I had fond
memories of this one from childhood and, fortunately, I still found it funny
when I revisited it last night – and not too many movies actually make me
laugh. Here, uptight dentist Alan
Arkin’s reactions to the preposterous situations that “global businessman”
Peter Falk gets him into are priceless.
Falk himself is no slouch in his portrayal either – especially when you
discover that he was improvising some of his dialogue (probably adding to
Arkin’s incredulous responses). The plot
is as follows: Arkin’s daughter is
engaged to marry Falk’s son and the big wedding is coming up. They finally meet, amidst some problems for
Falk involving the theft of US$ engraving plates, angry gangsters, and a
Central American dictator. Things quickly
spiral out of control and Arkin finds himself in many ridiculous (and
dangerous) positions – and ends up bonding with Falk (who may really know what
he is doing – or not!). I chortled along
throughout the film and I recommend it to you!
(I’m not interested in seeing the remake).
Director Paul
Schrader once wrote a book about transcendental cinema that focused on Bresson,
Ozu, and Dreyer – and he echoes those masters in this film. Ethan Hawke plays a Protestant minister
struggling with his faith, so you could point more specifically to Bresson’s
Diary of a Country Priest or Bergman’s Winter Light as forerunners. We hear
Hawke’s own tormented diary entries in voiceover, as in the former film. But Hawke’s
Reverend Toller has his faith shaken by a more modern concern: the fact that
humans are destroying the Earth via our inability to avert climate change (plus
toxic waste, etc.). “Will God Forgive Us?” becomes his catchphrase. As if this
wasn’t enough to worry about, Schrader digs deeper, also burdening Toller with
an adult son who has died (in the Iraq war), a broken marriage, a drinking
problem, an affair that ended poorly, and possibly stomach cancer. His boss (Cedric the Entertainer) from the nearby
mega-church is starting to have concerns about Toller’s fitness for duty (at
the small historic church that is more tourist destination than real place of
worship). Hawke does a solid job at playing the stoic, but we can see from his
internet searches that he is quietly plotting something. At the same time, he befriends
a young pregnant widow (Amanda Seyfried) who shares his worries about the
environment (and also some trippy moments where Schrader lets his freak flag
fly). And then, and then, and then, the movie rushes to a sudden surprise
conclusion that I am still puzzling over.
Was it all just selfish pride, now diverted? Or are we seeing joy and
relief at the discovery of communion of purpose and the end to loneliness?
Where does God figure in this? Schrader does not give us any easy answers but a
lot to mull over.
Notable as a key
influence on Star Wars (1977), this is Kurosawa’s fantastically fun adventure film. I introduced Amon (aged 8 ½) to this last
night and it didn’t disappoint. The film
follows two bumbling and greedy peasants (played comically by Minoru Chiaki and
Kamatari Fujiwara) who escape from being accidental prisoners of war in the
battle between the Yamana (bad guys) and the Akizuki (good guys) to find
themselves involved with vanquished Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and her loyal
general Rokurota Makabe (Toshirô Mifune). They are convinced to help these
fleeing Akizuki leaders because they believe they will get a share of the clan’s
gold that needs to be smuggled (along with the Princess, the only heir to the
throne) across enemy territory to the safe lands of the Hayakawa. What follows is an episodic journey that
allows Mifune to scowl and grimace and tease the bumblers, even as he guides
them all through difficult circumstances. One pivotal scene, reminiscent of
Renoir’s honour between combatants in La Grande Illusion, sees Mifune duel one-on-one
with his Yamana counterpart, buying time for the fleeing group; another focuses
on a Fire Festival that highlights the film’s existential themes. Throughout it all, Kurosawa keeps the
excitement and sense of adventure going. Highly recommended.
Not just another
boxing noir, but one that uses the sport as a vehicle (or metaphor even) to
attack capitalism and its ill effects on individuals and society. (It might come as no surprise that star John
Garfield, writer Abraham Polonsky, and director Robert Rossen and many more
from the cast and crew had trouble with blacklisting via HUAC – but Rossen
named names and escaped their fate). Charley Davis (Garfield) is from a poor
background and, after his father dies, the only way that he can see to bring
money into the house is by boxing; in other words, the only way to get ahead is
to beat up somebody else. Of course, it
is even worse because the fight game is corrupt; to secure a chance at the
title he needs to make a deal with a gangster who then arranges for his
opponent (a poor black fighter with a blood clot in the brain) to take a dive
in the final round. As soon as he reaches
the top, Davis is surrounded by people addicted to money – and soon he is also
hooked into spending big, taking cash advances against his next purse, and constantly
needing more. His idealistic artist girlfriend
Peg (Lilli Palmer) eventually tells him that it is boxing or her – and he
leaves her for a gold-digging floozy. Of course, the moment finally comes when Davis
himself is asked to throw a fight so that the gangsters can bet against him
(the sure favourite) and make a killing.
Suddenly, Davis has some moral qualms (supported by Peg and his mother,
played sternly by Anne Revere) – the final fight, shot intensely by James Wong
Howe, doesn’t disappoint. I’m not sure the metaphor holds up completely (“everybody
dies” seems to be another way of saying that capitalism has no mercy) but we
know that the rich get richer and the gangsters are not going to sit quietly at
film’s end.
Actually, director
Rob Reiner does a much better Hitchcock impression than I would have expected
(and yes, this is my first viewing of this Stephen King adaptation). You can
actually see where he borrowed some of Hitch’s montage style to increase the
suspense (i.e., shot of James Caan looking, shot of bobby pin on the floor,
shot of Caan, shot of door lock; then when he is out of the locked room, shot
of Kathy Bates’ car returning, etc.). But let me back up. The plot involves
famous author (and King surrogate) Paul Sheldon having a car accident during a
blizzard and being rescued by psycho “Number One Fan” Annie Wilkes (Kathy
Bates, who won the Oscar for this role). She pretends that the phone line is
out and that she has to nurse him back to health herself (she is a nurse by training
after all) – but obviously he is her prisoner and she wants him to write a new
book about her favourite character from his works. Things get fairly gruesome
when he rebels but, in fact, the film often veers into black comedy (again not unlike
Hitchcock) perhaps to release all the built up tension from Wilkes’ behaviour.
Folksy Richard Farnsworth as the persistent local sheriff is a nice touch. I
suppose the only thing I might quibble with is the over-the-top finale (not the
coda); I tried to imagine how Hitch would have handled the conclusion
differently (without so much overt violence) but I could not. Perhaps, as in
Psycho, he would have kept these violent moments for their shock value. Kudos
to William Goldman for his screenplay which kept the simple premise going far
longer than I thought he could.
This time through,
I watched Antonioni’s The Eclipse (third film in his famed trilogy) with
Richard Pena’s commentary and it shed more light on this notoriously abstract
film (he positions it somewhere between traditional narrative cinema and the
more purely experimental films of the day – but much closer to narrative, it
should be said). As the film opens, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is splitting up
with her boyfriend, Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) who wishes she wouldn’t. She leaves
on foot past the EUR tower (another architectural landmark which Antonioni
loves to film) in a gentrified area of Rome and heads to the local stock market
where her mother is a small-time investor. Little do we know at this point that
Piero (Alain Delon), her mother’s broker, will become her next love interest. Although
Antonioni sticks with Vittoria long enough to see her visit a friend from Kenya
(allowing the director to elicit viewers’ reactions to European colonialism), soon
the film shifts gears to observe Piero who likes fast cars and call girls. It
is hard to see how he will connect with Vittoria who seems disconnected from
people but after some awkward scenes at his parents’ house, the film cuts
forward in time, where they seem to be a happy couple. We see them in certain locations in Rome and
then they part, planning to meet the next day.
Instead, Antonioni shows us these same locations without Vittoria or Piero,
as if they haven’t bothered to show up (for a full seven minutes). We are left
to ponder the meaning of this jarring finale. Has their relationship ended? Are
all relationships transient then? Or are we meant think about how the places
around us will continue to exist after we’re gone, really gone? Are our actions
really just devoid of meaning? Or perhaps the actions of the new bourgeoisie,
cut off from the moral foundations of the past, lost or finding themselves only
in materialism, are Antonioni’s target, as in the previous films of the
trilogy. The digression about the drunken man who steals Piero’s sports car and
dies in an accident may tell us as much. In any case, this is one to ponder.
Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid (1969) – G. R. Hill
After finishing
the movie, I contemplated what it might have been like if shot by Sam Peckinpah
rather than George Roy Hill. After all, The
Wild Bunch was released in the same year (and forced screenwriter William Goldman
to change the name of Butch’s outfit to The Hole in the Wall Gang when
historically it really was The Wild Bunch). I guess it was the ending that made
me think about this – a violent ending to our outlaw heroes (an ending that
made Amon cry: perhaps PG really did require more guidance on my part -- oops)
not unlike what might have been offered by Peckinpah. Hill, in contrast, likes
things light-hearted, even when our protagonists are bank robbers; I did find
the “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” sequence rather unsufferable though. In
fact, early on, I was ready to be disappointed by the film (not having seen it
in decades) but very gradually, it grew on me, probably when the “super posse” started
trailing Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) for an
extended amount of time. This gave the actors a chance to develop their
characters and camaraderie. When the action switched to Bolivia, even better. What
sort of strange Western was this? Another one playing with the form and
examining the dying days of the Wild West (similar to what Peckinpah was doing,
even more violently and bleakly). To his credit, Hill fills the screen with
some beautiful scenic vistas, along with handsome actors, and it’s no surprise
that it became a huge hit.
The second in Antonioni’s
trilogy (or tetralogy) about alienation in the modern world (alienation from
self, alienation from others, alienation from nature, alienation from moral
purpose). I find this the most difficult and least enjoyable of the four,
perhaps because both Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni play such sombre,
unhappy characters – mere reflections of who they should be (echoed by
Antonioni’s frequent decision to place them in front of glass-walled modern
buildings). He is a writer who has just released a novel that is achieving modest
success but he wonders aloud about whether writers are needed anymore. Up until
now, she has supported them both with family money but it is clear that this
has come at some cost. As the film opens, they visit a dying friend in the hospital
– she feels the impact more strongly (we learn later that this friend once
courted her) and she escapes to wander the streets of Milan looking for…herself.
Upon her return, she tries to re-awaken her love for Giovanni (Mastroianni) by
going on a date to a nightclub but his passivity leads her to suggest that they
attend a party instead -- where he seeks to fill his emptiness by impetuously pursuing
Monica Vitti and she herself is pursued by another suitor. They are at a crossroads
(or perhaps more than one). The whole film occurs across the space of 24 hours
(the party runs until the wee hours) but we are made to feel the full weight of
time on their relationship.
Revisiting
Antonioni’s breakthrough masterpiece for the first time in ages, I decided to listen
to Gene Youngblood’s audio commentary while watching – it certainly deepened my
appreciation of the film. As you may
recall, this is the work that was booed at Cannes, potentially because it sets
up audience expectations about a mystery (Anna disappears from an outing by a
small group of rich people to a deserted rocky island north of Sicily) that it then
never solves (Anna is never found and the plot gradually drifts away from the
search). Another reason for the booing may have been Antonioni’s determined
break with the traditional film grammar of the time: here we have long shots and
empty shots that create ambience (but may have been felt as longueurs by the
audience) along with cuts that do not match, awkward close-ups of backs of
heads, characters placed meaningfully but unusually in the frame, and so on.
These choices serve to focus us on the internal psychology of these characters,
which remains unspoken because they themselves can’t express how they
feel. Monica Vitti plays Claudia, a
friend of Anna who is from a lower class – she may be the one having the “adventure”
as she bears witness to the aimless behaviour of the bourgeoisie. Clearly, she
is ambivalent, even as she succumbs to the advances of Anna’s fiancé, Sandro
(Gabriele Ferzetti), who is dissatisfied with his life, having stopped pursuing
his own architectural career to take on lucrative (but not creative) consulting
positions for the idle rich. According
to Youngblood, Sandro pursues women (and sex) as a way to escape from the
emptiness this decision has created in his soul. Antonioni places Sandro against
many unique and beautiful architectural settings to subtly reinforce his
problems. Indeed, the landscape itself (shot beautifully) contributes to the
story, from the barren island to the empty places that Vitti and Sandro visit
as they wander Italy, presumably searching for Anna but really falling in love
(if Sandro is really capable of this) with the love scenes heightened by shots
of the environment (as are all emotional moments, which might be punctuated by a
look at the raging sea or a windblown tree). All the while, we see Anna’s mixed
feelings and her transition (walking through archways) between uncertain and
confident selves, going with the flow and actively choosing her fate. In the end,
she takes stock of all she sees and feels pity for the plight of those adrift
in modern society such as Sandro, those unable to make confident moral
decisions. This is not to say that we know what is in her thoughts nor what her
future may hold – if anything, Antonioni has left the whole film open to
interpretation. For that reason, it rewards multiple careful viewings that
expand your mind.
