Before we leave September, here are a few more jottings on films.

The Cranes Are Flying (1957), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky. I add the cinematographer’s name here because the camera work in this Soviet film is nothing short of stunning. The mobile camera tracks, swirls, lifts, falls, angles and generally serves as another actor in this anti-war film that focuses on the home front, and especially the women/woman left behind. Veronika (Tatyana Samoylova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are young lovers. As the film begins, we see these two skipping happily by the water and generally displaying the vigours and energy of youth. They stop and watch cranes flying above them, and then they are sprayed by a passing truck that is washing the streets. This dampening forewarns what is to come. War is declared. Boris leaves for a tour of duty and the two young lovers are separated. Scenes of departure are chaotic and distressing. Anyway, what follows lets us know that Boris dies in battle, while Veronika waits for his return. Meanwhile, young Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) sets his sights on Veronika, pressing her into marriage. Mark turns out to be dishonourable and things fall apart. The story is conventional and perhaps even predictable. However, the actors are fine and the filming offers something special. What we see looks forward to a film like Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). The Cranes Are Flying stands with Kubrik’s Paths of Glory as two of the finest anti-war films; both come out in 1957. One focuses on the women at home, the other on the soldiers in battle.

 

Ahed’s Knee (2021), directed by Nadav Lapid. Here is a film seething with anger. Its protagonist is a movie director, Y, played by Avshalom Pollak, who is preparing to make a film concerning the young Palestinian activist, Ahed Tamimi, who was sent to prison for slapping an Israeli soldier, an event that was on TV. Apparently, a man who saw the news footage tweeted that Ahed ought to be shot in the knee. The film begins with a montage of knee shots and some actors reading for parts in the proposed film. Meanwhile, Y travels into the desert to a small town where he is to screen one of his films at the local library. He meets his host, a librarian who now works for the government as a Deputy Minister for Culture, Yahalom (Nur Fibak). The two of them form something of a bond, and Y confides in Yahalom, telling her of his unpleasant experiences while serving his military service. These two appear to share a dislike of the present government’s curtailing of free speech. Despite their seemingly similar views, Yahalom asks Y to sign a form that stipulates what topics he can and cannot address during the question period following the screening. Y is filled with anguish and even rage. His only other confidente appears to be his mother who collaborates with her son on the films he makes. She is ill with lung cancer. By the end, things have come unstrung. Anyway, the film has some wonky camera swirls and cuts, much desert dreariness, and lots of anger as Y monolgues his way to the end. (Can ‘monologue’ be a verb?) This is a film about the artist’s commitment to free speech.

Red Cliff (2008-9), directed by John Woo. This is a four hour and forty-eight-minute film about the battle of Red Cliffs that took place in 208 AD. It is lavish in the extreme, even breathtaking. It is also very much a film about male friendship and male enmity. A driving force of the plot is the nefarious Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), Prime Minister of the Han Empire. He desires Xiao Qiao (Chiling Lin), wife of Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) who is leader of rebel forces. Then we have master strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who forms a bond with Zhou; they are brothers in arms, although Zhou does all the impressive fighting. Aside from Xiao, we also have Sun Shangxiang (Wei Zhao), a spunky young woman who infiltrates the Empire’s forces to gather useful information. Of course, there is an assortment of other characters, and a huge cast of extras. Woo was allowed to use 1,500 government soldiers to helps with sets and action, and to provide men for the battle sequences. The battle sequences are complex and spectacular. Woo also had two full-sized ships built for the action on water and the many other ships appear courtesy of CGI. It is quite amazing how Woo and his collaborators find multiple ways for soldiers to die. Mostly what the film offers is eye-popping action, although it does manage a bit of romance (and bromance too), a smidgen of political scrutiny, and a lesson on how to make tea. The actors are attractive, the action furious, and locations, sets, costumes, and camera work as good as it gets. The length of the film is kept in check by separation of the narrative into Parts 1 and 2, Part 2 beginning with a short visual summary of Part 1. In other words, you may watch the film in two sittings, if you prefer.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), directed by George Miller. Miller is known for his Mad Max films, and so you can expect exuberance. What you may not expect is a fantasia of colour and weirdness in an Arabian Nights vein. The screenplay is an adaptation of a story by A. S. Byatt in which an academic, a professed narratologist, finds herself inside a story thousands of years in the making. She releases a Djinn who pleads with her to make three wishes so he may be released from long years inside a bottle. She knows about story and so she knows that stories of genies and wishes are cautionary tales. The academic is Alithea (Tilda Swinton) and the Djinn is, well the Djinn (Idris Elba). Seeing the Djinn traipse about in Alithea’s hotel room wearing a torn white bathrobe might make you think that the academic had made her wish and it has come true. Anyway, we have a lavish recounting of several stories. Costumes are colourful and voluminous. The whole thing is strange, but in an interesting way. Ultimately all the finery, all the time skipping, all the opulent sets, all the discussions of desire and fear and power and so on devolve into something like, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round. 

I’m Not There (2007), directed by Todd Haynes. "Poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity," so we are told as this film begins. We might add, vagabond, trickster, singer/songwriter, welder, painter, jerk, joker, actor, ragman, man in black, and probably any number of other labels. The film captures not only the person, Bob Dylan, but also the times that were changing. It captures the person by confessing that capturing the person is a futile, but joyful endeavour. It opens with a train and it ends with a train, a reminder of the ever-rolling thunder that is the subject of the film. Always on the move, never standing still, elusive, mysterious, mercurial, dodging, now here, now there – this is the singer and the song. Haynes’s film plays out like a Dylan song, skipping here and there and yet always with a clever coherence, and always with a cogent allusion. References abound to the life and the songs of Dylan, and to the movies of his most energetic times. We have visual nods to Fellini, Godard, Lester, Peckinpah, Nichols, Goulding, and others. We have songs from the early years to Time Out of Mind, most covered, but a few by the elusive tramp himself. We have children with guns and sharp swords, we have a child beside a dead pony, we have a geek, we have characters who tell tall tales, who womanize, who take seriously the call for everybody to get stoned. We have six characters pretending to be the same person, and doing a fine job of being different persons. Finally, no matter what the matter was, he simply will not talk. All the time, of course, he never ceases to say what is in his mind, one hand waving free. This is a film that aspires to the condition of music, and manages to achieve greatness.

 

 Before September is out, here are a few Billy Wilder films.

Irma La Douce (1963), directed by Billy Wilder. Wilder’s early films in the 40s and 50s deliver gritty street views and ruined lives. By the 60s, he and I.A.L. Diamond were delivering Hollywood set pieces such as Irma La Douce, a film that has a colourful set that purports to be the meat-packing and market area of Paris. Most of the action takes place on one block where the Hotel Casanova welcomes a bevy of prostitutes and their ‘clients.’ Across from the hotel is a café and bar run by Mr. Moustache (Lou Jacobi) – but that’s another story. One of the prostitutes is the titular Irma (Shirley MacLaine) who has the best spot on the street for herself and her small dog, Shorty. Irma meets Officer Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon) on his first day patrolling this district. Officer Patou is unaware that previous patrolmen took money from the local pimps to turn a blind eye to the goings on here. In short, Officer Patou becomes civilian Patou and then the ‘Tiger,’ the pre-eminent pimp in the place after a brawl with Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell). As things go along in screwball fashion, Nestor finds himself pretending to be Lord X from England where he has a castle of some 90 or more rooms and 400 acres. Nestor and Irma are by now living in the same small upstairs apartment with a window overlooking the busy street – “Paris never sleeps” or at least this street never sleeps in a Paris that only exists on a Hollywood backlot. The shenanigans are fun, and the jabs at bourgeois life are also fun. Just what we are to make of the women here is awkward. On the one hand they are brassy and strong, living their lives with zest and a certain independence. On the other hand, they are indentured workers who hand over their earned cash to the men who sit around drinking or playing pool. Add to this, a long-windedness in the filming and we are left with a film that has its delights, but also has its lapses and unfortunate ambiguities.

 

The Fortune Cookie (1966), directed by Billy Wilder. This is the first of ten films that would pair Jack Lemmon’s everyday guy with Walter Matthau’s more cynical fellow. It was also Lemmon’s fourth film with Wilder. As for Wilder, this is his second look at the Insurance Industry in America, after the quite different Double Indemnity (1944). Looking back at The Fortune Cookie, I find the film striking for is romantic interest in male friendship, and in this case it is not the friendship between Lemmon and Matthau, but rather between Lemmon’s Harry Hinkle and Ron Rich’s Luther ‘Boom Boom’ Jackson. Hinkle is a television cameraman who, at the beginning of the film, is shooting an NFL football game between the Browns and the Vikings, when he suddenly gets bowled over by the Brown’s star punt return specialist, Jackson. Hinkle ends up in the hospital none the worse for wear, but his brother-in-law, ‘Whiplash’ Willie Gingrich (Matthau), who happens to be a shyster lawyer, sees an opportunity to make a load of money if only Hinkle will pretend to be severely injured. Soon Hinkle’s ex-wife, Sandy (Judi West) is on the scene looking to cash in on Hinkle’s continuing affection for her. Meanwhile the bevy of high-priced lawyers for the insurance company hire a detective to spy on Hinkle hoping to discover he is faking. This is a lot of hokum, and pretty good fun. The script, as you would expect when Wilder and his long-time mate I. A. L. Diamond are responsible for it, is acerbic and often quite funny. But as I started to say above, what distinguishes this film is the relationship between Hinkle and Jackson. Jackson is a black football player who suffers remorse at having apparently injured the cameraman, and he becomes something of a houseboy to Hinkle suggesting the sadly familiar positions of black people and white people. However, as the film moves toward its finale, these two become friends and end, in the film’s final and evocative shot, as equals cavorting on the football field together. This is a powerful ending and re-envisions the usual Hollywood romantic ending in an important way.

 

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), directed by Billy Wilder. The film should have been a labour of love, Wilder having planned a story about Holmes as early as the late 1950s. And there are good things for the finding here: some quick quips, an effective mise en scene, a clever use of Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee), etc. On the whole, however, this is not Wilder at his satiric best. He does, perhaps, take Holmes too seriously. Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely as the two principal characters acquit themselves adequately, and Genevieve Page as Gabrielle Valladon, Holme’s client and adversary is attractive. These characters are set to work in a less than effective plot. The bit with the Loch Ness monster is hardly mysterious or even believable, although I guess it is memorable since it is the only bit of the film that I remember from a viewing many years ago. Wilder also tries to tackle the implications of Holmes and Watson living together, erring on the side of convention. We are to rest assured that these two jolly fellows are as straight as they come! So what to conclude? This is not, by any means, in the upper tier of Sherlock Holmes films; on the other hand, it offers a pleasant enough way to spend two hours.

 Daisies (1966), directed by Vera Chytilova. This is a zany surrealistic example of the Czech New Wave. Two young women take note that the world has gone bad. As the credits role, we see shots of bombs and devastation caused by war and toppling buildings, letting us see just how bad the world has gone. In response to this bad state of things, the young women decide to be bad. They set out on a wild adventure into excess, especially excessive eating. Their hedonism knows no bounds. Neithr does the cinematography that jumps about, just as the women jump about, and changes colour as often as the women change clothes or make-up. Some of this reminded me of Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou, although there are touches of Pasolini and Parajanov here too. I also detected Chaplin as an influence. Without a plot, but with much bravado, this film explores both the excesses of the modern state and cinema itself. This is not a film to be taken lightly; it demands attention and thought. It was banned and Chytilova was not allowed to work for nine years. This ought to indicate just how effective this film is in its critique of state control. 

La Bestia Debe Morir (The Beast Must Die, 1952), directed by Roman Vinoly Barreto. This Argentinian noir has all the elements of a whodunit combined with the edge and visual appeal of film noir. The story is based on Ray Blake’s detective novel published in 1938. The plot is straight forward. Jorge Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia) is a rat of a human being who abuses his wife and his step-son and just about anyone else he can abuse. Soon after the film opens, he unknowingly drinks poison and dies. Who is responsible for this murder? As we begin to unravel the story behind the murder in flashback, we see that Jorge was a hit and run driver, having struck and killed a young boy one wet dark night. The boy’s father, a man named Frank Carter, who writes mysteries under the name of Felix Lane (Narciso Ibanez Menta), decides to seek out the man who killed his son and murder him. Things move along briskly as Felix Lane meets the killer’s sister-in-law, falls in love, finds himself involved with the sister-in-law’s family, becomes friendly with the beast of a murderer, and then briefly becomes a suspect in the beast’s murder. He has, however, a solid alibi. Who, then, did the deed? No, it was not the sister-in-law who has suffered the advances of the beast, Jorge, and who was in the car that fatal night. There are several other candidates, but what interests us more are the relationships between people. Perhaps the most powerful relationship is between Felix and the young step-son of Jorge, Ronnie Hershey (Humberto Balado). Ronnie reminds us, and Felix, of Felix’s deceased son. This is an impressive film with some impressive lighting and camera work.

 

Los tallos amargos (The Bitter Stems, 1956). This Argentinian noir opens with the clock sounding midnight as two men prepare to board a train. Thus begins the move to a perfect murder. This film has several features of noir: voice over, analepsis and prolepsis, cynicism, entrapment, a mysterious, if not fatal, woman, shadows and some dark nights. This is a noir without a villain in the usual sense. Oh, Alfredo Gaspar (Carlos Cores) does commit a murder, but he is really not such a bad fellow, just somewhat slow to grasp things. He is a poor schmuck of a journalist who embarks on a questionable venture with a new-found friend, the illegal immigrant Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos). Alfredo begins to think that his friend is out to con him a well as the customers the two of them are duping. This leads him to carry out an impetuous and extremely foolish act of murder. He buries the corpse, along with a number of seeds the dead man was carrying. From these seeds grow plants that are Alfredo’s undoing. He kneels in front of an oncoming locomotive. The end! This is all very dark and impressive. The camera work is effective, with lines of shadows that communicate threateningly early in the film and nice contrasts of dark and rainy nights with bright sunlit days. That opening with the signaling of midnight says it all. Midnight comes as the stroke of doom. Did I say “perfect murder”? Well yes, if only poor Alfredo knew anything about agronomy.

The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Yesterday was Remembrance Day and we watched Pontecorvo’s devastating film on the struggle for Algerian independence from France in the 1950s and 60s. The film begins with a notice that no newsreel film has been used, and yet everything looks very real in this documentary-looking film. We have several characters to follow, but no heroes or villains. Both sides accept collateral damage in this street-war, fought in alleys, streets, tenements, and markets. The point-of-view is quite balanced, although when push comes to shove, we know where Pontecorvo’s sympathies lie. At one point we have a reference to Sartre whose sympathies were with the nationalists. The French Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) remarks that Sartre always takes the liberal side. In any case, both sides kill indiscriminately. As a captured FLN leader says, one side uses women who carry bombs in baskets and the other side uses napalm dropped from planes. This very real-looking film has a structure, beginning, after a scene in which an abject fellow is tortured for information, with four people, two men, a woman, and a boy, hiding behind a wall while French soldiers, who have learned their whereabouts from the tortured man, seek them. The camera eventually focuses on one of the men, then things fade back years to when this young man was a street thief running from the police. We see how he becomes a member of the resistance. Although the action of the film takes place 50 to 60 years ago and in Algeria, what we experience is depressingly familiar, and similar atrocities continue to take place in various countries. Despite the remembrance of such things past, humanity does not grasp the idiocy, the stupidity, the injustice, the devastation of warfare.

 

Death of a Cyclist (1955), directed by J. A. Bardem. This film brings together Hollywood noir melodrama with Italian neo-realism in order to expose the failings of the social system under the Franco government in Spain. Behind most of the action here is the war, the Spanish civil war and the larger European war a decade ago. The noir elements include a hero caught in a fraught situation, a femme fatale, an arch art critic cynical to a degree, and some of the lighting and camera work we would expect. Then we have the neo-realist parts of the film, shots of poverty and dilapidation, kids in the street, a city divided by wealth, and intense close-ups. The editing is clever and sly pairing shots deftly bring out both emotion and meaning. For example, the cutting between gazes of the lovers as if they were in the same room, although she is actually with her husband and her lover is by himself in another place. Such cutting reaches its witty best when the lover, Juan, exhales cigarette smoke in one room/cut to Maria Jose, his mistress, who brushes smoke away from her husband’s cigarette. We also have the pairing of wealthy children in their finery with the street kids struggling to survive. There is much more to admire in this film, but suffice to say the cyclist has the last word – as it were.

El: This Strange Passion (1952), directed by Luis Bunuel. Apparently, Jacques Lacan liked this film, and it is easy to understand why this might be so. This film, like so many of Bunuel’s works, is about twisted desire, desire so insistent that it cracks open the Real. The opening scene in the church with the priest washing and then kissing the feet of supplicants, our protagonist Francisco (Arturo de Cordova) assisting in the ceremony, and then seeing the feet of a woman whom he instantly singles out as the love of his life indicates the theme of fetishism. Francisco pursues this woman despite the fact that she is engaged to an old friend. Francisco is wealthy and lives in a stately and singularly lavish mansion. His wealth impresses the young woman, Gloria (Delia Garces), and her mother, and Francisco is successful in his pursuit. He marries the love of his life only to fall into violent jealousy as early as the honeymoon. As the masculine definite article of the title suggests, the film is about masculine desire, paranoia, and irrational violence. Twice Francisco tries to kill his wife, failing to do so both times. He also tries to kill the priest who has defended him against the allegations of Gloria. But the film also gives us an opportunity to follow Gloria and her resistance to leaving a man who clearly frightens her. She keeps hoping she can change him. She can’t. Eventually she does manage to escape and find comfort in a marriage with Rafael (Ricardo Lujan), the man she was first engaged to before she met Francisco. The film ends with Francisco living a quiet and contemplative life with monks. His sanctuary is with the Church, an institution that, arguably, initiated all his trouble in the first place. Bunuel is one of my favourite directors. This may not be among the best of his films, but it holds my interest and it clearly deals with Bunuel’s recurring themes.

 

 

 Some spaghetti westerns for September.

Massacre Time (1966), directed by Lucio Fulci. This is Fulci’s first western and it is something of a prelude to his more famous horror films to follow. The opening pre-credit scene sets the tone. Here sadistic young Jason Scott (Nino Castelnuovo) and his men with their dogs chase a peasant across rough terrain until they come to a river where the dogs catch the man and tear him apart. Credits follow and we begin the tale of Tom Corbett (Franco Nero) and his brother, the inebriate Jeff (George Hilton), and their dealings with land baron Mr. Scott (Giuseppi Addobbati). This is a story of revenge and family romance. The film looks good, its cinematography crisp and colourful. Franco Nero looks remarkably like Clint Eastwood in the dollar films, complete with sheepskin vest and cigarillo. George Hilton gives a broad performance as the drunken brother (or is he really the brother?). The violence is strong, including a lengthy scene that takes the whip scene in Burt Lancaster’s The Kentuckian (1955) to exuberant lengths. The final shootout is something to behold, worthy of standing beside some of the pyrotechnics of the Shaw Brothers. Worth a look.

 

My Name is Pecos (1966), directed by Maurizio Lucidi. This Spaghetti western is as violent as they come, with shootings that include women and a child, beatings, rapes, hangings, and mayhem. Robert Woods stars as the eponymous character, a Mexican whose family has been murdered by the nefarious Joe Clane (Pier Paolo Capponi). The plot is straight forward, the action linear, and the conclusion expected. The formula was set with a Fistful of Dollars: a mysterious stranger rides into town, a town overrun with unsavoury baddies, he meets the town undertaker who is suitably slimy, then he has a shootout or two in and about the local saloon, next he takes a vicious beating, and is whisked away to hiding by a woman and a doctor whose hands have been crushed by that same baddie, Joe Clane, then he recovers and sets about eliminating the baddies until he arrives at the showdown with Joe, the man who is responsible for the murders of his family, and finally he rides off, perhaps not into the sunset, but into the arid desert. As the mysterious stranger, Robert Woods does not have quite the same charisma as Clint Eastwood or Franco Nero, or even Tomas Milian, but this film did spawn one sequel. That said, Pecos did not catch on the way Django, Sartana, Ringo, and Sabata did. The filming in this one is impressive, although the cast of extras who ride about furiously could have used a bit more practice riding.

 

Bandidos (1967), directed by Massimo Dallamano. Dallamano was the cinematographer for Leone’s first two “Dollar” films, and his way with a camera shows here. This is an exceptionally well shot Spaghetti western, with a camera that moves smoothly and follows a bottle as it slides down a bar top, follows boots as they move quietly on a western street, and captures men hiding and peeking out from behind a piano or a wagon or a corner of a building. As for story, this is familiar. It reminded me of Death Rides a Horse from the same year. An older man, Richard Martin (Enrico Maria Salerno), is a sharpshooter who has his hands destroyed by a former friend, Billy Kane (Venantino Venantini). This sets up the revenge plot. Richard finds a young man, Ricky Shot (Terry Jenkins), to mentor. He teaches Ricky to be a sharpshooter. What Richard does not know is that Ricky was on the train that was robbed when Richard had his hands shot by Billy. This event takes place at the beginning of the film. Anyway, the action plays out with the usual violence, lots of bodies falling here and there. What distinguishes this film is the cinematography, and it is quite astonishing. I don’t think this film has the reputation of such Spaghetti westerns as those by Leone or Corbucci or Questi or Solima, but it deserves a look. This one is as well made as they come.

 

And God Said to Cain (1970), directed by Antonio Margheriti, aka Anthony Dawson. A rather subdued Klaus Kinski plays ex-convict Gary Hamilton, who has spent ten years hard labour for a crime he did not commit. The person responsible for Gary’s incarceration is Acombar (Peter Carsten), who not only took Gary’s freedom, but also his girlfriend, Maria (Marcella Michelangeli) who looks as if she would be right at home in a Hammer horror film. Maria’s appearance suits this gothic western with its impending tornado, tolling bell, hall of mirrors, and creature of the night, the implacable Gary. Much of the action takes place at night in the streets, buildings, and underground tunnels of a western town. The tolling bell reminds us of Poe, the extreme wind signals Gary’s sweeping through the town like death itself, and the hall of mirrors works as it does in Welles’s Lady from Shanghai. The room with the many mirrors is perhaps the most impressive touch in this horror of a western suggesting the entrapment at work here. The pace is slow, but again this suits the slow twist of death as it moves wraithlike through the town. The title lets us know that Gary is forever cursed to wander between the winds. He takes revenge, but doing so dooms him. The score also suits the atmosphere with its organ music and trumpet. The story might be simple, but its darkness is perhaps only topped by Corbucci’s The Great Silence, another film with Kinski.