Criterion Sunday 600: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama stands up even today as a pretty intense piece of work, not least because it was breaking several taboos for its time — in detailing a fairly horrific crime in scientific detail, they were making a film that wasn’t for all ages, and indeed there’s plenty of incidental details to suggest a rather troubling existence. It’s Lt Fred Manion (Ben Gazzara) who’s on trial, for the murder of his wife’s rapist, but it might as well also be Laura Manion (Lee Remick) who is too, given the extent to which she is subjected to scrutiny also (I can’t think of any movie, old or new, which has so relished repeating the word “panties” quite so many times). Of course, the focus is on James Stewart’s defence counsel, who is seen putting on a performance to try and get his client off the charge, and when put together with the rather dubious nature of the reality being deconstructed in this small Michigan courtroom (and this is one of the few films I’ve seen set on the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of that state), it’s a compelling black-and-white drama that leaves us with no clear conclusions about who’s in the right and who is in the wrong, but it’s an essential film for fans of the courtroom drama.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Otto Preminger; Writer Wendell Mayes (based on the novel by Robert Traver); Cinematographer Sam Leavitt; Starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott, Arthur O’Connell; Length 161 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 24 December 2022 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, April 2000).

Criterion Sunday 591: 12 Angry Men (1957)

This is one of those perennial classic films that always shows up on lists that I’ve contrived never to have seen until now, but I have to say it certainly does hold up — albeit perhaps not legally. However, I do love a chamber drama, and this one, as the title suggests, features twelve men, fairly indistinguishable on the surface though as the film goes on we get to know each one for obviously — this is a basic screenwriting requirements, one imagines — they have quite different personalities. This could be just a writer’s exercise, but it comes alive in the telling thanks to the taut dialogue, the fine, expressive acting (far more the latter for Lee J. Cobb), and sinuous long take camera movements that really serve to open up this claustrophobic and (both literally and figuratively) overheated space. There’s not much reason this should work, but it does so and with excellent economy.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Sidney Lumet; Writer Reginald Rose (based on his play Twelve Angry Men); Cinematographer Boris Kaufman Бори́с Ка́уфман; Starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 19 November 2022.

Criterion Sunday 538: Paths of Glory (1957)

I think by the time Stanley Kubrick made this film he was really hitting his imperial phase, when every element of his craft was honed towards some form of perfection. I used to find that thrilling, but it has less effect on me now, though I’d certainly not quibble with anyone proclaiming this a masterpiece. It is a perfectly tooled piece of filmmaking after all, the many elegant dolly shots back and forth intensify the restless energy of Lt Dax, Kirk Douglas’s central character, as he struggles against the implacable will not of an unseen enemy but of his own military bosses, who show such contempt for human life that they are blithely willing to kill their own troops. You can well see why it was banned in France for so long, because there’s a genuine clear anger that is fully and almost bluntly directed in the courtroom scenes and the meticulous preparations for yet another senseless (if judicial) murder. It’s all beautifully shot and harrowing in some ways, almost as precision tooled as the military weapons it depicts.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Stanley Kubrick; Writers Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson (based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb); Cinematographer Georg Krause; Starring Kirk Douglas, George Macready, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Meeker, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel; Length 88 minutes.

Seen at Paramount, Wellington, Sunday 31 March 2002 (as well as earlier on VHS in the university library, Wellington, September 1998, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Monday 6 June 2022).

Global Cinema 30: Cameroon – Sisters in Law (2005)

It’s a fair while since I last did a ‘Global Cinema’ feature. For some reason I got a bit stuck on Cameroon and have ended up recycling an older review that I think I put up at some point, but not as its own post. Anyway, it’s a worthwhile film (like anything by Kim Longinotto) and while an indigenous production may have been more interesting, it’s not exactly a country with a widely distributed cinematic output.

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Republic of Cameroon (aka République du Cameroun)
population 26,546,000 | capital Yaoundé (1.8m) | largest cities Douala (1.9m), Yaoundé, Bafoussam (800k), Bamenda (270k), Garoua (236k) | area 475,442 km² | religion Christianity (71%), Islam (24%) | official language English, French (français) | major ethnicity Cameroon Highlanders (31%), Equatorial Bantu (19%), Kirdi (11%), Fulani (10%) | currency Central African CFA franc (FCFA) [XAF] | internet .cm

A West-Central African country, bordered by Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic (inland) and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic on the Congo, it opens onto the Gulf of Guinea at the Bight of Biafra (or Bonny), though most of the country sits inland. The area was first settled in the Neolithic era and its longest continuous inhabitants are the Baka (pygmies). Indigenous inhabitants of the Lake Chad region founded the Sao culture around 500 CE, leading to the Kanem then Bornu Empire. The earliest Europeans to arrive were the Portuguese in 1472, who noticed shrimps in the Wouri River and called it Rio dos Camarões, leading to the English name Cameroon. The Germans were the earliest to stake a claim in 1884, but after World War I, it was taken over by the League of Nations and split between French and much smaller British territories (the latter administered from Nigeria). France outlawed the independence party UPC in 1955, leading to a guerrilla war that eventuated in independence under Ahmadou Ahidjo in 1960, while the Southern Cameroons (under British rule) also voted for independence and joined with the formerly French state on 1 October 1961. Ahidjo stepped down in 1982 and passed power to Paul Biya who remains President (the longest-ruling non-royal world leader). A territorial dispute with Nigeria over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula was resolved in Cameroon’s favour in 2006. Separatists in the formerly British territories continue to agitate for independence as Ambazonia.

There is both French and English-language filmmaking in the country (the latter sometimes referred to as Collywood, apparently). Filmmaking didn’t really begin until independence, largely French-taught with filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa (who directed Muna Moto in 1975) and a handful of others throughout the 70s and 80s. A few cinemas were even sustained for a time, but now much exhibition tends to happen at mobile cinemas. A film festival began in 2016, though there’s still not a huge international recognition of Cameroon’s filmmaking, hence the film I’ve focused on is a collaboration with a UK documentarian.

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Sisters in Law (2005)

Kim Longinotto tells another fascinating story of women in marginalised spaces fighting for rights, this time in Cameroon. There’s clearly a wider picture of a society based on ‘traditional’ values trying to change, or rather being pushed to do so by the strong women of this story (whether those bringing charges of assault, rape and the like, or those defending them or judging their cases). However the film really focuses in on these key four stories and follows them through, and it is in its way, after all the detailed accounts of abuses heard earlier, a heartening one.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto; Cinematographer Longinotto; Length 104 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Wednesday 18 May 2016.

Two 2018 Films by Sergei Loznitsa: Victory Day and The Trial

For my history themed week, I’m focusing on a couple more films which are somewhat tangential to history, both made by a Ukrainian filmmaker. The Trial takes footage from the 1930s and uses it to make a point about the way that events are manipulated by the (state-controlled) media, whereas Victory Day is about the way that history informs the present, specifically World War II, taking a celebration of Soviet victory over Germany, but as it unfolds at a monument in Berlin itself. These are slow, self-effacing documentaries that nonetheless reveal something fairly interesting about the ways we relate to history, and the way it can be used.

Criterion Sunday 320: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Perhaps this just plays much more strongly to American audiences, but the swelling orchestral music that comes in at key moments makes it pretty clear what a fundamentally honourable man this simple Abraham Lincoln was, even when he was a young man just starting out in the law. This would be nothing more than hagiography (or perhaps a superhero origin story) were it not for Henry Fonda’s performance and John Ford’s guiding hand that somehow keeps it from turning too mawkish, focusing instead on the justice he wrings from a case of two young lads getting into a dust-up with a local ruffian (and Deputy Sheriff). Still, simple values isn’t the same as simplistic, and for all its overwrought melodrama, this is a canny film about a national hero made at a time of global crisis.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director John Ford; Writer Lamar Trotti; Cinematographers Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller; Starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver, Ward Bond; Length 100 minutes.

Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Tuesday 26 May 2020.

Four Underappreciated Films by Hirokazu Koreeda: Distance (2001), Hana (2006), Air Doll (2009) and The Third Murder (2017)

The filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda has been turning out warmly-received films since his fiction feature debut Maborosi in 1995. Many of them — certainly, it seems, all of the most acclaimed — are warm-hearted family dramas, whether dealing with children directly as in I Wish (2011), with parents of kids in Like Father, Like Son (2013) or with young people in Our Little Sister (2015). However in many ways that’s only half his output, as he’s also made plenty of films that don’t fit quite so neatly into this framework. I was planning on writing a post about maybe one of these, but then I realised I had a vast cache of reviews of films that really aren’t very well known by this famous director, and I wonder how many great directors could have made great films if they’d been given as many chances. For one example not even covered here, there’s his latest English/French-language The Truth (to be reviewed here later this week), but there are also these four films reviewed below: a film about terrorists; a period drama; a sex drama; and a legal thriller.

None Shall Escape (1944)

Looking back at war films I’ve seen in the last few years (a genre I’m not a huge acolyte of), I find most of the ones I’ve seen cover World War II, during which conflict cinema became a powerful propaganda tool (perhaps not for the first time, but certainly more widely than ever before). This 1944 film takes the war film genre and spins it as a speculative fiction, addressing in real time the war crimes of the Nazis and how they will come to pay for them (as, indeed, they did).

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A rather extraordinary speculative fiction, made in 1943 (or at least that’s the production date on the film; it was released the following year) but set in a future where the allies have won the war and put Nazi war criminals on trial. It focuses on one character, Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), and charts his descent from schoolteacher in Poland to, well, Nazi war criminal. The trial is the framing device introducing figures from his life like the priest who tells of how in 1919 he was going to marry Marja (Marsha Hunt), a Polish woman who taught alongside him, except that World War I had changed him, and now he felt as if the Germans could yet conquer the world. Then his brother Karl takes the stand and narrates how Wilhelm returned to stay with him in Munich in 1923, but was attracted by the rising star of one A. Hitler, whose ideology continued to warp his mind in successive flashbacks to 1929 and 1933, at which point Wilhelm has his brother sent to a concentration camp (which he has somehow survived to be giving testimony), at which point we move to some pretty full-on wartime scenes of Nazi atrocities (not least the burning of books, the murder of all the Jews along with the town’s rabbi, who recites the kaddish as he dies, and then the forced prostitution of the women). The final speech of the judge is directly into camera and explicitly addressed to the UN, so this is essentially a propaganda film, but it’s one that’s fairly prescient about the way that things would be for a long time to come — and which sadly makes it still fairly contemporary now. Nazis are bad.

CREDITS
Director Andre DeToth; Writers Lester Cole, Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than; Cinematographer Lee Garmes; Starring Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, Henry Travers; Length 85 minutes.
Seen at Cinema Lumière (Sala Scorsese), Bologna, Wednesday 27 June 2018.

Lasting Marks (2018)

I don’t usually devote reviews to short films, but I really liked this short documentary subject and it was particularly good to see it with a panel discussion afterwards (with the filmmaker present) to talk out the issues it raised about sex, consent and the legal frameworks of justice. It can be watched on YouTube.

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While the screening I saw this film at was in a partly academic setting, that’s not to say the film is only of academic interest, though the rather unusual A4 aspect ratio makes it feel tailored to that kind of audience — in formal respects, it is perhaps the most literal interpretation of “documentary”, in visually presenting only document-based evidence (reports, newspaper clippings). However, the images are accompanied by vocal testimony from someone involved in the case being covered (one from the early-1990s involving sado-masochistic sex acts amongst a group of consenting men), which in some senses has come to define the boundaries of p0rnography and the “acceptable” limits of sexuality in the UK, and still has troubling implications for consensuality quite aside from what it says about our toxic media and political debates. This voice we hear speaking is one of the men who participated in what we see in the documents described as a loathsome, morally depraved sex crime, but he is by some measure the voice of reason and stability against which the pictured voices of authority (of the police and the media and its commentators parroting the police’s official line) lose their power. The film, in its quiet way, effectively confronts and destabilises the accumulated power of the “official” accounts, suggesting the limitations not just of what we think to be true from what we read, but also the way that such assumptions are embedded into our very legal system, and the systems of control that are exercised over our (consensual) bodies and behaviours.

CREDITS
Director Charlie Lyne; Length 14 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Goldsmiths, London, Thursday 21 November 2019 (and before that on YouTube streaming at home, London, Saturday 13 April 2019).

Two 2018 Biopics Directed by Women: On the Basis of Sex and Mary Queen of Scots

I don’t like to feature films I find a little disappointing, but both of these biopics failed to live up to the expectations created by the respective subjects and the many fine actors involved. Still, it’s worth shining some light on them as both are directed by women (albeit both written by men), and perhaps others will enjoy them more than I did. Both have a lot to commend them, after all, despite my tepid reviews.