Five From A Favorite - Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, 2007)

Ford & Faces

Lately I've been working on filling in some holes in my John Ford viewing, which there are sadly way too many of, and one of my most pleasant discoveries yet is his 1933 film Pilgrimage, starring Henrietta Crosman as a crotchety and bitter small town Gold Star mother who makes the titular trek to France to visit the grave of her son who died during combat. It's quite a nifty and frequently enthralling piece of filmmaking, switching modes often and at the drop of a hat, morphing from domestic chamber drama to tragic love story to an overseas comedy of manners to finally becoming a redemption piece, Ford's deft touch and Crosman's endlessly witty performance giving the whole thing a remarkably cogent feel. Aside from the motley narrative, there are plenty of interesting things going on visually in the movie, and in particular I found the opening 15 or so minutes, taking place on Crosman and her son Jim's (Norman Foster) Arkansas farm home, to be the most arresting. Aside from the evident riffs on Murnau that take place, there is an incredibly odd, almost insular bubble-type quality to the way Ford shoots the pair and their neighbors working on the land, as if they are the only humans left on the planet or something.

Anyway, my favorite moment in the film, the one that struck me the most and the one that the three shots above are from, takes place about 20 or so minutes in. Jim, after having already been shipped to war, gets a quick visit with his girlfriend Mary (Marian Nixon) during a brief stop at a train station. Mary reveals that she's pregnant, and Jim pleads with his superiors to give him additional time to go and quickly get married, which he is denied before promptly being wrestled back onto the train. And here the camera cuts to Mary's face as she stands alone on the platform, anxiously watching her lover board the train. He screams out that he's sorry, she screams back not to worry and to write when he can. Neither of them know it will be their last time seeing the other. The camera continues to stay on Mary's face as the commotion reaches a pinnacle, and the train begins to chug. The chugging accelerates, and we can hear the train moving along now, but the camera stays on Mary. She clutches her face and seems overcome with grief - maybe she does know it's the last time they'll see each other. We now hear the train moving along even faster, horn blowing as it shoves off further out from the station, and a weird tension quickly develops because it really feels like the editing should cut to a shot of the train departing, but Ford is relentless, and the camera stays on Mary. Tears have welled up heavily by this point, and just as it reaches an almost unbearable level, the train - way off in the distance by now - toots its horn one more time, as if to give a final goodbye, before Ford finally relieves the suffering with a fade to a war bunker.

Ford's impulse to fix the camera on Mary's face for the entire duration (nearly a whole minute) is brilliant and heartbreaking, elevating into the realm of aching poetry a moment that in the hands of most would serve as mere melodrama. What a scene, what a movie. What a director.

Five From A Favorite - I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

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As essential a horror film as there could ever be, I Walked with a Zombie is the finest achievement from both legendary producer Val Lewton - whose crop of creepy, atmospheric horror movies produced for RKO Pictures in the 40's have made him an unlikely but enduring icon of the genre - and the great maverick director Jacques Tourneur, whose multi-genre flexibility and impeccable sense of style left behind one of the most overlooked and important bodies of work to come out of the studio system.

Zombie is a rousing triumph in many ways, but perhaps what amazes me most about it is how the elusive nature of the story - which picks up after the most pivotal events have already occurred - is so perfectly mirrored by its pervading atmosphere of heavy gusts and gloomy dimness, remote drums and skies that crackle with that special electricity of a calm before the storm. Narrative and ambience coalesce in a rare way, both elements keeping the viewer at bay from the main event, providing not much more than whipping winds and wisps of suggestion while Tourneur's sublime shadow language and mastery of mood and detail fill in the blanks with pure, poetic dread.

In the Shadows

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Fuller loved his shadows. Here are two men from two masterpieces - Richard Kiley as the scheming communist boyfriend Joey in Pickup on South Street (1953) and Paul Winfield as the dog trainer Keys in White Dog (1982) - sitting in silence, faces half obscured, riding out the calm before their respective storms.

Five From A Favorite - Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)