Moonrise: Frank Borzage

By 1948, Frank Borzage, that old master of Hollywood, that unapologetic romanticist whose work triumphed during the Twenties and Thirties, had fallen by the wayside. The man who had won the very first Academy Award for Directing in 1927 was now struggling to secure projects. Perhaps Borzage’s brand of earnest melodrama turned sour in the mouths of a generation who had struggled through the hell of World War Two. As the years marched on, war-time idealism melted into nihilistic cynicism. This was no longer a time when a director who concluded an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms with doves and church bells could flourish. And yet, as his career began to crumble, Borzage managed to release one more true masterpiece; a film that reconciled his passion for lovers facing adversity with the nightmare psychoses consuming America ego. That film was Moonrise.

The opening few minutes of Moonrise set the tone for the rest of the film. It begins with the execution by hanging of a man accused of murder. The proceedings are shown via shadows that seem chiseled onto the wall behind the gallows. As the hangmen pulls the lever, smash cut to the crib of a newborn. A grim outline of a toy doll literally hangs over the bedsheets as the criminal’s infant son, Danny Hawkins, wails and wails. Jump cut to Danny as a schoolboy forced to endure the taunts of his classmates. “Danny Hawkins dad was hanged! Danny Hawkins dad was hanged,” they chant as their ringleader Jerry Sykes wraps his hands about his throat and pretends to choke himself to death. Another cut, another few years pass. Danny’s torment continues. And finally, one night as Jerry beats him senseless, two things break: Danny’s mind and Jerry’s skull.

Those who know Borzage purely by reputation as a romanticist may be shocked by the jagged, neo-expressionist visual grammar used in these scenes: extreme shadowplay, stilted frame compositions, and high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting. But Borzage had been using such techniques for decades, having first picked them up from his contemporary F.W. Murnau while they were both working at Fox in the 1920s. Though Borzage’s films were rich in sentimentality, they demonstrated acute stylistic acumen. As the film continues, Borzage continues to reveal bold stylistic techniques. One of the most apparent is his consistent use of crossfades between charged images: a young woman wringing her hands in church into an old woman’s hands knitting; a paranoid man’s face into a raccoon. Indeed, Moonrise is not a film that can simply be watched passively. It demands to be watched, not merely observed.

From Danny’s desperate act of murder, the film charts his mental decimation, emotional reconstruction, and psychological reconciliation with his actions. A few kind souls help in his rehabilitation. The first is Mose, a retired brakeman who lives in self-imposed isolation in the woods with his hounds and guitar. Played with great dignity by Rex Ingram, Mose may be a kindly old Black Man who helps the White Protagonist, but instead of solving Danny’s problems, he helps force him to confront them.

But the other is sweet Gilly Johnson, a schoolteacher who quickly forms the other half of Borzage’s romantic universe. It is here that we find the major difference between Moonrise and many of Borzage’s other films: the forces that seek to tear the lovers apart. Often these forces are external ones such as World War One in A Farewell to Arms (1932), the sinking of a lavish ocean liner in History Is Made at Night (1937), or the rise of Nazism in The Mortal Storm (1940). But in Moonrise the adversity springs from Danny’s tortured mind. It manifests itself physically, such as an early scene where traumatic flashbacks cause him to crash a car while she was in the passenger seat, and  mentally. During a coon-hunt with Mose he has a minor breakdown while shaking a raccoon out of a tree. Borzage cuts to a pile of logs next to a cabin...a pile suspiciously similar to the one where Danny murdered his tormentor. Does Danny project himself on the raccoon? If so, then what does it say about his desperate attempts to capture it?

Danny’s internal dilemma of coming to terms with a forced act of violence takes on new meaning when evaluated in the context of post-World War Two American society. One of the cornerstones of film noir were protagonists who were damaged, either physically or mentally, by their time in the armed forces. If we consider Danny’s psychoses as allegorical, then Moonrise becomes more than just a dark melodrama; it enters the realm of bona-fide film noir. Consider Danny as America: haunted by the specter of a violent tragedy (Danny’s father’s hanging/World War Two), the protagonist is goaded into violence (murder/World War Two) by an incessant attacker (Jerry Sykes/the Axis) that leaves him broken, beaten, and bruised.

Of course, this is merely one possible reading. While it isn’t absurd to believe that Borzage may have deliberately made such comparisons, there is no doubt that at the end of the day his primary concern in Moonrise was Danny Hawkins and Gilly Johnson. Their love is no panacea, but it offers hope that Danny can rebuild his life. And therein is Borzage’s secret: the belief that despite everything the world may throw at you, love can be a force for salvation and goodness. His romanticism does not deny the world, it burns in spite of it.

9/10

An American in Paris: Vincente Minnelli

[Revisit Review]

Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris is one of my favorite feel-good movies. Just watching it is enough to put me in a rapturous mood. The sets, the costumes, the songs, the dancing! Half the fun of watching the film is simply marveling at how easy Gene Kelly et al. makes it seem. Even watching him wake up and get his apartment in order at the beginning of the film (in reality, the film's first dance number) is stunning in its casual fluency. I was surprised to find how much the film's central love-rectangle plot annoyed me this time around. It strains the pace of the film a bit. But it hardly seems to matter. 'S wonderful!

9/10

Three Stars: Lutz Hachmeister

Lutz Hachmeister's Three Stars isn't so much a documentary as it is a 90-minute advertisement for the Michelin Guide. They try to hide this by focusing on nine world-class chefs with varying Michelin star ratings, but instead of probing, they promote. They mention briefly two major flaws with the Michelin Guide: that it has been accused of Classism for only promoting restaurants out of the price range for the vast majority of consumers and that it has led to the nervous breakdowns and suicides of chefs fearful of losing their ratings. This first problem is hand-waved away by the smiling head of the Michelin organization with claims that they are making a concerted effort to promote more economically "friendly" restaurants. If this documentary had focused even briefly on some of these "affirmative action" eateries, it might have saved the film. But they don't. And they treat the fact that a European chef literally killed himself because of the ratings with a few clips of newsreel. There’s a line in Three Stars where an interviewee admits that people whose careers have been made by the Michelin guide will never bad mouth it. Is a similar thing going on with the makers of this film? Although I have to give the film kudos for including multiple interviews with Japanese chefs who outright condemn the guide as pointless.

5/10

Harold and Maude: Hal Ashby

[Revisit Review]
[Spoilers Ahead]

Yes, yes, the suicide scenes in Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude are the film's most memorable moments. But as I re-watched the film, I found myself more captivated this time around by the softer, quieter moments: Harold and Maude watching a flock of seagulls on a beach, Maude reciting poetry of her own invention but forgetting that she had written it, and Harold walking away from a cliff-side while playing the banjo. Harold and Maude could have been a mindless exercise in gallows humor, but there is an earnest humanism coursing beneath its surface. Re-watching the film also left me with a lingering question that eluded me during my first viewing: did Maude kill herself in spite of Harold or because of Harold?

9/10

Happy Feet: George Miller

[Revisit Review]

Yes folks, George Miller's Happy Feet is still as silly and ridiculous as I remembered it to be. The female penguins have cleavage and hourglass feather patterns, racial stereotypes abound, and the film climaxes with a line so absurd that it made me laugh for the first (and only) time while watching it: "I don't want to live in a world without penguins!!" The environmental message was cliched, the characters were uninspired, and the music was sapped of its creativity and emotion. The only brilliant moment in the film was its depiction of zoos as numbed purgatories wherein the occupants become docile zombies.

5/10

Blood for Dracula: Paul Morrissey

[Revisit Review]

I think Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula is a superior film to his other erotic European horror film Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), mainly because it doesn't try as hard to be a horror film. Blood for Dracula is essentially a very graphic, very macabre drawing-room melodrama. Whereas Flesh for Frankenstein had shocking, gore-fueled jump scares scattered throughout, the moments of carnage in Blood for Dracula (with the exception of the last few minutes) are focused around the pathetic convulsions of Count Dracula's body after drinking non-virgin blood. Indeed, these are the best moments of the film. Aided in no small part by Claudio Gizzi's score and Luigi Kuveiller's cinematography, Udo Kier somehow manages to make Count Dracula both a pathetic and sympathetic character. It's also interesting how the film positions the film's "hero" who kills Count Dracula as a misogynistic rapist. His Marxist sympathies also add a symbolic undertone of Old World aristocracy versus New World politics to the proceedings; the secular versus the perversely mystical. Some of the acting is stilted and occasionally the European accents are too thick to understand (particularly from poor old Vittorio De Sica). It may not be a good "film," but it's a thoroughly worthwhile experience.

7/10

Flesh for Frankenstein: Paul Morrissey

[Revisit Review]

Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein could very well have been a masterpiece of 70's horror if it had featured more than two actors who could actually act. The film features a ingenious twist on the Frankenstein mythos courtesy of screenwriter Tonino Guerra of Blowup (1966) and Amarcord (1973) fame. The film's visual beauty is mesmerizing. Luigi Kuveiller's cinematography is agonizingly beautiful and stands triumphantly beside his work in such films as Avanti! (1972) and Deep Red (1975). Indeed, the image from this film that lingers the most in my mind isn't one of the graphic gore effects or sex scenes. Instead, it's of the camera tracking along an impossibly lengthy dinner table to reveal a deranged family sitting apart from each other at opposite ends. But alas, most of the acting is flat and monotone. Udo Kier and Monique van Vooren are fine as the incestuous Baron and Baroness von Frankenstein. But almost everyone else is laughably incompetent. The worst is the actor who plays the aspiring monk who unwillingly becomes part of the Frankensteins' scientific blasphemies. Honestly, he seems to channel Tommy Wiseau (or is it the other way around?). I've heard that the film is supposed to be a dark parody of the Frankenstein sub-genre. If that's the case, then it could be argued that the wooden acting is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for the revived corpses that are so essential to the story. But I don't think so. If anything, the bad acting isn't indicative of an artistic decision, but of European actors unable to communicate with their American director.

6/10

The Bank Dick: Edward F. Cline

[Revisit Review]

One of the single most insightful observations ever made about W. C. Fields came courtesy of Roger Ebert: "[He] is the most improbable star in the first century of the movies." His individual works are wildly disparate in terms of quality. But when viewed as part of a whole, that being the totality of Fields' career and cinematic persona, they are fascinating. The Bank Dick, arguably his best work, is a solid film despite the fact that it is easily outclassed by many other comedies of its day. There are a number of ingenious moments: Fields being carried around like a stereotypical Oriental king on the shoulders of four underlings while posing as a film director, Fields running into a room and punching a con artist through a bank window in one swift movement, and an extended chase sequence near the end wherein Fields remains the utmost (albeit beleaguered) embodiment of polite courtesy despite a) the fact that he is being held at gunpoint by a bank robber, and b) the fact that the car he is driving is literally falling apart in his hands. The Bank Dick is a good comedy, but not necessarily a great one. But this brings me to perhaps the second most insightful observation ever made about W. C. Fields, also courtesy of Roger Ebert: "There is not a single Fields film that "must" be seen in order to qualify as a literate movie lover, and yet if you are not eventually familiar with Fields you are not a movie lover at all." With that in mind, The Bank Dick is indispensable.

7/10

Spellbound: Alfred Hitchcock

[Revisit Review]

While re-watching Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, my sister (who had never seen the film before) mentioned how much Dr. Constance Petersen reminded her of Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Both were young female professionals in male-dominated fields who become intimately involved with a mentally disturbed man. The romantic angle in The Silence of the Lambs was of course merely suggested, but in Spellbound it was very blatant. After all, this is a Hitchcock film where people fall in love when the music tells them to. But I immensely enjoyed Spellbound. George Barnes' rich cinematography adds sinister textures to a film diving into fractured minds and psyches. I would love to read a feminist evaluation of the film, particularly concerning how all of the male medical professionals claim to know more about Dr. Petersen than she knows about herself. I was disappointed with how the film handled the infamous dream sequences designed by Dalí. I hate how they were broken up with cuts back to reality and drowned out with dull narration courtesy of Gregory Peck. But, of course, this was Selznick's fault, not Hitchcock's.

8/10

Ministry of Fear: Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear is a competent war-time noir rich with the paranoia and intrigue that so characterized Lang's early work in America. Based on a novel by Graham Greene, the film follows a man released from a mental institution who accidentally walks into the middle of a Nazi spy ring. Whereas Hitchcock would have taken this premise of a wrongly accused man (one of his favorites, coincidentally) and made the film into an audience-pleasing thriller, Lang opted for a more moody examination of fate and duplicity. It's no accident that doors are such a common symbol throughout the film: Lang creates a universe full of little secluded pocket worlds that shield men and women who aren't who they say they are. I have to admit that it was a little strange to see the protagonist actually end up with the romantic lead. In a Hitchcock film we know from the very beginning that they will end up together. But Ministry of Fear goes to such pains to emphasize how nobody is who they appear to be (the stalker who turns out to be from Scotland Yard, the blind man who definitely ISN'T blind, and even the protagonist who we fear might have an unreliable point-of-view because of his incarceration, etc, etc). I understand that this storybook romance (complete with a perfunctory epilogue of them discussing marriage plans) was probably a concession to Hollywood from Lang. But it still doesn't mesh with the rest of the film.

7/10

Castle of Owls: Eiichi Kudō

If I remember one thing about Eiichi Kudō's Castle of Owls (itself an unlikely event because I fully expect to forget about this film in a couple of days), it will be that I didn't realize that there were two different protagonists until an hour into the film. And even then, I only came to that realization after stopping the film and seeking out a plot summary online because I was so lost as to what was going on. From what I can gather, the film is about two rival ninja. One swears vengeance on Toyotomi Hideyoshi for the murder of his family and the destruction of his clan. The other enters the employ of Hideyoshi, abandoning his clan for self-advancement. And along the way the revenge-bound ninja falls in love with a kunoichi. I will say that I enjoyed the plot twist wherein the first ninja finally confronts Hideyoshi only to find that he is a senile, bed-ridden old man. Disgusted, the ninja cannot bring himself to kill such a pathetic creature. When Castle of Owls ended, I couldn't help but feel cheated. I tried so hard to follow what was going on. I enjoyed much of the cinematography, particularly scenes where characters are swallowed up in torrents of rain. But to what avail? Castle of Owls may have been pretty to look at, but it left me scratching my head and wondering what in the world I had just finished watching.

6/10

Draft Day: Ivan Reitman

Here are the most important criteria for a sports film: people who have never heard of the sport before in their lives can a) understand, b) follow, and c) enjoy it. Before watching Ivan Reitman's Draft Day, I knew practically nothing about that yearly event wherein professional football teams compete to hire rookie players. But that didn't hamper my ability to enjoy the film at all. Indeed, Draft Day contains such a tightly constructed script that even people who have never seen a game of American football can appreciate what is going on. One of the major criticisms I've heard about the film is that it mythologizes professional football. To which I say: and didn't Rocky (1976) mythologize boxing? Now, I'm not saying that Draft Day is a film on par with Rocky. But my point remains. Kevin Costner is excellent as Sonny Weaver, Jr., the beleaguered General Manager of the Cleveland Browns. Costner has aged brilliantly into this role wherein his acting abilities are stretched further than they have been in years (to magnificent effect). Jennifer Garner is equally brilliant as Ali Parker, his girlfriend and salary cap manager for the Browns. Parker is the kind of boss that we all wish we could have had during terrible jobs. I particularly love the scene where she chews out a high-ranking employee for verbally assaulting an intern ("Don't you dare ever talk to an intern that way again"). In fact, the whole film could be used as a blueprint for how to be an effective leader. Watch the scene where Sonny confronts the aforementioned intern after unknowingly destroying his laptop in a fit of rage. The film's editing may seem distracting to some, what with it mimicking of the razzle-dazzle techniques used by major television networks during game broadcasts. But I found these techniques (split-screen conversations, screen wipes, and characters walking into and through adjacent parts of the split-screen) to be a charming method of keeping the film's energy level up. After all, this film is mostly comprised of people talking about sports statistics.

8/10

Hangmen Also Die!: Fritz Lang

[Revisit Review]

Funny story...Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! was the eleventh film that I ever reviewed for my first film blog Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear. I decided to re-watch it so I could have some context for my upcoming review of Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944), another one of his war-time American pictures about Nazism. And I was shocked to discover that Hangmen Also Die! didn't hold up at all. Now I find the film painfully bloated and overlong. Many scenes contain great immediacy and power, particularly those involving the Gestapo interrogating Czechoslovakian citizens and members of the Underground Resistance. If the film had focused solely on these (and been only around 90 minutes) then this film would have been sensational. But too much time is given over to Reinhard Heydrich's assassin, the family that hides him, and the 400 civilians arrested and sentenced to death during the ensuing investigation. As such, the film fails to cohere into a concrete whole.

6/10

Ten Wanted Men: H. Bruce Humberstone

Howard Hawks once said that a good movie has "three good scenes and no bad scenes." H. Bruce Humberstone's Ten Wanted Men, a Western about a corrupt rancher who hires a group of villainous gunfighters to harass and exterminate the rival Stewart family, may be a minor film, but it fits Mr. Hawks' criteria. In this case, there is one good sequence, one good idea, and one good scene that makes Ten Wanted Men pass the bar. The sequence is a fantastic gun battle where the remnants of the Stewart family hole up in a house and the gunfighters lay siege upon them. The idea is that after killing the corrupt rancher the heroes have to mop up the rest of the gunfighters who are laying waste to a nearby town. After all, the gunfighters have no loyalty to the dead rancher. Why would they suddenly leave when he dies once they have been paid? Wouldn't they stay in town where they could spend their ill-gotten gains? Who's going to stop them? After all, they're still armed and dangerous. The good scene takes place during the aforementioned siege. The evil rancher reveals that he has the sheriff's wife hostage and makes her beg them to surrender. The men almost do...right until one of the women they're fighting with marches out into the No Man's Land, confronts the wife, and knocks some sense into her. She doesn't even care that she will be taken prisoner as a result. She just does it. Bad. Ass.

7/10

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson

For a time, Wes Anderson has been a director at odds with himself. After such early successes as Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), he has spent almost a decade trying to catch the same kind of lightning in a bottle. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) was the obvious exception, but that was a marriage of Anderson and Roald Dahl. The Grand Budapest Hotel, on the other hand, is a triumphant return to form for one of America's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. And, yes, the film is heavily influenced by the writings of Stefan Zweig. But whereas Fantastic Mr. Fox could not have existed without Dahl, I could totally believe that The Grand Budapest Hotel sprang fully-formed from Anderson's forehead. As a film critic, I am constantly searching for films that tell stories that I have never experienced before. Not only does The Grand Budapest Hotel contain such a story, it presents it in a manner that is downright unprecedented. The film contains a plot so complex that I dare not try and summarize it here in any great detail. But here is the big picture: it follows a refuge named Zero Moustafa who gets employment in the film's eponymous hotel situated in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka located in the Alps. He develops a deep friendship with the hotel's concierge Gustave. Their relationship is tested when Zero breaks him out of jail after he was framed for killing a wealthy old woman. The film glides from genre to genre without hitting any turbulence. Indeed, if you were to ask me when the film transitioned from a comedy-of-manners to a murder mystery to a faux-espionage thriller, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I have heard Anderson's films described as living dollhouses, and I am unsure if that description has ever been more apropos. In this film, every character, every prop, and every background is meticulously framed like an animated daguerreotype. Whenever I watch an Anderson film, my eyeballs are kept occupied; they flit all over the full length and breadth of the screen soaking in every detail. And while in some of his later films this style has merely been distracting, in The Grand Budapest Hotel it is perfectly matched with the story. If I say one thing about the film, let it be this: it represents a perfect marriage of Anderson's form and content.

9/10

Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Captain America: The First Avenger was my favorite film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase One, mostly because it featured a hero who felt the most like a superhero. Now that I have seen Anthony and Joe Russo's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I think it will be safe to assume that this will be my favorite film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Two. Loosely based on Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier storyline from his run on the Captain America comics, the film sees the return of Steve Rogers' past friend and ally Bucky Barnes as a brainwashed super-assassin who works for the sinister terrorist organization HYDRA. Two of my favorite things about the film are the depictions of Black Widow and Nick Fury. Unlike her previous role in The Avengers (2012), Black Widow is actually portrayed as a CHARACTER with FLAWS and MOTIVATIONS. She actually makes MISTAKES, unlike her Whedon doppelgänger who was essentially a cardboard action figure who existed to role her eyes at the silly boys in costumes and look flawless even during an alien invasion of New York City. Nick Fury also seems like a wizened old master spy with ghosts and skeletons in his closet. In most of the other Marvel films he was in, Nick Fury came off more like Samuel L. Jackson with an eye-patch. And here is one of the film's greatest strengths: its characterizations. I adored Chris Evans' Steve Rogers. Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson was a joy to behold. Sebastian Stan managed to make Bucky seem like a tortured character without coming across as unnecessarily melodramatic or emo (haircut notwithstanding). And for the first time in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I enjoyed watching Black Widow. Throw in some fantastic fight scenes (particularly the early mission where SHIELD confronts Batroc the Leaper and his host of pirates...even if the camerawork and editing was a tad bit too shaky and erratic at times), and you have a magnificent superhero film.

8/10

Laura: Otto Preminger

[Revisit Review]

The moment where Otto Preminger's Laura goes from being a good murder mystery to a great one is the scene where Laura, the victim whose murder has set the film in motion, suddenly re-materializes. Suddenly Mark McPherson, the New York City police detective investigating her death, has the ultimate weapon: the supposed murder victim herself. It's a twist so brilliant that if it had occurred in a film released a few decades later it might have been heralded as a masterpiece of meta-fiction. After all, how absurd is the idea of a murder victim tagging along on their own murder investigation? Roger Ebert wisely pointed out that most of Laura consists of people standing around in rooms talking to McPherson. What keeps the film from growing tedious is how each character is dirty, rotten liar in their own fashion. But not everyone is good at it. I've heard complaints that Dana Andrews performance as McPherson was too flat and monotone. But I find that Andrews' performance was so lifeless that it transforms the detective into a caricature in his own right.

9/10

The Tall T: Budd Boetticher

Originally published at Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear in 2010.

The Tall T is a film that many will probably never see. It’s not because it isn’t a great film or a particularly rare one. The reason that many will probably never see it is because everything about it seems like a stereotypical Western. In a genre that has been milked as dry as the Western, some would argue even to the point that it is impossible to say anything new with it, few would probably want to take the time to watch such an unassuming film. It stars one of the great cowboys of the silver screen, Randolph Scott, in the lead role. But he doesn’t have the star power that actors like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Henry Fonda maintain to this day. To many, Scott’s image on the movie poster or DVD case for The Tall T probably wouldn’t seem any different than any other B-movie actor that inundated the Western genre. The story seems too familiar. Scott must save the damsel in distress being held for ransom from a gang of outlaws. How many times have we encountered that story? And finally, the name itself, The Tall T, doesn’t really do anything to grab a potential viewer’s imagination. It doesn’t have any nostalgic romanticism that titles like High Noon or Stagecoach. But perhaps all of these things are what makes The Tall T such a good film. It doesn’t insist upon itself. It knows the rules of the game and is content to play by them. By doing so, The Tall T transforms itself into one of the purest concentrations of Western cinema ever committed to celluloid.

It’s starts of simply enough. Pat Brennan (Randolph), a tough old cowboy, rides into a stagecoach way station to get some water for his journey into town. It’s obvious that he knows the station manager and his young son. The boy can hardly wait to see him and begs him to let him water his horse. Brennan and the station manager pass jokes good naturedly and the boy asks him to bring him some candy from town. The old cowpoke agrees. Despite his tough-as-leather exterior, he has a soft spot in his heart for the boy. He promises to bring him some on his way back.

After he gets into town, he loses his horse in a bet. Forced to return back to the station in foot, we get a comical scene of him walking down a desert road wearing the very saddle that he rode into town on. In fact, the entire film so far has a friendly tone, much like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). It’s clear that he would rather not wear the saddle, but he takes it in stride. Just another day as a cowboy…

Thankfully, he isn’t forced to walk the whole way back to the station. He is picked up by his friend Rintoon, a stagecoach driver, who was transporting newlyweds Willard and Doretta Mims. Willard initially refuses to let him on board, but Doretta convinces him to change his mind. As Brennan joins Rintoon at the front of the stage coach, he jokes that this would be the first time he’d been on a honeymoon.

But the jokes end as soon as they return to the station. They are held up by a band of thieves led by Frank Usher. One of them, a heartless killer named Chink, kills Rintoon. It turns out that they were trying to ambush another coach. Nevertheless, they get ready to kill Brennan and the Mims. It’s obvious that they mean business seeing as how they murdered the station manager and his son and threw their bodies down the same well that the boy had used to water Brennan’s horse.

But perhaps I am telling too much about the plot. The rest of the movie transpires in a predictable fashion. The husband cowardly offers his wife for a ransom, is killed after delivering their demands to her father, Brennan and Doretta fall in love, and they manage to outsmart and kill the three bandits. As I said, the plot is pretty standard Western fare. It’s how the director, Budd Boetticher, commands all the different elements of the story and characters together that makes The Tall T such a powerful film. In the incredible three part documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), Scorsese explains, “Budd Boetticher explored the bare essentials of the genre. His style was as simple as his impassive heroes; deceptively simple. The archetypes of the genre were distilled to the point of abstraction…The choreography of basic human passions was his forte. In the seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott, Boetticher always gave precedence to character over action.”

To truly understand what Scorsese means, one need only to examine the most important relationship in the film. It is not the one between Brennan and Doretta, but between Usher and Brennan. Scorsese explains, “In the power play, the hero and the villain were complimentary figures. They shared the same loneliness, the same dreams, and the same ethical code. Somehow, the gentleman and the desperado were fascinated by each other.” The scene where they talk over a campfire about their hopes and aspirations brings to mind the famous coffee shop scene with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro from Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). Both men are obviously impressed by each other. They admire each others’ skills and abilities. Usher obviously respects Brennan more than his own trigger happy men. Brennan realizes that not only is Usher not a simple criminal, but he is someone who may have turned out like him if life hadn’t dealt him harder breaks. But they leave with the knowledge that they could not be partners or friends and that they will eventually have to destroy each other.

Under Boetticher’s direction, even simple cliché’s take on deeper meanings. One of the great unspoken rules of the West is that you never shoot a man in the back. As an undiluted Western, the characters comply with the rule. Well, at least Brennan does. While Chink is content to shoot Mr. Mims in the back when he flees back to town, Brennan warns him before shooting him so that he has a chance to turn around and fire back. This code is so important to Brennan and so intrinsic to his character that he even lets Usher go after killing his two men because it would mean shooting him as he fled. It was only after Usher returns for the ransom money that Brennan can kill him and ride into the sun with Doretta. Instead of merely pertaining to cinematic traditions, the act of not shooting Usher in the back proves the integrity of Brennan’s character.

While some Westerns play to the balconies with epic gun battles, over the top villains, and fantastic set pieces, The Tall T is content with remaining a simple film. It is a story of tough men and an even tougher environment. It is a story where the villains are as honorable as the heroes, at least in their own way. It is a story that has been told since the first cowboy drove his first herd of cattle. While it is an old story, The Tall T is one of its best incarnations. Where other Westerns would run ahead and burn out, The Tall T just keeps rolling on from one town to the next, happy to enjoy the scenery and wondering what is behind that sunset after all.

7/10

Hopscotch: Ronald Neame

[Revisit Review]

For years now, I've stared at the Criterion DVD of Ronald Neame's Hopscotch that sits on my shelf. And for years, this has led to the exact same thought: "I know that I've watched this film before, but I literally can't remember anything about it except for a brief shot of an airplane taking off." Remembering that at some point I had paid good money for it, I decided to refresh my memory and re-watch it. The film, about an ex-CIA agent (played by Walter Matthau) who leads the department on a wild goose chase across America and Europe over a soon-to-be-published "memoir," was surprisingly enjoyable. I wonder why I didn't remember it more. I particularly enjoyed the 3-way dynamic between Matthau, his KGB counterpart played by Herbert Lom, and his one-time protégé Sam Waterston. These men approach the world of international espionage with good humor and even better manners, sharing drinks at information exchanges and demonstrating authentic respect for each other. In a sense, they seem ripped from an Ernst Lubitsch film. Additionally, it's nice to see an espionage thriller that a) doesn't take itself too seriously, and b) has a happy ending.

7/10

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance: Kenji Misumi

Kenji Misumi's Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance is a deliriously entertaining film borne from a realm of pure imagination. Blood sprays like crimson geysers, limbs fly like debris, and each death is treated like a spectacle straight out of a musical or a production of Shakespeare. Based on the manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, the film follows a wrongfully disgraced samurai named Ogami Ittō who travels the countryside with his infant son seeking vengeance on those who murdered his wife and framed him for heinous crimes against the shogun. He keeps his son is a baby-carriage equipped with several hidden weapons. Did the Japanese even have baby-carriages in this time period, let alone armored ones? It doesn't matter. Admirably, the film's internal logic concerning honor and people's willingness to die and/or kill for others is remarkably consistent. For instance, Ogami is framed for crimes against the shogun when his personal emblem was discovered in a shrine made by Ogami in honor of the people he had executed. Later, Ogami manages to escape an ambush by donning clothes with that same emblem on it. As such, the attackers can't assault him without assaulting the shogun. See what I mean? This kind of consistency is indicative of a well-crafted screenplay and the combined talents of many skilled writers and creators. Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance isn't just a great action film; it's a smart one.

9/10

Out of the Past: Jacques Tourneur

[This will be my inaugural Revisit Review. These will be a series of very brief reviews where I revisit films that I have seen before.]

I agree with Roger Ebert that Out of the Past is one of the best encapsulations of what makes film noir great: exquisite cinematography, brooding characters doomed before the film even begins, an elliptical narrative that bounces from the present to the past, and wonderful acting by one of the titans of the genre, Robert Mitchum. And yet, I can't help feel that the film is slightly over-rated. I know I will make no friends with this assertion, but as I re-watched Out of the Past, I found myself agreeing with my original assessment of the film from when I first watched it years and years ago. The film is too long to sustain itself. If the film had ended shortly after Mitchum's first major flashback, then I feel that Out of the Past would have been a masterpiece. Additionally, I can't figure out Jane Greer's motivation. She's obviously the femme fatale, so within the realm of film noir she exists to betray and be destroyed. But why does she return to Kirk Douglas? Why does she try to kill Robert Mitchum? She's an enigma. In a film where character motivations are so important, that simply isn't good enough. Don't get me wrong: Out of the Past is a very good film. But I feel that maybe it has been oversold over the years.

8/10

Thor: The Dark World: Alan Taylor

 

My issues with Alan Taylor's Thor: The Dark World are tempered somewhat by the fact that overall, the film is an enjoyable experience. The film clips along at a stunningly brisk pace. When the movie ended, I could have sworn that it was nearly 2 1/2 hours long. Imagine my surprise when the run-time turned out to be 112 minutes. But unlike most films that feel longer than they really are, I wasn't bored by Thor: The Dark World. It felt like a 2 1/2 hour film because it had enough plot for a 2 1/2 hour film. Honestly, I think that it had more plot than The Avengers (2012) and the first Thor film combined. Here's what I think happened: Marvel Comics had probably wanted to adapt Walt Simonson's Malekith the Accursed storyline from his legendary run on Thor, but, remembering that they had turned all of the inhabitants of Norse mythology into space aliens in the first Thor movie, transformed the legendary Dark Elves of Svartalfheim into creatures from before the birth of the universe who seek a powerful weapon known as Aether which accidentally bonded to Dr. Jane Foster. It's a far cry from the Casket of Ancient Winters unleashing a new ice age upon the earth, but I suppose it'll do for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I mentioned that I have issues with the film. The biggest one is that it demonstrates a tendency to repeat exposition. The Dark Elves back-story was recounted twice and I could swear that the film explained the whole "every 5,000 years the Nine Worlds align and the fabric of space-time becomes unstable" at least three times. Exposition should only be provided ONCE. If you have to explain back-story more than once for the sake of uninformed characters, you have failed as a screenwriter. It makes sense within the world of the film, but not for the audiences in the world of the movie theater. But the special effects are effective (MUCH more so than the video-game visuals of the first Thor film), the dialogue funny, the characters endearing, and the story gripping. The fight scene between Thor and Malekith where they jump through different dimensions and Mjolnir struggles (and fails) to keep up is one of the best in all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

7/10

The 47 Ronin: Part 2: Kenji Mizoguchi

If my dislike for the first part of Kenji Mizoguchi's adaptation of The 47 Ronin had to do with its frustrating narrative tactics, my outright hatred for the second part has to do with how it forced him to betray his values. In The 47 Ronin: Part 2, we see one of the screen's greatest feminists abandon his values to praise men who destroy themselves despite the pleadings of their women. In this film, the famous attack on Kira's estate happens relatively early and most of the narrative focuses on how the 47 ronin cheerfully awaiting the order to commit mass seppuku; Ōishi and his men are all laughter and smiles right up to the moment where they kill themselves. If the first film had propaganda undertones, this second film has propaganda overtones. The message is clear: Japanese men should willingly and happily destroy themselves in the name of honor (read: Imperial Japan). There is a sizable subplot where one of the doomed samurai's bride-to-be dresses as a man and tries to become an apprentice to Ōishi so she can be near him. We are then treated to a prolonged scene where Ōishi downright laughs at her devotion, chastises her for being self-centered and trying to distract her groom from his duty, and calls in the aforementioned groom who then denies ever having seen her...to her face. And you know what the bitch of it is? Ōishi and the samurai are treated as having acted appropriately. The woman is only redeemed at the end when she commits seppuku at the same time as her lover. THIS from the man who gave us Osaka Elegy (1938). THIS from the man who gave us The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939). THIS from a man who spent almost an entire career condemning a society which dehumanized women, crumpled them up, and threw them in a wastebasket when no longer needed. Listen...I can forgive Mizoguchi for making this film. After all, it came out months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was forced to make the kinds of films that the government demanded. I can't hold this film against him any more than I can hold The Most Beautiful (1944) against Akira Kurosawa. But I can condemn the film as a repugnant piece of trash unworthy of one of the cinema's greatest artists.

5/10

Kelly’s Heroes: Brian G. Hutton

I like to imagine that Donald Sutherland's strung-out Sergeant Oddball from Brian G. Hutton's Kelly's Heroes was the in-universe father to Donald Sutherland's devil-may-care Capt. Hawkeye Pierce from Robert Altman's M*A*S*H* (1970). That doesn't really have anything to do with my thoughts on Kelly's Heroes...I just wanted to preserve that observation for posterity. So what do I think of the film? Well, I think that Kelly's Heroes, a war comedy about a group of soldiers from the 35th Infantry Division who go AWOL to steal 14,000 gold bars from a German-controlled bank while behind enemy lines in France, is entertaining enough to make the audience forget that technically all of the characters are war criminals. After all, isn't what they were doing technically looting? Well, anyway, Kelly's Heroes is enjoyable enough. It has a wonderful sense of spectacle. Scenes like Sergeant Oddball and his three Sherman tanks invading and destroying a German camp from inside a train tunnel to the sounds of laid-back music make me yearn for the days when action scenes weren't slaves to shaky-cams and CGI. There is a visceral excitement to watching a building explode into a fireball and a tank running straight through a farm-house that can't be duplicated with computers. Additionally, the film seems to predict the historically anachronistic soundtracks of Quentin Tarantino films by several decades. I never would have thought that World War Two and hippie music could have meshed together so well. But a few bars of "Burning Bridges" was enough to make me a convert.

7/10

Memories of Underdevelopment: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

In many ways, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment can be read as a companion piece to Glauber Rocha's Entranced Earth (1967). Both are films by Latin American leftists that came out during times of extreme political upheaval within their respective countries. Both films are highly metaphorical and examine the frustrated aspirations of their countries' revolutionary movements via the lives of disaffected young men trying to make sense of where their lives (and by extension the lives of their nations) went wrong. Memories of Underdevelopment follows a rich businessman-turned-writer named Sergio who spends his days utterly bored. His family owns an apartment building which manages to completely finance his lavish lifestyle. As one boring day passes to another, he reflects on the many changes that have taken place in Cuba. In particular, he meditates on such crucial events as the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He ponders life in an "underdeveloped" country that has lost sight of its revolutionary aspirations. The film is extremely self-reflexive and intellectually challenging; if a viewer is not intimately familiar with Cuban history from the era when the film was made, Memories of Underdevelopment will seem an enigma. But Alea's stylistic approach which combines newsreel footage, introspective narration, non-linear storytelling, and academic discussion will make the film fascinating even to those ignorant of Cuba's sociopolitical background circa the 1960s.

7/10

The 47 Ronin: Part 1: Kenji Mizoguchi

Different does not mean good. Breaking with convention does not guarantee brilliance. Kenji Mizoguchi's adaptation of the legendary tale of the 47 ronin may be bold in its stylistic execution, but it ultimately flounders and fails to engage either as a story or a film. Instead of emphasizing physical violence, Mizoguchi focuses almost entirely on the emotional turmoil of his characters. He uses narrative ellipses to jump over scenes that most storytellers would consider crucial: the seppuku of Daimyo Asano, the dissolution of his House in Akō, and almost a year's worth of floundering about in brothels on the part of his head chamberlain Ōishi Yoshio. Most poignantly, the film ends with Ōishi's wife and younger children leaving him in shame for not overtly seeking revenge for his daimyo's death. The film contains some of Mizoguchi's most powerful long takes: the aforementioned scene where Ōishi's family leaves him, the opening sequence where Asano assaults Kira Yoshinaka, an almost bird's-eye view of Asano entering the courtyard where he will slice his belly open while one of his retainers sobs outside the entrance, and a lone samurai wandering dejected through Asano's home in Akō when news of his death first arrives. Extended long takes are also used for heavily emotional moments such as when one of Asano's retainers begs an official on his hands and knees to spare his lord's life. Mizoguchi's refusal to include close-ups helps create a heavily theatrical cinematic grammar. And yet, Mizoguchi is too indulgent in his cerebral machinations. Audiences unfamiliar with the story of the 47 ronin will be confused and disoriented by the narrative. The Japanese may have known that Ōishi was acting a drunken craven in order to deceive Kira's spies, but his motivations are never confirmed and barely hinted at by Mizoguchi. Yes, the film was made for war-time Japanese audiences who knew the story inside and out, but in an adaptation that is focused on the emotions and inner turmoil of the characters, context is desperately needed. Otherwise the characters are enigmas whose decisions are confusing and inexplicable. And that is what The 47 Ronin: Part 1 is: inexplicable. Even though it is almost two hours, it feels like it is only half a film. Whereas the narrative ellipses and deliberate pacing should have made the film feel introspective and thought-provoking, it ends up feeling unfinished and dull.

6/10

Yoso: Teinosuke Kinugasa

The few scant reviews that I could find of Teinosuke Kinugasa's Yoso framed the story, a fictionalized retelling of the relationship between the real life Empress Kōken (reigned 749–758 AD) and a Buddhist monk named Dōkyō, as a tragic love story. But I think that the film is best read as (and was perhaps originally intended to be) a Buddhist parable. The film establishes Dōkyō as a righteous Buddhist monk bestowed with immense magical powers after completing a rigorous 10-year training program. He sets out to use his powers to help people and preserve life. For a while, he does so: he heals a sick man and literally brings a dead thief back to life. Word of his power gets out and the royal court recruits him to heal their sickly Empress Kōken. He does so and for a time he serves as a righteous adviser who helps weed out crooked politicians and potential usurpers. He is depicted as helping restore dignity, honor, and benevolence to the Nara court. But when he begins to return the Empress' affections, he loses his powers, she dies, and he is murdered by evil politicians. The Buddhist undertone is clear: he strayed from the Noble Eightfold Path (in particular the vow of chastity covered under the division of samyak-karmānta, or Right Action). Kinugasa's deliberate, moody direction helped keep the film's proceedings from flourishing out into the realm of melodrama. Additionally, Hiroshi Imai's stark black-and-white cinematography helps give the film an atmosphere of the mythic. I've long harbored the belief that the Japanese were more suited to widescreen filmmaking than their American and European counterparts. Imai's brilliant cinematic compositions in Yoso have served to help reinforce that idea.

8/10

The Old Dark House: James Whale

In the wastes of Wales lies a dilapidated old mansion harboring a family of grotesqueries. A gaunt old man named Horace Femm shares the house with his vicious zealot of a sister named Rebecca. Upstairs lives their invalid father of 102 years. Elsewhere another brother named Saul, an insane pyromaniac, is kept behind lock and key. And finally there is Morgan (Boris Karloff), their mute butler who resembles a lycanthrope trapped in mid-transformation. To their decaying estate comes a group of travels trapped in a terrible storm one unfortunate night. And here is where the action begins in James Whale's The Old Dark House, a magnificent early 30s horror film that ranks among the director's very best. I was fascinated with how little actually happens in The Old Dark House. Much of the run-time is spent diving into the psyches of the individuals trapped overnight in the house. My favorite is the boisterous Sir William Porterhouse (played with much heartiness by Charles Laughton), a businessman whose exterior behavior masks insecurities and mental scars as jagged as any in the mansion's woodwork. The film is also magnificent to simply look at; Arthur Edeson's twisted, chiaroscuro cinematography is as fresh, striking, and bold today as it was in the 30s. Of course, the performances by the various members of the Femm family are as warped and macabre as any produced from this era of horror cinema: Karloff's Morgan is a sympathetic beast, Eva Moore's Rebecca is deliciously nasty, Elspeth Dudgeon's gender-bending performance as Sir Roderick Femme, the family's ancient patriarch, is bone-chilling and unnerving, and Brember Wills damn near steals the whole movie in the last 15 minutes as the alternatively sane[ish] and maniacal Saul. The scene where he smashes one of the guests over the head with a chair and proceeds to light the house on fire is one that will forever remain lodged in my mind...and nightmares.

8/10

Muppets Most Wanted: James Bobin

James Bobin's Muppets Most Wanted is a vastly superior film to The Muppets (2011) if only by the virtue of the fact that the film is actually about the Muppets. Muppets Most Wanted is the Muppets film that I have been waiting for for years: smart, funny, inventive, touching, and full of great musical numbers (except for one bizarre duet between Miss Piggy and Celine Deon that leaves the audience wondering if the filmmakers accidentally forgot to edit in a crucial punchline). The film is a send-up of the Muppets caper films of the early 80s: the Muppets embark on a world-wide tour after Kermit is kidnapped and replaced by Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, who uses their shows as distractions while he and his subordinate, the "Lemur," rob Europe's greatest museums and vaults in an attempt to find hidden clues about how to steal the crown jewels of Great Britain. The various subplots are genuinely delightful: Kermit's attempts to escape from a prison in Siberia where he is mistaken for Constantine, the Muppets realizing that Kermit was what kept the show from collapsing into itself, and Sam Eagle teaming up with his European counterpart, Jean Pierre Napoleon, to catch Constantine (seriously, could we just have a movie of these two running around America and Europe?). The film's tongue-in-cheek (or is it mole-on-cheek?) nature helps keep its self-referential parodies from collapsing in on themselves. I've heard that some people thought that there were too many musical numbers. But if all of the musical numbers are excellent (barring the aforementioned Deon duet), what's the problem? I was a bit bothered by the film's use of CGI during sequences where Constantine danced around and used martial arts on hapless prison guards. After all, the Muppets are one of the last bastions of traditional special effects in all of Hollywood. But Bobin said in an interview that "if we are doing CG compositing...we always have puppeteers perform it. We never go down the road of having a full CG character, which you could easily do. It feels that the joy of this movie is the Muppets exist. They're real; you can touch them." And if that's the case, then I can forgive the film for that.

8/10

Million Dollar Mermaid: Mervyn LeRoy

Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman may have been one of the most fascinating women of the early 20th century. After overcoming a disability which left her legs weak as a child, she went on to become one of the first women to attempt swimming the English Channel, became a star of stage and screen, and helped popularize the one-piece bathing suit for women. It seemed predictable that Hollywood would one day make a film based on her life. But what I couldn't have predicted was that the ensuing film, Mervyn LeRoy's Million Dollar Mermaid, would essentially make Kellerman a supporting character in her own story. Here's the film's main problem: it takes a very interesting story about a woman overcoming a disability to become a super-star and a force for social progress and makes it a vapid love story. Kellerman's relationship and eventual marriage to James Sullivan, her American promoter, dominates most of the film. The scenes that actually focus on Kellerman, her life in Australia before traveling to Europe and America and the lavish synchronized swimming sequences (one of which I could swear I saw when I was a young child at my grandmother's house in rural Georgia), are fantastic. But the romantic side-plot turns a very fascinating, ground-breaking woman into a wistful puppy desperate for approval and affection. Perhaps the most nauseating moment is near the end when she is accidentally injured during a disastrous accident during a film shoot where she suffers a potentially career-ending spinal hematoma. And, incredibly, the film suggests that it was James who gave Annette the agency to recover. The reconciliation of their relationship at this point is treated as the film's emotional climax. What is this? A silent melodrama starring Mary Pickford? I might be more forgiving of the film's decision to frame Annette's life as a romantic melodrama if it wasn't for the fact that as a character James Sullivan is so boring that whenever he's onscreen (which makes up a considerable chunk of the film's run-time) almost all of the energy and enthusiasm is sucked away. So as a tribute to Annette Kellerman, the film is a failure. And as a piece of entertainment, it is also a failure.

5/10

Hellzapoppin’: H. C. Potter, Joseph A. McDonough, Edward Cline

Deep within the bowels of Hell, demons stuff victims dressed in lavish fashions into giant barrels labeled “Canned Guy” and “Canned Gal.” As they sharpen their pitchforks, turn women in expensive dresses on spits over open fires, and torment the eternally damned, they sing a happy song.

Hellzapoppin/Ol’ Satan’s on a tear
Hellzapoppin/They’re screamin’ everywhere
See the Inferno/of Vaudeville
Anything can happen/And it probably will!!

Suddenly a taxi appears and two beleaguered men fly out onto the ground after a tidal wave of ducks, dogs, and other animals inexplicably crammed into the back seat. One looks up and mutters to the other: “That’s the first taxi driver that ever went straight where I told him to!” These two unfortunates are vaudevillian legends Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. They have arrived in Hell for possibly the most nightmarish reason of all: making a Hollywood film. For they have been given the grim responsibility of making Hellzapoppin’, perhaps the most subversively anarchic comedy to ever spring from the forehead of the Hollywood studio system. Is it any wonder why at the beginning we are treated to a title card reading: “......any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental.”

Hellzapoppin’ was an “adaptation” of a musical revue written by Olsen and Johnson that had been a smash hit on Broadway, running for more than 3 years for 1,404 performances. At the time, it was the longest-running Broadway musical in history. The revue was a model of controlled chaos. As reporter Celia Wren recounted: “The smash hit "Hellzapoppin" was a smorgasbord of explode-the-fourth-wall nuttiness: sight gags; comedy songs; skits abandoned partway through; cameos by audience stooges; an absurdist raffle; and in a trademark stunt, a man who wandered through the theater hawking an ever-larger potted tree.” So Olsen and Johnson were confronted with a problem: how do you adapt a musical with no real plot that heavily relied on an interactive circus atmosphere?

The answer was to make a movie about Olsen and Johnson trying to make a movie of Hellzapoppin’. Confused yet? Let me explain.

After the opening number in Hell, it is revealed that it is all a Hollywood sound stage. They are confronted by a director (Richard Lane) and a nervous screenwriter (Elisha Cook Jr.) who want to pitch them a script for the film. The suggested film is about a love triangle between three “disgusting rich” aristocrats: “young fella” Woody Taylor (Lewis Howard), playwright Jeff Hunter (Robert Paige), and wannabe actress Kitty Rand (Jane Frazee). Kitty is putting on a Red Cross benefit at her estate and Olsen and Johnson are hired as prop-men. As Woody, Jeff, and Kitty play their game of romantic musical chairs, Olsen and Johnson run about trying to gather all of the outlandish props that the show will need. Later, when they realize that Kitty will marry the wrong man if the show is a success, they sabotage the benefit with a menagerie of pranks and tricks. Other notable characters include Hugh Herbert as Quimby, a detective and master of disguises who bounces around the film spreading chaos wherever he goes like a mythical trickster, Mischa Auer as Prince Pepi, a lecherous European aristocrat who poses as a fraud for free food and sympathy, and Martha Raye as Betty Johnson, Chic’s man-hungry, vivacious sister.

To add to the mayhem, there is another layer to the narrative: an easily distracted projectionist played by Shemp Howard who literally runs the film from his booth. Throughout the film he interacts with both Olsen and Johnson in the framing narrative and Olsen and Johnson in the film-within-the-film. Many of the film’s best gags come from their interactions: he repeatedly fails to keep the camera focused on the principle characters (instead turning the camera to beautiful women), he gets reels mixed up and throws the unfortunate duo into a Western, and, in the film’s most ingenious gag, gets the film stuck, thereby trapping half of the characters onscreen in the bottom half of the frame and the other half in the top half of the frame. These gags are not only effective; they also demonstrate the duo’s ability to appropriate the capabilities (and limitations) of the cinematic medium for comedic purposes.

It’s an unwritten rule that a musical is only as good as its musical numbers. So, thankfully, Hellzapoppin’ does not contain any musical misfires. Two numbers in particular almost knock the house down. The first is Watch the Birdie, an impromptu ode to photography wherein Raye almost steals the whole damn picture away from Olsen and Johnson. As she sings and swings with all of the skill and abandon that only a lifelong vaudevillian can muster, footage of people diving into a pool is paused, reversed, and played over and over again. The second number is a show-stopping Lindy Hop performed by the black employees of Kitty’s estate. Much like a similar sequence in the Marx Brothers classic A Day at the Races (1937), the Lindy Hop number gave a chance for otherwise disenfranchised black performers to demonstrate their ferocious talents.

Also like many of the Marx Brothers’ films, Hellzapoppin’ devotes a couple of musical numbers to the bland romantic couples who, for the most part, serve as dull straight-men (and women) to the madcap antics of the film’s stars. But surprisingly, Hellzapoppin’ managed to make these segments memorable as well. One early sappy love ballad is frequently interrupted by title cards announcing: “Attention Please! If Stinky Miller is in the audience -- GO HOME!”

Another ballad is intercut with sequences of choreographed synchronized swimmers, predicting similar numbers in future films starring Esther Williams. But even more fascinating is how the filmmakers transitioned between shots of the singers and shots of the swimmers: they would frequently take a close-up of an inconsequential object, like a white rose or a fan, and do a fade-in of the swimmers arranged in a similar pattern.

These sequences speak to the underlying genius of Hellzapoppin’: it is just as much a piece of cinema as it is an adaptation of a theatrical musical. Instead of simply moving from one to the other via an edit or a tracking shot, the filmmakers utilized a technique that would have been nearly impossible to replicate on stage. But in fact, most of the film could be described that way. I couldn’t imagine a film like Hellzapoppin’ existing (and succeeding) in any other medium. Ingeniously metafictional, distinctly cinematic, ruthlessly creative, joyfully anarchic, and most importantly, deliriously entertaining, Hellzapoppin’ is a treasure of the American musical comedy tradition.

10/10

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice: Yasujirō Ozu

Yasujirō Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a simple movie about appreciating the simple pleasures in life. The film centers around a strained, middle-aged married couple with no children. The husband, Mokichi Satake (Shin Saburi), works as an executive at an engineering company and enjoys living relaxed lifestyle. He loves traveling third class on trains, cheap cigarettes, and ochazuke, a simple dish consisting of green tea over rice. The wife, Taeko (Michiyo Kogure), finds Mokichi dull and unbearable. She seems to relish opportunities to lie to him so she can go on lavish vacations with friends to spas. Their lives are disrupted when Mokichi's family asks them to act as matchmakers for Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima), their strong-willed niece who resents arranged marriages. Soon Mokichi and Taeko have a falling out: Taeko won't speak to him, even when he is assigned by his company to fly to Uruguay on a business trip. After he leaves, Taeko comes to the realization that maybe Mokichi's outlook on life had some merit after all. The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a minor film by Ozu, but it should be of interest to scholars because of how often he moves his characteristically static camera. There are many shots that take place from the inside of moving vehicles. Additionally, a shot where Ozu slowly zooms his camera in and out on an empty domestic room is repeated several times throughout the film. In a sense, it almost acts as one of Ozu's trademark "pillow shots."

7/10

Love Affair: Leo McCarey

Leo McCarey's Love Affair is the second Irene Dunne movie that I've seen recently that I originally dreaded watching but ended up loving. The first was George Stevens' I Remember Mama, a melodrama about inner city immigrants living in San Francisco in the 1910s. Another similarity between the two films is that they were made by directors that I usually feel ambivalent about: I love McCarey's comedies but rarely enjoy his dramas and I find Stevens' work to be painfully hit-or-miss. But I was taken aback by how deeply Love Affair effected me. The film is rich in McCarey's trademark warm, subtle humanism (which, admittedly, I find weighs down most of his dramas instead of improving them). The film, about a Frenchman named Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer) and an American named Terry McKay (Irene Dunne) who fall in love during an Atlantic cruise and swear to reunite at the top of the Empire State Building six months later, is gentle and sweet. But it also contains moments of stunning artistry, usually thanks to the efforts of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, most famous for his work in such immortal classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932). Two early scenes where the couple meets with Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) on the island of Madeira are particularly stunning. First, they pray in a local chapel. The lighting, Maté's cinematography, and McCarey's careful editing helped turn what could have been a boring scene into a moment pregnant with the numinous. The second scene takes place right as they are about to leave the island. Janou wants to play them a song before they depart. As her shriveled hands stumble and trips over the keys, Terry begins to sing along with the music. By the end, Janou stops and collapses in tears. Is she mourning the loss of her talent? Is she happy that Michel has found his soul-mate in such a kind, loving young woman? Or is it something more intangible? I'm not sure. But I have a feeling that I will be revisiting this scene sometime in the future.

8/10

The Indian Fighter: André de Toth

André de Toth's The Indian Fighter is a proto-Revisionist Western that portrays American cavalrymen as bigoted, settlers as greedy opportunists willing to enslave Native Americans with alcohol in exchange for gold, and the Native Americans as completely justified in their fury and anger towards the White Man. Even its hero, the eponymous "Indian fighter" Johnny Hawks, an ex-soldier from the Civil War tasked with escorting a group of settlers through Sioux territory, is depicted as self-centered (he abandons his wagon train so he can "rendezvous" with an Indian woman) and dangerously possessive (early scenes where he effectively forces himself on the same Indian woman while the soundtrack blares romantic music are extremely cringe-worthy). At times I found myself wondering if De Toth was deliberately poking holes into the persona of the Western genre equivalent of the Great White Hunter. The Indian Fighter, with all of its cynicism, tasted like a bitter pill. But it does contain some incredible cinematography. I pointed out one fantastic example of the film's cinematography over here. But another is an Indian attack on a cavalry fort late in the film where the combatants seem to smash against the fort's towering walls that reach up and up into the sky. The film still suffers from yellowfaced actors and painful stereotypes such as Johnny Hawks being able to defeat Native Americans in one-on-one fights (thereby indicating that White Men are better at being Indians than actual Indians). But The Indian Fighter is a fascinating, and arguably important, film.

7/10

L'espoir: André Malraux, Boris Peskine

André Malraux's L'espoir, an adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical novel about the Spanish Civil War, deserves to be remembered as a vital (albeit romanticized) historical document but NOT as a good film. Jonathan Rosenbaum, the critic whose writings about the film made me seek it out, described its production as such:

"[The film was] started in Barcelona in July 1938...suspended in January 1939 after the Franco Nationalists seized Barcelona, completed in the French Joinville studios just ahead of the German occupation, and finally released only after the Liberation, in 1945."

As a result of its tumultuous production, the film was so disjointed that subtitles were frequently utilized to fill in missing plot points that were unable to be completed, much like how missing scenes are recounted in partially lost silent films with intertitles. The film concerns itself primarily with a group of Spanish Republicans who seek out and destroy a bridge in the Sistema Ibérico mountains via a bombing run in order to stop the advance of Francoist forces. And in all honesty, many of the surviving parts are exceptional: an early eulogy for a slain Italian pilot who is posthumously embraced into the Spanish community for his sacrifice, a suicidal charge at enemy artillery which cuts to birds flying in the skies at the moment of death, and the solemn funeral processions of the dead Republicans at the end of the film which seem to predict the seemingly endless columns of soldiers depicted in Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible: Part One (released in 1944 one year BEFORE L'espoir's release but several years after its principal photography was completed). And yet, for all its poetry, the film as a whole is an incoherent mess. For a film whose English title was literally Man's Hope and which supposedly praises the sacrifices of the Spanish Republicans, the film is incredibly pessimistic and paints their struggle as noble but doomed and their eventual failure as inevitable. Maybe if Malraux had been able to complete the film as he had originally envisioned it, L'espoir could have been more tonally consistent and less of a mess. But it isn't. And that's a great tragedy.

6/10

Monte Carlo: Ernst Lubitsch

It occurs to me that Ernst Lubitsch's Monte Carlo would make a great companion piece with Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932). Both films are charming American musicals by European directors that feature plots revolving around romance between members of different social classes. Both film feature a prominent reversal wherein the male protagonist "switches classes" in order to get closer to the object of his desire. But whereas in Love Me Tonight a tailor poses as an aristocrat, in Monte Carlo a count named Rudolph Falliere poses as a hairdresser to be with the Countess Helene Mara, a naive, temperamental young woman who fled to Monte Carlo after leaving her fiancé, Prince Otto Von Liebenheim, at the altar. Both films end with their respective couples confirming their love despite different social classes (although Monte Carlo's anti-class narrative is damaged somewhat be the inevitable revelation that Rudolph is an aristocrat and therefore suitable marriage material for Helene). And both films represent meteoric advancements in the evolution of the cinematic musical. The difference between Monte Carlo and The Broadway Melody (1929), billed as the first feature-length musical, is almost as stark as the difference between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Stagecoach (1939). Musical numbers flow organically from the dialogue, entire crowds join in the singing, and the audience feels like they are transported to the world of the Movie Musical where people spontaneously sing and dance to express their feelings (contrary to The Broadway Melody which ostensibly takes place in "reality" where performers, for the most part, save the singing and dancing for the stage). The sophisticated grace of the "Lubitsch Touch" is on full display here with its delicate, mannered humor. I'm reminded of one scene where Rudolph storms out of a room after an argument. Instead of going around a couch in his way, he steps on top of it. There is even an insert shot where his foot is shown in extreme close-up stepping on top of the fabric. It lasts for only a fraction of a second, but it is as characteristically Lubitsch as anything he ever did in his films: only a man truly at wit's end would dare step on top of a couch. Lubitsch knows this and he makes sure that his audience appreciates this faux pas of bad manners.

8/10