Seven Beauties (1975)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Seven Beauties (1975) – L. Wertmuller

Giancarlo Giannini seems to be hamming it up comically in his part as a wannabe macho loser in Naples during Mussolini’s rise to power.  But director Lina Wertmuller puts him through the meat grinder instead.  First, he accidentally kills his sister’s pimp and gets 12 years in the insane asylum.  Then, after raping another inmate, he is freed in order to fight in WWII but deserts and is captured by the Germans and placed in a concentration camp.  In order to survive, he decides to seduce the queen bitch female commandant but she has other tortures planned for him.  Wertmuller cheerfully ignores the boundaries of good taste but manages to say something about shame and degradation.  Is it better to humiliate oneself (and even commit atrocities) in order to walk away alive or should one sacrifice one’s meaningless existence for a moral principle, even when the sacrifice will have no effect?  Maybe we’d all choose the latter (or we’d like to think we would) but not Giannini.  He suffers instead.  There is a Fellini-esque flavour to the proceedings but things get much darker than the maestro chose to go.

  

Cria Cuervos (1976)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Cria Cuervos (1976) – C. Saura

Superb blend of memory and reality channelled by a child who has seen and heard too much (played precociously by Spirit of the Beehive’s Ana Torrent).  Ana and her two sisters experience the deaths of their mother (played by Geraldine Chaplin) and father, an officer in Franco’s army, but not after bearing witness to fights over the father’s infidelity (which they later play-act in their bedroom).  Ana may be haunted by the spirit of her mother who appears in the house at night, repeating well-rehearsed lines from the past; or the vagaries of memory may lead to overlapping in the recall of the periods when Ana and her sisters subsequently lived with her strict but well-meaning Aunt Paulina.  Matters are made all the more mysterious by the fact that Chaplin also plays the adult Ana who occasionally speaks directly to the camera.  The title refers to an idiom “raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes” – suggesting that parents are to blame for the consequences of their actions on their kids (and their kids’ adult behaviours).  No doubt, director Carlos Saura also meant the film to be a slap in the face to the Franco regime, suggesting that the years under fascism would have far-reaching and lasting effects on Spain.  But the picture works as a potent tale of childhood, where emotional events are writ larger on budding lives. 

  

Cornered (1945)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Cornered (1945) – E. Dmytryk

Dick Powell is a shell-shocked Canadian airman at the end of his tether looking for the Vichy French collaborator who killed his wife (and dozens of others) and fled to Argentina.  He doesn’t listen to nobody but that’s probably a wise idea when the people he meet are like Walter Slezak’s oily guide (a.k.a. go between) who leads him straight to the fascists hiding his target only to double or triple cross him (although everyone is out for themselves here).  It isn’t clear whether we are meant to be seeing things from distrustful Powell’s perspective or whether the endless lies told by all of the secondary characters were craftily designed to fool us.  This is a film noir that is constructed to create a world that is confusing as hell.  Even at the end, I wasn’t quite sure until the final minute who had won.  Director Edward Dmytryk was notorious as a member of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for contempt of Congress for not speaking to the House Un-American Activities Committee, who eventually named names.  Whether he inserted a message willingly or not, Cornered does contain some pleas for solidarity against the fascists who could be anywhere, even today. Indeed, the fascists in this film attribute the credit for their own success to the policies and acts of major governments that keep people in poverty and refuse to take notice of them and to treat them with respect. The film looks grimy and burnt out, exactly as a post-war noir should.

  

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) – P. Noyce

Although it elides most real details in favour of an emotional overview, this story of three Aboriginal girls who escape from a virtual prison camp for “half-caste” girls is dramatically compelling and rewarding.  It is also a didactic history lesson, telling viewers (worldwide) about Australia’s policy of removing children from their families in order to propagate a vision of White Australia.  This fear of Blackness is embodied by Kenneth Branagh who plays the official charged with overseeing the lives of Indigenous Australians in Western Australia in the 1930’s when the film takes place. (Children were removed all the way up until 1970 – they are referred to as the “stolen generations” and an apology was only offered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008; this movie may have swayed public opinion).  The acting by the three central girls, aged 14, 10, and 8 is a bit variable and the baddies are really bad but the film’s episodic structure, where encounters with kindly and insidious Aussies are interspersed with beautiful landscapes and some voiceover narration, helps to keep things on track and elevates the film to a kind of fable.  At the end, we see two of the girls as elderly adults as we discover that we have been watching a true story.  Shame, shame, shame on Australia. 

  

The Cameraman (1928)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Cameraman (1928) – E. Sedgwick

Buster Keaton’s late great feature (after all of his greatest hits: The General, Sherlock Jr., etc.) is a slow-boiler that favours small gags over the giant set-pieces of the past. Still, by the end it has picked up speed (and a small monkey) and the usual chaos that surrounds Buster is in full swing. The plot involves Buster’s attempt to become a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl.  However, he is hapless as usual. Funny scenes include their date at the swimming pool, including a very awkward dressing room bit and a ride on the side of a bus (surely an influence for Jackie Chan).  The Chinese Tong war is impressive.  All told, this ranks up there with his best but marked the begin of his decline when directorial responsibilities were taken away from him by MGM.

  

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Hail, Caesar! (2015) – J. Coen & E. Coen

I’m a movie nerd, so I found the Coen Brothers’ latest homage to the old days of the Hollywood studio system highly enjoyable.  Josh Brolin (channelling Brian Donlevy?) plays Eddie Mannix, The Fixer, who prevents the stars from causing scandals and keeps the day-to-day production routines running smoothly (mediating between the studio head and the directors and stars, fending off gossip columnists, engineering publicity stunts, etc.); apparently he’s based on a real figure from MGM’s golden days.  This time, star George Clooney has gone missing, presumably on a bender but actually kidnaped by a communist cell (screenwriters, of course).  Other real Hollywood luminaries also make appearances:  Scarlett Johannson facing a Loretta-Young-styled pregnancy scandal, Ralph Fiennes as a fastidious British director, Tilda Swinton in a dual role as duelling gossip colunnist sisters, Channing Tatum as a dancing star.  The events as laid out hew pretty close to what is known about Hollywood history – no surprises here and not much attempt to critique or revise.  However, the loving recreations of classic genres (the Busby Berkeley synchronised swim, the western, the very gay musical, the sitting room drama, and the sword and sandals religious epic) are top notch.  I chortled out loud on numerous occasions and the Coens’ intelligence is on display discussing some pretty high level content (religion, communism) that doesn’t often make it to the mainstream cinema.  This isn’t a masterpiece but it fits well into the upper half of the filmmakers’ oeuvre.

  

Love in the Afternoon (1972)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Love in the Afternoon (1972) – E. Rohmer

The last of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales finds Frederic, a young businessman, reflecting on his life after three years of marriage. His internal thoughts are narrated in voiceover.  He thinks about women and his attraction to them in the context of his fidelity to his wife which he is proud to honour. They have a very young daughter as well.  Frederic’s life has become bourgeois but he sees himself as a sort of urban cat, prowling around in the afternoons.  When an old acquaintance, Chloe, returns after a six-year absence overseas, she provokes him and challenges his views about relationships.  She is rootless, flitting from job to job and from man to man, clearly independent and willful and sexy for that reason.  Frederic finds himself drawn to her and they set up rendezvouses on certain afternoons, physically chaste though emotionally all over the place.  Rohmer is good at getting into his male characters’ psyches, undermining their confidence and throwing moral dilemmas at them.  We don’t really get inside the women but they are treated as mysterious and special.  Rohmer’s films are naturally all talk but they can be exhilarating and refreshing.  We don’t know where Frederic is heading but the conclusion of the film feels to be his choice, made freely and autonomously and Rohmer respects it (as he respects his audience and his vision).

  

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) – J. Ford

Enthralling tale of Okies being thrown off their land during the Dust Bowl/Depression and subsequently heading west to California to live in squalor with others seeking jobs. Henry Fonda is suitably rebellious as Tom Joad, the kid just back from prison who has to pack up with his family (11 all told) and navigate the route and the perils upon it.  So, it’s a road movie of sorts, but the real drama takes place in the Golden State when their hopes and dreams are dashed. Director John Ford chose his character actors well (they are not all recongizable stars) and cinematographer Gregg Toland uses light beautifully both on location (particularly in the desert) and on the studio sets. Yet, for all the realness infused here, you can’t forget this is a prestige picture, as the flow of things comes to a sudden halt every now and again when one of the players let loose with a hefty chunk of text from John Steinbeck’s source novel.  Fonda gets the meatiest quotes (“Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there…”) but the picture ends nobly with Ma Joad’s (Jane Darwell) “We are the people” speech, apparently producer Zanuck’s idea against John Ford’s wishes for a more downbeat ending.  But how downbeat can you get?  That said, I reckon the actual reality for folks at that time was harsher and less cinematic.  For all their attempts to p a collective solution to the problems of poverty and exploitation by the owning classes, Steinbeck and Ford wound up being investigated by HUAC (even though Ford was a noted conservative).  You can’t win.