The Doll: Ernst Lubitsch

In a tight black room, a svelt young man gently removes the lid from a chest. Placing it upside-down on the table, a verdant field sprinkled with flowers and split by a wandering road is revealed. Reaching into the chest, the young man pulls out a number of figurines and models which he assembles on the lid: a dollhouse, paper trees, a sky, and finally two dolls. With a cut, we are transported inside a life-size reconstruction of the tableau. From the dollhouse door the two dolls emerge as humans: a stringy youth who tumbles down the curved road into a pond and his plump caretaker who pulls him out with an umbrella. From this opening begins Ernst Lubitsch’s The Doll, a fantastical romantic comedy that seems more at home in the realm of postwar German Expressionism than with his later genial American productions. Never has Lubitsch’s artifice been so pronounced. And never has he been more joyfully delightful.

The Doll follows Lancelot, the effete youth from the opening sequence, who schemes to marry a life-like doll in order to placate his uncle, the Baron of Chanterelle, who is desperate for an heir. The local doll-maker Hilarius constructs him a mechanical replica of his high-spirited daughter Ossi that is capable of actions as complex as autonomous dancing. But Hilarius’ careless young assistant accidentally breaks it. To spare the boy her father’s wrath, the real Ossi takes the doll’s place. And so begins her strange and wonderful journey through villages, castles, and monasteries; to parties, suppers, and even a wedding. She dutifully keeps up the illusion (breaking now and then to flirt and dance with others while Lancelot’s attention is diverted) until one night the sight of a mouse causes her to scream. Ossi’s secret is revealed to Lancelot. But another revelation is due for the young man: she has fallen in love with him.

Here is a story that can only inhabit the realm of fairy tales. To tell it, Lubitsch creates a diegetic world of playful artificiality: sets of hyperbolic caricature (the sun has a face and carriages are drawn by men in horse costumes), serendipitous coincidences (Hilarius literally drops from the sky at the end to give his blessing to the newly married couple), and just a touch of white magic (Hilarius’ hair literally stands on end and turns white when he learns of his daughter’s deception).

As so many historians have pointed out, The Doll was released mere months before the debut of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). While they both feature similar themes concerning people being physically controlled by forces outside of their own will, what is most astounding is how similar their visual language is. But where one film covets shadows and gloom, the other cherishes bright, open spaces and jubilation. If The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the nightmare of German Expressionism, The Doll is its daydream.

But one of the key elements of The Doll’s success was the casting of Ossi Oswalda as Hilarius’ daughter, the eponymous doll. Trained as a ballet dancer, Ossi made her screen debut in Lubitsch’s Shoe Palace Pinkus in 1916. From there she would go on to become one of Germany’s great silent film stars, appearing in numerous comedies (many of which were also helmed by Lubitsch). Film historians Hans-Michael Bock and Tim Bergfelder described her as having a “cinematic alter ego of a hyperactive, coquettish, spoilt Lolita whose anarchic antics caused havoc amid the films’ sedate and ordered Prussian surroundings, but who invariably got tamed in time for the happy end.” In some of her earlier films, Ossi’s persona bordered on the childishly petulant and infantile.

But she hit the right balance in The Doll: playful without being irresponsible, flirtatious without seeming puerile, and just kind enough that we can believe that she is a woman who would actually volunteer to act like a doll. The genius in Ossi’s performance is that we never get the sense that she isn’t in control of her situation. She could easily escape her predicament, but she chooses not to. At first it’s because it’s an adventure and she’s just having too much fun playing along. But then, unexpectedly, her feelings evolve into love.

The Doll was made during a period of explosive creativity for Lubitsch. In just a few years he would direct, in addition to a number of straight dramas, a group of excellent romantic comedies that pushed the boundaries of gender norms and sexual ethics. Three of the best were also collaborations with Ossi. I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918) featured her as a woman who cross-dresses to escape the boring life and societal expectations of a young lady. The Oyster Princess (1919) saw her as a bratty American heiress whose father “buys” her a prince to marry. And finally, The Wild Cat (1921) saw her at her most anarchic as the leader of a group of mountain bandits who falls in love with a lothario lieutenant assigned to a nearby border fortress.

Along with The Doll, these films were stylistically audacious and featured tightly knit endings where Ossi was neatly paired off with the character she was most meant to be with (don’t let her affections for the lieutenant in The Wild Cat fool you). But the romantic intrigue in The Doll is the most convincing by merit of the film’s deliberate evocation of the fairy tale.

A closing word, then, about the Lubitsch Touch. The elusive Touch is a much discussed je ne sais quoi that permeates Lubitsch’s work. Nobody can seem to agree just what the Touch is. But it exists. And I see it displayed in a marvelous scene near the end of The Doll. When Lancelot takes Ossi to the monastery where he has been staying, he leaves her in the dining room with a group of gluttonous monks. They peer over at her and she begins to dance. The monks gleefully join her until their abbot comes in and chases them away. Close-up on the abbot’s face. Cut to a close-up on Ossi’s bare ankles. We fear the worst. But then he positions himself next to her and begins to mimic her movements. It wasn’t sex he wanted, but to join in the dance.

9/10

Godzilla Raids Again: Motoyoshi Oda

Kaiju effects just look better in black and white, don't they? I guess that when you're working with two primary colors, it's easier to buy into the illusion of giant monsters. In any case, Motoyoshi Oda's Godzilla Raids Again was the sequel to the original Godzilla film. Only this time there are two giant monsters destroying Japan, not just one. And I have to give the film credit, the new kaiju named Anguirus had a pretty cool design. Also, the fights between him and Godzilla were genuinely impressive. Unlike later kaiju fights that look slow and obscenely over-rehearsed (a practical necessity, I suppose, when the actors can't really see out of the suits), the kaiju fights in Godzilla Raids Again are so fast and energetic that the filmmakers must have sped up the film while shooting. If you ever really pay attention to how lizards move (I live in Florida, don't judge me) you'll notice that they are extremely fast and jerky. And the kaiju in this film move that way, too. The climactic fight scene at Osaka Castle was absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, after it was done the movie realized that it still had about 30 minutes left to burn. So it shoehorns in a subplot about pilots trying to trap Godzilla under an avalanche of ice and snow. It's a nice sequence, but there is too much of a lull between it and the Osaka Castle fight. It makes the last third of the film feel tacked on. Don't get me wrong, I liked how they showed humanity reacting to the aftermath of a kaiju attack. But they didn't transition between plot points smoothly enough for it to truly be effective.

6/10

The Wildcat: Ernst Lubitsch

For good melodrama to work, the audience has to emphasize with the characters. Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat is a wildly inventive romantic comedy that hurts itself by forgetting this important rule. The film follows the romantic entanglements of the occupants of a military border fortress and the eponymous "wildcat," the de facto leader of a group of bandits named Rischka. There is some impress visual gymnastics involved in Lubitsch's lampooning of military life: the foolhardy commander sending out an armed force to defeat the bandits of which around 70% of the troops are musicians, a bandit wedding where the participants treat the proceedings with all of the reserved pomp of a royal ceremony, and the ubiquitous use of outrageous camera masks which seem to lampoon the works of D.W. Griffith. But where the film fails is in its unrepentantly repugnant male lead, Lieutenant Alexis. He impenitently abandons a literal army of bastard children and their mothers to their fates before becoming the toast of the border fortress. Every woman who meets him falls madly in love with him. And here's the kicker: we are never explained why he is so attractive. He never has to woo anybody, either. He just goes about with a smarmy grin as everything falls into his lap. There is no charisma to his character. So when Rischka, an anarchic spirit of liberation, falls so madly in love with him that she desires marriage, we can't help but feel it is unaccountably inexplicable. So the tragic moments where Rischka must abandon her beloved ring hollow. This film apes the mechanics of melodrama without capturing a bit of its pathos. Still, the film's visuals are unique enough to warrant a viewing...and even subsequent admiration.

7/10

The Oyster Princess: Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch's The Oyster Princess is a sweet and silly story about love, wealth, and mistaken identities. By 1919, the year it was released, Lubitsch had begun to develop his own visual style of storytelling seeped in sophistication. Eventually this would come to be known as the "Lubitsch Touch." The film follows an almost love triangle between a spoiled American heiress, a down-on-his-luck prince, and his long-suffering friend/assistant. The assistant, ordered to vet the heiress, ends up marrying her under the assumed identity of the prince. And from there things go humorously awry. There are two very interesting things about The Oyster Princess. First is Lubitsch's aforementioned visual style. He portrays the household of the American heiress like a mechanized factory: lines of servants robotically carry out commands, the mansion is much too big for its few inhabitants, and everything is mercilessly sterile. I read one observation online that astutely compared a scene where the heiress is bathed by several maids to an automated assembly line. This leads to the second area of interest in The Oyster Princess: the portrayal of Americans. Lubitsch's Old World sensibilities perhaps made it impossible for him to resist poking fun at the New World nouveau riche. At times it is almost impossible to tell whether he is being light-hearted or genuinely malicious towards his American characters. I'm still not sure. Perhaps both. Remember, The Oyster Princess was made one year after America helped defeat Germany in World War One. You make the call.

7/10

I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch's I Don't Want to Be a Man is a film ripe for scholastic rediscovery: it is a subtly subversive gender-bender about a young woman who poses as a man in order to live a more libertine life but falls in love with her caretaker. That the caretaker is male is not surprising. That they share a "same-sex" kiss is shocking (for the year it was released, I mean). That the film and its characters don't seem to pass judgment on the "same-sex" couple is downright stunning. The humor in their relationship comes less from their gender hijinks and more from the fact that a free-spirited young woman and an uptight, prissy man fall in love. And then, after getting fabulously drunk, the two are accidentally deposited in the other person's house by their carriage-driver. Honestly, the film could have worked perfectly fine without the last minute reveal of the young woman's gender. But though the film is potentially fascinating for historians, I fear that it would try the patience of modern viewers. Setting aside the obviously ludicrous moral that men have a harsher lot in life than women, Ossi Oswalda plays the part of the female lead so childishly that it borders on infantilism. The way she responds to and provokes people in the first third of the film is akin to a toddler knocking over their baby bottle just to get a reaction from their mother. Although this does lead to one funny scene where she throws treats from her second-story window into the outstretched mouths of nearly a dozen young suitors, their faces wide and expectant like seals begging for fish from their trainers.

6/10

Godzilla 17: Godzilla vs. Biollante: Kazuki Ōmori

[Spoilers Ahead]

Movies should always err on the side of brevity. Better to risk being too short than being too long. This is not just an observation for the benefit of the audience, but for the filmmakers themselves. Take Kazuki Ōmori's Godzilla vs. Biollante, the second Heisei-era Godzilla film and direct sequel to Koji Hashimoto's The Return of Godzilla (1984). Based on a story by Shinichiro Kobayashi, a dentist who moonlighted as a science-fiction writer, the film was a brave departure from other Godzilla movies by featuring a story that aspired to nothing less than poetry: a heart-broken scientist accidentally creates a giant rose-monster named Biollante after combining Godzilla DNA with genetic material from roses and his murdered daughter. He had been trying to make a radiation-consuming bacteria that could kill Godzilla if and when He ever returned. The film ends with Godzilla defeating Biollante after a second giant fight. As Godzilla returns to the oceans, Biollante disintegrates into spores which form a giant rose in outer space. If the film had just focused on the Godzilla vs. Biollante plot, it could have been one of the greatest modern Godzilla films. But after Godzilla defeats Biollante after their first fight, the film repeats the third act of The Return of Godzilla almost verbatim: humanity fights back with a flying spaceship which is eventually destroyed, Godzilla annihilates a city (this time wrecking Osaka instead of Tokyo), and scientists manage to trick Godzilla into walking into a giant trap designed to either kill or incapacitate him. Only this time the last-minute gambit fails. It is only then that Biollante returns in a more powerful form. I will admit that the effects in this film far outstrip the ones in The Return of Godzilla. Biollante's second form is an especially impressive creation that might rank as the finest piece of practical kaiju costuming ever captured on film. Additionally, the scale models that the kaiju demolish look more like actual buildings and vehicles than the obviously cardboard cut-outs of The Return of Godzilla. But the film ultimately bites off more plot than it can chew. Despite its excellent human drama and outstanding effects, the film is just too long and beleaguered for its own good.

6/10

Meyer from Berlin: Ernst Lubitsch

Ignoring its rampant antisemitism, Ernst Lubitsch's Meyer from Berlin is not a very good film. It is, in a word, quaint. Much of the humor is dry and depends on dialogue and not body language. One of the main reasons why the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd are still so fresh and entertaining almost 100 years later is that physical comedy is universal. But Meyer from Berlin relies too much on what the characters are saying instead of what they are doing. For silent cinema, that is a death knell. The film itself follows a Jewish Berliner named Sally Meyer (played by director Lubitsch) who fakes an illness to his wife so he can be "prescribed" a trip to the Alps "for his health." While there, Sally immediately starts to romantically pursue a young woman. Their courtship climaxes with a nearly disastrous climb to the top of Mount Watzmann. Visually, the film is plain and unimpressive. Unlike some of his other silent films, Meyer from Berlin merely looks like a movie serial that managed to snag a half-way decent shooting location in the Bavarian Alps.

5/10

Days and Nights in the Forest: Satyajit Ray

There are people much more intelligent and qualified than me who can expound on how Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest demonstrates the literary technique of the carnivalesque. I am not sure I fully grasp the theory myself. So I can only speak on my own personal experience with this film by Bengali cinema's greatest master. The film follows four friends from varying social classes of Indian society who seek to escape into the countryside for a vacation. Their quest for societal detachment becomes a journey of self-discovery as each friend is forced to confront their own anxieties, fears, and desires. The film seems like a distant precursor to Joseph Vasquez's Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991), another film about four friends from different walks of life who seek escape from their daily lives via a brief Bacchanalian respite. Both films skillfully portray their main characters as complex, three-dimensional people who seem genuinely alive in a way that many movie characters don't. As always, Ray's work here is paced and measured. Some might be tempted to describe the film as "slow." But I was never bored with the film. There are many great directors whom I admire greatly whose work can occasionally be a chore to sit through; Dreyer and Bresson immediately come to mind. But Ray never taxes my attention span or my ability to stay awake. I hope that one day I can figure out why.

7/10

Godzilla 16: The Return of Godzilla: Koji Hashimoto

Perhaps I was too quick to write off all of the sequels to Ishirō Honda's Godzilla (1954). Until now, all of the sequels that I had seen were from the Shōwa era. But with Koji Hashimoto's The Return of Godzilla I have entered the Heisei era. And, to be honest, I was much more impressed. A direct sequel to only the very first Godzilla film, The Return of Godzilla sees the King of Monsters return to his roots as a destructive, uncontrollable force of nature. At first I was bothered by how many of the miniatures (especially the gigantic cities that Godzilla destroys with such great delight) looked more like deliberate scale replicas and not earnest attempts at facsimile. But then I was struck by an idea: maybe that was the point. The original Godzilla tried to make the effects as realistic as possible because they were actually trying to create the illusion that a giant monster was destroying Japan. The other Shōwa era films (at least, the ones I have seen) seemed to care little about creating any kind of genuine illusion of scale. Everything was just a pretense to spotlight men in rubber suits beating the crap out of each other in long shots swallowed in mercilessly diffused lighting. But if I am not mistaken, in The Return of Godzilla there were attempts to create scale (see all of the process shots of actual actors fleeing from burning buildings and Godzilla's footsteps) combined with an emphasis on artifice. I am eager to see if this trend continues in the other Heisei era films. If so, then it may force me to completely revamp the way I review kaiju films. After all, in Hollywood musicals deliberate artifice is seen as a virtue. Therefore, if there is a kaiju aesthetic, it must be discovered, defined, and delineated when reviewing kaiju films. The film itself was fine. The whole idea of controlling Godzilla with magnetism was a bit of a stretch, but I guess it was better than getting aliens to mind control him for the umpteenth time. The subplot about the Soviet and American nuclear missiles accidentally reviving Godzilla after he was defeated was a nice touch. It seems to argue that mankind, not kaiju, will always be its own worst enemy.

6/10

Godzilla: Gareth Edwards

If I take one thing away from Gareth Edwards' Godzilla, it will be a scene where a group of soldiers perform a HALO jump into the ruins of San Francisco. As they plummet towards a cauldron of smoke and flame, gas canisters release ribbons of red smoke behind them, marking their descents like a dozen small trickles of blood. It's a scene that feels -- dare I say it? -- Herzogian in its primal power and blasphemous beauty. If the entire film had managed to live up to this scene, then it could have ranked as one of the greatest monster movies of all time. There are fleeting moments of unabashed greatness in Godzilla: when the King of Monsters finally reveals Himself in all of His glory before bellowing His immortal roar, when he gets into a roar-fight with one of the MUTOs, when our stomachs twist in anticipation when His tail begins to glow blue, and generally any of the scenes where we get a worm's-eye view of the kaiju fighting. Gareth wisely films most of these scenes from the perspectives of people unfortunate enough to be trapped on the ground. By doing so, he truly drives home the feeling that these are forces of nature which mankind can only witness. I love how Godzilla is generally shown to be unperturbed by humanity; He doesn't go out of His way to destroy things, but if a skyscraper gets in His way or a battleship gets stuck on His tail, oh well...My problem with the film is that it is bogged down with many of the same problems that plague most American kaiju/disaster films: cookie-cutter characters invariably drawn into tired subplots about family members in danger, an odd fetishization of the military (there was a reason why it took a scientist, not a soldier, to destroy Godzilla in his debut film), and an over-reliance on human characters coincidentally running into people they know in gigantic, chaotic crowd scenes whenever the plot needs to get moving again. But as a kaiju film, Godzilla delivers the goods where it counts. Hail to the King, baby.

7/10

The Tourist: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

[Spoilers Ahead]

For most of its run-time, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Tourist is a vapid, if pretty, spy-thriller/comedy/romance flick about a poor sap played by Johnny Depp who, while on vacation in Europe, is pulled into an espionage cat-and-mouse game thanks to the actions of a beautiful spy played by Angelina Jolie. Their romantic chemistry is...passable at best, but usually awkward. Then at the end of the film there is a twist that complete squanders what little good will I had for the film: it turns out Depp's character was actually the alter-ego of a master spy who just so happens to be Jolie's on-again/off-again lover. This makes no sense because the film violates one of the most important rules involving plot twists: the characters involved forget about the twist when they are by themselves. We are repeatedly shown Depp being a frightened, ineffectual, and stupid character when literally nobody else is around him. You could argue that he was doing so on the off chance that he was under surveillance. But the film makes it clear when he is being spied on and when he is not being spied on. The character might not know this, but the audience does. And plot twists should service the audience first, the characters second. If the audience were informed that literally every move he made was under surveillance, we could buy this twist. But the international authorities are repeatedly portrayed as so laughably incompetent that they can't watch somebody without being painfully obvious to their quarry. So we have too many scenes where both the audience and Depp know that he is not being watched wherein he still acts like a moron. As a result, the twist is forced and ridiculous.

5/10

Confessions of an Opium Eater: Albert Zugsmith

A procession of extended "Oriental" dance sequences betray Albert Zugsmith's Confessions of an Opium Eater for what it is: sleaze. But if sleaze were an art form, Confessions of an Opium Eater would have its own exhibit. One film that springs to mind when I think about it is that great accidental masterpiece: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), an almost no-budget noir that created a macrocosm of fear, anxiety, dread, and doom. Both films hide their budgets with clever camera tricks, over-the-top performances, and an aesthetic where the style truly becomes the substance. Loosely, loosely, loosely based on Thomas De Quincey's novel of the same name, the film follows Vincent Price as Gilbert de Quincey, a man who gets pulled into a tong war in nineteenth-century San Francisco concerning opium and the human trafficking of "brides" from China. The entire film feels like a fever dream. The performances (with perhaps the ironic exception of Price's) all feel slightly "off." Many of the actors and actresses behave like they are wind-up robots, particularly during a bombastic opening scene where Chinese women are literally thrown from ship to ship outside of San Francisco. The streets, back alleys, secret passages, and tunnels that spider their way throughout Chinatown take on a sinister, labyrinthine life of their own. Rooms seem to materialize in places they don't belong. One bizarre scene involving a drowned woman asks the audience to believe that the gangsters either have an underground dungeon adjacent to a harbor divided only by a sheet of glass or a ground level dungeon adjacent to a massive water tank. The centerpiece of the film is an exquisite 5-minute slow-motion sequence where Price has to escape from a group of murderers while high on opium. Again, spatial logic is violated when Price jumps through a window in what we thought to be an underground opium den only to reveal that they were on the top floor of a giant building.

8/10

Bellissima: Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti's Bellissima is many things, but it is not a comedy. I'm not sure if it's a satire, either. I say this because I have seen both words used repeatedly to describe this film about a maniacal mother who go to great lengths to make her 5-year-old daughter stand out during auditions for a film role. If this is a comedy, then why are there so many shots of the child alone and crying? If it is a satire, why does it feel more like a condemnation of the mother than of the industry she traumatizes her child over? I certainly felt fury during the justifiably famous scene where the mother watches a room full of executives laugh at her daughter's disastrous screen test. But I slowly felt my anger redirect itself from the cruel executives towards the mother forcing her daughter to WATCH the executives mock footage of her crying and shrieking for the screen test to end. Bellissima is a wildly uneven film. If it had focused its energies on depicting the mother as a monster, it might have been better. But it can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be light-hearted, serious, funny, or tragic. Of course, a great film can be all of these things simultaneously. But Bellissima isn't one of them. This incongruity doesn't seem deliberate, it seems the natural result of a film with no clear destination in mind.

6/10

The Baker’s Wife: Marcel Pagnol

Marcel Pagnol's The Baker's Wife is about an hour too long and it is peppered with too many scenes that add nothing to the plot. But that was kind of the point of the film: it's a movie about characters more than plot. Oh, there is a story involving a cuckolded baker whose inability to make bread due to his despondency leads to the town rallying as one to return his prodigal wife. But this is merely a framework on which to hang portraits of the village's many colorful characters. There are a squabbling pair of farmers whose animosity springs from a couple of poorly located trees, a bickering leftist and the local priest, a whole host of Arcadian rustics, and, of course, the baker himself played by the immortal Raimu. Honestly, the film reminds me a lot of Howard Hawks' Hatari! (1962), another film about an hour longer than it needed to be that was more concerned with its characters and the insouciant pace of their lives while not on the hunt (for animals and/or unfaithful women) than on a plot. Both films are about the empty moments in-between spurts of action and the magnetic personalities that inhabit them. Here is a film that is as warm, lazy, and inviting as an afternoon in the French countryside.

7/10

A Night at the Opera: Sam Wood

[Revisit Review]

It might be sacrilege, but I have to say it: Sam Wood's A Night at the Opera isn't very good. Though the film does contain some of the Marx Brothers' best work (and let's be honest: even mediocre Marx Brothers is worth the cost of admission), the film fails to come together as a whole. MGM wouldn't get their Marx Brothers formula down right until their next film, A Day at the Races (1937). The neutering of the Brothers' anarchic spirit, the addition of too many sappy musical numbers, the abrupt start (obviously a symptom of the film being re-edited by the studio during World War Two), and the bizarre choice to make the Brothers almost supporting characters in their own movie make A Night at the Opera an average film. And average isn't good enough for the Marx Brothers.

7/10

Hangin' with the Homeboys: Joseph Vasquez

Joseph Vasquez's Hangin' with the Homeboys is a small miracle of a film that combines the immediacy and introspection of John Cassavetes with the energy of the then burgeoning inner-city independent scene in American cinema. The film follows four friends on a Friday's night out on the town destined for doom and disaffection. By the end of the night their sojourn onto the mean streets of NYC will see their friendships tested and ultimately destroyed. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Hangin' with the Homeboys is Vasquez's ability to make all four friends feel like people instead of characters; each one of them has clearly defined hopes, dreams, hang-ups, fears, and hatreds. There's Tom, an aspiring actor with a dead-end job as a telemarketer who allows himself to be taken advantage of for money by his unemployed friends, Willie, a jobless urchin who shields himself from his own shortcomings with empty Black Power slogans and accusations of racism, Fernando (aka Vinny), a fast-talking, mooching Lothario with a severe racial inferiority complex, and Johnny, an idealistic yet hopelessly naive grocery store clerk who can never seem to work up the nerve to pursue what he wants, be it enrollment in college, friendship, or women. This isn't a film where the characters are driven by the writer from set-piece to set-piece in an attempt to keep the story moving along. This is a film that moves along organically without seeming tedious or contrived.

8/10

The Big House: George W. Hill

The use of sound is so integral to George W. Hill's prison drama The Big House that you could essentially watch it on the radio. In many ways, what you hear helps inform the audience almost as much as what you see. The cold, empty walls of the prison are accompanied by the mechanical sound of marching prisoners. Individual voices promising vengeance bleed out of synch with the others during hymns on Sunday. These are just two examples. Martin Scorsese cited The Big House as an exemplary development in Hollywood's adoption of sound in the early 1930s. But the film is also remarkable simply as a story. The film follows three inmates in a desperately overcrowded prison: Kent, a new prisoner locked up for manslaughter while driving drunk, Morgan, a prison veteran up for parole, and Butch, an unpredictably violent brute who rules over his fellow inmates. Besides the film's use of sound, what intrigued me the most in The Big House was how it subverted expectations concerning its central characters' story arcs. By the end of the film, the character we first identified as the hero has become a villain and one of the villains has become the hero. Finally, the film ends with an electrifying prison riot that turns into a full-on battle between the inmates and guards complete with machine guns and tanks. The Big House is a wonderful film, both as an artifact of the early Hollywood sound era and as an entertainment.

8/10

Sweet Smell of Success: Alexander Mackendrick

[Revisit Review]

Is Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success a perfect film noir? Dodging the obvious absurdity of the question itself, it is hard to deny that the film is not just one of the towering exemplars of the genre but of 1950s cinema in general. The stars must have aligned when it was made. How else could you reconcile the combination of James Wong Howe's cinematography, one of the greatest screenplays ever written (that is NOT an exaggeration), Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster's performances, and a story which refuses to relent in its nearly nihilistic intensity?

10/10

Veronika Voss: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[Revisit Review]

Re-watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Veronika Voss, I must have started and stopped watching it about five times because I know and dread what comes at the end. To me, that's one of the marks of great filmmaking. The destruction of Veronika Voss, the murder of Henriette, the tampering of the crime scene...it makes me so physically angry that I could barely stand to watch it again. But in addition to its magnificent story, the film is heart-achingly beautiful. Is it hyperbole to say that Xaver Schwarzenberger's black-and-white cinematography is some of the most colorful ever committed to film? I doubt it. Fassbinder's neo-Hollywood film grammar is also fascinating and makes his premature death a few months after the film's release all the more tragic.

10/10

Mary Had a Little...: Edward Buzzell

Edward Buzzell's Mary Had a Little... isn't just a bad comedy, it's a stupid one. The plot is stupid: a desperate playwright enters into an absurd bet to trick a doctor into thinking an actress is pregnant so he can try and influence the hypothetical baby's development into a perfect child. The characters are stupid: none of them act like human beings. The jokes are stupid; the most painful one being where two people are accidentally hypnotized at the same time to repeat the phrase "I am having a beautiful baby" whenever they hear the word "baby." And, surprise, one of them is a man! That gag literally had me rolling my eyes. By the end I had lost track of what was going on. But it wasn't because the film was confusing. The reason was that I had stopped caring enough to follow it. The ending involves a mob of desperate people running around trying to get married, trying not to get married, and trying to get laid. The climax of this sequence ends in what I think was a police station. Just imagine a dumbed down version of the court-room denouement from Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972).

4/10

The Apartment: Billy Wilder

[Revisit Review]

What is it with me giving Billy Wilder movies 8/10 scores? Once again I watch one of his most acclaimed films and I can't help but think, "That was very good, but not 9/10 or 10/10 material." His films must lack a certain je ne sais quoi. Take The Apartment, for example. It's a very good film. Jack Lemmon is heart-breaking as "Bud" Baxter. The screenplay is well-constructed and intelligent. And Joseph LaShelle's black-and-white widescreen cinematography is stunning! The film represents an excellent mixture of comedy and tragedy. And yet...I don't know. The individual bits and pieces of the film are outstanding. But altogether? I'm stumped as to why they leave me feeling so cold. Once more I find myself admiring the craftsmanship, but questioning the craft itself.

8/10

Black Girl: Ousmane Sembène

[Originally published in 2010 on Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear]

Diouana: “Back in Dakar they must be saying: “Diouana is happy in France. She has a good life.” For me, France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and my bedroom.”

Sometimes, on a whim, I like to imagine what would happen if the Catholic Church canonized filmmakers. The idea isn’t too far-fetched. After all, the Church already has patron saints for painters (St. Luke), actors (St. Genesius of Rome), and even singers (St. Gregory the Great). So who would be the patron saints for film directors? I usually like to think that each country has a patron saint. For France, I would choose Robert Bresson or Francois Truffaut. For Italy, it would be either Federico Fellini or Roberto Rossellini. Japan would get to pick from Kurosawa, Ozu, or Mizoguchi. As for America, that could be tricky. Common sense would say Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, or D. W. Griffith, but I like to imagine Orson Welles or Martin Scorsese. Hey, it’s my list. They don’t have to be dead or even Catholic to be my choice.

I guess that my point is that every film-making culture has a director whose work is so important, so vital, and so influential that it borders on the sacred. Their work is a wellspring of cultural identity and pride which inspires their fellow countrymen to pick up movie cameras and to create great films. So how do we choose who to venerate? For countries that have a long history with the cinema, it can be difficult. But other times, the answer is obvious. Such is the case with Africa and their great godfather of cinema, the eternal Ousmane Sembène.

Born in Senegal in 1923, Sembène would spend his life documenting the plight of his fellow Africans. He started as an author, writing novels about the evils of colonial governments and later about corrupt African governments. His books would establish him as one of Africa’s greatest writers, along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. But he began to realize that if he wanted to reach a wider audience, he would have to expand beyond literature. After all, many of his novels remain un-translated, thereby limiting their appeal abroad. So, at forty years old, he decided to become a filmmaker.

His first feature film, La Noire de…, was the first feature length film released by a sub-Saharan African director. Essentially, with this film, Sembène became Africa’s first director. Jonathon Rosenbaum argues in his book Movies as Politics that La Noire de… was, “the symbolic genesis of sub-Saharan African filmmaking, at least to the extent that the authorship belonged to a born and bred African.” With it, Sembène proved to the world that Africa had its own distinct voice in the world of cinema.

The film centers around a young Senegalese woman from Dakar named Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) who is hired by a French couple to be their nanny. She moves to France to live with the couple. Moving from Africa was a difficult decision, but she is enthralled with the opportunity of living in France. She has dreams of buying expensive clothing with her wages. Until she gets her first paycheck, she even walks around in spike heels. But it soon becomes apparent that something is amiss.

There are no children at the couple’s house. At least, not at first. It seems that they are studying abroad. In the meantime, however, Diouana is made to do all kinds of housework. She has to sweep, scrub, do laundry, brew coffee, and all other manner of tedious chores. At one point she is even made to cook “African food” for the couple’s friends. She removes as much of the spices as she can, but alas, it is still too spicy. It dawns of Diouana that she was never meant to be a nanny. Instead, the couple have essentially bought a maid. But then again, the promise of a paycheck goes unfulfilled. In reality, the couple has purchased a slave.

They begin to order her with a bell. The housewife transforms into a tyrant, screaming at her for things like not making the coffee for her before she woke up. She doesn’t let her eat until she does her work. Diouana quickly becomes disillusioned with her job. Refusing to let herself become their servant (or dare I say slave) she slashes her throat in the bathtub. Her tragic end is only punctuated by the French man traveling back to Diouana’s home with the intent of paying her family her back wages. They refuse his money. By refusing the money, Diouana’s position as an unpaid servant is confirmed. Confused, the man walks back to his ship.

A short film (only clocking in at 65 minutes) it nevertheless remains a powerful piece of cinema. It speaks to the powerful topic of post-colonial identity. While many readers may be surprised at Diouana’s treatment, I would remind them that this was only a few years after Senegal formally declared its independence from France. Could it be that the couple was using Diouana to fulfill their subconscious need for superiority over their lost territory? It’s very possible. But I would propose another interpretation of the film. Instead of hiring Diouana as an act of revenge, I believe that they were hiring her because she was exotic. Let’s look at the facts.

She prepares African food for their friends. They wanted to impress them with their worldliness. Of course, this is foiled by the fact that the food was cooked in a way that was sensitive to their tastes. But no matter. The guests go on about impressed they are. At one point, one of the guests stands up and addresses Diouana, saying that he has never kissed a black woman before. He grabs and embraces her. Satisfied, he sits back down. To them, Diouana is an attraction. The couple is more than happy to show her off.

But then we need to examine a recurring symbol in the film: an African mask that Diouana gives the couple when they hire her. Overjoyed at her new position, she grabs a mask from a small boy in the street of her village and presents it to her new employers. They look at it, admire it, and announce that it appears to be the real thing. They proudly display it upon their wall for all to see. They don’t realize that it is a worthless mask. To them, it represents exotic Africa. Repeatedly throughout the film, it stares down at Diouana as she descends further and further into depression over her new lot in life. Finally, after she cannot take it anymore, she takes it off the wall. When she kills herself in the bathroom, the mask sits there in the room with her.

Anyone who sees La Noire de… will instantly realize the handiwork of a master craftsman. Perhaps it was because Sembène started as a director when he was so old that he was able to create such magnificently realized films. I like what Roger Ebert said about Sembène when he wrote about his last film, Moolaadé (2004), “[Sembène] must have lived enough, suffered enough and laughed enough to find the wisdom of age.” I couldn’t agree more. Even when we go back to his earlier work like La Noire de… we find a man who is in complete control of his story and what he wants to say. It is emotional without being melodramatic. It has a message without seeming preachy. All he does is tell a simple story. What else could we expect from the great Saint Sembène? 

9/10

The River Fuefuki: Keisuke Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The River Fuefuki is a worm's-eye view of the turbulent Sengoku Era of Japanese history, a period of almost constant warfare that lasted over a hundred years. It follows one family of farmers as generation after generation of their young men and women are chewed up and spat back out by the military machinations of savage warlords. Perhaps the most memorable element of The River Fuefuki is its bizarre cinematography: largely shot in black and white, it features bold swaths of vibrant color literally painted onto the frames. Sometimes entire scenes are shot through bold color filters, turning the whole screen green, blue, etc, etc. The hyper-artificiality of the cinematography makes the film seem like a fable. The film's commentaries on human nature are ruthless. Perhaps the most memorable character is Sozo (played with astonishing charisma by Kôshirô Matsumoto), a young man who despises his life as a farmer and, ignoring the pleas of his family, becomes a samurai. Sozo's transformation from a bitter young man to a raving monster who callously forces his siblings into the war effort (and their eventual deaths) is remarkable. I also love how the young men are basically brainwashed into thinking that the local warlord family, the Takedas, actually have their best interests at heart. "The Takedas are our benefactors" is a statement at once outrageous, horrific, and sobering. How appropriate for such an outrageous, horrific, and sobering film.

[Side note: the ending where the old woman tries to get her children to return home from their military unit during their death march to the temple hit me with an unexpected amount of emotion.]

8/10

Night of the Living Dead: George A. Romero

[Revisit Review]

It was fascinating the revisit the nascence of the modern zombie genre once again. Here are some of my collected thoughts:

-Before Barbra gets to the farmhouse, Night of the Living Dead looks and feels like a AIP-schlockfest. But the cinematography gets noticeably more competent, moody, and claustrophobic once the survivors get trapped in the house.
-One of the film's faults is that Romero doesn't exactly seem to know what his zombies are capable of. In the beginning they demonstrate rudimentary problem-solving skills (the first zombie smashing in the window to Barbra's car). Later they are mindless automatons.
-The government conscripting rednecks to fight the zombie horde is simultaneously the film's most insane and believable plot twist.
-Important plot details such as Johnny smashing his head on a tombstone and Ben getting trapped outside the farmhouse by Harry after the failed attempt to get the truck going happen so fast that they are easily missed if you don't pay attention.

9/10

Cat People: Jacques Tourneur

[Revisit Review]

There was always a scene of dialogue in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People that struck me as unnecessary and superfluous. It was the scene where Oliver Reed confesses to Alice Moore that he was flummoxed by his marital difficulties with Irena Dubrovna. He explains that he didn't know how to react because he "had never been unhappy before." But this time around, that conversation hit me a different way. See, this is a few scenes before Oliver and Alice confess their love for each other and Oliver confronts Irena with desires for a divorce. Then it hit me: Irena was always a means to an end for Oliver. She made him happy. But as soon as she became a liability, he wanted to get rid of her. I began to think of Irena not as a hapless victim, but as a tragic hero. Her magical powers were her ethnic identity which she surrendered to live in the West, much like her ancestors when confronted with the "civilizing" sword of King John of Serbia and Christendom (note the scene near the end where Oliver and Alice use an impromptu cross to keep Irene from attacking them). And then I realized the kicker: Irene was totally within her right to be suspicious and jealous of Alice. Stalking her before she officially hooked up with Oliver was perhaps a bit too much, but after her break-up I sympathized with her anger and fury towards the people who used her up and threw her away like a ball of trash. In addition to being a psychological fable of repressed female sexuality, Cat People can be viewed as a metaphor for how the West exploits and abandons ethnic "others."

10/10

The Seventh Seal: Ingmar Bergman

[Revisit Review]

If the cinema is a language of images, then The Seventh Seal is one of Ingmar Bergman's most distinguished and valuable films. Very few of his other works would be so visually captivating. His conjuring of a chess game between a knight and the embodiment of Death and the danse macabre that concludes the film catapulted him, and art cinema in general, into immortality. And yet the film is very uneven. The general gloom, doom, and apocalyptic atmosphere are broken up one too many times by sunny scenes involving the family of actors. I can understand their value to the narrative. But Bergman failed to seamlessly transition them into the overall story without spoiling the film's tone.

8/10

I Walked with a Zombie: Jacques Tourneur

[Revisit Review]
[Spoilers Ahead]

I Walked with a Zombie is a film that I didn't fully appreciate the first time that I saw it. If I remembered correctly, I dismissed it as rather dour and lifeless. Oh, how foolish I was...Today the film strikes me as a near-masterpiece of atmospheric horror. There aren't any jump scares (that I can think of). Instead, the entire film works to create a universe of dread, mystery, and suspicion. My favorite image in the film is of the Carre-Four standing watch at the crossroads leading to the houmfort. It's a perfectly conjured image of terror. But my favorite moment is when Mrs. Rand reveals herself to be the voice inside the shack at the houmfort. It isn't a scary moment, but it's a perfectly calculated one that pulls the rug out from under you and makes you truly wonder if anybody in the film is who they say are.

8/10

A Town of Love and Hope: Nagisa Ôshima

A Town of Love and Hope was the debut feature-length film of director Nagisa Ôshima, a man who would establish himself as one of the greatest iconoclasts and political subversives in all of world cinema. The film is a parable on class differences in Japanese society, a theme that would reoccur with frequency throughout his career. It focuses on two romantic relationships. The first is between an impoverished junior high student named Masao who sells his handicapped sister's pigeons for money (they always escape and return home, providing him with a slow yet inexhaustible source of income) and Kyoko, the rich daughter of an electronics manufacturer. The second is between Masao's teacher Akiyama and Kyoko's older brother Yuji. Akiyama-sensei and Kyoko try to convince Yuji and their father to give Masao a desperately needed job, but they refuse when they discover Masao's pigeon-selling scheme. Ôshima's thesis in this film seems to be that the wealthy are incapable of understanding what the poor have to do to survive. And if they are capable, they are simply unwilling. Watch how Yuji callously dismisses Kyoko and seems genuinely shocked when Akiyama-sensei tries to leave him after betraying her trust and, more crucially, her student. The film's ending is one that stayed with me for days afterwards. Another one of Yuji's sisters confronts him on the roof of their house with a rifle and one of Masao's pigeons. She asks if he has the guts to kill Masao's pigeon, a creature that will help fund his poor family. Remember, Yuji will never see Masao or his family again. It will cost him literally nothing to let it go. So, of course, he shoots it.

7/10

Hatari!: Howard Hawks

In the auteur circles of film criticism, Howard Hawks' Hatari! is one of the most frequently referenced films of that great Hollywood master whenever his career is discussed. In the tradition of Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Red River (1948), and Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! is a textbook example of Hawks' macho pictures that focus on groups of professional men working in dangerous professions. This time around the profession is catching wild animals in Africa to sell to zoos. John Wayne heads up a group of expatriates from all over the world who literally risk life and limb daily to capture these magnificent beasts. Incredibly, the scenes where Wayne and his men capture wild animals were real. These were shot first on location in Africa. It was only after all of this footage was captured that Hawks had frequent collaborator Leigh Brackett write up a script which connected these scenes together. Perhaps more than any of Hawks' other macho pictures, Hatari! concerns itself with its characters' lifestyles and the daily minutiae of their lives. This is both the film's biggest weakness and greatest strength. The decentralized plot leads to a punishing run time that clocks in at over 2 1/2 hours. But whereas a normal film would have been crippled by such length, Hatari! manages to sustain it. This is a film about Life on the Hunt; the empty moments in-between captures where the hunters wait for their next assignment and bide their time the best they can. The film also features Wayne at his most charismatic. Watch the scene where he kisses Elsa Martinelli's character despite her face being covered in cream. As he wipes the cream off his nose and smiles, it becomes immediately apparent why Wayne is one of the true immortals of the cinema.

7/10

Noah: Darren Aronofsky

I never would have pegged Noah as an action hero. But Darren Aronofsky makes several other intriguing changes to the biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood in his film Noah. The film represents this odd combination of high fantasy and post-apocalyptic thrillers. Indeed, the humans and their towns of skeletal ironworks look like a society rebuilt after the bombs have dropped. But I digress. The film had some striking imagery and some inspired sequences, particularly a two-minute Creation montage told from the perspective of evolutionary creationism. The rapid editing in these sequences remind us that, yes, Aronofsky was the same man who directed REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000). I also like Aronofsky's technique of framing characters in the middle of the frame as black silhouettes. Most of the computer generated effects (i.e. the animals) are sub-par. The birds were the only animals that I felt looked real. And even then the computer trickery became painfully apparent during shots where there were hundreds of birds onscreen at once. Curiously, the last third of the film takes place on the ark after the Flood has swallowed the earth. During this section, Noah becomes an outright tyrant at odds with his family. He even tries to kill his new-born granddaughters because he honestly believes that God only meant for him and his family to survive long enough so that they could guarantee the survival of the rest of His creatures. Noah is a different kind of bible film. I can't say that I've ever seen anything like it stylistically or psychologically.

7/10

Murder by Contract: Irving Lerner

I agree with both Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their celebration of Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract as a triumph. The film is an existentialist masterpiece that I earnestly believe fits right alongside of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a penetrating glimpse into the mind of a murderer who believes themselves to be either above or outside of the law. The film's protagonist is Claude, a disaffected man who one day decides to become a contract killer. After rising through the ranks of the underworld, he is assigned to kill a woman in Los Angeles. And for the first time Claude is uneasy with his orders: he hesitates killing women because he views them as less "predictable" as men. This late era film noir is dripping with effortless style and magnificently embodies the aesthetic of the "cool." The restrained camerawork, the isolated electric guitar soundtrack, Vince Edwards' insouciant performance as Claude, and the film's frequent passive passages that focus on Claude biding his time, exercising, and waiting either for his next assignment or for the right moment to strike, make Murder by Contract unlike any other American film of its era. One last thought: when Claude's mob handlers in Los Angeles mock him by calling him "Superman," are they referring to the superhero or to the Nietzschean ideal? Or maybe, just maybe, are they calling him both?

9/10

The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Marc Webb

[Spoilers Ahead]

There was no reason for Harry Osborn or the Green Goblin to be in Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He was included for one reason: to kill Gwen Stacy. At some point the filmmakers looked to each other and said, “Gwen needs to die.” So in comes Harry. It was unnecessary. The film would have worked perfectly if it had just focused on the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy and their fight against Electro. I am bamboozled by the negative outcry against Jamie Foxx's Electro because I honestly think that he is the most compelling and frightening Marvel villain since Dr. Octopus. He felt like an actual THREAT and not just an over-hyped Monster of the Week. His character arc was brilliant, he was sympathetic, and his Times Square debut was easily the best part of the film. I loved how Peter and Gwen worked together to defeat him near the end of the film. If Peter’s whole arc was centered on him coming to terms with risking the people he cares for by being Spider-Man, then ending with Gwen's acceptance of the risks and, most crucially, Spider-Man accepting Gwen’s acceptance of the risks, would have been poignant and meaningful. The first Spider-Man film was about how a hero copes with death. This film SHOULD have been about how a hero copes with LIFE. Gwen's fridging and Osborn's inclusion in this film annoyed me greatly. First, it added to an already dreadfully over-long running time. Second, it was an addition of pointless cruelty to a film that had already been intense and emotional. Many of the film's best moments are the quiet ones where Peter and Gwen talk about their relationship. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are incredibly charismatic and their romantic scenes are charming and effective. But I would expect nothing less from the director of 500 Days of Summer (2009). I've also heard people complain that this was more of a romantic soap opera than a straight-up superhero film. To which I respond, "Uh...that's kind of the point with Spider-Man." There are great parts of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But overall the film is too cluttered, too long, and too cruel. I know that Gwen Stacy dying is almost as important to Spider-Man canon as Uncle Ben dying. But a fridging is a fridging.

6/10