tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53610870635179348912024-03-13T17:31:40.994-04:00The Blue VialDrew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.comBlogger173125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-71637742172376147492015-12-28T13:11:00.000-05:002015-12-28T13:13:30.600-05:00First Time Viewings / 2015Twenty five, in vaguely preferential order:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Les Fantomes du Chapelier</i> (Claude Chabrol, 1982)<br />
<i>Alice, or the Last Escapade</i> (Claude Chabrol, 1977)<br />
<i>Abigail's Party</i> (Mike Leigh, 1977)<br />
<i>The Last Hunt</i> (Richard Brooks, 1956)<br />
<i>A Geisha</i> (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)<br />
<br />
<i>Greed</i> (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)<br />
<i>La tempestaire</i> (Jean Epstein, 1947)<br />
<i>The Tin Star </i>(Anthony Mann, 1957)<br />
<i>Sabotage</i> (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)<br />
<i>La signora di tutti</i> (Max Opuhls, 1934)<br />
<br />
<i>The Ceremony</i> (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)<br />
<i>Warm Water Under a Red Bridge</i> (Shohei Imamura, 2001)<br />
<i>La signora senza camelie</i> (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)<br />
<i>Jour de fete</i> (Jacques Tati, 1948)<br />
<i>Phoenix</i> (Christian Petzold, 2014)<br />
<br />
<i>Five Came Back</i> (John Farrow, 1939)<br />
<i>Spontaneous Combustion</i> (Tobe Hooper, 1990)<br />
<i>The Outfit</i> (John Flynn, 1973)<br />
<i>Tomorrow</i> (Joseph Anthony, 1972)<br />
<i>Bay of Angels</i> (Jacques Demy, 1963)<br />
<br />
<i>Toni</i> (Jean Renoir, 1935)<br />
<i>The Kindergarten Teacher</i> (Nadav Lapid, 2014)<br />
<i>Schachnovelle </i>aka<i> Brainwashed</i> (Gerd Oswald, 1961)<br />
<i>The Visitors</i> (Elia Kazan, 1972)<br />
<i>Danger: Diabolik</i> (Mario Bava, 1968)<br />
<br />
<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-61322702381660985572015-01-01T03:22:00.000-05:002015-01-01T03:43:17.596-05:00'14Illness has pretty much sapped any desire I may have had for putting together an end-of-year post more comprehensive than the humble sketch below, which doesn't feel "representative" of very much to me. But it would have felt weird to not post anything in this spot at all, and so the bare minimum amount of thought to justify its existence was put forth. Pivotal first time home viewings were plucked freely from the jumbled memory cloud and may easily have included many more.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>5 pivotal first time viewings</b></span> (<b>16mm/35mm</b>)<br />
<br />
<i>Grand Illusion</i> (Renoir '37)<br />
<i>The Loves of Pharaoh</i> (Lubitsch '22)<br />
<i>A Report on the Party and the Guests</i> (J. Nemec '66)<br />
<i>Shutter Interface </i>(Sharits '75)<br />
<i>Third Eye Butterfly</i> (De Hirsch '68)<br />
<br />
*********************<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>5 pivotal first time viewings</b></span> (<b>home viewing</b>)<br />
<br />
<i>Cry Danger </i>(Parrish '51)<br />
<i>Secret Sunshine</i> (Lee Chang-dong '07)<br />
<i>The Testament of Dr. Mabuse</i> (Lang '33)<br />
<i>Travelling Players / </i><i>Hideko the Bus Conductress </i>(Naruse '40/'41)<br />
<i>Un soir, un train</i> (Delvaux '68)<br />
<br />
<b>...and five more:</b><br />
<br />
<i>Im Schatten</i> (Thomas Arslan '10)<br />
<i>Intimidation</i> (Kurahara '60)<br />
<i>Le garcu</i> (Maurice Pialat '95)<br />
<i>Mr. Thank You</i> (Shimizu '36)<br />
<i>Neighbouring Sounds</i> (Filho '12)<br />
<br />
*********************<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">5 favorite new movies seen 2014:</span></b><br />
<br />
1) <i>The Strange Little Cat </i>(Zurcher)<br />
2) <i>Seventh Code </i>(K. Kurosawa)<br />
3) <i>Night Moves </i>(Reichardt)<br />
4) <i>The Homesman </i>(T.L. Jones)<br />
5) <i>Oculus </i>(Flanagan)<br />
<i><br /></i>
also liked/worth mentioning:<i> Under the Skin </i>(Glazer); <i>Norte, the End of History </i>(Diaz); <i>Maps to the Stars </i>(Cronenberg); <i>The Immigrant </i>(Gray); <i>Snowpiercer </i>(Bong); <i>Coherence</i> (Byrkit); <i>Jauja</i> (Alonso); <i>Proxy</i> (Parker); <i>Black Coal, Thin Ice</i> (Yinan); <i>Particle Fever</i> (Levinson)<br />
<br />
*********************<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>5 film books that I always kept near in '14</b></span>:<br />
<br />
<i>Japanese Film Directors</i> (Audie Bock)<br />
<i>The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium</i> (Gilberto Perez)<br />
<i>Rio Bravo</i> (Robin Wood)<br />
<i>Films and Feelings</i> (Raymond Durgnat)<br />
<i>A Man With A Camera</i> (Nestor Almendros)<br />
<br />
*********************<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">DVD/Blu-Ray personal highlights:</span></b><br />
<br />
<i>Bakumatsu Taiyo-Den</i> (Masters of Cinema)<br />
<i>Classe Tous Risques</i> (BFI)<br />
<i>The Complete (Existing) Films of Sadao Yamanaka</i> (Masters of Cinema)<br />
<i>Eric Rohmer l'integrale</i> (Potemkine)<br />
<i>Don Siegel's</i> <i>The Killers</i> (Arrow Academy)<br />
<i>Frank Capra: The Early Collection</i> (TCM)<br />
<i>Ghost Hound: Complete Collection</i> (Sentai Filmworks)<br />
<i>Les Blank: Always for Pleasure</i> (Criterion)<br />
<i>Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery </i>(CBS)<br />
<i>Western Union</i> (Koch Media Western Legenden)<br />
<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-25716916565848552522014-12-08T12:27:00.000-05:002014-12-08T12:47:42.674-05:00Last Sunset<i>This post is:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>1) A contribution to The Late Show Blogathon being hosted by David Cairns at his essential blog <a href="http://dcairns.wordpress.com/">Shadowplay</a></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i> 2) Dedicated to James Millican the actor (1910 - 1955) and James Millican the "material ghost" (1932 - 1956)</i><br />
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Born in New Jersey in early 1910, actor James Millican would first live onscreen in DeMille's <i>The Sign of the Cross</i> (1932), an uncredited job that would be followed by 15 years of such anonymous background work primarily for Paramount, MGM and Columbia. His breakthrough would seem to come in the late 40s with a series of credited performances that lean heavily towards authority figure-types, as well as a slew of westerns. The western was the ideal fit for Millican, with his stiffened gait and easygoing nature, and though not much seems to exist in the way of biographical data about the actor, a consistent tidbit to be found is his friendship with cowboy star Wild Bill Elliott, along with his claim to have appeared in upwards of over 400 B oaters.<br />
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Indeed if Millican is remembered at all today, it is for his late career character actor work in various 1950s westerns for directors such as Anthony Mann and Andre De Toth who each cast him numerous times in some of their best films during that richest decade of the genre. Millican's tracks stop at Jack Arnold's <i>Red Sundown </i>(1956), a Universal-International production and Arnold's second of three westerns for the company. Millican would die of cancer in November of '55 shortly after the filming of<i> Sundown</i> ended and a solid few months before its release in March '56. This timeline tells us then that it's somewhat reasonable to assume Millican was aware of his dire health during the shoot, and his regretful, doomed character of Bud Purvis, consigned to and obliterated within the remarkable first act of this film, becomes heavily, even uneasily, tinged with the mournful flavor of a cinematic epitaph.<br />
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But first, a few unavoidable words devoted to Arnold's spare bone poetry, which provides the canvas. History and our eyes tell us that Universal-International was not always the most auteur-friendly studio. The snappy, punchy, Technicolor-driven house style could often seem resistant to ideas of personal expression (though certainly Sirk had something to say about that) and while many of their westerns are excellent or at least notable, and while many of those were helmed by excellent or at least notable directors, few directors in the genre actually did their best work for the studio (unheralded figures such as George Sherman and Richard Bartlett stand as the possible exceptions, while Boetticher is the clearest example of a unique voice hemmed in, only to burst forth fully formed instantaneously upon leaving.) Jack Arnold, genre hopper, <i>metteur en scene</i> extraordinaire and longtime Universal hand, often found striking ways of nudging his assignments and the studio apparatus towards a slightly more contemplative, philosophical and even metaphysical space, traces of which can be found at least as early as the 1953 twosome of <i>It Came from Outer Space</i> and the slightly Langian <i>The Glass Web </i>(the latter utilizing its 3-D to paint some startling existential quandaries) and which culminate in the supreme achievements of 1957's <i>The Incredible Shrinking Man</i>, with its famously desolate ending that Arnold fought the studio tooth & nail for, and 1959's <i>No Name on the Bullet</i>, with its Audie Murphy-as-chess-playing-death-incarnate Bergman premonitions.<br />
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Two of the westerns that Arnold made for Universal-International, <i>Red</i> <i>Sundown</i> and<i> The Man from Bitter Ridge </i>(1955) - both shot in Conejo Valley, CA - display examples of his adaptability and temperamental leanings by using the expanse of the locations to play with various notions of perspective and space, snapping back and forth and up and down between extreme longshots and more intimate viewpoints with cosmic zeal as characters observe, ponder, and spy on one another across bare landscapes. The post-credits opening of <i>Sundown</i> is a haunting illustration of the idea in clear, somber, Wyeth-esque compositions :<br />
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Gunslinger on-the-move Rory Calhoun spots what appears to be a bug skittering out in the distance which is quickly, thanks to one of these ice-shock Arnold cuts, whipped up into a desperate, stumbling, thirsty James Millican, having just escaped lockup and hanging on by a thread, announcing an eerie variety of dead-man-walking motions before Calhoun rides in for the rescue. And as so often happens when a classical western opens up with such a scenario, with two strangers crossing paths fortuitously on the edge of nothing, they are never really strangers and already know of each other through reputation: Millican, elder life gun hawk, has heard things about Calhoun's kickaroo draw and recently watched a former partner of Calhoun's older brother bite the big one. That older generation is hinted at as collapsing in on itself with death and capture, and Millican's purpose in the narrative swiftly comes into focus through his initial interactions with Calhoun: he will not so much preach but rather express, through a small series of laments prefiguring a sacrifice, the regrettable lot of the wasted life of a gun for hire, the very life Calhoun is on pace for.<br />
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I have to say here that the point of this post is not simply to excavate some lost, poignant death/art convergence from the mass tombs of the studio system; Millican was a fine actor who by this point had reached a kind of rarefied air of character actor pliability, and his performance here is striking in and of itself, rippled with organic melancholy and subtle, meaningful gesture, and deserves to be appreciated as such and discussed on those terms. I wouldn't want to speculate on the wider knowledge base regarding Millican's health during the production because we simply can't know, nor would I want to harp too much on certain quotes from his character one might be tempted to call 'eerie' (they are not insignificant in number); all we have is the movie and the bare, chilling fact of the parallels.<br />
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The first time I watched <i>Red Sundown</i>,<i> </i>Millican was but a vaguely familiar face to me - I certainly had no idea this was his last role, or the reasons why, but I was startled by the immediacy and impact of his presence. Finding out the details later after another viewing, well, did <i>click</i> things into place a bit, is perhaps the best way of framing it. Millican's character Bud Purvis ultimately functions within the overall structure as little more than a transient, corrective influence on Calhoun, the embodiment of a second chance and a prologued tool for the plot proper to be set in motion, but the potent, grave integrity and force of emotion that Millican imbues Purvis with alongside the endgame air of apocalypse that Purvis saturates his surroundings with is almost unaccountably powerful within the context of the material, to the extent of rendering the "real meat" of the movie to follow as mere fallout from the true epoch. Which is to say that the opening act, while setting up and informing everything to come, also seems to swallow it all, and for the many possible reasons that a movie is occasionally unable to shake its earliest moments, this one seems to conform to none that aren't cast in the shade of Millican's shadow.<br />
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Purvis, forever composed in the key of regret, processes the bleakness he's been surrounded by of late with a moving, mannered wipe of the face that visually introduces the key symbol of his ring ("all I got left from being a big man" he'll claim later) but also inevitably brings Hawks to mind, whom Millican worked for on no less than three occasions that each resulted in a major masterpiece (<i>Only Angels Have Wings</i>, <i>His Girl Friday</i>,<i> Air Force</i>.)<br />
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The pair ride on to a near town. The blood-tinted sun-setting theme of the first act - which applies not only literally to a movement from day to night and from life to death but also from past to present and future in the form of experience ingested and applied - finds stirring ripples in what at times seems like an index of life's small pleasures: Millican and Calhoun splashing their faces with cool water from a spigot after a long ride ("AH there's nothin' like it!") and later breaking bread and smearing it with jam in a last supper ("nothin' like strawberry!").<br />
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And now a few unavoidable words devoted to Calhoun, whose generous performance is a pivotal piece of the puzzle. In westerns at least, he was an interesting screen presence, with a minor in charisma and a major in low key, bug-eyed, sweat-glazed, loose canon potentials (Edward Luwig's 1963 <i>The Gun Hawk</i> being the key text.) In 1956 Calhoun was nothing close to a supporting player, but this <i>is</i> Millican's movie, for a time at least, and Calhoun seems more than game to oblige, patiently ceding the floor and developing a sensitive rhythm with Millican as the web of their brief relationship is weaved and the emotional batons are passed down, and striking art is made because of it. It's one of Calhoun's best roles, and it's hard to imagine any of Universal's other leading western men of the time doing it as much justice.<br />
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A fight breaks out in a saloon with a rowdy gang. Calhoun, in an act of rotten efficiency, spontaneous but written in stone, puts a bullet in one of the wild men and the pair beat it back to Calhoun's small shack a lengthy ride away. There, in the final daylight moments found in this section, Millican/Purvis delivers the first of two twilight mini-monologues expressing his regrets in a life that the film senses, and probably the character does too (let's still resist temptations to presume thoughts for the actor) is soon to end, one that's barely left him with "the makins' to show for it." At nightfall the rowdy gang catch up and hold siege; a gunfight leads to a quick slug in the belly for Purvis. Lying in bed, the romance of longing stripped away and urgency setting in, Purvis has an idea: Calhoun should dig himself a "grave" with a hidden pipe for a breathing hole, and after Purvis's distraction (aka immolation) they will think Calhoun has evaded them. But is it simply an <i>idea</i>? Purvis wants Calhoun's character to give up the gun if he survives: "A guy warned me once, like I'm trying to warn you..."; the propulsion of the drama seizes up and the prior ritualistic nips finally coalesce - this is a chain, a cycle, it is about to be broken, and Purvis is its last victim.<br />
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Fire is set to the shack, Purvis transfers his ring to Calhoun (like similar rings to be found in <i>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me</i> and Lang's <i>Moonfleet</i>, it has the power to both affirm and negate identity and existence) and Calhoun crawls into his "grave" to wait out the game. Purvis makes a charge outside, giving himself to a spray of bullets against the backdrop of fiery hell, and the rebirth/Phoenix-intimations of Calhoun's predicament are brought to full visual fruition as he emerges unscathed from his ashy ground womb the following morning, taking stock a final time of Millican's body playing Purvis's corpse before a fade to black shifts the story events along their "proper" Calhoun-centric course. There is approximately an hour left of movie at this point; it's quite a good movie, and worth talking about. Maybe there's another post for that. This one ends when Purvis leaves the film, and when Millican leaves the cinema.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-77021036594721373082014-11-05T08:56:00.000-05:002014-11-06T22:45:30.054-05:00When It Rains #3 - Harikomi (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1958)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Also known in English as <i>The Chase</i> or <i>Stakeout</i>. It earns both titles. <i>Stray Dog</i> would have been a good one as well, and in fact the similarities with Kurosawa's masterwork pile up quickly: procedural structure, young male killer on the lam, old detective/young detective dynamic, devastating summer heat, emphasis on the <i>physicality</i> of an investigation. There's even heavy use of the all-purpose wipes that Kurosawa loved so much and was still employing regularly at this time. But for every apparent parallel, <i>Harikomi</i> frequently takes things down its own path, with a naturalist performance style that often extends to the dramaturgy (modest personal quandaries are prized over weighty philosophical stakes and any exaggerated sense of wisdom transmission between generations) and a thrilling approach to form that blends fluid camerawork/stamps of unity with a rhythmic, clipped editing style, sometimes to vaguely surreal effect - one late sequence with Minoru Oki's undercover protagonist trailing Hideko Takamine's secretive housewife for the nth time (among other things, the movie is a play in variations on the most basic of genre requirements) quickly escalates into a city-to-country down the rabbit hole scenario that reminded me somewhat of the more extreme and absurdist no man's land spinout that comes late in Naruse's <i>Morning's Tree-Lined Street</i> (1936).<br />
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The scene that provides the screens above are nothing of that sort, though. One of the shorter and more subtle of the aforementioned numerous trailings, Takamine simply breaks a shoe during a storm and hobbles over under some shelter, as her pursuer is put in the awkward position of unsuspiciously maintaining a pace. As a moment of vulnerability for Takamine, up to that point only little more than a cipher, it represents a bit of an eye opener for Oki, one that takes on significant thematic import (among other things, the movie is a string of male meditations on female unhappiness) - a beautifully wrought exercise in using simple elements to inscribe quiet dramatic value to a wispy relationship.Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-44941407992815402014-10-13T11:34:00.001-04:002014-10-13T11:40:30.874-04:00When It Rains #2 - Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Melville must have swooned. Nearly as much as in <i>This Gun for Hire</i> or <i>The Asphalt Jungle</i>, one can sense a wellspring for the great French director in the first 15 minutes of Hubert Cornfield's <i>Plunder Road</i>. A nearly wordless, sartorially attentive and process oriented train heist taking place entirely in the rain and snipped at from a variety of viewpoints, this opening sequence (gobbling up roughly a quarter of the total running time) not only looks forward to the later abstract Melville's, but glances back a year as well; it's almost impossible to not be struck by protagonist Gene Raymond's <i>Bob le Flambeur</i>-like<i> </i>aura during his introduction: pensive, middle-aged, pale haired, a perfect gentleman with a "real hood's face". Actually, we can't ever know if Melville saw <i>Road</i> or not, but I'm not sure that it matters; this was 1957, and noir iconography at this point had already started to empty itself out and take a half step towards the kind of ghost imagery that Melville would shape to his own extreme and eccentric end. The spiritual union is there if nothing else.<br />
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Not that this opening is without its own eccentricity; indeed, part of its brilliance (and I would without any intended hyperbole deem it one of the great marvels of the 50s American B cinema) is the indefinable rhythm that it creates through a fundamental motional clash: fleet, exemplary action editing applied to images and movements of great physical weight. Cuts slam back and forth continuously between careful men, cumbersome machines and sensitive mechanisms; the object of the heist is a cache of gold bricks that can only be moved by crane and many guiding hands. And lording over all in this sequence is the rain, which sharpens the contrast in both directions: as a dynamic visual presence that adds an instant vivid force to the decoupage while simultaneously acting as yet another factor responsible for further weighing down of the bodies in frame. Almost certainly a matter of budgetary restraint, the film's approach to depicting its rain actually doubles down on this central clash, very clearly using a rain machine at times, and clearly using some scratch or pencil technique committed directly to the emulsion at others. The difference between these two methods is the difference between a biting realism and a frenzied Brakhagian rush, or the difference between muddy bootstraps and the electric consciousness that carries them.<br />
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-23064719928290666422014-10-07T08:44:00.000-04:002014-10-07T09:07:00.997-04:00When It Rains #1 - Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Early Capra can have a heckuva way with space. Take for instance the running gag in 1931's <i>Platinum Blonde </i>with Robert Williams' repeated sarcastic bows to Jean Harlow's butler from various points across the gulf of her mansion; it registers not only as a soft jab towards upper crust convention, but also, in its own way, as an eloquent bursting of the awkward bubble of physically distanced communication via wit. There's something similar at play one year earlier in <i>Ladies of Leisure</i> with Barbara Stanwyck's introduction: after popping a flat, Ralph Graves pulls over to the side of the road on a bridge over water; Stanwyck, in deep space and fancy dress, having just escaped the clutches of an apparently nefarious party yacht (the scenario which has led to her jumping overboard remains unspoken) rows a small boat towards a rickety dock and gets out. "Can I do anything for you?" he shouts from on high. "Yeah, you can look the other way!" she sasses back from the depth of the unbroken shot.<br />
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The water theme is played to the hilt during the course of <i>Ladies;</i> like a myth Stanwyck emerges from it in the beginning and attempts to give herself back to it at the end. In between there are too many tears to count, and one remarkable sequence - the most pivotal in the film, I'd say - set against rain that also happens to provide her with the all too rare opportunity to keep dry. A storm forces the hand of Graves' surly painter; having been resistant to Stanwyck's sly charms up to this point, he grudgingly offers her a spare bed to sleep in after a modelling session so that she doesn't have to brave the downpour. Fade to the middle of the night: a restless Stanwyck lies awake, and then Graves, in a concise succession of shots that have the expressive integrity and sharp economy of the barely-in-the-rearview silent cinema, wordlessly exits his room and walks over to place a blanket on the faux-sleeping Stanwyck, leaving her marvelled at this first display of affection.<br />
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In addition to any purely ambient function, the rain in this sequence provides a particularly potent erotic charge, the fixed tempo of its patter playing counterpoint to the barely suppressed emotions in play. But then Capra has an extra trick up his sleeve: as the sequence fades to black and both the rain and Stanwyck trail off, we are met at fade in with a very Preston Sturges-esque egg frying in the pan, bubbling and alive in all the ways Stanwyck's visage was, with the frying sound almost a precise rhyme with the rain. The effect is mildly startling and fairly complex, with a pressure-and-release quality that at once preserves the abstract energy built up previously, while also finding for it a very particular expression by couching it in a reciprocal act of domestic ritual - Stanwyck, with an ostentatiously devotional touch, is preparing breakfast for Graves.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-29736474646666231862014-03-12T15:25:00.000-04:002014-03-12T19:36:31.495-04:00And Then There Were None<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By sheer coincidence I watched two westerns recently that, while being very different from one another in many important ways, both happened to turn on the age-old plot strategy of establishing a group of characters in a dire situation, and then systematically whittling this group down to a lone scrappy party, whose survival functions both to crystallise a key thematic as well as to taper the narrative off with some degree of triumph. The history of this general premise in literature and genre cinema - my mind associates it most strongly with mystery in the former and horror in the latter - seems almost tied to the hip with the effect of suspense produced, but in the two westerns I watched, this wasn't really the case - events in both play out more as the logical outcome of dubious choices and suboptimal means. But it occurred to me in all of this that the western is a particularly apt canvas to play with this sort of approach: a more classically hermetic setting such as a mysterious old mansion or isolated island will inevitably plunge into a hotbed of hysteria and paranoia, whereas the expanse of the western landscape, loaded with eternal connotations, would seem to provide ample room for experimentation with throwing these dynamics into all sorts of relief.<br />
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The first western I watched was <i><b>Posse from Hell</b></i> (1961), a late Universal-International production directed by Hitchcock collaborator Herbert Coleman. It's almost proto-Peckinpah in the forcefulness of its violence and in the grim complexities flirted with in Audie Murphy's loner posse leader, and this is one of those darker roles that makes good use of Murphy's troubled intensity and low boil menace, one of those roles that Universal unfortunately only began throwing at Audie in the latter half of his career. Coleman seems to be a curious case, having only two directed features to his name, the other also starring Audie and also made in 1961, a war film for Fox called <i>Battle at Bloody Beach</i>. The second western I watched was Thomas Arslan's latest, <b><i>Gold</i></b> (2013). It seems that a lot of critics don't know quite what to do with this one, and that's not surprising considering that, like his previous film <i>In the Shadows</i> (2010) it is a deeply serious piece of genre filmmaking beholden to a deeply alien sensibility. Speaking strictly of those two, the only ones I've seen from him, Arslan is like Siegel mixed with Dumont: a terse, dynamic formal craftsman on one layer, and on the other a neo-Bressonian that uses his flat affect to play with audience expectation and build inexorable moods with swift, discomforting actions. Perhaps the crime film, by its very nature (socially "on the fringes") absorbs eccentricity more easily than the western (historically "on the front lines"), and that this may partly explain why <i>Gold</i> hasn't quite stuck its landing the way <i>Shadows</i> did. But I sense a deep regard invested by Arslan in both films, and the occasional awkwardness of <i>Gold</i> feels productive to me, as though its confronting us with the challenge of reconciling its earnestness with the various lines of tradition that pass through it. (Contrary to some of the fine pieces written, I'm not sure how much interest Arslan has in turning anything "inside out".) In any case, both westerns are recommended, and <i>In the Shadows</i> is recommended twice - a stunning, extremely great film.Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-85074712255390579552014-02-21T13:59:00.000-05:002014-02-21T14:11:09.547-05:00LetterboxdI didn't use MUBI all that often, though I did enjoy logging on once in awhile and keeping some activity going. Since things aren't looking very optimistic at that site right now, and since many folks, as far as I can tell, seem to be flocking to Letterboxd, I've created an account over there and have rated a dozen recent viewings. I can't promise any kind of regular updating, but if you'd like to follow me (and in turn give me someone to follow) then you can find my account here: <a href="http://letterboxd.com/dmc/">http://letterboxd.com/dmc/</a>Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-72847933606846922972014-01-21T17:05:00.000-05:002014-01-21T17:12:52.311-05:00End of the Road<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>La marge</i> (Walerian Borowczyk, 1976)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lost Highway</i> (David Lynch, 1997)</td></tr>
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The similarities in this instance not being solely limited to the image, but extending to facial ticks, presumed state of mind, presumed fate, and placement within the duration of the film. Because <i>La marge </i>could not innacurately be described as a somnambulistic Joe Dallesandro leaving his family to wander around nighttime Paris and have strange sex, it's drawn comparison in some quarters to <i>Eyes Wide Shut</i>, which I think holds a little more water on paper than it does during the actual act of watching. What was evoked for me was Lynch at times (though it often feels like he's destined to live in the back of my eyes forever) as well as, in its occasional status as a piece of erotica that seemingly can't wait to shake off its flesh, Jean Rollin. And the non-condescending, detailed interludes of brothel lifestyle, with their casual immediacy and ellipses, gives a hint of what Pialat's <i>L'Apollonide</i> might have looked like. (If <i>La marge</i> is great, and it might be, it is so because of these sequences.) But none of that quite gets at the movie's own peculiarities of style and attention, the odd appropriateness of its disarming musical choices, the manner in which its play of ideals and their oblivion accumulates a gravity that should be next to impossible to wring from its initial eye-rolling portrayals of the former.<br />
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As my first dip into the work of Borowczyk I am without auteurist context here, but I did watch<i> Touch of Evil </i>again last night, so maybe the best way to leave it is to say that <i>La marge</i> is some kind of a movie.Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-48030302458895376482014-01-16T21:15:00.000-05:002014-01-16T23:30:49.605-05:00First Impressions: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Real (2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I liked <i>Real</i> a good bit, though it is a departure for Kurosawa in significant ways that have fought off a few qualities I value in his art - namely, it seems that working from source material has flattened him narratively and thematically (gone are those idiosyncratic airs of anomalous tone and plot construction; here the mysteries of thought and behavior are approached as mere puzzles to be unlocked instead of regarded as symptoms) and visually it is almost <i>too </i>good looking, with the rough-hewn edges that have defined so many of his previous visual conceptions almost entirely smoothed over, with sleek architecture and rich foliage sitting in for dilapidation (the one decaying location portrayed is explicitly lamented for and, thus, benign).<br />
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Still, Kurosawa, one of the great "protractor-and-metronome" directors (as Ray Durgnat once referred to Lang and Murnau) is able to flex his mastery of rhythm and the ability to conjure unease, and what is most interesting about <i>Real</i> is that this takes place within what is essentially the director's crack at the 'virtual sandbox' subgenre, here taking the idea of intrusion into another's mind and, through its depiction of space, agency and challenge, renders something analogous to the open-air video game experience. Kurosawa is of course no member of any video game generation, and so what we get is not, obviously, the kind of breakneck thing that, say, Neveldine/Taylor or the <i>Harold and Kumar</i> movies (the latter being more unconscious experiments in sandbox realization) offer up, but instead something more composed and curious/suspicious, an "old man's" video game movie, like Cronenberg's <i>eXistenZ </i>(eternally underrated). What these two movies have in common (and some of Phil Solomon's experimental work deals with this also) is an attention to and patience with the vacant details of their environments, a mise-en-scene that forges a dialectic between the attractive freedoms and the inherent artificiality and loneliness of these experiences. <i>Real</i> may lose its footing a bit in a last act that would maybe seem more at home in a Bong Joon-ho picture, but there is a strong feel of mournful investigation here that's hangs in my memory above most of the weaknesses.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Real</i> (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2013)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>eXistenZ</i> (David Cronenberg, 1999)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Real</i> (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2013)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>eXistenZ</i> (David Cronenberg, 1999)</td></tr>
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-48190804538765661312014-01-02T13:30:00.000-05:002014-01-06T04:58:56.714-05:00Fin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Movies didn't occupy as much of my time in 2013 as they have in previous years - hence both the limited attention I've been giving this blog of late, as well as the more direct nature of this post, at least as compared with previous year-end posts I've done here. Here are, in vaguely preferential order and with a few footnotes, twenty five important first-time viewings I had in 2013:<br />
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<b>*</b> <i>Trouble in Paradise</i> (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)<br />
<i>The Wonderful Country </i>(Robert Parrish, 1959)<br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">%</span></b> <i>The Raid</i> (Hugo Fregonese, 1954)<br />
<i>Le Trou</i> (Jacques Becker, 1960)<br />
<i>This Island Earth</i> (Joseph Newman, 1955)<br />
<i>Make way for Tomorrow</i> (Leo McCarey, 1937)<br />
<i>Harakiri </i>(Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>^</b></span> <i>La Tete contre les murs</i> (Georges Franju, 1959)<br />
<i>Passe ton bac d'abord</i> (Maurice Pialat, 1978)<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>#</b></span> <i>Le Cercle Rouge </i>(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)<br />
<i>Tomahawk</i> (George Sherman, 1951)<br />
<i>Sound of My Voice</i> (Zal Batmanglij, 2011)<br />
<i>Union Depot</i> (Alfred E. Green, 1932)<br />
<i>Kid Auto Races at Venice</i> (Lehrman/Chaplin, 1914)<br />
<i>Man Without a Star</i> (King Vidor, 1955)<br />
<i>Smilin' Through</i> (Frank Borzage, 1941)<br />
<i><b>~</b> The Westerner </i>(Sam Peckinpah, 1960)<br />
<i>The River</i> (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)<br />
<i>Blood for Dracula</i> (Paul Morrissey, 1974)<br />
<i>The Marquise of O</i> (Eric Rohmer, 1976)<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>!</b></span> <i>Twilight's Last Gleaming</i> (Robert Aldrich, 1977)<br />
<i>Red Sundown</i> (Jack Arnold, 1956)<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>$</b></span> <i>Fat Girl</i> (Catherine Breillat, 2001)<br />
<i>Quai des orfevres</i> (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947)<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>@</b></span> <i>Star in the Night</i> (Don Siegel, 1945)<br />
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*<b> </b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(<i>Time Machines, or The Curses and Blessings of Cinephilia in the Digital Era as a Splash of Cold Water in the Face</i>)<b> </b>An inexcusable blind spot from a favorite director, one I was more than pleased to have the opportunity to correct via a beautiful 35mm print shown at Emory University in Atlanta. (Emory's bi-annual Cinematheque Series screenings, one of the few movie-going bright spots left in the area, are wonderfully programmed and open to the public for free (!) and if you live anywhere in the vicinity and care about movies then they should be a big deal to you). What to say about the movie? Not much here, only that it's one thing to speak of Lubitch's mythical enduring freshness in hallowed hushes and nodding approvals, and it's another thing entirely to experience it directly - that is, to experience Lubitsch in 2013 the way he was meant to be experienced (or so I imagine)<i>,</i> a concept that factors in, among other things I would say, a particular type of motley audience, one alien to our modern segmented film culture, one varied across the board in age and expectation (it was made clear to me at the screening that a not insignificant number of attendees were students whose presence was mandatory) and the attending exuberant surprise and sense of participation as a special picture faultlessly does its job within such an atmosphere (sidenote: how many American moviegoers in the 30s went into the theater on any given day expecting something <i>singular</i>?) I'd never heard this amount of, or more importantly, this <i>kind</i> of laughter and joy from an audience before, have never felt near this degree of shared, positive energy from any kind of movie screening, and walking out it was quite hard to not notice the buzzing and be struck with the notion that I had been part of a serious <i>event</i>, in the Thomas Elsaesser sense of the word, as a film experience which carves out its singularity upon recollection not only from the direct experience of the film itself but also from the strands of unique human experience which invariably tangle up with and tint our perception. Needless to say, for the modern cinephile, one accustomed to mathematically dispersed multiplex crowds and 700MB .avi rips, this can be potentially a rather startling experience to have, as well as a nourishing one, and a sad one, sad in the way that getting merely a taste of something distant and overwhelming and alluring can be. I don't pretend that none of this contributes to <i>Trouble</i> being my favorite film viewing in 2013, but for what it's worth, I've watched it again since, on my couch, and it lost next to nothing.</span><br />
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% <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"Never trust a person who can't acknowledge their debts" said someone, somewhere. While I have trouble envisioning viewing methods less structured and more vulnerable to whims than my own, I nevertheless found myself regularly referencing the following items when the craving for guidance of some sort came along: <a href="http://thefilmsaurus.com/blog/" target="_blank">Jaime Christley's decade-by-decade lists of essentials at TheFilmsaurus</a>, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, Phil Hardy's The Western, Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage's two-volume American Directors, <a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/blu-ray/" target="_blank">Glenn Kenny's Blu-Ray Consumer Guide column</a>, and <a href="http://www.panix.com/~sallitt/bestfilm.html" target="_blank">Dan Sallitt's lists of favorite films</a>. The last of those of which turned me on to the Fregonese masterpiece placed here. In addition to his neat color-coded lists and valuable writing on film, Dan is also a filmmaker, and if you didn't know, his latest work <i>The Unspeakable Act</i> is quite excellent. (And it is in at least my opinion that his 2000 film <i>All the Ships at Sea</i>, included as an extra on the Cinema Guild dvd release of <i>Act</i>, is just as good.)</span><br />
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<b>^</b> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">At 46 years of age, and having already mastered a particular subversive, poetic approach to the documentary short, Franju gives us one of those most fascinating of all film objects: the first feature that is also - in the long-settled calm of its vision, in its elemental tone - an autumnal one. Further exploration of Franju's oeuvre was a big highlight for me this year; the missing link between Feuillade and Lynch, this spot could have just as easily gone to <i>Pleins Feux sur l'Assassin</i><i> </i>or<i> Premiere Nuit </i>(either of which could reasonably be called <i>Les vampires</i>), or <i>Therese Desqueyroux</i> (which could reasonably append the subtitle 'A Woman in Trouble').</span><br />
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<b>#</b> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Quick confession that I'm not proud of: after a miserably unsatisfying viewing of <i>Le Samourai </i>some years back, I pretty much gave up on Melville. I didn't get it, at all, and there was not much there I was tempted to pursue. Earlier this year I stumbled upon a cheap used dvd of <i>Le Doulos</i>, watched it almost grudgingly, was shocked at how much I liked it, and subsequently ran through the entirety of Melville's work (minus <i>Samourai</i>) in awe. Feeling that surely the boat would come back around this time, I watched <i>Le Samourai</i> again, and was once again left tepid. What is it about certain directors pushing certain elements or tendencies to certain extremes that can provoke these types of responses? I find myself in a similar position with <i>His Girl Friday</i>, another highly regarded work by a favorite director that I have every bit of trouble in the world connecting with. And yet<i> Le Samourai</i> and <i>Le Cercle Rouge</i> seem to occupy the same room in the same house. If anyone can crack that one then please give me a call, because I can't. </span><br />
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~ <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Not a film of course, but the 13 episode 1960 television series, starring Brian Keith, created and produced by Peckinpah, and directed by a stable which includes Peckinpah and Andre de Toth. It's a shame that this brilliant show has never received any sort of home release. </span><br />
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<b>!</b><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Olive Films continues to quietly be one of the physical media-hoarding cinephile's best friends, and their release of this forgotten masterpiece is essential. What to say about the movie? Not much here, only that I'd like to briefly indulge in one of those auteurist parlour games and propose an unofficial Aldrich trilogy, made up of three back-to-back films, <i>The Longest Yard</i>, <i>Hustle</i>, and <i>Twilight's Last Gleaming</i>....we'll call it the 'Touchdown' trilogy, a trilogy where football is first taken as a prime subject and then with each subsequent film allowed to recede slowly into the margins (perhaps the 'Safety' trilogy would be more apropos?) What's interesting in this respect about the latter two examples is the way the presence of the sport is merely incorporated into initial and non-essential background maneuverings, only to take on a reincarnated weight in the form of the conflicts at the center of the drama - in other words yet another and particularly gradated assertion of Aldrich's world as one of a pure struggle. This sensitivity to the phenomenon of the sporting event and its place in even the most quotidian of social circumstances - and this could only come from a true sports fan I think; Aldrich played football in college - seems to me one of the unique properties of his cinema. Let's also remember that Aldrich's first and last movies were sports films: <i>Big Leaguer</i> (pleasant, minor) and <i>...All the Marbles </i>(passionate, major). </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">$</span></b> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"Never trust a person who can't change their mind about art" said someone, somewhere. Quick confession: I've seen <i>Fat Girl</i>, once, many years ago, and didn't care much for it. I watched it again this year, and it wasn't the same movie I watched all that time ago. Or, more likely, it was a different person watching the same movie. Either way, it may as well have been that I had never seen it before, and so I feel little qualm including it here. I'm still a bit on the fence with Breillat (my newfound enthusiasm for this one sent me down a path with a few other previously unseen Breillat films with mixed results) but I can no longer deny the brilliance of <i>Fat Girl</i>. I'm still trying to sew back together my nerve-endings from that final act, an urtext of the New French Car Anxiety, alongside Cedric Kahn's <i>Red Light</i>s from 2004. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>@</b> I'm not saying that <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i> isn't a great film - it is. But I get everything I get from that movie here, force intact, and I don't have to spend three hours in front of the television. Just sayin'. Siegel's first directed job is a small miracle I think, and it's fascinating to see his natural talents put towards a profoundly tender mode of expression that would find little use in his later work. Not that I'm complaining about the Siegel that we got. </span></span><br />
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As far as new films go, for me this year there was Shane Carruth's<b> <i>Upstream Color</i></b> and then everything else.....the best of which would include, in vaguely preferential order: Alain Guiraudie's<b> <i>L'inconnu du lac</i></b>; Brian De Palma's <i><b>Passion</b></i>; Harmony Korine's <i><b>Spring Breakers</b></i>; Andrew Bujalski's <i><b>Computer Chess</b></i>; Dan Sallitt's<b> <i>The Unspeakable Act</i></b>, Kiarostami's <i><b>Like Someone in Love</b></i>; Claire Denis' <b><i>Bastards</i></b>; Timo Tjahjonto and Gareth Huw Evans' segment <b>"Safe Haven"</b> from <b><i>V/H/S 2</i></b>;<i> </i>and select sequences from <i><b>A Field in England</b></i>, the latest picture from Ben Wheatley, who continues to mount a compelling case for himself as the most frustrating of all working directors, the chasm between his genuinely exciting and bold ideas and their oft-haphazard realization seemingly growing wider with every new work. And winning the 'C'mon, It's Not THAT Bad' award is Brad Furman's <i><b>Runner, Runner</b></i>, a nothing-special picture to be sure, but one that often presents a reasonably pleasing facsimile of certain fleet narrative tendencies found in the fifties B-pictures. And Ben Affleck is actually pretty great in it. </div>
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-29896192823889249622013-12-04T22:35:00.000-05:002014-03-12T19:39:07.676-04:00Divided<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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No one ever told me about <i>this</i> Walter Brennan. The one in <b><i>Along the Great Divide</i></b>. Is that why the movie shocked me so much? For a spell, at least, his is one of the most wicked constructs in any western I've ever seen. To be sure, there are characters in the genre's history who've committed grander atrocities than singing a song, but I'd be hard pressed to recall a dynamic as intimately discomfiting as the one between Brennan and Kirk Douglas here, one in which a psychic wound is located and assaulted with such relentless and gleeful surgical precision.<br />
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To clarify: Douglas is the marshall who is transporting Brennan's horse thief to face a murder charge properly in a courtroom, evading the father of the murdered man and his lynch mob who assume Brennan's guilt and seek his neck. Brennan, who sees this escort as merely (cruelly?) prolonging the same fate the mob intends to mete out, whiles away the hours with song, and stumbles onto the tune ("Down in the Valley"; more lovely = more menacing) which Douglas's father, killed years ago in a preventable lynching, used to sing to his son. Brennan hones in on the distress the song creates in Douglas and, against warnings, sings it loud and repeatedly, taunting the haunted lawman with invoked and mocked paternal parallels.<br />
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Towards what end? Presumably, Brennan aims to be set free in lieu of the madness he might provoke. (As played, a bullet in the head seems the more likely natural outcome). But Walsh and Brennan conspire to point at something more sinister: that this man is positively relishing in the torture he is inflicting, secretly thanking the stars that they have aligned to put him in such a position. The basic survival strategy of Brennan's character here is, as far as Hollywood logic extends, plausible - in an impossible situation, a person pounces on any scrap that may translate to power - but it does not account for the almost pathological grins of satisfaction and gut cackles of pure pleasure that inflect Brennan's performance. These interactions are so stinging, so stark in their single-minded pursuit of emotional damage, that they threaten to overwhelm practically every other development of drama and character in the film. That Brennan ultimately winds up some Frankenstein monster of victim, devilish antagonist, fool, ally, ghost, patsy, and benefactor of faith is just one source of the film's mystery. And when Walsh's sadistic streak (which doesn't begin and end with Brennan; Ray Teal's repeated delighting in the desperation and violent infighting of his prisoners is just as unaccountable) seems ready to tip over into the wearying, we get the remarkably tender scene of Douglas riding horseback with a dying John Agar, singing the forbidden song to comfort his friend as the life leaks out of his body while shots of Brennan, a tired and wholly impassive witness, are tossed out like a dare. The movie turns on such sequences where configurations, both mythic and immediate, of child/parent/death become fluid and interchangeable, with the residual guilt and grace momentarily assuming total command of the narrative. The dexterity with which the film bridges not just pure viciousness and utter humility, but such credible versions of each, is astonishing.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-79047959474864860232013-10-30T13:00:00.000-04:002013-10-30T22:12:47.434-04:00Sinister<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Adorno and Eisler once argued that music in film often acts as an antidote against the picture, that rather than supplementing the emotions of an onscreen character it instead works towards helping the audience cope with fear and shock. The degree to which much modern horror cinema has fine tuned with awesome precision a hollow dependency on the loud shocking jolt for effect shows that an inverse of this hypothesis can also ring true: silence utilized not as a neutral, anchoring presence but instead as another manipulative tool that dulls its horrors by reducing them to a clinical play of crashing noise. It's easy to imagine practitioners of such faux-horror hunched behind their cameras with thought bubbles over their heads containing that quote from <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>,<i> </i>co-opted as a mantra<i>: </i>"Everyone breaks, it's biology."<br />
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<i>Sinister</i> doesn't exactly escape cheap shock-jump syndrome, but one of its subtle strengths is its carefully crafted Christopher Young score, an amorphous, ubiquitous dark churn that never sees fit to simply work in accordance with the jolts but instead often seems to exist independently of the specific screen actions, occupying a more elemental place within the emotional dimension of the film, dovetailing with the central themes of obsession and paranoia and amplifying them in a particularly bleak and subterranean manner. The film isn't a complete success, but it's strikingly naked in its despair and takes it seriously (in spirit it feels at times like something plucked from the 70s and slapped with a modern veneer) and its efforts to destabilize on both the aural and visual level (I can't think of many recent mainstream movies of any genre so willing to hang onto a disorienting, visual blackness) are effective more often than not. There's a modest lesson or two in small scale, unbombastic eeriness here that the James Wan's of the world would do well to take note of.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-45962517114425763892013-10-28T17:15:00.000-04:002013-10-28T18:25:43.711-04:00LOL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A bit of roundabout communication from D'arrast's <i>Laughter</i> (1930). The continental flavor and penchant for spicy intimation here have led some, in the small pile of writing I've been able find on the film, to invoke Lubitsch, which seems I suppose as perfectly reasonable a starting point as any in situating this rich, forgotten Paramount item. Likely not enough of D'arrasts's scant output circulates in any capacity today to parse out any kind of full bodied "touch", but to my eyes the real heart of the film pumping beneath Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (one of his earliest, and it's a hoot; some acid religious sarcasm or class barb pounce out from every corner) is a physical, jubilant discursiveness that feels very much the product of a distinct sensibility: a potentially awkward situation early in the film is diffused by Frederic March banging out some jazzy number on a piano, opening the door for Nancy Carroll and Diane Ellis to launch into surely one of the most manic of all precode dance numbers; later on Carroll and March break into a home to avoid a rainstorm, and their mounting sexual tension naturally leads to them dressing in bearskin rugs and engaging in a bear battle. Narratively these tangents feel justified in their illustrations of the allure of the bohemian temperament (the source of the title), but the effect is of viewing a group of characters who continually seize any opening to wriggle free from the sway of plot and give into some primal impulse.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-89878758170006804492013-06-13T13:15:00.000-04:002013-06-13T13:17:52.639-04:00Points of Contact (6/13/13)<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gpaY04nD670" width="420"></iframe><br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-49850699023460209392013-04-06T12:25:00.000-04:002014-03-12T19:39:07.685-04:00Sarah / Mary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Shepherd of the Hills</i> (Henry Hathaway, 1941)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfdfy7fVZv_82-ZGfMD2xSd6dr2wCNQW4D8tTfLBVHV5e7bLEJiwRzO0VhOwXI0jH2twQ-x_606Z1w3Tvg_jjWKItJKaZc_0CRPswW5GgrmAObMkF_Y_DEyyqg4tXQ-ZNPoUPiLUQJDgE/s1600/ribbon3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfdfy7fVZv_82-ZGfMD2xSd6dr2wCNQW4D8tTfLBVHV5e7bLEJiwRzO0VhOwXI0jH2twQ-x_606Z1w3Tvg_jjWKItJKaZc_0CRPswW5GgrmAObMkF_Y_DEyyqg4tXQ-ZNPoUPiLUQJDgE/s1600/ribbon3.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>She Wore a Yellow Ribbon</i> (John Ford, 1949)</span></td></tr>
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Speaking of non-Ford Fordian movies (which <i>Shepherd</i> is most definitely; in addition to the above, Harry Carey plays Wayne's father (!), and Wayne and Ward Bond have an all-out brawl in front of everyone), I'll throw a quick plug in for another fine example that's found reason to be brought up in certain cinephile corners lately, George Marshall's <i>Pillars of the Sky </i>(1956). It's one of five films on the recently released TCM DVD box set <b>Western Horizons: Universal Westerns of the 1950's</b>, surely one of the essential home video releases of the year. I was initially attracted to the set due to the presence of George Sherman's <i>Dawn at Socorro </i>(1954)<i> - </i>I've<i> </i>been watching lately as much of Sherman's marvelous Universal-International output as I've been able to get my hands on and this was one of his most obscure and highly thought of from the period - but every one here is great, with maybe the biggest surprise for me being John Sturges' tough, taut, cerebral <i>Backlash </i>(1956), a truly incredible western<i>. </i>A highly recommended purchase.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-64618006023685242562013-03-18T11:05:00.000-04:002014-03-12T19:39:07.696-04:00Points of Contact (3/18/13)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnWGLM7XfYGet8rMXowUFDEnZiOBsbtAVTr3FKMZlG6rNKW-KNJtTZxf9_M65CzgaJPk5tkSIGusq6tLUKA5lS_xF1OXqn0ua89AsXKBmEeSfKM2gjCjUJzJTa690ipQVZtIifh8SwCJI/s1600/flamingstar1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnWGLM7XfYGet8rMXowUFDEnZiOBsbtAVTr3FKMZlG6rNKW-KNJtTZxf9_M65CzgaJPk5tkSIGusq6tLUKA5lS_xF1OXqn0ua89AsXKBmEeSfKM2gjCjUJzJTa690ipQVZtIifh8SwCJI/s1600/flamingstar1.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flaming Star</i> (Don Siegel, 1960)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flaming Star</i> (Don Siegel, 1960)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvpTFeEa1-hgXmR8GUgH7sw__ZSaIAD9TWCNG0c4yo964Aa8ElvU0-A5LXlCmnC21cWayFnu0q3-av3jMT1KinP1Ffbiicx20T7l4rY5f6D5woyWBcqq7_68DZqjFQxSvZEcKNIMHob6w/s1600/flamingstar3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvpTFeEa1-hgXmR8GUgH7sw__ZSaIAD9TWCNG0c4yo964Aa8ElvU0-A5LXlCmnC21cWayFnu0q3-av3jMT1KinP1Ffbiicx20T7l4rY5f6D5woyWBcqq7_68DZqjFQxSvZEcKNIMHob6w/s1600/flamingstar3.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flaming Star</i> (Don Siegel, 1960)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ00odfMuAMVY7Ct5YHbocO1s51a2M_Brp7CwwOzIhSGgKsscNCx7ZTniwpN0QIzcM0mkT8rhZaHaH1jSFG8Ri23VmBO883A7KepVGlE50MiIRwwJyFIz6M5gguEUACJg3nxcqpBRUj0c/s1600/flamingstar4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ00odfMuAMVY7Ct5YHbocO1s51a2M_Brp7CwwOzIhSGgKsscNCx7ZTniwpN0QIzcM0mkT8rhZaHaH1jSFG8Ri23VmBO883A7KepVGlE50MiIRwwJyFIz6M5gguEUACJg3nxcqpBRUj0c/s1600/flamingstar4.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flaming Star</i> (Don Siegel, 1960)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnMCXE3d6ikkzR8nFJFZyim6qAzo1htLJxOoI0tgEw9wEBlh64s_9168daPOdlF_xANP8_jLS0unD3ep96cVCrlrrtzR6ykXjX4amg6X0ZubG7joG6giA0K6iOogydbXns-bhKMrhAiTI/s1600/christinas-world-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnMCXE3d6ikkzR8nFJFZyim6qAzo1htLJxOoI0tgEw9wEBlh64s_9168daPOdlF_xANP8_jLS0unD3ep96cVCrlrrtzR6ykXjX4amg6X0ZubG7joG6giA0K6iOogydbXns-bhKMrhAiTI/s1600/christinas-world-2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Christina's World</i> (Andrew Wyeth, 1948)</td></tr>
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-32812244664732622932013-02-13T00:25:00.000-05:002014-03-12T19:39:07.680-04:00Saddle Tramp<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's only little more than a month into 2013, and though there's still a lot of time to go in the year it'd surprise me if I came across many films better than Hugo Fregonese's brilliant Civil War western <i>The Raid</i>. Released in 1954, it came a few years after what is probably Fregonese's other best known western today, the very fine <i>Apache Drums </i>(1951), notable for being the last film produced by Val Lewton before his untimely death. Going back one year even further to the director's previous film <i>Saddle Tramp</i> (1950) gives an indication, in an early sequence, of what may have caught Lewton's eye.<br />
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Joel McCrea plays the drifting title character en route to visiting an old friend who, as it turns out, has lost a wife and gained a few sons in the years since McCrea has last seen him. That night McCrea and the boys fall asleep by the lantern light while his old friend rides a horse off into a raging storm. McCrea awakens and traces the missing man's path, arriving at a slain body splayed in a ditch. Not a terribly unique premise in and of itself, but the manner in which it is filmed - as a repeated series of mysterious actions captured at a remove, with acute attention paid to the unstable atmosphere and a strong sense menace lurking just beyond the frame - is particularly oneiric for a fifties western, and is absolutely in line with the brand of suggestive horror Lewton's name is normally associated with.<br />
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For better or worse, the promises inherent in that unusually moody setup are never allowed fruition, and so develops what is basically a gentle story about a drifter suddenly saddled with responsibility in the form of abandoned children, albeit a gentle story occasionally splashed with the unusually surreal or violent touch. (One scene where the children beat a defenseless man repeatedly in the head with shovels over a lighthearted musical theme is a prime, merged example of both.) In the midst of McCrea's attempts at negotiating his freewheeling ways with his newfound position helming a family unit, peripheral characters and storylines crop up on both sides threatening to make the movie their own (conflicts over stolen cattle, the hunt for a runaway.) But, similar to <i>The Raid</i>, the narrative of <i>Saddle Tramp - </i>grounded by<i> </i>Fregonese's sturdy visual touch and clear-headed sense of spatial arrangement (very reminiscent of Boetticher) -<i> </i>is essentially a straight line movement towards an all-in commitment, rippled with ambivalence and nudged in all directions but resolutely staying on course.<br />
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-16588603307455485642013-02-12T02:15:00.000-05:002014-03-12T19:39:07.659-04:00Sharp ('34 - '13)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Saturated with blue-faced bedlam over the positively shocking occurrence of Rex Reed being a jackass, the daily discourse, at least if my Twitter feed is to be believed (my god those words), seemed all too content eliding over the death of writer Alan Sharp, whose small yet astonishingly high quality run of original screenplays in the early 70s produced three major wonders of the period: Peter Fonda's <i>The Hired Hand </i>(1971), Robert Aldrich's <i>Ulzana's Raid </i>(1972), and Arthur Penn's <i>Night Moves </i>(1975)<i>. </i>(I've yet to see the Fleischer/Huston co-directed <i>The Last Run, </i>but I've heard it's very good.)<br />
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I would argue that, in the latter two examples at least, his tight and intricate hand brought out the best in those great directors. Unfortunately his career in films seemed to peter out in the following decades, with only a few theatrical features (Peckinpah's The <i>Osterman Weekend</i> and the Liam Neeson swashbuckler <i>Rob Roy</i> being the most notable) and a modest slew of TV movies to his name. But that exciting mini-body of work from that most exciting time in Hollywood will remain and fascinate as long as cinema remains and fascinates, and even if I'm only kidding myself to think that this post, in which I've said basically nothing, could be the teeniest of correctives to the latest Dumb Critic Quote Swarmfest, then at least that brief, immortal exchange from <i>Night Moves</i> at top has excuse to grab a few more seconds.Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-5871127022417114172013-02-08T01:50:00.000-05:002013-02-08T02:24:10.313-05:00The Eve of St. Mark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Andrew Sarris' sole, brief comment on Stahl's <i>The Eve of St. Mark </i>(1944)<i> </i>in "The American Cinema" can seem a little odd in the specificity of its claim: "...<i>revealed a profound comprehension of the emotional implications of two-shots as opposed to cross-cutting.</i>" Don't many of Stahl's films exhibit this very quality? To my eyes, the director regularly defaults towards an unusually detached and observational mode with his framing, and the presence and repeated use of a gentle, backwards track in his work feels almost designed towards substantiating a vivid, enveloping and essential atmosphere void of privilege (like Raoul Walsh, Stahl is a director whose films consistently play as <i>a</i> <i>world </i>> <i>its characters</i> rather than <i>the characters</i> > <i>their world). </i>How else would one possibly describe the finale of <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> (1939) if <i>not</i> as a supreme example of the "emotional implications of two-shots as opposed to cross-cutting"?<br />
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Watching the movie, it makes more sense why Sarris may have singled it out for this specific quality. Frequently in Stahl the melodrama arises from a secret or unspoken impediment in a romantic relationship (Gene Tierney's psychosis in <i>Leaver Her to Heaven</i>; the marriages of John Boles and Charles Boyer in, respectively, <i>Back Street</i> and <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>; the deception of identity from Montey Woolley in <i>Holy Matrimony</i>), the drama being a natural outgrowth or endpoint of the way the data contained in this gulf is responded to; the distanced approach in these examples generally producing a bristling, private tension and a certain understatedness to the emotional charges (very powerful stuff, and a large reason why I value Stahl so much). <i>The Eve of St. Mark</i> reverses these terms; instead of an aberrant, intimate romantic relationship, it presents a homogeneous ensemble (of WWI soldiers), and instead of organic melodramatic development, its players are thrust into an extremity outside of their control (a losing battle in a dank cave of a malaria-ridden island somewhere in the Philippines); the result being here that the two-shots (or three or four; that is, the lack of cross-cutting during dialogue or drama intensive scenes, which is as predominant as ever) effectively act as the affirmation of a set of collective fears and anxieties which slowly begin to atomize as a climactic moral imperative comes into focus. The communal baseline in play here doesn't necessarily make the approach more potent, but it stands out, and is more concentrated and demonstrative than in any of the other Stahl I've watched.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> (John M. Stahl, 1939)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eve of St. Mark </i>(John M. Stahl, 1944)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eve of St. Mark</i> (John M. Stahl, 1944)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eve of St. Mark</i> (John M. Stahl, 1944)</td></tr>
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All of that comes in the movie's latter half, which is pretty much as dark and dire and effective as it sounds, but the earlier sections are all pitched at a significantly lighter tone, reinforcing that Stahl and comedy are a pretty fascinating combination. The humor is never really subsumed into the solemnity, and vice versa; rather they exist alongside each other, are even placed in dialectical opposition by Stahl. A good example of this is the main character in <i>Holy Matrimony</i>, a world famous painter who fakes his own death to escape celebrity; the incorrigibility is played fairly broadly and often for chuckles by Woolley, but Stahl's camera retains a certain air of remove that underlines the pathos of the situation. The extended courtroom sequence which ends that film winds up hinging on the explicitly absurd importance of a pair of hairless collarbone moles, yet Stahl's courtroom looks like <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Y3KHhoh.png" target="_blank">this</a> and <a href="http://i.imgur.com/VdMg1sJ.png" target="_blank">this</a>. In <i>Eve</i>, the funniest sequence involves a few of the Army buddies sneaking out to meet a couple of girls at a pub. Their stumbling waiter ignores them, gets the order right anyway. Vincent Price woos a drunk girl eating a hamburger by locking eyes with her and reciting Shakespeare. But then a couple of the guys leave to pick up easier looking girls; Vincent Price tells his girls to go wait on him in a curtained booth then decides to leave, stopping by the booth to flash a smirk before abandoning, Stahl's camera lingering behind for a brief moment. It's kind of haunting, and is the first thing I thought of when I read that Maxwell Anderson, author of the original novel, hated the movie.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eve of St. Mark</i> (John M. Stahl, 1944)</td></tr>
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-52574817489888045972013-02-07T02:25:00.000-05:002014-03-12T19:39:07.691-04:00Images of the Day (2/7/13)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>From Hell to Texas </i>(Henry Hathaway, 1958)</div>
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-29293102031182110082013-01-29T18:10:00.000-05:002013-01-29T22:39:32.829-05:00Upperworld / R.D.R.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Early on in Roy Del Ruth's <i>Upperworld </i>(1934), Warren William, playing a character named Stream, saves a lady from drowning in a river, a beautiful blonde who he'll maybe fall in love with but who will die around the midway point of the film anyway. Matters of psychosexual obsession never rated terribly high on the agenda of these early thirties Warner Bros. pictures, so the <i>Vertigo</i> similarities mostly end there, but the direction the film winds up moving in is perhaps as peculiar and unconventional in its own way as in the Hitch.<br />
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After being struck down with loneliness by the absence of affection from his priggish socialite wife (Mary Astor), William begins an affair with the aforementioned blonde (Ginger Rogers), a sweet and charming burlesque dancer who is also in the grips of another malicious fellow intent on blackmailing the very wealthy William; things come to a head one night when Rogers and the blackmailer are both killed (she by the blackmailer's hands, him by William's) and William tries to cover up the entire thing, manipulating evidence to give the impression of a murder-suicide. But bad luck in the form of a cop William had previously used his social standing to banish to cheap street beats returns to bite him - his hand in the incident is discovered and William is put on trial. He's found not guilty (escaping blame for the murder he did commit as well as the one he didn't), and the movie ends on what could be seen as a sardonic note, with William and Astor on a cruise, love as strong as ever after William has explained away his affair ("Oh I was fond of her. She never took your place.")<br />
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The sneaky uneasiness of it all comes from the way that the earlier Rogers-William relationship was built up and worked through with such goofy earnestness; the heart of the film was in that direction, and though some late gestures are made towards reinstating the Astor character, it all feels done in the service of something rote, and the aftertaste is bitter. Rogers was an innocent, met with a horrible fate and with tears in her eyes, yet the film tosses off her memory with a cruel casualness, subordinating its most seemingly sincere moments to affirming the queasy marriage of this not terribly likable couple who, frighteningly enough, seem all too sincere themselves. There's a lot of Chabrol and Varda here, and <i>Upperworld</i>'s spiritual cousins are as much <i>La femme infidele</i> and <i>Le bonheur </i>as anything else from the pre-code era.<br />
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William was of course one of the great screen scoundrels, but not talked about maybe quite as much is his striking nature as a physical presence. Many of his performances seem to emanate from a central bodily conception (a gravel-throated big man bark in <i>Employees' Entrance</i>; a boozy, swishy grifter slouch in <i>The Mind Reader</i>; a hands-to-the-hips wire stick posture here in <i>Upperworld</i>) and Roy Del Ruth in particular appeared to be sensitive to this in their collaborations together.<br />
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This, I think, is one place to look when discussing the more subtle yet still considerable talents of Del Ruth, one of those problematic auteur cases who had no obvious, definable style to his name - nobody watches A Roy Del Ruth Film - but yet whose very best work seems characterized by a remarkable lightness of touch and thoughtfulness in staging that seems to me to hover just above the notion of the "finely crafted workman studio picture." Add to the William examples above the graceful lilts of Cagney's smallest movements (<i>Taxi</i>, <i>Blonde</i> <i>Crazy</i>), Lee Tracy's walking incredulity (<i>Blessed Event</i>, probably my favorite) - none of it is lost on Del Ruth's watch, and indeed many times slices of the drama seem to be staged with preserving these qualities in all their degrees of oppositional expression and integrity in mind.<br />
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My thoughts are still rough, but if I had to point to one example that displays most what I value in Del Ruth's direction, it would be a great little sequence in the otherwise average <i>Bureau of Missing Persons </i>(1933), involving Glenda Farrell, Pat O'Brien, a diner, a steamboat horn, and a crash of condiments. All of the qualities are there: speed, distance, warmth, math, all in service of the careful construction of a modestly eloquent payoff.Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-17318858215134035372013-01-20T18:15:00.000-05:002014-03-12T19:39:07.665-04:00Westward the Women<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Time and again in <i>Westward the Women</i> we're reminded that for few directors does death visit as swiftly and brutally as it does in the films of William Wellman. (think: Maria Elena Marques in <i>Across the Wide Missouri</i>; Mitchum in <i>Track of the Cat</i>; multiple examples in <i>The Ox-Bow Incident</i>.) The open-ended hesitancy built into the title grows in significance with every corpse left on the trail - westward may be the movement but the destination for each is far from certain.<br />
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Wellman's severe approach to capturing a body giving up its ghost may be a hangover from the pre-code era where the conditions of production practically guaranteed that such fleet and fateful depictions reigned supreme, but the most devastating passage in <i>Westward</i> occurs in the aftermath of an offscreen Indian massacre and draws its force from something far more sombre, while looking forward, in miniature, to the work of Roberto Bolaño, specifically "The Part about the Crimes" from <i>2666</i>: "How many did we lose?" Robert Taylor's trail boss inquires as he surveys the carnage, and the sequence unfolds at some length as a rigorous account of each individual female casualty, a breathing woman beside the slain one chanting the dead's first and last name into the echoing desert air, the camera then shifting to a full visual of the victim, no unique details of her murder spared.<br />
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It's worth noting that despite the grim portrait I'm painting, <i>Westward the Women</i> is not only Wellman's finest western, but also one of his most purely humorous films - the bit with the "sting bat" is the hardest I've laughed at anything in some time (it's all about the silence), and the film's view of sexual attraction as something unaccountably idiosyncratic is a frequent source of amusement, such as the early scene where the women choose prospective husbands from photographs pinned to a board: "Face like a mackerel" mutters Hope Emerson's Patience to one photo with more than a hint of disdain, before claiming it for herself with a smirk.<br />
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<br />Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-63846953214140610072013-01-15T03:45:00.002-05:002013-01-15T03:49:00.585-05:00Images of the Day (1/15/13)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium;">A nos amours</i><span style="font-size: small;"> (Maurice Pialat, 1983)</span></td></tr>
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"Perhaps, Pialat suggests, that's what being human is - and hence the hovering sadness of all his films - a series of links, tentative communications, relationships, just waiting to be severed."<br />
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- Molly Haskell <a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/426-a-nos-amours-the-ties-that-wound" target="_blank">"The Ties That Wound"</a><br />
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5361087063517934891.post-67670580863389791682012-12-27T17:15:00.000-05:002012-12-28T13:34:50.431-05:00End of the Year / 20While thinking of possible approaches to take towards a year-end something-of-a-summary post for my 2012 film viewing, my mind kept returning to <a href="http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2012/05/personal-archiving.html#comments" target="_blank">this </a><a href="http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2012/05/personal-archiving.html#comments" target="_blank">post on Girish's blog</a> from May. Girish talks about his personal process for archiving film viewings/impressions, and then goes on to say: "I'm shocked by the discrepancy between how <i>forcefully</i> a film and its elements can sometimes register with me immediately after I've seen it, and how <i>quickly</i> these impressions (so vivid and strong the day of the viewing) can evaporate from memory.....I find this aspect of the film experience - a movement from strong registration and impact to fogginess and oblivion - to be positively frightening. I suppose that recording and archiving my immediate impressions is a small gesture against this terrifying ephemerality."<br />
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That post struck a very strong chord with me initially because it was the first time I had seen put into words a very troubling undercurrent experienced but never quite fully acknowledged in my own movie watching history, and its resonance only increased exponentially as I sat down to peruse my viewing logs from the past year and realized fully and bluntly and with much frustration that out of the 400+ first time viewings I had in 2012, in far more instances than not what I am left with today is merely an impression of an impression - that is, I can remember fairly quickly <i>whether</i> I liked or disliked a given film with far more clarity than I can <i>why</i> I liked or disliked a given film.<br />
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I am not good these days about taking notes and recording observations. Occasionally I will be struck by something in a certain way that leads to a post here on the blog; more often than not it doesn't work out that way. Last year I operated almost exclusively off of these faint memory impressions to divide my favorite discoveries of the year into <a href="http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-end-of-year-summary.html" target="_blank">a post made up of fairly arbitrary categories</a>. This year, rather than categories or equally arbitrary numerical ratings, I've decided to compose something intended as, in the words of Girish, "a small gesture against this terrifying ephemerality." I've chosen to highlight 20 moments (20 being the number I settled on for uninteresting/practical reasons) from older films that I watched for the first time in 2012 - moments that, for one reason or another, left an unusually strong impression on me and have remained in my brain as something of an intact shard amid what is in many cases an otherwise half-faded tangle. There was no rhyme or reason to the films and/or moments that were selected; it was simply whatever popped off the page and triggered something as I ran down the list of all that I'd watched. Hence, it was not even a necessity that I <i>like</i> every movie making an appearance below, though that did largely wind up being the case, coincidentally or (I suspect) not.<br />
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It's a method that can be limiting in some obvious ways. For one, it was almost inevitable that the chosen moments would invariably come from narrative-based cinema, which due to the relatively blocky tendencies of more conventional plots and forms tends to give itself over to the retroactive isolation and crystallization of individual scenes far easier than much experimental cinema, which I also spent a good deal of time with this year and which I tend often to experience as - and this is more than a bit reductive, but illustrates the point - either intensely visceral/sensorial total objects, or intellectually provocative thought experiments worked through in a manner by which the parts are inexorably linked to their sum.<br />
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Another problem with this approach is the matter of context. I've tried to summon it where I can, and in some cases I've gone back to review the specific scene as a refresher; some I didn't revisit at all. It can be tricky to situate a fragment meaningfully outside of its whole, and there's some vaguely inadequate feeling that comes along with attempts to do so. Nonetheless, even with these built-in flaws I feel like this exercise is ultimately more productive personally, and, for anyone who winds up reading this, a more honest representation of my relationship with movies in 2012. The list below is alphabetized by movie title.<br />
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<i>Note: For those wary of such things, the endings to some of these films are discussed.</i><br />
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<b><i>The Bridesmaid</i> (Claude Chabrol, 2004)</b><br />
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For those who take their Chabrol with two parts Lang and one part Hitchcock, as opposed to the other way around. (I'd put myself in the first category.) What I remember here are the narrow, twisted, empty spaces, thick with menace; the inanimate objects that are spoken to; the doors that open by themselves. The last detail specifically, which is returned to multiple times in various manners (the detached observation of a character's entrance in an icy, off-center static shot early on; a roving, subjective penetration by the camera itself a little later) seems to stand as a pure image of the film's overall sense of dread-as-a-pass, of crossing a threshold into a dark unknown. For me, the mysterious qualities of Chabrol's best work can feel as fertile and bottomless as anything created by any of his New Wave brethren. <i>The Bridesmaid</i> deserves to be talked about in the same breath as his greatest and most chilling films.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJxW44vanBMp74Ewoe557r4-V5pETSp1qpgFV0i5kyOgpURG6ITi1cpnU-Yu9-X5s4cnv0sB53ms-1MDwBwADttMzhCTkbQ0E2LFt_mFyU3EadS3PkkOi0-7ydSlSDUwAFCMuwETo8c48/s1600/hsoldiers.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJxW44vanBMp74Ewoe557r4-V5pETSp1qpgFV0i5kyOgpURG6ITi1cpnU-Yu9-X5s4cnv0sB53ms-1MDwBwADttMzhCTkbQ0E2LFt_mFyU3EadS3PkkOi0-7ydSlSDUwAFCMuwETo8c48/s1600/hsoldiers.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>The Horse Soldiers</i> (John Ford, 1959)</b></div>
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As mere character drama, Ford's <i>The Horse Soldiers </i>doesn't work out too well, and as a moralising war actioner it is only marginally more successful. As a visual monument to southern landscape and ambiance, however, it is maybe as perfect a film as I've ever come across. There is one particularly sublime scene about an hour in with the Wayne-led Union cavalry hiding in brush as a unit of Confederate soldiers trace a horizontal path on the far side of a near river. Obscured by trees and singing a war tune that sounds more like some kind of distant, echoed incantation, the Confederates here are pure memory-in-motion, and the depth of feeling and mastery of this scene comes from the manner in which Ford snips at this event from various similar angles, all of which distribute primacy evenly between his receding mythical lines, the portraitured suspense of the foregrounded soldiers in hiding, and the vast sensual and structural beauty of the steady nature which both separates and binds them.</div>
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<b><i>Japon </i>(Carlos Reygadas, 2002)</b></div>
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The jury is still out on Reygadas for me. That final apocalyptic tracking shot in <i>Japon</i>, however, is somethin' else.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoM6kP47yVuxwWI_1DwVOvsoJopAZK9X2RNqOAnGSy3zdT3ulKD6emM-y8IxqJWlcQ_Gsobz_DhrhpHLV6kK_r8kSx4tSKtb5W_MSzP1MSdRAtrxgqiRDC6VbM0RnTJomkqZ0xAUd0st8/s1600/loburl1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoM6kP47yVuxwWI_1DwVOvsoJopAZK9X2RNqOAnGSy3zdT3ulKD6emM-y8IxqJWlcQ_Gsobz_DhrhpHLV6kK_r8kSx4tSKtb5W_MSzP1MSdRAtrxgqiRDC6VbM0RnTJomkqZ0xAUd0st8/s1600/loburl1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Lady of Burlesque</i> (William A. Wellman, 1943)</b></div>
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Stanwyck delivers a smush-lipped zippy one-liner and a slapstick blow to her on-stage partner (Michael O'Shea) to the delight of the packed burlesque house crowd; the lights go out, the police raid the joint and all hell breaks loose.</div>
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I'm still not sure why I find this seemingly innocuous sequence from Wellman's post code pre-coder so interesting. I saw stronger Wellman pictures with Bigger Moments this year to be sure, but there's something incredibly impressive here in the way the frenzy is organized and graded from mass to personal chaos. The initial moments of the police raid are filmed in long shot, capturing a total picture of urgency as the spectators flee outwards and the performers rush backstage; Wellman frames the stricter physical confines of the backstage pandemonium in medium-longshots, then moves in for close-ups of eccentric precaution - a couple dressed in animal costumes hide in a car; a man closes himself off in a large bird cage and covers his eyes - before finally arriving at a backwards dolly of Stanwyck descending some stairs as a pre-giallo pair of hands plunge out of the darkness behind her in an attempted strangulation. The stark tonal shift of this sequence from ebullience to fear - and, with the Stanwyck character, the accompanying rapid emotional flux from power of the stage performer to a complete, dark vulnerability - feels fairly radical.</div>
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<b><i>The Late Show</i> (Robert Benton, 1977)</b></div>
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This one is a little bit of a cheat, in the sense that it's not highlighting a single moment, but rather an individual performance, probably my favorite from everything I watched this year: Art Carney's weary, sweaty private eye, guts eating him from the inside, gun and glass (of either booze or alka-seltzer) occupying one or both hands at any given time. It's equal parts <i>Ride the High Country</i> (genre elegy) and <i>El Dorado</i> (index of bodily maladies), and what I remember admiring most about the film is the way it lays out nearly its entire grid of characters early on, the narrative in turn functioning not so much as a working through of mystery plot convolutions, but as a constant refinement of the personalities on display.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPE64djUvF8pFvmD5TWaVD-ZeWidDCV5T3vDA42plMzw2yymRvDJYlpKLt9UKAkmChdOuT4KKRLvVZz_7LfMaY6jZfUuaD7eM7g4L_IwWDRYpFAOvS9_LqDOwwZp3TRQtpZfRF9A9DGio/s1600/leorme1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPE64djUvF8pFvmD5TWaVD-ZeWidDCV5T3vDA42plMzw2yymRvDJYlpKLt9UKAkmChdOuT4KKRLvVZz_7LfMaY6jZfUuaD7eM7g4L_IwWDRYpFAOvS9_LqDOwwZp3TRQtpZfRF9A9DGio/s1600/leorme1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Le Orme</i> (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975)</b></div>
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If the brilliant giallos of Luigi Bazzoni can be said to share something of a united thematic front, it would be an urge to paint clustered visions of personal worlds immediately guided by the dreams and visions of an unknowable, unshakable past. <i>Le Orme</i>, perhaps his most potent statement, takes as its clinging past faint memories of an obscure science-fiction film seen at a young age by its grown protagonist (Florinda Bolkan), a professional translator who begins experiencing unaccountable amnesia while images and dialogues from the mysterious movie - starring Klaus Kinski as an ostensibly sinister scientist conducting experiments on astronauts - continue to assert an increasingly corrosive presence in both her waking and dreaming lives. What ultimately makes <i>Le Orme</i> so intriguing isn't Bazzoni's unique method of bypassing genre tropes whilst remaining firmly rooted in what makes the genre tick on its deepest levels, nor the penchant for elegant explorations of architecture-as-mind-space, but rather it's the peculiar confessional quality conjured up by the deployment of these unsettling, half-remembered scraps of film-within-a-film: that of an artist haunted by the inability to either shake off entirely the ghosts of cinema or to situate them into any kind of logical system.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKoJv7dviTOhNfTWUwLsA3Yc1SZRwSVhHh5ZWOdO5ex4-OIPtv1diSACh3X9JgWDrewdhkAC7cf93DkiXtura4J1PSXTjRPD1g5wz6gNzQt9JMj5WGmw7ksMLibT_EBDqHShLK8MkwLk/s1600/lylahclare1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKoJv7dviTOhNfTWUwLsA3Yc1SZRwSVhHh5ZWOdO5ex4-OIPtv1diSACh3X9JgWDrewdhkAC7cf93DkiXtura4J1PSXTjRPD1g5wz6gNzQt9JMj5WGmw7ksMLibT_EBDqHShLK8MkwLk/s1600/lylahclare1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>The Legend of Lylah Clare</i> (Robert Aldrich, 1968)</b></div>
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Within their shared gothic attitude towards the Dream Factory as a destructive and possessive mechanism, the most direct line between Robert Aldrich's <i>What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?</i> and the <i>Legend of Lylah Clare</i>? Dog food commercials. In the former film, the televised advertisement (brand: Iliad) is spoken by an on-air personality and presents itself as a normatively annoying interruption of a broadcasted remnant from Blanch Hudson's long faded acting career. In the latter picture - a vast critical and financial failure - the commercial (brand: Barkwell's) is revealed through two layers of invasion: firstly by disrupting a televised awards ceremony where the <i>film maudit</i> that's been at the center of the plot is being celebrated, and secondly by rupturing the very film the viewer is watching. The sanitized televisual images of an aesthetic home owner lovingly feeding her pet take over the diegesis entirely as the scenario quickly descends into madness with a ceaseless stream of savage canines crashing the party and bringing forth some kind of cannibalistic apocalypse. Aldrich's Hollywood devours itself from the inside out in this brutally distilled ending, which could be argued for as the piece de resistance of the great director's career.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZ2zkGTAcwoNQNgu6XVT9TUe7zeVf6Ss8RsynfZvBwSU5M6IVZUjxV1UR58BJzNfpIIlrf_ar18RAnXX4fJlYc_L78NBUTCEnKRAIBuElsoMbQbQdowA1lF-bJoxw9ydnDYtH7xdtBnI/s1600/lovers.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZ2zkGTAcwoNQNgu6XVT9TUe7zeVf6Ss8RsynfZvBwSU5M6IVZUjxV1UR58BJzNfpIIlrf_ar18RAnXX4fJlYc_L78NBUTCEnKRAIBuElsoMbQbQdowA1lF-bJoxw9ydnDYtH7xdtBnI/s1600/lovers.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Les Amants de Pont-Neuf</i> (Leos Carax, 1991)</b></div>
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Fireworks. 'Nuff said.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg734jOG_FYwsVr0AGCTrvmLa0kx02jvZuS4CWEZo0R_Qc7WB4EmpuAzJ9AbUQmz4BqCFLz9EnFIGI47OuHHmD_k7_Iz69aLL5JvCNF8wsZ7EdZKAr1bebcosygohWumHQBCrzZWjAFNIw/s1600/lightning1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg734jOG_FYwsVr0AGCTrvmLa0kx02jvZuS4CWEZo0R_Qc7WB4EmpuAzJ9AbUQmz4BqCFLz9EnFIGI47OuHHmD_k7_Iz69aLL5JvCNF8wsZ7EdZKAr1bebcosygohWumHQBCrzZWjAFNIw/s1600/lightning1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Lightning</i> (Mikio Naruse, 1952)</b></div>
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One of my viewing highlights of the year was a couple of weeks spent with the haunting, understated films of Mikio Naruse. Though I have plenty left to delve into and reappraise, my favorites coming out of this were <i>Late Chrysanthemums</i> and <i>Lightning</i>, the ending of the latter film sticking with me in particular as one of the most movingly lucid and economically rendered of cinematic epiphanies. The sounds - distant piano music, pained pleading and sobbing; the images - two figures, close in proximity within Naruse's slightly skewed geometric compositions but distant in every other way, a despondent gaze into a stormy sky, a bolt of lightning that releases the tension through a granting of clarity and emotional order.</div>
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<b><i>Living on Velvet</i> (Frank Borzage, 1935)</b></div>
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<i>Living on Velvet</i> wasn't my favorite Borzage discovery in 2012 (that would be the remarkable <i>Little Man, What Now?</i>), but it did contain at least two beautiful and quintessentially Borzagian moments that stand firm in the memory: the first meeting, at a stuffy social gathering, between free spirits Kay Francis and George Brent, their fixed, mutual gaze linked through a series of rhyming crosscuts and elegant pans, and then the final, ascenting backwards crane shot - pictured above - which utilizes snow and figural placement to give the impression of the couple as unified centerpiece within a private snowglobe.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjXw8GyqAN_MAMO5BkGJl6Mqe-YSFX2LlZPVVMuP7rc2mLTsDQ7ZPeO-Z3Pj8-qM1jEU9kdlhZYornUVleThUdZ4OVmnq6Fyh9pQptTZNn-ouhtK-Cl8ha3_W1asYqyJ7MuuwJQMNXBuQ/s1600/possessed1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjXw8GyqAN_MAMO5BkGJl6Mqe-YSFX2LlZPVVMuP7rc2mLTsDQ7ZPeO-Z3Pj8-qM1jEU9kdlhZYornUVleThUdZ4OVmnq6Fyh9pQptTZNn-ouhtK-Cl8ha3_W1asYqyJ7MuuwJQMNXBuQ/s1600/possessed1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Possessed</i> (Clarence Brown, 1931)</b></div>
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The only Clarence Brown films I'd seen before were a couple of Garbo vehicles that didn't do a whole lot for me. I watched <i>Possessed</i> because of this really awesome scene from it that Zizek analyzes towards the beginning of <i>The Pervert's Guide to Cinema</i>, with Joan Crawford watching a train slowly pass right in front of her, each cart giving a glimpse of the individual mini-worlds contained within. The train scene was of course awesome (very, very much so), but, surprisingly, so was the movie. The emotional content is fairly sophisticated for its day, and visually I remember Brown doing some nifty things with deep focus towards the beginning and, in the political rally at the film's finale, pulling off a couple of tricks that seem to anticipate, of all things, key moments from Clouzot's <i>Le Corbeau</i>. Anyway, Warner Archive has put this out on disc; the train scene alone is worth the purchase price.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrt0Lwcca2OkJmt2CqWC-aLGQZOXJYTd3_X-v8sv7eXNSgZnXhuDaJ1AwZrdZDm6DVqizVWs8UQxSWm9ymlg2wVNyLNiWpW8mANENHafqlwVCUgTTJ000k0QVIsRdScp8ZZTs-f8WDSLg/s1600/princeod1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrt0Lwcca2OkJmt2CqWC-aLGQZOXJYTd3_X-v8sv7eXNSgZnXhuDaJ1AwZrdZDm6DVqizVWs8UQxSWm9ymlg2wVNyLNiWpW8mANENHafqlwVCUgTTJ000k0QVIsRdScp8ZZTs-f8WDSLg/s1600/princeod1.png" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Prince of Darkness</i> (John Carpenter, 1987)</b></div>
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<i>"This is not a dream..."</i></div>
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Co-owner of the Haunting Ending (Horror) crown (along with Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Carpenter almost always sees fit to send things out on a black, hanging note. It's arguable that an apotheosis is found in <i>PoD</i>'s penultimate scene, where a collective nightmare is revealed to be a posited offscreen future, one desperately and (it's suggested) futilely attempting to correct its past (the film's present). Thus, <i>PoD</i> reveals itself as a doomed object viewed through a looking glass - a narrative equivalent to Carpenter's throbbing, dreadful score.</div>
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<b><i>Regular Lovers </i>(Philippe Garrel, 2005)</b></div>
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/<i>A comet streaks by with all its speed!</i>/</div>
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Death of a dream gives way to death in a dream.</div>
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<b><i>Rich and Strange</i> (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)</b></div>
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I enjoyed reading <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/the-criticwire-survey-underrated-hitchcock" target="_blank">this Criticwire survey</a> on underrated Hitchcock films. Hitch's oeuvre is, like that of a Ford or a Mizoguchi, of such volume and depth and consistency in quality that "underrated" as an entry point into discourse seems to take on less a fanciful function and more a utilitarian one. I'd have to think long and hard about my choice (on most days I might lean with Jake Cole and Glenn Kenny towards <i>Under Capricorn</i>), but this tough-to-pin-down entry from his British period - morality tale on the top layer, something seething and unknowable on the bottom - had a peculiar lasting power with me after first viewing it earlier this year, and I'm sure some kind of (strong) case could be made for it.</div>
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A climactic moment with the central married pair (Joan Barry, Harry Kendall) trapped in a sinking ship plays as an eerie negative image to a similar scene from Borzage's <i>History is Made at Night</i>, to come six years later: the Borzage couple, above water on a deck next to an abstract iceberg, huddle in ethereal fog and the director's typically intense framing and thwart their doom with the quick accumulation of shared intimate details; Hitch's couple is resigned, underlit and underwater in a cabin, panting as much as speaking, the last image they see before slipping into what should be their last sleep being ocean water sloshing intrusively in through the bottom of the door.</div>
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<b><i>Ruby Gentry</i> (King Vidor, 1952)</b></div>
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<a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/42/vidor-hawks-ford/" target="_blank">Tag Gallagher</a><a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/42/vidor-hawks-ford/" target="_blank"> on Vidor</a>: "In no other filmmaker (not even in Alexandr Dovzhenko) is there such an emphasis on the land - on spiritual truth as inherent in nature."</div>
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In addition to the examples provided by Gallagher in his phenomenal piece, many would point (rightfully so) to the rapturous irrigation climax of <i>Our Daily Bread</i>; I would submit the beautifully poetic moment from the very lovely <i>Ruby Gentry </i>in which Ruby (Jennifer Jones) and Boake (Charlton Heston) sit in a car parked outside of Boake's home, looking out over his acres of salt marsh while a brand new nitrate pump intended to make the land financially viable rhythmically throbs over the soundtrack. "Sounds like a big heart beatin'" says Ruby, locked in embrace. "It is. It's my heart." replies Boake. The sensuality of nature and of physical passion commune in an instant - earth commanding flesh and blood and desire, and vice versa.</div>
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<b><i>Slattery's Hurricane</i> (Andre de Toth, 1949)</b></div>
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Fred Camper highlights in his <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/slatterys-hurricane/Film?oid=1072184" target="_blank">typically superb Chicago Reader capsule</a> the single moment here that hit me the hardest, and he describes its emotional heft via formal function better than I could. So read that, and then read more of Camper's writing while your at it.</div>
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On the film as a whole, I will say this: it's probably my favorite of the de Toth's that I've seen to date (all of which I've at least really liked), and may even be some kind of masterpiece. It's also one of those odd cases where the limits and subtleties imposed by the Production Code actually work towards a richer mode of expression. In large part a tale of heroin addiction (this coupled with its aviation milieu would make <i>Hurricane</i> an interesting double bill alongside this year's <i>Flight</i>), de Toth was denied access to pretty much all of the obvious and possibly sensationalist manifestations of the condition as present in Herman Wouk's original story. The result is a depiction reliant on slippery and muted signifiers, on vacant and erratic behaviors and expressions; in other words, a particularly truthful (if unintentional) representation of the slyly insidious manner in which addiction may evince itself in the presence of disengaged company. All the while the eponymous tumult accumulates force in the air of de Toth's modestly studious compositions, and the entire work seems to tremble with a barely suppressed pain.</div>
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<b><i>The Thin Man </i>(W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)</b></div>
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That face Myrna Loy makes.</div>
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<b><i>Tiger Shark</i> (Howard Hawks, 1932)</b></div>
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This year I caught up with a good bit of what today might be considered some of Howard Hawks' more fringe work. He's a favorite of mine, so it feels a little strange to choose for this list something from the film that was probably my least favorite of all these first time Hawks viewings, and it feels particularly perverse from an auteurist standpoint to highlight a scene that the director reportedly didn't even direct. Nonetheless, the 6+ minute documentary detour into the daily grind of sea fishermen that halts the late game narrative vapors of <i>Tiger Shark</i> is more than worthy of being singled out for praise, and is easily one of the most thrilling pieces of filmmaking I encountered in 2012.</div>
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Beautifully composed pictorially yet shocking in its raw physicality: a half dozen men stand bracingly with rods and reels against the ocean (horizon at head level) on a narrow, flimsily railed boat edge, swinging in with their tools a seemingly endless supply of giant, twitching tunas and sharks, bodies of all sorts lurching and rising and dipping while the splash/crash music of the waves cuts no one an easy break. Other than the fascinations of viewing a tough job carried out with equal parts proficiency and temerity, what's most striking here is the real sense of danger that it feels like the actors are in -- at one point someone actually does fall over the railing and into the ocean, and it's perfectly unclear whether it's a staged incident or captured accident.</div>
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The idea of authorship at play here gives me an excuse to post a quote that I like a whole bunch from Jonathan Rosenbaum, taken from his Criterion essay on <i>Germany Year Zero</i>: "But selection clearly plays as important a role in defining an auteur as any sort of pure "creation", especially when some form of documentary truth is what's ultimately at stake."</div>
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<b><i>The Uncertainty Principle</i> (Manoel de Oliveira, 2002)</b></div>
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I don't want to say too much about the scene I've chosen here - pictured in the screencap above - as part of the great pleasure offered from de Oliveira's Bessa-Luis adaptation is in 1) the way the titular scientific rule is dramatically teased out through the story's circuit of fluid character relations, and 2) observing the unique way the director's theatrical aesthetic navigates such an uncharacteristic milieu: the modern club scene. The more de Oliveira you've seen, the more this moment will shock you with its directness and aggressiveness.</div>
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<b><i>Vagabond</i> (Agnes Varda, 1985)</b></div>
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The most purely joyful movie moment I experienced all year: Sandrine Bonnaire's young drifter sharing spirits and laughs with the elderly Aunt Lydia (Marthe Jarnias, whose history with Varda as a bit player in an early short is recounted in a slim but compelling extra on Criterion's <i>Vagabond</i> disc.)</div>
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As far as the new films that I saw in 2012.........</div>
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<b>I liked very much</b> <b>(with some reservations)</b> the following: <i>Haywire</i> (Steven Soderbergh), <i>Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance</i> (Neveldine/Taylor), <i>The Day He Arrives</i> (Hong Sang-soo), <i>The Turin Horse</i> (Bela Tarr), <i>The Cabin in the Woods</i> (Drew Goddard), <i>Looper</i> (Rian Johnson), <i>Killer Joe</i> (William Friedkin), <i>Alps</i> (Giorgos Lanthimos), <i>The Comedy</i> (Rock Alverson), <i>The Color Wheel</i> (Alex Ross Perry), <i>Flight</i> (Robert Zemeckis) ; <b>I loved</b> the following: <i>Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie</i> (Heidecker, Wareheim),<i> 4:44 Last Day on Earth</i> (Abel Ferrara), <i>This Is Not a Film</i> (Panahi, Mirtahasebi), <i>Cosmopolis</i> (David Cronenberg), <i>Holy Motors</i> (Leos Carax). And <b>my</b> <b>favorite movie of the year</b> is Andrew Dominik's <i>Killing Them Softly</i>.</div>
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Drew McIntoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07054307044280470117noreply@blogger.com8