ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
****
USA
The quintessential Technicolor melodrama of the
50s, where middle-class widow Jane Wyman falls for her virile gardener,
who happens to looks like Rock Hudson and possess some remarkable innate
insights into human nature. Not the first of
Sirk's notorious gloss packages but probably the one that
directly spawned the greatest number of remakes, rip-offs and homages. For
the combination of overwhelming soap, outrageously rich mise-en-scene and
subtle social comment, it continues to fascinate.
dir: Douglas Sirk
cast: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, Virginia
Grey, Gloria Talbott, William Reynolds, Jacqueline de Wit
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK
***
IL BIDONE
***½
THE BIG COMBO
*****
USA
An obsessive cop and a sadistic
gang lord are in love with the same woman.
A sharply written, stylishly directed and impeccably photographed late-period noir, with a
plethora of memorable sequences and deviant undercurrents.
dir: Joseph H. Lewis
ph: John Alton
cast: Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Jean Wallace, Brian Donlevy,
Robert Middleton, Lee Van Cleef, Ted de Corsia, Helen Walker, John Hoyt
A BLOODY SPEAR ON MOUNT FUJI
***
Japan
A young Samurai is accompanied on a journey by his eccentric but loyal
servant.
The point of it all only becomes apparent towards the end, which is
fine - except there's not much of a story to hold onto along the way.
dir: Uchida Tomu
cast: Chiezo Kataoka, Ryunosuke Tusigata, Chizuru Kitagawa, Yuriko
Tashiro, Daisuke Katô
LES DIABOLIQUES
***½
EAST OF EDEN
***
JEDDA
**
Australia
The Australian film industry
was ailing during the 50s (and 60s), and this was the most notable picture
to emerge from it around this period. It's a ludicrous mix of soap opera
and outback taming, revolving around an Aboriginal woman raised as 'white'
but unable to resist 'the call of her blood'. Hilarity ensues. It's a jaw-droppingly
inept bit of filmmaking on every level, and because of that, it's never boring.
dir: Charles Chauvel
cast: Ngarla Kunoth, Robert Tudawali, Betty Suttor, Paul Reynall,
George Sympson-Lyttle
KILLER'S
KISS
***½
USA
Before Stanley Kubrick mastered the fundamentals of pacing, storytelling,
character development and directing actors, he was already a consummate visual
stylist. So, while this limp, budgetless, crudely patched-up noir never gives you the sense that it's going anywhere worthwhile,
it's bewildering to look at and it regularly breaks out into stunning, indelible setpieces of an intensity
rarely found even in sophisticated productions.
dir/ph/ed: Stanley Kubrick
wr: Stanley Kubrick, Howard Sackler
cast: Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Jerry Jarrett
KISS ME DEADLY
*****
USA
An intricate, intriguing, sadistic and nihilistic
B-noir package, famous
for, among other things, introducing stylishly awkward camera angles to
the genre. It's embroidered with trashy tough talk, an overly excitable orchestral
accompaniment, production and performances far from the highest calibre as
well as a perennially lurking and wholly arresting atmosphere of impending menace.
You know you love a picture when even its flaws are endearing. Reportedly
it proved a great influence on the French New Wave.
dir: Robert Aldrich
wr: A.I. Bezzerides
ph: Ernest Laszlo
ed: Michael Luciano
cast: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Maxine Cooper, Gaby
Rodgers, Wesley Addy, Juano Hernandez, Nick Dennis, Cloris Leachman
LADY AND THE TRAMP
***½
THE LADYKILLERS
***½
LOLA
MONTES
***½
France/West Germany
Andrew Sarris once pronounced this the greatest film ever made. It's an
odd assertion and a tricky one to back up. It would have
been fascinating to see him try.
Max Ophüls' final film, this opulent, expensive melodrama
charts the scandals, affairs and gradual destitution of an exotic dancer
and courtesan who in real life bedded Liszt, Ludwig I of Bavaria and
hundreds of influential men around the globe. The film boasts vast, gaudy,
meticulous sets, grand personages, grander statements and Ophüls'
signature sweeping, gliding camerawork. But it's undone by a blank-faced
vacuum at its centre.
You can sense Martine Carol's hunger for fame, to be admired
and thought beautiful. And it's not a giant leap for the imagination to
conceive her sleeping her way to the top (how else could she have gotten
this role?). But she doesn't show any special kind of spark that would
make you understand why a king would stay til morning.
dir: Max Ophüls
ph: Christian Matras
cast: Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Henri
Guisol, Lise Delamare, Paulette Dubost, Oskar Werner
LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME
**½
THE
MAN FROM LARAMIE
****
USA
The last of the dense, bleak, extraordinary series of Anthony Mann-James
Stewart Westerns, this one pits the hardened, disturbed Jimmy against an
aging cattle baron and his psychotic son while he seeks revenge for his
brother's killing. A heavily involved, absorbing soap opera, it's marked
by several outbursts of sadism that are still unsettling to watch. In a
supporting role, the grounded and still radiant 1930s starlet Aline
McMahon gives a lesson in effortless charisma and soulfulness.
dir: Anthony Mann
wr: Philip Yordan, Frank Burt
ph: Charles Lang
cast: James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Alex
Nicol, Aline MacMahon, Cathy O'Donnell, Wallace Ford, Jack Elam
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MARTY
***½
MR. ARKADIN
****½
France/Spain
A powerful European financier
employs his daughter's American admirer and aspiring blackmailer to
uncover his shady past.
Among the worst-dubbed of all films, this muddled, rushed melodrama
with an incongruous plot and paltry production
values grabs you almost in spite of itself. Welles' handling of it is far
from steady but he manages to throw in some kind of exciting visual
flourish at least once every minute. You learn to look past the fuzz and
appreciate the good bits. Likely the fault for the fuzz lies with the financiers, who butchered
the picture before release (which
is why it now exists in various
versions, reportedly the best one of which is titled "Confidential
Report"). All the same, it's come out an unorthodox but beguiling bit
of fun, with atmosphere, eccentrics and striking setpieces.
dir: Orson Welles
cast: Robert Arden, Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Patricia Medina, Akim
Tamiroff,
MISTER ROBERTS
***½
MOONFLEET
***
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
*****
USA
A horror film cross-bred with a fairy tale and a religious dialectic,
filtered through a baroque, Southern Gothic sensibility. It's transfixing,
it's gut-wrenching and it's astounding.
With 'Love' tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and 'Hate'
on the other, preacher Robert Mitchum strides out of prison and straight
into his executed cell-mate's home in Depression-era rural America. With
his eager piety, sinister-smouldering hang-dog expression and bewitching,
stentorian renditions of staples like "Leaning on the Everlasting
Arms", he seduces the widow (and the township) in no time. But it's
the children that hold the vital information he's after (the money's
hiding place) and they won't give in quite as easily. They embark upon a
moonlit downriver flight as ethereal and disturbingly beautiful as any
sequence in cinema.
James Agee based his script on a novel by Davis Grubb and was
reportedly quite faithful to it. Charles Laughton summarised it as "a
nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale" - which it is - but this
doesn't account for its questioning, undermining and odd reaffirming of
Christian faith and fanaticism. While the 'Reverend' symbolises the danger
of faith allowed to run unchecked, the eventual saviour proves heroic
precisely because she won't allow any outsider or institution to stand
between her and her belief. In a sense, she's similarly intimidating in
that her ferocity and conviction is equal to the Reverend's (and
potentially just as destructive, if founded on false belief). It isn't her
'truer' Christianity that distinguishes her from him - it's just as much
her weapon as his. The key difference between them is that she interprets
faith as selflessness and humanism, whereas he calls on a transcendent
force to justify his greed and bloodlust.
The film's critical and commercial failure ensured that
Laughton would never direct again. But no other man with a single
directorial credit to his name has invested his characters and visuals
with such boldness, such mystery and intensity.
Few screen performances are as indelible (and - if you're
into that sort of thing - absurdly sexy) as Mitchum's deranged, monstrous
Reverend. As the abiding bedrock of Christian virtue, Lillian Gish strikes
a fierce, vivid and piercingly human pitch. And the children - Billy
Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce - are hypnotic.
dir: Charles Laughton
wr: James Agee
ph: Stanley Cortez
cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Billy
Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, James Gleason,
Don Beddoe, Gloria Castillo
ORDET
***½
PATHER PANCHALI
****½
India
The first part of Satyajit Ray's instantly canonised Apu trilogy was also
the first bit of filmmaking Ray, along with most of his crew and cast,
ever attempted. And they must have shot it chronologically since the movie
starts off crude and choppy, moves into Miramax-friendly
exotic-childhood-with-a-quirky-grandma territory as it acquires more
polish, and finally evolves into something much more graceful, resonant
and richly textured. The sitar score by then-unknown Ravi Shankar, while
lovely to listen to on its own, tends to suffocate the early sections,
though Ray learns to tone it down eventually and create mood in a more
organic, lyrical fasion.
wr/dir: Satyajit Ray
ph: Subrata Mitra
m: Ravi Shankar
cast: Karuna Bannerjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Subir Banerjee, Uma
Das Gupta, Chunibala Devi, Runki Bannerjee PICNIC
***
PRINCESS
YANG KWEI FEI
***
Japan
Kenji Mizoguchi's first colour film was this soap opera about an 8th
century emperor's romance with a pretty kitchen-hand and the underhanded
politicians that destroy it. It's delicate to look at (and listen to), but
otherwise simplistic and leaden.
dir: Kenji Mizoguchi
ph: Kôhei Sugiyama
m: Fumio Hayasaka
cast: Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori, Sô Yamamura, Eitarô Shindô,
Eitarô Ozawa, Haruko Sugimura
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
***½ RICHARD
III
***½ THE
SEVEN YEAR ITCH
****½ SMILES
OF A SUMMER NIGHT
***** TO
CATCH A THIEF
***½ THE
TROUBLE WITH HARRY
***½
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