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A PROPOS DE NICE
***½
France
The first of Jean Vigo's four films: an early short
satire of the bourgeoisie, posing as a travelogue and unfolding solely
through images - no dialogue or title cards. Something of a curiosity piece,
but still quite fresh and evocative.
wr/dir: Jean Vigo
L'AGE D'OR
*****
France
Arguably the greatest and second-most influential of the features that came
out of André Breton's official Surrealist Group, this one was made right
after Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) and
it proved even more scandalous. (Banned in France within a week of its
premiere, it practically disappeared for the next forty years.)
The picture consists of five barely related segments, the most
prominent of which revolves around a horny young couple fighting against
obscure obstacles to consummate their love. It's a fierce attack on the
aristocracy and the Church - Buñuel's perennial
targets for the next 50 years - with a dream-like feel and lots of abstract
symbolism.
As you might suspect, it's not unpretentious and neither is it
flawless, but it's often savagely funny and bizarrely poetic and just
generally unlike anything else you'll ever see. (Dali also played a major
role in its conception, but abandoned the project after the first day of
shooting.)
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel,
Salvador Dali
cast: Gaston Modot, Lya
Lys, Max Ernst, Pierre Prévert, Jacques Brunius
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
****½
ANNA CHRISTIE
***
USA
"Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And
don't be stingy, baby." Garbo talks!
Garbo also contorts her face quite brutally, along with a couple
of veterans - they're alcoholics, you see. She looks beautiful and seems to
be carrying the best and most heartfelt intentions in her acting approach,
but she doesn't pull it off half as well as the mannered, theatrical,
incomparable Marie Dressler, who has a ball as a drunken old tramp near the
start, and then practically disappears from the film all too soon.
dir: Clarence Brown
cast: Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George Marion, Marie
Dressler
ANIMAL CRACKERS
****½
THE BIG TRAIL
***½
USA
John Wayne's first starring gig, this is a pretty arbitrary Western that
sometimes breaks into sequences of startling grandeur. It's also considerably
livelier than the majority of early talkies.
dir: Raoul Walsh
ph: Lucien Andriot, Arthur Edeson
cast: John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall,
Tyrone Power Sr
THE BLOOD OF A POET
***
THE BLUE ANGEL
****
CITY GIRL
**½
USA
A city waitress marries into the country.
Reportedly this project was taken out of Murnau's
hands at the last minute, and it shows. He goes over much of the ground he
covered in "Sunrise" (1927), but the beauty and sensitivity of that
picture are missing. There's little left.
dir: F. W. Murnau
cast: Charles Farrell, Mary Duncan, David Torrence,
Edith Yorke, Dawn O'Day
EARTH
****½
USSR
A landowner faces antagonism in a Ukrainian village.
An artful, poetic meditation on the natural cycle of birth and
death. Rather than as demonstrations of technical bravado, the elaborate
montages serve as cinematic ceremonies to the beauty and vitality, the joys
and cruelties of nature and humanity as its offspring. Although indulgent in
its earnestness, it carries a strong weapon in the peasants' authentic,
mesmerising faces, with their skin hardened and reddened by decades of
battling the fields. Although financed as a lesson in collectivisation, it
differs distinctly in tone from other Soviet propaganda of the period (which
is why it ran into some trouble with the censors).
wr/dir/ed:
Alexander Dovzhenko
ph: Danilo Demutsky
cast: Semyon Svashenko,
Stephan Shkurat, Mikola Nademsky, Yelena Maximova
HELL'S
ANGELS
****½
USA
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LITTLE CAESAR
***½
USA
The story of Rico Bandello was among the first half-dynamic Hollywood talkies
and, although not the first, probably the defining gangster picture. Though
it's more alive and engaging than a lot of things made around the time, it
hasn't dated sensationally well. As directed by the rarely exciting Mervyn LeRoy, it lacks the zest and tension of the other
genre-defining classics, like Scarface and The Public Enemy.
But in his star-making role, Edward G. Robinson is still vivid and wonderful
to watch. He went on to do much more nutritious parts but remained closely
identified with Rico throughout his career.
dir: Mervyn LeRoy
cast: Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Glenda
Farrell, William Collier Jr., Ralph Ince, George E.
Stone, Thomas Jackson, Lucille LaVerne
MONTE CARLO
***½
USA
Lubitsch had his way with Jeanette MacDonald years before she was a virgin. In
this early musical, she is tart, sassy and even sexy - picture Joan Blondell
if she had traded some cleavage for a soprano.
McDonald plays a penniless countess, with a patently homosexual
count romancing her. The writers, working off a Booth Tarkington novel (among
other sources), have a tough time filling out the plot and perpetually
postponing the happy reunion. It's an awkward little thing, but Lubitsch gives
it plenty of charm and wit.
dir: Ernst Lubitsch
cast: Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Buchanan, ZaSu Pitts, Claude
Allister, Lionel Belmore, Tyler Brooke, John Roche, Albert Conti
MOROCCO
*****
MURDER
**
UK
An actor serving as a juror at a murder trial is convinced the accused young
actress is innocent.
Dated, leaden melodrama from Hitchcock's early years.
dir: Alfred Hitchcock
cast: Herbert Marshall, Norah Baring, Phyllis Konstam,
Edward Chapman, Miles Mander
PEOPLE ON SUNDAY
***½
PRIX DE BEAUTÉ
***
France
A bored typist enters the Miss Europe beauty pageant despite her fiancé's
objections.
One of those movies begun as a silent, with dialogue crudely
dubbed in later. You can tell it's European because
it prizes the young woman's liberty over the righteous path her selfish
working-class boyfriend represents. Sadly, it veers further and further into
melodrama as it goes along, but Brooks remains remarkably naturalistic
throughout. Against odds, she fleshes out a relatable character and grants
the picture some dignity. A strikingly beautiful, clearly intelligent woman,
this was her first French production and last major screen role. Her singing
voice is none other than Edith Piaf's. René Clair is credited with the
original idea and, though it's easy to see why he passed it on to someone
else, you wish he'd stuck around a bit longer.
dir: Augusto Genina
cast: Louise Brooks, Georges Charlia,
Augusto Bandini, André Nicolle
SALT FOR SVANETIA
****½
USSR
A haunting, superbly crafted propagandist docudrama about an isolated,
impoverished Georgian community and its various customs and rituals, which
verge on pagan and self-destructive. Highly reminiscent of Alexander Dovzhenko's "Earth" - and in many ways its
equal - but sadly forgotten.
wr/dir: Mikheil
Kalatozishvili
ph: Shalva Gegelashvili, Mikheil Kalatozishvili
THE TALE OF THE
FOX
*****
France
The gullible, much-abused animal kingdom turns against the crafty, amoral
Fox.
One of the earliest feature-length animated films, this
dazzling, delightful stop-motion masterpiece has been criminally neglected.
It took ten years for forgotten genius Starewicz
and his team to finish it, and they reportedly went through great pains to
achieve the creatures' realistic look. But beyond marveling
at the technical innovation, the great joy of this - and Starewicz's
other films - is to watch even the technical limitations overwhelmed by an
odd, dark and wonderful imagination, with delightful, distinctly individual
characters and gorgeous, meticulously detailed sets.
dir: Ladislaw Starewicz
voices of: Claude Dauphin, Romain
Bouquet, Laine, Sylvain Itkine,
Léon Larive, Robert
Seller, Eddy Debray, Nicolas Amato, Pons, Sylvia Battaile, Suzy Dornac
UNDER THE ROOFS
OF PARIS
***½
France
A Parisian street singer falls for a shy Romanian girl involved with a
gangster.
Clair uses mostly music and a minimum of dialogue, opting
instead to structure this film as a silent one, which detracts from its
energy - particularly in the first half hour. But it offers charming,
naturalistic performances, and a number of wonderfully romantic scenes - as
well as a stunningly staged final showdown - that stack up to leave you
feeling good.
wr/dir: René Clair
ph: Georges Périnal
cast: Albert Préjean, Pola Illery, Gaston Modot, Edmond Gréville
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