The Wind Rises (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Wind Rises (2013) – H. Miyazaki

Miyazaki’s last film does have an elegiac feel (and it isn’t for children).  It’s set in the decades leading up to WWII but only comments on Japan’s growing militarization in passing (despite having some scenes in Nazi Germany).  Apparently, Miyazaki first published a manga featuring his telling of aeronautic engineer Jiro Horikoshi’s bittersweet story but I have to guess that this beautiful moving picture rendering stands head and shoulders above that.  Indeed, there are so many dazzling moments of animation, it might be possible to watch the film without sound and just gawk.  The scenes of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake are incredible.  The story itself feels a bit too long and, despite numerous fantasy sequences featuring an Italian airplane designer, it is otherwise determinedly realistic – up until the sad end.  An unusual film on which to end his career perhaps, but undoubtedly important to Miyazaki himself.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959) – B. Stern

This is more than just filmed jazz.  Instead, Bert Stern has used his photographer’s eye and sensibility to create moments of real transcendence and even joy from footage of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.  Of course, the music itself heightens the ecstatic moments caught on camera, with sounds ranging from the traditional (Louis Armstrong) to something slightly more modern (Chico Hamilton Quintet featuring Eric Dolphy, Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre) with Chuck Berry and Mahalia Jackson thrown in for good measure.  There is a vibrancy here in the photography (reflections in the water, birds overhead, transfixed or finger-snapping audience members) and in the way the music and the photography come together that makes you want to really look at things in this world and to take out all those old jazz records and put them on.  A little bit of social commentary drifts in if you notice the racial dynamics of the event – but things seem so harmonious that suddenly 1958 feels like an idyllic period in history captured perfectly and forever by Stern.  Remarkable.

The Killers (1946)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Killers (1946) – R. Siodmak

I haven’t read the Hemingway short story in a long time but I don’t think it involves Edmond O’Brien’s insurance investigator zealously putting the facts together after the titular killers have offed Burt Lancaster.  But this is exactly the structure that Siodmak’s exemplary film noir takes – that’s right, all flashbacks as O’Brien identifies and interviews one relevant person after another, slowly piecing together a major crime (hat factory payroll) and a dirty double cross involving a too good to be true femme fatale (young Ava Gardner).  Low-key high contrast lighting (shadows everywhere) is the order of the day and a fair few additional trademarks of the noir genre also make an appearance (boxing ring, heist, protagonist hiding out under an alias in a small town, professional killers, hospital deathbed clues in last words, and so on).  Lancaster comes across a bit more naïve than he might later in his career but this serves the story fine.  One of the classics.

The Ipcress File (1965)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Ipcress File (1965) – S. J. Furie

The word “Ipcress” is the key to the movie and not really a Macguffin at all (as it might first seem to be when a newly minted spy comes across it in an abandoned warehouse).  As with all spy thrillers (and I was in the mood for a good one), the plot here has many twists and even the different British spy agencies can’t seem to trust each other.  Young Michael Caine (seeming more and more a contradiction in terms these days) is full of Cockney insubordination and an eye on the birds.  This could be a parallel universe to the Bond series with a more realistic bent – until the Manchurian Candidate-styled conclusion (which takes things to a definite psychedelic place).  So, in the end, it’s not quite the grey world of Le Carré but rather a bit of adventure for the lads (and lasses). 

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

In the Heat of the Night (1967) – N. Jewison

Potentially a great deal more audacious in 1967 than now when racism may be less overt than shown here (it has only gone undercover, sadly).  Sidney Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide detective who gets stranded in Sparta, MS, after being apprehended as a murder suspect (racism) and then asked to help out (but not really – racism again).  Rod Steiger plays the new Chief who has to overcome his own redneck impulses while trying to stifle the racist tendencies of his force and the local townspeople.  Of course, Poitier solves the crime (despite being misled at one point by his own tendency to suspect rich white racists); however, this isn’t really the focus of the film (i.e., I’m not sure the facts of the case lead easily to the real killer).  Nevertheless, the political points made here are still well worth it (try if you wish to substitute a Muslim cop into the Poitier role and see how it plays out in your head).  Norman Jewison does an OK job directing, although some elements feel a bit schematic and the score by Quincy Jones is dated (sound and use). But you can always rely on Warren Oates!

Cairo Station (1958)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Cairo Station (1958) – Y. Chahine

Youssef Chahine directs and stars as Qinawi, a disabled denizen of Cairo Station who sells newspapers to earn his meagre living but seems to spend most of his time gawking at the other members of the Station community. Chief among these is Hanuma, a sexy free-spirited gal who sells illegal sodas to train passengers and who serves as a constant source of sexual frustration for Qinawi.  She is set to marry Abu Serih who is a porter attempting to rally his colleagues to the union cause and who is generally kind to Qinawi, originally a sympathetic if weird and forlorn character.  But things turn quite dark.  Chahine’s film fits perfectly into the golden age of world cinema (50’s/60’s) with its eye-opening and cinematic intro to another culture, however unlike the straight humanism of, say, Satyajit Ray, instead we get a noirish look at obsession and desperation, albeit within the family-like community centred on the train station. It’s compelling all the way through.

Nuit et Brouillard (1955)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Nuit et Brouillard (1955) – A. Resnais

There is no good time to watch such a film but one must watch it, as an act of moral courage and understanding. – and, of course, remembrance (as a possible protection against such things happening again).  Alain Resnais (like his assistant on this film, Chris Marker) often used time and memory as his themes, focusing on their emotional impact and on their distortions.  Here, as we examine horrifying footage from the Nazi concentration camps (and footage that is horrifying by implication) we are also shown how the camps look now, grassy and overgrown, abandoned, potentially forgotten.  The message is not to forget that this is possible, that mass-murder is happening now – for Resnais, the pointed allusion was to Algeria, for us today it is to Iraq and Syria, and other places we may be ignoring.  Of course, no single atrocity is as potent, terrible, terrifying, saddening, and soul-destroying (no adjective really works here) as the Holocaust, during which the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews and millions of others they thought undesirable. It is hard to watch the footage of the victims and to hear how they were tortured, but it is our moral responsibility to learn and to stop governments and individuals from setting off on this path ever again.