A Generation (1954), directed by Andrzej Wajda. This is Wajda’s first feature film and the first of his war trilogy. The opening panning shot is worth the price of admission. Here the camera takes us on a tour of the outskirts of Warsaw as we observe the daily life (drudgery?) of the local people. Then it comes to rest on three young men playing with a knife. One of these young men, Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki), provides a voice-over and also will be the film’s protagonist. This is a coming-of-age story following this young man and also a group of young people who become involved in the Polish resistance during the Second World War. One of the group of youngsters is played by a teenaged Roman Polanski. Anyway, the filming is beautiful, providing an ironic counterpoint to the action that involves young people learning to kill. The camera is fluid as it ranges through neighbourhoods and workshops and homes and streets. The scene with the spiral staircase is powerful. The film has the sensibility of post-war neo-realism. The look of the film reminded me of Hollywood noir films, and the beginning reminded me of Ford’s The Informer. For a first feature, this film is assured and absorbing. 

Kanal (1957), directed by Andrzej Wajda. This is the second of Wajda’s war trilogy, and it ups the ante considerably. A passing reference to Dante lets us know, had we somehow been oblivious to this, that we have entered the underground in all its filthy ugly violent and punishing horror. The last third of the film takes place in the sewers of Warsaw, and a ragged troop of resistance soldiers try to make their way to the centre of the city. A voice over at the outset of the film, lets us know their fate; nevertheless, no viewer can be prepared for the way this fate plays out. Again we have Wajda’s fluid camera; the film begins with a four minute tracking shot that introduces us to the troop we will follow on their doomed journey to the underworld. Actually, they are in the underworld from the beginning (or is this purgatory?), but they simply go deeper as the action moves along. This is as harrowing an anti-war film as we could ask for. We get to know most of these soldiers and knowing them makes what happens more difficult to accept. The scenes in the sewers must be some of the most powerful in cinema. Perhaps the tone of the film is set early when one member of the troop stops to talk with a wounded girl who lies covered on a stretcher. He asks what her mother said about her joining the resistance. We have a pause. The girl then replies, “She’s dead.” The solider then asks about the young woman’s wound, and she says, "It’s nothing.” At this point, a couple of soldiers lift the stretcher and the woman’s blanket falls away revealing her legs. One leg has been amputated (or blown off) above the knee. 

 

Man of Iron (1981), directed by Andrzej Wajda. Using documentary footage folded into a fictional narrative, this film chronicles the days of the strike at the Gdansk shipyard that spread throughout Poland in 1980. Through the perspective of a reporter, Winkel (Marian Opania), we learn about the life of activist Maciej Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), from his early days as a student to his work with the shipyard union. The film manages to merge historical events with the personal lives of its main characters. Lech Walesa even makes an appearance. What strikes me as important about this film, is its peek at state-controlled media and state-controlled life in general, something uncomfortably close to what could happen in our own time and our own place. The film has an intensity born of anger and a mixture of hope and dread. Unlike Ashes and Diamonds, this film is less interested in cinematic experiment than in historical urgency.

 Some World Cinema.

Downpour (1972), directed by Braham Beyzale. Goodbye Mr. Hekmati. This Iranian film tells the bittersweet story of a young teacher who arrives at a new place and new school. The film opens with his arrival at the place where he will live, and among other belongings he brings books, a lamp, and a mirror. The books make it into his room, but the mirror and the lamp (sorry, but M. H. Abrams comes to mind) are broken before they can enter the new dwelling. Later the books will tumble from their shelves. The signs are not good, and Mr. Hekmati will have a rough time in his new job among new neighbours and new colleagues. He will also meet a young seamstress who catches his fancy. For her part, the young seamstress, Atie, has a suitor, a bullish butcher by the name of Rahim. Rahim and Hekmati become rivals, and there is an amusing sequence in which Hekmati tries to transform from the 99 pound weakling he is into someone who can take on Rahim in a fight. Late in the film, we have a night of drinking end in a funny fight between these two rivals. The film has humour and also sadness. It also has a gaggle of likeable kids who come through when it is most necessary. The kids’ show of affection for Mr. Hekmati is double-edged; it gives Mr. Hekmati his just recognition for single-handedly restoring the school assembly hall and stage, and it also precipitates his transfer away from the school and area. Thus, the film ends with a reversal of its beginning, the cart with Mr. Hekmati’s belongings now departing. Visually, the film has a few striking compositions, and we can see shades of neo-realist films, plus the influence of Kurosawa. 

 

Chess of the Wind (1976), directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Image and, after the 1920s, sound are the essence of cinema, and Chess of the Wind is a film of image and sound. It does have a doozie of a plot, but the visual sumptuousness and haunting sound are at the forefront of this examination of decadence. Long lost, the film was rediscovered in 2014 when the director’s son found it in a junk shop in Tehran. What a find. For those in the west, the film plays out as an exercise in the gothic with its action taking place inside a large and luxurious house with its wheelchair-bound matriarch who wields a mean thing-a-ma-bob with deadly force. Or does she? Punctuating the action inside this luxurious house is a repeated shot of local women washing clothes at a fountain in front of the mansion. These women serve as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the lives of the rich. The plot gives us a number of people circling the matriarch in hopes of acquiring her wealth. No one is particularly pleasant. The film was banned by the Islamic Republic, and it is easy to see why. This is a devastating critique of a social system that insists on hierarchy, and that functions on greed and corruption and even violence. Its target may be the Pahlevis dynasty in Iran, but the critique covers that which came before as well as that which came after. Most impressive for me is Aslani’s painterly sensibility manifested in the colour and compositions. The actors are also impressive, especially Fahkri Khorvash as the paraplegic Lady Junior. We are lucky to have had this film survive.

Lucia (1968), directed by Humberto Solas. This film is a product of the Cuban Revolution. It has three parts, each part giving us a different Lucia, a woman (or women) who chronicle Cuban history from the late 19^th century. Part one takes place in 1895 during the war of independence. Part 2 takes place in the early 1930s during the regime of Gerardo Machado, and Part 3 is a story from the 1960s. Each Lucia represents a different class: first the upper class, then the middle class, and finally the working class. Each episode offers a glimpse into history and the changing of social and political relationships. The emphasis is on revolution, first against Spain, then against a dictator, and finally against the patriarchy.  Solas’s camera is fluid to the point of being frenetic, and his lighting is hot, very hot. Scenes of battle across fields or brouhaha on the streets are hectic with quick and insistent cutting. The hand-held camera roves about quickly. The film somehow reminds me of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and also Soviet cinema from its early years. Aside from some furious action, Lucia presents faces, the faces of people from all classes up close and personal. This is a film of faces and furious action. It also manages to carry its revolutionary zeal heavily. What we see does not inspire optimism in revolutionary action.

Prisioneros de la Tierra (1939), directed by Mario Soffici. This Argentinian film deals with the exploitation of workers in early twentieth-century Argentina. The mensus (indentured labourers) are taken deep into the wild to work for a company clearing forest and running a mill of some kind. Their lives are controlled by the brutal mill contractor, Kohner, played by Francisco Petrone. The men are brutalized and suffer from disease, malaria and worse. To help deal with the men’s sickness, the contractor takes a doctor, Dr. Else (Raul de Lange), and his daughter with him to the yerba mate plantation. The doctor has a serious alcohol problem. He is also proud of his sturdy walking stick, an object that proves fatally dangerous. The daughter, Chinita (Elisa Galve), finds herself attracted to one of the workers, Esteban Podeley (Angel Magana), while Kohner finds himself attracted to Chinita. You can bet trouble ensues. The plot has some affinity with that in films such as High Sierra (1941) and its remake Colorado Territory (1949). To tell you this is to let you know the film shows the dark side of life. The black and white cinematography in Prisioneros de la Tierra has an expressionistic edge that highlights the jungle drudgery and dread. The film examines capitalism’s unrelenting drive of the downtrodden worker. If the film has a bright spot, this spot is to be found in the one-armed character who is always happy, and who plans to make much money by distilling orange liquor. Unfortunately for him, Dr. Else drinks all the samples of this range liquor. Undeterred, the one-armed fellow insists he is happy. 

 

Sambizanga (1972), directed by Sarah Maldoror. Maldoror worked as an assistant director on Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, and she brings the political intensity of that film to Sambizanga. This film tells the story of the arrest and incarceration of a construction worker, Domingos (Domingos de Oliviera), and the quest of his wife, Maria (Elisa Andrade) to find him. Maria, with her young son on her back, walks the long journey to Luanda seeking news of her husband. Meanwhile, Domingos is beaten by the Portuguese authorities in their effort to get him to divulge the names of members of the liberation movement. Maria finally reaches the city and tries to get information of the whereabouts of her husband. The authorities prove less than helpful. By the time Maria does locate Domingos, he has been beaten to death inside one of the city jails. The film begins and ends with powerful shots of a raging river. These shots indicate the powerful forces, emotional forces, at work that will not be quelled. As for the narrative, this begins with the apparently contented life of Domingos and Maria and their son, then moves to their separation when Domingos is arrested, and finally moves on to Maria’s doomed quest. This is a powerful film that deals with corrupt colonial authority and indomitable human drive for liberation from oppression. At one point, we have a character tell those around him that the rich need the poor in order to maintain their position of privilege and ease. The rich exploit the poor. It so happens that in Angola the rich are white Portuguese and the poor the Black Africans, but colour is not a necessity for this system of oppression to exist. As I say, this is a powerful film, simple, straight forward, and honest.

 Foreign Correspondent (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is quite an amazing film, featuring set designs by the inimitable William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come 1936, Invaders from Mars and The Maze, both 1953). The various set pieces are as good as anything in other Hitchcock films: the windmills, especially the gothic interiors, the umbrellas, the crash through the awning, and the fabulous plane crash in mid ocean leaving a few survivors clinging to a broken and detached wing of the plane. These are all memorable, and that sequence after the plane crash on the water is very convincing (it reminded me of Lifeboat). The plot turns on the bad guys’ quest to discover the contents of Article 23 (I think it is 23), an article in a treaty signed between Belgium and another country (I can’t remember what country). Article 23 was never written down; rather, it was memorized by just two people, one of whom the bad guys kidnap and torture to force him to divulge the contents of Article 23. McGuffin. The cast is attractive and fun. Joel McCrea and Larraine Day are the two young people who run into difficulties trying to sort everything out. The main villain is only half villain; he is played by the suave Herbert Marshall. Edmund Gwenne, Robert Benchley, and George Saunders come along for the ride. The script has its touches of humour. I ought to note that the cinematography here is in the more than capable hands of Rudolph Mate. This film is a lot of fun.

Suspicion (1941), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one that got away from Mr. Hitchcock. He did not get his wish to have the ending follow the ending of the book from which the screenplay derives. If you watch the film with the original ending in mind, then Johnny Asquith (Cary Grant) will give you chills. He is a ne’er-do-well playboy who charms the wealthy woman, Lina (Joan Fontaine), marries her, and then sets about to control her considerable wealth. His ultimate goal appears to be to get rid of Lina by giving her poison, arsenic. She is suspicious, and her suspicions in the book are well-founded. Not so in the film. The film’s ending negates all the suspicion and does so rather weakly. Having said this, I take note that this is a Hitchcock film and it does have his trademark touches, the ominous lighting, lush landscapes and interiors, likeable supporting players, the very Hitchcockian glass of milk, the trains and the scenes of perilous driving. Lina focalizes the action. This manipulation of point of view is also a Hitchcock trademark. 

 

Dial M for Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is Hitchcock’s first of three films with Grace Kelly, and his only film shot in 3D. Like Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), this film takes place mostly on one set, the apartment of Tony (Ray Milland) and Margot (Kelly) Wendice. The confinement to one set gives the action a claustrophobic feel; it is also a sign of the origins of the story in a stage play by Frederick Knott. We have characters and situation familiar to Hitchcock. I think of Hitch’s Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train (1951) when I see Tony Wendice. Both have a suave charm that exudes something sinister. Tony is a tennis player, and hence something of the anti-Guy Haines (Farley Granger), also from Strangers on a Train. Then we have the proposed murder. Here Tony bamboozles, or more specifically blackmails, his old school mate, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) into carrying out the dastardly deed. The action turns on objects, as so often in Hitchcock, here a latchkey (or a number of latchkeys), a pair of scissors, a scarf, a letter, and various items that decorate the apartment. So much depends upon characters, and the cast here deliver engaging performances, especially Milland as Tony and John Williams as Chief Inspector Hubbard. As far as Hitchcock films go, this one is, perhaps, not top drawer, but it does have its charms. And one very Hitchcockian moment is when the murderer falls to the floor with scissors in his back and we watch those scissors slide deeply into him as his weight presses down. The dark side of genius indeed.

 

The Trouble with Harry (1955), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The opening credits pan along a line of what look like a child’s drawings of birds and trees and such pastoral images until we stop on a corpse. The illustrations are by an uncredited Saul Steinberg, and they set things up nicely. The film offers pastoral of the macabre. Set in and around Morrisville, Vermont in the autumn, the film boasts gorgeous shots of the countryside with its fall colours. In the beginning, we see a young boy with his plastic ray gun wandering this lovely countryside until he comes upon the body of a man. Thus begins a caper involving this dead body. I’ve lost count of how many times the other characters in the film bury, exhume and rebury this body – poor deceased Harry. Was he murdered? Who murdered him? Such questions hardly matter. What matters is the grisly goings-on carried out with insouciance. Apparently, Hitchcock liked this film, and we can see why. It is wry and gruesome, reminding me of Hitchcock’s mischievous introductions to his television programme. Part of the joke rests in the film’s lack of a set-piece such as a chase on a national monument or suspense of the who-done-it. This is, after all, pastoral, and pastoral delivers a world attractive in its pleasantries. I suspect even the so-called genius artist here is part of the joke. Art really is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case the rather myopic millionaire who offers to buy all the artist’s work. The film is a lark.

 

To Catch a Thief (1955), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is another innocent-man-out-to prove-his-innocence film from the master. The master, however, dozes through this one. Here the man-on-the-run plot makes way for the romance of two sophisticates, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, both at their most icy, witty, and attractive selves. Awkward sentence for an awkward film. But Hitchcock serves up some sumptuous location shooting, and a lavish party scene. The characters are decidedly not the hoi polloi. We are among the wealthy set on the Riviera, where a retired jewel thief, John Robie (Grant), finds himself the object of a police hunt because the police assume he is the perpetrator of a series of jewel heists. He must elude the police while proving his innocence, all the time romancing a wealthy heiress, Frances Stevens (Kelly), who first accepts his innocence, then does not, then does, and so on until the two of them finally come together in the most fairy tale of endings. The film is certainly lush, but it is also slight.

 

North by Northwest (1959), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This thriller was fun the first two or three times I saw it. It is still fun. It has, perhaps, more set pieces than any other Hitchcock: the scene in the United Nations building, the chase down the faces on Mount Rushmore, strangers meeting on a train, the drunken drive down the mountain road, the wacky antics during an auction, and pre-eminently the corn field scene. The latter remains a masterclass in building suspense in an environment so clear and open that nothing could disturb the stillness. “That’s funny. That airplane is dusting crops where there ain’t any crops.” Indeed. The plot is typical of Hitchcock’s insistence on the wrong man theme, the innocent caught in a web of intrigue. Here the intrigue has something to do with a man who does not exist, spies, the Cold War, an icy blond, and a suave villain with a trio of henchmen, one of whom, Leonard (Martin Landau), has more than a passing interest in his boss. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint make an attractive romantic pair. As I say, the film is a lot of fun. It does, however, take a willing suspension of disbelief, especially nowadays, because the back and front projections and sound stages fitted out for various locales (a forest near Mount Rushmore, for example) are so obvious. Note the dining car scene on the train. The train is traveling from New York to Chicago, yet out the window we have a scene passing by (a couple of shots repeated) that looks nothing like upper New York State, at least to my eyes. But I quibble. Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendal on the run make for exciting, witty, and even suspenseful adventure.

 

I Confess (1953), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The exteriors for this film were shot in Quebec City, and we have some lovely reminders of the beauty of this city. Montgomery Clift plays Father Logan, a priest who hears the confession of someone who has committed a murder, and soon after finds himself accused of the same murder. Of course, he cannot betray what he has heard in confession even though this means he must go to trial for murder. The film is something of a dry run for The Wrong Man (1956), and like that film, I Confess is dark and dour. Despite the real killer being exposed at the finale, none of the characters emerges unscathed. The deep black and white with dark streets, shadows and other trimmings of cinema noir accentuate the difficulty the characters face. The one flashback, shot from the point of view of Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), is bright and sunny, contrasting the action in the ‘present’ time. The contrast of light and dark is, perhaps, at the centre of the film, as is the contrast between reason and faith. Hitchcock appears very early in the film, crossing the screen laterally and in extreme distance suggesting a certain distance from the proceedings, a certain absence of humour felt throughout the film.

 

Stage Fright (1950), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Is it Elsie, Phyllis, or Mavis? No, that would be Doris who is not really Doris but rather Eve. Such is the delight of Stage Fright, a film that has one of Hitchcock’s most outrageous tricks. He enjoys manipulating his audience and here he does this with a flashback right at the beginning of the film. He also turns the tables on the man-on-the-run theme that is front and central to so many of his films. And then we have the cast. The performances are superb, especially those of Alastair Sim, Richard Todd, Jane Wyman, Michael Wilding, and Marlene Dietrich. Joyce Grenfell as “Lovely Ducks” has a small but very amusing part. We have many of the Hitchcock touches: the opening curtain that tells us we are entering a play in which all the characters are performing roles, the doll that seems so important at the time, but really is something of a diversion, the fair (put to even more extensive use in the following year’s Strangers on a Train), the family that functions, but barely, the humour, the superimposed shots, and so on. We even have musical numbers, "La Vie en Rose" and "The Laziest Girl in Town," allowing Dietrich to play her sultry best. The film reminds me of Billy Wilder’s Witness For the Prosecution. Saying this is something of a spoiler.

 

Notorious (1946), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one about drinking, about patriotism in the extreme, about government callousness, and about a mother and a father, especially a mother. Oh, it is also a spy thriller, set just after the Second World War and involving uranium (the atomic threat). The film uses rear projection extensively and the technique seems somehow appropriate in a film dealing with subterfuge and sleight of hand (literally in the scene with the key change). We also have many close-ups of bottles, of glasses, of cups and saucers to drive home the ominous aspect of drinking. It can be lethal! The morality of using a young woman's sexuality to obtain information is questionable, and the hero is possibly less likeable than the villain. Leopoldine Konstantin, in her only American film, plays Claude Rains's mother; she is memorable. Hitchcock appears about an hour into the film, drinking a glass of champagne at a party. He exits quickly. This is not my favourite of Hitchcock's films, but it just might be his first fully-formed Hitchcock movie with all his signature elements, a central love story that centres on trust and suspicion, a camera that has a voyeuristic lens, a playful manipulation of objects, framing that limits the characters' actions, and so on.

 

Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one with the Salvador Dali designed dreamscape, and this sequence is memorable. Also memorable are the straight razor and the over-sized pistol, typical Hitchcock quirks. I will add the skiing scene which is memorable for its silly amateurish filming. And finally we have the stuff about psychoanalysis that will strike us a dated now. We even have a doctor, Dr. Brulov (Michael Checkhov), who not only mentions Freud, but who looks like Freud. The story involves amnesia, guilt complexes, romance, and an on-the-run couple. The film somehow leaves me flat, but it does have its moments. I confess that John Ballantyne”s (Gregory Peck) tendency to recoil and even faint at the sight of straight lines leaves me unconvinced. But both Peck and Ingrid Bergman as Dr. Constance Peterson are likeable actors, and they manage to capture our sympathy as the couple trying to figure out what makes the Peck character faint and fall every so often. Of course this has something to do with childhood trauma. The film also has a parade of other familiar actors: Wallace Ford, Leo G. Carroll, Rhonda Fleming, John Emery, and Regis Toomey. Toomey has, I think, one line and Wallace Ford does not have many more. This may not be the best of Hitchcock’s films, but it is clearly a work of the master.

 

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Small town America, homemade apple pie and ice cream, family dinners, friendly neighbours, pretty houses and gardens, a family of five, and then along comes Uncle Charlie. Shadow of a Doubt may lack the set-pieces we see in famous Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest or Psycho or Foreign Correspondent, but it does have Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) reminds me of another Hitchcock villain, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) from Strangers on a Train (1951). Both are suave, loquacious, wily, and devious. Both are, perhaps, just a tad loony. Uncle Charlie’s dinner-table diatribe against rich widows is chilling and at the same time hilarious. The plot has Charlie visiting his sister’s family in a tidy town somewhere in California. Uncle Charlie’s niece (Teresa Wright), named Charlie after him, begins to suspect that her uncle is not all he pretends to be, and herein begins the intrigue. The father of the family, Joseph Newton (Henry Travers) is an unsuspecting innocent who likes to spend his time discussing ways to murder people with his neighbour, Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn). These two provide a rather macabre humour, a typically Hitchcockian humour. I often say that Strangers on a Train is my favourite Hitchcock film, largely because of Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony, but I will add that Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie comes in a close second.