Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964)

 

John Frankenheimer’s 1964 drama Seven Days in May is inevitably dated, and a bit too arid, but remains a stirring reference point, not least for how its resonances shift with the times. The film sets out how Marine Corps. Colonel Casey (Kirk Douglas) stumbles onto evidence of a possible coup plot by his direct superior, James Scott (Burt Lancaster), and other military brass, in response to a recently-negotiated, highly divisive peace treaty with Russia (viewed in the age of Trump, one might almost shake one’s head at the inefficiency of plotting to subvert the democratic process by way of such cumbersome intervention, compared to the much more direct method of doing it from within). The movie’s aging President Lyman, embodied with great authoritative nuance by Fredric March, seems now like the kind of leader that’s lost in time (notwithstanding that Joe Biden was cut from similar cloth), even refusing out of basic decency to use some salacious letters that it seems would have done much to sully Scott’s reputation. But his instincts are sharp, seeing better than Scott that a United States in the hands of a military dictatorship would far more likely provoke Russian aggression than extinguish it, and here too, it’s impossible not to mull on how the current administration’s coup-like disregard for conventions and norms coexists with an inexplicable subservience to Russian self-interest and distortion of reality. Although some of the film’s devices now seem simplistic, such as the flurry of bland-seeming messages about a horse racing betting pool which turn out to be incredibly consequential communications about participation in the coup, these add to the pervasive sense of institutional vulnerability, to its excessive reliance on a few good men (and in this film, of course, they are all indeed men, a point underlined by the tediously shoehorned subplot involving Ava Gardner).

Two Girls on the Street (Andre de Toth, 1939)

 

Andre de Toth’s Two Girls on the Street is somewhat mistitled in that its two female protagonists, while initially down on their luck, spend most of the film more than adequately housed and financed, its primary concern being (of course) man-related. Gyongi, an aspiring violinist, is disowned by her father after an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and eventually ends up playing in a dive bar; she comes across Vica, a lower class factory worker, distraught after escaping an attempted sexual assault by Csiszar, a successful architect, and takes the dispossessed woman under her wing. Gyongi variously refers to Vica in terms evoking a daughter, a best friend, a little doll, or even a lover; the film drops recurring hints of some deeper communion between the two, a dynamic rendered peculiar though by the physical similarity between them, and the fact of the actress playing the often mothering Gyongi being two years younger than that playing Vica. The film makes many striking choices both cinematically -  such as scenes that often end more abruptly than one expects, or in the arresting deployment of montage (for example to depict the spread of gossip) and point of view – and narratively, as in the absence of any depicted reconciliation after Vica’s ongoing involvement with Csiszar drives a wedge between the two (although we see Vica celebrating Gyongi’s eventual professional success from  a distance). The film has a distinct strand of social awareness – Vica chides Csiszar for bragging about the buildings he’s built, saying the real work was that of the physical labourers – and yet seems to uncritically view the two women’s materialism once their luck changes, with the final moments appearing to exult in how Vica’s new wealth and status separate her from those masses. But the film’s choices, omissions and possible contradictions are consistently stimulating, even when rather puzzling.

Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)

 

George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is the smoothest of Hollywood comedies, flowing along as seemingly effortlessly and gracefully as any movie, its stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in perfect sync whether flirting or feuding: a single-take scene of them preparing an impromptu dinner embodies the film’s seductive flow (albeit there’s some major cheating in how quickly the meal comes together). The plot has Assistant D.A. Adam Bonner prosecuting the high-profile case of a woman (the fascinatingly singular Judy Holliday) who shot her cheating husband, with his wife Amanda Bonner taking on the defence, a set-up based in contrasting views of the law, morality, and of their own relationship. Amanda bases her defence in equal rights, in the premise that a man who defended his home, even violently, would be viewed as a hero, and that a woman’s actions should be assessed comparably; given though that the crime was committed far outside the home, after the woman stalked her husband to the apartment of his presumed mistress, the intriguing implication might be that a woman’s legitimate zone of “home” interest extends further than a man’s, that it’s as much a moral or emotional construct as a physical one; an implication nicely complicated in the final scenes when Adam seems to be the more invested of the two in their country home, and demonstrates how he can turn on tears at will (it’s a shame though that the closing line wasn’t stronger than a vague celebration of the “small differences” between men and women). Of course, the film is a work of its time, the relationship being of the kind where Adam demonstrates his thoughtfulness by buying his wife a new hat, in which even when things are in full flow she’s seen to be “managing” him, facilitating his crustiness in a way that needn’t be reciprocated. Still, it’s skillful enough that the dated certainties of other films register here as stimulating ambiguities.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Leonardo Favio, 1975)

 

Leonardo Favio’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf announces itself as based on a “famous radio drama,” but the narrative has agedly mythic roots, and the film often achieves a sense of not having been crafted as much as excavated or revealed. Nazareno is the seventh son of a father who was warned that such a child would be a werewolf; the father and other boys now dead, he’s grown to young adulthood without the curse coming to pass, but then he falls in love with the beautiful Grizelda, and the wheels of fate start to turn (the meeting of lycanthropy and sexual desire rather anticipates Paul Schrader’s approach to remaking Cat People). While feeling entirely distinct, Favio’s film often brings Pasolini to mind: in the rich and unfiltered-feeling local flavour and almost aggressive absence of conventional cinematic polish (the swooning treatment of the lovers is a prominent exception); in the use of non-professional actors and the very basic approach to evoking the supernatural (a sequence in which an old woman relishingly demonstrates how she can change into a variety of animals could hardly be more simply conceived, but is rendered irresistible through the woman’s robust and sustained laughter). The evocation of the underworld has its Trilogy-of-Life aspects to it too (for example, the glimpses of naked activity in the background), but the character of the devil comes as a surprise, marked by longing rather than malevolence, regretful that he experienced neither being or having a son (a recurring preoccupation of the film), quite poignant in the request he makes of Nazareno, rendering the film’s final moments both beautiful and melancholy . This viewer was rather surprised to hear the tune of Johnny Mathis’s When a Child is Born used as a recurring love theme; research indicates that the melody is Soleado, used here before its appropriation as a Christmas hit.

Exposed (James Toback, 1983)

 

In a way, the title of James Toback’s endlessly fascinating Exposed is diametrically misaligned with the underlying film, in that the trajectory of its protagonist Elizabeth Carlson is as much toward a kind of erasure or embalming as toward self-actualization. The opening stretch feels like a great American origin story, following Elizabeth as she quits school, returns home to her Swedish parents on their Wyoming farm, endures the ups and downs of New York at its most rough-edged, and then while reluctantly working as a waitress is discovered by a fashion photographer and becomes a world-famous model. An extended scene of Elizabeth dancing exuberantly in her new apartment, the embodiment of having arrived, is in hindsight a kind of conclusion, the film thereafter dominated by the rivalry of two men: a mysterious, at first seemingly romantic pursuer who initially calls himself Daniel Jelline (Rudolf Nureyev), his interest in her in fact partially or maybe primarily rooted in the knowledge that she fascinates the murderous terrorist Rivas (Harvey Keitel), and may be able to serve as bait. After initially resisting, Elizabeth starts following the trail by herself, finding her way to Rivas, who despite his suspicions allows her to observe the heart of his operation, including his murder of a group member who betrays him. The final freeze-frame of Elizabeth, at a moment of extreme trauma, bridges the many glamour photos we see of her and Jelline’s collected newspaper clippings of Rivas’ and other atrocities, as such summarizing the tension between image and action that propels much of the film, her activism and initiative having brought her to an existential dead end. The casting of Nureyev, and as a violin player rather than a dancer, might embody how the film seldom delivers its pleasures quite, or even at all, as one anticipates.

Distant Thunder (Satyajit Ray, 1973)

 

Satyajit Ray’s 1973 Distant Thunder, set in 1943, is one of his most quietly incisive works, charting how a tiny rural village far removed from world events becomes physically and spiritually decimated by their effects. The film initially focuses on a young teacher, Chakravarti, newly-arrived with his wife; as the only Brahmin in the village he’s also called on to be doctor and spiritual leader, exploiting his privilege with quiet smugness (when called to treat a cholera outbreak in a nearby community, he sizes it up as an opportunity to buy his wife a new sari). But the price of rice starts to rise as the war (directly evidenced only by the planes that occasionally fly overhead, a sight that initially seems wondrous) messes with supply chains, food rapidly becoming virtually inaccessible, prompting chaos and despair. By the end of the film, the perceived superiority of caste has been eviscerated: we realize the teacher’s ignorance on matters of world events (peddling bad information on foreign countries and their role in the war), his status as local leader meaning nothing in the face of escalating hunger, rendering him an ineffectual onlooker, increasingly and symbolically absent from the film as matters deteriorate. The narrative encompasses violent assault both sexually and financially motivated, desperation-motivated prostitution, and even a covered-up murder, but even at its most despairing, the film finds pockets of compassion and empathy (even for characters who Ray makes convincingly hard to put up with), ending in a vision of remade and even expanded community. The final shot, of silhouetted masses shuffling toward the spectator, rather evokes a horror film, and for all its humanity and restraint, Distant Thunder almost invites such categorization, as an examination of sustainable (if imperfect) community devastated by events beyond its understanding or even vague capacity to resist.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

 

Possibly Robert Altman’s most intricately complex and strangely beautiful work, 3 Women might also count among his strangest (although it has some competition), especially if one tries to take it at any kind of face value. The film starts as a strange chronicle of Pinkie (Sissy Spacek), a new employee at a health facility for seniors, latching onto another employee, Millie (Shelley Duvall); the third woman, Willie (Janice Rule) is an artist married to Millie’s landlord, for most of the movie’s duration seeming too marginal a character to be coherently grouped with the others, her significance ultimately stunningly evident (the film’s men are all either flagrantly flawed, like Willie’s drunken, unfaithful braggart of a husband, or else non-entities of one kind or another). The film has a pervasive sense of the fluid and ungraspable, of something in formation, hinted at even in the opening scenes of the old-timers on their guided water-walking, to a pivotal swimming pool “accident,” to the startling climactic juxtaposition of Millie overseeing Willie’s delivery while Pinkie, instead of fetching a doctor as instructed, stands and watches from a distance, the aftermath carrying the quasi-ritualistic, bloodied impact of a horror film. And although Willie’s child doesn’t survive, biological destiny is realized in strangely displaced form, the three women forming a new living environment (Willie’s husband, it’s suggested, having been violently dispatched) which appears at least momentarily stable, but seemingly at the cost of a surrender of self, a suspension of growth in one woman counter-balanced by an acceleration of it in another, the suppressed mother-daughter elements always visible in the Millie/Pinkie relationship now explicit. This might all seem somewhat schematic if not for the film’s extraordinarily detailed texture, minutely realized in matters of clothing and décor and food, and more dramatically in the strange, sexually ambiguous shapes that Willie generates (often on the walls of empty swimming pools); Duvall and Spacek are in mesmerizing form from start to end.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005)

 

Hou Hsiao Hsien’s haunting trilogy Three Times casts its leads Shu Qi and Chang Chen in three stories of imperfect connection, set in three different decades. The 1960’s sequence is primarily structured around a soldier’s search, during a brief leave, for May, who worked at a pool hall he formerly frequented. The 1910’s sequence somewhat reverses the dynamic, the woman now a courtesan, always there, the man an occasional customer who she sees as her primary hope of obtaining freedom, even in the absence of any promises or stated intentions on his part. The woman in the technology-heavy modern-day is the freest of the three by most measures, but her situation remains defined by challenge and dysfunction. Both the main actors are perfectly cast and deployed, with Qi especially engaging and wide-ranging: the way May beams with delight when he unexpectedly turns up in the first sequence is particularly irresistible. The film suggests that the barriers to mutual discovery are ever-present, but shifting, the three stories drawing in the country’s vulnerability to foreign powers, the machinations of wartime, the indentured courtesan system, and more recently the impact of a speeded-up, connected society. That last sequence ends with the most explicit assertion of female choice, her on the back of his motorcycle after she tells him to take her to his place: such freedom is far removed from the plight of the poor courtesan, but as presented here hardly represents a straightforward expression of female progress (in a way, May’s perpetual changing of jobs and locations in the first story suggests an existential lightness of being that the other two woman lack, even though, or indeed because, we don’t know what underlines it). The non-chronological ordering of the sequences is just one way in which Hou discourages a simpler reading of the film, even as the multiple use of the same actors, and the director’s matchless formal grace, provide a binding sense of transcendent persistence.

Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)

 

Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine is an intricate, outre delight that leaves you feeling empty and dissatisfied, at least in part by design, reflecting the passing of the short-lived glamrock era it swims within. To say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Brian Slade is a “Bowie-like” figure hardly captures the extent of the correspondence, as the character appropriates the sound, the look, the cultural positioning, the fluid sexuality, and other big chunks of the biography: the big difference is that whereas Bowie renewed himself multiple times after retiring Ziggy Stardust, the more conventionally mortal Slade has to engineer a fake shooting before disappearing for years, eventually reappearing in such radically overhauled form that no one knows it’s him. The film is gorgeously and tangibly imagined, crammed with perfectly-judged costumes and videos and posters and album covers, and has some fantastically combustible sequences, all of this shoehorned though into a rather turgid (and pointlessly Citizen Kane-evoking) framework involving a journalist (Christian Bale) who ten years later tries to put the story together. There’s none of Bowie’s music in the film – apparently he refused permission – but we do hear instantly recognizable tracks from Lou Reed, T-Rex and others, giving the distractingly strange impression of a parallel universe in which music evolved in exactly the same way, with the same people (even Gilbert O’Sullivan!), minus that one vital figure. Another much-debatable point, the use of a different actor to play Slade in his new identity was criticized by Meyers, and perhaps too easily allows points of logistical quibbling (no plastic surgery was ever as successful…), but seems to me in a way to cement Bowie’s uniqueness, his near-supernatural capacity for renewal needing in his absence to be made literal (like Dr. Who, one might think). The film is brave, emotionally expansive, and galvanizingly slippery and unpredictable; little matter then if it’s often on the dull side too.

L'ami de mon amie (Eric Rohmer, 1987)

In Eric Rohmer’s L’ami de mon amie, Blanche and Lea, both in their early twenties, become friends; Blanche is single but develops a crush on Alexandre, a man she meets through Lea, and who feels nothing for her; Lea lives with Fabien but the relationship is bumpy, and then while Lea is away, Blanche and Fabien connect and sleep together. The theme of intertwining couples and mismatched desires is worthy of classic romantic comedy, and Rohmer delivers a finale in that vein, in which each of the two women misunderstands which man the other is referring to, a confusion that’s ultimately happily resolved. The film is unusual in Rohmer’s oeuvre for its setting, the “new town” of Cergy-Pontoise, an easy commute from Paris but a universe away in terms of its modernity and artificiality and sometimes rather bizarre-seeming concept of space. Cergy is conceived as a place one might barely ever have to leave, with work and home and play all within precisely-curated walking distance: Fabien refers to an occasion on which he ran into the same person seven times while out and about, becoming increasingly frustrated about how to respond, an anecdote that nevertheless in a way confirms the location’s effectiveness in promoting connectivity. Even more than in some other Rohmer movies then, there’s a sense here of social experimentation, that Cergy-Pontoise ought to be productive territory for relationships, thus adding to the characters’ frustrations at their own failures (Blanche’s crush on Alexandre is presented as utterly absurd, and the moment when she finally realizes that he’s more naturally drawn to Lea is quietly penetrating). Rohmer doesn’t seem cynical about the setting though, his film marked by both fascination and optimism, by a sense that the possibilities of Cergy at that time might have been running ahead of the capacities of its occupants.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff (Ira Deutchman, 2019)

 

Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff is a modest but cherishable piece of cinema history, packed with juicy anecdote and memoir. The now seldom-mentioned Don Rugoff was an exhibitor and distributor, his holdings including a group of upper East Side Manhattan theaters that embodied the “arthouse” of the 60’s and 70’s (Rugoff was as responsible as anyone, for example, for Lina Wertmuller’s short-lived preeminence). An emblematically colourful and turbulent character, he habitually slept through screenings (which didn’t prevent him forming strong opinions on what he’d missed) and had lousy personal habits, possibly exacerbated by an untreatable tumor in his brain; still, for a while he made a lot of things happen, with a flair for imaginative publicity ideas (such as pumping up the prospects of Pumping Iron with bodybuilding demonstrations in the theaters). The documentary’s title references the somewhat extraneous Searching for Sugarman-type strand in which Deutchman tries to track down a small-town cinema club which Rugoff ran at the end of his life, the details of which have fallen into obscurity; while this material illustrates the depth of Rugoff’s fall from visibility, that part of the narrative would be amply clear regardless. Among the film’s notable omissions is any detailed account of Rugoff’s distribution business, and its impact on cinema culture outside New York, an absence that seemingly underlines the narrowness of Rugoff’s core achievement. Even growing up around that time on the other side of the Atlantic, I recall how largely that strand of Manhattan cinemagoing loomed in one’s perception of various films, of what it was to be a cineaste; as wondrous a moment in time as that was, it may seem in hindsight that a culture rooted in such a geographically and sociologically specific, and to most of us distant piece of the world, and bolstered by an unsustainable amount of spending on stunts and overhead, might not have been optimally built to last…

Gwaed ar y Ser (Wil Aaron, 1975)

 

As in the joke about the piano-playing dog, one was probably never supposed to ask whether the 1975 Welsh-language Gwaed ar y Ser (Blood on the Stars) is any good, it being miracle enough that it exists at all. Lasting only about an hour, the premise is of a serial killer knocking off the line-up for an upcoming night’s entertainment at a village hall, the joke being that the victims were indeed at the time relative “stars” within the tiny confines of Welsh-language culture. The film places an uncertain foot in the folk-horror genre, the killer himself being less malign than the local kids’ choir that he notionally conducts, the threat from which will seemingly outlive his inevitable arrest. But any potential creepiness is swamped by a haphazard shooting style, scattershot jokiness and massive tonal uncertainty, devoting too much time to a way-over-the-top lead detective, and allowing minor characters to prattle on at pointless length. As a medium for the Welsh language, the film spans everything from ornate oracular eloquence to English-infused vernacular, and it dispatches with its celebrities in a varied bunch of ways, from a live-on-air DJ opening a package containing a deadly snake, to a folk singer whose dead body is found painted green (a sight the camera dwells on with particular relish), to a harpist electrocuted by her own instrument (after she leads a visitor through a gluttonous and mostly very starchy-looking cornucopia of local delicacies). Stuffed with in-jokes and references that probably barely resonated with its target audience (to the extent that one can imagine one) even at the time, the film was hardly designed to meet any kind of test of time; the bizarre fact of it popping up fifty years later on a Canadian streaming service seems then like a crazed vindication of sorts.

Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)

 

Max Ophuls’ Caught follows the journey of Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) and her relationship with two men placed at economic, social and emotional extremes from each other, the title seeming to refer primarily to the imprisoning gravity of money and the power it bestows. The film is driven by Leonora’s conflicted impulses and motivations: she enrolls in a “charm school” to increase her social effectiveness, takes a job as a department store model, and accepts an invitation to a party on a yacht belonging to the super-rich Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), but her ambivalence and reluctance are often evident, and although she’s frequently criticized during the film for being preoccupied with marrying well, it appears to be more of an imposed attitude than a deeply-felt one. Ohlrig does marry her, but with equal lack of conviction, perhaps primarily just to prove a therapist wrong, thereafter wearing her down with his disregard. The film doesn’t demonize Ohlrig, showing him to be in the grip of various kinds of malaise, but in the end he simply fades from relevance, a structural choice intriguingly balanced by how the other man in Leonora’s life, an idealistic doctor for whom she takes a low-paid receptionist job after attempting to break from her husband and who helps refine her values doesn’t appear until almost halfway into the movie (notwithstanding James Mason’s top billing). There’s something rather startling about the film’s ultimate deployment of death as a necessary ultimate step toward redemption, its twist on the familiar intertwining of biology and destiny, the impact into the material world rippling outward (the final image is of a once-prized fur coat being carried away). And if not one of Ophuls’ very greatest works, Caught is (of course) consistently visually eloquent and striking, whether exploring the alienatingly vast interiors of Ohlrig’s Long Island mansion or the drastically contrasting no-place-to-turn East Side spaces.

The Widow (Nam-ok Park, 1955)

 

Nam-ok Park’s 1955 film The Widow is highly worthwhile viewing, notable as the first Korean film to be directed by a woman, and marked by its sympathetic treatment of female perspectives. Shin is a single mother, widowed by the war, established in the early scenes as weighed down by money problems but also as independent-spirited, not inclined to settle; she’s financially assisted by an older acquaintance, but doesn’t sleep with him, contrary to his wife’s suspicions. Meanwhile the wife herself has a lover, Taek, who eventually in turn falls for Shin, their marriage plans imperiled by the return of Taek’s old love, whom he’d assumed to be also dead. The film’s examination of societal pressures on women evokes Ozu’s films of the period, but the comparison (not an entirely fair one of course) rather underlines The Widow’s lack of formal rigour and the relative softness of its approach (perhaps summed up by the recurring use of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening). At the time of writing, the film can only be viewed in a truncated version in which the second-last reel is without a soundtrack, and the final reel is missing altogether, and although that’s obviously objectively not for the best, it does lend what’s left a rather singular vanishing quality. Just before the sound disappears, the film briefly detours for the first time into becoming a musical, and then a narrative that seemed geared toward a romantic coming together becomes one of separation, felt all the more deeply for the silence, underlined by a series of shots of her feet as she walks alone, and then later by a corresponding series of his feet, and a final shot of Taek alone in the night, staring in the direction of his lost love, the sudden imposition of the end seeming to define an absence and a longing that can never be filled or mitigated.

The Bible...in the Beginning (John Huston, 1966)

 

John Huston’s The Bible…in the Beginning is as misbegotten as any big-budget movie of its era, its superficial fidelity to the source and humorless solemnity embodying a perceived importance, if not transformative capacity, but barely coherent as conventional narrative while also lacking any sense of unifying mystery or basic theological curiosity. The film travels through God’s initial establishment of the light and creation of the world, through the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, making dull use of the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole, sometimes momentarily impressing with its spectacle and resources, but never penetrating or moving: the episodically plodding, literal approach succeeds at least in establishing God’s unknowable, if not wantonly capricious, nature, but offers almost no discernible means of navigation. As presented here, for instance, the mythic grandeur of the Noah story can hardly surmount endless questions: how one old man and his family possess the resources and know-how to harvest so much timber, build such a seaworthy vessel and so on; what kind of land it is in which kangaroos, hippos and polar bears live in close proximity; what the point of the flood was when the movie depicts mankind rapidly returning to its fractured and sparring ways (even so, the Noah episode at least possess a sense of fun absent from the rest of the movie, with Huston himself turning in the film’s most enjoyable performance). The film concludes with its longest segment, the story of Abraham (George C. Scott), presented here as a one-note trudge, much of it likely to be mystifying to non-scholars (one’s resistance reaching a pinnacle in the brutal final testing of Abraham’s faith). The film’s approach ultimately might seem forged in veiled contempt as much as in intelligent engagement or respectful devotion.