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CÉSAR
*****
France
The deeply satisfying resolution
to the wonderful Fanny trilogy, which has regularly been referred to as
Marcel Pagnol's trilogy even though this was the only part he
directed. All of the warmth, wit and character insight of "Marius" (1931)
and Fanny (1932) spill over into
this concluding chapter, which finally adopts as its title the name of the
trilogy's earthy, delightful protagonist.
wr/dir: Marcel Pagnol
cast: Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Fernand Charpin,
André Fouché, Marcel Maupi, Paul Dullac, Robert Vattier, Edouard
Delmont, Alida Rouffe, Milly Mathis
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE
**½
THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE
***½
DESIRE
****
USA
Gary Cooper plays an American car-engineer holidaying in Europe, who falls
for Marlene Dietrich as a
glamourous jewel thief. Screwball ensues.
Cooper is really just the poor man's Cary Grant, and
producer Ernst Lubitsch
would have done better to take care of the pace rather than the schedule.
But Dietrich's swaying of her monumentally arched, pencil-line
eyebrows passes nicely for duplicity, and it's terribly silly to complain
about technical things when there is such
crisp dialogue and so much fun to be had.
dir: Frank Borzage
wr: Edwin Justus Meyer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein
ph: Charles Lang, Victor Milner
ad: Hans Dreiser, Robert Usher
cast: Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, John Halliday, Zeffie
Tilbury, Ernset Cossart, Alan Mowbray, Akim Tamiroff
DODSWORTH
*****
THE
EX-MRS. BRADFORD
***
USA
It's possible that Myrna Loy was temporarily unavailable for a Thin Man
sequel so RKO decided to shove Jean Arthur along with William Powell into the next
available mix of screwball and whodunnit. He's
a doctor and she's a writer of murder mysteries. At the beginning of the
picture they're divorced, so naturally they get themselves tangled up in -
what else? - a real-life murder mystery.
It's B-grade material with some fun in it. It's a shame
however, that these two stars, among
Hollywood's most charming and sophisticated, were never re-teamed
for a better script.
dir: Stephen Roberts
cast: William Powell, Jean Arthur, James Gleason, Eric Blore,
Robert Armstrong
FOLLOW THE FLEET
***
USA
One of the less memorable
Astaire-Rogers musicals. The numbers are still enjoyable but the action
drags in between. The highlight is a monkey.
dir: Mark Sandrich
cast: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Harriet
Hilliard, Astrid Allwyn, Harry Beresford, Lucille Ball, Betty Grable
FURY
***½
Fritz Lang's first American hit
- and it was a big one - was this
odd, excitable condemnation of mob mentality, the legal system and
just about all things American.
Spencer Tracy plays an innocent man jailed in a small town and pursued by a vengeful mob.
The picture is alternately tense and laughable, layered
and hysterical, powerful and preachy. Above all however, it is notable for introducing
Germanic stylistics to the all-American small-town setting.
dir: Fritz Lang
cast: Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney, Walter Abel, Edward Ellis,
Walter Brennan, Bruce Cabot
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH
***½
THE GREAT
ZIEGFELD
**
LIBELED
LADY
****
USA
Four mega stars project and enunciate their way though
this typically zany
and enjoyable screwball comedy. Spencer Tracy is
a newspaper man, who convinces his
fiancé - Jean Harllow in her final performance - to marry an ex-employee
(William Powell) in order to manipulate an heiress (where Powell goes,
Myrna Loy must follow) out of
suing him for libel.
dir: Jack Conway
cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy,
Walter Connolly, Charley Grapewin, Cora Witherspoon, E. E. Clive,
Bunny Beatty
MODERN TIMES
*****
MARY OF SCOTLAND
**
MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN
***½
MY MAN GODFREY
*****
OSAKA ELEGY
****½
Japan
Telephone operator Ayako begs her bosses to take pity on her impoverished
and soon to be incarcerated father, argues her suitor ought to be ready to
go to jail instead, then scolds her father at home for cowering and
complaining without searching for a solution. She becomes her boss'
mistress to settle the family's debt and is inevitably ostracised for it.
Melodramas this mature and switched-on are rare and Kenji
Mizoguchi's is decades ahead of its time in the topics it tackles, the acuteness
and the naturalism with which it tackles them as well as its sophisticated visual
style (every composition is a lesson in elegance). The heroine is
essentially a victim of social mores but Mizoguchi refuses to exploit her victimhood
and Isuzu Yamada - who, decades later, made a memorable Lady Macbeth for
Kurosawa - plays her with suitable pluck.
dir: Kenji Mizoguchi
wr: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda, Tadashi Fujiwara
ph: Minoru Miki
cast: Isuzu Yamada, Seiichi Takegawa, Chiyoko Okura,
Shinpachiro Asaka, Benkei Shiganoya, Yôko Umemura, Kensaku Hara
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UNE
PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE
***½
France
The forty minutes of footage which Jean Renoir shot along the way of an
adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant story have been routinely hailed as a
masterpiece. Around the half-hour mark, from a crude comedy about a
Parisian merchant's family picnic in the country, it evolves rather
abruptly into a tragedy. Intertitles fill in the gaps in the story left
over from unshot material.
Renoir, with his talented nephew Claude as DOP, has a lovely,
lyrical way of capturing light and landscape that is openly indebted to
the Impressionists. There is something pointedly unsettling however, about a
heroine who is left to recall her rape as the happiest time of her life.
wr/dir: Jean Renoir
ph: Claude Renoir
cast: Sylvia Bataille, Georges D'Arnooux, Jane Marken, André
Gabriello, Jacques B. Brunius, Paull Temps
THE
PETRIFIED FOREST
***
USA
A creaky stage adaptation based around a metaphorical showdown between
impotent intellectualism and brute, virile force. As a suicidal writer,
Leslie Howard is swallowed up by his florid monologues, while Bette Davis
- who very possibly hasn't experienced humility, naivety or selflessness
in her life - is cast as a humble, naive truckstop barmaid sacrificing her
dreams for the sake of others. Only Humphrey Bogart, in his breakout role
as the gangster who holds them hostage, seems to be breathing.
dir: Archie Mayo
cast: Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve
Tobin, Dick Foran, Charley Grapewin, Porter Hall
REMBRANDT
**½
UK
A by-the-numbers prestige biopic, occasionally infused with charm by
its performers. At one point, Laughton, that is, Rembrandt, is made to say
about a just-finished painting: "It is a great moment - as when a
shoemaker completes a new pair of boots."
dir: Alexander Korda
cast: Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Gertrude Lawrence,
John Bryning, Edward Chapman, Walter Hudd, Roger Livesey
SABOTAGE
***½
SAN FRANCISCO
**½
SECRET AGENT
***½
SISTERS OF THE GION
****½
Japan
Between Osaka Elegy and this singularly elegant indictment of a
society that suffocates women with tradition and discourages them from
pragmatism, 1936 was the year that Kenji Mizoguchi came into his feminist,
visually ravishing own (or so we are led to assume, since few of his
earlier films have survived). The matchless Isuzu Yamada plays the younger
and more proactive of two geisha sisters battling to secure patronage and
a comfortable lifestyle in a tainted Tokyo district. Mizoguchi's
compositions are as evocative as they are innovative and Yamada's plucky
anti-heroine is among the most engaging and fully realised movie portraits of Japanese
womanhood.
dir: Kenji Mizoguchi
wr: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
ph: Minoru Miki
cast: Isuzu Yamada, Yôko Umemura, Benkei Shiganoya, Eitarô
Shindô, Taizô Fukami, Fumio Okura
THE
STORY OF A CHEAT
***½
France
A picaresque tale of the maturation of a con artist narrated by
writer-director-star-likely-egomaniac Sacha Guitry in non-stop voiceover
commentary with occasional dialogue interludes. It's a delight, but it's
exhausting.
wr/dir: Sacha Guitry
cast: Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, Roger
Duchesne, Rosine Deréan, Elmire Vautier, Serge Grave, Pauline Carton
SWING TIME
***½
THINGS TO COME
***½
UK
This is the Serious kind of sci-fi, with a lot of grim warnings about
man's incapacities. It
begins in 1940, then moves through a bunch of world wars and plagues until
a century later, when man attempts to walk on the moon.
The best chunks
are shot and edited in a manner reminiscent of silent cinema, but the film
loses all credibility any time somebody has to speak (it's another one of
those semi-early talkies that would have worked much better as a silent
picture). H.G. Wells adapted his novel "The Shape of Things to
Come" into a screenplay and no one seems to have read it out loud
before the shoot began - the dialogue is unspeakable. A group of normally
dependable actors - along with a busload of wooden, anonymous ones - make
utter fools of themselves. The futuristic togas they have to wear in the
closing sections don't help either.
Visually however, the picture is
astounding. William Cameron Menzies, who directed, was a master production
designer and the sets in this film (though credited to Vincent Korda) are
as elegant and majestic as those he would design three years later for a
certain famous romantic epic set in the American Old South.
dir: William Cameron Menzies
wr: H.G. Wells
ph: Georges Périnal
pd: Vincent Korda
cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson,
Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Maurice Braddell, Ann Todd
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