Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Fandango, PBS, YouTube.]

Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Another movie with a highly improbable premise: an accountant with a military background (Dennis O’Keefe) is persuaded to go undercover to expose the racketeer who has just ordered the murder of his accountant. What makes this movie worth watching: Paul Stewart as a misogynist racketeer, Abbe Lane as a nightclub singer and racketeer’s moll, Xavier Cugat as a bandleader on the edges of the criminal world, and Allison Hayes as a wrench in the mob’s works. A bonus: lots of Chicago streets, and a visit to the Field Museum. An extra bonus: the Chicago freight tunnels. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence, 1961). A duet, with Peter Cushing as priggish bank manager Harry Fordyce, and André Morell as “Colonel Gore Hepburn,” a bank thief posing as an insurance investigator. The colonel’s fiendish scheme has elements that compel Fordyce to become an accomplice in crime. Suspense abounds as the two open a safe and load suitcases with money. I won’t say how the movie ends, but I will point out that Fordyce more than slightly resembles Scrooge and that the events of the movie take place right before Christmas. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Dark Tower (dir. John Harlow, 1943). Three nominal stars, but the movie belongs to the fourth-billed Herbert Lom as Torg, a swarthy fellow who materializes at a traveling circus and talks the manager (Ben Lyon) into a job hypnotizing star aerialist Mary (Anne Crawford) into performing sans a balancing prop. And yes, Torg has designs on Mary, which doesn’t please her partner Tom (David Farrar). Considerable circus atmosphere, with real performers. The story seems to me to take place in the weird imaginary Europe of, say, The Lady Vanishes. ★★★ (YT)

*

A little Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti festival

Sideways (2004). From a fambly discussion, 2010:

“Wait till you’re older. Then you might like it.”

“I am older.”

I wrote in a 2010 post that you have to be at least forty to like Sideways, but now I think that thirty-five is right. ★★★★ (DVD)

The Holdovers (2023). I wrote four sentences about this movie earlier this year. All I want to add here is that the movie’s sentimentality, even corniness (as in the candlepin bowling scene), merits appreciation. The sadness and snow might make The Holdovers my favorite Christmas movie. And as I noticed once again, there’s even an homage to A Charlie Brown Christmas (no kidding). ★★★★ (F)

*

Among the Living (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1941). We watched because it’s a movie with Frances Farmer, who made only sixteen film appearances. But she’s hardly on screen here. The real interest comes from Albert Dekker in a double role (mad twin, sane twin), Harry Carey as a doctor with dubious ethics and a hilarious accent, and Susan Hayward as a boarding-house owner’s daughter who doesn’t realize it’s the mad twin who’s buying her gifts and stealing her heart. Dekker is disturbingly (insanely?) convincing: it’s sometimes difficult to believe the same actor is playing both his roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Jack Goes Boating (dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010). Hoffman’s only directing effort, from a play by Robert Glaudini. It’s the story of two couples: Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are in a relationship whose foundation has sustained considerable damage; Jack (Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are naifs barely getting started. Their tentative beginning looks back to Delbert Mann’s Marty and perhaps served to influence Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. Alas, the movie jumps a big shark in the dinner scene and never quite recovers. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Price of the Ticket (dir. Karen Thorsen, 1989). A documentary about James Baldwin, with archival footage in abundance, and Baldwin speaking truth with a fierce hope about human possibility: “the bottom line,” he says, is that all men are brothers. Considerable commentary from Maya Angelou, Baldwin’s bother David, and others. The most unexpected moments: David and Bobby Short singing spirituals, as they once did with James. This documentary aired as an episode of the PBS series American Masters. ★★★★ (PBS)

*

The Last of Sheila (dir. Herbert Ross, 1973). A mystery of bewildering complexity: one year after his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a wealthy man (James Coburn) devises a game for six of his friends (Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch) to play as they travel the French Riviera on his yacht (named Sheila). Each friend is given a card with a secret, and the object of the game is to figure out whose secret is whose. Harmless enough, right? The screenplay, by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, is filled with delights and meta jokes about storytelling and moviemaking, but damn if I understand the plot. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Joe Pesci stars as Leon Bernstein, The Great Bernzini, a photographer of New York City crime scenes and street life, loosely based on Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Barbara Hershey stars as Kay Levitz, a nightclub owner in difficulty with the mob who looks to Bernzini for help. The plot seems beside the point, everything here being a matter of atmosphere, with an extraordinary degree of attention to sets and furnishings. The only character who’s not merely a type is Bernzini himself, though he is of course a type of Weegee. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (dir. Carl Reiner, 1982). It’s a simple, deftly managed premise: scenes from black-and-white noirs mixed into the (also black-and-white) story of a private eye (Steve Martin) and his client (Rachel Ward). Thus we get what might be called cameo appearances by (in order) Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney. It’s fun, but the novelty wears off, and the juxtapositions aren’t especially funny. I would like to have seen the intertextuality extend to the older movies themselves, with, say, Ray Milland talking to Lana Turner. ★★★ (F)

*

Female on the Beach (dir. Jodrph Pevney, 1955). A wildly melodramatic, campy delight. Joan Crawford plays Lynn Markham, a recently widowed woman who moves into her late husband’s beach house. She just wants to be alone (that’s how she likes her coffee: alone!), but odd neighbors Osbert and Queenie Sorenson (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer) and their protégé of sorts, Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler) make that difficult. The relationship that develops between Lynn and Drummy is, at every turn, bizarre, and why Drummy is the way he is, why he cannot “change,” and how Osbert and Queenie so quickly find another protégé are questions left unexplored — and maybe I’m reading too much into the movie. ★★★★ (CC)

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Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, TCM, Tubi, Vudu, YouTube.]

Larceny (dir. George Sherman, 1948). Before watching, I promised: no Dan Duryea imitations. Here he’s Silky (lol!), a criminal schemer who devises a con by means of which his better-looking compatriot Rick (John Payne) can scam demure war-widow Deb (Joan Caulfield) for all she’s got. Also on hand: Shelley Winters as Silky’s’s two-timing girlfriend Tory, and Percy Helton providing comic relief as the manager of a YMCA-style residence. A solid and, as far as I can tell, little-known noir. ★★★ (YT)

[I performed no imitations. But I can hear my inner Duryea now: “How ’bout it, baby? Did I keep my word?”]

*

The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). The zone is the Interessengebeit, the area around Auschwitz reserved for SS use, where we meet camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their children, friends, and servants. The film depicts the Hösses’ daily life in a shiny modern house where Hedwig would like to live forever, separated from the camp by nothing more than a wall topped with barbed wire: thus the incongruity of idyllic scenes of gardening and children’s games as gunshots and screams fill the air and smoke rises from crematoria chimneys in the background. Call it the banality of evil, with a table of well-dressed men going over plans for a new kind of crematorium, and Höss as a mid-level white-collar worker explaining to his wife why the higher-ups want to transfer him. In its oblique narrative strategies and startling soundtrack, The Zone of Interest is an impressive film, and its depiction of the banality of evil speaks to our time in countless ways. ★★★★ (M)

*

Violence (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1947). Eddie Muller apologized for this movie when introducing it, and it’s not a distinguished effort. But its post-WWII story is eerily of our time: a difficult economy, a shortage of affordable housing, people who feel they’ve been left behind, and a populist demagogue, True Dawson (Emory Parnell), leader of the United Defenders, channeling the anger of veterans into mob violence while accruing money and power for himself. The noir comes in via Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), a journalist with a Life-like magazine who infiltrates the Defenders while fending off the advances of organization higher-up Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard). When Ann awakens after a car crash and finds a faux-fiancé (Michael O’Shea) pumping her for information, will she remember who she is, or whom she’s pretending to be? ★★ (TCM)

*

A Place among the Dead (dir. Juliet Landau, 2020). A horror movie of sorts, directed by and starring the actor who played Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juliet Landau is the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and the movie she’s made is an allegory in which her character hunts a serial killer/vampire who is a stand-in for the narcissistic mother and father (shown in family photographs) who have destroyed her spirit. Lots of Blair Witch Project atmosphere, with overwrought acting from Landau and brief comments on the nature of evil from Anne Rice, Joss Whedon, and others. Don’t believe the improbable string of ten-star write-ups at IMDb; this movie has an interesting premise but ends up a mess. ★ (T)

*

Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet, 2023). A strange death — a writer/husband lying in the snow, with a wound on the side of his head — is the ostensible mystery in this drama: did he fall from the top floor or balcony of the family’s chalet, or was he pushed? The movie becomes an anatomy of a marriage and a family, with two writers (Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis), their son (Milo Machado-Graner), and recriminations and secrets galore. My strong misgiving about the movie is that the explanation of the husband’s death, if we’re meant to accept it, seems to stand independent of what would typically count as evidence: fingerprints? footprints? traces of blood in the chalet? a weapon? Best scene: the long argument. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2023). Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) move from job to job, begin an inarticulate courtship, lose touch, and — somehow — manage to cross paths again and again. Strong overtones of Brief Encounter (there’s a poster for it outside the theater where they see The Dead Don’t Die) and Next Stop Wonderland, with copious vodka (Holappa has a problem), all kinds of karaoke, and a sweet dog named Chaplin. And throughout the story: radio updates on Russia’s war against Ukraine. Most poignant scene: Ansa buys a (second) fork, knife, and plate in preparation for her dinner date. ★★★★ (V)

*

Deep Waters (dir. Henry King, 1948). Life in a Maine fishing village, with all outdoor scenes shot on location. Dana Andrews is lobsterman Hod Stillwell; Jean Peters is social worker Ann Freeman, Hod’s former fiancée, now looking out for the welfare of Donny Mitchell (Dean Stockwell), an orphan whose father and uncle died at sea. You can probably see where the story is headed, and it’s a good story, warmhearted, unpretentious, perhaps even New England neorealist. With Ed Begley, Ann Revere, and Cesar Romero. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature 1950: Peak Noir

Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947). Lawrence Tierney is Sam Wild, a paranoid, murderous opportunist; Claire Trevor is Helen Brent, the heiress who finds him irresistible: “You’re strength, excitement, and depravity!” One of the loonier noirs, with Wild romancing both Brent and her foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long). all as Wild’s sidekick and domestic companion of five years, Marty Waterman (Elisha Cook Jr.), stands by his man. Esther Howard steals the movie as a fading alcoholic determined to do right by a dead friend. Marty gets the best line: “You can’t just go around killin’ people whenever the notion strikes you — it’s not feasible.” ★★★★

The House on Telegraph Hill (dir. Robert Wise, 1951). A Bergen-Belsen survivor (Valentina Cortese) takes a dead friend’s identity and steps into what promises to be a life of ease in San Francisco. Of course it’s anything but, because her marriage to her friend’s young son’s guardian (Richard Basehart) is complicated by the presence of a cold governess (Fay Baker) and a house full of danger and mystery. The movie is Gothic noir of a high order, with an air of dread hanging over even a game of catch. Best scene: the juice, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Suspicion. ★★★★

*

From MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series

Patrolling the Ether (dir. Paul Branford, 1944). Social media and its dangers, WWII-style. A man from the Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission (“an FBI of the airwaves”) asks a teenaged ham-radio operator to keep “cruising the spectrum” for anything suspicious. Together they trace a radio signal to a graveyard. The most interest thing about this short might be the convincing transformation from teenager to grown man via a fedora and pinstripes. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1961) / A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Kenny Leon, 2008). Familial harmony and conflict, with a three-generation Black family, long-awaited money from a life-insurance payout, and the dream of leaving a South Side Chicago tenement for a house of one’s own. We watched these two adaptations of Lorraine Hansberry’s play on consecutive nights, and there’s no contest. The earlier adaptation has the principals from the Broadway production, with Claudia McNeil as Lena Younger (the matriarch) and Ruby Dee as Ruth Younger (daughter-in-law) far more persuasive than Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald. John Fiedler makes a far better representative of the white property-owners’ group than the ludicrously miscast John Stamos. And as Walter Lee Younger, Lena’s son, Sidney Poitier is a tightly wound, frustrated grown man; Sean Combs seems a laughably truculent youth by comparison. Two more points in favor of 1961: black-and-white cinematography, and a score by Laurence Rosenthal that evokes (at least for me) Porgy and Bess. Color cinematography and treacly music give the 2008 version at times the feel of a Hallmark movie. But I’d like to time-travel 2008’s Sanaa Lathan back into 1961: she brings a lively, caustic wit to the role of Beneatha Younger than Diana Sands seems to lack. ★★★★ (DVD) / ★★★ (TCM)

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Twelve movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Nancy Drew, Detective (dir. William Clemens, 1938). Well, it was on TCM. Silly nonsense, but Bonita Granville as Nancy shows luck, pluck, quick thinking, and comedic skills. Her boyfriend Ted (Frankie Thomas) is just a second banana, even if he can rig an X-ray machine to send a message in Morse code to the River Heights radio station. “Ted Nickerson, what are you doing in my flower bed?”

*

Nightfall (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1957). On the run from murderous bad guys (Brian Keith, Rudy Bond), innocent James Vanning (Aldo Ray) teams up with Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft) to form an unlikely couple. Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography make for a superior chase movie. I suspect the fashion-show scene as an influence on North by Northwest, other elements as an influence on the Coens’ Fargo. “Why me?”

*

Wonderstruck (dir. Todd Haynes, 2017). Two stories, one set in 1927, the other in 1977, of a child searching for a parent. Deafness, a bookstore, the American Museum of Natural History, and parallel lines converging. A kids’ movie that should also appeal to grown-ups. “How do you know my name?”

*

RBG (dir. Julie Cohen and Betsy West, 2018). A lively, quick-moving documentary. Did you know that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her studies at Harvard Law School she was the mother of a fourteen-month-old child? Ginsburg’s intelligence, determination, good humor, and loyalty to conscience make her a model human being. “She changed everything.”

*

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (dir. Alexandra Dean 2017). She was the actress typecast as “the Ecstasy Girl.” And she was an inventor, who, with George Antheil, developed and patented a “Secret Communications System” that made use of frequency hopping. “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks, I think,” Hedy Lamarr told an interviewer. Alas, this routine documentary is not equal to its subject.

*

The Hitch-Hiker (dir. Ida Lupino, 1953). There was a lot more to William Talman than his work as Perry Mason’s adversary Hamilton Burger. In this film, his finest hour, he plays a psychokiller who hitches a ride, pulls a gun, and takes the car’s occupants (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a days-long drive through Mexico to escape the law. “Loco,” says a local. Modestly made and relentlessly compelling.

*

Darkest Hour (dir. Joe Wright, 2017). Gary Oldman gives an extraordinary performance as Winston Churchill. But a ridiculously contrived (and wholly fictional) scene of Churchill going to the Underground to sample public opinion made me suspicious of other contrivances, starting with the blue and brown palette that signifies The Past. “It must be late there.” “In more ways than you could possibly know.”

*

The Invisible Man (dir. James Whale, 1933). The special effects are nifty, but the human stuff is more interesting, particularly the conflict between two scientists (invisible Claude Rains and William Harrigan) as rivals for the hand of the white-goddess daughter (Gloria Stuart) of their scientist boss (Henry Travers). Remarkable to find oneself rooting for the pointlessly destructive and utterly murderous Invisible One. “The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain.” Thank goodness this movie was pre-Code.

*

The Unknown Girl (dir. Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2016). As in Two Days, One Night (the only other film I’ve seen by these directors), the emphasis is on work and moral responsibilities. A young doctor (Adèle Haenel), still in her clinic an hour past closing time, refuses to answer the door and later discovers that the young woman who had been seeking admission has been found dead. Figuring out the unknown girl’s identity and story becomes the doctor’s purpose. “If she was dead, she wouldn’t be in our heads.”

*

White Material (dir. Claire Denis, 2009). Colonialism and its discontents, with Isabelle Hupert as Maria Vail, whose family owns and lives on a coffee plantation in an African nation. Civil war breaks out; the French military flees; bands of child soldiers roam the countryside; and Maria is determined to finish the harvest, whatever the danger, whatever the cost. I thought of this sometimes confusing film as a variation on Brecht’s Mother Courage. “How could I show courage in France?”

*

The Other Side of Hope (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2017). Like Le Havre (2011), it’s a film about exile: a Syrian refugee, trying to make a new life in Helsinki, meets up with the owner and employees of an unlucky little restaurant. Lots of Kaurismäki’s deadpan comedy, lots of human goodness and hospitality. Kaurismäki has said that his intention in telling this story was to change Finland first, then the world: no film could be more timely. “I was lost, but good people helped me.”

*

Oleanna (dir. David Mamet, 1994). A professor (William H. Macy), a student (Debra Eisenstadt), conversations behind a closed door, a charge of sexual harassment. Stagy dialogue, improbability, and sheer human ugliness abounding. And who would ever refer to their tenure committee as “good men and true”? This nightmare just doesn’t ring true.

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“Pepper sardines”

Sardines are not a reason to watch The Other Side of Hope (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2017). There are many others. The story, which brings together a Syrian refugee and the owner and employees of a little restaurant in Helsinki, is an exceptionally timely reminder about the possibilities of human goodness and hospitality. Not that such things figure in this scene. Click any image for a larger view:





I especially like the non sequitir “We serve fusion cuisine.” But I think I like the pepper shaker more.

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Thirteen more movies

All of which I can recommend with enthusiasm.

Happy-Go-Lucky (dir. Mike Leigh, 2008). Sally Hawkins as Poppy Cross, an indefatigably cheerful, funny, kind teacher. It’s other people who have life the wrong way round. The fourth Mike Leigh film we’ve seen.

*

Phffft (dir. Mark Robson, 1954). Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as partners whose marriage flickers and dies before coming back to life. Two comic geniuses at play. Best moment: mambo. With Kim Novak in her second credited film role. Bonus feature: a bachelor pad with a bearskin rug.

*

Good Neighbor Sam (dir. David Swift, 1964). Jack Lemmon as a suburban everyman involved in a scheme to secure his wife’s best friend’s inheritance. I imagine that this film represents grown-up, slightly risqué comedy before “the Sixties” began. With Mike Connors, Dorothy Provine, and the ill-fated Romy Schneider. Also featuring the Bradbury Building and the Hi-Los.

*

The Ox-Bow Incident (dir. William Wellman, 1943). Mob action and lynching in nineteenth-century Nevada. That the ending seems inevitable in no way detracts from the movie’s power. Such a cast: Dana Andrews, Frank Conroy, Jane Darwell, Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Anthony Quinn, Leigh Whipper, and others. Even the Bowery Boys’ Billy Benedict shows up. How had I never seen this movie before?

*

A Borrowed Identity (dir. Eran Riklis, 2014). A young Palestinian man among young Israelis at a school for the arts. A film about friendship, kinship, eros, selfhood, and cultural constraints. How much can one change before ceasing to be oneself?

*

Pushover (dir. Richard Quine, 1954). Fred MacMurray in a Double Indemnity -like role as a police detective gone wrong. Kim Novak appears in her first credited film role. Also includes a pocket notebook. I could watch such black-and-white stuff forever.

*

Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941). Already the subject of this post. Grammar and usage and squirrel fever. One favorite moment: the conga line. Cinematography by Gregg Toland, which means a moment or two of the deep-focus technique even in a light comedy.

*

Lemon Tree (dir. Eran Riklis, 2008). The Israeli Defense Minister moves to a house on the Israel-West Bank border, and a Palestinian woman takes legal action to preserve her lemon grove, which Israeli authorities claim may offer a hiding place for terrorists. Based on true events.

*

Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a rogue cop with a dark secret in his past. (Notice that even the proprietor of his favorite café knows him only as “Mister Detective,” no last name.) The film’s stationery supplies are the subject of this post.

*

The Lavender Hill Mob (dir. Charles Crichton, 1951). Alec Guinness (Holland) and Stanley Holloway (Pendlebury) plot to steal gold bars, melt them into souvenir Eiffel Towers, and smuggle them out of England. A genial, clever comedy in which everything hinges on a question of pronunciation.

*

Armored Car Robbery (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1950). About as inventive in plot and characterization as its generic title suggests. But Guy Roe’s cinematography is genuinely inventive. And there’s an exchange name. And it’s fun to see William Tallman on the wrong side of the law. (He later played District Attorney Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason .)
*

Crime in the Streets (dir. Donald Siegel, 1956). Teenage gang members and the settlement-house worker (James Whitmore) who tries to steer them straight. With John Cassavettes, Mark Rydell, and Sal Mineo as aspiring psychokillers. Virginia Gregg, character actress of countless television shows, has what must be her finest moment, as a long-suffering mother. A great musical score by Franz Waxman. Watch the opening credits and tell me that this film didn’t influence West Side Story .

*

La Vie de Bohème (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1992). Our household’s Kaurismäki spree continues, at least intermittently. This loose adaptation of Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème looks like a black-and-white French film from the 1950s. Very quietly funny at the expense of creative types. (The composer Schaunard curses a cabdriver who has the nerve to want to charge him for going only a few miles: “The swine!” ) Other favorite bits: the reappearing jacket, the piano performance, and the announcement “I’m going to sit and order a drink” — namely, water. With three Kaurismäki old reliables: Matti Pellonpää, Kari Väänänen, and André Wilms.


[In reverse alphabetical order: Wilms, Väänänen, Pellonpää.]

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Twelve more films
Thirteen recommendations
Fourteen more recommendations

Fresca’s favorite films

Fresca at l’astronave is posting, in installments, a list of one hundred favorite films. It’s Fresca’s blog that led our household’s recent Aki Kaurismäki spree.

A baker’s dozen, plus one

Fourteen films I recommend with great enthusiasm, more or less in the order in which we watched them:

House of Games (dir. David Mamet, 1987). A psychiatrist enters the world of con artistry. A fiendishly tricky story, with each false bottom opening onto another. Bonus points for Ricky Jay’s appearance.

*

Le Havre (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2011). In the French port city of Le Havre, Marcel Marx (André Wilms), shoeshine man and one-time writer, befriends and hides Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young boy smuggled out of Gabon. He hopes to get to London. With Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen as Marcel’s ailing wife Arletty. The sweetest Aki Kaurismäki movie we’ve seen.

*

Moro No Brasil (dir. Mika Kaurismäki, 2002). A documentary by Aki’s brother, about the music of his adopted country Brazil. No bossa nova here. The film is in the spirit of a field recording, documenting music as the everyday joy of a people. How much music may be found in a tambourine? This film has the answer.

*


[“So happy together.”]

Total Balalaika Show (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1994). The Leningard Cowboys, a faux-Russian Finnish rock group, perform with the Alexandrov Red Army Choir and Ballet. My favorite moments: “Let’s Work Together” and “Happy Together.” Elaine and I have now exhausted the Aki Kaurismäki reserves of Netflix and our university library. But I still cannot spell Kaurismäki without double-checking.

*

Hangmen Also Die (dir. Fritz Lang, 1943). The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Nazi-occupied Prague, and its repercussions. A good performance from Brian Donlevy. “Bert Brecht,” as he’s listed in the title sequence, is one of the film’s writers. The cinematographer is James Wong Howe.

*

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (dir. Brian Knappenberger, 2014). The life and death of Aaron Swartz, a beautiful and generous mind who exemplified all that is bright and human in digital culture. A Boston prosecutor’s effort to make an example of Swartz (who had illegally downloaded JSTOR articles) had tragic consequences: facing the possibility of thirty years in prison and a million-dollar fine, Swartz took his life before going to trial. For contrast: the three men guilty of lying to investigators or obstructing justice in the Boston Marathon bombing recently received sentences of three years, three and a half years, and six years.

The Internet’s Own Boy is available for online viewing at archive.org.

*


[Carol Kaye.]

The Wrecking Crew (dir. Denny Tedesco, 2008). Finally on DVD after a long fight to clear the music permissions. This documentary is a labor of love by the son of the guitarist Tommy Tedesco. The Wrecking Crew, a loose congregation of Los Angeles studio musicians, played on countless American pop and rock recordings in the 1960s and ’70s, from the Beach Boys to the Monkees to the Tijuana Brass to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions. The focus is on Hal Blaine, Plas Johnson, Carol Kaye, and Tedesco, with briefer appearances by other musicians, and a great many perspectives on the anonymity of studio work. Many, many DVD extras, including a sampling of musician jokes. This film would make an excellent at-home double-bill with Standing in the Shadows of Motown (dir. Paul Justman, 2002) or 20 Feet from Stardom (dir. Morgan Neville, 2013).

A Hal Blaine joke: What do you call a musician in a three-piece suit? The defendant.

*

Searching for Sugarman (dir. Malik Bendjelloul, 2012). A singer-songwriter from Detroit records two albums that go nowhere — except in South Africa, where unbeknownst to him, he becomes a major figure in music. (Estimated South African sales: half a million copies.) The film documents the search for Rodriguez, Sixto Rodriguez, and his later-in-life return to performing. (He’s now opening for Brian Wilson.) You don’t have to take to the music (which sounds to me like a cross between Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond) to find the story wonderful.

*


[Francine Bergé, holding on, for now.]

Judex (dir. Georges Franju, 1963). Homage to a 1916 silent serial (alas, not included in the two-disc Criterion release). A character helpfully explains the title: “It's a Latin word meaning ‘judge’ or ‘upholder of the law.’” A gleefully bizarre story of revenge and love, with silent-film and Hitchcock touches.

*

Magnificent Obsession (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1954). Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in what might be called a philosophical melodrama, one that treats the question of How to Live. The chemistry between the two is unmistakable. The Criterion release includes the 1935 original with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor (dir. John M. Stahl). Elaine preferred the original for its greater plausibility. I preferred the remake for its greater implausibility.

*


[Cary reads the Bible.]

All That Heaven Allows (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1955). Wyman and Hudson again. Cary Scott is a well-off widow; Ron Kirby, a gardener and tree-nursery owner, and mentor to aspiring non-conformists. Will Cary accede to social pressure and walk away from this younger man, or will she gain the courage to march to the beat of a different drummer? My favorite scene: the lobster dinner, a gathering of the local eccentrics, including Manuel the lobster man, Grandpa Adams, beekeeper and artist (“Strictly primitive!”), and Miss Pidway, “head of the Audubon Society, and an outstanding bird-watcher.” Next-favorite scene: the gift of a television. This film gives melodrama a good name.

*

The Rape of Europa (dir. Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham, 2006). A documentary about the Nazis’ systematic effort to steal or destroy art, and the Allied effort to recover what was taken. Includes interviews with real Monument Men. Many of us will know the gist of the story from a single painting and legal battles over its ownership. But the extent of Nazi theft and destruction may come as a shock. There are strange overtones of ISIS here, now destroying and selling the treasures of Middle-Eastern antiquity. But the Nazis wanted art for themselves. I learned about this film (and Aki Kaurismäki generally) from Fresca.

*

The Band Wagon (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1953). I asked my dad this past Saturday, “Dad, do you know The Band Wagon?” “Do I know The Band Wagon !” said he. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, and Jack Buchanan put on a show. Songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. As one of those songs says, that’s entertainment. The injection of high culture in the form of Oedipus and Faust (via Buchanan’s character) makes for a special kind of hilarity. Trying to imagine a plot that could account for the songs of the final show makes for another kind of hilarity.

Reader, what have you found that’s worth watching?

Finns and Ducks

One more from Shadows in Paradise (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1986). Ilona (Kati Outinen) is thinking about taking a trip: “My aunt’s been to Florida. She says there’s nothing there. All she saw was some Finns and some Donald Ducks.”

Other Karuismäki posts
Ariel : The Man Without a Past : Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl  : Trashy dialogue

A little trashy dialogue

From Shadows in Paradise (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1986), an exchange between garbagemen. One (nameless, played by Esko Nikkari) wants to start his own company. He tries to interest Nikander (played by Matti Pellonpää) in signing on:

Co-worker: I’ve got a great slogan already: “Reliable garbage disposal since 1986.”

Nikander: But that’s now.

Co-worker: That’s why it catches the eye.

Nikander: Pretty smart.

Co-worker: Isn’t it.

Kaurismäki posts are beginning to pile up here: Ariel , The Man Without a Past , Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl . This one is for Fresca.

Proletariat Trilogy bookends

[Nikander (Matti Pellonpää), Ilona Rajamäki (Kati Outinen), and Melartin (Sakari Kuosmanen), out for a drive in Shadows in Paradise. Click for a larger view.]

Our household’s Aki Kaurismäki spree (if spree is the right word) now includes the other two thirds of the Proletariat Trilogy, the first and last films of the series, Shadows in Paradise (1986) and The Match Factory Girl (1990). Like the middle film Ariel, they take up familiar narrative possibilities in a world of working-class poverty filled with ancient radios, makeshift tables and chairs, cracked and peeling walls, and sofas doubling as beds. Shadows in Paradise is the romantic comedy of the trilogy — tracking the relationship between an inhibited garbageman (Nikander, played by Matti Pellonpää) and an inhibited supermarket cashier (Ilona Rajamäki, played by Kati Outinen). One might think of the film as a painfully awkward variation on Marty (dir. Delbert Mann, 1955): compared to Nikander and Ilona, Marty Piletti and Clara Snyder are players. In The Match Factory Girl, a revenge tragicomedy, Outinen returns as Iris, a cipher of a factory worker who takes calm, indiscriminately murderous action in intolerable circumstances. (Part of the pleasure of watching Kaurismäki is seeing his people reappear from film to film, as in, say, the work of Preston Sturges.)

Elaine and I found all three films greatly rewarding, but we also thought that things improve from one to the next. And the trilogy’s ending is both satisfying and hopeless: nothing should follow that.

Other Kaurismäki posts
Ariel
The Man Without a Past

Ariel

[Left right: Matti Pellonpää as Mikkonen, Turo Pajala as Taisto Kasurinen, Susanna Haavisto as Irmeli Pihlaja.]

Ariel is a 1988 film from Finland, directed by Aki Kaurismäki. It’s the second film of his Proletariat Trilogy. Like The Man Without a Past (2002), it is dark and funny. Elaine thought of Umberto Eco’s characterization of Casablanca : Ariel, too, is “the movies,” with many deadpan moments of noir homage and parody. And yes, the protagonist Taisto looks as if he stepped out of Pulp Fiction (made six years later).

One of the many delights of this film is its wonderfully eclectic, eccentric soundtrack. What a treat to hear Casey Bill Weldon’s “WPA Blues” accompanying a scene of looking for work.

To understand why the sequence above is funny, you’ll have to watch the film.

[Weldon is identified as “Bill Casey” in the credits. Oops.]

The Man Without a Past

The Man Without a Past (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2002) is a Finnish film about a man (M, played by Markku Peltola) who suffers a terrible beating, loses his memory, and remakes his life. It is the first Finnish film I’ve seen. It is quietly, strangely funny.

Is there something deeply Finnish about the film’s dark, awkward humor? My guess is yes . The Man Without a Past reminds me of Robert Bresson (whom Kaurismäki acknowledges as an influence on his work) and, of all things, Napoleon Dynamite (dir. Jared Hess, 2004). The sprawling subdivision of Kaurismäki Heights is now part of our Netflix queue.

Thanks to Fresca, who seems to be an infallible recommender of films.