More of the Same

The Threepenny Opera (1931)


Director: G.W. Pabst


Notable Stars: I have the impression that Lotte Lenya is something of a name. Doubtless several of the other actors are substantial figures in German cinematic history but none of them are as yet familiar to me.


Did I like it? I found it difficult to self-generate any kind of response to it, positive or negative.


What I remember: All of these Weimar Republic era movies, especially the very late ones, are almost impossible to have any thoughts about without reference to the period that followed. This has the oppressive atmosphere, the hard characters and the air of cynicism that I associate with this family of movies, though I was unable to break through this impression to detect anything I thought was grand. Based on the 18th century John Gay play The Beggar's Opera, it is nominally set in London, but there is nothing about it that evokes any sense of London in any period whatsoever. While this may be an unimportant detail, it is nonetheless strange.


What I associate it with: M

Immortal (2004)


Director: Enki Bilal


Notable Stars: Charlotte Rampling


Did I like it? No


What I remember: It's set in 2095, when my daughters will be 80 and 84, and my sons, if any of them are still around, 86, 89, 92 & 93. The future, as always, appears to be even more seriously horrible than the present. There's no romance, no fun music, no sunshine actually--is that a side effect of climate change? People are killed a lot. Some of them are genetically enhanced, which seems to make them more coldly rational and heartless. It's based on a comic book/graphic novel. I don't care about it.


What I associate it with: Avatar? I don't know, I don't watch these kinds of movies for the most part.

The art of the modern world is absolutely killing me.


About Time (2013)


Director: Richard Curtis


Notable Stars: Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy, the guy who played Levin in Anna Karenina.


Did I like it? I am ashamed to admit it, but at the time, yes. The explanation in the next section will hopefully put this in some context.


What I remember: This was not on any of my lists. My wife had seen it on an airplane, and when I had my kidney stone last December at this very time and was laid up in bed for a week and had a catheter in and was feeling like my life was essentially over she made me watch this ridiculous English movie (from the same team that foisted the gross Love, Actually, which I genuinely detest, on the world) about a young man of the geeky type who has the ability to travel in time, though generally only in short distances, because when you go back too far the consequences of changing your past have too many other effects, including altering the genes of people not yet born, etc. However if you make a false step in talking to a girl or not being aggressive enough in bed or whatever, you can keep going back 5 minutes or a half an hour and try something else until you get a more satisfactory outcome. Rachel McAdams is a sweet-faced Canadian. She is also renowned as a activist for environmentalism and other left-wing causes, I am not sure how ferociously. Apparently Zooey Deschanel was originally supposed to have her role and she probably would have carried it off well enough too, but it would have been more playing to type for her, and I liked Rachel McAdams' presentation of the character. After being shell-shocked from all of the nihilistic modern movies full of mumbling dialogue, I was softened up enough to find the Bill Nighy (an actor I usually find annoying) character's propensity for quoting Dickens and finding consolation in the civilized pleasures of life a welcome diversion. If one were more critical one could take issue with the family's self-satisfied bourgeois smugness and apparently unassailable comfort and financial security--I believe they are all academics and lawyers in the most respectable tracks of those professions--but obviously I would like nothing more at this point than to have those comforts myself, my desire for which is much stronger than any I have to man the barricades (which desire Rachel McAdams, a participant in the "Occupy" movement, ironically does have). The occasion on which the Levin actor met Rachel, his love interest, for the 1st time, took place on a blind date type event in London in which the various opposed types--this is the kind of movie that wants to present itself as believing that same sex and other non-heterosexual orientations and couplings are completely socially mainstream--go separately into a basement restaurant in complete darkness where they are seated at a table with possible dating partners who they are supposed to talk to while being served a meal by blind waiters. It struck me as a quintessentially ridiculous 21st century ultra first world rich city idea while also making me kind of wistful at having both aged out of and been largely priced out of taking part in such scenes. The mere thought of having to sit alert for two hours and try to eat a meal and try hopelessly to make out what any women I might be talking to looked like in complete darkness caused my eyes to be possessed by a kind of panic though.


I associate this with: Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is the only other modern British movie of this type (romance among young professionals) that I can bear.

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)


Director: Otto Preminger


Notable Stars: Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Eleanor Parker.


Did I like it? Yes. I love the down and out 1950s (cinematic version) pretty much everywhere it turns up.


What I remember: Great jazz soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein (we'll see him again later). I've always thought Frank Sinatra was quite good as an actor. He did not, prior to 1960 or so at least, often play Himself, or the popular image of Himself, that has come down to us. He frequently played a scrappy underdog or deeply troubled type of character, and played them endearingly. The atmosphere of the dingy bars and apartments of this era in glorious black and white. Eleanor Parker's hair and skin tone. Kim Novak's hair and skin tone. Connection with late 40s/50s literary scene through the novel on which the movie is based, which I haven't read however.


Associated in my mind with: On the Waterfront, Edge of the City

Far From Heaven (2002)


Director: Todd Haynes


Notable Stars: Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Patricia Clarkson. I'm not a great fan of any of these people, but I can't pretend to not know who they are.


Did I like it? I have to admit I do like it. The story was not anything I thought great, but it is a gorgeous movie, and as a visual homage to the Sirk pictures of the 50s and the general nostalgic fantasies that have grown up around that period it strikes the right note a lot.


What I remember: While I don't have any better suggestions for what might have been done with the plot other than having more original treatments of the two major themes of repressed (though by the end not very) homosexuality and vile racism against the backdrop of evil 1950s society. The black character who befriends Julianne Moore checks off every box in the educated white liberal imagination: he is dignified, cultured, hardworking, entrepreneurial, an expert botanist, (tragically) a widower who is devoted to his daughter as well as an aging parent, he is constantly harassed and condescended to by moronic whites who don't have a tenth part of his intellect, grace, or character. Not that a person like this couldn't have existed, of course, but all of these qualities existing in the same person while suffering from oppression seems a little heavy-handed. Dennis Quaid's secretly gay corporate 50s man in the gray flannel suit on the other hand is so physically overwhelmed by the pull of his true orientation that everything else in his life has to be cast to the winds so that he can indulge whole hog in the love he craves. That aside I do love this particular recreation of 1957 Connecticut, though it is over the top in its preciousness as well, down to the dreamy blue title letters and the soundtrack by authentic 50s composer Elmer Bernstein, the same guy who wrote the music 47 years earlier for the just catalogued Man With the Golden Arm. He died in 2004 at the age of 82.


I associate this with: What you would expect. The authentic 50s movies, Sirk, et al, plus the more recent Mad Men type stabs at the era. But no direct companion stands out.

  
Trainspotting (1996)


Director: Danny Boyle


Notable Stars: Robert Carlyle became kind of famous, and Ewan McGregor I think became even more famous, though he isn't someone I usually take note of even when I see something he is in.


Did I like it? Yes, it is really good. I actually saw this in a theater in Prague when it initially came out, and I'm sure I thought it was good then, but when it came up now I had my doubts as to how well it would hold up, but upon seeing it again I was really impressed by how good it is, it's fantastic even. It's hard now at a remove of some months to exactly explain why this is so, but it gets so many things right, pace, energy, mood, the various scenes feel authentic but also feel like something actually important is at stake, which is remarkable for a movie about a bunch of heroin addicts and thugs in Scotland whose lives in conventional terms "aren't going anywhere." It is inventive in a genuinely interesting way. It never feels dated or obsolete even though it obviously takes place in a different time and predates the internet and other systems and attitudes characteristic of the present.


What I remember: I kind of summed up my impression above, but I still haven't put my finger on what is so effective about this movie. It is very good at inducing a sense of longing, for love or some approximation of it, or comfort, or joy or some thrill, and occasionally something like these desires actually come to fruition, but very fleetingly, a matter of seconds or minutes at best. I suppose the whole pattern of life is very much like this, which is why the movie works so well.


I associate this with: I don't know. Itself? It seems like there must be other movies like this, but they are all kind of rip-offs of this in one way or another.

Throne of Blood (1957)


Director: Akira Kurosawa


Notable Stars: Toshiro Mifune. Isuzu Yamada is a legend among film snobs but this is the only thing I've seen her in so far.


Did I like it? I know it's a classic. I sometimes have trouble connecting with Kurosawa's samurai pictures (my favorite movie of his is The Idiot, which I love). I would love, at least in theory, to join some kind of film club that showed these films on a big screen and had some kind of drinks and hors d'oeuvres reception afterwards with light but intelligent discussion. However whenever you go to one of those things, at least if you are me, the people are never the crowd you were looking for.


Yes, this has come up here previously. This is another title that I watched on VHS while the DVD languished in the Netflix "unavailable" purgatory for eight years or so before suddenly appearing in my mailbox.


What I remember: I know it's Macbeth translated to a medieval Japanese setting. I remember a lot of scenes in the rain. The woods of Dunsinane scene was very well done. The madness of the two lead characters was by Western standards highly exaggerated but I guess it is characteristic of the Japanese tradition.


I associate this with: the 1950s Kurosawa canon

This stretch ended with quite a few good movies in a row. Our luck will not hold out (entirely) into the next set.

1946-1949 Movie Post

I have been on vacation, hence the delay in posts. For any secret regular readers out there.

On the Town (1949)

This movie is quite silly, it doesn't have any songs that I am particularly taken with, one of its three leading women is decidedly ugly, and one of its other leading women has something too all around weird about her for me to warm up to. One will imagine that I am now going to say that I like it anyway, but that would not be wholly accurate; however, I do like certain things about it, and it was painless to get through, though it should not have been. In addition to all of its bombast and effort, it had a lot of that real, unconscious postwar optimism that is so infectious, and the like of which someone my age has never known. There is the sense, for example, that New York really does in a way belong to all of "us" who have any feeling for it, and that when we are young and energetic it is reasonable that we should go there, for a time at least, and test ourselves and engage with the life to be found there, and that if we do this, a more interesting version of our lives should happen for us, even if at 27 or 32 or 38 or 45 our time and usefulness in the life of the city has run its course and we have to vacate the premises to let a new wave of energetic people take our places. Like many musicals from this period, the movie allows its audience the conceit that life, or at least life as presented in it, is full of fun, romance, new experiences, new and like-minded compadres and all of the other things ordinary boring people daydream about endlessly but rarely get to experience. There are variations on this attitude throughout the history of Hollywood especially, but they were able to most consistently, organically, and spontaneously achieve it in the way I am thinking of in those first few years after the war.  

Frank Sinatra's role in this is odd to the modern viewer in that he had not quite become Himself yet. He's surprisingly small and scrawny, and is not the commanding superman-type presence among the other actors that one would expect from his later iconic status and "My Way" reputation. He is pretty much one of the group here. His character is also the least worldly among the males, and he ends up with the least attractive, indeed nearly mannish woman, which is also a departure from type.

I watched this the night before Esther Williams died, which was a coincidence, since Gene Kelly, Sinatra, and Betty Garrett, who are all in this, had teamed up with her the previous year in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The double play combination of "O'Brien to Ryan to Goldberg" in that film was a reminder of those heady days, so short-lived that maybe they only ever existed in my imagination, when it looked like Catholics, especially the Irish and Italians, and Jews might be teaming up for some desirable cultural or social purpose, before the American Catholic population fell apart as a substantial force in society starting in the late 1960s.

For some reason I had not known this movie was in color before this viewing. I had always imagined it in black and white.

Oliver Twist (1948)

Solid British version, directed by David Lean, who is widely regarded, on the strength of this and 1946's Great Expectations, which I have not seen, to be the best cinematic interpreter of Dickens. The movie is handsome, well-acted, and the story well-told. Only one time did I notice I missed one of the numbers from the later musical version of the story:

The depiction of Fagin, played by Alec Guinness, has been controversial for being obnoxiously anti-semitic. Guinness wears an enormous hook nose, which has been usually explained away by observing that this is how the character was drawn in the famous illustrations that accompanied the book, which the filmmakers tried to adhere to as closely as possible. Guinness also plays the character with a lisp, which I am pretty certain is manifest through the dialogue in the story, which anyway does not in itself suggest Jewishness to me. I suppose there are other negative Jewish stereotypes written into the character, though if you were not already aware of them I doubt you would make the connection from what is given in the movie. The dialogue and idiosyncracies of the character are overall extremely well-written and well-acted. I cannot really convince myself that this is not in general true. Fagin, at least as played by Alec Guinness, who really demonstrates considerable acting talent here, is the most vivid, verbally interesting character in the film. Do the stereotyping and prejudice detract tremendously from the story? One may feel it should, but that is not the same thing as feeling that it does. Most characters in Dickens are caricatures of one kind or another with one dominant aspect that is developed to a greater degree. Fagin in this sense probably is more roundly developed than the run of characters in Dickens's books, though the author committed a major faux pas by investing the caricature here with insulting traits associated negatively with ethnicity rather than personal qualities or education level or class origins, which modern people are generally more willing to tolerate (though many pure and dogged souls, God bless them, will not). This story does present particular problems for the person who would rather avoid these kinds of unarguable arguments because the character in question is a good and more than usually interesting literary or cinematic character, in the sense of what he says and does in driving the story along.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Much-praised film noir that I had some anticipation to see because in addition of course to being a fanatic of this period I did not know what to expect at all. It wasn't bad but it didn't seem to me to be quite the classic it is made out to be either. As in a lot of these noirs, the premise is rather clumsy, and the film is dependent on other elements--atmosphere, dialogue, compelling performers/characters--to have anything to say to me, and none of that really happened here, apart from the scene where Lana Turner's lawyer gets her to spill out and sign the confession that turns out not to be official so that she would get it out of her system--that part was good. Of the two leads, Lana Turner was considered one of the absolute bombshells of the age at the time, and she is what she is, but I cannot say I find her all that fascinating; and the male star, John Garfield, I have to admit I had never heard of before this movie, though there was a short documentary about him included in the extras that made the claim that he was a huge star for about ten years from the late 30s to the late 40s, before getting called before the un-American activities committee and not naming names, shortly after which (1952) he died of a heart attack at the age of 39. He sounds like an interesting guy--he was an important stage actor in one of the major movements of the serious theater during the 30s--but I can't say he drew me in to him in this movie either.

The book on which the movie was based was written by James M Cain, who was also the author of Double Indemnity. Cain's father was on the faculty of St John's College Annapolis, and the author was born in the Paca-Carroll house on campus where the family lived. This building is now a dormitory, though so renovated as to be quite modern on the inside.     

That East Coast Melancholy

It would be good to go down even for a day or two and wander about a little. I'm running out of autumns, at least when I won't be rather old and past any kind of commisserate-meaningfully-with-the-magic-of-New-York date. I know it grinds people to dust and all of that if they fail to achieve their desires, but just because you can't possess whatever it is that makes the whole area so special, you still sense that it is there. I knew it was there when I was there as a teenager for 4 days with $17 to my name, sleeping half the night in Central Park and Madison Square, spending the other half wandering all over the deserted streets. Obviously I was mostly unhappy at the time, and exhausted, and cold--it was in October--and I was cutting a pitiful figure, but in spite of all that I still found it exhilarating to be there numerous times in the course of a day, especially when I was able to pass as a semi-normal person--sitting in the main library, or taking the Staten Island ferry, which I think was a quarter at that time, or observing people my age taking a real part in life, with things to do, and romantic interests and so on, which was inspiring to me. Wretched as I was, I didn't want to leave, and I had consumed enough media to believe if I hung around long enough something might happen to me--indeed, to be honest, if I had had an appetite for gay sex, it is quite possible a number of things might have happened to me, but I didn't want New York quite bad enough to embrace it on those terms.

One item which serves to show you much things like parenting have changed in the last 20 years, when I finally gave up and called home to explain that I was in New York and didn't have any money (I had hitchhiked there, or actually to Newark and then taken a commuter train into town), hoping somebody might wire me some cash, or, I suppose, offer to drive up and get me, they didn't do either of those things, so I tried to hitchhike by one of the tunnels, I forget exactly which one, but the police told me I couldn't do that, that in fact I couldn't hitchhike anywhere in Manhattan, so I had to get off the island somehow, and I ended up walking all night the length of the island up to the George Washington Bridge--it was only about ten miles, but by that point I hadn't had a proper sleep in days and my feet were also all calloused and were very painful, so I was pretty much spent. This entailed going through Harlem of course, which at that time was supposed to be much more dangerous crimewise than it is now, but I didn't have any incidents on this occasion. Certainly I did not present an image of any person who was carrying a lot of money. So I walked across the George Washington Bridge around 7 or 8 in the morning and set out with my thumb on I-95--again, you allowed to do this kind of stuff anymore, not that I would want to, but at the time I was just desperate to go places and I had a terrible work ethic and sense of future orientation and I couldn't think of what else to do. Eventually I got back home that afternoon and I slept for about two days and it was the best sleep I've ever had in my life I'll tell you, but when I woke up everybody was really mad at me or thought I was on drugs, which was the popular explanation at the time for any kind of inexplicable behavior. Apparently not one person understood that I just wanted to go to freaking New York for a couple of days; (and apparently no one does still).