Mangrove (2020), directed by Steve McQueen. This is the first in McQueen’s Small Axe series for British television. It tells the story of the Mangrove 9, a group of Black British citizens on trial at the Old Bailey in 1971. The film reminds me of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), another court room drama about something that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were heady times, and both films capture the sense of urgency and passion of those lost years. Both offer close detail to the lives and times in the U.S. and Britain focusing on racial unrest and systemic injustices. Both are timely and important films. 

Lovers Rock (2020), directed by Steve McQueen. The second in the Small Axes series, this film offers an immersion in a house party in 1980s London. Jimmy Stewart once called films “pieces of time,” and a piece of time is what this film offers. Its story, told with music, dance, and minimal dialogue, is the story of people living their lives against a backdrop of exclusion. Although we do follow a few characters and get to know something of their lives, what matters here is the sense of community, a sense of lives that matter. Like any community, this one has its likeable and its unlikeable people. McQueen’s camera slides through the house party as one of the participants. It will take many of its viewers with it. It will also allow some viewers to understand what it means to be excluded, outside the community, like the white young men on the street outside the party house. Like the food being prepared at the beginning of the film, what we see is spicy and inviting and filled with a variety of flavours.

 

Red, White and Blue, and Alex Wheatle (2020), both directed by Steve McQueen. Here are numbers three and four of the 5-part series Small Axe. The first of these, Red, White and Blue, tells the story of Leroy an intelligent young boy from the Jamaican community in London. He excels at school and becomes a forensic scientist with a Ph.D. This job, however, is not fulfilling, and Leroy decides to become a policeman. He is especially motivated after his father is unjustly arrested and beaten by the local constabulary. The film gives us McQueen’s familiar fluid camera that finds awkward and disorienting angles from which to shoot the action. His distinctive camera placements remind us just how skewered the world of the protagonist and his community is. Leroy’s hope is to change the system from within. Important here is Leroy’s education, and education is the focus of this film and the following two films including Alex Wheatle. Alex Wheatle tells the story of a young boy who grows up not knowing his parents. His childhood and youth are spent with foster parents and in an institution; in both, he meets insensitivity and violence. No wonder, then, that he grows up something of an outsider. He finds a mate who introduces him to music, lingo, and fashion. Alex takes to this world fairly easily and finds himself inside another institution: prison. Here he meets an older rasta inmate who teaches him the importance of books and learning. In something of an inversion, prison here proves to be Alex’s salvation, rather than his undoing. The film ends before Alex becomes the successful writer of Young Adult books that he is today. As with Red, White and Blue, Alex Wheatle ends in medias res, as it were. These characters have yet to reach their full potential, their full understanding of themselves and their community.

 

            If you are the big tree

            We are the small axe 

            Sharpened to cut you down

                                    (Bob Marley)

Education (2020), directed by Steve McQueen. This is the fifth and final film in the Small Axe series. It tells the story of Kingsley, a 12-year-old boy who finds himself shunted to a “special school” for the “educationally subnormal.”  True, he does not read well and he sometimes engages in hijinks, but he is definitely not unintelligent. He wants to be an astronaut. He is polite and curious. This film examines an educational system rife with racist attitudes, an educational system in which teachers care little about the welfare of some of their students, especially those students with black or brown skins. McQueen again gives us his distinctive take on life for black citizens in Britain. One long scene gives us a classroom in which students doze while their teacher (a word carrying a load of irony here) plays on the guitar and sings, both rather poorly, “The House of the Rising Sun.” The length of this scene is worthy of Morpheus, allowing the viewer to experience what the students are experiencing. Students in this “special school” look forward to a future without hope of success in any endeavour; although not explicitly stated, the move here for many will be from school, to the dole, to prison. Luckily for Kingsley, a couple of forceful women have organized a community effort to help the children in the supposed school, and by the end of the film we have a ray of hope for Kingsley and others like him. As in the other Small Axe films, the hope that shines, is just a ray, not a full-blown cloudless sky.

 

 Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang. Speaking of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Bosley Crowther remarks, "They can tote phone books on their heads or balance feathers on their chins and be amusing—." And they are amusing in this delightful look at automation in the work force. In this film, four women who run a research department for a large corporation find their jobs threatened by a large piece of hardware known as a computer. I include this film at this time of year because it is a Christmas movie. Well, if Die Hard can be a Christmas movie, then Desk Set can too. The Christmas Party in Desk Set is far more festive than the one in Die Hard. Indeed, the entire sensibility of Desk Set has something festive about it. Even Emmerich the feminine computer has twinkling lights and tinkling sounds. The film was released in 1957 and computers were a tad more cumbersome than the ones we now wear on our wrists or tuck in our shirt pockets, and so the whole computer vs human brain power thing seems rather quaint now. Nevertheless, the principals are likeable, the colours bright, and the wide screen wider than wide. 

Reindeer Games (2000), directed by John Frankenheimer. This director has made some noteworthy films. This is not one of them. Oh, it is okay as a heist movie with twists and turns aplenty. And it has the added fun of having the five robbers dress as Santa Claus. The action takes place in a wintry Michigan at Christmas time, and the soundtrack uses familiar seasonal songs in a wry manner. The whole thing plays out as a sort of grunge version of Ocean’s Eleven. Characters are one-dimensional for all their changes of direction, and the plot, for all its baroque twists, is predictable. The actors are easy on the eyes, and Ben Affleck plays a dopey everyman believably, even if the plot he inhabits is hardly believable. Frankenheimer moves the action efficiently, and the opening shots of dead Santas is catching. All in all, this film is okay, but it will not (and has not) become a holiday classic.

 Some Christmas films:

The Bishop’s Wife (1947), directed by Henry Koster. If you ever wanted to see a Christmas movie in which Cary Grant dazzles with his stunt double’s skating prowess and also plays a mean harp, then this is the film for you. Released a year after Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife serves up some of the same Christmas optimism, along with an angel who has yet to get his wings. The story argues that human relationships are more important than position and money, while at the same time accepting the Bishop’s wife’s desire for a hat that graces an expensive shop’s window. Apparently consumerism is bad when what one wants is a huge new cathedral, but good when what one wants is a rather ugly hat. Despite what I say here, this film has its delights, not the least of which are the performances by Loretta Young, David Niven, Monte Woolley, James Gleason (who also skates with a sort of aplomb), Elsa Lanchester, and most especially Cary Grant who seems to be enjoying himself more than is fair. This is typical Christmas fun, without the more obvious disparities we see in Capra’s film. The city here may have its poor, but it is no Bedford Falls or Pottersville. Gladys Cooper in the role played by Lionel Barrymore in It’s a Wonderful Life is suitably crusty, but no match for the ruthlessness of Mr. Barrymore.

 

Christmas Eve (1947), directed by Edwin L. Marin. Here’s a sleeper for Christmas, and by sleeper I do not mean a picture to put you to sleep. This is a clever metafilmic movie. Its stories of three brothers nicely encapsulates the major film genres in Hollywood movies at the time: the screwball comedy, the gangster film, and the western. The protagonist of each story is an adopted son of a wealthy philanthropic old lady whose only hope for Christmas is to see her adopted boys again after many years. If the boys do not return, then her fabulous fortune just might go to a nephew, Philip (Reginald Denny), who has designs on the lady’s fortune. She has plans to give much of it away to various causes. Each story is a tall tale: Michael (George Brent) is something of a Lothario who plans to marry for money, but his real love Ann (Joan Blondell) has a different idea. Mario (George Raft) is living in South America because he is on the lam from some trouble in Louisiana. His is a world of nightclubs and tough guys. Then we have Johnathan (Randolph Scott) who is a rodeo rider and all round cowboy, who finds himself adopting three orphaned girls on his way to see his mother on Christmas Eve. I won’t describe how this happens, but needless to say it involves a woman he meets and the two of them undertake a preposterous adventure. Oh, and did I mention that the elderly lady, Aunt Mathilda (Ann Harding) uses an elaborate train set to pass the sugar, cream, and other things at her dinner table. The emphasis on adoption strikes a particularly fine note. Here we have a family that does not have a biological connection, only an emotional one. We found the proceedings quite satisfying, and most suitable for Christmas. 

 

White Christmas (1954), directed by the dependable Michael Curtiz. No snow in Vermont and it is Christmas time. No matter, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye can spark things up and bring people to this snowless ski resort, and besides, snow starts falling on Christmas Eve. This is a patriotic celebration of Christmas with a variety of musical numbers. It begins and ends with a reminder of the recent war. Memorable is Danny Kaye in purple leotard with similarly clad group of dancers parodying modern dance. Danny Kaye is especially clever and kind in bringing his comic repertoire to this film; he does not steal scenes although he comes close to doing so. And then we have Vera-Ellen of the slim legs (yes, sad to say she did struggle with anorexia) dancing up a storm. She is flexible, graceful, and pixyish. Rosemary Clooney and Bing sing pleasantly. The plot is simple, predictable, and certainly well-timed for the holiday season. Everything is staged carefully. And the film reminds me, snow is coming!

 Strangers in the Night (1944), directed by Anthony Mann. This is an early Mann picture, his fifth I think, and made for the quickie studio, Republic. It does have elements of noir – lighting, and camera work, a somewhat sappish hero, entrapment – but it is more of a gothic thriller in the Rebecca vein. It is short, under 60 minutes, and driven by the performance of Helen Thimig as Hilda Blake, an elderly woman who walks with a crutch that signals her origin in folk tales that feature a chthonic character, a character with sinister overtones. She is deranged. She is devious. She is manipulative. She is waiting for her daughter to return, a daughter that never came in the first place. She lives in a huge house set upon a huge cliff. She makes the lives of a local female doctor and a veteran recently returned from the war because of injury ah, difficult. The solider (actually a marine) has come to this small seaside village in California to meet Hilda’s daughter, Rosemary. As I say, the film is short and snappy. It oozes atmosphere. Some of the performances are just okay, but Helen Thimig delivers the goods. You can also see her in Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead (1945).

Strange Impersonation (1946), directed by Anthony Mann. Another noir. Here Mann moves closer to the noir conventions with this story of a female chemist whose experiment, with the help of her female assistant, goes horribly wrong. And then there is the tipsy female who appears to be nudged by the female chemist's car. This is a noir that puts women front and centre. It delivers plot twists and more plot twists. Spoiler: it's narrative reminds me of a slightly later and better noir, Woman in the Window. The story also has something of A Woman's Face in it. Here we have a web of deceit and betrayal entangling a young woman who just wishes to carry out her scientific research without impediment. The film has a narrative shape reminiscent of noir, and it has some of the canted angles we associate with expressionist cinema. Despite lots of plot - I haven't mentioned the unpleasant lawyer or the sympathetic fiancé/husband or the murder mystery or the play with identity - this is a snappy 68 minute film.

Desperate (1947), directed by Anthony Mann. A young couple on the run, these newlyweds are desperate to get away from the hulking villain played by Raymond Burr. This is the film that gives us a basement beating under a swinging lightbulb. We also have a vortex of a stairwell. Perhaps there are some implausible touches to the plot, but all in all this is an effective noir. Steve Brodie takes a turn as a noir hero, a well-meaning young man with a truck who finds himself in a predicament and running for his life from thugs who mean to rub him out. Then there is the wry and cynical policeman who serves as something of a deus ex machina. We have both gritty city locales and brighter country places. Everything moves along briskly, until the ending with the clock ticking and time slowed to an agonizing crawl. I especially appreciated the getaway among large creepy masks.

Side Street (1949), directed by Anthony Mann. Just after their pairing in They Live By Night, Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell appear in this film by Anthony Mann. Mann is best known as the director of a series of westerns, mostly with James Stewart, in the 1950s, but in the previous decade he made a series of procedural noirs. His eye for detail gives these films an edge. Here he uses the canyon-like streets of New York as location for the cat and mouse chase between his luckless hero, the villains, and the police. Late in the film, we have perhaps the first of the modern car chases on film. This one looks both tense and unusual, unusual because the streets are mostly empty unlike more recent car chases in which streets are crowded with people and vehicles. The photography has both a documentary look and a compositional look of planned cinema. The opening aerial shot of the Empire State Building and the streets of New York looking like a maze is impressive, going one step farther than Ray's opening helicopter shot in They Live By Night. The film, partly through the opening voice over, makes it clear that the city contains a stark contrast between the wealthy and the down and out. For the sake of $200, young Joe Norsom (Farley Granger) sets off a series of events that take him deeper and deeper into the ugly labyrinth of the big city, endangering himself and others.

 Some noir for November

Another noir for a Tuesday evening, this one quite apropos to current events. This is The Killer that Stalked New York (1950), directed by Earl McEvoy. The killer in this film is a woman who has just returned from Cuba and, along with some diamonds she is smuggling, she unknowingly carries a deadly disease, small pox. The film tracks her movements in the city as she comes in contact with various people, including children. Soon hospitals are receiving patients with similar symptoms, soon the city becomes a hot zone of fear as authorities, both the police and health officials scramble to get the situation under control and to find the person who started the epidemic. Soon the health system runs out of vaccine and scrambles to find the money and the means for more. What makes this film work is the plot that involves not only the outbreak of small pox among 8 million people, but also the machinations of a small time crook who is the sick woman's lout of a husband. The characters are tough and raw coming from the hard knocks side of the city. Evelyn Keyes as the small pox carrier is convincing. Even Jim Backus turns up as a seedy night club proprietor whose lascivious actions get him more than he bargained for. The film has fine cinematography, perhaps most striking in the opening credits with the huge silhouette of a woman looming over the city. This is another film to watch during a pandemic!

The Reckless Moment (1949), directed by Max Ophuls (credited as Max Opuls). Ophuls is best known for films such as La Ronde (1950), Lola Montes (1955), and Le Plaisir (1952). His signature is a fluid camera, constantly moving and tracking characters as they move about. In The Reckless Moment, a noir that has a woman as the trapped central character, the camera follows prim Mrs. Harper (Joan Bennett) of Balboa, California, as she discovers a dead body, a man she thinks her daughter has murdered (she hasn't). After finding and disposing of the body, Mrs. Harper soon finds herself confronted by an insistent blackmailer (James Mason speaking with a light Irish lilt). The plot moves along with sufficient tension, but the most arresting aspect of the film is the camera work as it tracks, climbs, descends, moves in or out, all the times following things as if it was carrying out an intricate surveillance. The sets in a small coastal town with houses and boathouses that have many stairs and docks also with stairs give the camera opportunity for moving up and down. Meanwhile, shots inside automobiles or oppressively furnished rooms give the impression of entrapment. All in all, this is a pleasant little exercise in the noir mood.

Racket Busters (1938) directed by Lloyd Bacon. This is one of the many Warner Brothers gangster films of the 30s and 40s. This one is about union corruption in the trucking and produce business. John 'Czar' Martin (Humphrey Bogart) is the boss of a gang that sets up a rival union to the proper truckers' union. The film focuses on the people whose lives suffer because of the criminal infiltration into the unions. This is not one of the more powerful of the Warner crime films, but it does nicely remind us that corruption seeps into pretty much all areas of life. The main character, Denny Jordan (George Brent), finds himself compromised because he needs money to pay for his wife's hospital and medical bills. If this sounds familiar, it is. More recently we have TV series such as Breaking Bad or Good Girls that contain a similar plot line - the debilitating effects of a health system that can bankrupt patients and their families. Denny Jordan is caught between the mob and a system that demands he put himself and his family in danger. He is in a position of what we now think of as precarity. In other words, what this film presents has its contemporary applications. A final note: Alan Jenkins as Skeets finally has a role that gives him something to work with. His character knows both the trucking business and the produce business from the inside. His character also has strength of character. As for Bogart, his character wants to control the food chain!

 A couple for Halloween month.

Carnival of Souls (1962), directed by Herk Harvey. The film reminds me of Robert Enrico's Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge, made a year earlier. There, I have given everything away. But the reason for seeing Carnival of Souls is hardly for the plot or the scares or anything horrifying and perhaps even surprising. The film is worth seeing for evidence of what beauty a film maker can bring to film with hardly any money and mostly unprofessional actors. Much of the film is visually stunning, an amalgamation of Bergman, Corman, and even the intrepid Ed Wood Jr. The locations - the organ factory in Kansas, the ruined Pavilion near Salt Lake City, the garage, the church, even the boarding house that the owner says is not a boarding house - are suitably creepy and unsettling. The opening shots before the credits invoke 1950s films about teenagers, films such as Jack Arnold's High School Confidential and even that film by Nicholas Ray, the one with the famous car race. After the credits things roll along in a rather haunting manner until the dance macabre near the end. In its strange way, the film is carnivalesque. It follows the rules but in a manner askew from what we might expect. It upturns convention and while delivering the expected gives us something unexpected. Again, it manages to do this through its imaginative and clever cinematography. As for the story, this captures something of the soulless state of affairs lurking just beneath the Camelot surface of the early 1960s. The film looks forward in both look and sensibility to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (something Romero acknowledges).

The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton. This is Henry James's spooky Turn of the Screw about the governess and the two creepy children in her charge. The cinematography is by Freddie Francis, and it is marvellously moody. The deep focus is so sharp that at times it looks as if we are seeing 3-D. The setting is grand in excellent gothic mode. The two children are as spicy as one could wish for, working in the vein of children in such films as The Bad Seed, Children of the Damned, and These Three. They smile and fawn all the time possibly playing the villain, but then again possibly not. Young Miles is especially off kilter. The opening of the film is stunningly stark and nicely ambiguous. The falling rose petals and the beetle and the turtle and the sense of decay and decadence are palpable. The house, as in The Haunting (1963), is somehow alive. Deborah Kerr manages to portray the main character in a suitably unaccountable manner. Is she overly repressed? That final kiss is so very unsettling. The primness of things simply intensifies the audacious happenings. This is a film that delivers its shivers generously. The two ghosts are strangely there; note the drops of water on the desk after one of the ghosts appears and then disappears. Having no lines, they nevertheless manage to communicate a malevolence that pervades the house and grounds of this stately country manor. 

Eyes Without a Face (1959), directed by Georges Franju. Franju said his studio wanted a horror film without blood and without a mad scientist. The film he delivered had a doctor/scientist who may be obsessed, but he is not crazed. As for blood, there is a small amount, just enough to make the viewer (or this one anyway) squirm. The plot involves a doctor who has come up with what he terms a way of grafting skin, called heterograft. He uses his technique to try and remake his daughter's face which has been severely disfigured in a car crash. Before working on humans, the good doctor has worked on dogs and he has a large number of canines in a spooky kennel beneath his mansion. These dogs will find release and revenge, of this you may be sure. The whole thing is quite delicious, and the movie has proven influential. Here's a snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the film.

"The film was re-released in its original and uncut form to American theaters on October 31, 2003. Based on 54 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Eyes Without a Face received an average 98% fresh rating with an average rating of 8.4/10. The reviewers commented on the film's poetic nature and noted the strong influence of French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader praised the film, referring to it as "absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale". J. Hoberman of The Village Voice declared the film "a masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality".[26] The Encyclopedia of Horror Films agreed with the assertion of Cocteau's influence, stating that "Franju invests [the film] with a weird poetry in which the influence of Cocteau is unmistakable". David Edelstein, writing for Slate, commented that "the storyline is your standard obsessed-mad-doctor saga, one step above a Poverty Row Bela Lugosi feature ... [b]ut it's Lugosi by way of Cocteau and Ionesco". In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. Eyes Without a Face placed at number 34 on their top 100 list."

 

A few Mizoguchi films:

Sisters of the Gion (1936), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. The final words of the film, spoken by one of the two geisha sisters, Omocha, are: "Why do there even have to be such things as geisha?" The film follows two sisters who work as geishas in the "pleasure district" of Kyoto, one traditional in thought and action and the other (the younger sister) rebellious and cynical. Neither finds the peaceful or prosperous life they might wish for. I will not outline the plot except to say that the older sister finds herself left behind by the man who had her loyalty, and the younger sister finds herself tossed from a speeding automobile by the young man she has jilted. Men, as in the earlier Osaka Elegy, are selfish and irascible. The film has beautiful tracking shots, moody lighting, and long narrow streets and alleys that suggest the confinement the characters experience. No one in this film has much room to move or to develop or to breathe. For a film of the mid 930s, it is forward looking. The only Hollywood film I can think of that is perhaps similar in its view of women is Lloyd Bacon's Marked Woman (1937).

Osaka Elegy (1936), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi often focuses on a woman in distress, and this film is his first exploration of the theme. A young telephone operator at a pharmaceutical firm, Ayato Murai, lives at home with parents who argue most of the time. Her father owes some 300 yen and he does not have the money to pay the debt. Ayato, meanwhile, finds herself the object of her boss's attentions; in short, he wants her to be his mistress. After talking with a young man and finding little help, except for his affection, she decides to meet her boss and take money from him so she can pay her father's debts. Events follow that farther entrap Ayato in a life she does not want until finally she and her young beau, Nishimura, find themselves questioned by the police. Nishimural says he has no interest in Ayako and the police let him leave. Then they offer a stern warning to Ayako and leave her under the authority of her father. She returns home where she receives, to put it mildly, an icy reception. Neither her father nor her brother (she has also taken money from a second man to pay for her brother's tuition) have any respect for her and think she should leave. She leaves home, wanders onto a bridge, meets the doctor of the family who, in effect, tells her she really has no recourse but a life of "delinquency." She walks slowly toward the camera and the film ends. Mizoguchi offers a lyrical yet sharp look at the difficulties of a woman's life. The film has elegant tracking shots and much murkiness and shadow.

Women of the Night (1948), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Despite the title, much of this film is photographed during the day, a nice way of pointing out that for the women in the film, pretty much all time, night or day, is dark. This is a raw look at post-war Japan, and especially the women, or at least some of the women, who have lost everything in the war and now have to scrabble to put their lives back together, as often as not failing in the endeavour and ending in prostitution. Mizoguchi shoots his film on the streets of Osaka using inferior film stock that renders the look of the film close to the Neo-realist films coming from Italy at the same time. Once again we have two sisters, a predatory boss, and many uncaring people. The prospects for the women here are dim, to say the least, and the final scene shot amid the rubble of a bombed out church is harrowing. The shot of the stained glass window depicting Madonna and child only reinforces the sorry state of things for these women. In this scene a gang of prostitutes gather like feral felines and attack one of the sisters and her young friend. Fusako, the elder sister, is beaten, whipped, and nearly stoned after she tries to protect her young friend and after she asserts her intention of "going straight." Mizoguchi shoots the scene from above showing the women behaving like a pack of wild animals. The action is furious and deeply troubling. A hospital does offer a sort of sanctuary for prostitutes, some of whom carry STDs, but this hospital is as much prison as it is medical centre. Surrounding it is a high stone wall topped with barbed wire. From the opening scenes in which Fusako's tubercular child dies to the unsettling end in the churchyard, the film is unrelenting in its examination of ruined lives.

Street of Shame (1956), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. This is Mizoguchi's final film, and it is an ensemble piece, focusing on five prostitutes who work for a brothel named Dreamland in Tokyo's Red Light District. Each woman has her dream of somehow finding a better way of life, and each woman finds this dream elusive, if not downright impossible. Melodrama is the order of the day, but effective melodrama. One of the women speaks of "tackling" men in order to lure them into the brothel, and this pretty much sums things up nicely. The plot, such as it is, involves the anxiety raised by the Diet's consideration of a bill that would make prostitution illegal. We see enough to know each of the five women well and understand her plight. One wants to leave and live with her now grown son, another just wants to care for her ill husband and infant, another works her tricks to save enough money to find her way into another life (she becomes owner of a shop that supplies fabric to the brothel), another marries and finds married life just another trap, and yet another simply wants to have as many material things as she can have. Near the end, another prostitute arrives, a young virginal girl terrified of the life she has entered. Her arrival, along with the defeating of the anti-prostitution bill in parliament, suggests a continuation of the street of shame. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this film is the musical score by Toshiro Mayuzumi. The sounds and clang and unusual notes provide a cacophonous accompaniment to lives lived on the edge.