ACE IN THE HOLE
****½
THE AFRICAN QUEEN
****
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**½
USA
You'd expect the combination of Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney to yield
a classic, but when it happened, it really didn't work. It's maybe
one of the first cases of Americans horribly mishandling otherwise
perfectly decent British humour. Where Carroll's heroine was
sweetly naive and tempestuous, Disney's variation is bland and
condescending. Where the original story was strange and inventive, here it
becomes rambling and inconsequential. Everybody pauses far too long
between sentences and they break into song just about every time you
really wish they didn't (the songs themselves are poorly contrived and
repeated ad nauseam). The colours are bright and pretty enough, but the
whole thing comes off as generally lifeless. Easily the weakest of the
features that Disney himself supervised.
dir: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
****
THE DAY
THE EARTH STOOD STILL
****
USA
A lot like a Spielberg movie made about twenty years before he
managed to make his first. A precocious, fatherless boy makes friends with
a benign extra-terrestrial, here on Earth to promote world peace and
cosmic balance.
What’s striking about this polished, HUAC-era B-movie is its leftist
slant. The gun-vaporising robots and humanoid space vegetables that
inescapably formed the villains in cheap Hollywood horrors of the 50s are
here awarded the role of heroes. There is a heroine also – played by a
young, commanding Patricia Neal – who is infinitely more assertive and
life-like than the vacant shrieking starlets that were a staple of the
genre during this period.
dir: Robert Wise
wr: Edmund H. North
cast: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam
Jaffe, Billy Gray
DIARY
OF A COUNTRY PRIEST
*****
France
Generally considered the film wherein conflicted-but-devout Christian
Robert Bresson found his modernist mojo, this lucid, luminous probe into a
cancerous young curate's spiritual crisis could quite comfortably be
classified as a cornerstone of European art cinema. Bresson spurns
traditional plot machinations and lets his [anti-]hero's murky interior
life determine the course and pace of the story .
"I don't think I'm doing anything wrong in writing down
daily, with absolute frankness, the simplest and most insignificant
secrets of a life actually lacking any trace of mystery," announces
the priest at the outset, before going on to grapple with the grave,
searing and fundamental mysteries of life and death. The patience, the
purity and the soft-hearted rigour with which Bresson presents these
render a subdued, austere psychological battle with the epic force and
wrenching fatalism of a war film.
Though he's
desperately eager to engage with you both intellectually and emotionally,
Bresson won't play to any of your biases. Irrespective of whether you're
an atheist or a believer, Bresson won't offer you any concessions. Part of
the picture's impact stems from this very attitude, which ensures that
even heathens can tap into the various beauties, conflicts and
transcendences of faith and a life based on religion.
wr/dir: Robert Bresson
ph: Leonce-Henri Burel
m: Jean-Jacques Grunenwald
ed: Paulette Robert
cast: Claude Laydu, Jean Riveyre, Andre Guibert, Nicole
Maurey, Nicole Ladmiral, Marie-Monique Arkell, Martine Lemaire,
Antoine Balpetre, Jean Danet, Gaston Severin
EARLY
SUMMER
***½
FANFARES OF LOVE
***½
Germany
The German gender-bending original that was remade into Some Like It Hot.
It's awkward compared to Wilder's film (which does, in fact, borrow many
scenes) and Borsche and Thomalla have lesser range and much more prominent
Adam's apples than Curtis and Lemmon. But they're lots of fun in their own
right.
dir: Kurt Hoffmann
cast: Dieter Borsche, Georg Thomalla, Inge Egger, Grethe Weiser,
Oskar Sima, Ilse Petri, Beppo Brem
THE LAVENDER HILL MOB
****
THE LOST ONE
***
Germany
Peter Lorre's sole directorial effort is this fascinating, fact-based but
confounding indictment of unofficial Nazi politics. At the beginning of
the picture he's a doctor with a patently nasty secret who comes face to
face with a shady figure from his past. After a rambling conversation
follows a rambling flashback, which morphs from espionage melodrama to
serial killer psychodrama to conspiracy melodrama. It's difficult and only
occasionally interesting to follow. The Expressionist-flavoured visuals
though are arresting.
dir: Peter Lorre
ph: Václav Vích
cast: Peter Lorre, Karl John, Helmuth Rudolph, Johanna Hofer,
Renate Mannhardt, Eva Ingeborg Scholz, Gisela Trowe, Lotte Rausch
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THE MAGIC BOX
**
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT
****½
MISS
JULIE
***½
Sweden
The opening title reads "August Strindberg's Fröken Julie" in a
large, florid font that reeks of prestige. From then on however, director
Alf Sjöberg seems ashamed of his story's humble theatre beginnings. He
stuffs the vast portion of his picture with dream sequences, flashbacks
and showy transitions and superimpositions. The original plot - about the
destructive relationship between the impulsive daughter of a count and her
valet - seems like an afterthought.
Sjöberg gets so caught up on the lovers' traumatic pasts he
doesn't get around to developing their present relationship. Wherever
Strindberg employed a brief pause, Sjöberg sees it as a chance to dump in
a morbid childhood memory (each of the lovers gets to have at least one
flashback too many). Where Strindberg strived for psychological insight,
Sjöberg resorts to histrionic melodrama.
The picture is easy on the eye and it holds your attention in
that a lot of sensational things happen very quickly one after another and
you can't afford to look away. But the tension and impact of Strindberg's
original piece, which largely depends on stark naturalism and a lack of
interruptions, is diminished.
Furthermore, whatever case the otherwise misogynistic
Strindberg built against the subjugation of women is belied by the film's
witch-like portrayal of Julie's fiercely feminist mother.
wr/dir: Alf Sjöberg
cast: Anita Björk, Ulf Palme, Märta Dorff, Lissi Alandh, Anders
Henrikson, Inga Gill, Max von Sydow
A PLACE IN THE SUN
***½
QUO VADIS
***
THE RIVER
***
India
The first film Jean Renoir made during his period of post-Hollywood
recovery was also his first foray into Technicolor. An adaptation of Rumer
Godden's semi-autobiographical novel, it was shot on the banks of the
Ganges and it chronicles the dramas that befall the family of a British
jute-factory manager during his wife's pregnancy. The focus in particular
is on his daughter's plunge into puberty.
With irreproachable poise and diction, a lady named June
Hillman reads out in voiceover sections from Godden's novel, which serve
to ground the film within the realm of quaint, leaden exotica. It's a
colonialist's view of Bengal, so the natives are given a single, unanimous
character of serene docility. Their lovely dances and mysterious stories
about life and death are used for decoration.
The cast is a mix of non-professionals and bad actors. Their
performances though, are uniformly paltry.
Nevertheless figures as forbidding as Pauline Kael and Martin
Scorsese have gushed over the film, chiefly due to its lyrical use of
colour. Its use of colour is indeed lyrical and accounts for several
pleasing passages where no one is speaking or where it's easy to ignore
the person who is.
dir: Jean Renoir
wr: Jean Renoir, Rumer Godden
ph: Claude Renoir
cast: Patricia Walters, Adrienne Corri, Thomas E. Breen, Radha,
Nora Swinburne, Edmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
SHOW BOAT
**½
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
****½
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
****
SUMMER
INTERLUDE
***
Sweden
Hailed once upon a time as the first sign of Ingmar Bergman's maturation
as an artist, this mildly pretentious love story between a ballerina and a
fresh-faced fan contains several plodding bits of reflecting on cracked
personas, the creeping spectre of death and, naturally, God's silence. The
more atmospheric passages are quiet and subtle, and include an entrancing
early encounter between the brooding heroine and an old woman
strolling near the seaside.
dir: Ingmar Bergman
ph: Gunnar Fischer, Bengt Jarnmark
cast: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin, Georg
Funkquist, Mimi Pollack, Annalisa Ericson, Stig Olin, Gunnar Olsson
THE THING (FROM ANOTHER WORLD)
*****
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