It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963)

 

There’s a desperate quality to the title of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; a miscalculated belief that the strenuous repetition could pound the underlying movie into the desired comic nirvana. Plainly it didn’t work out that way – the film (which is propelled by a dying man’s revelation of buried treasure, heard by five men who subsequently race against each other to get to it first, drawing in other participants along the way) has few actual laughs or notable comic invention, but a vast (or let’s say, a mad, mad, mad, mad) amount of yelling and shrieking and bickering. It’s sometimes fairly handsome at least, with much of the action taking place against imposing scenic backdrops, and of course some ideas land better than others, if only through sheer effort (Jonathan Winters contributes to a fair percentage of those; Ethel Merman to none of them, although of course that’s a matter of taste, if such a term can possibly be applied here). Perhaps the most intriguing, if underdeveloped, element is the withering vision of marriage and male-female relationships in general; among other things, Terry-Thomas’ English interloper character has a strange digression about the emasculation of the American male, and one of the wives comments in apparent seriousness that her dream, if she had most of the money for herself, might be to use it to get into a convent, but it goes no deeper than that. Spencer Tracy (playing a detective who’s been after the loot for years) is given more space than anyone else to build a more complexly motivated character, but he hardly seems fully present (which does at least provide some contrast to the all-too-present central cast). The array of cameos only means that the movie existing on the margins (Buster Keaton turns up for about a minute, the Three Stooges for a single shot) often seems to carry greater potential than the one at the centre.

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (Eric Rohmer, 1993)

It might seem ironic that Eric Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, his most resolutely localized film, also has perhaps the most wide-ranging dialogue of any of his films, the conversations at various points touching on the Amazon forests, the science of global warming, the impact of technology on work patterns, and the merits and characteristics of various ideological and political systems, to name but a few. But this speaks to the richness of Rohmer’s project, of illuminating how local issues become larger ones, with a corresponding difficulty in ever identifying the right thing to do, let alone getting it done. The mayor (Pascal Greggory) plans to build the mediatheque in the centre of the village (it’s amusing that such a project, where we’re told visitors will be able to watch films not available elsewhere, would long since have been rendered largely obsolete by streaming), along with an open-air theatre and swimming pool, creating local jobs and attracting more visitors, but with inevitable impacts on traffic volumes, centuries-old landscapes and so on, including the ancient tree referred to in the title (however, to focus primarily on the tree, as a magazine piece does in covering the dispute, simplifies the complexity). In the end, the plan falls apart for mostly bureaucratic reasons, and the movie ends on a song, straddling sincerity and satire, about taking the right steps for future generations. Romance is a secondary consideration here, and one might superficially dismiss the characters as being largely mouthpieces, but that would overlook Rohmer’s attentiveness to small but illuminating details, and his genuine immersion in the world depicted – we get to see the mayor’s garden in such detail that you might plausibly be able to sketch out the whole thing afterwards. And much as it may seem to end on a celebratory note, the film raises too many urgent issues not to leave a somewhat disquieting aftertaste.

Green Ice (Ernest Day, 1981)

 

Ernest Day’s Green Ice may be most notable for being the movie playing in a mall theatre in Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties, making a small but cherishable contribution to Akerman's exploration of its era’s not-so-golden ideology. Day's film, in (extreme) contrast, doesn’t provide much to think over, being a blandly shapeless mishmash of elements. Omar Sharif plays Meno Argenti, an expatriate Italian who’s a bigshot in the Colombian emerald racket, while primarily focused on getting back into his first love of the diamond market, from which he was exiled for past transgressions; to that end, he strategically romances the highly-connected Holbrook (Anne Archer), but she’s more interested in aiding the cause of the rebels he exploits (the passages with the rebels, while hardly politically daring, are at least among the film’s more relatively meaningful). An under-achieving electrical engineer, Joseph Wiley (Ryan O’Neal) gets drawn in, as people do, eventually leading to a daring heist on Argenti’s supposedly impenetrable emerald-hoarding fortress, and various subsequent showdowns. As in a movie like The Tamarind Seed (another use of Sharif as all-purpose foreigner, in that instance Russian), Maurice Binder’s title sequence is easily the most visually striking aspect of the experience, while bearing no stylistic or thematic relationship to anything in the movie proper. Day (better known as a cinematographer) shows himself to be a wondrously perfunctory director, with even the supposed visual highlights counting for little or nothing. Other oddities include a (not generally very helpful) score by Bill Wyman, and the casting of Philip Stone (the barman from The Shining) as one of Sharif’s heavies, the Kubrickian resonances wondrously out of place here. O’Neal and Sharif (both at the end of their heydays, and rightly so on this evidence) deliver startlingly dull, disengaged performances. We can safely assume that the mall theatre I mentioned would have had few satisfied customers that week…

Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999)

 

Leos Carax’ darkly haunting Pola X might most straightforwardly be seen as a tale of madness and self-obliteration: under the influence of a strange, homeless woman who claims to be his sister, a successful young author abandons his fiancée and elegant surroundings to live in increasing poverty and disrepair, the downward trajectory of his life so darkly compelling that it eventually draws in the fiancée and spreads through what’s left of his family. But at the same time, it may be one of cinema’s most unnerving tales of liberation; those opening scenes are mocking in their opulence, hinting at incipient instability in the way that he seems to have a more complex sexual tension with his sister (Catherine Deneuve) than with his fiancée, the facts of his success coming under a pseudonym and of his inability to make progress on a second novel all pointing to underlying fracture. The sense of looming tragedy is immeasurably boosted by the subsequent personal history of its two leads – the trajectory of Guillaume Depardieu’s Pierre from cutting-edge handsome to an imposing wreck seems to foresee the actor’s pending misfortunes, and Katerina Golubeva’s Isabelle is one of the gravest presences in modern cinema; the scenes of the two walking together in their outdated, oversized clothes evoke a visitation from below, an impression that resonates against the repurposed factory in which they find a home, occupied by a vaguely cult-like alternative community of music-makers and techies and who knows what, as if in some workshop of the soul, gradually eroding any possibility of returning to conventional society. But the film is also extraordinarily physical and immediate, not least in its then-notorious sex scene, at once heart-stoppingly intimate and rather offputting in its directness, further establishing the extreme tangibility and transgressiveness of what we and the protagonists are experiencing.

Love & Money (James Toback, 1982)

 

It’s regrettable that James Toback’s behavioural excesses may now be more widely known than his films, but given how his best work is seeped in a compulsive-seeming rush of sex and power and appetite, it also makes a certain displaced kind of sense. The enjoyably eccentric Love and Money is one of his more ambitious projects, given that the plot encompasses global commodities markets and potential revolution in a South American country, but hardly has an epic feel about it, the prevailing tone driven much more by personal obsession. Ray Sharkey plays Byron Levin, a dissatisfied bank employee living with his book dealer girlfriend and no-longer-tuned-in grandfather (King Vidor!), approached by Stockheinz, a wealthy businessman (Klaus Kinski!), to help persuade his best friend from years back not to nationalize his country’s silver business (the best friend, naturally, is now the country’s President), all of which occupies Byron less than his instant desire for Stockheinz’s wife (Ornella Muti). For much of the time, there’s a sense that things could veer in one direction as easily as another, with little explanation required (as embodied in Levin’s hilariously inadequate explanations for his extended absences from home); the movie toys with political sentiments, while its depiction of the fictional country “Costa Salva” is flagrantly thin and unconvincing. The use of Vidor and the recurring motif of the piled-up old books suggests an affinity with classicism, but there’s a restlessness to the movie, a sense of searching for new alchemies in complex times: if not fully achieved, it’s a fascinatingly bumpy journey (although one that ends strangely abruptly, as if Toback’s attention were already moving on to his next and best, Exposed). And you can’t overlook the moment when Byron’s failure to get aroused can only be cured by hearing The Star-Spangled Banner (see, at heart it’s all about American values!)

The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)

 

Antonioni’s The Red Desert must rank high in the list of colour films that most suffer from being seen in a suboptimal print; not necessarily because the colour provides a clarity that would otherwise be absent, but because of the very opposite, of the nature of the film’s particular mystery. It’s arguably rather short on conventional pleasures (there’s some comparatively racy talk about sex, but no visualization of it), reflecting a reality that has become overwhelmingly confusing and oppressive; its use of colour is sometimes a direct appeal to an alternative reality (as in a story that’s told about a girl on an island) but more often an abstract representation of the meaning and order that evades us. It’s made explicit in the damaged central character’s plan of opening a shop, for which the decision on what she might actually sell comes second to covering the walls with different paint possibilities; at other times, even such muddled human agency is denied, and the film takes on a sense of chronic violation, its brandishing of (or denial of) colour seeming like part of the attack. The ending provides a note of relative hope, as she muses that the birds would have learned to avoid a factory’s emissions of hideous (and yet, if the context and content were different) weirdly beautiful yellow smoke; reflecting a broader sense that communication between people and their environments is at least possible, however confusing the progress toward it. But the hope is indeed at best relative; the search for how to live (essentially the same thing, we’re told, as the search for how to see) not without lightness, but defined as much by absence as by presence. The film’s focus on labour practices, upheavals and shortages suggests that the plight it depicts is at least in part a feature of modern capitalism and industrialization, a critique that remains urgent and relevant (even if in a different form now).

Someone to Love (Henry Jaglom, 1987)

 

Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love casts the director as Danny, a version of himself, prompted by his and his brother’s relationship problems (the brother is played by Jaglom’s real-life brother) to hold a Valentine Day’s event in an old theatre scheduled for demolition, to meet people and connect while also getting a movie out of it. Much of the raw material gathered from this (by Henry and Danny alike) is pretty mundane: lots of not particularly novel or informative perspectives on hopes and dreams, occasional advances by participants on each other, none of it apparently getting anywhere. As in all his films since his debut, A Safe Place, Jaglom emphasizes cinematic artificiality, foregrounding juxtaposition and editing, often creating back-and-forth interactions out of shots that plainly seem to have been obtained at different times. This reaches an apex in the film’s use of Orson Welles (in his last role); his appearances are sprinkled throughout the film, and he has extended conversations with Danny and with a group of women, but is only ever seen alone in the frame, sitting in the same seat, filmed from the same angle; the sense of a created world supports the central tease, regarding the ambiguity where the line between reality and artifice lies. Some characters express reservations to Danny’s project on ethical grounds, or just on grounds of basic taste, but Jaglom seems more occupied by the tangibility of the filmmaking process than by any particular narrative or thematic object, bringing the notional plot strands to only the thinnest of closures; in the end it feels like he’s mainly interested in using up his spare footage of Welles. Still, it’s all more interesting than it might be, not least because it contains the most notable film appearance by the great late Dave Frishberg, also playing a close version of himself and singing his “Listen Here,” in addition to a couple of covers.

Walpurgis Night (Gustaf Edgren, 1935)

 

Gustaf Edgren’s Walpurgis Night initially impresses for its social consciousness, starting with a newspaper office discussion about Sweden’s declining birthrate, the participants splitting on whether the causes are primarily social (in particular a housing shortage) or whether it’s basically because of there being not enough love to go around. It rapidly becomes clear that the film is staking itself on the latter, less rigorous theory, as it launches into a bizarrely overstuffed and coincidence-strewn plot encompassing a raid on an illegal abortion provider, a wicked blackmailer, a covered-up murder, and much else; it even encompasses a scene in the French Foreign Legion (including the execution of an attempted deserter). By the latter stages, the movie is racing through key point developments (such as an apparent successful subsequent desertion), as if randomly discarding as much weight as necessary to get a rickety plane off the ground; still, this does somewhat contribute to a sense of societal insecurity and anxiety. An interesting secondary aspect is the portrayal of a society beset with people making a living by peddling opportunistic photographs or stray bits of gossip to the newspapers, a practice presented here as being amusingly harmless for the most part, but which speaks to the censoriousness and societal hypocrisy explored in so many other Swedish films (it’s typical of the film that while it makes much of the discovery of the abortion operation, it shows no interest in the plight of and consequences for the women whose privacy was thereby breached). The movie may most often be viewed now for the pre-Hollywood Ingrid Bergman, not that interestingly cast here as a woman of almost cloying virtue. Victor Sjostrom plays her father, with something of the pained gravity that would reach its zenith years later in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, lurching between treating his daughter as a latter-day saint and damning her as a common trollop.

May Morning (Ugo Liberatore, 1970)

For much of its length, Ugo Liberatore’s May Morning seems largely anthropological in intent, closely observing the architecture, social texture and embalmed oddities of Oxford University, apparently boundlessly fascinated with the rowing and the punting and the dining halls, with the contrasts between the very proper dons (that’s what they call the teachers) and fashion-channeling students, with such rituals as the “sconce,” in which a social wrongdoer is punished by being made to drink a large amount of ale. The film’s outsider perspective, embodied in an Italian protagonist, Valerio, who struggles to fit in, is illuminating up to a point, although the fact of many of the actors being dubbed into English introduces a counter-productive sense of distancing. It’s not just the central presence of Jane Birkin (playing Flora Finlake, a student who happens also to be the daughter of Valerio’s tutor) that suggests Antonioni’s lurking influence (although given that Zabriskie Point was released a little later, the occasional similarities in that regard must be coincidental); the “swinging” elements become more prominent as the film goes on, with actions dictated by alcohol and anger and horniness, ultimately feeling like a rather disembodied, twisted reverie. Liberatore certainly takes pains to emphasize the institution’s repressed aspects, having a character observe that dons were traditionally prevented from marrying, and throwing plenty of baggage into the Finlake household; Valerio is presented as being rather supercilious and academically lazy, but his main transgression is simply his exotic otherness and its threat to cozy continuity, attributes which ultimately mark him as a suitable “sacrificial victim” (as the film’s poster put it). In that respect, May Morning’s unexpectedly wide scope also encompasses links to the later Wicker Man and other localized, ceremonial horrors (interesting that the University's term for expulsion is “rustication”); other aspects though, such as the prominence of the Tremeloes on the soundtrack, seem now to maroon it back in time.

Judex (Georges Franju, 1963)

 

The final note of Georges Franju’s Judex, following an elegantly romantic happy ending on a beach, is a reminder of the “unhappy time” of 1914 that gave rise to Louis Feuillade’s original silent film serial, reminding us of the severe global turmoil and threat that originally underlay such inventions, and that if we should feel inclined to dismiss them as pure genre fancifulness, they’re rooted in humankind’s darkest capacities. The point could perhaps be missed, because although Franju’s version has no shortage of venality – such as a rich man coldly running over his car over an old peasant who’s antagonized him – it doesn’t consistently evoke the pervasively disquieting societal threat that marks the original (and the most comparable works of Fritz Lang), being set instead in a rather charmingly disembodied world defined entirely by the narrative’s demands. At times Franju emphasizes pure whimsicality, perhaps best summed up by the scene in which a detective is standing in the street, at a loss over how to reach the upper floor of a building to carry out an urgent intervention, and a circus troop happens to wander by, including a star female acrobat who’s an old friend of his (problem solved!). Likewise, for a master operator, the titular Judex is quite charmingly fallible at times, letting his grand antagonist escape from custody and easily getting overpowered and knocked out at one key point (again, a good thing that acrobat came along). Other parts of the film – the eagle-headed magician that captivates the crowd at a grand ball; skin-tight costumed figures climbing walls or clambering across rooftops – are pure cinematic iconography, only notionally rooted in the surrounding narrative, and perhaps all the more striking for that. It all adds to a quite singular creation, nostalgia and retrospection inherent in its conception, without in any way diluting its vivid sense of presence.

Haut bas fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

 

Haut bas fragile is one of Jacques Rivette’s most beautiful assertions of the world as a playground, so easily and constantly enjoyable that its radical strangeness is rapidly absorbed or overlooked. Just as a small example, the film would generally be labeled as a musical, but the first such number doesn’t arise until well over an hour into the film, and one of the three main characters (all followed through separate, occasionally intertwining narratives) is excluded from any singing or dancing…except that she’s haunted by a song she’s had in her head since childhood, that she believes might lead her to her birth mother, thus in a sense making her story the most purely musical of all. The film teems with elements of quasi-mythology or fairy-tale - a woman waking up after years in a coma, finding herself the owner of a mystery-filled house left to her by a deceased aunt; a mysterious underground society where the members engage in a form of Russian roulette (it turns out to be a fake, but still…); peculiar encounters with men, or with cats – but never feels like a work of frivolity or denial, with none of the three strands providing perfect closure. On the contrary, all three women in a sense choose to defer discovery and accountability, all the better to keep moving unpredictably through life (nevertheless, one comes away with the general sense of a happy ending, as one would wish). The highly theatrical dance choreography forms its own interrogation of life and cinema: one character moves as if openly trying to possess the entire floor, another oscillates between minimal moves and sudden extreme, jagged poses, as if to preserve an element of surprise; all of which (in combination with the quirkily beguiling songs) render the musical sequences not so much an adornment or expressive addition, but a counterpointing source of mystery and reverie. The cast (including Marianne Denicourt and Anna Karina) is almost pure delight.

Walking a Tightrope (Nikos Papatakis, 1991)

 

Nikos Papatakis’ Walking a Tightrope in fact figuratively walks (or runs, or leaps) across a series of them, stretched across a strange, highly iconoclastic variety of narrative and thematic divides and contrasts. The film does feature a fair amount of literal tightrope walking: famous author Marcel Spardice (Michel Piccoli) fixates on and later seduces Franz-Ali, a young man who catches his eye while picking up elephant dung at the circus, and then invests much time and resources in helping Franz-Ali work toward his high-wire dream. But with Franz-Ali failing to fulfil Marcel’s vision for him, and another young lover appearing on the horizon, Marcel’s attention moves on, and Franz-Ali eventually ends up back where he started, except that it’s unbearable now, and only obliteration awaits. There’s much genuine longing and loveliness in the film - not least in the character of Helene (Polly Walker), initially little more than a procurer for Marcel (it’s clear how those with power and connections manipulate the system to their advantage), but later overcome by a doomed love for Franz-Ali – and much personal and societal pain. The film counterpoints Marcel’s initial pursuit with a damning portrait of engrained racism – Franz-Ali’s mixed ethnicity causes him to be randomly rounded up and thrown into jail, after which a policeman volunteers to his German-born mother that as bad as the Nazis were, her dilution of racial purity by marrying an Arab is a worse sin. But this aspect of the film rather recedes as it goes on, while certainly remaining implicit in Franz-Ali’s decline – for instance, even at the height of her love for him, a large part of Helene’s plan is to have him work as a uniformed manservant either for her or her sister. That’s just one aspect of Papatakis’ consistent confounding of expectations, of his highly singular, energized sense of cinematic and emotional form and balance.

A Little Night Music (Harold Prince, 1977)

 

Stephen Sondheim’s sublime A Little Night Music surely had (and retains) the capacity to spawn a beautiful film version, but in the hands of original stage director Harold Prince it’s a mostly glum affair. If nothing else, the film might have taken something from Ingmar Bergman’s spawning Smiles of a Summer Night, the theatrical styling of which almost seems to anticipate the likelihood of the later musical; more broadly, Bergman’s film carries an acute sense of moral investigation, of sex as an object of the most elevated seriousness, but one inherently reliant on a degree of evasion and stylization. That’s all there in the musical’s underlying text, but Prince’s blocking and filming are largely static; the film feels starved of breath, let alone of joy. The casting hardly helps, particularly (and there’s no pleasure in piling on in this regard) that of Elizabeth Taylor as the famous actress and object of desire Desiree Armfeldt – Taylor seems here like an inert actress and entirely indifferent singer, a miscasting exacerbated by preserving the stage version’s Len Cariou as her fated lover Ferderick Egerman (Cariou is evidently too young for the role, among much else, seven years younger than Taylor and only fifteen older than Lesley-Anne Down, also ineffectively cast as Egerman’s inappropriately young and virginal wife, which doesn’t help that aspect of the film either). Of course, some of the songs can take care of myself, and Prince lands the occasional scene, but it’s much less than should have been expected. It’s no doubt inevitable that some of the original’s songs had to be sacrificed, but still, the omission of The Miller’s Song and Remember seems most regrettable, and the cutting of Hermione Gingold’s Liaisons leaves the character of Desiree’s mother entirely gutted (it’s tempting to read several peculiar close-ups of a disengaged-looking Gingold as a sad acknowledgement of this).  

A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer, 1990)

 

Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime may bring to mind the maxim driving his earlier Full Moon In Paris –“He who has two women loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind.” Jeanne, a young philosophy teacher, can’t stay in her own place because she lent it to a cousin, and doesn’t want to sleep at her messy boyfriend’s place while he’s away, so she accepts a sleepover invitation from Natasha, a music student she meets at a party, and then remains for a week, getting drawn into the complications between Natasha and her father and his younger girlfriend Eve, whom Natasha detests, suspecting her in particular of stealing a family heirloom necklace. Despite the promise of the title, the film is among the more withholding of Rohmer’s late works, partly reflecting the relative severity of its protagonist – when philosophy is discussed here, it’s as much for display as anything else, with Eve flaunting how her knowledge is greater than Natasha’s. The film develops a sense of escalating pressure – the larger the canvas of possibility that Natasha presents for Jeanne (including the notion that Jeanne might replace Eve as her father’s partner), the more restricting it starts to seem; release only arrives through a freak event that absolves everyone of guilt, emphasizing the prominence of chance and caprice in our lives, and the traps inherent in human intellect and perception. Still, when in the end the film realizes its title by having Jeanne return to familiar territory, replacing a vase of withered old flowers with some bright new ones, it’s a less satisfactory arrival point than Rohmer customarily provides, with the nature of Jeanne’s inner renewal rather hard to glean (other than that, in some general sense, she’s found a way to modestly evade the inner confinement that arises from a life hemmed in by logistics and infrastructure).

Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli, 1962)

 

Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town might seem overly self-referential in numerous respects: it’s a risk inherent in movies about movie-making, amplified here by the use of Minnelli’s own The Bad and the Beautiful to denote former and perhaps no longer attainable glories. The film transcends that trap partly because its love of the cinematic process is so palpable, immersing us in the atmosphere around the set and such things as the mechanics of dubbing; more broadly in the way that even a once-great filmmaker might lose his way with actors, with the cinematic apparatus itself. Minnelli himself of course evidences no such decline here, generating one amazingly expressive widescreen composition after another, culminating in a wildly self-purging nighttime car ride staged as a deliriously abstracted, swirling spectacle. It’s a work built on multiple personal fragilities, Kirk Douglas’ Jack Andrus leaving a high-end clinic (shades of Minnelli’s earlier The Cobweb) and coming to Rome (depicted here as a site of churn and displacement and shifting relationships) in the hope of resurrecting his Oscar-winning but now devastated acting career under the guidance of Edward G. Robinson’s legendary director Maurice Kruger. Virtually from arrival, Andrus is taunted by actual or metaphoric reminders of past traumas; the elements aligning, as if guided by a therapeutic universe, to allow him a chance of comprehensive personal and professional renewal, before further setbacks point the way to a final equilibrium. The Andrus-Kruger interactions provide a memorably toxic central plank, the two men loving and resenting each other in roughly equal measure, Kruger’s outreach at once redeeming and destructive – he’s last seen in bed staring off into space after delivering his final blow, like a man imploding from the force of his own impossibility (and left under the thumb of his wife, with whom he has – if it’s possible – an even more spectacularly passive-aggressive relationship).