Criterion Sunday 649: Ministry of Fear (1944)

A commentator on this release calls this a minor Lang film, and maybe it is, but it’s made with a taut understanding of the tension required in a wartime spy thriller. Ray Milland feels well-cast as a sort of bland everyman who falls into a mysterious Nazi spy ring plot — not unlike, say, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much; indeed, the ordinary person happens upon bad goings on is a pretty common trope to cinema of this period, it feels like, perhaps because it was rooted in an everyday reality. Lang keeps the tension high — even during a village fête cake raffle, rather remarkably — and everyone, whether Nazis, suspected Nazis or British police detectives, is filmed as though a looming and dangerous presence, because in a sense they all are for a hero who has just been released from an asylum, in a rather wonderful opening sequence that is heavily freighted with symbolism around time running down and things coming full circle.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a 15-minute interview with scholar Joe McElhaney, who draws out many of the themes and symbols deployed by Lang in this film and others of his wartime period, quite an interesting piece, and one which deepens my feeling toward the film, which is what you want in any discussion.
• The only other extra is the trailer, which feels very of its time, with a breathless narrator telling us the excitement we should expect from the film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Fritz Lang; Writer Seton I. Miller (based on the novel The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene); Cinematographer Henry Sharp; Starring Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond; Length 87 minutes.

Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Wednesday 17 June 1998 (and more recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Sunday 4 June 2023).

Criterion Sunday 648: Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)

It’s weird the way that films from the 1960s, and particularly the French New Wave, feel so much more contemporary than films from even a decade before, partly I suppose because a lot of the techniques which that movement made commonplace are ones that are still heavily used today, and the ideas they created inform so much of contemporary media culture and modernity itself. Look, I’m not a philosopher or a sociologist, so I can’t really speak to this in depth, but suffice to say that when watching this film from a mere 62 years ago (further ago than the turn of 19th century was to the film), it’s difficult to take in what a break it represented, as the film which begat the term cinéma vérité, extending New Wave ideas of location shooting on the streets of Paris to the documentary form (though Rouch had done plenty of documentaries before this which use some of the same techniques, so it wasn’t exactly the first). However, as the first film to claim this description, it’s also more nuanced and more self-aware than we might expect: the directors are frequently referenced, and the film ends with a sequence wherein the participants are shown the film and asked to comment on themselves and how they are represented.

All that aside, it’s of more than just film historical interest. The filmmakers begin with some simple vox pops asking people if they’re happy, but quickly spin off into more in-depth discussions. Most notably, they have Marceline Loridan (who would go on to work with and marry documentarian Joris Ivens, being integrally involved in some of his grandest works, like How Yukong Moved the Mountains). A young woman in 1960, she speaks of her childhood spent in a concentration camp, in a moving sequence that spins off from discussion of the tattoo on her arm, though it’s employed in the context of racism against African students she’s speaking to, so it all becomes quite complicated to parse.

Certainly there’s a constant dialogue in the film between its supposed veracity and how much of this is constructed or performed, further brought out in the final sequence of its interlocutors speaking to their own appearance on film. My point, garbled as it is, may merely be that there’s a lot here to unpack, and I think it demands active engagement, but it’s quite an achievement as both a film and an advance in documentary practice.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin; Cinematographers Michel Brault, Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillière and Jean-Jacques Tarbès; Length 90 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 28 May 2023.

Criterion Sunday 647: On the Waterfront (1954)

Undoubtedly a classic film, one that had a lasting impact on the film industry and on screen acting. That of course may be its greatest legacy, but it’s a film suffused with the craft of generations of American filmmakers, feeling of a piece in its carefully-toned monochrome with the films noirs of the decade before, and has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama, bolstered by a fine line-up of character actors all doing some of their best work. It’s a pity then that it feels like an attack on the idea of unions — which is a problematic message to take from Elia Kazan — as these dockworkers are shown in impotent thrall to the power plays of the criminal gangs who could have been union-busting thugs but instead feel like the unions themselves. In a sense I suppose the physical world of work on the docks is just a backdrop to an internal struggle, but it boils down to: whether to go to the cops when you’ve witnessed a crime; whether thereby to save your eternal soul (a rather heavy-handed part nevertheless laid down with conviction by Karl Malden). Still, it has some classic speeches, some great scenes and some arresting cinematography.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Elia Kazan; Writers Budd Schulberg; Cinematographer Boris Kaufman Бори́с Ка́уфман; Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint; Length 108 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 22 May 2023 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).

Criterion Sunday 643: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

I’ve not seen either of Hitchcock’s films of this title, though the 1956 one with Doris Day and James Stewart is much the more famous. However, this British film from his mid-1930s period is still pretty tight — it has a 75 minute running time! — and has a lot going for it. The central couple (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) have that familiar chipper upper-middle-class moneyed English way about them that a lot of pre-war heroes seemed to have in British cinema, as Brits abroad, holidaying in Switzerland. They’re sorta nobodies, but they have their particular skills: she’s a good shot with a rifle (hmm) and he… well, to be fair, I don’t remember very much about Banks’s Bob Lawrence. He’s fairly unflappable, which is always a good quality, and he has a habit of pushing his nose fairly fearlessly into things, which certainly helps this plot. As it happens, they unwittingly uncover some international intrigue — it’s just what happens to English people on their European holidays — and must piece together the plot and foil a murder that could destabilise the whole world. So the stakes couldn’t be higher, and Peter Lorre is the manifestation of this vaguely Germanic threat (never specifically stated, and Lorre himself had to learn his lines phonetically, having fled the Nazis not long before). He has some of the same baby-cheeked menace he had in M, with a streak through his hair and a prominent knife wound on his forehead used to hint at his dangerous personality. It’s all what we would consider classically Hitchcockian and certainly one of his successes of the pre-Hollywood era.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Alfred Hitchcock; Writers Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis; Cinematographer Curt Courant; Starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre; Length 75 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 7 May 2023.

Criterion Sunday 636: Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Given the extent to which this film was used as a byword for what defined Hollywood overreaching in the 1980s, it’s difficult not to lead with the naïve question of why it should have been that way. I can see that its bloated budget and runtime can’t have been great news for film executives, but the rest of us are just people watching a film, and from my point of view this is a lot better than the nasty mess that is The Deer Hunter. It does still feel messy, of course — it’s a sprawling story with a large number of characters — and the sound design feels particularly loud and bombastic (I couldn’t much make out what a lot of people were saying, but it feels weirdly close to Days of Heaven a few years earlier in that respect) but it’s a beautiful film with a real sense of place and a heartbreaking central narrative involving one of her (and our) generation’s finest actors, Isabelle Huppert. Perhaps I might assume some of the bad feeling was towards the film’s loose, dismissive relationship towards the historical events it’s based on — it has almost no overlap with what really happened amongst the characters who share these names in the part of the world and the time when it was made — but in that case perhaps it best be seen as a sort of recreation of what might have happened, an alternative history that still honours the land and the aspirations of the people. Sure, it’s long, and I wouldn’t wish to try and rehabilitate the reputation of Michael Cimino himself, but this particular movie is a fine, epic story.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Michael Cimino; Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond; Starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, John Hurt; Length 216 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Sunday 23 April 2023.

Criterion Sunday 633: I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972)

The second film in Pasolini’s so-called “Trilogy of Life” is another film based on an episodic text of classic literature, in this case Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English stories of pilgrims, in which once again Pasolini himself plays a key artistic figure (in this case, Chaucer himself). Like The Decameron, there is no shortage of bawdiness and tawdry sexuality, shitting and farting too. Here of course the setting is England, and while the primary language on the film is Italian, there’s also an English dub that makes more sense given the film itself is populated by English actors speaking in that language, which is why I watched it with that setting. Certainly you get to see a lot more of the fourth Doctor than perhaps you were hoping, but many of the key figures are the same Italian actors who were in Pasolini’s film of the year before, like Franco Citti as The Devil and his partner Ninetto Davoli as a foolish Chaplin-like figure. It’s all put together with a broad comic energy that is a bit wearying after a while, but there’s certainly plenty to enjoy in the film, in a series of tales largely drawn from Chaucer, but also with a bit of extra content to suggest the contemporary era of Pasolini’s production, and to heighten the hypocrisy and repressiveness of the era.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini (based on the collection of short stories by Geoffrey Chaucer); Cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli; Starring Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Hugh Griffith, Josephine Chaplin; Length 111 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 9 April 2023.

Criterion Sunday 632: Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971)

I can’t really fault Pasolini’s adaptation of the 14th century work of Giovanni Boccaccio (not that I’ve read it). It feels like a lusty, bawdy, carnivalesque vision of the era that matches Pasolini’s view of his contemporary society, with thieves, murderers, religious men and ne’er-do-wells of all sorts matched alongside naifs and simpletons, all out to try and do the best they can in their short lives, often squalid and living in poverty but with a sort of primal pleasure-seeking instinct. Through it all there’s Pasolini himself as the painter Giotto, as a sort of guide to these various characters, who show up in a dream for an unpainted third triptych portion to a scene he’s painting in a church while these variously unsavoury characters scheme and cavort. Still, for all that, it’s perhaps not a mode of filmmaking that I feel most at ease with, though there’s plenty of beauty captured by the camera, there’s also an underlying ugliness in the stories, which revolve around cynical and slightly nasty resolutions to his little vignettes — these presumably are drawn from the text, but they are also commentaries perhaps on modern life, and if so it’s not much of a vision. Still, as a film it’s not without its diversions.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini (based on the collection of short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio); Cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli; Starring Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli; Length 111 minutes.

Seen at the Paramount, Wellington, Friday 15 May 1998 (and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Saturday 8 April 2023).

Criterion Sunday 624: Quadrophenia (1979)

This is a classic of British cinema, based on a ‘rock opera’ by The Who — which I’m guessing is just a fancy way of saying it was a concept double album — telling a story of Mods and Rockers in 1960s London (and, memorably, Brighton). This film adaptation though, to be clear, is not an opera, not even a musical, though music looms large in the protagonists’ lives. The source is also perhaps a hint to something of a studied disconnect to it: despite coming over as a gritty urban realist drama, there are constant hints towards the affectedness of it all. These characters could burst into song at any moment (one of the main actors is even Sting), and sometimes they do repeat refrains from their favourite tracks, but mostly it relies on a very clean, precise aesthetic and the heightened emotions conveyed well by all the actors, but especially Phil Daniels in the lead role of Jimmy.

In a generally unlikeable group of bored and angry kids, Jimmy is the most unlikeable — and yet compulsively watchable — of the lot, and the by the denouement the story has moved away from its gritty roots into something surreal, almost folkloric (like a lot of great 1970s British cinema), with a sequence of songs on the soundtrack finally eclipsing the spoken word, and a grandly staged finale that feels like an end and at the same time, leaves things open for Jimmy. However grim it seems to become for him as a character, the film has the careful poise of a musical (or maybe a Dennis Potter TV drama) in just slightly standing back. Perhaps I’d have fully embraced it if they had broken into song, but it’s still a fine evocation of an era and an introduction to a lot of 80s acting talent.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Franc Roddam; Writers Dave Humphries, Roddam, Martin Stellman and Pete Townshend (based on the album by The Who); Cinematographer Brian Tufano; Starring Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash, Philip Davis, Sting, Ray Winstone; Length 120 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 16 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 623: Lonesome (1928)

This is technically not a silent film, but it’s also not not a silent film. In fact for much of its running time, it’s an exemplary advertisement for the freedom and artistic possibilities that the medium had reached in the year after the similar Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was released, because when the brief segments with synchronised sound come they literally stop the film in its tracks. What is a city symphony for New York City, with loose impressionistic photography, heady use of lap dissolves and location shooting, suddenly becomes for about a minute each time a static and ugly dialogue scene with an unmoving camera and no real sense of place. Luckily, those scenes pass quickly, largely self-contained, leaving Lonesome to be a sweepingly romantic film about two people who find each other by chance, visit Coney Island, then are separated just as (un)fortuitously (by the cops no less, going above and beyond their duty of care), and that’s pretty much the plot of the thing. However, it’s a fairly swooning film that for all its slender plot still manages to carry you along.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Pál Fejős [as “Paul Fejos”]; Writers Edward T. Lowe Jr., Tom Reed and Mann Page; Cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton; Starring Barbara Kent, Glenn Tryon; Length 69 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 10 March 2023.

Criterion Sunday 622: Weekend (2011)

It creeps up on you this one. Set in Nottingham, and following a young man called Russell (Tom Cullen) who seems a bit shy, it starts out with loud party scenes, little moments glimpsed at a party then a bar that Russell heads off towards, such that I spent part of the film just wondering if the sound mix was right (these are all loud environments, drowning out the words to a certain extent). But this is a film about people who can’t quite make out what the other wants, or are trying to protect themselves in ways that put emotional distance in their relationship, even as their every other fibre seems to be screaming for something closer and more intense. The actors do a great job in conveying this push and pull while director Andrew Haigh finds these moments that seem to encapsulate the drama, until at length the two just talk to one another. There are no big redemptive moments or melodramatic changes of heart, but you sense there’s feeling between the two that won’t go away immediately, and an openness that gives them both a little bit of extra strength in a world where you register small moments quite piercingly. For example, just one that comes to mind, there’s a scene of Russell standing on a tram on his way to meet Glen (Chris New), and he’s near some younger kids making fun of gay people, and we observe him just subtly taking off his flatcap and altering his body language to try and make himself blend into the background more; the film is filled with little moments like that, suggestive of their situation for observant viewers to pick up. It’s a film of small wonders, made on a small budget but with plenty to recommend it.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Andrew Haigh; Cinematographer Ula Pontikos; Starring Tom Cullen, Chris New; Length 97 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Tuesday 7 March 2023.