AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
***½
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
****
THE
CRANES ARE FLYING
*****
USSR
One of the great Soviet films as well as one of the great movie love
stories, this increasingly overlooked Khrushchev-era Palme d'or winner
tells of two swooning lovers separated and gradually destroyed by WWII.
With some exquisite photography, a grand old-fashioned orchestral score
and several astonishing impressionistic sequences, director Mikhail
Kalatozishvili (who nearly three decades earlier helmed the similarly
brilliant though forgotten Salt for Svanetia)
amplifies the already-heightened romanticism of the story in a way that,
rather than soapy, becomes intensely affecting.
dir: Mikhail Kalatozishvili (aka Mikhail Kalatozov)
wr: Viktor Rozov
ph: Sergei Urusevsky
ed: Mariya Timofeyeva
m: Moisey Vaynberg
cast: Tatyana Samoilova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasili
Merkuryev, Aleksandr Shvorin, Svetlana Kharitonova, Konstantin Nikitin,
Valentin Zubkov, Antonina Bogdanova
EDGE OF THE CITY
*****
A FACE IN THE CROWD
***½
USA
A small-town hick is
transformed into a hugely influential media personality.
A drawn-out, heavy-handed early assault on the media's
potential for mass manipulation. It anticipates "Network"
(1976) in its appreciation of hysteria over relevance and realism but
there are regular flashes
of insight that keep it continually absorbing along with some dark comedy and superb
acting.
dir: Elia Kazan
wr: Budd Schulberg
cast: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Lee
Remick, Anothony Franciosa, Percy Waram, Rod Brasfield, Charles
Irving, Howard Smith
FORTY GUNS
****
USA
A little-seen Western melodrama
set in Tombstone, Arizona and revolving around a wealthy, corrupt land
baroness facing off a noble gunman. It's a mixture of elements that
ordinarily come with a decent budget - Stanwyck's star presence, an
unusually convincing (for the period) tornado sequence - as well as
elements truer to this picture's B-status - long takes, flashy camera
angles, strange psychosexual undercurrents. These characters' shames and
frustrations are more fully fleshed out in the absence of the
sensationalism that overwhelmed Sam Fuller's later output (though the
sensationalism did, of course, carry its own sense of fun).
wr/dir: Sam Fuller
ph: Joseph Biroc
ed: Gene Fowler Jr.
cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John
Ericson, Gene Barry, Robert Dix, Jidge Carroll, Eve Brent
FUNNY FACE
***½
GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL
***
A KING IN NEW YORK
***½
LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON
***½
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA
*****
Italy/France
This funny-melancholy-searing tale of a low-rent Roman prostitute, coming
as it did out of Fellini's grounded phase, is more indebted to the Italian
neo-realist tradition than his famed plunges into surrealism. It tends to
get buried under Fellini's sexier achievements, though in truth it's one
of the two or three best things he ever did.
Cabiria is marked by the same goofy irrepressibility as
Gelsomina, though (The Great) Giulietta Masina takes on her with a fresh
ferocity that charges both her performance and her many tragedies with a
hefty visceral impact. The squalid milieu that Fellini paints around her
has all the vividness and resonance of those in the most urgent
neo-realist works but without the self-consciousness and sentimentality.
Above all things, Fellini is committed to building and fleshing out his
great character (and Cabiria is unquestionably one of cinema's great
characters) and exploring the kind of isolation that comes caked in layers
of self-preservation and insecurity. So the surrounding detail and social
context and the grace and humanism seeping out are purely a happy
by-product.
dir: Federico Fellini
wr: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Pier
Paolo Pasolini
ph: Aldo Tonti, Otello Martelli
ed: Leo Cattozzo
m: Nino Rota
cast: Giulietta Masina, François Perier, Franca Marzi,
Amedeo Nazzari, Dorian Gray, Aldo Silvani, Ennio Girolami, Mario Passante
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PATHS OF GLORY
*****
PEYTON PLACE
**
A dubious, hysterical, compulsively entertaining soft-focus trash-fest
about the primarily sexual frustrations that abound in a small New England
town.
dir: Mark Robson
cast: Lana Turner, Diane Varsi, Lee Philips, Hope Lange,
Lloyd Nolan, Arthur Kennedy, Russ Tamblyn
THE SEVENTH SEAL
*****
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
***½
THE THREE FACES OF EVE
****
3:10 TO YUMA
****
THRONE OF BLOOD
*****
Japan
The notion of a kabuki adaptation of "Macbeth" may strike you as
intriguing more than credible. But considering their shared affinity for
bloodletting, 'universal' subjects and lofty, sweeping statements on
Humanity, Akira Kurosawa is maybe the closest the cinema has offered
to a Shakespeare successor. What Shakespeare did with words, Kurosawa does
with light and shade (and, particularly in this case, fog). And he is such
a master at framing tiny human figures against a forbidding
landscape that it's entirely possible you'll remember seeing this
picture in Widescreen even though Kurosawa himself didn't turn to
"Toho-scope" until the following year, with "The Hidden
Fortress".
Toshiro Mifune contorts his face formidably as a samurai
Macbeth, while, with her eerie, sickly voice and her eyes frozen into a perpetual
leer, Isuzu Yamada makes for an incomparably chilling Lady Macbeth.
dir/ed: Akira Kurosawa
ph: Asaichi Nakai
m: Masaru Sato
cast: Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura,
Minoru Chiaki, Akira Kubo, Takamaru Sasaki, Yoichi Tachikawa, Chieko
Naniwa
TWELVE ANGRY MEN
***½
WILD STRAWBERRIES
*****
Sweden
Although thoroughly - and innovatively - cinematic in execution, Ingmar
Bergman's study of a hushed regret with death encroaching has the richness
and complexity of a fine novel. Victor Sjöström is the elderly
professor, who, after a striking vision of his own funeral, travels (in what resembles a hearse)
with
the radiant Ingrid Thulin to the University
at Lund to claim an honorary degree. Along the way, he remembers, reflects
and regrets.
Bergman's first big American success contains glimpses of the
major hangups that would haunt the rest of his work (death, bitter
marriages, half-repressed hysteria, death), but it's an infinitely
softer-edged film than his others. This isn't to say that he's being
sentimental or naive or remotely optimistic in any way, but he is gentler
to the Professor than he has a habit of being to his protagonists. Maybe
it has to do with Sjöström's face. Maybe in it Bergman sees a
manifestation of his own future (Sjöström was, after all, a personal
hero, and every bit the cinematic revolutionary that Bergman was, only 40
years earlier). Or maybe in it he sees the wrenching, the scars and the
weariness of a war that has singed the core of a being across decades,
only to have finally reached the point where it continues as a state of
normalcy, a hum so familiar as to bring with it its own sense of
serenity (of sorts). It's a gorgeous, galvanising face.
And the supporting actors are no less vivid.
wr/dir: Ingmar Bergman
cast: Victor Sjöström, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar
Björnstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Folke Sundquist, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Naima
Wifstrand, Gunnar Sjöberg, Gunnel Broström, Gertrud Fridh, Sif Ruud,
Max von Sydow, Gunnel Lindblom
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION
***½ THE WRONG MAN
***
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