Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

 

Kubrick’s filming of Nabokov’s Lolita is perhaps his first great filmic maze, subsuming eroticism (or even any real engagement with transgressive sexuality) to a recurring sense of entrapment, of obstacles and traps and distances needing to be traversed: in retrospect it may feel like much of the movie consists of watching cars in motion. James Mason’s Humbert Humbert says early on that every game has its rules, referring to his initial calculation of marrying a woman he detests, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), in order to be close to her teenage daughter Lolia (Sue Lyon); they are rules though that he perpetually fails to navigate adequately, learning only near the end of the movie that the object of his obsession was always more focused on another, playwright Clare Quilty. After Charlotte’s death, Humbert sets out to establish a new life with Lolita, behind the cover of being a respectably urbane professor and single father, but his strategy, while arousing the suspicion of neighbours and observers, pales in effectiveness against Quilty’s wild iconoclasm and bizarreness, brilliantly embodied by Peter Sellers as a man operating almost outside normal time and space (the film’s opening and closing scenes, sealing the intertwined fates of Humbert and Quilty, might almost accordingly be taking place in a different dimension, as if jumping two Kubrick movies ahead). Kubrick’s sly casting underlines the ridiculousness of Humbert’s desire, Mason’s full and searching presence often hilariously contrasted with Lyon’s deadpan superficiality (as in the scene where he tries to impress her by reading from “the divine Edgar”), the effect aided by the film’s frequent sense of dislocation (arising in part from filming such a deeply American story in the UK); his ridiculousness sealed by the deliberately strenuous ordinariness of Lolita’s ultimate arrival point, pregnant and married to a decent man of only modest prospects, Mason’s Humbert crumbling like one who’s truly reached several kinds of end.

I...for Icarus (Henri Verneuil, 1979)

 

The opening moments of Henri Verneuil’s I…for Icarus could hardly be more explicit about the film’s desire to tap into the facts and myths of the JFK assassination: would-be assassin Daslow (check out that anagram!) raises his rifle to take aim at the presidential motorcade below, finding that his gun cartridge is empty; the president is shot dead by an unseen other and then so is Daslow, in what’s staged as a suicide. A year or so later an investigative commission names him as the sole killer, over the dissent of a single member, Yves Montand’s Attorney General Volney, who then launches his own much more energetic inquiry. The film undermines itself with leaden writing and plotting: characters speak at rather than to each other (even the great Montand, to most viewers likely the only recognizable person in the cast, seldom surpasses the strictly functional) and the Volney inquiry proceeds so easily and quickly that it’s impossible to imagine how the original commission filled its time (even allowing that it was a put-up job), often progressing through hokey devices such as a key witness revealed as a liar because a photograph indicates he wasn’t wearing his glasses and so couldn’t have seen what he claimed to see, or a tape which for some unfathomable reason contains a helpful montage of commands issued in connection with the assassination and other misdeeds. The would-be shock ending is telegraphed so far in advance that one merely grows impatient at the film’s failure to pull the trigger (uh, so to speak) and get it done. For all of that, it’s never dull of course, well in line with latter-day conspiratorial attitudes, suggesting a “deep state” of almost limitless reach and awareness, and taking an extended detour into a psychological experiment about submission to authority which almost constitutes a self-contained film within the film.

Circle of Two (Jules Dassin, 1981)

 

No one emerges with credit from Jules Dassin’s last film Circle of Two, a thoroughly artificial and disengaged concoction that almost makes one wish the director had found a way to work in his wife, the reliably unwatchable but at least lively Melina Mercouri. Fifteen-year-old Sarah (Tatum O’Neal) sneaks into a porno theatre, where artist Ashley St. Clair (Richard Burton) is asleep in the row in front of her: they briefly register each other when the film ends, and then meet again in a café, but it’s typical of the film’s superficiality that his seemingly out-of-character presence in such a location is never even casually probed. She visits him at his studio, and then again, and they rapidly gravitate to being physically affectionate while out and about together; he never makes a sexual move on her though, and indeed explodes in anger when she takes off her clothes for him (although that’s to offer herself as a subject for a painting, not a conquest). Even so, the relationship becomes all-consuming (a reedited version of the film was released under the title Obsession), with Sarah refusing to eat when her parents prevent her from seeing Ashley; it’s all psychologically and behaviourally incoherent though, with Burton at his most offputtingly stiff throughout, and O’Neal generally seeming to be reciting lines she barely comprehends. The film hints at unhealthy family dynamics (Sarah recoils from her mother trying to dress like her, and is justly surprised one morning to find that the overly controlling boyfriend she dumped has been invited over for breakfast) but even these frail points of interest come to nothing, and things ultimately end as abruptly and incomprehensibly as they began. The script’s poverty of imagination includes a dopey fixation on Gone with the Wind, cited twice as a reference point for Ashley’s name, and elsewhere in speculating on the length of the porn flick.

Love's Confusion (Slatan Dudow, 1959)

 

The basic plot of Love’s Confusion, the last film completed by Slatan Dudow, sounds as frothy as that of any Hollywood romcom: art student Sonja is dating medical student Dieter, who gets distracted by the less complex Siegi, whose boxer boyfriend Edy then sets his sights on Sonja, the two reconfigured couples eventually heading toward marriage despite the obvious intellectual and temperamental incompatibilities. Dudow oversees these events with a sustained lack of sentimentality or romantic exuberance; Sonja is particularly self-contained and enigmatic, seeming to regard her boyfriend’s interest in another woman as something of a social experiment (even as she acknowledges that the distraction is eroding the quality of her art). For an East German film of its period, there’s little ideological or moral content (only a few brief scenes of industrial production!): the characters seem largely self-defined (and not overly subject to economic constraints), and the film has a rather startling vein of titillation including a few bare backsides and, in an extended “carnival” sequence, intimations of widespread sexually liberated goings-on. That sequence is a modest tour de force, with Dieter wandering through areas labeled for purgatory and hell and love and so forth, among hundreds of thronging costumed extras, and a sense of burgeoning possibility which recurs throughout the movie – even in the recurring scenes of Dieter’s class attendance, the lecturers often seem less to be imparting hard knowledge than to be drifting into philosophy. This culminates in a finale when matters correct themselves on the way to the altar, not an unfamiliar genre device, but one again executed here in remarkably low-key, matter-of-fact manner. Overall, the film is hardly as radical and memorable as Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, but then not many are; on its own terms it’s often quietly surprising, with a palpable sense of pushing against imposed standards and boundaries.

In God We Trust (Marty Feldman, 1980)

 

Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust has no shortage of ideas, albeit that the commercialized, grotesquely monetized brand of modern religion makes them easy to come across: unfortunately, Feldman isn’t much of a stylist, and struggles to wrestle the material into any kind of shape. He’s a rather diffident leading man also, playing Brother Ambrose, venturing into an unfamiliar and mostly sleazy world in search of money to save the remote monastery in which he grew up: the film’s humour runs from Ambrose heading for refuge to a place advertising “All Night Mass” and having to go running when realizing that the signage’s last three letters had been temporarily covered up, to his constant resort to cold showers to dampen carnal urges toward the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him in, to a temporary job nailing plastic Jesus figurines onto miniature crosses. The film lacks any sense of real engagement or relish, but it does luck its way into seeming mildly prophetic via Andy Kaufman’s televangelist character Armageddon T. Thunderbird, who preaches self-righteously absurd sermons (God is in the E.R. and you’re the ones that put him there) to an adoring and pliable crowd, easily whipped up into giving something eerily close to a Nazi salute, working every angle for his own financial advantage and planning to unveil a third political party which will carry him to supreme power – more than a few pre-echoes there of our own false prophet, including the hair (although from the neck down the styling is more evocative of Liberace). With more subtlety, Feldman’s film might also have seemed to carry a warning about submission to technology, given that the closest thing to an active God in the film is a sentient but misinformed supercomputer (bearing the likeness of Richard Pryor), all too easily here reprogrammed onto the path of righteousness.