I Want to Go Home (Alain Resnais, 1989)

 

The main character of Alain Resnais’ I Want to Go Home, Joey Wellman, is a veteran American cartoonist (but not one of the top-tier ones, his work barely celebrated now) in Paris for a convention; his almost estranged daughter is already there, studying at the Sorbonne and trying to shed her roots, fixated on getting her thesis on Flaubert to the attention of a public intellectual (Gerard Depardieu) who however is more interested in the old man. The cartoonist is played by Adolph Green, much better known as a songwriter than an actor (I Want to Go Home isn’t a musical, but sometimes seems on the verge of becoming that); others involved in the project include Jules Feiffer, John Kander, Linda Lavin, Geraldine Chaplin and John Ashton (at the time widely recognizable from Beverly Hills Cop and other mainstream movies), with references ranging from Victor Hugo to Krazy Kat – it’s surely a unique mixture of cultural coordinates, carrying the sense of a cultural puzzle to be unlocked. This manifests itself for much of the way as sometimes grating and repetitive conflict (Joey’s complaining about even the smallest aspect of French culture might profitably have been pared back at least a little), although ultimately leading to a rather mysterious transference in which some of the central characters reorient their affiliations and arrive at reconciliation; the final shot in which Joey’s temporary new home in the country sprouts into a Disneyland-like castle is the final assertion of possibility. Ultimately, for all its annoyances, the film insists that one might find delight even in the most unlikely locations and interactions, if one is only open to it. And of course, if that’s not so easy, you can draw on the common ground of cultural touchstones– those small-town French people may not recognize the most basic words of English, but they know “Clint Eastwood”!

March or Die (Dick Richards, 1977)

 

Dick Richards’ March or Die is something of an oddity – a British-financed French foreign legion picture made in the late seventies, its cast encompassing Hollywood respectability (Gene Hackman), the European mainstream (Terence Hill) and arthouse class (Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow). The film reflects these competing resonances, with Hackman’s character often lost in dark brooding built on brutally hard-won life lessons and a keen sense of political realities, while Hill’s provides doses of exuberant anti-authoritarianism, and Deneuve (whose character is an object of fascination to all the male principals) embodies the tangled romantic perspectives that have always accompanied tales of the legion (in a nice touch, an old woman who spends the day wordlessly lost in her thoughts might be, on the basis of what we’re told of her back story, Marlene Dietrich’s character from von Sternberg’s Morocco). The core plot engages critically with the imperatives of colonialism, with Hackman’s Major Foster unenthusiastically drafted to protect an archaeological dig led by von Sydow’s Professor Marneau, knowing that the Arabs view the project (the proceeds of which will be shipped back to France) as mere plunder and that if things go bad, his men will be hopelessly outnumbered: when this proves correct, it makes for some truly eye-filling scenes of conflict, with the Arab leader El Krim unleashing wave after wave of fresh attacks on the wretched soldiers. The fact that El Krim is played by Ian Holm (with a crime-boss-like veneer of philosophical brutality) sums up some the film’s limitations; it’s also evident that those separate strands I mentioned don’t always easily coalesce (Hill’s breeziness belongs in a different filmic universe from Hackman’s tightly-wound, implication-heavy self-reflection). Nevertheless, the overall impact is more satisfyingly bracing than you might expect, notwithstanding a final scene packed with tired notions of ambiguously evocative closure.

L'inhumaine (Marcel L'Herbier, 1924)

 

Marcel L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine is a feast of eye-popping design (the only film able to boast Fernand Leger as art director), audacious (albeit, by later standards, not entirely smoothly executed) narrative, and instinctive cinematic know-how. The film’s opening section immerses us in the world of singer Claire Lescot, an impervious goddess (she claims no interest in humanity, only in those exceptional individuals who transcend it) surrounded and fawned over by a diverse circle of would-be suitors. When she rejects one of them, the inventor Einar, he apparently drives his car over a cliff; her decision the next day to go ahead with a scheduled concert bolsters her reputation as an “inhuman woman” (in one of many witty digressions, a butcher is seen opining she has no innards, as he lays out those of his inventory for sale). However, Einar turns out to be alive, leading into a second half in which he leads a more passive Claire through a new world of technology, culminating in a life-changing finale which causes her to transcend her earlier philosophy (one of Einar’s inventions, observed almost in passing, is a world-spanning device that allows a performer to survey all those who are wirelessly listening to her, its rather mystically intoxicating impact clearly anticipating the lure, almost a century later, of virtual events and interactions and godlike access). L’Herbier’s sense of style and play even extends to the intertitles, executed in varying layouts and typefaces; the film has fire-eaters, a poisonous snake, intimations of the supernatural, and all manner of modernist interiors, furniture, devices, and figurative bells and whistles. The film’s home stretch in particular feels incompletely realized in some respects though, the sense of Claire’s character rather dissipating, and the train of events not rendered entirely clearly, all of which does partially add to its cherishable singularity.

Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

 

Kicking off with the sudden death of a furniture company President, Robert Wise’s Executive Suite then follows the machinations to secure a majority of the seven board votes that will decide his successor. Five of the seven voters have a declared or potential interest in the position, with the main dynamic pitting an overriding focus on maintaining the bottom line against a more organic, forward-looking approach based on innovation and investment. No doubt a remake would feel compelled to focus on a more glamorous sector than the furniture industry (but then, Wise’s film derives from the heart of the materialist Eisenhower-era boom); such a remake would surely spend more time too on environmental sustainability, which no one thought they needed to worry about back in those fortunate days (for an interesting modern-day reference point, Danone kicked out its CEO in 2021 for allegedly focusing too much on an “activist agenda” versus the bottom line). Some aspects of the film remain interesting from a technical perspective: the one unscrupulous director (Louis Calhern) who sold the stock short to capitalize on an expected decline, and sees it going against him; the machinations of the vote itself. But it’s disappointing that in the end it comes down to typical movie speechifying by the youngest and most visionary of the group (William Holden), the opposition crumbling with improbable speed, and that other than a clunky initial sequence shot from the perspective of the doomed President, Wise never achieves anything very cinematically interesting. The cast also includes Fredric March as the very epitome of the blinkered numbers man (another character bitingly snipes at his "night school CPA") and Barbara Stanwyck, the only woman on the board, but only as a result of family inheritance rather than business acumen (a gender bias of its time, not yet fully rectified in our own).

In Search of Famine (Mrinal Sen, 1981)

 

Mrinal Sen’s In Search of Famine initially immerses us in the exuberance of movie-making, with a crew arriving from the city to film a drama about a 1943 famine, settling into the dilapidated mansion they’re to use as a base; early on, the fascinated locals crowd around to observe the filming of every scene, marveling at the magic being created (a nice throwaway scene has a someone riding through town advertising a screening of The Guns of Navarone, described as a unique masterpiece starring the world’s greatest actress, “Anthony Queen”). But the filmmakers’ moral compass is rapidly shown to be confused, the plot seeming to be tangled in melodramatics, and with inadequate thinking about the representation of such suffering (in one scene, they use historical photos of famine victims as a guessing game to while away the time); when they hit on the idea of casting a local as a woman forced into prostitution to feed her family, it triggers an outrage, exacerbated by the film crew’s destabilization of the shaky local economy, and the crew quietly packs up and leaves, probably headed for the greater comfort of the studio. The final moments focus on the sad subsequent fate of one of the women with whom they cross paths, her face receding into darkness, a piercing cinematic moment emphasizing all that the film within the film fails to grasp or engage with. Sen’s treatment of the crew, a strenuously urbane, quote-spewing bunch, often verges on satire, but of a kind tinged with melancholy; more broadly, the film is deliberately hard to read in its desired equilibrium of sorrow and anger, in the degree of culpability we should assign for various events depicted. If it doesn’t ultimately feel completely satisfying, that may be as it should be; developments of subsequent decades (such as the proliferation of the reality genre) increase the film’s ambiguous richness.

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.