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L'ATALANTE
*****
France
Jean Vigo's only full-length feature is a poem, a tonic, a precious, precious
thing. A breezy, entrancing love story, with Jean Dasté and Dita Parlo as
naive newlyweds (both of them profoundly sexy in an unassuming way) embarking
upon their non-honeymoon aboard his shabby, cluttered barge. The brash,
uncouth and just generally priceless Michel Simon is the first mate.
It's impossible to determine the precise elements that combine
into the film's dreamy, intoxicating pull. But Vigo was certainly onto
something with all this combining of purposely, charmingly clumsy naturalism
and unshowy but piercing surrealism. It's as close as any piece of art could
hope to get to evoking the rich, bracing gust of human desire, of sensuality
and longing.
dir: Jean Vigo
wr: Jean Vigo, Albert Riéra, Jean Guinée
ph: Louis Berger, Boris Kaufman, Jean-Paul Alphen
ed: Louis Chavance
m: Maurice Jaubert
ad: Jean-Louis Bompoint, Francis Jourdain
cast: Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo, Michel Simon, Gilles Margaritis,
Louis Lefebvre, Maurice Gilles, Raphaël Dilligent, Jacques Prévert,
Pierre Prévert
THE BLACK CAT
**½
CHAPAYEV
***½
USSR
A long time ago, this biopic of a legendary Red Army commander was greeted
with the kind of adulation normally reserved for Eisenstein. It hasn't aged
terribly well, but it's notable in its portrait of a Russian war hero as more
fallible (and less statue-like) than is ordinary for this period and the
battle sequences are as accomplished as you'd expect.
dir: Georgi Vasilyev, Sergei Vasilyev
cast: Boris Babochkin, Leonid Kmit, Varvara Myasnikova, Boris Blinov,
Illarion Pevtsov, Stepan Shkurat, Vyacheslav Volkov
CLEOPATRA
***½
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
***
DAMES
***
DEATH TAKES A
HOLIDAY
**½
USA
This self-serious allegory is mostly known as the source for 1998's
three-hour meditation Behold Joe Black's Natural Highlights. Fredric
March plays Death in the form of a sleazy mortal with a habit of veering into
thunderous tangents on Life and Youth and Love and Futility. Mitchell
Leisen's first directing gig this was, and in later years he would grow very
adept at selling syrupy-fatalistic romanticism. But here he gets bogged down.
dir: Mitchell Leisen
ph: Charles Lang
cast: Fredric March, Evelyn Venable, Guy Standing, Katharine
Alexander, Gail Patrick, Helen Westley, Kathleen Howard, Kent Taylor, Henry
Travers
FOG
OVER FRISCO
***½
THE GAY DIVORCEE
****
THE GODDESS
**½
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
*****
IT'S A GIFT
****
USA
dir: Norman Z. McLeod
cast: W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard, Jean Rouverol, Julian
Madison, Tommy Bupp, Baby LeRoy, Charles Sellon, Tammany Young, Morgan
Wallace, Josephine Whittell
JUDGE
PRIEST
***½
USA
LILIOM
***½
France
LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW?
****
USA
Frank Borzage is saddled with a portentous, awkward mediocrity of a
screenplay - about the state of [un]employment in Weimar Germany, no less -
and he renders it into something tender and radiant. It's still preachy, to
be sure, but rather than delusions of grandeur, there is conviction behind
the humanity.
dir: Frank Borzage
ph: Norbert Brodine
cast: Douglass Montgomery, Margaret Sullavan, Alan Hale,
Catherine Doucet, Fred Kohler, Mae Marsh, DeWitt Jennings, Alan Mowbray,
Hedda Hopper
THE LOST PATROL
**½
USA
One of those movies where an unseen, anti-Western enemy systematically,
unfeelingly eliminating stranded soldiers, with slasher-film precision and
the actors' order of billing as the sole consideration. Victor McLaglen heads
this particular crew: British military unit (including Boris Karloff as a
religious fanatic) fighting them sneaky Arabs in the Mesopotamian desert in
1917. As soon as anyone veers off on the I-coulda-been-a-schoolteacher (or
equivalent) tangent, you know they're doomed. It's the strained lyricism
though, and not the formula, that makes this a tough sit.
dir: John Ford
m: Max Steiner
cast: Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, Wallace Ford, Reginald Denny,
J.M. Kerrigan, Billy Bevan, Alan Hale, Brandon Hurst, Douglas Walton, Sammy
Stein, Howard Wilson
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MAN OF ARAN
****
UK
Flaherty's majestic documentary of the coastal community of the isolated Aran
islands and their dependence on the ferocious sea. Parts of it are obviously
staged, though that doesn't diminish its impact. Flaherty dabbles with
self-conscious avant-gardism through some of the editing techniques he
employs, though he retains at all times the basic human interest in the story
of courageous, hard-working people surviving day to day in a daunting,
terrifying landscape.
dir/ph/ed: Robert J. Flaherty
m: John Greenwood
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
****
THE MAN WITH TWO
FACES
***
USA
A routine suspense melodrama, chiefly distinguished by the rare chance it
affords Edward G. Robinson to play pompous. He excels at it.
dir: Archie Mayo
cast: Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, Ricardo Cortez, Mae
Clarke, Louis Calhern, John Elderidge, A.S. Byron, Henry O'Neill
THE MERRY WIDOW
****
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
***
OUR DAILY BREAD
**½
USA
Comfortably among the worst well-intentioned pictures ever made, King Vidor's
labour of love has the morbid fascination reserved for the most brutally
misconceived of solemn sermons. Vidor's social conscience blinded him against
any notions of artistic integrity, thus allowing him to found this paean to
communal living upon an infantile plot and some astonishingly stilted acting
(over-enthusiastic leading man Tom Keene is particularly beguiling to watch).
Along with the cartoonish communist ideals however, Vidor also borrowed some
montage techniques from the Russians, so he caps off an hour of crude
didacticism with a famous irrigation sequence, the slick execution of which
makes the slack-jawed simple-mindedness of everything leading up to it that
much more confounding.
dir: King Vidor
cast: Tom Keene, Karen Morley, John Qualen, Barbara Pepper, Addison
Richards, Harry Holman, Billy Engle, Henry Hall, Ray Spiker
THE RICHEST GIRL
IN THE WORLD
**½
USA
The richest girl in the world poses as her own secretary to test the love of
a prospective husband.
The premise sounds as if it was conceived for a screwball
comedy, but it's played straight, so it basically comes off as soap opera.
Hopkins is barely allowed to breathe, and her co-stars look like they never
learned how. A contemporary version would very much suit the likes of Freddie
Prinze Jr. or Lindsay Lohan.
dir: William A. Seiter
wr: Norman Krasna
cast: Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Henry Stephenson,
Reginald Denny
THE SCARLET EMPRESS
*****
USA
Some years before Citizen Kane, Hollywood had already reached a grand,
lurid, entrancing, mind-boggling peak when Josef von Sternberg plunged
Dietrich into the baroque spectacle that was Catherine the Great's life. It's
entirely likely that Empress Elizabeth did not favour a monumental,
malevolently crouching granite eagle for a throne; nor would she have
decorated her court with gnarled gargoyles for candleholders. But precisely
because of the gargoyles, the improbable gowns, the outsized --- glowering courtesans
and grinning lunatics
Dietrich contributed more to the cinema as an icon than as an actress, and
this means that several of her first-rate performances remain
underappreciated. Consider though, what other face could have kept afloat of
this kind of sprawling, slithering, sublimely grotesque orgy? For the film's
first half, you breathe with her, and by the time she morphs from wide-eyed
naïf to crushed pawn to mercenary seductress to consummate politician, you've
no breath left.
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
****
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS
****½
THE THIN MAN
****
THREE SONGS OF
LENIN
****½
USSR
A wide-eyed deification of Lenin, less impressive for Vertov's horndom over
the deceased ideologue than for his mastery of montage and composition. On a
purely visceral level it's a thrilling piece of cinema.
dir/ed: Dziga Vertov
ph: Mark Magidson, Bentsion Monastyrsky, Dmitri Surensky
TWENTIETH CENTURY
****
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