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.