop growing (to protest against the adult world). However, we are only sometimes alerted to the societal changes that the Nazis brought to this corner of Poland (particularly in the treatment of Charles Aznavour, a Jewish toymaker, and of course on September 1st, 1939) – because director Schlondorff’s attention is elsewhere, on Oskar’s family and their own problems, likely due to the source novel by Gunter Grass, which is by all accounts pretty weird.  As is this film.  (I feel like there is a metaphor or some other symbolism hidden here but I can’t quite locate it – people act cruelly to each other at both the personal and societal levels?).  Probably unforgettable.

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968) – A. Resnais

Perhaps taking a cue from his friend Chris Marker, Alain Resnais tackles time travel in his fifth fiction feature.  A bunch of scientists convince Claude Rich to serve as their guinea pig in a risky experiment after a failed suicide attempt suggests to them (or their computer) that he might not care if he dies in the process (although mice have survived in the earlier trials).  As intriguing as this is, Resnais takes the premise and makes an even more insane film than you would expect.  It turns out that, rather than spending one discrete minute in the past (a year prior) as intended, Rich gets stuck in an endless loop bouncing around his past.  This allows Resnais to show us various scenes from his life (pre-suicide attempt) in a Burroughs-styled cut-and-pasted jumbled order for the next 60 minutes.  So, this is a film of wall-to-wall non sequiturs and I say keep ‘em coming.  The puzzle to be solved involves piecing together the events of a life from these snippets.  But even if you let the moments wash impressionistically over you, a gestalt still emerges. Perhaps Resnais (who died this year) was trying to represent our fragmented stream-of-consciousness which dips in and out of the past, remembering moments here and there, and consequently influencing our present, emotionally, cognitively, behaviourally -- and doing it with science fiction.  For this, I hereby dub him the grand master of high concept (but truly Resnais’s themes of time, memory, and longing are a key to his greatness).